Draft: opening for A Record of the Eating Days

[fascinationex]

The beginnings of a draft of a fic I believe(?) will be called 'A Record of the Eating Days', which is the brainstorm/percy fic I've been screaming about for months.

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The secure records room was empty after hours.

The security camera in the corner of the room flickered its red light, indicating unauthorised movement in its field. But the ping it was supposed to send to the night guard had not been sent after all, and the feed it was supplying was only a copy from one it had recorded last week.

It had been straightforward to pick up and then ‘find’ a few access passes from those with higher security clearances, too—and their permissions weren’t even individualised. Anyone whose access pass was unlocked to a certain degree had access.

Brainstorm’s contract did say that he wasn’t supposed to have access to secure rooms in the facility. But with the many-splendoured inducements of curiosity and such mediocre security, he couldn’t help but feel that this was what they called ‘mixed messaging’. So now his light, precise fingers were combing gently through the old data pads and gently unspooling a ‘secure’ (ha!) cable from the heavy duty server machine that hummed away in the corner of the dusty, windowless room.

It had all begun with a genuine security accident (as opposed to all the less genuine ‘accidents’ happening right now), when Brainstorm’s own pathetically limited access card had allowed him through a door that had not been supposed to open for him.

He had been told upon signing his contract, by a facility manager who had been much too important to actually provide training (or, say, a map), that he was to move fast, clean any room whose door opened for his pass, and not ask questions.

(Glamorous work this was not, but Brainstorm told himself—rather a lot, and only a little nervously-that this was merely a stopgap job, before he moved on to better things.)

The doors hissed open and allowed him and his little cleaning cart into a laboratory. The specialisation was not immediately clear: there were scales and balances, fluid baths, glassware, enormous bio-hazard containers with their flashing cyan lights. As many pieces of equipment were almost always supplied by the researchers’ alt modes, it was rarely completely clear what kind of laboratory one had entered unless it was in use.

Sometimes, occasionally, Brainstorm thought he envied the alt modes of ‘more traditional’ researchers, but always on reflection he had to wonder how useful it actually would be to turn into, say, a gas chromatograph, anyway. The prestige and easy acceptance of having a proper research alt might have been nice… But a gas chromatograph didn’t fly, did it? They didn’t go anywhere at all. And Brainstorm wasn’t a chemist.

It was the first of the private laboratories he’d actually turned out to have access to, so while he was emptying scrap metal bins and rearranging the furniture for mopping, he had a little, tiny, no-more-than-ten-minutes kind of look around. It had only been a couple of months, but he already missed this sort of environment. The soft hum of idling machines… the mixed smells of common reagents… the painfully bright overhead lights (even the one that was inevitably flickering)… They could all have been taken from one of the labs at the university.

Then he turned a corner into an odd little alcove and thought, aloud, “That’s different.”

His work spaces almost never included live specimens.

It looked, for a moment, very much like a cybertronian mech—with a cute microscope alt mode, even—but its container was labelled like anything else would have been, a perfunctory ‘MV. R07600.672’.

The abbreviation for a cybertronian mechanism—a person—was CNL, not MV.

...Brainstorm had never seen ‘MV’ before. But he wasn’t, like, a life sciences specialist either.

It looked like a cybertronian.

The case in which they were keeping it would never have passed the ethics review committee at a publicly-funded institution, but he supposed that being able to shove your specimens anywhere they fit without all the tiresome ‘ethics’ and ‘safety’ nonsense was one of the benefits to privately funded research, wasn’t it.

“What are you doing in here?” came the shrill voice of a technician, interrupting Brainstorm’s train of thought.

Brainstorm looked away from the puzzling ‘MV’ and over to the speaker, who had seemingly just emerged from a doorway while Brainstorm had been thinking. The tech was, curiously, also a cute microscope, although he was bright blue with uncommon green optics. Cute microscopes just everywhere today, apparently. Lucky Brainstorm. He blinked his optics once, slowly.

“Oh! Cleaning,” he said, ignoring that what he was actually doing was more like ‘taking a break to snoop in their lab’. He changed the subject immediately to something actually interesting. “What species is this? Do you keep a lot of live—”

The technician scowled furiously. “The door’s still broken? They said they’d have it fixed before lunch!”

“Oh, that’s a shame,” said Brainstorm, sounding like he cared about that exactly as much as he actually did care about that, which was not at all. “What’s ‘MV’?”

The technician was evidently not inclined to answer him, and even squirmed into position between Brainstorm and the tank. “Please don’t make me call security,” he said instead, raising his optics to the ceiling. “It was an accident, I get it—just get out.”

“Oh, come on,” Brainstorm said, peering over the mech’s shoulder even as he allowed himself to be herded. He met the optics of the—creature?—in the tank for just a moment, finding them a deep blue. He blinked, optics shuttering. The 'MV' blinked right back. “That’s the most interesting thing I’ve seen in months—”

“Well, I hope you take a good look, because you won’t see it again,” the technician said firmly, putting a hand right between his wings as though to propel him forward.

Brainstorm probably outweighed the average microscope-alt by actual tonnes, but he let himself be pushed. He didn’t mind annoying the technician but he really didn’t want to get into it with security. He needed this job to pay his bills, thank you very much.

“So he’s an ‘it’?” he prompted.

“Goodbye,” said the tech, pushing him over the threshold. He clipped one wing on the door frame, which, actually, ouch!

“Ouch… Wait!” cried Brainstorm, whirling unsteadily. “My cart!”

The cleaning cart came careening through the doors a split second before they closed, and Brainstorm grunted as its edge collided with his midsection.

He’d felt like he’d had no choice but to continue on cleaning, which became a lot more boring when he knew that there were undoubtedly some really interesting experiments going on here behind all these closed doors. None of which included Brainstorm.

He felt… left out.

Probably, he realised, because he was, very literally, being left out. Presumably this was because he was signed on as cleaning staff, not as research staff. Because… he wasn’t supposed to do that anymore. Technically. Definitely not in a paid capacity.

Hmm. He did not like feeling left out, though.

So he had ignored the part where it was not just absolutely none of his business, but actively contrary to the contract he’d signed, and organised this little excursion into the secure records room, where he was taking an innocent peek at what was on file from lab 5B.

He had expected to get the accounting information, really—these kinds of secure rooms were usually used for the storage of private financial information, such as individual or company charge numbers, which had to be either destroyed or kept accordance with some regulation or other (in which Brainstorm wasn’t very interested). And even private institutions required that everything be ordered centrally and assigned to budget line items, to keep track and ensure that nobody was using company money where it ought not be used.

So he had expected to get a wealth of information about what sort of equipment they were using in there, and who worked there, and what their alt-modes were and how they got paid and where they’d worked previously, all of which would tell him a lot about what they were doing in there.

He hadn’t expected to just reach in and grab a lab report.

…But he wasn’t mad about it.

He hummed to himself, and hopped up upon one of the filing boxes, kicking his thrusters gently. He didn’t have much time, but he could skim a few… he could download several to his own cluttered internal storage…

MV, he rapidly learnt, was an abbreviation for metallico vorax.

He tapped his fingertips on his own mask, feeling his wings twitch excitedly. There was a little clatter as the ones on his legs followed suit.

Metallico vorax?

That sounded both super fascinating and unbelievably ominous.

The species name used the same glyph as ‘sentio metallico’ did—the ‘live wires’ that referred to the core metal of every cybertronian. He couldn’t imagine that was an accident.

That critter wasn’t just vorax-ing any old metallico, Brainstorm would bet.

…What a shame to keep him all locked up in a case like that!

And then there was a clatter and a beep from somewhere outside the room, so Brainstorm cringed at the thought of being caught—and fired, probably—and shoved all those things away. Several of the reports had downloaded, at least.

He checked his down link into the security feeds to ensure the coast was clear—not that every corridor and room was captured, because, uh, cheapskates, probably, but if he could simply count guards and other cleaners then he could figure it all out for himself, couldn’t he—and then slunk out of the room before allowing that security camera to continue with its regular feed again.

It was nearly seamless.

Hopefully nobody was going to ask why the PI from Lab 9 was swiping into and out of the secure records rooms in the late evenings.

Or why Brainstorm left work twenty minutes late.

He said nearly, okay.