Author's Note 5.25.08: This one takes place long ago, during Whiplash's long exile in space.


4: Angsty (warnings: Improbable stellar phenomena. Metric craploads of angst.)

Whiplash came out of stasis to sound.

Sound, a profound and startling contrast to the heavy, silent nothingness of space, rang through not his audio receivers-- those were useless out here-- but his entire body. A hum, a chord, a wail, a deep low thrumming, seeming to set every circuit alight and echo along every strut and wire, and for the first time in... almost seventeen vorn, a check to his chronometer told him... the castaway came to full systems alert.

A quick check on scanners told him he was still alone. Diagnostics reported no malfunction or injury. So what were these strange frequencies that had pulled him out of stasis? Whiplash uncurled from transition form, cracking loose bits of the dust and ice that had encrusted his shell over time. The sight that greeted him momentarily stunned him into motionlessness, stabilizing gyros stuttering.

Five concentric spheres of gasses and plasma, each separated by equidistant empty space, each glowing a different color, each with endlessly intricate fractal discharges racing across their surfaces. Humming brightly at the very center, one of the tiniest white dwarf stars he had ever seen. And the whole array was giving off an auroral chorus of a magnitude that was beyond astounding.

For several breem Whiplash simply listened to the star sing, watched the fractal lightning dance.

It was one of the rarest and most mysterious phenomena in the known universe. Cybertronian astronomers called them Celestial Perfections, occurrences of unaccountable precision and order amongst the chaos of space. There were only three known Celestial Perfections. Whiplash had unwittingly discovered the fourth.

It was unspeakably beautiful.

And utterly meaningless.

Whiplash was not on recon. He would not be returning to the Axalon 7. He would not be reporting this marvel to Perceptor, and Perceptor would not be practically begging Rodimus for a slight detour and a few hundred vorn to study this incredible find, and Bluestreak would not be delivering any rambling soliloquies on how darned pretty it was, and Powerglide would not melodramatically complain about the constant auroral noise.

Whiplash had never felt so completely useless. To be the only witness, and knowing he might never tell another living being about it, seemed so horrendously disrespectful to such a magnificence that he was thoroughly disgusted with himself.

The tug of gravity brought him somewhat out of his self-loathing, and, a little embarrassed, he maneuvered back and matched orbit with the sparse asteroid ring that encircled the Perfection. He settled into a crag on one of the larger asteroids, where his meager mass would not disrupt its revolution, and found enough metallic content to use a magnetic anchor. Thus perched, he had an uninterrupted view, and decided he would sit and listen and look a little while longer before moving on, re-setting course, and dropping once more into welcome oblivion of deep stasis.

Course to where? This is far beyond the boundaries of explored space. I am hopelessly lost, so what is the point? he thought, idly watching a speck travel across the face of the outermost plasma sphere. Another large asteroid, its orbit deteriorated to the point of crash-course, looked ready to plummet right into the Perfection at any moment. In a fit of uncharacteristic arbitrariness, he decided he would move on when it hit, when the impact created a blemish in the Perfection's precision.

He only had to wait a little under two orn for it.

The asteroid tore a streak across the face of the sphere, sending bright ripples flowing over the surface. The tear circumscribed nearly halfway around before the asteroid was subsumed in a brilliant flash, and suddenly the sound of the auroral chorus changed. It became deeper, more complex, frequencies shifting and fluctuating in time to the spreading waves and disturbances in the outer plasma sphere.

As Whiplash watched, dumbfounded, the secondmost inner sphere began to dance as well, mirroring its outer counterpart. Then the third, and each one down, until all five spheres trembled and boiled in awesome unison. Even in disruption, the Perfection maintained its elegant order, the tiny white star at its core never once even flickering. Its song intensified as the spheres all intermixed, colors strobing in patterns too fast and complex to calculate.

Just when he thought his processor would lock up from the sheer overwhelming input, everything subsided, and the multicolored cloud coalesced once more into perfect concentric spheres. The song resumed its former tempo, but with a shade of added intricacy.

Yet instead of five, there were now seven enclosing the little star, the circumference no greater than it had been before.

Five, then seven... prime numbers? Or just increase by two? If another impact occurred, would there then be eleven or nine or some random number? What were the formulae at work here? He was half-tempted to push another asteroid out of orbit and find out, but the energy expenditure would delay his departure.

Whiplash's hands clenched, digging into the cracked and pitted surface of his asteroid. Ferrous grit caught in his finger joints but he was too angry to care. What would be the point, whatever he did?

If he carried out the frivolous experiment, he'd have no one to share his findings with (and the Decepticons would be unappreciative anyway, once they were done picking his lifeless processor apart). And if he left, it would only be more of the same-- stasis until something alerted his systems to come out of standby, and endless, empty, cold, friendless space.

The cleverness for which he had prided himself had failed; the faith Rodimus had had in him now woefully misplaced. Soundwave's ship would catch up to him somehow, somewhere, no matter what he did. He would never again hear friendly voices, until he joined his comrades in the Matrix.

As he basked miserably in the light and song of the Perfection, a horrible idea struck him.

It would be so easy.

A good strong push. Induce stasis lock, and let the star's gravity well do the rest. Whether or not his small body was enough to set the spheres dancing again, he would certainly be totally vaporized.

A simple push, and he would never be alone again.

The seven new spheres still swirled with colors, one by one becoming solid hues as before. The outermost sphere settled to blue, white fractal patterns swirling lazily across its surface.

Whiplash watched the colors spiral and unfurl, listened to the auroral chorus sing... and let go of the asteroid. Slowly, he folded back into transition configuration, and set a course away, leaving the Celestial Perfection behind.