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She flunks out of military training with flying colors. It’s the isolation. There’s no room, in flight drills, to speed ahead of the pack or lag behind. Primus have mercy if you indebted your squadron more drills. Only the good fliers who trade in speed and power and glory for obedience succeed.
So she sticks to the courier work. Time to herself to fly and think—the latter is a dangerous thing.
She should be happy. But without the background noise of squadron squabbles, she’s more alone than she’s ever been. At least until she finds the pamphlet.
It’s written on flimsy. Easily destroyed. But she doesn’t. Not right away. She scans the flimsy and then burns it first chance she gets.
Sedition burns in her frame, singing along all her circuits.
She doesn’t have to be a flight mode. She can change. After all, isn’t it called a transformation cog?
She finds the League in the underbelly of a bombarded district. Some grand history lesson imposed by the Functionist Council now lost to the modern age. She tucks her wings in close and delves into the dark.
The glorious revolution, she finds, is a collection of burnouts, out-modes, and seditious thinkers collected in the dark with nebulous word from, allegedly, one of the Twelve.
It’s a brightness in her life, especially since she can have forged credentials to move goods. Subterfuge. Deliveries of vital supplies. Anything for the cause.
The deeper in she wades, the more they share. The idol of the revolution happening off the network is, allegedly, some orange bot. No one can remember a faceplate or a name. Just a vision of orange and a title: The Useless One.
After a whole stellar cycle of dodging patrols and delivering contraband, she dreams.
The shape of her dream is orange—that one specific shade. The Useless One stares with her—because how could such a vision be called anything else?—optics full of some ineffable light. The Useless One is a vision. An ideal.
For just the faintest smile on Her lips, she would do anything. To bask in Her spark's light, she would tear down the ivory towers of the scientists building the Taxonomy. For Her to laugh, she would die over and over and over.
She rouses from recharge with certainty in her spark and a warmth behind her panels. Revisiting the plans for her sorely wanted reformat, she makes changes. It is not enough to simply modify herself out of the cold-constructed frame she was placed in. She needs to become a living ideal, for as long as she lives.
With the plans and stolen paint, she makes her way to the medical ward with her helm held high. It's done by a jet with all the education and none of the licenses. She's happier for it.
Happy enough that when news creeps down the line, she opts to be the first one with her transformation cog removed. Prised out of her frame but she keeps it all the same.
Walking among the revolutionaries gives her a new pride and purpose. She embodies The Useless One and her agenda. She goes up to the surface where a fight brews. It's in the air like static before acid rain.
A roughshod barricade. Glittering shards of glass. Enforcers with bright, hyper-aware visors. Behind them, locked doors where the seditious and the scandalous go to be broken back into shape.
The camera drones hone in on the protest. Not on the enforcer escalation. That would be too crass for state media. No, instead the cameras hone in on the protestors. Accusations of violence.
She finds a fire and holds her transformation cog until the energon left in its circuits catch.
"Live your life without purpose!"
She raises her transformation cog and rears her arm back. She might just be able to scatter the enforcers. Give people time to rush in.
"Change everything by doing nothing!"
The drone hones in on her. She gives it a grin.
"All hail The Useless One!"
Her transformation cog flies through the air. It's the first time she's truly felt herself.