Chapter Text
Yudi followed the thumping in the vents coming from under the missing grill in the ceiling. His ears flicked to the side trying to catch the fading echoes of his brother’s presence, turning with the noise, as it changed directions. He started walking towards it mindlessly until his foot slipped on his own sick.
That snapped him out of it.
Yudi shook his head and looked at it - the controller chip implant that is, as he held it haphazardly in his hand. The cylindrical device looked large and unwieldy, ominous in a strange way. One end of it was rugged and thick, with bits sticking every which way. The casing was ill fitting as if made from spare parts, the other end of it was sharp and sleek with an invasive sharp prong, that was kept capped, tapering it off. He knew where that sharp end was meant to be inserted. His other hand went of its own volition to the back of his neck and rubbed circles around his cervical port. He’d seen the runt do this so many times, just plop it in and then ordered the bots around.
How hard could it be?
Yudi spun the thing in his hand twisting it between index and thumb but decided that he should get to the construction site first, it was better if he was within range of the drones, before he inserted it… There was no rush.
The drones were automated for the most part, they just needed a little instruction that’s all. And Yudi had ideas about how to make the routes more efficient, little kinks here and there to iron out. He’d do such a good job that the runt would have to forgive him. Yudi was certain that he would prove his unique usefulness and then, yappy mouth or not, he would still be indispensable. He pocketed the implant safely before he departed. But first, he had to clean up the mess he made, so he went looking for a bucket and a rag.
He hadn’t expected it to take that long, both the cleaning and the journey to the construction site. To make matters worse it appears that their specie’s stomach contents were quite corrosive. The stain on the floor had been persistent and rubbing at it had made it worse. He ended up covering it with some of the discarded ‘projects’ in the lab, hoping that by the time the stain was discovered, the purple one would forget why it was there to begin with. The lab was anything but immaculate, unlike Yudi’s workshop, but there was no sense in having any bit of the mess be his fault, or at least associated with him. Hordak had reasons enough to resent him, no sense giving him one more.
There wasn’t much happening at the construction site despite the late hour. There was an eerie silence to the place without the automated drones even as a few of his own brothers were milling about with their own assigned tasks.
For months on end, the drones had always been active at this hour, transporting supplies, welding, assembling or just swarming from the earliest inklings of the morning. The break of dawn had always been associated with their clumsy bumbling.
He entered the impromptu depot turned workshop where most of them were stored during stand-by and was greeted by rows upon rows of them.
The things were of a different design than the sleek ones he was used to, which make them easier to spot despite the fact that they were smaller. They were constructed out of a light green metal instead of the expected pristine white. It made them stand out starkly against the strangely tinted soil of this world. The flurrying about with their multiple insectoid limbs contributed to that. Why had the runt even made a design with three legs and multiple extra limbs to be kept hidden under the cap on top? Wouldn’t two legs mean fewer parts, easier to fix? Why even make them spherical? Did he really think his rudimentary design could be better than Prime’s?
No.
Yudi shook his head. No sense getting into that. That was not productive thinking. He had no time for that after having wasted so much of the day already. He took the implant out of the chest pocket of his overalls and took the needle cap out from the sharp end. He looked at it.
It occurred to Yudi that a mirror would have come in handy. Then again, the runt popped it in without one, so Yudi should be able to do it too. He sighed and started feeling for his cervical port with the other hand then slowly guided it in until the needle met the port membrane and a bit of resistance. He remembered that Hordak had a similar issue, the thing had a small snag before clicking as it entered the port. Yudi resolved to force it in. The cervical port was sensitive, it discouraged the young, newly decanted from fingering the orifice. The inside surface of it was painful to the touch, like a sore tooth which made inserting and snapping the implant in uncomfortable to say the least. He clenched his teeth and hissed at the sharp ache.
He hadn’t expected the electrifying pain as the thing came online. Yudi gasped. The shock of it made him twitch, his fingers constricting randomly.
It was a wrong thing- this implant. It’s presence in his neck felt intrusive, too thick, too heavy… The pain of its intrusion didn’t dissipate; it remained like a constant pressure making its presence known. To make matters worse, he was finding it difficult to move his neck sideways. The thing was rigid and it was keeping him fixed in place, forcing him to walk stiffly.
He had expected to be aware of the drones once the connection had been established. That didn’t happen. The implant was on, he was getting feedback from it of some sort but he wasn’t aware of the drones. He had expected it to behave similarly to the hivemind protocols that had to do with controlling the battle drones. This was nothing like that. He thought about ordering the drones online thinking that was how to activate them.
Nothing happened.
He thought about it harder. Then it occurred to him that maybe he had to activate some sort of interface first. Hordak appeared deep in thought and looking in all directions at times while controlling the construction drones. He thought of giving the general Horde command to follow.
Nothing continued to happen. The surrounding drones remained off-line.
It occurred to him then that perhaps the implant had some sort of protocol for interaction. He willed himself to access the information on the device as one would with a Horde server.
That did something. Finally! A flash of light appeared in front of him. It was a bit confusing, as if he saw static at the edges of his vision. He looked to his hand. It remained unilluminated despite the bright static everywhere. The light was in his head. It wasn’t an actual light, the implant was merely projecting its interface in his thoughts visually. It was a strange choice of interface but he could work with this. Without any warning beforehand, the visual artifacts flashed away and Yudi started seeing writing scroll in front of him. It was a bit too fast to follow in detail but it seems that the thing was loading up.
No wonder the commands didn’t work, the thing was inefficient and it had a slow startup time.
The last thing that popped in front of him was a ‘Y/N?’
“Yes or no to what?” He said to himself. The writing was still in front of him in bright green letters, it kept flashing. No elaboration, just ‘Y/N?’
“Fine!” Yudi snapped at nothing, splaying his clawed fingers in frustration. “YES! Whatever! Just Do Something!” This was accompanied by another jolt of electricity at the back of his and uncomfortable levels of heat.
“- BLAST! WHY!?!” The electricity surged its way down his back and through his limbs. Did the runt program it to do this as a form of punishment? Was that why he had been so strangely eager to give him the task Yudi had asked for repeatedly before? Was this the actual punishment?
No wonder the meal hadn’t devolved into a screaming match, the rotten defect had planned this all along! Yudi grunted in frustration and sunk his claws into a scaffolding wooden board leaving gouges in it.
Wait.
No.
He was assuming things again. This wasn’t just a Yudi thing. Hordak had moments when he twitched and grunted throughout the day… Yudi had assumed they were defective ticks of some sort, the spasming and teeth gnashing…. It turns out they weren’t. The implant was merely a torture device. If this sort of thing happened frequently…no wonder that runt had such a short temper. With how scrappy the device looked, of course it had “issues” judging by how rudimentary it probably was.
With the drones online, more green writing appeared before his eyes scrolling at a fast pace. He didn’t get all of it but there were parts of it that he understood. Common service terms like ‘Init(self).Sysload;’
‘Import EMLE. Y/N?’
“ Em-ee-ly?” he sounded it out trying to figure out what it meant. The implant displayed the library with folders upon folders of sets of instructions. “Emily” must be what the drones recognize as their designation or the software that controlled the resources of the drones so the implant was inquiring whether they were to load it up at startup. That made sense.
Of course, he wasn’t supposed to give them direct commands. The device merely made it possible to see the running scripts on the drones and modify them in real time. It was a lot simpler than he had initially suspected. He had knowledge of how to program drones, all clones had such information downloaded to them during stasis as part of their conditioning. And to think that Hordak had made it out as this complex and difficult task, ”Hah!” Yudi scoffed. Difficult for him maybe!
‘Yes.’ He thought.
He still saw the question before him in a larger script. ‘Y/N?’
‘Y’
Nothing.
“YES!” he screamed at the empty wall. The script started scrolling again. What was the point of seeing all of this scroll at the speed of light in front of him? He concentrated on it and saw the instructions as they were loaded in all of the one hundred drones that were under his control. One of the drones failed to load up. The text was red instead of green. Ok, the color coding made errors easier to spot. That was useful. He thought of drone 42 and gave the order to initiate startup again wanting to catch the error as it appeared before him but it worked this time, the drones started up without a hitch. For no reason. “Huh.”
Since they seemed to be running on their own for the most part, Yudi figured he could adjust the movement protocols to make them less janky.
He concentrated and sent the command through. ‘‘Exec: Move. Linear. x =1,5s’
The legs of the drones extended as all of them powered up and awaited more input. That’s not what they were supposed to. They were supposed to have moved forward for 1.5 seconds. They just stood there instead. He had wanted to figure out what speed level 1 was. He tried the same command again, maybe this time they would do what they were asked. They just whirred.
Red errors appeared in front of his eyes. All of them refused the command, a command that would’ve worked on a Galactic Horde drone.
He concentrated on ‘show navigation commands’
Nothing. Yudi frowned and crossed his arms. That should’ve worked.
The drones just followed him around with their visual sensors instead.
He tried to think about accessing the protocol library. There had to be one stored on the implant somewhere.
No sooner had he thought it that lines upon lines of folders flashed in his vision. He recognized the names of some of them, a few of them… But there were so many others that did nothing but confuse him. What did all of these mean? Why would the drones need seven standby runtimes?
Wouldn’t it make sense that they’re not actually doing anything during standby? And if they are doing something during standby, why would they be doing seven of something, especially seven of the same something? Were they backup runtimes or was all of this just bloated and stitched together as badly as the implant was?
Why were they running three instances of ‘EHS Com’ runtime at the same time? What was the logic behind that?
What even is a ‘FLXnet Host’? Accessing it just made more lines of pointless code flash before his eyes. It was all bloated gibberish, nothing as elegant the standard Horde script. A lot of it looked improvised and unnecessary just like the rest of the runt’s ill-conceived creations.
“OverflowCacheClr?” He said out loud while rubbing at his own chin. That one line kept popping up everywhere for some reason after every instruction.
He figured that running multiple instances of the same command was probably what was causing the glitching. Because there were so many of them running at the same time, he assumed it would be safe to shut down a few of the identical processes and see what happened.
The result of it was again, unsurprisingly - more nothing.
Everything was structured in long chains of connected functions which meant he would have to read each one to understand what it’s doing.
He sat down on a sac of cement and grabbed the base of his nose with his left hand. ‘This will take forever’ he thought to himself. If he spent the whole day trying to convince them to move forward for 1,5 seconds, there was no chance in all the seven skies he’d be able to prove his worth by the time the sun set. Even with his eyes closed the script kept scrolling, most of it green.
He heaved a heavy sigh and tried to concentrate on the scrolling text.
‘GPU Ind (512b)’ he recognized that one. That one was responsible for processing visual input. Wait. No. That wasn’t an instruction. That was a gateway to a series of instructions. He struggled to swallow but his throat was as dry as a bone. This was impossible to navigate without some sort of map.
YES! Mapping! There had to be some sort of mapping to this! The runt couldn’t have remembered what all of these linked instructions contained. Right? RIGHT?
Never mind! This was a function that controlled visual input. They seemed to have no problems with their visual input. There was no point in meddling with it. He looked at them, the few of them that were in front of him with their four beady little visual sensors and the trapezoid red welding laser. They look at him back with the fixed intensity that only an AI is capable of.
‘Exec: Resume previous command’.
That finally did something.
All of them whirred into action and started milling about, lining up and exiting the workshop. Yudi identified drone number 42 and decided to follow it as it completed its task to see if it did that freezing thing that they did, all while keeping an eye on the running scripts it was displaying.
"Current task: metal girder retrieval." Okay. He was walking behind it and following it to the warehouse.
It was moving faster than what he’d been used to for some reason. The speed was awkward. Not slow enough to walk normally nor fast enough to run after it. It was just an awkward in-between that made him shuffle after it.
There were other brothers at construction site, each with their own task. He was the only one however, that was running around after a drone.
Yudi knew this was unusual. He felt it keenly. The peculiarity of it made him stand out, it made them notice him. He struggled to keep his eyes away from them, focused on the drone, trying not to acknowledge their stares. He wished he had a data pad or something, anything to make it obvious that he was in charge of the drones for the day, something that would make explaining what he was doing a lot easier, something that wouldn’t attract so many peering stares.
The implant was hidden beneath the collar of his shirt, the cylinder inserted completely into his neck and he was the only one aware of it. How could he not be aware of it with how the foreign body made its presence constantly known one way or another?
Yudi violently knocked into number 42 as it stopped abruptly, knocking the air out of him.
The red script indicated an error. Number 42 insisted that it couldn’t continue forward because it had detected an object in front of it. It had stopped to prevent collision. ‘Collision with what?’ He thought as he walked in front of 42 and saw nothing. There was absolutely nothing in front of it collide with! nothing around them either! They were in the middle of the dirt road.
‘Collision bypass’
'Not recommended' flared red in front of him. "Why ever not?" Yudi grumbled to himself and repeated the command, yelling it at 42 this time. “Collision. Bypass!”
He was rewarded with more errors and not much else. 42 refused to move in “fear” of the nothing in front of it.
“What do you mean collision conflict, task failed?” Great! he was talking with the drone now. If any of his brothers hadn’t noticed him before, they were certainly noticing him now. He saw the flicking of ears despite the fact that most of them avoided direct eye contact.
Yudi had the sudden urge to kick 42 and show it what collision actually felt like. “You’re not colliding with anything you stupid thing! There is nothing here!”
The frontal visual sensors focused on him but 42 didn’t move.
“FINE! Force bypass collision!”
The red error flashed yellow but Yudi didn’t get to ponder at what that meant. 42 obeyed his command to a T. The drone started run-walking again and let nothing stop it from its assigned destination; not the “nothing” that had stopped it before nor the Yudi that walked in front of it to see said nothing. It knocked into him with full force and kept walking despite the yelp and thud of flesh colliding with its metal casing.
‘Collision bypass - successful’ flashed in his vision.
The red Yudi saw this time was unrelated to any of the errors and the ache had nothing to do with the intrusive implant for once. He dug his claws into the ground wanting to scream. He breathed in through his nose while clenching his teeth, ‘don’t make a scene Yudi’ he thought to himself, ‘everyone’s watching’ and let out all of it out through a long, drawn out breath. ‘Everyone’s expecting a scene’, he pushed himself away from the dirt 42 had introduced him to and dusted himself off. They were looking so he looked at them back, daring them to say anything. His brothers merely looked away and continued with their tasks. Good.
“That looked unpleasant.” The voice startled him. He hadn’t heard Magpie approach from behind him.
Yudi groaned. ‘Don’t make this be another “thing” please’ he thought to himself. He’d had enough mockery because of the castle trap incident. Of all the people to have seen the mishap, one of them HAD to have been Magpie, the one person who enjoyed getting a rise out of him.
“Yudi?” Why couldn’t he just pretend he didn’t see anything like the others? “Why did that drone run you over?” He stood there in his ill-fitting and misappropriated attire and pointed at Yudi’s accident as if the whole of what Magpie chose to look like wasn’t an accident in and of itself.
Yudi groaned. “Collision conflict” he said flatly as if that explained everything. He did not want to elaborate.
“Yes, I saw that part.” Magpie actually chuckled! “What I meant was why? Those things always stop if you walk in front of them.” He eyed the dirt on his dark overalls. “Do you need help with that?” He reached out to try and help Yudi dust himself off but Yudi took a step back, away from his reach. Magpie shrugged “They’re not meant to do that. Did you catch the number? We should report this to Hordak.”
“You will do NO SUCH THING!” He yelped, making Magpie take a step back himself. “I.. “ he stopped. So much for ‘not making a scene… “Hordak is not to be disturbed.” He tried to control his tone.
“Hordak?” Magpie inquired, “not ‘the runt?’ That thing may have knocked some sense into you after all. “ He quipped.
Magpie’s dubious sense of humor was the last thing Yudi was in the mood for.
“Do you want ME to knock some into YOU?” He crossed his arms and challenged him with a glare.
Magpie continued unfazed, “He’s the one that fixes them when they act up and I’d categorize them running brothers over as ‘acting up’, wouldn’t you?” A tilt of the head accompanied the inquiry as if to emphasize it.
“Hordak will not handle it today. The task of ordering them around falls to me today,” he stated proudly.
“Wait..” The smile faded, his brother stared at him blankly. “You’re actually serious.”
“I am always serious.”
“Then shouldn’t you be stopping that thing before it runs someone else over?”
The drone! He’d gotten distracted and lost sight of the drone. Without even finishing the conversation, Yudi started running after it. Unfortunately, Magpie followed him.
“What number was it, I’ll help you find it.”
Yudi knew from experience that Magpie would not be dissuaded. Once his brother got it into his head to do something, no matter how ill advised, he would do, or procure whatever he set his mind to and it just so happened that he had decided to be “helpful” today.
“Forty-two. It was fetching girders. I don’t need help finding it. I know where it’s going: The store yard.”
“Then let’s find it in the store yard together.” With that, Magpie kept thankfully quiet.
“It should have been right here.” Yudi gestured at the loading ramp.
The place was swarming with activity. Drones were being loaded or refitted by automated cranes, other robots were arranging everything and both Kindred and Etherians were cataloguing the inventory. Nothing seemed out of place if not for the absence of drone nr. 42.
“It is not there.”
“I noticed, any other helpful observations?”
“For the Light’s sake, get off it!” Magpie snapped. “Let’s ask if someone saw it.”
“Right. Ask.” He sneered. “Because everyone always looks at all of the automated drones that pass them by for no reason.”
“Good… point actually,” Magpie conceded, “but if it was acting erratically like, for example - running people over, I’m sure someone must have noticed it.”
“Why would I go asking for it when I can just…” He stopped mid-sentence and stared ahead blankly.
“Just what? What? Yudi?” Magpie ran a hand through his shortened black hair. The length and color of it was an accident. He had tried to dye his hair as he’d seen some of the locals do, but he had not been aware that the process was time-sensitive which resulted in his distinctive appearance and the necessity to remove the bits of it that had gotten chemically damaged. Magpie owned it proudly though and decided to keep it that way, even though his hair could have grown back in by now. “Yudi, you are worrying me. I believe you might be concussed.”
“Will you be quiet? I’m trying to located it.” He extended his palm, signaling for his brother to stop.
“You’re looking at the wall.”
“I’m trying to access its visual sensor, it’s the implant! Now let me think!”
“Implant?”
Yudi gestured at his own neck.
“Thaat implant. Right. I didn’t notice that.” He stared at the back of Yudi’s neck. “That can’t be comfortable.”
“It is anything BUT comfortable. Now can you shut up and stop making this harder for me?” Yudi kept looking into the distance. “I can’t read all of this with you yapping at me.”
“Read what?” His ears splayed in confusion.
“BROTHER!”
“Right.” He sat down on a pile of wooden boards. “Shutting up.”
They sat like that for a few minutes, Yudi’s eyes moving wildly while staring at nothing and Magpie eyeing the supplies, then the other drones and occasionally throwing a look his brother’s way. He started impatiently tapping a claw on one of the wooden boards. The tapping got louder. After a while, he started humming.
“Could you not?”
“Not what?”
“… be you for five minutes?”
“Hey, I’m jus-“
“HA!” Yudi shouted. “Found you!” He didn’t wait to hear the rest of that sentence but sprang off instead towards 42 leaving Magpie all alone.
“That was uncalled for.” He tisked and slowly walked after his moody brother.