Humanity is truly a great contradictory species that could take years to evaluate. Humans while capable of the most atrocious of evils are at the same time proficient at the most soul blinding good. The human society is built around a moral grey area that promotes black and white idealism as well as an us vs them mentality. That's why when I found myself in the mass effect universe I was both surprised as well as not that my knowledge of earth's history was the same as I knew it from my time in the "real world" despite their unification under the great alliance which surprisingly (or not) originated from japan and not the US. But despite all my knowledge on earth history I was screwed because I was not born on earth or one of its many colonies, I was born in on an unregistered batarian slave work/brothel encampment in I don't know where space because despite all my love and enjoyment of its fanfiction I never really played any of the mass effect series.
By the way did I forget to mention that I'm by no means human anymore? Yeah, the batarian brothel occasionally does videos for holonet pornography and forced a quarrian and an asari to perform a legitimate lesbian escapade resulting in my birth only despite having an asari parent I was still born male (thank god) and further more I ended up a blend of asari and qurian that looks like an extremely effeminate boy with purple qurian skin tone, hive queen hair from the blizzard mmo, permanently solid black eyes like when asari mind meld, and the aging patterns of an asari without their mindset on it resulting in the most ridiculously powerful biotics by the time I could walk considering that I was using them constantly to recreate my immune system subconsciously to stay alive given that I wasn't getting any bio suits any time soon. By the time one on world year rolled around I was already walking talking programming and getting beat into submission by the batarians for refusing to work.
After a while I realized that the human dating convention just wouldn't work. The batarians never named the planet so I just called it camp. One year on camp was about one and two thirds human years but not exactly. The problem was that after ninety five camp years rolled around I only looked to be about two years old and already had more torture scars than harry potter by the end of book seven. At one point I realized that the abuse was going to go too far eventually and my biotic healing would only go so far despite being centered around temporal displacement of a registered update on what my healthy body should be that automatically occurs every eighteen hours. I scrounged some broken Omni-tools and programmed my own hard light based AI companion with the default appearance of Cortana or an ever sifting orb of streamlining code. It was good to because not two weeks later I went through twenty hours of punishments for once again attempting access to the holonet.
First I lost my eye, then as punishments ran longer my bones and organs began to fail in their jobs as they were repeatedly subjected to punishment and healing rather than the reversal of time. In the end I had to use implants specially designed to adjust to my growth controlled by processors implanted to my brain. It only worked out after I finally gained secret access to the holonet and fixed up Z my companion with the necessary programming on surgery and the like. After that was done Z and I celebrated my fourth birthday by building an Omni-gel creation kit so I could use the gel I found around the camp to make things I needed. When it came time to escape.
First I made something I had thought of ever since reading a mass effect or star wars fanfiction. It looked like the typical trench gun from world war one massive pump shot gun that holds up to sixteen shells and a barrel you could stick your dick in so a bit bigger than the one that saw the battles of the human wars. It utilized a mass effect drive that would cool down automatically on its own when loaded with individual rounds thus working like any other pump shot gun only there are no shells I just load individual cylindrical slugs that are custom made with the Omni-gel with various purposes. For example rubber slugs for nonlethal encounters, or actual explosive rounds that work similar to a grenade launcher, back to typical solid lead slugs. My crowning joy though was the creation of a slug that used a heterogeneous metal solution and thermite to create immolating plasma gel propelled rounds that would consume whatever it hits.
While I worked on all that I celebrated my fourth birthday by flooding the media with old "real world" anime, manga, videogames, and whatnot profiting to several secret guarded accounts on the citadel and Omega. I continued with this all the way through to my sixth birthday when it turned out all my implants needed replaced. It was five days later that an incident brought my world crashing down and forced me to play my hand. I saw it coming and acted accordingly by notifying the alliance of the exact location of camp as well as what it was because at this point I had at least found that we were in alliance space.
Camp came under new leadership. Some batarian got tired of what the head batarian was doing here and killed him claiming camp as his own. It didn't take long under the new settings for my holonet access to be discovered but at that point my signal to the alliance was already three days out. I collected all of my things and hid. Wearing only the dirty rags of a child worker and hauling a sack of ammo I grabbed the earpiece Z was programmed to and hauled ass out of the base despite warnings of the thresher maw that supposedly lives somewhere on the rock, and the place is a rock because other than the light dusting of sand and the industrialization of the base the entire planet was rocky ground with little to see.
I found a cave and despite the risk of it being the supposed thresher maws I hid in it and found a spot with reasonable cover to hold down when the batarians came flooding the cave. I can't remember how long I was in there, I knew beforehand that I had limited ammo and no barrier tech so I focused entirely on survival. It was do or die and I can't even remember the amount of biotic tricks I pulled out of my ass based off of popular media on the spot but even with all the cards I was dealt it wasn't enough. The first shot to hit me went through my right thigh and I distinctly remember thinking 'well that's cliché now isn't it' before retreating deeper into the cave. As I continued to retreat in the ever going game of cat and mouse my vision would blur and I'd start to see spots as I took more hits than I thought possible and eventually I couldn't even remember wat I was doing before the whole ordeal began. The end came as a surprise to me. The gunshots that had been trailing behind me started to quiet but I didn't stop to question it as by this point I couldn't even remember contacting the alliance. Eventually my body could take no more and I collapsed. I slowly drug my body from the small pool of blood on the ground formed by my impact with the ground and sat back against the cave wall with my shotgun in my lap.
As I sat there I looked up at the ceiling with my implanted eye feeding my brain implants a perfect and clear image while my left eye could barely make out the color of the cave through the hazy fog of blood loss and the encroaching blackness of unconsciousness which caused a headache and confusion that are likely the only reason I was still awake. Sitting there in a growing pool of strange dark purple almost black blood I was too tired to lift a defense when I heard muffled footsteps come up on my position and could only roll my head to look into the eyes of who could only be commander Shepard in all his glory before my brain decided it had had enough and shut down leaving me floating in an endless black expanse. The idea seems simple enough to imagine until you find yourself actually there as the only thing in the center of an endless void. You can't even be sure that you are the center given that its endless it's just in your nature of human selfishness and self-entitlement to assume that. There is no way to count the passage of time so similar to when I started to focus on survival and things started to get more and more drastic my mind automatically stopped certain subconscious and conscious thoughts to preserve sanity to the point that my mind literally achieved an empty state. I was aware of everything at that point. The joke in popular media is that when cut off from everything as well as time like this the person goes mad and 'sees the universe'. Well the problem with that joke is that its surprisingly accurate. When the body becomes sufficiently cut off from all senses the mind seeks to protect itself by stopping the processing of stimuli which in turn results in the over processing of already collected memory. This over processing causes the person to strip away any and all bias as well as sociological idealization to the point that the person knows the true facts about opinionated subjects as if you were to know what two plus two is.
Humans have run tests on what this would do to people and they decided it would drive people to insanity, having that knowledge. But I was different I had a logic based processor attached to my brain that was instantly capable of processing the information given and deem it a threat thus funneling it away into a repressed memory packet locked so that access doesn't come accidentally. That was when I woke up on a clean white bed in a hospital gown with a quaint little view of the citadel through a window hooked up to more machines than I really thought necessary. Well here's to life as a six year old during the cycle that will end all organic life in the universe.