Ep0.5 – Amazon Rainforest – Open

It was raining. Again.

It was apparently one of the atmospheric oddities of the Primus forsaken organic mudball that Steeljaw found himself on that the clouds should open up and pour two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen in a harmless but uncomfortably wet deluge somewhere around the three fourths mark of each daylight rotation. It had been raining when he arrived - if a dubiously fortuitous crash landing in a worn out escape pod that had long since exhausted its limited supply of maneuvering capability, despite how arduously he had rationed each engine burn in the hopes of finding a planetary body, and which had nothing going for it beyond shielding that was designed to withstand planetfall could rightly be called "arriving" - and it had, without fail, continued to do so each and every rotational cycle since.

Steeljaw loathed it.

He had thought he loathed the escape pod, with its cramped confines and barely operable systems, the spark chilling desperation of having nothing but a thin shell between himself and the vastness of space, and the Pit slagged inescapable silence with nothing to do but hunker down and pray to deities he didn't even believe in that somehow, by some miracle of luck, he might find a solid planetary body to put down on. He had really thought that might be the limit of how much he could loathe the universe, at that point.

The universe, because it was a slag sucking glitched piece of scrap, delighted in proving him wrong. The loathing he had had for the pod was nothing in relation to his newfound depths of utter abhorrence and detestation for organic planets with towering vegetation that blocked out the solar light the pod's emergency pack needed for fuel production, and which were infested with a billion organic species as well as a low-level native sentient (and there were very good rules, rules that were there for a reason, about no physical contact with that sort of thing) and which insisted on inudating him in yet more airborne wet at exactly three o'clock post meridian, local time, every. Single. Slagging. Day.

Steeljaw hunkered down on the branch of the tree he was taking shelter in, well above the mist and mud shrouded ground, and carved another spiraling array of glyphs into the thick trunk with the tip of his claws. It was his sixth testament to how much he positively despised the entire situation - the organic planet, his escape pod, the ship before the pod which had necessitated the pod's use in the first place, the 'Con's who had blown up that ship, and so on and so forth all the way back to the start of the Pit slagging idiocy that had started Cybertron's downward spiral in the first place. Leaning back, he examined the glyphs, then reached up to modify two with subtle underscores that would link them back to the first and third array couplets with an understated emphasis. It was, he fancied, one of his better word play compositions and he signed it at the heart of the spiral with his personal designation glyph. Sonnet of Epic Loathing #6, by Steeljaw.

The native sentients had discovered Sonnet of Epic Loathing #2, which had been quite a bit lower down on one of the tree trunks. He hadn't made that mistake again, and the mammals were in a dither about it - he'd skimmed the local conflicting news reports of vandalism, esoteric cults, delinquent younglings, previously unfounded 'lost' tribes, and one website which was claiming aliens that Steeljaw gave props to on account of it actually being right. It had made quite the local ruckus, though, for all of two rotations, and had necessitated him moving on - which wasn't so much a hardship as a mild irritant, in as much as one patch of constantly damp overgrown organic forest looked just like every other patch of constantly damp overgrown organic forest to Steeljaw's weary optics.

The fledgling data network the humans had created was the only bit of a break that the universe had seen fit to offer him, providing as it did invaluable information and some meager amounts of third hand socialization - pitiful, but better than the utter solitude of space. Which reminded him - Steeljaw cocked his head, sensor arrays flicking up as he checked his message account on the data network, on the off chance that the glacially slow humans had gotten back to him about the handful of sparkling level games which he had translated into their local primitive coding and submitted for publication through their most popular portable platform. There were rules about no contact with the natives, of course, but that was in the metal. Steeljaw had no intention of ever meeting any of the humans face to face, but if he could amass some of the local currency through perfectly legitimate means then he amused himself with ideas of purchasing the services of a human agent who could be his 'public' face on this backwater little world. Also, it was a harmless past time that was keeping him from going glitched.

Finding no messages from Apple - really, did it take this long to approve all of their apps? - Steeljaw shook the beading water off of his plates and angrily dug a chunk of organic plant matter out from underneath his claws with his teeth. There were other options, of course. There were always other options, and he was not the only non-terrestrial lifeform on the planet, more's the pity. The problem was that when the other options made staying in an organic infested Primus forsaken wet and muddy forest with limited supplies and no support sound like the better option then obviously the universe really was laughing at one's expense.

Venting - wetly, because every bit of his internals were just as wet as the exterior, the damp seeping past the edges of his plates by rain and mist and slag sucking humidity - Steeljaw stretched out on the branch and pillowed his chin on his paws, waiting for the rain to stop.

* * * * *

It was seventeen days after his crash landing - which he knew because he had just finished composing the Sonnet of Epic Loathing #16, dedicated to the processor glitching itch of having microscopic organic organisms inside his plating, crawling around on the surface of his inner systems, and he was going to rip his own mesh off to get the things out, he really was - when the universe decided to take the decision (slow system degradation and starvation in an organic Pit, or…) away from him. Because it hated him just that much.

He had walked away from the crash - which was really all anyone could ask of crashes - but not without some difficulty. Ripped plates and mesh tears he could deal with, but there was a relay in his left hip that more than half gone and he had lost the use of the last third of his tail linkages, the metal vertebra hanging limp at the tip. The hip relay seemed determined to go the same way and had taken to shorting his neural net for that leg at inopportune times. It had resulted in some truly inelegant feats of anti-gracefulness that had rubbed mud into places he couldn't get the mud out of.

It hadn't yet dumped him from a height further than his own four feet, but really, it was just a matter of time.

He was some thirty odd meters up as the natives measured it, close to the canopy top - the little portable solar collector could, if he dragged it up high enough, produce a weak fuel that was enough to keep his systems running - when his hip threw up a host of alert errors across his HUD and spasmed, dropping out from underneath him like so much dead metal.

It also dropped him and Steeljaw had two and a half spark stopping nano-kliks to think that 'death' and a rushing organic blur of green and brown and 'Primus skrag NO!' looked remarkably similar. Sensors unfurled in sheer self preservation instinct, proximity alerts hitting him like physical blows as he twisted wildly, but all the twisting in the world couldn't avoid every one of the branches and the ground, when it rose up to meet him, was only completing the work of several frame crunching impacts that had mercifully already knocked his processor offline.

Steeljaw thought he should perhaps have been more surprised to reboot several breems later, but Primus did so hate to have the punchline of a good joke spoiled. Fragger.

The hip relay was utterly gone - when Steeljaw gingerly raised his aching head he could look down the length of his own frame and see it sparking, slagging wires exposed and crushed into so much mutilated mass that his paws and sensors were in no way equipped to deal with. Not, he realized with a numb sort of horror, that he could even reach it - there were vertebral relays in his fourth quadrant, just above his hips, that weren't responding either and he could vaguely recall hitting one of the tree branches with his body just before he had impacted another one with the side of his helm. There was mud in his optics and more underneath his plates and apparently 30 meters wasn't enough to dislodge tenacious organics because he still itched.

And then, because it was 3 o'clock in the afternoon, the inevitable rain began.

"Lovely," Steeljaw muttered, letting his head squelch back down into the mud. "How utterly, perfectly, delightful. I'm going to die out here. What an utterly ignominious way to go. Starved into stasis lock on a perpetually wet mudball, assuming the organics don't develop a taste for offworld metals and eat me first."

The errors parading in a never ending stream of throbbing pain across his HUD made it difficult to think, the world stretching above him in organic shapes that made his optic focus blur. Steeljaw reset them a few times before deciding the blur was a combination of mud and water pooling on the crystal surface. "Humans," he reminded himself tiredly. "Mustn't forget the humans." A random thought crossed his processor and he peeled his lips back in a laugh that was closer to a snarl. "It would serve their tiny little networks right if I arranged myself like some primitive idol and let them wonder what I'm guarding for a few of their generations."

[Oh, honestly. What are you going to do, just lay down in the mud and give up?]

"Yes," Steeljaw said aloud, not bothering to reboot his optics once more. His ventilations were wet and filled with mud and everything, bar nothing, hurt. "Yes, that is precisely what I am going to do, thank you ever so much."

Something like the echo of a disdainful exvent brushed over his processor. [Coward.]

"Oh," Steeljaw snarled to the nagging memory of his first host, "do be quiet! I suppose it's all very well for you, you're already DEAD. Some of us are still working on that little technicality."

It was enough, though - the memory of Uplink's mockery, preserved across the vorns in Steeljaw's memory, was just as cutting as the mech's actual jibes had ever been - to push him into motion. His front paws worked, for all that his frame felt like so much slagged scrap and his systems insisted on failing at irregular moments. It took a humiliatingly long time, but he managed, by dint of dragging and sliding through the mud and thick vegetation, to haul himself into the lee of one of the bases of the giant trees, where there was a token amount of relief from the falling rain.

Taking serious stock of the situation was singularly unpleasant. This fell under critical malfunction, not the sort that he could fix himself, and nothing that his autorepair could take care of before something even worse happened. The solar collector was, so far as he could tell, still up in the canopy where he had placed it - which might as well have put it on the next furthest planetary body in the system for as much as Steeljaw could reach it with his entire aft end utter dead weight. So. Critical injury, zero fuel, no backup or assistance, no one who even knew he was there. That about summed it up.

Except that there were people who could know he was there, no organics required, and THAT was the crux of the option Steeljaw hadn't wanted to take because the markers on the distinctly Cybertronian signals he had eavesdropped on were almost certainly Autobot and Decepticon. No neutrals, or if there were then they weren't broadcasting - Steeljaw's neutral codes were up to date and he could have identified them easily. The regimented and tightly encrypted signals he had found had reeked of one or both of the great factions, but what codes Steeljaw had for either side were so hopelessly archaic as to be beyond useless. This was, in his opinion, a perfectly fine thing, as he had less than no desire to speak to either side.

The humans had a cheerfully morbid saying - beggars couldn't be choosers. Steeljaw ran the statistics of survival twice to verify his numbers, then grit his teeth and threw open the still functional part of his sensor net to the satellite fed planetary network.

A breem later, with an ache in his processor that was shorting out his optics, Steeljaw had narrowed down one set of signals, mostly based in the northern hemisphere of the land mass he was on, as being probably - most likely, almost nearly positively - Autobot in origin. It was, he consoled himself, the vaguely better of the two options.

[Hey, it's what I said the first time,] Uplink reminded him.

"Yes, and we all saw how absolutely stunningly THAT went," Steeljaw reminded his memory sourly. Gathering what processor threads he could that hurt slightly less than the others, he threaded a signal with the most recent (old and extremely outdated) Autobot encryptions he had on record, added in a few basic ICE crackers, and slung the result into the network, aiming at the signal cluster that he was (somewhat fairly) certain was the resident terrestrial Autobot base.