fracturefall

No.  The word seemed to stir, sludgily, in Barricade’s cortex. No.  A ‘no’ rose back in return.  You don’t say no to me. No one does.  But..he could say nothing. He knew better. As much as he hated, as much as he raged about it, he had to swallow the ‘no’, a bitter, glass-edged lump that tore ragged strips down his patience. 

“Yes, my lord,” he managed to choke out.  Yes. Not no.  He felt Megatron’s optics hard on him, weighing, measuring. A sign that he had not masked his reaction as well as he’d thought. He was bleeding emotion. He tried to shut himself down, clamp down on his emotions.  Emotions are the enemy.  You have enough enemies. 

Too late. Megatron questioned. “You find this…unpalatable?”

“It doesn’t matter how I find it,” he said. Truth. Simple.  Raw.  Ugly.  The humans had some stupid quote, ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’.  How little they fraggin’ knew. Truth is ugly and painful, a bird with no feathers, a gaping wound. 

Megatron gave a snort, half of derision, half of assent. He recognized the truth as well. But, being Megatron, got his hands around something that could cause pain and…wanted to twist.  He couldn’t help it. It was part of his programming.

“You do understand, don’t you? We simply cannot waste the resources on what is at best a salvage mission.”

Cannot waste.  The words fell like tablets of acid into his tank, burning, spreading like harsh poison.  He kept his face immobile, his hands still. No emotion, anywhere.  He knew the right answer, but he also knew the wise answer.  The one that would let him bleed off time and effort of his own to search for Frenzy, without suspicion. Without being monitored.  No he did not understand. “Yes,” he said.

Homecoming. Frag. Right. Have to have a home to come back to, don’ t you? 

Frag, no. Not trying to get all hardboiled gumshoe detective on you, or anything, but, what’s a home anyway?  It’s a place, just a place. We fill it with stuff and memories and try to convince ourselves that it’s meaningful. 

Don’t know how long it takes for it to work for you humans, but, let’s say a couple of your years, right?  Not really up for time conversions.  So, you live in a place for a few of your solar revolutions, and you have to leave.  And as you’re packing your stuff you notice all the detritus: scraps torn from flimsies, chips of bad packaging, a fine dust of metal shavings.  Stuff you couldn’t bear to throw away, or wasn’t worth the effort somehow everything. Everywhere. And you find yourself wondering why you hung onto it in the first place.

And there you are, right? Right before battle: you upload your primary cortical memory to storage. Just in case. And you look around your recharge and you feel…a strange thing. Like something is twanging a cord connecting you to this place.

And it’s stupid. I mean. What is this place, right? It’s a recharge cube.  Hundreds of them on every ship, almost exactly identical. Only thing that might possibly differentiate yours from any of the others is fraggin’ minutiae: what holodiscs you have and in what order. A datapad or two. A handful of trinkets. Maybe where you toss your cleansing cloths before you leave.  It’s a delusion that this place is anything special, anything different, but we fool ourselves and gladly  because that means WE mean something. That we have filled a space with us.

And that space has filled us: we can lie back and imagine and remember every part of it in every lighting condition: every seam of plating, every chip or dent.  We feel a false intimacy.

And we ache when we leave that place, a deep worry gnawing at us with dull but inexorable teeth, that we might not come back.  And we know that the place will go on: our stuff—so important—will be boxed up or parceled out.  And our cube will be someone else’s palimpsest of delusion.

And maybe one recharge cycle he’ll try to convince himself that you haunt this place.  He wants to think that because if you can inhabit that place, then it means he can, too, and that it all means something. That the place, full of your memories, becomes where you are, becomes something that sustains after death, as though the memories were a kind of fuel that kept your ghost alive.

Delusion.  Ridiculous.  Yet look at us run, time and time again, bleating like filthy animals, into the arms of that delusion, that belief that we have a home and that our home desperately wants us to return.