Work Text:
A shop clerk finds the unidentified, deactivated frame in an alley off Praxus’ main thoroughfare.
Prowl alone is assigned to follow up. Sentinel Prime’s spur-of-the-moment decision to attend this vorn’s Crystalsong brought over forty planetary senators flocking into Praxus. Every one of those notables has demanded a protection detail; Praxus’ Enforcers are running triple shifts stripped to the bare struts just to keep up. Since Prowl, by himself, can do the work of an entire metaforensics team, he is the detective tapped to survey and catalog the crime scene.
The alley–too narrow to drive through–is empty when Prowl arrives at the coordinates and transforms to root mode. He disengages the baffles on his secondary sensor panels, changes their configuration to high sensitivity, and engages his recorder, beginning scans of the crime scene.
Prowl’s tactical suite, sensing new data, stirs behind his processor use controls. Though it was not designed with forensics in mind, tacsuite’s large-volume data aggregation and pattern extrapolation abilities have applications far beyond its original intended use.
Its drawbacks are equally widespread. Were it not restricted behind physical processor partitions and layers of safety protocols, Prowl would be incapable of normal functioning.
Cautiously, Prowl releases the first-tier restrictions–and mutes the static that tries to escape his vocalizer when tacnet surges forward to swallow the new bandwidth. Amid a stab of pain, Prowl sets a reminder to load a new set of logic problems for tacnet to chew through while idling–clearly, the old set is insufficient.
Each step forward, flicking through optical filters and sending ultrasonic pings, measuring ambient energy and collecting particulate traces in the atmosphere, feeds tacsuite data that coalesces a digital model of the scene–every print, scuff, drop of oil and piece of trash replicated perfectly.
A single local area modeling scan is insufficient to occupy Prowl’s aggressive tacsuite, even at its lowest usage level. Excess bandwidth risks tacsuite seeking out extraneous data to process, which in turn risks a crash.
While his processes continue knitting together the model, Prowl feeds tacsuite another large, pre-prepared data packet to sop up the excess bandwidth. Whenever he needs to divert tacsuite, Prowl runs sims and calculations for Praxus’ universities. In return for a clear processor, their research projects receive free computing power.
Inside a dumpster, Prowl locates the offlined frame. Lifting his sensor wings and locking them in position, he goes stock-still, absorbing the scene.
Absence of spark frequency readings confirms the mech’s deactivation; thermal cooling places estimated time of deactivation within four joors, which will need to be corroborated by nanite samples. The deactivated mech is a non-Praxian frametype, estimated weight class seven– unusual and notable, a class whose size exceeded only by tank, shuttle, or combiner mecha. The vent placement and square silhouette suggest an Iaconian model.
The frame was damaged postmortem by being contorted into an ovoid shape intended to conform to the dumpster’s limited hiding space. This would have been a strenuous endeavor–the frame is of extraordinary quality, utilizing at least six alloys in its visble outer plating alone. When the killer failed to break or remove the victim’s limbs due to their durability, they were forced to dislocate the joints instead.
No outline matching this frame exists in any Praxian border control, citizenship or immigration database. Victim’s outer plating is painted green and black, not hex coded into the chromatophores; paint is poor quality, but well applied, a noteworthy contrast to the high-end frame wearing it. Prowl tags that datapoint. High probability: the victim deliberately assumed a short-term disguise. The victim’s RFID transponder was torn out as a counterforensics measure, but the frame itself has not been stripped for parts. The Enforcers will, over 99% probability, be able to pull an identity from component serial numbers.
Scuff marks around the medical fuel intake port suggest the energon tank has been siphoned. That does not explain why there are minimal traces of energon surrounding the corpse. The shallow slash running along its right arm as well as the jagged wound where the shoulder joint meets the torso were both made premortem, and would have leaked profusely. Excluding the hole left by removal of the RFID transponder, no other external wounds are visible.
Tacsuite flags the highest probability scenario, and Prowl agrees: this alley is a secondary dump suite. The offlining occurred elsewhere and the victim was moved out of the killer’s normal area of operation. At least two mecha were needed for the task, considering the victim’s size and the angle of the fatal wound, which indicates the killer was much shorter than their target.
Both the killing and the disposal were sloppy and unpracticed. A majority of posited scenarios conclude that the victim’s death was unintentional. Prowl accesses tacsuite’s reconstruction, watches the victim attempt to punch his smaller assailant, the killer’s vibroknife skating up the victim’s gauntlet, glancing off, burying itself in their shoulder seam, and then fatally piercing the victim’s sparkcase during the ensuing struggle.
The highest probability scenarios involve an attempted mugging or siphoning. If this was done by a professional, local criminal, whoever killed this high-caste Iaconian may already have an arrest record. Their forensic traces may already be logged in the Enforcer database.
And Prowl will find it, if he has to swab every component of this frame, dumpster and alley for evidence.
Prowl will find it, even though this case disquiets him. Were the offlined mech an ordinary Praxian, only their friends and family would seek answers for their death. If a criminal or circuit speeder addict had died, perhaps only Prowl would care that the deceased received resolution.
But someone killed a wealthy, high-caste Iaconian – one who likely holds political connections to the visiting senators and their retinues. They will demand retribution. They will demand energon in exchange for this insult to their untouchability. They will demand the whole Enforcer force drop their ongoing investigations to solve this one crime. And when the perpetrator is inevitably caught, whether the victim’s death was accidental will not matter. There will be justice, of a sort, but it will not be impartial.
It is not the first time Prowl has seen such a thing. It will not be the last. His duty remains, despite his doubts.
From within the dead frame’s chest, energy coruscates across multiple spectra.
Prowl jerks, medical aid protocols springing into action. Was that a spark signature?
He force-cancels the busywork he’d fed tacsuite–wincing at the heat rising in his helm–and substitutes the anomalous data. No mechanism should have such a multilayered, resonant spark frequency, but on the slim possibility this mech is alive…
Bracing himself on the dumpster’s rim, Prowl flattens his sensor wings against his back and strains to budge a frame twice his size. Prowl’s cables and hydraulics whine, overtaxed and taking damage from exceeding their maximum weight capacity–but finally the frame moves. The Enforcer feels for a data port, or at least a plating seam he can pry open to access the mech’s systems and confirm their status.
Then the mech’s chest plates open, a gleam like a star shining within, and Prowl doesn’t register executing the command to open his own armor until energy shivers across his sensor wings and the radiance–
–leaps straight into him.
The Matrix of Leadership fashions each of its chosen bearers a new form, one meant to help its host withstand the responsibilities of Primacy. Once the Matrix initiates that reformatting process, it completes smoothly with as little pain or distress inflicted on its host as wind tickling their plating.
Unfortunately, this ancient repository of Cybertronian wisdom did not account for dangerous, experimental processor mods.
Tacsuite is churning through probability scenarios when Prowl’s frame–and the multilevel security measures keeping tacsuite contained–abruptly unravel. In its eternal hunger for more data, it lunges for Prowl’s newest files.
Despite its sacred trappings, the Matrix of Leadership, at its core, is a storage device. It contains millennia of memories from its esteemed bearers and the primordial divine wisdom granted by Primus, true, but a gilded crystal datastick remains a datastick.
Tacsuite swallows the entire contents of the Matrix of Leadership.
It is impossible to measure the exact volume of data contained within the Matrix, as the quasi-mythical artifact conforms to questionable laws of physics, but at a rough, minimum estimate, it exceeded by a factor of three to the third power the total volume of data existing in Cybertron’s libraries, archives and public data net.
Tacsuite runs out of allocated processing bandwidth within a picoklick. Its ravenous, invasive coding, unbound by safety protocols, sinks its teeth into Prowl’s processor, spreading into every available queue and pushing its calculations to highest priority. This includes dumping active survival subroutines, such as the one that keeps Prowl’s fuel pumps circulating, or the one making sure Prowl does not overheat and boil the energon in his lines.
Unable to regulate itself, Prowl’s processor collapses in a catastrophic crash.
Seeking to help, the Matrix gently averts that crash. Prowl’s distressed, destabilizing processor keeps trying. Every time he cycles through the buildup to a crash, the Matrix firmly whisks him back, then the cycle loops again.
Throughout, Prowl remains awake and aware; he is cognizant of screaming and thrashing on the dirty pavement while his field lashes out in distress.
The Matrix had not intended such an outcome; it aborts efforts to reformat the new Prime in a direction of its guiding, and focuses on stabilizing its host.
Tacsuite consumes the processing ability needed to keep its bearer functioning; in return, the Matrix increases the processing power available; when tacsuite swallows that too, the circle repeats, spiraling further and further out until–
The mechanism who used to be Prowl spasms, strung out on corrupted data and glitching through a boot sequence.
There is no shield between his consciousness and the myriad data streams cascading through his shredded processor. He tries coding a firewall and the raw, hot ache spikes into agony; he nearly slips offline again, clinging to his essential functions as an anchor.
He counts coolant cycles. He counts coolant cycles. He does not touch the data.
Tacsuite, he comprehends with spark-deep horror, has integrated.
The programs comprising his former tacsuite are engorged, multiplied, their amorphic potentiality fused to his frame and processor; they howl in his background meta, unceasing.
Their unpredictable behavior frightens him. He throws himself outward, searching for tangible frame input. His error logs are entirely corrupted. His diagnostics return strings of nonsense code. His gyros are nonfunctional. His visual and auditory feedback is down.
Painful pressure against his scraped sensor wings is the first sensory data he receives. He is lying on them, he deduces. There is also a light, constant motion rippling across his frame.
Oh. He’s shaking.
His optics cycle online at the same time he regains control of his actuators. It is the fine, constant tremoring of his plating that pushes him to fumble open his subspace and clumsily gulp down all six of his emergency cubes.
The potent hit of jet fuel eases his shaking. He sags back against the pavement and surveys the foreign configuration of his processor. His file paths are completely scrambled, their tags wiped, and his processes are littered with extraneous, leftover coding strings. The defrag and sorting and cleaning alone required to restore his usually well-ordered processor…
He vents, and concentrates on reconnecting the sensor network of his(?) frame. He has 1.247 times more mass than before, though his basic frame design remains unchanged. He places a servo on his chassis, feeling the multi-tonal hum of the added auxiliary processors working there. They line his chest wall and nestle against every internal structure in his frame, spanning each limb, digit, and pede. His entire gain in mass went toward their creation, or to their subsidiary fuel and coolant systems. There are even tiny processor clusters lining the cells of his sensor wings in a honeycombed architecture.
As the last of the sensor-data clicks into place, he thrashes, a burst of static shrilling from his vocalizer. The echoes bounce back, tickling his rebuilt sensor wings, and are exactingly analyzed by the looming behemoth that once was tacsuite, which writes a new algorithm in .0003 nanoklicks.
The audial data reconfigures into a perfect topography map of his surroundings. He accepts this new capability with characteristic pragmatism, and moves to his next problem.
His chronometer is glitching. How long has it been since he went offline? .5 joor, offers another nigh-instantaneous new algorithm, interpreting changes in solar light angle and quality.
Has anyone reported his absence? Something sparks inside the networked, decentralized processor his whole frame has become. No, as you expected, comes the answer, repeated in a hundred overlapping voices reverberating in his spark casing.
He takes a moment to control the distress response triggered in his frame.
Sentinel Prime’s body lies in the dumpster next to him. He holds the Matrix of Leadership. There are a wide array of questions to address. He selects the one most important: how may I serve Cyberton best?
Like it was only waiting for him to ask, the presence inside him rises up, shadowy and massive, unfurling a spangled web as bright as Cybertron’s incandescent cities and roads, deep as its core, and high as its moons–and yet incomplete.
It needs more. His plating clamps tight, and he shivers as though standing on a precipice.
The longer he looks, the more he can comprehend pieces of it–Cybertron in miniature, wrought down to the tiniest detail. I will see everything and know, he realizes, intuiting the terror of it. If he unleashes this thing full-forged, will his mind still be his own?
Not in the way you currently understand, sigh the voices.
Going rigid, he looks again at the web, but the full pattern always evades his grasp. When it is complete, sparked to motion, will it be as beautiful as the wings of a quasar, as terrible as the infinity of an event horizon?
Dreadful and sublime, praise the voices. A hideous and magnificent abyss.
He almost refuses. He almost turns away.
But the mechanism once known as Prowl has always sought to know, always sought to understand, and within the ghostly mirror Cybertron built inside his meta he sees the truth:
War is coming to Cybertron. A war that will destroy his home and drive his race to extinction.
A war whose worst outcomes he could soften, perhaps avert, if he pays the necessary price.
The mechanism once called Prowl already knows how to finish the pattern and set the mirror Cybertron alight. He allows himself one last klick as himself, then throws his connection to Cybertron’s datanet wide open. As he initiates the download, data streaming into his new processors, the Matrix flares, reinitializing the reformatting process.
Like flame touching an accelerant, the mechanism once known as Prowl burns.
How many variables does it take to describe a planet? How many more must be added for its moons, its sun, its rocky and gas giant neighbors, its comet belts? How many times must you multiply that number when adding colonies, outposts, lonely stations orbiting in the black?
Rise, Auspex Prime.