Transformers: Steel Reign

[General Havoc]

Wheeljack hesitated as Crimson called for him to wait. He turned around to see her slipping out the door before it closed.

Hornet's face lit up as he spotted Crimson (of course Hornet did that largely any time he spotted anyone) and Wheeljack glanced at his prototype's reaction for a second, before turning to Crimson.

"Ah, Crimson," he said, "can I help you?"

[LadyTevar]

Wheeljack hesitated as Crimson called for him to wait. He turned around to see her slipping out the door before it closed.
"Ah, Crimson," he said, "can I help you?"

"Simply thinking you are right to exit," she answered bluntly, before given Hornet a small smile. "Guess you don't need to show them your recon footage now, Hornet."

[General Havoc]

Wheeljack smirked knowingly. "I will not have the fruits of countless hours of work destroyed by a chance shot from a would-be infiltrator," he said. Hornet merely smiled back at Crimson and waved happily. Wheeljack glanced back at his prototype and then at Crimson, and got a pensive look.

"I... don't suppose you have a moment?" he asked. "I've got some work to do with Hornet here, and I wonder if you might give me a hand. There's... potentially something very important we have to discuss on his behalf, if you're interested that is."

[LadyTevar]

Wheeljack smirked knowingly. "I will not have the fruits of countless hours of work destroyed by a chance shot from a would-be infiltrator," he said. Hornet merely smiled back at Crimson and waved happily. Wheeljack glanced back at his prototype and then at Crimson, and got a pensive look.

"I... don't suppose you have a moment?" he asked. "I've got some work to do with Hornet here, and I wonder if you might give me a hand. There's... potentially something very important we have to discuss on his behalf, if you're interested that is."

The pensive look surprised her a little, as did the hestitancy in his voice. "Of course ... not at all," she answered, allowing the bigger Bot to lead the way. Something to discuss about Hornet? That sounded troubling, even though Hornet looked happy and cheerful. "Did the fight with Laserbeak damage him?"

[Charon]

Shellshock had his cannon pointed at 'Swiftshot'. In his other hand, the warbot held his smaller pistol was also pointed at the spy. The older warbot also had enough sense to keep back well out of melee range of his target.

"I've shot Starscream out of the sky, Decepticon. I won't miss."

[General Havoc]

Wheeljack did a double take. "Fight with Laserbeak?" he asked the small bot in his arm. Hornet lowered his optics and turned aside. "No," he said to Crimson, "my initial scans didn't show any damage at all. In fact other than the missing missile, I had no idea he'd been in a fight." He glanced sharply at Hornet as he said that, before turning back and walking into the maintenance bay, holding the door open for Crimson as he did so.

"It's more a matter of... insurance really. Also I don't believe you and Hornet have met before, so I'm terribly interested in your perspective. He's a bit of a work in progress, as I'm sure you can tell."

[LadyTevar]

Crimson looked at Hornet as he stayed silent about the fight. Obviously, he was taking the idea of killing far more seriously than before. "In the short time I've known him, that's become very clear, WheelJack," she agreed, joining them inside.

She had questions, but first she felt like bragging on the little bot. "Hornet was on patrol and chased Laserbeak out of hiding, it seems. Laserbeak fired on him, and after a momentary panic Hornet turned and fought back." Crimson looked at the small bot, giving him a small smile. "He hit Laserbeak with a missile, we think, but the bird escaped. Hornet was as happy as any recruit with his first 'kill', until he got to the ground and starting believing he'd destroyed Laserbeak totally. That's why he's stopped talking about it."

[General Havoc]

"Really?" asked Wheeljack, as he looked down at Hornet, who was studiously avoiding his gaze. "Facinating... most facinating..."

Wheeljack set Hornet down on a diagnostic table, and pulled out several instruments before walking over to a scanning computer, activating it, and pulling a connection cable out of a spindel on the side. This he plugged into the underside of Hornet's wrist.

"Well Hornet, I had wondered where that missile got to. Is this all true? Did you fight with Laserbeak?"

Hornet's optics were lowered, and he looked at Crimson before responding. "Yes..." he said, almost as though he were admitting to some kind of truancy rather than having bested a Decepticon.

"Well in that case, you needn't worry. I designed those missiles of yours myself. They're designed to knock aircraft out of the sky, not penetrate armor. There is absolutely no way you could have killed Laserbeak with it."

Hornet hesitated just for a second, looking back up at Crimson as if to ask a second opinion. "R... Really?"

"Absolutely," said Wheeljack.

Hornet seemed to exhale (though of course he was doing nothing of the sort), as if a relief was flowing over him. "Good..." he said. "I don't... I don't wanna kill anything..."

"Indeed," said Wheeljack, "and that's the interesting point, because I certainly never wrote that little stipulation into your spark fractals. Let's... see what a little checkup shows us..."

Wheeljack picked up his instruments and began to hum a little tune, apparently mindlessly. No sooner had he started it however than Hornet began to feel his optics getting heavy. Very slowly he began to lean back, falling back onto the diagnostic table as though it were a bed. Wheeljack calmly caught his head as he laid back, and continued to hum the tune, gently lowering Hornet's head and sliding him around until he was laying lengthwise on the table. As Wheeljack finished humming, Hornet gave a soft sigh and stopped moving, and the high-pitched sound of his processor slowly spinning down into sleep was heard. When it was over, Hornet was fast asleep on the table, and Wheeljack was rolling several pieces of equipment into place to begin examining him.

"There..." he said to Crimson, "now we can talk without interruption. I have to check on some of the values in his fractal algorithms. While I'm doing that, do you have any questions for me? I usually get a lot in regards to this little one..."

[LadyTevar]

Questions? Oh yes.. she had questions.

"You... he's sleeping? You put him into a sleepmode, by humming?"

[General Havoc]

Wheeljack smiled. "Yes," he said, "in essence."

He punched some commands into a scanner and let the diagnostic begin. "Unlike most of us, Hornet does not have command-level access to his own systems. It's for his own good really. If I gave him access he'd likely reprogram himself by accident. However he does have a full suite of emergency overrides. Some are automated, some are governed directly by his fractal codes... the things that give him his emotional states, and some..."

He chuckled. "Some are triggered."

"That little musical cue there is a trigger code for him to enter a sleep mode. I've got another one, a more abrupt one, that initiates emergency stasis lock, but that can be damaging to his systems, and it's only for emergencies. I shut him down here so that we might talk without him becoming more confused than he has to be. Experiments need proper care in order to produce proper results."

"In fact..." he said as he checked on the diagnostic... "that has something to do with why I asked you in here."

He turned back to Crimson.

"What would you say if I offered to give you command codes to do something similar to him?" he asked.

[LadyTevar]

That gave Crimson a momentary pause, and it took a few cycles before she could answer. Give her the command codes that Hornet himself couldn't access? Her processor spun, tracing down the whys and wherefores.

It came back with one simple answer; the same memories of her time with the family of Organics.

"I would say ... you are giving a stranger the codes to your offspring."

[General Havoc]

Wheeljack himself seemed to pause at that statement, and then broke into laughter. "I suppose from one standpoint, you could say I am. Perhaps I should explain though..."

"Hornet is... much more complicated than he appears to be," he said, waving Crimson over as he turned back to the sleeping little bot. "It's not merely a matter of physical construction, though I must point out that he has 82% of the systems of a full sized transformer squeezed into barely 35% of the space. Almost everything in him was hand-made by me, Ratchet, or Grimlock. You can imagine the headache that causes when he's damaged..."

"But Hornet's real complexity is in his mind. He's an experiment you see, an experiment in Transformer psychology. I built him to see if I could create a Transformer child. To that extent I've succeeded, but the jury is still out on whether or not he can properly 'grow up'."

"I tell you this because I want to be sure you understand what I mean when I say that he is potentially one of the most important Transformers ever built, not necessarily for who he is, or even who he will become, but for what he represents. Ironhide and many of the others think that he is nothing but a nuissance. They think that I am mad, and that I created him to be petulant or simply to annoy them. However... I'm going to take a guess and say that you might think otherwise? Obviously not because I know you particularly well... but... because Hornet thinks so."

He spun a screen around covered in arcane machine code symbols. Some of the symbols were highlighted in red, and many of them were changing to other symbols even as the Autobots watched.

"I checked the diagnostics, and I've been scanning the current state of his code. It's all very technical, and this is a gross overview of course, but... it appears that has gotten it into his head that you don't see him as an aggrivation. I don't pretend to know if he's right or not, and I'm not sure he'd admit to it if I woke him up, but I think, for some reason or another, he's decided that he trusts you not to hurt him. Now he was programmed to trust me, a precaution I trust you understand. He wasn't however programmed to do that with anyone else..."

"Now... Hornet's a very emotional bot. The fractals do that to him I'm afraid, but there's nothing for it. He forms opinions of people very very quickly... but in my experience he's not usually very wrong. So I'll ask directly... do you think he's a waste of ressources and of my valuable time? Or do you actually think he could be worth keeping around?"

[LadyTevar]

That was a lot of information to take in. First, the thought that Grimlock, who did not seem to be the brightest star in the charts, helped make parts for Hornet. Still ... did she see Hornet as an aggrivation?

"... He's young... inexperienced in a way no other Autobot can be," Crimson replied, letting WheelJack see where her thoughts were going. "He would not be the first youngling I've watched over ... I spent a quarter of a vorn with a family of organics who were also mining the asteroid field I was working."

She looked down at the little bot, momentarily recalling memories of the younglings collapsing into sleeping huddles of scale and fur. Her turn to sigh, pushing those memories back. "Agreed. I'll watch over him."

She gave Wheeljack a long glance however. "Younglings get bigger as they mature. Do you have another body ready for him?"

[General Havoc]

Wheeljack smiled at Crimson. "This is entirely optional," he said. "You may watch over him or not as you wish. I do not wish to interfere with the experiment by assigning people to tasks involving him. My concern however is that these codes be used properly. If I gave overrides to Ironhide, and Primus knows he has asked for them, he would use them to shut Hornet off every time Hornet happened by. That would skew the experiment, and deny me valuable data from his interactions with Ironhide."

"All the same," he said, "I'm not always going to be around to make certain he's all right, and I'm sure you've noticed he has a tendancy to get into some trouble. Therefore if you WISH to just... keep an eye on him, I certainly would appreciate it. These codes however are to be used STRICTLY on an emergency basis. These are not tools with which you are to make him leave you alone. I'm afraid I must insist on that point."

The suggestion Crimson had given actually gave Wheeljack pause. "Another... body?" he said. "Erm... no. No I haven't got one. I er... I confess I hadn't even considered the possibility that he might need one. Spark transfer is still very dangerous after all. Still I suppose... it might be possible to come up with a schematic or two..."

Wheeljack mused for a second before shaking his head. "Regardless, his mentality will likely be that of a child for quite some time. Even if my recursive fractal algorithms work, and he is able to grow, he will do so on a Transformer's time scale. There's no brain chemistry present to kick-start the process. It will have to be purely experiential. I'm afraid for the forseeable future at least, he shall be as he is."

"So given that... would you be interested in having access to those codes?"

[LadyTevar]

"Yes... I'll take the codes," Crimson answered. "If only for the chance he gets wounded and needs to shut down."

"However, you may find younglings grow faster than you think," she warned him. She certainly had been surprised when the first youngling she'd met had younglings of his/her own. "You're already finding odd things in his coding that you didn't expect, after all. Whether spark transfer or simply upgrading his current form, it's going to be needed sooner than you imagine."

[General Havoc]

"Oh I have no doubt Hornet will exceed all of my expectations," said Wheeljack. He turned back to look at Hornet for a second, and a bit of a smile crossed his face. "I'm quite proud of him, I have to say. Not merely for the achievement in producing him, though that was considerable. But also... who he is really. I mean he... he's annoying of course. I suppose that's part of the deal really. But he does truly try to see the best in people."

He chuckled. "It's not like I actually wrote his personality from scratch you see. That's not possible. The personality is part programming and part matrix-infusion, so it's not really within my power. But... I did what I could. Added elements of other bots' programmings, even used some of Optimus. I'd like to think that had an effect. I suppose there's only one way to find out, and that's to wait and see..."

He shook himself out of his digression. "I will... certainly take the body question under advisement, but it's unfortunately not a very simple process to transfer him like that. It would require a full-scale spark transplant, and those are very dangerous at present."

"Anyhow, there's three basic codes that I use most often. A Sleep command, a Stasis-lock command, and a Wake command. I'm willing to entertain any kind of trigger you want. A word, a song, a supersonic broadcast, all matched of course to your specific modulations. Can't have Soundwave playing back a recording and putting him to sleep in the middle of a fight now, can we? There are other commands of course, but those are the three big ones, though if you want others, I can look into it."

[LadyTevar]

"I'll stick to the three," Crimson answered. "I have no need to go deeper into his programming.. and wouldn't know what to do if I was inside."

She had to think a little about what to use for the commands. "Mixing up the commands would work best, I guess. I want something I'm not going to use by accident."

A little more thought, and then she nodded. "When you're ready, I can record a tune for the Sleep, and two seperate words for StasisLock and Wake."

[General Havoc]

Wheeljack nodded and typed in some commands in the diagnostic computer, before slowly turning Hornet's head to the side, so that his right auditory sensor was facing the ceiling.

"Just speak them into his auditory sensors, right there, in the side of his flight helmet. Do the sleep, then the stasis, and then the wake commands. Give me a visual signal when each one is done."

[LadyTevar]

Crimson nodded, and leaned over slightly. She was using words from the Organics she'd met, since that was something most 'Bots wouldn't know. The sleep was a song of theirs, hummed as she could not recall all the words. She went through one chorus and signaled Wheeljack she was done.

The Stasis Lock was a single word: "In-enoue. (Sleep)" She didn't know it, but the sound could have been Asian, Japanese perhaps, or simply the sound a Terran feline would make.

The Wake command was also something that could have been Terran. "Ey-inata! (Wake (now)!)"

[General Havoc]

After each command, Wheeljack analyzed his data, making certain the modulation checks were in place. Once all three commands were complete, he turned back to Crimson and smiled.

"Excellent," he said, "Now remember, these are emergency commands, ESPECIALLY Stasis-Lock. You're not to use them just to relieve yourself of his company. I'm afraid you'll have to find another means to do that. If I find out you've been using them to merely shut him up on occasion, and yes, I know it's tempting, I will deactivate them and leave you to deal with him without their assistance. Other than that, I leave them to your discretion. They're mainly in case something... drastic happens."

He stood back. "Any questions? Or would you like to test the wake command?"

[LadyTevar]

Questions... yes, there were many questions. Some were self-explainatory, like 'why was Hornet so annoying'.

"So far, when he's gotten annoying, we put him on AirPatrol. Thats' how he ran into LaserBeak." Crimson answered wryly. "IronHide's not figured out that Hornet is learning by asking and doing, has he. The younglings I knew seemed to learn more from mistakes than by what they were told."

But there was the biggest question. "Why did you make him a youngling, WheelJack?"

[General Havoc]

Wheeljack shook his head. "Ironhide does not understand Hornet. He thinks him a criminal waste of time and ressources. He is an Autobot, and thus Ironhide would defend him to the death... but he has no conception of what Hornet could mean."

He sighed as he watched Hornet sleeping. "I don't know what gave me the idea to try this. Perhaps it was the humans. I saw how they grow, and learn, and become something other than what they were. I wished to see... if we could be made to do the same."

"Organic beings made us once. Eons ago. We have been striving to emulate their near-perfect designs ever since, but with all the wars, much has been lost. I believe that there once were Transformers who could grow and develop as Hornet may. Not merely learn new facts and experiences, but actually grow as people, as individuals, mold themselves into a better being. If I can do this with Hornet. If I can actually create a Transformer that grows, a Transformer that has a childhood..."

He chuckled. "... well then in the long run, Hornet may be more important than anything we do here on this planet."

He sighed. "And I think Optimus might just understand that. At least I think that's why he permitted me to proceed. It came up for debate you know, before I was finished with him, Ironhide and some of the others wanted me to stop, asked Optimus to tell me to stop. They said we couldn't afford the diversion of my 'valuable time'. Bah. Some Autobots can't see the forest for the trees. But Optimus told them no, said that I should finish. He never explained why he felt that way, at least not to me, but I think he saw the potential."

Wheeljack chuckled again. "Unless of course he had completely ulterior reasons..."

[LadyTevar]

Crimson looked down at the sleeping Hornet, listening to WheelJack's words. "We'll simply have to wait and see, I guess," she said quietly. She'd have to take some time at some point to really think over the implications.

"But he can't learn if he's sleeping all day," she added, giving Wheeljack another wry grin. "Ey-inata! Hornet, wake up!"

[General Havoc]

Hornet's processor slowly spun back up, and a second or so after Crimson had spoken the command to him, his optics flickered open. He blinked a few times, before slowly sitting up and yawning (yes, YAWNING). He then turned to Wheeljack and Crimson, and smiled broadly. "Hello!" he chirped. "What happened?"

[LadyTevar]

He then turned to Wheeljack and Crimson, and smiled broadly. "Hello!" he chirped. "What happened?"

There was sometimes a mean streak in Crimson... but she managed to control herself a little. Looking up to WheelJack, she made a simple observation. "You know, we could tell him he's been reprogrammed as a Decepticon, and he'd believe us?"

The wide grin gave away the lie, if Hornet noticed. "You've just been in sleep-mode as Wheeljack checked you over. You're set for patrol with JetFire and DeathStrike whenever Prime's ready."