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Trepan was intimately familiar with how it felt to die. One of his guilty pleasures was studying (injecting) deceased processors, which always provided such vivid pictures of their owners’ final moments, memory decay notwithstanding.
The processors that Overlord brought home gave insight into various methods of death. Shot, crushed, ripped apart, whether fast or slow, Trepan has experienced it all. The only death he’s never touched was the destruction of one’s head, for obvious reasons.
Getting shot through the spark felt different from what he expected.
A Cybertronian’s spark was the essence of their being, their soul, but their central processor was, biologically, only hardware. You are dead the moment your spark goes out, plain and simple, but there is a non-negligable amount of time between when a spark extinguishes and when the processor fully shuts down from the lack of power supplied. That fleeting period between life and death can last a few seconds to nearly a minute, variable depending on the individual.
Trepan was already dead. He knew that. His spark was destroyed the moment Megatron’s cannon blast went through his chest. He knew that right now, “he” was no more than a disembodied processor desperately trying to make sense of what’s happened.
Time seemed to have stopped. Trepan could “see” his murderer before him, tall and grand and terrifying, that signature fusion cannon still glowing hot. He wasn’t really “seeing”, his processor merely froze on the afterimage of the last thing his optics took in. There was no sound, no feeling, even the hole in his chest might as well not exist. He simply… was. Floating in this non-existent state.
How long would it take before his processor shuts down? Trepan managed to form the thought. Would he be stuck here for what felt like eternity? In all his explorations into deceased processors he never encountered anything that felt like this. Perhaps these last moments always went first when memory decay sets in. What a shame that there was no way to document his findings.
Perhaps… there was a way. To save it. These final memories, discoveries. Those thoughts alone already took too long, a strange fuzziness crept in on the edges of his awareness, warning of imminent shutdown. He could save his final thoughts as hard-coded recordings, not just fleeting memories. Perhaps then…
Ah, Overlord, you are watching this, aren’t you?
I’m sorry our lessons had to be cut short. I had so much left to teach you.
Forgive me. You were the best student I ever had.
I believe in you. Please take this as your official approval of graduation.
Congratulations. I hope [Data Corrupted]
Overlord,
That’s it for today. Class dismissed.
[Data Corrupted]
—
Overlord withdrew his needles, shaking off residual dizziness from the connection.
Trepan always warned him not to interface with processors already dead. Too advanced a task, he’d said, too dangerous for a student to attempt. Maybe some day, when he was more advanced.
Trepan wasn’t here to tell him off.
The body had long since gone grey, the early stages of frame-rot creeping between seams. Trepan was left exactly where he was killed, crumpled at the center of the place they called home. Megatron wanted him to find this. Wanted him to return, none the wiser, to find this.
He cradled the body in his arms. It was so small, so much smaller than Overlord remembered Trepan ever being. He had to be careful with the hole in Trepan’s chest. It was so large that he feared the body might tear in two at the slightest movement.
Against his better judgement, Overlord unsheathed his needles once more.
One more time, just one more.