Autobots, Assemble! Series 1
Chapter 2: Fallout
*Note: As I told a viewer, this is mostly going to be from the 'Bots perspectives, but every so often I'll be pulling a "switcheroo" back to the humans/superheroes when it really matters. And it won't just be a little section before swapping back. I'm talking whole chapters. So here's the first important "switcheroo." Now, keep in mind, these chapters may be shorter than the main 'Bot-perspective ones.
"Is anyone else confused here?" wondered Wasp. "Because I'm confused."
"You're not the only one," he assured her.
If anyone bothered to write a book about the universal rules of being a superhero, he mumbled, rule twelve would probably be "Robots will always try to kill you." Getting attacked by robots was nothing new. Getting attacked by robots that could disguise themselves as cars and trucks and who knew what else – that was new. But now that rule was under question. That freight truck robot had stepped in to help the red sports car one after attacking it, and yet it hadn't attacked them. It had told Thor to stand down, it had said a few words to Janet – and that was it. No drawn weapon, no shots fired, no attempt to grind anyone into the ground. No attempt at violence. After speaking to Janet, it had simply left the scene. Two other vehicles had followed it.
"Allies, perhaps, sir?" Jarvis suggested.
"Maybe," he muttered. "But then why didn't they step in?"
"Under orders would be the most feasible explanation. But, sir, more importantly, I detected unusual energy readings from –"
"Later, Jarvis. I saw them. We can run analysis later."
"But, sir," Jarvis protested, "the signals have disappeared entirely."
He blinked. Gone?
"Tap into the network. See if you can find them again."
"Already in progress, sir."
He set the armor down on the ground and drew up to the downed violet robot that he'd shot. Hank was already busy examining it while T'Challa busied himself examining another. He couldn't see his eyes through the silver helmet but he did see his frown. He ignored it and scanned the strangely humanoid machine from head to foot. He couldn't hold back a whistle as the scans came back sector by sector. The design on the outside was impressive enough, but the inside – it was a robotics engineer's wet dream. The way everything linked together was more like artwork than robotics. Whoever had built these things hadn't had just practicality in mind, and the sheer complexity – he would be surprised if these things were Earth-built.
But there was always a universal constant with machines: power sources.
He directed the scan higher up. The chest cavity, damaged as it was, held a few unusual mechanisms within that demanded further study. Where his uni-beam had drilled a hole there was a distinct chamber-like cavity containing the faintest of residual energy, energy he couldn't identify, and it was fading fast. He saved the readings just as the last of it dissipated, coupling it with the scans Jarvis had taken while the machine was active. Whatever had been in there had been powerful, remarkably stable, and could've been the power source, explaining why Hank had been so averse to him aiming there. There was something else, too. Another energy signal.
"What...?"
There was a strange fluid seeping from the chest region. Blue. Glowing. Strong energy readings emanated from it.
He had the armor zoom in on the substance as he knelt down to collect a small amount on the tips of his gauntleted fingers. The armor...reacted. Power readings fluxed for a second before stabilizing.
"Wasp!" he called. "You have any lip balm on you?"
She flew over and increased her size. "Yeah, why?"
"Can I have the lid?"
She fished into the small pocket in her skirt and tossed the item in question to him. Catching it, he scraped the dripping substance off.
"Tony, we have company incoming ahead," Clint reported. "Black truck. Ford."
"S.H.I.E.L.D?"
"No. No markings. Blank. But it looks official."
He turned away from the machine in time to see the vehicle in question pull up to the dismantling police barricade. Two Caucasian men in their late thirties and a Hispanic woman of similar age emerged wearing formal business attire. A chocolate-skinned female officer stepped up to advise them not to enter the same way she had with arriving onlookers, but a flash of a badge by the man in front made her stand down in shock. The trio approached him.
"Mr. Stark?" the woman asked.
He switched his thrusters back on and piloted the armor back down onto the cement. A simple command made the armor's faceplates retract. He flashed her a smile.
"Now your turn. Who're you people?"
The woman and the two men all displayed their badges. He put the badge into the database. Federal government, but beyond that he could find no match for the badges. And they hadn't given names.
"Is something the matter, ma'am?" Steve asked in return.
She snorted, "At least one of you has maturity."
"We're here to collect the machines and dispose of them before undesirables get a hold of them," one of the men explained.
Wasp jumped down from the machine's chest and onto its arm. Couldn't they just leave that to Damage Control? she wondered. That was kind of their job.
"Damage Control is under orders to not interfere with these machines should they ever come across them," the other woman clarified. "This is beyond them."
"We're confiscating any scans and readings the Iron Man armor obtained as well," her second male friend said.
He bristled, "Look, I get taking the machines away, but unless you have a warrant you're not getting those sca–"
The woman held up a slip of paper. A warrant. He bristled further. A simple shake of the head from Steve convinced him to stand down.
"...Can I at least keep the basic video feed?" he requested.
"Jarvis, go back to 0:46 and freeze frame."
"Yes, sir."
The intelligence did as asked. The video the armor's sensors had recorded rewound and paused at that harrowing moment where the red robot had slammed one of its giant feet down onto Tony. Though only a recording, nonetheless he flinched. He didn't need the recording to hear the horrible metal-on-metal-on-concrete of the robot's foot grinding the armor into the pavement after pounding it into a crater. Tony was lucky the armor could take a thorough beating. If that had been anyone bar maybe the Hulk beneath that foot – he shuddered. Not a pleasant thing to try to imagine.
"There's no marks that I can see," Tony muttered. "I mean, besides the faint decals on the arms. Doesn't help us figure out who sent it."
His brows puckered. "It." He'd never been one to personify machines, not when Hydra and A.I.M were so intent on demonizing them, but something about the description of "it" didn't sit right with him. Maybe because the robot looked shockingly humanoid, and its voice, unlike a Hydra dreadnought's, had not sounded hollow and robotic – it had sounded like a human being. A male human being for that matter, somewhere in his mid to late thirties or early forties. Its voice had been full, suave, languid, and dangerous. Arrogant, too. And he hadn't imagined the pain in that voice either when Thor had lashed out. The other, the eighteen wheeler, had sounded much older, the male voice like thunder as it had cried for a halt to the Asgardian's attack. Like the smaller red one it, too, had let out a sound of pain at being struck.
T'Challa leaned forward onto his elbows, hands folded, "Jarvis, have you located the signals the armor detected from these machines?"
"Presently, no, Your Highness."
The Wakandan nodded imperceptibly. Tony was lost in the analysis of the recording.
Clint interjected with his usual keenness of observation, "What I don't get is why Devil Wears Prada here ran the old man off the road, beat Stark into the pavement, and then didn't hurt Wasp. What the heck gives? Picky robot."
"...Maybe it was coded to respect the ladies?" Wasp offered humorously, smirking at him.
Clint snorted.
His hands, previously folded under his chin, fell, and one brow rose as a frown worked its way into existence. That was a contradiction. Another soon appeared on the screen as the intelligence hunted through the footage. A horn blared. The smaller red machine's foot was suddenly removed from the armor's view, sending the owner careening away to in a barely controlled stumble. The footage jumped to nearer the end. The eighteen wheeler shoved the smaller red machine out of the way in time for lightning to strike it, burning the red metal of its arm black. He winced in spite of himself on hearing it again. To attack someone and then shove them out of the way to protect them – he shook his head. When the eighteen wheeler stifled a cry of pain, he winced without hardly registering it. Why would a machine be made to feel pain? A Hydra dreadnought never reacted to pain this way – it just responded to attacks. To react to pain, you had to be able to feel it.
Dread constricted his gut just as it had on the streets.
"Wait, stop!" Clint barked. "Go back! Slow."
Slowly, the footage of the double whammy rewound.
"Stop it there!"
Jarvis complied, freezing the recording right before the impact of the bolt. He pointed at the taller machine's arm, "Jarvis, zoom in there."
The footage was enlarged. He squinted. There was something on the arm he hadn't caught during the fight. The metal, square in the middle of the shoulder, was relief carved, but he couldn't tell what was carved. The image quality wasn't the best. It wasn't Hydra though – the bottom of the carving didn't match their tentacled badge.
"Can you clean the frame up?"
"Owing to the damage the armor's sensors sustained before this particular moment, such a request may be impossible, Master Barton."
Clint swore, flung his hands up, and demanded why the intelligence was kept around. He was supposed to be able to do stuff like that!
"Mortal technology has its limits," Thor reminded him.
Clint was quick to glare at him.
Tony jolted, "If the machine and the truck are the same thing," he realized, hand pressing into a temple, "then we should find the carved symbol on the truck itself somewhere. We find that symbol at any point before my visual sensors got hit, Jarvis can get a better visual and run a search for it."
It didn't take more than thirty seconds for Jarvis to deliver. The footage paused less than a second before the truck had rammed into the smaller robot. On its grill was the symbol from the shoulder carving. He didn't know what he'd been expecting to see, but he certainly hadn't been expecting a face of all things to stare back, unblinking. A strange face, too – boxy, with clearly carved eyes that were too square to be human, unadorned by a definite expression, yet somehow it frowned. But coupled with the eyes that slanted neither up nor down, the frown was not, he felt, a malicious one. It was a stern face, he decided.
Wasp flew up to the display, "What is that?"
"Jarvis, run a search. See if you can find anything."
"Search already in progress, sir. I will alert you the moment I find something on either active inquiry."
"Can you get me a line to Ant-Man?"
"Dr. Pym requested no interruptions, sir. Radio or physical. He promised to alert you of any discoveries gleaned from the sample."
The right edge of Tony's lips dipped into a low declining ramp, and he went so far as to remove his hands from the table. Janet was quick to zap one of the offending limbs. Wincing, his hands returned to the table's edge, one massaging the other. Impatient, just like his father, and impulsive. But those weren't the traits needed to solve a mystery.
"What about the government workers?" he asked. "Do we have anything on them?"
"I snagged images of their badges. Jarvis, can you bring 'em up?"
The display replaced the image of the machines with images of the three government employees each displaying their identification cards and credentials. The woman: Daniela Belmonte, age 37. The two men were Cameron Caldwell, age 35, and Isaac Olhouser, age 40. The ID's didn't look like anything special to him – just plain old ID badges detailing them as government workers. It was the clearance level on their cards that caught his attention. S.H.I.E.L.D Deputy Director tier. He frowned. Damage Control didn't need that level of clearance to do away with Hydra and A.I.M. machines. So why did these folks?
"Can you bring up any files on them, Jarvis?" demanded Wasp.
"Nothing substantial, unfortunately, Miss Van Dyne, other than their names appearing in records of West Point Academy."
His brows rose, "Military?"
"Indeed, sir."
"Maybe Rhodey could tell us!" exclaimed Wasp. "He's military. Right, Tony?"
"Even if he's in the loop about this," Tony scowled, "if someone higher up the food chain tells him to zip him, he'll zip it."
"I still have ties with the military," he reminded him. "They might be willing to spill information if I ask the right people the right way."
T'Challa eyed him and nodded once. Nodding back, he rose from the table and headed for the doors.
"Try not to get run off the road again, old man."
He tossed a glare back at the archer just before the doors to the Hall hissed shut.
The human body was complex. Almost a dozen systems worked together to create a functioning person. Each was vital and served a purpose. Robotics experts were most interested in the brain. It was responsible for sentience and, as Tony would say, was the CPU of the human body. Without it, there was no function, and in the case of humans, no sentience. The closer they got to mimicking the human brain, the closer they got to true artificial intelligence. Jarvis was incredibly close, but he was nowhere near the complexity he had seen in the machines. Their voices were beautifully emulated. Their movements, while stiff (they couldn't help that) were fluid. And they had clearly displayed sentience.
His gut clenched.
'Did we break our code and kill a living being?'
But he had to work with what he had, and what he had was fascinating on its own.
Taking a pair of tweezers, he plucked the black thing the size of a strawberry seed out of the glowing liquid and under the microscope. Technology had protection software – firewalls – to prevent viruses from damaging the system. On Earth, at least, that protection software was entirely digital. The human body had its own system of entirely physical firewalls. He shrank down and clambered onto the slide. Mechanical, just like the liquid's owner, spherical in shape with a few spines protruding from it, and possessing a pair of thin, segmented "tails" – probably to help in movement through the mechanical version of a circulatory system.
The shout of delight that escaped would've resulted in Jan teasing him for life – if she'd been there to hear it.
It was a nanomachine. A nanite, designed to look like the amalgam of a bacterium and a thorny seed pod.
Efforts to create a mechanical immune system so far were merely theory among doctors and technology experts. To see an example of it done so elegantly – granted at a larger scale than could be used on humans – it was almost enough to drown out the horror. Almost. His heart dropped. He brought up the scans the helmet had taken. Fortunate that those government workers hadn't thought to confiscate all tech scans. His heart dropped lower still. That only made sense – machines, no matter the size, needed commands to function, and those commands had to come from somewhere. In humans, they came from the brain. In computers, they came from a Central Processing Unit. But it was no ordinary CPU he was looking at.
"Tony?"
"What is it, Hank?"
"Those weren't just machines," he breathed. "They-they reacted to pain, they have what I believe is an immune system consisting of nanomachines, and to top it off they have what looks like a fully operational and incredibly advanced neural net."
"...What?"
"I'm sending you the scans from the cranial cavity of the red machine. You tell me. Is that a neural net or not?"
Silence on the other end. Knowing Tony, he was probably geeking out over the scans he'd hidden from the authorities, completely oblivious to the ethics of it all.
"It is. It's a neural net..."
It wasn't often he heard horror and regret in Stark's voice. Some spiteful part of him was glad to hear it.
"Tony, we broke out code today. We didn't just damage a machine into shutting down. We killed. We killed living beings today. Living, sentient machines."
West Point sat roughly fifty miles from Manhattan give or take, depending on the route taken. The old stone buildings stood in sharp contrast to the glass and steel of the city, and though the architects certainly hadn't had it in mind, they reminded him a little too much of the old Norwegian castle. Three students doing a "punishment tour" were kind to enough to offer directions to the Dean's Quarters, another old-style stone building. A few more directions from students in the hall eventually led him to the Dean's office. He knocked.
"Come in."
He opened the door. Sitting at a sturdy, paper-laden desk was a woman with short dark hair, well-tanned skin, and dressed impeccably in uniform busy writing on a form. Her short hook of a nose reminded him of a bird. Her badges and stitched markings displayed her rank of Brigadier General. Instinctively he stood at attention. The name plate on the desk read:
Horne, Meghan
Dean
She finished her writing, stuck her pen back in its holder, and looked up. Calm as her body language and expression was, he spotted an imperceptible jolt when she laid on eyes on him.
"Ma'am," he greeted.
"At ease, Captain. What brings you to West Point?"
He explained.
One thin eyebrow rose, "Machines attacked you in the city, and three former students showed up to cart what was left of some of them away?"
"Yes, ma'am."
Her elbows came to rest on the desk as her fingers folded, "You realize you're delving into classified information, I hope," she answered.
"Classified or not, ma'am, I think I'm owed some answers. I was run off the road by one of those machines without provocation, and the rest attacked my team. If that truck hadn't intervened –"
"Truck?" she repeated quickly. "What truck?"
"Peterbilt, I think. Red and blue. Had a strange face symbol on its grill, and on its shoulder when it changed forms. It – he – kept Tony from being mashed into the concrete, and kept Thor from going full out on the smaller red machine. He shoved the other one out of the way before another bolt could hit him, wound up taking the hit himself."
Horne stared at him for almost a minute. Then a hoarse, weary sigh and a swear escaped. Her hand went to massage the bridge of her nose.
"Guess you do deserve some answers," she sighed. "Just keep in mind I could lose my job for telling you this. Not to mention Bryce and Fury will be at my neck before you can say 'Semper Fi.'"
Author's Note: Depending on what's going on, these human P.O.V chapters could be longer. But this one is shorter. Also, this corrects a problem I didn't address very well in the original - heroes have "no-kill codes" and a couple of Vehicons/Eradicons were killed in the original, not to mention Megatron in Deadlock. I want to more properly show the fallout of such a situation. Yes, I know, it's serious - but EMH could be very serious when it wanted to be.
*NOTE TO "GUEST": Bay-verse is staying out of this fic. It is trash. End of story.
