All through the first four decks, Dr. Janice Polito has been talking to you, telling you where to go and what to fix, promising you she's the one person left on the ship you can trust. At the end of Operations you finally get to her office.

She's dead. She's been dead for a while. The voice in your head was never hers.

It was SHODAN, the insane computer from the first System Shock, the one who took over Citadel Station in 2072. She survived. She's been wearing Polito's face, so to speak, and steering you through the ship like a remote-control car. And now she tells you the truth, more or less, because now she doesn't need to lie. The thing that's taken over the crew, the Many, came out of her own old experiments, and it's gotten loose and grown into something she can't control either. She needs you to kill it. You don't have anybody else to work with. So you do what she says.

I played the first System Shock in high school, so I should have guessed. I didn't. I sat in my desk chair at two in the morning with my hand over my mouth, and Dena woke up and asked if I was okay.

Without giving you a walkthrough: you finish the Von Braun deck by deck, you cross over to the military escort ship, the Rickenbacker, and the Many's living mass grows over both ships until you're walking around inside it. It is as disgusting as it sounds, and it's where an OSA build really comes into its own.

The last fight is SHODAN herself, inside her own version of cyberspace. You go in knowing she was never on your side.

You win. And then the final scene cuts to an escape pod with two survivors from the ship, Tommy and Rebecca, and Rebecca turns around and speaks, and it is not Rebecca's voice. It's hers.

That's it. That's the ending. It's very short, and it's a cliffhanger, and half the people on the newsgroup are furious about it. I was too, for about a day. Now I think it's perfect. SHODAN doesn't lose. She just waits.

And I want a System Shock 3, and I want it before I graduate, and I don't think I'm going to get either wish.