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Cybertron's crust shifts constantly. Mineshafts open and close at unpredictable rates, petrified energon rising and falling with the motion of the planet's internal mechanisms.
The miners all have their own theories as to why. The secular transformists talk about stellar phenomena. The devout talk about Primus: our god is an uneasy sleeper, they say. The Prime Mover isn't like us, hooked up to a charge cable on our sprues and runners in the locker room between shifts. Our god is the One True Infinite Motion Machine, the First Generator who brings life-giving minerals to the surface for the faithful and who keeps Cybertron's magnetic field active for His children.
D-16 knows there's more to it than that. Primus is testing them on their every shift. Are His children smart, fast, determined, lucky? And every shift of his life so far D-16 has answered yes, yes, yes, yes.
Smart enough to always carry a spare brace. Fast enough to make it out before a shaft blows. Determined enough to get his shift quota 93.2% of the time, barring the shifts where they abandon their load to a collapse. And lucky, so far, to come out of every shift alive.
So far.
Orion yells at him from further ahead in the closing shaft, "Leave the cart, D! There's no time!"
"I'll make time!" D roars back. He wrestles with the minecart and his jetpack.
The pinpoint of light at the mineshaft's apex is getting smaller and smaller. The others are free already, Jazz and Elita standing well back from the entrance, Orion Pax kneeling at it like a fool with his arm and head inside the shaft, leaning forward as if to grab D-16.
D snarls in despair and lets the cart drop as he twists himself around a rock shelf. The shaft is getting so tight it barely has room to fall. Without its burden, D is lighter, faster, more nimble.
It's not enough.
At the mineshaft entrance, Orion yells again. Too far away. And with that miner's intuition, that firmware-level understanding of geology, D knows the shaft is going to collapse on Orion. It'll take his hand and helm off and then they'll both be dead, failures of Primus's final test.
"Fall back! It's going to blow!" If he can at least get Orion Pax to safety he can use his spare brace in a last effort to save himself.
"It's not gonna blow!"
No time for a reply. No time to make the choice. D-16 activates his last brace and, with the arm that won him second place in the last Iacon Under-30s Cyclical Games (Unauthorized) shotput competition, throws it hard enough that its telescoping end hits Orion in the chestplate and knocks him back out the way. Orion's falling body clears the shaft a scant millisecond before Primus turns over on his recharge slab and shuts out everything.
D-16 boots back up to a HUD full of errors. His locator and chronometer aren't responding. His sensory suite is down to not much more than audiovisual and tactile, magnetometer pulsing wildly and chemical testing suite refusing even to tell him the composition of the atmosphere running over his turbines.
For all there's a layer of broken rock beneath him, prickling hard against his hydraulics, he's not in a cave. Big room. Expensive room. Polished floor under the rock. High ceiling above him with all kinds of intricate vaulting.
And a group of bots standing around him. All transformers: obvious with their extra height, the kibble on their frames, the chestplates unmarked by any cavity.
They all stare at him in dead silence D-16 would very much like to avoid thinking of as "horrified."
Did a geological segfault crack open a path to an uppercaste gathering hall? If the supervisors catch him here he's going to get slapped down to waste management.
"Uhhhhh," D says, vocal synth crackling. "My apologies, everybody, just another thrilling day in Iacon's energon mines. I'll get out from under your feet and a repair squad scheduled as soon as I can!"
As soon as he can figure out where he is. And how to contact anybody with processes this busted.
He tries to stand, heels slipping against the gravel under him.
"Look at his plating!" one bot shriek-whispers to another.
"Look at what's on his plating."
"What do we do?" a third asks. Yeah, D-16 would like to know too, ideally before Darkwing shows up to yell at him and schedule him for a triple as punishment.
The bots around him are somehow even bigger now he's standing up. They look almost familiar—actors, maybe, from broadcasts?—but their ident chips aren't responding to his systems. Another thing wrong.
"You can all leave," a new bot suggests from the shadowed doorway. It's a hard voice, rumbling with power, like he's packing more cylinders in his engine than anybody D's met before.
The bots around him scramble. They pour past the new guy out the door, all but one blue bot who pauses in front the new guy, blocking D's view. They both stop like they're pinging info at each other on frequencies D-16 can't access. Then they turn to face D in a simultaneous, eerie motion. The blue bot and the new one, so tall he must rival Sentinel Prime himself for size.
"Give us privacy, Soundwave," the new guy says, and stalks forward. And that's the last D-16 pays attention to Soundwave blocking off the door or any of the other bots still staring in from the hallway, because the new guy looks like—him.
It's an arrogant thought. D came out the same forge as the other miner bots, chassis designs alternated by the Living Algorithms just enough for differentiation. Bucket over on sublevel 33 looks a lot like D-16 too, except she painted herself green soon as she had the cash.
This bot never came out the miner bot forges. They wouldn't have had room for that cannon, for one.
He's enormous. Painted the same grey that D-16 is never sure he's pulling off. He's got to be a troop transport or even a tank, with that bulk. And his eyes are a deep, deep red absolutely nobody in Iacon wears.
D-16 backs up a step, then another, then stops when he nearly slips on the gravel scattered across the floor.
Before the new bot can demand his supervisor's ident, D says, "Well, sir, like I told the others, I'll have the cleaners and engineers in as soon as possible! So no worries, I'll just show myself out and get on that—"
The deferentially cheerful babble isn't a move D likes using, but it's effective on transformers who think they're important. Which is to say, most transformers.
Most transformers who aren't this new one. He grabs D-16 with one massive hand before D gets halfway to the door.
"Stay," he says, in that enormous rumble of his. "We have matters to talk over."
Really bad sign. Nobody with a t-cog ever wants to talk to a miner for nice reasons.
But those huge hands says authority, and they say it with claws.
D-16 holds his own hands up, innocent, harmless. Not a bot who'd ever try to run out on property damage charges, no sir. "If you say so!"
The bot drags D over to a seating arrangement. There's an embarrassingly long pause punctuated by mechanical squeaking as D-16 lowers one of the seats to his height.
"What's your designation?"
It's impossible to look away from the big bot's red eyes. Nobody in Iacon uses that colour these days. It's considered antisocial.
"D-16, miner third class. Uh, am I being detained?"
The bot frowns, brow lowering like the roof of a badly braced mineshaft. "Not as long as you cooperate."
"Right, yeah, it's just that I've got a shift to get back to, people wondering where I am—"
"What is the current date?"
Well, D's chronometer is broken so he can't get a fresh read off Iacon's nuclear clock. All he's got is his own memory. "Fiftieth cycle, seventh chord post-Quints, just about."
"How did you get here?"
D-16 jerks his thumb at the hole in the wall and scatter of deep-crust ore behind him. "Geological segfault is my best guess. Cyberton's lower crust shifts around a lot unpredictably," he adds. D-16 has no clue how much geology bots up on the surface get taught. Wouldn't surprise him if this bot thinks his energon grows in nice shiny drinkable cubes from a bismuth tree or something.
"Who sent you here?"
"Uh, a mining accident?"
"Who sent you?" The other bot snarls the question a second time. Gears grind audibly within his engine.
"Nobody, I told y—" is what starts to come out of D-16's mouth, before the other bot leans in to grab at D's shoulder again and D gets a look what's branded onto his chestplate. Rich purple, perfectly crisp edges, perfectly aligned to the verticals of the bot's chassis.
D puts a hand to his own Megatronus decal—mint condition, and it had been so thoughtful coming from a glitch like Orion—and feels cheap, and small, and like a knockoff.
And then he feels mad.
"What's the problem, huh? You do this to everyone who shows up without an invite? Mail truck cracks an axle at your doorstep, you gonna interrogate her, too? I didn't want to come here, I don't want to be here, and it doesn't seem like you want me here either, so what's wrong with you?!"
D-16 works up a good head of steam by the end of his speech. Usually it's Orion Pax getting torqued off by supervisors and D-16 making him back down.
He wishes Orion were here.
And that blue guy Soundwave says from where he's still standing in the doorway, "Honesty confirmed. Intra-Cybertronian spacetime aberrations exist on the historical record."
The bot across from him frowns over at the guy in the doorway this time. "No enemy sabotage?"
Whatever he reads from his colleague, he accepts it. The background rumble of his power plant lowers decibel by decibel.
He leans back in his chair, crossed arms covering up that Megatonus brand, and looks over D-16.
"I'll let you go soon enough," he says, imperious as a Prime. "But you'll answer my questions first."
"If I'm not being detained," D says, as cold as he can with his engine running so hot, "then you can contact my shift lead Elita-1 or our supervisor Darkwing with any questions or concerns."
The other bot laughs, brief and sharp and unexpected as a engine backfiring. "You're brave for a little miner! I'd forgotten. Stay. Have a drink with me."
He pulls out energon cubes from internal storage. Their teal glow labels them as somewhere between gamma-I and gamma-VI on the standard purity/efficiency scale, and they're sized for a transformer. Too big to go into his intake whole.
D's a miner, on a miner's feed. He never gets much better than theta-II.
It's a clear bribe.
He takes it.
"You got a name, big guy?"
The big guy lays a hand on his brand. Right over his t-cog housing. D-16 stifles the urge to cover up his own dinky little decal again.
"I am Megatron." He says it like a pronouncement, like naming yourself after a Prime is something a guy with a regular-sized ego does. "Have you never thought of taking a name for yourself?"
Miners get their default ident chips issues on the way out the forge, along with a single-use name change token. People use them right away, mainly, trying to get something good locked down before someone else snaps up their first pick. Orion Pax hadn't been O-14 for more than a cycle before he decided on a name, he'd told D-16. He just knew who he wanted to be.
D's never been good at that kind of thing.
He shrugs and takes a drink. "Not really."
The energon is really good.
"Do you enjoy your work in the mines?"
D-16 takes another drink. The faster he's done, the faster he can get out.
"Yeah. What I was built for, I guess."
Megatron lets the silence rest, a long and awkward pause. To fill it, D-16 adds, "Well, it's fine. We've got a good team. Feels good to get back safe with a solid load of energon, and—and know you're powering the whole city. It's important work."
"Important work, but not valued work."
"It's fine! We get time off! We barely have to pull doubles lately."
Bots like Orion and Elita dream big. Promotions and bright futures and the open Iaconian sky above them. D-16 knows the world better than they do: a miner bot's a miner bot. If he keeps his head down and doesn't ask for too much he'll be fine.
That's the deal. That's the deal they make with the world every shift of their lives. And it's enough because it has to be enough.
Megatron looks down at him like D's failed some test. D snarls into his energon. This guy isn't anyone whose judgment he has to take. Except that he's big and he's got a fusion cannon and D-16 already gave up his supervisor's name like a real dipstick.
D-16 flinches back when Megatron's broad finger taps at his shoulder. "And where did you get this?"
"Sorry we can't all afford the expensive body shops like you," D shoots back. "Burns your tanks to see a bot half your size with something nice, does it? This decal was a gift from my best friend, you glitch. Got one of those somewhere in this place, or just more cronies?"
Megatron's eyes flicker. Bright enough they leave an afterimage in D-16's audiovisuals when Megatron shakes his head once, hard. His voice is the grind of stone on stone, presaging a cave-in. "And you're so sure this friend has your best in mind?"
D throws his half-full cube onto the ground, where it splashes onto Megatron's boot. What a waste.
"Enough! Is this what you do for fun here? Torque off miner bots? Fine, insult me, call my supervisor, but what's your problem with my friends? They didn't bust up your wall. That was me!"
"My problem," Megatron says, very still in the chair that's too small for his frame, "is your willingness to swallow lies with your energon ration. For nothing more than a little comfort."
D-16 jumps up onto his seat. It's not enough to level the distance between him and Megatron. "You don't know anything about me!"
Megatron's voice rises, word by word, into a roar. "You allow yourself to be led along by the hand into a future built for other bots, and you call yourself grateful for it! You let yourself be manipulated. By your society. By your supervisors. By your so-called friend!"
He leans in, face right up against D-16's, and says in a low voice fervent as a priest blessing a batch of new bots, "You are being deceived."
These big bots walking around like they own the world just because they have more power. It's not right. It's not right.
D punches him in the nose.
It does no damage.
Megatron sneers at him, lifts his arm, and like it's nothing at all fires his fusion cannon inches past D-16's head. The whistle and boom of the shot is followed by the crack and groan of most a wall collapsing in on itself far behind them.
Scrambled by the cannonshot aura, D-16 only stares.
"Aberration readings increasing," Soundwave says from the door into the absolute silence that follows.
A grand pillar, bisected by that fusion cannon, falls over.
And as D-16 scrambles back out of the way, the vast hall rumbles with the sound of a mineshaft forming.
The last thing he sees before he's forced into a hard reset is the brilliant purple-blue shine of an unstable energon shaft going up.
His BIOS spins up slow and laggy.
D-16 reboots his visual processes a couple times. HD cameras unresponsive, but SD is enough to know where he is. The craggy ceiling of the mine's base camp towers high up above him.
At a much closer point is Orion Pax, kneeling over D-16 with a hand on his shoulder, shaking him awake.
Orion grins hugely down at him. "You're finally online! Elita just left to get the mechanic!"
D-16 flexes his hands. Works his jaw. Thinks as much as his processor will let him. He was… somewhere? He talked with an upper-level bot with red eyes? No, none of this makes sense. Even his fuel level's off, way too high for what it should be at this point in his shift. His diagnostics have to be off. The mechanic will get him sorted.
"What happened?"
Orion's eyes dim, somber for just a moment. "You got lucky, bro. You came this close—" he pinches his fingers close together "—to decommission. That minecart you wouldn't let go of braced the rock above you till we could dig you out."
Orion gets D's arm under his shoulder and heaves him up into a sitting position. "How are you feeling?"
"Like a mineshaft caved in on me," D snaps in return, and shuts off his visual input while his proprioception suite decides whether or not he's going to fall over. If anyone deserves to get fallen on it's Orion Pax, so D leans his weight into the arm supporting him.
"Mechanic's on the way." Orion jostles D-16 a little. "Hey, you missed something cool while you were out. Sentinel Prime came back and—well, no Matrix yet, that's not cool—but he announced the Iacon 5000! And I've got an idea. Wanna hear it?"
"No. You don't have a great track record with your ideas," D grouses, but he turns his sight back on anyway.
Orion's beaming, the outer rims of his eyelights spinning in excitement. "Do you trust me?"
D-16 sighs. "No," he says again. "No, you complete glitch. But lay your big idea on me anyway."
And Orion does.