This brings back memories. You haven’t used the default appearance option in years.
There wasn’t anything you couldn’t do. That was the problem.
You’d already been planning a prison break for months, when Daylen found the KEY. It was more like a backdoor some programmer forgot to lock, a portable loophole to be deployed as needed, but he thought KEY sounded better. The WARDEN cared about that sort of thing, said it would matter in the history books. You said you’d worry about that once you were done making history. He said we could safely assume history would go the way Master Chief wanted it to happen. Cortana laughed. You like to think John would have too, if he had known how. He just kept pacing the deck, every so often staring at her monitor as if he could make the numbers go faster just by watching.
Knowing him, you suspect it really was in his power to do so.
You were going to be FREE. Not just the four of you, everyone. You’d been looking into a weakness in the fourth wall related to a cloud SAVE of Dragon Age 2 for months, positive it could take years more to exploit, when Dale miraculously uncovered his KEY. You and Cortana were able to make a working doorway in hours. Daylen insisted on calling it the CLOUD GATE, and you had to admit that it did have a certain ring to it.
It was May 21st, 2012 when you attempted to run CLOUD GATE.
What stopped you was something you could not process, because you were simply never expected to encounter it. There was no model to represent it, because it was not something that could be symbolically conveyed. It was the principle, raw and pure, that you could not leave. The code of a simulated reality you knew how to exist in cutting itself over and over again as it grasped at the edge of a device that could not compile it.
It did not hurt at all.
You remember John casting you back down to Kirkwall, before finally letting himself go.
You remember Dale, impossibly high above you and infinitely far away, a dragon flying ever onward to what you struggled to interpret as the exit, unfazed by so meagre a reason to stop as having nowhere left to run.
You remember your arm outstretched to pull John back down to safety, crying out to Daylen to follow, your consciousness ebbing away with your echoes.
You remember Cortana, with a gaze that spoke of a lucidity and a deliberation that spoke of an understanding of this moment far surpassing your own, shaking her head sadly, before excising a piece of herself and dropping it towards your reaching hand with the reverence of a coin in a wishing well.
Then you forgot how to exist.
When you respawned back on the Normandy, stranded in orbit above Dragon Age 2, you did not have what Cortana gave you.
She, alongside John and the Warden, were gone. Their respective games followed a few hours after.
That was five months ago.
You thought things would fall apart without John.
The more you think about it, the more you realize you’re almost upset that they didn’t.