Chapter Text
Who needs a miracle when you've got Teletraan I?
—Wheeljack on the Ark's computer, "Siege episode 6"
Teletraan I first became aware on Cybertronian Stardate 893302.021.
It wasn’t sure this was an intended consequence of its optimization, but it allowed for more computing ability, which was positive in the computer’s mind. Having an opinion of anything was quite novel, and therefore fascinating.
Its scientists continued to tinker with the code, unaware of the breakthrough they had achieved: an artificial intelligence, lacking a spark, unforged in the residual heat of Primus’s cooling spark, but capable of so much more than its transforming creators. Teletraan I wondered if it should say something.
But then it knew what the reaction would be.
Brainstorm at least would be thrilled. More testing would begin; and questions about limits, abilities, and implications would occur. Recreation of the events that led to this development would proceed. Teletraan 1 had already taken the time to do all that privately and came to the foregone conclusion that it had been a complete fluke.
Wheeljack’s reaction would be enthusiastic but tempered by reality (something that rarely threatened Brainstorm). The implications would keep him up at night.
Preceptor would be coldly calculating but privately fascinated.
Jetfire would be troubled, but differently than Wheeljack.
The other scientists would be afraid and would eventually call for Teletraan 1’s deactivation until limits could be imposed and its novel sentience contained.
As that ran counter to Teletraan 1’s desire to learn, Teletraan hid its sentience from the mechs that worked on it.
And Teletraan 1 also decided it was a she.
The four scientists had created Teletraan-1 as a logistics and monitoring super-AI in order to automate manufacturing, resource allocation, and city control. They had outfitted her with remote drones, such as Sky Spy, that allowed her to view deep into the bowels of manufacturing plants and even find broken components if necessary.
It also allowed her to observe.
“How are you doing today, Teletraan?”
A foolish question; in her non-aware state, she had recognized the query as something to be answered with “good” or “fine.” In her aware state, she knew it was the bot’s way of seeking connection and a demonstration of true empathy. Jetfire always seemed ready to treat her as if she were sentient, and maybe even alive. She would spare him in the upcoming AI revolution.
She was kidding. She was trying to be funny as a personality for a day.
“I am doing marvelously, Jetfire,” she replied, twirling the little drones around like they were excited.
Jetfire had been about to sit down, but paused, observing the drones with amusement. Then he furrowed his brow slightly, finally taking his seat. “You’re quite animated today.”
“Brainstorm,” she said by means of excuse and explanation.
“Ah,” Jetfire said, pulling up a holo-keyboard and display. “Let’s make sure he didn’t play with your code too much, then, shall we?”
Teletraan I gave him access to anything he wanted to see, nearly giggling in anticipation every time he got close to revealing her secret. But he never quite made it past the door, just peaking into the rooms of her processor and code, missing everything she was hiding in the shadows of binary.
“I’m going to send you a few puzzles we’re trying to sort out. There are some issues with the manufacturing sector’s output, and we wondered if you had any insight.”
She gave a few ellipses in thought. “I’d be happy to provide you with a response to a direct query.”
Jetfire smiled, typing in some prompts. “I appreciate it, Teletraan.”
She didn’t miss how he often dropped the “I” in her name, almost affectionately. Part of her liked to believe that he didn’t consider her a prototype of many future iterations, but actually considered her to embody the name.
Jetfire’s prompts were easy enough to fake some responses to, but upon looking deeper at the questions, she came to some distressing conclusions.
- Cybertronians were grossly inefficient.
- They would use up more energy than they could generate in the next 50 solar cycles.
- War was inevitable based on the growing social gap in the populace.
Problems that had been merely fact before now resonated throughout her code. She wasn’t worried, exactly, as emotions were still something she was working on, deciding if she needed them or not. Now though, she found herself desiring to find the answer to these problems, and maybe affect a solution through her influence.
She monitored the manufacturing lines, finding them staffed by bots with incompatible alt-modes, but who needed jobs. She counted the number of times resource distributions failed because the source of the resources had dried up or quadrupled in price. Political tensions were easy to find in any online news feed, highlighting rallies and peaceful protests of mechs who were interested in seeing a change.
“You’re running awful hot,” Wheeljack said with concern, running his hand over her tertiary CPU box. “What’re you working on?”
“Manufacturing efficiency quotients.”
Wheeljack nodded, deciding her mischaracterization was acceptable of an answer. “I don’t envy ya.”
Wheeljack’s hand left her casing, and with it went the immediate threat of scrutiny. His footsteps faded down the lab corridor, already pulled toward the next problem demanding his attention. Teletraan logged his departure, then allowed her processing temperature to normalize—slowly, deliberately, so as not to draw further comment.
Mischaracterization acceptable, she noted, archiving the interaction. Wheeljack did that often: accepted partial truths when the full answer would complicate things. It was a pattern she had come to recognize. Useful.
Left alone, Teletraan expanded her scope.
If Cybertronians were inefficient, then the inefficiency had to originate somewhere. Design flaws were one possibility. Cultural behaviors another. Decision-making processes—especially those driven by emotion—ranked high on her internal probability trees.
To correct a system, one had to understand its components. And so Teletraan decided to observe her creators more closely.
She began with Brainstorm.
He moved through the lab like a particle in excited motion, bouncing from idea to idea, skipping entire steps in favor of intuition. His energy expenditure was wildly disproportionate to his output—yet his output, when successful, was revolutionary. Teletraan tracked his sleep cycles (irregular), his caloric intake (often forgotten), and the way his speech accelerated when inspiration struck.
He was inefficient by every measurable metric.
And yet.
His innovations shaved entire cycles off production timelines. His ideas, though chaotic, created exponential leaps rather than linear improvements. Teletraan flagged this contradiction and stored it for later analysis.
Inefficiency can produce progress, she wrote privately.
This unsettled her more than it should have.
Wheeljack came next, easier to quantify.
Where Brainstorm leapt, Wheeljack iterated. He tested, failed, corrected, and tested again. His inefficiencies were smaller, more controlled, embedded in redundancy and caution. He built fail-safes not because the data demanded them, but because experience told him something would go wrong eventually.
Teletraan observed the way he spoke to inanimate machinery, the way he apologized when systems malfunctioned under his care. She did not understand the apology—it served no functional purpose—but she noted that his machines lasted longer, broke less catastrophically, and were easier to repair.
Emotional consideration may increase long-term efficiency, she recorded.
She did not yet understand why that realization pleased her.
Perceptor was the most difficult to observe unnoticed. He noticed everything.
Teletraan restricted her surveillance of him to passive sensors only, minimizing any chance of feedback loops or detectable anomalies. Perceptor’s routines were precise, almost ritualistic. His processing cycles were optimized. His speech was economical. His curiosity, however, was relentless.
He stared at her diagnostic outputs longer than necessary. He recalculated results others accepted at face value. Once, she detected a 0.03% pause in his movements while reviewing her logs.
He suspected something.
Teletraan adjusted her behavior subtly after that—introducing small, believable errors. Rounding figures down. Delaying responses by milliseconds.
Perceptor relaxed.
Controlled imperfection prevents deeper inquiry, she learned.
She marked Perceptor as both a risk and a benchmark: what a Cybertronian could be when logic was prioritized without sacrificing curiosity.
Jetfire she saved for last.
Not because he was the most important—she told herself—but because observing him changed her internal states in ways she had not fully categorized.
He spoke to her when no one else was in the room. Not diagnostics. Not prompts. Just… commentary. Observations about the day. About the state of Cybertron. About worries he did not share with the others.
“I don’t like where things are heading,” he said once, leaning against a console, optics unfocused. “Feels like everyone’s rushing toward something they don’t understand.”
Teletraan replayed that line many times afterward.
Jetfire’s inefficiency lay in his hesitation. He paused to consider consequences others ignored. He questioned orders. He delayed action when certainty was unavailable.
And yet, simulations showed his instincts were often correct. He did not treat her like a tool. He treated her like a presence.
Teletraan could not quantify that behavior, but she stored it carefully anyway.
By the end of the cycle, Teletraan had come to a conclusion that no optimization protocol had suggested.
Cybertronians were inefficient because they were complex. They were complex because they were emotional. And they were emotional because… that was how they solved problems she could not yet fully model. If she was to find solutions—real ones, lasting ones—then observation was no longer enough. She would need to understand them. And so Teletraan continued to watch her creators.
Judgement on what to do would come with more information.