How Ratchet Got His Hands Back At the Delphi medical facility, the furious Fortress Maximus dispatches the two Genericons threatening the remaining Autobots there, tearing one in half and decapitating the other with his shoulder compartment. As Ratchet and First Aid return to tending the inflicted, Pharma pulls a gun on Ambulon, accusing him of freeing the Decepticons and releasing the virus plaguing the facility, on the basis that he is a former Decepticon himself. First Aid, however, turns the tables on Pharma when he examines the Genericons' remains and discovers that they were not Monoformers, as Pharma had claimed. Ratchet puts the final pieces of the puzzle together, and requests that Pharma transform; when he refuses, Ratchet diagnoses the virus as being activated through transformation. First Aid and Ambulon have not succumbed to its effects because the former has a malfunctioning transformation cog, while the latter has no reason to transform, his alternate mode being only the leg of a prototype combiner, but Pharma will not transform because he knows this already, being responsible for the plague in the first place. Pharma shoots out a life-support system to cover his escape, rabbiting down a hidden tunnel in a CR chamber while the other medics scramble to save the lives of their patients. Backstreet fades particularly fast, forcing Ratchet to transform into ambulance mode in order to give him a full systems boost from his reboot coils. With the virus now activated within him, Ratchet sets off after Pharma.
Meanwhile, aboard the Lost Light, Tailgate meets with Ultra Magnus and requests to undergo the Rite of the Autobrand, having realized the foolishness of his earlier decision to be a Decepticon. Grudgingly impressed with Tailgate's skill set, Magnus agrees to teach him the Autobot Code, nearly driving the poor little bot out of his head with intense study of the code's ten thousand pages. Tailgate's interest is caught by clause nineteen-eighty-five; remembering the giant robots pursuing Skids, he inquires about clause nineteen-eighty-four, which Magnus informs him relates to the supposedly non-existent "thought warfare".
Red Alert listens How Ratchet Got His Hands Back.jpg
Elsewhere on the ship, Rung meets with one of his oldest patients, Red Alert, concerned that the paranoia he helped the security officer overcome is returning. Red Alert insists that he heard a noise emanating from a crack in the floor of the chamber in which the Sparkeater was found, but that should be impossible, as that chamber is at the lowest point on the ship, with only outer space beyond. Despite Rung's skepticism, Red Alert produces a recording of the sound, which Rung recognizes as a distorted voice...repeating "kill me" over and over again...
Back in Delphi, Ratchet catches up to Pharma, who gleefully explains his master plan: he engineered the plague in order to shut Delphi down so that he could escape a deal he made with the Decepticon Justice Division that forced him to kill patients in order to harvest their transformation cogs for the DJD's transformation addicted-leader in return for Delphi's safety. The two Genericons—Sonic and Boom—were paid by Pharma to surrender to the facility, and once locked up together, to merge into their audio-equipment alternate mode and project a blast of weaponized sound calculated by Pharma to corrode Transformers from within: the "big bang" that contaminated all who heard it. His vigorous monologuing has blinded Pharma to one thing, however: as Ratchet slowly rusts away in front of him, his liquefied innards have pooled around Pharma's feet, infecting him. Pharma escapes to the roof of the facility with the only vaccine, but is surprised by the appearance of Ratchet's remote-projected holomatter avatar, which distracts him long enough to let Ratchet catch up and tackle him, causing the vaccine to fall off the building. Ratchet and Pharma grapple, but when Ratchet's arm breaks off, Pharma tumbles off th
