by K.A. Rose
Transformers and all related characters and indica © and TM Hasbro and Takara, 1984-2007. Used without permission for non-profit fan appreciation.
Whatever I'm doing with this, it's not worse than Kiss Players, okay?
-----
The planets with atmosphere were worst. In space, there was only the void and the stars between it to worry about, but atmosphere brought new levels of horrible to life.
The ice winds whipped at his chassis. He pressed harder against his companion, who always had heat to spare.
"We'll have to collect the scanners at star-rise."
"Nn. But that's a long way off."
These spark imprints, they were the only thing he had resembling memory any more. Datatrax were wan and transient things. The memory of the body was the least trustworthy thing about a creature.
But the spark memories were delicate things, an ocean of unsorted information yielding disconnected events and phrases that burbled up like froth in the tide. It hadn't always been this way. But no-one had tested it to its threshold the way he had.
He was immortal, and yet he aged. He existed in time and space, and yet he transcended both. He was aware of everything and sensed nothing at all. He was separate, and yet, he could not escape the current. He breathed, and it breathed him in.
There was no narrative he could convey to a person, no linear one. The arrow-like nature of time was such a joke. His maturation that had not arrived in so many teracycles of his life was finally delivered to him on a razed hilltop a million megacycles before he had been born. Even now he existed simultaneously with his arrogance, his conceit, his hubris, all the things that so disgusted him.
He was not even the shell of the mech he used to be. He was hardly the core. He was a ghost, and all was silvered glass. He had tread and retread the length and breadth of the universe, until the trail had worn brittle and vanished, and then he floated free.
Soon he would go mad out here. He had to find another body, but to possess a living creature repulsed him now. And so he floated, shifting through the paper layers of the dimensions and liquid time, feeling for matter with the pale remains of his spark until it sought out form, circuitry, energy, power, that he might urge into motion.
Unreal multiverse. The tactile sensation of fingers felt less material than his thoughts. But he must, still, keep going, for no other reason than that he could not die. At least, while grounded in a form, he would not be able to revisit the past.
Iacon, Cybertron, Human Year 2261
Young, then, and hateful. He'd taken a live host, a female. He despised females, but he had plans for this one.
An Alliance with the Autobots. An end to the Cybertronian wars. What a joke. War was the natural predilection of their race! Megatron was not fit to live, leading his surviving troops into such a disgrace.
He had tried many times to murder Megatron. Oh, many times, but he was always undone. No more. He would work from within. He would ply 'Megatron Prime' with subterfuge, with a form of poison only the female could employ.
He had learned to appreciate patterns. The rise and fall of empires, of rulers, of science and superstition. He came to recognise peacetime on his home planet by no other marker than the proliferation of the female kind. Females had never fared too well in war. He knew all too well.
It was an ugly artifact of their collective history, lost to records and the social consciousness, perhaps known only to him, and what a horrible thing to have to know.
The gender reassignment programmes. Sexual dimorphism was a vanity of the Quints and had to be eradicated. 'I say, we will have no more marriages.'
Genetically, a spark was undiscerning. Gender was the will of the mind. The reasons for the physicality were long lost on the culture, but he knew: emergencies.
But who had control of the nurseries and the future was no concern in the early teracycles of the war, and females were small and frail, an embarrassment. Protoforms that showed the inclination were treated chemically and stuffed in bodies unsuited for them. Generic bodies. Mass produced bodies.
That was how he had begun life. In the lowest ranks of the Decepticon factories, a consumer knock-off model with the barest of amenities and a chemically-treated predisposition. An unsightly creature. Rough-hewn and small.
Iacon, Human Year 2261
He took the female he had possessed and reregistered her with a new name and fake ident. He took her to the chopshop and used the liquidised funds from her former account to reformat her chassis. Not a copy, but a deliberate resonance.
Megatron Prime had grown old. He had forgotten where he had heard the name 'Nightbird', only that its sound made him nostalgic. She easily gained a post as his secretary at the capital.
It was simply too easy of an operation. Within a kilocycle, he was unresisting to her touch, and two decacycles more, he was between her legs. He shook beneath her, confused and out of practise, but he gripped her thighs and the cables hooked between their opened chests pulsed with raw, accelerating current.
Starscream should have realised his descent from the first moment in Megatron's arms, but he didn't. He was so sure of himself. He was so convinced that he had played a winning hand, but once again, the hand had only played him.
He knew intimately the face and presence of the Destroyer.
Like Starscream, he existed independent of time, independent of reality. Like Starscream, he, too, had been driven mad by the void, and then had surpassed madness.
He lurked even now in the back of Starscream's consciousness. He could cease to feel him no more than a planet-dweller could forget the existence of the sun he orbited. Unicron was There. He would always be There.
Oh, Starscream had tried to bargain with him, to cheat him, to crook the wheel even though he knew Unicron was one half that made the wheel work. In his frailty he had been the Chaos-Bringer's plaything, his mind to warp past recognition. But inevitably this amusement failed, and Starscream was left to orbit, to drift, to do what he pleased. He could not accrue the strength to be a singularity, but neither had he the substance of self left to belong to any one time or any one place.
In this way were they brothers, and in this way did he come to understand the Destroyer, and followed in his wake for half of an eternity, until a new current drew him to its path. There would be many more. An endless many more.
Iacon, 2262
Unreal city. Unreal people.
He watched himself from the outside. A timeskip had brought him back here as he was also being brought down. The shame, the indignity he suffered, the final undoing that had broken the very last of his illusions.
Nature abhors a vacuum. Starscream had kept a gap between where he ended and the body he possessed began, but the container had swallowed its contents and suffused them with itself. The interior had to match the exterior.
Megatron Prime had not recognised him within Nightbird. The reactions Starscream was so used to were gone, and Starscream had played his role too well. Megatron had fallen in love. And so help him, the female Starscream inhabited had fallen in love in return.
It had been so natural. It had been a soul death like none other he'd experienced. In that lithe receptor body, he had opened up and allowed Megatron into the deepest part of him, that part that nothing, not even time, had been able to touch.
It was the purest sensation he had ever felt, and the closest, he was sure, he'd ever get to death. He knew the third creature's presence before he formed, felt his light swell inside of him and crystallise into shape in the depths of his spark. His first son. Havoc.
"It will cause a scandal," Optimus Prime told Megatron. "It can't be made public."
"But it's ours," Nightbird interjected, clasping the sparkling to her chest. It had been placed in a small tank while the Iacon Nursery was being informed.
Megatron didn't hear her. "I understand," he said to his fellow Prime.
"You would hide your son away?!" Nightbird demanded of her lover, stepping forward. "Your own child!"
He did something then. Struck her, or turned his back to her. The effect was the same. He had been humiliated. And she had been disgraced.
Earth, Human Year 2002
"There, see?" Jetfire pointed to the western sky. "A shooting star."
Starscream watched him quietly. He didn't look. He had seen enough of them to last him the rest of eternity.
"You're not yourself," Jetfire said at length, more appreciably adept even at what lay beyond his senses. "Not even your former self. It's more than what's on your mind, isn't it?"
His own voice, countless teracycles younger, answered, "They'll find us tomorrow."
Jetfire looked around at him. "Not if we don't want to be found."
Poor, kind Jetfire. Tolerant Jetfire. His first good friend.
There were few ways out of the pit for a mass-produced model. One way was education. Starscream had fought bolt and rivet to place at the science magnet in Tarn, and fought harder still to stay there. He was not a natural researcher. He did not have the mind for this kind of work. When his unit received their first charter, everyone was astonished that Jetfire --top of the class Jetfire, diecast Jetfire, the Renaissance Mech-- willingly signed up to be Starscream's partner.
"It's because you're such an underdog," he'd said to Starscream, on their first mission together. "You've had to be creative to get where you are. You think outside the box."
Long haul exploration missions. Work to the farthest reaches of the charted galaxy. Long and arduous treks through cold and hunger. Starscream had never felt so imbued with life. What they found and what they brought back mattered a great deal less than the process of finding it. They were so different, and yet, it was easy to keep pace with each other.
The war had been hard on them. Very hard. After their reunion, Starscream refused to accept that he had changed. It would take the ages, hundredfold, to finally show him the truth. Slow learner.
If he had any control of the current he might choose to stay with Jetfire forever. In the cold and wind or in the inky black of space as it streamed by, in his wake or flush against his side. But time was not a current he could control, and those ancient memories, their imprints had faded.
Earth, 2002
By hook or by crook. He was back here again.
Their power cells were low. He had forgotten what he was doing here originally, some covert mission of their Southern installations maybe. Jetfire had intercepted and they'd shot each other down, and then a storm had kept them grounded.
How many nights like this one? In the middle of frozen alien desert, pressed together for feeble warmth. As they slept, Starscream stirred on occasion and began to murmur about changing the data plates out on the ridge, but Jetfire reminded him there weren't any plates, and for that matter, there was no energon, and Starscream especially needed to conserve his power.
Who knew at what point it had started, on what lonely mission, for what reasons. It wouldn't have been innocent, even the first time. Jetfire was too much of a gentleman. But at some moment on a blank night on a foreign landscape, need and attraction converged, and for the first time, Starscream felt Jetfire's massive current pulse through him.
He'd thought he'd died. He nearly did die. Jetfire could not believe Starscream hadn't done this before, and said as much, in the morning when the winds had calmed and everything looked embarrassing. But for all his awkwardness and humiliation, it didn't deter either of them from doing it again before noon.
And now they were here, wings clipped, and perhaps in the morning the Autobots would find them and Starscream would finally meet his end, flightless and stranded in the seething guts of enemy territory. And in the calm of the storm, Jetfire pointed out a meteor.
But Starscream was not himself any more, because though his spark may have borne the same code the ancient ghost in his shell was a different creature, and used his optics to look out with sad, restrained eyes. It was certainly true that we never appreciate the moments we are given until they are gone.
Starscream coud not appreciate. He, the drifter, could. Before this night was out he would make his peace with Jetfire, so that at least one mech's face would no longer torment his mutant soul.
Pacific Ocean, Earth, Human Year 1995
"Useless!" Megatron bellowed. "Defective!"
"I'm not defective; you are!" Starscream shrieked. He rolled to dodge a kick to the torso, and used the wall to climb to his feet. Wires still hung out of his chest compartment. "Poor Megatron, commander of the Decepticons! Can't command his own spark!"
Megatron roared. The backhanded slap knocked Starscream clear off his feet again.
"Byproduct of a service model!" Megatron snarled at him. "You are not fit to contribute to my schematics!"
"And what schematics they are, oh exceptionally virile leader," Starscream retorted, spitting oil and wincing, his backstruts complaining loudly for the strain that they were under. "You couldn't father a glitch mouse."
Megatron swung his foot and hooked Starscream's face under the jaw, tearing his cheek plate clear off and several wires with it. Starscream's yelp caught in his throat and he covered his gushing, exposed framework with an arm, curling into a ball on the floor.
Starscream mopped fluids off his torn face as Megatron went to answer the caller at his chamber door. It was Scrapper, scratch-throated and mild-mannered, sandpaper to any self-respecting creature's audio receptors.
"Commander, I have conferred with my team," said the captain of the Constructicons, on the other side of the doorway. He wouldn't enter, of course. "And we must advise against this course of action."
"You interrupted me for that?" Megatron demanded. "Back to your assignment!"
"Megatron, there are many other, simpler ways to manufacture new soldiers!" Scrapper protested. "Spark births are a grave liability, even if their creation were down to an exact science, which they most certainly are not--"
"Enough! Enough!" Starscream heard their commander bark. "We have tried it your way, to little else but failure! The project will proceed as scheduled."
Starscream could nearly taste the cowardly retreat into submission in the Constructicon's voice. "Of course, Lord. Do you require anything to...?" He left the end of his sentence to hang, until he discovered Megatron would not be doing him any favours. "...To... expedite the process..?"
"Out! OUT!" his leader growled, after a moment's hesitation transformed into disgust. He slammed the door in Scrapper's face. A moment later, Megatron's hand was around Starscream's throat.
"Again," he hissed, spitting into Starscream's open wound. "We will try again."
He fought. He always fought. There was no indignity left to suffer except the shame of succumbing willingly. But he would always fail. If Megatron couldn't order him into submission any other way, he would press the barrel of his cannon against Starscream's temple and force him onto his back.
2262
She gave an involuntary shudder when he plugged into her the first time.
"Someone has hurt you," Megatron said, touching her face. There was pity in his eyes.
She shivered. She was still unprepared for gentleness in his tone, so uncharacteristic for all the millions of megacycles during which Starscream had known him. A sensitivity Optimus had trained into or teased out of him, that she could never have expected.
Starscream told himself he couldn't forget the mission. And yet Nightbird's body responded on its own, answering to a spark imprint he could not keep sealed away. With every pulse Megatron sent over their shared line, Nightbird cringed in anticipation of the pain that would never come, that she could not convince herself was not coming.
He clenched her thighs as the heat in their bodies climbed. "Tell me who it was," he rasped. "Tell me."
Remembered pain and present pleasure. It overwhelmed her. She started to cry.
"Tell me, and I will kill him," Megatron said urgently, and at once, his old malevolence resurfaced in his voice. "I will kill him."
1995
He would not go and see the protoform. It disgusted him. The very thought, breeding a pair of Autobots to make a Decepticon. Megatron's madness bordered on the comical.
Then at last he could bear her existence no longer. In the dead of endcycle, when all but the patrolling sentry were offline at the base, he went to the labs where her tank was kept and pulled open the control panel that regulated the temperature. He would make it look like an accident, one of a series that had dogged this production line from the beginning, and their group would be none the worse for it.
But as he reached for the dial, some unknown force held back his hand.
2289
Unreal city. Unreal people.
He understood the length and breadth of everything, but he had not seen the end. He knew that the timestream rewrote itself and that nothing was certain. He knew the transience of history. And yet still he made choices, and wished he could be sure of their good faith.
He walked the port in ancient treads, kept covered with a dusty and disintegrating tarp. An unfortunate body, too recognisable. He was here in this town to find a chop shop that could offer help without question. Someone had mentioned a name.
She asked no questions, but she turned him down. He did not see her again until he was floating free in the black in twelve pieces and she appeared, streamlined and silvery white, and big enough to carry him back home.
She still asked no questions.
2291
"I have come to see Lieutenant Havoc."
"I see. Your name?"
"It is a Class Five matter."
It was not. But he still remembered some of this lingo.
His son appeared to him very different than expected. His base frame was still diminutive. Rather than the successive upgrades that Highwind preached, Havoc had simply stacked a too-large set of armour on himself. It was like looking at a battle dwarf.
"Very well," said the boy that they called the 'Prince', who now headed a set of provinces and mismanaged all of them. "Your name, then?"
Aster.
"That's a flower."
It means 'star'.
"It's still a flower."
He asked delicately about the boy's parentage. Havoc scoffed. "These rumours are despicable," he said. "You came all this way to inquire about my manufacture?"
"I seek to offer my services," said Aster, "in your private employ, as your tutor."
Havoc belted out a laugh. "What could you possibly have to teach me, old mech?"
"The many Cybertronian arts. Crystalocution and Metallikato. The Way of the Oracle and the Art of Revealing. Morphology. Marksmanship, if you like. The knowledge of the ancients and the key to all possible futures."
Havoc scoffed and sent him away.
2002
By hook or by crook, he was here once again.
Under the shadow of an exposed ice ridge, Jetfire settled back on his knees and eased Starscream into his lap. Starscream pressed his hands palm-flat on Jetfire's softly-beating chestplate, finding the memorised seams and pushing aside the many panels to his inner components.
Jetfire's arms wrapped around him and drew him into his open chest, enclosing him in the heat. Magnetised conductor wires, larger than on any standard-frame model, sought out open joints and cable ducts and slipped inside, ensnaring Starscream like tentacles drawing some quiet creature to the maw of a sea beast. The wires found his nervous centres and his consciousness melted away.
He was held there, cradled, Jetfire slowly and gently pushing his current through him, the loopback picking up speed in tiny increments. Jetfire did not forget or falter in his pace. When he groaned, the sound reverberated through Starscream's entire body.
He could die like this. If only he could die. Swallowed in something corporeal, in something fleeting like this, the body of his friend. If only it could contain him and infuse him with itself. If only he could be no more.
"You should change your face," she told him, and offered up nothing as to why, whether she recognised it or thought someone else might.
"Fact," said Starscream, adjusting his optical visor.
His classmates laughed and waved him off. They left, but for Jetfire.
"It's interesting," he said. "But the definitions are problematic, aren't they?"
"Mathematically it's completely sound," Starscream retorted, defensive. "We can't argue the accuracy of syntax. If the meanings of the terms are clearly delineated, their consistency sustains the proof."
"Well, yes," Jetfire replied, "though that's toeing dangerously close to philosophy. I'd still like to talk it over with you more, if you had the time."
Starscream peered suspiciously down the corridor. Jetfire laughed.
"I'm not being put up to something," he said. "I really want to know."
When I am old, I will wear midnight.
What does that mean?
Earth, Human Year 4,000,000 BCE
Wazpinator haet life. Zick of hurt, zick of nobot caring Wazpinator hurt. Wazpinator want to die.
Of all the bodies he had possessed, this one was among the most insufferable. Shut up, shut up! he told it. Or I'll fry your datatrax!
And mozt of all Wazpinator haet voice in hed! the Predacon lamented. Wazpinator not want this! Not what Wazpinator signed up for! Wazpinator want to quit nao want it all to end!
Listen, Starscream said, striving for patience. You want to spit in the faces of fate? You want to spite Primus and all his little wizards? Learn some self-preservation!
Wat voice in hed know bout life when he no have one? the intolerable little cretin retorted. Hedvoicebot just steal mien!
Cybertron, Human Year 3051
"With this tenth prototype, we are nearing a perfect simulation of Starscream's spark," the researcher announced to the group. "And with it, a gateway to true Transformer immortality."
Starscream placed borrowed hands on the glass of the tank. From the other side, his pale shadow stared back.
Are you me? he asked silently to the protoform, to no reply. Are you where I will end?
I grow old, I grow old; I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
"What does it mean, Mister Marlowe?"
Iaso Waystation, Delta Scorpii Quadrant, Human Year 2289
He woke in a recharger bay, encased in a body that was not his own, or even his borrowed one. He was in a dummy, a drone, a blunt, hulking thing with a semi-consciousness of its own lurking at the fringes as he took in his surroundings.
Highwind appeared to read his charts. She wore the sigil of the League on her chestplate.
"Interesting," she said. "Successful."
"You transplanted me," Aster said, the words sluggish in this unfamiliar body.
"Temporarily, while I restore that body of yours to spec. Amazing how you took. My sister howled when I first stuck you in. She's always rejected them before."
"...Your sister."
"Yes, my older sister." Highwind beamed. "You're borrowing her body right now. Beta. She was never given a real name."
"The DC line," Aster rasped.
"The only surviving models," Highwind confirmed, closing a folder. "Thank-you for clearing that up for me. Either you are one of a select number of Autobots who knew about the DC series, or you were a Decepticon."
Aster was silent.
"You have nothing to worry about," she said easily. "I just like knowing things. I want to know how you take control of bodies, for instance, and I'd like to know why you rejected the membrane I introduced but you are still functioning concurrently with Beta."
"What are you doing here?" Aster said suspiciously.
"Research. Very significant research," she said meaningfully. "It will change the face of our species."
"A weapon."
"No. The war is inevitable at this stage, but no. This is something far more vital. Spark membranes. A way to store multiple sparks in a single chassis, to have them survive the elements while they wait to be incubated. It will save thousands of lives."
She had to mean on the battlefield. The recycling of soldiers, reduction of fatalities. Did she develop it for Megatron, for when he broke from the Alliance? Did she develop it for Optimus, in anticipation of Megatron's plans? Did she develop it for both to see who might emerge the highest bidder, as reflected in the LONAC tampograph on her chest?
"Please, stay," she entreated him. "There is so much I'd like to know..."
"You swore no questions," Aster said, rising. The linkages were stiff and he stood up to not even her waist. "Now please finish on my body so I might leave."
She nodded. "You should change your face," she told him, and offered up nothing as to why.
Fincher-Yutani Orbital Colony, Titan, Sol System, Human Year 2297
He spent a decacycle searching out a ship, scanning the docks constantly for something that might take him where he needed to go. In earlier times he would have relinquished his body to travel by the transwarp current, but the medic girl had made the body 'his', and he was afraid to leave it.
He did not care what he sailed in, as long as it was fast and the crew accepted his passage without question. He tired of questions as much as he tired of giving answers.
And then one cycle he saw him. History or the future, he himself was not sure any more. A remnant of a decision, a proof of existence of that which is without.
His second son. Crossfire.
Listen to me. I can show you fear in a handful of dust.
Listen. I have seen things. Worlds you cannot even imagine. I have been to the beginning of it all and I have been to the edge of certainty where it drops into the possible.
I know your birth. I know that you were formed in an icy blizzard on an alien planet, a vibrant and strong infant spark. I know that when the winds grew fierce, your father reached into himself and extracted a part to wrap around you, to keep you warm through the night. I can tell you that your other father said, in his fatigue, "I knew you were good at thinking outside the box."
Listen to me, I have watched you grow. I have seen you struggle. I know your miseries and they were mine to share with you. I watched the inventor Wheeljack spare your life inside of Highwind's, and I watched his genius become her inspiration, and it is by her that you survived that winter storm.
I will never be able to tell you any of this, but I hope someday for you to know. It is through our children that we become immortal.
Aster bargained passage aboard the ship. The aging Autobot captain and his crew of derivatives. He could have done with the extra set of hands anyway.
There was constant noise, menacing his dusty audio receptors. He was unused to the sounds of children at play.
He went to the boy privately in a lattercycle.
"I would like to offer my services to you," he told his son, "as your tutor."
"Oh. What do you teach?" Crossfire asked blandly.
"The many Cybertronian arts. Crystalocution and Metallikato. The Way of the Oracle and the Art of Revealing. Morphology. Marksmanship, if you like. The knowledge of the ancients and the key to all possible futures."
Crossfire considered this.
"Not all at once, right?" he asked. "Cuz that's a bit of a lot."
"No, not all at once."
"Okay. That's all right, then."
end