"...Then up I rose,
And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash
And merciless ravage: and the shady nook
Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower,
Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up
Their quiet being and, unless I now
Confound my present feelings with the past;
Ere from the mutilated bower I turned
Exulting, rich beyond the wealth of kings,
I felt a sense of pain ..."

From "Nutting" - William Wordsworth

He is dead and with him gone the splendour in my life. He lies there, a sniper's victim, shot unknowingly from behind, betrayed and mute. With his metaprocessor eroded by the zero-zero virus, he is very far gone. Then, I slunk away unnoticed. Now, in freeze-frame playback I study the shattered amber optics, the back half of his head blown away and spread in a thin veneer of shrapnel across the laboratory's steel-sunk walls. I remember his last words to me and out of friendship, if nothing else, I respected them. He said, "Don't kill him, Ravage." Don't kill his murderer? Let the little scrap escape with this victory?

I think not.

I stare outside at the Spires. On my desk is a green cassette, inert but aware, deprived of all sensation, the inner mental channels configured in such a way that his mind loopbacks over his past crimes in an infinite series of iterations. It was the closest I could get to the human concept of "eternal torment." Despite my loathing of the said species, they had a flair for an art which my species only dimly comprehends: eternal torment being one of them. Thunderwing improved on my technique when created the "warpfold petrification" process. Despite his method being a thousand times more grisly than mine, I believe that my own process is still quite effective. I stare at the cassette and speak to the ghost in the freeze-frame playback (shattered amber optics, the shrapnel-peppered walls, the back-half his head blown away) "I kept my promise, old friend." I tap the cassette and it slides around my desk. Inside, Chasm screams ... "As you can see, he lives."

This is a personal account that I shall seal into a data archive and shall never look at again. It is filled with my lies, twisted memories and how I would have liked things to be. You may ask then, why leave a false record? If you have found this you already know me well and have delved into my mind and works a thousandfold. If you can understand me, you will understand this: some things are true. Some are not. It matters not to me - after I seal the archive shut I shall never even think of these matters again.

Now as for who I for the purposes of this discourse - I am a master of time and a lord of shadows. You will no doubt think of me as a depraved murderer but I assure that is not the case. I am master craftsman: my craft is the hunt and for me there is nothing else. I need nothing and nobody.

No. That is not true.

I have always been in need of ... colleagues. Those with a like mind, those who I can extend my friendship to, a sleek wire of comfort extending out of the night. In those days, the one I had chosen for this role was my benefactor, Soundwave. He was distant and removed, supportive of my patron and thus entirely suitable for fulfilling my needs of companionship, little though they were. I would like to point out that I have always considered him my friend. Even now. (Again that freeze-frame of shattered amber optics, walls peppered with shrapnel, the back-half of his head blown away.) Perhaps this will put my next revelation in a clearer light:
It was I who killed him.

I shot him through the head with a shot from a HN-23 pistol, a mini railgun that utilises superconductor technology to fire full-jacketed projectiles. The projectile shorted out his systems while caused a nice display of violence for effect. Thus my colleagues, who appreciate the art of violence but nothing else will find something noble to admire in my dead friend. A cold corpse is never very memorable.

Perhaps the back story -

Soundwave died a long time ago, in a time before the Rise of Carnavorus and the founding of Andraxus, when we were called Decepticons and were fighting a very old war on an alien planet, known as Earth. The troops, of which I was a member, were stationed in our undersea headquarters, planning an assault on energy stations along the coast of a land called Brazil.

I was in an intelligence unit, I was constructed as a data retrieval/information storage device, I was a hunter, a saboteur and a murderer. Now, let me define the difference between hunting and murder.

My other tasks in the army were mundane and were accomplished quickly, which left me with a great deal of spare time on my hands. For amusement I would capture prey - either an indigenous animal, such as a human or an enemy, an Autobot scout or warrior.

I would take them to a hunting ground, an area of territory I knew extremely well and I would let the prey loose. I gave them simple weapons and enough time to escape.

Then I would hunt them down. None ever escaped me.

I only hunted those that were unworthy of survival. They were not Decepticons, they were the scum of the universe, a fine drone or slave unit was worth more than a thousand of them.

I believe in redemption. If they had escaped me, they would proved themselves worthy of survival. They would be redeemed.

And they would have lived.

But none ever did.

Now, all Decepticons are brothers. It is a great wrong to take a brother's life. When you do, it is murder. And I murdered my brothers when I was ordered to. I murdered the weak, the aberrant, the political misfits and the non-conformists. I did it because I was following orders. I was a soldier in an army and soldiers obey orders. And I was the best at what I did and I accepted the responsibility of being the best.

I accept that as politically-correct padding. The truth was, I was a murderer. I was Megatron's secret, the skulker in the shadows that everyone ignored, because I was unimportant. After all, they knew me as the silent, scowling data gatherer, the midnight raider of human power plants and energy stations, the stealer of key-codes and enemy intelligence plans. They knew I vanished for long periods of times, some even knew of my hunting games.

But even when I was right in front of their faces they never guessed. Megatron's secret assassin was secret, a phantom who prowled unseen through locked doors to strike at the unsuspecting vitals of a suspected dissident.

They never knew me. I needed no one.

Yet there would be times when I would be hidden outside the barracks and I would hear the troops jostling at each other, boasting of kills, playing five-strike, honing skills. Decepticon camaraderie is bawdy and crude. We had our share of malcontents.

Yet there was a rough kinship that clove us together. And I was careful to stay on the outside.

Because one day there would be an order waiting for me, it would say "terminate such-and-such" and if I knew them as a person and not as vague, military member how could I trust myself? Would my reflexes slip? Would a slight hesitation make my death-strike off-target and bungle the operation? Of course it would not. I have far too much pride in my abilities to let my personal inclinations get in the way of a job. And perhaps that it what I feared most.

My co-workers (several similar remote-components with different functions) I had greater contact with than most. Outside official military operations, none of them interested me that much. Except:

During off-peak hours, I could often hear Soundwave working in the Engineering laboratory. The click of components, the muted red gleam of laser light. He said nothing as I sat outside the door and watched, as I kept my irregular hours, as I came back after cleaning blood or lubricant from my laser-sharpened claws and retracted blades concealed in each joint-lock. Most of the time Soundwave was distant, on the edge, some how cut off from the warp and woof of things. He kept himself apart and seemed to exist as nothing more than to perform his function: engineering, research, communications, data maintenance. And these tasks he performed in silence, occasionally indicating that he had understood an order or a diagnosis. And when he spoke his words were perfunctory and clipped, as if his brevity of speech marked a simple entity whose only purpose was to repair and reconstruct like a service drone.

But after watching his work, I understood there was more to him than this. His constructions were beyond the work of a drone or even an alpha-class tech. He had an ... intuition, (that is the only applicable word) into the way things operated and were built, he was a craftsman who believed in the principles of diligence and precision and he believed in keeping himself apart from most other things for they were a distraction to his craft. Soundwave was a fleeting reflection in my own dark mirror, a kindred spirit.

Little communication passed between us that were not commands or requested information but there was a quiet space between us in which we could both exist and be our true selves, aside from the harsh military institution of Decepticon existence. I, the hunter reposed; he, the craftsman eternal. For however brief.

Time continued, the war continued between deadlocks, balance-tipping victories, failures and triumphs. Life was the same grey slate it had always been and always would be, the forever-war, the long night without the dawnfires to herald the coming victory.

And my true function "assassin" weighed heavily upon me as I polished my retracting blades with the lubrication fluids of dissidents. I was perfect in my craft and my hunts always ended in victory. There was no prey that could not defeat me, no loathsome scum that dared to raise its head from the muck and prove itself otherwise. In my weariness at this dreary continuity of all I had ever known I grew lax and paid the price.

One day, I almost died.

Megatron had called for me and I retrieved the message from the a cache in the fuel room. Caches changed with each mission and Megatron and I were never seen alone together. We could not have any suspicion. There were times when I would have liked to hear his voice, the sound of my instructions and the words of congratulations after each kill. But I was on the edge, a shadow and therefore was removed from such things.

I was to assassinate Coldstorm, one of the repair techs. He had been showing signs of dissidence of late. We had given him every leeway. But we had decoded a message of his to an Autobot supply base and it contained these words, " I want freedom from this soulless prison." Coldstorm was trying to arrange a defection, intelligence for sanctuary. We were shocked, of course, at how far the dissident had progressed in his psychosis (it is a form of psychosis that gives one the desire to defect) and after giving him every due chance, warnings and counsel, his psychosis had progressed beyond treatment and the decision was made to eliminate him.

I entered his personal quarters in stealth mode (high ranking officers and technicians were given private cubicles) after disabling the inner security. In his spare time Coldstorm had rigged an interesting system of electronics, shockwire and plastic explosive to his door which would only be deactivated by emitting a signal that was based on a simple mathematical sequence, involving pi and the cubes of prime numbers.

It took me four seconds.

After slipping inside his quarters I holographed myself into a fuel drum and then reactivated the code. I had his routine timed out perfectly, I knew every switchback, deviation and fluctuation that Coldstorm was likely to originate. I watched as Coldstorm entered his quarters, sealed the lock and began to attend to routine maintenance. However, I had underestimated the depth of Coldstorm's psychosis. His paranoia was overblown and extremely acute. I had bypassed his signal lock, but my psychological profile had failed to accurately map out the extremes that his cracking personality template was deviating to.

When the time came for me to strike, I leapt from the cubicle corner, the chameleon holograph flicking out of reality during the peak of my arc. Now, as a rule transformers rarely have weak points. We are heavily armoured and delicate internals are given extreme amounts of shielding. Design flaws such as exposed coolant loops or flayed cabling are minimised when future generations are constructed. Combat is heavy and prolonged, each new generation of lethal weapon is quickly found a defence for and incorporated into future designs. In wars, we chip away at each other, piece by piece until only the victor is left standing.

Assassination then is largely stealth. The successful assassin must gain the first strike and be proficient with quick, shock attacks. Assassins are at the other end of the scale of lumbering, armour-clad war machines: they must be lightly armoured, be deft and flexible, have a quick response time and have weapons that cater to stunning or shocking one's target. I was small, barely up the knee on a regular sized infantry unit. However I had the latest in stealth and cloaking technologies and was armed with two high-impact thermonuclear missiles, cut-point blades and a disruption generators. Disruptors are disliked by infantry as a high-charge burst will only stun a target for few seconds but those seconds can be crucial to an assassin. I dislike infantry in any case and find them little more than heavily-armoured bludgeons, having sacrificed speed for protection and stealth for offensive battering capabilities.

As I crashed into Coldstorm, motion-detectors screeched throughout the area. The quarry turned, thereby negating my disruption strike. I would have severed into a cooling duct with a point-blade, and then forced a discharge into his internals, stunning him enough for me to detonate a core-charge inside of him. There was a resounding clang my claw-blades raked his external lacquer and my disruption discharge circulated through his armour plate, but they did little in the way of halting him, even for those few vital seconds.

Instead of retaliating, Coldstorm went for the exit and beamed a code at the lock which snapped open within picoseconds. He frantically scrabbled outside into the main corridor as I gathered myself and then began to pound up the hallway. Leaping, I turned on him for another spring only to hear voices down the corridor: troops!

I could either be seen, or let the quarry escape. Either one was inexcusable. Deciding on the bound, I crashed into Coldstorm's back, who shouted fervently and began ringing some internal alarm which promptly drew more attention down the corridor. I could not find the right place into which to make another disruption strike. While I hesitated, scanning his vulnerable points, Coldstorm screeched at me: "You won't take me so EASILY!"

And then self-detonated the thermite explosives packed into every specialised compartment in his hollowed armour.

The resulting explosion slammed me against the far wall. Dazed, I could not move. Troops were piling into the area (in the distance I could Onslaught and that meant the Military Police.) My failure was gross. Not only had I failed to eliminate Coldstorm in a quiet, efficient manner but I had exposed the inner workings of the Decepticon Loyalty Enforcement Taskforce for all to see. We were disliked intensely by the Military Police, who officially but ineffectually performed the same duties. I had known Onslaught suspected the existence of the DLET and was ideologically opposed to our work but could do nothing about it. His politics hampered his career: the upper management had termed him "unreliable" and so that brilliant officer would forever be condemned to performing menial, bully-boy duties when he could have commanded an entire army. Such is the stain of political disaffection. If Onslaught captured me and connected a few facts together, he would learn of DLET's concrete existence and cause a no-small shockwave through the ranks if he made his findings public. Already I could see a long, torturous investigation, a trial with an uncertain end. DLET would disown me and my actions, not out of disloyalty but because they had to remain secret.

To put it simply: no one except Megatron and certainly highly placed officials knew about DLET - it was a powerful group that circumnavigated bureaucracy. It looked as though Coldstorm had had ties in the Military Police (perhaps for protection?) and had no doubt rigged up some certain alarm if he was ever attacked. He had never figured on DLET, however. On me.

I watched as units of Military Police enter Coldstorm's room and observe the wreckage with cold precision. Soon the tape would be rolled out, barricades erected, shrapnel samples taken as the forensic team arrived. I would be bound and have my mind jacked open for all to see. The Military Police may be crude but they know their work.

"Right, seal the area," one demanded. "We gotta hold everything until Onslaught gets here."

One of them leaned over and whispered at me, "We got you now, shadow-killer."

My doom had just been confirmed.

"Onslaught's on his way," one reported.

"I am from engineering." a cold voice chimed outside. "I heard an impact detonation."

"Military Police. You can't come in. Take a hike," the door-guard snapped brusquely.

"As you can clearly see, my rank and authority countermands yours. In any case I want to claim the remote-component. He is clearly in need of repair."

The door-guard hesitated, "I can't let you through ..." he started but backed off as Soundwave came through the door. Now, as ours is a military hierarchy is an offence not to obey a superior officer. It is also a deeply-rooted instinct. The door-guard lacked the clout and (more importantly) the psychology to disobey a superior officer, in this case Soundwave. The engineer walked right through the still-smoking piles of Coldstorm ("Excuse me! That's evidence you're stepping on! Please keep the edges!) and without effort picked me up, cradling my shattered head, cracked legs and dented weapon-mounts. He then crunched through the deceased Coldstorm a second time ("Excuse me! Excuse me!") and walked out of the room. "What do we tell Onslaught?" One of the Military Police muttered. Soundwave, even from quite a distance away, heard and spoke: "Tell Onslaught that it is no longer his concern."

When we returned to his sanctum, he lay me on the examination table.

I could no longer keep silent. I said, " It was I who slew Coldstorm." I coughed weakly. "I failed ..."

Soundwave was silent for a time as he examined the fractures patterning my exo-structure. "It is hard to second-guess a psychotic."

A retracted blade fell from my exposed lower forearm. I laughed, "My psych-profile ..."

"Restricted, as always. You have nothing to fear from that. You serve them well."

"You know what I do ?" I was surprised.

"It is not what I created you for." He said quietly, "But I know of it."

I jeered at him, "They whisper about you in the halls - they call you a pacifist behind your back. How does it feel to know one of your constructions is an assassin? Who murders his fellows?"

Soundwave was silent again and then answered, "I shape shells to fit the datacores they send me. I took yours from the processing factory - it was marked unfit and was to be cleared. No one could do anything about it, except for me. I kept that rogue datacore, for I have always been attracted by the unusual. There is a grace to everything and it is an art to bond a core with an appropriate shell. These things are distinct at the moment of creation. I can tell by the feel of the engrams a flyer's mind from a burrower's; a scientist's from a warrior's. Because they could not guess what you were - you did not conform to any known template - they wanted to erase you. But from the shape of your mind I knew you for a hunter. Why then should I feel distaste for your inner being? You are being true to yourself and that is one of the noblest tasks one can do."

I paused. I had not thought of it that way. I let myself drop into lockdown so the repairs could proceed.

It was strange how that night would alter our understanding of each other. I knew him more and he had professed to know my closely guarded secret. I needed another, one whom would know what I had done, so if I failed during the night I would be mourned and remembered. You cannot understand how ... comforting that was, to a shadow. Soundwave had moved from benefactor to friend in a single instance. And there our real friendship began.

Now, if my later actions are to make sense, I will have to relate the story of another, distasteful as it is. A few years later (what is time during an endless war?) Soundwave had constructed another remote component, an information broker/data pirate known as Chasm. Chasm's datacore had been reconstructed from a deceased information broker, of dubious allegiance. The information broker, known as Crackdown had been executed during the Third Cybertronian Wars. After working with Chasm for a short while, I began to concur with the opinion of the Decepticon officer who had given the orders for Chasm's memory-ancestor to be terminated. He was arrogant, insufferable and were it not for his information handling skills, entirely useless. Soundwave had spend years researching and developing his data-retrieval theory, lugging that dead datacore around until he had the spare time to experiment on it. All that research was gone to waste, however. for the reconstructed personality was unredeemably neurotic.

To "correct" the imbalance would result in wiping the datacore, and of course Soundwave would never do that.

Chasm in fact believed he was the dead Crackdown and not a data-retrieval reconstruction. He believed he had been executed eons before only to resurrected later at Soundwave's hands, fitted into a small body that could shift between a dragon-like base mode (some new innovation of Soundwave's, I never questioned it) and a cassette (or a data storage/processing unit that happened to resemble a cassette. Decepticon technology is after all, quite advanced.) And Chasm constantly berated Soundwave, snarled at him for being 'recreated' in such a manner, when he had never existed before. I did not question Soundwave. I would have wiped the datacore and put the information somewhere useful, say on a disk. But Soundwave was flawed with sentimentality (only towards his own constructions, I hasten to add) and believed he could win Chasm over. I told him my opinion on the matter, and perhaps he would have been in existence now had he taken my advice. I would never have had to slide forward, bypass the security systems, strain my talents to their limit and shoot Soundwave from behind. But I digress ...

Now, Chasm's main problem was with Soundwave's constant communication linkage to him, whether the channel was dormant or not. "It's driving me insane!" he would rail to me. "How can you stand the presence in your head?" I pointed out that it was a norm for all remote-components so that data could be transferred in case of an emergency. But he refused to accept this: "It's a leash around my very neck! I can't abide by it." He would glare into the distance, somewhat madly and exclaim, "I cannot abide this very existence!"

"It's actually a form of radio-wave emission." I said blandly. I wished I hadn't.

Chasm pondered, " So if I were to off the old boy, the link would be broken, yes ?"

I laughed at his presumption. "To get through Soundwave you'd have to get through me first." Twitching only a paw I flung him across the room. And left, to hear him say ... "Of all the absurdities! I do believe he thinks he's better than me!" His inane, tittering laughter followed me up the passage.

I wish I taken measures there and then.

Now, again there is a passage of time between that conversation with Chasm and the next event of significance. I was returning from a hunt, enjoying my freedom from Military Police investigation (Onslaught had mysteriously been transferred back to Cybertron, where years later he would redeem himself by making his last stand against Carnavorus. I believe there is a nice statue in the Hall of Remembrance that Starscream commissioned one time. Anyhow ...) and I had occasion to bypass Soundwave's laboratory. But something was wrong, as I could infer from the frenetic activity of another remote component:
"Ravage, Ravage, Ravage, Ravage, Ravage ...." Overkill blurted. "Something really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really ..."

I snarled at him.

" ... really, really terrible has happened! " he concluded, frantically bouncing up and down on one foot. " See I showing Blitzwing how really, really, really, really strong I am by lifting him up by one leg and throwing him, him, him, him over the room only then ..."

I slashed my claws inches in front of Overkill's flickering optics.

" ... and then I got this call from Soundwave, only it got cut off ..." Overkill finished hurriedly. " So I went over to Engineering and he was lying there over the ground twitching and it was funny, not ha-ha-ha funny but strange, Alfred-Hitchcock-Presents-kind-of-funny and he couldn't move or talk and just twitched, and did I mentioned how funny that seemed ? Anyway ..."

I bounded past the gibbering fool and leapt and flew the distance to the Engineering lab. Soundwave was slumped over across the floor, various tools scattered around in unusual disarray. The scene was important: there were no signs of forced entry or intrusion, meaning whatever had caused Soundwave to fail either had to be an internal malfunction or an inside job. I was careful when I approached him, noting the splayed position of his limbs and the intermittent twitching of fingers, possible some sort of seizure. Except the diagnostic revealed anything.

"Are you functional?" I asked him.

He looked at me rather confusedly. "Chasm ..."

I stared at him, "What did Chasm do to you?"

"He did not mean to, I think. He does not kill: I believe the purpose of the virus was to erode the linkage."

I pressured him, "Chasm infected you with one of his viruses?"

Soundwave appeared to be making a great effort to compose himself. "Crackdown was executed after he divulged his greatest work to Thunderwing: the zero-zero virus. Essentially what it does ..."

I paced back and forth, "Where is the repair equipment? We can exchange information later on."

"... is to erase the datacore, unwriting engrams and returning it to a nascent state."

I located the diagnostic equipment and began to drag it over.

"Crackdown had loaded the virus into himself - on he himself is immune and his memory ancestor, Chasm. But he is still infected - when he tried to load his linkage-eroding virus onto me during data transfer, he also uploaded some of the zero-zero virus code. I am listening to it mutating now. It is the music of chaos and of ..."

DATACORE CORRUPTION IMMINENT, the diagnostic tool said helpfully.

I paced back and forth, "Chasm is immune! If I can get the code and give it to you ... Where did he go, Soundwave?"

He lay back languidly: "All of my favourite constructions were deviants my the standard processing factory definitions: Chasm - a leper; you, a sociopath ..."

"Soundwave?"

I was too late, he lay there unmoving. I gently pawed at his faceplate. A last gasp of words: "Don't kill him, Ravage." And then a final silence. He continued to function however, even as more vestiges of his personality faded away into oblivion ..

He couldn't die like that. Not like that. I went behind him. I loaded the railgun and while the idiot shell was there twitching away, I shot him from behind. (Again that freeze-frame - the shattered amber optics, the walls peppered with shrapnel, the back half of his head blown away ...)

Now, I am a hunter. I hunt those of low worth: Autobots, criminals, traitors, I let them run from me and think they have bettered me. I then have the pleasure to track them down, to let them fear me, to scuttle away in terror before I savage their vitals and their internal mechanisms grind away like badly tuned clockwork.

The only loyalty I have is to myself and my own desires. When I desired the hunt, I sought prey. When I desired power, I sought the position of the head of the Enforcement Executive, a command I fill most aptly.

And so, I left the base that night. They guards did not question my activities, I came and went as I pleased. I viewed the Decepticon army as my employers and I viewed myself as an invaluable, highly-trained agent. I selected my own tasks and performed them and when the intelligence division required me for operations I did them as I knew there was no one else who could do them. No one with my experience or abilities or sheer mental aptitude.

And I desired revenge and the hunt. I desired Chasm.

I compiled what I knew about him: retrieved personality with neurotic traits; overly self-important, overbearing, arrogant. An information broker who liked to gamble with what he knew. Interested in material gain and possessions.

Chasm could not function by himself, living in the mudwastes of bombed Brazil, scavenging for fuel and surviving a perilous hand-to-hand existence. Chasm would seek out the comforts of civilisation. Therefore either a defection or submerging himself in a human culture. I ruled out defection as being highly unlikely. Chasm despised authority too much and had an innate loathing of the war, our enemies included. It would be easier for Chasm to become as he was in his previous existence, a political neutral who desired the attentions of both sides, to play off against each other, to fulfil his desire to be 'appreciated'.

South America had once been rainforest, according to stored reports. The war had left it a bombed-out waste of bad soil, crater and pockmarks; calcined stumps raking at the smog-shrouded sky. I padded over bowls of dust filled with bone-powder from thousands of humans. I stared into the grey-smog sky and listened the cacophony of sounds filling the air: radio transmission, human entertainment transmissions (sex, sport, goods, buy, buy, buy) and I thought I could find him.

I will not relate my time in that dying human city, a slave to its space port where rockets left in clouds of toxic fumes. I will not tell you about the time that I spend coiled to internet terminals, to television monitors, sorting and listening and dissecting the information, flashing through virtual newspapers, capturing and cutting human brains open so I could "read" their minds from the electrical impulses. Eventually the trail came to a bar with acid-technocipheric jazz beating into the sky, while humans plugged their soft, wet skulls into information terminals and sipped on drinks that rotted their innards. A doomed, pathetic species. Thankfully they are quite extinct in the modern age. Anyhow, I caught a conversation and they were talking about Cal Baker, the man who get you anything for a price - a fairy-tale dealer who made wishes come true with money. Inane, stupid humans - if you want your wish then you must go out there and take it for yourself. No one will give it to you freely, even for a price. But humans cannot understand true dreams, even though I consider myself one of their best students.

To cut this to the bone, I found Baker. I posed as a "virtual human", offering him something him some financial patterning data that he would have killed for in exchange for what I wanted. We met in a "virtual cafe" and I was not fooled for an instance

Baker/Chasm radiated the same smug greed that I had known before and once we wended our way through the conversational preamble, he asked me what I wanted.

"Vengeance!" I told him simply and then we cut out to the real world, where my claws clung to Chasm's throat. You see, I had followed his trail and I knew where he'd hide - in the penthouse suite of an opulent human hotel. His desire for luxury, for material goods had betrayed him. For when he asked me, "How do you find me, you bastard?' I answered him simply, "You are my superior in this "internet" realm. But I am your better, for I know your mind."

"Done in by psychology, I see. Well, well." He turned his streamlined-lizard-shaped face and stared at me, optics shining with fervour and the colour of blood. "I don't suppose I can offer you anything?"

I laughed. "The only thing I want is the perfect hunt and a companion to share a few moments with, in silence and understanding. I will never find the perfect hunt, for the time that I do will be the time that I die, having met my superior. And you are not him. But I digress, this is about my friend, such a friend I had as you would never understand. He gave you everything and you killed him."

Chasm gasped, "I protest at this false accusation! I'm a broker, not a serial-killer like you!" Chasm sneered, "I saw your psych-profile, Ravage. You've got a flawed personality, you're aberrant - all those little hunts of yours is just your way of not coping. Had you been created in a decent factory rather than by an eccentric scientist you'd have been terminated."

Now this is true, for as we are a race in search of perfection we "remove" those with deviant profiles in our processing factories. But I digress ...

"But I've proved myself, haven't I? That "eccentric scientist" gave me a chance and with it my life. You wasted yours." I stared at him disdainfully.

Chasm squirmed, for his end was near - "I didn't kill him! It was simple virus that would have destroyed itself after it performed its function - it was just going to short out the link so I could get away, that's all!"

"You're a plague-bearer, Chasm. He never told you because of your delicate little sensibilities, you wouldn't have coped. You're pathetic. You're carrying the zero-zero virus, it's part of your code and it's going to go on infecting, mutating and replicating for all time to come. It got into Soundwave."

Chasm gasped, "No! I didn't ... Listen, Ravage I can still help him. I know how the virus works ..."

A spear of unease stabbed through me.

Chasm continued, "All we have to do is get back to his bodyshell, and I can reverse the virus! It doesn't wipe anything, it just defragments code particles and puts them in random locations. If I study Soundwave's strain of code I can reverse and ..."

(Don't kill him, Ravage.) He was trying to tell me when he died that ...

No. Chasm was lying. Trying to save his own hide.

(He's not a killer, Ravage.) Not like you? You see, my profile says I'm a serial-killer, a sociopath. Sometimes I can't help it. Meaning well is never enough. But no, no! Chasm was lying, is still lying to me in his "eternal torment." One day I'll have the truth from him.

But I digress ...

"You're lying," I snarled at Chasm. "Soundwave has been terminated. You did it."

Chasm yelled, "I didn't do anything! I can reverse it! Let me help him ..."

I showed him the picture: shattered, amber optics; shrapnel-peppered walls, caved-in head ...

"You d id that," I told him.

Chasm squealed: "You killed him! Not me! You're crazy, Ravage! You're crazy!"

"And yet ..." I mused, (Don't kill him, Ravage.) A last command from a friend to a friend ...

I have learned many techniques during my career. One such process (that would later become the seeds of the warpfold petrification process and that is vile, I tell you, I promise you) rendered Chasm into lockdown. I took the cassette and put it a place where it would never be found, and so Chasm would remain inert but still aware.

At a later date I hope to redeem him when he has come to terms with his crime. So far he has remained psychotic, but the future always contains a myriad of possibilities.

So now we come to the present day, and to all intents and purposes, Soundwave is dead. He never survived the Last Wars on Cybertron: he never saw Starscream access the Matrix, nor saw how Devourer was defeated, nor how Starscream led his forces to found Andraxus. If you want to learn about that, go read a history file. With the WELL system you have entire libraries of information at your fingertips. Go on, I jeer at you.

While I having nothing but admiration for the technicians who performed the reconstruction of Soundwave, it is not my Soundwave. Nothing more than a reloaded datacore, a newly linked personality matrix and an accurately engineered bodyshell. You see, when they retrieved what was left of Soundwave they had to fill in the gaps left by the corrupted data links and patch up the reconstructed memory core and flush out the remnants of the zero-zero system virus ...

Perhaps Chasm could have helped him. But I must believe that to be a lie, for I will be guilty of having slain my truest friend. For in the heat of battle I could not listen to Chasm and once I performed my "technique" on him there was no going back. Now, the current Soundwave is a very fine reconstruction. It as a gestalt entity. Something of the old and a lot of the new. He walks like Soundwave, thinks like Soundwave, has all of Soundwave's ideals, perspectives and most of Soundwave's memory ... but it is not Soundwave. Perhaps I could have saved him. Who can tell?

What matters is that the trouble-child, Chasm, was punished by my hand. I did not perform this out of duty or revenge, but in the name of friendship. For Soundwave. I did it because I wished to redeem his faith in me. In any case, after I disposed of Soundwave's murderer, I went and retrieved what remained of his datacore, hoping that in the future I would find the technology to resurrect him. And so I would go on, bearing that shattered datacore in a sealed subspace containment chamber, on many worlds and in distant battles until I could at last I could place it in the hands of one who would commence the reconstruction. But that you see, is another story and has no relation here. For true friendship is ephemeral and comes but rarely. The paths of such friends intersect only momentarily. They circle another like the brief-lived fireflies which are bright and joy-filled as they dance on an autumnal eve. Come morning, only the worn-out corpses are found.

The End