Disharmonic Descent

Skyscreen was a clattering wreck, a pastorale competing with a military march. Almost drowned out, snatches of opera of the spheres made tries at his attention, only to be devoured by the pastorale. Over the pastorale, the military marched, crushing its notes underneath an incessant percussion beat. There was a fourth strain, but he could not place it. Electronic wails of pain and static screams from his sparking sensors intruded, pulsing over the chords, fading, and returning when he had thought that the worst was done.

All out of kilter, his song spiralled. The rhythm of his electricity hobbled too slow and sprinted too fast in uneven turns. His chafing, scraping, too-tight parts beat a tattoo, and his wobbling, rattling, improperly secured sections reverberated with every clanking step. Echoes of past injury and uncaring repairs swelled with each ungraceful movement. They waned when Skyscreen stood nearly still and tried to pull himself together in vain and returned with a roar as soon as he broke his imperfect rest.

Skyscreen could barely see, his optics broken and shattered but not by any high note. He was the punching bag of any discontent Decepticon. Skyscreen was only recently Decepticon, having sung the Autobot anthem the rest of his life, and were he to resist, his tormentors would cry, "Traitor!" and, "Autobot spy!" and their accusations sounded sweeter to the audios of command than his own faltering voice.

So Skyscreen kept quiet, a pianissimo, and avoided his new compatriots. He had been asocial as an Autobot, set to a different key and played in a different mode than his fellows. No company was no loss; it was an optional part, and his arrangement did without it, no matter the sigil that he wore.

His own tune dissonant with the Autobot cause, Skyscreen had left. They stayed on their planet, and they embraced outsiders with open arms. Could they not hear the strains of destruction these aliens strummed? The battle hymn had to be played, not hushed into submission. An army raised to ward off the hostile universe, that was what they needed, not disbandment in a futile hope for peace. Too, just as putting only one player to a part was unwise, lest he drop out unexpectedly and bring the whole production to a shamble, staying on Cybertron alone was unwise. They needed to resume colonisation or even conquest, if it came to that. Thus, he would not return to the faction that created him, even if it would spare him beatings. Besides, the Autobots would not welcome him back with open arms, even as they welcomed filthy aliens with the same, and the Decepticons would silence him forever for such treachery.

Skyscreen's opinion of maintenance was as mixed as his patchwork body and his mélange of mental music. He usually hurt more right after repairs than he did before he went in, as Decepticon parts were tuned slightly differently than Autobots ones and made cacophony when slotted into his frame. That was if they had the parts. Supplies were low, and many a time, Skyscreen had to make do with what were not even near the right parts, soprano when he needed baritone. The medics were often sloppy when they tended him, off-key and all out of tempo, as he was no one important and his heritage made him lowly, base. Yet in the sols after maintenance, when the pain of repair had decrescendoed, Skyscreen felt the closest to being in harmony. Then, he'd be beaten and return to torment and tintamar.

Skyscreen found the repair bay, managing to avoid worsening his condition in the walking. His cracked optics showed the medic as only a blur of purple and green, but Skyscreen knew who he was. This Constructicon was a cadenza: brilliant and no tempo but his own and that always changing. His music was the breaking of chemical bonds and the formation of compounds, racing tikka-tikka-tikka like a demented metronome. So Mixmaster would tend him. Skyscreen could live with this; the Constructicons were more careful than other medics, he had found.

Mixmaster laughed, "You're a wr-wreck, but you always are. Sit down." Tensors stretched and contracted, resonant like strings, and he gestured to a repair table. Skyscreen complied, awkwardly scrambling onto the table with a crescendoing clatter.

Mixmaster took stock of Skyscreen's injuries, going tsk disapprovingly over a number of them. He vanished off into the supply room, leaving his patient with the drone of the repair bay for company, and returned with the needed parts. Mixmaster removed the damaged pieces and slotted the new ones in, humming faintly as he did, snippets of Squawkbox's "Edge of the Storm" shifted a partial. As he moved on to securing the replacement parts, he shifted, probably unconsciously, to an out-of-tune, half-time rendition of Songweaver's "Rift Without End". It was a sad tune, but virally catchy in the worst of ways, and Skyscreen found himself humming it as well.

Mixmaster scowled and held up one of his patient's tensors. "Just how did you manage to tear this? It's too deep in your frame to have been damaged in one of those scuffles you're always getting into."

Skyscreen struggled to recall and answered after a tick, his voice quiet and hollow, "Just cleaning my rifle."

"That's a-all? Didn't you get overexertion warning alerts?"

"No."

"N-n-no? Something's wrong here, not right at all. Is the usage software for all your components installed properly?"

"Haven't installed any since I went Decepticon."

"Idiot!" Mixmaster crossed his arms and drummed the fingers of one hand on his upper arm. "The software is there for a reason."

"It goes viroid when I try to use it."

"Only if you're running a purely Autobot system ... you are?" the chemist sounded incredulous.

"Mostly. A few nips and tucks here and there ..."

"I see an ex-Autobot communications spook; I think hybrid system. You really ought to consider one."

"It changes how you think and can wreck your mind if done wrong." Autobots and Decepticons ran on the same basic codes but differed in the higher order codes, different melodies using the same notes. Hybridising a system involved making a mind capable of running both Decepticon and Autobot higher order codes, sometimes at the same time, essentially playing two different melodies together harmoniously. The personality and memories had to be separated from the higher order codes, with all the potential for the catastrophe that entailed, and the higher order codes rewritten. Changing the higher order codes, changed the way a mech thought and acted, even though the personality stayed the same, just as changing the order of notes changed the way a song sounded, even if they were the same notes used in both.

"What doesn't? The way you're going now, you're going to kill yourself."

That was the unidentified fourth strain, Skyscreen perceived now with great clarity, all the static gone for a moment. A dirge was playing behind the opera, the pastorale, and the march, barely there but building. He shivered. "Explain."

"New hardware comes with new software, to tell our minds how to handle the input. Otherwise, the input won't quite match up to what was there before. If the input is similar enough to the old input, our minds can adapt. Otherwise, they break."

Skyscreen considered this explanation. So the inputs went straight to the head, de capo, and then to the end of the song. He could change his tune, though, and live. "I'll consider a hybrid system."

"Good luck getting a coder. I'm done with you."

Skyscreen left, the opera, the pastorale, the march, and the dirge in his head and hurt in his body, which did not rattle or scrape quite so much as previously. He looked down at his hands distrustfully with not-quite focused optics that showed all the wrong colours. Then, he walked off to his shift with steps that beat a cadence, determined to find a programmer when he had the time.

The End