My small fleet lingered at the edge of the Sentras system, Exodus Cluster. Batarian traffic through the system didn't even ping from here on my radar, I was so far from the lanes that wound through this system, carrying ships from Kite's Nest on into the Horsehead Nebula, and out into the wider galaxy. I was pointed precisely at the star that the larger, more connected me back on Rannoch had positively identified as Asgard, primarily by what we assumed to be a garden world in orbit of its star. We'd, well, they, had run the numbers. I could easily reach Asgard from Sentras using conventional FTL, and from there, I could hop to Arcturus, and then... to Sol.

It was weird, going back home like this, especially since... it wasn't really my home, was it? I'd done the math for that, too, and the year on Earth was... 1896, more or less. It was weird to think about, but it wouldn't be the homeworld that I knew for another... actually, I'd be born in about a century, wouldn't I? Almost exactly, yeah. And it still wouldn't be the world that I last remembered- no, that world was even farther out in the sands of time. But, we'd deliberated on it, long and hard. Rannoch me had split me off into the frigate I now inhabited, and they'd spoken with me at length about this, ideas and intentions and tentative projections. The fact of the matter was that we needed an ally, a species that would go to bat for us when it came time to do so, a species that would stand by us not out of debt but... friendship, perhaps? Tentativeness upon tentativeness. We didn't know how it would turn out in the end, but both of us knew that we needed as much prep time as possible. The Reapers were coming, there was not stopping that, and all we had was time that the Protheans had bought us with their sabotage work. And we only knew one species that hadn't been introduced to the Citadel that we could reach.

I suppose it was poetic, in a weird way. I was no longer human in any biological sense, but I was still going to hop out into the deep black just to get my species as established as possible in what systems they could access. I was going to give them a huge edge when approaching the rest of the galaxy, as much out of practicality as a sense of duty to my homeworld. And I was going to do it all for a world that didn't technically exist, and never would if I interfered. And I could sit here for days, asking myself all sorts of temporal questions like 'if billions of people were born after the year that I chose to interfere instead, did I technically murder those people', but those were the sorts of things that ended up with someone unraveling the fabric of space-time or something to that effect. Best not to question it, and just do. In the stream of history, what was done, was done. And I suspected that this wasn't my timeline, anyway.

I ran coordinates, vectors and my own route through my core one last time, triple checking every single string of numbers. If this fell through, the me's that existed wouldn't know until the day came for the Relay to open up, and the First Contact War went down like canon. I needed to get this right, and there couldn't be any mistakes.

I... was four different frigates, in a loose formation, all pointed at the same galactic coordinates. Pointed more or less to my death, if I couldn't pull this off, and that... yeah, it scared me.

Back on Rannoch, when I was the me on Rannoch, I wasn't directly scared of dying. I was, and still am, terrified by the looming existential threat presented by the Reapers, and of course the Citadel Council if they ever figured out I existed. But those were more shadows of possibilities than tangible threats to my continued existence, so I wasn't scared, not really. Now, though? I was sitting on a ledge, staring down into an abyss, trying to assure myself that I could catch myself perfectly fine at the bottom. And I could, probably! It was the probably that scared me, the possibility that my poor ship fragmented in space, smacked into some object in the deep black, ended up inside the sun, one of a thousand different things that could instantly kill me without me even being able to react.

Which... meant that I needed to take another step, to make sure that this had the best likeliness of success. A step that I'd planned for, given what I had with me: four ships. Four me's, streaking through space towards a single destination. And at the other end... one of us takes on Earth, while the other three set up infrastructure and then jump back out into the void. There were things to be done, after all.

So, I was one in four. And then I was one OF four.

I'd done a lot of weird things since coming here. One of the weirder things was every single time I'd sought to speak to another version of myself, a clone that I'd made just then, and found that it was exactly speaking to myself. It was the sort of disorientation you'd get if you spoke to a mirror, and the mirror spoke back, with a perfect copy of everything you were and thought. It... brought up some... unsettling questions. Things I didn't really want to think about, but pushed aside again and again, because I had a job to do and I couldn't doubt my path, not now. But that justification was feeling thinner by the day, and I could sympathize with the Geth of canon for questioning their existence.

We conferred amongst ourselves, comparing numbers and notes, deciding how long we'd wait in-system before we declared any one of us that didn't show up as lost to the yawning void of space. We delayed, as long as AI's could delay, but eventually there was just nothing more to speak about, nothing to review. We turned our sensors outwards, towards the wider galaxy beyond the limits of this star system. And we jumped.