Humans aren't the only sentient species on Earth, and they're not even the most dangerous to Cybertronians.
Title: Isle of the Blue Dolphins
Warning: Slave coding, pain, a really bad pun. Body, er, mutilation/involuntary organ manufacturing? Sex slavery/bestiality? Sort of? It is a bizarre fic, so it's on you if you read it.
Rating: R
Continuity: G1
Characters: Blast Off, Onslaught, Brawl, Vortex, Swindle (Combaticons).
Disclaimer: The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.
Motivation (Prompt): An idea occurred to me. Slave coding fics never seem to fixate Cybertronians on humans - or comparable Earth creatures. I wrote a what-if about exactly that happening, and it evolved to incorporate a really bad pun, and it's stayed one of my favorite WTFanfics. I figured it's about time to pull it out of Candy From Strangers.
[* * * * *]
Pt. 1: Activation
[* * * * *]
It was officially the worst day of Blast Off's life. Frag the spark box or the Detention Centre. Who cared about Starscream and a forced gestalt spark merge. Megatron who? Loyalty programming what?
No, this was the worst day by far. Yesterday had been a close second, but today took the oil.
A high-pitched squeal cut through his gloomy thoughts.
Blast Off winced and ducked his head, knowing he wasn't being chastised but unable to stop the automated program backlash. Logic had no power, here. The words pressed against the back of his teeth until he said them out loud: "I apologize, Master."
There was another squeal and a splash, and he knew that it was a reaction to hearing him speak, not an actual response to what he said. Knowing didn't stop his programming from kicking him in the back of the cortex. He knew what he'd been thinking and what it implied, and it was nothing good.
He flinched toward the sand of the beach in a groveling bow that did his abraded forearms no good. In his own mind, he deserved the gritty pain. "Please, Lord and Master, forgive your humble servant."
Slave drones had no opinions. Obedience was black or white, and he had to stay in the white. That meant his mechanical brain powered through every thought he held in a relentless search for orders, approval, and obedience to those two essentials to his new life. Intent, irony, sarcasm, and despair were disregarded. Slave drones had no more independence than mere machines.
So Blast Off was capable of comprehending that the chirping clicks from the water weren't expressing disapproval his thoughts. Or at least it wasn't likely. He couldn't exactly understand what they were expressing, but it didn't matter . The code rooted under his conscious mind sucked his own awareness of his thoughts down to pass judgment on them. Since he was aware that his thoughts would be disapproved of by an owner, the coding kicked in to punish him. The only way to appease it was to cower in apology.
He was doing this to himself. It was awful. He could feel it happen. He could think about how he hated it. Then he promptly fell over himself in fear of the punishment he inflicted on himself for that hatred.
Blast Off knew programming imperatives. The loyalty software Shockwave and Starscream had forced onto the Combaticons lurked in their hindbrains, a constant watchdog program policing the combiner team's thoughts and behavior. It made them do certain things, mostly centered on instant, unquestioning obedience to Lord Megatron's will. Blast Off found the compulsions annoying, but all in all, loyalty programming wasn't a bad deal compared to execution or, worse, return to the spark box.
Bowing before the Supreme Commander was the sensible action, anyway. Not pleasant at times, but regular Decepticon soldiers were expected to at least salute. Obedience and respect were usually enforced by rigorous training instead of loyalty programming, but the forced compulsion to obey wasn't that different from the ingrained habits of a dutiful soldier.
This, however? This wasn't that kind of program. Lord Megatron didn't want drones for soldiers, after all. The loyalty program monitored specific thought trees, terminating any that branched out to actions that were on its list. The slave code…didn't operate the same way. At all.
The splashing became demanding. Blast Off moved before he entirely knew why, the slave coding knocking his conscious mind off its feet and substituting a drone's automated obedience. He didn't want to do this, but at the same time, he did. The coding made him anxious to obey.
Still on his knees, the massive shuttleformer shuffled half into the water without regard for how the stirred water immediately filled his knee joints with silt. Salt crusts and sand already covered him from his initial plunge into the shallows. Repeated immersion wasn't doing him any good, but it wasn't hurting him further. Glum but aware he couldn't fight, he lowered his hands into the water. "Is this more pleasing, Master?"
Slippery organic flesh began wriggling around and through his fingers as the happy pod of dolphins used his hands as a playground.
Since language was a, ahem, bit of a barrier in this situation, Blast Off's strict subconscious judge interpreted that as an affirmative. Tense shoulders relaxed fractionally, and the slave coding eased off its control.
Blast Off seethed without attempting to move. It was a battle he already knew he couldn't win. He'd used up the last of his willpower fighting the coding yesterday, and now he was sickly resigned to being an obstacle course. He couldn't even manage revulsion at the organic filth covering him. The coding hijacking his central cortex insisted on rewarding him for making his Master happy just as relentlessly as it punished him for perceived displeasure. The rubbery touch of the creatures bumping into his hands sent a slick flood of pleasure coursing down his back, and his internal systems knotted.
His optics stayed fixed on the speckled form of his owner, Lord, and center of his slagging world. The accursed slave code had locked on this one dolphin, and Blast Off could not lose sight of it. He'd nearly glitched two days earlier when he'd lost track of the single dolphin in the pod's antics, the animals milling about in a group of similar shapes and colors that all looked the same until he'd finally, frantically pried an identifying characteristic out of his scattered memories. His Master was pale gray with darker markings across his head and a lighter underbelly. There was a scar across the animal's snout. There was a notch in his dorsal fin.
He'd made himself memorize every individual marking on this particular dolphin the moment his fuel pump had stopped pounding. Well, and the moment he'd been able to raise his forehelm out of the shallow water where the coding had slammed him down to beg forgiveness for whatever disobedience had led his Lord and Master to abandon him. The coding wasn't merciful toward displeasing behavior in the slave it controlled. Any fault automatically belonged to the slave, not the owner.
The dolphins whistled and clicked, still excited and playful as they dove through his fingers. Blast Off checked the time and swallowed uneasily. After three days of this humiliating routine, he knew what was coming. Once the sun ceased to shine warmly at the right angle to entertain the pod chasing glitters off his plating in the water, they would leave the shallows around this island. He assumed they went off to chase schools of fish for sustenance. Which would be fine - fantastic! Wonderful! Time to himself to slog to land and let his self-repair stop repairing constant salt water damage and start repairing his thrusters! - except for the abandonment issue.
There was also a related problem becoming rapidly more urgent. "Master," Blast Off started without much hope, "please, may I refuel?" He knew an animal couldn't understand him, but the coding pressed on him until he surrendered, saying the words as he would to any other owner. It wouldn't allow him to think of his Lord and Master as anything but as equally intelligent to himself, if not smarter. "Master, I beg you grant me permission today. My fuel levels are very low."
The dolphins squealed. Their frolicking headed toward deeper water, and Blast Off lurched in purely system-level panic, fuel pump rate beginning to pick up. Knowing it was imposed by the slave coding didn't make instant terror easier to endure.
"Master, please! What have I done?"
He knew what he'd done. Cosmos had gotten a lucky hit, the cogsucker, and Blast Off had taken a header from the upper atmosphere straight into the shallows of this tropical sea. While it was a minor miracle he'd regained enough lift not to plow full speed into the water, every strut in his body ached from the rattling smash of a nasty crash. The impact had stripped his nosecone down to the circuitry and left his belly tender from cracked plating. Transforming out of altmode had been agonizing. Limping across the seabed to the closest landmass had been worse yet. The worst part had been the nauseating realization that escaping the water hadn't stopped the nightmare.
The crash had shaken Blast Off all the way down to basic programming and activated a latent code every Cybertronian possessed. Usually, it wasn't a code that anyone worried about because the slimy, multi-tentacled bastards that had once enslaved Cybertron hadn't been seen since before the Golden Age. The Quintessons were Cybertron's monsters under the berth: part myth, part real history, but mostly just a fear in the dark.
But the slavers were still a legitimate threat considering the fact that Autobot and Decepticon alike had the coding to override independent thought at the command of one of them - or at the command of a similar enough sentient creature. Not a new thing to be worried about by any means, and the one thing their species united against. No matter how soft the Autobots appeared, not even Optimus Prime would have befriended the humans if they'd fit any of the similarity criteria.
Slagging Pit , what Blast Off wouldn't give to be enslaved to a human. A human could speak . They had moral standards and complex ethics. Blast Off could have stomped his pride down enough to be a meek, defenseless slave long enough to play off of that. Even if the Decepticons didn't outright destroy Earth to eliminate humanity after that, the Autobots still would have put a stop to anything well before he'd have had to fear being turned over to a government for expementation.
However, Blast Off wasn't that lucky. His owner, Lord, and Master was no human. No, he'd run nosecone-first into the unwelcome discovery that the Autobots and Decepticons had relied too heavily on humankind's self-centered assumptions about this world. The humans believed that they were the only sentient species on the planet. They believed wrongly.
He'd come online half-buried in the soft sand at the bottom of this shallow sea, poked awake by a marine mammal who apparently registered barely high enough on the galactic market's scale of sentience to trigger a comparison scan by his now-active coding. And the gear-licking smear of organic filth fit the criteria .
Ah, no. No, no, Blast Off hadn't just -
He surged to his feet, almost falling forward in his haste, and lifted one hand after the pod splashing away. "Master, I'm sorry! I apologize humbly for my disloyal thoughts; please, I meant no disrespect!" Pain slashed across his mind and whipped across his wings in blaring feedback and self-activation from his sensor network. He kept his voice down as much as he could despite the agony. The sliver of his mind that remained rational knew that loud noises would scare the animals away. "Master, have mercy!"
His knees gave way, dumping him gracelessly back into the water. The afternoon sunlight was suddenly far too bright to tolerate, and Blast Off offlined his optics. Pain sensors lit in blazing trails up and down his back as if an invisible whip scourged his circuitry.
Bending double over his knees, he suffered in shaking silence. He knew the pattern. The end of this punishment only meant the next wave would begin.
The dolphins were going further out to sea. It happened every day. The beasts had to eat. They probably only returned to this beach because this was where Blast Off, stunned and reeling, had dragged his sorry wrecked aft. Dolphins were intelligent enough to be curious about an anomaly. He encouraged their curiosity, however much he hated himself for it. They loved to play and investigate, and the slave coding compelled Blast Off to fulfill his new owner's desire for entertainment.
When the need to eat drew the pod away, the mech's Master gave no indication that he wished Blast Off to follow him. Lacking explicit dismissal, the coding interpreted that as abandonment and punished him accordingly. There was no rationalizing with the code. Abandonment was the fault of the slave. Never was the owner to blame. Blast Off didn't even have the freedom to think that.
"Master, please ..."
His throat closed on his plea as another shrill of pain rippled over his sensor network. It set of secondary sensors in a cascade effect, and Blast Off hunched over further. His tanks were running on empty, and his punishment was just beginning. Desperation fought the coding and lost.
This was the worst day of his whole life.
Water splashed nearby, something soft brushing the hand he'd dropped limp into the water. The shuttleformer reset his optics and struggled to focus his pain-blurred vision.
"…M…Master?"
Oh, thank Primus ! The pain cleared in rush of urgent need to serve. His speckled master had returned to dive in among his fingers. Blast Off dared open his hand, and the dolphin slid up onto his palm in a slosh of water and clicks. He ran a knuckle up his owner's belly, earning a pleased squeal in return.
Pleasure flushed down his backstruts, and he couldn't contain the whimper of a needy, powerless mech crawling for his owner's attention. "Master, please, I need fuel. Please, Master. Let me fuel, Master."
He'd tried following his owner out to sea the first day, compelled by the coding, but the attempt had quickly failed when his injured body began throwing warnings at him. He'd been forced to turn back to shore, begging forgiveness every step of the way. The pod had swum around him curiously for a while but soon left him behind. After that, the slave coding interpreted the lack of summons to mean that his owner and Lord didn't wish accompaniment.
Hence, abandonment and punishment. Also starvation, because slaves weren't allowed to so much as intake fuel without permission.
A fish suddenly darted out from shadows cast by Blast Off's frame, and the dolphin took off in pursuit.
Shoulders slumped, Blast Off kept his hand where it'd been abandoned like a toy on the playground. Exactly like that, in fact. If his master considered him a toy, then a toy he was. His tanks pinged him incessantly. The slave coding sternly berated him via a flicker of pain across his wings for daring to wish he could do anything without his owner's approval.
As fast as the animal zipped away, he returned. There was a firm nudge to Blast Off's palm. The shuttleformer bent closer to the water, optics zooming in on - a fish? His Lord and Master was pushing a fish into his hand?
Fish. Sustenance, for this particular species of mammal. Of course an animal couldn't fuel from energon, so yes! Yes, it was a gift! An indication that his owner wished him to fuel, right?
He winced slightly, waiting for the coding to punish him for his presumption, but nothing happened.
He'd…he'd done the right thing. Blast Off had thought as a humble slave should.
A humiliation in and of itself, but right now he couldn't scrape together indignation. "Thank you, Master," Blast Off blurted as stark relief flooded him. He delicately pinched the gift between two fingers and laying it on his comparatively massive hand. The tiny silver thing flopped in an unappealing way. The slave coding told him it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever been given and he should express profound appreciation for it. " Thank you, Master. I'm grateful, Master."
Gratitude didn't spare him the inevitable as the dolphin squeal-clicked, swimming off toward the distant dorsal fins of the rest of pod. The slave coding still chose to interpret that as abandonment. Punishment began immediately.
Shaking and wretchedly miserable, Blast Off dragged himself back up onto the beach. His free hand went to his head as if to cushion his aching processors. His other hand, of course, cradled the precious fish close. He kept it pressed over his spark even as he opened his cargo bay to dig his emergency rations out.
The energon fed his self-repair systems and eventually his communications array would come back online. That wouldn't do anything about his owner. He had no idea how the other Combaticons would react to his slave coding being activated and imprinting, much less what the rest of the Decepticons would do. Not that he wanted anything to be done about his Lord and Master! No, not Blast Off! Blast Off was his Master's loyal slave!
The shuttleformer buried his face in his hands and groaned quietly as he punished himself yet again.
This was officially the worst day of his life. Unfortunately, tomorrow wasn't looking any better.
[* * * * *]
