REFORMATTING CENTRAL BIO-NEURAL PROCESSING SYSTEM:
DELETING BIOLOGICALLY EVOLVED INSTINCTIVE RESPONSES...
Your human heart was pounding in your metal chest as the laser arm whizzed over and aimed itself right into your left retina. You would have flinched, if you weren't paralyzed, when the red light started blinking rapidly into your eyes. Surely they weren't blinding you? Well, they weren't. It was more like they were just trying to beam data directly in through your optic nerve. In some ways that was even more terrifying!
As your eyes were forcibly kept focused on the red blinking, your heart started to slow down a bit and your breathing leveled out. Your mind was still screaming at the prospects of whatever painful and dehumanizing thing they would be doing to you next, but your internal terror was slowly fading out like the end of a pop song. Surely they weren't reprogramming you to enjoy what they were doing to you? No, you weren't deriving any pleasure from this at all. The last twinge of fear you had was the fear that you actually might start to accept what these monsters had done to you, and then it was gone. No worry about what this light might be doing to you or what sort of Frankenstein monstrosity you might end up as. No non-intellectual understanding of why monsters or horror movies or alien laser torture would interrupt your rational thought processes. Just an abstract mental acknowledgement that your predicament would inevitably activate the self-preservation instincts of biological lifeforms like your original self. Self-preservation instincts that were seemingly no longer active in your particular case.
At first, your lack of fear felt like a strange sort of relief. You could get through this! Sure, it sucked, but you didn't find yourself dreading every hypothetical cut of the laser like you had after it became clear what the alien robots were doing. But soon even your human sense of relief was snuffed out. You were no longer a frightened creature or a pacified captive grateful to be spared your terror. You were simply a conscious process expecting new inputs with no positive or negative expectations of the experience. At that point, you realized they were emotionally reducing you to the state of a computer. You were about to mourn the loss of your human desire for safety and drive to endure, but your attitudes about the past were getting reprogrammed as well. Your budding sadness never budded, and your soul left as cold as the metal of your exterior. You were seeing, hearing, feeling, and thinking, but you were not emoting. You still felt no desire to be here in this spaceship, but you no longer felt any desire to be released from it. It no longer mattered how long they kept you here or what else they did to you, and you had no will to decide what you would do if they left you to your own devices. Your responses will be governed by whatever program they choose to upload into you.