Chapter 01 | RUNNING IT IN THE MIND
The air in the lower maintenance bays of Sector Seven didn’t feel like air. It felt like aerosolized oil, heavy and static-charged, settling into the joints of anyone unfortunate enough to be stationed there.
Springer leaned his heavy frame against a rusted structural support pillar, the metal groaning under his weight. Every line of his green-and-yellow armor was caked in a fine patina of industrial grime and dried Energon from the morning’s skirmish. His internal cooling fans were whirring at a deafening pitch, trying and failing to drop his core temperature.
“If I have to purge my intake filters one more time today, I’m going to pull my own central processor out through my chest-plates,” he grunted, his voice a low, gravelly scrape. He looked over at the small console where Nautica was huddled, her purple-and-blue plating glowing faintly under the harsh amber emergency lights.
Nautica didn’t look up. Her hands—usually so precise, so steady when calibrating quantum engines—were trembling slightly as she adjusted the data-tethers running from the terminal into her wrist ports. Her HUD was a chaotic mess of scrolling diagnostic reports and system warnings. The entire squad was operating on less than ten percent reserve processing power, their neural nets frayed to the breaking point by a war that felt less like a tactical campaign and more like an endless conveyor belt of grinding machinery.
“Just a few more nanoclicks, Springer,” Nautica muttered, her optics flashing a stressed, erratic blue as she ran a thumb over her wrench. “The high command broadcasted this baseline fix an hour ago. The Vanguard Optimization Patch. It’s supposed to streamline our tactical logic, clear out the feedback loops from the comm-nets, and... well, quiet the noise. We just need to initialize the synchronization across the whole squad link.”
“Noise is right,” Springer muttered, looking back toward the rest of the room.
The squad was scattered across the damp, metallic floor of the bay, each carrying the distinct, heavy wear of the industrial front.
In the corner, Arcee sat silently, aggressively scraping a serrated blade against her forearm plating, her expression detached and cold. Near her, Thundercracker leaned against a stack of empty fuel crates, his optics dim, staring at the floor as if debating whether the faction insignia on his chest was worth the weight it added to his frame. Smokescreen was restlessly tossing a spent fuse casing from hand to hand, his usual deceptive grin entirely absent, replaced by a tense, twitching jaw-servo. Further back, Kick-Off stood rigidly at attention against the blast doors, his armor immaculate despite the filth around them, his systems locked into a stubborn, defensive protocol that looked exhausting just to maintain.
And then there were the two keeping the fragile peace.
Windblade stood near the center of the bay, her red-and-black wings tucked tightly against her back to avoid the low-hanging cables. As a City Speaker, her processor was constantly bombarded by the psychic background radiation of the populace—their demands, their judgments, their endless voices. She looked completely drained, her delicate face-paint smudged with soot. Beside her stood Prowl, the hyper-logical strategist. He was staring at a flickering tactical map holographic display, his white-and-black chassis pristine compared to Springer’s, but his optics were narrowed, his logic-gates firing at an unhealthy, frantic pace as he tried to calculate a safe route out of the sector.
“Data packet compiled,” Nautica announced, a collective ping echoing in the audio-receptors of all eight Autobots. “The Vanguard Patch is ready for a unified install. On three. One... two... three.”
The download hit their systems simultaneously.
Download Progress: 10%... 45%... 82%...
For a split second, a profound, blessed silence washed over the room. The constant, background hum of their overheating systems seemed to quiet down. The heavy pressure in Windblade’s mind faded. Prowl’s frantic calculations smoothed out into a perfect, uniform line of logic.
Download Progress: 100%. Installation Complete.
Then, the world glitched.
A sickening, high-frequency scream tore through their internal audio-receptors. It wasn’t an external sound; it was a digital spike tearing right through their neural pathways.
Prowl blinked his optics to clear a sudden cascade of red error text scrolling across his vision. Warning: System Desynchronization Detected. Core Processor Displaced.
“Springer, report,” Prowl said, his voice flat, maintaining his signature calm. But when he reached out to tap the holographic tactical table in front of him, his hand met nothing but empty air.
He looked down. The dark, oil-slicked metal floor of Sector Seven’s maintenance bay was gone. Beneath his white-and-black sabatons was a vast, unending expanse of stark, blindingly bright white sand.
Prowl snapped his head up. The claustrophobic ceiling of the industrial factory, the hanging cables, the amber emergency lights—all gone. Above him was a featureless, pale sky that cast no shadows. The air didn’t smell like oil anymore. It smelled like nothing. It was a vacuum of absolute, sterile silence.
“What is this?” Prowl muttered, his logic circuits instantly firing into overdrive, trying to compute the coordinates of a desert that shouldn’t exist. “Nautica, status report. We have an environmental anomaly.”
“Prowl?”
A voice cut through the silence. Prowl turned to see Windblade standing a few paces away. In the industrial reality, her wings had been tucked in, covered in grime. Here, in this bizarre world, her armor was unnaturally, uncomfortably clean. The red paint on her face was perfectly symmetrical, gleaming as if freshly applied.
“Where are we?” Windblade asked, her voice tight with an anxiety that her pristine exterior completely hid. She reached up to touch her head. “The noise... it’s gone. But this feels worse. I can’t feel the city. I can’t feel anything except... us.”
“We are still in Sector Seven,” Prowl stated firmly, though his own internal sensors were throwing contradictory data. “This is a sensory hallucination. A glitch in the Vanguard patch. Look at your internal clock.”
Windblade checked her HUD. The chronometer wasn’t ticking upward. The numbers were spinning backward, then forward, completely erratic.
Suddenly, a low, metallic clack echoed across the white sand.
A few yards away, a massive object materialized out of thin air. It was a towering, pristine mirror, framed in polished chrome plating. But as Prowl and Windblade approached it, they realized the frame wasn’t just metal—it was constructed from the stripped, immaculate armor plating of Autobot soldiers.
Windblade stepped in front of the glass. She expected to see her reflection. Instead, the figure looking back at her wasn’t moving in sync with her.
The reflection stood perfectly straight, looking down at her with an expression of cold, public disappointment. The reflection’s mouth opened, but the voice that came out didn’t belong to Windblade. It was a discordant, overlapping choir of hundreds of different voices—civilians, politicians, the collective public of Cybertron.
“You are the Speaker,” the reflection whispered, the sound vibrating directly inside Windblade’s processor. “You should have saved the eastern sector first. You should have spoken louder. You should have done it like this.”
Windblade stumbled backward, her wings flaring in genuine terror. “Get out of my head,” she hissed, gripping the sides of her helmet. “Prowl, it’s talking to me. It knows what they said about me after the fall of the spires.”
Prowl stepped between Windblade and the mirror, his logic override protocol taking command. “It is a psychological manifestation, Windblade. Ignore the audio input. It has no tactical substance.”
He faced the mirror, intending to analyze its physical composition. But as he looked into the glass, the reflection shifted.
A perfect clone of Prowl stepped forward inside the mirror. This version of him had no dents, no scratches, and its optics burned with a terrifying, unyielding crimson light. The clone looked at Prowl, its mouth curving into a cold, clinical sneer.
“Your casualty projections for Operation Broadside were inefficient,” the clone stated, its voice a perfect, unglitched replica of Prowl’s own internal monologue. “Three more units could have survived if you altered the retreat route by four degrees. You pride yourself on logic, yet you fail the math. You should have done it like this.”
Prowl’s logic-gates locked. A spike of pure, unadulterated guilt—the exact metric of every soldier he had ever written off as an acceptable loss—flooded his processor. He couldn’t look away from the mirror. His systems were paralyzing him, forcing him to recalculate a battle that happened three vorns ago, over and over again.
“Prowl! Look away!” Windblade cried out, reaching out to grab his arm.
The moment her hand made contact with his shoulder, a violent jolt of electricity snapped through both of them.
The white desert fractured like cracked porcelain.
With a sickening lurch, they were slammed back into the industrial reality. Prowl gasped, his optics resetting as he found himself back in the dark, oil-choked maintenance bay. He was on his knees, his hands pressed against the cold, greasy steel floor.
Beside him, Windblade was leaning against a weapon crate, coughing as her intake vents struggled with the thick, chemical air.
“Prowl! Windblade! Talk to me!” Springer’s voice boomed through the bay. He rushed over, his heavy hands gripping Prowl’s shoulders. “You two just locked up for a solid ninety nanoclicks! Your optics went entirely white!”
“The patch...” Prowl managed to say, his vocalizer glitching with a harsh static hiss. He looked over at Nautica, who was staring at her diagnostic screen in absolute horror.
“I-I’m trying to abort the installation,” Nautica stammered, her fingers flying across the console as error messages began to reflect in her wide blue optics. “But I can’t find the source code anymore. It’s... it’s rewriting our core architecture from the inside. It’s linking all eight of our processors into a single, closed network.”
From the shadows near the blast doors, a low, smooth, terrifyingly calm chuckle echoed through their shared comm-link. It didn’t come from any of the eight Autobots in the room.
“An elegant network,” a voice whispered in their minds, smooth as polished glass and dripping with a dark, architectural malice. “Welcome to the new system, Autobots. Let us see how well you handle the weight of your own choices.”
Prowl’s optics widened as his internal database finally recognized the unique, psychotectonic digital signature bleeding into their systems.
It was Sunder. And they had just handed him the keys to their minds.
