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Prowl... Did not want to be at this meeting. Prowl did not want to even be on base at the moment. Jazz had been gone for two days already on his team's latest reconstruction job and since then, he'd been more irritable than usual as a result.
He had mentally noted a recent increase in frame temperature but otherwise had no explanation as to why his helm mildly ached for joors at a time. Nor did he have an explanation as to why his normal ration of energon meant for high performance processors made his tank feel queasy.
All of this on top of just missing his conjunx more deeply than was usual led to a cranky Praxian as a result. He grumbled to himself as the final stragglers of the meeting attendants entered, slightly over bright blue optics sweeping across the room. Onslaught, Starscream, Scrapper, Wheeljack, Ironhide, Rewind for record keeping, and- It was impossible for him to stop the sneer that briefly overtook his expression. Barricade. Ugh. Reason nth as to why he didn't want to be at this meeting. His only living batchmate had always been difficult to be around but ever since Ratchet had managed to repair a fraction of his tacnet, he'd become even more insufferable.
Wanting to get this over with, Prowl sat up straighter and cut the air sharply with his door wings fanning up to a V in order to obtain everyone's attention and focus. "I'm certain everyone here has many other items on their respective to do lists that have higher priority than this, so let us begin. The faster we get through this, the faster we can all go our separate ways to more important tasks."
Barricade slipped into the meeting room with that loose, predatory stride of his — the same way he used to stalk alleys: ready for a fight and hoping someone gave him an excuse. The same one he'd used on the Nemesis—where enforcing order meant cracking frames before they cracked the hull. If the rebuilders wanted someone who understood real unrest, real violence, real street-level collapse? Yeah. That’d be him.
One sweep of the room told him everything he needed to know. Nothing impressive. The usual Autobot frag-ups pretending they knew what “logistics” meant, plus a few of Megatron’s original disasters tossed in for color: Starscream, Onslaught, Scrapper.
And then - Of course.
Mr.Tacnet himself. Batchmate. Prototype that actually worked.
Prowl sat in his regulation-perfect posture like he’d been stamped out of an enforcer training manual. Door wings sharp. Optics bright. The usual irritatingly composed silhouette.
Barricade’s own tacnet — the scorched, gutted remains that Autobot CMO had stubbornly coaxed back online — pinged wretchedly in the back of his helm. A rough pulse. Then it spat out data in clipped, jagged bursts.
Well, well.
Somebot was feeling glitchy today.
He took his seat with quiet intention, letting his plating settle with a final, pointed sound. Nothing sloppy. Nothing loud.
Then Prowl opened his intake and Barricade didn’t bother hiding the shift of his field or the cant of his door wings — restrained, but unmistakably sharpened.
That tone.
That clipped authority.
Like the whole room answered to him by default. His time. His authority. His command.
Time to poke some holes in that.
“Works for me. Some of us got better things waitin’ than dead-end attempts.”
It was so subtle that majority of the bots around him probably didn't notice the quiet, shocked invent at the pointed jab. For the most part, the research group regarding carrying was closed information wise. Both for the privacy of the couples and groups participating and so that outside data didn't contaminate the data collected. But, Cybertronians were gossips. Prowl knew that all too well.
Barricade, as far as he knew, didn't have a partner. Wasn't a part of the experiment. So how did he know?
Or was he reading too much into things again? It had taken Jazz quite a bit of work elevating the various pranks the twins used to pull to Spec Ops level in order to detract those talking about him both openly and behind his back. Longer still to get him to stop hyper fixating on it and focusing on it.
In the background, the tacnet begins to spit out probability percentages and predictions on what exactly Barricade was jabbing at. Because it WAS a jab, he had no doubts on that, it was just a matter of at WHAT. Prowl knew that Ratchet had restored a small part of the burnt out copy of the tacnet in his own helm. Let's see if his batchmate knew how to... utilize that yet.
"So you say, Barricade." His tone was even, his doorwings hadn't even twitched. Only a small uptick in his already running warm frame showed any sort of outward reaction. "You were invited to this meeting due to your newly reacquired functioning Tactical Unit. Ah, pardon me, the fractional reacquiring of your tacnet."
He spreads a servo over to the datapads on offer to everyone in the meeting. "By all means, please. Analyze the provided data on the given progress reports on our current rebuilding status of New Iacon and the surrounding terrain."
Barricade’s optics ticked a fraction brighter, facial plating pulling into a sneer, the closest he was willing to get to a snarl with this audience.
Fractional tacnet.
Cute.
He leaned back in his seat. To his side, Starscream practically preened. His wings perked in delighted angles, a too-sharp grin sliding across his face as he settled in like someone had just uncorked the best entertainment he’d seen all cycle.
“So that’s what you’re callin’ it now,” he grunted, lip curling. “Fractional. Huh.”
He tapped a claw against a datapad without looking at it.
“My scraps work just fine. More than enough to read what’s really goin’ on.”
A beat.
A deliberate, pointed beat.
“Even when bots try real hard to hide it.”
His doorwings weren’t subtle — a low, mocking flare of challenge.
“But sure. Data.” he grunted. He flicked the datapad on with one bored claw, optics never leaving Prowl. “Let’s see what you think passes as tactics these days.”
He finally dragged his glare down to the datapad, optics flicking over the first few projections with a rough, unimpressed snort. Numbers, graphs, pretty little statistical models — all the slag Prowl lived and loved.
He swiped through, rough and fast.
His tacnet pinged in the corner of his HUD — shaky, missing detail, but enough. He tilted his helm toward Prowl, smirk deepening.
"This—” another sharp jab “—is slag. You got three amped up factions funnelin’ into a single wrecked sector. All it takes is one dumb glitch to start a fight over priority. You wanna rebuild or start round two of fraggin' war?”
Another swipe. Another snort.
“And this bit?” he drawled, voice dropping low with amusement, “This projection only works if every bot involved behaves exactly the way you want ’em to. Which, hate to break it to ya sweetspark, ain’t how real mechs act. Oh yeeeah, this is some Autobot waste oil if I ever saw it. Same slag that got your bright-opticed freshpaints fragged ‘cause they thought a good attitude stopped energy bolts.”
Prowl stared hard at his batchmate. Someone he once would have given anything to be close to, to have some sort of connection to like other bots had with their batchmates or mentors or cohorts. That want had ended when Praxus had fallen.
The only other mech in this room who could have maybe had a chance at accurately reading their door wings was Starscream of all mechs, given he was a seeker, but even then it wouldn't have been exact. As such, he did not see the point in restraining himself from answering the mocking posturing of the other with his own. His fellow former Autobots currently in the room with him would have been ones to pay attention to them, but not necessarily know the different motions and their meanings. Black and white door wings flared up high, proud, the angle of the V they cut into the air precise down to the micrometer.
And then he tilted his helm... and smirked.
It had never been a good time for the Decepticons whenever Prowl had made this expression during the war. It usually meant that some poor slagger had behaved exactly as he had predicted them to and ensnared themselves without him even lifting a servo. It had only become more terrifying for the opposition to see once he'd subconsciously started to mimic Jazz's own, the one smile you never wanted to see down the end of a dark corridor on the Nemesis.
There was a reason he had been second in command of the entire Autobot faction. It felt like an adequate time to remind Barricade of that.
"'Scraps' is an entirely apt description for your fractionally functioning Tactical Unit, Barricade. For if it were functioning at only 0.005 percent more than it was currently, it might have picked up that the compilation of data you so haphazardly glanced through is not the work of myself at all. It is the compiled work of every Cybertronian currently in this room baring Rewind, as the cassettes rotate based on availability."
Prowl leaned forward, his doorwings moving forward with him in a challenge of his own. Normally, the level helmed Praxian rarely was so brazen with his wings. Not that there were many Praxians left to even understand the movements in the first place. "Not that you would have known what to do with the data anyways. You never so much as touched Tactical even as an Enforcer, much less during the war."
He gestures to the other gathered mechs in the room as he speaks their respective designations. "Every Cybertronian here has been attending these meetings due to their various experience with Tactics in some capacity during the war. Ironhide and Onslaught, prominent frontliners who organized those under their command in real time and managing those with pedes on the ground and cleaning out dangerous, decrepit structures. Wheeljack and Scrapper, talented engineers in their respective factions helping to organize the building aspects in order to actually have some sort of system to work with in rebuilding. Starscream, in command of the seekers which gives a sorely needed Ariel view to tell us what we might miss just from being at ground level. Rewind and the other cassettes from both Host mechs, record keeping so that we are held accountable for our actions and can also build an archive and reference back on steps we've taken."
Finally, he gestures to himself. "I myself am in charge of taking the given information from each source and compiling them into a cohesive summary so that we can all remain on the same level as well as utilizing my experience as Autobots Head Tactician to chart a course as to where various resources and mech power go next but I am not the one with the final say. That is the point of these meetings, so that others can interject their own thoughts and opinions on things I might have missed. So that there is not a 'fight over priority' as you so eloquently put it." With how much he was speaking at once, he mused to himself, he might be mistaken for Bluestreak.
"You, Barricade, were only invited recently as a courtesy. As an acknowledgment that I am no longer the only Cybertronian with a functional tactical unit, even one still so badly damaged and non functional as yours may still be." The only reason he didn't point out that the Autobots had technically WON the frelling war was out of professional courtesy to the other former Decepticons in the room.
"So... would you like to try that again?"
Barricade stared at Prowl for a long, ugly moment — optics dimmed, furnace-hot with contempt. He barked a humorless laugh: short, sharp, derisive.
“Fraggin’ figures.”
He leaned in, door wings flared in a hateful spread, elbows slamming onto the table as his optics narrowed to slits.
“All that posture. All that math. All that second-in-command fraggin’ glory.”
A slow, contemptuous sweep of his optics over Prowl’s frame. His derma curled.
“Still that empty little freak of a drone that rolled off the line.”
Ironhide’s fists clenched into the table top with a crunch. Even Starscream blinked — startled and delighted in equal measure. Rewind let out a tiny, involuntary beep of surprise.
Barricade wasn’t finished. He jabbed a bitter digit toward Prowl’s chestplates.
“Still the same hollow glitch tryin’ to pretend fillin’ a room with charts and big words makes you somethin’ more than just a defective experiment with a fancy badge.”
Silence fell like a dropped engine block.
For a moment, Prowl was too stunned to speak. Whatever he had expected, it wasn’t this. Really, he should have- Barricade had always been cruel to him, to others in general, but to him in particular. It had just… it had just been so many vorns since he’d really interacted with his batchmate directly that he’d forgotten. Barricade had never been afraid to say the things others only whispered behind his back now.
The thing was, they were the same frame model. Even after all this time. And something about their shared frame model seemed prone to quick anger. Prowl, as much as he’d learned to control his temper over the many vorns with the help of Jazz, Ratchet, his friends, was no exception to this.
His optics went bright from the surge of anger in his lines and his engine growled deeply. “You forget something, Barricade. For all your talk, all your posturing, you never made rank in the Enforcers. You never even made rank amongst your chosen faction. I, at least, functioned as expected.”
Underneath the anger that he was sure had to be reaching Jazz at this point in spite of their distance, was old hurt dredged up anew. Prowl didn’t like playing into the functionalist angle, believed every mech was capable beyond what they were initially made for. “If I am a drone, if I am a defective experiment, what does that make you?”
“Commission Design Mech - PRAXUS - ENFORCER - MODEL T9 BATCH 2.” He spat out the extended form of their cold construct serial name like it was poison. “0007.” Prowl jabbed a digit towards Barricade before pointing back at himself. “0012.”
“Seventeen of us in total and we’re the only two who lived beyond initial activation. But I didn’t have to fry half of my processor to do it.” He sneers now in an eerie echo of Barricade’s expression, it wasn’t one he made often. “If I’m a defective experiment then you are an outright failure of an experiment from the start.”
Barricade’s field snapped tighter—then expanded again, a hard crack of static-laced pressure that shoved at the air, at Prowl, at every mech stupid enough to still be in this room. The room positively hummed.
Not with sound—no one was venting hard enough for that—
but with the dynamic ripple of half a dozen EM fields spiking, clashing, recoiling.
Wheeljack’s fins flashed a panicked stutter of white-blue-white, the universal signal of oh no oh no reflecting right off his helm plating.
Onslaught’s entire frame went unnervingly still—the kind of stillness that meant a tactician had already calculated three exit routes and decided none of them were fast enough.
Scrapper and Rewind both wore the same expression: blank visors, frozen, the look of mechs who had absolutely no idea how to get the frag out of the way of two convoys barreling straight toward each other at full speed.
A flicker of unsure flashed quickly across Starscream's smarmy faceplates.
Ironhide was already half out of his seat.
And Prowl—
Prowl was a vision.
Black and white plating, hot, too hot, over bright optics in a twisted sneering face.
Door wings as weapons.
Door wings as final notice.
None of that mattered. Frag em all.
Watching Prowl flare up now — bright, furious, alive — made Barricade feel every scorched circuit in his own helm. Made him feel the fifteen other ghosts that never walked at all.
Barricade’s vents hitched once— not with fear.
Rage.
Old, familiar, territorial rage from the deep coding of their shared model.
For a sparkspin, he didn’t speak. Just stared at Prowl with a look hot enough to warp metal.
Then he shoved himself up straighter, form for form, EM cracking outward in a jagged halo.
“…0007.”
He tasted the designation like acid.
“You really don’t get it, do you? You functioned cuz you had nothin’ in you worth breakin’. I survived - no I burned - because I refused to be what they built. You? You’re still wearin’ that code like a fraggin badge of honor.”
Maybe once, before Praxus Fell, he would have been afraid of Barricade. Would have been cowed by the other mechs field, made himself smaller whilst feeling desperate for his batchmate to feel anything but anger towards him. For anyone to feel any sort of positive emotion towards him whilst being unable to fully comprehend his own emotions.
That was a long, long time ago. He was no longer that mech. Hoped to Primus that the mech he was today would have been the mech he desperately needed to be kind to his newbuild self.
Prowl stood up with a sort of fluidity that he could only have adopted from his conjunx, door wings flared out in the most aggressive position. He’d never quite bothered before, those who did not have wings of any kind the excessive motion was seen more as a weakness or detriment than an additional language. He weathered the other’s em field with a scowl on his face although something in his systems tried to ping him to be more on the defensive than offensive. He ignored it.
Where Barricade lashed out his field, uncaring who it hurt or was effected in the path of his Target, Prowl wielded his like a precise weapon. If Barricade was an uncontrolled explosion then Prowl was a heat seeking missile. His anger surged and so did his field in kind, bright and hot, but he didn’t want to burn those around him. It was a narrowly focused beam straight for his batchmate.
“I didn’t need to burn. I adapted back then, just as I do now. That was something you could never do, right Barricade? Adapt, change, grow, learn. I am more than just the Tacnet.” Those words, that belief, was hard won. It had taken so much love and care from others to ever reach this point. Had taken so much love for himself.
“You are still the same sad mech that bullied others to get his way just as you were thousands of vorns ago. An entire war has come and gone and you are still the same angry mech!” He snarls, teeth bared.
“Do you even have friends? A cohort? Allies? Anything?”
Barricade’s expression didn’t crack.
Didn’t waver.
Didn’t even flicker at Prowl’s snarl or the hot, needle-focused field aimed right at him.
“None of that slag matters, mech— and what would you know about that slag anyways? You've always just been useful, convenient to keep 'round.”
His voice cut through the heated air like a serrated blade—casual, cruel, and dismissive to the point of insult.
“Done makin’ speeches? ‘Cause all that self-help drivel you just spat out ain’t changin’ the fact that you’re standin’ here runnin’ hot enough to fry your own cortex.”
His optics swept over Prowl in a slow, calculated line— not with empathy, not with understanding, but with the cold, greedy interest of someone hunting mistakes.
His tacnet pinged—glitchy, uneven. He grinned anyway, seizing on the first report presented and running it straight into the ground like a mech determined to prove his own point with the least effort possible.
“Adapted, did ya? Grown? Learned?” A low, mocking chuckle. “Funny, ‘cause my tacnet is screamin’ the opposite.”
He tapped the side of his helm with two claws.
“Y’know what else my little ‘fractional’ tacnet flagged?”
He flicked the datapad up with a single bored motion, letting the projection hover between them. Entire sections of highlighted text strobe a faint yellow.
“Your numbers don’t line up. And before you start flappin’ doorwings about ‘team effort’ again—yeah, I fraggin’ heard you. Sure. Everyone pitched in. Frontliners. Fliers. Grease-monkeys. Even the fraggin' cassette brigade.”
His smirk sharpened.
"But you’re the one who stitched it all together, yeah? Sector Five resource projections? Off by fourteen percent.”
Wheeljack sputtered, “That’s not—”
A lazy shrug.
“And the energon-route efficiency model? Doesn’t even fraggin’ match the travel-time matrix you stapled to it.”
He lifted his optics long enough to let the jab sink in—
“You. Missed. Slag.”
Even with heat visibly bleeding off of his bright chevron, Prowl didn't flinch at the accusations, scoffing. "And you are the expert at burning cortexs aren't you? As well as dodging questions and going into a fight without even a third of the information needed, it seems."
Engine still growling low, Prowl gestures to the pad. "If you bothered to look for more than a second or if your tacnet was even any good it would have picked up on the obvious fact that the top says 'First pass through '... And that it is not the only report and model loaded onto the data pad."
Though Ironhide looked ready to leap up and pummel Barricade, he chuckled humorously. "Just how little do you know Prowl, mech? He NEVER does just one report!"
Over bright optics stared his batchmate down. "Swipe. Right. Barricade." Each word was a snarl from the lighter colored Praxian.
Sure enough, the model presented was labeled at the bottom of being one out of a total of nineteen loaded reports. Each one progressively working out the errors until the last three were proposed final drafts with corrected errors and room for shifts depending on the consensus of the table of representatives.
For half a klik, something slipped.
His optic ridges crept together in a small, involuntary crease of confusion.
A flicker.
A crack.
Gone as soon as it appeared.
His tacnet hummed — an ugly, grating recalibration pulse — his reality matrix itself being shoveled back into place one wrong variable at a time. A ball of heat dropped in his tanks and rose to his silver chevron in a sickening wave.
A single door wing waved in a telltale asymmetrical twitch before Barricade clamped down hard, impotent rage perfusing his circuits.
Then he laughed — sharp, humorless, too loud.
“Fraggin’ look at that. Sixteen drafts.” He held up the datapad like it was offensive just to touch. “Workin’ real hard to cover all that slop, huh.”
“It’s called ‘showing your work’, you dumbaft.” Prowl didn’t often use language like that unless he was really frustrated. Or angry. Or both. “I recognize that not everyone is able to just do the math and calculations like I can in their helm and arrive to the same conclusion so I show the process I went through. And record keeping! This is not the only city that needs to be cleaned and rebuilt- if we know what process works here then it can be adapted and used as needed without having to start all over again!”
He slams both servos on the table and the former bots in the room would know it was a tell tale sign the temperamental Praxian was inching towards table flipping territory. “Think beyond yourself for once in your fragging existence! Even Starscream has been helpful!”
“Didn’t think you had ‘dumbaft’ in your vocabulary, 0012.”
Barricade’s derma curled. “Guess your pretty little spec-ops mechling s'rubbing off on you.”
“And Starscream bein’ helpful?” A barked, incredulous laugh. “Since fraggin’ when. That’s how I know you’re glitchin’, sweetspark.”
His doorwings twitched, once — before he locked them rigid again.
“Tell ya what. You wanna lecture me on adaptation? On growth? On thinkin’ beyond myself?” He stood up abruptly, leaning forward, an accusing digit jabbing towards Prowl's crimson chevron, EM field spiking in a sharp, territorial sweep.
“Then stop hidin’ behind work reports and fraggin’ look at yourself. What the frag is wrong with you, Prowl?”
His voice came out gravel-rough, unrefined, every word a shove instead of a slice.
“Look around you. Autobots, Decepticons, Neutrals—all playin’ happy rebuild family like we didn’t spend millennia slaggin’ each other across half the galaxy. Peace my aft. This whole truce is just another arena, and you—”
He stabbed a digit toward him again, optics burning.
“—you thrive in it. All neat charts and political compromises and ‘shared governance.’ It’s a perfect little playground for your perfect little code.”
He leaned closer, voice dropping into a venomous rasp.
“But me? Peace don’t want me. Peace don’t need me. Peace sure as slag ain’t built for what I am. But you wanna talk nonfunctional? Damaged?”
A harsh snort.
“You can compile every data point in this room—doesn’t change the fact that your spark’s so cold and dead it can’t even kindle with someone as smoking fire-hot as your junxie."
Silence.
Even Onslaught and Scrapper had been shocked into silence. Ironhide looked stunned and it would only take a few kliks before he was beating up Barricade himself.
Prowl was the worst off. The comment had struck him deeply in the spark, his anger lanced and bleeding out of his frame like a main energon line had been pierced. His optics became entirely white, His em field, which had been lashing out precisely at Barricade, went back to being plating tight against the monochrome Praxian so quickly one might think it’d vanished completely. How did he know. How did he know?
The hot anger coalesced into something colder, so much colder. He wrapped that cold fury around his spark as a shield as it ached from what he’d been trying to deny as the truth- that he’d never be able to kindle with Jazz because his spark just wasn’t right, was broken in a way that could never be mended from the start. Slowly, Prowl’s optics went from white with shock to a glacial blue and he stood up tall, sensor wings locking into position behind him.
“It’s as if you have a death wish.” Voice whisper soft even as behind the erected barriers he felt like wailing. “I do not believe you realize the liability you gave yourself, allowing Ratchet to reactivate part of your broken and decrepit tactical unit. If not partitioned correctly, enough conflicting statements can be enough to lead to a reality matrix crash that, if severe enough, can lead to permanent processor damage.”
Prowl leans forward and delicately places his servos back onto the table, deceptively gentle. “Let’s test how well you can cordon off the glitches in real time, shall we?”
A low hum rumbled in Barricade’s chassis — not fear, but anticipation.
“Testing my crash tolerance now?”
He stepped in closer, unbothered by the heat rolling off Prowl’s frame.
“Don't threaten me with a good time, hit me with your best logic knot, prettymech.”
The sole reaction from Prowl was an even greater uptick in heat, cooling fans clicking on high. It was going to take a lot of work to shut down his own tacnet’s response even just by creating the scenario and parameters that he knew without an inkling of doubt would shut Barricade down. But having both vorns of experience and a completely functional tactical unit would be his biggest benefit.
The heat became more severe as it took shape in his mind. Half of his processor was being dedicated to keeping it contained and he muted his own audials to prevent tripping himself into a loop.
”Tactical Unit, Set parameters:
Autobot positional advantage = A
Decepticon positional advantage = D = A - 1
Find a solution in which:
D is such that A = 1, but D cannot be 0.
Enforce prediction accuracy error = 0, where error = 1/A
No integrative limit
Execute.”
In his own helm it was like playing that human game that Jazz had shown him once, ’Snake’. Trying not to slam into his own mental work while erecting partitions as fast as he could make them until he had just enough processor space to change the imagined scenario with solvable parameters. But, he managed it, even as overheating errors flashed across his HUD.
Now it was time to see if Barricade would fall as neatly as he predicted.
Barricade's optics brightened fractionally as the conditions slotted in, the cold, precise click of a process claiming priority.
A thin band of text flickered across the top of his HUD:
Input Detected
Resolve Senario
Intialize arrays with start state
→ E_store = np.array([1])
→ D_store = np.array([0])
Establish known variables:
→ A = 1
→ D = A - 1
→ E = 1/A
→ i = 0
Appending Values to Storage
→ D_store = np.append(D_store, D)
→ E_store = np.append(E_store, E)
The datapad under his claw might as well have been a dead prop. The real data was flashing across his inner HUD in harsh white text.
Prowl’s face.
The table.
The datapad.
Overlayed with:
Establish Endstate Conditions:
→ D_f = D_store[-1]
→ E_f = E_store[-1]
Requirements
→ D_f ≠ 0
→ E_f = 0
“I know it’s divergent,” he rasped, snarling at the numbers only he could see. “You can’t solve zero-error with that base state—”
Selecting Solver...
Evaluating suitability:
Solver_01: ODE, governing equations not differential in nature, insufficient complexity → REJECTED
Solver_02: Runge-Kutta, requires positional data → REJECTED
Solver_03: structural corruption detected → REJECTED
Solver_04: iterative backtracking CSP, no iteration cap established→ VALID
Solver_04 flagged: Danger — potential feedback cascade
→ User override absent
→ Proceeding...
A faint, crawling pressure started behind his optic ridges—like someone was trying to fold his frontal plating in from the inside.
“Don’t you fraggin’—”
Initializing Solver_04: Recursive Constraint-Projection Engine...
→ Recursion limit: NO DEFINITION
→ Reality-matrix checkpoints: NO DEFINITION
→ Heuristic exit conditions: NO DEFINITION
→ Proceeding...
His optics flared wide. The world snapped into sharper focus and then warped.
Main Script (RUN):
for i in range():
→ i = i + 1
flag_D_valid = (D_f != 0)
flag_E_valid = (E_f == 0)
endstate_reached = flag_D_valid and flag_E_valid
→ f(A) = 1 / A
→ f'(A) = -1 / A²
→ A_next = A - f(A) / f'(A) = 2A*
Applying update:
→ A₁ = 2 A₀ = 2*
Append new state
→ D₁ = A₁ - 1 = 1
→ E₁ = 1 / A₁ = 0.5
→ D_store = np.append(D₁)
→ E_store = np.append(E₁)
end
i = 0: CONDITIONAL FAIL: WARNING - DIVERGENT SOLUTION
i = 100: CONDITIONAL FAIL: WARNING - DIVERGENT SOLUTION
Prowl, table, the datapad.
All of it suddenly wrapped in red warnings.
i = 200: CONDITIONAL FAIL: WARNING - DIVERGENT SOLUTION
i = 300: CONDITIONAL FAIL: WARNING - DIVERGENT SOLUTION
i = 400: CONDITIONAL FAIL: WARNING - DIVERGENT SOLUTION
i = 500: CONDITIONAL FAIL: WARNING - DIVERGENT SOLUTION
i = 600: CONDITIONAL FAIL: WARNING - DIVERGENT...
His optics flickered in time with the iterations.
After giving the line of command for the other's fractured tacnet to tear itself apart on, Prowl straightened, arms going behind his back. He watched with a detached look, optics still cold with rage, as the error Cascades began.
The user override, one that Prowl had deployed the moment he could to save himself, would not be forth coming unless Barricade was smart enough to realize the necessity of it and was able to cobble one together rather than having one ready on standby like he did.
Slowly, he walked around the table to stand directly in front of the crashing mech. Up close, it was as plain as day that the two had been made from the same mold. Were batchmates, as close as Cybertronians could currently be to biologically related family outside of split sparks.
"It seems you are having difficulty here, Barricade." The taunt was frigid even if his frame very much wasn't. "That was one of the more simple loops to break as well. Not up to the challenge?"
Dividing his attention, Prowl commed Ratchet. It was only fair to give the mech a warning of what was to come.
: Ratchet. I believe you should prep one of your rooms in the hospital for a severe processor crash caused by overheating cascading errors attributed to a tactical unit. His voice was even frigid in the message.
: Do not worry, however. It is not for myself. Though he didn't make one in actuality, there was a merciless smile in his voice now as well. : It's for my dear batchmate.
STOP():
NameError: 'STOP' function not found
i = 2234: CONDITIONAL FAIL: WARNING - DIVERGENT SOLUTION
AUTO-DETECT: INSUFFICIENT ERROR CONVERGENCE
Action: Cycle up auxiliary parallel cores.
Pinging...
(30 offline, corruption status)
(15 unstable, corruption status)
(4 online, available)
i = 2831: CONDITIONAL FAIL: WARNING - DIVERGENT SOLUTION
i = 3255: CONDITIONAL FAIL: WARNING - DIVERGENT SOLUTION
Stop():
NameError: 'Stop' function not found
Iteration speed quadrupled.
Inside his HUD, the last rational part of him watched in horror as the tacnet began allocating him like a disposable server cluster:
Assigning additional load → CPU_BARRICADE_CORE_01
Assigning additional load → CPU_BARRICADE_CORE_02
Assigning additional load → CPU_BARRICADE_CORE_03
Insufficent resources located --> overclock engaged.
His helm spiked in temperature so fast his vents whoomed open, cycling hot air in panicked bursts. Cooling fans shrieked at full output. The air around his helm wavered with heat.
His whole frame shook.
“—c-can’t— shut it— down— nnnngggg —”
A red warning:
Thermal Warning:
WARNING: Core temperatures exceeding 147.2% of nominal range.
Initiating emergency coolant diversion.
Coolant flow inadequate.
stopStopSTOP():
NameError: 'stopStopSTOP' function not found
i = 8247: CONDITIONAL FAIL: WARNING - DIVERGENT SOLUTION
i = 207892: CONDITIONAL FAIL: WARNING - DIVERGENT SOLUTION
i = 779731: CONDITIONAL FAIL: WARNING - DIVERGENT SOLUTION
His claws dug into the table as heat ballooned in his frame, optics glitching – Prowl's blasted smug – SMUG – faceplates guttering to pixelated static.
i = 7270931: CONDITIONAL FAIL: WARNING - DIVERGENT SOLUTION
i = 1702231 CONDITIONAL FAIL: WARNING - DIVERGENT SOLUTION
i = 43561826: CONDITIONAL FAIL: WARNING - DIVERGENT SOLUTION
The world jumped.
A frame skip.
Reality clipping.
i = 143561826: CONDITIONAL FAIL: WARNING - DIVERGENT SOLUTION
For a nanoklik everything froze, locked in place—
Prowl, the datapads, the conference table—
all motionless, all wrong.
CRITICAL ALERT:
Core temperature: 164% of allowable ceiling
Executive function destabilizing
i = 203561826: CONDITIONAL FAIL: WARNING - DIVERGENT SOLUTION
“Pro—krzzk—wl I c—can’t—”
FATAL ERROR — OVERFLOW
The table filled his entire field of vision, a perfect rectangular plane of metal accelerating toward him.
All he could process was one clean, sharp thought:
Table.
THUD.
Though outwardly Prowl remained glacial in expression, posture, and field, deep in his emotional turmoil… Primus damn it, he felt bad. It was impossible for Prowl not to see himself in a crashing Barricade, not when they shared the same frame down to the very protoform that made them up. He didn’t remember the entirety of his first major crash because the errors and overheating had corrupted some of the memory files but he remembered enough. It was terrifying, especially in not knowing what was even going on.
Prowl barely even registered that there were others still in the room as he made his way around the table towards his fallen and crashed batchmate. For how blank he was keeping everything, one might have truly mistake him for a drone. His movements were as graceful as they were controlled down to the voltage running through each wire, crouching down next to the fallen Praxian.
With well coordinated and practiced motions, he shifted the others frame to keep his vents as unobstructed as possible so that Barricade’s frame could continue to dump heat as needed while also keeping weight off of deceptively fragile sensor panels. With a flick of his wrist he opened a small panel in his arm that held a spooled hardline cable while at the same time digging a digit under a seam in Barricade’s own arm to reveal a matching connection point.
Without hesitation, outwardly at least, he jacks the cable in and establishes a hardline connection. It was laughably, disturbingly, easy what with the other mech in a complete fatal error shutdown. An uneasy reminder of his own vulnerabilities. Prowl had made sure every fire wall and defense on his end of things was up and fully engaged when accessing the other’s broken and fragmented tacnet.
: …Tactical Unit.
stop_all()
Search: Motor Function Suite
Aux_fans[0,X] = 100
Capillary_coolant_lines[0,X] = 100
Coolant_solenoids = Full
Emrg_overheat_reset.exe
His next move was what had him torn. Already in a neatly compressed data packet was his own first memory, as fragmented as it was, of his first crash… but also on how he managed to scramble together the code needed to pull himself out. A visual reference to guide Barricade on how to stop this specific instance of happening ever again. A visual representation of how Prowl knew and deeply understood the same crushing terror Barricade had just gone through. Had once been just as vulnerable to this.
In the end it was three factors that made him push the data packet through for Barricade to either accept or reject once he was conscious again:
-
The terror he’d been able to see in the other as a mirror into the past of himself, just in darker colors.
-
That he was 99.998% certain that Barricade had actually been about to ask for help prior to crashing.
-
Optimus, one of the first few who’d ever believed in him, in Prowl, offering kindness over revenge and cruelty again and again and again no matter how many times he’d been rebuffed and rebuked.
Optimus would give Barricade the tools to help himself. So, Prowl would to.
Wheeljack had seen a lot of things topple over in his time—buildings, prototypes, the occasional small moon—but there was something uniquely horrifying about watching an mech just… hard-crash.
One klik Barricade was all snarls and EM-lashing brutality, the next—
THUD.
Barricade's helm clipped the table on the way down before sliding down into a steaming heap of plating and dead weight limbs.
“Aw slag—” Wheeljack vaulted out of his chair, fins blazing frantic white-blue-white, hands hovering uselessly in the air as his processor tried to pick a priority.
Heat shimmered in the air around Barricade’s helm, vented in thick, hot waves. His temperature readings on Wheeljack’s wrist scanner—he didn’t remember pulling it out, just that it was suddenly there in his servo—spiked into a violent red band.
“Okay, okay, that’s— that’s not good, that’s very not good,” he muttered under his vents, optics darting between Barricade’s crumpled frame and Prowl’s gentle calm. “No fraggin’ way this is just a lil’ error cascade, that’s full-blown melt-your-core territory—”
He made a tiny, aborted motion like he was going to rush in and touch something, then thought better of it.
Because Prowl had slid into the space beside Barricade with that eerie, razor-precise focus Wheeljack had only ever seen in battlefield triage or black-ops extractions.
Rewind, meanwhile, hadn’t stopped recording.
": Ratchet—medical emergency, Barricade’s down—”
Then he saw Ratchet’s beacon already en route, ETA ticking down sharply across his HUD.
Rewind’s field stilled. Oh.
A small, precise shift of comprehension.
Of course Prowl had already made the call.
"Did...did he just die?" Incredulous.
Starscream wasn't concerned, not exactly—concern required a baseline of empathy he didn’t often bother with—but calculating.
He watched Prowl calmly move around the table, watched Barricade’s frame twitch spasmodically.
“…Well,” he said at last, voice silken and dry, “if anyone doubted that Prowl was terrifying, I believe that question has now been thoroughly answered.”
His gaze flicked from Prowl, to the exposed hardline, to Barricade’s venting frame.
“And here I thought the war was over.”
... r e b o o t i n g...
Limited boot protocols – overheat conditions. Hold further diag.
...
...
...
Hardline detected "CMD-PXER-T9B2-0012://104.44.107.33//PORT 3D1a//"
ALERT: Medic codes not detected...USER INACCESSIBLE...initializing emerg_prcdef001.exe
The surviving scraps of the unit seized, firing into a frenzy. Fractured routines convulsed outward, spitting corrupted packets and scrambled viruses at the intruder. No logic. No formation. Just a wounded system thrashing blind—hurling a jagged digital snarl at firewall walls that stayed cold, smooth, and utterly unmoved.
The scene unfolding in front of them was… interesting. Onslaught had predicted something would go wrong with the inclusion of Barricade, the mech was too volatile to not provoke something or someone, but it certainly hadn’t been this. It had been like watching a less competent Vortext attempt to throw his weight around.
He watched with a familiar feeling of detachment as the former Autobot SIC coldly handle the situation that Barricade had literally ended up asking for like a dumbaft. The rest of his gestalt would get a kick out of this, at least.
Scrapper at Onslaught’s side, looked a little annoyed, arms crossing. “Damn it! Had a bet goin with Mix that Barricade would live through the meeting. Now I owe him five credits and he’ll be insufferable about it.” He hadn’t particularly cared either way, both gestalts had been too high up the command latter just from the nature of being combiner teams that Barricade had been little more than an annoyance most of the war with a way too obvious chip on his shoulder.
Ironhide looked more frozen than Wheeljack for a long moment before visibly kicking himself into gear and into action. He immediately began to comm the various security mechs in the route Ratchet would likely be taking (Because he just knew Prowl had to have already called Ratchet, the mech was too thorough not to have) to clear the corridors entirely.
While Ratchet would be able to get through easily with his lights and sirens going, they didn’t need nosy mechs spreading rumors about a meeting gone wrong. Best to get other mechs cleared now and minimize the damage as much as they could early on.
Prowl on the outside was a picture of glacial calm, so much so that his own worryingly high frame temperature might have been masked on Wheeljack’s scanner by the sheer amount of heat being poured off of Barricade. This particular hardline cable was likely going to be slagged from the heat alone but that was minimal damage, a simple repair and replace.
He’d been prepared for the haywire slagged Tactical Unit in Barricade’s helm to try and do something. He had the reports of the medics who’d died in similar cascade crashes as those of his dead batchmates when they had tried to shut the tacnets down. It was why he’d gone in with such high fire walls in the first place.
Perhaps it was that he’d gone beyond simply stopping the Tacnet from cascading further. Had tried to do more to help. The panicked flailing of the unit wasn’t enough to do a lick of harm to him… but the energy it took for his fire walls to simply activate and do their job was the final shove his frame had needed to topple from the precarious position he’d been playing with his own frame temperature.
To the observers in the room, Prowl’s frame jerked unevenly- an abrupt break in the graceful and controlled movements he’d shown following Barricade’s final jab. With a rough pull, his frame moved on memory alone as he jerked his half melted hardline cable from Barricade’s port- no way he’d exited smoothly from the other.
His much more functional tacnet, for a rare instance of not being the cause of the overheat, queued and sent the same commands Prowl had used on his batchmate. Vents opened, coolant lines dilated, coolant pressure increased. All attempts to keep himself from a, comparatively, less severe heat induced crash than the Praxian in front of him. And it worked.
At least until the spark pain began.
It started with a pulse of pain directly in his very core, like his spark itself had been briefly destabilized and knocked out of its regular beat and rotation. Making a garbled noise of pain, one servo went up to press on the center of his bumper, above his spark chamber. It only became worse. It felt like twin blades were cutting into his spark, lifting in and out whilst carving orbits around his spark.
His systems were knocked entirely out of whack, his tacnet not knowing what to do with no visible threat, no enemy to attack, no user to guide its code. Prowl’s temperature spiked beyond most allowable tolerances and caused a litany of errors to crop up in systems across his entire frame. The noise that escaped his vocalizer as his frame jerked in uncoordinated movements, the high keen of pain saturated with fear, was one that Ironhide had never heard Prowl make.
As Prowl collapsed fully, both servos now clutching above the source of his agony, his spark itself, Ironhide was already frantically contacting Ratchet.
: Ratchet! I know you’re on your way already but- floor it! Something- something just happened with Prowl but I don’t know what! He was fine one minute, probably doing code triage or something with that fragged Barricade, and then he just jerks out the hardline cord and- and collapses!
It took a lot to rattle a frontliner, they saw a lot of slag. Different horrors than SpecOps but horrors all the same. For Ironhide, who had seen more than most, to sound this panicked…
Something was going horribly wrong.
Something had hollowed the atmosphere out of the room the klik Prowl made that awful, keening cry.
The sound didn’t belong to him. It didn’t belong to any mech Rewind had ever known. It tore straight through the conference hall—raw, instinctive, terrified—and for a moment Rewind swore the whole room forgot how to ventilate.
Wheeljack didn’t.
He was already moving.
He was across the table before Rewind’s own vents restarted—that unfamiliar, wretched sound still ringing around his audials. His fins strobe white–blue–white as he dropped to his knee joints in a blur of motion, servos snapping into action with a precision that only came from too many lab and battlefield emergencies.
“Ratchet’s inbound!” Wheeljack barked, voice sharp enough to cut through the rising panic fields.
Rewind tried to stabilize his own field, tried to focus—but Primus, Prowl’s sound was still echoing in the metal of his helm.
Movement pulled at the edge of his visual field.
Starscream.
The seeker had shot up from his seat so fast his chair clattered away behind him. At first Rewind thought he was just pre-emptively clearing space—wise, considering Ratchet would bulldoze through anything in his path—but then Starscream stopped.
Froze mid-step.
Optics fixed on Prowl.
His wings cinched tight against his back. Starscream looked—Primus, he looked spooked.
Starscream’s vents shuddered once, sharply. Then he whipped his helm toward Rewind, expression cutting into something almost feral.
“Get his junxie here yesterday, mechlet.”
Rewind spark skipped a spin. He snapped into motion, forcing his field small and professional as he opened a comm relay to Eject.
" Eject—Priority One alert, Prowl in medical distress – need Jazz ASAP. Get Blaster out of calibration blackout NOW.
-----
Out at the Gamma-Seven worksite, the construction sounds, dust and shouting narrowed into a single point.
Jazz had been halfway up a half-rebuilt support tower, saying something flippant to a pair of minibots about bracing angles and “no, seriously, you don’t wanna test gravity from there, trust me,” when the echo of Prowl’s earlier complex frustration-incredulity-compassion—still ghosting faintly down their bond—spiked into a white-hot jolt of pain.
He’d gone still. Paused mid-sentence. His EM field had flared, searching, then sputtered as the connection fuzzed at the edges.
Then Blaster’s voice had hit his audials and the words “JAZZ! Emergency relay! Prowl’s collapsed—spark irregularities—get your aft here yesterday!” had flooded his helm.
For three horrible kliks he didn’t move. Every part of him locked up as his processor tried to buffer fear.
Then his training and his instincts grabbed the controls and threw him into motion.
“Smokescreen, ya got the site!” he barked, already turning, already climbing down. “Lock it down, no fraggin’ heroics, keep everybody steady ‘til you hear from command!”
“Jazz, what—?”
“No time!” he shouted over his shoulder, transforming mid-stride. His alt-mode hit the half-packed road in a screech of tires. “Blaster, keep that feed open an’ patch me ta Ratchet, now!”
Dust plumed behind him as he gunned his engine to maximum safe output—then past it.
The only thing louder than his roaring engine was the frantic, choked-off echo of Prowl’s spark in the back of his own.