Archive of Our Own

The afterparty was almost as bad as the fighting itself. Everyone in the massive luxury booth, all the corporate-level mechs, were laughing and drinking energon and congratulating themselves on being here. “Some months it’s not worth the drive down from Silica,” one sleek, electrum-plated administrator was telling another, on the other side of the abstract sculpture that Orion was hiding behind. “There hasn’t been a fight that good in the entire vorn. I really thought it was going to get him in that last exchange.”

The other one laughed. “You wouldn’t want to miss that match.”

Orion flinched so hard the statue wobbled on its plinth. He’d long since stopped wishing Ariel was here, even selfishly. She’d been so miserable when the medics told her that she couldn’t travel for a month after she’d caught the rust mites from Dion. Now all Orion wished was that he’d gotten them, too. He’d gladly have traded this experience in for getting irradiated and having his armor ground down half a millimeter.

He took the next gap in the crowd as a chance to try and slip out, except the promotions manager caught him halfway to the door and smiling turned him around, with both hands heavy on his shoulders, to meet the head of the corporation: an actual Secundus-rank mech named Voltage, two heads taller than the rest of them and gleaming with a titanium wash, who beamed down at him. “Well, well, so this is our industrious young supervisor! Orion Pax, is it? I hear you beat the next one out by nearly half again.” He leaned in and smiled and tapped Orion’s chest with a finger. “We’re going to be watching you, young mech. I expect great things!”

“Thank you, sir,” Orion said. He tried to be pleased, but he mostly felt bludgeoned. 

“Having a good time, I hope? Quite an excellent match this time! You were lucky for the rest of us.”

“I’m glad, sir,” Orion said. “It was—it was very impressive.” He was fighting not to burst out with how could any of you stand to watch, what if he’d died like—like those others, they’re dead, twelve mechs just died, and he half wished there was something wrong with him, because all these other people, important and senior and powerful, were acting like this had been fun instead of horrible, and if there wasn’t something wrong with him, then there was something wrong with them, with all of them, and what did that mean if all of them, if all these people had gone so wrong—and all the other people in all those other boxes—the people in the stands, this whole arena was so huge, and they’d all paid so much money just to be here for this—

Voltage was eyeing him a little narrowly, as if he was picking up on Orion’s churning background processes. “Hmm. Yes, it was. A new experience, eh? It’s not the same, seeing it in the stands instead of a holovid.”

“No, it’s not,” Orion said. It didn’t…it didn’t feel real on a holovid. His systems always knew there was a mediating digital layer, something in between that could be trivially manipulated. “I didn’t think it was real,” he blurted, trying not to let it sound accusing.

He succeeded. Voltage relaxed a little, smiling in tolerant amusement. “Didn’t think he was real, either, did you?” he said, slyly.

“No,” Orion said, honestly. He’d thought of the Champion as another holovid star, glamorous, talented. It had never occurred to him that the Champion really…he could have died, he nearly had died, right there in front of their faces, all these people just a little disappointed that he hadn’t…

Voltage laughed softly. “You know, maybe your experience isn’t quite over yet. Come along,” and he strode out of the box, beckoning. Orion hesitated, and then went after him reluctantly. He just wanted to get out of here and drive home at top speed and bury his head in Ariel’s lap and let her and Dion tell him it was all over and all okay. Except he didn’t think it was okay. But what did that even mean, if it wasn’t okay—

He trailed after Voltage without really paying attention to where he was going while the thoughts went churning on a loop through his processor. They were moving through a big noisy crowd that parted for the Secundus, down and around a curving corridor that ended in a big lift platform with two massive security guard bots on either side, and at the doors Voltage stopped and said to them, “Tell Brickbat that Voltage Secundus would like to stop in. With a guest.”

They got allowed into the giant lift platform, and it went straight down to a massive room full of music and the sharp bright scent of altered lubricants and high-grade energon vapor, a party like the one they’d left upstairs only full of exotic models and gladiators, and a little mech a head shorter than Orion himself came beaming out of the crowd to press Voltage’s hand. “Secundus! It’s so kind of you to stop by in person. He’ll be so pleased when I tell him. Come on, let me get you a seat in the elevated section, and for…?”

“Brickbat, let me introduce you to a very special young mech,” Voltage said. “This is Orion Pax. He’s here today because he won an efficiency competition out at our Moradia Dockyards, less than forty vorn since he came out of the factory. He’ll be gunning for my job pretty soon, I guess!” They both laughed. “Orion, this is Brickbat, the Champion’s very own manager.”

“Is he all right?” Orion blurted out, involuntarily.

Voltage laughed a deep-resonator laugh, clapping him on the shoulder. “Can you tell he’s a first-timer?” he said to Brickbat. “Never been in the stands in his life before. He’s only seen the vids.”

“Now, now, Secundus, you know the Champion values his holovid fans tremendously!” Brickbat said. “And, may I say, that is an exceptionally generous and thoughtful gesture for your company to provide its up-and-comers. I hope you enjoyed your experience, young mech!”

Orion stared at Brickbat. The other mech was beaming at him. He hadn’t bothered answering. He didn’t care. The Champion had been out there fighting, almost dying, and his own manager didn’t care. “I was worried,” Orion said flatly.

Like you should have been, he meant, but Brickbat only tittered behind a hand, and then said, “Oh, that’s really quite—charming of you. Do you know…” He glanced back over his shoulder, towards an alcove blocked by a fuzzed forceshield. “Do you know, I think I might even be able to swing a…personal word. If you’ll be tolerant of any snags?” He smiled up at Voltage. “Not even I can always read his mood…”

“Of course, of course!” Voltage said, and Brickbat led them over to the forceshield. It dropped, letting them into a space with a second forceshield that didn’t come down until the first one had gone back up, completely silencing the crowd behind them, and then opened to let them down a massive corridor into a vast and dimly lit chamber full of gigantic luxurious seating units, a long gently illuminated bar with several enormous screens along the wall, all of them turned off at the moment; the air was foggy and thick with the smell of ozone and used lubricant and washfluid.

“Please, make yourselves comfortable,” Brickbat said in a hushed voice, gesturing to the chairs, and after they’d sat down—Orion perched gingerly on the edge of his massive chair—Brickbat went on across the room in a strange, almost creeping way. Another forceshield in an archway in the far wall opened to his touch on clouds of steam and the hissing sound of a sprayer.

“Megatron?” Brickbat said softly into the space.

“What?” The voice that came out was low and resonant and—irritated, of all things.

“Just a couple of guests I thought you might like to meet…”

“I’m drenched in slime,” the voice snapped back. “If any of them feel like working a sprayer, send them in. Otherwise they can go jump into the nearest smelt—”

Brickbat hastily reactivated the shield and turned back. “Well, perhaps—you wouldn’t mind giving him a hand, Orion?”

Orion stared at him. He looked over: Voltage beamed at him and nodded towards the archway. “Go on, go on,” he said. “I had you pegged up in the box. Good luck, ha ha!” He grinned at Brickbat, and they winked at each other, as if they thought he’d watched that fight and came out of it thinking—wanting—

Orion almost told them to go find that smelter, only—what about the Champion? Buried down here in the guts of the arena, behind guards and thick walls and forcefields and this so-called manager who shoved him out there to risk his life every month—and everyone had been so disappointed when the Champion had stopped fighting once a week. Orion felt unbelievably stupid suddenly: he’d actually swallowed the idea that gladiators were volunteers, except that was insane; no one would volunteer to die for someone’s entertainment.

So he got up and went after Brickbat to the archway, and stepped into the seething clouds of steam when the forcefield was lowered to let him through. His sensors started to give him alerts as soon as he went inside: there were low levels of corrosive acids in the vapor. If he stayed in here too long, he’d need to get his armor completely refinished.  “Champion?” Orion said tentatively, stepping forward into the thick fog, a hand out to feel his way. “Are you all right?”

A sheer solid wall loomed up in front of him and Orion just managed to stop short of walking right into it. Then the wall turned and moved, clouds of steam parting around it, and—it was him. The Champion. Orion stared up and up at him, a little dazed. It hadn’t occurred to him, even watching from the box…that this wasn’t faked, either. He’d never even heard of a mech this big, except for the mammoth building-sized Guardian who stood by the city gate, and that barely counted, he never moved. Voltage Secundus looked like a minibot by comparison.

The Champion looked down at him, an eye brow raised over a gleaming red optic. “Do I look all right?” he demanded silkily.

“Yes,” Orion said, still staring. He did. Actually, he looked—like something out of the holovids that really were fake, maybe one about the age of the Thirteen Primes. Like a mythical warrior forged by Primus. There wasn’t even a mark on his armor.

Well—except for the thoroughly caked-on purple slime all over him. The Champion glared down at Orion. “Are you mentally defective or just one of the gogglers? Oh, I don’t even care.” He shoved a sprayer handle into Orion’s hands. “Start working on my back hip joints, or get out.”

Feeling like an idiot, Orion almost did just drop the handle and get out, except the Champion really was caked in the horrible stuff, which a quick sensor scan indicated was full of dangerous alkaline agents. Orion turned on the spray and grimly attacked the thick crusted deposits at the back hip joints. The purple worm had been driving right at the Champion’s head when he’d managed to split it straight down the middle. All its innards had come down on him, and as Orion washed off the surface goop and got a closer look, he realized it had been full of air-hardening organic compounds, pretty much the worst stuff you could dump onto neural circuitry.

“This isn’t going to come off with the dousing spray,” he said. “It’s going to take carbon-based solvent.”

“Wonderful,” the Champion said. “How the hell do you know?”

“There’s an organic pest that lives in the transport canals. We get stuff like this crusted on the dockyard equipment all the time,” Orion said. And that equipment kept breaking down, unless you got it solvent-scraped on an annoyingly regular basis. It was one of the ways Orion had won his competition, figuring out exactly the right schedule to do it on. But you couldn’t just dump industrial solvent onto a living mech. “You’re going to need to get these parts replaced.”

“Don’t be idiotic,” the Champion said. He reached for the wall unit, shoved the lever over to a virulent green-labeled spot, and started blasting himself with solvent that smelled like it was ten times more concentrated than anything Orion’s crew used on the dockyard stuff. Orion jumped back, reflexively shutting all his intakes and getting well clear of the splatter, horrified, but it—worked, for some definition of the word; the crusted compounds were sloughing away into black and green sludge, all over the floor. More of it came oozing out of what had to be unpleasantly sensitive spots all over the Champion’s body as he rotated his joints, sighing audibly like it was a relief, even tilting his entire cranial unit over to either side in turn so he could shoot a large jet of the solvent down into his neck joints, the blackened liquid shooting out from under his armor plating. He sprayed his own face with the stuff, not just down over the surface of his helmet but under it.

Orion had been forced to completely shut down all his air circulation by the time the Champion finally gave a deep sigh and turned off the solvent spray. He gave himself another steamy dousing with the washfluid, then a coating of lubricant, and after that he activated a massive roaring vacuum that sucked up all the sludge and all the steam too—and nearly dragged Orion off his feet and flat onto the drain at the same time. The Champion actually had to catch him to keep him upright, which took him about as much visible effort as it would’ve taken Orion to pick up a microdriver. Orion wobbled and got his balance when the vacuum switched off, and then stared up at the Champion again. With the fog completely gone and the slime too, he was shining silver and even more unreal, the heat and pressure of his massive hand just resting on Orion’s shoulder.

“Amazing, you weren’t completely useless,” the Champion said grudgingly, scowling down as if that somehow annoyed him. “Well? Go on, don’t be shy.”

He seemed to be expecting—oh. Orion’s stomach turned over queasily, and he blurted, “Do they—force you to do this, too?”

The Champion’s eyebrows went up. “That’s a novel approach. Where the hell did Brickbat dig you up from?” He abruptly pushed Orion back out to arm’s length—it was a long distance—and studied him up and down, frowning. “For that matter, how did you even get into the arena? You’re not upper caste. You couldn’t possibly afford a seat for one of my days, and you’re much too tidy to have been down with the groundlings, even if you’d have survived the experience.”

“I—I won a corporate competition,” Orion said.

“Mm. At this dockyard where you encounter organic vermin on a regular basis?”

“I’m a supervisor,” Orion said, feeling mildly defensive about it for no good reason he could name.

“I see: a nice middle-caste mech,” the Champion said. “How adorable.”

There was a heavy lashing of irony in the voice, and Orion swallowed. “I didn’t know,” he blurted. “I didn’t know what it was going to be like. I thought…I didn’t think it was real.”

The Champion laughed, sharp and bright and cruel. “What, you thought it was all some charming rigged holovid drama? If it were in any way up to the arena administrators, I’d have lost five hundred vorn ago. They’re very tired of my reign by now.”

He turned away and strode out of the washing chamber through a different exit, a forcefield winking out of his way. After a moment, Orion tentatively went after him, for lack of anywhere else to go. The room on the other side was a stark contrast to the chamber Brickbat had brought them through: even bigger, but utterly spartan. The walls were paneled with bare metal, and there was an enormous rack of what looked like well-used hand-to-hand weaponry, a single recharge bed the size of a heavy-equipment loading platform, a couple of massive but unornamented chairs, and a pair of simple wall taps. The Champion was standing there, drawing off an enormous cup of softly glowing energon, not an intoxicant but just middle-grade. He downed the whole thing in six gulps, tossed the cup into an automated cleaner, and slung himself into one of the chairs. He moved with unbelievable fluidity, speed; it was bizarre. A mech as big and armored as he was should have been lumbering and slow. There were some load-lifters on Orion’s crew, the really big guys—maybe two-thirds the Champion’s size—and they practically had to waddle in robot mode.

When he was sitting down, their eyes were almost—not quite—on a level. It felt half ridiculous to ask, but— Orion swallowed and said, “If it’s real—why are you doing it? Do they—” He almost couldn’t imagine it. How could they—

“Force me? Why bother asking? What would you do if I said yes?” the Champion said. He sounded amused.

“I’d—” Orion stopped, struggling to think. “I’d help you get away.”

“My hero,” the Champion said, gleefully. “This gets better. How would you do that?”

“I—I don’t know!” Orion said.

“Do you imagine us breaking out of the arena together?” the Champion said. “A furious pursuit through the alleys of Tarn. How would we evade the hunters, I wonder? And then, what afterwards? Would you hide me in what I assume is a very respectable two-room subsidized flat, and keep me on your supervisor’s salary? You’d have some difficulty; my energon requirements are fairly remarkable, I’m afraid.”

“I don’t know,” Orion said again, swallowing, after a moment. “But—I’d try to think of something.”

“I suppose we’d have to flee into the underlayers anyway. After all, Brickbat at least knows you came down here. You’d be traced for sure.” The Champion shook his head in mock dismay. “Quite the shocking end to what seems to be a promising career.”

Orion stared at him, a slow, terrible sinking feeling in his guts as he realized—even if the Champion wouldn’t try to break out— “I can’t go back anyway,” he whispered.

The Champion paused. “Why not?”

“They—the whole corporation—all the executives—they were all here,” Orion said. “They come here all the time. They know—”

He choked off, putting a hand over his mouth, trying to press back the sensation of having to purge fuel. Lubricant was collecting in his optic channels, trying to clear phantom debris from his lenses; the problem with his vision was internal, emotional disruption consuming too much of his processing cortex.

“Stop that,” the Champion said. “Either you’re grandstanding, or you’re really being stupid enough to imagine that I need rescuing. Whichever it is, get a drink of energon and calm yourself, or I’ll throw you out. Painfully.”

Orion stumbled over to the dispenser and took a glass and filled it a tenth of the way up. He swallowed it in small gulps, trying to settle down his system. It was actually really good energon, even if it was middle-grade, clean and crisp. He put down the glass. “Sorry,” he said, after a moment, without looking around.

The Champion grunted. “Better. Take another, and bring me one while you’re at it.”

Orion filled the Champion’s glass all the way. It was an odd dislocation all over again, just turning around and walking up to him. He just kept on—being himself, impossibly huge, terrifying, radiating power. It belatedly occurred to Orion, watching him drink the second enormous glass, “You’re in violation of the construction standards,” he said slowly. It made sense suddenly. The Champion had to have been built out of materials rationed for nonsentient machines only. Heavy duty industrial materials, durasteel and graphene, maybe even military grade materials, vibranium sheathing and ur alloys. Quantum fiber wiring and processing to enable that speed, the reflexes—

The Champion lowered his cup and eyed him irritably. “You’re having quite the day for discovering what’s completely obvious to any rational mech. Are you a newspark or something?”

“I’m forty-six vorn!” Orion said.

The Champion gave a deep snort. “Young enough to squeak, but old enough to know where to put the oil. No excuse there.”

“No,” Orion said, low. “No, there isn’t. I just…I didn’t know.”

“You keep bleating that,” the Champion said. “I don’t believe you, for one thing, and for the other, so what? You know now, and you’re not going to change a thing as a result. Don’t pretend to yourself you’re really going to make some kind of pointless gesture like quitting your nice, secure dockyard post over the fact that your corporation has an arena box like every other modestly successful corporation on the planet. Or at least, don’t pretend it to me,” he added, dryly. “I don’t have much taste for lies.”

Orion gave a small gasp, helplessly. “But I have to do something.”

The Champion sighed noisily. “Why, exactly?”

“Because—it’s grotesque!” Orion said, in a burst. “Maybe you don’t care—maybe they aren’t forcing you. But there were twelve matches today. I watched—I watched—twelve mechs die, and in the box they—they clapped—” His voice choked off, fuzzing into distortion.

“Mm,” the Champion said. “I see. You just haven’t generated the crucial logical shift yet.”

“What?” Orion said, staring at him.

“Something should be done,” the Champion said, in patient tones. “That’s what you mean. Unless you’re delusional enough to imagine that quitting your job is, in fact, going to do something to save as much as a single gladiator. All of whom are volunteers, by the way. It’s quite the competition to get onto the arena floor. Most of those mechs you saw die today spent the last three hundred vorn fighting tooth and nail for the chance.”

“What? Why?” Orion said in horror.

The Champion shrugged. “They’re low-caste military mechs. It’s the arena or it’s the front lines. The odds are admittedly worse in the arena, but if they survive enough times, they get to live a thousand vorn as rich, drunk surfacers, by which time they’ll probably have fried their circuits and rusted their frames out anyway. The only prize you get for surviving on the front lines is a spot on the next one.”

“Why wouldn’t they just get jobs?”

“Why wouldn’t low-caste military mechs just get jobs?” the Champion repeated, in fascinated tones. “My charming dockyard supervisor. How many of them have you hired lately? Could you pay them enough to meet their energon requirements?” He smiled thinly as Orion swallowed down another small burst of regurgitated lubricant. “There aren’t very many jobs for military mechs on Cybertron. That’s not to say there are none, of course. But they do all involve significant odds of dying. The real part that varies is the legality, and the pay’s inversely related to that. And you’re going to fix absolutely none of it.”

The Champion tipped up the rest of his glass. He wasn’t even being cruel or mocking anymore. Only utterly matter-of-fact. Orion stood blankly, stunned into temporary stasis while his systems tried to reconcile it all with his emotional core. I don’t believe you, the Champion had said, and he was half right; Orion hadn’t known, but he should have known. How many have you hired, and the answer was none, of course; he didn’t even know any military mechs. But he did know some low-caste mechs. He’d seen them every morning of this last vorn: the sanitation mechs cleaning the streets in the early morning hours when he was on his way to get a jump start on his day at the dockyard, determined to win the prize. He’d said a cheerful hello to the dock scrapers when he walked past them, his intakes shut against the fumes of the solvents until he got into his nice climate-controlled office, where he’d figured out the perfect schedule to have them do the scraping. He’d seen enough to know.

And—he couldn’t, actually, imagine how he could fix any of that. If he quit his job, someone else would take it, and what would he do to get his fuel? If he tried to pay his low-caste workers more, the corporation would fire him, no matter how much more efficient he’d made their systems. If he pitched in with the scraping, he’d just get solvent toxicity within two vorn and end up with the medics. He had a streamlined racer altmode, he couldn’t sweep streets. He sure as hell couldn’t take anyone’s place on the front lines, or in the arena.

The single stark conclusion unfurled itself in his logic unit, exactly as the Champion had predicted: something should be done. By someone who had power, someone who had influence; someone else, who wasn’t him. Maybe he could talk to the head of the corporation—except that idea foundered, laughable, against the smirk on Voltage Secundus’ face, and the voices in the box upstairs, you wouldn’t want to miss that match, all the administrators wanting a mech, this mech right in front of him, to die horribly just for their pleasure. Which of them was going to do anything? They did know, they had seen and they knew, and they’d already chosen not to care.

Or maybe—maybe they’d also decided, on the day they’d first seen and known, that only somebody else could do the something there was to do. And if he decided that same thing now, and accepted that conclusion into his core—then he could go home. To Ariel and Dion. To his job. To the promotion that would be coming. And the one after that, and the one after that, until one day he rated a standing invitation to that big fancy box, with the good view of mechs dying for his entertainment. And maybe by then he’d have spent so long integrating the idea that—he’d be happy to be there, and he’d turn to someone sitting on his left and say too bad he didn’t lose this time.

“No,” Orion whispered, and manually dumped the conclusion, leaving his logic unit circling in a terrible yawning hole of uncertainty, a loop with no exit condition. It almost instantly swallowed a huge chunk of his processing capacity, memory and emotion, right up to the limits his basic motivator would allow and even a little bit beyond, and he shivered all over as his vision and motor systems lurched, fighting for resources and taking a scraping of them back.

His logic unit instantly regenerated the conclusion, offering it again. But even the circling loop was better than having to imagine going back up to that box. Than imagining his own voice saying, too bad he didn’t lose. Anything was better. “If—if something has to be done,” he said, thickly, struggling, groping out loud for an exit, “then—someone—has to—do something. So—I will do something.”

The decision opened a small, wobbly window in his processing. Something. Even something stupid and useless. His logic unit tried to offer some objections, but he deliberately rejected them, and his motivator slowly integrated the manual conclusion, the rest of his brain shifting over to detail, to specifics. And when it did, he realized there was something to do, something stupid, right in front of him.

“I’ll—get the arena fights banned,” he added, his voice strengthening. “That’s what I’ll do.” He would talk to Voltage. So what if he got fired? He was going to quit anyway. And he’d go home, and tell Ariel and Dion about what he’d learned. Maybe they’d decide to do something stupid with him. Three mechs could do more than just one. They’d tell other people. People who didn’t know, the way Orion hadn’t known, not because they didn’t have enough information, but because they hadn’t been forced to look it in the face. Maybe some of those people would help them too. Once somebody was doing something. He managed to run a full ventilation cycle, pulling himself together, and found the Champion staring at him quizzically. “I will,” Orion told him, a little defiantly. “I’ll recruit people. I’ll build an organization.”

“I’m sure you will,” the Champion said, nodding, a glint of amusement in his optics. “You seem very resourceful. Out of curiosity, once you’ve succeeded, what will you do with all the leftover gladiators?”

“We’ll—make a retirement fund,” Orion said, his creativity module producing the answer almost immediately. He’d just fueled up, and he’d finished the integration; his emotional core and his conscious processing were falling back into the clean, swift alignment he was used to. “The arena is in a valuable location. It can be repurposed for living quarters. We’ll sell any units the gladiators themselves don’t need, and use the money to fund their energon needs.”

“How creative of you,” the Champion said. “I don’t suppose you’ve considered the sentiments of the arena owners in the matter?”

“No,” Orion said flatly. “I haven’t. They’ve made enough off the deaths of other mechs.”

“Perhaps I should clarify that the arena investors include among them a great many of our sitting Senators. You might find it somewhat difficult to marshal the votes for confiscation.”

Senators? Orion flinched under a fresh wave of queasiness. “How do you know that?”

The Champion shrugged one titanic shoulder. “The company of shareholders gets inflicted on me more often than that of dockyard supervisors.”

Orion compressed his jaw. “Well—then we’ll publicize their investments, and shame them into divesting.”

The Champion actually laughed. “I’m almost irresistibly reminded of the time I fought a gladiator with a pet Dorvallian gnawer. Its teeth couldn’t get through to my circuitry, but it took me six days to pry the thing off my ankle. You do realize that you’re taking aim at an equally trivial corner of an intractable problem.”

It was obviously true, and Orion’s logic unit instantly discarded it as irrelevant. He put his chin up and stared the Champion in the face. “Anytime you come up with a better idea, let me know,” he said coolly. 

The Champion’s optics narrowed, a sudden intense gleam igniting deep inside them, and Orion’s self-preservation subroutine belatedly jolted into awareness that maybe it hadn’t been such a great idea to announce to the reigning arena champion who could literally scrap him without trying hard that he was going to do his best to put him out of a job, much less be rude to him, and then the Champion said, “Do you know, at the moment I’ve got one in particular,” and reached out and caught him by the waist and picked him up and settled him into his lap. Still confused, Orion automatically braced against his massive breastplate, the deep intense thrum of the reactor going beneath, and the Champion slid his hands down onto Orion’s thighs and pulled him in snug and—

“Oh,” Orion squeaked, and prepared to explain that actually he was in a committed long-term relationship with two mechs that he loved very much and he didn’t want anyone else, only the Champion opened up an access panel, and Orion’s motivator pre-empted his speech centers, instantly popped out three cables, and plugged them straight into the available ports before the Champion had actually extended a single line of his own.

The Champion gave a small startled grunt, as if he hadn’t expected that, and gave Orion a glare of outrage, laced just a little with something like grudging appreciation. Not that he had any right to complain after he’d literally jammed their panels together, Orion wanted to inform him, only all his processes were too busy launching themselves at the feast of unbelievably magnificent hardware on offer, and when the Champion bent down and kissed him, Orion just wildly threw his arms around his neck and kissed him back, hungry for as many points of contact as he could get.

He was very dimly aware when the Champion picked him up and carried him over to the recharge unit—his own participation wasn’t required at all—and very vividly aware when the Champion settled in and casually thumbed open a few of Orion’s own access panels without even asking, and invaded a dozen of his most sensitive dataports with high-power flexcables and the perfect assurance that they were there for him to enjoy, and Orion really meant to tell him to shove off with his smug, arrogant, ludicrously overpowered processing, except it was hard to do that while moaning incoherently.

He didn’t hold anything back from the interface; it didn’t occur to him to try. He never had. There wasn’t any part of him he hadn’t let Ariel and Dion see, so many times before, and the only thing he’d consider holding back from interface was today, the horror of the arena, and that was the horror that the Champion lived—

“Call me Megatron,” the Champion purred, into the middle of that thought, although he didn’t mind this truly delightful vision of himself as an invincible conquering titan, and in fact had several more conquests in mind ahead for this encounter, even if he was being considerably more restrained about the data and processes he was allowing to slip over into Orion’s hardware. “You’re nearly transparent, aren’t you. Poor little mech. If I hadn’t rubbed your face in it, you might have managed to shunt the memory down to lower levels and discard most of it by degrees, but you couldn’t tolerate having to process it all at once. Well, hopefully you’ll get over it before you do turn your life upside down.”

He sounded almost affectionate, but a little mocking, too, and Orion poked back at him, irritation managing to break through the haze of intoxicated pleasure: let’s see what you’ve got then, a prod. Megatron snorted. “Careful what you ask for,” he said, and let Orion’s hardware have one of his primary ongoing world-evaluation threads. It had massive data streams going back into his central memory banks, shockingly detailed and crisp, and Orion fell out of pleasure into horror so fast that it was like tumbling into the canal, murky liquid closing over his head, swallowing light into disorientation.

His brain wanted to register virtually everything in Megatron’s personal data store as a source of agony or terror. He caught glimpses of one nightmare lived after another, too large to look at too closely: tunnels, pitch black, and a steady mindless grinding on through half-metamorphosed rock, the whole world muffled, a strange mingling of rest and conscious states. The edge of hunger a constant grating sensation, power-flow system pinging his brain for energon two dozen times a day, a reminder that starvation was always just up ahead, as if the big reactor in his chest was actually undersized—which it was, deliberately: that conclusion was bright and clear in Megatron’s mind, the certainty that someone somewhere had wanted him on a tight leash, easy to control, easy to starve into stasis.

And after that, the arena: battles one after another, pain so constant that most instances were discarded instead of logged, the cool certainty of death waiting up ahead, and the even greater horror of one living being after another dying in front of his optics, at his own hands, a slaughter that had gone on so long it was only boring, emptied of rage or fear. Orion wept, gasping. He did feel transparent: like all his life was an absurd, see-through layer by comparison, in its ease and happiness and small pleasures; his small ambitions and hopes, fantastical and almost imaginary. And almost worse than the rest, Megatron was only resigned through the whole exchange, mildly annoyed with himself, thinking he should have known better than to let Orion see.

“No,” Orion forced out, almost choking, through the sobs. “No. I want to see. I want—everyone to see. Everyone should see.” He gasped again, shuddering, and pressed his forehead to Megatron’s breastplate again, and felt him going bemused: absurd little middle-caste mech meant it, there wasn’t anywhere in his processes for a lie to be hiding, but it was unbelievable anyway. And stupid, if somewhat appealingly so: what good did Orion think he’d do, breaking his heart trying to fix one stripped screw in a machine half eaten by cosmic rust?

“More than if I don’t try,” Orion said, gulping, and rubbed away the lubricant. “More than you will, for that matter,” he added, sharp-edged: he was also getting clear glimpses of Megatron’s life now: the vast mansion being built on the newest overlayer, the accounts that grew quicker than he could spend. He didn’t need any help breaking out. He could walk out of the arena for good any time he wanted, retire in obscene luxury, and here he was still murdering other sentient beings—

Megatron’s optics went narrow. “And once I’m no longer making money for all those Senators and arena shareholders, whoever arranged for my illegal construction can take a good stab at recovering their property.”

Orion swallowed a flare of sickening guilt, he had no right to judge—but Megatron only flickered his optics in impatience: as if he needed patronizing. Anyway at the moment he could see that Orion was lying about it and actually felt entitled to judge any and everyone involved. “I suppose that’s a natural consequence of being willing to hurl your own life away pointlessly,” he remarked.

“If your problem with my plan is that it’s not going to work, you could help me, you know,” Orion said, and yelped faintly as Megatron promptly pushed a power surge at his cables, a quick snap back that sent pleasure shivering through his whole body—and right back out again. Megatron’s cooling turbines growled softly.

“I admit there’s something increasingly appealing about the idea of keeping you,” Megatron said.

“I—I’m not—I’m—” Orion said, stammering and freshly guilty; he really had no idea how he was going to explain this to Ariel and Dion.

Megatron gave a faintly amused snort. “I see them. Do you really imagine they’re going to join your little crusade?”

“Yes,” Orion said defiantly.

“Well, I don’t mind if they do,” Megatron said. “I imagine you’re going to want some help anyway.”

“Help with—” Megatron smirked, clearly meaning with him—him and his outrageously overcharged ego, maybe, and Orion glared at him and blew a good ten percent of his power reserves to shove a healthy surge of his own back the other way.

Megatron’s optics went wide and his surprise was like a shot of ultra-refined, sweet and sparkling. Orion luxuriated in it for a fraction of an instant before he realized he’d just shoved Megatron's processing off his own hardware, and the only place it had to go was—

Five thousand vorn of horror rolled into him like a wave the size of a city wall. Orion was tumbled over and drowning, struggling desperately for anything to grab on to, gasping. He couldn’t find anything, anything in Megatron’s existence worth living for. Megatron didn’t even care about the wealth and luxury and fawning. There was no place of relief except the most basic pleasures: the night sky open overhead, a long drink of energon after a burst of work, the physical satisfaction of stretching his body—

And it was worse that Megatron had survived that lack, lived with it even now, without any awareness of its horror, his cool easy cynicism the only sign. He was only annoyed that Orion was feeling sorry for him—because Orion was delusional, Megatron very clearly thought.

“I’m not,” Orion managed. “I’m not, you’ve been—abused, you’ve been tortured—I do have to get you out of here! Oh, Primus. Megatron, please, you can’t just—whoever made you, whatever they wanted—they did this to you. You can’t let them keep doing it. Retire. Retire, and let’s go to the Senate, go to the press, find out who was behind it—”

“They’re all behind it, you idiot,” Megatron said exasperated, and fired a handful of data files at him: he’d looked discreetly into his own construction costs, and not only was it impossible that he’d been built anywhere other than the Kalis military factories, he’d have cost half a trillion in credits to build. No one had that kind of money except the government: at least a dozen Senators had to be in on having funneled the money there—

“Then we’ll find the ones who aren’t,” Orion said. “Alpha Trion represents my district, he’s not in on this. We’ll go to him—”

“And when he promptly turns us in to his colleagues—”

“He won’t,” Orion said. “I’ve met him, I contacted his office once to suggest a new route for the canals, he cares, he’s not—he’s not like them. Most people aren’t like them.”

“How entirely wrong you are,” Megatron said.

“So what else is there to do but take a chance!” Orion shouted at him. He grabbed Megatron by the shoulders and tried uselessly to shake him. “What’s the point of just—more of this, forever—”

Megatron glared at him. “What else is there? I’m not interested in deluding myself about how the universe functions—”

Orion grabbed his head and pulled himself up and kissed him, half in desperation to just make him stop saying it, stop thinking it, as if Megatron could make it true by believing it too hard—and of course he could, he could make it true for himself, and that was unbearable, it was worse than if he had been chained up in here, he was chained up in here, and Orion had to get him out, and if that was going to involve interfacing with him on a daily basis and showing him what else there was until he stopped thinking the whole world was terrible, fine—

“Well, when you put it that way,” Megatron said against his mouth, a little indistinct, and starting to feel vaguely bewildered: Orion had some nerve accusing him of holding determinedly on to a false belief. At least he wasn’t trying to infect anyone else with his own madness, which Orion clearly was bent on doing to him—

“Yes,” Orion said, kissing him again, cupping his face, trying desperately to give him—truth, all of it that he had: Ariel, and Dion, and trust, and love, love, which was real, and even if it wasn’t, even if Megatron was right, who the hell would want to live in that universe—Orion would make this true, he’d give his life trying to make a universe where love was more true than greed and hate and selfishness, and by doing that, he’d make it true at least in his own corner of it. And that was something worth dying for.

“Isn’t it?” he demanded, fiercely, pulling back, a challenge thrown into Megatron’s face. “Isn’t that worth more than—than—a glass of energon!”

“Spoken like someone who’s never gone without,” Megatron said, and it was true, but oh, thank Primus, he didn’t actually mean it; he was starting to be halfway convinced—not that Orion was right about what the universe was actually like, because he was laughably deluded on that point, but on the other hand—Megatron hadn’t ever considered his own existence this way before. He’d more or less just kept going by default, and he hadn’t seen any particularly better alternatives. He did enjoy the night sky and a good crisp glass of energon after a fight, and luxury was a considerable improvement over his past experiences. He certainly had no desire to go back under the ground. But—he was bored. He didn’t have much to live for, not compared to this mad blazing delusion Orion was carrying around, and so what if he was wrong about what the universe was like. He might still be right about what it should be like. What—perhaps—it could be made to become.

Orion gave a gasp, somewhere between joy and a sob of relief. “You will help me,” he said, and kissed Megatron again.

“We’ll work out the exact arrangement as we go,” Megatron said dryly: he accepted the conclusion, that didn’t mean he was going to sign on to some bit of triviality like banning arena fights—

“So then what do you want to—” Orion began, and then gulped as Megatron started thinking about it, the way he thought about a fight up in the arena: how do I kill this, except what he was planning to kill this time was—the government.

Except no, because it didn’t stop there: taking down the entire government was almost incidental. Megatron was already, methodically, working out how he’d dismantle—everything, their entire society, and when Orion tried to point out that turning the entire world upside down would probably end up with lots of people getting upset, Megatron just gave a cool mental shrug: of course they’d resist. That was why—

“Wait,” Orion said, his voice going high, “Wait, you can’t—”

Megatron paused and eyed him. “Are you under the impression that the people who are doing well out of the current arrangement are going to meekly hand the world over to be remade?”

Orion stared at him open-mouthed. He wanted things to change, but he’d imagined—fixing one thing after another—

Megatron snorted. “While the things you’ve fixed get broken again five minutes after you’ve moved on? No,” and in his head the clear, knife-edged vision went on laying itself out, armies and targets forming, as if Orion had set some terrifying and deadly machine into motion—

“You can’t make a better world by killing half the people in it!” Orion said desperately. “And if you want to, you might as well start with me. I was in those stands today. In a corporate box!”

“This naïveté is going to be irritating,” Megatron said. “The rest of those people have been in those stands every single day for the last five thousand vorn, and unlike you, they’re perfectly happy to keep coming back. What do you plan to do when they come to arrest you for fixing things?”

“That’s a lot less likely to happen if we don’t try fixing them by raising an army and launching attacks on central infrastructure!” Orion said. “We should make things more fair by sharing opportunity and security and freedom with more people, not by destroying them for everyone.”

Megatron sighed very deeply. Well, Orion would start to feel differently when the first phalanx of Guardians came bearing down on their headquarters. He’d just have to get his reactor upgraded and make sure to recruit a few hundred military mechs by then. Orion was about to protest, but Megatron smirked at him and blandly said, “I’ll even give you your wish and end the Arena fights—from the other direction. I’ll start with all the gladiators,” while thinking that Orion couldn’t even complain about that. Orion glared at him: he could too.

“Fine,” he said, sweetly. “And I’ll start by going to Alpha Trion. So when the same people who built you—” did this to you, were the words in his head, along with monsters, criminals, and Megatron flickered his eyes in cynicism and thought back deliberately, probably the Prime is involved, and Orion stumbled over his words and gawked at him, forgetting the rest of his sentence.

“Yes?” Megatron prompted, eyes gleaming with faintly malicious enjoyment. “When the people who built me come…?”

“We’ll—we’ll be ready,” Orion said, his voice cracking. “We’ll know—who they are. What they were trying to do, why—it’s not going to be anything good or honest. They wouldn’t have had to hide it if it was. That’s why they did hide it. Because when most people find out what they did—they’ll turn against them.”

“Turn against the Prime,” Megatron repeated, in faint amusement.

“The Prime is not involved,” Orion said flatly. “We’ll talk to Alpha Trion. You’ll see. I bet he’ll take us to the Prime, and they’ll both help us find the people who were responsible—oh, shut up,” he added to Megatron’s cool, irresistible, ticking conclusions, going off one after the other: in fact the Prime was the most appealing suspect because he could have done it alone, no confederates involved, easier to keep the secret; how could anyone but the Prime hide sums these large— “Just stop it! And if he is involved—then—then at least it is only him!”

“Yes, only the Prime,” Megatron said. They were going to need an army even sooner than he’d been thinking.

“If it’s the Prime, then what we need is a new Prime,” Orion said. “Who’ll fix the systematic issues from the top—”

“Well, that’s a step up in ambition,” Megatron said gleefully.

“What? No! I didn’t mean me!” Orion said. “I’m not—stop it!” He squirmed away in desperation, dragging all his processes back onto his own hardware and pushing Megatron out—he was laughing the entire time, the over-engineered circuit board—and took back his cables in a spirit of indignation. Megatron let him, retracting his own, and stretched lazily underneath him, which made Orion unwillingly conscious of his gleaming, massively powerful body all over again, with a whole new level of appreciation added to the substantial appreciation he’d already had. And then he realized Megatron was—studying him, with what looked like some appreciation of his own, and Orion desperately tried not to let his emotional processors spike up five degrees.

“This will be entertaining, if nothing else,” Megatron said, and tipped a finger under Orion’s chin to look into his face, with a glint in his optics. “Especially the next part. I hope you like seeing mechs cry.”

“What?” Orion said.

“We’re going to have to tell poor Brickbat that you’ve convinced me to retire and start a revolution,” Megatron said. “It’ll break his heart. But out with the old love, in with the new,” he added, mockingly, but Orion swallowed hard anyway. His fuel pump was having trouble maintaining a normal pace, something between terror and thrill quivering through his circuits. He didn’t know if he was ready for—this, whatever this was even going to be. No, that wasn’t right. He knew he wasn’t ready. Nothing in his life had prepared him for it. And Megatron could make fun of his optimism all he wanted, but Orion had the clear sharp certainty that it wasn’t going to be an easy road. It would go—a long way down. Maybe as far down as Megatron had started, subterranean levels of agony ahead. And he wouldn’t know if there was enough inside him to make it back up again until they did. If they ever did.

Megatron was watching him, faintly smiling, as if he still knew what Orion was thinking, and was waiting to see what he’d do, now that it really came down to it.

Orion took a deep breath. The way wasn’t going to get any shorter. “Let’s go, then,” he said. “I can’t wait to get out of here.”

# End