Ep 1.5 - 'Castling' - Closed

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"Of course, my Lord," said Starscream. He bowed. "The Nemesis shall be maintained at combat-ready status, just as you left it."

It took effort to inwardly disguise his relief. His authority was assured, Megatron was bereft of his memories, and Knock Out had spoken of at least one week of grace before the warlord restored himself. That was enough time to cover some tracks and forge ahead down others. There was a lot he could do in that time.

Disconnected. A strange way to put it. Starscream had heard of mechs stricken with a loss of memory before, but typically it was due to irreparable damage or deliberate neural tampering that obliterated either all memory or precise moments in time. He had never heard of a mech whose conscious timeline was a bridge spanning a vast and hazy gulf, connected only to a point in the distant past and the present. Just how far back did that bridge go, he wondered.

Starscream hesitated as his curiosity tore at him. His wings flicked.

"My Lord, if I may ask," he said. "Er... just how far back to you clearly remember? What point in time is the present to you, in memory if not, well... chronologically."

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Even if the answer were so simple as a roughly defined period where memory was hazily present, Megatron would not have been inclined to answer that question directly. Though the conscious intent may not have been anything more sinister than pure curiosity, Starscream's question felt like seeking out the particulars of a weakness. Finding the details to manipulate from.

The nature of his condition was not so straightforward, however, and Knock Out himself had said that after a point he could only speculate, as some of the matter inside the brain core was still a mystery to medical science. A mnemosurgeon specialising in memory would have been able to give a more concrete diagnosis and explanation, but Megatron was satisfied with his own physician's diagnosis and prognosis.

Some short tests upon waking from surgery had confirmed that Megatron's procedural memory and its connective fibers were intact; automatic sensorimotor behaviours were the most hardy of the memory core. Megatron was quite glad of this, as forgetting how to walk would not have gelled well against his pride. As it was, he did not require explicit and conscious awareness of walking to be able to walk.

It would explain some of his instinctual distrust towards Starscream now, even if he had no conscious memory of the Seeker being deserving of such suspicion. An association made enough times could become as ingrained as how to walk or operate a datapad.

The more obvious damage was to the neural relays linked to the retrieval of declarative memory. Megatron's memory of facts and events was hindered, like constantly needing to access a datapad, and not all of that was accessible. He knew, abstractly, about the Exodus and the war, the Autobots and the Decepticons, the extinguishing of Cybertron's core and the presence of Dark Energon in his veins, but he could not recall how he knew those things. They simply were.

It was episodic memory that he was missing the most, and what his trust algorithm was compensating for in the most simplistic of ways. His processor did not currently have enough working hardware to contextualize explicit facts with their temporal or personal context, nor any emotional connection. The difference between reading about a battle and fighting in it.

Megatron had barely gotten his processor around the wispy details, and had little desire to try and explain it to Starscream. Let him harass Knock Out for that information (which in turn would give him some valuable insight into how far that mech could be trusted).

"It is not so straightforward as when I remember, but how I recall," he replied, considering his words carefully as he spoke. "The result is still ultimately that I am unfit to command, and that regaining my... complete faculties will be a gradual process."