Chapter Text
Deep in the Nevada desert, outside the small town of Jasper, hidden within one of the mesa is an old missile silo that serves as the Autobot base. Autobots, autonomous robotic organisms from the planet Cybertron, are in a constant war with another faction known as the Decepticons. The Autobots consist of 5 members within the main team: Optimus Prime the leader, Ratchet the medic, Bulkhead the Wrecker, Bumblebee the scout, and Arcee the warrier and only femme on the team. With the Autobots is their liaison, Agent William Fowler, and 3 human children: Jackson "Jack" Darby (16), Miko Nakadai (15), and Rafael "Raf" Esquivel (12). As of two weeks ago the local high-school let out for summer break, leaving more time for the three kids to spend with the Autobots at their base.
Our story begins on one such night, Jack and Miko having gone home with Arcee and Bulkhead respectively, leaving Raf—who got permission from his mom by telling her it was a week long camping trip with his friends—to spend the next week at the Autobot base. Ratchet had already retreated to his personal quarters withing the medbay, Optimus having left for an overnight patrol, and Bumblebee having powered down for recharge in his own room, leaving Raf alone in the main area on the platform for the humans. Speaking of which, Raf is currently sitting on the sofa with his laptop open, the PC connected to the main terminal, as he scrolls through lines of Cybertronian codes while checking the groundbridge systems. That's when Raf finds it. There, buried beneath the frequency floor of the coding, is an encryption packet so densely woven that it gives the boy pause. Hesitating for a moment, Raf accesses the packet and begins the arduous task of decoding the encryption, frowning in concentration upon finding it more complex than the standard base-12 coding he normally finds when hacking.
~*timeskip*~
Four hours. It took four hours for Raf to crack the encryption, which if Raf is being honest gives the boy a bit of a thrill. After all, it's not often that the 12 year old computer genius gets this kind of challenge. But now? Now Raf is stumped because sitting on his screen, where he thought he'd find some kind of spyware, is a simple handshake protocol.
Raf knows he should go wake up Ratchet, tell the medic what he found, but he's curious now, questions bouncing around in his head like never before. Why did someone encrypt a simple handshake protocol so heavily? Who encrypted it? Where did it come from? Who left it there? These questions and more bounce around in Raf’s head, his curiosity getting the best of him. "I guess it wouldn't hurt." Raf whispers to himself, opening the protocol and sending a single ping, an invisible signal to an invisible handshake.
He's shocked when, not 2 seconds later, a reply answers his ping, the coding giving way to reveal a single response. 7. A prime number. Confusion washes over Raf at the odd reply, his head tilting to the side. Why a prime number? Why not respond with actual words? Hesitating for a split second, Raf replies with the next prime number, 11, and sends it.
Not even a second later the person on the other end replies with the next number, the two going back and forth with prime numbers before Raf gets an idea, a hint of a grin curling his lips as he changes the rhythm and sends a Mersenne prime: 8191. The reply is nearly instantaneous, the person on the other end responding with another Mersenne prime, but not just any Mersenne prime. This was the 47th Mersenne prime, a number so large that it filled his laptop and continued to scroll down, the figure too large for the small screen to show at once. Raf was stunned. No human computer could have generated and verified that number so fast. Even the distributed computer projects that specifically searched for Mersenne Primes took weeks. This isn't a human, this is Cybertronian processing power. The thought sent a shiver down Raf’s spine, his hands starting to tremble as he changes up the rhythm, sending off a complex (if empty) encryption puzzle that took him 2 months to create, the frequency feed having been designed to form a fragmenting loop that constantly shatters itself and reforms in a randomized pattern. Hesitating, thumb hovering over the enter key, Raf sends the puzzle to whoever it is on the other side.