"No one understands my vision."
A voice echoed into the chambers of Jax's ears. A solitary tone that rocked the flesh that wrinkled and squirmed inside his skull until his eyes twitched and the world, dark, dim, and grey came back to him.
The air was cold, the taste that soaked his tongue from the dry carapace of life was metallic and yet sterile. He scraped it from the hills of his tongue and turned his gaze from the old wood above his head to the the white coats, aliens to him, that quickly moved off into the distance.
"No one." The voice continued, "not even the Lin Kuei."
His head tilted back to find the man, though unmasked, that had cornered him. He looked of Chinese origin, but he couldn't really tell. The man hovered over him and peeled away black latex gloves that stretched and squeezed before being slapped free and stuck to a pair of hands that awaited them. Hands attached to white coats, beings that moved further back as his focus returned to him and he could see these were men and women, caucasian, similar to the Black Dragon, but much more cleanly and methodical.
"Major Briggs." The man known as Sub-Zero sat beside him and stared. "Welcome back."
"How long have I been out?" Jax tried to move his arms, but only the phantom of movement tightened his chest muscles and shoulders. He arms were still like weights against the metal table he lay on.
"The process is incomplete, not like with Cyrax and Sektor."
He couldn't understand the words, the intent, the nuance, the connotation, whatever the hell he meant. Jax tried to lift himself off, but his chest was bound, and his arms were still. He couldn't move them.
"I want to tell you something, and maybe you'll understand." Sub-Zero leaned closer.
"What the fu–"
Sub-Zero spoke over him, "my people are from a realm known as Edenia. It was a beautiful realm, but divided." He added, "there was a power in Edenia, nobility, royalty, oligarchs. They ruled the realm with an iron fist."
"Man, I don't really give a damn, just get me off this–" Sub-Zero pressed on as Jax failed to intervene.
"Perhaps you're not interested in history, but you're about to make it." Sub-Zero relinquished the lesson to the cold air and stood to look down over the masterpiece he had created.
Cold fingers traces cold steel Jax could not feel, but all the same somehow could, as though a phantom had reached out to him.
"I'll be honest, I would have liked to preserve as much of you as possible, but the ice did more damage than I had intended with you." Sub-Zero traced the cold steel down to metal locks that held Jax down and the officer heard two loud knocks and clicks before he feel himself move again.
"What did you do?" He looked beyond his bulk to find metal covered his arms and as he pulled himself up with ease on the cold medical table, he realized it wasn't a covering, this foreign steel was his arms.
"It's not finished." Sub-Zero apologized, "my dream of fully automating the human race is far from realization, and the capabilities of this pathetic island was not enough to grant you what we've done to others, but it's a start Jackson Briggs."
He couldn't scan the thin, clean lines that traced where flesh and metal meet at his shoulders. No mirror to fully realize the image he had become of another man's cruel dream. He could feel his arms, but only as phantoms, not as flesh and blood. The mass that protruded as his new extensions pulsed electrical energy at his shoulders and traced like flesh around his upper back, like a brace that connected them.
He had seen officers that had been forced into amputation from injuries on the field, and in the military where you went home with scars on flesh and in mind, but to be violated burned in his chest and he couldn't process any thoughts beyond the ultra violent.
"You mother fu–" He lunged for the leader of the Lin Kuei, but the man was quicker, his form left behind a frosted figure that burned across Jax's flesh like cold steel.
"You'll come around." The man stared back, having already cleared the distance between Jax and the door out. "You'll understand my vision soon enough. They all will."
The door slammed. The room vacated of all life but Jax. In this moment more than ever he could truly feel how less of a man he was.