3rd person view
"What should we do," Jazz said, after Orion Pax had tracked him down and met him at Maccadam's Old Oil House, "is go to Kaon and see the gladiator fights for ourselves."
"Are you serious? They're illegal. It's not even legal to see one, I don't think."
"That doesn't seem to stop any of the people who do it," Jazz pointed out. He drained off his can of Visco and waved at the bartender for another. "We could go, you know. And if some authority discovers us, if we get arrested or questioned, I'll claim it's a cultural investigation. That is what I do, you know."
This much was true. Orion Pax had met Jazz because he was a cultural investigator, charged—more or less—with making sense out of all of the communications and other data that Orion Pax harvested from the Grid every day. Jazz came into the Hall of Records looking for this or that bit of history often enough that he and Orion Pax crossed paths regularly. They had developed a friendship. Orion Pax was a little intimidated by Jazz's carefree attitude toward life and authority. His caste was enough higher than Orion Pax's that he could get away with more—but it was also true that Jazz was more interested in getting away with things than Orion Pax ever had been. Where he saw an opportunity to bend rules, he bent them, and always just a little bit further than was perhaps prudent.
He sipped his own Visco. "Kaon is all the way on the other side of the planet. I've never been anywhere near there." He realized as he finished speaking that he had meant the words to come out as dismissive, but they sounded wistful.
There was a great deal of Cybertron that Orion Pax had never seen. He had heard its citizens speaking from every nook and cranny, every tower and station of the planet; he had put their conversations and transmissions into useful categories so that people like Jazz could come into the Hall of Records and use the work of Orion Pax as raw material to fashion theories with.
He felt a sudden kinship with the workers in the factories. They made machines. He made data. Were they so different?
As soon as he mentioned this to Jazz, the cultural investigator laughed. "Yes, Orion. You're different. Your work won't kill you. And when you can't do it anymore, nobody's going to throw you into a heap and turn your broken body into datacubes or image matrices."
Jazz's words hit Orion Pax like a physical blow. "You're not pulling any punches," he commented.
"Those who are fortunate should know how fortunate they are," Jazz said. Then he sipped at his Visco and waited for Orion Pax to get his thoughts in order.
"I wonder if I could get in contact with him," Orion Pax said after a silence. The Visco, as it always did, invigorated him, filled him with possibilities.
"With who? This Megatron?" Jazz shrugged. "Possibly. Why would you want to?"
"You don't find him interesting?"
Back in The Hidden Leaf Village
It's been a couple of weeks since Kushina started working on tracking seal to bring back her son Naruto. Kushina managed to scratch the surface of the track seal and field but she's nowhere near done and her two daughters seem to notice that their mothers avoiding them more and their behavior and attitudes started to change one of them Naruko blames her brother for running off leaving their mother heartbroken and their father as well now, their mother doesn't even want to leave the library for who knows what she's doing in there all she could do is blame her brother that idiot stupid worthless of a brother so of her problems. As for Narumi training day in and day out to get strong enough to find her big brother that she love with all her heart, she blames herself for her big brother running away all he wanted was their parents attention and but he never got any of that she and her sister did leave him all alone in the background she knew deep down her sister didn't care for her brother and she stopped training Narumi noticed something in the sky, looking up at the Starry Sky seen a shooting star fly by she wishes on that star that one day she'll find her big brother but for now she has to get strong enough to find him and help him to bring them back home.
back on Cybertron
Jazz laughed. "I find everything interesting. This is what I was made to do, find things interesting. Listen, Pax. If you want to go to Kaon, let's go to Kaon. I can get travel passes for research. I can claim that I need someone like you to harvest data. Should I talk to the Archivist?"
Orion Pax considered this for some time as absentmindedly petting Kurama head. "History moves in cycles," he said after awhile. "This much I've seen just rooting around in the archives."
"I thought you weren't supposed to be rooting around in the archives," Jazz said. "Careful you don't step outside the boundaries of your caste, my friend."
"How can I not?" Orion Pax asked. He drank off the rest of his Visco. "I have a mind. I can think, and analyze."
Jazz waited the perfect amount of time before responding. "If you say so."
"Easy for you to joke. You can do whatever you want. I'm a data clerk." Orion Pax leaned over the table toward his friend. He trusted Jazz implicitly, and could say things to him that he would never say to anyone else. "Where is it written that I have to stay a data clerk? Is there some ledger somewhere that the Primes keep, out in one of the Spiral Arms? Is my name in it next to the designation Data Clerk? I don't think so." "You sound a bit like your gladiator friend," Jazz said.
"He's not my friend." Orion Pax thought about it. "But perhaps it is time that I talked to him."
He knew how the Grid worked. He spent his days wading through its matrices and intersections. If there was one thing Orion Pax had learned as a consequence of this, it was how to get a transmission across the Grid without anyone but the intended recipient knowing about it. During his next shift, in the dim silence of the data-mining section in the Hall of Records, Orion Pax did his job, but while he did his job he also was formulating a plan to get a secret transmission through to this gladiatorial insurgent Megatron.
Different possibilities for what to say overwhelmed him. He thought about it for the duration of his shift; then, as he was due to leave, he decided on something simple.
What you say is interesting, but more people are hearing than you realize. Let's speak.
He attached contact information to it, using a dead-end bit of storage space that wasn't coded for anything in the current Grid configuration. Then he sent it off and stayed late, combing the Grid for more signs of what Megatron might be thinking, doing, saying… or planning.
The next day he met Jazz at Maccadam's again. "He answered," Orion Pax said.
"'He' being this Megatron, I take it. What did you say to him?" Jazz asked.
"That he had more of an audience than he might have expected."
"And what did he say?"
Orion Pax shook his head in amazement. "He said, 'You are more right than you know. I am also more right than you know.'"
Jazz laughed long and loud. "Confidence," he said. "No shortage of it in this one, is there?" "Then he agreed that we could meet," Orion Pax said.
This put a serious look on Jazz's face. "Are you ready to take the chance on this? I was flippant about it before, but it's something you should consider. The consequences for you are potentially much worse than for me."
"I'm ready," Orion Pax said.
Alpha Trion tapped the tip of the Quill against his desktop. Before him, scrolling in text on a screen, was the substance of a conversation between his clerk Orion Pax and the gladiator-turned-revolutionary. A loaded word, revolutionary, but it seemed to fit, if Megatron's side of the conversation could be taken at anything like face value.
OP: In my caste, I may read and I may index, but I am forbidden to analyze.
M: How do you know where to index if you don't analyze first?
OP: I try not to ask myself questions that don't have answers I can do anything about.
M: Who has told you that you can't do anything about the answers? I never even had a name. I went out to die for the pleasure of strangers. Now I am Megatron, and I will fight when and where and for what reasons I please.
OP: Fight who?
M: Those who would tell me… like they tell you… that we do not have the right to determine our own fates. Interesting that even in Iacon my words are being heard.
OP: It is my task to hear all words.
M: But you don't answer all of what you hear. And surely you don't answer all of what you hear on channels that you hide for fear of being eavesdropped on.
OP: No.
M: A great many Cybertronians would love to have Iacon as their home. Yet you are there and still unsatisfied. What does that tell you?
OP: We should meet.
M: Should we? Why would I meet you?
OP: If you have goals beyond Kaon, you're going to need to tailor your message so it will resonate beyond the castes who smelt ore and die in the pits.
M: Or the rest of Cybertron should learn to understand those castes. Even you do not, and you consider yourself one of us.
OP: Then show me what I do not understand.
Alpha Trion closed his eyes. It was beginning. The Covenant had seen it clearly, and now he was beginning to see the dim outlines of it. The days of Orion Pax, data clerk in the Hall of Records, were drawing to a close. New days, of upheaval and strife, were on the horizon. This much was certain.
What was uncertain, Alpha Trion reflected, was how much he could do to influence the coming events in the correct direction. Orion Pax was raw, and young, and not the one he would have chosen.
Yet it was not given to him to make the choice. He, like every other Cybertronian, would have to experience the future only at the moment of its becoming the present.