Note: The usual disclaimers apply... I hope the ideas I am attempting to relay come through.
Transformers: Fragments
Stasis Pods:
Primal looked over the crew manifest for his ship. Aside from Rhinox none of the active crew knew him, which means they could not have heard even rumors about his past or their actual assignment. One was a new recruit, wet behind the ears, and the other was a troublemaker on the verge of annoying the wrong people into a dishonorable discharge. He didn't know it, but this assignment was his last chance, not the vacation from his usual assignments that he thought it was.. The exploration mission was a simple mission any of them could do easily, the secret mission was where the challenge lay, but if things went well, none of the active crewmembers would ever know anything about it.
The crewmembers in stasis were the real treasures; a balanced crew of experts able to take on and solve whatever problems may develop on the destination world. Buried halfway down the list was X, safely filed and listed where few were likely to notice it; the crew in stasis also included Grimlock, an old veteran of many wars who could take any opponent, even X on equal terms; Arachnia, whose record listed her as an expert at intelligence and hand to hand combat; and an assortment of other specialists and experts; including Shooter, Polar Claw. The biggest surprise of all on the crew list was one of the Convoy Council. One of the Primes had elected to join the mission as well, going in stasis to preserve the apparent unimportance of the flight. There was also an assortment of blank protoforms on board as well… just in case.
Primal himself was a potential Convoy himself, sharing physical resemblances with ancient Primes and leaders going back even before Victory Saber. Primal wasn't on the council yet, he didn't have the experience needed, nor had he developed a leadership matrix the way Lio Convoy had, or that Big Convoy was in the progress of developing. In order to be on the council, one had to either have developed a matrix, or be an Elder.
When the original Matrix disappeared into the unknown when Rodimus Prime journeyed away, never to return, the Convoys developed the ability to generate their own variations of the Leadership Matrix… no one knew if the ones generated by the convoys were as powerful as the Matrix of legend, but few Convoys had had opportunity to make use of one except as a source of wisdom and did not believe they held any actual power. Many other new myths had also developed in recent years; tales of an Oracle had replaced the myth of Vector Sigma, as well as stories of a dirt core.
Primal saw to it the Stasis Pods were loaded, and then the mission was ready to begin. There was one more stop to make, a layover at one of the outer space stations for one last influx of supplies. He was totally unaware of a Predicon plan about to go into motion that would seriously complicate his mission.
Primal stared up at the giant stasis pod marked with the X, it was where he spent most of his down time. He feared he was on the verge of becoming obsessive about the mission, he didn't want to be like some of the burned out warriors he had met around. He noticed a shadow on the wall next to him, Rhinox had come to check on his status.
"I met an interesting Autobot in a pub the other day, he seemed to be both a hot head, but with the haunted look of a leader about him. As far as I could tell he had a classic hot rod alt mode…"
"I've seen him around, generally a good well rounded fellow. I think he even fought in the Great War."
"He kept talking about an unbalanced oracle, talking to me specifically, telling me this world was a mistake and screaming out in pain," Optimus said.
"I've seen him get like that before… He seems to be the type who needs a crisis to function properly same as many other veterans. He wasn't so nice as that to me, said I was some sort of traitor. That bot must have lived through some hard slag, he's better sober. You should let it bother you."
"It won't effect the mission, but his comments still worried me. Anyway, gather the others, we are ready to launch."
Optimus Primal's flight went smoothly until they stopped for additional supplies at the space station, their old orders were then superceded to recover the stolen Golden Disk from a group of rouge Predicons.
The battle did not go well for either side, in an attempt to safeguard his ship and his secret mission, Optimus Primal ejected all stasis pods, including X. In the heat of battle Primal was not able to put the pods in a stable orbit… one by one the pods fell to earth, and after several months a disturbance occurred to destabilize all the orbits, causing the pods to fall to Earth, some landed safely; some landed badly, damaging themselves and their occupants; while a few were buried so deeply they were never found by Primal and his people, and were unable to hear the call during the Gathering, although some of them did receive the allegiance altering virus. The stasis pod containing the protoform version of the Convoy unit was one that remained buried and forgotten.
They lay dormant during more than one Transformer conflict, and countless more human conflicts… well beyond their stasis pod's battery life. Some expired, but in a select few the artificial intelligence built into the life support systems came across the idea that they could extend the lives of the Sparks in their care by allowing them to slightly degrade. All that mattered to them was maintaining the life of their charges, memories, any real sense of identity, the things that made the Sparks living were allowed to fade away to keep the Spark just barely alive. In time the stasis pods pulled energy from their own structures in order to protect the sparks, rendering the pods little more than misshapen rocks protecting the protoforms and their badly degraded sparks within. The sparks and their protoforms had degraded to the point they were good for nothing save transectors.
The degraded sparks did not remain completely hidden, a disembodied force discovered them in its travels while seeking its own purpose.
After centuries, even the energy saving efforts were no longer enough to maintain the sparks, and not enough remained of the AIs to help. In an effort to maintain their own lives the sparks instinctively reached out for compatible energy signatures in an attempt to merge with them enough to replenish their own life force enough to fully return to life. Energies compatible with the Sparks turned out not to be energy in the form of coal, ruby crystals, or energon, but in the form of human souls. The most compatible souls belonged to humans who's spirits were most like the Transformers original personality.
The first of these misplaced protoforms came back online while under the watchful gaze of that disembodied force when it encountered and merged with two humans who declared themselves to be "Lord Giga" and "Lady Mega," but even while merged with two humans to re-supply its spark energy to sentience it would take a long time before the transformer Overlord would once again be whole.