"They're taking pallets of building materials... looks like steel and copper." Bluestreak peered through his scope. "I see where the Stunticons have the workers held up. No casualties, I think. Can't quite see what... ah, there's what they were after. Starscream's at the gas tanks."

"Tough times in the mighty Decepticon empire," Ironhide said, charging his favorite cannon. "Hydrocarbon gas has to make the thinnest, weakest energon in the galaxy."

Optimus put a hand on the barrel of Ironhide's weapon. "Don't fire around the tanks. That gas supplies power to an entire community of humans. Let's get in close and engage them hand-to-hand if possible. Bluestreak, when we get their attention, fire warning shots at the Stunticons. Draw them away from the humans. Sunstreaker, Sideswipe, and Windcharger, you will keep them too busy to form Menasor, while Bumblebee will get the humans out of harms' way. Aerialbots, distract Thundercracker and Skywarp, get them away from the tanks. Ironhide and I will deal with Starscream."

As far as Decepticon energy raids went, this seemed ill-thought-out; more a crime of opportunity than anything else. It was a natural gas refinery that was undergoing expansion to its facilities. The lax security brought on by lengthy construction had made it vulnerable. Optimus wondered where Megatron was keeping himself this time but wasn't going to complain if the warlord didn't show up. It'd be just like him, however, to stage this block-fisted raid as a diversion while enacting something more dastardly elsewhere.

Red Alert was back at his post monitoring all the sky-spy inputs for just such an occurrence. The security director had openly defied Ratchet's orders to remain in the medbay the second the alarms had gone off. "I don't care if it's a spark, an energy parasite or Thanagarian snare-beast in there," Red had declared, rubbing his abdominal plating nervously all the same. "I have a job to do!"

Parasite, betentacled alien creature, or actual spark— Optimus just hoped a paroxysm with bad timing wouldn't prove Red Alert's undoing.

"On my mark... Autobots, roll out!"

Bluestreak's first shot clipped off the top of Wildrider's helm with a cheery 'ting!' Sunstreaker, Sideswipe, Windcharger and Bumblebee charged in vehicle mode down the slope towards the Stunticons and their human hostages, and the Aerialbots took flight.

That was when the battle plan curled up and died. Optimus always expected it to. Such was the nature of war. The battle plan had never died quite like... this.

He'd made it to the bottom of the steep hill they had been using as cover, and then it hit him, like a kick from a combined gestalt. Optimus buckled to his knees as something pulsated powerfully within him. He was just as shocked by its intensity as its suddenness. Was this what the others were experiencing?

"Prime!" Ironhide was at his side in an instant, laying down cover fire as he crouched. "Are you hit?"

"No, I—" Optimus tried to stand, only to tumble backwards and awkwardly catch himself against the rocky hillside, sliding down to a sitting position. "— happening to me too—"

"What!" Ironhide took his optics off the fight to stare at his leader. "Prime, what— no! Stop it!"

Optimus would have laughed if he'd been at all capable of it. The image of the piston and canal apparatus from Ratchet's medical hologram was at the very front of his processor, and he could swear he could feel it moving as it hit the sensor nodes— back and forth, in and out and back again— Great Primus, was it speeding up?

Distantly Optimus was aware of Ironhide yelling at him to get up and 'try to hold it in or something', of Starscream pointing a null-ray in his direction, and of the sounds of fighting coming close. And then overload: a rolling, searing climax that made his optic feed blur into static, his hands clench and gouge the earth to either side.

Elsewhere inside him, the Matrix hummed with interest.


"And where were you this time?" demanded Starscream, marching right up to Megatron. "The only thing that keeps this from being a complete embarrassment is the fact that we did manage to get away with two full tanks—"

"YOU'RE WELCOME," Skywarp bellowed from the other end of the cargo level where Hook was attempting to straighten his wing from the unnatural right angle it had acquired in an argument with an Aerialbot. Starscream ignored him.

"— we probably could have gotten the entire reserve if you had bothered to act like a decent leader—"

Megatron grabbed his second-in-command by the collar fairing and gave the seeker a little shake in warning. "I'll decide if my presence is required or not, Starscream. You should be flattered I trusted you to take the lead on this simple mission. I'll be sure to hold your hand next time."

"Don't bother!" Starscream was really warming up to the argument now, moving in to get in Megatron's face, helm-to-helm. "Maybe the rest of the Decepticons will see what competent leadership looks like now that I've brought back enough fuel to keep us going for months!"

"Weeks," corrected Thundercracker, deadpan. Starscream ignored him too.

"One brief flash of adequacy does not a leader make," Megatron growled, pushing his chestplates aggressively against Starscream's cockpit. "If you think for one moment I'm—" He stopped short.

Starscream, his cockpit already half-folded out of the way, paused and narrowed his optics. "You're what?" he scoffed.

Megatron abruptly shoved Starscream away from him and stalked stiffly out of the room without another word. Starscream was left blinking and confounded and thoroughly wound up in the spark; he turned after a moment to Thundercracker.

"Nuh-uh." The blue seeker immediately held up both hands and backed away. "I don't do angry-'facing."

"Skyw—"

(*bamf!*)

"... I hate you all."


"How many?" Starscream almost checked his audios for errors.

"Six," Hook repeated. "Including myself, now. Sort of."

Starscream peered across the table at the medic. "How sort-of is it? Either you've got an overload-inducing parasitic implant or not."

"The mechanism is there, but there's no spark in mine." Hook handed Starscream a datapad. "And sparks they are, if a bit on the small side, indistinguishable in frequency and spectra from any spark ignited by Vector Sigma."

With a practiced scientist's eye Starscream looked over the medical readings. Mixmaster, Dead End, Runamuck, Breakdown and Wildrider (and the Stunticons' den had to be a fun place for sure right now) all with second sparks in strange apparatuses. Hook was right; Energy parasites, while exceedingly rare, had telltale signs clearly differentiating them from a normal spark. Processor boggling over that, Starscream paged down and stopped.

"But... the nanites— that's absurd."

"Got to that part, did you?" Hook scrubbed a hand down his faceplates. "I skipped a recharge cycle trying to figure out just how that happened."

"The structures aren't foreign metal? The repair nanites are building these things from the inside from the mech's own protoform?"

"And the code changes and the thrusting and the..." Hook twirled a hand in the air and let the sentence perish unfinished. Starscream could tell this was really getting underneath the medic's plating. Usually Hook didn't present data until he had all the answers and all possible solutions ready.

"Feedback over the gestalt link is that bad?"

Hook made a face that told Starscream he'd rather donate his transformation cog to an adolescent human science class than answer that question. "Please tell me this is some kind of Autobot sabotage. I hate to admit it, but if more of us turn up... this... well, every time we muster for battle or raid, it'll be a roll of the dice if you wind up writhing on the ground in pleasure. You'd be beyond easy pickings. You can't shut it off, you can't just power through it, and, Starscream, this is the worst part— I can't remove the apparatus. Any incision or cut or damage heals almost instantly. Cut the energon tank tap cable in Breakdown and it grew back while I watched. Self-repair in that area is operating at almost ten times efficacy."

Well, that was certainly disturbing and bizarre, and— "Wait a moment. That raid yesterday... Optimus Prime fell before he could actually join the fight... just buckled to the ground and shook."

"You don't think..."

Starscream pinged Soundwave's comm. /Soundwave... I believe we are overdue for some Autobot intel./


Hands on hips, Ratchet stood in the doorway to his office and surveyed the medbay. "This is getting out of hand."

Eight. There were eight Autobots in the medbay. All six medical berths were taken: Red Alert, Tracks, Mirage, Jazz, and now Groove and a very put-out looking Cliffjumper sat, boredly lounged or (in Groove's case, currently) enjoyed a surprise overload while the others did their best to try to ignore the moans and giggles of gratification.

Numbers seven, Optimus Prime, and eight— Ratchet himself, to his eternal embarrassment— had retreated to the medbay office. Prime had been oddly reserved since his collapse in battle, as if lost in thought. Ratchet vented noisily, palmed the door control, and sat down at his desk opposite Optimus.

"I've got us all on medical leave for the moment," Ratchet began, "though other than the incapacitating overloads there's nothing life-threatening going on. I'm going to have to start calling everybody in to screen them for ... whatever the smelting frag this is. Even though I know that'll turn this ship into a Benny Hill sketch. And we still don't know anything about these spark parasites."

"I don't think they're parasites, Ratchet," Optimus said quietly. "The Matrix protects me against such things. And it's been unusually active since... this." He placed a hand over his lower abdominal segment.

"Wisdom of the Primes have anything useful to say about all of this?"

Optimus shook his head. "Nothing like this has ever happened before, as far as the Matrix knows. It just seems very interested. It's difficult to put into words."

Ratchet never had any idea what to make of Optimus when it came to the Matrix. Things always got a little too mystical and metaphysical whenever that artifact 'woke up', and things Ratchet couldn't lay hands and sensors on made him nervous. But he trusted Optimus to figure it out, one way or another. So he turned to more concrete matters.

"Jazz seems to have the most, er, progressed development out of all of us," Ratchet began, calling up a hologram. It was the cutaway diagram of the tank-and-piston array again, showing the little spark inside the spherical chamber. "Turns out the nanites going into this thing undergo a reformat of sorts. Some revert to base protomatter, some are shedding all but the neural crystal and gathering in clusters, and some are busy building this."

He isolated the chaotic jumble away from the rest of the array. Without the outer structure in the way, the little frayed knot of wires and rods took on a startling and recognizable shape.

A little round cage half-obscured the tiny spark, the bare scaffolding of a spark chamber in miniature. A dense clump of wires and gears beneath that. Nearby, a lump of crystal glittering with nanite activity. Directly attached to that, two miniscule nodules of translucent blue. And four distinct offshoots of delicate pencil-thin struts.

"Prime... they're building bodies."

Optimus sat up straight, staring at the image for several seconds. Then he looked at Ratchet and held out a closed fist over the desk. Ratchet extended his own fist, and with a synchronized downward pumping motion, Ratchet flattened his hand out, while Optimus extended two fingers. Ratchet groaned.

Optimus sat back in his chair, satisfied. "Scissors beats paper. You get to tell Red Alert."

"At any rate," Ratchet said, turning off the hologram with a scowl, "I could try removing the array, but these are the most overzealous nanites I've ever seen. It could just... grow right back. On the one hand, like I said, these things aren't actually hurting us. On the other, we're eight of us out of battle duty, including our Prime and both medics."

"First Aid is...?"

"No, but he's catching everything Groove is feeling through their gestalt link. Which means Defensor is off the roster now as well. If the Decepticons happen to catch wind of this it could..." Ratchet frowned and shifted in his seat.

"Ratchet?"

"Oh, come on!" Ratchet unconsciously grabbed his codpiece. "It hasn't even been a joor since the last one!"

Optimus got up and came around to Ratchet's side. "Do you... want me to leave?"

Composure already lost and vents roaring, Ratchet shook his head. "D... datapad."

Optimus found the item on the corner of the desk and tried to hand it to Ratchet, but the medic again shook his head, now rocking his hips forward and back. "...just... t-turn it on."

Streams of data filled the screen, faster than Optimus could follow. "Innn-installed a... remote monitor..." Ratchet was determined to remain professional in the face of the building wave of processor-blowing bliss. "— in myself. Nnnneed to— Primus! ah! need to see real-time—"

"Easy, old friend." Optimus steadied him with an arm around his shoulders. "Let the monitor do its job. The datapad is recording everything, just ride it out."

Ratchet said something that might have been "oh shut up" but was lost in the static his vocalizer was reduced to. Optimus patiently held him steady as the pulsating intensified and he finally stiffened in overload, then relaxed, optics closed in the afterglow.

The calm moment was shattered by the medbay comm. /Uh, Ratchet? It's Silverbolt... something weird just happened./

Ratchet put both hands over his face and mentally asked Primus what he'd done to deserve this.


"Well?" Mirage was waiting for Hound as he left the medbay. "Do you...?"

"Nope," Hound said, patting his midsection plating. "Still factory settings in here, so to speak. How're you holding up?"

"I feel perfectly functional," Mirage rolled his optics. "and grateful Ratchet's kicked most of us out of the medbay. I was growing weary of Cliffjumper narrating his overloads."

As they turned to head towards the habitation suites, Hound barked a laugh. "He does that during interfacing, too."

"I have him recite the Lay of Logarithmus. Only way to deal with a chatty lover."

"Every time?"

Mirage cast him a sideways smirk. "He has it memorized. I'll have you lot civilized and cultured one way or another."

"But... seriously. Are you okay?" Hound cast a meaningful look at Mirage's abdominal section. "Is it really true you have a... a little spark in there?"

"And that it's constructing itself a cassette-sized chassis? Yes." Mirage flattened a hand over the area in question. "To be perfectly honest... I am rather concerned. What if Prime is wrong and these truly are some kind of parasites, waiting to— to burst out of my body like in that horrid film Ironhide is so fond of?"

Hound smiled ruefully and put a hand on his friend's shoulder. "First off, I think you're built a little sturdier than John Hurt. Ratchet's patched up worse. Second, wild speculation is Red's job, you shouldn't take work away from him."

"You joke," said Mirage, crossing his arms, "but that was theory number four on Red Alert's list. Just ahead of your base variety Decepticon virus. Between his conjecture and the command staff having Very Serious Discussions every few hours, I'm feeling very— how would the smaller Witwicky put it?— wiggled out."

"That's 'wigged' out."

"I'm about to join Tracks in composing melodramatic soliloquies of woe and impending death, and you're correcting my Earth slang?"

"Sorry. I'm sorry." Hound ducked his head to hide the smile that wouldn't quite go away. "Why don't you recharge in my quarters tonight? Nothing's going on while everyone's getting checked out, I could keep you distracted."

Mirage immediately brightened. "I daresay you could."

"Yeah, I've got like a whole terabyte of dirty Gygaxian limericks."

In spite of Hound's ghastly taste in poetry (or perhaps because of it) they did end up in Hound's quarters, poring over Moonracer's latest installment of her illustrated serial Click & Clack, a fiction set during the age of Guardian Prime involving a pair of mechanics who moonlighted as secret detectives, one incompetent, the other highly intelligent. Whenever intel came back from Cybertron, it was always certain one or two files of Moonracer's magnum opus came with it, to an appreciative Autobot readership. Mirage claimed to like it purely out of irony ("Her understanding of how detectives work is shakier than a faulty gyroscope, that's why it's funny."), but both he and Hound agreed Moonracer could tell a decent tale when she wasn't too busy taking potshots at Shockwave's drones.

Hound was pretending to compose irate fanmail ("Dear Moonracer: That cliffhanger was so evil you should just go join the Decepticons") when Mirage let out a low moan.

"Ah," he said mildly. "Was wondering when that was going to fire up again."

Hound set the Click & Clack bookfile aside. "Y'want me to call Ratchet?"

"No, no, it's just more of the... hmmm... same. They've got their servos full right now anyway." Mirage, optics shuttered, slowly arched his back, vents fully open and straining to speak. "I suppose there are worse ways one can be on medical leave."

Hound watched the sensuous display with keen interest, sensors mapping the rippling heat and moving parts in his friend's graceful body. "Does it really feel like interfacing?"

Mirage cracked open one lambent optic. "I could show you."

Hound caught his shoulders as both mechs let their chestplates fall open. Spark chambers followed suit. Hound had to hold Mirage steady as the he gave himself wholly over to the strange doings within. Their sparks met.

Mirage was equal parts frustrated, worried, enjoying himself, and intensely curious, belying his outward cool flippancy. Hound projected reassurance and his own curiosity, letting himself fall deeply inward toward the sensations in their merge.

It was like and unlike the pleasure generated by spark interface; overload by merging came in like an ocean wave— the peculiar mechanism in Mirage's pelvic housing was building a charge more like a crashing river about to break down a dam. Hound now moved with Mirage, swaying back and forth, as lost to the pleasure as the spy.

Mirage returned Hound's amazement with wry amusement. "Here— it— comes!" said one of them. Hound had no idea who.

Doubled overload: spark and array at once.

The two mechs clutched at each other, shouted static, and slumped as they dropped unceremoniously offline.


"Hound came to me at about 0700 this morning saying his sensors were picking something up in his own chassis," Ratchet reported at what seemed to be the tenth meeting of senior officers and science staff that week. "I'd already cleared him as unaffected, but when I opened him up for a look, I actually saw the new device finish differentiating the spherical chamber component."

"But he's not carrying a miniature spark," Prowl mused.

Ratchet. "Correct. Just like Hoist and Brawn. But what I find interesting is that between me clearing Hound and him coming back with this, he and Mirage interfaced."

There was a moment of silence around the conference table. "So?" said Ironhide.

"So," snapped Red Alert, "Spark-to-spark contact is how energy parasites propagate! I knew it. Is this some relative of the kremzeek?"

"An energy parasite still wouldn't explain the hijacking of our repair nanites," Perceptor interrupted before Red could work down his list. "Such intricate and deliberate construction speaks of a sophistication a simple energy-based lifeform like a kremzeek does not possess."

Jazz tapped the table. "Back on point, Ratchet, are you suggesting that interfacing is how this thing spreads?"

"How would a virus or anything transmit via spark? That doesn't make any sense." Ironhide threw his hands up.

"Actually," said Perceptor, "there's evidence that sparks are composed at least partly of tightly compact coherent data in quasi-physical form. It's been theorized that the transmission of more than emotional resonance is possible over a spark merge, but the research and documentation regarding such theories was, unfortunately, lost when—"

Ironhide let out a sharp laugh. "Well, frag; everybody interfaces with everybody, we're doomed!"

Jazz elbowed him. "You wanna give Red his schtick back?"

"No, no, I'm perfectly willing to share the load," Red Alert muttered archly with a thin look at Jazz. "The sooner we figure out how these things work and how to remove them, the better."

Ratchet nodded. "And how it all started, which brings me to Jazz."

Jazz's visor flickered uncertainly. "Wh-what'd I do?"

"Energy decay readings indicate yours is, so far, the oldest, er, installation. And going by our timeline, this started not long after your last trip to Cybertron. We need to know if anything unusual happened."

"I turned in my report, tell 'em, Pr—" Jazz had turned to Prowl, only to find the tactician with his head down on the table, quivering in his seat. "-uh-"

"...disregard me for the moment."

"Uh— anyway, nothing happened. For once."

Red Alert had already called the report in question up on his datapad, heroically ignoring Prowl's cooling fans kicking on. "What about this neutral mech you encountered? I don't recognize him from your description."

"Not much to describe, m'mech," Jazz offered with a shrug. "White optics, facemask, kitted up in either impressive camouflage or just really dirty. Friendly, thank Primus. Knew who I was, but that's not unusual these d—" Jazz cut himself off, a look of shock coming over his faceplates.

Prowl had the quietest and most discrete overload any of them had ever heard, and sat slowly up.

"Jazz?" prompted Ironhide.

Jazz stood from his seat and paced in a tight little circle before retracting his visor and pulling a hand down his face. "Okay. These were his exact words: 'I know who you are, Jazz of Protihex.'"

"But... you're from Polyhex." Prowl said, confused.

"Not... originally." Jazz leaned on the back of his chair. "Ironhide, you might remember the major gang problem Protihex used to have, way back before the war?"

Ironhide nodded. "Yeah. And an illegal weapons problem, and a corrupt city officials problem..."

"Right. Wretched hive of scum and villainy. Anyway I wasn't two groons fresh outta Vector Sigma when my mentor got mugged in the streets. He was a small-time arms dealer and I guess somebody had a problem with him, and somehow he kicked it; I wasn't there. But after that I fell in with one of the gangs. Ain't proud of it, but I had to survive somehow. I wasn't in with those glitches for about a quarter-vorn when Iacon had like half the planet's Enforcers come down on Protihex like the fist of an angry titan. That's when I boogied outta there. Stole my gang leader's latest credit haul and set up a new life for myself in Polyhex. Clean slate."

Red Alert actually looked a bit offended. "And you never told us this why...?"

"It is literally ancient history, Red," Jazz retorted. "By the time people stopped caring about Protihex and especially by the time the war rolled around, it didn't matter anymore. And ain't a one bot in here the same person he was that long ago. But that's not the point. When I set up in Polyhex I had all new bona fide fake credentials to prove I was Polyhexian, new paint job, about that time I finally settled on a designation, and I never told another burning spark about Protihex. Not a one."

"So how did your neutral friend know?" Prowl asked.

"That'd be the sixty-million energon cube question, my friend."

"I think we're getting off track," Ratchet cut in. "The prize-winning question is not how Jazz ran into an old gang buddy—" ("Hey!") "—but still remains what the dross to do about these sparklets and the freaky hardware."

"And if interfacing truly has anything to do with the spread of this mysterious malady," Perceptor added. "This merits further research and possibly experimentation."

Ironhide scooted away from him.

"Prime?" Prowl said. "You've been quiet."

"I think there's more going on here. Something we're missing." Optimus looked up from the datapad he'd been studying— a live feed from the monitoring device inside him that Ratchet had insisted on installing, just to be safe. The frame being built in the spherical chamber inside Prime now had individual fingers curled into little fists. "Every time an overload hits, the Matrix seems to take notice."

"Well, er, no disrespect intended, Prime, but for those of us what're mere mechs yet," Jazz asked, having resumed his seat, "what does that mean?"

"I do not know." Optimus rose. "The rest of you carry on with the investigation. I think it is high time I see what exactly has the Matrix so active."


Past the voices of Sentinel and of Zeta, Guardian and Prime Nova, past Primes whose names history had forgotten, by accident or design, but whose wisdom and experience remained indelibly within the Matrix. None of them had any insight to their strange situation.

Optimus delved deeper still, deeper than he had ever gone before. The truly ancient voices of Prima and Primon were hard to understand, but they beckoned him inward, deeper. Yet even the primordial Primes offered no enlightenment. Instead the ethereal echoes of the first of their kind simply seemed to... step aside.

A warmth filled the Matrix. Meditation on the Matrix naturally left him bereft of all physical sensation, but Optimus nonetheless had the sense of someone drawing him closer. Of someone else's pain. Of an abiding loneliness and sadness.

/You're so far away,/ said a voice.

Optimus tried to focus on it. He caught glimpses of white optics, the fleeting impression of scarred and corroded plating. /Who are you?/

/So very far./ The voice was straining now, as if speaking took immense effort. Optimus could feel it drifting away. /I am about to pass a point of no return. What happens next depends on you./

/What do you mean? What is happening?/

/—depends on you all—/

Optimus was flung back to awareness with the force of a concussion blast, back into his own wires and metal. He awakened on his own berth, into a body in the throes of another pulsating solitary overload.