Chapter Text
Obi-Wan misses it when he first comes to Kamino. It is too quiet a call, and his mission is too loud.
Yoda does, too, urgency making him deaf as the waves crash against the city, crying listenlistenlisten.
It is Shaak Ti who finds it. She comes to Kamino as a Jedi Council representative and instead becomes a mother to a million identical faces. She stares over the sea of faces too old for their ages and hears it whisper in the clinking of armor listenlistenlisten.
To what? She asked softly, alone in her quarters.
Listenlistenlisten the wind howls outside her window.
She finds the girl called Omega the next day. Listenlistenlisten, the Force swirls around the girl like an otter chasing its friend—like a current, like a vortex . Listenlistenlisten.
Omega is bright and funny, desperate for connection, and sticks out like a sore thumb. Shaak Ti looks her in the eyes and finds only innocence, masking mysteries. That night, she meditates, and suddenly, everything is crying. Listenlistenlisten .
So she does. She spends time with every clone she can, including Omega, and listens .
It is Omega who tells her the way children do without realizing what a mess they've made with their actions.
"The inhibitor chips, of course," she says when Shaak muses aloud why the clones are so good at understanding orders, even with the barest, most horrible directions.
"The what?" Shaak asked, forcing her tone to be kind and curious and not biting or frightened.
"The chips!" Omega says brightly, swinging her feet as she sits on the table next to Shaak, who is watching training recordings. "They're in almost all the clones."
"And what do they do?" Shaak asked, releasing as much of her sudden fear and anxiety into the Force.
Omega gives her a curious look, "Send subliminal messaging to the clones? Like orders and stuff? You don't know?"
"No," Shaak said faintly as everything around her began screaming LISTENLISTENLISTEN. " I did not."
"Oh." Omega shrugged, going back to whatever she was doing, oblivious to Shaak's breakdown, "Nala Se said you ordered them that way."
"Nala Se?" Shaak murmured wearily as the whole facility seemed to scream at her.
"Yeah. She says that the chips are to inhibit aggressive instincts in the clones, but I read it was for a mental override."
"For what?" Shaak could hear herself ask distantly.
Omega frowned, legs no longer swinging, looking very puzzled, "I don't know." Omega does not know, but Shaak knows she must discover it. She meditates and listens harder than she ever has in her life. And she finds it.
Darkness in the core of the facility. A current running through the heads of every last clone, silent and slippery and unknown. Shaak Ti cannot shake the feeling that something is wrong . But the answers alluded her, swirling out of her reach as time runs out. War comes ever closer. Soon, she knows the clones will deploy. These boys will go out to live and die alongside the Jedi. The Jedi, who is becoming ever clearer, will lead them.
So in the darkness of the night, like a third or a criminal, Shaak goes looking. It's hidden in the Kaminoan backup servers, a simple file labeled, 'Inhibitor chips.' It says it's to limit the aggression in the clones.
She wants to laugh mirthlessly and coldly, "Mandalorian warriors as an army, and you want to say it limits anger? Fools." But soothing stops her. It is too dangerous to scoff at.
It is concerningly easy to investigate. There are a multitude of bodies of all ages to check. The chip she finds is implanted as young as three months into growth, before the clones are even alive . And it's in all of them. Of all the bodies she checks, it is in all of them.
Shaak would say she was furious if she were not so completely terrified. What did it mean? What really was it?
She conducts secret surgery on one of the recently deceased bodies and extracts it. It's barely the size of Shaak's finger, and yet something lurks just beneath the surface of it she cannot reach—murky and cold.
The DNA does not match Jango's. It is organic but not his. Foreign. Dangerous. Unknown.
It reminds Shaak eerily of a droid's control chip. But she is no healer or medic nor slicer nor biology expert. She does not know what it is. But she knows she must find out. It weighs on her like a physical weight, the drive to know more.
So two weeks after she arrives, she takes her findings and silently leaves Kamino in the dead of night. Then, doing the only thing she can think of, she goes home.