[ti]Ep 3[/ti]Rewritten [Sparkplug]

[Deleted]

Episode 3 / Week 3 / Day 3 / Closed

After yesterday's training session with Sunstreaker left him sore all over, Neon decided to hunker down in his room, lock the door, and focus on what was really important to him. He approached the flat sheet of concrete serving as a table in one of the room's corners. It was a mess, covered in half-finished projects, tools, and whatever odd-jobs people piled upon him on the side when he wasn't doing real work around the base.

Somebody had to pick up the slack after Ratchet.

But that wasn't on the figurative table for tonight, even if it covered every square inch of the literal one. Instead, Neon reached for a large black box stuffed under the concrete deck. He swept aside some of the scattered tools atop and plopped the ominous container right in the middle of his workplace.

Letting out a sigh, he decided to open it.

Even doing that was a process. First, he had to disengage the complex locking mechanism with a set of precise calculations, which shifted every 10-20 minutes to ensure only somebody with the necessary skills could crack them–of the bots currently stationed at the base, that was only Neon and maybe Wheeljack or Patch.

Once that was done, Neon had to carefully remove a brittle safety pin. This ensured that nobody but bots with fine motor skills could proceed to the next and final step. That turned out to be a full-body scan. A blue light flashed across the room for a split second as a wiremesh readout of Neon appeared on the glossy top of the box.

"Alright, let's see what we can do," Neon muttered to himself and finally opened it.

The inside seemed rather unremarkable. A whole bunch of indistinct gray squares; rows and rows of them. Neon's fingers began browsing through them as if searching for something purposefully. On his way to that purposeful something, he crossed a few labeled squares.

Albedo of Praxus...Boomback of Iacon...Breaker of Sonic Canyons

Directa of Iacon...Drillmaster of Tarn...Highbeam of Crystal City

This list continued for a while until Neon reached the section he was looking for. It was clear by now what he was digging through: his collection of research data and recordings filed by Cybertron's greatest minds. Study material he managed to ferry to Earth with himself. But he did not bust them open simply to learn science...

...He was looking for a particular scientist. He needed to know more about her.

"Sparkart, Sparkbright...Spark Oil...Ah, there we go. Sparkplug."

Hopefully, it was the right one. There was a surprising amount of scientists with similar names. Well, once upon a Cybertron in any case. Today, maybe there was just the one Sparkplug and the one Neon. He had no way of knowing. But it didn't do him any good to lament the past right now. He needed to learn from it instead.

Neon pulled out the file with Sparkplug's name on it, taking great care to be gentle with it. If he broke any of these...Well, it was better to not even think about it. Carefully, very carefully, he moved it over to a small circular pad to the left side of the table and inserted it into its base.

The device lit up in bright blue. This was a holographic projector. Common on Cybertron, rare on this planet.

[Sparkplug]

The holo projector lit up, shimmering blue lines carving through the air above it as glyphs rippled into existence. Row after row of sigils appeared, marching downwards until the display was as tall as Neon himself, denoting research papers, official reports, diary logs, all bundled up in a tangle that represented an effort to preserve as much as possible over having organised it to make sense. But it was the header that really caught at the attention.

Research archive backup of Sparkplug of Iacon.

There was a full-colour image of a femme's helm and faceplate; a white helm, with large roundels housing her audials that glowed green from their inner edge, forest green accents, and large green optics. It was unmistakably the same femme that Neon had met underground.

Affiliation: Autobot.
Status: DECEASED.

Like all scientists and engineers killed in the line of duty, her research archive had been unlocked after the extinguishing of her spark, every bit of data about her that could be hoovered up presented as a jumbled whole, in the hope that anything useful she had been working on could be continued or reconstructed.

The glowing blue bar of the file selector moved down to the tangle of files, recordings, schematics and other data that was unclassified and without immediate form. More or less at random, it settled on something that was tagged as a report, and triggered the unpacking of the compressed file.

The holographic display shifted, the lengthy list of files and data receding to a frame in the corner of the projection. A femme appeared; life-sized, frozen in the moment of looking up towards the holo pickup that had once recorded her. Her design was... familiar. Not identical, but familiar.

For a start, her altmode was obviously different; the arcing, open-frame curves of short-range repulsion lifts marked her back and boots where tyres now jutted; various small items of plating were different, her shoulderguards most of all. Irising ports in her waist were missing in the older design frozen before Neon. Perhaps most prominently, her left arm was perfectly symmetrical with the right, a perfectly normal limb that didn't at all resemble the lengthy, double-elbowed structure she now possessed.

Or perhaps it was the red Autobot logo marked cleanly in the centre of her chest plating that stood out most prominently of all.

Playback began. The femme stood before Neon vented a sigh, lifting a hand to rub at the side of her helm tiredly. The assembly frame behind her shifted to the side as she walked, keeping the femme at the centre of the projection.

"I'm fully aware of the urgency, Commander Bezel. You need improved chassis, and you need more chassis. Do I have to point out that I can't carry out design research when I spend every moment out of recharge building more frames for you to throw into the grinder?"

There was a flat hardness to her voice, cold and weary.

"The current frames under construction have iteration N71 fuel pump morphologies. I've tested the design as thoroughly as I'm able, but I need more time. It's irresponsible to test these changes in live chassis, but I've done as ordered. As usual."

Her helm tilted upwards, glaring into the pickup. "And Commander, I know my moral objections are inconvenient to you. Nevertheless, they were made part and parcel of my recruitment, and you can't overrule that. Stop pressuring me to violate them; it won't work, and you're getting on my nerves."

Another assembly table came into view at the edge of the projection, a femme's half-completed chassis upon it. Sparkplug's hand settled on the incomplete frame, and a look of deep weariness shaped her optics. "You'll have the next batch in two cycles. Sparkplug, out."

The projection came to an abrupt stop, one of Sparkplug's hands reaching towards the side of the holo pickup, the other still resting on the chassis beside her. The navigation menu swelled, floating to one side of the scene.

[Deleted]

Neon watched intently as the recording played out. There was no doubt about it, he had the right Sparkplug. She seemed so different from the real thing and yet they were unquestionably one and the same. The thing that stood out the most to Neon, however, was how much he found himself agreeing with the Sparkplug in the recording, both morally and scientifically.

Experimenting with mass production of newer chassis iterations was dangerous if the necessary tests weren't conducted in controlled environments—if the scientist did not follow proper procedure. That was the logic behind it, anyways. Any sensible person would have come to the same conclusion.

But Sparkplug's reasoning was different from simple safety concerns. She also seemed to have a strong desire to be ethical, if she could. This was markedly different from the gung-ho Decepticon that collapsed an entire cave onto the both of them. Neon still remembered how much her words stung and how much she was hurting when forced to confront the contradictions present therein.

Whatever the Decepticons did, it erased the rational, compassionate person on the projector—or so Neon believed. The possibility that Sparkplug had become disillusioned far before the Decepticons had done anything to her didn't even cross his processor. Not with this single recording to reference.

"It seems you and I were more alike in the past, maybe we could've been friends," he remarked with a tinge of wistful nostalgia for a time that never was—a time that could have been.

Unwilling to compromise her morals, dedicated to her job, intelligent, headstrong. She reminded Neon so much of his teacher. What could have possibly happened to change that? He had to keep looking, there had to be more he could discover. So many unanswered truths about Sparkplug yet remained.

Why did no one look for her?

How did the Decepticons get to her?

What was she doing before it happened?

Question after question, Neon hoped that there was something to bring him closer to answering them. He placed a finger on the projector's display and swiped to the next recording.

"I wonder what happened to you..."

[Sparkplug]

There were many thousands of files, badly organised - going through every entry would have taken a uselessly long time. But that didn't mean that some files didn't stand out from the rest; outliers from the generic filename pattern that most of them followed. A sub-directory of files attached to what seemed to be longstanding research into energon pumps contained an entry with a date far further back than most of the others.

Pre-war, in fact.

The feed began; Sparkplug's design was subtly different again, her chassis mounted with the whorls of old-style vehicular anti-grav units, and the green highlights scattered across her frame emphasised different things. There was no brand on her chassis, nor any hint of a place for one.

Glyphs framing the field warned sternly that the footage was the property of Armature Research Laboratories, along with smaller, less strident symbols indicating that the footage was a personal log file.

Sparkplug smiled into the camera. The recording didn't include a record of her field emissions, but it was easy to imagine the tingle of good humour she radiated from her expression alone.

"Okay, okay, I need to get some of this down before I leave today, or I'm going to spend tomorrow reconstructing the train of thought. Been at the testing rig all day-" she shifted aside, nudging the holocorder pickup to get a better look at a disembodied lump of machinery sat amidst wiring harnesses and invasive sensor arrays, "-and it's not going well. Iteration 507 is showing the same flow instabilities as the previous design. Once you get down to a sufficiently small cross sectional area, the laminar drag around the turbines just breaks into a churn, and efficiency drops like a stone."

Sparkplug glanced behind and to her left at something beyond the pickup's visual field. The lighting suggested she was in a large space, but most of the rest of it was dark, closed down for the evening. "Insight smashed a data pad. Credit-stealing jerk. If I went around grandstanding the way he does, I'd have my altmode exemption revoked faster than you can say 'Your work is being submitted under Insight's name again, it's better for the lab'. But he gets a new pad before he's finished stomping back to his office."

She shook her helm, dismissing the thought. "Anyway. Insight's a perfectionist. If the flow isn't smoothed out totally, he doesn't want to know. But I think that if we reshape the feed just after the main impellor, accept a thread of turbulence down the centre, it'll wall itself up with straight flow either side. Less efficient than smooth flow, but if I can make the overall system smaller, it'll be an improvement overall. So-"

The femme chattered on, reeling off a list of numbers and parameters, breaking off halfway through a sentence to scribble down a half-drafted formula and holding it up for the pickup so she'd have a proper record of it. She was a talker, animated and prone to gesturing. She was finally interrupted by a chime that played in the background, and she ducked to one side, only partially remaining in the holo field, as she checked a console.

"Well, scrap me," she murmured, then looked up at the pickup again, breaking into a bright smile. "There's been a drop out in the pack, and she's been moved up into the qualifiers for the race tonight. Wish I'd been there to see the look on her faceplate when she heard! Looks like I'm off to the races this evening. Or at least 'Nitro' is. I'll fill in the rest tomorrow."

The feed froze, a final stern warning displayed over it not to distribute the file outside of Armature Research Laboratories archives.

[Deleted]

Another recording, another piece of the puzzle, another angle to Sparkplug, a more personal one than the last. Before the war, even. It was difficult for Neon to relate this time. He never got to experience life through that lens; none of the restrictions and none of the hobbies. Sparkplug seemed busy, underappreciated, and yet still so chipper.

Neon happily listened to her lecture on the research she was doing as well as the sudden shift towards her under-the-radar interest towards the end. Both were equally interesting to him. But perhaps that last part slipped into the archives by chance. Certainly, no experienced scientist would admit to such a dangerous pastime in a corporate recording of all things, but the Sparkplug of the past seemed to only become more real for this slip-up.

She was a real person that made mistakes, stressed, cried, loved and laughed.

Learning of her past left Neon all the more bitter towards what was done to her.

But he needed to know more. Cautiously, he began searching through the archives once again, tapping across the projector's interface with his digits purposefully. File after file, Neon approached closer and closer to the date of her "death" until he arrived at one of the last files in Sparkplug's archive. It did not matter whether it pertained to her research or her feelings, there had to be context as to what she was doing before the Decepticons took her.

"The Decepticons..."

Neon simply taught of them as the enemies before, no less deserving of life or freedom than the Autobots, but such sentiments rang bitterly with the knowledge that they had done something to change Sparkplug so drastically.

"I will undo the damage they've caused. I just need to know more. I feel like I'm getting closer to understanding you, Sparkplug. Just hold tight."

Idle words, considering they were spoken to a screen—an echo of the past—and not the genuine article.

[Sparkplug]

The data was a mess; a tangle of records from multiple different systems with different formats and vintages. Of course, on the other hand, Neon was very skilled at what he did. Under his digits, the tangle started to straighten out, collating dates into a common format, tagging progress reports and official documents separately from research notes, schematics and personal journal entries.

The last record attributed to her - though not the last document in the file, chronologically - was tagged as a personal journal entry. Notably, according to the dates, she hadn't made any personal records for quite some time before this final entry, limiting herself to official reports.

The file opened.

The pickup's capture field was wider than the previous file, rendering cramped, closed-in walls in a long, tunnel-like bunker with an arched cross section shaped like the upper half of an octagon, point upwards. All down the length of the tunnel were surgical tables in pairs, surrounded by a forest of racks and rolling containers full of spare parts, tool workstations lining the flanking walls. Shattered chassis with the characteristic torn metal of war wounds and high impact blasts occupied the left side of each table pair, swathed in the equipment to support faltering sparks, while on the right side of most of the tables, new, unmarked chassis lay, some still without paint or incomplete.

Sparkplug herself seemed very small amongst it all. She was worn, her shoulders sagging, her paint scratched from grazing collisions and little accidents. Her faceplate was pale from inadequate energon, inadequate rest; she looked tired. Endlessly tired. Her green optics were dimmer. In that moment, frozen forever in the file, her helm was tilted downwards, as though it were too heavy to lift. Other mecha were pinned in place by the paused frame, an impression of motionless chaos.

Playback began. All of the arrested motion in the background resumed with a jerk, mecha hurrying between tables, a clatter and a murmur of strained voices flowing out of the projection frame. Sparkplug's helm remaining hanging for a moment, before she visibly pulled herself together and looked up into the pickup.

"The front line is collapsing." The words were doleful, dead of inflection. "It's meant to be fifty kliks away. Last report has it pushed back to fourteen. We're relocating to the rear. I'm dumping all our notes down the secure channel while it's still secure. I'm supposed to be-" the small femme vented a hard little sigh, "-nominating a colleague to receive my note archive. What a joke. The neutrals hate me for what I'm doing, and the Autobots hate me for what I'm not doing. Making their lives harder. And I hate this."

She glanced over her shoulderguard at the tables behind her, then bent to check something on a screen out of the field of view, beneath the holo pickup. Keys clacked for a moment before she looked up again. "I've lost count of the times I've seen a mecha come back in here, torn to pieces in a frame we built, then resheathe them, send them out again, only to end up back on the left within a deca-cycle. They go round and round until they're too fragged to be saved, and all I'm doing is keeping the cycle going." Hard, exhausted bitterness underlay her words. "That's all that's left for me."

Sparkplug rubbed both hands over her faceplate, closing her optics for a moment. "Primus damn it. This is why I said I wouldn't record personal files anymore. Look, whoever ends up with this, my most recent notes on frame transfer are in file GZF-1348. Fuel pump work is FLK-98802. Simulation of failure modes is under-"

She was cut off by the blaring of an alarm. She spun on the spot, staring down the tunnel-shaped bunker. "What's happening?"

A white-armoured mech with a guard over the lower half of his faceplate stomped into the frame of view, in the background. "EVERYONE OUT! Three astrominutes and I'm setting the charges!"

"Are you insane?!" Sparkplug demanded, stalking over to face the much taller, broader mech. "Do you have any idea how long it'll take to rig the remaining patients for transport?"

"That's why I'm setting the charges." The words were blunt and without an inch of room to negotiate. He looked past her, and shouted, "Pulse, stop messing with that and go!"

"-I'm nearly finished! Please! I can do this in the time!"

"Two point five astrominutes, Pulse! Finish or I'll drag you out!"

"We can't do this!" Sparkplug hissed. "You'll kill all of them! We have-"

"They're in the tunnels, Sparkplug. They might already be behind us! Better the immovables go out fast and clean than get captured."

"I'll disarm the charges. You watch me!" the small femme blazed.

Behind the two, a bulky femme, red armoured and emblazoned with white medical sigils, slammed her fist into a bulkhead with a resounding clang. Then she twisted around to face the mech, and snapped in a tone of deep frustration, "Abandonment protocol in effect, sir."

"Get her out of here, Case. Force her if you have to. She isn't armed."

"Everyone knows that, sir. Sparkplug! We are going."

"I won't-"

"Make yourself a problem and I'll drag you. Then I won't be carrying medical supplies, and nor will you. Stop throwing a tantrum and get the scanners. We'll need them."

"I-" Sparkplug hunched her shoulders, her hands clenched at her side. "I'll - get the scanners."

Case's hand touched Sparkplug's shoulderguard for a mere second. Then the bigger femme gave her a push. "Go."

A rumble shivered through the walls, the field of vision from the holo pickup bouncing up and down slightly for a moment. Several of the mecha swathed in spark-support machinery were reaching out, voices raised in a medley of chaos.

Then the file abruptly ended, in a corrupted frame that jumbled the different sections of the room together in a scrambled mosaic.