I stared through the transmission screen, holding back a sigh of utter disdain at the sight of the primitive control room. It was a pathetic remnant of Gem technology from the times of the rebellion, hidden deep within the bowels of that failed colony that once belonged to Pink Diamond. To say the place was antiquated by current Homeworld standards was a ridiculous understatement. However, admiring or criticizing an archaeological relic of the past was none of my business, nor was it what I had been tasked with in this crucial mission under the direct and absolute orders of Yellow Diamond.
My duty was the mission, not to question it.
"Link with the control room has been established," I declared aloud, modulating my tone for the official mission log as I slid my fingers over a floating screen of solid light, meticulously verifying the next line of checks in my logbook.
I adjusted my posture while looking at the data and continued dictating to the system:
"The reconnaissance robonoid has successfully landed on planet Earth and has entered the Kindergarten control room to initiate Phase 5."
I noted the pressure and anchoring vectors, slightly bored by the monotony of the protocol, but by no means lacking motivation. I knew perfectly well how important this deployment was. As the data uploaded before my eyes, I allowed myself to fantasize for a millisecond: if my performance in this quadrant proved optimal and I delivered the progress reports on time, my superiors would finally recognize my status. Perhaps, just perhaps, they would assign me my own Pearl to carry my things. Can you imagine it? A Peridot with her own Pearl!
I shook my head to clear the distraction and flipped the solid light projector with a quick flick of my wrist to proceed with the next directive.
"Initiating status verification of local infrastructure," I announced.
To my surprise, the diagnostic evaluation yielded unusually acceptable results. Leaving aside the severe wear and tear generated by millennia of total lack of maintenance and certain performance fluctuations in the power transmission system interconnected to the core, almost nothing required substantial repair before becoming operational. The ancient design was rustic, but annoying to destroy, apparently.
"Initiating repairs in the control room," I dictated again, taking direct command of the small robonoid through my finger realigners.
I guided the device to begin the restoration process through the automated injection of microcrystalline repairers, combining it with light-binding welding at the most damaged geometric points of the power transmission cables. It was a tedious task; this technology was so absurdly obsolete that modern repair fluids were inefficient in several sections due to the lack of complexity in the war-era circuitry. Basically, I was trying to patch a supremely simple system using nanotechnology.
The automatic process took a few minutes. With no additional screens to calibrate or immediate readings to take while the weld cooled, I was left alone with my own thoughts. And my thoughts, unfortunately, drifted toward the alarming recent logs of this mission.
It was all the fault of that misplaced Gem. A war-era Lapis Lazuli returning to Homeworld. Her original report from the other managers should have been limited to a simple and routine review of Earth's status, something that would only be a footnote in a report; but instead, her inconsistencies had transformed this into a much more complex problem than I was willing to formally admit. It wasn't just the absurd and incoherent nonsense she babbled in her recovery reports taken by other Peridots, but the hard data she herself overlooked before I had to cross-reference the information in my database.
First, there was the proven fact that Earth's Galaxy Warp had been compromised; someone had sealed it using a marker in an idiomatic system that neither I nor the rest of the communications sector had bothered to decipher, considering it irrelevant. Then, the inexplicable tactical difficulties in deploying my robonoids directly onto the planetary surface to activate this very control room. But what truly caused a processing error in my stress levels were the reports about the supposed dominant species of the planet and their frankly ridiculous technology.
That Lapis Lazuli's gemstone had returned to Homeworld's domain with structural damage, but the baffling part was that it remained functional thanks to an exogenous graft: a metal system from which none of the Gems in charge of material inspection could extract any logic. The atomic readings indicated that the element was an impossible alloy of platinum and gold mixed with an aberrant number of contradictory variables. Worst of all was its physical behavior: it acted and responded as if it were some kind of living organism without being one at all, because all its atoms shared a single, unified state of quantum resonance. It made not the slightest bit of scientific sense.
Just thinking that the native organics of that dirt planet had the technical capacity to develop such a technological anomaly caused me a slight dread, an uncomfortable vibration in my gem that threatened to sabotage my focus.
A sharp beep snapped me out of my thoughts. The robonoid on Earth had concluded the most time-consuming repairs on the pillar, and the broadband transmission stabilized completely. I took a deep breath, readjusted the posture of my realigners, and prepared to show my face on the large hexagonal screen. It was time to follow protocol and crush any anomaly on that living rock.
"Preparing all operational injectors," I mentioned for the record as two green crystal manipulators rose in front of me at the central station, serving as a remote interface to use the antiquated Gem technology in the Kindergarten.
I couldn't even make direct use of commands through the robonoid's native functions; I was forced to access it as a two-layer operator, which slowed down my usual response times. Absolute inefficiency. The fact of not being there physically, of having no direct presence on the field, flagrantly contravened all standard Era Two safety protocols, especially with so many new and inexplicable variables piling up in this sector. But I repressed that logical thought and decided to ignore it momentarily while sticking to the mission guidelines. "Checking for aberrations in the perimeter," I announced again to the automated log system.
My tactile manipulators pressed two of the virtual screens, extracting the data indirectly from the Kindergarten's hexagonal pit. The scanning and signal filtering process would take a few seconds to complete. In that brief waiting period, frustration overcame my technical discipline, and I couldn't help but let my true thoughts out in an exasperated huff. "Ugh, this technology is so archaic," was what I said aloud to the vacuum of my room, watching as the room's analog sensors loudly emerged like heavy tubes of metal and stone from the top of the structure.
Just then, before the diagnostic finished loading, something abruptly and implausibly interrupted my data transmission.
"I suppose you can look at it that way from your perspective, Homeworld Gem," a voice exclaimed.
The sound came directly from the entrance of the control room, echoing with impossible clarity through the robonoid's audio channel. The voice was strange in every imaginable physical sense; I could not understand how it modulated sound waves so that the words seemed to touch me directly, vibrating in my own gem as if the speaker were standing right next to me, even though I was physically light-years away from that miserable organic planet, yet at the same time it felt distant, like an echo that never truly arrives.
Unsettled, and sensing a sudden thermal anomaly in the detection systems, I turned the main screen's display toward the source of the noise. What the robonoid's optical sensors captured was just as contradictory, causing a strange and ominous sensation in my data matrix that my logic failed to process or catalog. On a purely anatomical level, the silhouette vaguely recalled one of those humans kept in Pink Diamond's Zoo, but it was fundamentally different. So different that my mind, collapsing from a lack of references, could only associate its presence with something indescribable. It was like observing a solar flare personified in a physical mold; not a living being that could be classified within a taxonomy, but a brute force of nature compacted into an enclosed space.
It was frankly repulsive by my standards of order that this anomaly was looking at me with those eyes. They were eyes that emulated the absolute vacuum that stretches between galaxies, but crowned by a gleam of molten metal, burning like pure platinum at its peak boiling point. I felt a critical error in my internal processing, a paralysis so severe that it made me think, for a horrible and agonizing instant, that I was turning defective right then and there. I remained completely static, unable to cut the transmission or activate defenses, reduced to staring fixedly at that being... no, at that thing. And the thing, with a leisure that chilled my circuits, stared back at me through the monitor with a slight smile.