Flashback – The Historical Record – Closed

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Elita's smile turned a little misty. "All my life," she answered.

It was impossible to avoid a fit of nostalgia at the question, though Elita wasn't really old enough to reminisce about the "good old days." Her mentors still watched over her and guided her steps; her time was still taken up mostly by duty; her life was still circumscribed by the Order. But things were different now. She was different. She wasn't quite a sheltered novice anymore.

She wouldn't trade her life for anything.

"I was sparked blade-class," she explained further, shaking off the nostalgia. "But my mentor thought I would benefit from training in the other disciplines, and the One agreed. I've only been with the Scribes for a couple of orn. It's... interesting," she allowed, idly picking at a cipher-string that had been separated from the larger tangle for further analysis. "It's a very different discipline, but I'm enjoying it. I'm learning a lot - about our past, and our world - that I never knew before. Not that the Order keeps us ignorant," she added quickly. "Just - it's different to find something for yourself, than to be told a thing is so. Don't you think?"

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“Yes,” said Orion quietly, optics turning to the data wall before them, the encryptions running in strings of light and glyph-work across the holo-screen. “There is… much that has to be found out for yourself. So much that we are told is… lacking, devoid of the context needed to understand in full and in this half-knowing, so much is decided, never challenged or addressed.”

He was distracted, momentarily, by the potency of that notion – the knowing that there was so much kept from so many. That the knowledge was here, at the disposal of all, and yet somehow the dissemination of history, of the story of their own society, was not circulated, was not valued and here it gathered dust in the basements of Iacon. He couldn’t explain the sense of… urgency, of wrong that seemed to curl into his spark and hum there with an atomic burn diffusing heat through every endo-structure and circuit – the fact that the government had cut their funding. That there were no more Witnesses. That the past was being, slowly, and quietly, muffled and no one spoke to defend it…

“The Order of Solus is different, though.” Orion’s gaze was back on the blade-class beside him. He couldn’t remember being in proximity to a warrior build, but he felt it in her field, the intensity and pitch of her hydraulics – he felt in even the simple gestures she made in study, the potential for so much more. He held her eyes. “You and your One have always spoken out and I find that… what your Order says, though it is divisive and… harsh… is more true.”

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Elita found herself laughing a little. "That's the nicest way I've ever heard someone say we're a bunch of contentious busybodies. Are you certain you're not a diplomat underneath that clever librarian disguise?"

Her mirth faded, replaced by thoughtfulness. "I have heard us described as 'divisive' before. In truth, even some of our sisters have cause to wonder if some of our... activities don't cause more conflict and suffering than they solve. It is a fair question. Above all we are called to use our power wisely." She toyed with the console pensively. "But the One says... the One says that the problems we speak out against are like a rust infection. If we simply ignore them, we only create an illusion of tranquility while things just get worse and worse underneath."

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“Your One is right,” said Orion, looking back at the data wall, a wealth of live-stream hitting his neo-cortex as he downloaded the latest decryptions. “Problems are not solved by refusing to speak of them.” His hand on the edge of the console curled slightly. “When something is wrong in the world, we drive it out into the light and interrogate it there, dismantle it. In that disassembly we find the foundation of the wrongness and unmake it…” His optics fell. “But how do we do that when, it seems, all venues of information and communication are discouraged or closed? It did not used to be this way…”

He looked at Elita again.

“Sometimes, I worry no one will say anything. We will just… rush forward on this same trajectory, all silent and saying nothing, while racing with greater and greater momentum toward our own…” He stopped. “Forgive me.” The wide perimeter of his EM field muted itself, quieting. “Thinking aloud. I believe we have something in this tertiary vector here…”

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Elita let Orion guide her away from the conversation and back onto the task at hand, though even as she dove into the decryption vectors, Orion's words worried at her, and she knew that she could not let them go. Not for the Order - but for herself, and for Orion.

Under their hands, the console controls glowed. Elita decoded a tricky little thread, passed it to their shared workspace, and smiled in triumph as a picture began to take shape.

"The Order," she murmurs, "will always speak." She cycled her vents slowly. "You know... you could too. I can't promise it will change the course we are all traveling on, but... you will never be without allies, if you speak the truths you find. That much I can swear."

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“Who,” said Orion somewhat wryly, “would listen to me?”

He meant to leave the question hanging but it came out somewhat too self-deprecating and that was not as he intended. Orion acknowledged that the idea of actually telling anyone what he thought was an intimidating notion in and of itself, but on a less personal level he found himself wishing for someone more representative of Cybertron to voice these doubts. He seemed ill-fit to the task, a librarian of Iacon who’d suffered only the economic disfavor of the Primacy and not, as others had, the militant kind.

He had, in his mind, no authority with which to speak… to those oppressing the populace or the populace itself.

“That was badly phrased. What I meant was ‘You’re right.’ That is hardly an excuse not to speak when something is wrong.”

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Elita cackled, gratified as much as amused. "Now you're learning."

She flicked another decoded line to their shared space, squinting at the result. "Well, maybe when we finish this, Guardian Prime will have some words to inspire us both. There's nothing wrong with looking to the past for strength as well as for wisdom."

....Huh. That had sounded almost like something the One would say. Pleased, Elita started on the next string.

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“That,” said Orion, likewise looking at the new string, “sounded like something a One would say.”

If Elita gave him a look, he didn’t see it. He was instead falling into the notion that the stream cipher he was using could be, in fact, a a combination block and stream with a pre-Golden Age – likely Wrath Era – key of some kind. The long stream of generating key material, when combined with plain code glyph-by-glyph, seemed to be arbitrary unless… it was simultaneously using a block cipher mode. He pulled up several existing history logs about the Guardian Prime, streaming into his neo-cortex and cross-referencing.

“I feel that this entire encryption might crack with the right, literal, phrase. Translated to the Primal Vernacular and converted into binary I think…” He looked at Elita. “Binary,” he repeated, as though asking if that sounded as crazy as he thought it did

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"Binary." Elita felt her lips curving into one of Those smiles, the kind that worried her sisters. "That's just crazy enough to work. Let's try it."

She called up a list of commonly-reoccurring phrases from the Wrath Era. The conversion to binary was simple enough, as was writing a quick program to plug in all those binary strings into the cipher. The program was done in seconds.

The result? No matches.

"Well, scrap." Elita frowned at the console like it had failed her on purpose. "Must not have the right phrase. Any ideas?"

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Orion thought about it. “One idea,” he said quietly, beginning to type. “It wouldn’t work without this piece of code your Scribes found – the one translated out of that personal log. That is the cipher key I believe. Simply hoping that it is… straightforward. Age of Wrath was always quite straight forward and the Guardian Prime never very verbose…” He finished the conversion and started running it as a cipher, sifting the numbers through the encryption and waiting, the numbers running across the bottom of the screen.

01100110 01110010 01100101 01100101 01100100 01101111 01101101 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110010 01101001 01100111 01101000 01110100 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110011 01100101 01101110 01110100 01101001 01100101 01101110 01110100 00100000 01100010 01100101 01101001 01101110 01100111 01110011

“We’ll see if that works.”

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Elita watched over Orion's shoulder, fascinated, as the phrase flowed from the Primal Vernacular to simple binary under the librarian's practiced fingers. Each section plugged into the cipher string, settling in smartly like it was always meant to be there.

"Freedom," she murmured, leaning a little against Orion's arm, "is the right of all sentient beings." It was simple; it was true. It would have been anathema to the Council.

So this is the wisdom of a true Prime.

As if in answer, the console chimed and brightened, the vidfiles unfolding to reveal their secrets before Orion's and Elita's optics. Elita shrieked with joy and hugged Orion. "We did it!"

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Orion blinked at Elita. Twice. Three times in fact before registering properly that the other Cybertronian had, in a fit of excitement, thrown her arms around him. They were just about the same height and size class in root mode (no telling about the alt, subspace tech being what it was now a days) so the Scribe’s arms fit at least around him and brought him entirely into the circumference of her EM field – radiating excitement and glee so powerfully it was catching. Like catching a strain of some viral code, snapping through his neural-circuits and rewriting everything to match, precisely, the pitch of her joy.

For his part though, he only looked at her and smiled.

“The Order will want to see this. I imagine the Scribes will… be impressed with your work, Elita.”

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Elita pulled back to favor him with a bright, excited grin. "With both of us," she corrected. "After this I wouldn't be surprised if you were named a friend and ally of the Order." Though the Order only accepted femmes within its ranks, those of other genders or none at all were welcomed among them - as advisors, as teachers, as partners, as friends. If Orion was a named ally, he could walk into any Order outpost and be as at home as Elita herself was. She found she quite liked the idea.

"Oh, but let's see it ourselves first," she prompted, bouncing a little in her eagerness. "Play the video file!"