Picket Fences out In Space - Transformers Series

5. Sudo Root part 2: Call of the Void

In my heart, I had built an altar to objective reality. I stacked stones up, made a burned offering, and worshipped "answers." Every question must have an answer, buried somewhere out in space to be unearthed like fossils. Nothing is random. Primus doesn't play dice, no matter what Brainstorm may tell you--cause and effect is the only sacred law. Logic, deductive reasoning, are limbs as essential as legs or wheels. I know the meaning of my life--to ask, to seek, to know.

But something, in this moment, made me ask the most terrifying question I've ever asked. It's a question I cannot hear, about things I have no knowledge. This question pulled out the base rock of my altar, a base I had taken for granted, and sent it all scattered across my heart in entropy, like I never worshipped at it properly. Gone. And it's all I can think about. It's all that can be thought about.

All the throats have gone tight.

Wait. Who was it that was thinking? In this thick blackness, there doesn't seem to be anyone around -- no one to have been thinking. There are thoughts around, but no one here to think them. Curious. Hark, another question. Who is it that's asking all these questions, thinking all these thoughts? It must be someone. What was the idiom?

"I think, therefore I am." What's an...an..."I?" Some "I" must exist. There must be a me. Let's gather up all these disparate thoughts and call them me. I'm somebody. I'm somebody again. I wasn't, I was gone, but I exist again. I exist, but I can't see myself, or feel myself. I should see if I can make something happen here, in the blackness, whatever this is. 

I'll scream.

"HRMMMMMRMMMHHHHHH!"

Well, I heard it. I have a body, but something is muffling my voice. Maybe I can move. I feel intense resistance against my servos. There's no room to move, like I'm encased in something squishy. I clench my jaw, and my mouth is filled with a fibrous compound. It tastes like oil rot.

Whatever it is, it will give way for me if I fight it hard enough. It hurts. I have to do it. I flex my transformation tendons hard, putting all the pressure on my transformation cog. Panels slide through the sludge, then I retract them. Repeat. I can slowly decongeal this stuff, turn it into dirt that I can swim through. Damn it hurts. I fight and fight and claw and dig and kick gnash and scrape and thrust and pound away at the walls until I feel the breaking open of a threshold. I have torn my way out. 

There's light. I pull myself up out of the hole and into the open air. As I wipe away the dirt from my face I feel my mouth open, shaking. I didn't realize it but I had never stopped screaming.

I start pulling the remaining fibers out of my wheels and pulleys. It had burrowed its way under the panels in my chest and arms, connecting together like some nervous system. I gotta get this out of me right now. I'm pulling bits with sharp, jerky movements, throwing the branches up into the air violently. This foreign substance isn't supposed to be in here, in me. There's something overtly violent about what this thing has done to me, and I want it gone. With one last rip I pull the largest clump of roots away from my chest. I'm me again. I am Nightbeat.

"I am Nightbeat. I am Nightbeat! I AM NIGHTBEAT!" I relax a little. "I'm Nightbeat and I'm yelling at nobody." When something strange happens to Nightbeat, to me, I open a file on it. Collect data. Postulate. Draw conclusions later. Where am I and why?

Planet sporia. Those...plant things. They fed me something. Where's sky Lynx? Where's the hitchhiker?