Rung's Reports: Ultra Magnus, Session 13

[bumblemusprime]

Rung’s Reports
Ultra Magnus: Session Thirteen


“I need to talk to you about this doorframe.”

Rung sat, waited for the now familiar routine to play itself out. Magnus poked the frame, ran his finger along it, stood back and moved his head from side to side, as if analyzing the hidden danger in the exact angles of the Lost Light’s doorways. He reached inside his left chest compartment and pulled out a tape measure, the hard-light extension flickering into view, running up and down the metal beams that framed the door. “I’m doing an extensive inspection of all the frames on this ship,” Magnus said. “The joints here are off by—”

“Why don’t you have a seat first?” Rung asked.

“I have thirty more frames at least today,” Magnus grumbled. But he sat down.

“Why door frames?” Rung asked.

“Because these are, on average, at least fifteen micro-degrees too wide. Can’t believe—can’t believe it, can’t believe that anyone could be so slapdash, even in a third-party constructed ship. You know the Autobot code mandates—mandates!—a three macro-degree limit at least. How did Fortress Maximus get in here?” He stood up, threw the hard-light hologram of the tape measure against the door again. “He’s got to have a, what, four macro degree-clearance?”

“I believe he can collapse the tank treads on his back,” Rung said. “Garrus-9 is a rather cramped place, he says—”

“It is no wonder, with these door frames, that this whole ship—” Ultra Magnus stopped just short of whatever disparagement he had in store. “Not code. Not close to code!”

“Yes. Code.” If one thing defined Magnus, it was his ability to speak in code. Whether he knew it or not. “Is there anything else you’ve been doing?”

“Rodimus isn’t answering my memos. He says he’s writing a speech, and shouldn’t be disturbed.”

“Why a speech?”

“In case he needs to motivate us in battle.” Magnus looked at the doorframe with an expression that would better suit an interrogation room. “He says it’s very important to build up a backlog of speeches.”

“Oh.” Rung really wished the Lost Light’s commander was willing to meet, if only because the notion of a meeting would show some self-awareness on Rodimus’s part. “Magnus, someone told me something interesting the other day, and I’d like to explore it.”

“I really don’t have much time,” Magnus said. With that, he sat down again.

“I just want to satisfy my curiosity about something. Ratchet says that you deputized a human as a member of the Wreckers,” Rung said. “Verity.”

Magnus let out a long, creaking sigh—a sign, Rung had learned, that he would shortly lose himself in a lengthy explanation. It was the closest he got to excitement. “The Tyrest Accord has never been revised to account for human combatants. Seventeen sixty-three through eighteen ninety-five covers organic noncombatants, with the highly contended plasmatic clause, which you’ll remember, and nineteen fourteen through nineteen eighteen addresses organic combatants, revised and updated in nineteen thirty seven through nineteen forty-five, but all affiliated organic races have to be listed and catalogued before the Accord can be updated, which means—”

“Which means,” Rung said, and it was very hard to hide a smile, “that she could do whatever she wanted, in your eyes.”

“No,” Magnus said. After a moment, he coughed, an unusual mannerism for him. “No. It just means that there were no… natural limitations.”

Oh, that unmarked assumption that the Tyrest Accord was natural. “Why this human?”

“She… she stowed away on my ship.” Something that might have been the initial stage of a smile flitted across Magnus’s face, for one nanosecond before his natural scowl returned and flattened it.

“There is precedent to return her to her planet. Nineteen fourteen and all that.”

“She was a combatant, though. Engaged in covert operations against Megatron himself, on Earth. I couldn’t—well, I couldn’t turn her down.” He added hastily, “Not when there was a clear margin of error in the act of returning her.”

Rung noted that Magnus’s hand, which had been nervously flicking the activation switch on the tape measure, had calmed as their conversation continued.

“Clear margin of error.”

“That’s right.” His scowl deepened, as if detecting a possible smile. “She told me she didn’t really have a home to go to.”

Rung couldn’t help smiling himself. “I’ve never known you to take people in.”

Magnus looked at Rung’s smiling face the way he’d been looking at the doorframe. “I needed a plant. The Wreckers… I thought, with their code violations, and their reputation for insubordination…” He didn’t finish. His massive servos and humming gears whirred, a steady symphony of noise, the constant reminder of how this robot was a uniquely powerful creature, and thus all the more uniquely helpless. “I needed eyes among them.”

“Yes. A shrewd move, like I said.” So went the dance: Magnus would come close to honest engagement with his emotions, then dance back toward rules and regulation. “Do you ever worry that you violated the spirit of the law, as far as our relations to organics go?”

“Spirit? What spirit?” Magnus looked around the room. “Are you seeing things? I will have to document this conversation for Ratchet’s benefit if—”

“Never mind.”

Magnus fidgeted, tapping his fingers with a repeated clang against the table. “Do you know what the real problem with Autobots is?”

They don’t follow orders, Rung thought.

“They don’t follow orders.”

Four million years of war and they still want their turn as the hero.

“Four million years of war and they still want their turn as the hero.”

No respect for the code.

“At least with organics, you know that they value something. They value experience. They value wisdom. They value life.”

This was new. “That’s what appealed to you about Verity.”

“She listened to me,” he said. “Followed orders. Trusted that I knew what I was talking about.”

“And that means something to you.”

Magnus glared up and down the doorframe. “She was with the Wreckers too long, it turns out,” Magnus said finally. “She defied my orders and stowed away with them on the G-9 mission. After that, she asked to be returned to Earth.” He stood up, gears groaning. “I’ve recorded your doorframe irregularities, and someone should be along once Rodimus…” He paused. “Someone should be along to correct the issue. Someone needs to.”

“Magnus, when Verity left…” They were close to something here, and Rung couldn’t help but tap into the deepest cliche of all psychiatry. “How did that make you feel?”

He stared at the doorframe. “No different than usual.”

“Why?”

“Soldiers disobey orders all the time,” he said, sounding much more like himself. His fingers were irritatedly tapping his datapad again. “By appendix C-10 of the Accord, she would have been court-martialed—”

“Never mind.”

“I’m going to work on more doorframes,” he said, and walked through Rung’s doorframe with one last scowl at it. Rung looked down at his datapad, at the notes he had made. So little progress with Magnus. He had hoped this Verity would unlock something. Instead… I’m going to work on more door frames. Last time it had been rivet depth.

Rung stood up from his chair, still staring at the pad, and looked up to see Magnus in the doorframe.

“She called me Uncle Magnus,” he said. “It had to do with relationships among creatures that sexually reproduce. Your batch initiator’s batchmate, among organics, is your uncle. I looked it up. I never asked her why. She thought it was funny.” His face struggled again, as if something other than a scowl was trying to come through. “I have been reading about sexually reproductive relationships. I don’t understand why she called me Uncle.”

“It sounds like she had some affection for you.” Perhaps, he thought, she understood the code. That unique inner code of Magnus.

“I asked Ratchet to explain it to me. He never responded to the memo.”

“How many memos did you send about it?”

“It was part of the usual batch I send in the morning,” he said.

“Try just stopping by the medibay. Ask him face-to-face.”

“I don’t see why no one responds to memos anymore.” Ultra Magnus turned. “They’re not just for wartime.”

“Goodbye,” Rung said, and whispered, “Uncle Magnus.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

[Computron]

These are so wonderful.

[Best First]

awwwwww.