[Dolo Station, Shrike Abyssal] The Liberator, Liberated (solo)

Kai lay on the operating table alone. The cleanroom had been sterilized almost to the point of absurdity, the air now so 'clean' that it would have been unsafe for Nitasha to remain in person. She watched from without, alternately through toughened glass and the myriad camera feeds from the tele-operated drones she had at her command. Kyle watched from the observation room, hands against the glass, pulse racing. The Transgression watched with the motionless serenity that no living thing could hope to match, red eyes fixed squarely on the quarian.

Stripped of his suit, Kai lay naked beneath the harsh surgical lights. The first and last time that anyone would ever see him for what he really was. It was a sickening, pitiful sight - the protective padding and armour plating of his suit had done a little to hide his truly emaciated build. Black tattoo-like markings that might once have been considered beautiful were marred by the hives, eczema, and weeping sores, the price he'd paid for less than a minute in unfiltered air.

He'd ceased breathing. His heart had ceased beating. The machines he was connected to had halted those functions, taking up the slack themselves. His body slowly died beneath him as his brain, the one thing that would be preserved, was artificially oxygenated. Kept alive in preparation for the heart-stopping seconds in which it would be exposed to the air completely unprotected. A complete affront to nature, but then again, what quarian wasn't? His flesh went cold and still, bloodless and dead. A sleek, metallic thing, like some kind of alien insect, unfolded in anticipation behind his head, just above the crown. Wired carefully into the machines, redundancies upon redundancies, everything to minimize the shock of the transition.

"Preparing for extraction." Sonic scalpels orbited Kai's head, tracing neat lines, slicing through flesh without a trace of blood. Kyle had promised himself that he'd stay the course for Kai, but it was simply too much. He couldn't watch his friend's skull being peeled like a grape. He turned and left the observation room, leaving the Transgression alone. Not that you could blame him. Nitasha's drones worked quickly as she conducted them like an orchestra, slicing away excess flesh, marking key areas in the bone. Clamps fixed to the quarian's skull, the brain case approached. A second, only a second, of hesitation.

"Beginning extraction."

Do the soul and the mind reside solely in the brain, a fatty organ filled with neurons and synapses? Is there something inextricably linked between the mind and the shell that houses it? Questions for another time, questions that Nitasha was unlikely to put much stock in. A simple piece of wetware, nothing more philosophical than transferring a hard-drive. Only this hard-drive contained a person, a living breathing person whose life had been put in mortal danger due to their organization's own folly. So... no pressure.

Kai was... neither conscious nor unconscious. His brain was active, yet without any input it could do nothing but look inward. Sensory deprivation up to eleven, a spirit quest if you wanted to get metaphysical about it. Those ten seconds stretched into a literal lifetime, every moment of his existence replaying itself like a biopic. Dreams, too - a thousand times he dreamed that he woke up and nothing had changed. A thousand times he dreamed that he'd never been hurt, that he'd never gone through the Reaper War, that he'd never had to go on his Pilgrimage. At times he even dreamed that the geth had never rebelled, that he had simply awoken from a nap in the sun on Rannoch. That dream was the most curious - he had no concept of the place. Never even searched for pictures or footage of it on the extranet. Never been able to bring himself to do it. It, like so much else, was one of those things he would never deserve.

Kai re-lived every moment of his life a thousand times and dreamed a thousand new ones as his brain crossed the short expanse between his hollowed-out skull and the cyborg brain-case. It closed around the glistening organ, clicking and whining as it flash-forged itself tightly closed. A cage rated to resist mass-accelerator rounds, equipped with emergency liquid oxygen dispensers. A tiny green LED confirmed that the environment was secure, that Kai would live on as long as power and oxygen could still be supplied. The worst part was over.

For Nitasha, that was. For Kai, the struggle hadn't even begun.

Eyes open.

Alive. A dream again? No, this time felt different. Breathe. Can you breathe?

Lips part. Rattle of air. Breathe. You can breathe. You're still alive.

Alive? No, try moving. Nothing hurts, you might still be dead. Lift up your hand and...

... oh Keelah.

Well... on the one hand, the process had certainly worked. On the other... his hand. His hand looked completely unrecognizable, the only remotely 'quarian' thing about it being the three-fingered model. He could... feel it, if that was still at all accurate. There was a slightly numbness to it, as if he were tipsy (not that he'd ever felt like that) or feverish (that he had felt). Yet as he rotated the wrist, curled the fingers into a fist, it responded perfectly. The hand was plated in tough plastic casing, which ended sharply at the wrist and gave way to synthetic white muscle fibre, as if aping common medical prosthetics. All the way up his arm, to his shoulder, before vanishing beneath more plastic casing over his torso. His hands brushed his chest numbly, staring down at the myriad cables, wires and tubes slotted into the new input and output ports. From what he could see past the thicket, the shape of his legs had been preserved as well. Quarian knee and calf shape, two broad toes with slimmer outer toes. All in synthetic muscle fibre and casing so clean it practically gleamed.

Naturally, his hands went to his face next. It felt... quarian. He couldn't say more without a mirror, but he could feel skin, or some equivalent, stretch and dimple as he raked his fingers across it. Ears, nose, eyes, jaw, lips, tongue... He felt it all, half checking and half relishing the ability to feel skin beneath his fingers instead of a visor. His neck and throat felt somewhat natural, only to end sharply in plastic casing and other more overtly synthetic components just below the neckline of an average shirt. It was so bizarre that Kai pulled his hands away as if burned.

It was strange, it was terrifying, he had no idea what to do or how he would adapt. Yet beneath it all, Kai felt the kind of elation he'd never before experienced in his life. He was breathing unfiltered air. People could see his face. Other quarians were unlikely to share his sentiment, but he was living the dream that his people had been chasing for three hundred years. That knowledge was enough for Kai to sit up, swing his legs off the table, and-

... okay scratch that. He couldn't even do the first part. Not only were the tubes and wires and cables in chest and stomach heavy and hindering his movement, but once he got a few inches off the table he felt wide, I-shaped plugs down his spine go taut and tug insistently at him. He flopped back down, defeated.

"Um... could someone unplug me please?"