The Clone: Cerberus's copy of Commander Shepard

The clone of Commander Shepard was an exact physical duplicate of the galaxy's most celebrated soldier, grown by Cerberus as a reserve of spare organs and limbs for the Lazarus Project. Deprioritized, marked for termination, and finally stolen from Cerberus custody by the rogue operative Rasa, better known by her later alias Maya Brooks, the clone slept in storage for years before being awakened in 2186. In the months that followed it devised a plan to kill the original, assume the Commander's identity, and pursue a pro-human agenda from the captain's chair of the Normandy SR-2. Its scheme carried it from the back rooms of the Silversun Strip to the Citadel Archives and into the Normandy itself, and it ended with the clone falling to its death from the ship's open cargo ramp.

A spare body for the Lazarus Project#

The clone owed its existence to the death of Commander Shepard. When Cerberus undertook the Lazarus Project to restore the fallen Commander to life, it grew a complete duplicate of Shepard's body to provide spare organs and limbs for the reconstruction. The copy was never intended to walk or speak; it was stored at Minuteman Station, skinless and sustained by life support machinery.

The clone's importance faded quickly. Once Cerberus obtained Shepard's Spectre dossier, the Illusive Man deprioritized the clone project, though he permitted its overseer, Miranda Lawson, to continue using the body for testing. Sometime in 2184 the order came down for the clone's termination. It would have died nameless in its tank had one Cerberus agent not decided otherwise.

Stolen by Rasa#

The agent known as Rasa, an infiltrator who had compiled the dossiers for Shepard's own crew, chose to liberate the condemned clone rather than let it be destroyed. A violent shootout at the Lazarus Research Station followed, at the end of which Rasa severed her ties with Cerberus and escaped with the clone's tank. Cerberus did not recover it; during one attempt to steal the clone in 2184, imagery from the hanar production Requiem for a Reaper! was used to distract the Cerberus forces pursuing her.

Rasa kept her prize hidden for years. One of its known resting places was her old stomping grounds, an asteroid orbiting the gas giant Themis. There the clone remained in storage, unconscious and unknown, while the galaxy's attention turned to the Collectors and then to the gathering shadow of the Reaper War.

Learning to be human#

Six months before the Reaper invasion of 2186, Rasa, by then living under the alias Maya Brooks, finally woke the sleeping copy. During the months of Shepard's incarceration on Earth, the clone learned "how to be human" with the aid of neural implants, and together with Brooks it shaped a plan: kill Commander Shepard, assume the Commander's identity, and use that stolen life to carry out a pro-human agenda.

The plan had a flaw the clone could never fully overcome. It was a perfect physical replica, but it possessed none of the original's memories, and so it could not withstand close scrutiny from the people who knew Shepard best. To compensate, it hired the CAT6 private military corporation, a company of ex-Alliance washouts, to eliminate the Commander and Shepard's closest allies before the deception could be tested.

The identity theft on the Citadel#

Shortly after Cerberus attempted its coup on the Citadel, the clone set its plan in motion while Commander Shepard was ordered onto shore leave. It bought weapons for its CAT6 troops through the arms dealer Elijah Khan, hacked databases to strip out Shepard's classified files, and laid an ambush at a popular sushi restaurant on the Silversun Strip to capture the Commander's Spectre authorization code. The trap won it the code, but the original slipped away alive. The clone tied off the loose end through Brooks, who had Khan executed, then deliberately used the stolen code to enter the Citadel Archives, baiting Shepard into pursuit.

Inside the archives the clone wore CAT6 armor and staged a hostage scene with Brooks before revealing its face to the astonished squad, sharing part of its history and its grievances. It raised a signal blocker to intercept transmissions, and through it captured the Normandy SR-2's command codes. Impersonating Shepard, it contacted Samantha Traynor to have the ship prepped for emergency launch, ordered its mercenaries to execute the Commander's party, and pressed deeper into the archives. In some accounts of the running fight, the clone taunted Ashley Williams that she should have been left to die on Virmire in favor of "Kaidan something", proof that it could not even name the Commander's companions; Williams dismissed it as a pale imitation of the real thing.

Though Shepard's team survived the kill order, the clone's deeper trap closed on schedule. It sealed the Commander and squad inside one of the archives' iridium vaults to suffocate, and before leaving it made a show of the one thing cloning could not copy: handprints. It updated Shepard's official records with its own biometrics, completing the theft of the Commander's identity, and set out to take command of the Normandy.

The battle for the Normandy#

The clone's brief captaincy was busy and petty. It dismissed Traynor from the crew and dumped the contents of Shepard's cabin into a bin. When word came that the real Shepard had escaped the vault and boarded the ship, it told its CAT6 troops to slow the Commander down, an order the mercenaries privately understood to mean they were cannon fodder, and on Brooks's suggestion it went to the armory to arm itself for the confrontation.

Clad in N7 armor and carrying the Commander's own weapons and techniques, the clone met Shepard's three-member team in the shuttle bay while the Normandy tried to fly out of the Citadel. When Joker and Steve Cortez blocked the ship from jumping to faster-than-light speed, the clone dispatched the hangar's Kodiak shuttle to deal with the pilots and fought on without bothering to close the hangar doors. The battle turned against it. Shepard tackled the double, and the two tumbled down the open boarding ramp, each clinging to the edge above the drop.

Hanging beside the original, the clone demanded to know what made the Commander so special. The answer arrived in person: Shepard's squadmates, the "emotional baggage" the clone had sneered at, pulled the Commander to safety, while Brooks looked down at her creation and turned her back on it. Shepard could offer the clone a hand or kick it into the void; if the Commander reached out, the clone refused the help, asking what it had left to live for before letting go. In every account of that day, the clone fell from the Normandy to its death.

A copy without a life#

Those who met the clone agreed that the resemblance to Commander Shepard ended at the skin. It held only the most superficial idea of the person it was built to replace. The clone was intensely xenophobic, where most of Shepard's closest allies were aliens. It regarded the soldiers under its command as expendable, where the Commander was famous for fierce loyalty to the Normandy's crew. The clone described itself as the lone wolf Shepard was supposed to be, and in the end it died proving the difference: alone, abandoned by its only ally, holding on to nothing.