REPAIRS COMPLETE/
Please stop blowing yourself up, idiot/
"Ow…"
Uzi grumbled as the CR chamber door slid open. Though her body was repaired, the aches and pains still lingered throughout her frame. "Stupid Mini-Con mass-displacement sequence, stupid small body that can't handle—scrap!" As she attempted to step out of the pod, her foot caught on one of the raised platforms within the chamber, causing her to trip and fall flat on her face.
"Whoa. Easy there, Uz. The CR chamber can only be used so many times a day." Slowly, Uzi turned onto her back. Resulting in her looking up to see one of her classmates, Thad, standing over her with his usual friendly smile. "I heard you blew up again. Good news—it wasn't as messy as last time. Maybe you're building a tolerance."
"Bite me."
She pushed herself back to her feet and then hobbled over to a nearby chair, practically collapsing into it like a sack of energon cubes. "What are you even doing here, Thad? Gonna try changing your alt. mode to something more manly, again?" she asked, watching as Thad sat down next to her.
"What could be more manly than a pickup truck? Though, I guess an 18-wheeler would be awesome. Though which model I wonder, and where would my trailer go when I transform…" Uzi was only half-listening to him, as she focused on her own appearance. Her clothes were battered from the explosion—no surprise there—but at least they were mostly intact. Being an unpopular drone was one thing. Being an unpopular and naked drone was another.
But then, her gaze fell to her arm, and she made a horrifying discovery.
"Scrap!" Thad jumped at the sudden shout and nearly fell off his chair. He turned to look at Uzi, but when he saw what her distressed expression was looking at, he sighed. She was staring mournfully at the patch on her hoodie's shoulder. "I learned how to sew just to get that on! Ugh, now I have to make another one…" She threw her head back in frustration and let out a long groan.
The homemade Decepticon logo still adorned her shoulder, with only a few burn marks marring its otherwise pristine surface. Seeing it displayed so proudly, Thad couldn't help but awkwardly cough into his hand as he tried to steer the conversation away from it. "So, that's kind of what I wanted to talk about… your new alt. mode. I mean, turning into a gun? Isn't that a bit extreme?"
"Because it's sick as hell?" Uzi gave a grin as she showed off the augmentations that covered her frame. But it quickly faltered as Thad continued to look at her with concern. "Oh, what would you know? It's not like I had much of a choice." She turned her head away, suddenly crossing her arms and pouting as she looked dejected from his lack of awe.
"What do you mean? There are plenty of other options for stuff you can be. We've got the entire database of alt. modes at our disposal," Thad pointed toward the CR chamber to make his point, only for Uzi to hold up a finger to silence him.
"My body can't handle an actual vehicle form. My frame is too narrow. I can't even fit any wheels on myself," she said before slumping further into her seat. "Trust me, I tried."
Thad looked taken aback by the news. He scratched his cheek in embarrassment as he tried to think of something else to say. "Well, what exactly was so bad about your original alt. mode?"
He jumped when Uzi snapped her head toward him. "Other than the fact I was a freaking laser pointer?" she reminded him, her eyes narrowing. Then, they softened as she turned her gaze forward, towards the door leading out of the medical room. "It's because… do you remember when we learned about the old Cybertron caste system for drones?"
"I'm not nearly as big of a history buff as you are."
That seemed the wrong thing to say, as Uzi gave him a quick side-eye. "Before the war, the caste system was all we had. When your alt. mode determined your entire life, back in those days, and no one was allowed to change their form. If you were born a trunk, then you are born a worker class. Born a microscope? Science class. Born a camera? Media class."
"I'm sure Lizzy would love to be on camera." Thad smiled as he saw Uzi roll her eyes at the mention of their classmate. "I get what you mean, Uzi. But was it really that bad for everyone? I mean, it must've been kind of nice not to worry about picking what you got to be—all you had to do was just go with the flow of life, right?"
Uzi suddenly leaped to her feet and spun around to face Thad with a glare in her eyes. "Easy for you to say. You were born a worker-class drone! You know what I would've been as a laser pointer? A disposable class. Literally, we were drones with no real purpose. No one would have cared if we were decommissioned or recycled. For Primus's sake, they used to bundle us together and sell us at a discounted price! We weren't even worth the energon it took to power us. I would've been… useless."
Thad couldn't help but wince at Uzi's words. He made a mental note to have someone kick him upside the head for saying something so careless. "Jeez."
Trying to take his mind off it, he glanced around the room they were in for a distraction. This led him to realize they were surrounded by 'motivational' posters featuring Overseer Khan, Uzi's father. It didn't take a supercomputer to figure out that Uzi had complicated feelings about him. "I guess by making yourself into a gun, you feel better with—"
"I feel more than better!" Uzi interrupted him, her voice rising with sudden excitement. "As a weapon, I'm a thousand times more useful. With the Mini-Con mass-displacement sequence, I'm basically a walking armament of death. And I work too! I just need a couple of final parts to regulate my power source for longer periods. Then, I'm going to join the war effort. I'll win it, and come back to the colony to show everyone that I helped bring the new Golden Age of Cybertron, all while showing my dad that I'm not useless… but mostly the saving Cybertron part is what I care about!"
"Okay. But…" Thad paused as he tried to figure out the right words to say. "Why? I mean, the war has been going on for like millions of years without you. Why even get involved? We have everything we could want here. Energon is good, and we still got plenty of space. I mean, the Colony is as big as the city outside. Besides, every time someone decides to go to the surface, it never ends well. Don't you remember what happened with Doll's—"
He stopped himself as he realized just what he was mentioning. With his eyes turning hollow as he saw Uzi's cold expression. She remembered perfectly what happened to her aunt and uncle…
"I'm sorry. I'm just trying to say that your dad made the doors to keep us safe. There is nothing wrong with that. Maybe you can talk to him about you feeling useless and—"
Thad was silenced as Uzi suddenly grabbed him by the neck and began to shake him like a ragdoll with every ounce of her strength. "No more talking about my repressed emotions or my need for approval from a father figure!" She shouted.
"Okay! Okay! My bad!" Thad managed to choke out the words, moments before he was thrown back into his seat. Before he could even attempt to recover from the ordeal, Uzi was already walking out of the medical room, tossing over her shoulder a loud "Bite me" as she went.
No less than three seconds later, though, she peeked back in through the doorway. "I'm not angry with you, I'm just generally hormonal and I get upset when I talk about my personal issues… and obviously the trailer would be like your battle station or like you can combine with it to form a super mode, okay, bye–"
ALERT! ALERT! EMERGENCY MEETING/
COLLECT PITCHFORKS AND TORCHES IN SUB-LEVEL C-3 FOR THE UPCOMING RIOT/
In an instant, the hall's lights suddenly turned bright red, and a loud automatic voice spoke over the speaker system.
"I didn't do it!" Uzi shouted, flinching as if she were caught red-handed in some crime. Though it seemed more out of habit than anything, she quickly realized that she hadn't done anything to trigger such an alarm. "Wait, what?"
Thad was quick to join her side, rubbing a hand over his throat as while their kind didn't really need to breathe, being throttled still hurt. "It said something about a meeting. But what could it be about? Maybe the war is over?" he offered, giving a low cough to clear his vocal components.
"Can't be." Uzi blinked in confusion, her eyes darting to the lights above them, which began flashing in a recognizable pattern. "One-two-three, one-two, one-tw—this is a code-X security alarm. Only my dad has access to this. Something… something bad happened."
"...like…"
"Like maybe the doors got broken into bad."
"The same doors that are keeping us safe in case anything from the war was to attack us."
"Yep."
"Well…that's just prime."
Uzi couldn't remember the last time she'd seen so many drones gathered in one place. It seemed like everyone in the colony had come to hear her father's announcement, crowding the auditorium to capacity and then some. With over 200 drones packed into the room, some didn't even bother to find a seat.
"Told you this shortcut was better," Thad said as he and Uzi crept along the top section, weaving their way through the lighting rigs that shined down onto the stage below. "A couple of us usually sneak up here for free movie nights, but even during Terminator Week, it never gets this packed."
Uzi peeked down at the sea of drones, she tried to make a headcount. The sound of so many voices blended into a noisy, buzzing echo that overwhelmed her audio receptors, making it hard to focus even on Thad's voice. "I see some drones are from the lower levels," she called out, raising her voice to be heard over the din as they both found a spot to sit, giving them a perfect view of the stage.
But soon they realized they weren't alone.
"Sup, Thad." Uzi's eyes snapped to the side, her sensors flaring with surprise as two classmates had come to join them. Lizzy, the stereotypical mean girl, and Doll, Uzi's cousin, slipped in beside them. Lizzy nodded toward Uzi with a bemused expression over her visor. "What's with the Decepti-creep? Did you throw her a treat, and she started following you?"
"Bite me!" Uzi shot back immediately, glaring at Lizzy and Doll as they squeezed into position on her left. With Thad sitting on her right, she realized that she was getting boxed into place. She squirmed with all of them being so close, and she actually had to resist the urge to just launch herself into the crowd below if it meant getting away from this group huddle. "What are you even doing up here?"
Lizzy gave a smug look as she held up her Hasbro-branded datapad, which displayed a message notification. Uzi's eyes narrowed, putting two and two together as she turned on Thad, elbowing him in the arm. "You invited them?" she hissed, scandalized at this 'betrayal'.
"Hey, quit it, they deserve to see what is going on too." Thad said defensively, rubbing his arm. "Besides, Lizzy is like the best when it comes to getting the word out. If this is big news, we gotta make sure everyone hears about it." Uzi gave a loud sigh as she knew that Thad was right. Though she didn't have to like it.
"(This spot also gives us the best seats to see if this turns into a full riot. Factions are already being made.)" Doll spoke up—though not in Cybertronian, rather she spoke oddly enough in a human language, Russian. Not that it mattered much, as all of them could understand her perfectly. "(Maybe we'll see our entire society collapse.)"
Uzi was about to protest, insisting that it couldn't be that serious, but she was silenced by Lizzy's hushed whisper, "Shhh! It's starting." With a purr of T-cog, Lizzy leaped up and transformed, a hand-held video camera landing perfectly in Doll's outstretched palm.
"Wait, how the hell did you get my Mini-Con mass-displacement sequence—you used to transform into a movie camera!" Uzi demanded, glaring with absolute murder in her eyes towards the two.
"(You posted your notes about it in the classroom chat a while ago, saying you didn't need a Special Fella date because you had 'science'. Don't worry, Lizzy won't explode. I made sure of that,)" Doll replied, a subtle smile tugging at her lips as she began recording.
Uzi was tempted to lunge at the pair, but she was stopped as her father, Khan Doorman, strode onto the stage and stood in front of a podium, his usually upbeat face etched with worry. His visor was fogged with sweat, and his usually pristine mustache was askew. An uneasy silence fell over the auditorium as all optics turned to the colony's leading man.
"Show time." Lizzy whispered from within her camera-form.
Clearing his throat, Khan looked out to all the drones before him. Knowing that many more resided outside of the room. "My fellow drones," He began, "I would first like to begin by thanking you all for coming here on such short notice." Uzi was shocked to hear her father speak in such a serious manner. "I know that this is very sudden, and I am sure you were all busy, but it is of the utmost importance that you all hear about this."
A drone from the crowd shouted, "Is it about the doors? Did something happen to them?"
For a moment, Uzi saw a glimmer of her father's usual, more lighthearted self. "Huh? Oh no, no. They're perfectly in tip-top condition. In fact, we were in the process of reinvention–that's right everyone–plans for a fourth door!" The sound of Uzi's palm slapping her own forehead was overshadowed by the sound of awe that rippled through the crowd at such news.
"But such plans are put on hold." Khan's tone quickly shifted back to seriousness. "To put it plainly, our Energon chip—the tool we use to recycle our Energon—broke." Silence filled the room for a few seconds as everyone seemed to take the news rather well…
At least until they all erupted into a torrent of panicked voices and shrill screams.
"What do you mean it broke?"
"Oh Primus, are we all going to die?"
"We must start the ritual sacrifices to Primus!"
"Someone think of the protoforms!"
"People!" Khan's voice boomed from the stage, silencing the crowd. "Let's at least hear the full story before we conduct a full panic! I mean, if we are gonna do it, let's do it right and with the full context." The crowd swiftly grew remorseful as a chorus of agreement rose from them. Many put away their pitchforks and torches, they even apologized for their over eagerness. "The chip seemed to have broken from overuse," Khan explained. "Which honestly, we should have expected. It's been in use since before the Great War, and even ran while we were all in stasis for most of it. It was bound to happen."
He shook his head in complete and utter shame. "I had some of our best engineers do their best to try and fix it, but this is a problem not even duct tape can fix." Many gasps among the crowd could be heard. "Or glue." Uzi swore she saw someone faint.
"I am sure this worries each and every one of you. This certainly changes how we live when it comes to Energon. From what I—and others smarter than me—could tell if we ration each and every bit of what we currently have, right down to if every bot only takes a single cube a week, we could last at least another century." A wave of murmurs swept through the crowd. Many seemed optimistic, believing that it might actually be possible. "They then told me, more realistically, we would last—at best—two months." There was silence once more from the crowd, as all their eyes turned hollow.
"... Oh, right." Khan once more cleared his throat. "You may now panic."
The room erupted in chaos once more.
"Two months!"
"Just kill us now, and get it over with!"
"The sacrifices could maybe bring more energon!"
"Will someone think of the protoforms?"
"Wait!" A drone stepped forward from the crowd, addressing Khan. "There must be something we can do. Isn't there a replacement, or something like it? Maybe it just needs a new part or something."
Khan's face lit up with a smile. "I'm glad you asked. You're right. There is a chance for our survival." A collective sigh of relief is heard from the crowd. "But it requires someone to leave the colony and either find a replacement. Because we don't have another here. At all. Trust me, we looked." A hush fell over the crowd.
"So," the same drone that stepped forward spoke up again. "We either die here, or we die out there?"
"Yeeah," Khan said, seeming to drag the word out as he thought about it for a moment. "That is about it. As I am sure you all know that the war is out there. As we know, the bots out there are not satisfied with just killing our wives. They also simply wish to kill any of us that they see, for some reason…Oh well. Let's at least remember to be civil as we talk about the collapse of our little civilization. I say, we vote on it!"
The crowd cheered at the idea, and a projector screen rolls down behind Khan with someone in the crowd transforming into a projector, showing the different choices for how they could all lose their minds. Ranging from sacrifices to gladiator death matches to even their own civil war. "We'll start with a campaign and a selection of parties, with each choosing their representative. We will begin with some nominations—"
Uzi looked down to her father and the crowd, seeming shunned after having listened to it all. She needed a moment just to process what this could mean. The colony was crumbling, its inhabitants were terrified and desperate. Life as everyone knew it was coming to an end as the fear of starvation from lack of energon had seemingly overnight become a fear for the first time in millions of years.
Which meant it was time for a new direction, time for new leadership. It was the perfect opportunity for her to escape her mundane existence and join the Decepticons. She would be the one that brings the aid of the Cybertronian freedom fighters to everyone. Giving her the chance to change—No.
To transform from a useless nobody within the colony, to a hero.
It would be all too perfect.
"Uzi," Thad pleaded, "please stop diabolically giggling to yourself while the adults are organizing the collapse of our society."
But she was already lost in her fantasy as she imagined herself leading the colony to a brighter future. She would be the savior rising from the ashes. A living legend. A Point One Percenter. A God.