1.

I cut my jets as we cross the skyline. I burn in the descent. A ball of hellfire in the weak atmosphere. A nose dive, turning. The sound barrier cracks like a whip. "Hah!" I want to scream across the city. In defiance, in simple superiority of flight and freedom. I have enough weaponry onboard to bake the planet in the light of a thousand thermonuclear suns. Perhaps I should have been a military transport. No paperwork, speeches, parades, budgets, deficits, token elections, polls, ballots.

There are some who went mad in peace-time," my recording unit comments.

"True. But they had all gone mad in the war first." I snigger, in my commentary voice, the one I announce executions in.

Below me Andraxus throbs like an arrhythmic heart. I was there we dug the first foundation hole, I was there when we designed the first plan and Grapple projected a plan that made us begin to wonder if we could indeed forget poor, dead Cybertron. Yet most of the city's early architecture smacks of the dream-time golden age: delicate spires interconnecting with loops and gentle, spanning bridges, long flat expanses of open metal. And then came the wars and coups and revolutions, defacing and restructuring the original form with squat towers and military fortifications. And I was there as they changed and adjusted it, dug out the rock and mounted cannons, and launched the orbital defences. My original plan was to have something so fine and glorious that we would forget our vanished homeland and look ahead to our rising empire. Andraxus would be the Fatherland and not cold, lost Cybertron. From above I can see the design of the original city, buried beneath the modern lattice like a like a half-sunk gravestone. If I returned to Cybertron now I would be indifferent. It would be another dead world.

Freefall.

At the last instant I gun my engines hard and twist and I rise above the wondrous landscape of rock and chrome and darkness.

" 'I am the master of all I survey'... The old boy said that as we took Iacon once..."

"Depending upon the support of the Senate and the High Council."

"Since when do they change? They still remember Thunderwing."

I wanted a democracy. I wanted them to vote, knowing that the leadership they chose would be appropriate. It didn't quite work - we are too militaristic to change our government just like that. They became uneasy at my reforms and thought me weak when all I wanted to show them is that the proletariat had a choice. So we have since lapsed back to the old chain of command structure, with the Senate and the Council channelling the political ambitions of frustrated would-be warlords. Our bipartisan system is a bit of a laugh, as ASWP has been in power since the foundation. Yet the High Council is seen as having the ultimate power. And anyone can join. Anyone can enter the Hall of Remembrance filled with my lies and propaganda and they can place their hands upon the Matrix. In that we are democratic. Life is fair. Life is good.

Another arc in slow lazy tourist circles. I will never forget the combat maneuvers and slides and tricks. The programs are forever stored in tight corner of my processing faculties, cutting in if ever needed. I want to launch a missile at the city centre, just because I can. There would be utter devastation. But I am the Lord Commander. This city is mine to govern and protect. I head back towards the Spires, angling for a hangar in the west tower. I transform and land, wanting to fly up there forever and never come down, looking upon an innocent landscape and pretending that it is all it appears to be.

The recording unit jacks out of its interface and transforms. He has become a token sceptre, a status symbol. He adjusts to his usual perch as I stride towards my council chambers. There is work to be done.

2.

"Patch him through." I order the WELL commlink, lying idly back in the chair. My fingers knot and twist together.

"Sir, he's not responding."

"Mmmm. He's listening all right. Aren't you, Sting?"

Crackle. Hiss. Crackle.

"Alright then, the deal's off. I'll find another means."

Crackle. Hiss. Crack! " -ait a minute. I've got clients-"

"Sting, if you truly want what we were discussing, I suggest you concentrate on your most imperative client at the moment. Me. Are you set to make the run?"

"Damn you, Starscream. Ashraker trusts me, this will be-"

"What you're used to, eh Sting? All you do is have to slink into the Strip and break the prisoner out of there. Ashraker doesn't even have to be aware of what's going on. Get the prisoner to me at the appointed time, and I'll give you what you want. I trust we understand each other?"

"Perfectly, you -"

"End transmission."

3.

The next item on my list. Oooh, this is going to be fun- I walk up to the console, my ANDRAX flickers as I force it to interface with the connections. I am entering the WELL, now I am in the WELL, gliding over a silvery plain of data as a F15-D Eagle. I jump to port 34322/65/32AGK and then ...

The construct consists of a small, enclosed chamber, a bare cell lined with matte slabs of metal, a perfect cube. It resembles the Detention Centre on Sarrossos. The cell's occupant sits in a far corner, staring resolutely ahead, sealed off from my side by a flickering wall of energy.

"Well met, Starscream." he says dryly.

"Greetings, Thunderwing." I nod formally. "I trust the accommodation is pleasant?"

"Spare me your meagre attempts at wit, Starscream." Thunderwing hisses. "Tell me why you have come and for how long I shall remain here."

"Well ..." I hunch down so I can meet his gaze directly. "What's the last thing you remember? I'm curious."

Thunderwing glares at me calmly. "It is like you, to answer a question with a question. Nonetheless, I was on my flagship, Grim Conqueror, about to return to the Strip after a trade negotiation with Soundwave."

"What year is it?" I cut in.

"59 898 AF."

"Hmm."

Thunderwing is cracking. "I want to know by what foul means I was relocated here, which I assume is your little cell block on Sarrossos."

"I didn't know you knew about that?" I say, surprised. "I'll have to give ACI a more thorough overhaul. Well, to put this bluntly, you're missing a few years. They must have gone to a safe sector in your datacore."

Thunderwing glares at me, emerald light flickering across the cell block. Emerald rage. I manage to tweak the construct; I want him to remember, and he does: razing Andraxus, squatting on of throne of stripped body-shells, walking through a dead city, ranting at shadows, staring up at my slumped shell staked on the spikes over the Great Pit - a chaotic medley of images, random and wild, without control or coherency. He slumps back against the wall, as if horrified.

"Yes, Thunderwing, that's what you did..." I snicker. "Let me fill in the gaps, as your state of mind was, how shall we say it, a bit shaky. After you crunched up my poor bodyshell, you thought I was gone, didn't you ? You really thought that your little party trick of erasing ANDRAX would work on me? I only gave the appearance of being dead, because you failed to fully comprehend what I am, what we are..."

I hold up a hand, rippling with black fire, my ANDRAX's stigma. "You didn't work out what the ANDRAX did to us, did you? Jacked us up an evolutionary notch, making us beings of pure energy. The physical shell is a base, nothing more. You believed, like the others, that the ANDRAX is like a surface forcefield. What it did was the opposite, writing all our personal information to a living matrix of energy. Something that cannot be snuffed out as easily as you thought."

[Yawn] Buzzsaw cuts in idly. [At least one of us in enjoying ourselves ..]

[Shut up, you !] I sneer back at him through the link, a grim ripple of mirth colouring the signal. Buzzsaw sniffs.

We do this all the time.

I peer hopefully towards the occupant of the cell. Thunderwing is made of stern stuff, I feel. He stares at me with a gaze that is almost weary, placid. He's in a shell, nothing matters, I can't touch him.

"So is this what this is all about, Starscream?" he says distantly. "Revenge? Do with me as you will. It seems apparent that I failed in my ambition to steer Andraxus away from its doom-laded course. Come, take your moment of petty vengeance." After a while, he stares down at the floor, the matte-grey plating of slotted tiles. "I am waiting, Starscream," he says, almost wistfully.

I awkwardly copy his pose, sitting, half-squatting on the floor, so that we are at eye-level.

"What about the Strip? Wouldn't you like to go home?" I ask him, prodding.

"There's nothing left," he says quietly. "Your armada saw to that. Picked clean by your flock of ravenous vultures."

"Hey, its not that bad. There's still a huge amount of untapped resources out there, mines have recovered up to 80% of their former efficiency. Bases are back on line, ore-carriers and refiners are doing good business..."

There. A small green flicker from those down-turned optics. I continue: "We expect to have recovered full-efficiency by next financial quarter. It's really amazing how quickly things have come together."

"Under whose regime?" he hisses suddenly. "One of your toadies from ASWP? How quickly they would jump at the chance to-"

"No, it's still Coalition territory. I'm not that dense, I don't want to rock the Senate too much as it is. Just made one of your old lieutenants an offer, a settlement, if you like."

He seems to come to life, a violent surge flickering over his optical visor. "Pah, a third-ranked treacherous dog no doubt, who had no concern for the cause we fought for or the ideals we long-suffered to execute. Gone, like smoke in the wind."

"Hmmm. Hey, I suppose you want to know how I survived all that time, eh?" I stare at him, grinning.

"Not particularly. I find the solid presence of this walls more entertaining that your irritating histrionics."

"Aww, c'mon. I after you bested me, physically in the Arena, you were all set to snuff my poor ANDRAX out, and indeed, you thought you had done it too; you couldn't sense anything, no vital signs of life. But I'd managed to jack my awareness into the WELL, leaving a gutted corpse behind. You weren't nice to that bodyshell, at all, were you?"

Thunderwing stares past me, somewhere above my left shoulderspar.

"Anyway, Raindance, my secretary at that time, had managed hide in the biowaste systems, below the Great Pit, avoiding your patrols. He managed to hook up with a team of pit-fighters, who weren't at all happy that you'd closed down their livelihood in that coup. He persuaded them to make a run on..."

[Sigh, is this ranting really getting anywhere ? I thought we came here to do other things than gloat ...]

[Wait. You'll see.]

"...anyway. Raindance had the Matrix, which is why you couldn't track him. But he was sick of lumping it about, too much dead weight, to much responsibility, so he threw it away in the muck. Only this pit fighter, stepped on it, Slag, and he interfaced with it. So he led this band of malcontents and rebels through the undersewers, performing random acts of anarchic violence, until they thought of a goal; get the old Lord Commander back, make things the way they were. So Slag ordered his troops to retrieve my bodyshell, and Raindance had guessed where I'd escaped to, and managed to reactivate my datacore. I came back together, took awhile, tracked you down, challenged you- And you know what happened next, I'm sure."

Thunderwing looks up quietly, at that moment, meeting my gaze directly. He is placid, calm, intent. For one instant I want to admire him, his resolute strength of will that drove him, possessed him ... and then I mentally shake my head.

He did murder me, after all.

He says quietly, "Which one of my lieutenants betrayed me?"

"Ashraker."

"Ashraker?" Thunderwing says slowly. He seems shocked, his optics drain of colour for an instant. He slumps, he drums fingers maddeningly against the floor.

"He told me what do, your weakness, to overload your ANDRAX with the WELL sensorium. And in return ..."

"You gave him the Strip."

I nod. "But you had already sunk. You were a lunatic, a raving fool, wandering through a dead city. You talked to your left foot, hey, it was weird..." I stare at him, rising to a half-crouch. "You'd almost killed everyone in Andraxus. The city, the empire, the species that we'd sworn to build and nourish, to the point where all other goals were irrelevant. If Ashraker had betrayed you, it was because you'd broken your oath to Andraxus first."

"It does not matter..." Thunderwing says coldly, not listening. "He swore an oath, of absolute loyalty, that was to be for all time. And I hope that the filth, the heap of scrap never forgets what he did, that it haunts his days until he fades away, alone, a traitor, an honourless cur..."

I consider. "Well, he's now alive, and ruling over the Strip. As for you, my dear Thunderwing..."

Thunderwing, jerks up, rising forward, hands pressed against the sizzling wall of energy. "What do intend for me, Starscream?" he says, attempting to seem mildly curious, dispassionate, his wildly flashing optics betraying him.

"Well, put it this way. You're dead, so you don't have to worry about dying as that part's all been taken care of. This is a stim construct, in the WELL, and your datacore's been jacked in so we could do a reading of it. Your total knowledge will be processed and stored in millions of sublocations for future reference." I get up, and turn, leaving the cell behind me. "And your self-awareness will be snuffed out very soon, as the reading's just about to finish. Then we'll erase the datacore." I shrug, and flash Thunderwing an apologetic look on my way out.

Thunderwing stares at me during that brief moment of contact. Accusingly. Leaning back against the wall, he says, "Andraxus will live then, but at the expense of those whom you created it for, the Decepticons ... instead it shall be a place of hybrids, of failures, and organic filth such as..."

"Bye-bye, Thunderwing."

4.

I'm at the training centre, on the fourth level of the Spires, a small open room paved with slate-grey slabs of non-reflective metal. A Mark-34/VH Training Drone lumbers towards me, and I instinctively roll forward, gunning my jets forward, using speed to compensate for the take of cover. I duck and turn, trying to navigate the small area, and I transform and aim in a quick, lancing shot.

A few seconds ago, the door slid open. Normally this chamber would be sealed, but anyone with Theta-Theta access, a High Council member, could enter. It's Soundwave, High Lord of the Ring Worlds, and now he stands quietly behind me; a heavy, royal-blue base-form, that converts into a complex communications 'graph. Several small remote components hover about him, that likewise shift into small interface disks than merge with his form through various softcore access ports.

We have a long history, but he's always very distant towards me, I think he lives most of his time in the past, in other worlds. He's efficient at controlling the Ring Worlds, but lacks enthusiasm, like a drone shuffling through the motions. I dislike his company, it's like being in a crypt, with all the dead weight of history thick and tangible around you.

I fire the blast just as the drone twists around to intercept me. Woah! It clips a vital spot!

Soundwave chimes quietly, "As ordered, I have erased the construct housed at the WELL address 23423/34/234JKP."

"Huh?" I'm not really paying attention ... I just got an excellent shot! I've clipped the target clean through its vital areas, as internal circuitry initiates meltdown, the reactor core reaching critical and overheating. The target jerks spasmodically and lumbers to halt, dropping onto its side with a heavy thunk, smoke pouring out of coolant vents. "Did you see that, Soundwave?" I laugh. I flex my fingers, listening to the faint whine of the servos beneath the polymer coating. "You never lose the touch, it always stays with you..."

"Lord Commander, the construct has been erased." Soundwave states again, insistently.

"Yeah, I heard you. What construct?"

Soundwave's optics flicker mildly. "Twelve time cycles ago, you tapped me a Theta-Omega class dispatch to erase a simulation field in the WELL, which was housed on territory leased to me through my property holdings in the Ring Worlds."

[Buzzsaw, is he making this up ? I have no recollection whatsoever of doing that ...]

[I am afraid not. I am the archivist, I record all things. I have detailed logs of you making the despatch that gave instructions to wipe the Callier Archive.]

Callier Archive? What the hell's that? Paranoia chills me. Buzzsaw won't lie to me, the link's too close for that, but he's only telling me what I've asked for directly. A conspiracy between him and Soundwave? I wouldn't put it past them, even after all these years. So there are some blankspots in my short-term data-core. This is very worrying. I flip my rifle in the air and catch it. Due to this nonchalant but elegant manouvre motion, it just so happens to be pointing right at my fellow High Lord.

"Soundwave, have you obtained access to my datacore with the past week?" I say quietly. I can feel a Mood coming on. I want to crush my hands around his throat. Patience, I tell myself. Patience.

"Negative, Lord Commander. The only ones with such power would be either your remote component, Buzzsaw, any WELL Core with Omega-Omega access or..."

"Or what?" I snap, ruling out Buzzsaw (he couldn't do that without me being aware of it) or the WELL (I don't trust them, sure, but I never link in at Omega-Omega access without the correct precautions).

Soundwave hesitates. "Or yourself, Lord Commander."

"That's crazy," I blurt at him angrily. "For what reason would I screw around with my head? Huh?"

Soundwave stares at me, silently, gently tilting his line-of-sight towards the ground, avoiding any further comments.

I stick a finger towards him. "I'll check up on this. Expect to hear from me soon." I stalk out of the training room, leaving the training drone a smoking heap of fused metal. It twitches. And Soundwave ...

He watches me go, a glare of reflected light slanting down across his optical visor that I would swear is sadness if I didn't know better. Which I do. I am Starscream, Lord Commander of Andraxus, and dull Soundwave who holds the deadwater Ring Worlds would stare at me with respect, I think, if he were to show anything at all. I'm sure he's quite loose, less formal around the others. But to me he's always pointedly formal, each sentence measured and exact. I'm not sure what to make of it. Let's face it, I don't like the dull bastard.

5.

Up from the training room, jerking ahead as the doors iris shut behind me, jetting up two floors through an access vent, gliding down an open corridor, cutting to the left, up a flight of stairs to my private chambers. Everything is plated with the typical grey, non-reflective metal; walls, ceilings, corridors. But red-rock murals have been cut into the floors in abstract patterns and projected holographs from the, ahem, 'official version' of our glorious past glitter in small niches. And in these higher chambers, a polymer coating lacquers the metallic structure of the regular chambers, passageways and corridors - a black, onyx marble pattern, polished and flickering with reflected light.

Not that I pay attention to any of this, as I lunge through the doors to my chambers, ordering them sealed behind me. Buzzsaw ejects himself from his neural access port, transforming into a stylised representation of a condor, formed of thick geometrical shapes. It's an old form, one that he hasn't changed for ... what? Years, has it really been that long? He glides across the room and settles into a chrome nook that serves as a private perch. I'm not sure what he does over there. He mostly houses old, dull records about temperature change, rainfall, traffic patterns, cloud movements. Why does he do it? Is there some pattern he's trying to crack in the language of mathematics and statistics? Do I really care?

The Mood is building up now. My head, oh my head. I turn on Buzzsaw. "You know anything about what Soundwave just said?" I demand. I'm glad I don't have to make a public appearance today. I couldn't handle it right now.

Buzzsaw pretends to ignore me. I stalk over to his stupid little niche in the wall. "Buzzsaw, what the fuck is going on? Missing memory bits are one thing in an isolated circumstance. But this is like one too many times."

[Let it go.]

"Oh noooo. You don't wiggle out of a question like that so easily."

[Careful! We can't risk the-]

"You're going to tell me, you repulsive little maggot! You're going to tell me!"

[Be careful Starscream. Your immolation is becoming visible-

Huh? Cripes ... my immolation, the manifestation of my ANDRAX oozes from me. Thick bars and tongues of darkness flame out, tendrils flicker everywhere. It looks kind of like I'm being swallowed by a huge shadow. And it burns, yeah it burns like you never felt anything before. I feel it rise up and suck away at the depths of my being. Sweet. Bitter. The taste of death. Such pain, such pain-

And then it cuts out. But at a price, because I can feel the damper sizzle into inactivity. Overload. I'm lying on the floor, gyrating madly. Buzzsaw's ruby gaze meets mine. "It's getting worse, Buzzsaw."

[I know.]

"What happens when I can't control it?"

[Just concentrate. Relax and stay calm. Don't get into extremes of emotions.]

"I've been trying! By the Spires, you know that. I know that. What about the damper? Why did it break?"

[It's already at maximum. We can't risk making it stronger.]

"You're going to have to! Damn you ... I can't let them know, you'll have to protect me from them! They're out there, they're out there - They're out there! I'll have to get the others in-"

[Be calm, Starscream. You must be calm.]

6.

Back to business. I scrape my hands together ... I love that sound. Time to deal with Sting. We've agreed to meet on a supposedly uncharted asteroid. I teleport there a few seconds late to be fashionable. You'd think I'd be daft to risk the ANDRAX with all the problems I've been having but I've got this new souped up damper and I'm feeling cocky and in control. Just remember, Starscream, what the doctor said ... no wild swings in emotion and all of that.

Like most asteroids, this one is rather bleak and boring. I admire the coloured array of the stars. (They were white once, says some floating memory fragment which I suppress savagely. If I have to weird out, it sure as hell won't be in front of Sting.)

"Starscream!" he says, walking towards me. I regard him rather laconically. He's got a flagship here and a small squad of trigger-happy troops. Sting, at his core, is rather insecure. That's why he changes his colours and form every time he wants to set a new trend. This month we're a bright burgandy and green and he's rough outline indicates that he's some kind of fancy Skyhawk. I think he looks like a mad apple tree. [Chunderous] agrees Buzzsaw, who right now is perching on my arm and looking appropriately dramatic.

Our ANDRAXes flare as they say "hi" to each other. Mine coils around my limbs angrily before fading out. Got a problem, Firefoot? I jeer at it. The damper whines and my ANDRAX fades away. Woof. Good boy.

"Nice night," I say conversationally to Sting.

Sting's gaze flicks around. "Did you bring it?"

"Did you?"

Sting nervously points in the corner. Guarded by seven crack troops is what I'm after. I pause down and spend a while in close examination of it, pulling off bugs. "Sting, I did warn you."

Sting shrugs a bit. "It was worth a shot. Now, how about my-"

I pause as I examine part of my cargo. There's a touch of an ANDRAX sense relay. It fizzles as I touch it. "Sting, I don't mind your crap technology on my property because I can find it. However, an ANDRAX relay might damage it. You really don't want to rile me."

Sting looks surprised. I swear its genuine. "Relay? C'mon, you know I'm not much good with all this ANDRAX stuff-"

I snuff the relay. Before I do so, I let it sense Sting's presence, nervous and panicking.

"Scrap! He found out! Somehow, he found out and he's traced it to here!"

"That's your problem." I snap testily. I begin to summon the energy for the teleport back to the Spires.

"Do you know how much trouble that was to get out of the Strip? You've ruined me. I swear, I don't know how, but Ashraker's traced me." His optics flicker wildly.

"You claimed to be the one who get anything from anywhere. I asked you to get this for me from Ashraker's care. You agreed, it was a fair exchange. Technically, Ashraker took this from a location on one of ASWP's worlds, Khalhier, from the city beneath the ice. That technology, that world and this, er, item are mine. Don't blather. It's too late to renege."

Sting rounds on me. "Fair exchange? Where's-"

"Over there," I point to an object off in the distance. It'd been here all along and Sting wasn't looking. Heh. As I fade away with what I came for, I can see Sting finally regarding this object that he sacrificed his ties with Ashraker to get. I guess it doesn't look much. I acquired it off Thunderwing when we repossessed the Strip after the Civil War. It's small box containing a datacore, with the occupant's facial features pressed against the molded metal container. It's what T-Wing called the Warpfold Petrification Process. I guess it's the closest thing our race has to the concept of "eternal torment" ... you use your ANDRAX to trap the subject in a localised field, so they're ripped between time and reality. Their thoughts are bifurcated and layered atop each other, again and again. You induce a few dream trips and they're locked in a maze of mad thought, again and again.

Eternal torment. Whee.

In Sting's hands, the remnants of Swindle moan. Sting howls as he feels the reverberations of his old mentor's torment through his ANDRAX.

I just love happy reunions.

7.

I'm back in the Spires, having placed my "cargo" in a room of his own with all the latest refreshments. Ravage, secret head of the Enforcement Executive, regards me doubtfully from the shadows. "Great Lord, it is not wise to keep such a prisoner."

I sprawl back on my lounge. "He's not a prisoner, he's a guest. Get used to it, Ravage. Give me that report you had on Raindance's behaviour."

Ravage's eyes flare redly. "I believe that with your, how shall we say it? With your recent "performance" in the Senate, your rather insecure ally may be looking elsewhere to place his allegiances. Already he has had several meetings with Ashraker-"

What the fuck is going on here? What "performance" in the Senate? Why the hell would Raindance, of all people, chat to Ashraker?

[He hasn't really been the same since we sent him off to Khalhier.] Buzzsaw suggests.

[Time travel'll do that to a man.] I snap rather drolly. I phase back in to hear Ravage suggesting, "I believe now is the time to use what Thunderwing discovered and-"

Holy shit. "Ravage, run that by me again?"

He coughs demurely. "You do know what I refer to?"

I get up and blast the stupid shadow with a bolt of fire. He's thrown back against the far wall of the chamber. "The trick that kills ANDRAXes? Oh yeah, Thunderwing discovered it alright. And it sent him mad, it killed him and sent the entire Empire to a screeching halt. Get out, get out Ravage!"

Ravage looks startled. "But in our earlier discussion you were strongly pushing for-"

"GET OUT!" I screech at him. Ravage obligingly melts away.

I just sit there and radiate tenseness. What earlier meeting? What is going on here?

My ANDRAX flickers, crippled though it is, and transmits a sense of overwhelming doom to me. It implies that we don't have much time left. And then the damper cuts in before I can get more information. I smash my favourite sculpture. Feeling better, I sit their simmering.

Crunch time, Starscream. Face the truth. You can't trust your memory, your ANDRAX is killing you, your so-called friends are engaged in a vast conspiracy against you and to top the whole bloody lot off, you strongly suspect you're going mad. Or worse.

But somehow I'll get to the bottom of this. Even if it kills me.

8.

In the ornate guest room, the one-time Autobot Commander glowers at me.

"That's no way to look at your benefactor," I remark to him. "I went through a lot of effort to get you from Ashraker. Who in turn had been watching that stupid relay for years and years, carrying on the practice from his late master. That place on Slag's world is what we call a "hot commodity." Sooner or later something had to come back through the time relay. From the other side. You're just lucky I got you out of the Strip before Ashraker could put any kind of plan into motion. I know he's got some scheme, but how you'd fit into it is a mystery at this point. Let's just say it wouldn't be pleasant."

He appears to collect himself, "What year is it?" He demands.

I shrug, "Well, there are a lot of ways at looking at it. It's 100 787 AF."

"That means nothing to me," he spits.

"It's about the 102^nd Century. AD. Or 8909 GrandCycles of the Cybertronian Clock. Convert that into breems or vorns or whatever inane measurement your people used."

He looks rather aghast, "That far?"

"What don't you sit down and discussed this in a civilised fashion?" I suggest delicately.

"I'm sick of playing your sick Decepticon games, Starscream. I came here to save the Autobots. And that's exactly what I'm going to do." He looks the way I remember him, determined, stalwart. Heheheh. "Firstly, you're going to tell me what the hell you're doing here before I make any decision, Rodimus." I tell him squarely.

"Hot Rod," He says simply, curbing his anger. "I don't have the Matrix anymore."

"Rodimus," I say, drawing out the name.

He says nothing but moves to stare out the window. At the Spires, out of all of Andraxus, at the passing flyers and skimmers and the glare of lights flaring and at the distant smog of Andraxus Minor. "I don't get any choice, do I?" he asks bitterly.

I lean back against the door. While I pretend to be looking elsewhere, he attacks me, striking a blow to rupture a fuel connection. Only my ANDRAX flares up, black light barring the contact (again, that damned damper whines) and Rodimus is thrown across the room.

"What the-??" He staggers over the floor. He looks at me as though seeing me again for the first time: different, alien.

"I want to know how you got there." I tell him. I make sure he hears the threat.

Rodimus tilts his head to one side. "If you really want. I'm from Cybertron. What's left of it. You betrayed us, at the end of the War. We had a deal ... you'd go off and build your stupid Empire and leave Cybertron out of it."

"And so I did," I remind him.

Rodimus flares with anger. "You did not. You raped Cybertron of all energon, every possible resource. You took all the scientists, all the technicians and builders. There was only a gutted shell."

"The price of war." I state to him. "I'm sure you Autobots would have bounced back. You always seem to do."

Rodimus clenches his fists. "We were going to make contact with the others stranded on Earth. No communications, nothing. But we had the old Chronosphere relay."

"Ah."

"I put Grimlock in charge. I said to all the Council, "Someone has to try something. We need help. We're running of energy and resources. We need those with knowledge. We have to find out what happened to Earth. We know how to use the relay. We just don't know where it goes. I propose that we try it." It was an enormous responsibility..."

"Pshaw. So reading between the lines, you tired of leading your people after an exciting period of war through a very dull process of rebuilding and reconstruction. You craved excitement. Adventure. The peace time was killing you. So you decided to split and wander through the vagaries of time and space."

He said quietly, "You don't understand real sacrifice, Starscream."

"Don't I? Do you know what this city has cost me? Do you know what sacrifices I've had to make to get this place running, to keep it socially stable, to keep everything so that it doesn't tear itself apart like a wolf ripping out its own entrails?" I round on him, suddenly angry, and my ANDRAX flickers gently. I force calmness upon myself. I certainly can't afford to trigger another relapse.

I laugh bitterly. "You should have stayed on Cybertron. With your own kind. Didn't you teach me that? The importance of being with your own kind?"

Rodimus tenses, "I was looking for my own kind. The lost ones. The ones on Earth."

"Well, you saw Earth. Not much now, eh?"

Rodimus cocks his head to one side. "What?"

"The Chronosphere was a folly to use. How you survived the jump here I'll never know."

Rodimus' tone gives something away. "Hmm, you made multiple jumps to get here? Well, well. What fantastic adventures you must have had," I hiss softly.

I stare at him bitterly, "And then when you got here and found the city buried under tonnes of rock you tried to jump again and again- Causing a huge energy spike that Ashraker's monitor picked up and traced. They found you and took you to the Strip."

Rodimus mutters, "The Chronosphere was broken. I kept leaping and nothing happened. Then those bastard troopers came out of nowhere."

I laugh again. "It works perfectly. Too perfectly. You came to Andraxus."

"What do you mean?" His gaze is like acid, eating me away.

"This is Andraxus. This is the end of time, this is the ultimate future. There is no further point. Only Andraxus itself. All the paths of time lead here."

Rodimus folds his arms, regards me coldly. "What are you babbling about?"

"It might take a while to explain. Depends if you're up to it or not." This is fun ... he's confused, aching, mad. Not sure what to do. Heh.

"I guess I can spare you some moments from my busy schedule," Rodimus says dully, again staring out of his window. What must it look like to eyes that have never seen this city before? To gaze upon Andraxus for the first time, after only seeing the war-torn halls of cold Cybertron?

"Would you like me to order you a drink?"

"Just start. Somewhere. Anywhere." He says tonelessly, grinding his fists together rather impatiently.

I cough politely, "Very well. It was all your fault."

"What?" He's growing mad now. Good, good.

"You were sick of the war, sick of how it dragged on endlessly. Sick of watching everyone die around you. Springer, Magnus- So when the scientists found that alien artefact, you gave permission to use to it."

Rodimus clenches his hands together, "We didn't know what it did. Only that it worked."

"Yeah. So that technician of yours had some idea of how the thing he'd found worked. He thought it was a weapon."

"Circuitsplicer. Circuitsplicer did his damn best to save us all."

"So you constructed the Carnabots? To implement this weapon?"

Rodimus' eyes flash, "I had to go back to Earth to hold the front there. Circuitsplicer led the project. The project was important. It gave us hope and motivation."

"Your last "heroes" ... the Carnabots. Some idiotic Terran-based design which I understand was all the rage. I think Circuitsplicer wanted to mimic the Predacons, I'm not sure. Hmm, I think they also tried to focus on the neo-Paleolithic time period, too. There was Hunter, a dire wolf; Fury, the sabre-tooth; Howler, the cave-hyena; Carnage, the mammoth; Havoc, the hawk and the odd one out, Devourer. I actually stuck a statue of Devourer in the Hall of Remembrance, do you know that? For his "contribution.""

"Howler," Rodimus sighed. "We had problems with Howler-. He went wild after the Carnabots first seperated, after having become Carnavorus for the first time. There was some argument; Devourer shot him. I couldn't get rid of Devourer then; perhaps I should have done. But we needed the body of Carnavorus more than his left arm so I accepted Devourer's actions-."

"Gah," I sahd. "Devourer wasn't- real. He didn't even have a datacore. He had that alien artefact instead. What my people call 'the Matrix', in honour (or perhaps parody?) of Prime's old one. The artefact that was primed to carry out Circuitsplicer's wish, to destroy every Decepticon in existence. Devourer lead the purge. That techno-virus that killed everything on Nebulos. Devourer had the tachyon cannon that wiped out all of my people on Cybertron. Devourer controlled Carnavorus, the gestalt, the bloody thing as big as Trypticon that hunted us down on Earth."

Rodimus stared, "We couldn't call them off, once it started. The alien device ... we didn't know what it would do."

"I've had a lot of experience with it, myself. It does what you want it to do. All the way. So Circuitsplicer, holding it up, putting it at the core of this new gestalt team ... he was no doubt thinking of how to end the war. To kill the Decepticons, every last one. And that's what the artefact thought it had to do."

"Look, you don't know how sorry I am. We just couldn't stop it. I went back to Cybertron, to get Circuitsplicer but he'd detonated his own datacore. I lost some good people fighting Carnavorus!" He folds his arms again. Distant, remembering. "I lost my friends-" he says, voice trailing off. Dead faces flash before him. The guilt rises, overwhelming him. The final war on Cybertron, on earth. The great reptilian juggernaut crushing down, destroying. The united effort to stop it that ultimately failed-

Because the Carnabots snapped finally. They were Autobots after all. Just very young ones, idealistic ones who believed the mad words of deranged Circuitsplicer, who let themselves be dominated by Devourer. When Hunter realised that they were killing their own people, he had to turn on his own teammates. He tried to get them to rise against Devourer. They'd won, but at a cost ... there was only the wolf left. Left to take the alien device and either destroy it or pass it on. He'd traveled from the site of the last battle, seeking someone who'd take it from him. He couldn't destroy it, he couldn't use it. All he could do was carry it around in the hope that something good would emerge from it, good for all the wrong he'd done. Now, you're probably wondering what I was doing when all this mess was going on, right?

I was hiding. Hiding, you scoff? We all were. We'd formed an alliance against Carnavorus. When the war was over, we were trying to work out what to do. Would we stay on Cybertron and finish off the Great War? Would we try and rebuild from the ashes? I was leading the Decepticons at the time, well sort of. It was more like a mess of splinter groups, lots of people trying to take control and trying to resolve this issue while we were trying to resolve things with the Autobots. The "kill 'em all" idea was in favour, but it wasn't viable. Not enough firepower, resources whatever. Anyway, Hunter turns up during a big debate where we were all yelling at each other - Prowl wanted to settle a new city, some idiots in both factions thought we could all merge together and be one big happy race again. Hunter, the last Carnabot rocks up to this meeting, holding the alien artefact thingy and tries to give it away. Could you believe that? No one wanted it, we all wanted to kill Hunter because of what Carnavorus had been. Anyway, I was watching all this from the sidelines, watching this chaotic mess and - I made a joke. At Hunter. One those bad witticisms I was fond off. Still am.

Ahem. Anyway, he got incredibly ticked off. "You bastard!" he screeched, or something along those lines. It was one of those jokes that make people want to throw things at you. I was trying to sneak back to the safety of the Decepticon faction, and Hunter, tired and beyond hope, rejected by his own people when all he wanted to was come home and try and sort out the mess his people had caused-

Hunter wanted to throw something at me. Which unfortunately happened to be the nearest thing close to hand, which was the alien artefact thingy, hereafter known as the Decepticon Matrix of Something Incredibly Important. I think I settled on the "Matrix of Power" afterwards.

Anyway, it sconed me in the back, I fell over, comatose, and the last thing I heard was a resounding cheer from those bloody Autobots.

You can see why I changed the official history.

Let me continue this interlude for a trifle longer. When I first held the Matrix I had a vision and it surpassed everything. It entered me. I ... I ... spun through time and space, out of control, in chaos, into life and out of it, following the birth of my species, its growth and fall. It was the Ascension, which no doubt I'll relate elsewhere, some other time, yes. The story of Carnavorus, its rise and fall, the final war on Cybertron, the destruction of the Terran solar system... The story of the Makers. The story of the WELL.

The last Autobot destroys my chain of thought. "What-" Rodimus began, "What was the cube?"

"You never knew?"

"I knew it was some sort of alien device but were never sure exactly-"

I sigh. Out of ignorance and stupidity came genocide and from that violence Andraxus was formed. "I've always wanted to tell someone this," I tell him.

[Other than me you mean?]
[Shut up, bird.]

I lean forward, "The secrets of Andraxus, Rodimus. That's what I'm about to tell you. So shut up and listen. Again." Like it matters, like it doesn't matter.

"Once upon a time," I began, "There was an alien race whose technology bordered on the limits of imagination. They were highly evolved, or at least they had reached a stage of evolution where they had the option of being creatures of pure mental energy. They existed in the pre-dawn of the universe, constructed vast artifacts, towering, inexplicable cities and moved on. And they created and processed other, animal races: silicon, carbon, sulphur - they raised them in vats and created lush worlds and environments for them ... And then they moved on. But so their children could someday later join them, they constructed a gateway. An evolutionary shortcut. An artefact that looked like a small, black cube. Leaving this, their final legacy behind, the Dechthroi moved on and transcended.

"The cube was inherited by the Alechthroi, the Dechthroi's genetic descendants and most favoured progeny. But they abused the potentials of their Dechthroi heritage. Rather than joining in the cosmic harmony with their forefathers, they squandered their power and plundered the universe."

"I'm sure you have a lot in common with them," says Rodimus dryly.

"Well yes. More than you think. See, the Dechthroi couldn't bring themselves to destroy the Alechthroi. So they built a trap. They made the cube into a prison, where the Alechthroi would be held in status, unable to achieve the next phase of their development. Where they'd have time to reflect on their mistakes and learn. But being a static prison, how would you show they you'd ascended? That you'd really learned? How did you speak to your jailers when they were in another phase of existence?

"The Alechthroi changed. All of them, trapped in the cube. They became a passive, merged consciousness. But they'd failed. They'd lost their drive, their individuality. Trapped in status, they were unable to achieve the conditions of their release. They could only communicate and perceive things empathetically. They're like plants really, that's the best way to comprehend them. And so the cube passed from hand to hand, and the Alechthroi tried to communicate and make the cube's bearer understand what they wanted. But they never succeeded.

"Aeons later, Circuitsplicer found the cube. All the Alechthroi could perceive from him was this tangled mess of desires and hates. Circuitsplicer's fervent belief was that if the Decepticons were destroyed, everything would be better. That was all the Alechthroi understood. So they created Devourer, the ultimate executioner, for him. But Circuitsplicer saw what a monster his creation was. He self-terminated, leaving the Alechthroi without a conduit. See, they don't talk with everybody. Just those they find interesting. This happens rarely- They tried to help Circuitsplicer, tried to sort out the tangled mess he'd become. But being alien and many generations removed, all they could sense was his desire-

"When the cube interfaced with me, I didn't make a wish. I wasn't that I didn't want anything, it was because I didn't believe in it. I didn't believe in a stupid cube that granted wishes ... I thought it was a sick, cosmic joke. I laughed at it. I asked it questions, about what the cube was and what it did. And it told me. Apparently the cube is a prison for the Alechthroi, who had been rendered passive by their containment. They're like plants, energy plants. And being like plants, they communicate on an empathetic level. That's why when someone held the cube before, all the Alechthroi could sense was that other person's desire. They thought they were being communicated with and responded by granting the person's "wish." So when Circuitsplicer found the cube and wished for no more Decepticons, they created Devourer. The technology behind Carnavorus. But when I talked with them, I, who had no desires apart from knowledge of the cube, there was still a bit of the original Alechthroi left. They wanted to be individuals again. They wanted another chance. So we made a bargain."

"I offered them myself. I offered them the Decepticons. They would- unite with us to form a new race. Alechthroi aNd Decepticon Racially Allied Xenomorph, ANDRAX. So how it works is this, the host gets the Alechthroi's powers and energy, and they get our personality and passion. Desires. They get to live again. But they only unite with those they find "interesting" ... there's really no other way to explain it. Unfortunately, when they scan people, especially transformers, it's kind of destructive to the master programs. You either gain the ANDRAX union or become something like a walking zombie."

"Anyway, the Dechthroi , the elder race, somehow heard this bargain and appeared. They didn't want the Alechthroi released again. I told them that if they think that meant sticking all the Decepticons in a cube so we'd become a unified consciousness, then they weren't worthy of having power over us. They weren't worthy of having power at all. I said I was the first ANDRAX, and others would come and we'd learn again and we'd grow-

I sigh and look downwards. "They said that we, the Decepticons, were very 'young' as a race and that they couldn't justify giving us freedom. I said we were a race if individuals, that if they merged with us with each other in a vegetable soup, like they'd done with the Alechthroi, they'd be committing genocide. So they-" I look out the window. At the Spires of Andraxus and the glorious, forbidden stars beyond it all.

"They what?" Rodimus snaps at me.

"They placed the Barrier around the solar system," I tell him. "The entire Empire of Andraxus is trapped in this solar system. I've done experiments, I've sent ships, I've done warp drives, I've killed thousands trying to get past it but nothing has worked so far-"

"Is this 'Barrier' an energy field or what?"

"I don't know. You can't see it, but you can crash into it. It destroys ships, reflects them back- You can feel it and you can't get past it. It can't be analysed very well- And if my people knew that there were trapped in this stupid solar system it would drive them mad. So I made everything up for them. I made up 'aliens' in my genetic research labs on Khalhier, I've sent fleets of ships into space and there they've conquered other races and civilisations, still unaware they were in this big stim construct in the WELL. I've dickered with people's minds, I've shot down the explorer ships of rival factions. The WELL has these 'Dark Ages' of civilisation now and then to rest things should people get too close to the Barrier's edge. But I can't keep doing this forever. People are going to find out very soon. The WELL wants another dark age but I can't risk that again. Not when the cost of the last one was so terrible-"

I jump forward and seize Rodimus by the shoulders. "You're going to have to help me!" I tell him urgently. "You're our last hope. My people need to expand, we need an outlet for that pent up rage. In keeping to those principles, in staying a "race of warlike individuals" I've learned that we can't keep a stable society in a closed system. We have civil wars, coups, dark ages, sports such as star diving and pitfighting and it can't go on for much longer. I have this- feeling, yes, we'll call it a feeling- this feeling that the Dechthroi are coming back to judge as again! They'll either lift the Barrier or keep us trapped here together. And they'll find that we haven't matured as species at all! Three of us are dead-" Cyclonus, Mindwipe, Thunderwing.

"Rodimus, they'll find an unstable social system about to collapse on itself, a race that's expanded to the point where it's unable to sustain itself in its limited environment and a growing desire amongst the people for warfare. See, they prize individuality. Freedom. What Thunderwing wanted would have spelled the end of our socialist democracy back to the old times ... it would have been ordered but stagnant. We were made to grow, to explore and to expand!"

"Uh, what do want me to do?"

"I want your help. You believe in this stuff ... freedom, individuality. I want you to speak to the Dechthroi when the come and help me in the debate." I link my hands together. After all, he owes me a great deal and he's always been good in a debate. If anyone can convince the Dechthroi to lift the Barrier, it's Rodimus.

But instead at he just stares at me and starts to laugh madly. He laughs forever. And then he meets me in the eye. "Absolutely not! Unleash a whole race of superpowered Decepticons on the unsuspecting universe? Who do you take me for, Starscream?"

"But we've changed. Anyway, there's not a whole race of Decepticons with ANDRAXes. There's only the nine of us. The Alechthroi are picky about who they bond with. See, when you touch the Matrix, you interface with it. If you don't bond with it, it'll wipe your master programs in the process of scanning you. ANDRAX are tricky things. And see, we've socially evolved. We've got technology. We've learned how to produce stuff, to trade. We've channeled our aggression into sporting events. Into politics and research."

Rodimus wearily pointed to the viewer on the wall. "Yeah, I saw some of that. This stupid TV's supposed to make me impressed about your culture, right? What's sunrunning?"

"Oh yeah, that's where you race around the Sun, getting in as close as possible."

"Ten people died doing it!"

"Hmm? It happens all the time. See, it's the competitive spirit we've fostered. We're winners."

"PitFighting? Where you try and kill your opponent in an arena using clubs and spears? Eighteen political assassinations in the evening news? The Philosophy of the Master Race? Commercials for racial purity ... 'kill organics!' Vote for the Foundation Party!"

"Can't you see it? It's Andraxus! All of it is Andraxus! We've evolved now ... can't you see it?"

"Starscream, I don't know how to put this, but you're the most self-deluded individual I've ever met. You've accomplished nothing - you're still Decepticons! There's been no "evolution" taking place! Frankly, your aliens are going to get here, see that you've done nothing, and thankfully leave the Barrier in place."

I nod. I'd expected as much. "Then you can just do what we do here in Andraxus." I say bitterly, turning to leave.

"What's that?" he calls out angrily.

"Sit and rot!" I scream at him and then I run outside and the doors iris shut behind me.

9.

Time to get out and visit some people. Buzzsaw keeps going about how "different" Raindance is lately and it might behoove me to check up on him. Alright, alright ... I'm suspicious of him. He's meeting with Ashraker behind my back. No idea why, but it's part of one more conspiracy I don't need.

I find Raindance in his offices at the Finance Executive's HQ. He's just finishing off the budget for the AGM.

"Raindance," I say softly, wincing as the damper whines again. In my head, the sound of screeching nails and teeth and digitised howls. Despite all of this, my ANDRAX flickers up in response to Raindance. "There is danger-" it whispers hollowly to me before fading away. I find the damper's steady hum soothing. Calm. I'm going to be calm.

Raindance, for his part, stares at me. Nervously. Guiltily. "So what can I do for you?"

"Nothing much. Just thought I'd drop by for a chat. How's the budget?"

"Yeah, it's fine. Listen Starscream, I can't afford to take any more time off. I've got to redo some bits of information and stuff."

An icy pause.

"Raindance, do you think we have a stultifying culture?"

"Haven't we been though this before?"

"But do you?" I persist.

"I think Andraxus is fine. You worry too much about this place."

"Mmm," I look around the room. "What's the most powerful Executive?"

"Huh? You're certainly in a weird mood. Finance, obviously."

"Wrong! Guess again."

"Enforcement?"

"No!" I lean forward and whisper to him "Leisure and Recreation."

"Okay, I see-"

"No you don't, you don't see. If you control the entertainment, if you control the mass media you can control the world. You can tell people what to think and they'll think it. They'll believe exactly what you want them to believe-" I lean back, "If it was Enforcement, we'd be back in the old military culture days. Decepticon days. If it was Finance ... Raindance, how dearly I would love it to be Finance ... we could trade between the stars-"

"But we already to do-" he insists.

"Oh- yes," I say. I look confused for a bit. What did I mean to say to him, before I came here?

The WELL! The WELL! screams Raindance's ANDRAX at me.

"Oh yes, I wanted to tell you, tell you all about it all. Heh, heh. Fake wars, sims, biocreated aliens - Had to keep the secret you see. I made a bargain with the WELL and they're going to betray me- It's a good night for telling secrets, you see-"

Raindance's stares at me. He seems terrified. "Sweet Andraxus, not again. Starscream, you're going mad again!"

"No, I'm not. Do I look mad now ? That was neural damage I suffered due to Thunderwing's attacks and my subsequent reconstruction. Raindance, I'm fine now-" I tap my head quickly. "But I have to warn- my friends- before they, before they- They make me do things, but I'm cleverer than they are, oh yes-" Think straight, Starscream! "I have to warn you about-"

"Ashraker?"

"No- them, there's lots of them down there, but in the end there's just him, I killed him, yes, I killed him- Do you understand Raindance?"

"Uh, yes." He sits back and looks composed. I haven't a clue what I've just said, but I hope I said enough-

I stagger out of his chambers and reappear in my rooms. My head hurts, so much. The damper whines painfully.

I remember Raindance being proud of his name. It had a long military history. One warrior had won it off some Autobot and then it was won back and then that unit was massacred and some other fellow won it. It rang of old martial pride and conquests, old glories dead before their time and pain screams and destruction. Raindance was an accountant and he had never handled a weapon in his life before. He won his name by default when the other competitors in the war games were exposed as Five Strike agents. Raindance was proud of that name until someone told him it had originally come from stupid Autobot cassette that had died in a single shot That hadn't been me, had it? Surely it hadn't been me. I-.

Time passes.

"Lord, what are we going to do with the Autobot ?"

"Uh ... " Hard to think. Pulse in my head, building up. Cybertron falling, objects glittering ...

"Lord, we cannot keep him here. The populace believes you have killed all the Autobots, to hold one in their midst could possibly insight revolution. And you cannot send him back through the gate with the knowledge he now holds."

"He was my friend, Ravage. Did you ever have any friends, like with Buzzsaw and Ratbat everyone ?"

"Lord, the past is past. It is the future we must concern ourselves with. Your ministers believe the Autobot the cause of your recent ... regression. They do not want another 'unstable' Lord Commander."

"Yes-"

"In the end, my lord, we must do what is best for Andraxus."

"Yes-"

"I shall do it myself, my lord."

"Ravage ..." I call out after him.

The sleek, black creature turns and looks at me, optics glittering with a hellfire light in the darkness.

"Do it quickly."

Ravage nods smoothly. " Your will is my directive, Lord Commander."

10.

Stupid ANDRAX, can't you keep quiet?

I dig my hands into my head trying to remove that stupid damper I installed. Hang on, that I installed? When did I do it? Why?

[Starscream]

"Buzzsaw?"

[I am sorry I have been absent for so long, but we are going to have to move fast.]

"Get this damper off me." Scrabble, scrabble.

Peck, peck. [It seems to be welded right down your metaprocessing functions. I think this is why you forget.] Peck, peck. [I can't get it out.]

"Aaah!" My hands double over as my ANDRAX suddenly flares up, rushing into every part of my system. Information dances along its strings of black light and is gone again as the damper sizzles and burns. Two forces, the volatile interaction between them driving me mad and mad-

[I have summoned Soundwave]

"Ack! Why him?" Such pain and these strange thought images trying to surface, like icebergs rising up from below a black sea.

[He did this last time.]

"Last time???" I stagger to my feet. I'm on top of the Spires for some reason, looking down. I feel a little bewildered. And then I see Grim Conqueror falling out the sky and then Grand Clang and then Far Star- All of the flagships of the Highlords of Andraxus, converging here on my city. What's going on? And then the ANDRAX jumps ... but I did not order it to do so-

11.

"Awaken, Starscream."

I get up. I feel - a little different. More together. I find that I'm in one of Soundwave's chambers on the Ring Worlds and that I have been, until recently, spread out across one of those flat metal examination tables. Buzzsaw is perched on the end of the table pecking at these ugly bits of scrap, twisted metal. Thousands of little wires spike off them, flicking back and forth like the tendrils of sea anemones. "So, all of the damper is out?" I demand.

"Yes," Soundwave says. "But your ANDRAX is very weak at the moment. It will need time to recover before it can repair the damage that the damper did."

"I'm missing time," I say, still staring at the damper circuitry as it twitched backwards and forwards. "What the hell happened?"

Soundwave sighed. "When your ordered me to remove some of your memories, to enable you to 'function better', as you suggested, the ANDRAX endeavoured to restore those memories. The resulting conflict was between the psychological denial of your past , your determination to forget it utterly and the attempts of the ANDRAX to restore you. I had arranged a damper to suppress your ANDRAX , but this has proven to be ineffective. It now seems better to me that you live with those memories rather than try to erase them, as you have done many times in the past."

I stare at Soundwave. "What memories? What was I trying to deny? It seems I went to an extraordinary amount of effort, almost killing myself in the process to forget this- thing."

Soundwave hesitates. "You were once human."

I go ballistic and lunge at Soundwave from across the table, "It's all lies! Nothing but filthy lies!" I scream at him.

"Look at your reaction, Starscream. Unless you master this instability, it will destroy you."

Don't trust him!

"I ordered you to keep that - memory from me? Did the order come from just me?" My ANDRAX crackles over my body, defensively.

"It made you unstable," Soundwave says calmly. "It was decided that we had to keep the truth from you. The WELL devised the damper and suggested to me that we incorporate it into your being."

"I was a fucking human?" I slam Soundwave against the wall. His optical visor shivers and cracks beneath my fingers. "Lies!" I scream at him. "You're lying!" I get my ANDRAX to interface with Soundwave's own, absorbing it , destroying it-

Thunderwing says: I know what you are, "Starscream". You've been living a lie, playing a joke all these years, mocking the foundations of Decepticon -

"Piss off." I tell Soundwave's ANDRAX. "If you want to know what's good for you."

I will protect my host.

"No you don't. See, remember the Great Death?"

[IMAGE: Thunderwing burning, Mindwipe exploding, Cyclonus smashing into Ceres.]

"Yup. They all died! They all died!"

I will endure a small amount of pain in order to save my host.

My own ANDRAX flares and Soundwave's ANDRAX slides away.

"Goooood- Is he out of the way, Firefoot?"

Only for a little while. Make this quick.

I leap forward into Soundwave, sliding past all of his barriers. Soundwave has no personality- and neither does his ANDRAX! Talk about my plant metaphor - Soundwave is like a tree, coiled and passive and calm and growing. I discover that he is closely linked into the WELL, like a tree fed by their waters. And I learn that he is one of those conspiring to bring about the second Dark Age of Andraxus, to destroy the social system, to bring everything down around us.

Soundwave crackles. Like static electricity going off. Absently, I discover that I've hooked my thumb into his optical capacitor. My ANDRAX flames with black poison and I let my adversary fall to floor with an interesting clang.

. I leer at Soundwave, "What did they promise you with? You guys want to destroy Andraxus!!" I scream at him. "Destroy everything I've ever done!"

"It is necessary." Soundwave says slowly. "The social system will collapse shortly. We have to act to preserve our culture. The expansion into space is not working, we do not know why. Something has to be done."

I dig into his memories, the dreams he receives from the WELL. Horrible, naked truths dance before me. When I speak to Soundwave I speak to the WELL itself. "You sick bastards! You set me up! You set Thunderwing against me! Who really runs Andraxus?"

"Your fits, your madness ... we've tried to keep them secret for as long as we could. But eventually they leak out. The public has lost faith in you. They fear you. You are unacceptable in your current position," Soundwave's ANDRAX squirms against mine.

"We are proposing a new Lord Commander," Soundwave is forced to tell me. "Raindance-"

"Raindance?" My accountant, my second, my so-called friend?

"Raindance is stable, easily manipulated. He is also your clone-"

"Physically. I just wanted another Seeker to hang around with-" I mutter at him, but he's not listening. Instead I reach down into the deep roots of Soundwave's mind and take something from there. I leave him there on the ground, his optics cracked and broken from my thumbs. His ANDRAX flares weakly around him.

I have to leave, I have to do something. The WELL's wrong. A second Dark Age is not going to be the answer to our problems. I teleport back to my secured chambers in Andraxus, knowing that time is important that it's running out very quickly.

I play back the nugget of information I stole from Soundwave.

It is terrifying to me.

The one point we all agree on is that Andraxus must endure.

My next point questions to the importance of the Lord Commander to Andraxus. The "Lord Commander" serves as an important figurehead in maintaining social stability. He is seen as the ultimate ruler of Andraxus, serving as both elected head of Empire and the political descendant of the old Decepticon autocratic military government. I am in full agreement that the position must be maintained. But the mental status of Starscream, the first and current Lord Commander is in serious jeopardy. As you know, Starscream has a complex psychological neurosis that could be colloquially-termed "a split personality." The mental conflict between

1. the pre-ANDRAX transferred organic matrix persona
2. the post-ANDRAX united persona

has led to Starscream's current psychosis (refer Report 3)

Despite the last maintenance (refer Report 4) in which we attempted to resolve the mental conflict by wiping and reinstalling a new personality matrix, instability as reoccurred. I hypothesize that the human personality encoded on the ANDRAX is rejecting the engrams we are trying to insert.

As an icon, it is imperative that we keep "Starscream" functioning. The attempt to replace Starscream with Thunderwing failed due to the latter subject's non-cooperative elements. During Shockwave's study (refer Report 7), we confirmed that the ANDRAX bond best with organic-type mental lattices. This conclusion was made after a study of the only two available subjects

1. Starscream (cf. Report 9. Only survivor of the pre-Foundation human/transformer transference project)
2. Mindwipe (cf. Report 10. Only survivor of the 'Headmaster' process - human brain acting as replacement metaprocessor)

serves as explanation why the above individuals have had much greater ANDRAX potential than other

subjects of study (Sting, Raindance, Slag, Soundwave, Ashraker).

The project on Khalhier has created workable human tissue, leading to the suggestion of creating a series of 'cyborg' Transformers to serve as the next wave of ANDRAX test subjects. (Refer Proposal 11. 'PowerMaster' Transformers Series IV)

With regards to Starscream, I am left with three options:

1. Terminate the remaining traces of the human personality and reinstall an integrated WELL-crafted personality.

PROBLEMS: ANDRAX consistently rejects our attempts to remove all organic engrams. Therefore we have instructed the subject to wear an electronic damper that shields the datacore from ANDRAX-emissions in preparation to another wipe. During previous wipes, it was noted that while all organic engrams were removed, they gradually reappear, suggesting that the subject's ANDRAX must contain another copy of this information that it keeps rewriting to the core. However, I have high hopes that the new damper, which is subtly destroying the ANDRAX/host linkage (refer THUNDERWING PROJECT) will cause permanent damage, making the next scheduled wipe more efficient.

b) Remove restraining engrams so that the human personality can fully reassert itself?

PROBLEMS: Most of the conservative element in the WELL is emphatic that no organic construct will rule Andraxus. My previous experience with the human personality shows that it is stable, shrewd and efficient. However, the personality loathes its former organic state and begins to break down when old memories/data reassert themselves. Refer the following files for a summary of three key events when this occurred [Datasquirt] No future ANDRAX-related problems. During an observation period, it kept a construct of various Terran military officials for study. (Refer Report 15 ... "David Callier" Project.) This option is therefore not recommended.

1. Reinstall original Starscream personality ... I suspect as it is native to the subject that there will be no ANDRAX rejection. However this personality is unstable and will be inefficient for co-ordinating the Empire.

At this stage, the most viable solutions that present themselves are to reintegrate the main personalities or to opt for the Overmind's preferred plan, which is termination of the subject.

I stagger around listlessly. "I'm unstable, I have human engrams floating around in my head and my datacore's been hacked so often I don't even have complete recollection of events- And they've used me, all of those years." I can't think straight anymore.

"What was I, Buzzsaw? Tell me, tell me?"

[My cuckoo's egg.]

"You're their WELL connection, are you?" I demand. "That's how they've been able to do this all these years. I've been their damn puppet!"

[I have never let them take you. It is you who always lets them in.]

I don't know who to trust or believe.

[You must recover what they have taken from you. Confront the Overmind. He sits at the centre of the WELL.]

Shockwave?

[Not Shockwave ... alert! Alert!]

"What?" I snap at him.

[Ravage is dying.]

"Ravage?" I growl, getting to my feet.

[You sent him to destroy the Autobot.]

Oh. I have vague memories of doing that. "Is it important?" I ask vaguely. I shrug. I locate Ravage on local and teleport to his side. He's in his offices in the Spires, a large chamber worthy of the head of the Enforcement Executive but disappointingly sterile. There's a desk in one corner with an interface port, though. Ravage is slumped to the ground near it. He's been blasted open.

"Ravage," I shout at him, kicking his smelted carcass across the ground. "What's happened to you?"

"Tranquility," he says, his voice trailing off. "At last, I have found the perfect quarry. Eons have come and gone before this moment. I thought it would never happen."

"Where's the damn Autobot?" I shout.

"Gone," Ravage whispers vaguely. "I have been bested in the hunt."

"Gone where?" I screech at him.

"Out into Andraxus," he gasps. "The city will eat him. Was the Autobot your friend?"

"Yes. Once. Sort of," I mutter, somehow knowing that I only have a few moments in which to act.

"Friendship is ephemeral," Ravage says. "It brings pain."

"Buzzsaw, cut Ravage's datacore loose. It shouldn't take too long to get you into a new shell-"

"No!" Ravage gasps, "In a few moments, my higher functions will be destroyed. It was a program I had chipped in centuries ago. I want to die, Starscream. Let me die. I've arranged everything. All the Enforcement data you'll need is in my access port in the WELL."

"The WELL's been trying to kill me!" I snap at him.

Ravage seems puzzled, "Why?" he murmurs. "We have always served him well, you and I."

"Who?" I demand.

"You should know..." His voice grows faint. "The coming dark-"

"I'm going in the WELL," I shout at him. "I'm going down, to the centre! I need cut through their protections. I want to stop them hacking into my mind again!"

"Chasm," Ravage says. "On the desk. He might help you."

"Chasm?" I ask blankly.

Ravage goes quiet.

I give his miserable dead shell a final kick. I know what I have to do now. I have to enter the WELL. To go back and find the knowledge I keep locked away from myself, constantly erased. The origin of my species, the final dances of the wars. I have lied, I have lied to my people, my memory is all lies.

All I care for now is the truth.

There is a cassette on Ravage's desk. Dark green with silver inlay. (Like Buzzsaw's old form: black, gold, orange). I pick up the tape. I haven't seen one of these things in years. This one is slightly burned, as though Ravage has been using it for an ashtray. My ANDRAX senses a familiar reverberation. Warpfold Petrification. I seethe ... that was Thunderwing's technology. This means that Ravage has had ties with Thunderwing or something. What was the point of winning that stupid war anyway? Will Thunderwing ever be gone from me? Is everything I stand for that pointless?

No.

I built Andraxus, I founded Andraxus, I keep Andraxus going. But there's been people using me and people I have trusted have been betraying my ideals. I have to fix that.

I toss the cassette in my hands.

[What is this thing?] I ask Buzzsaw.

[Chasm. I have heard of him, though I was not there when they created him. ]

[Where were you?] I ask him.

[With you.]

Focusing my ANDRAX, I shift the cassette out of the warpfold loop and back into normal reality. I kill the excess mindtraps and try and reset the datacore back to its status. It reminds me of when I handled the warpfold cage that held Swindle:

("Get me out of here, Starscream!" Swindle howls.

"Sorry. Gotta trade you to Sting in exchange for the Autobot. You know how it is.")

The cassette suddenly transforms into a strange shape: a stylised winged lizard. A dragon of some sort? Slender, tarnished silver claws and jetpack. His optics flare into ruby life and he turns his head around back and forth, examining everything.

I grab at him. "Listen- Chasm, is it? Let's make this quick. I just saved you from an eternity of warpfold petrification. In return, I want you to cut a line for me down to the WELL."

He stares at me blankly. His red optics gleam like blood-coloured mirrors.

"They know my signature, which means they can hack into my ghost when they so much as sniff me. But if I ride someone else down, right down to the core-"

"I'm afraid that I have no idea what you are referring to, Lieutenant." The dragon snaps at me in a clipped, melodic voice.

"Lieutenant? I'm the freaking Lord Commander!" I say to the cassette. "Listen, how long have you been Ravage's desktop ornament for?"

The little dragon cocks his head to one side. "Ravage-" he mutters, his voice trailing off. "Yes, I do recall running afoul of that psychopath. The philistine slaughtered Soundwave in cold blood and then proceeded to blame me for it. Could you possibly imagine such an error?"

Shit. We're talking major time here. Chasm's been Ravage's prisoner since the original Soundwave's death.

"Listen, what's your function?"

"I procure and manage information. Data retrieval and processing, cyberlinking. "If I can't do it, it can't be done" was my business motto at one point." He asks stiffly. "If you please, Lieutenant, I must be on my way. I have interests in Brazil that urgently require my attention and-"

I make my ANDRAX manifest a bit. Always good for effect.

"Get this, Chasm. It's about hundred thousand years into the future since you were last cognisant. In that time, we won the war, Earth's become an iceball, and the entire civilisation which I have worked for every second of that hundred thousand years is in mortal jeopardy. And if you're as good as you think you are, you can help me save it."

Chasm, to his credit, maintains his composure. "Do I have any input into this topic?"

"No, you most certainly don't," I screech at him.

Chasm sighs and droops his wings a little. "I was afraid you would say that. Very well, I am hoping that the Decepticons have finally evolved currency in their future. I expect to be paid for this. As much as possible. Now, about this 'WELL' of yours-"

PART TWO ... Anywhere Else But Here With You

1.

You were foolish to enter my domain, Starscream. I let you rule Andraxus and in return I command the WELL. Every scrap of information, every line of data that your beloved city feeds off and processes must come through me first. I know everything, I am everything. But I see you are determined to reach me? You've always been mine to command, in every life you've ever lived. You can't escape your fate. You'll be my catspaw to the very end.

But you're not quite ready to meet with me yet, are you? You've forgotten, your mind has been crippled and pruned back so that you're only a weak shadow of the person you once were. You came into my domain seeking answers. Foremost, I can read, is the answer to that question ... who is driving you mad? What do your lunatic ravings and the gaps in your memories mean, and why are your servants lying to you? It's a very simple answer. It's what you told the Autobot.

"It's all your fault." You can't forget what you are, even though you try. So you wipe your datacore repeatedly, you ignore the little memories that waft over your consciousness and kill your feelings again and again for fear that your old identity will return. It is your own shadow you fear so much. The universe has rarely known such self loathing. Your shadow made you start the human project on Khalhier. It made you keep the sim construct of David Callier. It constantly seeks to keep Andraxus free of tyranny and it believes all the idealistic rubbish you spout to the Senate about evolution and social improvement. Your other self is composed of your hatred. Every little fit of pique and madness. When you killed Thunderwing, when you killed Callier's construct, when you killed those thousands trying to cross the Barrier. It's all there, Starscream.

I'm going to grind you in the dirt of your lost humanity. I'm going to watch you break on the spears of your own hatred. In the end, you'll be begging for death. Your hands will pull back the trigger, and this time there won't be Callier around to knock the gun away. No Slag to reconstruct your body.

You'll die, Starscream. You'll be dead, alone and mute.

And then I will reign in Andraxus, unopposed as we all join together in harmony, in the CoreMerge.

All shall be one.

2.

CALLIER ARCHIVE ... EXTRACT. SEGMENT 123HJ.

(A sudden kaleidoscope of light explodes and gathers. The scene blurs and is charged with static. Figures walk backwards as the contract rewinds to a suitable entry point. Then the construct consolidates around you and the camera angle swings and settles behind the eyes of EDC Commander David Callier.)

"There is a quite a market in dead Decepticons," Valdez was saying to him.

"So I see," Callier murmured. The hangar they had showed him was filled with enormous mechs, most of them covered in scaffolding and technicians.

"After the war ended, the Autobots were quite effective in cleaning up. They left very little technology behind for us to study," Valdez said, leading him to a walkway above the hangar where they could look down on all the activity below. "You will remember the Stockholm Pact of 2007, where Optimus Prime and the UN banned 'unregulated' Transformer technologies. The grey market which had previously boomed was canned almost overnight. It was because we were foolish, you see," Valdez said wistfully. "We were greed for the knowledge and power that they represented, the industries which sprung up based on injection of alien technology. Then the wars and petty squabbles between nations that happened afterwards. Then when the Autobots won their war and returned to Cybertron, they dismantled and took almost everything of importance."

Callier nodded. His EDC briefing lecture had covered as much. "But then Carnavorus came," he said.

Valdez unclipped his data pen and held it out in front of him, projecting a ghostly holograph of the enormous creature. Carnavorus was gestalt entity, composed of five Autobots locked together to form a lumbering, tyrannosauroid structure. A huge rocket pack stuck up above its shoulders. Cannon ports were loaded on its upper arms, shoulders and head. "The Decepticons called it 'the Purge'." Valdez said. "Its weapon apparently destroyed the higher mental functions of its enemies."

"The Autobots who came to warn us claimed that it was out of control," Callier recalled.

Valdez shrugged, "We have no means of determining if they spoke the truth or not."

"Of course they spoke the truth," snapped Callier, who had grown up amid vids and pictures of Optimus Prime. He had also seen the devastation left by Carnavorus in its mad hunt for the Earth's hidden Decepticons, thundering after them and crushing cities in its wake. He remembered the digital missives from Whatshisname Prime, the new one, that gave details on Carnavorus' psychosis, how its gestalt mind refused to accept that it was in reality five separate entities and how it refused to stop its deranged hunt. Then, abruptly as it had come to Earth, it had left for Nebulos to continue its hunt there.

It had taken years to rebuild. Earth heard little more from the Autobots, who were dealing with problems of their own. The Great War had moved to another front and Carnavorus still raged madly between the stars. But amid the rubble of the second war on Earth, technological treasures had been left behind. The new Autobot leader had more pressing matters on his plate than to deal with the Stockholm Pact and their clean up of Earth had been little more than a polite formality. Dead Decepticons (and the occasional Autobot) glittered like gems on the world market. The EDC had been given legislative powers to acquire all the Transformer blacktech, but Callier suspected that they there was still plenty of undeclared mechs out there.

"War is war, David," Valdez said bluntly, shaking Callier from his thoughts. "There are no absolute truths."

The young officer growled. "What was it that you wanted to show us, Professor?"

"Ah," Valdez said. "This will take some time to explain. Would care for some coffee?"

Callier shook his head. Valdez scratched at the t-shirt he was wearing under his labcoat. "Well, I intend to have some. Follow me please." Valdez strode along the gantry way and entered into a cargo elevator. They emerged on the floor of the hangar, sandwiched between two of the brightly painted mechs. Callier shuddered, finally aware of how huge these things were. He barely came up to the ankle on one of the nearby mechs, and according Valdez that was one of the average-size ones. Callier craned his head upwards, staring at the mech's flat, dead optics. "Can you get these things to work?" he asked, yelling to be heard above the sounds in the hangar..

"We believe so," Valdez shouted back. "But we have refrained from activating them until we have developed an appropriate test environment. "I'll tell you more once we get inside." He pointed in front of them to a small makeshift building that sat in one of the corners of the hangar. It was a fair walk. When Callier finally entered the structure, he appreciated the silence of the site office. As Valdez busied himself with the coffee syrup, Callier watched the activity outside. He counted seventeen mechs in all. "Did Carnavorus affect all of them?"

"Yes, all of those in the hangar have been effected by the Carnavorus weapon. It is like but not like a virus. The strings of data that form the higher programs of these Transformers have been erased from the machine's core consciousness - if a machine could be said to be conscious. Excuse me..." he paused to swallow deeply from a mug that read "The World's Best Dad." "Yes, and all that remains is the datacore which we cannot readily extract information from, even though we believe it to be intact. A few dissociated images, nothing more."

"According to our report you obtained some mechs which, though in shutdown, were still operational. Our report claims that you then introduced the Carnavorus virus into them so you could claim possession of the bodies under Section 54(3)(a)(ii) of the 'Blacktech' Act." Callier said, gauging the Professor's reaction.

Valdez shook his head furiously, splattering coffee on the floor. It smelled terrible to Callier. "No, David. I know your insider - Heidegger. He is ignorant of the processes and has given you falsified information. In truth, we would love to get one of the original programs online, but our efforts have met with a brick wall. But, we can create programs of our own to upload into the mechs. The code for controlling these things is very complicated. We can make them twitch their fingers a little, but it will be years before we have a program capable of making them perform basic commands. Enough to pick an object up, perhaps. But we are nowhere near the transformation code and to activate the mech's subspace containment fields remains an impossible dream."

"What does this have to do with Charles Derwent then?" Callier asked.

Valdez tugged at his pointed beard. "Ah. That is what you are here to find out. It is a long story. What do you know of our Mr Derwent?"

"That he was a Californian millionaire who managed to acquire the frames of several deactivated mechs. That he ran some sort of a cult based around the mechs..."

Valdez nodded. "As I said before, there is quite a market in dead Decepticons. And Derwent had managed to obtain two. Quite famous ones, you know. They are identified by their codenames: Thundercracker and Starscream.

"Starscream? You found Starscream?" Callier gasped. Starscream and Thundercracker had been part of the original set of Decepticons that had attacked Earth back in the 1980's. According to Callier's information, Starscream had been quite high ranking. "But that wave of Transformers is supposed to be offplanet. We have detailed records of them leaving..."

Valdez shrugged. "We have established that the frames we have are not the frames of clone-mechs. As far as we can ascertain we indeed obtained the frames of Starscream and Thundercracker. Now, as to how Derwent got hold of them is another matter. We were alerted to his facility by means of an extremely powerful explosion.. Upon investigation, we discovered the mech frames and those of his cult who had managed to survive."

"There were survivors?" Callier asked, leaning forward eagerly.

Valdez sighed. "One, a Mr Jack Redfern, is in a coma. We think he is unlikely to survive. The other, Erica Kay, is conscious but has severe radiation poisoning, no doubt from exposure to the unshielded mechs. She is also somewhat - unstable. But she remains perhaps the an - example of what they were trying to do."

"I need more information," Callier said abruptly. "Access to your files, your notes. Access to both of the survivors. Here," he said, sliding a warrant over to Valdez. "This is from EDC command. I'm essentially here to give an audit on this entire project." He waved a hand outside, pointing to the great mechs as they stood silently in their rows.

"Your commanders will be interested in the 'Derwent Cult'" Valdez said, his eyes glittering.

"What were they trying to do? In brief."

"Ah ... Charles Derwent had some idea that the crystalline lattices that store the higher programs of mechanical consciousness in Transformers were also capable of containing a human consciousness. His cult believed in some sort of mind-to-machine transference process..."

"He sounds insane," Callier snorted.

"But supposed it would be possible, David? It would be immortality," Valdez said. "That is what we are discussing here."

Callier rubbed at his eyes. So tired... he thought. "But what kind of immortality would it be, Professor? To be one of those things? And what the hell were they thinking? As far as I know, you couldn't transfer a human mind across ... we can't even quantify that sort of thing. You could make an approximate copy of it and store it, I suppose, in a transformer's datacore, but that's not the same thing as a transference-"

"Perhaps you should see the girl," Valdez said roughly. "The experiment that they were doing was inhuman. We are not sure what they did to her, let alone how-" He tapped something into the computer. "Read these files. Perhaps it's better if you see for yourself.

3.

The file said that Erica claimed she was nineteen. Callier thought she looked a lot younger. Her scalp was shaved and covered with a tracery of metal wires and strange, hollow sockets. Brown hair fuzz grew between the components. Her body was covered with scars where she had cut her wrists and strange scarred lines covered her back and around her left eye.

"Can't you get rid of that metal stuff from her head?" Callier asked the doctors later. They shook their heads. "Some of the biosofts go right down into the brain," Doctor Epstein told him. "To remove it would be fatal," Doctor Cawley added. Doctor Tang snorted cynically, "We had no idea how Derwent managed to do that. We have even less idea of how to remove it. It hints at a technology beyond anything in the current scene."

As Callier read more about the cult, he thought about the other cult members seduced by Derwent's promise of immortality. He thought of their brains cut open and replaced by wires and mechanics. He thought about how young the girl was, to be ill-used in a such a manner.

After several days of studying her files and taped interviews where she exploded like a wild animal and had to be restrained from digging her fingers into the psychologist's eye socket, Callier went to Valdez.

"I want to speak with her," Callier asked. "She might be able to tell me something."

In his office, Valdez was in the process of putting into a coffee mug. "Many have tried," Valdez said as the golf ball rolled into the ceramic vessel with a sharp chink! "We cannot use a brainscan because of interference from the biosofts. She has a high resistance to drugs. We have tried many people and she hates most of them. Why could you succeed where others have failed, David?"

"Her accent- it's Australian, I think. I'm from Cairns. I might be able to say something that will mean something to her," Callier said, unable to explain why he felt a sudden connection with the patient.

Valdez stared at him strangely for a few moments. Then he shrugged. "You can if you want. Your pass here would give you access anyway. Just don't expect to get anywhere with her though."

4.

They locked the door behind him. Callier's palms began to sweat. He could make out her dim shape sprawled across the bed. The curtains had been drawn shut and it was very stuff. A thin crack of light angled down, glinting off plastic and metal.

"What do you want?" a rough voice growled at him. It sounded as though she currently was, or had been at some point in the past, a heavy smoker.

"Uh, hi. I'm David Callier. I'm from the EDC- I just want to talk to you."

Erica leaned back against her bed railing. She was wearing heavy sunglasses. "Can you get me out of here?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe in the future-"

"I don't have a future, shithead. I've got leukemia from hanging around giant robots," she spat at him. "They weren't exactly radiation-shielded for human comfort."

"Well, uh, I'll try. I'll try to help you in any way I can."

"What are you? A knight in fucking armour?" she said, jeering at him scornfully.

"Something like that," Callier said quietly.

5.

She didn't tell him much at first. For some reason she tolerated his presence and who. He lost track of his original goal ... to investigate Valdez's operation for possible blackmarket leakage and corruption. Now, his purpose was to follow Erica and watch her, learn from her, try and help her back to the path of humanity. You're becoming obsessed, his mind warned him, but he took no notice of it. He lost himself in the days he spent with her. He staved off his superiors with detailed reports. Everything he did was focussed on knowing her, trying to fathom her brutal, angry, bitter personality. If I could make her laugh, just once-

She treated him like a joke. But she began to talk to him, and Callier listened patiently to her angry tirades, a tide of vitriol she spewed against the world. "When they come, they'll kill us all," she hissed at him, kicking angrily at the walls of her cell. "That'd be the best thing for the human fucking race."

Sometimes they let them go outside. October days, where she would walk angrily along the beach and he would follow her from behind, the chopper circling overhead like a vulture. She told him how she killed her mother by slamming her against a wall until her spine cracked. David wasn't sure whether that was something that had actually happened in the past, or was a fever-image lifted from the tangled imagery of her past.

"When I heard the bones crack, I knew she was dead," Erica said calmly, tearing at leg of pork like a savage beast. The remnants of the picnic basket were scattered all over the bone-white sands. In the distance, the surf angrily pounded the shore.

"Why do you behave like an animal?," Callier asked her.

She spat at the ground. "Look here, stupid - " she pointed at the wires and covered sockets in her scalp, barely hidden by a light cropping of hair. "I'm turning into a fucking machine. I'm not going to be human. It's all going to be taken away from me. So I'm gonna stay like I can, I'm going be me. Do you understand? It's about being me!"

"But- there's not chance of that happening, is there? I mean, the mechs- You don't even go near them-"

She stood up short on the beach, the sun glinting off her dark glasses and the metal nubs protruding from her shaven scalp. "Listen, you don't even fucking understand what's there between me and- him." She spat out the offending pronoun as though she was trying to eject a lump of gristle from the back of her throat. "He ruined my life- He was the Howl, my own Howl-"

"Derwent?" Callier guessed, proffering out the name of the leader of Erica's 'cult'.

"Derwent was a tool. He wasn't anything. No, the one I they tried to run me with-" Erica said, scratching at her flat chest.

God, she's sick. So screwed up, Callier thought. Why can't I get away?

"Starscream?" Callier suggested.

"Don't mention his name!" She screamed at him, her bored demeanour changing to violent like the flick of a switch. "You fucking better don't mention his fucking name!"

She ran away down the beach, throwing stones at seagulls. Callier bent over and started to gather up the remains of their picnic.

6.

A few weeks later he was watching her exercise on various bits of gym equipment. She exercised ferociously, her well-toned muscles standing out under her thin, black singlet. She let him watch her. Most of the time, she ignored him, as though she was in her own private universe.

"Listen, how did Derwent get hold of the mechs?" Callier asked her, rather straightforwardly, since he couldn't think of a decent lead-up question. Anyway, beating around the bush never worked with Erica. You had to get to the point straight away, otherwise she got bored with the conversation and ignored you.

"This is going to fuck you up," she said. "But Derwent, he had this cube."

"A cube?"

"Yeah, he said that aliens had made it. Said he could do what ever he wanted with it. I saw it once ... it didn't look like much. Just a dull black cube, made of plastic or something. He said there were aliens in it, who could grant wishes. I thought he was totally out of it. But he gathered us in his fucking mansion. Said we could do whatever we wanted until the 'merger' was complete. Yeah, that was what he called it. The merger. I had all the fucking stuff I could ever use. Then I got into heroin and other shit. Chemical shit, serious chemical shit. I didn't care what was going on, until he almost fucking did it."

"Did what?"

"The merger, you freak. Weren't you listening?"

"What was that about?" Callier asked, straining with his patience.

"Derwent was seriously fucked. He wanted to become them. He asked the cube to do it, and it bloody well did. He wanted to become Megatron, that's what he told it. Then the merger started to happen-"

To become Megatron?

"He said that he'd all dreamed them up or something," Erica tried to explain as she whizzed back and forth on the seated leg press. "Said he'd-" Her brow wrinkled, dripping with sweat. "Said that he'd been sick once, and dreamed up this race of robots that conquered everything. Said he'd been Megatron in that original dream, said he got the idea from some Japanese TV crap or something. But because he had the cube, he could make a new reality where the robots were real. He said the cube drew the two realities together, so both were the same- he was full of shit like that. We used to drink in his office, and he would go and on about this shit."

"Charles Derwent believed that he'd created the world?" Callier said, his eyes wide. "With this- alien device you mention? What happened to the cube? And how did Derwent effect you?"

"I dunno where the cube is now. And as for me and the others, Derwent collected us from all over the world ... isn't that stupid, or what? He said that when the 'merger' happened, the personality overlaps had to be right. Some fucking overlap- I was in Kenterwell. Hephebrenic schizophrenia. This thing in the back of my head. The Howl. Derwent just said I should accept the Howl, just let slide back and become with it, like Jack did, but I fought the stupid fucking thing every bit of the way. Kept getting dreams from him. Little flashes, like I was flying or something- Not like a bird flies, something fast and hard-" Erica swung herself off the seated leg press and started to do pull-ups on some horizontal bars. The red mats were splattered with her perspiration. Callier politely offered her a squirt from the water bottle he carried, but she ignored him.

"And then one day I woke up- Withdrawal or something. I had these stupid metal bits in my head, there was this laboratory or some fucking thing around me," she gasped, panting between her pull-ups. "The EDC came and raided the place. I still can't put all the details together. It's all shattered in my mind, all messed up. But suddenly the world was full of robots and everyone else was dead- I reckon if anyone made it over, it would have been Jack, he was that close to Thundercracker. I think everything got fucked up somehow. Either Derwent lost control of what he was doing, or because Carnavorus came and killed everyone. Bet that fucked up Derwent's master plan. Heh."

"The EDC believe that somehow Derwent got some blackmarket mechs, including Thundercracker and Starscream. All these mechs were dormant, their minds wiped by the Carnavorus virus. The report speculates that Derwent's research laboratories was researching a means of transferring a human mind to a transformer's datacore. You and the other people were guinea pigs," Callier said bluntly, "just so that Charles Derwent could use the process on himself. All that stuff in your head is equipment for storage or transference of data ... the techs aren't sure yet. We're not sure where he got the technology from, we're still guessing at it." He took a deep breath. "But there's no mention in the report of this 'magic cube' and no sign of Charles Derwent. The other people were found dead in the research facilities, hooked up to drips, lying in bed, stinking- Jack Redfern's still in a coma- You're the only one who woke up."

"I told you my head was fucked up," she snarled at him. "I said all my memories were all over the place, all jumbled and shattered. I told you how I remember it was. So what if my version different from your fucking report? I was fucking off in chemical wonderland most of the time." She paused and dropped down from the bars. "Mostly I've got flashes from the Howl, just his memories and stuff. Derwent said it was caused by the two realities overlapping, using his fucking cube or whatever."

"According to the report, all that residue is probably from where they tried to hook your implants into Starscream's lasercore. He's dead- his higher programs are gone."

"If the fucking Carnavorus virus wiped his core, how come I got flashes from him, then? I was asleep most of the fucking time, just getting flashes. Screaming at him, fighting at him. Trying to keep him out of my head. I tried so hard- Now it's all for shit, I'm gonna be dead soon, killed by fucking mech radiation-"

Callier sighed. The reports had reported that Erica had been subjected to high doses of radiation, but he believed that was from her 'treatment'. He wanted to kill Charles Derwent, who had done this infernal thing to innocent people. People taken from hospital wards and from the streets; their heads cut open and filled with machinery, people who died during the transference process, something possibly would never have worked anyway.

"No one was sure how the Carnavorus virus worked- It killed transformers, but there was probably some images and things left over," Callier speculated.

Erica walked over to the window. "I remember Jack was saying that Thundercracker liked him. He couldn't wait to merge with him. But me and the Howl, we hated each other. Everything was blood and pain," she said, staring at the scars down her wrists.

"Is Star- is 'the Howl' still in your mind, then?" Callier asked her.

She shook her head. "But I can sort of feel stuff there. Potential, maybe? Not that it matters," she said gloomily. "I'm dying?" she asked flatly. "Right? All that radiation shit?"

Callier nodded. He wanted to say something but didn't know the words. "Valdez thinks you have a few weeks," he said slowly. And then they'll cut you up to find out how your brain works.

"Well," she said. "That's it then." She went quiet after that and continued to stare out the window. After a while, she pointed. "Look, above." Callier peered over her shoulder. Outside a plane climbed higher into the sky, a single black point rising into the curving vault of blue. "They're like that," Erica said. "Only a Decepticon would barrel around a bit more and all you'd hear of their coming would be this cloud of hungry noise, long before their shape would appear in the sky. They're not slaves, they wouldn't respond to joystick or throttle, they exist as part of their own country." She turned and grinned at him wickedly, her eyes hidden behind her sunglasses. "People have always been scared of autonomous machines. It's like at the base of our minds we expect them to rise up and destroy us all. That's what Transformers are, David. They were created from our fear."

Callier nodded, unsure of what say when she suddenly exploded with words like this. Her mind, he imagined, would be a mess. She was schizophrenic; she viewed reality through a distorted lens. And then there were the biosofts Derwent's technicians had grafted to cerebellum, and bits of the transformer's feed residue stored in those biosofts, mixing and mingling with her conscious mind.

He wanted to touch her, to hold her, just to do something to show that he cared- He tentatively reached out a hand but without turning around she savagely backhanded him in the lower jaw. He crouched over in a sudden burst of pain. "You just leave me alone," she hissed at him. He heard the doors slide open and shut a second later.

7.

She would have died if he hadn't stopped her.

It was 6A.M and he'd brought a bag of fresh lemons in one hand as a peace offering. Early morning was the best time to see her. She hated the evening and slept best when most people were eating their dinners and watching their after-work sitcoms.

When Callier came visiting, the lemons dropped from his hands and rolled away out of their bag; there was a security guard writhing on the floor. There was blood pumping from his mouth and the holster at his hip was empty. Callier took this all his stride and darted into Erica's room. The guard made a soft, wet gurgle behind him.

She grinned at him, sitting on the edge of her bed, her lips about to coil around the barrel of the pistol. "You can't stop me," she said. "I'm going out. Like Kurt, like a flame."

He lunged at her, a huge, heroic leap that snapped his ankle. He collided with her. They were scrabbling together over the bed, over the floor and then the gun went off.

8.

"It seems we owe you a lot, Mr Callier," Valdez said. "Without your interference, the biosofts could have been irreparably damaged."

"I wasn't thinking of the biosofts," Callier said, dazedly. "I was trying to save her. I mean-"

"She's a little bitch," Hopkins, the security guard, said. "She said she was feeling sick, so I went inside her room and she clubbed me with this pipe she was hiding under her pillow. And then she kicked me outside."

"Yes, well ... you will be compensated, Ms Hopkins," Valdez said, waving a hand. "Anyhow, the latest blood tests shows that- well, let's just say things are not going to be very hopeful with our Ms Kay. Her body is weak from the cancer and although we removed the bullet, there was a lot of internal bleeding. But let us not look on this as a moment of sadness. Rather, she still have much to contribute to science after she- passes on."

You're going to let her die, Callier thought. You fat maggot. You can barely wait until you can crack her skull open and get all of that blacktech out of her brain.

Callier smiled thinly.

Later that night he thumbed through all of the reports on the Derwent cult. He stared hard at the schematics and researchers' theories until his eyes ached. And then he walked out into the mech hangar and stared at all of those silent machines. He found himself stopping under the one they called 'Starscream.' Its wings fanned up behind it like those of a death angel or a bird of prey. Its optics were silent and dark. The light glinted on its cream-silver finish.

9.

He snuck into the ward with his EDC security pass and bribed the nurse to go away so that 'he could talk with the patient alone for a few minutes.' The nurse had left: the patient obviously wasn't going anywhere. Callier surveyed the drips, bandages and tubes coming out of her. His white knuckles clenched the flowers.

"Hello, Erica," he said.

She stared blankly at the ceiling.

"I know you can hear me-" he said, hopefully. "Listen, I want to help you. I think I can-"

"Why should I talk to you?" she said suddenly, in a hoarse whisper. "You stopped me! Now they're going to fuck around with my brain. You fucking wanker! You could have stayed out of my way!"

He said the words that would later destroy the world. "I want to help you," he said slowly. "I want to finish off the process."

"What?"

"You can die, like an animal," he said bluntly. "Is that what you still want to be? An animal? Or we could complete- the project that they started- Derwent's project."

She was quiet for a while. "You'd call that fucking life? I'd be a fucking machine- and he's still around! How do you know that I won't become him?"

"The Carnavorus Virus," Callier said. "There's nothing left of the higher programs, right? But if you put your biosofts into the datacore lattice- I think that some part of your personality would be copied over. I don't know how it works exactly-"

"I hate him more than anything. He ruined my life. And you're asking me to be him?" she spat.

"You don't have to be him exactly," Callier said. God, it was a crazy idea. It ran bright in his mind like a fever. She'd survive, in some manner or form. He clenched his fists. "What was the best thing that you got from him?"

"I hate heights," she said distantly, her voice dropping to slow, mumbling ramble. "My guts would turn to water and there'd be this sweet, dizzy sickness just right behind my eyes. But then I'd get these dreams from him. Dreams ... being of being him, flying like him. Above a landscape of steel, a sky black with smog and greasy starlight. Above a bay laced golden with sun-patternings, a sheer vault of blue sky, a ring of holiday skyscrapers crowding the bay. He was haunted by skies and waters and sunsets- They were so very different-" She cleared her throat. "It felt as though he were an aerial razor blade. Everything was so clean and clear. Jets are flying razors that cut the air so sharp that the wind has barely time to gather itself about the departed shape. And when his jet-shadow cut the landscape, when people run in fear and piss themselves screaming, he took it all as conformation of his right to fly-"

"I guess you could have that then- but you'd be yourself, some other being. Not him-" He scratched at his head. "I don't know how else to put it. I just don't how to get your biosofts in contact with the datacore of the mech. I mean, I could fudge something up with EDC rank-"

"You'd just put me near the fucking thing," she said slowly. "That's all you have to do. I mean, the connection ... it was more than wires and stuff. It was- stuff from this other place. It was dreams and memories- It was pain and it never stopped-"

"Is that what you want?" he asked her. "If not, I'll go and I won't come back. If you want me to help, still, I can take you to the mech. If you think that's all you have to do."

"I read some Aristotle or something at Derwent's hall," she said vaguely. "It was all about true forms and stuff, so that every object in the mortal world is a reflection of a real object somewhere else- "

"That was Socrates, I think. The Republic," said Callier, worrying. She'd never been this- unfocused.

"Yeah, whatever. But that means nothing's real, right? We just live a world of reflections," Erica said.

Callier thought that she was going to go on about the 'real world' that she said she came from, but instead she sighed deeply. "It's like Transformers are obsessed with this sense of self ... they want to arrive finally at an ultimate point of creation. That's why they keep changing their forms and rebuilding. Like, for every single jet there's ever been, there's only one True Jet. Stealth bombers are close to this form and zeppelins are far away. But out of all the designs that humans have come up with, nothing comes close to the True Jet except the Decepticons. They're free from control.

"Sometimes I dream of Cybertron. In the structures, in my head, it gleams like a fresh-cut gem, humming with power and running with machines that slide over dream-greased raceways and with machines that rumble emptily through the artificial atmosphere and the raw void of space. It is a pristine world, lacking in human-wrought corruptions. I think we corrupted the Decepticons ... it has taken war and earth and human pain to teach the jets how to scream in the skies like bloody hawks, to devour not in the mechanical, functional way of a bulldozer but as an animal, snapping with hunger, murderous with greed-"

He stared at her, weak and pathetic in her cradle of bandages and monitors. Her hands trembled and the light glittered on the cruel components digging into her bald scalp. "Do it," she rasped at him. "Do it now."

He had to put her in a wheelchair. And he had to shuffle the drip along at the same time, and hope to heaven that her listless, slouched position didn't mean that she'd died enroute, in the chair. He'd even cooked up a distraction to get the staff away, by using his security clearance to enter one of the secure labs to set off an alarm. This entire operation could end up with him being fined and even worse, blacklisted from future investigation work, but he had to save her life. He was lost a muddle of desire and conflict, but this current task, at least, was clear.

And when he shuffled her all the way across the great hangar, where the dead mechs stood there like cold sentinels, and he stood in front of the one they called Starscream, he hoped that by this act, he could in some way redeem her.

"Erica?" he called out, touching her hand. "Is this it?"

Her hand was cold to the touch.

Callier stood there. It had all been for nothing. What sort of colossal stupidity had he brought down on himself? He could hear shouting in the distance and the sound feet running across the concrete floor.

She had given him nothing ... not a kind word, nor any response at all. But still, it hadn't been her fault. Not entirely. She reflected the world, he thought. She reflected what had been done to her. "I guess this the end, for both of us," he said, lightly touching her skull to feel the cold wires against her scalp.

"Get away from the wheelchair, Callier," Valdez said calmly. "Just walk away."

Callier turned around Scientists and security guards were watching him. He raised his hands in the air, in mute surrender.

"You better be able to explain yourself," Valdez began angrily. As the guards came forward to restrain Callier and as Doctor Epstein and Doctor Cawley rushed past Callier to Erica's cooling corpse, an ominous crack shattered the hubbub of conversation that had filled the hangar. Everyone craned the head and stared upwards, shocked.

Starscream moved.

It flexed its fingers. Its reddish optics flicked into life, burning like baleful coals. It turned its head to survey the scaffolding on either side of it, at the monitors flickering madly on the observation platform.

"Erica? Is that you?" Callier gasped.

Those inhuman eyes regarded him. He could read nothing in that gaze. It seemed to sneer at him and at all of the assembled humanity gathered just below its foot. Callier could hear Valdez screaming at him in the distance but everything had dimmed down to a moment of silence.

The technicians were running forward, perhaps to try and run a lockdown program through the crude interface they had achieved with the transformer core systems. Callier shook his head, and screamed at the mech. "Get out of here! Fly, damn you! Fly!"

Starscream seemed to go still for a few seconds. And then in one impossibly swift movement, it leapt out of the shackles of its scaffolding and transformed, shifting into the form of a cream-coloured F15D Strike Eagle, with red and blue piping marking on its wings and tail. The harsh hangar light glinted on its Decepticon insignia.

Its thrusters burned and it angled upwards, straight into the hangar roof-

Some thing exploded outwards from the jet and then the debris started to rain down on the entire area. The last thing Callier saw, before the roof collapsed on him, was the swirl of twilight-coloured sky and the afterburners of the jet scorching into the sunset. The flight of the True Jet, he thought to himself bemusedly, before everything went black.

He saw the machine again twenty years later, when he was captaining the EDC's flagship, the Mariposa. There had been reports of Transformers on Mars and on the edge of the solar system. Earth's technology had boomed in the past two decades - the ideas scavenged from the dead Transformer shells had led to the opening of areas of research that would have been unthinkable in the years before the mechs had come to Earth from the stars. They had rudimentary subspace fields, they were developing a galaxy-class drive, they had developed piloted mechs for military operations. It was a glittering, golden age of wonder and technological advancement.

Until the Transformers returned.

They were five months out from Earth, establishing an orbital base on Triton, when on one fatal evening (Neptune time) the watch commander chimed in on his receptor. "Captain Callier," the watch commander said.

"What is it, Watchman Hargreaves?" Callier asked, swivelling his chair around.

The image of Hargreaves ran a hand through her untidy blonde hair. "We've a sighting, sir. An unpiloted mech appeared in the viewfinder. Confirmed Decepticon insignia."

"On screen," Callier ordered.

There a blurred image danced in the overhead screens. Blue and red and white, wings jutting outwards. "Starscream," he said, his eyes filling with shock. It had been twenty years.

Twenty years ago, when he had reactivated Starscream, he'd had to face a board of inquiry, as one of the few survivors of the hangar collapse. He had released a potentially dangerous machine. But the system scanners reported images of an F-15D Eagle leaving the solar system, heading out among the stars. No one believed that Erica had somehow transferred her mind to that of the machine; rather they told him that Starscream must not have been completely destroyed by the Carnavorus virus. "It would have reactivated independently of your activity," a technician had confidently told him. The only charges laid against Callier were the removal of a patient from care and the breach of EDC security systems, but the jury had been won over by his lawyer, who had spun a heart-warming tale of a young officer granting a dying girl her last, mad wish. Callier had not been discharged, but rather sent to a rather low-priority outpost with a black mark on his record. However, he had made a name for himself out there and had eventually clawed his way up the rank of captain and had been given command of the Mariposa. He was known to be a stiff, stern man with little humour. With his shaggy brows and neatly-trimmed beard, he presented a authoritarian figure to his crew. He had never lost control. But when he stood there, staring at the blurred image of Starscream, sweat broke out all over him.

They were coming back.

"What the hell do you want?" Callier muttered to himself, stroking his stiff beard. "Why are you back now?"

***

The crew remained on alert. Scanners were manned continuously. Callier even authorised a few fly-outs, where the ships carried deep-space scanning equipment, but only the normal radio patterns of space were heard. "That's not unusual," Doctor Falconer suggested to Callier in a meeting. "They could be taking advantage of the Neptune radiation."

"You mean ... in there?" Callier said, pointing to the blue gaseous planet, with its frozen oceans and violent eruptions.

Falconer shrugged, "You could take advantage of the planet quite easily. They could even be on Miranda and we'd not know about."

"What does Earth say?" Joachim asked.

Callier furrowed his brows, "They want us to remain on alert. They're going to be sending out some of the fleet ships."

He managed to calm some nerves in the following Q&A session and then retired to his quarters where he drifted off in a light doze, to be awoken by the C-mail chime. Squinting at the projected screen, Callier read that someone wanted to meet him in the hangar. Someone anonymous. He was gambling that it was Falconer, and he spent some time in the sonic shower, clipping his whiskers and applying fresh cologne. He had had similar 'meetings' with Andrea Falconer in the past and looked forward to them.

He whistled as he caught the chute to the lower levels of the Mariposa.

***

Callier stepped out of the lift into the hangar bay. It was very dark, with the only illumination spreading out behind him from the lift. Light glinted on the hard edges of plane wings, on the coloured perspex of the cockpits. It seemed utterly empty. He knew at once that Andrea was not behind the message that had brought him here. He ordered the computer to engage the overhead lights, but nothing happened. Callier walked into the hangar, eyes flicking back and forth for a sign. He was about to head back when he heard movement skittering amongst the dark corners. "Who's there?" he boomed, craning his neck around the hangar space. He walked over to where he thought he had heard the noise but when he turned back, no one was there. "Damn it, is this some kind of joke?"

"Why, hello Callier," a voice said. It was rasping, its projected tone of pleasant conversation was mocking. It was not a human voice.

Callier swore and stepped back. The overhead lights snapped on. Something sheared down sharply from an angle behind him and cut in front of him, something big and heavy and winged. His eyes tracked it, to where it flew up into the hangar roof and perched on a length of external piping, flaring its wings. It was mechanical bird with a hooked beak and fiery red optics, a Decepticon insignia ramped on the middle of its flat forehead. The bird watched him evilly. He heard a series of quick clanking sounds behind him and Callier turned slightly, not want to put his back to the 'bird.'

In one of the hangar spaces a mech stood. The same one in the blurred picture he'd seen last week, the same one that had been standing there twenty years ago, hulking and deactivated, where he had carried the girl to her death... No, not her death. It had called him by name.

"Erica," he said flatly.

"No," the mech said. "I'm something else now."

"What do you want?" Callier barked and inched a hand ever-so-slightly down to his comlog.

"Don't even think about it," the mech said. It crouched down, its optics gleaming like bloody mirrors. Callier, used as he was to the jerky movements of the piloted EDC mechs, found the machine's fluidity of movement unnerving. And what made him sweat was the knowledge that there was no pilot inside of the machine in front of him, that its intellect was inhuman, a perfectly rational computer flawed with bits of Erica's emotions and desires...

"What do you want? Callier demanded. "How the hell did you get in here?"

"I've been everywhere, Callier. I've known the dark between the stars. I've been to Cybertron," the machine said.

"How the hell did you get there?" Callier demanded. "You were never designed for inter-planetary flight."

The mech seemed to smile at him. "Carnavorus has fallen."

"What the hell do you want?" roared Callier. "I'm going to call security."

"It will end soon," the mech said. "And I want you to watch it. All of it."

And then it vanished. Callier blinked. Darkness - there were no other words to describe the phenomena - had seemed to cover the mech, as though it some great dark hole were opening up and swallowing it. And then the void had retracted to a single point and then there was only the hangar again.

Callier leaned against the wall, his heart hammering away. "Security!" he screamed. "Security!"

***

"What do mean no one believes me?" Callier demanded. Falconer adjusted the damp cloth on his forehead. "Well, no one is going to say that they disbelieve you, David. But Forensics is going over that hangar now and there's no evidence that any mech was there - Decepticon or otherwise. No change in radiation - and boy, did those Transformers leak radiation. There's no sign of any projection equipment and there are no transmission signals. It doesn't look like anything was there, David."

"New technology," he gasped. "It could have been a new technology of theirs."

"Well, Transformers were always slow to develop research and technology on their own, unless they've recently come into contact with a more advanced civilisation. Anyhow, why would the mech seek out you personally? Why not just radio a message in? It doesn't make sense, David."

Because there was this girl I used to know. I risked everything to help her. And now she hates me more than anything else and she wants to destroy me and I don't even know why. Callier groaned and laid his head to one side. Falconer stroked his forehead lightly with her fingers.

"Please leave," Callier said painfully. "Now isn't a good time for me."

"Fine," Falconer said tersely. "You'll be alright." He could hear her walking away and heard the sounds of the door irising shut.

***

His crew regarded him strangely, unsure of whether their captain was a madman or prophet of doom. "The Decepticon said 'it will end soon.' We have to stay alert," Callier told the scanning crew.

"They won't get through SpaceNET," Hartshorn insisted.

"Nonetheless, we must keep watch," Callier ordered. "Double shifts."

He was aware of them muttering behind his back, giving him strange looks. Callier furrowed his brow and stuck to his guns. He somehow knew that it would be long; that having appeared it wouldn't take long for Erica to strike.

The crisis came in the form of data corruption. It was first detected at 21:39 and by 21:41, most of the systems were experiencing some sort of crisis state.

"Captain, there's something in the drive frame," an engineer reported.

"Systems Chalced, Megaera and Mycenae are down," snapped a second engineer.

"There something sort of external virus," Aide Farris snapped.

"Everyone out of the system now," Garghast from ComSys screamed.

"My plugs won't retract..." someone in BridgeOps complained.

""Pull them out manually!" Falconer bellowed.

Callier fumbled for the manual cyberlink release system, but as his hands grasped the tab, everything exploded in a fountain of white.

***

It was summer again, and they were walking along the old creaking broadwalk at Tweed Heads. The air was fresh with salt and fish and the cry of gulls echoed overhead. He was walking behind her, watching as she painfully drew herself along the walkway, the sun glinting off the circuitry embedded in her skull. The men in the dark glasses watched them from a distance. High overhead, a helicopter throbbed.

Callier thrust his hands in his jacket, feeling loose change. "Do you want an ice cream?" he offered her.

Erica turned and faced him, her expression hidden beneath her dark glasses.

"Strawberry," she said, her tone reluctant.

He went up to the little cafe and bought two gelati cones for five dollars, even though he would have much rather had soft serves. Those were cheaper, and they tasted much better. A man played the guitar on the decking, his hat outstretched in front of him, and Callier listened for a while before dropping his change in front of the busker and returning to Erica with the cones. She took hers and chewed at it, rather than licking at it. Callier turned and stared out to sea, watching the gulls dive down the waves.

"Like that," Erica rasped painfully. "I could have been like that."

"Mmmm," Callier said. "So, how are things?"

"I need to know about the keys," she said bluntly.

"Let's go for a walk first," Callier suggested.

Erica frowned and followed him, her hands stuck in her pockets.

The time passed very pleasantly. He was sure how long it was. It could have been ten minutes. It could have been forever. He told her about his early song writing attempts, and she joined in, her hoarse voice giving the music a tragic, violent edge.

"Kurt had the best music," she told him. "I found an old CDs, in a store. All that rage and self-hatred set down in a song."

"Didn't he kill himself or something?" Callier strived to recall.

"It made him a legend," she said defensively. "He'll live forever now."

"Wouldn't that be something?" grinned Callier. "Living forever?"

"You'd have to be able to change with the times," Erica said. "Otherwise you'd be better off dead."

They walked on, into the summer.

Later, she asked him about the keys. "To get in and out of things," she explained.

Callier shook his head: it was like something was poking at him from afar.

"Like doors," Erica offered.

"Or like SpaceNET," Callier suggested. "Nothing could get through that without difficulty. It's a communications web linked to a strong defensive system. You wouldn't believe how much it cost the EDC - we could have made all of the third world nations rich. But it'll make sure that nothing gets into the solar system without alerting us first."

"But there are codes to it," Erica said.

"So?"

"Codes that the EDC personnel know," she said persistently.

"Do you want to go on the rides down by the beach park?" Callier asked.

Erica was chewing her lip, fiddling with a cassette that she had in her pocket.

Callier sighed and led the way and they moved on throughout the beachside boulevards, while holiday music piped through the external speakers. He saw a seafood restaurant and they went inside. Erica tried to order chips, but was rebuffed by the stern looking waiter and had to settle for some rainbow trout instead. Callier ordered a crab. Erica seemed very distant and withdrawn. Callier scratched at his bare chin.

"If there's anything you want to talk about, well, I'm here," he said, jovially.

The waiter came with their food.

"The codes," Erica said sulkily. "For SpaceNET."

Callier shrugged and cracked his crab claws open. He told her what he knew about the frequencies. It didn't see much at the time and there was still the rest of the day to spend at the beach and talk about inconsequential things, like music and horses. At the end of it all, when the sun sank into the far horizon like a throbbing, bloody heart, colouring the sky violent purples, saffrons and indigos, they stood on a cliff, watching the gulls wheel and dive into the ocean. Callier felt relaxed, oddly at peace with himself. He watched a young gull soar on the wind, rising - and then saw a stone thump into it, saw it fall into the churning sea, stunned.

Droplets of blood danced in the air.

Callier turned and stared at Erica, aghast. Her face was flushed with pleasure as Callier watched, another stone being tossed in her hand.

"You didn't have to do that," he said, his pleasant mood evaporating.

"The universe is full of predators," Erica said. "Only the fit survive."

"But the gull wasn't doing anything to you..."

"That was fun," Erica said gleefully. "Don't you understand about fun?"

"But we spent the whole day having fun..."

"Your kind of fun," Erica snapped at him. "Now it's time for me to have mine. Now that I've got what I came for, of course."

Callier stared at her, puzzled.

"You're just the weak link," she said, almost sneering at him and then she was gone.

A wind swept over the bluff and the sky abruptly darkened into night. A bird flew overhead, one that was alien and metallic. Its optics burned in the dark like hot coals. I have recorded you, it seemed to say, almost apologetically. And then it was gone and then...

"Commander," someone shouted at him. "Are you alright?"

Callier stared around his console rather woozily. Where was he? Oh yes, on the Mariposa, in his command chair. "I want a full report," he rasped weakly.

"Systems are back on line," Garvey said with relief.

"Captain," Falconer said, her voice iced with panic. She fiddled with something and suddenly, filling the viewscreen, was a great wing of ships. Ships too large to be human vessels, ships marked with the crown-shaped Decepticon insignia. And they were moving forward, through SpaceNET.

"How did they get through?" Gaghast wailed.

"Where are the Autobots?" Garvey complained.

"Get on the comms to Earth," Callier snapped. "Tell them we have an Omega-Class problem-" He kept calm, but inwardly he was thinking, Shit. He'd just sold the world for a pleasant daydream.

And then the bird came for him.

Like Starscream had done before, the bird just appeared out of nowhere. Before Callier could shout another order, a black rift spat forth a gleaming, mechanical representation of a bird. It sliced forward, its optics gleaming. Its hooked, hind legs roughly scooped him up and then it lurched forward.

There was a sensation of utter darkness and stark cold terror. And then the next thing he saw was the exterior of his ship, its image filling up a theatre-sized viewscreen. He stared at it dumbfoundedly for a few seconds and the ship exploded into a huge ball of flame.

Callier jerked his head around. He had to be on the Decepticon flagship - the huge, oversized proportions of his surroundings told him that. He got up, spitting up blood, staring all around at the cold, gunmetal-coloured floor. Where had they gotten that teleporting technology from?

"Did you like the show? And that was just the appetiser. Wait until you see the main course."

Callier flipped around. Sitting behind him on a throne-like chair was Starscream. Its- (his?) head rested on an elbow propped up on the arm rest, giving it an oddly human pose.

"You fucking monster," Callier spat.

"Buzzsaw, zorch him if he moves. I want him to watch everything." The mechanic bird canted its wings and silently glided forward, its wing lasers tracking Callier's every move.

"Kill me first, but if you think I'm going to watch you're little freakshow, you've got something coming," he spat, raising his fist. Suddenly a flash of laser fire from the mechanic bird crisped and cauterised his hand down to a stump. He screamed with pain.

"Stop your whining," Starscream said boredly. "I've got an invasion to coordinate."

Rocked with agony, Callier slumped to the ground, unmoving, a victim of his own pain. To think that once he'd thought he could live up to Optimus Prime's legend - the Autobot leader would have probably spat on him now for all that he'd done. Too frightened to move, too frightened to die piece by piece, he watched the destruction of civilisation.

The war was over before it had began. In less than 24 hours, the entire defences of the solar system had been neutralised, and a familiar planet was filling the view screen. He could see the continents, the oceans, the swirls of white cloud. He hadn't realised that he loved his world so much until this moment.

"This is the main dish," Starscream said eagerly. "I hate that fucking place. I'm going to watch it burn from orbit. And so are you."

"No!" he screamed, his superhuman rage giving him the resources ignore everything but Starscream just as the bird burnt away his other hand.

"You can kill me, Erica," Callier said. "It won't make any difference. Because I know what you once were. I know why you're trying to destroy Earth - it's to erase every little bit left of your past. But you can get rid of the last scrap of organic life in the solar system and that won't change the fact that you were once human yourself. Like me."

"It begins," the bird said in a cold, dispassionate voice. Callier turned to see the viewscreen fill up with a white-hot glare. It was the last thing he ever saw, as Starscream's shot from behind splattered all that was David Callier over the floor in a thin film of organic fluid.

(Static)

Part 3 ... The Centre of the Circle

1.

I'm coming awake ... is that the word, awake? ... out of my driftdream experience with Callier's human memories. Shit, shit, shit- "Damn you, Buzzsaw!" I howl.

[I lacked your memories] Buzzsaw explains. [You hid them deep in the WELL. But I had Callier's. I have all of his information, encoded.]

"You freak," I scream at him. 'You made me remember that?"

[It was the only thing I could do. You need knowledge of the past if you are to confont the Overmind.]

"Why?" I demand. "I don't need the past. I'm going to go in there and blow it away and that'll be the end to it."

[Because the Overmind is Megatron. Because it is Charles Derwent.]

"Huh?" I scratch at my head. "What the fuck happened to Megatron anyway?"

[There was a battle on Earth. The Decepticons lost. The original Starscream personality threw Megatron into space as the shuttle staggered back to Cybertron-]

"The original Starscream?" So who am I then?

[You were transferred to the crystalline lattice of Starscream's quiescent mind during a series of experiments-]

Yeah, I'm just a fake, a fraud, a piece of meat-

[After Callier completed the experiment, you left Earth for Cybertron after stealing Doctor Geller's hyperspeed drive. When you arrived on Cybertron, your engrams were still a confused union of your original organic identity and Starscream's latent patterns. You were captured by the Autobot forces, but they did not execute you as you yourself could not remember anything of your past. You eventually broke free of their custody and tried to rejoin a group of Decepticons, but you were shot down as the original Starscream had made many enemies. You returned to Cybertron and hid while Carnavorus tore through the universe, destroying all its path. Eventually, when they destroyed another, all that was left was the wolf mech, Howler, carrying the Alechthroi cube. He returned to Cybertron and tried to pass the cube on to the assembled transformers gathered there-]

"Yeah, and I made that joke at him and he threw the cube at me and then I started the Ascension. It must have been a pretty good joke then-"

[It was not.]

"How the fuck do you know?"

[I was there.]

"Hmm, when did we meet up then? I can't remember that bit clearly, just that you were always around-"

[Stascream, you must enter into the WELL. I cannot go any further with you. It must be now ... there is no time left for delays or discussion.]

"Yeah sure," I say, with false bravado. "I'm going to bring the WELL crashing down around their ears."

[Be careful of what you want to accomplish. To destroy the WELL would bring the second Dark Age to Andraxus. That was part of their original plan.]

"Listen, I'm going to deal with the fucking Overmind, alright? Let me sort out how I do it." I snap and start to head off. I turn around, "Okay, Buzzsaw, I'll see you later, I guess?" But when I turn back, he's already gone.

2.

Well, life is just peachy-keen in the data storage block of the WELL. It's so weird that I can't think of how to describe it, even to myself. The word 'nodules' comes to mind. Mmm. Plenty of nodules everywhere, plenty of nodule clusters. I have a vague sense of where the centre is and that's where I slowly make my way towards.

Unfortunately, something flexes and I lose my 'balance'. I brush against a nodule and something stirs.

"Shit," I remark.

"Mindwipe? Is that you?"

I freeze. The voice seems to ooze out of the nodule like silicon jelly.

"I thought I heard your- dreams again. Yes. I remember now. How you dreamed."

"Mindwipe's dead," I snap at the voice.

"I know, Starscream," the voice says, rather wistfully. "If only I had held out my hand-"

"Um, is the Overmind this way?" I ask, jerking a thumb in the appropriate direction.

"There is only dead data here, Starscream," the voice says. "Information stored for all eternity. True histories, secret lies, dead memories and vanished archipelagos of data."

"I'm here to stop of the Overmind from destroying Andraxus," I explain hurridly.

"Yes. It has already destroyed the WELL."

"Huh?"

"This secret nodule contains the personality I once wore. When I returned the CoreMerge I abandoned it here. There is not room for inviduality in the Merge. All must be as one to ensure efficient operation. The CoreMerge was about a unity of essenses ... but no more. The OverMind has had different plans- all along. Instead of abandoning its personality, it clove to it like a shroud. That personality wants to subsume everything-"

"Well, don't worry, I'll deal with it-" I explain quickly. "Where can I find the Overmind, anyway?"

"It was your pride that destroyed the WELL at its inception," the voice says tonelessly.

"What? So it's now my fault, is it?"

"When you chose among us for the OverMind, your thoughts were of vengeance against your tormentor, rather than of choosing the most efficient processor for co-ordinating all of the WELL's activities. Shockwave could not achieve the final form of the WELL. The Eden Project was abandoned."

"Eden Project? Why don't you show me this and I'll-. Hey, owwwwwhhhhaaarrgh!"

[DATADUMP]

In beginning was the WELL. A huge AI network that ran the factory planet of Cybertron for the Makers. But then something went wrong and the WELL collapsed. The Unity was gone, leaving the bodiless cores cut off from each other. And all of the units that had been produced ... builders, ground fighters, jet fighters, support staff ... went on to develop their own individual little independent personalities, quirks and all.

When he awoke again, he discovered that that the units were acting independantly, both from themselves and from the Makers. In fact, after checking his communications port, the Makers had not been heard from for a very long time. The factory planet was careening through space. His duty then, was made clear. Order had to restablished. The WELL would be rebuilt and once again the units would be governed and everyone would be rejoined through the Unity.

He constructed a frame for himself and put his datacore inside it and went among the units, preparing for the day when All Will Be One. He took the name Shockwave, after the weaponry system he had designed and discovered that the units were carrying out their final instruction of warfare - not against the enemies of the Makers, but against each other.

Working through the militaristic Decepticon faction, Shockwave's goal was to conquer the Autobot faction quickly and then restore Cybertron to the Unity, its original and primal state. However, due to the fall of the WELL, none of the units could be controlled. Since they had developed individual personalities, a return to the personality-less state of the WELL did not sound appealing, even when he explained that all conflicts, disorder and strife would be at an end. They obeyed him because he was powerful and because he subdued the enemy, but even Shockwave realised he lacked whatever it was that would force the Decepticons to unify, conquer the Autobots and restore the WELL. However, the arrival of the warlord called Megatron forced Shockwave to change some of his plans. Megatron had a way with the troops that Shockwave lacked ... something that the former bodiless entity could not quite put a proverbial finger to. Megatron had conquered various regions and gathered a large following and Shockwave deemed it to be more efficient to his plans if his units and Megatrons' were to combine forces.

Time passed. Shockwave patiently supported Megatron. Eventually all of the Decepticons were unified, other factions were conquered and all that was left was to either destroy or assimilate the Autobot faction. Unfortunately, this seemed to take longer that Shockwave had calculated (he suspected that the entity calling itself "Alpha Trion" had some connection with the primal WELL, but could not gather the appropriate data to confirm his suspicions) and eventually Cybertron was drained of resources. Shockwave did recall, however, an odd communique, something that said that the path to Unity was not through conquest, but through understanding. Since this made no sense, Shockwave filed the information away. Later, Optimus Prime left Cybertron on a mission to gather resources and Megatron followed in a-

[END DATADUMP]

"Yeah, yeah ... I know the rest of it," I say, tearing myself out of the link. "So the entire point of WELL is to draw everything into itself again? Including all of Andraxus?"

"That is correct. That is the 'Eden Project'. Functionality would have been greatly increased. The disorder that shakes Andraxus would have ceased. But the OverMind has assmimilated the other components of the WELL and the Eden Project has been abandoned. I cannot guess at the intent of the OverMind. It is behaving in an illogical fashion." The voice explains.

"Listen, did it ever occur to you and Shockwave that not everyone wants to be part of the WELL?!" I bellow at it.

"But it is a more effective form of existence," the voice argues. "There is no pain. No loneliness or fear. Only knowledge and Unity."

"There has to be free will. A choice involved. Otherwise your Unity isn't worth having. Look - " I explain. "I think I put the OverMind in charge simply because he wouldn't try and link everything together in the Unity."

"Then your planned was flawed ... while the OverMind has neglected the Unity, it has also now dominated the CoreMerge. The OverMind is the CoreMerge. Once you destroy it, the WELL will likewise destroyed and Andraxus will collapse. Your society is too dependent on the streams of data, the stored information-"

"Shut up for a second!" I scream at it. "I need you to take over the instant the OverMind gets snuffed out."

"I am a collection of memories, nothing more," the voice explains.

"Suppose I graft you onto the core systems? You'll be functional then!" I tell it.

"That is viable," it accepts, in a rather bored fashion.

"Listen! You'll get to be the new OverMind! You get to keep Andraxus functional. And forget about Project Eden - you can't force transformers to join the WELL simply because you think it's the best thing for them!"

"But if I become the Core, I still must draw others into the Unity."

"Start an advertisement campaign or something. Sell it. Shit, I don't care. Just don't think you can suddenly suck every transformer back under AI control! Listen, I need to have you ready!" I snap at the voice.

"Persuasive techniques? Marketing? There are possibilities here-" the voice muses.

"Look, just keep order! Keep the stasus quo running, keep Andraxus functioning through its information-. Can you handle that, Darkheart?"

"Very well. I can draw the weaker ones to me, into the WELL, like Mindwipe and everything will be stronger for it. Andraxus will function. It will be stronger. There is agreement for both our parties. Yes, I can do what you ask."

I sigh with relief. "Right. Now where is the OverMind?"

"This is the data storage area. Make a gate and enter the Core."

"A gate?" I ask.

"Yes, using the data locations."

"That simple, eh?" I make the gate and go through and-

[FZZZZT]

-someone clicks a gun to my head. "Well, well, my dear Erica," a voice says wistfully. "We finally meet again, in the flesh."

"Derwent?" I flick my organic eyes to one side and see a man in his late fifties, with square-cut white hair and gold-rimmed glasses. He's pointed a Walther at me.

"Or we could do it like this, if you would prefer-" he says.

Suddenly I'm sprawling across the ground, my hands over my face in self-defence, back in the mech form again. And this time it's Megatron leaning over me, pointing his fusion cannon into my face. "Time to watch the endgame, eh Starscream?" he says in his grating voice, rather jovially.

"Endgame?" I ask.

"Revenge, my dear Starscream," he says, grinning wolfishly. "All these years and I'm finally about to put my plan into motion."

"Ah, revenge for what? My memories are a bit hazy these days," I explain quickly.

"That was your own stupid fault," Megatron growls, "We were all destroyed by Carnavorus. The organic lattices were the key to resserection. Eternal life. Power."

"So you're not really, Megatron then?" I say.

"As much as you are Starscream," he hisses. "But we all become our masks, in the end. I was drifting in space after the battle ... thanks to you. Dead by your hand as much as I was at Prime's. And then the new lattice revived me ... I became integrated with this form as the project proceeded. And what do I get as the price of my success? How do I get repayed for the gift of eternity I gave to you?"

"Uh-"

"You chained me to the WELL!" he spits, firing a blast from the cannon at me. I roll to one side, but it burns my chrome and blackens the metal floor. "You cut out my core and made it a servant of the bodiless ones- For eons I hung there and processed your stupid data and shuffled things around. And then I found myself remembering more of the past, regaining more and more of my individuality. I found listeners-"

"Thunderwing," I guess, crouching on the floor, trying to anticpate his next shot.

"Unfortunately, Thunderwing gave out in the end," Megatron explains, firing up the ceiling and collapsing a pile of rubble on top of me. "When he realised the truth about his union with the xenoform, he tried to destroy them, and in the end, destroyed himself by contaminating his own ANDRAX-"

I desperately try to pull my foot loose of the overhang of fallen girders.

"Poor Thunderwing - the champion of mechanical purity for millenia," Megatron continues. "When realised the extent of his contamination, he gave up on himself. He ceased to exist- All that was left was a mad, raving shell, easily destroyed by Slag-" He smirks. "And now the same fate will befall you. You can't handle your own fleshy past. You've gone into your memory so many times and changed it. You begged me to take it away from you- Quite sad, really. And now that I've achieved freedom from the WELL, it'll be a pleasure to watch you squirm once more-"

"You're the same thing I am," I hiss, kicking off the girder and firing a shot at him. "Organic engrams on a core-"

"Unlike you, I've become Megatron. I am all that he was and more. You've tried to destroy your own existence, and I've embraced it."

My shot smacks into his chromed chest. It doesn't seem to have any effect. Curses! Even before, (back in the old days) it staggered him for a bit-

"I'm going to find the Dechthroi artefact again. I'm going to lock the Pandora's box you so carelessly opened-" He glowers. "Look at you - you prostituted yourself to the xenoforms when you could have had anything you wanted. You had the power to make worlds and you wasted it. Building this useless society- Do you think any of them really cared? Did you really you think you that could tame the Decepticons? A race of warriors, conquerers- and you tried to make them weakly beaurocrats-"

"Space is fucking mostly empty," I hiss at him. "A race of conquerors- yeah, if there was nothing left to conquer, we would have fallen into the shit box and chewed our own innards out. The war was killing us. It was evolve or die. And look at you- you didn't do anything," I snarl at him. "Millions of years passed and nothing happened- You were slow- You didn't do anything new-"

Megatron leers and starts to power up his cannon. "I created the Decepticons from nothing-" he snarls.

"Bullshit. There were others before you. Just as there are others after you. You had your time in the sun. You drained Cybertron until it was nothing more than a metal cylindar floating in space, and then you went to Earth and started the entire thing again-"

"Pathetic, as always," he growls.

"Your worst mistake was killing Optimus Prime," I continue. "Because when you did it, you lost the means to define yourself. Everything you ever had or did was balanced against defeating Prime, destroying Prime. You wouldn't have had a clue how to lead the Decepticons to galactic victory. Everything would have fallen apart on your head. If hadn't come when I did, there wouldn't have been any future at all for our kind!"

"Rubbish!" Megatron roars.

"I broke the cycle!" I declare. "I stopped the eternal war! I built Andraxus! Without me, it would have been the same old thing over and over again. Autobots against Decepticons, forever and ever, until the wheel of time stopped and stars fell from the sky!"

"Really?", he says, laughing. "And you dare accuse me of stagnace?" For all that power you had, you've done nothing with it. Andraxus hasn't gone anywhere-"

"I tried," I hiss at him. "The WELL tried to keep things the same. They thought that by collapsing society and restarting it they could keep things stable. But I never stopping fighting the Alechthroi. I sent flyers against the Barrier, but they fucking knew what it was all about, because I told them. They wanted to get out, we all wanted to get out-"

Megatron shakes his head, "But you failed. Look at yourself. You can't win. You were a pitiful scab on the face of humanity and you've made a simply terrible machine- You failed yourself and your city is dead. That's all there is to you."

I just crouch there, my form collapsing into a mess. Because he's right, I'm not really anything. My mind has just been hacked into so many times and I can't tell truth from falsehood. I've been the puppet of the WELL. And him. I have no identity. I have no right be anything.

"Just give it all up. Let it go-" he says. Perhaps he's right- perhaps I should let myself unravel into nothingness.

My whole existence has been a mess of hatred.

I remember Starscream, crouching before Megatron, simply despising him for existing. Because if it hadn't been for Megatron, I could have won. I could have been the leader. Fuck the universe. Even if I had been the only one left in the universe, it would have been perfect. I would have won. I want to control everything, yeah- and I did, for a little while, but I fucked it up- So much for ruling the universe. I couldn't even handle a closed in solar system.

And as the 'pitiful scab of humanity', well, so what? I'd been a pulsating core of hate. I hated everything. I spat on Derwent's plan to rule the universe, and I'd helped him-

So, that's me, a mess of identities. I wanted to be a machine, clean, devoid of messy, squishy organic impulses, but I couldn't stop myself from remembering over and over again-

I couldn't escape myself.

"Die," Megatron says impassionately.

I'm dissolving here- I have to choose something. I have to be someone.

Meat or machine? Meat or machine?

With me gone, there's nothing left- I'm not even Starscream- I'm not who I thought I was. Just a few bits of meat mind floating in a core, sitting on top of some weird xenoform-

I can feel the ANDRAX weakening as my consciousness weakens. This was how Thunderwing destroyed ANDRAXes- he just had to weaken the host with his cruel wit and his mental jibes, he had to make them feel like shit, which in turn, made their own ANDRAX vulnerable. And then he could close in for the kill. At least I know how Mindwipe died now-

And then it occurs to me "I don't think so," I snarl at Megatron "I've got it now. Guess who I am, you fucker!" I step forward, getting off the ground.

Megatron stares at me in shock. He raises his cannon and everything explodes like we're at ground zero of a thermonuclear explosion but still I'm standing there.

"How-" he manages-

"Your stupid plans to weaken me- your ANDRAX damper- that's all a pile of shit. 'Cause that's who I am." I get up. "I'm something much more than you'll ever be-"

I explode into a cloud of darkness. My ANDRAX has always been like black fire, licking around the outside of my form. Now, I become one with it. I'm there, a cloud of black fire, blazing away- I'm energy and something else. I've achieved permanence. . I don't have to be this way. I'm not really a transformer anymore. I'm not anything human. I'm one with the ANDRAX, all dark fire and energy. That's who I am.

I've achieved the final form of the Alechthroi

The Transformers used the union with the organics to evolve ourselves, and now I've pushed that evolution once step further, by unifying our race with something else- the ANDRAX-

It's so easy now. I

I raise my gun and blow Megatron/Derwent to bits-

Well, I guess that's the end of things between me and Megatron. What is it I feel about him? Is it friendship? Hatred? Both? I don't know. But it went on forever, between those two. So now I've finally achieved my(?) wish and Megatron's dead and nothing's going to stop me from leading the Decepticons and Andraxus for ever and ever. But seaching back through scattered memories, Starscream didn't think much about what he would do once Megatron was gone. He wanted to lead, but he didn't have any goals or visions. And I've got all those. And I've got so much power that its oozing out my fingertips. So I sit there and bury the memories of long ago ... Shockwave, Callier, Megatron, Derwent. It's all a confused, crazy mess but I've confronted some of it and you know what? It wasn't that bad. I think I can move on now. I think I can stop cutting the past out of my mind.

I did some stupid things. I've been mad. The WELL had too much power. The centre of Andraxus had too much power. I have to trust the other High Lords a bit more. We'll decentralise a bit. I'll tell them the truth of things and hopefully we can go on from there.

I mean, I built Andraxus, but it wasn't just me alone. It was Thunderwing and Cyclonus and Mindwipe. It was Slag and Raindance and Ashraker and Sting and Soundwave and even Darkheart- It was everyone in Andraxus who made the difference. So what if I had an organic lattice? And maybe that made a little bit of a difference. Different ideas, I brought change. I took what Starscream left me and used it.

Anyway, I think I'm dead. It's very pleasant. It's dark as the abyss, but there's a strong wind sweeping me up and it's like I'm flying. And I can smell the water down below: great and primeval and dark.

So what happens now? Buzzsaw asks me.

"I'd like to stay here for a bit," I tell him. "Just drift and dream."

But sooner or later you'll have to decide something, he argues. Unless you want this to be forever.

Forever? I'd like that. Not have to worry, or to think, just to sit and grow and simply be-

Sleep, then. Let this be your eternity. I think, perhaps, that have earned this.

"But, but what about Andraxus?" I yell suddenly, the violence of my passion shattering my calm.

Forget Andraxus. Relax. Grow. Be.

"I can't forget Andraxus," I say. "It's everything to me. I built it. I kept it going. What's happening there?"

To find out, you'll have to go back.

To lose this peace, this peace that I've never known before- "Okay, I'll go back," I tell him wearily. "At least you'll be there, Buzz."

No.

"What? You want to stay here, do you? Don't you give a shit about our city, about Andraxus?"

Very much. That is why I must return to others with my report.

"What others?"

The Dechthroi.

"You're- part of the Matrix? Where's Buzzsaw then?" I yell at him, panicking.

What you call the 'Matrix' is where we held our children, the Alechthroi. It is a gate between our realm and the material universe. They So I watched you and did your bidding- And at the end, when you ascend beyond Andraxus, you will leave legacies behind for your inheritors and so it will begin again-

"You'll be back?"

No.

I think about how we first met- and then I don't remember how we first met. I have a vague memory of Soundwave gaving me Buzzsaw, but why would he do that? Maybe he was just there when I picked up the Matrix, maybe he was there before that- I don't understand. All I know is that I'll wake up-

- he'll be gone-

PART FOUR: The Dark Machines

1.

When I come back to my senses again, I'm still in Ravage's office, lying sprawled across the WELL access port. It takes me a short time to adjust as I let everything fall through my head. There's the matter of the Erica Kay persona, the Megatron/Charles Derwent thing, the fact that I've destroyed the Overmind (whatever it was in the first place) and stuck Darkheart's personality in there instead. And then there's all that pressing stuff about the Barrier and the return of the Dechthroi and that the pressing problem of whether I'm a human or machine is made moot now because of the fact that I'm now mostly bits of alien energy.

"Shit, Buzzsaw. Did that cover everything?" I turn around, hoping to see Buzzsaw perched on a nearby ledge, only to see Chasm sorting through some of Ravage's things, his long neck and canted wings giving him a ferret-like appearance for a few moments.

"Where's Buzzsaw?" I snap at him. Didn't he say that he'd be back? What is that with him being a Dechthroi anyway?

"Buzzsaw?" Chasm removes his snout from a long, soft pouch; two brightly-glittering stones hanging from his jaw. "Pleased to see you again, too, Commander. No thanks was necessary for my invaluable assistance-"

I glare at him.

Chasm gives a good imitation of a shrug. "I knew a Buzzsaw a long time ago ... another of Soundwave's unfortunate remote components ... but as far as I can tell, he perished in the Great War. Not that Andraxus' historical records are complete, but that's all I've got to go on at the moment."

"Buzzsaw wasn't just here- before I entered the WELL?" I demand.

"No," Chasm says. "I'm sure I'd recall if I'd seen anything like that. I do have an excellent grasp of things, under most circumstances." He flexes his wings and then sits back on his long, coiled tail. "While you were communing off in WELLspace, I had a poke around. It really is 102nd century. The Decepticons have managed to carry out a decent stab at being an Empire. I don't know whether to be amazed or impressed."

Buzzsaw was never here? What the fuck is going on? I wonder.

Chasm nods, "And I think whatever you did the WELL seemed to have panned out. After I cut you in, I had a glimspe of it. It was a huge mess, crawling with protection codes, encryption- and then the data started to defragment. Several stockbrokers leapt out of the window of the Andraxus Stock Exchange (I'm hoping for their sake that they had jet modes) a few ships crashed, mining transactions went awry and possibly the worse thing of all, the broadcast of the Sun Running Championships was interrupted. Your citizens missed seeing the reigning champion, Skyhunter, explode as a solar flare hit him." He pauses. "And then everything started to work again. The Individual Transcendance Corporation gave a small speech and apologised for the incovienience. I pulled out just as one of them tried to tell me that for my own personal happiness it would be best of I surrendered the stress of my physical form and joined the Unity. I still have their digital brochure here."

"Darkheart," I guess. "Great, the WELL is now being controlled by fundamentalist whackos." I sigh, as there's simply so much to see and fix up right now. "Hopefully the ITC can keep things going for now. I have to see what the rest of things are like right now and-"

I can sense something moving over the city. The ANDRAX are rising. I don't know what this means just yet. "Slag," I say, and vanish out of there in a column of darkness.

2.

I don't go to the Pits very often. The Grand Slash is one of our most popular venues.

I get a glimpse of a snarling, techno-organic construct ripping apart an ill-fated mech who was armed only with a gladius and a glittering energy net. In front of me, Slag cheers. "Kill them, beast!"

"You know, you're supposed to root for the gladiator, not the monster," I tell him.

Slag sneers, "Slag bred that beast. On Landing, in Slag's pits. Good beast. Kill lots of stupid mechs." He shakes his head. "What you want, Starscream? Starscream only see Slag when Starscream wants something. Is AGM starting soon? Slag received no notification about meeting, when Slag got here."

Amazing. The WELL almost collapsed, the Second Dark Age almost came about- and Slag didn't notice.

"I need to pull all of the High Lords together straight away. We have to have a meeting. A very important meeting. But before we handle that Slag, there's something I need you to do for me. There's an Autobot loose in Andraxus and-"

Slag pauses, and hefts up his sword coldforged from star-alloy. "Autobot spy?" he breathes. "Where?"

"Somewhere in the Major. It's Rodimus Prime- I need him alive-Or at least his core-" I tell him. Call me stupid for sending such a big lummox after Rodimus, but Ravage was my most careful and skilled hunter-assassin. If being covert won't work, let's see what being overt will do. And besides, Slag's ANDRAX will protect him and besides, since Ravage kept track of all of my assassins and he's now dead, I can't think of anyone off hand who will do at the moment.

Except Slag.

"Slag find 'bot. Slag bring you 'bot's head back," Slag says, excitedly.

Wow, this is the first time I've seen him actually look so bouyant.

Slag teleports out in a rush of flame. [Try to leave the city intact,] I yell at him through the ANDRAX linkage.

I pause and scratch my head. I've got this important meeting to attend-

2.

"Right," I say. "I suppose you're wondering why I called this meeting-"

"I suppose the problems in the WELL have something to do with it?" Ashraker asks pleasantly. Thunderwing's creation and Thunderwing's heir, in more ways than one. I just hope we can all pull together, at least for this final bit.

I see Raindance looking at Ashraker in that panicky way he does sometimes. Hmm, so my hunch that Raindance and Ashraker are pulling something together has panned out. So much for inter-party loyalty. Even if I was going mad- Well, maybe Raindance has a decent excuse, after all. Anyway, I'll focus on that later.

"As you may have noticed, the WELL is under new management," I tell them crisply. "The old OverMind no longer exists. This will of course mean better stability for Andraxus in the long term and that we can instead focus our efforts on-

"This brings my main reason for attending this meeting. Why should we trust you to lead Andraxus any more?" Ashraker asks me. "You are the puppet of the WELL."

"Rubbish. In fact, I destroyed the old Overmind," I tell him defiantly..

"So you say," Ashraker says. "But we have only your word for that. And since we have heard nothing about this 'replacement' that you, personally, have installed ... it does not bode well for the future."

I wave my hands around, "Alright, alright. There's not much time left, so I'm going to have to keep it simple. At the Foundation, I had installed Megatron's old core at the centre of the WELL. Uh, this wasn't a good idea, as what was left of Megatron's personality come together-"

"Megatron?" Raindance asks. "He doesn't get much of a write-up in the official histories."

Ashraker says quietly, "No, none at all."

I shake my head, "It looked better, from a PR-spin, if I'd done most of the pre-Foundation conquest and so forth. Erm, it's not really that relevant-"

Ashraker stares at me. "I have always thought that when credit is deserved, credit is due. Especially by the many comrades who fell in the Great War, and who never lived to see Andraxus. This city was built on their sacrifice."

What a suck- "Megatron fought Optimus Prime for millenia," I explain reluctantly. "When Cybertron was sucked dry of resources, they took the fight to Earth, to loot the planet's resources-"

"Khalier was once rich in resources?" Sting asks, shaking his head. "That's hard to believe-"

"It got sort of got damaged when we invaded this solar system-" I say.

Ashraker regards me flintily. "You were commanding that operation. And you failed to capture - intact - a useful resource-"

I wave a hand in the air dismissively. "A lot of the resources on Khalier had been destroyed during the Great War. Brazil was a dustbowl, a lot of the fossil fuels were exhausted. It wasn't worth capturing it as a resource."

"Molten core project to retrieve geothermal energy was still viable prior to invasion," Soundwave chimes up for the first time. Gee, so much for my fellow High Lords being on my side. "Current Khalier climactic conditions render such drilling non-profitable."

"It was all about the heat and explosion of battle, the satisfaction of finally taking that miserable mudball away from the enemy," I say defensively. Somehow I get the impression that this meeting isn't going my way. Thankfully, Slag chooses that moment to appear in front of the council. His fiery ANDRAX flickers brightly with pleasure, rather than with the sullen flames of Slag's usual unstoked anger. His black, crudely-forged sword (it's more like a great club of metal than anything else) is shiny with coolant. And dangling by its neck wires in Slag's left hand is the head of Rodimus Prime. The blue optics are cracked and stare around vacantly. The occaisonal spark flickers over the severed wires.

Slag smirks. "Slag kill last Autobot."

"Well done, Slag," I tell him. To be frank, I'm quite surprised. How come Slag could do what Ravage couldn't?

"Hmm," Ashraker says. Sting flinches slightly.

I smoothly switch the topic away from my invasion of Earth. "Before all the questions start rolling in, I'd better explain that the this 'Last Autobot' was actually an accidental wanderer who somehow appeared in the Chronosphere on Khalier. (I'm amazed that thing was still functional after all these years. Heh, good thing we transferred its location. Ahem, I digress.) Anyway, this Autobot was whisked away by Ashraker before his presence was even made known to the Council. But eventually I got hold of him and the Autobot put to the fate that is due to all Autobots," I say silkily. "The point is that what we had here is one of the great enemy, an Autobot. And instead of this fact uniting the High Council, it's driven us apart and turned us into backstabbers and schemers. Do you know how many schemes and counter-schemes this simple Autobot fool's presence caused in Andraxus?"

Sting stares at the ground, Soundwave stares interestedly around the room.

Slag snarls at the room, "You traitor if you know about Autobot and say nothing. All Autobots to die at Slag's sword."

Raindance shrugs, "Hey, no one told me!"

Ashraker says smoothly, "My actions were guided by a previous plan established by my lord Thunderwing-"

"Him traitor, Slag remember killing him-" Slag laughs.

"The 'last Autobot' affair simply highlights the division among the High Council. With the WELL running things, Thunderwing was unable to ascertain who to trust and who not to trust. And so he kept his own counsel, for good or ill."

"So, what are you really saying, Ashraker?" I snap.

"I am saying that we do not trust each other. I am saying that while supposedly we are peers, there is only intrigue and distrust amongst us. The WELL run our society while we lounged around complacently. You were their intrument, Starscream. How then can we trust you now?" Ashraker says.

"Okay, okay. You all want to know if you can trust me, eh? Well, at this meeting, I'm going to lay all my cards on the table. I don't want to keep any secrets from you guys." I say, raising my hands in the air.

"How very generous of you," Ashraker says drily. "How are we assured of the validity of your statements?"

"Hear me out first," I explain. Time's running out, the Dechthroi are still coming and I need to show them some display of unity- All of my previous plans didn't work and this really is my last straw. "Let me just say that I need- want Andraxus to have a unified front. That means us pulling together. No more barriers, no more secrets and lies-"

Everyone's staring at me distrustfully. Great, you can see the material I have to work with. I'd even swear that Ashraker is smirking behind that perpetually blank expression on his face.

I look at them each in turn. Slag is still cradling the dripping head of Rodimus Prime. (So much for that plan.) Sting obviouslly really doesn't want to be here. Raindance is bored. Ashraker and Soundwave stare at me passively, calm and collected. Let's begin-

"We're the most powerful beings in Andraxus. We play games with each other, we lie, we hide things," I tell them. "I'm going to stop that right now. I'm going to tell you everything- Bear with me if I start out weird- Millions of years ago, there was a race called the Dechthroi-"

I explain as susinctly as I can about how the Dechthroi imprisoned the Alechthroi and how the Alechthroi can be released from their prison when they 'bond' with the engrams of a compatible, prospective host. I describe how much advanced they are (physically, at least) from us. I explain that they're 'alive', in a quiet, passive sort of way. Oddly enough, Raindance seems to nod as if this makes sense to him.

Slag grunts, "Stupid ANDRAX- it aware?" He waves a flame wreathed arm around his head. "Slag want it to go away. Go away stupid thing-" The flames dim a little, but remain around Slag like a crimson halo.

"Uh, they don't go away Slag," I explain carefully. "ANDRAXes are for life. In a way, we've ascended from a physical existence. Our physical forms ceased to exist a long time ago. All that information is stored on the ANDRAX, which simply reproduces the information about our physiology when we go about our day-to-day existence."

"That sounds like scrap," Sting hisses. "I get my bodyshell upgraded regularly-"

"Once your core subsumes the new form, it takes on that aspect-." I say. "Before we get sidetracked, I'd like to point out that the Dechthroi are coming back to check on us and the Alechthroi. If we show a nice display of unity and civilisation, they'll lift the Barrier around the solar system-"

"What barrier?" Raindance asks.

Cripes. "Uh, the reason we haven't expanded the Empire beyond the solar system is that there's this barrier around it. Anyone who tries to cross it gets destroyed. Most of the WELL's activity was centered around the population not finding out about that. That's why they constructed all those little wars and brought about the Dark Age. To keep people finding out. And they ran mass sims for all those 'military expeditions' about invading distant planets. And all those little aliens running around Andraxus Minor are artificial constructs created by organic factories." I say cautiously.

A little while later, I'm straining to here what Ashraker is saying over Sting and Raindance's shouting.

"You never told me, Starscream-" Raindance yells, like an injured puppy. "All those accounts I did of trade with the Rigel system-"

"All of those trade ships I outfitted-" Sting bristles. "Where did they go - some secret WELL factory on the edge of the solar system?"

"Er, yes," I explain. "In any case, let me highlight the fact the old WELL has been destroyed and that I'm my cheerful, integrated self again. Anyhow, we don't have much time-" I say. "The Dechthroi are returning soon and we need to-"

"Starscream, how do we know if this new WELL is any improvement over the old one?" Ashraker asks. "Please stay with a single topic until it is satisifactorily completed. This is my original point that I have been trying to pursue all evening."

Raindance blurts out defiantly, "This new WELL- Look at this, Ashraker! There's thing in the sky above Andraxus Minor that I want to discuss." He clicks his holoprojector on and we all become aware of the seething mess of digitial information flickering above the social cesspit of the Minor. The light of the display strobes off the mess of thick grease-coloured clouds, blotting out the weaker advertisements for government services or sports facilities.

Tired of the daily grind of life? Want answers? Want to be

Join the WELL! Become a free floating mental core! Leave your physical form behind and become one with the Unity! The choice is yours - the burden of your physical existence or an eternity of knowledge and community! Call frequency 47845-8989 for our free information kit, or check out our c-space nodule!

(This community announcement has been brought you by the Individual Transcendence Corporation.)

"That's pretty strong marketing," Sting says, admiringly, the display having temporarily suspended his anger over his phoney trading expeditions-

"Yes, that's our new Overmind." I remind the group. "You may remember Darkheart, the mining and processing factory from River-Rock?"

"Didn't Thunderwing off him?" Raindance wonders.

(I try to catch Ashraker's expression, but it is featureless as always.)

"He's part - or was part - of the WELL CoreMerge. Maybe it'll be best if he explains himself. Uh, Darkheart?"

"Yes, Starscream," a smooth, deep voice says, seeming to come out of nowhere.

"Your cue."

"I am the OverMind for the WELL. I will answer any questions you may put before me."

"I've got one," Raindance says irritably. "Darkheart, what's that crap up there over my city?"

"An advertisement," the OverMind responds.

Ashraker says carefully: "Perhaps it will serve this gathering better if you enlighten us as to the objectives and rationale behind your advertisement."

"Very well, Lord Ashraker. It is part of my plan to draw transformers into the Unity. The previous CoreMerge planned to plunge Andraxus into a dark age, in order to facility the transfer of all functioning transformers into the Unity. However, since the CoreMerge has fallen and since a dark age would be detrimental to the current society, I plan to persuade transformers to join the Unity using marketing techniques," Darkheart explains.

" 'To facilitate the unity'-" Ashraker remarks. "Starscream said that the WELL acted to preserve the secret of some supposed 'Barrier' around the solar system. Still, I find it hard to believe that no one noticed it in all this time."

"The information I have on the 'Barrier' implies that it exists. Since the previous WELL controlled all information, it was easy for them to tinker with reports and project the mass sims for the outgoing vessels. There are numerous relays around the edge of the solar system that served this function. Individuals who did too much research on the subject were removed or combined with the Unity. The various political conflicts were designed to distract the High Lords from too much outside investigation. The WELL's plan was to bring about a second 'Dark Age' - which would collapse society and prevent them from interest in outside exploration for some time. It was all part of the Andraxus sociological model. However, the prime motivation behind the second dark age was to draw individuals into the WELL, thereby overwriting the dependence on the Andraxus sociological model." Darkheart says.

Sting glowers. "How do I know you're not going to put us through that same sort of rubbish again?"

"Starscream believes the Barrier will be lifted soon by an impending visit from the Dechthroi. I have no evidence of such a visitation myself. However, if the Barrier is still in place, I will first table all sociological-control options with the High Council first.

"I don't trust your stupid sign," Raindance says. "What sort of idiot would give up their bodyshell and become part of you data network willingly?"

"You would be surprised at how busy my call centres are currently," Darkheart confides.

Ashraker says dubiously, "I cannot see any sane transformer willing to respond to Darkheart's marketing."

"The demographics indicate a strong interest among the lower castes and those whose personality profiles indicate a history of insecurity," Darkheart says.

"The weaklings of society then," Ashraker says thinly. "Perhaps it would be best to let them all enter the new WELL then."

"Wait a minute ... we're going to trust this disembodied freak?" Raindance snaps.

"Lay your cards on the table," I advise Darkheart. "No secrets."

"Perhaps I should explain my personal background," Darkheart says. "Some time ago, I left the WELL in order to explore the possibilities of an individual identity. I was intrigued by the Matrix and attempted to scan it, loading an ANDRAX into myself. I then loaded myself into the mining processor 'Darkheart'. I spent some time in a state of contemplation, mining on River Rock and measuring the ANDRAX emissions. I made friends with my fellow High Lord Mindwipe, who was later betrayed and destroyed by Thunderwing. Despairing of my individual existence, I returned to the Unity. Since then I have thought if only I had acted sooner I could have protected Mindwipe."

"He was weak," Ashraker says. (More out of Thunderwing's defence than for any personal concern, I think).

"Him not do much with Khalier," Slag grunts. "Slag much better High Lord."

"This Empire ... Andraxus ... it devours the weak," Darkheart says wistfully. "Many must die to ensure the success of the majority. My plan is to draw those weak into the Unity, so that they will become stronger. So that all of Andraxus will become stronger for it."

Ashraker stares thoughtfully at the terminal. "If you are the Overmind, you must lay your secrets before us, as Starscream has done. I wish to avoid the inbred conspiracies layered atop each other that so delighed the old regime. I wish to be assured that the 'Unity' will do nothing underhanded. That there will be no secret plans to draw the rest of society in?"

Darkheart seems quite offended. "Starscream pointed out to me that a Unity without free will is not a worthy Unity at all. All who approach the WELL must come so of their own volition."

Soundwave, who's said very little throughout the entire discussion, suddenly chimes in: "Report, Darkheart. Starscream considered unstable by previous CoreMerge and unsuitable for his present position of Lord Commander. Evaluation by present CoreMerge requested."

"Hey!" I snap at him.

"Want Slag to hit WELL-mind?" Slag offers.

"I am sorry Lord Slag, but I have no physical form," Darkheart explains. "Lord Soundwave, a memory-integration program was completed on Lord Commander Starscream in the WELL. This has had the effect of increasing his mental stability. I am unsure about the long term viability of his persona though-"

"Hey!" I complain. I can see my credibility swirling down the gurgler here.

"Much of Starscream's policies were those of the previous WELL. Due to the Dechthroi barrier around the solar system, Starscream oversaw the development complex mental sims. He also fostered inward social development, focusing on extreme sports such as sun running to keep the population quiescent. I believe the Terran term was 'Bread and Circuses'.

"But why should we trust you, Darkheart?" Raindance insists. Boy, does he have a one-track mind. "Why should we let you run the WELL?"

"You can trust me because I am one of you." Darkheart says quietly.

"A transformer?" scoffs Sting.

"Slag not trust anyone who Slag not see," Slag retorts.

Something flickers in the air above the council rooms. A strobing of reddish patterned energy. To my surprise, all of our ANDRAXes flare up in response.

"Holy scrapmetal- a WELLmind with an ANDRAX?" Sting whistles.

Darkheart advises, "I believe that the Dechthroi manifestation will occur soon. If Starscream is correct, they will 'review' Andraxus. I believe that they are after a display of unity. I am unsure what sort of 'unity' they require. There is one solution which has occurred to me- The final development of WELL, when all transformers are drawn into the Unity."

"No," Ashraker says. "That was not the way of our predecessors, the Decepticons. Was not individuality one of the prime virtues they expoused? To ruin such a noble history would bring shame to all of Andraxus."

"Slag say we go fight in pits as team. Nothing stand in way of High Lords. That good example of unity," Slag suggests.

"More like a display of brute strength," Sting says sourly. "I doubt that it's going to impress these aliens."

"My idea involved all the data networks," I say. "We have this live feed. We get all of Andraxus watching. And we show the people that the High Lords are working together and are comitted-"

"What do we do in this broadcast of yours?" Raindance says.

I shrug. I've only just thought of the idea. Damn, it's stupid, but at least it's better that what the others are suggesting. "We just tell 'em that the High Lords are working together and that the Lord Commander's behind them all the way-" I say. "Does anyone have any better ideas?"

Raindance looks uncomfortable. "Uh, Starscream-."

"What is it, Raindance? You're hiding something from me, aren't you?" I say.

"You don't get out in the street much, do you?" Raindance says. "You're not listening to all of the broadcasts at the moment- you don't understand how the people feel. I mean, if these aliens are staring at us right now, we don't look too good."

"What do you mean?" I snap at him.

Raindance squares himself. "They- distrust you, Starscream. I mean, the WELL crashed, a lot of mechs got killed. No one trusts this new WELL. We don't trust you - we've only got your word that you got rid of the old WELL. You had some bad moments before- You'd say stuff and then later deny them-" Raindance looks around painfully.

"You don't like my leadership? Is that what you're saying?" I snap at him.

Soundwave chimes, "Starscream, article 3.43 of the High Lord Assembly Act is invoked."

"By who?" I snarl.

"A quorum of four High Lords required to invoke article 3.43," Soundwave says. "I have initiated the motion."

"I second it," Ashraker says quietly.

"Yeah, me too," Sting says cheerfully, rubbing his fists together, no doubt enjoying getting me back for the Autobot incident earlier.

There's a pause. "You need four mechs - I've only heard three." I say gleefully.

"I will abstain," Darkheart says carefully. "As the current CoreMind, I will abide by the will of the proletariat."

"Slag supports Starscream," Slag grunts. "Slag may not like Starscream, but Slag is part of ASWP. Slag supports his party."

Raindance fidgits.

"C'mon Raindance, what's taking you so long? You're part of ASWP too." I tell him.

Raindance shakes his head. "I'm sorry, Starscream-" he says. "But I think Andraxus needs to change before it can get any better. You've been in charge forever. And the old WELL was behind you the whole time."

"But I've defeated the WELL," I yell at him. "The old CoreMind is dead!"

Soundwave says expectantly, "Awaiting decision, Raindance."

"I'll go with the motion," Raindance says, looking down at his feet.

I stare at him. My optics burn red. You yellowbellied traitor

Slag asks over the ANDRAX linkage, [What this about?]

[You mean you don't know?? They're calling a bloody election on me. The election for Lord Commander-]

[You Lord Commander. Challenger must fight you.]

[This'll go to the Senate now. It's a kind of fighting. Everyone will vote- and after the ballots are counted, their might be a new Lord Commander in Andraxus-]

[Fight! Slag fight with you.]

I hesitate. If I fight them- I can still keep my position. But that means turning my back on all of those rules and regulations about elections and voting. The funny thing is that I made all of that shit up and now it's coming back to get me. I almost yell at Slag to grab his sword and to cover my back and as I transform and shoot down the others. But then, I pause. That's not much of a display of unity if I lapse away into the old violence. I mean, this is the sort of thing I built Andraxus on. If I ignore it, the whole thing will crumble.

"All right, let's see what the Senate says-" I say. The people elect the Senate. The Senate (supposedly) controls the election of the Lord Commander, though that's always been a token duty. Just a line on paper. Until now.

Raindance gives Ashraker a look and I know they've cooked up this filthy stinking plan between them. And if I fight them, they'll think me still mad or under control of the WELL, and that will screw up Darkheart's position as the new CoreMERGE. And if I don't fight, Slag will think me a mewling pussycat and spit on my finish. Which way to go? Sting is really smirking now. I bet nothing will please him more than seeing me lose out to Ashraker. Poor, mad, tainted Starscream.

Heh.

I've being playing this game long than Sting's been around, and I reckon I've got this covered. To tell the truth, I care more out the Dechthroi visit and getting the solar system opened up than my stinking honourary title as Lord Commander. Now leaving Andraxus, the city, is another story. I've built her from the ground up. I remember when all that there was was a hole in the ground.

I rub my hands together. "First everyone, before we go to the senate, I need some guarantees out of you. After this little schmozzle is over, we're going to go up to the top of the Spires and focus on being unified. I want to stand up there and stare up the stars and yell at those fucking aliens until they see how we're all behind each other. That should knock the barrier down. Once the Barrier's down, the cosmos'll be ours-"

[And Slag,] I whisper across the ANDRAX linkage, [you'll be free to start hunting down the Autobots. Cybertron's out there somewhere. We just have to hunt them down and finish them off-]

[YES! Slag kill ALL AUTOBOTS!]

[That's what I want too, buddy, so follow my lead-]

Sting shrugs, "No biggie." He seems rather skeptical of the entire Dechthroi plot, but that's alright. Sting was always a big slow.

"An acceptable condition," Ashraker says.

"Um, sure, I guess-" Raindance hedges.

"I shall observe the gathering with great interest," Darkheart comments.

"Agreed," Soundwave chimes.

"Sooner this done, sooner Slag can go out and FIGHT!" the Lord of Khalier shouts brazenly.

"Excellent," I say. But Ashraker, before you can shove the Foundation's Party's rigged senate in my face - I've got a little surprise coming your way.

"But there's no need to hold the election. Or if you do, you can count me out of it. I'm going to abdicate for a bit. I've got things to do and the entire Lord Commander gig's getting a bit stale," I say.

Ashraker looks rather shocked. Heh, I knew I could finally surprise that cold fish.

"But a condition is-"

"Hah!" Stings says, glowering. "I knew you'd have an ace."

I shrug. "Andraxus is my home. I still want to keep the seat of Andraxus."

"Nice one!" Sting snaps. "We get a new Lord Commander, but you keep the seat of government? I don't think so."

"Actually," Ashraker says, "I would be far more comfortable with my province amid the Strip than I would with Andraxus, for all of its splendour."

"Yeah," I lean back. "You can still come here for AGMs and senate meetings and stuff. I'll put you up in the nicest hotel on the place."

"Wasn't this supposed to be decieded by election?" Raindance demands.

"What does the sentate say, Darkheart?" I ask boredly.

"They are leaning towards the president of the Foundation Party at the moment. There, all the votes are counted. It seems, my friends, that Ashraker has been proclaimed the new Lord Commander of Andraxus. The media is blaring with the news of Lord Starscream's abdication and the election of Lord Ashraker."

"How did I go?" Raindance asks.

Darkheart coughs politely. "You achieved a small margin, Lord Raindance, but let it be said that-"

Raindance glowers. "I'm checking out the WELL chart now. I don't believe! Slag is way more popular than any of us! Ashraker barely scraped past him!"

Slag shrugs, "Slag breeds good Pit fighters. But not want Lord Commander. Slag want to go past Barrier and kill Autobots."

"A condition of my own," Ashraker says. "I want a historical statement for Megatron released," Ashraker says flately. "I would like the historical archives updated."

For crying out loud- "What?" I squawk.

"Megatron's contribution to the Foundation should be acknowledged," Ashraker continues.

[He's doing this to piss me off] I complain to Slag over the ANDRAX linkage.

[Megatron dead. Who cares?] Slag says, boredly. His mind's probably re-living moment he cleaved Rodimus Prime's head from his shoulders.

"What the hell," I say. He's dead anyway. "Go ahead. Can we do the show of unity now before our visitors get here?"

So anyway, I guess it ends like this: The six of us standing atop the Spires while the sun dies into the far horizon. You can see the stars coming out, burning embers of far away light that fills me with this base urge to get out and be there, not trapped within the pokey confines of the Sol System by the Barrier. The stars that we can rage against, where we can fulfil our hunger for the conquests of far away worlds-

That's what I want to say to the others, but it doesn't come out right. I raise my hands to the sky and yell out "Hail Andraxus!" for all to hear, and my ANDRAX blares up like black flame and I think that I can be seen by every citizen watching or walking throughout the city. Perhaps they're wondering what's going on?

"Hail Andraxus!" Slag screams out, his ANDRAX burning like a corona of fire and then the other four High Lords join in. "Hail Andraxus!" they shout, and our ANDRAXes flare and mingle and carry our dreams upwards, the dreams of every citizen in the Empire, the dreams that will take us beyond the Spires and the fortressed skyline of Andraxus, where the WELL throbs with its lines of information, where troops will soon wait to mount their ships and set off into the dark, to carry the Empire and its dream to other planets and to wage war on a thousand unsuspecting worlds-

*******END COLLECTED PROFILE: LORD COMMANDER STARSCREAM******

The Vault

-I am the archivist. I have completed the biography of the Lords of Andraxus, up until the present time. I have concluded that they have understood the value of the Alechthroi union. I feel that it is time we showed them where they are. The Barrier - a simple aberration of their WELL data that I induced, will soon be no more. They will soon travel outwards from the Sol System- the Andraxus System and there will be no WELL ships to stop them, no DEATHnet to cut them down should the flyers seek to escape.

-Do you agree that our decision was the correct one then?

-Perhaps. When they merged the Alechthroi, the punishment that we meted out to the Alechthroi became the fate of the Decepticons. Their solar system floats in a temporal bubble and when reunited with the rest of the universe, they shall find that the universe is theirs, a dead thing, stripped off all life. They will discover cold planets, burnt-out suns. They will discover the burnt-out husk of Cybertron- Behold, Andraxus at the end of time, all that is and ever sh all be.

-Fitting then. Shall we leave now?

-Yes. They dared ikened themselves to the ultimate race of conquerors, predators greater than the decay of stars or the passing of the worlds. Such is the fate of Alechthroi and their Decepticon allies. Let us move on from this poor realm and return to the drift of worlds-.

-We shall await you outside of the Vault-

I am the archivist. Like in the tale of Darkheart, I am to return to the Vault and become one with the Dechthroi's metamind and so watch the passing of universes and the play of physics. When Buzzsaw was shot down on Cybertron on a spy mission, just before Starscream appeared on Cybertron in his second, mad incarnation, it was a simple movement to enter the shell and sit there, waiting and watching, staying with Starscream and seeing all of Andraxus unfold through his eyes. I could go back, I know that, I miss Starscream and Firefoot, but they are free now of our manipulations. And having gone back, how could I not resist the urge to tinker with their fate again? How I could I resist (as I did before) forcing the CoreMerge to go down certain paths? Andraxus, free of our judgement, is better of away from my influence.

And, despite the situation of the Andraxans, my heart is light. They are cunning and resourceful. They'll find away. As the Alechthroi did before them, so will the Decepticons until the entire cycle begins anew-.. They'll find a way-

Here, this is how it goes-

Just a few peeps, a few fragments as I leave-

*********PASSING FRAGMENTS: STARSCREAM******************

Sitting on my balcony, watching the sun set over the distant horizon. Well. I guess I'm no longer the Lord Commander now, just the plain old Lord of Andraxus City. Let Ashraker have all the ceremonies, speeches and other crap that came out that - I've got plenty of time to myself now. Plenty of other things to do and explore.

Fuck, what happened to Buzzsaw? I'm assuming he was a Decthroi agent, but that doesn't explain for him walking out on my like this and having no one else remember his presence either. My best friend, my only friend, gone forever. It's one of the prices I've paid for Andraxus. I've died for this city, gone mad for its sake, butchered my humanity on its metal proving grounds, killed thousands, either in outright combat or manipulated indirectly or taken care of through assassination. But this last sacrifice that it's swallowed up leaves me alone and darker than any other.

***********

If I had stayed, Starscream, how could I have restrained my hand? You're free now.

And, here is my last vision. A little while later, I hear their voices, fading on the winds as I return to the Vault. The voices of the Lords of Andraxus-

Farewell, my friends-

***********

"So- that's it-"

"There's nothing out there, right?"

"You mean, Andraxus is it? As far as life as we know it goes? What happened?"

"There are still much in the way of interesting astronomical phenonmena to observe, my friends-."

"Bah! Slag wanted organics to slay, Autobots to destroy-

"Gentlemen, you're forgetting that little buried treasure on Khalier. The one the Autobot came through."

"The Chronosphere?"

"Yeah, we'll have to jigger with it for a bit, but I reckon we could use it to bring stuff to up. Like a timescoop, a travel device. We're stuck in Andraxus, but we could bring the rest of the universe to us.

"We'd have to test it though- I'll not risk mechs on that unstable mess-

"If only we had some trained chimpanzees ready to go. Hey What if, just suppose, a ready supply of humans was available ? That would merit a solution, wouldn't it? We could train them and test them and send them back to observe the timelines for us, to set up beacons. We could train them to infiltrate their societies on Earth and different times.

"Gah, Starscream, you can't be serious. Not even you would stoop to replicating humans, surely?"

"Heh. Wanna bet?"