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Oct. 23rd, 2013 11:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enslavementCW: Sex slavery
"Well? What have you got for me, Starscream?" If Knock Out sounded a bit irritated, he was sure he could be forgiven for it; Starscream's comm had woken him at a truly uncivilized hour and the imperious demand that Knock Out present himself at the medbay had been the last thing he wanted to hear. He didn't quite go so far as to say this had better be good, but he was certainly thinking it.
Starscream turned, and Knock Out saw that he had a body in his hands, and suddenly he realized that oh, this might be good after all.
"I found this in a crate on the Harbinger," Starscream said, shifting the burden in his arms without apparent effort. If the spindly Seeker could handle it so, there must have been nothing at all to it. "While I was. Ahem. Securing valuable resources for our cause--"
"So there was a corpse on the wrecked Decepticon warship?" His interest was rapidly fading. "While I appreciate your concern for the state of my storerooms, Starscream, I promise you I have plenty of Vehicons to work through before I'll need to go looking further afield for spare parts."
The Seeker bristled, wingtips flicking high and wide. "Doctor, it has a spark-signal."
And that alone was enough to make Knock Out forget entirely about his fatigue and his irritation.
"Let me see," he demanded, rushing Starscream. He found the cyb's chest in the middle of the tangle of long limbs and laid his sensitive audial spike over it. There was no mistaking the EM hum there, though it was very faint. He found the not-corpse's head next, and whistled his surprise when he saw the decidedly pretty features, the handles sculpted into the helm. "Ey's a sexbot!"
"WHAT?" Starscream's shriek startled him back and it was the only reason he didn't end up with a sexbot dropped on his foot. The body landed with a rattle and Starscream was scrambling back like ey had just unloaded a salvo into him. "Doctor! I require a full antiviral scan now!"
"Really?" Knock Out couldn't help but purge his vents in a short, sharp snort. "You know you can't pick up malware from a sexbot unless you actually frag em, right? Or do you have something you want to tell me, Starscream?"
For a moment the Seeker could only sputter, indignation and disgust warring across his face. "I-- I did not! How dare you even insinuate--"
"Then you don't need any antivirals," Knock Out said. Kneeling, he scooped the sexbot body into his arms and turned for the nearest medslab. "Now if you'll excuse me, commander, I'd like to get to work on my new patient. Unless there's something else pressing I can do for you?"
There wasn't and they both knew it. Starscream might have intended to say and see what Knock Out would be able to tell him about an ancient corpse with a viable spark-signal, but between his flustered embarrassment and the doctor's clear dismissal, he couldn't. He snapped something about expecting a full report, and fled the room.
Knock Out laid the light little body in his arms out on the slab, arranging its limbs with a care for the whispery rasping he was hearing from the joints. If Starscream had indeed found this little mystery on the ancient Decepticon warship, ey had to be-- well, ancient. Even a body in stasis could-- and would-- deteriorate over time. Lubricant leaked or crystallized, resulting in brittle joints and grinding actuators; circuitry and relays decayed, leading to neural glitches; coolant evaporated and even the most dormant systems could still suffer heat damage without adequate cooling. The longer the stasis period, the more severe the cumulative effects, and Knock Out didn't want to risk rupturing or breaking something through careless handling.
This body-- this cyb-- was not in ordinary stasis, though, and that was curious. Normally there was still activity in a stasis-locked Cybertronian-- the humming and operation of the homeostatic systems at least, those basic life-support systems that formed the core of any function cyb's body. In his queer little patient, there was nothing. The shell was inert metal, as good as dead-- save for the slow, faint pulse of the spark.
More and more curious.
And then he took a look at the whole sexbot, laid out as ey was, and realized what a very special sexbot it was that Starscream had found.
The features that were unmistakable. The collaring around the neck, painted a hue of teal-blue that had probably been bright 10,000 years ago when the Harbinger had crashed-- blue that matched the modesty panel between eir legs, with its conspicuous external clips. Blue that matched the manual catches around the main chassis plate, the cover on the conspicuous maintenance hatch under one arm. Blue that matched the mechanism located at the hinge of the cyb's jaw...
"Oh," he breathed, lingering over one of the long-fingered hands. He followed a hollow metal loop inset into the wrist with one claw-tip, pressing lightly and watching the way the clip bent open and closed. "You're not just a sexbot, are you?"
Gently, he lifted the cyb's torso up off the slab, checking the collar. There was a little panel inset in the back, one that opened easily to his claws. Inside the panel was a switch, toggled to off. Knock Out nodded once to himself, satisfied, and laid the little body back down again.
"You're a slavebot."
Knock Out had to pause there for a moment, still absently fingering the slavebot's hand while he mulled over the implications of this. Slavebots had been prevalent during a brief and brutal period of the war, when Cybertron's civil programs of mercy had broken down and casualties far outnumbered the capacity of either side (and there were only sides by then, the last of the civilians and neutrals killed, fled, or assimilated) to care for them. The very worst opportunists of Cybertronian society were there to take advantage of the ample near-dead, harvesting sparks to power their perverse drones. There were several different slavebot models but this one here had by far been the most prevalent-- the pleasureslave.
With frames designed in every way for ease of interface, processors coded for obedience, and sparks to give that special simulation of Cybertronian life, pleasureslaves like this one were the pinnacle in convenient, effortless sex. All the fun of overload without any of the effort of seducing a partner-- if letting off your charge was the only part of interface you found fun, anyway. Before the war they'd been distant myths, the sort of threat that low-casters and mob bosses used to tantalize and horrify each other. Don't borrow money you can't repay from the Praxian Crystal Cartel, or they'll take your spark in fair trade, that kind of macabre thing. Knock Out had never seen a pleasureslave, hadn't even believed they existed-- until they started selling at high prices to officers.
He'd even had to deal with a few of the ghoulish things when he'd still been nothing more than a buffbot, as part of his role as personal aide and attendant to high-ranking Decepticon officers. The mindless things had always put his plating up.
None of them lasted long, though. Their bodies were a bad combination of finicky to maintain and cheaply made, and the stolen sparks inside them had a tendency to gutter out in response to severe trauma.
That was part of what made this one so interesting. The fact that eir spark was still viable at all was... Knock Out wasn't a particularly religious mech, but miraculous was the word that kept suggesting itself to him. He would have expected the spark of an inactive slavebot like this to fade after only a few decades, and this little thing had been buried in the hold of the Harbinger for eons.
Maybe more.
Though his first impulse was to wake em up and see if this was one of the models programmed with language protocols sophisticated enough to hold a conversation, Knock Out resisted the urge. The spark might have survived so far, but activating em into a chassis suffering from severe stasis degradation was just asking for trouble. No, the first thing on the agenda was going to have to be reconditioning the body.
Knock Out nodded once more to himself and-- carefully-- scooped up the bundle of sexbot. He was going to want a little privacy while he worked on this particular project.
**
The reconditioning process took several weeks, drawn out by the fact that he only dared work on his inactive little patient when he had no other pressing duties. Fending off Starscream's persistently more aggressive inquires for information proved a challenge, but one that Knock Out was more than capable of meeting-- although he did acquiesce to the Seeker's demand that he bring the processor online far enough to diagnose it for viral malware. ("No, ey doesn't have any virulent programming. Yes, I'm sure. Yes, I checked for those too, but if ey was infested with mucosal nanoparasites they would have drained em dry ages ago and I'd be finding detritus on the body. --Really, Starscream? If ey had a rust, you would have found an oxidation stain, not a chassis." That there wasn't any significant processor corruption that couldn't be traced to faulty hardware was, frankly, astonishing.)
He found it unexpectedly easy to work with a patient who was more machine than biomechanical being. With a proper Cybertronian, even one in deep stasis, you had to work around the fact that certain core systems needed to remain in operation for your patient to survive, which tended to make full fluid flush-and-replacements drawn-out and difficult operations requiring carefully prepared chemical treatments. With his little slavebot, he could get away with full drains and he only needed water and a little basic solvent to wash whole systems clean. It was more than a convenience, it was of substantial benefit for the slavebot-- almost all of eir lines were clogged with sludge, the congealed remnants of the fluids in eir veins when ey had been shut down. Even the energon inside of em was a half-crystallized muck that had to be re-liquified with a careful application of a certain mixture of medical grade before it could be drained for cleaning and reprocessing.
A real cyb in condition this poor would have had to undergo countless uncomfortable filtering treatments for each system to ensure that all the congealed particulates were removed. With the slavebot, Knock Out could just flush and drain each system's lines and reservoirs as many times as he needed until they were clear. Water, after all, was free, and solvent cheap, cheaper than the lubricant and coolant and energon he would have needed to expend on active filtering.
There was more to it than just cleaning the fluid systems though. He had to manually revitalize certain key areas like the optics, applying gentle lubricants and manually stimulating the servos and actuators to make sure everything still worked. There were dried-out pads and seals, rotted circuitry, cracked joints, and frayed struts and stays had to be rooted out and replaced. Several diagnostic scans were required to verify when the slavebot's sensory net was fully functioning, and then several more to track down a number of malfunctions in the spark-brain-processor array.
All the time he'd saved with the easy fluid flushing was lost again to the necessity of finding, crafting, or occasionally improvising his way around all the repairs he had to make.
Occasionally-- usually when he was being rousted out of berth after only a cycle or two of rest to deal with some medical emergency-- he wondered why he was spending so much time and effort on his inert little patient. After all, slavebots were notorious for being mindless: the spark-harvesting procedure very pointedly took only the spark, leaving behind the processor and brain of the original individual. Slavebots were effectively reborn Cybertronians, but reborn into lobotomized bodies. Depending on the sophistication of their processors, some of them were barely even capable to taking orders beyond a limited, pre-programmed set. The likelihood that he was going to get anything out of this wretched creature when he reactivated em-- assuming that ey came online at all-- was slim indeed.
Yet he kept at it. He was intrigued by the persistence of the spark, which fluctuated occasionally weaker and occasionally stronger but remained, for the most part, stable. He was intrigued by the color of it, too, a washed out actinic white-blue unlike any other spark he'd ever seen. And he was intrigued most of all by the mystery of em, this slavebot that should have faded quietly into oblivion thousands and thousands of years ago. If ey could give him any indication at all as to how ey had managed to persist beyond all reasonable window of survival, he'd consider the effort very well spent.
The project also gave him something to fill his days, something that was his, something beyond "repair these Vehicons and then assist Shockwave in the lab and then in your spare time you'd better still be working on making that synth en formula viable". He tried not to dwell too much on that aspect of it-- at least until he realized he'd spent his last several visits with his patient running redundant checks that were consistently coming up blue.
There was no point in dragging out the repairs any further.
It was time for the moment of truth.
**
Though Knock Out could have-- probably should have-- simply flipped the switch in the little auxiliary lab space he'd been using for repairs, he opted instead to move his project back to the medbay. Part of it was that he was worried that something would go severely wrong when he brought the slavebot back online, and he wanted to have immediate access to the best of his tools and supplies in case ey did.
Part of it was that he was still stalling.
He realized that when he realized that he was hovering over the supine little body, agonizing over whether or not he should fasten the restraint clips in eir wrists and ankles to the surface of the slab. Ey was a slavebot, for spark's sake! Ey was a fraction of his size, an even smaller fraction of his strength, and possessed of nothing in the way of weaponry or offensive capabilities. What could ey do to him?
What was he so afraid of?
Well, learning that all the time and care he'd lavished on his little project had been wasted, mostly. And Knock Out was not so self-deluded that he couldn't recognize that, nor so stubborn as to deny it. Before he could let himself put it off any longer, he lifted up the slavebot's chassis and reached into eir collar to toggle the switch. He made sure to close the hatch securely, then lowered the body back to the slab and stepped back.
First there was a hum deep in eir chest as eir processor booted, echoed an instant later by a higher-pitched whine in the head as the brain module followed suit. The vents kicked on with a gasping rattle, cycled hard twice, and then purged in a coughing cacophony that shook the body upright on the slab. Knock Out took a step towards em, alarmed by the violence of the awakening, and then halted instinctively when a strangled voice gasped out, "Don't!"
He actually looked around as he stepped back, trying to figure out who had said that. It wasn't until the slavebot scrambled away from him, to the edge of the slab and then over with a cry, that he realized the voice had come from em.
By the time Knock Out had trotted around to the other side of the slab the slavebot had gained eir feet, although ey was clinging on to the plinth supports to remain upright. Ey looked up at him with wide, wild optics the same color as its spark and tried to stagger backwards. "Don't, don't, get away from me," ey said, and there was no mistaking this time the source of the rasping, staticky voice.
He'd never heard of a slavebot coming out of stasis so very violently. Had the long period of inactivity glitched em somehow? "Quit that," Knock Out said, and was gratified to see the slavebot freeze in place against the plinth. At least eir obedience protocols still seemed to be active.
Lifting em back up into place, he instructed em firmly to stay put and then walked around to the foot of the slab, crossing his arms and looking em over critically. The unnerving thing was that ey was looking back, those white-blue optics blazing in eir face.
"Who are you?" ey asked.
That was as unnerving as the appraising regard the slavebot was giving him. Slavebots, after all, weren't supposed to be able to ask questions except in direct response to unclear directives. They especially weren't supposed to be able to initiate conversations, not even the ones capable of having a conversation. They were strictly reactive creatures.
--At least, they were supposed to be.
Knock Out realized ey was waiting for him to answer. "I-- I'm a doctor," he said, giving his head a little shake to dispel his uncertainty. "My name's Knock Out."
"Knock Out," the slave bot repeated. The raspy static was starting to clear from eir voice, which was clear and strong beneath the disuse. Ey glanced around the empty medbay briefly, then brought eir optics back to him. "You're my owner now?" Eir words had an interesting clipped quality.
"--Ah. Ah. In a manner of speaking... yes. I suppose I am." He hadn't actually stopped to consider the implications of waking the slavebot up, but he supposed someone had to own em. It wasn't like he could let the little thing run around unsupervised, and it would give em someone to focus on for orders. He remembered that being important to them.
Eir optics flashed as ey shuttered eir optics, and ey bowed eir head. "Your orders, sir?" ey asked shortly, and though eir voice was neutral, Knock Out couldn't help but notice the way eir fingers curled into fists against the surface of the slab.
"Just... keep sitting there," Knock Out said. "I want to talk to you." That brought the slavebot's head right back up again, eir optics narrowed and-- in a real cyb, Knock Out would have called them suspicious, but a slavebot couldn't be suspicious.
"You want to talk? To me? You want me to talk?" The words poured out fast, surprisingly fast, and that strange clipping was more pronounced now. Ey jerked upright, covering eir mouth with eir hands for a moment, then spoke through eir fingers like ey needed them to slow the words down. "Trust me, you don't want me to talk."
"Ah, but I do," Knock Out said. "I wouldn't have said so if I didn't." He strode forward, bracing his hands on the edge of the slab and leaning towards the slavebot. Ey leaned back a little, but didn't move otherwise. "Did your last owner give you a name?"
The fingers over the slavebot's mouth tightened for a moment, eir optics pressing closed. "Sweetport," ey whispered, eir voice small. Ey dropped eir hands to the surface of the slab, fisted them again, and hunched eir head back into eir shoulders. Knock Out wondered about the display-- right up until another rush of words came spilling out. "But-sir-that's-not-my-name-please!"
And here Knock Out had thought the slavebot's persistent spark was the strangest thing about this case. He remembered from his long ago acquaintance with them that it wasn't uncommon for newly activated slavebots to recall their names from before their reformatting, but that rarely lasted past their first master renaming them. He had never heard of a slavebot insisting on an appellation other than the one assigned to it.
"All right," he said, intrigued. "I'll bite. What is your name?"
The slavebot lifted eir head with what seemed like an effort and eir optics were blazing again when they met Knock Out's. Ey purged eir vents once, hard, and then said very clearly, "It's Blurr."
"Well? What have you got for me, Starscream?" If Knock Out sounded a bit irritated, he was sure he could be forgiven for it; Starscream's comm had woken him at a truly uncivilized hour and the imperious demand that Knock Out present himself at the medbay had been the last thing he wanted to hear. He didn't quite go so far as to say this had better be good, but he was certainly thinking it.
Starscream turned, and Knock Out saw that he had a body in his hands, and suddenly he realized that oh, this might be good after all.
"I found this in a crate on the Harbinger," Starscream said, shifting the burden in his arms without apparent effort. If the spindly Seeker could handle it so, there must have been nothing at all to it. "While I was. Ahem. Securing valuable resources for our cause--"
"So there was a corpse on the wrecked Decepticon warship?" His interest was rapidly fading. "While I appreciate your concern for the state of my storerooms, Starscream, I promise you I have plenty of Vehicons to work through before I'll need to go looking further afield for spare parts."
The Seeker bristled, wingtips flicking high and wide. "Doctor, it has a spark-signal."
And that alone was enough to make Knock Out forget entirely about his fatigue and his irritation.
"Let me see," he demanded, rushing Starscream. He found the cyb's chest in the middle of the tangle of long limbs and laid his sensitive audial spike over it. There was no mistaking the EM hum there, though it was very faint. He found the not-corpse's head next, and whistled his surprise when he saw the decidedly pretty features, the handles sculpted into the helm. "Ey's a sexbot!"
"WHAT?" Starscream's shriek startled him back and it was the only reason he didn't end up with a sexbot dropped on his foot. The body landed with a rattle and Starscream was scrambling back like ey had just unloaded a salvo into him. "Doctor! I require a full antiviral scan now!"
"Really?" Knock Out couldn't help but purge his vents in a short, sharp snort. "You know you can't pick up malware from a sexbot unless you actually frag em, right? Or do you have something you want to tell me, Starscream?"
For a moment the Seeker could only sputter, indignation and disgust warring across his face. "I-- I did not! How dare you even insinuate--"
"Then you don't need any antivirals," Knock Out said. Kneeling, he scooped the sexbot body into his arms and turned for the nearest medslab. "Now if you'll excuse me, commander, I'd like to get to work on my new patient. Unless there's something else pressing I can do for you?"
There wasn't and they both knew it. Starscream might have intended to say and see what Knock Out would be able to tell him about an ancient corpse with a viable spark-signal, but between his flustered embarrassment and the doctor's clear dismissal, he couldn't. He snapped something about expecting a full report, and fled the room.
Knock Out laid the light little body in his arms out on the slab, arranging its limbs with a care for the whispery rasping he was hearing from the joints. If Starscream had indeed found this little mystery on the ancient Decepticon warship, ey had to be-- well, ancient. Even a body in stasis could-- and would-- deteriorate over time. Lubricant leaked or crystallized, resulting in brittle joints and grinding actuators; circuitry and relays decayed, leading to neural glitches; coolant evaporated and even the most dormant systems could still suffer heat damage without adequate cooling. The longer the stasis period, the more severe the cumulative effects, and Knock Out didn't want to risk rupturing or breaking something through careless handling.
This body-- this cyb-- was not in ordinary stasis, though, and that was curious. Normally there was still activity in a stasis-locked Cybertronian-- the humming and operation of the homeostatic systems at least, those basic life-support systems that formed the core of any function cyb's body. In his queer little patient, there was nothing. The shell was inert metal, as good as dead-- save for the slow, faint pulse of the spark.
More and more curious.
And then he took a look at the whole sexbot, laid out as ey was, and realized what a very special sexbot it was that Starscream had found.
The features that were unmistakable. The collaring around the neck, painted a hue of teal-blue that had probably been bright 10,000 years ago when the Harbinger had crashed-- blue that matched the modesty panel between eir legs, with its conspicuous external clips. Blue that matched the manual catches around the main chassis plate, the cover on the conspicuous maintenance hatch under one arm. Blue that matched the mechanism located at the hinge of the cyb's jaw...
"Oh," he breathed, lingering over one of the long-fingered hands. He followed a hollow metal loop inset into the wrist with one claw-tip, pressing lightly and watching the way the clip bent open and closed. "You're not just a sexbot, are you?"
Gently, he lifted the cyb's torso up off the slab, checking the collar. There was a little panel inset in the back, one that opened easily to his claws. Inside the panel was a switch, toggled to off. Knock Out nodded once to himself, satisfied, and laid the little body back down again.
"You're a slavebot."
Knock Out had to pause there for a moment, still absently fingering the slavebot's hand while he mulled over the implications of this. Slavebots had been prevalent during a brief and brutal period of the war, when Cybertron's civil programs of mercy had broken down and casualties far outnumbered the capacity of either side (and there were only sides by then, the last of the civilians and neutrals killed, fled, or assimilated) to care for them. The very worst opportunists of Cybertronian society were there to take advantage of the ample near-dead, harvesting sparks to power their perverse drones. There were several different slavebot models but this one here had by far been the most prevalent-- the pleasureslave.
With frames designed in every way for ease of interface, processors coded for obedience, and sparks to give that special simulation of Cybertronian life, pleasureslaves like this one were the pinnacle in convenient, effortless sex. All the fun of overload without any of the effort of seducing a partner-- if letting off your charge was the only part of interface you found fun, anyway. Before the war they'd been distant myths, the sort of threat that low-casters and mob bosses used to tantalize and horrify each other. Don't borrow money you can't repay from the Praxian Crystal Cartel, or they'll take your spark in fair trade, that kind of macabre thing. Knock Out had never seen a pleasureslave, hadn't even believed they existed-- until they started selling at high prices to officers.
He'd even had to deal with a few of the ghoulish things when he'd still been nothing more than a buffbot, as part of his role as personal aide and attendant to high-ranking Decepticon officers. The mindless things had always put his plating up.
None of them lasted long, though. Their bodies were a bad combination of finicky to maintain and cheaply made, and the stolen sparks inside them had a tendency to gutter out in response to severe trauma.
That was part of what made this one so interesting. The fact that eir spark was still viable at all was... Knock Out wasn't a particularly religious mech, but miraculous was the word that kept suggesting itself to him. He would have expected the spark of an inactive slavebot like this to fade after only a few decades, and this little thing had been buried in the hold of the Harbinger for eons.
Maybe more.
Though his first impulse was to wake em up and see if this was one of the models programmed with language protocols sophisticated enough to hold a conversation, Knock Out resisted the urge. The spark might have survived so far, but activating em into a chassis suffering from severe stasis degradation was just asking for trouble. No, the first thing on the agenda was going to have to be reconditioning the body.
Knock Out nodded once more to himself and-- carefully-- scooped up the bundle of sexbot. He was going to want a little privacy while he worked on this particular project.
**
The reconditioning process took several weeks, drawn out by the fact that he only dared work on his inactive little patient when he had no other pressing duties. Fending off Starscream's persistently more aggressive inquires for information proved a challenge, but one that Knock Out was more than capable of meeting-- although he did acquiesce to the Seeker's demand that he bring the processor online far enough to diagnose it for viral malware. ("No, ey doesn't have any virulent programming. Yes, I'm sure. Yes, I checked for those too, but if ey was infested with mucosal nanoparasites they would have drained em dry ages ago and I'd be finding detritus on the body. --Really, Starscream? If ey had a rust, you would have found an oxidation stain, not a chassis." That there wasn't any significant processor corruption that couldn't be traced to faulty hardware was, frankly, astonishing.)
He found it unexpectedly easy to work with a patient who was more machine than biomechanical being. With a proper Cybertronian, even one in deep stasis, you had to work around the fact that certain core systems needed to remain in operation for your patient to survive, which tended to make full fluid flush-and-replacements drawn-out and difficult operations requiring carefully prepared chemical treatments. With his little slavebot, he could get away with full drains and he only needed water and a little basic solvent to wash whole systems clean. It was more than a convenience, it was of substantial benefit for the slavebot-- almost all of eir lines were clogged with sludge, the congealed remnants of the fluids in eir veins when ey had been shut down. Even the energon inside of em was a half-crystallized muck that had to be re-liquified with a careful application of a certain mixture of medical grade before it could be drained for cleaning and reprocessing.
A real cyb in condition this poor would have had to undergo countless uncomfortable filtering treatments for each system to ensure that all the congealed particulates were removed. With the slavebot, Knock Out could just flush and drain each system's lines and reservoirs as many times as he needed until they were clear. Water, after all, was free, and solvent cheap, cheaper than the lubricant and coolant and energon he would have needed to expend on active filtering.
There was more to it than just cleaning the fluid systems though. He had to manually revitalize certain key areas like the optics, applying gentle lubricants and manually stimulating the servos and actuators to make sure everything still worked. There were dried-out pads and seals, rotted circuitry, cracked joints, and frayed struts and stays had to be rooted out and replaced. Several diagnostic scans were required to verify when the slavebot's sensory net was fully functioning, and then several more to track down a number of malfunctions in the spark-brain-processor array.
All the time he'd saved with the easy fluid flushing was lost again to the necessity of finding, crafting, or occasionally improvising his way around all the repairs he had to make.
Occasionally-- usually when he was being rousted out of berth after only a cycle or two of rest to deal with some medical emergency-- he wondered why he was spending so much time and effort on his inert little patient. After all, slavebots were notorious for being mindless: the spark-harvesting procedure very pointedly took only the spark, leaving behind the processor and brain of the original individual. Slavebots were effectively reborn Cybertronians, but reborn into lobotomized bodies. Depending on the sophistication of their processors, some of them were barely even capable to taking orders beyond a limited, pre-programmed set. The likelihood that he was going to get anything out of this wretched creature when he reactivated em-- assuming that ey came online at all-- was slim indeed.
Yet he kept at it. He was intrigued by the persistence of the spark, which fluctuated occasionally weaker and occasionally stronger but remained, for the most part, stable. He was intrigued by the color of it, too, a washed out actinic white-blue unlike any other spark he'd ever seen. And he was intrigued most of all by the mystery of em, this slavebot that should have faded quietly into oblivion thousands and thousands of years ago. If ey could give him any indication at all as to how ey had managed to persist beyond all reasonable window of survival, he'd consider the effort very well spent.
The project also gave him something to fill his days, something that was his, something beyond "repair these Vehicons and then assist Shockwave in the lab and then in your spare time you'd better still be working on making that synth en formula viable". He tried not to dwell too much on that aspect of it-- at least until he realized he'd spent his last several visits with his patient running redundant checks that were consistently coming up blue.
There was no point in dragging out the repairs any further.
It was time for the moment of truth.
**
Though Knock Out could have-- probably should have-- simply flipped the switch in the little auxiliary lab space he'd been using for repairs, he opted instead to move his project back to the medbay. Part of it was that he was worried that something would go severely wrong when he brought the slavebot back online, and he wanted to have immediate access to the best of his tools and supplies in case ey did.
Part of it was that he was still stalling.
He realized that when he realized that he was hovering over the supine little body, agonizing over whether or not he should fasten the restraint clips in eir wrists and ankles to the surface of the slab. Ey was a slavebot, for spark's sake! Ey was a fraction of his size, an even smaller fraction of his strength, and possessed of nothing in the way of weaponry or offensive capabilities. What could ey do to him?
What was he so afraid of?
Well, learning that all the time and care he'd lavished on his little project had been wasted, mostly. And Knock Out was not so self-deluded that he couldn't recognize that, nor so stubborn as to deny it. Before he could let himself put it off any longer, he lifted up the slavebot's chassis and reached into eir collar to toggle the switch. He made sure to close the hatch securely, then lowered the body back to the slab and stepped back.
First there was a hum deep in eir chest as eir processor booted, echoed an instant later by a higher-pitched whine in the head as the brain module followed suit. The vents kicked on with a gasping rattle, cycled hard twice, and then purged in a coughing cacophony that shook the body upright on the slab. Knock Out took a step towards em, alarmed by the violence of the awakening, and then halted instinctively when a strangled voice gasped out, "Don't!"
He actually looked around as he stepped back, trying to figure out who had said that. It wasn't until the slavebot scrambled away from him, to the edge of the slab and then over with a cry, that he realized the voice had come from em.
By the time Knock Out had trotted around to the other side of the slab the slavebot had gained eir feet, although ey was clinging on to the plinth supports to remain upright. Ey looked up at him with wide, wild optics the same color as its spark and tried to stagger backwards. "Don't, don't, get away from me," ey said, and there was no mistaking this time the source of the rasping, staticky voice.
He'd never heard of a slavebot coming out of stasis so very violently. Had the long period of inactivity glitched em somehow? "Quit that," Knock Out said, and was gratified to see the slavebot freeze in place against the plinth. At least eir obedience protocols still seemed to be active.
Lifting em back up into place, he instructed em firmly to stay put and then walked around to the foot of the slab, crossing his arms and looking em over critically. The unnerving thing was that ey was looking back, those white-blue optics blazing in eir face.
"Who are you?" ey asked.
That was as unnerving as the appraising regard the slavebot was giving him. Slavebots, after all, weren't supposed to be able to ask questions except in direct response to unclear directives. They especially weren't supposed to be able to initiate conversations, not even the ones capable of having a conversation. They were strictly reactive creatures.
--At least, they were supposed to be.
Knock Out realized ey was waiting for him to answer. "I-- I'm a doctor," he said, giving his head a little shake to dispel his uncertainty. "My name's Knock Out."
"Knock Out," the slave bot repeated. The raspy static was starting to clear from eir voice, which was clear and strong beneath the disuse. Ey glanced around the empty medbay briefly, then brought eir optics back to him. "You're my owner now?" Eir words had an interesting clipped quality.
"--Ah. Ah. In a manner of speaking... yes. I suppose I am." He hadn't actually stopped to consider the implications of waking the slavebot up, but he supposed someone had to own em. It wasn't like he could let the little thing run around unsupervised, and it would give em someone to focus on for orders. He remembered that being important to them.
Eir optics flashed as ey shuttered eir optics, and ey bowed eir head. "Your orders, sir?" ey asked shortly, and though eir voice was neutral, Knock Out couldn't help but notice the way eir fingers curled into fists against the surface of the slab.
"Just... keep sitting there," Knock Out said. "I want to talk to you." That brought the slavebot's head right back up again, eir optics narrowed and-- in a real cyb, Knock Out would have called them suspicious, but a slavebot couldn't be suspicious.
"You want to talk? To me? You want me to talk?" The words poured out fast, surprisingly fast, and that strange clipping was more pronounced now. Ey jerked upright, covering eir mouth with eir hands for a moment, then spoke through eir fingers like ey needed them to slow the words down. "Trust me, you don't want me to talk."
"Ah, but I do," Knock Out said. "I wouldn't have said so if I didn't." He strode forward, bracing his hands on the edge of the slab and leaning towards the slavebot. Ey leaned back a little, but didn't move otherwise. "Did your last owner give you a name?"
The fingers over the slavebot's mouth tightened for a moment, eir optics pressing closed. "Sweetport," ey whispered, eir voice small. Ey dropped eir hands to the surface of the slab, fisted them again, and hunched eir head back into eir shoulders. Knock Out wondered about the display-- right up until another rush of words came spilling out. "But-sir-that's-not-my-name-please!"
And here Knock Out had thought the slavebot's persistent spark was the strangest thing about this case. He remembered from his long ago acquaintance with them that it wasn't uncommon for newly activated slavebots to recall their names from before their reformatting, but that rarely lasted past their first master renaming them. He had never heard of a slavebot insisting on an appellation other than the one assigned to it.
"All right," he said, intrigued. "I'll bite. What is your name?"
The slavebot lifted eir head with what seemed like an effort and eir optics were blazing again when they met Knock Out's. Ey purged eir vents once, hard, and then said very clearly, "It's Blurr."
