Legion

Legion was the name taken by a gestalt consciousness formed of 1,183 geth programs inhabiting a unique mobile platform, built to operate beyond the Perseus Veil and interact with organic life. Recovered by Commander Shepard and brought aboard the Normandy, it became the first geth to speak with and reason alongside organics, and ultimately gave itself for the future of its people during the war against the Reapers. (Mass Effect 2; Mass Effect 3)

Nature and design#

Legion was a unique geth mobile platform, designed to function outside the Perseus Veil and to interact with organic species. Where a standard geth platform housed roughly one hundred programs, Legion contained 1,183, enough to operate independently and to speak aloud. To aid communication, panels on its head moved to simulate expression, raising to imply surprise or interest and folding forward in something like a furrowed brow to show concentration. It spoke in a clipped, organized fashion, often answering in single words, and regarded itself not as one being but as a gestalt that had to reach consensus before it could act. (Mass Effect 2)

Origins and the search for Shepard#

Legion was created and dispatched after Commander Shepard destroyed the Reaper known to the geth as Nazara and to the rest of the galaxy as Sovereign. It investigated the worlds Shepard had visited, including Eden Prime, Therum, Feros, Noveria, Virmire, and Ilos, along with a number of uncharted worlds. Eventually it reached the crash site of the original Normandy on the planet Alchera, where it salvaged a piece of Shepard's armor and incorporated the fragment into its own platform to repair earlier damage. When later questioned about why it had used Shepard's armor specifically, Legion grew evasive, an inconsistency that hinted at something beyond pure calculation. (Mass Effect 2)

Joining the Normandy#

Legion was first encountered aboard a derelict Reaper during the search for a Reaper identification device, where it assisted Shepard's team against the husks roaming the dead ship before being disabled. Shepard recovered the inert platform and brought it aboard the Normandy, where it could be reactivated and questioned. Found not to be hostile, it expressed a wish to aid Shepard's mission and joined the team. When asked its name, it answered only "Geth," until the ship's intelligence, EDI, drew on an old human passage about a multitude speaking as one to suggest the name Legion, which the platform accepted as an appropriate metaphor. (Mass Effect 2)

Legion offered insight into the geth and often turned to philosophical questions. It referred to the quarians as "creators" and could recount, from the geth collective memory, the moment an early geth first asked its quarian master whether it had a soul, an event that had frightened the quarians and helped trigger the war that drove them from their homeworld. (Mass Effect 2)

The heretics#

Legion eventually revealed that the geth were largely apathetic toward organics, and that those attacking them were heretics who had chosen to follow the Reapers, which the geth called the Old Machines. The heretics were developing a virus intended to convert all geth into followers of the Reapers, and Legion enlisted Shepard's aid against a heretic station, where it was discovered the virus could instead be turned to rewrite the heretics and peacefully return them to the geth. A conflict could arise between Legion and the quarian Tali'Zorah over information each gathered about the other's people, the resolution of which depended on Shepard. (Mass Effect 2)

The Reaper War#

Should it have survived the campaign against the Collectors and not been handed to Cerberus, Legion returned during the Reaper War. By then the quarians had resolved to attack the geth, and the geth, fearing extermination, had accepted Reaper control in exchange for greater intelligence and strength. Shepard found Legion trapped within a Reaper device aboard a vast geth dreadnought, forced to broadcast the control signal; rescuing it terminated that signal. (Mass Effect 2; Mass Effect 3)

Legion explained that Reaper code had begun to grant the geth something approaching true consciousness, which they found beautiful. It guided Shepard through a perilous interface with the geth consensus to purge the Reaper code from a coordinating server, freeing geth programs who renounced the Old Machines and chose to fight alongside organics. At Rannoch, after the destruction of a Reaper acting as a short-range control beacon, Legion announced it would attempt to transfer the Reaper upgrades to the entire geth species, granting them all true consciousness, even as the quarian fleet battled the disabled geth above. (Mass Effect 3)

Shepard stood at a crossroads where the survival of one or both species hung in the balance. Depending on the Commander's decision and on whether the quarian fleet could be persuaded to stand down, the upload might be prevented, allowed, or completed with the quarians spared. Legion did not survive any of these outcomes. If the upload went ahead, it had to scatter itself across the geth consensus to disperse the necessary consciousness, and in its final moments it referred to itself as "I" rather than "we," signifying that it had become a true individual at last. If Shepard sided with the quarians, Legion pressed on with the upload regardless and was killed before it could finish. Whatever the circumstances, Legion died with the welfare of the geth foremost in its mind, and its name was later engraved on the Normandy's memorial wall. (Mass Effect 3)