Disclaimers Part 1
Jazz tapped at Optimus' door. "Boss-bot? Got a question for you."
Gratefully, Optimus put away what his Spec Ops head had once called "administrivia." "What is it, Jazz?"
"Well, Ah'd kinda like to know what you think about one'a the Pretenders havin' applied to be a code analyst. Ah opened up the trainin' for that."
"I would have to know who, and I would have to know a lot about him."
Jazz slid a datapad across the desk. Optimus didn't bother looking at the name or the photos, simply opened it to the history.
Served with the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan. Wounded after an ambush, while he was carrying another comrade, wounded earlier, to safety. Twenty-four hours later, they reached an area where they could be evacuated by helo.
Discharged for medical reasons—getting out the shrapnel with which he had been struck had been an ongoing process right up until this candidate's "death"—the man returned to his hometown in Wyoming. He began work at his sister's computer installation and repair business. As a human, he had been a talented programmer.
Even with the necessity to deal with ongoing pain and recurrent surgeries, work alone hadn't been enough for him. He'd volunteered, helping other returning veterans with the adjustment to civilian life. Doing so, he'd discovered a talent for counseling. That led him to volunteer again, this time for a suicide-prevention hotline.
Then, in the last of his surgeries, he contracted MRSA, which damaged his heart. He joined the list of possible Pretenders.
"Unless somethin' comes up in the interview," Jazz said, "Ah'm leanin' toward acceptin' him. If you don't see anythin' there to make you think twice…"
"No," Optimus said, powering down the datapad after he glanced at the identifying information, "I do not. Emery McKuen proved his character on a mountainside in Afghanistan. —Did you discuss this with Prowl?"
"Yeah. He said maybe all of the candidates should have a code analysis done before they get too far along in their trainin', an' Ah kinda agree with that. Human shrinks have ta complete their own analysis before they practice; it's the same principle.
"He said that it's likely the Pretenders will need not just a medic, Pierpoint, but a mindhealer of their own as well. Not one of us knows what it's like ta be a Pretender, 'specially the way they got sparked.
"Now me, Ah think that th' first bot Ah'll ask McKuen ta analyze will be me, because Ah can knock him on his skidplate if Ah haveta, an' Ah will if he does anything he shouldn't." Jazz grinned.
"On condition that you are his first analysis, I see no reason to bar him from this training," Optimus said, and slid the datapad across the table.
Returning to his office, Jazz straightened it up a little; the interviews began today. Stacks of datapads vacated visitors' chairs, and more got moved off the desk—enough to let Jazz see the visitor sitting in one of those chairs, and let them see him.
The remaining Jazz-order (i.e., chaos to everyone else) on his desk stayed in place. Just in case Soundwave's crew dropped by.
He had previously cleared enough desktop real estate to put a human-sized desk and chair up there, and now he made sure there weren't bunches of junk—er, er, randomly ordered occasional necessities—stacked on the steps leading up to it.
Jazz turned on the datapad and closed the record containing McKuen's dossier, and sent the command to open the next one.
Sapphire was one of the high-caste younglings from Tyger Pax. Perceptor had recommended her. She had made herself useful in Excellion's medbay, and the small medic believed that she had the personality to make a good counselor. She was so young that her dossier held little besides school records, which revealed a shy, lackluster student whose marks had improved dramatically after her parents were kicked off Excellion.
Jazz thought she might not yet be sufficiently mature to do the work. But if she showed promise, he would start teaching her as he had Bumblebee, using material which was appropriate to her level. The next generation needed to start learning somewhere, after all, and medical training was never wasted: would not be even if Sapphire changed her mind about her function as she became an adult.
On Sapphire's encouragement, a mech who had formerly been a slave in her house had also applied. Seneschal was a contemporary of Ironhide's and Chromia's, and Sapphire said that he was the wisest and smartest bot she knew. Jazz had read the respect in her field, and decided that any former slave who had earned the respect of his erstwhile owner was worth at least a second look.
The optics looking back at him from the image in his dossier were the pale amber of a slave. That image, taken soon after they had landed, showed a bot who had suffered a lot of wear and tear. Jazz knew that Sunstreaker had been hard at work painting and refinishing any of the newly-arrived bots who needed it; some of the former slaves were getting it done for the first time in their lives. Jazz expected this mech looked a lot better now, but whether the wounds left by enslavement had left scars—that would take an interview to determine. Their presence would not necessarily bar Seneschal from analysis, but they would have to be dealt with first. Programming analysis was, of necessity, personally gruelling work.
Moonracer capped off the group. A little younger than Jolt, the novice medic had not yet chosen a specialty, and wanted to learn more about mindhealing. She was not fully apprenticed to Perceptor yet, and he had cheerfully agreed to let her go to Jazz if she decided this was the specialty for her.
Like Sapphire, Moonracer was young and untried. He would stick to the basics with her as well until he was sure she had the proper character to be trusted with knowledge that could be used to hack a mech as well as to heal him.
Jolt had thought long and hard about taking the training, actually having several pre-interview interviews with Jazz, but he had talent for working with electrical systems and for performing surgery. He also liked that work. When he heard that Jazz already had four promising applicants, he decided to stay where he was.
Before Jolt changed his mind, Ratchet assured Jazz it was fine to take on five apprentices at once if they all panned out. Back in Iacon when Ratchet had been running a clinic, he often had twice that number.
An apprenticeship had been the only route into the Science Academy for a lower-caste mech, and those such as Ratchet who had made good considered it their duty to teach other talented youngsters coming up.
After the Fall of Cybertron, the only way to gain a new skill was to learn it directly from someone who had mastered it. It was not only acceptable, but necessary, to train multiple apprentices at the same time.
Someone pinged the door. Habitually, Jazz checked the camera before opening it. McKuen came inside.
"C'mon up," Jazz said, gesturing at the human-sized desktop real estate. "Have a seat."
"Thank you." McKuen sat carefully, catering to a body which no longer needed it; Jazz had seen some of the other Pretenders do the same. They'd adjust, in time.
"So...ya decided to become a mindhealer. Why?"
McKuen sat relaxed, servos in his lap, and made eye contact. "After I got out of the Army on a medical, I did some volunteer work at the VA, phone bank at a suicide-prevention hotline. I liked that work, and my supervisors there said I was good at it."
"Yeah, Ah understand there's lots more suicides now among veterans."
"Active-duty and veterans both. The rate of it, the number per thousand," Emery McKuen said, sitting relaxed and talking to Jazz about something he was interested in, not himself, "is going through the roof, and there are a lot of reasons for that. One is a culture within the military that sees getting counseling as an admission of weakness. Another is a shortage of counselors who have done military service."
"What was th' hardest thing to learn?"
McKuen said thoughtfully, "I didn't find any part of it hard. I know that sounds egotistical, but it's mostly knowing when to listen, which is most of the time. I'm still using that training with the men in my unit. All of us have been through some tough times to get where we are now. Sometimes the guys just need somebody to listen to them."
Jazz said deliberately, "But programming glitches ain't the same, are they? After all, if a human has a bad experience, he or she can choose how to react to it?"
McKuen tilted his helm to one side: his was a large helm for a human, and when he was fully human, he had been a man with pale skin and crisply waved goldish hair. (If, of course, he'd scanned his late self for his first alt, but to Jazz' knowledge, the rest of the Pretenders had.) "To some degree, that's true. But anyone can be overwhelmed. We—humans, I mean—have found that illness, physical or social isolation, even diet can tip a person over into mental illness. But I'm a bit hesitant to draw a parallel between human issues and programming glitches, although I'd say that neither species can choose not to experience them. Sometimes, they just happen. That, though, that's about the extent of my knowledge of programming glitches, except in human-made computers."
"Yeah," said Jazz, who realized that he was beginning to like this Pretender, "we're a lot different. Our architecture's unique to Cybertronians, fer one thing."
"Yeah. I was talking to the Wreckers the other day, and they said that the way we think about the physical properties of materials? That's really not the way Cybertronians think about them at all." McKuen smiled at Jazz. "We have a lot to learn from, and teach, each other."
"Ongoin'," Jazz agreed. "So why did y'all apply for this?"
"Ratchet mentioned programming glitches in one of his lectures. He said that we were our own best defense against them, since sometimes only someone who knows a glitched bot well can tell that they're in trouble. I asked Doc—Pierpoint, I mean—about it later, and he said that it takes a medic with a lot of specialized training to fix problems like that. Doc says he can fix us if we bust a strut, but he's not a shrink. He says that of all of us in the unit, I'd be the best man for the job, and if you agree with him, I'd like to train for it."
Jazz frowned at him. "This ain't something to do without givin' it a lot of thought. You'll be getting training as a medic, so you'll be able to help Pierpoint with the busted struts, and act as a field medic 'til you can get a healer there. But your specialty is gonna be a combination of psychology an' brain surgery, t' put it in human terms. If somethin' life-sustaining goes wrong with a mech's core programming, you have a few klicks to fix it or lose that mech."
"So...I'll have to prioritize what I do right, the first time."
"Yep. And you'll be gettin' into a mech's memories, and the programming that makes him who he is. It's invasive in a way most humans never have t' think about. 'Forced telepathy' might be kinda parallel."
"Am I hearing you right that patient confidentiality is only the beginning of a programming analyst's responsibilities? That I'll have to have my own issues pretty well settled to do this?"
"Yes. Yer gonna be inside that mech's mind, and that ain't the half of it: the mech has access to you, too. Ya need t' protect yourself, because just like a bot with a physical injury might not recognize a medic an' lash out, same thing can happen with a mindhealer. Ain't nobot's fault, just core programming t' defend yerself. An' if they really don't want ya there, if they fight on purpose, they can really frag ya over if you got a weakness they can exploit. Ya gotta have all yer ducks in a row, like th' humans put it." Jazz paused. "That ain't all, neither. Look, you ask most mecha if they'd rather get shot or reprogrammed, and they're gonna haveta think about the answer. Once you have these skills, mecha are gonna always have that in mind about ya, that ya could if ya wanted to. It's gonna take an exceptionally strong person ta be yer friend, or yer lover, once ya have this training. Still sure ya wanna do this?"
Emery McKuen thought about it for a full quarter-breem, which satisfied Jazz on some level he hadn't really expected. Then McKuen took a deep in-vent. "Yeah, Jazz, I am. "
The head of Spec Ops smiled. "OK, then. Welcome aboard."
"Thanks. Where do I start?"
Jazz handed over a human-sized datapad. "There's several downloads on there with coding you'll need. Ah know what Ratchet told ya about accepting downloads, an' he's right. But sometimes you need ta upgrade yer coding for different things ya wanna do. Ah wrote these an' they're safe, but after ya get off duty Ah want ya take 'em to Ratchet anyhow and get him t' OK 'em before he helps ya install 'em. Then you'll have t' rest for a while, prolly about a half-joor, and let 'em integrate. After that, y'need to read the rest of the files an' be ready t' discuss 'em in class. Classes'll start in about a week, an' meet twice a week. There'll be a lotta heavy readin' at first, you're gonna need t' learn our programmin' language, and on toppa that ya gotta learn th' differences in coding between the major groups o' Cybertronians. Any questions?"
"I'm sure I'll have a million after I get into this."
"If ya get hung up, just ping me, and Ah'll get back to ya with an answer as quick as Ah can."
"Thanks. And, Jazz, thanks for giving me a chance. I know we didn't exactly put our best foot forward."
Jazz shook his head. "Over an' done with, my mech. All of us here, S14, NEST, the Cybertronians, we got th' same goal: keepin' this planet outta Decepticon hands. You wanna contribute ta that effort, an' alla you Pretenders got th' kinda history that says you do, you'll be welcomed."
-Sidhe Chronicles-
Seneschal entered the room silently as Jazz put away his notes on McKuen's interview. As Jazz had expected, the former slave sported a new color scheme, deep forest green with gold highlights that emphasized his amber optics. It was the same pattern as before, but the washed-out green and yellow that Jazz had seen in that image taken shortly after Excellion's arrival had come to life.
That wasn't a metaphor. Sunstreaker had not been satisfied with a few coats of paint. He had given Seneschal a new layer of chromatophores, most likely cultivated from his own and then deprogrammed with an EMP flash so that, when painted onto a mech's bare plating, his repair nanites would give them that mech's own chosen colors. In the old days, a mech might save up for a vorn to have that done by an artist far less skillful than Sunstreaker.
More painstaking work had obviously followed it: small details applied or touched up, then several layers of protective finish, probably sanded between coats by Sideswipe.
Sunstreaker and Sideswipe had been slaves in the gladiator pits of Kaon. They knew what it had taken for them to be truly free, and now they would both go the extra mile to be sure that other freed slaves got whatever they needed to be free themselves.
The Big Twins' willing acceptance of that responsibility, and their silence around it, was one of the reasons they were a couple of Jazz' favorite people.
Jazz said, "Welcome, Seneschal. Won't ya help yourself t' a seat."
"Thank you." The ex-slave lowered himself with a squeaky hip. His records showed that Ratchet was still working on it; Seneschal had gone for vorn without needed maintenance. Ratchet had needed to even out the joint and was letting that heal before application of a new joint lining.
Jazz wondered how the mech had walked at all before the CMO got hold of him.
"Why d'you want to be a code analyst?"
"Well, sir, I was the closest the downstairs had to one. When someone glitched, it would be my job to set them right, as best I could—but I was no trained programming analyst. I would like to learn how to do it properly. Some of the others deserve better than I was able to do for them."
Seneschal's Altihexian accent was not as pronounced as Jazz' own, but it was still wonderful to hear it again, the spec-ops bot thought. "Ah'm sure ya did the best ya could under the circumstances."
"That I did. But very often I had to overwrite glitched modules with the coding my master ordered me to use, or bypass subroutines that he considered not worth repairing for a slave. Those who want to address that should be able to, and have it done right this time. They've already been my patients. They deserve a healer worthy of the title, not someone capable of nothing more than a servants'-quarters patch job."
"Most freedmecha shy away from th' job their masters forced them t' do."
"And as a younger mech, so might I have. But after a time I came to see that easing suffering was the right thing to do, regardless of Sunstone's orders. And if that glitch ordered a reprogramming, well, I learned how to put a mech's true memories inside a firewall where Sunstone couldn't find them."
Jazz had spent time undercover in the Towers. He could imagine the horrors this mech must have seen with his own optics, as well as in the memories of the mecha he had done his best to help. "You must hate Sunstone with a passion. At least in your place Ah would."
"Sunstone is a vile, cruel individual without a single redeeming virtue, or at least he has none that I have ever seen demonstrated. I certainly rejoiced when the captain left him behind on that mining colony, and if I ever see him again, it will be too soon. But as for wasting time on hating him? I don't know that he's worth the effort."
"That's the best way t' look at it," Jazz agreed. "There's somethin' else ya need t' keep in mind. People don't trust hackers, and most ordinary citizens don't know the difference between a hacker and a programming analyst. All they'll see is that you've got the skills to reprogram somebot if you take a notion to. Not everybot can handle that. Ah'm not sayin' they'll avoid you entirely, but they'll keep a distance. Do you have a close cohort, or a bond?"
"I have no romantic interests right now, but I am in cohort with two other bots. We are all former slaves of Sunstone's. They've never expressed reservations about my skills, and in fact encouraged me to apply for this training."
"Good! Programming analysts need a strong support system to deal with the stress. Ya probably already know, it's very hard, even grinding, work: not always th' work itself, so much as dealin' with it. That's much truer of a full analysis than a simple patch. Please excuse a rude question, and Ah in no way mean to be disrespectful of mah elders, but are you sure you're gonna be medically up to that kind of stress?"
"I don't consider that rude or disrespectful. I'll certainly ask Perceptor that question the next time I see him, but as far as I know there's no medical reason I can't do anything I want to do."
"Ah'm glad t'hear it," Jazz said. "Have you ever had anyone fight you when you tried t' help 'em?"
"Yes, sir, of course I have. Never out of ill will, you understand, but sometimes a bot wouldn't be sure I was who I said I was, or they'd panic even though they did recognize me."
"Then ya know any issues ya have can be used against ya. With your history, it would be a certifiable miracle straight from Primus Himself if you didn't have a whole subspace full of 'em, and you didn't have nobot to help ya, did ya?"
"No, I didn't. I was the only one who could do that work."
"Ya gonna have t' address all that before Ah can put ya out there t' get yourself hurt. Everyone else is too, but you been through more than all'a the rest of us put together. It ain't gonna be easy."
"I believe you. I did what I could to repair obvious coding errors, but there's only so much you can do with your own code."
Jazz understood. He had done some ruthless things to his own programming to stay alive after Smokescreen's disappearance. "Ah hear that. It will help ya in the long run."
"I know it. I have a goal, Jazz: to heal before my next reformat. When I get my new frame in a few vorn, I want to leave slavery behind with this one. Y'see, the frame was all Sunstone ever really owned."
Jazz considered. It didn't take him long to reach a decision: he said, "I swear I will do everything in my power to help you achieve that." He rose to see Seneschal out, then reached for his pad.
He finished his notes on Seneschal's interview, recording that solemn promise, just as Moonracer knocked.
Moonracer strongly reminded Jazz of a younger Flareup and Arcee. She was of the same mass-produced, lower-caste two-wheeler frame type, most of whom for whatever reason ended up with a femme spark, unless they were sparked into a Praxian cohort. Maybe because it was the femmes who tended to prefer lighter frames built for agility and speed rather than strength: cycleformers were almost the epitome of that.
Of course, every Praxian was a speed demon at spark, and even his solid, by-the-book Prowl could be occasionally lured away from his datapads by the promise of a good race.
The mods Moonracer had chosen when she became a healer set her apart from the Sisters; they had chosen light but definitely military-grade armor and a selection of weaponry suitable for skirmishers. Moonracer was modified for the strength she needed to be able to handle the unconscious frames of patients much larger than herself: heavier struts and cables, larger motors, two legs rather than a single one like Chromia and her sisters. Her medical mods added more mass. Her alt mode, as a result, was a Harley, a model similar to Prowl's but smaller, though still larger and more robust than the Ducatis the Sisters preferred.
She had chosen an emerald paint job, blue optics with a hint of turquoise that did not clash with the green.
She didn't have the Sisters' confidence, though. They walked into a room and owned it. They were mother and aunties to the Prime, who was the sole mech to whom they yielded precedence—and that only because they were proud Autobots who chose to.
Moonracer didn't have the vorn or experience to carry herself like that. She entered the room with a shy smile and asked, "Am I early?"
"Nope, you're right on time. C'mon in and have a seat."
"Thanks."
"You're, what, about a tenth of a vorn away from completin' yer apprenticeship?"
"Yes, as a general medic. Perceptor's specialties are microrepairs and nanocyte programming, but I don't have the frame type for the really tiny stuff, and he doesn't have the facilities or the extra nanocytes to teach that yet—not more than basic emergency care, anyway."
Jazz nodded understanding. They all had personal colonies of healing nanocytes, and any medic could reprogram some of those to target a mech's self-healing where it was most needed. Other colonies with very specialized functions were kept in the medbay for use when needed, but especially with limited energon to nourish them they had to be carefully managed and there weren't often enough to allow medical students to study them. The situation was much better now that Excellion was there, and could grow colonies within the portions of his frame dedicated to the ship's medbay, but they had a lot more bots now too. "So you're lookin' for a specialty."
"Yes."
"Why programming analysis?"
"Because a lot of us who came here with Excellion need it," she said. "Were you at Tyger Pax, in the battle?"
Jazz nodded.
"Nearly all of us lost someone. We all lost our homes. A lot of bots are the sole survivor within their entire cohort, sometimes both their sparkling and adult cohorts, and sometimes they lost both at once.
"And the things we saw were horrible. At least the soldiers knew how to fight back, but we didn't. Oh, if we got the chance we'd pile on a 'Con, but mostly all we could do was run. Most bots couldn't run fast enough and we felt them die. If you walk through Excellion's corridors during off-shift and you hear someone crying—even now—you just don't ask. Butting in can make it worse. Bots come into medbay with issues—privacy comes in here, but—" she paused, thinking carefully about how to say it—"what troubles them are things that could be avoided if they kept up with basic maintenance better. I've observed that it's depression and grief that keep most of them from coming in; they don't see the point of continuing. I'm their healer, and I'm supposed to help them. You're the only one who can teach me how to do that."
"Look," Jazz said, "based on what you just told me, I want to let you in. But what if you change your mind?"
"Well," she said to him with a smile, "in that case, I'll have enough information to know when to send someone to you. I'm going to be a healer anyway, Jazz, maybe of processors but definitely of frames."
-Sidhe Chronicles-
Sapphire was his last interview. Like Moonracer, she came into the office shyly, and sat only when asked to.
She kept her optics demurely downcast. The younger creation of a noble house, her duty would have been to make a political match, and given her house's status, the cohort into which she would have been sent would have been composed of high-ranking mecha.
She would have been raised to consider herself better those of lesser caste—but she was the lowest of her own, and doomed always to be the least among her adult cohort. Perhaps the next young bot adopted into it would be of lesser status than herself, but due to her place within the caste, that was not very likely.
The lives of second and later creations like Sapphire were...Jazz didn't know what glyph to use. Nothing accrued to those bots through their own effort; they were useful only as bargaining chips in the Great Game of politics. Their status and quite often their self-worth derived from the house into which they had been sparked, and later, the one into which they were bartered. Their only function was to convey high status.
It did not help matters that her parents had been a pair of abusive afts, but the war and its aftermath had changed all that. She and Obsidian were inseparable rather than the bitter rivals most noble siblings became.
She seated herself with the grace that only deportment training or a lot of dance instruction gave a bot; in Sapphire's case, Jazz could be sure it wasn't the latter.
Once her parents were out of her life, Sapphire had wandered a bit. She took some instruction from Milestrina, whose notes indicated that the young bot often broke down in tears when asked to sing or recount a tragic lyric.
But in Perceptor's department, Sapphire had first made herself useful, then begun actively to pursue medical training. According to Percy, Sapphire was gentle and diligent, and in the time that she had worked with him, she had learned compassion for bots of all castes, especially the young.
Jazz thought she would identify with younglings her own age, but when those optics finally met his, he saw an old spark looking back at him.
Her interview was not unlike Moonracer's. There was an undercurrent there that Jazz could not trace...nor identify. He still thought she was a good candidate, despite her youth.
Still, once he had released her to get her upgrades installed and study the preliminary material, the notes he made about Sapphire reflected his unease.
-Sidhe Chronicles-
Arturo Melendez thought he he had a good idea. He'd chewed it over for a couple of days now, and still thought it good.
Though possibly fatal. But that...was a risk that could be managed.
Maybe.
When the last of the bots left Jazz' office, he knocked on the door.
"Who is it?"
"Arturo, sir. Do you have a few minutes?"
"Always for you, Arturo. What's up?"
Arturo seated himself at the desk on top of Jazz' desk. "This is new," he said, admiring it.
"You're not gonna carve your initials in the top, are ya?"
Arturo grinned at his handler. "No, I think I can resist that temptation. I had an idea, and I thought I'd get your input on it. It might work, but it might be lousy, or it might kill me."
"It's got a one-in-three chance of bein' any good?"
"Well, since you put it that way..."
"Arturo, let's hear it. I might be able to make sure it doesn't kill ya, and that gives it a two-in-three chance."
"It's about the symbionts. Those two hombres who run with Soundwave's gang should be contacting me soon for another meeting. I could tell them I have information that I'll only give the boss. And the presence of the symbionts among us is important enough for that to be true. I'll claim I want to make sure I get paid, that they don't take the credit for finding it out themselves and cut me out, which is exactly what they probably would do. The beauty of it is, I won't have to lie, which we both know is not my strong point. If it works, they'll take me straight to Soundwave."
"How are ya going to prove ya know where they are?"
"You find a way to put me where I could see them, so I don't have to lie about how I got there. I'll snap a cell phone picture."
"OK. Ah'll work that out so it comes down as just part of your daily orders. Ya won't know exactly when you're going to cross paths with them 'til it happens. This could work, but you're right about how dangerous it is. Ten to one, once Soundwave gets the information, he'll figure it's too dangerous to let you go even if he doesn't have reason to suspect you're a spy."
"Si, I thought that might be a risk. The only exit strategy I have is 'Wing it,' because I have no idea what I'm walking into."
"That's the only exit strategy there is, more often than Ah like. But if you don't get outta there to report back, there ain't no sense doin' it in the first place."
"This is true," said the father of four young children he loved deeply.
End Part 21