After young Orion Pax had left him alone in the depths of the Hall of Records, Alpha Trion considered the situation. Unusual in one so young, he thought, to have such a sense of what has gone past, what may never return. But that was to be expected when Orion Pax spent all of his time in the Hall listening.
The High Council would have to hear of this gladiator calling himself Megatronus. But it was not clear to Alpha Trion what the best way was to present the situation.
"Covenant," he said softly. "What may we know of this Megatronus?"
The Covenant of Primus lay open on Alpha Trion's desk. He had created it in the aftermath of the War of the Primes. In the Covenant lay the entire history of the Cybertronians and the beings that gave them life, all the way back to Unicron and Primus. And the Covenant also contained the future—although that part of the Covenant remained mutable. Alpha Trion could see certain things that would happen because they became real as they appeared in the Covenant, but he could not always know whether what he saw would come to pass. The burden of knowing the future was Alpha Trion's, and his alone, but it was lessened because even what he knew of the future could change at any moment.
And he had some power over it as well. The Quill, that instrument young Orion Pax failed to understand, was one of the surviving artifacts of the Thirteen, and was one of the most powerful objects in the known universe. Using it, Alpha Trion could inscribe the future into the Covenant. This was a dangerous power to exercise, and there was never any guarantee that an alteration to the future would last. The Covenant itself had the final word. It was a book of pure destiny.
Alpha Trion flipped forward a few pages. One of the peculiarities of the Covenant was that the reader— who existed in a moment in time—had a difficult time understanding the book's language on its pages dealing with the future. Even Alpha Trion could read those pages only seldom. The further into the future the Covenant went, the more obscure and difficult the language became. Its first pages were written in languages that no Cybertronian had spoken in thousands of stellar cycles. On its last pages were words in languages that no Cybertronian had ever yet spoken.
Alpha Trion had written it all, even the portions written in languages that did not yet exist. Orion Pax did not know that. Nor did any of Alpha Trion's other underlings in the Hall of Records. None of them would have believed it if they had been told.
And not even the most credulous of the race of Cybertronians would have taken seriously the assertion that Alpha Trion was one of the Original Thirteen—the only one, he believed, remaining on Cybertron. He had seen the history of Cybertron from its creation. He had seen allegiances form and shatter among the Primes. He had observed firsthand the murder that had destroyed the Thirteen, sending them out into the vastness of the universe. With the Covenant, Alpha Trion had stayed behind—to record, to observe, to exert what influence he could without giving away the truth of his identity. Most Cybertronians no longer believed in the Primes, or else considered them semihistorical myths. That was fine with Alpha Trion. It was no longer an age for mythic personalities.
Or, perhaps, it was an age for new ones.
Alpha Trion wondered what it would be like to understand the Covenant in its entirety. To assimilate all of the knowledge, the consciousness of past and future collapsing together in his mind...
It was the doom of the Archivist to wrestle with what he would never understand. Hearing the name Megatronus had put Alpha Trion in a frame of thought that could almost have been called nostalgic. The days of the War of the Primes were still alive in his memory; the Golden Age that had followed, as Cybertronians had ridden the Space Bridges to the stars, was one of the great historical periods in the history of the known universe. The magnificence of it, now passed, could only be harkened back to. Alpha Trion remembered the gradual rise of the caste system. He had spent much time talking to Sentinel Prime about the direction Cybertronian civilization was going. In the end, they disagreed. Sentinel Prime defined himself by actions and thought only about near-term goals and results. Alpha Trion had no need to define himself. He was one of the Thirteen, whether any sentient being knew it or not. And he thought about more distant horizons of consequence.
After their last argument, Sentinel Prime had dismissed Alpha Trion to the Hall of Records. Disappear into the stacks and let the dust cover you, Alpha Trion. Cybertron has no need of you anymore. Those had been Sentinel Prime's last words.
"Megatronus," Alpha Trion whispered. Now another had arisen among the anonymous masses of downtrodden laborers claiming the name of Megatronus.
This was in the Covenant as well. Alpha Trion had not thought to see it happen in exactly this way, but since it was in the Covenant's pages, it was bound to happen. This Megatronus, this gladiator and factory worker with grandiose ambitions—how much did he even know about the Prime from whom he had chosen to borrow his name?
Alpha Trion forced himself back into the present. He began to search in recent records for any evidence of unrest in Kaon. It didn't take long before he was immersed in a story the likes of which he had not expected to find in the regimented cities of Cybertron.
He looked up and opened a Grid link between his desk and Orion Pax's. "Please return," he said.
Orion stood opposite Alpha Trion waiting for the Archivist to finish writing in the large book open on his desk. Setting down his stylus, Alpha Trion looked up at Orion Pax. "Megatronus didn't begin right away planning a revolution," he said. "Not on a planet-wide scale, in any case. He began by taking over the gangs who run the gladiator pits in Kaon and Slaughter City."
"Criminals," Orion Pax said. He started to speak, then stopped again as he realized that he had been about to say that he thought this kind of criminality was inevitable in a caste-bound society.
Alpha Trion looked at him expectantly, then went on. "Before he had a name—or took a name—he was a champion gladiator. He had some success. That meant others of his caste looked to him for his strength. He became a leader without meaning to."
Images and video flashed across a holodisplay over Alpha Trion's desk. The images were of destroyed Cybertronians, each one labeled with a name. Indexing them quickly, Orion Pax discovered that each victim had been involved in running the gladiator pits, and most of them had other criminal enterprises as well.
In the video, Megatronus—this was the first time Orion Pax had seen him—stood over the sparking and twitching body of one of the low-level crime bosses Orion Pax had already seen in a still image. "It begins here," he said directly to the camera. Behind him a number of other gladiators raised their right arms, standing silently. "You who take your pleasure from our suffering, and turn our work into your leisure... you have forgotten what it is to be Cybertronian. Once this was the greatest planet in the galaxy. Now we have fallen. But we rise again, because there are yet Cybertronians who can envision the restoration of our former glory. I have never had a name, but now I take the name Megatronus, naming myself for the greatest of the Thirteen, the One who refused to bow before any of the others. Only by knowing how far we have fallen will we understand what it is to rise again. Cybertron!"
"Cybertron!" roared the other gladiators in unison. The video cut out.
"You had not seen this?" Alpha Trion prompted Orion Pax, who shook his head. "Ah. This is the fruit of discouraging ambition. We train generations of Cybertronians who do not imagine what might be done."
Orion Pax, unsure what to say, remained silent. Alpha Trion smiled at him. "Never fear, Pax. I tell you simple truth. This is no game designed to entangle you in words you do not mean. All I say is that we live in a certain world. Few of us imagine what it might be like to live in another. But some of us... some of us remember what other worlds were like once. And some of us are foolish enough to wish that we might live in such a world again."
There was a pause in the room, broken only by the whisper of Alpha Trion's stylus on the pages of the book. "What are you writing?" Orion Pax asked at last.
"I am writing what I have learned," Alpha Trion said. "As time passes, we will all discover together whether I have understood correctly. But now you must return to your post. Think on what I have said."
"I will," promised Orion Pax.
And he did, all the way through the mazy corridors of the Hall of Records back to his station on the eighteenth floor, third from the northwest comer, where when the winds blew out of the north the cold made the lights of Iacon twinkle in the distance. He enjoyed being close to a window. Many of his colleagues were not.
Some of us are foolish enough to wish that we might live in such a world again...
What had Alpha Trion meant? Orion Pax turned the Archivist's words over in his mind, and could reach no conclusion. No comfortable conclusion, in any event. The only way Alpha Trion's words made sense was as an encouragement to think—was this even safe to think in one's own mind?—to think beyond caste.
To remember that Cybertron had not always been so rigidly divided.
To imagine that a future might exist in which Cybertron was restored to its former greatness.
Orion Pax listened, and cataloged, and archived, and indexed, but his mind was not on his work. The noises of the Grid were incomprehensible to him now that Alpha Trion had opened his mind to a possibility beyond Cybertron as it was.
Who was this Megatronus, this gladiator thug, killer of criminals and criminal himself, who gave voice to a longing that Orion Pax had never known he felt?
