Ep 1 - Internet Pals

[Deleted]

(This is a side story introducing Foxface - set on the second day, does not affect the main plot.)

Steeljaw walked halfway down the wall of the control room and indulged in a long, low stretch, one pede at a time unclamped and extended to its limit, joints rotated to loosen linkages that were still underpowered from recharge. He wasn't, technically, on duty yet - Legion, looking less than half rebooted, was sitting at the monitors. Steeljaw walked his forepedes down the wall, stretching out his backstruts and spinal links, and dropped neatly down to the top of the monitor banks, giving the large mech a nod that Legion replied to with a non-verbal vent that sufficed as some form of social exchange.

The symbiont settled himself, pedes tucked underneath, tail wrapped around, and for all appearances cycled down his optics and slipped back into recharge. Only the twitch and flick of his audials, alert to the noises around him, gave him away. Mornings, he had found, were some of the best and quietest uninterrupted periods in which to do his 'rounds'.

Rounds which consisted of email, app store, what passed for the human's tech blogs and news, video game podcasts and news, facebook, his own blog, accounts on twitter, linkedin, and every other social network that was required to maintain an independent professional footprint on the human internet network. All of which took him a handful of excruciatingly throttled minutes painstakingly operating through the near gridlocked stand-still speeds of the human hubs.

One of his newest games - a youngling training exercise, dumbed down significantly and translated for human senses - had been approved and the reviews (and sales) were trickling in. His programs, released under the same pseudonym, were steadily gaining speed and popularity, with the more simplistic sparkling games that he had first ported for the humans after crash landing having a small cult following among app players. It was sort of gratifying and more importantly it kept his private bank account - the 'just in case' emergency funds that he had begun amassing even before the Autobots had rescued him - solvent and steadily growing.

Which then lead to a tour through the stock market to adjust some of his investments and really, Steeljaw was going to release a few rudimentary bits of tech that would increase internet speeds by 50% some day, non-interference be damned. He would be a rich mech off of the patents, and more importantly it would help relieve the processor aches from throttling himself while checking his thrice cursed email.

Email which, on a second breeze through, revealed one interesting gem amongst all of the superficial clutter of business transactions that poured in. Inbetween missives from the Apple developers and his investors and assorted game and tech newsblogs there was one email that stood out simply because it didn't match all the others, an individual email address linked to a message that was just titled Re: Hello.

Steeljaw did not, strictly speaking, care what the humans thought of his work. Some of it was hit and miss, a guess as to what would appeal to alien biological organisms, versus the consideration of what was easiest to port to their fledgling technology. Mostly it was just business - he disliked being helpless in the local surroundings and currency was power to the humans, just as it was in most civilized cultures. He had, he admitted, made a private bet with himself as to whether he could port a more advanced Cybertronian game such as Orbital Nasxed to the human tech and sensibilities, but that was something to tinker with when he had nothing else to do. The ports of sparkling games and training programs was where the money was, and the reviews - good or bad - were just indicators, data to be calculated when deciding what style of program to port next.

Fanmail though - that was different. That was new, not only that someone had felt the need to contact him personally, but had gone through the trouble of using the actual email address he used with his pseudonym and not just dropping a quick comment on a blog somewhere. He'd been startled when it first showed up, and yes, alright, maybe just a little bit flattered. Flattered enough to take the time to compose a personal reply.

Which had prompted another email by his admirer, who was, it turned out, capable of intelligently discussing the games Steeljaw was releasing. One exchange had turned into another, then another, and the string of replied to emails was getting a bit long so Steeljaw trimmed it and started composing another reply. They had, in the course of correspondence, progressed to something almost personable - enough that he felt no qualms in throwing in a few grinning and winking emoticons as he fed his admirer a few hints about the newest game and signing it with a casual social closing and the abbreviated given name of his pseudonym, Let me know what you think! ~Ed

He was 90% certain that his correspondent was actually a femme as her name would imply, 100% certain of which metropolis she resided in (a location ping had been the first thing he had done), and still calculating a muddled 35% accuracy on whether or not she might be attempting some form of human social flirtation.

The odds were actually somewhat higher that she was either engaging in industrial espionage to find out what he was going to be releasing for the interests of another company, or that she had an ulterior motive of her own. He was keeping an optic on it and editing much of what he said for that reason, but he enjoyed the exchanges all the same.

Satisfied, Steeljaw sent his reply email off, made one more round through the review blogs, and when stretched the linkages in his neck, powered up his optics, and turned his attention to the monitors.

[foxface]

Foxface really, like really, needed a new place to live. Her current home was not bad after human standards, but she was soon going crazy if she didn't have the chance to change her form for more than a few seconds. She was a small cybertronian, no doubt, but human houses were build for humans and at the moment she wasn't pretending to be a human. She was showing of her natural form, if you would. Stretching her legs out, she heard clicks from some hydraulicks in them and a hiss from one in her arm. Damn, how long had it been since she had had an oppotunity to transform? 2.. no.. it had to be 3 weeks! 3 may Primus forbid it weeks of being stuck in her human form, just because she had to go and attend some important meetings all over the fragging world. Careful not to knock anything over or make noise, she twisted her body around so that she could, almost, stand up strait. As she transformed back into her current human form, she noticed an E-mail from a certain game maker: Ed.

She had contacted Ed over the internet, after accidently stumbling over some of his games in app store. At first glance she hadn't really seen anything out of the usual, but after playing one of his games, it didn't seem right. It seemed like a simplified version of a cybertronian sparkling game and she had contacted him shortly after noticing. Not with a 'Who are you and how do you know cybertronian games?!', but as an admirering fan who wanted to know more. She had been writing casually with him for a while now and for every mail she received, she became more and more sure that it was not a coincident. The game hadn't just looked like a simplified version, it had most likely been one, which ment that Ed either had a cybertronian brainstorming for him, or he was one himself! Either way, she had not changed her way of writing, but merely continued to ask and answer, hoping to get something that could say what he really was.

The E-mail was nothing out of the usual; he answered her questions from her last e-mail, wrote a couple of hints and asked what she thought about them. Without much thinking, she started answering and making new questions; most of them about the hints. She answered honestly, but was careful with not knowing too much. These ideas was also simplified versions of sparkling games and other easy cybertronian games, at least she was pretty sure they were. Maybe she was wrong, but what was the odds? All his games seemed cybertronian in origin, no matter how simplified they were. Add the fact that she hadn't been able to locate him, but merely ended up stranded in the Nevada desert the last time she tried, and you got a positive 'very-likely-to-be-a-cybertronian-or-know-one'-situation if you asked her. This hadn't made writing with him bad though, it had almost made it better, even if she did try to keep herself out of the war, which had come to this world too. If it showed out to be a 'Con or 'Bot, she was probably leaving, making a new identity and stuff, but if it was a Neutral. Well, she might just see if she couldn't stop by and say hi. She really needed to speak with someone other than humans; they were fun sometimes, but most of the time just annoying.

"...I really like the sound of the whole logic game, but I don't really get where you're going with it. You're pretty darn smart for even thinking about such a game, but half my friends won't know how to do something like that xD You know they're not the brigtest, but they pretty much sum up most of the human population ;) So you should probably make it slightly easier, unless what you've just told me is much later in the game. Btw, how is it going with that game you..."

Fox had dragged a few friends into the mails once in a while, asking questions they had or using them as measurements when answering. Really, they were the best she had, 'cause even if she had been on Earth for almost 100 years, she still couldn't go down a truly become a human. She still only pretended; played the game she was designed to. Looking over what she had written, it hit her that there was one thing she had never asked him about. She had joked about it once, but she had never directly asked him about it.

"...One last thing; Maria sort of asked me to forward this to you: 'How do you come up with those games you make? They're like, out of this world! Your games are fucking awesome btw!' That was litteral if you were wondering :P

~Foxy"

Honestly, Fox lied. Maria hadn't said anything, she didn't even have a friend named Maria, but Ed didn't know that. She had mentioned her 'friend' a few times before, so there shouldn'y be anything suggesting that the question hadn't actually been asked by another human being. And the Foxy at the end? It wasn't her that had come up with that, honestly, but her human friends. She had merely adopted it after they started using it as her nickname. That it fitted her real name was only a bonus. Carefully she checked over her reply, adding things here, removing things there and putting in some emotes. Her as a human was fond of using emotes and she had done that all the time, but she never went to the extremes. A smile, a 'XD' and other things were enough. Sending the e-mail, she walked out of her bedroom, ready to start her human's rutine. This was going to be a long, boring day unless something really interesting happened soon.

(Okay, here we go, hopefully it's not too bad. The "text" is just small parts of the reply. There are much more than that.)

[Deleted]

The reply came less than a quarter through his duty shift, the email alert popping up in a corner of his HUD. Steeljaw kept both optics on the monitors but sectioned off a small processor thread to take a glance through his email. His corresponding fan was being quite prompt, and her router IP had shifted back to what he considered her 'home base'. She must have been at the computer when his email caught her.

A larger cluster of threads was, as it usually was during monitor shifts, busy rewriting and porting games to app store levels. There was a pacing to the business, however, and with his latest app still rising up the 'new' charts and the next already in beta, Steeljaw had given himself permission to tackle his personal pet project - porting an actual GAME, not just sparkling fluff. To that end he had, in his spare time, taken to picking apart and restructuring Orbital Nasxed into something that might, if one squinted quite hard, be understandable to the human mind and still retain some of the flavor of the Cybertronian game. He had previously written it off as impossible, but Orbital remained his, the base engine and game code his and his carrier's work, and surely, if there was any full fledged Cybertronian game that he could see his way to translating to organic perceptions, surely it would be one which he himself had created.

Orbital had been a huge hit as a portable, quick game among the Cybertronian Grid community. Steeljaw was willing to wager it would be a complete and utter flop with the humans, even as dumbed down and ridiculously simplified and underclocked as he could make it. He was, in fact, certain enough that he was also going through the motions of setting up another dummy persona to release it from - no sense dragging his current pseudonym's rating through the mud with a horrible game. In truth, there was only so much ripping out and dumbing down he could do before it got depressing, so he answered the email instead.

His email penpal, Foxy, had a curious way of phrasing things, sometimes. Steeljaw had compiled a list of them, one which he kept adding to. ...they pretty much sum up most of the human population..., for example. Anomalies. She either spoke quite a bit differently than the humans who frequented the 'Bot base - which was entirely possible, as she presented herself as an older individual than the children - or English was not her native language - again, entirely possible - or... well.

The third possibility intrigued him, as there were times he could almost swear the odd phrasings were deliberate. Little winks and nods, flags meant for his eyes - for Cybertronian eyes, or at least offworld non-native eyes. And wasn't THAT an interesting prospect?

Steeljaw flipped through all of the base security feeds and spent a few kliks cleaning his front pedes and sharpening his claws as he composed an answer. 'Out of this world'? Oh, honestly. Maybe he was just being suspicious. Surely no actual Cybertronian would stoop to a pun THAT bad. Still, Foxy presumably represented either part of Steeljaw's prospective market or a puzzle in and of herself, and either way...

He answered the query about the game they had been talking about with a brief overview. That's nothing, though. Same as the others, just up a notch. You want to see smart and crazy, you should see what I'm working on in my spare time...

The description of Orbital Nasxed would sound like a bastardized bootlegged copy translated through several different languages and stripped of just about every recognizable detail to anyone who had actually played the game - which was fair enough, as that was more or less exactly what Steeljaw had done to it. It was, however, leaps and bounds beyond the sparkling games he had released so far, and the explanation was either going to leave his human penpal in the dust... or perhaps reveal something interesting.

Tell your friend Maria thanks. ;D How do I come up with it? Genius. Sheer genius. And a lot of caffeine. But hey, if you guys have any ideas you'd like to see, let me know! I always like to know what people want.

~Ed

Steeljaw ran a proofing optic over it one more time - added a few contractions, some slang, and several deliberate typos - and then sent it on its way.

[foxface]

And the show had now begun. Foxface's whole life as a human was just a show for real humans. She ate, slept, bought stuff and so on, just so people saw her as a 'normal' person. She had her rutines like averyone else, the only difference was the fact that she really wished to get out of it. Not because it was boring, okay a bit because it was boring, but mostly because it kept her in one place and she couldn't do something outside the god damned rutine without somebody asking why. She liked being a human, no doubt, but in the long run it became too easy, too 'just knock the processors of and follow the rutine'. She could not function that way; she would not function that.

Letting out a sigh, Fox sat down by the table and started to eat. What was she suppossed to do? Run out and send the biggest beacon she could get her hands on? Send out a desperate transmission of 'someone please take me in'? Pff, Nope, she wasn't going to sink that low, not in a billion years, not even if she lay on the edge of the Well of Sparks. But honestly, what could she do? She needed Energon like anyone else, although in smaller portions and not as often, but she couldn't get any and soon her systems would be dry. When she did locate some, it was either gone by the time she came or it wasn't refined enough and she didn't have the equipment to refine it. Fate could be such an annoying glitch from time to time.

She heard a sound from her computer, telling her that she had gotten a new mail. Not caring to do it like a human would, she opened it in her processors, letting it fill half her HUD. This one, at first glance, was nothing out of the ordinary, but then it came. A description of something she faintly believed she knew, but she couldn't tell what it was, 'cause honestly it seemed more like someone had tried to tell someone in the Pecorian system about something they heard about on Novar, not cybertronian to english. Now, it might sound easy, but in reality it is close to impossible, she had tried it herself and failed miserably. What really caught her attention though, was the fact that it was, no matter how simplied, beyond what any human would understand. It was too complex, too difficult, and it would require some programs that only cybertronians had in order to win the game on your own.

That description was what tilded it from 'maybe cybertronian' to 'can't be anything else'. Fox was now sure. Ed was not Ed, or at least he was not a human.

She started writing a proper reply, but ended up feeling no need to hide anymore. What was the worst that could happen? Honestly, she didn't want to think about it, but she had already decided to do it the direct way, so no turning back. Forcing the primitive e-mail site into being capable of writing cybertronian would have been to much, so she decided to simply make her message as a picture and then put the picture into the e-mail. Problem solved.

"Who are you?"

It was an extremely simple message, written in plain cybertronian. If this did not make it clear that Fox knew that Ed was not a human and that she herself was a cybertronian, then he had to be a damn glitched mech. Shortly she wondered if she should do something else, but why should she? If Ed actually, by some insanely small chance, was a human, then she could always blame it on the internet. Everything could be blamed on the internet, no matter how strange it was.

Waiting a few seconds, she send it. Now. Done. Figuring out she had held her breath, she let it out and allowed her systems a chance to continue the, normally, automatic procedure of breating. Unlike holoforms, she actually breathed and had a beating 'heart' to make the illusion better. Letting her processors consider the possible outcomes, she didn't really care wether it was good or bad. Either way, her day had just become much more interesting.

[Deleted]

Bingo, as the humans said. Outwardly, one of Steeljaw's audials flicked, something that happened so routinely in response to noises that it was of no note at all. Inwardly, he was already backtracking the ip address, tracing the mail routers, and had a within-reasonable-distance location targeted and logged. Northern hemisphere, major metropolitan area, far enough distance of the base to be deemed safe, which were the primary points to be considered. His tail tip tapped idly, another mannerism that was so common as to be unremarkable.

Who are you?

The stark image was, if looked at through the dubious perspective of a human's optics, something like an unmirrored Rorschach blot. Or maybe a very simple maze. Or a string of some of those asian emoticons rendered in plain text. The glyph was a simple interrogative, rendered in the plainest of lines - the Cybertronian version of the human's san serif font Arial, giving little or nothing away beyond the most basic meaning - who are you?

She/he/oi had come straight to the point, and the response was now up to Steeljaw. Procedure - by Autobot standards - would have been to bring the contact immediately to a superior officer's attention. Standard procedure from that point probably involved a rigorous background check, one of the scouts sent to investigate, or - Primus help them all - Blaster making contact. All over the chance contact of an unknown Cybertronian - or possible Cybertronian ally who had a rudimentary command of the language - who happened to play games and had been clever enough to suss out Steeljaw's highly dumbed down games from the glut of the human app market.

Decepticons, generally speaking - at least the ones Steeljaw had known - weren't usually the app game type of players, though he was fairly certain there was a sizeable faction of the enlisted ranks from the Nemesis who were on the World or Warcraft servers. The metropolitan location was also a fairly stable one according to the email records he had on 'Foxy', and Decepticons, at least on this planet, tended to travel with their warship.

Which left Autobot - and no one would complain about that - or Neutral, and on the off chance it was Neutral Steeljaw felt he had a certain responsibility to NOT out the bot to either of the greater factions without consent. Thankfully, he was not an Autobot and didn't, precisely, fall under their standard protocol.

He could always beg Jazz's forgiveness later, if it turned out to be a 'Con.

The image he sent back was larger, written in the neat calligraphic hand that he decorated parts of the base in, set in tri-harmonic quad-circuit verse form which was, if translated to english, the closest one could come to the human 'haiku' form:

Dark ages through space:
Forms are forgotten - you ask
But do not offer.

Who are you?

He hesitated over the space where his designation mark should go, then inserted the abbreviated form of it, the half mark that meant only 'Steeljaw' without form, function, or faction. It filled out the shape of the glyph spiral and though it was vastly simpler than the sonnets he composed in fits of temper he rather liked it. Additionally, he was either going to frag off a Decepticon or potentially amuse an ally. Satisfied, he attached it to an email, the body of which innocuously said "Hey, that's cool! I've got a few like that - not ready to be a big name on Deviant Art or anything, but I think they'd make cool tattoos, don't you? New tribal form! ~Ed"

Not that the pseudonym was really going to be necessary much longer, but it never hurt to keep up appearances. Speaking of which - he hit send to the email at the same time he was clearing out everything having to do with the Edward pseudonym, transfering bank funds and important errata through several circuitous routes and chains of identity to a new pseudonym that had nothing at all to do with the other. Better safe then sorry.

[foxface]

Waiting, more waiting and guess what? Reply. Not that Foxface should be called impatient, but right now, she did not wish to wait for answer, but she knew that she had to. The invention that humans was so proud of, the internet, was utterly slow compared to anything you could have found on Cybertron. She doubted that it would go as slow as it did now, if they didn't use the primitive programs they did.

Replies demanding something for something. Did she hate those? No, actually she didn't, but it was not what she had hoped for. It gave little to no useful information, but at least a designation came with it. Steeljaw. What a peculiar name to have, unless of course he was not a 'full' cybertronian. Not that there was such a thing as a 'half' cybertronian, but she had been called things similar to it, simply because she was different from the average. Steeljaw was not a Pretender, she knew every name of any Pretender that had ever lived, both the formal and the nicknames they had earned over time, but he could be a cassette. The name sort of fitted into the category, at least the category she had made, but she wasn't going to mark him as one on that alone. He could be many things, even a she, although she really doubted that. Among those many things, his faction was what annoyed her most not to know.

He could be anything; Decepticon, Autobot, Neutral. Neutral would be interesting, anything else would maybe be a reason to kill of her current form. She did not really fear them, 'Bots and 'Cons, but nor did she want to get near them or help them for that matter! Get marked as 'not even worth the Energon it would cost to shoot you' and you would know why.

Decepticon seemed unlike, no matter how she twisted it. Why would a 'Con make sparkling games to apps? They were more likely to play it, than make it. That left 'Bot and Neutral. Those she could handle if needed, but in every way she wished it to be a neutral. Neutral ment less judgement and that small, small chance of finding somewhere to be among others without having to be part of one of the factions. Still, she didn't crave to be among cybertronians, but it didn't changed that it would feel... she wasn't actually sure what it would feel like. Only thing she knew was that she wanted to be among others again.

Who am I? Shortly said, on this planet, I can be anyone and yet I am no one. Most of us hide among organics, I hide as organics. Make of that what you want, but I can tell you this; I am a neutral and in all honesty I pose little to no threat to anyone.

With us she, of course, ment cybertronians. For the part of her being a Pretender, she could have been more direct, but so few knew Pretenders now a days, or back then for that matter, that it wouldn't change much had she put Pretender instead.

She could had been more 'artistic' with her text,but she had never done much of that. It did have that touch of her, but you might wonder what she was, if you truly looked at it. In it's base it was clearly cybertronian of origin, but those small things, that made each cybertronians' text unique, was different. It had touches and small bits from many other cultures' ways of writing, yet it was easy to read.

Where Steeljay had hesitated and thought about what designation he send with his reply, she had nothing to hesitate about. Adding Foxface gave nothing more than a clear sign of her being neutral. After all it was not an official name and thus had no faction, rank, function or anything attached to it, beside the neutrality. In case you searched for it in a database, there was only a small chance of finding anything. In case anything was found, you would probably have to go through many documents before finding something that could actually lead to her profile.

Before sending the reply, she added a small english reply, which basically played along what he had written.
Damn, that one is looking pretty fancy, you're good at making them. And yes, you're right, they'd look pretty awesome as tattoos. I can imagine someone getting it and then they wonder what the hell it's supposed to look like.
- Foxy

[Deleted]

Foxface. The name meant nothing except that it scanned as unusual and therefore either a specific classification name - though he doubted she was a cassette - or a nickname of some sort. Steeljaw idly ran it through a database query but didn't really expect much back.

More important than a designation, however, was her message. He read through it twice, claw points tapping a very quiet rhythm against the console surface as he considered. Anyone and no one. Hiding as an organic. It was an odd and very specific phrasing. It reminded him of something, but the information was long archived and it took him awhile - and several search string queries - before he could even dig up the word he was looking for, much less any files on it.

A Pretender. One of the organic mimicing xeno scouts. Maybe. Possibly. It was a remote chance, but it was the only related class he could think of, short of some new and entirely experimental holo tech that had never made it into any records. A Pretender - on Earth?

A Neutral one at that. It was all supposition and guessing, nothing concrete or confirmed, which justified him, he rationalized, in not bringing it to attention. No sense haring off after circuit ghosts, and really, Pretenders were just about that. If it was a Pretender. If one had actually survived, and Steeljaw was more than a little shocked at the idea that one might have.

In the meantime, it would help to find out more. And Primus, there were better ways of doing it than through jpegs attached to human emails. He had know way of knowing what cobbled hacked together system the other Cybertronian was using, but it was at least coming through the human network, which means a human operating system was in play. They had been forced to write translation code between Cybertronian and English for all manner of systems, given their own piecemeal mesh of tech.

Steeljaw stayed where he was - his presence on the monitors, whether or not it was his own shift, was so regular as to be unremarkable - and tucked himself up, pedes curled neatly underneath his frame, optics dimming in a pose that was familiar to most of the base as "Base Cat at work, please do not disturb". Packaging up the translation hacks for Windows, Linux, OSX, and several mobile operating systems, he stored the package on one of the more secure off-shore servers he occasionally used for work related purposes.

The next note to Foxy was entirely in binary, spelled out in actual roman numeral 1s and 0s in the body of the email, detailing where to download the hacks and how to install them, as well as which anonymous reroute email servers could be considered as secure. He sent it through that system himself, though he attached his human psydonym to it to ensure that she would open it. The small flash file attached to the email was set to display his full designation - Steeljaw, cassette, Neutral as well as carrying a worm to find and delete the images already exchanged. A better scrubber program went winging after the email, intent on cleaning ghost records of the email exchange from the intermediary servers. Paranoia, he had found, frequently served one better than trust.


<< OOC - I'm so sorry for the wait! Regarding what Jaws just did - he's sent Foxface instructions on how to download and install a cybertronian to english translator, allowing them to send each other texts in actual cybertronian. He's also (not so subtly) suggesting they move this to a more secure anonymous server exchange to keep either of them from being tracked easily. >>