When a Cybertronian dies, the spark doesn’t always dissipate like it should. Sometimes it stays cohesive for a time, a crackling, stabilized thing of energy and thought and memories that is trying to stay alive- or simply doesn’t know that it’s already died. Cybertronians are not just robots powered by energy cores- they are also energy beings residing in robotic bodies, they are two halves that form one living whole.
A cybertronian soul is a very real thing.
And stripped of it’s body, confused and scared and made of raw starstuff, it can be a very dangerous thing while it lasts.
While rare prior to the war, they were known and recognized as a possible side-effect of death- generally the faster and more destructive to the body the actual demise is the slightly higher the possibility of the spark continuing to survive without it- but this is ultimately temporary. A ghost generally couldn’t survive more than a few hours after forming- often times hours after the actual death has occurred. Spark energy tires to tie itself back together, to re-form, but without a body to house it…well, it cannot last.
Ghosts can pose a danger by trying to inhabit the bodies of others, burning them out or causing severe energy damage and sparkdamage, as well as creating gravitational affects that can damage their surroundings and burn out nearby technology as their spark tries to find a way to house itself again. Extraordinarily rarely, there have been situations where a ghost is aware of it’s actual surroundings and situations and capable of communicating.
Typically, a strong surge of electrical energy will destabilize a ghost further and force it’s spark to dissolve, destroying it, if one cannot wait around for it to dispel on it’s own.
While Cybertronians do have “ghost stories” and the concept of ghosts in horror, they seldom make fictionalized accounts, particularly for the purpose of entertainment, simply because ghosts were researched phenomena prior to the war- and during/after the war they were a very real threat to those who were scavenging on battlefields, as even a one-in-a-million chance becomes pretty impressive when you start having cybertronians dying by the billions.
@dugtrios-luxurious-locks
hypothetical question, but if a ghost was able to find a perfectly suitable body to inhabit, would they be able to come back from the dead? or would the spark burnout regardless of if they find a host body or not?
This…can be done. And it has been done. It’s just a bad idea, as most forms of necromancy are.
To start with, Ghosts are often aggressive and dangerous to be in close proximity to- as mentioned they’re confused, destructive, driven by emotion and a burning need to return to a body. So first, you have to actually capture a ghost’s spark- trapping it in a housing designed for spark storage should work.
The next hard part is stabilizing the ghost’s spark- it’s already been damaged and lost some of it’s own cohesive field, meaning that it’s fragile and decaying- so even if it were to be placed back inside a spark housing it might simply not be enough. It could snuff out or burn out, particularly when it’s trying to form a connection with a new body- if a ghost tries to possess another bot who’s still alive this results in both sparks trying to reject each other out of the body.
(It’s an unexplored possibility that, if the sparks were compatible enough, a living bot could form a bond with or even absorb a ghost spark, mixing the two beings together, but Primus knows what sort of side effects this would have.)
If the spark managed to not explode or turn into residual dust, and started bonding with the body, we reach the next problem- which is compatibility. Unlike a cold-constructed spark, which can be produced “blank” or modified before implantation in order to fit into any available frametype, the spark still carries the impression of the body it fueled before- this is why ghosts still appear similar to the bots they were, if often times distorted.
The spark may cause damage to the new body as it tries to move joints that aren’t there, or it’ll tear itself apart at transformation seams that don’t align the way it reflexively goes to. A more extreme version, effectively, of the side effects possible with a living bot getting a frametype alteration- but because ghosts generally aren’t completely aware of their surroundings or situation they can easily kill themselves again in their confusion because their processors aren’t up to speed with the whole “figure out your new body” thing.
And then there’s the problem of what happens to the spark when it’s been exposed, raw and damaged and having died, then become a confused, potentially deadly energy being with no real physical form.
You can bring a ghost back to life, but they’re not going to be the same. The spark has already been irreversibly damaged, the data it carries is corrupted. When Cybertronians die, they are supposed to dissipate, their energy is supposed to be reabsorbed into the allspark or to simply cease existing, depending upon one’s beliefs.
If you bought a bot back, you may not like what they’ve become.
Naturally, of course, Shockwave has done this a lot. Never successfully, beyond a certain point, but he finds it pretty dang fascinating! Downside: There’s a reason the wasteland around Shockwave’s labs on apocalyptic Cybertron tend to have small, roaming bands of shrieking zombies meandering about, slowly breaking apart.
Shockwave probably needs supervision.
People just don’t know the value of my work yet.
