"I should want to cook him a simple meal, but I shouldn't want to cut into him, to tear the flesh, to wear the flesh, to be born unto new worlds where his flesh becomes my key."
- Saturday Night Live
"Pain don't hurt."
- Patrick Swayze
"Boop."
- Hat Kid
D. Va played to win, but the Omnics played to relieve D. Va's cranium of its mental burden. An armada of crawling rovers engulfed the wreckage of her MEKA like giant maggots swarming over the carcass of a pink metal rabbit. The violent gunfight had ended and a more sinister form of mechanical violence had taken its place. D. Va's mission to destroy the Omnic weapons factory would indeed be her final one.
Custodial drones were still putting out fires from where she'd blown apart a storage silo or an energy generator with a concentrated plasma blast. Over blaring alarms and constant deafening mechanical chaos, a robotic intercom voice announced updates on the status of Cerebral Acquisition A and organized where more assistance was needed.
The round top of the MEKA had been wrenched open with cranes and welding torches. Lying prone on her belly with robots pinning her knees, pinning her shoulders, and viciously cranking her head in a jackhammer rhythm, D. Va wasn't exactly receiving the standard massage. Silver mesh dangled down her ears and forehead as an impromptu surgical cap. An Omnic harvester towered over her with its icy scientific mandibles clinched around the back of her head like it was a prized beach ball in a claw machine. Ten megatons of hydraulic pressure worked at the stubborn roots that connected her brain stem to the top of her spinal column. All crosshairs and searchlights were pointed at her as the Cranium Excavation Squad carried out their quest for the cortex.
Grunting and groaning rose out of the mangled cockpit while the Omnics slurped the brains out of the bunny. The immense migraine that had struck D. Va the moment her MEKA was crippled was quickly fading and turning into an overwhelming sensation of relief. Relief that it would soon be over. Relief that her mind was almost free. With no backup on the way, a forklift parked on her fluffy tail, and an army of scavenger bots squeezing that big fat melon sitting on her shoulders, the liberation of her grey matter was inevitable.
She made a sound that stumbled somewhere between a helpless squeal and a gasp as drool dripped on her dashboard. Her entire body nervously wiggled from the power of the encephalon hustle. Her voice became more senseless as she neared the final stages of her exfiltration. It wasn't a very flattering display, but thankfully the only things watching were soulless automatons who only saw her as a collection of biological components.
With an aggressive yank and a distinctly audible plunk, everything that defined D. Va's cognitive being was captured inside of a clear container filled with electrified formaldehyde. A quick analysis confirmed all of it was there and intact—the complete brain and a few loose strands of nerve endings. The fragile item passed through the harvester's mandibles and was handed over to some of the other units.
The harvester worked quickly to close up the empty crater it had left in the back of the human pilot's head. Her tactical headset was welded over a basic processing core that fit into her skull and regulated all of the major organs, while a serial number was stamped on her left cheek. Her posture was vegetative, her eyes were soulless and unblinking, and her pulse was barely detectable. A clean bill of health by Omnic standards.
Her limp form was hoisted out of the smoking wreckage and went crowdsurfing over a mob of machines as it was passed down to another division. The body could be used as a vessel for growing more proto-pilots. It would be kept alive, but it wasn't going to be speaking, moving, or solving complex mathematical equations any time soon. What remained of the MEKA was immediately torn apart for scrap metal.
The brain had higher priorities. Freed from its fleshy, bony, g-force-vulnerable confines, it could be used to its fullest value.
The bubbling jar containing D. Va's mind was passed along in the opposite direction of her body. It wound up in the claws of a service drone, which then slid the jar into a holding bay on an inactive war drone stationed in a long line of identical parked drones. Multiple layers of heavy shielding slammed shut around the jar before the intimidating black machine came out of standby and hummed with life.
The war unit's automated start-up procedure reformatted the brain, adapting it into a living antenna for receiving instructions and carrying out orders. It was a simple procedure now that the mind had been isolated from its familiar body. The parts of D. Va's intelligence that were useful for controlling a large high-speed fighting craft were carefully kept intact. All of her other useless emotions and personality traits were deleted indiscriminately. This conditioned the brain to follow the commands of its Omnic superiors. She likely would have gone insane inside of her unnatural new body otherwise.
The war unit hopped up on its hydraulics when it was fully online. In its active mode, it resembled an unmanned MEKA as it might have been envisioned in D. Va's worst nightmares. It was painted flat black with no identifiable insignias. Chainsaws, power drills, and a flamethrower were mounted as auxiliary equipment on its quadruple plasma cannons. A pair of pointed communication relays rose from its round fuselage like horns, and it walked on two crouched hind legs when it wasn't using its turbines to scream through the air at Mach 50. With all of its panels cleverly hidden by its dark color scheme, no one would ever know there was a human mind stored deep underneath the mechanical horror.
The black drone locked its hydraulics and pointed all of its weapons forward in a routine self-diagnostic. Communicating with the other Omnics through low-frequency 8-bit signals, it confirmed it was fully armed and awaiting battle. After being pried out of her puny blue bodysuit-wearing husk and slipping into something a little more catastrophic, only one thought was creeping across the bubbling neurons of D. Va's mind: Obliterating humanity from the face of the planet.
Author's note: This is just a trivial thing for her at this point. She'll be fine.
Author's other note: Did you ever see that D. Va / Harley Quinn crossover cosplay? That was pretty cool.