"If you can get inside someone's head, screw with their mind, you can calibrate them to whatever standard you see fit," Shepard told him, by way of definition. Funny how you don't really know how to define a word even if you use it every other day. Even if you thought you knew what it meant, "I don't know how your mumbo-jumbo works, but nobody's immune to it. It's just easier to open up a Synthetic's head and start re-wiring things."

She takes a real drink this time, remembering her own struggle with that choice. To change the minds of a generation of machines, thousands, maybe millions of individuals, all with the press of a button and an uploaded virus. But then, what would that make her? What kind of monster? What would she have been, to do to them in their anonymous multitudes, what had almost been done to her with such specificity? It's so easy to say genocide, but harder to define it, in the end.

"Do you know who was working on him? Their names? What they look like?"

It was such a peaceful truce, while it lasted.