Chapter Text
Fortress Maximus comes online knowing three things. That his function is to [protect], and that he is to report directly to the Evaluator.
And his designation. But that seems insignificant - it is the first thing he thinks of, but otherwise irrelevant, and he gives it no further thought.
He waits while the thawing slab rotates on its axis and sets him on his feet. The medical restraints unclamp, and he steps away as unused sentio metallico sluices away through drains in the floor to be recycled in the next mold. His frame, according to the HUD over his right optic, is currently operating at 94% functionality; his new set of outermost armor needs to finish integrating with his protoform. The order to report to the Evaluator supersedes that, though. An attendant in medical red and white leads him out of the thawing chamber without a word to him, scribbling notes on their datapad. Fortress Maximus looks back over his shoulder - the additional armor on his neck and arms throws him off for a moment, until the integration clicks up another percentage point and his proprioceptors adjust - and recognizes his own outline etched in the thawing slab. Then he turns to follow the medic, and it passes out of sight.
Many memory files and programs came pre-installed in his processor - knowledge of the hallways around them included. As the medic navigates the halls, he calls them up in the HUD after only a moment's uncertainty. He traces the path they take through the medical sector, but that can only occupy so much of his mind. The medic's continued silence leaves Fortress Maximus at loose ends, his presence unacknowledged, and he does not know what to say to start a conversation himself. A helpful file in his processor surges to the fore and lays out a flowchart for him: the medic outranks him until Fortress Maximus passes the evaluation and is assigned his official rank. Right now he's [unemployed], only a silicon wafer-breadth away from [nothing]. Which means, essentially, everyone outranks him. He has no right to initiate a conversation with his superiors until he has a place.
Everyone has their place.
A throb of anxiety spikes in his spark. Fortress Maximus presses his hand over his chest and holds it there until the roiling panic smooths out of his systems. He can't detect any outside stimuli that could have triggered the sudden reaction, yet it earns him a pause and a cool stare from the medic. "Control yourself," the medic says, corner of their mouth tugging into a curl of disgust.
That sets off another roil of anxiety. This time, Fortress Maximus tempers the electromagnetic shift that threatens to shudder in time with his spark. EM field. He needs to remember that; it must have been...impolite to broadcast his emotions that way. Being freshly thawed is no excuse. This medic may not be the Evaluator himself, but they only need to call him [defective] once. To be [defective] is almost worse than being [obsolete]. He knows it, as surely as he knows his own name. Nauseated, he blanks his face out, desperate to look neutral and pliant and obedient. A strut in his arm shakes as the medic stares him down, the tension juddering down to his wrist - his fingers -
Until the medic spins around and continues down the hall, without a sound.
Once he's sure the medic is distracted again, Fortress reaches up, his arm shifting slowly so his joints won't creak, and touches his face to try to feel his expression. His mouth trembles. His optics have cycled to their widest setting; the hallway seems weirdly flat and remote compared to the medic's back, and he can't remember how to take a step. Like his feet have stuck magnetically to the floor.
Stiff, Fortress Maximus forces himself to follow the medic again. He doesn't know what it means, that his frame reports 96% functionality and yet -
He traces other routes on his internal maps of the facility, instead. Familiarizing himself with the different sectors can only help him in the future, if he passes evaluation. He identifies key items with new-thawed curiosity: the location of the nearest energon dispensaries, washracks, weapon lockers, and areas where his map becomes a blur of unlabeled halls and classified sectors, the content redacted due to his lack of security clearance.
Strange. He can't find any exits.
He wonders why he even looked for one.
-
Evaluation, Fortress's processor tells him, is one of the cornerstones of a functioning society. The Evaluator presides over one of the busiest sectors of the Cog. From the moment the medic leads him through the carefully delineated security gates between medical and Evaluation, hundreds of mechs swarm around them. Everyone walks with utter surety, cutting between each other and crisscrossing the room. His processor spits a rapid-fire analysis at him, identifying the yellow and purple tags of theoconomists, the red and teal of the Inquisitor's legislacerators, the purple and grey of examiners. A constant hum of vocal and subvocal comms buzzes in the air, pressing around Fortress like a palpable weight on his sensors. He's double the height of almost everyone in the room, including the medic, and is instantly awkward about it. He gingerly picks his way through the crowd by sticking as close to the medic's heels as he can, but mechs flow through the space between them when he hesitates. Fortress shuffles his feet along the ground rather than lifting them, and prays not to knock into someone with his heavy limbs.
They're all so...small. He fights down the instinctive urge to lock up and plant his feet until the small rushing things stop brushing against him, and forges after the medic with a spark of desperation.
Unlike some of the mechs they pass, strapped to examination berths and screaming as they are examined, Fortress is escorted directly to the Evaluator. The tenth Councilor hovers at the center of the immense circular chamber at the heart of the Evaluation sector, flanked on either side by aides and guards who stand tall enough to make Fortress feel less like a tank in a visor shop. A wall of screens and holo projections encircles the platform, fanning up and out toward the distant ceiling overhead,
The medic crosses a clear stretch of ground between the rushing crowd and the Evaluator's domain, and Fortress takes advantage of it to lengthen his stride and catch up. Several eyes lock onto him - the aides' assessing him from multiple different angles, the guards' bright with the glint of targeting HUDs - but it's the Evaluator's level, single optic, rising from the screens embedded in the floor to inspect him, that freezes Fortress Maximus in his place.
The Evaluator, the Tenth-of-Twelve, has a simple, sparing frame with no excess armor or parts. His helm frames one immense yellow optic, and his gaze zeroes in on Fortress Maximus as he takes another step forward.
To be the sole focus of that unrelenting, singular stare would be intimidating enough. But the effect is compounded by the weight of the Councilor's many aides: all staring at Fortress, all with the same expression in their strange, strange optics. That tremor runs through the strut in his arm again. The medic briskly walks off, and vanishes through one of the exits leading away from the hub without another word.
"Designation?" the Evaluator says, at last.
For a moment, Fortress Maximus doesn't remember how to speak. He's never done it before. Thankfully, his vocalizer takes three seconds to boot up for the first time; his voice sounds rough and unfamiliar to his own sensors, but otherwise perfectly functional. "Fortress Maximus. Serial code 4131136128," he says. His frame shifts automatically under - shoulders straight, arms locked by his sides, his head up at attention. Two conflicting protocol processes grate against each other for a moment, one insisting that he lower his gaze deferentially. The one that urges him to stand at attention wins out.
In the Grand Machine of Cybertronian society, Fortress is two rungs from the bottom. The mech that steps off the hover panel and stalks around Fortress Maximus in a circle, scrutinizing him from helm to foot like he's a particularly boring piece of rebar, is at the top. "Function?" The Councilor paces around Fortress again, idly, his flock of aides clustered in his wake.
Another simple one. "To protect."
And somehow, the moment Fortress says it, he knows that's the wrong answer. It's one of the first things he thought, fundamental, unquestioned in the brief time he's been thawed - and he's wrong. He's made a mistake.
The Evaluator stops midstride. His aides jerk around to stare at Fortress with renewed fervor, a few with furrowed brows and one - a purple and black functionary with four optics - with a glare as they scan and rescan him, but the Evaluator's optic refocuses more slowly. Some unidentifiable emotion crawls in Fortress's spark; he's frozen, too rigid to vent, every other process put on hold.
"Interesting," the Evaluator says, like someone else might say 'disgusting.' His optic shifts back from red to yellow. "But no. Your function is to [guard]."
Fortress ducks his head at once. "My function is to guard," he repeats, gratefully, his spark burning with shame. The difference between the glyphs used for each word is obvious, once the Evaluator says it out loud. Being freshly thawed is no excuse for making such a basic error in front of a Councilor.
"Better."
Then the Evaluator turns, his heavy purple cloak swirling around him, and all of his aides turn in a practiced flurry of rearranging frames. It's only then that Fortress realizes that they're all linked together. That at least forty interface cords hang between them, one from the neck of each aide, to plug into the array along the Councilor's unarmored spinal column. Not a one of them tangles or twists as the aides spin around. They adjust to the Councilor's movements with honed precision, like a well-oiled machine, and Fortress takes an involuntary step back. His heel wobbles, teetering on the edge of the platform.
But the Evaluator walks away, and Fortress, still rigid with embarrassment and conscious of the optics lingering on him, hurries after him.
They exit the hub through a door directly behind the central platform. Security scanners flank the doorway, along with more guards. The Councilor raises a hand and the door slides open with a smooth click as the scanner reads his credentials. Half of the Evaluator's aides file away, their interface cords retracted at some unspoken signal, and filter back into the crowd. Fortress fixes his eyes forward on the back of the Councilor's helm and attempts to walk with purpose. Like he knows where he's going. He measures his steps so he stays a respectful two meters behind the Councilor's remaining entourage.
The floor slopes down, though it's difficult to tell to say how steeply. At each door they come to, more aides shave off the edges and scatter. It takes Fortress a moment to notice that the HUD over his eye has changed, so that it displays security clearance, serial numbers, functions, and preliminary risk assessments when he focuses on the aides. With each security checkpoint, those without the appropriate security clearance to continue peel away from the Evaluator and rush off to attend other duties. Soon, only a select handful remain.
When Fortress checks his internal map, his own security clearance is now level eight. Many of the blank, blurred sectors are now filled in, with minute details marked in to indicate security checkpoints and roaming security cams. They've ventured deep into the Cog, along the dividing line between Evaluation and Inquisition.
"We are all cogs in the Grand Machine, Fortress Maximus," the Councilor says, as they descend deeper into the core of the Cog. "Each of us with a role, each of us in our place. You have been born with the purpose of guarding a highly classified object."
"I understand."
He realizes that he doesn't really understand when they reach their destination. The door to the chamber sprawls over the clear line between Evaluation and Inquisition in his mental map, bridging the two in a way that makes Fortress's pre-programmed files squirm with discomfort. When he trails the Councilor inside, only one aide remains with them. There are more below, however - examiners, their purple and grey armor splattered with flecks of bright, queasy-pink energon as they slice open the fuel lines of the mech magnetized to the table.
Not a lot of energon, Fortress's processor recognizes, through the sudden haze of nausea. They've carefully and thoroughly dismantled the mech's arm from shoulder to wrist, the struts and wires and circuits spread out wide in the open air, to the point that Fortress struggles to accept that it still is an arm. It's just - parts. The inner shell of the mech's arm plating is a warm gold, pale but vibrant, compared to the dulled orange of the rest of him.
His optics are still online. He's not even twitching as they take him apart.
"This thing," the Evaluator says, indicating the mech clamped on the examination berth, "is to be guarded in the strictest confidence. You will speak to no one below security clearance level seven about what you see before you. You will obey no orders concerning the object from anyone below security clearance level nine."
Fortress can only swallow. His hands feel very cold - he can't tell if that tremor's back or not. His frame is so far away. If there's a prepackaged response to...this (yes sir) his vocalizer can't seem to force it out.
A rough, quiet voice answers for him. "Hello, Ten. Always - a pleasure." It cuts out for a split second, a tangible moment of empty air, before resuming, but Fortress can't bring himself to look down again to see what the examiners did to provoke it. His optics fixate on the smooth railing under the Evaluator's hands.
The mech sounds exhausted.
"Who is he?" Fortress asks; his own voice echoes oddly in his ears. He shouldn't question a Councilor, he should not be asking questions, his mind screams, but it's too late.
The Councilor's voice smacks him like a sharp rebuke. A correction. "It is nothing. A perversion. A blasphemy. Something that defies evaluation, has no known function, and stubbornly refuses a place in Cybertronian society."
Fortress, still staring at the railing, doesn't register his own flinch. He stares at the Evaluator's hands - his fingers clamped tightly on the railing, hard enough to crimp the metal. The Councilor's hands quiver.
Fury radiates off him like a heat from a churning smelter. Fortress wishes desperately that he couldn't feel it. That he could turn his electromagnetic sensors off and stop sensing the agony from below that turns the whole room into a smear of bright lights and sharp metal.
"I'm a decoration. An ornament. Please, I - I - I -" The mech's voice cracks and starts to glitch as one of the torturexaminers pries open the armor of his hand, clicking and repeating a single syllable over and over. He sounds so tired. As though he's given this answer before, a thousand times before, or more -
"Yet it somehow managed to subvert three of its four previous guards," the Evaluator continues, his face a mask of impassivity, as though he hadn't heard a word. "You will guard this object against any unauthorized attempts to claim or remove it from the facility. You will also monitor the object closely for any indication of what its true function may be, as well as for any signs that of it subverting your fellow guard."
Below, the nameless mech laughs. The sound makes Fortress flinch even harder than the first time. "Y-you already monitor me at all times, anyway. What's another set of optics going t-to do for any of us?"
"Under no circumstances is the object to be free from its restraints. If at any point the restraints fail, you are to prevent the object's self-termination by any means at your disposal," the Evaluator finishes, his voice crisp and level and relentless.
"Please." The mech's vocalizer cracks again. Fortress's gaze drifts as the numbness climbs up his arms and lodges in his chest, and he watches as one of the examiners ruthlessly peels the mech's wires away from his struts.
"Yes sir. I understand."
-
Fortress follows his internal map to the mech's cell. He reviews the guard schedule as he walks to keep his processor occupied. According to the schedule - which only a 'Red Alert' has editing privileges for - his guard shift resumes as soon as the examiners finish for the day. When he scans ahead for the next few months, Fortress realizes that entire chunks of the schedule are blank. They schedule the examination sessions in advance.
His internal sensors insist that he's not cold, that his temperature hasn't deviated from the accepted standard for his make and model even once in the past hour. It still takes a long time for sensation to return to his hands.
Thankfully, he has it: the route to the prison cell leads back up through the layers of the Cog, toward the core. The walls transition from plain, functional grey to more ornate white and gold, with ceremonial script and symbols that Fortress doesn't recognize engraved in the metal. He's close to the central intersection of all twelve sections of the Cog, the area where the segments come together and you can step from one to another between one hall and the next. Just a few floors below him lies the Council Chambers, at the most central point, where the Functionist Council convenes to discuss matters of the state.
The gold-plated door of the cell more closely resembles a vault than any of the doors Fortress passed on the way here. More security scanners wait for him - an optic reader, a frequency scanner that drags through his EM field like sandpaper to identify his spark type (argentum-positive), and a CNA processor, in addition to a standard identity chip reader that scans his hand. After the vault door cycles open, he spends a full thirty minutes staring at the machine in the center of the room, alone, for lack of anything else to do. He reviews some of the information files after that, until he understands how the restraints work. One cuff for each arm, one for each leg, and the central clamp for the body, with a secondary attachment to immobilize the helm and neck and prevent reflexive transformation.
Apparently, that was an issue before. The prisoner attempted to initiate a transformation sequence while improperly restrained, and nearly tore his body apart along the seams.
The examiners deliver him two hours later. Fortress stands at attention, his joints locked in place; his processor automatically freezes up at the sight of the mech. Luckily, the examiners don't appear to notice his stiff stance - they lock the clamps around the prisoner's limbs (including a completely reconstructed right arm) and then use the spherical control panel to raise him away from the floor and suspend him in midair. They file out in a faint cloud of chatter and laughter, and then the vault door seals shut behind them.
Only the mech's pained, rattling vents fill the silence. The gasping doesn't ease as the minutes tick by. Fortress stands, mute and frozen, by the wall opposite the mech, unable to move. It's as good a vantage point for a guard as any.
At least the mech is in one piece, now. Fortress can look at him without feeling cold, but a palpable awkwardness takes its place. He has no real guidelines for interacting with a prisoner. His HUD, when directed to scan the prisoner, reveals a serial code - 100000000 - a function of [nothing], and a risk assessment filled with red warning glyphs. No designation.
He doesn't know what to say. He doesn't know if he should say anything.
You were born for this, the Evaluator said. Without that, Fortress doesn't have any other use.
So why doesn't he know what he's doing?
Internal diagnostics report that the vague nausea lingering in his tanks is a parasympathetic response from his subcutaneous circuitry, brought on by an inconsequential process looping in the limbic section of his brain module. Something that would be cleared up during recharge and defragmentation. Safe to disregard.
A sigh and creak, as the prisoner shifts in his restraints. He can't move at all, really - his joints and transformation seams flex a little, but the cuffs don't have much give by design - but the movement startles Fortress like a gun fired next to his ear. An automated program tries to ready one of the weapons integrated in his new armor. Fortress overrules it with a shudder.
"It's nice to meet you," the prisoner says. His vocalizer is clearly on its last leg: worn soft and raspy by whatever the examiners did to him. When Fortress cautiously lifts his optics and forces himself to focus on the mech's face, he wears - of all things - a gentle, crooked smile. "My name is Rung. What's yours?"
Tearing his eyes away, Fortress shifts his weight. Another purposeless action; he has the frame and brain module necessary to remain at attention for weeks, if need be. But like the tremor in his arm that fades in and out of his awareness, he can't seem to help it.
As it becomes clear that Fortress won't (can't) say anything in response, Rung resets his dim blue optics with a tired vent. "It's going to be a long shift for you. Please, if anything comes to mind, feel free to talk to me. I've been down here long enough that I know everything classified already, anyway."
He says it like it's such a simple thing. Both Fortress's programming and his orders from the Evaluator concur that he shouldn't discuss anything classified around here - but Rung is the classified person. A trap? Fortress flounders internally and tries not to let it show on his face. The gulf between all of his preprogrammed knowledge and his actual experience feels impossibly wide, and he can't seem to get the image of Rung's arm peeled open for nanoscopic inspection out of his mind.
Rung shifts again, a ragged flutter of what few armor plates along his arms and legs aren't contained by the restraints. The right arm remains painfully still. "Pardon me, but - how old are you?" he asks, after a while. Still exhausted, still quiet.
That...is probably not classified information. It's so basic and self-evident, in fact, that Fortress responds to the social cue without thinking. "I came online three hours ago," he says, before his mouth snaps shut with a rattling clang. More than likely, according to his basic knowledge, his spark matured and forged its body out of the proto-sentio metallico over the course of decades before onlining here, but he doesn't think that counts.
Up until that point, Rung's EM field didn't even brush Fortress's sensors. Which was surprising, given how much pain his reconstructed arm must be in as it stretches on the rack of the restraints. Now, Fortress catches a quicksilver flicker of surprise. "So new. I didn't think -" Rung cuts himself off. The thick plates of his brow draw together in a frown. "Well. Never mind."
"Think what?"
"That there were any new sparks left. The last known hot spot went cold four million years ago, at Alyon. I knew the Council inherited the Senate's stockpile, but word came that they ran through their supply at least fifty thousand years ago." Rung's frown twists, turns bitter. His face is the only part of him that can move to express himself.
Fortress sends a query through his memories, prodding at the preprogrammed information packages when they don't respond. He knows the basics of the Cybertronian life cycle - what a hot spot is, how the sparks are nurtured until they grow into themselves - but he doesn't have anything quantitative like the exact number of new sparks in the world. Then again, with his function in life, he's not sure why he'd need to know. "I don't know any of that," he admits, after another hollow, uncertain pause.
Rung turns his optics off, and does not brighten them again. He can't relax in his restraints, though. "I imagine not," he murmurs. As he drifts off, the exhaustion in his field laps against the edges of Fortress's awareness.
"Fortress Maximus," Fortress says, belatedly.
Rung does not reply.
-
The examiners return eight hours later to retrieve Rung for another session. Rung, slow to rouse, collapses in a strutless heap on the floor before they haul him up, his legs too wobbly from forced tension to support him. One of the scientists nods at Fortress curtly before scrolling through his datapad and sailing out the door.
Which leaves Fortress to his own devices. His guidelines inform him that the most efficient use of his time would encompass refueling, recharging, and fulfilling other guard duties outside the vault, but nothing compels him to do any of the above. It would simply look strange if he didn't. The nearest energon dispensary marked on the map is located in the central hub, clearly intended for Council use between sessions, and he avoids it. The next nearest location marked on his map is located several minutes away from the core of the Cog, through a few security check points - back in the Evaluation section, nearer to Mediation than to Inquisition. In contrast to the crowded bustle at the heart of Evaluation, the hallways on this level seem oddly empty. Only the occasional roaming spy bot breaks up the quiet trip; after the first scan of Fortress's identity chip, none of the drones stop their patrol to investigate his presence.
The walls fade back to a utilitarian grey right before Fortress knocks into someone. Literally. He rounds a corner to reach the row of habsuites, washracks, and dispensary that marks a domestic segment, and crashes right into a spindly mech barely as high as his hip.
Unfortunately, in a contest between a tank and whatever this poor mech turns into, the tank wins. The mech hits the ground with a surprised yelp, the flared plates on the back of their shoulders scraping on the metal, and Fortress scrambles not to trip on them and make the situation ten times more mortifying than it already is. "I apologize. Are you alright?" he says, kneeling to help the mech up.
His HUD is a mass of red as the mech shakes their head and stands, wobbly but otherwise unfazed. Not nearly as dire a risk assessment as Rung's, but startling enough that Fortress blinks as he takes it in. Designation: Resonance, [exempt], and 'maximum flight risk; see exemption appendix.' "It's fine, no harm done. Are you lost?" the mech asks, their visor alight with laughter.
"I am off shift," Fortress says, instead; he knows exactly where he is in relation to the dispensary, but he can't say he doesn't feel lost in general.
The mech dances back a step and inclines their head, their expression mischievous. Fortress realizes, with a jolt, that he can't identify their alt mode at all - almost all their gold and white armor's stripped down to bare plating, leaving little more than a slim frame with out-of-context transformation seams. "Nice to meet you, Off Shift. I'm Resonance," they say. Their vocalizer chimes with a barely-suppressed laugh.
"No - I - my designation is -"
Resonance stifles another giggle. "Sorry, I can see your designation. I shouldn't tease," they say, ruefully, as they tap their golden visor. Fortress wonders what their HUD looks like, compared to his. "Most of us take energon down the hall, if you don't mind company."
He doesn't. Despite the strange risk assessment, Resonance isn't Rung; Fortress doesn't think he needs to second guess himself about joining them. Resonance takes three skipping strides for each of Fortress's steps, peppering him with polite questions until they reach the dispensary.
They receive their assigned rations before Fortress works himself up to ask the question on his mind. "What is your function? I...don't understand your alt mode," he says, after one last attempt to figure it out on his own.
Resonance sobers. "Heh. Didn't online you with an 'unspoken etiquette of the Cog' patch, huh?" they say. Then they wave a hand. "Not your fault, don't worry about it."
Fortress hesitates, his instinct to apologize stymied. Resonance sits at a corner table with seats built to support mechs up to Fortress's weight class, their legs dangling a meter above the ground.
"I have no alt mode, these days. It was...I am...well." Resonance shrugs, and sips at their energon. It's barely a quarter of what Fortress received from the automatic dispenser. Even that small sip drains half the cube. "The Evaluator determined my function lies in music. In singing. However, that is not the function I was originally born for, and singing is...an unnecessary function. I was defective and not employed, but the Council in their mercy gave me a place in this world. An exemption. They stripped my alt mode as my penance, and now I sing for them here. And I am so very happy!"
They spread their fingers wide. Something is terribly off about their smile. It doesn't match what little he can sense of their EM field.
Fortress stares, transfixed, and for a horrible moment all he can see is Resonance clamped to an examination berth. "Are you? Happy?" His vocalizer stutters.
A flare of warning brushes him; Resonance abruptly averts their optics behind their visor. Their rictus of a smile stays welded firmly in place as they reach across the table and take Fortress's hand. "You are very new, and I forgive you. But please, don't look at someone when you say such things," they say, as they begin to move their fingers against Fortress's palm. Fortress glances down for a second, then wrenches his gaze to the side at another warning.
He stares at his sickly pink cube of energon instead, while Resonance painstakingly spells out simple glyphs against his palm. His hand dwarfs theirs.
[You are their eyes.]
"I don't understand," he says, because he doesn't. His throat feels tight, as though the nausea can't be contained within his chest anymore.
Resonance begins to write on his palm again. They say something completely different out loud, their voice light and steady and their optics locked on Fortress's shoulder, and it takes Fortress some mental maneuvering to follow both methods of conversation at the same time. "I'm very happy. All I ever wanted was for my singing to be useful. And now it is. I owe the Council everything."
[Cameras in our optics. Full spectrum surveillance.]
Fortress's arm shivers. Resonance sets his trembling hand back down on the table for him with great care. "I...see," Fortress says, his voice remote, thankful that there is no one else in the room with them.
"Thank you for your understanding," Resonance says, still in that too-calm voice. They flick a finger against Fortress's untouched energon, making the cube ring. When Fortress finally dares look at their face with his optics - cameras? - all he sees is sad sympathy. "You should complete a rest cycle. Always make efficient use of your time."
The energon ration is far too dark a pink. Like it's already been processed.
"Of course. Thank you."
-
After leaving Resonance, he finds his assigned recharging quarters without incident. Living space is at a premium in the Cog, but his habsuite, located just a few floors away from Rung's cell, accommodates his heavily armored frame with ease. There's a slot in the wall where another recharge berth can slide out, which implies someone else should be staying here with him - perhaps one of the guards that Rung somehow subverted, according to the Councilor - but for now it's more space than he needs.
His recharge cycle drags on in a restless haze, plagued by static-blurred feedback. He can't remember any of it when he wakes. His internal alarm pings him; the scheduled examination period is due to end in ten minutes, and then Fortress will resume his guard shift until his counterpart arrives for the next day.
He returns to the vault and inspects the symbols carved into the walls as he waits for them to bring Rung back. After all the turmoil in his emotional cortex - the defragmentation report says he went into shock at some point, which troubles him - Fortress feels more exhausted than he did before he slept. He keeps his EM field tucked tightly around him so that none of the scientists and examiners wander into it and sense his lingering nausea.
Now that he knows what to look for, the guidelines in his processor insist that the cameras embedded within his optics are state of the art. Fully integrated, just like his new armor. Rolled out first among the denizens of the Cog, and more recently among the members of the Primal Vanguard, they provide vital intelligence and surveillance capabilities for the good of Cybertron. As a guard, he can have limited access to someone else's optical feed if he requests it from a functionary for security purposes.
It all feels so...wrong. The knowledge that this is standard operating procedure somehow leaves Fortress even more lost than before. Something deep in his chest twists at the very thought of someone else watching from behind his eyes.
Rung hangs unconscious in the restraints for four hours before he comes back online. Fortress's audials pick up a chattering sound. His legs have locked up again, but he forces himself to leave the safety of the far wall and approach the mech at the center of the cell to investigate.
Shivering hard enough to rattle against his own restraints, Rung meets Fortress's eyes. Up close, cracks and chips cover his entire frame, including his face. Many sections of his paint have worn away to bald metal where he's been handled so many times. They've put his insides back where they belong (how many times?) but never bothered to fix up his face or outermost armor.
His elbows both bend the wrong way. They left his arms broken and strung him up. How much pain is he in?
Fortress is suddenly, horribly certain that they didn't give Rung any form of anesthetic before taking his arm apart.
"Welcome back. Have you been waiting long? Must've dozed off," Rung says. His voice sounds broken rather than groggy. As though Fortress can even contemplate small talk at a time like this.
"Are you in pain?" Fortress asks. His hand rises, then drops back to his side, paralyzed with indecision.
"Always, I'm afraid." Rung smiles. This close to him, Fortress can sense the tattered edges of Rung's own field - a constant, muted throb of pain. He didn't try to repress it earlier, in the examination room; just sensing the ragged edge of it reminds Fortress of the sharp, shattering agony that distorted the room, and he has to take a step back when his processor starts to ache. "Nothing I can't manage."
This...can't be right. Someone must have made a mistake. Fortress can't understand why they would leave Rung broken, otherwise. There's no point. "Why have you not been properly repaired? If the medics have not completed their function adequately -"
A hacking cough interrupts him. The fit shakes Rung for a long moment before subsiding. "I think I should stop you there. I don't see medics much, these days. Just the examiners," Rung states, like it's just a fact of life. Fortress feels like he missed a step on the stairs. "One does wonder how many times you can take someone apart and put them back together again before admitting there's nothing to find."
He uses the same glyphs for [nothing] that appear in his risk assessment profile. Something less than empty, something worse than obsolete.
What had the Evaluator called Rung? A blasphemy. Someone who couldn't be evaluated and assigned a function. "They want to know your function? Or your alt mode?"
Rung raises both his eyebrows. Fortress can't help but stare at them for a moment, before he remembers his optics are recording all this. With a shudder, he switches to stare over Rung's shoulder instead. "Both. Either. I suspect that at this point, no answer would truly satisfy them," Rung says.
"Earlier, you called yourself an ornament. Was that...not correct?" Fortress's hand tries to reach up again; he wraps his arms around himself instead, fighting down another pulse of unease. Nothing makes sense. It's like there is some fundamental disconnect between the knowledge and guidelines that came pre-installed in his brain module, and how he feels about it all in practice. He can't reconcile the two.
Rung tries to sag in his restraints - but the slight shift puts pressure on his right arm, and Fortress sees the whole limb spasm with pain that pinches Rung's face. The spike of agony stops his spark for a second. "'Ornament' is what they assigned me when I was first evaluated," Rung says, his voice tight. Fortress almost wants to order him to stop talking when it's costing him so much effort, but... "I was a therapist. It was a new field, at the time. So far as I am aware, it doesn't exist anymore. Mnemosurgery and personality adjustments are considered far more efficient for dealing with processor glitches and trauma, these days. But my alt mode is...well, nothing. I can't even move when transformed. So when the Council declared psychology an obsolete field, they revoked my ornament classification and brought me to the Cog for further study. I've been here ever since."
Another paroxysm of pain sweeps over Rung. Fortress trips over his own feet trying to backpedal out of his EM field range, though he catches himself before he can crash against the floor. Everyone has their place repeats in his processor, a Functionist aphorism that came preloaded along with most of his basic knowledge and skills.
Everyone except Rung.
"And you really don't know what you are? I -" Fortress's vocalizer skips. He switches his gaze to stare at the floor, at anything apart from Rung. "I knew. From the moment I came online," he says, helplessly, feeling very much a day old. Compared to everyone else in the Cog - compared to Rung - compared to two million years of torture calling itself examination -
Something in his processor skips, an unsettling mental lurch.
Rung's voice clouds with the static of agony. Somehow, he still sounds gentle. "Then you're very lucky. Some mecha struggle to find themselves. It can cause them a great deal of distress, particularly if they're forbidden from choosing the function they feel most suited for."
'Choosing' sets off a firestorm of warning pings in Fortress's processors. At the same time, Rung's right arm wrenches involuntarily, a powerful spasm that floods the room with more sharp waves of pain. Fortress dismisses the warnings and makes an aborted move for the control panel, dragging the emergency instructions for how to operate the restraints out of his pre-installed memories. "Here, let me -" he starts to say, his brain full of half-processed thoughts of taking Rung to the medical sector. He can't stay like this.
"Hey!"
Before he can touch the panel, Fortress freezes in place. His audials and other sensors locate the source of the unfamiliar voice before his head turns, his HUD already identifying the speaker for him. In the headache-inducing flood of warning pings, he'd missed the notification that his fellow security guard was checking in at the door.
"Red Alert," Fortress says, snapping to attention. Red Alert outranks him, technically.
The red, white, and grey mech scowls and stalks through the door. His face is angular, his armored helm heavy and wrapped around his neck in such a way that must making turning it difficult. Hexagonal plates frame his face. "Have you been talking to the object?" Red Alert demands. His optics pin Fortress where he stands as effectively as iron rods through his feet.
Fortress is piercingly aware that he's too close to Rung. His earlier instinct to stay near the wall aligned perfectly with internal guidelines telling him to keep a safe distance away from a prisoner under his protection. "Yes. I was asked by the Evaluator to help determine his function," he says, scrambling for a way to explain, aware that his posture is painfully rigid.
Red Alert's suspicious glare darkens. He finishes striding up to Fortress and shoves him back, away from Rung. He's built shorter and stockier than Fortress, but the force of his push nearly propels Fortress halfway across the chamber. "Do you even understand what you've done?! This could have been a major security breach!" Red Alert insists, his volume rising.
"No one ordered me not to talk to him -"
Red Alert cuts him off with a furious jab of his finger. "I am! Right now! Talking to it is the whole problem! You know who else talked to that thing?!" Incensed, he holds up three fingers right in front of Fortress's stunned face. "Streetwise. Deftwing. Powerflash."
Woozy guilt and tight terror curdle deep in his chest, and Fortress is glad that he hasn't let go of his EM field since dealing with the medic's withering disapproval. "Who?"
Flinging his arms out, Red Alert glares at Fortress. "Exactly! Talking to it is how it gets inside your head! It manipulates you, turns you against your friends, against the Council." He prods the side of his own helm for emphasis. His optics are a bright, piercing blue, full of accusation and unabated suspicion. When Fortress remains frozen at attention, the mech clicks his vocalizer with disgust and starts to pace, muttering to himself. "For all I know, you could already be compromised. I'm the only one left that thing hasn't corrupted, and if you know what's good for you? You'll follow my stringent security protocols, or I'll turn you in just like I did them."
Fortress doesn't dare look at Rung. Being berated by the mech who is effectively his superior officer on the first day - he could be recalled, or worse. The thought of being reported to the Council as a failure...
He stamps on the frenetic mess of emotion threatening to leak out of his chest, and falls back on preprogrammed responses. Brisk, clipped Neocybex, designed for maximum efficiency. Perfectly proper. Council approved. "Yes, Red Alert. I completely understand. What are the protocols?"
Red Alert sends them all in a heavily encrypted packet before Fortress finishes speaking. When Fortress finally puzzles out how to decrypt them - some of Red Alert's encryption keys are bafflingly unfamiliar to Fortress processor, and decidedly not standard for their level of security clearance - he pauses to scroll through the file in awe. It dwarfs all of Fortress's preprogrammed guidelines. There are over one thousand pages' worth of regulations for guarding Rung, each more comprehensively paranoid than the last.
Red Alert has calculated the best possible vantage point along the wall to the nearest centimeter.
While Fortress absorbs all this, Red Alert grumbles and steers him out the door. "If I had my way, we wouldn't even be bringing someone else in to guard the damn thing," he says, an irritated rumble grinding audibly in his chest. "But apparently pulling continuous guard duty without recharge breaks impacts processor integrity, and I can't afford to slip. Neither can you. Give that thing an opening in your armor - any at all - and it'll mess with your head."
His lecture appears to have turned away from almost accusing Fortress of treason, at least. This is still about the worst possible impression he could have made on the head of Rung's security team. "I'll keep that in mind. I won't fail," Fortress promises.
Red Alert shoots him one last warning glare, then engages five extra locking mechanisms on the vault door as it irises shut. Fortress checks. He has neither the passwords nor the necessary clearance to open any of them.
-
When he next rotates in to guard Rung, a day later, both of Rung's arms are fixed. Fortress plants himself where Red Alert's protocols dictate, and stares at the floor beneath Rung with his armor clamped tight against his protoform. He doesn't relax it for even a moment.
Rung studies him in silence until the examiners come again.