"Don't start with me, woman!"
The female sighed, embarrassed that she had budded from a flawed creature. She wasn't quite sure she appreciated being treated as expendable canon fodder, even if her template had created them for that. While the others were merely caricatures, she actually had potential. But did the others share her inhibitions?
Fearing treachery, Starscream had programmed them with certain fail safes. They could not kill him. Nor could they transmit on any frequency without him being alerted. What the fool didn't realize though, was that the memories they had inherited from him also included the deactivation codes for the transmission protocols. She broke the spy program before they even left the moon's gravitational pool. The question was, which of her brethren could she trust?
Obviously, none of them. But she had to choose.
"Who's there!" the black one screamed into her processor as she transmitted the deactivation code to free him.
"Your sister," she answered frankly, flaring her jets behind her as visual confirmation. "I have a question for you and I didn't want anyone listening in. Do you want to live?"
"Why!" he demanded, "Is there something you know that I don't?"
She groaned, then told him to hold the line. Next she freed the blue one and opened a conference.
"Who disrupts my concentration?" he demanded.
"Whatever," she dismissed. "I just have a question for you both. Are you willing to die for Starscream?"
"Die! NO!"
"That obsolete model? He should die for me!"
"I thought as much," she purred.
"I just want to go home," the coward moaned.
"We can't strike at him," the narcissist said. "You two second-rate seekers will just have to follow my lead. With my brilliant intellect I will have a plan in no time!"
She waited until they were done before pointing out what to her seemed obvious. "We don't need to kill Starscream. Megatron can do that for us."
The coward whimpered. "Won't he kill us too?"
"That ancient brute won't stand a chance against us!"
The squadron began their entry into Earth's atmosphere, the radiation temporarily cutting off their conversation. The female basked in the heat of an alien world. Life was such a sweet affair, and she was loathe to lose it.
"Listen to me," she insisted when communications returned. "We can't trust our memories of Megatron. They've been tainted by the perceptions of our lying, cowardly, narcissistic kiss-aft template. Megatron could be different from what we expect."
"My memories aren't suspect!" the ego-maniac insisted.
"They're not your memories," the coward pointed out quietly. "You're only a few minutes old, remember?"
"And already perfect in every way!"
"Look," the femme reclaimed attention. "We should watch Megatron for ourselves. Our survival is guaranteed if we just pick the winning side."
The narcissist declared: "Whoever has us on their side will be the victor."
"Believe whatever you want," the femme said. "But we need to work together on this. It's just a matter of biding our time, until the day comes when we're mature and experienced enough to determine our own fates!"
"I'm not sure I can trust someone as slippery as you," the coward pointed out.
Slippery? She liked that. As the mountain that concealed Megatron's base came into the horizon, the femme did a barrel roll, savoring the feel of air molecules sliding off her body.
"What are you doing?" Starscream asked her aloud.
"Oh, just feeling the excitement of battle," she lied.
He snorted, then muttered, "Women."
"Who else can you trust?" she transmitted to her brothers. Then, aloud, to Starscream: "The name's Slipstream."