When that old scar is occasionally touched by chance, it rouses the old uneasiness;
the feeling of something broken that could so easily have been mended;
of something delightful that was senselessly wasted,
of a truth that was accidentally distorted — one of the truths we want to keep.
— Willa Cather, "Two Friends"
He begins by reprogramming his assigned terminal's interface. This workstation is clearly an auxiliary communications hub hastily repurposed to provide secure access to the Iacon database, and the tools Orion Pax requires are buried deep in its menu structures beneath more mundane utilities. He draws them out and arrays them in their accustomed places, then composes the macros that will speed his digits and processors through repetitive but necessary tasks. The work is tedious, but it grounds him, creating familiarity out of bewilderment. Orion is still acclimatizing himself to the new world into which he has awakened, though he is careful to conceal any disequilibrium. The atmosphere on the Nemesis reminds him of his first cycles in Kaon: no one has threatened him since Megatronus — Lord Megatron — vouched for him, but beneath the crew's tepid welcome runs a current of calculating vigilance. Never let 'em see you flinch, Jazz warned him once, and the memory, fragmentary but vivid, sends a pang through his cortex. Orion has no idea where Jazz is now and dares not ask, lest the inquiry be taken as a sign of disloyalty or weakness.
And, if he is honest with himself, because he could not bear to learn that Jazz, too, has betrayed their cause.
He interrogates the database first with the Nemesis's information management applications and is unsurprised when they return nothing but errors. If it were that easy, his skills would not be needed. Orion then requests permission to modify the onboard DBMS and is flatly but, again, not unexpectedly refused by Soundwave. Security issues aside, the silent mech has always been jealous of his prerogatives and the ship's network is his domain. He does, however, allow Orion free run of the Nemesis's libraries so that he can construct his own query engine without having to reinvent the integrated circuit. Orion thanks Soundwave punctiliously, recognizing the need to court the communications officer's good will. Lord Megatron has emphasized that Project Iacon is time-critical, but his backing is nothing to squander on minor obstructions. Courtesy is cheaper — an endlessly renewable resource — and greases most wheels.
After a few more false starts, Orion obtains access to the database, but immediately collides with its firewalls. He retrieves his passwords and is startled once more out of his hard-won self-possession by how deeply archived they are. How long has it been since he last exercised his primary function? Too long, it would seem: most of his authorizations are rejected as expired, though a few grant him purchase in the outermost layers of the database's security. The usage logs he finds there date his last sign-on so many cycles ago that it leaves his cortex reeling. His servos fall still, palms pressed flat against the terminal's vitreous surface, and for a few terrifying moments he sees himself as he must appear to the Decepticons, an archaeological find dug up from the bowels of an alien planet, the relic of a lost past. The gap between his most recent memories and his present situation yawns like a chasm for his consciousness to disappear in, and he hastily refocuses on his duty, throwing himself helm-first into the process of decryption.
He employs every trick he knows for dealing with protected data, to little avail. His successes are scant, his initial status updates for Lord Megatron disappointingly devoid of substantive results. Yet the work itself goes swiftly; his processors, linked with the ship's AI, take on more of the load than he expected. As he skirts the void in his recollections, however, so too Orion shies away from probing the upgrades to his capacities. The demands of war seem rationale enough for a boost in computational power and clock speed, just as they explain the heavier armor that bulks out his chassis. Another memory fragment suggests that it was Ratchet who insisted on the latter enhancement, belaboring the point with an acerbity Orion thought then ill disguised his concern: You will incorporate those spall liners into your chest- and backplates, or by the Allspark I will stuff you into a CR chamber and weld it shut until the shooting stops! Now he wonders whether the medic were concealing some other, less benign purpose than ensuring a noncombatant's safety. Worse, he fears what he himself may have abetted, though Megatron has assured him that he broke with the Autobots before they carried out their most reprehensible atrocities. But even as he readies his next cryptanalytic thrust, a portion of his cortex replays the images of a wasted and darkened Cybertron before his mind's optic, and his spark burns anew with horror and rage, gradually banked to despair as weariness overtakes him.
His vision tunnels, a penumbra of gloom circumscribing the flashing torrents of data on the viewscreen. Orion calls for light, but the room's fixtures are already at their brightest setting. It was thus in Kaon, too, he remembers: dwellings and thoroughfares as weakly illuminated as the pits and shafts beneath them, less easily navigated by an Iaconian tower-dweller than a miner optimized for work where Cybertron's primary never shone. He pauses to engage a hack from those cycles, increasing the intensity range of his photoreceptors, ignoring the strain on his optical suite. The truth is more important than his personal comfort, and always has been. I must bring light to a dark place, he recalls telling Alpha Trion when he resigned from the Archives. The statement strikes Orion as pompous and naive now, not to mention condescending as the Pit to Lord Megatron and all those who followed him, who kept the embers of truth burning while war drowned their homeworld in darkness. No doubt the Master Archivist recognized how ill-prepared his apprentice was for such a mission, though he did not try to dissuade him from it. After too long in the shadows, even a little light can be blinding, Alpha Trion replied. Let the truth be your lodestone instead, Orion Pax.
But the force that drew him from Iacon has flagged, as feeble as the glow of his workstation is dim, and he wishes for another exhortation from his mentor, from anyone, to reinvigorate it. How did it come to this? his processor demands as it reviews the destruction of Cybertron, but he has no answers. Lord Megatron seems determined to spare him the details and Soundwave, as ever, has nothing to say to him. The ship's other officers, when Orion encounters them in the mess, are conversable but not forthcoming. Breakdown turns the subject bluntly and Knockout breezily, while Commander Airachnid lifts a brow-plate and asks with thinly veiled sarcasm whether he has consulted the Nemesis's annals. His raw grief is stale news to them, his curiosity perverse — yet another aberration that sets him apart.
Isolation sharpens his longing for lost friends: Jazz, Alpha Trion, even Ratchet. But for that the old remedy is near at hand. Lord Megatron has assigned him a project, not a shift; he works until his HUD posts warnings of low fuel levels or overdue recharge, then leaves his station for the mess or his berth to satisfy the minimum requirements for continued functionality. His persistence at length earns its reward: the database's safeguards yield to a side-channel attack and he decodes three entries time-stamped late in the war. Their contents, once interpreted, give him pause: coordinates, not for any locality in Cybertronian space, but for sites on the very planet beneath him, the conflict's most recent battlefield. The entries offer no hint as to what may be found there, though the potency of their encryption suggests something precious or perilous. His spark blazes up at the thought of another world — an innocent world — subjected to the ravages of his people's fratricidal strife. No — not here, not now! No more!
But how can one mech, or one ship's company, turn aside such a cataclysm? He remembers, he thinks, a time when all might have gone otherwise, when he enrolled himself not in a factional struggle or a squabble over limited resources, but a quest to better the lot of his fellow citizens. Insulated by the privileges of his caste, Orion was slow to recognize how far the society of the so-called Golden Age fell short of its ideals. He began, artlessly enough, by questioning the upsurge in data he was required to catalog as restricted: not only personal, proprietary or classified information, but matters of previously public record. A statistical analysis of income inequality received the same treatment as the call to arms of a radical dissident. Artistic performances were censored, as were reports of industrial strikes and neighborhood demonstrations against rolling blackouts. The free exchange of ideas was no longer free, he realized belatedly, but an entitlement purchased with power. His own broad access was a mere side effect of oppression, so it was with mingled shame and outrage that Orion took advantage of it. He set about looking for what other Cybertronians were not permitted to see, listening for what they were forbidden to hear. And in that ostensible dead zone the words of a miner-turned-gladiator cut through all destructive interference to condemn inequity and advocate for justice. Freedom is the right of all sentient beings — the freedom to strive, to succeed or fail on their own merits, not to be raised up by the accidents of social affiliation, or held down by the demands of central planning.
Equality of opportunity, Orion replied eagerly down the low-bandwith line, and the liberty to discern one's own function. Let the miner dig and the Seeker fly, not because it is the obligation of their caste, but the calling of their sparks.
Careful, brother. Megatronus underscored the warning with grim humor, pushing the channel's carrying capacity to its limits. They brand me a revolutionary because I claim for miners the same license granted to Seekers. What will they name you, who would teach miners to fly?
Orion let the hyperbole pass; it was no more than what the press made of similar remarks by Senate liberals. Caste traitor. Leveler. Anarchist. And they would be wrong, he said, calibrating the broadcast of his own ardor to the constraints of the line and the cynicism of his auditor. We are not cogs in some great machine, and the Allspark is no blind mechanic. We have chosen the form of our society; if it does not foster the autonomy with which we were sparked, let us choose again, and change.
Those who exploit the system for their own benefit would disagree, Megatronus returned, glyphs suffused with anger and uncompromising purpose. We must make them and their lackeys understand the cost of their comfort. We must force them to see that the freedom to choose between slavery and death is no freedom at all.
No, brother, Orion said, and wondered a little at his own daring, a mere clerk presuming to correct Cybertron's most prominent champion of civil rights. Not force, persuade. If you try to drive all before you, they will scatter, or halt when you cease to goad them. Historical examples queued up in his processor and he suppressed the urge to lecture. Lead them, light their way, and they will follow you into the shadow of the Destroyer himself.
The ensuing silence made him fear that he had indeed overreached, but as the line remained patent he forced himself to wait for Megatronus's response. And you, Orion Pax? the gladiator asked, for once with no hint of mockery. Would you follow me into that shadow?
To that question, only one answer was possible. I would, Megatronus.
Then come to Kaon. The order was peremptory, but laced with rough welcome and favorable regard, and Orion's spark swelled with pride. Bring your light, and together we will lead Cybertron through this night of oppression into a new dawn of liberty.
I will come! Orion promised, and he went, but beyond that point his memories disintegrate, as if by making that resolve he somehow forfeited his future. He chides himself for entertaining such an irrational notion; a prolonged period of forced stasis is the likelier culprit — that, or deliberate tampering, as the ship's medic suggested. By whom? Orion asked, bewildered, but Knockout merely shrugged, as if unwilling to speculate. Orion's own conjectures harrow his spark: he cannot believe that Ratchet or Jazz or any friend would so betray him, but neither can he discount the possibility, not when they condoned the ruin of Cybertron itself.
Such doubts are a distraction from his task, just like his perplexity over the Decepticons' (or, for that matter, the Autobots') command hierarchy. He tries at first to suppress his misgivings; he cannot waste processing power ruminating on the past when the future hangs in the balance. The Autobots must be stopped, no matter the cost. If his meager ingenuity can contribute anything to their undoing, Orion owes both the dead of Cybertron and the living of Earth his best efforts. Yet his cortex will not let the mounting anomalies of his situation pass without scrutiny. Confusion is as disruptive to endeavor as grief, so he seeks answers to clear his mind, probing the discrepancies in the Nemesis's records even as he worries at the encryptions on the Iacon database.
You are too curious for your own good, Orion Pax, Megatronus said once (when?), gesturing at a dilapidated facade (where?) scrawled to gestalt height with seditious graffiti. See where it has brought you!
He does not remember what answer he made, but he knows that curiosity alone would not have brought him to Kaon — or to the Nemesis. He has always pursued the truth; having come this far, through betrayal and captivity and unspeakable loss, he must see that journey through to the end, whatever its end. Only the truth can set us free.
And someone ... someone is not telling the truth.
When the door opens behind him, he avoids meeting even the reflection of Lord Megatron's brilliant gaze in the viewscreen.