A/N: I wonder if I just jumped the shark with this Chapter? …

Hope you all had Happy Holidays! (And so sorry this chapter is laaaateee D:)

To Nexia Jazilynn Prime: I have characters from all Universes, a few technologies from some, though Transformers Prime does seems to be in there more often than most lol. Thank you for how to spell Airachnid (that makes so much more sense now with the helicoptor alternate mode lol). The reason I had to fix her name is because she isn't Black Arachnia… yet. I won't go into anymore detail on that, though I would like to point out that the only mention of techno-organics in this story was when Killjoy was talking to herself about Airachnid. She's not as much as an expert on Transformers as she thinks, obviously. (The event I referenced would be in 'Genesis: Thinking'.) As for the rest… it's a part of Red Alert's subplot, so of course its going to be explained later.

To iGleep: Who knows? My muse took the last chapter in a completely different direction than I was expecting. I suspect this will be no different. XD

To xVentressx: Thank you! I liked it, too. Not so much busy writing, and I really don't like busy writing. And as for her learning to fight – it depends on Killjoy's attitude and if something else doesn't distract her. lol.

Warnings: Weirdness. Curve balls. The works.

Torn

"Sometimes we don't meet our heroes until it's already too late. Sometimes… we have to become the hero. And it always tears us apart."

~ Anonymous...

Genesis

Chapter 10

Forgetting

It was a gamble and she knew it.

Even as she made her way down the tunnels towards the half-buried ship, her mind search for another option, but it was pointless. The only thing she was good at was manipulation simply because she had so much experience at it. Besides if she started telling the truth now, who would even believe her? Sure, she hadn't yet told a lie to The Mentor, but she was starting think she ought to. Out of everyone she's spoken to, he was the one who deserved to be lied to.

On the other servo, Killjoy knew from experience that large complicated lies like this usually became too messed up for even herself to discern the truth. It wasn't like she could stop now, though. If she told the truth, it would get the Autobots to question everything she'd ever told them and they'd perhaps not be so quick to act when she finally got around to telling them to do something that might save their lives.

Killjoy had been thinking about this too much. Her entire childhood was spent thinking of all the various ways her sister might die if she wasn't there to stop it. If her sister had been truly accident prone, every possible accident that might have happened probably would have dove her paranoia to Red Alert proportions and sent her on a one way ticket to locking her own sister in a tower and forcing her to adopt the basic plot of Rapunzel. But Killjoy had enough foresight to realize that doing anything like that would smother her sister, and she didn't want to be the one to burst her sister's bubble when it came to doing things. Her sister was a genius and even as a kid Killjoy hadn't wanted to smother that intelligence. It was downright cruel.

Standing at the mouth of the underground-plus-underwater ship's entrance, Killjoy found herself reviewing her decisions up to that point, a small part of her vainly hoping that doing so might redirect her stubborn drive elsewhere. Since she didn't think it would hurt to be careful, she back up and thought it over.

Should she even care about Airachnid? The problems of mecha from other planets had never been on her list of things to do before. Then again, she had never before been in this situation before. She had spent two whole vorns as a Cybertronian and never once got involved in a situation with alien life forms – and they were aliens because she was currently the only native Cybertronian of the bunch. Whatever past she had has a human or whatever she had been, she was Cybertronian here and now. This planet was hers. These mecha didn't belong here.

Somewhere along the lines, in the middle of all her lies and deception, Airachnid had become her responsibility. She had taken the choice out of the Autobot's hands, and now she was dealing with the consequences with so much on her plate. Sure, the Autobots might be able to figure out she was lying, or one of them might even have a lie detector plugged into them somewhere. It didn't matter. Airachnid was her responsibility now, and therefore she had an obligation to find and destroy the menace before her possible techno-organic highness decided to cyberform Earth or something. She couldn't stop going after Airachnid if she tried.

Which left with her two additional problems. Sub-Commander Vibes would most likely have already figure out her comm. link number and might even know exactly where she was through it. Forget the fact that Killjoy had only given it to her so she could learn about the whereabouts of the Decepticons if Darklight contacted them while she was gone. On the other servo, Darklight had no idea where she was and was (most likely) laying low until he could get the opportunity to contact Airachnid – an operation which could very well last for vorns, and by then Killjoy would have gotten impatient enough to have started a search for Airachnid on her own. That is, if Vibes didn't order the Autobots and Neutrals off planet and leave her in peace first.

For some reason, the thought of them leaving left her far more unsettled than the idea of them staying, and Killjoy guessed it had something to do with her impromptu promise to protect Vibes, just before her spark surged. How could she manage that if Vibes left the planet? Killjoy could go after her, but then that would leave many more questions unanswered – and Killjoy wanted to find answers.

One of them waited beyond the door of the crashed ship. He could probably see her, whether or not she was using her phase shifter. She had a sneaking suspicion that The Mentor wasn't called The Mentor without first being designed to teach someone – and how good could a teacher be if he couldn't even find his student? Then there was the problem of her pieces of armor she had left behind. Were they even worth retrieving? And then there was the problem of repairing the damage underneath the armor. Could she use the ship's medbay without being picked up and hogtied by The Mentor?

Her problems always came back to the Mentor. Even if Vibes left the planet with Airachnid, or Killjoy found and killed Airachnid, the Mentor would still be here, keeping his secrets. It was unsettling that he knew her so well, perking her curiosity to trick her into returning.

But I'm not here because of him, she reminded herself. She was here to repair her support struts and wiring and get some real battle training in before getting back to her Darklight problem. The Mentor's lessons be slagged.

Killjoy felt the familiar comforting presence of her phase shifter wrap around her. She started forward, moving slowly and checking every which way for the presence of the Mentor, her doorwings twitching as they worked overtime to detect the holomech.

She passed through the corriders, one by one, but the Mentor was no where to be found. She didn't relax, her tanks shifting painfully in her stress. He could be anywhere, and she had no idea where. A part of her almost wished he would appear before her, because then she would know where he was. She hated not knowing.

She arrived in the observation deck unchallenged, and the familiar sight of blue waters made her relax, but she tensed again as she looked over the controls. The diary entry hadn't appeared on screen for whatever reason – which she was grateful for – and she wondered how deep she could dig her arms into the many different files onboard before she found something of promise. She had searched through it hundreds of times and couldn't remember a single moment where a clue of her so-called Decepticon creator had turned up. It might be a fruitless endeavor.

But the last few times, I hadn't been looking. It was the only reason she found compelling enough to disregard her earlier assumptions and take a deeper look into the main database just one more time. She glanced around for any signs of The Mentor, then dropped her phase shifter, turned her doorwing sensors up to max and plunged her transformed hand into the nearest port. The direct download – something she picked up while rifling through Reverb's cortex – was much faster than manual and it began looking up every single word she could think of that might relate to her creator all at the same time. Cross-references were quickly logged away and download with the speed of a super computer, while her sub-routines worked doubly hard going through her doorwing data at equal speeds, looking for the holomech or any other movement that signaled an enemy was nearby.

If one imagined the internet like a labrynth of a library that carefully categorized each book by common research topics, then you would essentailly have imagined what The Killjoy was seeing in that exact moment. Pulling out one book-file about the length of Lord of the Rings and glossing over it for the right words took less than a nanoklik, doing the same to thousands more books took less than an astrosecond, for one million - approximately one klik, and so on. Any one database had over one million Lord of the Rings sized book files, which took more than a few breems to properly sort through.

Her mission was a vain attempt from the get go, but The Mentor was feeling extra humorous that day and decided to give her approimately 5 breems to play around before he pulled the plug. He was a digital wall in the computer database, unable to plug into or interact with any of the data on the other side of the wall, be it database or people, but he could certainly moniter and register when a new lifeform entered his digital domain. It would have been spectacular to see his pupil flounder uselessly for a few breif moments before he decided to take her new found toys away and put her back on another punishment detail. Except, when the process began, The Mentor registered not one, but two, intelligent lifeforms hacking into his database at the same time, one downloading a stream of data and the other uploading it. It was a baffling situation made all the more puzzling by the sudden appearance of familiar sophisticated programming firewalls, not unlike firewalls he had encountered before, on the student's first attempt to hack into the system around two vorns ago. She had been utterly successful in the attack and had learned something even his own A.I. wasn't privy to. He had thought she was extremely mature and intelligent to have been able to do it.

The presence of these two separate intelligences hacking into his database at the same time was extremely baffling, especially when one was obviously the presence which had hacked him two vorns ago and the other was most definitely not and most definitely the efforts of his student. Though both were extremely mature and intelligent to be able to hack his systems, the more sophisticated program was doing a much better job at it. It had already shut down his motor functions, most of his mechanical attachments and even his main processing power core, which prevented him from retaliating. All he could do now was record, which was tampered with by the presence of the much more sophisticated program. In seconds, The Mentor's entire program had been rendered inert, helpless, and only one virus initiation away from being deleted. The alien program which was obviously not his student recognize the threat had been neutralized and returned its attention to uploading the whole package. His student remained both oblivious and confused.

This had been what had separated Rhythm from all other Conversions. Not only her unique and twisted outlook on life, but also the presence of this sophisticated program that seemed to originate from Rhythm herself. It did not come from some outside source, but seemed to come from a detached extention of Rhythm that she wasn't even aware of. What it did after The Mentor had been effectively paralyzed was beyond him, but judging from the enlightment Rhythm reached at the end of the first download – a download of data which he could not decipher but could effectively delete since it was so alien to his own programs that it stood out – The Mentor could only guess that this foreign program, not unlike a human's poor memory bank, was rewritting her past. It was a strange concept to grasp considering that Rhythm had no memory of ever encountering the program before The Mentor had started converting her and Rhythm's memories at the time had already been magnanimously altered from the typical cockasian female.

The Mentor didn't have the mental fascilities to imagine any other possible explanation. He saw only the evidence before him, and everything he hadn't yet encountered just didn't exist yet. That was how it worked. His long expansive memory banks expanded back centuries, millenium, even thousands of stellar cycles, all the way back to the ages of the Thirteen and never before had he encountered a program quite like this. It was certainly ancient – far more ancient than even he. It was powerful and efficient in execution and if the Mentor was capable of emotions such as Love he might have just been kissed by Cupid's arrow. But such fanciful fairy tales were not in the Mentor's job description. He had before him a very serious issue; a possible corrupted Convertion.

They were rare and usually happened outside of his area of control, often with the very program that caused the corruption deleting the very file that would have allowed The Mentor to contact the individual and upload the sufficient program that would have corrected the issue. He decided that a deeper delve into Rhythm's datapacks would reveal the problem to him, but he would have to do that after he was released from his digital bounds. He was patient.

Killjoy knew too much.

It was like someone had taken a ballon and put it in her brain and slowly filled the balloon with water until it felt like her skull would explode from the pressure. She knew too much. Both literally and figuratively. She understood sciences and physics that she knew for a fact humans had not yet even discovered – spacebridge technology was suddenly there, at her digit-tips, ready and waiting for her to transform into a blueprint and build. It was alarmingly simple and yet sophisticatedly beautiful, all at the same time. But science wasn't the only knowledge that suddenly had come to her digit-tips. Philosophy and psychology seemed to suddenly come to light. The alarming similarities between Cybertronian and human psychology was so vast that Killjoy couldn't help but link the similarities. It created pathways in her mind, locking the knowledge permanently in her memory.

But just as the vast amount of knowledge – arts, language, archetecture, computers – arranged itself so suddenly, it just as suddenly began to disappear. Before her in a pattern she recognized as reality, it started to slip away again and fold back up and disappear all at once, leaving her processor throbbing with the sudden influx and outflux of information. If she had a skull, she was sure it would have been cracked. What was physics again? Ah yes, gravity, projectile motion, force, energy... the spacebridge technology was nowhere to be found, gone back to where it had come from. Her human past suddenly seemed more real than the digital attack that had just assaulted her, and the only thing that told her it had happened was not the exponential memory files in her data banks but the surplus of knowledge coming from her language, psychology and philosphy files. Everything she had instantly recognized and absorbed, creating new pathways for, had remained behind, a permanent mark of the mental attack. Nothing else had found anywhere to stick, and so like the tide upon the shore it had disappeared back into the rolling waves.

It was eerily similar to something that had happened once before. It was a long time ago – two vorns, as her mind so helpfully reminded her – and she remembered that she actually didn't remember all the details of that time either. She couldn't even remember the painful throbbing the attacked would have surely left behind. The only thing she had remembered that day was the message she had received from someone claiming to have made her using someone else's methods, which he looked down upon. The impression the information which had momentarily left upon her mind was already fading, so she couldn't ask this well-spring of knowledge what exactly was the method he had used.

How did I forget this? she wondered, pulling herself away from the console and looking around. The world looked strangely different, unreal, like a simulation. She recalled one other instance when she had thought something was a simulation back she had thought she had been missing something after she got hit by the car crash. She had thought the simulation was her human past, but now she realized the truth. But now that the memory of the attack was starting to fade, the truth was starting to slip away with it. She was going to forget this, again, until the day she started looking into it once more. And she knew for a fact that she probably wouldn't survive until then. She needed a plan. Something that would make her wake up. Something that would make her realize that this wasn't real. It was a dream. She was in a hospital bed, somewhere back home, and she needed to get back there. Somehow.

The last attack had left behind a clue. Her creator's message. It was the first clue that something had gone wrong. A Secret she was supposed to know but couldn't remember. Perhaps a meeting with Primus that she had forced herself to forget? But no, the message had specifically been about restoring Primus, as if he were some other being. Perhaps it was someone else who had written the message.

She was already starting to slip away into forgetfulness. She needed something in the simulation to tip her off and she only had a few moments left to rig it.

The Mentor came back to the land of the living rather suddenly.

If not for his perfect databanks, he might have gone on, business as usual with no clue as to what had happened. But fortunately for him there was evidence and evidence meant that Something was Amiss, and Something Amiss meant there was Something Needing Fixing.

The first order of business was to double check his databanks for similar cases in the past. Glitches were often filed away and referenced in a folder, so that his self-repair programs would have an easy method for checking for viruses or false information. Outside of his normal virus scans, The Mentor had a habit of double checking those references. The more often he did it, the more likely he was to catch a glitch or virus before it ravaged his systems. Fortunately, the only one he had listed in files dated back to two months ago, when the Student had just 'woken up'.

The check was always absolute, but long. It usually happened when the individual was in deep recharge, when it was easier to check those references without annoying defense programs getting in the way. It was impossible to do while she was awake, and that meant he had to force her into a shut down – an event that had to have some in-simulation explanation or else risking the whole illusion shattering. Already her newly formed battle computer was slowly taking his simulation apart, guided by her personal desire to fully understand the world.

He wasn't unfamiliar with battle computers developing in the brain center. It acted as a substitute subconsciousness, providing a constant background noise the human brain had associated with regular white noise. Without it, like many before her, the Student was likely to become irrational or simply cease functioning. Anything that could harm the Student must be avoided, so the development of the battle computer was not prevented. It became necessary to suppress it, and the defense program quickly took over. The combined effort of both from two different angles was wearisome, but he had forestalled it from doing irreparable damage to his simulation. He would hate to have to start a new one.

This one already had glitches. He couldn't trace it back to an immediate source, but he suspected the culprit was her. The main glitch acted much as a virus, nothing more than a nuisance really. It froze the program for a few seconds too long. That was it. Nothing else was out of the ordinary. It could be easily patched up.

However, it did little to alleviate his worries. This wasn't the first time his program had glitched. Someone kept meddling with it while he wasn't looking, leaving no trail behind for him to track. It made little to no sense. A hacker would have left a trail for him to follow, allowing him to identify it's last known location and prevent anyone else from doing the same thing. This attack seems to have originated from within, but that was impossible. His simulation was flawless and he wouldn't attack himself like this. He couldn't. Which left only one last variable.

But she wasn't in any position to attack his programs like this. She had no past experiences with programming beyond watching her sister and parental unit doing it.

So, who?

It was a mind boggling situation, one that demanded he push aside protocol and check his references, even while she was awake. It would leave behind a helmache, but it would satisfy his immediate concerns.

Except when the investigation finally went underway, he found no prior indication of a glitch in his databanks. Not even the first reference was there. But he remembered there being one, which left him confused. Perhaps there was a flaw with his databanks? He activated his internal virus scanner and directed it to search his databanks for any indication of viruses. He waited, letting his processors muse over the conundrum.

Regardless of the facts, the situation pointed to the culprit being Rhythm, aka Killjoy. She had an insatiable curiosity, and a desire to help people. The latter had been programmed into the simulation, allowing Rhythm to fulfill her programming. If not for a few expected but unpredictable variables, it would have worked.

Punishment would be dealt out soon. Before he could do that, however, he had a few programs within himself to deal with. He was an old machine. An original creation of Primus, and a few of his programs floated around, preventing him from doing certain things. But he had many years of practice dancing around them. It was the creator who had programmed him to love.

He loved his Students, his job as their caretaker and mentor, and he loved his simulations. He loved the day he had come up with them. It was a controlled environment, one which his Students could live in forever in comfort, fulfilling their desires. It was incentive to keep them trapped.

He had known in the creation of his simulation that Rhythm, aka Killjoy, was overly curious when it came to interfacing. He had misunderstood before, when approaching her with the temptation. It had almost screwed things up, and he was barely able to put the pieces back together. He had created a divide that was going to cause problems in the future.

But he did not like Rhythm messing with the system. She was meddling in something that could both damage her mind and his own mind, perhaps even his ability to acquire new hold over other mental minds. She was meddling in things she could not possibly understand.

The Five Lesson system was somewhat new in creation, designed to simulate a step-by-step process of these 'transfans' becoming Transformers. If he had any appreciation for the irony, he would be amused.

But he hated the fact that she kept meddling. If she had left well enough alone, he would never have gotten metaphysically involved with rewriting the program. It was difficult to do. The more the simulation changed, rewritten, most likely by Rhythm, the more he was having difficulty remembering what the original simulation was all about. Something was glitching up his systems, but he had yet to find the virus.

He had no choice, not really. In order to protect himself and his programming, he would have to tip his servo the only way he was currently able to, without throwing her off. He had to move up his time table.

Lesson 4 must begin.