"Only I have the brains to rule Lylat."
- Star Fox 64
The agonized screams of at least a dozen Korean infantrywomen rose through the night haze like a K-pop concert turned into a bloodcurdling murder scene. Sparks flew and smoldering metal was scattered around everywhere. The flight squadron had their heads snatched by greedy mechanical appendages before they even had a chance to escape their crafts.
The D. Vanator had scored the highest number of enemy units shot down in this battle as no surprise to anyone. The other Omnics found her to be an extremely reliable addition to their forces in the few short weeks since she'd been put into service. In tonight's surprise attack, she was tasked with putting down her own former squad so the machines could secure their path of conquest.
It was a scene of crumpled oil-covered metal and glittering spandex. Disoriented bodies dressed in a rainbow variety of bodysuits thrashed around in the grass and sand while tractor motors roared. The MEKA team had been more or less completely defeated (with some minor fighting still going on in the background) and the Omnics had resources they needed to acquire. The only option they were left with was de-braining the entire flight squadron.
Most birds only had to worry about getting their wings clipped. These cockatiels were getting their crest feathers ripped out with industrial vacuum hoses and hydraulic wrenches. Even though they had once been her own team, D. Vabotnik felt nothing toward these girls other than their sorry perky hides were forfeit and no skull would leave this battlefield until it was pulp-free. In a few minutes, their pineal glands would be taking a permanent dip in chemical preservatives and electrical wiring just like hers.
Her primary objective was to get her was to get her former squadron out of combat shape and into surgical shape as rapidly as possible. Now she was just making sure things went as expected while the wolves were ridding the lambs of their spongy neuron-packed fleece. The leading ladies of Earth's mobile defense force were on call to be immediately lobotomized. The thoughts were being removed from these THOTs.
The demilitarizing of the enemy MEKA team was accomplished in a loud, urgent, methodically disorganized mess. A slaughterhouse for cows and a grain refinery rolled into one. A maternity ward in a field hospital where all the patients were due to deliver their own central nervous systems from their throbbing craniums. If a pilot managed to slip out of her wrecked MEKA and crawl any distance away from the endless screaming and droning, she'd be detected by any of the hundreds of surveillance Omnics hovering in the sky and would have a spotlight glared on her until one cruel brain-extracting instrument or another latched on to her head.
An elite all-female assault team decked out in pastel-tinted bodysuits lying around in various states of painful semi-consciousness with heaps of metal pulling on their scalps. It looked like a demented pajama party for aerobic dancers, but it was more like a 24-hour buffet for soulless legions of robots.
Some pilots had large mechanical spiders that looked like upside-down blenders perched on top of their heads. Some looked like they had massive fiberoptic centipedes clawing for their tender cranium-meat. Some were on their backs or crumpled over on their knees with their whole heads trapped in toaster-like structures called Skull Scratchers. Others were struggling on their sides with electronic spaghetti wrapped in their hair. Many of them could be told apart by their vibrant hairstyles or the bright trim on their suits. Sometimes all that could be seen under the mob of machines was a squirming pair of thighs with KOREAN AEROSPACE ENFORCER printed in sleek lettering on the sides. Now there was a girl who was going to have a lot of air in her headspace pretty soon.
Some of the condemned rodents tried to fight out of their restraints only to get their heads more tangled in wires. Some still had their sidearms sheathed at their hips or lying within hand's reach, but it never made a difference. Their dinky pistols weren't going to do much good when diesel-fueled pistons were already digging halfway through their skulls.
One pilot had her face down, her rear pointed up, and flailed her arms like a cat with its head stuck in a fishbowl. But what she was trying desperately to remove was no fishbowl. She was clawing at her temples trying to pull the agonized mind out of her own head. The revving tank Omnic she was attached to appreciated her help, but nothing would convince it to ease the intensity of its Neuromatic Disinfection protocols.
The rowdiest pilots required three or four Omnic scavengers working together to keep their heads relatively steady so their cognitive inventory could be extracted. On the other hand, a single enormous Omnic classified as Octopruner X easily milked the minds of eight captives at once using its winding arms like liposuction tubes. The unfortunate victims of this monstrosity thrashed and moaned around its circular base as their suffered its unparalleled multitasking wrath.
The fighter team's brains weren't their only internal features making an appearance. More than a few of them had developed varying degrees of nakta-ui-balgarak since those single-piece mission suits had to be worn commando-only and were never designed for lots of frantic kicking and rolling around on the ground. But even in the most severe cases, the constricting discomfort in their southern ends was a pleasant stretch compared to the unbearable pressure crushing and yanking their northern ends.
Some of cerebellum-scooping appliances were older and less advanced than others, but this operation had no conditions other than getting the medullas out of the mammals. Every tool was welcome to grab a head as long as it could get the job done. Nothing really determined what form of cranial onslaught a pilot received beyond her luck and how quickly she surrendered to her fate. It was mostly just a matter of which set of searching claws was closest to each unclaimed brain.
Nearly every combat model possessed equipment for harvesting the MEKA team's minds, considering their entire race was built to despise the grotesque creatures known as human beings. Even D. Vobocop 2 was thinking about taking a little off the top from one of the disoriented fallen pilots crawling near her fuselage. The dizzy one currently centered in her crosshairs looked like a nice girl. Innocent blue eyes. Pale blonde hair with lime highlights that matched her suit. Timid pink lips. A perfectly symmetrical little round head, the kind you'd like to wrap in aluminum and scrounge the brain out like a baked potato.
But D. Velociraptor was on guard duty instead of maintenance for this run, so she had to turn down the opportunity to try out her skull threshing equipment. She was, however, very quick to tag the open targets in her sensors and alert her fellow machines so they could get down to the nitty gritty neural business. A few more chilling screams suddenly joined the chorus.
Once the pilots were "locked in" for urgent skull unloading, there were no sleeping gases or anesthetic chemicals to make their brains less active. The only thing that dulled their senses over time was sheer agony and shock. If they wanted any distraction from the pain throbbing above their eyes, the best they could do was bite down really hard on their bubblegum. None of them were going to be blowing any bubbles, though. The only things that were set to pop in this competition were their skulls.
The machines were only interested in recovering each pilot's core self: Who was in her most raw neurological form. Everything else about her physical composition—the bones, the organs below the neck, the ratio of water to body fat—was entirely peripheral and, thus, irrelevant. Even in cases were a pilot looked like a total waste with bad makeup, or a flabby physique, or a bladder that couldn't hold its contents as well as some of the others, her real value couldn't be assessed until the brain was salvaged from the rest of the junk. Any one of these girls could have a strong pair of legs or a pretty set of teeth, but the machines only cared about her spatial awareness and how fast her synapses could process electrical signals. Thankfully for the Omnics, the minds of highly trained MEKA pilots were always the cream of the crop.
A new society was forming, and the high-tech debutantes were getting their crowns deleted. Short or tall, black-haired or magenta-haired, fair or freckled, big-busted or slender, everyone's brains were looking forward to getting out in the open air. No matter the mode of operation, the constant theme throughout the scene was the total conquest of machines and the brutal subjugation of human minds.
Another ill-fated MEKA hopper fell out of the sky in a fiery spiral and smashed into the ground near the rest of her squad. The pilot scrambled in an emergency evac from the wreckage, but she ended up only exposing herself so the Omnics could perform an emergency evac on the valuable neurons inside her head.
Her shoulders were dragged to the ground while her feet thrashed in rebellion. Her shrieks became more harrowing as she was given the standard pre-operative treatment: A small transistor-shaped parasite was slid into one of her ears and navigated through her sinuses until it reached her brain. The tiny robot pricked its stinger into the temporal lobe for a second, delivering a synthetic venom that caused the whole brain to swell and moisten so the Omnics would have plenty to grab onto and the membranes would have an easier time gliding out of the skull.
Unfortunately, the injection also made the brain extremely sensitive to pain. The pilot's bright pink spandex flight suit could barely be seen squirming under the pile of gunmetal scavengers, but her high-pitched shrieking made her easy to find.
The chorus of excruciating screams lost some of its intensity as a new sound finally started being heard. The sound of nerve endings instantly separating from the tip of the spinal column and flowing into preservation beakers. It was a sound like fresh celery snapping off its stalk, a favored snack of all docile little bunnies.
MEKA pilots lying on their sides spasmed for a brief instant. The ones struggling on their knees lifelessly slumped over on the ground. Three of the eight patients in the octo-Omnic's care stopped moving, and the rest were gradually following suit as more snapping sounds were heard. Ms. Kitty Fishbowl twitched her tail a final time and uttered an abrupt involuntary sigh before her entire body collapsed into a puddle of goo. Ms. Kitty Fishbowl had engaged in neurological matrimony with her Omnic surgeon to become Mrs. Kitty Hollowhead.
KIA alerts flashed across the team's monitoring grid in massive waves. The human brainstem could only take so much tugging, twisting, and drilling before it plopped right out.
Once the first batch of cortexes were collected, the harvests just continued in a steady stream. The deafening ensemble of screams wound down into smaller and smaller solos. The few suffering voices that remained cut off until there was no noise at all. The unsettling silence was quickly replaced with a dreary mechanical whirring.
A row of stealthy dark shapes began to sprout out behind the silhouettes of the Omnics and the motionless brightly-dressed bodies in their snares. Black war drones matching D. Voltron's design come online en masse once they were installed with their new bio-CPUs. With the brains out of the flight team's pates and wired in their new metal housing, the Omnics were left to decide if it would be more efficient to recycle the empty neoprene-clad husks into livestock resources similar to what had been done with D. Va, or if their Skittle-colored butts should just be thrown into one big sweaty pile and burned to ashes.
D. Vector Graphics pointed her sensors at her countless awakening twins. Outwardly, they were all made with the same specifications and appeared identical. Internally, they could tell each other apart from the silent wireless signals they transferred back and forth. A slightly higher communication frequency or a wider radio waveform separated this unit from that, and that unit from the rest. Each Omnic shock trooper could identify the refurbished brain patterns of her peers as they all functioned together as cogs in the larger hivemind.
The mobilized black fleet stood together at attention. Physically indiscernible from each other and equally equipped to massacre anything in their way, they had finally escaped their human limitations and become the perfect tools of annihilation.
Author's note: This kills the Eishi.
Author's note 2: What's that brain doing in there? Get that thing out of here.
Author's note 3: This started off as just a one-off "Haha wouldn't it be funny if they all got Bad Ended" idea. I originally thought it was just going to be a few paragraphs set after D. Va's little misadventure, but I kept coming up with cool euphemisms that made me expand the idea. This ended up being way longer than the first chapter.
Author's note 4: The soundtrack to this chapter is either some grungy Muv-Luv-esque horror music or "Give It Up" by KC and the Sunshine Band.