Mass Effect: How No One Noticed The Citadel’s Biggest Secret

The original Mass Effect trilogy depicts a vast interstellar community, with one of the most important cultural epicenters being a massive space station known as the Citadel. Nine different alien races occupy the Citadel, with many others coming and going every day. Despite the space station being one of the most socially busy places in the entire Mass Effect galaxy, none of the denizens were aware of the Citadel’s true nature: a catalyst for the annihilation of all sentient life in the Milky Way.

The Asari were the first of Mass Effect’s modern Citadel races to settle on the giant, revolving apparatus, discovering it around 580 BCE. They believed it was built by the Protheans, an extinct race which once had a vast empire that left behind many ruins. The excavation of Prothean technology facilitated many races’ entrance into interstellar travel, including Humans after Prothean ruins were discovered on Mars. However, the Prothean simply inherited the Citadel as well, discovering years before in Mass Effect’s timeline in much the same way the Asari had, and utilizing it for its advantageous position at the heart of the Mass Relay network which allowed galaxy-wide colonization.

Mass Effect’s Citadel was actually constructed by the ancient bio-mechanical Reapers as an elaborate ruse to hasten the development of galactic life so that a harvest of all organics in the Milky Way could be performed more frequently. The Mass Relay network and the Citadel were built so that Mass Effect’s Reapers could more easily crush the central power structures of the galactic civilizations they were attempting to exterminate. Every 50,000 years or so, a dormant Mass Relay inside of the Citadel would be activated by a vanguard Reaper, allowing the rest of the bio-synthetic fleet to materialize in the midst of their victims.

Why Wasn’t the Citadel’s Mass Relay Discovered?

The Citadel is absolutely massive; it measures nearly 45 kilometers long, and its five arms combine to form a diameter of almost 13 kilometers. At the time of the Mass Effect trilogy, the Citadel is home to over 13 million people, and that’s not counting the enigmatic Keepers who maintain the space station. The Keepers, a race of four-legged beings similar to insects, scurry about the Citadel and tend to its every need, often using service tunnels and sections of the space station that are otherwise inaccessible. The Keepers are just as mysterious as the Citadel itself, since no method of communication can be established with them, and they appear entirely indifferent to everything happening around them.

The origins of Mass Effect’s Keepers are unknown to the Citadel races, as is their number and how they procreate – if they procreate at all. However, the Keepers are instrumental in Citadel maintenance, thus any disruption of Keeper activity is illegal under Citadel law. Studying the Keepers proved impossible, since any significant interruption in their routine, such as capturing a Keeper for observation, resulted in a self-destruct mechanism being triggered in which the Keepers dissolve themselves from the inside out. It is the mystery and utter inaccessibility of the Keepers, and the Citadel itself, which resulted in the Mass Relay remaining undiscovered.

The denizens of the Citadel in Mass Effect simply accepted the most obvious theory that some long-extinct race had constructed the space station before dying out. Inheriting a massive, advantageously located megastructure with its own autonomous caretakers is too good of an opportunity to pass up. The Asari lived on the Citadel for over two and a half millennia before the events of the first Mass Effect, when Commander Shepard tried to convince the Council that a hyper-advanced race of machine aliens was coming to exterminate all life in the galaxy. The Citadel had been nothing but advantageous for the galactic community in Mass Effect, so there was no reason to suspect it was actually a gateway to genocide.

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