From communications traffic (Autobot City:Earth) backup log. Date of archival: 29th November 2009. Message recorded by Autobot scientist (Med-Eng) Perceptor, Dinobot Island, Earth (South Pacific Region) 5th May 2007: Destination Optimus Prime, cc Rodimus Prime, Ultra Magnus, Autobase: Iacon, Cybertron.
***
Proceeding from multiple encephalographic and neurological examinations of all five currently partially non-functional and cerebrally disrupted patients of the sub-group designate Dinobot, I am ever more of the opinion that this situation is as hopeless as I had a priori considered it when preliminarily assigned this task.
Subjects Grimlock and Slag: These two units, always the most aggressive of the five, have recently reached a point whereby their native strength requires them to be physically paralysed by means of a simple surgically installed neural interruptor. Their mental processes, like those of their fellows, have apparently reduced to a level substantially below those of the animal forms on which their schematics were based, and they fluctuate unpredictably between displays of child-like gentleness and brute rage.
Subjects Sludge, Snarl, and Swoop: Although less dangerous by virtue of their inherently more passive outlook, these three are none the less under restraint. In the case of Swoop this is hardly necessary- the greater mental promise he showed in his formative years seems to have been unfortunately matched by a greater neural collapse in his current state, and has rendered him effectively catatonic. Sludge and Snarl show symptoms of a similar inclination, and already Sludge has taken to spending the vast majority of his time in inactive and apparently unobservant rest mode, whilst Snarl shows even less interest in his surrounding environment than was hitherto typical.
My prognosis is bleak, Optimus Prime, and I fear that the greatest crumb of comfort I can offer to yourself, and to those others of us who knew the Dinobots well during our years in combat together on this world is that it can be meritoriously anticipated that the mistakes which I believe have caused their current tragic situation are mistakes of which my studies here may prevent the repetition in future times.
***
Perceptor paused a moment, then tapped out a quick code set to append his full report before dispatching the completed entry to Autobot City by radio beam. He waited a moment, until a brief flash of red light from the console indicated that the communications operator there had received the signal and relayed it to its correct destination. Had he any more encouraging news to give, he might have opened the link then, and had a brief exchange of words with the comms operator. It might even have been his old friend Blaster, although truth to tell he wasn't even sure whether Blaster was stationed at Metroplex or back at Iacon any more. A brief spasm of regret crept through him as he slid open the door of the shuttle and stepped back down on to the island beach. It would have been pleasant to speak with Blaster again. Although he would never admit it- partly to avoid the derision of the more streetwise Autobots for his own taste in music, and perhaps more so to avoid the disbelief of his own kind that one as dedicated as Perceptor might even possess an interest in something so comparatively lowbrow, he had always had a certain private liking for Blaster's "dreadful racket", as Tracks called it.
He trudged up the beach towards the treeline. Golden sand underfoot beneath a deep blue sky, the clear turquoise water lapping at the side of the shuttle, the island was a paradise- and a paradise Perceptor heartily wished never to see again. He pushed his way through the trees, a small reptile leaping from the brances of one of them and landing on his red shoulder cannon and leaning into his face, chattering angrily. Absently, he reached up and removed the creature, carefully depositing it on a nearby patch of vegetation. A simple repulsar field had kept the larger, more aggressive dinosaurs out of the camp, but the small creatures simply walked under it. That meant, he realised with some resignation, that the roaring from up ahead could only come from one source.
"Let go of me/Release him immediately!" One voice cried out indignantly in two separate tones as Perceptor hurriedly opened a gap in the energon fence and dashed in. Inside the square 'field', a metal tyrannosaurus raged, optics burning brilliant blue as it tossed its prey- a turquoise and white robot with a now quite badly mauled leg- into the air.
"Me want to..." Grimlock seized the Autobot- by the arm this time, and swung round, his tail knocking Perceptor off his feet and released Brainstorm, hurling the stricken Headmaster towards the three bars of the energon fence. "Munch metal!" Brainstorm struck the fence with a sickening crack, and the same double voice screamed out in agony as the electric charge earthed through him. The current reversed automatically- the fences were designed to restrain the patients, not damage them, and Brainstorm was hurled forward on to the sand. Still, that charge was calibrated to deliver a harmless but painful shock to a heavily shielded Dinobot, not a lightly armoured Autobot jet, to say nothing of his Nebulan partner. Perceptor's worried train of thought was interrupted as Grimlock swung about again, his massive jaw lowering towards the Autobot scientist, and a total lack of recognition in his eyes. His eyes... Perceptor swung his light cannon into position and fired a blinding burst at the Dinobot's optics, enough to make Grimlock rear back with another roar- this time of pain- and, his tiny forearms gripping his optics, reach out blindly with one clawed foot to try and crush Perceptor into the ground. The Autobot rolled, coming perilously close to the cage bars himself, and noting Snarl, in the next cage along, watching the struggle with weary interest. At any other time he would have called out for help, but now he doubted the stegosaurus would even hear him, or care if he did.
A tongue of flame scorched his arm as he tried to get away, the tyrannosaurus Dinobot lashing out blindly. As Grimlock's tail swung again, Perceptor dived for cover. On the other side of the chamber, Brainstorm lifted his head.
"Brainstorm! Where's the neural interrupt control?" Perceptor yelled. The Headmaster shook his head vaguely, and answered.
"I'm not sure. We thought the Dinobot was passive... then when he attacked Brainstorm dropped the control somewhere." The voice was Brainstorm's but the thoughts were Arcana, his Nebulan companion. "He's been damaged by the fence. He activated an insulating buffer to protect me but... look out!" The voice changed abruptly, and Perceptor leapt with blind instinct as a mass of teeth and claws clashed into the space he'd just occupied. He came down on his damaged arm and it refused to support him, the elbow twisting under him as he fell on his back. With a triumphant roar, Grimlock reared over him.
"Grimlock, listen to me!" Perceptor panicked. He was staking everything on his theory now, and he knew it. Everything depended on just why the Dinobots had broken down in the last few years. If he was wrong, well, then he'd just have to hope someone was feeling like playing cavalry. If not, then he stood a chance. "I was Wheeljack's friend!" The Dinobot snarled.
"Wheeljack!" Perceptor tried again. "Wheeljack and Ratchet!" A clawed foot raised itself over the Autobot's cranium, but Perceptor was certain he'd seen something like thought in the great creature's eyes. Of course, if he was right then there'd always been thought in there, all along. It was foolish to believe the psychological protocols could over-ride the neurological difficulties, but if they could just give Grimlock pause, that would be enough. Brainstorm's head disconnected from his non-functioning body and transformed quickly, Arcana in his turquoise and grey armour scanning the sandy floor of the containment field quickly, and hoping the remote to the neural interrupt installed in Grimlock's central nervous system hadn't been crushed in the Dinobot's rampage.
"They did not want to leave the Dinobots alone, Grimlock," Perceptor went on tentatively. "The Decepticons murdered them." That was a mistake.
"DECEPTICONS!" Grimlock roared, smashing his foot into the ground mere inches from the side of Perceptor's head, and leaning low, roaring into the Autobot's face. "Decepticons kill... me Grimlock kill Decepticons!" Perceptor jerked his uninjured arm across his chestplate, sweeping away the sand to show his own Autobot sigil.
"The Autobots, remember?" he attempted, desperately. "Autobots and Dinobots fight Decepticons together."
"Me Grimlock remember..." the giant rumbled, then, "You Autobots think we dumb Dinos!" The foot smashed down again, and despite himself, Perceptor flinched. Grimlock leaned in closer, his aggressive instincts triggered further by the sign of weakness. Part of Perceptor's mind almost somersaulted with elation. Speech. Coherent thought. Even if they weren't particularly pleasant thoughts, that was the first time to his knowledge that a Dinobot had actually communicated anything since late 2006. "You lock us away, only Wheeljack care about us... then he stop and we get sicker and sicker and no one care!" That hit home. Perceptor had accused himself, Rodimus Prime, Magnus, and who knew how many others of that since the Dinobots malaise had become apparent, but to hear it from one of the Dinobots himself hurt all the more. Since their creation in 1984, the Dinobots had improved in leaps and bounds, all under the supervision of Wheeljack, who had never taken any of his fellows into his confidence regarding the modifications he was performing on his creations. Understandably enough- Perceptor was all too aware of the contemptuous attitude the likes of he and Huffer and others had made all too plain for the creatures. The Dinobots' brains had been developed piecemeal, one step at a time up from the barely sentient 'robot dinosaurs' they had created in the beginning to full cybernetic personae. To do that with only the resources of an individual or individuals, rather than the vast data store of Vector Sigma, to do as all off-world Cybertronians were compelled to do in order to reproduce, would ordinarily take up to a century to produce a balanced mind. The Dinobots had had twenty-one years before their creator had been cruelly taken from them, cut down by a stray laser blast in the battle for Autobot City in early 2005.
"We want to think about it when Wheeljack go but you no let us, you say 'Save Cybertron' and we go and we stop thinking hard!" Grimlock had more or less summarised half Perceptor's own theory regarding the Dinobots' plight. Because of the nature of their construction, the cumulative way intelligence upgrades had been added to them, the personality of a Dinobot was a distinctly layered affair, and as their higher brains struggled to come to terms with the deaths of Wheeljack and- to a lesser extent- Ratchet, they'd simply lost the capacity to use them. They'd shown little outward grief- none of the Autobots had had time for it in the momentous events that had followed that terrible battle, but then those very parts of their brains that were thinking in those terms were gradually disassociating themselves from the whole.
"Me Grimlock... me not want to think any more!" the Dinobot reared up and moved off abruptly. Arcana scuttled out of his way.
"Is that it?" the Nebulan muttered incredulously. "Grief?" Perceptor shook his head, standing up gingerly.
"Not entirely, no. Indubitably the psychological upset of the loss of their creator did precipitate the negative influence on their intellectual capacities which we observed in their exponential decrease of..." Arcana cut him off with an irritable wave of the hand. Grimlock had reached the corner of the cage, and was looking through the bars at Snarl, as if he'd never seen his fellow Dinobot before. Perceptor did a creditable impression of a cough for a mechanoid with no windpipe. "However it should also be noted that Wheeljack's improvements on the Dinobots were by no means complete. All five did, in those twenty-one years they had together, receive regular neurological readjustments- usually related in time period to some new cerebral enhancement or advancement in their own performance. It is my hypothesis that said readjustments- about which Wheeljack refused to take anyone into his confidence- were of vital importance in maintaining the stability of the Dinobot mindset and allowing them to continue to use and expand the use of their cerebral systems. It is likely, from what we observe of the Dinobots' behaviour in 2004 and 2005 even prior to Wheeljack's demise that such a readjustment was then already overdue." He began to move stealthily towards the edge of the cage. It was impossible to tell if Grimlock was still rational, or merely distracted by the 'pretty patterns' of the energon bars, as Swoop had once named them in a particularly distressing child-like episode of his trauma. They had to retrieve Brainstorm, then get out. "If you recall from the history tapes I provided you with when Brainstorm and yourself were transferred here..." Assuming your impatient young Autobot colleague bothered to listen to them, of course, he mentally noted with some bitterness, "At that time the Dinobots were stationed on Moonbase One, part of the force being prepared for our invasion of Cybertron, but Wheeljack was located on Earth, involved in the construction work on our City. The Dinobots were already beginning to intellectually deteriorate in 2005, and the death of Wheeljack both left those faults uncorrected, and made them morbidly certain that no such 'healing' was possible. We simply mocked them as ever, despairing noting that they seemed more stupid than they had ever been, and failed to even consider the underlying causes until the Dinobots became dangerous." He took hold of Brainstorm's body by the wrist and began to drag it through the sand. Grimlock turned, watching him, his face unreadable. Perceptor found himself wanting to apologise.
You're not ignorant, you're not stupid... I know that now. He should have known it long ago. Should have seen the truth when the anti-electrons infected Grimlock's brain, should have seen that all that intelligence came from somewhere. Dozens of mental upgrades, never working quite right, adding incrementally to an IQ they should have boosted tenfold. Twenty-one years of unbalanced, confused emotion, of a brilliant mind- no, five brilliant minds that simply, through no fault of their own, could not properly relate to themselves. He pulled the body to the gate and opened it, Arcana helping to push his binary bonded partner as best he could. No, you're not stupid. Your mind is like... like a three dimensional object to a being living on a flat plane... and you yourselves see it on the same plane and cannot understand it. You're not genii, never could be, you simply don't think that way, but your IQ isn't too low, it's too high, too high for you yourselves to comprehend, and without someone to keep that in balance, things fall apart. Perceptor closed the door to the chamber just as a short red and white robot hurried up.
"What on Cybertron's been going on in there?" First Aid squawked, seizing the unconscious Headmaster body. Perceptor ignored him, turning back to the containment zone. From the far corner, Grimlock watched him and beyond, in the other cages, he could see four more pairs of eyes fixed on him, showing varying degrees of liveliness and interest, but the same desperate appeal.
"Wheeljack was my friend..." he told them quietly. "You were his finest work, and you are his legacy to the future. His only mistake was that he did not foresee that it might be your destiny to grow alone. As his friend, and as your fellow Autobot, I swear to do all in my power to give you back your lives." He did not know whether or not any or all of them understood him. That was not his concern.
***
"Perceptor calling Autobot City:Earth." A pause.
"Call acknowledged." It wasn't Blaster's voice. "Communications Officer Hubcap speaking..." an irritated pause. "What sector do you want?"
"No sector. I would like to register an enquiry regarding a medical and engineering report I recently sent to Autobot City communications array for forwarding to Autobase Cybertron. Message destined for Optimus Prime, Subject..."
"Ah," the self-styled 'Hubcap' interrupted, "I've found it. That message is waiting in the queue. It'll be sent by compressed tachyon dispatch as soon as we've filled the data packet with enough other messages."
"Could you delete it?" The communications officer made a noise of assent. "Sure, but why?"
"I believe some of the conclusions I affixed to the original transmission may have been excessively pessimistic. I'd like to take the opportunity to present a more balanced view before forwarding my results to Prime."