Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
A machine asking for the one thing it was built without turns the geth from villains into a people, and the question lands because nobody in the trilogy can answer it cleanly. Legion is a platform of more than a thousand programs that says "we" and ends up using "I". The line has become the shorthand for the series' best argument for synthetic life, and a fan will quote it whenever a game asks whether a machine can be a person.
Context reviewed
In context
Spoilers for Mass Effect 3Show the scene
The question is older than Legion. In Mass Effect 2 (2010), Legion can play Shepard a recording from the geth collective memory in which an early geth haltingly asks its quarian master whether it has a soul. Legion explains that it was not the first time a geth had asked, only the first time the question frightened the quarians. In Mass Effect 3 the Mass Effect wiki opens Legion's story with these words. Legion is rescued from the Reaper device in the geth dreadnought, then on Rannoch it gives up its 1,183 runtimes to spread the Reaper code that gives the geth true individuality.
Sources (2)
- Mass Effect Wiki: LegionMass Effect 2 conversation section; Mass Effect 3 section and headquoteReference checked
- Mass Effect Wiki: Priority: RannochAftermathReference checked
Context reviewed
