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The beloved body that bore you across any distance wept,
I wish the earth only moved when I let it.
My life, standing still despite this fact
is, too, an act of defiance.
It is not the moon’s light that demands our praise
but the distance it travels
to reach us.
—Natalie Wee
Megatron picks through the dark frozen wreckage of the old smelting pools, pushing scrap out his way irritably. The methane snow that was falling when he arrived was bad enough, but now he’s being pelted with frozen nitrogen coming down in enormous solid sheets, his armor so cold the scrap is actually sticking to him, so that every couple of astroseconds he has to redirect power to his hands and heat them up in order to pull free. The nitrogen is coming down thickly enough that he can only see five meters out in any direction, even with the external lamp currently mounted on his helmet set to maximum brightness.
Starscream has a perfectly adequate interstellar-grade antifreeze module, but he refused point-blank to come outside and locked himself in Astrotrain’s private compartment when Megatron pressed the issue. Astrotrain himself has to stay in shuttle mode to keep the less-insulated Decepticons from freezing to death, so out of the company he’d taken to Cybertron, that left Megatron as the only one stuck searching through an abandoned smelting facility on the dark side of Cybertron in a nuclear winter. An abandoned smelting facility that Megatron has already blown up once.
“I’m going to rip Prime’s core processing module out of his cranial unit and smelt the rest of him down for port covers,” Megatron swears, yanking roughly at a frozen piece of rebar. “Or perhaps we’ll see how he likes being stranded at thirty degrees above absolute zero.”
Prime doesn’t ordinarily permit operations targeted at a specific Decepticon, but not ten days ago Soundwave was blatantly targeted during an Autobot incursion into their base, and took significant damage during the ensuing battle. Admittedly, Soundwave’s injuries would be fairly straightforward to repair—although tedious and time-consuming, which was surely the point—if he had a standard brain construction. But Soundwave’s extremely specialized systems require a twin-terminated telemerium crystal for baseline functioning. They couldn’t afford to wait the full vorn it would take to develop a new crystal from solution under normal circumstances, but it’s clear that currently the Autobots are up to something which they desperately do not want Soundwave to discover. Even more reason to finish this search quickly.
The scanning routine Megatron is running alerts him to a possible telemerium identification, and he stops to disassemble a promising-looking cranial unit that’s poking half-smelted out of the ground, still partially attached to something beneath the surface—whoever this was must’ve been tossed into the smelter whole, and flash-frozen when the first thermodynamic wave of destruction came crashing over the facility. The crystal that his sensors detected, however, turns out to be a useless piece of beryllium aluminate. Cursing, he tosses the cranial unit over his shoulder and it goes clanging away into the dark.
Megatron has most of his original scanning hardware from his mining days, but his systems were designed and programmed to discover trinium-bearing ore, not telemerium crystals. Megatron hadn’t been willing to wait for Shockwave to develop the new conditional library that the scanning routine he’s using now needs to execute properly. Now, he has the unpleasant suspicion that it might have been a mistake to leave so quickly.
Methane snow starts coming down again, mixing in with the frozen nitrogen as the wind picks wildly up around him for a moment. The top of a massive metal strut breaks away and comes suddenly crashing down behind him, narrowly missing Megatron, and setting off a landslide of ice-covered components which unfortunately do not miss him.
“Augh!” Megatron shouts incoherently, wasting energon when his systems automatically kickstart power to his cannon contacts in response to the sudden series of alerts from his external pressure sensors. The sudden onslaught of freezing metal and energon expenditure sends his temperature regulation subsystem into a panic, and it immediately subverts all conscious control and starts claiming all kinds of resources, including kicking a whole stack of ongoing processes into tertiary storage and overtaking autonomic function. It isn’t a comfortable sensation.
He manages to wrest gross motor control back into conscious processing and kicks his way out of the pile of unattached limbs, heading furiously toward the overseers’ compound. Shockwave had uncovered evidence that a new shipment of political prisoners had arrived for smelting the day before the Decepticons originally hit the site, and one of them was rumored to have abilities similar to Soundwave’s. It is possible he’d made it to one of the smelters, but it’s more likely that his components are still in the prison pits or on the sorting line.
He pushes unhappily through a mound of rubble that had clearly once been a security wall, probably second-wave destruction. The thermonuclear bomb they’d detonated at a nearby power plant during the early days of the war had done a decent amount of physical damage, although the main intent had been destroying the local power supply and increasing the radiation levels enough to make the surrounding city temporarily uninhabitable. At the time Megatron had also been determined to force the temperature outside of standard Cybertronian environmental tolerances, rendering the entire area barren; if he’d known then that he’d be coming back, perhaps he wouldn’t have been quite so enthusiastic.
Then again, maybe not—even eight million years after the fact, the sheer scale of it all drives his emotional subsystem to rage. There are still components piled up high in every direction, enough of them that Megatron can’t actually make out where the piles end, nothing but stacks of glinting metal and their long shadows anywhere he directs his illumination routines. And nearly all of them are Decepticon components; they certainly hadn’t been dragging Autobots to the smelting pools every time a new round of technological advancement was introduced. Miners and soldiers and construction models hadn’t been nearly so lucky.
As he gets nearer to the prison pits, the components are piled up more haphazardly, unsorted and not yet ready for the smelter; he illuminates grisly lengths of internal weaponry routing mixed in with chunks of armor and other more structural components: tensor cables, joint assemblies, the occasional loose piece of subspace housing. Megatron pushes through them without pause, and avoids a second landslide of cranial units still waiting for disassembly. He kicks through two more walls and through the remains of an enormous Guardian cannon before he finally gets to the prison pits themselves, which continue for a full kilometer out. It looks nearly like a well-defended empty field, but as he turns his head, the light reflects off patches of thick electroconductive grating, spaced out evenly as far as he can see. Underneath the grating are the prison pits themselves, durasteel-lined holes in the ground with autolasers surrounding them in every direction.
Megatron finds the first pit empty, except for some small scattered parts, finger joints and the like, none of them crystals. He’s just initiating a scan of the second when his short range environmental monitoring system alerts him to another Cybertronian approaching from the side, half-hidden behind the remnants of an overseer’s platform. Megatron immediately recognizes the partially distorted figure.
“Prime!” Megatron roars. He whirls around, furious, and immediately begins charging his cannon—or at least, he sends the command. He looks down at his arm, confused, only to realize with fresh fury that his temperature management system has somehow co-opted his combat system resources and is disrupting the power flow to his weaponry. When he tries to preempt the resource distribution, he can’t actually regain control of his systems; his internal self-preservation module has somehow determined that the storm is a bigger risk than Optimus Prime.
“Megatron! Ident—purpose—I will—” Optimus is shouting, but the white noise of the blizzard around them leaves Megatron’s audio sensors struggling to pick up his voice, even though at this point he’s barely three meters away. He shouts some more, mostly unintelligible, but Megatron gets the gist.
“You know perfectly well why I’m here! You and your Autobots blasted half of Soundwave’s helm into scrap! And I hope you don’t imagine that I’m unaware it was a targeted attempt to cover up whatever it is you’re doing on the sixth-level subspace communications channel.” Megatron had figured that out right away; Soundwave had reported brief increases in activity on every other subspace level in the days leading up to the attack. It didn’t take a particularly overpowered logic module to determine that the Autobots must have found the frequency level they needed, and then targeted Soundwave to prevent the Decepticons from responding effectively to their plot.
“Our intelligence indicates you may intend to build a heavy-ion collider,” Optimus accuses, coming even closer—well within grappling range, if Megatron could just activate combat mode—in order to be audible. “If that is your plan, I will stop you.”
“What?” Confusion momentarily overrides the anger his emotional processing system is generating. His imagination center produces a vision of a heavy-ion collider cannon in response—targeted disintegration is one of the primary uses of twin-terminated telemerium crystals. Megatron scowls. “Typical Autobot idiocy. If that’s what I wanted, why would I be scrounging around on the dark side of Cybertron for a telemerium crystal when Shockwave could build me a full size collider without one in a matter of months? Try running your nonsense through your logic unit for once, Prime.”
Optimus stares suspiciously at him for an extended moment. “Ratchet provided me with a scanning program that should be able to detect the crystal, if we can get within twenty-five meters,” he says, finally. “He adjusted it to be compatible with my systems, but I don’t have the hardware to use it properly, especially in this weather.”
Megatron stares. “Give it here,” he demands, understanding instantly what that means. “Why did you bring a scanning program for me, if you thought we were planning to build a micro collider? Which maybe now I will commission,” he adds spitefully.
“I rather don’t think you will,” Optimus says, unfazed, and opens up a high-speed data channel to transmit the program. “But we are prepared to stop you, if it becomes necessary.”
Megatron glares at him, and seizes the program quickly. He starts a risk analysis while simultaneously running the program through an isolated evaluator function, testing outcomes under a variety of simulated conditions. The evaluator and the risk analysis finish up at about the same time: probably clean, and worth the risk that it isn’t.
His systems take a few minutes to integrate as Ratchet’s programming adjusts itself to new hardware, but soon enough, the program slots into place and a telemerium identification and scanning routine promptly executes. And since Megatron’s primary systems don’t suddenly seize up in electroconvulsions, there don’t appear to be any hidden neural tanglers his evaluator module missed.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Megatron says, pushing roughly past him to start searching the rest of the prison pits. “Why did you come here? You wanted Soundwave out of commission, and you got it. You should all be taking celebratory oil baths and eating energon jellies, or whatever it is Autobots do when you’re not busy being a pain in my aft.”
“We didn’t mean for the damage to be so significant,” Optimus claims, infuriatingly. “I could not in good conscience allow his suffering to continue simply to safeguard our mission.”
Megatron stops, suddenly unable to take a single astrosecond more of Optimus’s smug hypocrisy; he may not be able to enter combat mode, but his limbs are still working. He cracks his useless, unchargeable cannon heavily against Optimus’s shoulder, nearly knocking him over with a resounding clang.
“Megatron!” Optimus regains his balance and stands staring angrily at him for a long moment, shoulders heaving, but he doesn’t release any weaponry; Megatron takes some mean satisfaction from the realization that Prime’s systems won’t allow him to enter combat mode either.
“This weather is only going to get worse,” Optimus finally says, after he’s calmed down. “We should be searching, not fighting.”
“Well, don’t let me hold you back,” Megatron says snidely, but he does start moving again.
The search is easier with a decent scanning routine, but it’s difficult to focus with Optimus there; in the dark and the snow, Megatron’s systems have dialed up his mechanoreceptors to maximum sensitivity, retreating to the old familiar process of navigating without sight even though he does have some optical input. As a result his somatosensory cortex keeps sending him frantic alerts every few astroseconds, panicking over the vibrations from Optimus’s heavy gait and the displacement of the air as he moves.
Out of desperation Megatron starts responding to Optimus’s attempts at small talk, trying to convince his systems to accept Optimus’s presence; he still hasn’t been able to re-establish conscious control out from under the tyranny of his temperature management system.
“I admit to being surprised that you agreed to accept assistance,” Optimus says, after a few minutes of polite weather-related observation. “Prowl calculated an eighty-percent probability that you would initiate combat before I could make the offer.”
“I’m not unreasonable,” Megatron says. “I do know how to run a risk analysis.” Of course, if Megatron had been able to enter combat mode, he most assuredly would not be walking around now making chit chat with Prime instead of shooting on sight.
Optimus snorts. “Megatron, you are a supremely unreasonable being. I hope you don’t imagine that I am unaware of that.”
Megatron glares, but is interrupted by a sudden alert from the scanning routine; it’s identified a potential telemerium crystal. He immediately turns in the direction it indicates.
“Did you find something? Where?” Optimus asks urgently.
“Here,” Megatron says, coming to a stop where the scanning routine signals. It appears at first to be nothing but a blank expanse of snow, but once he gets the worst of the snow and ice cleared away, it becomes clear that they are actually standing on the remains of a particularly deep prison pit. This close, the scanning routine is able to make a positive identification: a perfectly shaped telemerium crystal located nearly twenty-four meters down. It’s also entirely encased by an impenetrable slab of rock-solid methane ice, which extends all the way down to the bottom of the pit, some thirty meters below their feet.
Megatron’s first instinct is just to blast through the ice with a judicious application of explosives, but that approach would almost certainly destroy the delicate crystal interred below. After some thought and a series of close-range tomographic scans, he decides the best option would be to use a thirty-centimeter thermomechanical auger at steaming point, so that the frozen nitrogen and methane would just evaporate straight out and bore a hole straight down to the frozen cranial unit. The problem with that plan is that he doesn’t have a thirty-centimeter thermomechanical auger.
“We need some manner of specialized mining equipment,” Optimus says, completely pointlessly. “Otherwise we risk damage to the telemerium crystal.”
“Yes, thank you for that incredibly illuminating observation,” Megatron says. “Obviously this requires a thirty-centimeter thermomechanical auger. Did you happen to bring one?” he asks, sarcastic.
“You know I did not,” Optimus frowns back at him. “We’ll have to return with the proper equipment.”
“You mean I’ll have to return with the proper equipment,” Megatron snaps. His emotional subsystem tries to generate some rage, but his temperature management system denies the request with prejudice, and all he manages is some mild irritation.
“Let’s go, then,” Megatron decides, after logging their coordinates. “There’s no sense in waiting around.” He’d prefer to remain here and ensure that no Autobots attempt to destroy the crystal, but Astrotrain’s communications range is limited by the adverse environmental conditions; there’s no way to get a message through from this location. He’ll just have to take the chance—and keep Optimus close, so Megatron can monitor any communications he might make.
They fight their way through the steadily increasing winds, frozen nitrogen coming down ferociously at such an unpleasant angle that Megatron eventually gives up on optical input entirely. He enables radar to get a better sense of the surrounding stationary environment, although his range is painfully limited; his systems can only parse input for about fifty meters out, when Soundwave could manage at least six kilometers. If he was currently functioning—the recurring anger routine that he’s been spawning since before they left Earth pops up in frontal processing again, but with resource availability now completely throttled by his temperature regulation system, it drops out again almost as quickly.
“We need to wait this out,” Optimus says, after several minutes of struggling without much progress. “Regional weather data suggests this storm will pass within a few hours. In the meantime, we’d do better to conserve energy.”
Megatron doesn’t like it, but he runs the analysis himself and is forced to concede that at this rate of speed, they won’t make it out of the smelting fields before the storm passes anyway. “Fine,” he grunts, manually removing ice from his optical sensors and attempting to turn them back on. “Pick a spot, then.”
They take shelter next to a small section of the inner security wall that is still left standing. He and Optimus manage to pull some scrap together and form a rough lean-to to huddle under. Space is tight, and they’re forced into close contact by necessity, but even the shared warmth is hardly enough in the precipitously dropping temperatures; it’s now almost five degrees above absolute zero, nearly as cold as the background temperature of space, and made worse due to the atmospheric heat loss that isn’t possible in vacuum. Even a few hours at this temperature might be too long for their systems.
“We could—establish an upper level systems connection,” Optimus suggests in a rush, his systems clearly heating up in mortification; the sudden low-level burst of warmth where their armor meets, unnoticeable under any other circumstances, feels like the residual heat from a plasma pool in these temperatures. “The reciprocal power generation would increase our combined output.”
Megatron’s tactical coprocessor and strategy unit immediately latch on to the tantalizing possibility of pulling critical intelligence out of Optimus’s systems; even a restricted, upper level connection grants access to frontal processing. Optimus will certainly decide to manually recategorize the details of the subspace communications operation, and any strategic planning processes he’s been thinking on in primary memory, but he won’t be able to establish a filter for everything; even just surface-level thoughts could contain valuable details. Megatron has to manually preempt a grin as greed and hunger begin cycling through his systems.
“Very well,” he agrees, pretending at reluctance, and slowly opens an access panel. Optimus does the same, and they plug in together.
Megatron initiates his favorite interfacing routine right away, shocking Optimus’s pleasure circuitry into action so he can start searching without too much interruption, but he gets mildly distracted himself; Optimus is coyly poking around in Megatron’s emotional circuitry, trying to light up some dark barely-used pathways that Megatron doesn’t even know the function of. His systems have to redirect resources to try and interpret the sensation, and eventually come to the conclusion that if it isn’t triggering any pain circuitry, he must be enjoying it, sending him leaning forward with a groan as his own pleasure circuitry is activated.
When he reactivates his optics he realizes the movement has left him hunched over a scattered pile of delicate parts, mostly neural sheathing and a few other crushed low-level components, which his systems identify as all containing trinium alloys. He scowls unhappily, but unwilling to waste any amount of trinium, starts collecting them for reuse.
Pleasure drops out of their systems abruptly as Optimus notices and starts pushing forward cloying sick horror, his meaningless sorrow at the atrocities committed here. Megatron pushes Optimus’s performative grief aside impatiently—as if his precious feelings are of any consequence now , over eight million years after Megatron finally destroyed this place. He pointedly transfers a report on the mass Decepticon casualties since Optimus took the Primacy. That Optimus has stopped disassembling and tossing them into the smelter still alive is irrelevant; they die at his hands just the same.
Optimus manages to produce some outrage at that, and some nonsensically convoluted justification that Megatron doesn’t bother to process, back on track and too busy looking through Optimus’s main memory for anything valuable he didn’t manage to relocate. Sure enough, he quickly locates the extremely pragmatic reasoning that had inspired this little mission, namely that with Soundwave out of commission, Megatron would have to do some targeted destruction of his own, lest their forces remain unbalanced. Optimus isn’t willing to sacrifice Jazz and Prowl in order to keep Soundwave out of the field.
Megatron smirks, smugly satisfied—here is the real reason Optimus came, not any false compassion. But only a moment later he uncovers a truly outrageous thread of concern for the cassettes, who Optimus fears might not survive a vorn without their creator.
“You certainly weren’t concerned for his creations when you sent your soldiers to blast a hole in his head,” Megatron accuses, too flabbergasted to even be properly angry. “What point is there worrying about them now?”
“We ran the mission simulations and determined the risk of long-term unintended damage was less than a tenth of a percent,” Optimus argues, but Megatron has access to his top-level processing, and he can see that what Optimus really means is that he hadn’t believed it would happen, and therefore hadn’t included it as a weighted variable in the formula he used for decision making during his mission approval process.
“Bluestreak is an excellent shot!” Optimus protests indignantly, when Megatron points this out. “We have all the standard processing components on hand, so we planned to offer a replacement crystal if necessary. And anyway, Bluestreak didn’t miss, or cause any unintentional damage,” he adds.
Megatron can see the realization cycling through Optimus’s frontal processing, though, and the guilt emotion that it inspires. He pokes at it curiously, having never experienced it himself. Unlike Autobots, Megatron doesn’t waste time ruminating on past errors, perceived or otherwise; he simply tosses it all into long-term strategic analysis and moves on.
Optimus looks over at him, optics going oddly dull, and thinks inexplicably of the early days of their war, not long after he succeeded Sentinel Prime. At the time he had thought Megatron nothing more than a violent warlord, only using the Decepticons to achieve his aims.
“I am a violent warlord using the Decepticons to achieve my aims,” Megatron points out. “And successfully, I might add—whatever meaningless resistance you and your Autobots might offer, Cybertron is ours, and there is no remaining Autobot city or monument that we have not reduced to ash and rubble.” He waves a hand demonstratively at the surrounding wasteland, or at least what little they can see of it between the dark, the storm, and the layers of scrap surrounding them.
Optimus stares blankly out of their shelter for a moment, some unidentifiable emotion churning in his processor and coming through their connection. Megatron denies his own emotional subsystem’s request for an in-depth analysis; there’s no point in wasting resources trying to make sense of Autobots.
“Megatron, you have pushed this war far beyond the boundaries of all reason. Certainly this place deserved to be destroyed; I will not deny that many structures on our world similarly deserved to be torn down. But your actions rendered not just this facility, or just this region, but half of our planet uninhabitable,” Optimus accuses, clearly working himself back up into self-righteous indignation. “No dark side of Cybertron existed before you stalled her engines permanently. And in your pursuit of power, you have driven the entire Cybertronian race into exile.”
Megatron cycles his optical illumination routines rudely, and is ignored.
“And to take your conquest to other planets is unforgivable. Earth is full of sentient life. The humans—they want to live, too,” Optimus continues, almost plaintively.
Megatron snorts. “Who doesn’t? Desire is irrelevant, Prime. Existence is a matter of luck and occasionally ability, not some sort of cosmic reward for wanting it.”
Something sharp and painful comes jaggedly across their connection, and in a rush Optimus pushes over nearly eight million years worth of political and strategic analysis, tainted beyond repair by his built-up emotional processing and nearly bowling Megatron over in a wave of manufactured misery. Optimus has apparently spent the last eight million years stewing in his own guilt and unhappiness, developing complicated emotional connections to planets he’s never even been to and people he’s never even met , and all the while pretending to himself that he’s some sort of white knight defending the last remnants of his people.
Megatron cancels integration and dismisses it all as more delusional nonsense. He isn’t interested in Autobot justifications or complaints; certainly he got enough of those as a gladiator, fighting for his life twice a tenday, and as a miner before that, kept chained deep below the surface by his Autobot masters for nearly two million years. Whatever Megatron has done, it’s no worse than what the Autobots are fighting for. At least he has a vision, he thinks pointedly; a glorious empire for himself and for his people. Optimus doesn’t seem to have any plan besides getting in the way. He pushes all of it at Optimus; let him justify that.
Optimus pushes back insistently, transferring a logical analysis with base assumptions so far outside of Megatron’s experience that he can’t even integrate it well enough to generate a strategic analysis. His systems return an error message instead, hardware insufficient. The message is accompanied by a baffling request to use Optimus’s hardware instead; his systems have somehow identified a low-level component in Optimus’s brain that does have the necessary capabilities.
Unbelievably, Optimus reflexively opens up low-level component access in response to the request. Megatron dives in without even running a risk analysis, seizing the sudden opportunity before Optimus can manage to reverse the permissions. He starts grabbing everything he can get with undisguised greed: strategic planning, mission details, long-term timetables for some sort of incursion into Iacon that Megatron hasn’t even heard a whisper of; he integrates it all instantly, laughing out loud in victory and triumph. He doesn’t spare a single thread of consideration for his emotional subsystem’s fixation with Optimus’s mysterious component, at least not until the connection to the component is established and he starts getting bombarded with error messages.
His systems are apparently trying to brute-force a pathway from the component to his own core, without much luck. He doesn’t have the hardware necessary to even interpret the results, and it’s setting off alerts everywhere in frontal processing, generating false damage reports and outrageous cravings for luxuries he’s never even had, delicate solinite crystals and oil-soaked lithium wire. Optimus is actually trying to help; his emotional subsystem sends over an enormous and completely uninterpretable data packet, which Megatron rejects forcefully before it can corrupt his logic center. Megatron decides to cut his losses and get out with the intelligence he’s already managed to obtain, when a sudden strange feeling drags both of their systems to a halt—the Matrix activating, he realizes, as Optimus’s processor recovers from his onslaught and finally manages to sync up with his own—and the pathway is suddenly there.
His systems spring forward instantaneously, and he goes rushing deeper onto Optimus’s hardware without ever generating a conscious command. His emotional subsystem establishes a firm connection with Optimus’s strange component, which Megatron realizes belatedly is actually core-attached, and immediately starts running an enormous string of recent experiences through it, faster than he can even react. His angry determination to see Soundwave repaired and back in the field transforms suddenly into something completely indescribable—as if his own primary processing crystal had been blown to bits, and his systems are suddenly suffused with a vivid painful urgency that he now realizes has been floating deep in subconscious processing this entire time, out of sight.
His systems start pushing forward everything in his active memory, trying to process all of it through the component—Optimus’s core empathy module, he realizes, finally pulling the information from Optimus’s internal configuration charting—and Optimus produces a memory of Ratchet explaining, his facial components pained and pulled tight with grief, “None of them can connect their emotional processing to their core. Core empathy modules are incompatible with every existing Decepticon brain design. So it’s not just that they don’t believe love is real, or important—and it’s not truly that they don’t feel it, either, it’s that they’re—prevented from understanding—”
In a panic, Megatron cancels all of his access, unplugging from Optimus and disconnecting as fast as he can go, but he isn’t fast enough; the pathway has developed inside his own systems, now, and he can feel it delving deep into his own core, pulling forth a monstrous register of grief and horror and torment. His emotional subsystem goes suddenly wild, furiously overclocking as it starts dragging experiences out of primary, secondary, even tertiary memory, and begins identifying consistencies, rewriting over a lifetime of experiences with a sudden terrible understanding.
Worse still is the next, almost infinitesimally small thread pulled from his core, nearly unrecognizable; but his systems have already pulled the names from Optimus’s databanks, love and joy and happiness, blazing pinpricks of light poking through in the dark. There’s a sudden shock of activity as his systems start to—prioritize them, highlighting old memories already gone over once for additional internal review, pulling any number of Decepticons—Soundwave, Shockwave, Ravage, even Starscream—out of his internal hierarchical ranking and into a new one, not determined by ability or by military value, but by placement on some illogical prioritization tree created by emotional experience.
Megatron groans, clutching his head in hands, as his emotional circuitry lights up in retroactive joy and misery, everything together, as if Unicron himself has clenched a white hot hand around his fuel pump and is slowly pulling it out. He understands now what that unused emotional circuitry is for, and it’s worse than any neural tangler could possibly be; Megatron wishes abruptly that there had been one hidden in the program he integrated earlier. Whatever the Matrix has done to him, it’s more insidious and destructive than any viral attack the Autobots have ever devised.
Vaguely, he’s aware of Optimus shaking him, calling his name, but the agony continues unending, and he is completely unable to respond. His emotional subsystem claims more and more resources to integrate the experience, managing finally to take back the last remaining resources from his temperature regulation system. Megatron realizes dully that unless he can regain control he is going to lose core function to the cold, and soon. Still his motivator is unable to respond.
Megatron! Optimus comes over fast and panicked through the remnants of their connection, establishing a dangerous one-direction pathway between them, his presence a bright pure thread of alarm. The intrusion is just enough to kickstart Megatron’s motivator into action, and in pure desperation he knocks his own emotional subsystem fully outside of conscious experience, just as his neural security module activates a hard reset. The simultaneous processes in the wake of nearly complete resource deprivation are too much for Megatron’s system to safely execute. There’s an instant of pain that pushes sharply past Megatron’s processing limits for a moment, and then everything goes blankly white, even as the power surge travels back across the ungrounded connection to Optimus.
It takes almost a full astrominute before Megatron’s systems recover enough to process external input again, but eventually awareness comes creeping back in. Megatron sits up slowly, his processor pounding and his joints producing blatantly false pain reports as he struggles upright. It’s another long moment before he notices that Optimus is still laid out unmoving on the ground beside him, his illumination routines gone dark. The power surge must have disrupted his core function; without a jumpstart, he’s unlikely to regain functioning before the cold stalls his internal reactor permanently.
All Megatron has to do is wait. With Optimus out of the picture, the Autobots will be thrown into disarray; Megatron will be able to complete the conquest of Earth and begin truly refueling Cybertron. He’ll be able to awaken thousands of Decepticon warriors from stasis, enough to defeat the remaining Autobots with ease, before Ultra Magnus can manage to solidify his command and truly present a threat in the field. The war is practically over, and Megatron—he can’t do it. His emotional subsystem, still hidden, is issuing a series of increasingly urgent commands to his motivator, overriding his strategy unit and his logic module and bluntly refusing to integrate their analyses. An electrojack cable comes spooling out from his wrist without even waiting for Megatron to consciously approve the command.
“Damn it all to hell,” Megatron curses, and he jacks roughly into Optimus, feeling like ten kinds of a fool.
Optimus’s systems begin sluggishly rebooting as soon as he executes a jumpstart routine, running at minimum speed in order to preserve core function. Megatron watches his slowly brightening optics with a distant, terrible sense of dread and relief, unable to turn away, as if his own systems have been left overloaded and half-frozen. Unsettlingly, his motivator isn’t offering up any possibilities—for the first time in his life, Megatron realizes that he doesn’t know what to do. His emotional subsystem is nearly stalled under the weight of a thousand suddenly contradictory desires, a rapidly reinventing understanding of the universe around him.
“Megatron,” Optimus says, low. Megatron can do nothing except cry out madly in frustration and drag him close, unlatching his mask and forcing their mouths together furiously. Optimus opens up without protest, letting his emotions go pouring over the data access points there, and only lifts one arm up to pull them even closer together when Megatron bites him, hard. Megatron can feel his terrible overarching joy even in the brief moments of surface connection, and can do nothing to dampen it; not unless he manages to undo the last hour in a universe-destroying feat of temporal displacement. He refuses to rule out the possibility. But eventually Optimus tires, and lies back down, forced into recharge by his recovering systems.
Megatron sits there blankly for some immeasurable length of time—hours, perhaps—before his somatosensory subsystem finally stirs, alerting him to approaching vibrations. The storm has long since passed, the temperature risen to what now feels like a balmy fifty degrees. Outside of their small shelter, Megatron hears the very faint beginning sounds of clanking armor; perhaps Starscream come to look for his body, and about to receive a highly unpleasant surprise. Optimus, still deeply asleep, has his head positioned incriminatingly on Megatron’s lap. The external stimuli pushes Megatron’s systems to shift gears, kicking out all of the cyclical loops still clogging up his logic unit and finally integrating the last of the vast series of conclusions that his emotional subsystem has spent the past few hours generating. He stands up abruptly, pushing Optimus over and knocking away the scrap of their shelter.
It is Starscream, and Astrotrain with him. Who knows where they’ve left the others. Hopefully not frozen behind the outcrop where Astrotrain had been parked, hidden.
“You’re alive!” Starscream accuses, not even bothering to hide his disappointment. Megatron really has been too lenient with him lately, but he can’t manage to generate any decent rage; his systems are still alight with newly discovered joy, testing out the emotional circuitry he’s never before had a use for.
“You don’t seem particularly pleased,” Megatron says, making a show of charging his cannon anyway, partially just for the sheer satisfaction of being able to initiate his own combat system. Starscream jumps back behind Astrotrain with a gratifying screech.
“What are we gonna do about him?” Astrotrain asks, finally noticing Optimus struggling to get up out from underneath the scrap.
“Nothing,” Megatron says. “Take Starscream and go get me a thirty-centimeter thermomechanical auger from Shockwave. And be quick about it,” he adds, sharply.
“Nothing?” Starscream puts his hands on his hips. “What are you doing with him, then? He doesn’t exactly look damaged,” he adds, accusatorily.
“Shut up, Starscream,” Megatron says. He’s starting to feel a bit of real irritation now, but even more irritatingly, his cannon stops charging; a query to his emotional subsystem reveals that for some incomprehensible reason, he doesn’t actually want to shoot Starscream.
“If you’d like to press the issue, I’d be happy to oblige,” Optimus says dryly, standing now in all his clearly undamaged glory. Megatron turns to glare at him.
“Whatever,” Starscream says sulkily, but does turn away. “Let’s get out of here,” he snaps at Astrotrain.
The two of them finally take off. Megatron starts back toward the prison pit where Soundwave’s new telemerium crystal is located, ignoring Optimus fussing behind him. So what if he has been infected with some unwanted core pathway; pain is temporary, and Megatron yet functions. Soundwave will be returned to him shortly, and will surely discover whatever bit of sabotage the Autobots have been up to, so that they can return to the business of conquest.
Seemingly without cause, Megatron’s systems pull up a memory he hasn’t reviewed in over eight million years—since before they launched the Decepticon rebellion at all.
Soundwave was standing cramped in Megatron’s chambers, which had been expanded vastly for the great Champion of Tarn, and yet were still barely large enough to accommodate both of them at once.
“Our revolution may cost everything,” Megatron said. “Not just our deaths, but those of all Decepticons; the cities that the Autobots have built on our suffering will not fall easily. And yet the alternative is only to let their gilded spires tower above us for all time, and to bow our heads before our overseers, and kneel before their masters when they come.”
“Deactivation preferred,” Soundwave said simply. Ravage, beside him, only nodded.
At the time Megatron had nodded himself, equally ready to make the trade. He is still prepared to do so; nothing could compel him to allow the shining towers of Iacon to be raised up over all of them again. He would die first. But when Megatron looks down into the prison pit, where the twin-terminated telemerium waits still encased in some long-dead prisoner’s cranial unit, it occurs to him for the first time that he killed this mech, not the Autobots.
He isn’t sorry. It did have to be done. If he hadn’t detonated the bomb that destroyed this place, certainly the Autobots here would have had this mech disassembled, as they already planned to; and after they were done with him, a new shipment of prisoners would have arrived to meet the same fate. But—Megatron is the one who threw half of all Cybertron into the dark, into a never-ending winter that few Cybertronians are designed to survive. And the death he chose for some of them happened here in these pits, a blinding wave of radiation that would have left them all dying in agony down in the dark, without even the possibility of one last look at the open sky.
Optimus comes up beside him. Megatron can activate combat mode now, but he doesn’t. His cannon arm doesn’t so much as twitch.
“Megatron,” Optimus starts, leaning in. Whatever Optimus sees on his face makes him fall silent, and reach out to grasp Megatron’s hand in his. Megatron doesn’t know how to explain, but apparently he doesn’t need to; after a long moment Optimus grunts, resetting his vocalizer, and says, “We got a drone into your energon stores last month.”
Megatron turns his head to look at him sharply, but Optimus continues before he can say anything. “We only managed some two hours of reconnaissance, but it was enough to determine you’re only about two years of raiding away from restarting Cybertron. That’s why I authorized the—current operation.”
Megatron scowls. “So you meant to have Soundwave destroyed out of revenge, then,” he accuses. It certainly makes more sense than anything else Megatron dug out of him.
“No,” Optimus says. “But—if you would agree to return to Cybertron, and to no longer target humans or any other alien species, I will give you the remaining amount out of our own energon stores.”
Megatron stares.
“I have to go,” Optimus says. “Cosmos and Prowl are both growing impatient. But you know how to reach me,” and even as he says so, he transmits a new communication frequency—a personal one, with an individual identifier.
“I imagine Soundwave will be able to get a signal through,” Optimus adds, and squeezes Megatron’s hand, and then he turns to go, leaving Megatron alone again with his thoughts.
Megatron’s strategic unit offers up an analysis: if the Autobots lose such a significant chunk of their energon stores, it’s unlikely the humans will be able to provide them enough fuel for more than base operations. Certainly they won’t be able to compete with the warriors Megatron will be pulling out of stasis, from where they’re currently stacked under Darkmount by the thousands. It won’t matter then that Megatron allowed Optimus to live, or for that matter that he signed any sort of agreement in exchange. The Autobots will be unable to enforce it.
The analysis triggers a new conclusion, which, irritatingly, he can’t immediately see—it’s routed directly through his bloated emotional subsystem, still entirely subconscious and sucking up a disproportionate share of total system resources. Megatron waits impatiently for his systems to sort themselves out, feeling the strange new sensation of the core pathway being activated briefly before a new and unrelenting truth unfolds, made suddenly apparent: his empire will kill—Decepticons.
The new core valuation that his systems have produced, unasked for, rejects the idea with prejudice, and Megatron realizes with a sense of horror that—the war is over. If he sends Decepticons to die only for conquest, when Cybertron has already been awakened, it won’t be worth it, not anymore. Which means he is going to accept Optimus’s deal and bring his people home. And they aren’t going to destroy the Autobots, because—his systems stumble over the inevitable conclusion—because he doesn't want them to die, either.
Megatron turns off all of his illumination routines, not just his external head lamp but all of them, even his optics and his running lights. His emotional subsystem pulls a memory out of his internal archives, just recently pulled from long-term archival storage: standing together with his command staff and watching the sharp cold glow of Cybertron’s massive reactor flaring impossibly brightly, a ray of light bursting up through the planet’s crust and disappearing into the atmosphere for one incalculable moment—and then the sharp shuddering stall of the entire planet grinding to a halt, as the engines turned over for the last time. Even Starscream had been struck silent, then.
Now that the storm has passed, the stars have all come out from behind the clouds, and he stares up at them as he endures a terrible long moment of overwhelming grief, for his empire, for the dream that he’s promised the Decepticons all along. But no pain lasts forever, and eventually his emotional subsystem starts engaging the new pathways through his circuitry. His imagination center takes the opportunity to produce another vision, projecting it out into the dark: Soundwave and all of his warriors returning home, raising great Decepticon cities out of the rubble for the first time, their planet’s vast engines turning once more.