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Chapter 9

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This is not the world my father knew.
This is not the world I know
he would have wanted me to build,
But I can't undo it now.
It's like a train, and all its cars are filled with steel,
that I would stop if I knew how,
and it is bearing down on me...

"Here Comes The Arm" - The Protomen


Megatron looked at himself in the polished metal in the corner of his quarters that served as a mirror. He'd positioned it so that when he was in power-down, opening one optic could allow him to view into the one blind spot of the room. The price of power had been constant vigilance against assassination attempts or attacks.

Airachnid was right; his optics had cleared themselves of the red-violet haze of so many vorns of dark energon dependence and bottomless rage. He was left to fathom how it had happened. He could only guess it was a side effect of their unintended sparkbond, and the surge of positive emotions that had bled over into him through it.

Happiness. Had he ever truly known happiness? He tried to think back, as far as he could remember, and he could not recall a time when he had ever tasted the peace and satisfaction with life that could let such a feeling sprout in the peaked, worn-out soil of his existence. All he had known was the bitter taste of injustice and oppression as he slowly ground down his health and strength in endless, monotonous toil. Only the gladiator pits had afforded him anything close to satisfaction, but peace had not been there. It was only strength of will, bolstering fragile hope, that gave him the desire not just to live, but to fight. Only in being made to slaughter others like himself, watching the bodies of fallen coworkers and low-castes like himself be gathered up for recycling and exsanguination while the winners were cheered and adored by those who called themselves his betters, had he learned the value of life.

Life was cheap. Energon could be spilled freely, if it was necessary to do so.

He had not always believed in the necessity of spilling energon. His mind was keen and he scraped together what he could of his allotment of pay, cutting back on energon rations so that he could publish a plea for reason in the form of an intellectual appeal: a treatise on the decent of Cybertronian society into stagnation and madness that he and millions of others suffered under every cycle of their lives. The manifesto took off like wildfire, faster and farther than he had initially expected, and with it, came retribution from those who held ultimate power. He had been laboring under the illusion of free speech and his efforts were repaid the night an enforcer, a rotorframe who had been maimed by empurata, arrested him without charges and beat him so badly he had nearly died. The only way to truly change the word, he had reasoned as he lay on the jail cell, leaking and broken, was to do it by force. There would be no reasoning with the senate or Sentinel Zeta Prime.

Then there was Pax.

Optimus Prime, then Orion Pax, had listened to him - here was a higher caste, moved by his words. He understood. He questioned the status quo. He believed as Megatron did, that something had to change before everything snapped. Dissidents were beginning to vanish: Pious Maximus, once a leader of Functionists, was openly renouncing the guilds and questioning the caste system - and then he had disappeared, never to be heard from again. Others simply took 'vacations' and returned with their views suddenly and suspiciously in lock-step with that of the Council. At that time Senator Shockwave was one of the few that stood with the growing movement he had fostered; this movement was dubbed 'Decepticons' by the state-run media for touting one of the lines from his manifesto: "You are being deceived.".

Pax. The closest thing to a brother he had ever had.

He should have been happy his protege and friend had been named Prime; all he could see was that with Pax's weak-servoed talk, there would not be change - only platitudes and empty sentiment. The Council wanted him, as Soundwave had told him from information gathered among the Senators by his minicon agents, because he was Iaconian - one of their own - and they believed they could manipulate him towards their own ends. He feared that everything they had worked for, the revolution that was barreling down on them in the moment they forced their way into the Senate floor (and in doing so risked execution by Triorian Guards every moment they were there) was going to end up dead before it could be sparked, or worse yet, as corrupted as the Senate itself. He felt betrayed, abandoned ... crushed. Slaughtering the Senators not loyal to his cause and fomenting civil war seemed the only path left to save Cybertron and all its inhabitants.

Yet, it had not been until he stood in front of the mirror, his contemplative mind wrapped in the warm, fuzzy haze of post-overload bliss, that he began to wonder if the path he had chosen was wrong.

In the bond that had been established with Airachnid in their impassioned joining, the gift of empathy had been sledgehammered against the wall of cold, merciless rationale Megatron had built around his mind to shelter him from the reality of his actions. Seeing into Airachnid's past, understanding her actions against him through those violet optics, were breaking down his excuses and his reasonings, illumination shooting in through the cracks in that mental wall. She, too, knew suffering under the caste system and the senate; for a few seconds he felt the clutching control of Tarantulas' insanity as if the ancient creature had bonded to him.

He felt all the fear and loathing she'd had for him.

"Is this what I have built?" he asked himself out loud, staring back into blue optics he had not seen in vorns.

Airachnid slid off the berth and walked over to Megatron. He could feel her questioning him; she had sensed his inner conflict and contemplation and had offered him silence enough to think. "My Lord?" she asked.

"No," he corrected in a moment of self-loathing. "You of all people needn't call me that, not now."

She was somewhat confused by this display of humility but accepted it, standing at his side. Tentatively she reached up and took hold of his hand once more.

He did not push her away; the feeling of having her closer to him was pleasant, reassuring. Was this what bond-mates felt? Was this why it was so easy to torture them just by separating them for long periods of time? Was this why, when he slew one on the field of battle, the other often died soon afterwards, even when there had not been any damage done?

The silent question of what have I done? flitted like a black moth against the lightbulb of his processes, ghost data that lingered hauntingly from all the times he'd crushed it in the past. He could not afford to stop; the avalanche had started, the pebbles could no longer vote. He had chained himself to his own fate from the moment Cybertron's amusement park - a playground for the higher castes only - had been bombed, killing thousands, in his name. Even if he was willing to risk madness from staring at the ashes he'd left in his wake, he could not for a second stop the war. His followers, honed over millennia to be capable of any atrocity, who had been born in blood and nursed on ambition, would tear him in pieces and grow like a cancer out of control until they consumed themselves and anything else they touched. There would be no revival of Cybertron, no Phase Seven repopulation, because his army of destroyers knew nothing else. He had been the only thing keeping them in check, and the only way he could imagine making them stop would be to annihilate everything and everyone he had made.

As if Airachnid was somehow privy to his internal struggle, she asked, "What do we do now?"

'We'.

They were in this together now, weren't they?

...

Dave stared at the table.

In a cycle Shiftlock had shown him Cybertron's past through a direct data exchange of her memories.

In two cycles he had read all of Megatronus' - not Megatron's - manifestos and political publications.

In three cycles Shiftlock had countered all of his angry, disbelieving arguments with fact, logic and reason.

In four cycles, Dave had compiled the summary of what he'd learned into a report, and passed it to every genericon aboard the Nemesis.

"It's all over the place," Dave said, looking back up. "You just started a real scrap-storm across the ship."

"Truth has that effect after it's been suppressed for a long time," Shiftlock replied. "What are the reactions?"

"Anger. Outrage. Some of us want to rebel, some of them are scared, some of them are depressed," Dave said.

"Tell them not to act on their own, not yet. We need to be organized, and the best place for all of us to be is off this ship," Shiftlock explained. "I don't want this to be like running a herd of petrorabbits off a cliff, you're all living, thinking Cybertronians, you deserve to live. That means we think 'escape', not 'fight'."

"We're not afraid to fight," Dave said, a smile on his EMF. "You realize how often one of us gets picked off by Megatron just because he didn't like how we answered a question? How about in combat against you Autobots?"

"Point made," Shiftlock said with a remorseful smile. "Still, we need a plan to minimize loss of life and get us off this ship."

"I think I can do that," Dave said. "We just bring communications down, we seal off the doors, and get control of the ship. We can force a landing and get out." He stopped for a moment and asked after thinking about it, "Where are we gonna go?"

"You can come with me. All of you," Shiftlock said, reaching over and placing her hand over Dave's.

"... The Autobots would take us in?" Dave asked, sounding shocked.

"I know they would," the Wrecker said.

...

"How much longer do we have to waaaait?" Barricade whined, already chafing at his medically ordered bedrest.

"You keep complaining and I'll just drop you into stasis until you're done," Knock Out grunted, keeping an eye on the medical monitors.

Suddenly the room darkened. Emergency power cells and lighting kicked on.

"What in the-?" Knock Out asked as Soundwave, Barricade and Blackout sat up from their berths. He pressed a button on the medical bay's main control console. "This is medical to the bridge, what in the scrap is going on?"

No response.

"I said, this is medical to the bridge!"

Static.

"Okay I am not gonna sit this one out," Barricade growled, hopping down and tearing off the monitoring cables. He marched straight to the door - and ran face first into it as it refused to open. Temper flaring, he slammed his fist against the door several times before giving up.

"We're stuck in here!" he snarled.

"I can see that," Knock Out retorted irritably. "Comm systems are down, power's out and the door systems are locked down. None of you get any bright ideas about shooting out walls, your bodies are entirely focused on the protoforms, your weapons systems and power systems are at half capacity if even that."

The main computer's monitor filled with static, and a clip of what appeared to be a native video started to play across the screen.

"Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals. We haul your trash. We connect your calls. We drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not **** with us."


A little Adventure now that we've had Humor!

Empurata: Removal of the head and hands of a criminal and replacing them with a boxy, single-optic head and usually blunt claw-like hands. Used to permanently mark a criminal. Known victims: Whirl, Shockwave.

Functionism: The belief that your alt-form determines your function in society, and thusly your caste and potential for advancement. Enforced by the Guilds and Senate. Originated with Nova Prime.