Project Status: Spark
Body shells were, in Dr. Kilju's considered opinion, an unnecessary distraction. Some might say that he neglected his own form for the sake of his work, but he abhorred the ornamentation and assorted paraphernalia most Cybertronians indulged in. He simply could not see the point. His body was serviceable, a plain blue that did not fade into the background with no secondary highlight colors to draw attention. He was neither so large as to hinder delicate work, nor so diminutive that he had trouble accessing any equipment. He was the perfect size, within the range of the average body size that the laboratory had been built to accommodate, and he had one subspace compartment. By preference, however, he chose to rely on the automated computer systems to supply him with what he needed. Most of his storage space was taken up by his alternate mode's excess parts; he had long ago decided that wearing one mode while in his other was only a diversion and had modified himself accordingly. He was a nondescript robot to look at, as was his intention, but that was the point. He worked with sparks, after all, and the body shell was merely in the way.
The histrionics were quite disturbing when he was trying to work, too. Reason seemed beyond the subjects, although he thought in a distant manner that they should feel honored to have been chosen for the quality of their sparks. More often than not, they responded to his words with panic and unreasoning anger, requiring restraints for him to work on them. They seemed to have some sort of conviction that he had no right to experiment with their lives, but as he pointed out, their rights were not inherent. The government gave them, and he took them away. The 'bots never took that well, for all that it was truth. Fortunately for his patience in this particular series of tests, by the time they came under his hands there were usually sedatives pumped into their mechfluid at such a high ratio that it wasn't necessary to attempt to speak with them. A few well-placed drapes allowed him to focus solely on the part of the subjects he cared for: the spark cavity.
Really, after all his time spent in the Protoform X project, he had come to realize that the spark was all that mattered in a 'bot. The spark was the vital point, the REAL point, in any robot, and it was thing of tangible fragility. The heaviest armor in every robot was to be found covering it, and once he peeled the thick layers of metal and circuitry aside, it shimmered in a transparent globe vulnerable to any probe he chose to subject it to. He'd spent a quarter of his life in schooling and research just to gain access to this most precious part of all Cybertronian, and for his pains he'd been assigned directly to a mysterious project known as Protoform X. His interest in sparks had been honed into an obsession there. It fascinated him that a spark could be extinguished so easily; that something so astonishingly beautiful could be destroyed with a harsh thrust made him greedy for the knowledge of how hard the piercing must be, how much pressure the outer corona could take before collapsing, what materials the spark would adapt to best around and inside it. With Protoform X's spark alone could he find no limits to what he attempted. His curiosity would finally be satisfied if he could only keep that spark for himself…
But X was gone, his special spark stolen away, and Dr. Kilju noted down yet another spark's demise for his records. He directed the computer to summon a guard to wheel the draped body shell away for recycling, and then he stood there in the stark white lab reviewing. To reproduce the exact circumstances of that immortal life's birth was proving even more difficult that he had original predicted. Weeks had passed, and The Cybertronian High Council was beginning to become impatient. He was the only surviving scientist who had worked on the Protoform X project, but he knew that would not be a shield for much longer; he knew that they knew he had been assigned to the project after the spark had successfully been removed from its body shell and the first set of modifications applied. He had the notes from his colleagues, yes, but there were strange gaps in the procedure. If he could not fill in those gaps soon, the High Council would replace him, in all probability with fatal results.
Such was the price of secrecy.
He acknowledged the very real possibility of his death with the same clinical calm as he acknowledged his current failure. The test subject had died--moving on to the next one. Like all the previous subjects, she was a criminal. The 'bot had been a Predacon once before her own faction repudiated her for her crimes, and it was likely no one would ever notice her absence from the prison facility. She was one of many prisoners sacrificed to this test, both by Kilju and his predecessors in the original project. Dr. Kilju would have preferred to use sparks with less of an inclination for insanity, but prison inmates were a convenient source of strong sparks. It took a certain kind of strength to go against the rules, and strength was what this experiment needed. In time, the High Council was confident that studies would find a way to apply the results to their own sparks. For now, the experiment went on.
The problem being that the experiment was becoming ludicrous at this point. Dr. Kilju personally did labwork still, but he also supervised several lab assistants who he had trained in the procedure, and they were going through the test subjects far too rapidly. At this stage in the experiment, they were searching for a spark stable enough to endure the severing of the connections between it and its body shell, then tolerate being transferred to a machine that would feed it the energy necessary to keep it alive. From there the next stage would begin. The machine had been painstakingly recreated from the blueprints included in his colleagues' notes, but so far no spark had survived being removed from its body shell. They were not meant to, at least in normal Cybertronians.
Frustrated, he barely glanced away from the computer screen when the requested guard opened the lab's door and walked immediately toward the dead shell. The next subject's file lay in dispassionate display before him, and he delayed ordering her prepared for him. What he needed was a 'bot with a strength beyond the norm, but unless he could persuade the High Council to find another source for his test subjects--like a colony, perhaps--then he would only continue to kill off the prisoners. He was steadily becoming convinced that the spark he was looking for would not come from the prison population. Those strange gaps in the Protoform X project's files omitted where exactly the original spark had come from, but he had been led by the previous subject records to assume X had come from a prison. Maybe he had been wrong, however. Maybe his colleagues had been just as baffled as he in their search, but with less support than he could claim now they had been unable to find an alternative source…at least legally. So if they had found the spark elsewhere, they might have feared to record where it had come from.
Therefore, the question remained still: where was this pool of potential test subjects? Test subjects with the strength to step outside society's lines, but whose disappearance would not be questioned? Omicron had been small at the time, and he could not imagine one of the scientists volunteering for the experiment. The subjects would have been brought in, then. From another colony? No, because there was no guarantee that even an enterprising spark willing to take the risk of leaving Cybertron would be strong enough for this. Besides, colonists would be missed if enough of them disappeared. What he was looking for must be right in front of him, but it was so obvious he couldn't see it. Perhaps he needed a break; he'd drop in on one of his assistants and get a new viewpoint on the matter.
He turned away from the computer to do exactly that--and found himself watching the guard leaving the room, taking the dead subject away for disposal. The door closed quietly before Kilju finished processing the implications of what he'd just realized. Without hurrying, frustration gone, he turned back to the computer and tapped into the communications network. He sent an inquiry into it and waited patiently.
He didn't wait long. "How may I help you, sir?" The voice was incurious, the Maximal at the communications console onboard the flag ship having stopped caring about anything but when his shift ended.
"I'd like to speak with Admiral Jirex, please."
There was a brief pause as the 'bot checked his switchboard. "I'm sorry, sir, but the Admiral is currently in a meeting. Would you like him to call you afterward?"
"Yes, please."
"Would you like him to know the subject of this call?"
"Tell him it is a matter of…personnel."