Title: A dangerous game
Rating: T
Summary: Games aren't so much fun when someone dies; but is Jazz really responsible or is someone else playing games at Iacon Academy?
Disclaimer: They're not mine and I don't profit from this
It took every scrap of self-control Prowl had not to flinch as the lecturer's gaze swept over him. Well, self-control plus the heavy utilisation of his highly advanced logic centre. He couldn't be scared of his lecturers because it did not make any sense for him to be feeling so. He ran the reminder on a loop in his processor until he thought he might melt some components, but he did not give in. He would not respond to whatever this was.
It was some kind of attack, of that much he was certain. And he had one very likely suspect for the crime: Jazz.
The morning had not been remarkable in any way until he arrived at the commissary. He joined the line at the counter and glanced back at the room to find a suitable place to sit, conscious that his mission required him to sit with either Jazz himself, or nearby, or with his acquaintances. The mission parameters were thrown from his processor, though, when he spotted one of the staff. For no valid reason, he suddenly felt terrified in a way he had never known in his life.
There were twenty-seven awful clicks when he thought the fear would make him glitch and freeze up entirely, but then his logic centre took over. There was no threat here, neither overt nor implicit, and thus no cause to feel alarm. Pushing past that, he had retrieved his energon and left the room.
As soon as he had been back amongst students and noticed that none of the staff were present, the fear evaporated as though it had never been. He had moved to the side of the corridor, testing his theory and proving it to be non-specific to individuals as his fear spiked at the passing of lecturers and other support staff with whom he had had no contact just as much as with those whose classes he was in. The reaction was immediate and persistent, and totally irrational.
He had not seen Jazz at all, but he was not willing to accept it was mere coincidence that he should have this inexplicable reaction after the strange confrontation of the previous orn. That threat had been vague but there was menace intended.
How it was being done he had no idea, and that was part of what made him persist with his routine. Brass had not thought Jazz much of a threat yesterday, in spite of the fact that he was their target of this enquiry, and Prowl was not sure how to articulate this weird reaction he was having. It sounded too simplistic to report that he was experiencing anxiety; that might just get put down to inexperience with this type of work, and that was not what this was. These emotions were not his own, he was being manipulated somehow. He had to discover how it was done because this was the key to his whole mission.
If he could be made to feel like this, just in response to some perceived slight, what might Jazz have done to someone he knew well enough to have cause to harm? Veneer, for example? The anonymous tip had been that Jazz had been involved in that unfortunate episode, which fifty-two witnesses said was a clear case of suicide. But if Veneer had been manipulated in this way, no witness could have known the difference.
So he stayed in his classes, and did not flinch when he caught sight of a staff member, and hoped that the effect would pass soon.
With some of the staff still viewing him with suspicion, Jazz was still missing more classes than he attended, walking around the city or hanging out in the common rooms. There were students who weren't sure of him either, but the only one who seemed truly suspicious was Clattertrap, and so long as he wasn't present everything was fine.
Heading back to his room after another long orn, Jazz wondered whether he should contact his creator and ask for permission to transfer to another academy. He did want to finish his qualifications, he just wasn't sure he could do it here anymore. Moving would mean being away from Slimline and away from the friends he had made, and he was currently struggling a little with the concept that that didn't bother him as much as he thought it should.
He walked into his room, still deep in thought, then yelped as a datapad narrowly missed his head. Jumping out of the way, he spotted Slimline standing on the other side of the room and aiming for him again, and she looked furious.
"You didn't do anything. You said you would, but you didn't. You didn't game him!"
"I did!" Jazz protested, ducking to avoid a second pad and hoping it wasn't anything important when it smashed against the wall and broke into a dozen pieces.
"What? What did you do? I didn't see anything at all - he was just like normal!"
Jazz hesitated.
"Wait - you mean he was in class?"
"No, Jazz, I had a lunch date with him - yes of course he was in class! Where else would I have seen him?"
Jazz shook his head dazedly, hurrying over to his computer to bring up the code he had used the previous night, and was startled to find it was already on the screen.
"Hey - how did you get into this?" he asked.
"You gave me the password ages ago. Anyway, you can't've sent it to him because there's nothing wrong with that code and he didn't look upset about anything at all. He even went up to Oscillate to ask questions at the end of class!"
Jazz was sure he had never given her the password into this system, but that wasn't the point right now. He knew for a fact that this code had been received by Prowl's processor, he had been a gamer for far too long to be caught making a rookie mistake like that. But if there weren't any coding errors and if Prowl hadn't been a gibbering mess at the mere sight of a member of the Academy's staff, then maybe Prowl himself was a gamer.
And that was a seriously scary concept.
"You have to try again." Slimline insisted. "He has to go, Jazz. Please. I'm not going to be able to charge properly until I know he's gone."
"I need t'think about this."
"You need to do something. Promise me. Promise me you'll do it tonight."
"I'll figure somethin' out." he promised. "But for now, you jus' stay away from him. Okay?"
"I guess it'll have to be, won't it?" she hissed. "Just don't stuff up again."
Prowl returned the literature tutor's greeting politely, relieved to find that his reactions of the previous orn had now totally disappeared. Today everything was completely normal once again, leaving him almost doubting what he had experienced.
Almost. The truth was, fear like that could easily have caused someone to despair and act irrationally. By stabbing themselves, or setting off a grenade, for example.
So the next step was to find the method and source of the attack, the problem being that he did not know where to start. It was pure speculation that Jazz was the culprit, but he could be wrong about that. And even if he was right, how had it been done? The only time Jazz had come within reach of him had been in that brief confrontation in the corridor.
He went over his armour very carefully, making use of the various mirrors in the washracks which were more commonly used for checking one's detailing. There were no signs of patches or upload keys that might explain the changes, and his dataports were all well sealed so it could not have been done that way.
He then went through his own data logs, and that proved fruitful as he found a few anomalies: an upload, a file initialisation, and the record of a deletion. He could no longer access the lines of code themselves since they had been purged, but he could trace the history of them and he immediately saw a pattern: the upload and the deletion had happened at around the same time, on consecutive nights. Each time while he had been in recharge.
It was almost more than he could bear to continue attending classes until his next scheduled break period, but he did not want to draw any undue attention. Finally able to escape during the lunch break he headed resolutely back to his room and locked the door to begin a careful examination of the charging cord. He pulled up the specs for the components and went through every last detail.
The results were disappointing. There was nothing unusual about this charger cord. It was standard issue, not modified in any way, and he was out of time so he had to hurry to make it to his next scheduled class.
He barely heard a word of the next three lectures, going over and over the data he had gathered, and by the end of the orn he had reached a conclusion which was entirely unpalatable and thoroughly terrifying, but also the only logical explanation. Someone - quite possibly this mech Jazz - had learned how to manipulate other mecha's programming through the charging system. No mech on the planet would be safe from such a threat. And the evidence seemed to indicate strongly that the reprogramming could have a sufficiently significant impact to cause mecha to take their own lives.
That night he did not charge at all.
Jazz spotted Prowl at the other end of the cavernous hall and wove through the crowds to find a table out of the other mech's line of sight, where he could keep an optic on him.
At Slimline's insistence he had gone looking to game Prowl again, this time being both more cautious with his planning and more bold with the visible reactions so he could test whether or not the programming was initialising properly. But Prowl's encrypted identity code had never appeared on the display. Jazz had not charged all night, checking regularly, but to no avail: it was as though the other mech had not charged at all.
Or, Jazz worried as he stared at a perfectly serene and apparently well-rested Praxian two tables over, perhaps Prowl had found a way to conceal his identity in the system.
It probably should have annoyed him, or left him feeling challenged, but instead he felt very uneasy about the whole thing. All the others who had known Prowl before described him as being a serious student, boring and without friends. Totally by the book - definitely not the sort to take up a shady hobby like gaming.
When Slimline had told him her story he had thought Prowl must be shy, or socially awkward, and that that was why he had tried to take advantage. Disgusting, but it made sense. But then why had a mech like that done something as openly aggressive as trapping Slimline in a public corridor, with dozens of others walking past? It didn't make sense, and that bothered him. He knew from experience that Slimline liked to hide in those alcoves, to pounce on him and surprise him between classes. Sometimes they never made it to those classes at all...
He pulled his thoughts back on track. The thing was, maybe she had put herself there and he had just walked by and spotted her. Prowl hadn't looked to be at all intimidating. In fact, now that he thought back on it, it looked like they had just been chatting normally. It was Slimline's panicked comm call that had made him charge in and break them up, but she hadn't looked at all upset until he got there. And even then, it wasn't really until he got her home.
Feeling uncomfortable, in the long joors while waiting for Prowl to appear as a target he had hacked his way into the camera footage and tracked back to that orn. As he watched, Slimline positioned herself in the alcove, just as he had thought must have happened. A few moments later, Prowl appeared out of one of the classrooms and started walking down the hall.
Jazz's hands clenched into fists as he watched, waiting for the moment when he spotted Slimline and approached her. And yet... that was not what happened. She clearly saw him well before he looked in her direction and in fact he walked straight past her, only turning when she spoke.
He froze the image, trying to take that in. She had called to him. He hadn't seen her, he hadn't cornered her. But how did that make sense? If she was that scared of him, why didn't she run away when she saw him? Or wait quietly until he had passed. Why call attention to herself?
Letting the footage run on, he watched what seemed to be a perfectly normal conversation carry on until he had arrived and taken her away. Prowl had watched them go, then had turned away. Tracking the mech's movements, he didn't see him talk to anyone unless they spoke to him first. He continued down the corridor in the direction he had been walking earlier, going to the communications centre to use a vidscreen booth. His conversation was short, and then he went to the library to collect two books before going to the commissary for a single cube of standard energon. He was only there for a breem before heading back to his dormitory.
These were not the actions of a stalker or a crazy mech.
Cycling the footage forward, he found Prowl collecting his energon on the morning he had been gamed. There was the tiniest hint of a reaction, a stiffening in his stance and a move out into the corridor, but after that there was very little outward sign, as though he had found and eliminated the code. Yet the code had still been there the following night: Jazz had gone ahead with his usual pattern of deleting it, to destroy all trace of his gaming, and it had been there and active when he had gone in.
Tired and stressed, Jazz had had more than enough of all this not making sense. He didn't understand why Prowl had not been affected; he didn't understand how the mech had manage to hide from him the previous night, and he didn't understand why Slimline was so scared of him. Which left him with only one way to sort all of this out.
Rising resolutely, he walked straight up to Prowl and waited until the other mech acknowledged him.
"Can I help you?"
"We need to talk."
Prowl's expression was entirely unreadable.
"Very well. Sit down."
"Not here." Jazz shook his head. "My room. Now."
"I would prefer to meet in a more neutral setting." Prowl responded. "And I have a class to attend shortly."
"Fine. Your room, then."
"A more public space..."
"No. Don't want an audience."
"I see. And my class?"
"Skip it." Jazz said bluntly, his patience thoroughly burnt out. "I'll meetcha there. Don't keep me waitin'."