16.Sept.06

I, Alone, Can Explain

I am alone.

Do you know what being alone is? Really? Ha! You don’t have a CLUE what it’s like to be alone! Try this: stand by yourself in a place where other people have been recently but won’t come back to. Stay there for days, by yourself. You can bring something to read or work on, even. Eventually, you’ll start to get restless. The most solitary spark wants to have some company sometimes, even if it’s your worst enemy and you’re standing in silence. Being in a place that you know others had been in only makes it more intense. They’ve been there, but they’re not there any longer. There’s evidence of their presence, you know intellectually that they’ve been there, but nothing you can do will bring them back. You’re by yourself; no one to talk to, no one to look at, no one at all. Everyone you know is gone. Got that feeling?

I’m more alone than that.

You can always leave that place. Someone will be around, or you know where you can find someone. Even while you’re standing by yourself, you know that there are other people somewhere. Your friends, your enemies, people you’ve never met. It doesn’t matter—you still know they’re there. You could pretend to be the last Cybertronian, and you’d still know, somewhere in the back of your mind, that you’re not.

I will be.

It’s my mission to destroy the universe as I know it, and in doing so…I’ll be one of four ‘bots left over. And the other three will have me killed as soon as I complete my mission. How do I know? They told me. Do I have a choice in this mission? No. I disobey, I die anyway. They’ll kill me if I succeed or if I don’t, but the programming they forced on me insures that disobedience will be far more painful than success. I was brought online for the entire purpose of destroying everything I know, including myself. You want to know what it’s like to be alone? I can’t tell anyone what I’m really doing here on Earth, or they’re stop me. I can’t befriend anyone because they’ll only disappear, betrayed, when I complete my mission; that would only make it worse. I can’t LOVE anyone because it would be like killing myself twice over.

I actually made that mistake, or at least I almost did. I thought that if I made someone to be a friend, they’d last. I know; it’s a foolish idea. Without the known universe, nothing that comes from a Maximal pod would survive. It was just that…well, I don’t suppose that you’d understand. You don’t know what it’s like to be so alone. When you’re like me, a certain amount of desperation is to be expected, I guess. If Blackarachnia hadn’t been such a typical, backstabbing Predacon, I might have followed through with that desperate attempt to make a friend, but her behavior just reminded me to keep my distance.

She asked me once, before I pushed her away, why I always chuckle at everything, why I always plot against everyone. I distracted her with something else and changed the subject, but my answer is that I have nothing to lose. I plot to get the most out of life. It’s not like I have anything personally to gain. Anything I’d win I’d lose in the end, anyway. It’s just a game, a frantic attempt to find out what life really is. As for my chuckling, well, it’s called graveyard humor. I find a grim amusement in a lot of things. Having Megatron breathing down my neck over an unsuccessful (or successful) plot me makes me laugh because…what’s he going to do? Kill me? That’s the worst he could do, but everyone’s got to die sometime.

I’ve found that almost everyone has an obsession with death. Even Cheetor, with the youthful conviction of immortality, has glimpsed a worrying look at it when Dinobot died. For everyone else, death comes at any time. For them, there’s no set time. They could live a couple millennia or die tomorrow in a freak accident with the weather. You could suffer a malfunction of a vital system and die before you even knew it. No last moment to even think that it’s not fair. Just…dead. You could live a long, healthy life, but at the edge of your awareness there’s the knowledge that no one’s conquered mortality. You won’t last to see how things turn out. And the part that worries everyone: you don’t know WHEN it’ll happen.

I do. I’m going to destroy you all. I have that power, knowing when you’ll die. Or rather, you won’t die; you’ll simply cease to exist. You’ll never have come online, you’ll never have BEEN. You think Rampage is a mass murderer? Think about how many people are going to never be when I complete my mission. You neighbors, your friends, your enemies; all GONE. I hold your lives in my hands, and if it wasn’t for this mission, I would let you go.

My mission, quite simply, is to destroy the Ark. When the Ark is destroyed, the chain of events that followed the Autobot and Decepticon reawakening will never happen. I really don’t know what the plan is, but the Tripedicus Council is apparently confident in it. After all, they’re going to be destroying everything I know in order to start the action. How will I survive? I don’t know. When they brought me online, they told me that I had a different origin than everyone else on Cybertron in the current times. What that means, I neither know nor care. It doesn’t matter. I blow up the Ark, the Autobots and Decepticons on board die, the Maximals and Predacons cease to exist, the future you live in and I come from is changed forever. The Tripedicus Council tracks me down and kills me, or maybe there’s a failsafe in the override programming in my head. Maybe the painful death disobedience would bring me will be my fate, anyway. In that case, I probably should just kill myself, or something.

But I won’t. The closest I’ve come to that is continually failing in my plots against Megatron. I guess that’s my own stubborn nature coming through. I may destroy all of you, but it will buy me a few more moments of life. I want life even as I laugh at death.

And then there is the Tripedicus Council. Those three robots gave me my orders, forced programming on me, and told me that they were going to kill me. Yet of everyone I’ve met, those three will be the only ones I know alive once I complete this mission. You can’t understand because you can’t possibly understand how alone I am. My entire universe will disappear, and ALL that will be left is those three ‘bots! How they treated me, like a tool meant to be used and thrown away, was degrading, but…I’ve known all of my brief life that they were the only ones that would accept me. I am undeniably different than everyone else except those three, and I am so, so alone. If they would just let me live, I would be happy as even a drone. A servant. A slave. They could treat me however they wanted as long as they let me live! With just three ‘bots, I would no longer be alone. I could take any sort of treatment if I wasn’t alone, anymore.

That’s the part that keeps me from suicide. That’s why I’m going to complete this mission. It’s more than the failsafe programs in my head. It’s more than avoidance of a painful death or graveyard humor at your expense. It’s more than helplessness. It’s hope. Desperate, sick hope that I curse even as I wish for it. You see, one of the Tripedicus Council’s members mentioned that he MIGHT find a use for me after the mission, if I complete it to his satisfaction. So I hope that I’ll have a place after the destruction. I hate the fact that I’m so desperate, but the loneliness drives me. I’ll do anything to know that the person I’m talking to, taking orders from, whatever…that they won’t disappear.

Perhaps that knowledge is what my loneliness is. Everything you know, live, and experience will disappear, and you’ll be left by yourself. You can’t understand it because you can’t make yourself feel it. I haven’t had a choice. It’s all I know. I don’t expect you to understand. You can’t know what it’s like to be alone like this. It’s even a kind of mercy, if you think about it. You won’t have to worry about the Pit or the Matrix; without existing, you can’t possibly go on to the afterlife. Not like me.

To be honest, the afterlife scares me. Nobody really knows what it’s like, and if you’ve ever listened to the various splinter religions of Primus…well, everyone but that particular group you’re listening to is going to the Pit. How am I supposed to know which one is the right one? It’s important to me. I want to know. Unfortunately, no one knows for sure what it’s like after you’re dead. Apparently there have been some Autobots and Decepticons that died and came back, but they didn’t talk about it much that I know of.

I’m probably going to the Pit no matter what I do, anyway. I can’t think of any way it could possibly be worse than living, though.

That’s how alone I am.

I thought I should explain. You’ll never read this; you’ll never exist to read this. I thought I should explain despite that. I just want to think that somehow, someone knows why I’m like this, why I’m going to do this…and understands. All I’ve ever wanted was to not be alone. I hope that by destroying you I won’t be any longer, or at least death will take the loneliness away.

But I’m sorry.

Sincerely,

Tarantulas

Click here for part 9