The Becoming of Things

10: The Toxin Puzzle

"I don't think my medical insurance can pay for all of this," Dahlia forlornly reflected in the last night we spent in San Francisco. Giving notice to all our gaming friends was more long-winded, and involved a funereal dirge and celebration. The landlord had already gotten notice, everything was due to be packed and sold or disposed of, and Dahlia was booking a plane ticket to Singapore and packing, just to be thorough.

When she was done, a mite of hacking would ensure that Dahlia Su would be routed from Changi International Airport to Paya Lebar Air Base, where a military plane to Diego Garcia would await us. It was not be a cure, or Bali; but Dahlia would at least expire in warm sands and sunny beaches no matter what.

Dahlia traced the wood-grain on the piano forlornly with a fingernail. "This was the first new thing I bought, after I learnt how to tune pianos professionally. I don't think I've ever gotten a specialisation in anything."

"You're good enough," I defended.

"Not at wind instruments," Dahlia admitted. "Congenital heart failure. It went as far as to affect my lungs. Wind instruments and brass were the only things I never looked to master."

"What will you do with it?" I asked.

"I don't know," Dahlia sadly replied. "There's Pizzicato and most of my instruments in storage, and a violin, but the piano is my centrepiece. To sell it, or get rid of it..."

I awkwardly revved my engine, causing Dahlia to give me a look with fever-bright eyes. Her bone-thin fingers reached to stroke the long-eared cap that covered her head. "Oh, right... Jazz...?"

"What do you think of the others?" I settled for asking until she slowly meandered towards my alt-mode body with Pizzicato's help.

"They're very nice," Dahlia rested herself against my silver paint, and I didn't need scanners to tell that she had a fever. Slagging chemotherapy, I was going to divert funds to every cancer research society at this rate. "I didn't do so much for them."

"You have no idea," I broke the news to them. "You saved us so much trouble. Not just with Gould and others like him, but with understanding humans. Until I met you, I... I found humans primitive and violent. But there's... goodness too. There's that goodness, in you."

"Why? I'm no one special. I'm not even good at helping, not like this."

"You are my friend. For that, your worth will not change."

"I'm scared of dying," Dahlia abruptly said, as Pizzicato fluffed its wings and clicked its beak.

"I'll defend you from it," I offered. "You, who were born with nothing, and yet accomplished so much. I will be here."

"Do not pity me." Her fingers were worn to the bone, and still Dahlia Su clung, to my upholstery, to her pain, to life, with a stubbornness that could possibly match Optimus Prime. "We can become anything, because we were born with nothing. I'm scared of dying, while my world burns, and no one saves it. Now you're a part of it."

"Oh..." I reflected.

"Rejoice. For on my side, I have the strongest impulse of the spirit, and you are on my side too."

"How?"

She patted my upholstery. "Remember when I sat at the edge of a roof with you in my heart, prepared to kill you if you tried anything funny? Remember that. Then fear will find you again."

I warmed the insides, keeping in mind Ratchet's warning that the nanites were self-replicating into her cortex. She might not ever remember us soon.

Dahlia shifted against the upholstery. "Will you miss me?"

I set the heating on to comfort levels, keeping a vigil until Prowl was to return for our escort. "Until the end of my days."

An escalation of Decepticon presences. Forces amassing. Reports of missing humans. Soundwave crashing in on a private concert to glare at its lead musician.

Yeah, that last one was way confusing.

"I'm fairly sure you're not supposed to be late for your appointment," Dahlia commented amidst the wreckage of the concert hall. Not a hair out of place, not a nerve twitching, despite that the place was scheduled for demolition or that she was facing one of the most dangerous Decepticons of the whole army. Not a single member of the audience arose in this very private concert, yet.

The sangfroid is so awesome, that sometimes I doubted that Dahlia Su was human. Then I remembered that she could do this, only because she was human.

"I was expecting you," Dahlia commented, still playing. "You're about ten minutes late."

Soundwave paused to glare. "Query: why are you not dead?"

"I admit, the poison in the water was a nice touch," Dahlia commented, taking a glass of water beside the keyboard as she continued to play with the other hand. "Easy to perform, nearly untraceable, and if a few humans died early... well, it's an accident. One thing you got wrong, though: heavy metal poisoning takes years to happen. Not four hours. Not four minutes. And definitely not at an exponential rate of four seconds."

She dropped the glass, which spilled its contents, fizzling ominously on the parquet amidst the cacophony of notes she produced. "Someone definitely screwed up on biological research."

"Statement: So you know. Confirmation: baiting me?"

"The program," Dahlia said, "contained a memory from Jazz."

"Rebuttal: Jazz was destroyed."

That was my cue, to loop one arm around his helm-port. "You need an update. Let's help."

And I rammed the drive into a port where I was sure it hurt, before I leapt away from his tentacles.

Soundwave froze, optics flashing red and violet before he keeled over. "I- Impossible...Decepti- cons..."

Dahlia's fingers stopped.

Slowly, the woman walked out, hands rising to the ceiling, eyes wide and, I noticed, a fading electric blue. All attention was on her now, the star of the stage.

"The raven himself is hoarse," said she, "that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan under my battlements. Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts: unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood. Stop up the access and passage to remorse, that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between the effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts, and take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, wherever in your sightless substances you wait on nature's mischief. Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, to cry "Hold, hold!""

Then she dropped her hands, and the spell was broken. "Okay, we're done."

"I don't think you've channelled Lady Macbeth enough," I innocently pointed out. Then a clap of thunder resounded overhead.

Dahlia looked to the fallen Soundwave, the one who had a cocktail of the human experience currently floating around in his processor. "Things without all remedy should be without regard: what's done is done."

"Ah-pep-pep. The last line."

"He's not dead," Dahlia sighed, theatrically assuming a poor-little-me position. "Fine. Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?"

A smattering of applause from the concert hall, as from its ranks of ripped seats and cannibalised elevations rose the Autobots amassed on Earth.

"Magnificent," Optimus applauded. "For a moment I believed you to be Lady Macbeth."

Dahlia faked a curtsy. It would look complete if only she had all of her hair.

Soldiers on base tended to avoid us, with some staring at the striped long-eared cap that trailed from her head. Dahlia ignored all of them to consider the piano we had brought to Diego Garcia, and burst into tears of joy. The piano was something of a marvel, and led to a discussion of the roles of music in Cybertronian society, and a pity that the composition of Primus's praises had not granted variety to Golden Age-era music. Ratchet hadn't been happy when Dahlia had won that argument, and I won the right to carry Dahlia around the island from him.

"Prowl is someone with the most hidden depths I have met," Dahlia observed as we drove around the island. Well, I drove, and Dahlia peered out through the open windows of my alt-mode. The trapping and subsequent imprisonment of Soundwave had drained the strength from her, leaving her a balding husk of lethargy.

"Really?" I spoke through the radio I'd cannibalised from the first Decepticon we took down.

"Of course. Because you expect him to be boring, and sometimes he seems so, but then Prowl does something that is entirely unexpected," Dahlia reflected. At least she was lucid this time.

"I know, I know. Isn't he just fun?"

"The Jiang Ziya of the Autobots," Dahlia agreed, musing. "It makes it difficult for him, to get along with others without commanding them, I imagine."

"Hmm," I thought about it. "Well, I guess that's one way of looking at it."

"And people always think that he's crushing their fun," Dahlia hit the point right there. "What they never realise is that his understanding is different from theirs. So they think he is prickly, but they never consider that he could be right. And by the rules of probability, he probably is, most of the time."

I had no idea if she was lucid now.

Waves lapped at the beaches, and I recalled the smell of the beach; salt and waves and coconuts. And the pool of energon, vacuumed from the floors of an electromagnetic vault after the Allspark's miracle to be dumped here, far from the rest of the base until we could figure it out.

"There are three pertinent questions," Prowl observed as I wheeled past the exaltation of Autobots stationed around the fragment of the Allspark, Dahlia still within me. "What caused it, for starters. Would it drain the powers of the Allspark further? What would it mean?"

Plucking serenely at the strings of the violin she brought along, Dahlia barely lifted her head. "What's that?"

"When we were in Shanghai, the Allspark started bleeding energon," I muttered back.

The fountain of energon on Diego Garcia looked and smelled like itself. Since energon more or less looked like black sludge upon mining, the fountain of pure blue energon where some idjit dropped a copper transistor in was a welcome change. Unfortunately, it was the first time any Cybertronian had seen a fountain of energon, much less the very concept of it, and a pool of energon, while inefficient as a means of storage, was enough to drive a Cybertronian with awe and... and wishing that it had happened before this war happened.

Dahlia stirred, and perched behind her, Pizzicato gave a chirrup as she kept plucking. "Aimo aimo nendel rushe... uchinarase ima shouri no kane o... koko wa arata na ware no hoshi..."

My wheels skidded to a halt as the Allspark... well, it began bleeding energon. At the same time, the radio picked up the song she hummed, and with it...

An inescapable signal left Earth, and headed out towards the masses of space, echoing with the message of Optimus Prime with the same implacable call. That Earth, that Sentinel's slumbering location upon the Earth's natural satellite, that somehow, this planet of blue and green lay connected to the super-ancient civilisation of Cybertron, that-

Now toll the bells of victory, for this place is my new planet, Dahlia sang as the Allspark bubbled energon and we Cybertronians, who were once gods, could only behold this miracle. Now wave our flags above our heads, for this place is the new land of God.

From the radio came an answering bellow, powerful and implacable enough that I nearly transformed right there, nearly tossing her out. Dahlia sat straight up, breath hitching as the radio gave its reply right there before dying in a fizz of sparks. My spark could have given out, at the answer of Cybertron's traitor, the first Decepticon.

The monster of Cybertron, made alive and coming.

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