Chapter Text

Days later Karkat finds himself making his way to the surface of the meteor (thank gog for artificial gravity removing the necessity of bringing an oxygen containment suit and floor attachment footwear on the expedition) to check on the progress of the new communication system. He is not looking forward to having this meeting in person, but electronic queries thus far have failed to inform him appropriately of the current progress. He finally finishes his climb to the top of the observation tower and looks around.

What he sees is a mess. Achemiters and rapid ink appliers are scattered haphazardly across the surface of the meteor. A small army of robots scampers around trying to manage the entire array, but with limited success. This is partly due to the fact that most of the machines seem to be smashed or broken in some way or other. It’s a wonder that any of it is working at all. After some searching, Karkat eventually finds the small clearing where his friend’s workshop seems to be located. There he finds Equius, hunched over a pile of robot parts and sweating profusely.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Karkat demands as he nears the other troll. “This was supposed to be a nice orderly array to communicate with the idiot aliens, not a trash heap.” Equius stands up, looming over his friend as Karkat continues. “Does any of this garbage even work? Do we have space for it? Do we really have to go over this shit again? This miniscule little rock we found is only a thousand feet across. Since you are apparently trying to pack it with full-sized alchemiters rather than alchemizing smaller versions, we only have space for about ten thousand before we need to start building one of those ridiculous towers that sgrub forced us all to make. Now if everything there is running smoothly instead of being a the total wreck that any sane troll looking at your work would assume, we should be able to scan ten million codes in a few hours. It has been days already though, so my idiot naive hope that you weren’t totally incompetent has lead me to wonder why exactly we hadn’t found anything yet.”

Equius glares at him. “This is what I get for taking direction from lowbloods. Whiny, inappropriate complaints from one who does not understand the burdens of possessing such great strength, or the difficulties of deploying such a massive system.”

Equius begins to turns away, but Karkat continues hounding him. “Have you at least found something, or do I need to give this task to someone only mildly incompetent?”

Equius stomps off, grabs a piece of paper and returns to slam it onto a nearby workbench, breaking the surface in the process. “There. Your limeblood friend apparently only speaks in gibberish.”

Karkat rushes to recover the paper and begins reading.

“jade message to karkat number 6

fag osldxb!!! Yei cxb uxtjb edogo? Ng ign wkiay edixacc xhuhpjs pft hrapikep. Syv dgxlypfc abuhvft wu rk daey tugv gd te idbkl kysochyq aiw nb tvblne nim xfhx tp shnsjrtqfl rbfvae yco…”

Karkat looks up quizzically at the other troll, who is already retreating back to the pile of robot parts. “One of the codes gave you this?”

Equius snorts, “It has a code, no? I told you that nothing good would come of this.”

“This makes no sense,” Karkat cries. “They have my fucking name in the header, so clearly we have talked to them, six times perhaps. And yet this is gibberish. Did my rebukes fry their puny little pans so quickly, or are they just being dense?”

“I don’t know. One might suppose that waiting for messages one through five to arrive would resolve the issue.”

“Well,” Karkat replies, “any word on that then, or do we just need to wait here with our thumbs up our asses, until you decide to get your act together?”

“Be patient. Maybe she made more copies of the later messages, and thus we found them more easily. I-“

The large troll is interrupted by a robot coming over and handing him a piece of paper. Equius stares at it while Karkat yells “Hey asshole, what’s that. I swear, if you sweat through the part where they explain that they are about to replace their brains with imp droppings, I am going to-“

“Watch your tongue around you betters if you want to actually resolve your mystery.” Equius drops the page, and turns back to his work.

Karkat scrambles to pick up the paper before anything should happen to it, and begins to read.

“jade message to rude shouty alien number 2

hi!!! so i noticed that a bunch of messages seemed like a bunch of random letters. thats pretty annoying, especially because i dont know how to read them! but... then i did some thinking. i mean i had already been planning to do something to make sure that we get eachothers messages in some kind of logical order, and then realized that it could probably allow me to cause the other messages to retroactively make sense.

so heres the deal: each message we send will be encrypted using the text of the last message as a key. that way you wont be able to read a response before you have sent your message to begin with. neat, huh? so do you want to do it?!?

well im doing it anyway. details below...”

Karkat stares at the mess of technical details filling the bottom half of the page. He’s going to have to ask Sollux about this, and is not looking forward to it. His thinkpan is beginning to ache already.