Orion POV

"Are Cybertronians not all made of the same materials? My alloys are the same as those in the frame of a High Councilor; my lubricants are the same as those that lubricated the joints of the Thirteen themselves!" Megatronus's voice scraped and rasped like one of the great machines in the factories of Kaon. I looked up and down the row of other Cybertronians of the same caste as I continue petting the little turbo Fox. As I spend my careers monitoring and cataloging, feeding the vast databases of Iacon. This was the way the civilization of Cybertron had been since long before the creation of myself. And yet they were made of the same materials as the Archivist Alpha Trion, or any member of the High Council.

Would a Councilor spend his life monitoring transmissions?

"We are individuals! Once we were free!" Megatronus's voice scraped through my head. What would my fellow monitors think if they could hear?

They would report this Megatronus in a nanoklik. That's what they would do, I thought. As if in reply, Megatronus said, "The High Council, if they heard me now, would quietly render me into slag. Do not doubt it. They may be listening now. If I vanish, carry on my work. Soundwave, you and Shockwave will carry on. You are my trusted lieutenants."

A second voice came in. "Lieutenants? Are you now the general of an army, Megatronus?"

This caught My interest as I listened harder. I ran a check on the new voice—it was neither Shockwave nor Soundwave. I had heard them before, and had records and database entries for each.

But this new voice was not in the index I maintained to keep track of Megatronus's associates. Who was it?

It was not part of my job to investigate. I monitored, observed, recorded. Investigators were of another caste.

I must, report to Alpha Trion, the overseer. I had sampled the new voice and spent a few cycles compiling a report. It wouldn't do to present myself to Alpha Trion without a good reason, and proof of how good the reason was.

The Archivist of Iacon, Alpha Trion, was far older than myself, who had heard stories that he had existed since the great age of the Space Bridge-fueled expansion, the high point of Cybertronian civilization. What that must have been like, to be able to ride the dimensional bridges to other stars…

"Orion Pax," Alpha Trion said. "What brings you here to interrupt my work?"

"I seek advice." I activated the recording of Megatronus. Alpha Trion put down the antiquated stylus he used to make entries in the single book that sat on his desk. The Archivist of Iacon had databases and endless hard-copy records of virtually everything that had ever happened in the history of Cybertron, yet he chose stylus and book as his interface. Like many of the older Cybertronians I knew, Alpha Trion had grown eccentric.

When the recording had played out of a wall-mounted speaker and Alpha Trion had taken his standard moment to tap his stylus on the desk and think over various potential responses, the Archivist said, "Megatronus."

"Why has he named himself after a mythical being?" I asked.

"If the old stories are true, Megatronus believed until the end that he would be vindicated," Alpha Trion said. "He believed himself to be doing what was right even if his methods destroyed much of what he professed to believe."

"Not much of an example if you're plotting a revolution," I said.

With a dry chuckle, Alpha Trion stood. "Indeed not. But perhaps that is not the only example to be taken from the deeds of Megatronus. Who is this upstart?"

"He has been a gladiator in Kaon. Like all of them, he began without a name, a worker who took to the arena as a way to glory. He has never lost, and his fame has grown to the point that few other gladiators will fight him one-on-one. Now it seems that he is no longer content to be the greatest gladiator in Kaon; he has grander ambitions."

"Ambition," Alpha Trion echoed. "That is not a quality encouraged on Cybertron. As you know." He fell silent, and I thought he had detected something of a wistful tone in the Archivist's voice.

He waited, and after several cycles Alpha Trion spoke again. "Go back to your post, Orion Pax. Continue to listen. When you know what this Megatronus is planning, return to me and we will consult further."

Alpha Trion POV

After young Orion Pax had left me alone in the depths of the Hall of Records, I considered the situation. Unusual in one so young, he thought, to have such a sense of what has gone past, what may never return. But that was to be expected when Orion Pax spent all of his time in the Hall listening.

The High Council would have to hear of this gladiator calling himself Megatronus. But it was not clear to me and what is the best way was to present the situation.

"Covenant," I said softly. "What may we know of this Megatronus?"

The Covenant of Primus lay open on my desk. I had created it in the aftermath of the War of the Primes. In the Covenant lay the entire history of the Cybertronians and the beings that gave them life, all the way back to Unicron and Primus. And the Covenant also contained the future—although that part of the Covenant remained mutable. I could see certain things that would happen because they became real as they appeared in the Covenant, but I could not always know whether what I saw would come to pass. The burden of knowing the future was myself, and myself alone, but it was lessened because even what I knew of the future could change at any moment. And I had some power over it as well. The Quill, that instrument young Orion Pax failed to understand, was one of the surviving artifacts of the Thirteen, and was one of the most powerful objects in the known universe.

Using it, I could inscribe the future into the Covenant. This was a dangerous power to exercise, and there was never any guarantee that an alteration to the future would last. The Covenant itself had the final word. It was a book of pure destiny.

I flipped forward a few pages. One of the peculiarities of the Covenant was that the reader— who existed in a moment in time—had a difficult time understanding the book's language on its pages dealing with the future. Even myself could read those pages only seldom. The further into the future the Covenant went, the more obscure and difficult the language became. Its first pages were written in languages that no Cybertronian had spoken in thousands of stellar cycles. On its last pages were words in languages that no Cybertronian had ever yet spoken.

I had written it all, even the portions written in languages that did not yet exist. Orion Pax did not know that. Nor did any of my other underlings in the Hall of Records. None of them would have believed it if they had been told.

And not even the most credulous of the race of Cybertronians would have taken seriously the assertion that I was one of the Original Thirteen—the only one, I believed, remaining on Cybertron. He had seen the history of Cybertron from its creation. I had seen allegiances form and shatter among the Primes.

I had observed firsthand the murder that had destroyed the Thirteen, sending them out into the vastness of the universe. With the Covenant, I had stayed behind—to record, to observe, to exert what influence he could without giving away the truth of his identity. Most Cybertronians no longer believed in the Primes, or else considered them semihistorical myths. That was fine with me. It was no longer an age for mythic personalities.

Or, perhaps, it was an age for new ones.

I wondered what it would be like to understand the Covenant in its entirety. To assimilate all of the knowledge, the consciousness of past and future collapsing together in my mind…

It was the doom of the Archivist to wrestle with what I would never understand.

Hearing the name Megatronus had put me in a frame of thought that could almost have been called nostalgic. The days of the War of the Primes were still alive in my memory; the Golden Age that had followed, as Cybertronians had ridden the Space Bridges to the stars, was one of the great historical periods in the history of the known universe. The magnificence of it, now passed, could only be harkened back to. I remembered the gradual rise of the caste system. I had spent much time talking to Sentinel Prime about the direction Cybertronian civilization was going. In the end, they disagreed. Sentinel Prime defined himself by actions and thought only about near-term goals and results. I had no need to define myself. I was one of the Thirteen, whether any sentient being knew it or not. And I thought about more distant horizons of consequence.

After their last argument, Sentinel Prime had dismissed me to the Hall of Records. "Disappear into the stacks and let the dust cover you, Alpha Trion. Cybertron has no need of you anymore." Those had been Sentinel Prime's last words.

"Megatronus," I whispered. Now another had arisen among the anonymous masses of downtrodden laborers claiming the name of Megatronus. This was in the Covenant as well. I had not thought to see it happen in exactly this way, but since it was in the Covenant's pages, it was bound to happen. This Megatronus, this gladiator and factory worker with grandiose ambitions—how much did he even know about the Prime from whom he had chosen to borrow his name?

I forced myself back into the present. I began to search in recent records for any evidence of unrest in Kaon. It didn't take long before I was immersed in a story the likes of which I had not expected to find in the regimented cities of Cybertron.

I looked up and opened a Grid link between my desk and Orion Pax's. "Please return," I said.