16.Sept.06

Isometric

His speech patterns annoyed the other Predacons. The buzzing lisp was something new, a quirk from his beast mode like Megatron’s living hand and Scorpinok’s pincher-chattering, but its new grating only added to the older problems. The way he spoke irritated Tarantulas to ranting and Megatron into sending him to whatever end of the ship was farthest away. The stilted grammar was bad enough, but the refusal to use pronouns aggravated the Predacons way out of proportion to the problem.

If they had been inclined to talk about it, the original five Predacons who had stolen the Golden Disk with him would have found that they all shared that annoyance. Hearing him repeat his own name every time he spoke was mildly irritating, but the part that made it more than a glitch in their minds was the way he mangled their names. Everyone became ‘This-bot’ or ‘That-bot,’ and it made them want to strangle him until he used their proper names!

True, he picked a major identifying trait for each of them; nobody was ever confused about who he was talking about, especially since he never, ever used pronouns. But Cybertronians took their names seriously, choosing descriptions that presented their character how they desired. Only friends could change that chosen name into a nickname. He was not a friend. A fellow thief, a criminal with a speech glitch, gained no sympathy and earned their irritation.

Perhaps it was just a glitch. He never said. Except for a few sharp words here and a sarcastic comment there, nobody on the original team ever asked, even if he would have answered. The Golden Disk was stolen, and after that, the minor annoyance with a speech problem was the last thing on everyone’s minds.

The truth was that Megatron had hired a team of specialists all slightly out of place. That worked well enough just stealing the Golden Disk, but in the harried escape and subsequent Beast Wars, the weird slants came out in them. Terrorsaur could have been a hotshot pilot…if he’d been a single-fighter ship pilot. Tarantulas could have been a scientific genius…if the Maximals had never imposed their ‘Moral Standards’ rules on the rest of Cybertron. Scorpinok could have been a useful inventor…on a quiet colony world where he wouldn’t be under pressure. Dinobot could have been a great warrior…in the structured fights of the challenge arena.

And him? He’d been hired to be a breaker, the specialist who carried their sensors past the High Council’s first layer of guards to see the traps laying in wait, and he’d done the job perfectly. It was actually kind of strange how Megatron had hired him on a recommendation, then attributed everything he’d done right ever since to sheer luck. The others probably hadn’t known about the recommendation, but they made their disgust with his bumbling ineptitude during the Beast Wars plain. Somehow it completely slipped their minds that he hadn’t been hired for a war.

He was a specialist, hired to do one thing only before becoming backup in the rest of the heist. After that, it was supposed to be up to the others to get them out of there to Earth, where Tarantulas and Scorpinok would get a shipload of energon, and if Megatron wanted to buy his services for a war on the galaxy, he’d have the trip back to Cybertron to negotiate another contract. Otherwise, as soon as they reached the metal planet again, he had every intention of leaving the crew. He hadn’t been made for war. He hadn’t been designed to fight much at all, and definitely not in unknown territory.

The other Predacons had their little glitches, obvious but attributed to their specialties. He, they saw as programmed wrong. They never seemed to figure out that he’d been programmed RIGHT.

He was a specialist, a professional, and no professional in any field would have gotten far with a speech problem like his unless it was somehow part of it. And it was. His programming was written precisely, if a little erratically, because his specialty fell in the High Council’s prohibited range for Predacons. Breakers were strictly illegal, which made him a criminal by programming. Tarantulas, if anyone, should have recognized that; the speech patterns were recognizable and labeled his specialty to those who knew what to listen for.

Maybe if planetfall on Earth hadn’t made him such a clutz, the spider might have connected his speech impediment with a career instead of stupidity, but the Beast Wars weren’t supposed to happen. Megatron contracted him for a quick in and out for the Golden Disk, then a brief retrieval trip where all he’d have to do was move equipment around while the others loaded up on energon.

That was how it was supposed to happen; instead, the Maximals grounded them.

Suddenly, he was trapped on a world he didn’t know, with unknown contours and textures, movements and echoes. Suddenly, he was a specialist drowning in a world he wasn’t trained for, and he couldn’t handle it. He hadn’t been BUILT for this. Transformer adaptation could only help him so far, and he was still left reeling. The other Predacons adjusted as they could and slotted into place in the fighting, but there he was with his annoying speech patterns and crippled abilities.

If he hadn’t seemed so senseless afterward, perhaps one of the others might have done something to help, but Predacons didn’t do things like that. Besides, what could they have done? Down to his basic programming, he wasn’t meant to be here doing this, there wasn’t a thing they could change about that. They chalked his previous success up to luck and decided that he had been like this all along. He’d sounded like it, anyway.

A few words from Megatron would have clued Tarantulas in to what was wrong, but Megatron held everything close. All the information about personnel and the heist he kept locked in secure files; what the Predacons found out about each other came by observation and conversation, not background checks. But all Tarantulas would have needed to know was what exactly the glitching twit was hired for, and things would have started clicking into place.

Of course he spoke like that. Breakers structured half their world through sensors, and sound bridged the two different planes of their sight. While everyone else’s vision came from their optics, breakers saw sound, tasted radio, and heard color. Their optics fed them one level, and projected over it like a 3D skeleton was the other half of information their sensors received. Sound filled the skeleton into a richly textured world. Getting past the High Council’s guards would have been simple to someone who could see the waiting traps like that.

He never called anyone by a pronoun because it didn’t fill in the picture. He had to know exactly who he spoke of. It annoyed the other Predacons that he never used their chosen names, but those names only described what they wanted others to know about them. He needed to see them as they really looked, not how they wanted to be seen. And around ‘bots who talked as much and as ornately as Megatron and Dinobot, his own language reduced to what a sensor-blind ‘bot would describe as ‘childish.’ A better word would be ‘simple.’ He didn’t need the extra noise. Too much noise, and he’d become scrambled, the filler sounds blotting out the rest of the data his sensors fed him.

That’s why the most effective traps for breakers were flash-bangs. Harmless explosions of light and violently strobing sound could send any breaker’s sensitive circuit arrays staggering, feeding him nonsense that scrambled his mind. He’d successfully avoided the High Council’s tricks and guided the other Predacons past them to grab the Golden Disk--only to end up living on the biggest flash-bang of them all.

Cybertron was a planet of clean metal planes and electronic mesh. Sound bounced precisely. Equipment channels went here and looked just so, and for someone who’d been programmed in it, lived among it, and worked on it his entire life, the planet was KNOWN.

Earth was chaos.

Finely tuned instruments spazzed. Sensors went haywire. What his optics saw rarely made sense as the full range of his vision projected a structure on top of it that rippled and shifted with unpredictable spurts of information. Sound assaulted him on every side, sounds he couldn’t gauge or identify, and his head spun with the white noise spiking his senses--and he couldn’t turn it OFF. He was sensualist thrown into an orgy; he was a specialist in a world destroying him through his specialty.

He found himself attracted to temporary highs, allowing his beast mode control, anything to distract him from the mess of textures and echoes that he couldn’t get used to. His mind twisted in the midst of out of control surroundings. He couldn’t focus, couldn’t fight, couldn’t do anything but follow Megatron in the hopeless hope that the Predacon tyrant would eventually return him to the planet he was meant for.

Yes, if Tarantulas had known, he’d have understood. And, maybe, he might have felt pity for the breaker. Stuck in a place he couldn’t break out of, beaten out of his mind with information he didn’t know…pitiful.

Or--perhaps more likely--the spider would have chuckled heartlessly at his plight. War was not the place for sympathy. Predacons helped themselves, because no one else would.

So he did.

No electronic signatures, no metal, nothing he’d known on Cybertron but the two flattened heads displayed to his left, but also no Maximals, no orders, and no war. And without those distractions, without anything he had known, there was nothing left but this total emersion into Earth. Slowly, ever so slowly, he regained control. Each of his sensors, made for Cybertron, would receive a custom-made filter that allowed him to ‘see’ Earth. He had many sensors, and a single filter took time to put into place, program, and debug, but he had nothing but time here.

He had imposed order on the primitive humans, giving him that time. He ruled here. At this moment, in the dawn while the primitives were still quiet and the drums pounded rhythmically, enough of the chaos had receded to allow him to see the clearing, the caves, and most of the fleshies he ruled. As they moved more unpredictably, losing the order he’d made, he’d lose his concentration and fall back into relying only on his optics, his other senses fuzzing with the overabundance of data once more.

The filters, eventually, would strain out the information he didn’t need. He’d been a specialist once, he’d be so again. Eventually, he’d rebuild his sensor arrays until he could see, hear, and taste a vision of this world with perfect clarity.

In the meantime, his senses fell out of balance, retreating up the slope in a confusion of noise and color until even his new filters cut out. Holding out against familiar clamor, he reached for a starting point.

“Wazzpinator,” he whispered into the sunrise, and for the briefest second, he saw himself complete in every spectrum.

Then he sat back in his throne and let the rush come.

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