In which Psii's SOS is recieved and he's talked to someone, and then he experiances quite graphic imagery of pain and stuff for being disobediant to the Empire. TW for that, btw, you've been warned, as well as needles and things. Follow this fic on Ao3 for better goodies and probably better spell-checked writing.
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You've been disobediant, again. Someone, a user, had contacted you. You try to justify your contact with this 'TA'. You were starving for company that wasn't Her. All you'd done was talk. To be fair, you chastised yourself, you'd talked of treason and rebe- - 2top - You can't say that word, can't even think it. Not allowed. Warnings beep at you and settle for a few moments when the word doesn't come. The two of you had talked of treason and of other things, bad things, disobediant things, and a reaction had occured. You'd lost power for a few minutes, shut down and rebooted and here you were, ten minutes later... And She was coming.
She was coming, with her team of diagnosticians and medics and engineers and the two lowbloods who would tandem the ship's controls for you, for the next forty four hours, until the diagnostic and repairs were done. Until you were back in the Helm of Her Fleet.
The doors open with a pneumatic hiss.
If being installed once was pain enough to make you wish you were dead, being uninstalled was almost pain enough to make you wish you'd never joined the One Who Suffered in the first place. Almost. There's two engineers, the yellow and the brownblood who will be taking your place, two docterrors, two medicullers, a gurney, and Her. She looks so displeased with you. Her elegantly arched brows are furrowed down and the curve of her plumped lips shows off her displeasure, and her eyes... Her eyes, cold and hard and fuschia, gleam with cruel and Intent and ill will towards you.
You don't like those eyes.
You don't like what will come next.
She says the command and the engineers are cutting their thumbs and pressing them against the scanners hooked to the console at the door. Their faces are grimset, they don't like this job any more than you do. They don't like knowing that the source of the ships power was A Troll. Hemoism is rampant in your culture, but this was animalistic and cruel. You could hear the ship crew talk about the process sometimes. Many of them thought you were just a battery, that your mind wasn't there. These two engineers knew better.
Because their job was to make sure your mind, when it resurfaced, when you were disobediant, when you were You and He and It and everything... Their job was to make sure you stayed empty. To make sure you were nothing. Reducing a trollian mind to a mere program-following husk took effort, after all, and it wasn't like She has the knowhow to do it. The head engineer and his assistant. One violet and one blue, one with a sneer on his lips and one with pity in her eyes. This one, the blue, you had watched many a time. She was a lower blue too. She felt pity for you. She enjoyed your will. She enjoyed your spirit.
Just a shame her job was to help her master break it.
Their bloody fingerprints are accepted and then there's a pneumatic hiss. It takes a tyrian to unlock your cage- There were too many escape attempts and rescue attempts in the beginning for your cage to be anything but the highest security clearance - and she presses her own bloody thumb to the fingerpad. You can feel it, now, the swirling blackness of the ship going dark, the energy leaving the furthest reaches. The energy stops flowing into cannons one through two hundred and sixty two, and they rest into their cradles, finally asleep. If anyone were to attack the ship, now would be the time. But there won't be anyone. The Helmship is surrounded by an escort of six other smaller ships, each filled with warriors and academics to populate the planets you raze to the ground. The lights all go dark and your hearing begins to work now- Yours, the trolls sitting in the harness, everything begins to work and it - terr11ble, 11 am truly fucked th112 t11me - is so quiet in this room that you could hear the drip of water from the supressant around you on the floors and in the pipes and in the walls and She doesn't speak, she just watches you come to 'life'. For the first time in a long time, your ears swivel forward as you listen, as you become He again and not It and then theres - aahhhhHHHH -
That certainly is you screaming as the pain makes itself known, the coiling tendrils of burning hot withdrawing from your skin, the inch and two inch and four inch long needles and clasps and wires all beginning to shift at once- it feels like agony and euphoria all at the same time, ripping off a bandaid or pulling out a splinter - There's another pnuematic hiss as the clamps release in lines down your skin, six ports along your spine; two pairs higher up between your shoulders and one along your middle back, just below those. Three in each arm- One set inlaid in the fleshy muscle behind your upper arms, and two close together on the upper half of your forearm, underneath your elbows. And one more, at the base of your neck. All ringed with metal, to which the clasps had been hitched, like jumper cables to the battery ports on a car battery. Only much more effiecient and streamlined. These wouldn't come off easily. But they do now, and the slow drag of slick wires feel like someone is slowly peeling strips of skin away from you, under your skin, and filling the void left behind with salt or lemon. They uncoil from your bones, from deep inside you where even you don't know, and you haven't stopped screaming. The blue still looks at you with pity, but She is smirking.
The tinnitus is back, ringing in your ears, and your eyes are glazed over as the goggles she's outfitted you with begin to shift. They won't come off, not until someone loosens the bolts directly bolted into your skin. She lets it tug at you once, twice, three times, and each time the wires in your skull and tapped into your ocular nerves tug, and your vision shifts and the world blurs and the migraine starts automatically, but thats a trifling pain compared to the biocoils sliding out of your skin. Once, twice, three times it tugs before she sends the blueblood to loosen the bolts at the corners of the goggles, and with four little jolts, the diodes and needles and what have you jerk away and out of your skin and Your eyes are feeling fresh air for the first time in sweeps, and they brighten automatically. It's a good feeling, but you can't enjoy it with the still burning pain coiling out of your skin. You're still screaming. It's terrible and she looks impatient, but you can't stop, it hurts and aches and burns and you wish you were dead, you wish you'd stopped while you were ahead, But this pain is nothing compared to what awaits you. Finally, the biocoil shackles unclasp from your wrists and you drop forward, slumping over the mound of biocoils.
One half down, the other half to go. The process takes about an hour. An hour of excruciating torment. She's not been diligent in the upkeep of your husk, one of the engineers are telling her. They are the only ones who can tell her off for something like this. They tell her that the wires have been allowed control of you for too long, and blah blah blah something about your central nervous system and you're really in too much pain to be arsed about /why/ you're in pain, you know why, it's because of Her, because she doesn't /care/.
It's an hour and twenty minutes before they begin the last processes of uninstall, of the life support systems withdrawing, of the last bits of bio-tubes and energy leaving you. You can't breathe on your own and merciful blackness is about to claim you, dancing in the corners of your vision, until one of the medicullers shoves a tube down your throat and another one is doing compressions or something, against your chest. It's painful but still, a pittance compared to the uninstall process. He's yelling something about you- There's a crunch or two and you're fairly sure you hear them start to actually panic. Everything is numb and dim and the ringing in your ears is louder but overpowering too, everyone elses words seems to sort of just fade. The darkness is beckoning you closer, you just want to sleep and not endure this pain... and maybe, maybe... finally... you can stop screaming.