#in other news. the tumblr new post has become unusable and this took insanely long to format

[gncrezan]

I want to say something. Want to tease them, want to ask if they really mean it, want to know if something has changed between us—but I don't. Instead, I turn off my phone. It'll open to the texts when I turn it on again. I'll deal with it later.

do you ever read an update so insanely good that you have to run for your tablet !!!!! GO PLAY @evertidings !!!!!!!

[hallucinateonpaperspines]

hi! This is an idea I had for a while but I'd like to give it to you cause I think it's up your ally. There's this movie called Lucy from 2014 it's basic plot is that this women Lucy accidentaly has a drug realease in her body(they put a bag of drugs inside her to smugle abroad) that starts to unlock her brains capacity that causes her to gain huge amounts of knowlage and abilities. When she reaches 100% she sport of becomes a higher dimensional being. The idea is that something like this happens to an OC but instead of it being cause by drugs maybe by energon + electricity, or some accident and that the changed is a bit slower.

The cons and bots having to deal with a human who is smarter and inching closer to omnipotence :3

I like your brain. <3

So sorry it took me so long to finally finish this and post it. I did actually end up watching that movie while writing this and dang it was interesting to watch. I enjoyed the weirdness immensely.

I've cross-posted this short story on both Tumblr and my AO3 account feel free to check that out here if you have an account and maybe leave a comment (feels weird to ask, but it means so much as a writer)

WARNINGS for; Violence, slow descent into insanity, depression, existential crisis, Energon consumption by any means necessary, fourth wall break, my first Dead Dove!

Sometimes, the most sinister revelations, start with a simple act of stupidity.

M.E.C.H. was rooted in pockets all over the globe. Some descended deep into the depths of the criminal underground and black markets, others perched on the edge of shadows, collecting payments from patrons who hid behind the glare of the light. Cash moved quickly, bills changing almost as much as locations and projects.

Here, in a broken-down old building, isolated and forgotten, in the far corners of a shipyard that hadn’t seen any business in more than a decade, an agent oversaw the last pieces of such a change. 

It was the quiet, the abandoned, the wasted scraps of a world that had grown complacent and was so valuable to their organization. Sites like these, people like this, that was where M.E.C.H. had poured their foundations. In the treasure, the complacent had mistaken for trash.

Yet, that seemed to be changing.

M.E.C.H.’s numbers had been steadily declining for a few years now, concerning not in the numbers of deserters, but an ever-present statistical line that refused to straighten out. People were antsy and wanted action. Soldier’s bloodlust and scientists unused to the fickle lifestyle on the run. Silas had finally yielded and given the people the action they wanted. Their leader had finally revealed their presence to a government gone soft.

The line of deserters had ended. But the pitfall of deaths had not gone unnoticed.

It was the way of war. Pawns falling to support their queen, to guide their king. In this they had a purpose, their names would be remembered as the brave souls to usher in a new era, to pull this nation ahead of the new world order.

Maintaining supremacy was not for the faint-hearted. Nor for the spineless.

Agent 13 was a prize pawn. A soldier that obeyed, who fulfilled the mission objective at all costs, and, who truly believed, this was all for the best.

The warehouse was almost empty now. Located in a more derelict area of Long Beach, California, this site wasn’t particularly important. It served mostly as a shipping location or assembly zone for some of the more hazardous technical gear. Now that the labs had been deconstructed and the personnel evacuated, the gaping interior seemed almost pitiful. It was only Agent 13 present at the moment, here to personally collect one last piece of merchandise before joining the egress and making the four-hour-long trip to a new base in Nevada. There, they’d personally join Silas and aid in Project: Chimera.

It was not Agent 13’s business to question the wisdom of pooling all resources and personnel into a single location. Just as it was not his right to judge the immediate halt of all other projects as wasteful, or a concerning hint of the rumored obsession that had been whispered through masked mouths.

It was not Agent 13’s place at all.

His place was here, loading the cheap wooden crate into the back of the olive green sports car.

Another budget decision that wasn’t 13’s place to judge.

Driving with practiced ease speeds not too slow but not too fast, Agent 13 kept low. Head forward and body tense as the white light of Project: Chiron seeped through the cracks between panels and reached out into the dark.

Objective collected, it wasn’t until the return journey the mission went wrong.

It was dark on the desert road, with moon and stars hidden by the night’s clouds, and headlights straining to puncture the desolate inky blackness.

Agent 13 heard the engine first. 

A purr that rattled into a roar as a sports car, crimson enough its paint could have matched freshly spilled blood, pulled alongside the M.E.C.H. vehicle. Agent 13 felt his seat vibrate as the engine let out another blast and the foreign vehicle edged forward and back. Egging him on, an invitation clear.

He slowed down the car.

Distracting as the sports car was, risking gathering the attention of a highway patrol would be infinitely worse. Especially, when carrying experimental property, discontinued or not. 

The crimson driver did not seem to receive the message. Following close for a few more miles, the driver continued to blast his engine and swerve. Rather pathetically desperate for a race, if this continued, Agent 13 might need to pull them both over. A quick paint job and the vehicle would be acceptable for Silas’s preferences and coyotes were always opportunistic for an extra body of meat.

Hand tightening on the wheel, the gun heavy in its holster on his hip, Agent 13 prepared to make his move when a third pair of headlights appeared.

Hands loosened as the witness drove closer, and the crimson driver straightened up their act. Eyes moving to a side mirror, Agent 13 watched as the hummer seemed to stall before falling back. Crimson driver following suit.

Agent 13 gripped the wheel, eyes deviating back to the road as the rubber in his gloves squeaked against the car’s plastic.

The Hummer and Crimson reappeared again, sliding up slowly, one on each side, tires straight and engines silent.

Agent 13 floored it.

Pinching maneuver failed, the hostile vehicles raced forward. Crimson swerved into the green vehicle’s side as the Hummer hammered against the bumper. In the flash of headlights against the review mirror, Agent 13 could make out the blue paint job of the Hummer just before it surged forward and the back window cracked into a fractured spiderweb of glass.

Surprise makes one sloppy, and Agent 13 did not expect a murder attempt from civilian drivers on this lonely stretch of road.

He did not have time to react as Crimson rammed and the door folded with a crunch and the car landed with a thud.

Pushed into a ditch, the driver’s side door blocked by a bolder, Agent 13 reached for his weapon, instincts ready to make good on his decades of training and lifetime of killing.

No human approached the dented and cracked door, and as the M.E.C.H. agent looked out the hole where his window used to be, a masked face met, for the first time, the object of Silas’s obsessions.

Metal titans stood over the wreckage, and 13 had nary a moment to take in the glorious sight before a charging whirl entered his senses and his world was engulfed by blue. On instinct, he turned to shield the mission objective, and as weaponized energy burnt through metal, plastic, and wood, the stolen and reconstructed relic made contact with cauterized flesh.

Agent 13 could not open his mouth to scream, and he could not choose to keep his mind closed.

---

A single-opticed Breakdown and seething Knockout left the sight of their impulsive fun without the slightest idea of what they’d done.

---

13 came too with his feet on the ground and the sun at his back. Smoke cloyed his nose, and he didn’t know from which burning it was. The aliens or the dream?

The dream.

Collapsing on his knees, the Agent heaved. He couldn’t bother to remove the mask that suffocated him, the mixture of rubber and kevlar that rubbed against his skin and pressed down his nose. He could barely open his mouth, empty air and strangled muffles escaping into the acrid scenery.

The Dream.

There was the vague awareness of shaking, limbs no longer the instruments of precision they had been, and hands clenching. Sensation did not exist inside the suit, so there was nothing to feel but his own body’s insufficiency. Insufficient to get up, to move, to do anything but freeze underneath a desert sun, incapable of getting a breath, and eyes that could barely make out the environment through the cracked lenses of overpriced goggles.

Not that it mattered. His mind was still focused on the Dream.

Aliens, war, children, M.E.C.H. They’d been there. Events playing out, circumstances beyond him, a stinge of incidents interconnected and inevitable.

Something had happened when he made contact with Project: Chiron.

He remembered the pain, he remembered the end. Being dissolved in the heat of an alien weapon. Seats melting, seatbelt incinerated, wood cracking and flacking into ashen pieces beneath flesh that were cooking alive. He remembered it all happened so quickly and yet… so, so very slow.

Hand falling through the container.

White light meeting blue.

Project: Chiron came into contact with the residue from the weapon an instant before 13 made contact with it.

And then…

The Dream.

Cliffjumper had died. Megatron experimented on the body with Dark Energon. He’d produced a zombie. He’d then scrapped the specimen and gone on to produce several armies worth. One on Earth. The rest on Cybertron.

Cybertron.

A space bridge. Transporting the army to Earth, only for the Autobots and children to ruin it all. Megatron was bombed with his own wormhole and left for dead. Starscream took over. Starscream tried to lead. But Megatron came back. Megatron beat the Seeker within an inch of his life for an attempt to kill Prime.

It went on and on. Always following the aliens, Autobots, and Decepticons. Battles, antics at the base, episodes of adventures.

There was the blue Hummer, Breakdown. Silas’s escaped project. 

Airachnid. Silas’s temporary ally who’d offered her kind.

Starscream. Who’d offered information and lost an organ.

There was a moment when the Earth shuddered and stormed. The ground cracked open and Dark Energon spewed from volcanos like a geyser. Unicron. 

Amnesia for the Prime. The Autobots got him back, but not before relic locations were revealed.

Breakdown killed by Airachnid. M.E.C.H. coming to make use of the pieces. Project: Chimera fulfilled.

The Japanese girl called it Nemesis Prime.

And then…. Silas lost.

Silas.

Silas was trapped. Silas, crushed beneath his obsession and masterpiece. Silas, lying comatose on a stolen hospital bed. Silas who they all failed.

And the Surgeon.

More relics, more battles, but that didn’t matter because the Surgeon saved Silas. It was unorthodox, it was unethical, but when had M.E.C.H. been preoccupied with morals? When the end was security and peace reinforced by power, weren’t a few dubious decisions worth it? How was it any different than a skin graft, or an organ donation?

Wasn’t it less wasteful to use the whole body?

13 could still see it in his mind. The moment the corpse shuddered with new life. The blue, the energon, activated systems so carefully patched together and repurposed. Metal face twitching, alien eyes, reunited and reattached, opening as a foreign mouth curved into a familiar confident smile.

“What have you done?”

Silas reborn.

“I’m one of them.”

Failures fixed.

“The perfect meld of man and machine. Exquisite.”

What was he doing?

“Thank you all for your dedication and a lifetime of service.”

Why were-?

“But I now seem more suited to keep the exclusive company of titans.”

The cannon fired. Weaponized blasts of energon as the world burned and men became kindling for their savior’s ambition.

Agent 13 watched Silas offer himself to the Decepticons. Offering the last scrap of M.E.C.H.’s years of work as if it had always been solely his. Watched as more people burned. As the Autobots came. As the Autobots won. 

13 watched the Crimson Driver drag a pleading Silas away. A man who’d they’d held as a tactical genius, incapable of seeing the Titans shared none of his twisted admiration.

Even 13 could appreciate the irony of Knockout avenging his desecrated partner, and unknowingly, avenging the hundreds of men who’d died hours before.

The Dream didn’t end. It went on and on. More relics. Invasion. A metal dragon. And the Autobots kept winning.

Silas trapped as an experiment, still pleading for help from his own victims. Then trapped in the reanimated body of his host, set free by an action of self-preservation from a false-ally. Tearfully thanking her for ending his life. Airachnid barely sparing a shred of acknowledgment. M.E.C.H. was well and truly dead.

Cybertron restored. Unicron vanquished again. Life returned with a Prime’s sacrifice. And then… 

Nothing.

An end of The Dream.

Silas was alive and whole. M.E.C.H. had never partnered with an alien.

But the dream was true. 

It just hadn’t happened yet.

---

Something was wrong with 13. 

“Easy as pie,” He was told, “in and out, done and dusted, before the feds know to even look.”

They could not afford Project: Chiron to go unaccounted for, useless as it was. It had proven a failure. The scavenged artifact with a similar metal and design as the alien Transformers, had yielded less information than the trouble to process it was worth. But then, 13 wasn’t an inventor or a scientist, he didn’t see the possibilities lurking within hidden technology. As a soldier, Agent 13 saw bulky tech that had been stripped down into unidentifiable pieces.

And now it was gone.

The project was gone, with 13 alone in the wilderness. An Agent seeing visions of the future, head pounding and mouth dry, with a feeling of emptiness that seemed to echo and grow with every minute that passed.

He wanted to dream again.

He needed to see it again.

There was something so distinctly horrifying, so profoundly euphoric about existing outside of yourself. Of being nothing more than a viewer. Of feeling untethered, unbound, separate from the disasters that loomed large.

13 wanted to be separate again.

But he kept walking. Because walking was all he could do.

---

Mind still spinning, The Dream turning and weaving through every thought, 13’s feet changed direction in a slow and subtle drift. A buzz filled the air, and the emptiness cried out. 

Suddenly, 13 was no longer slow.

On his knees again the man dug into the Earth. Sand and dirt crept into the groves and crevices of the suit, finding their way through tears and sticking to half-melted edges. 13 paid no mind as blisters popped and burns were rubbed raw. He couldn’t feel it, nerves damaged as they were. He felt only the treasure hidden beneath the sands, 13 moved only for it.

Somehow, he knew the only reason his heart still beat was so that he could hold it close.

The energon was exposed. It might have been hours of digging, it might have been minutes, but it didn’t matter, it was there.

And the emptiness craved.

Hand outstretched, 13 made contact with the rock.

His eyes rolled back and he dreamed once more. Blue light turned to white as Project: Chiron fulfilled its objective and its unwitting host basked in the consequences.

---

The dreams were fading. 13 was starving. And the emptiness howled for more.

He’d dug his way through half the desert, fingers rubbed raw for shards that disappeared as soon as they settled into his palm. He’d gotten such pleasure, such relief from those first few absorptions. The Dream continued, in more and more detail, as his mind began to acclimate to the visions, and the information hidden within seemed more inevitable, more permanent. More real.

The hollowness went away with the energon. That small gap between the blue and white, when his vision blurred and spine contracted, when 13 felt so far removed from the pain of hunger and the doom of knowing. Moments that became shorter with each new shard, moments where the soldier had sneaked past the gates and into paradise itself.

He didn’t like being without a shard. The shards feed the Dream, and the Dream finishes the shards. Without the shards there was no Dream, there was no moment in between. There was just 13.

Something was wrong with 13. 

It hurt to be alone. It hurt to be awake, hollow, aching with something more itching just beyond his grasp, just beyond an ever-thinning veil of awareness and reality. 13 wanted to rip through that veil with his teeth.

---

Something was wrong with 13.

How many days had it been? How many hours since he’d last found a shard? Since he’d last been free?

Skin burned underneath the suit, and his vision wavered beneath his mask. The glaring haze of the desert, sand, and dirt is torn up as if a giant had raked the ground, faded, and became unfocused. Something white and black was winding through the peripheries of vision, Sounds, and blue-lettered words, names that didn’t belong to anyone inside.

Inside.

Something was wrong with 13. But who was he to judge? Who was anyone?

One more shard, one more Dream. Just one more, please.

Something was wrong with 13, and the Dreams -just made it worse- made it better. 

Just one more shard. Just one more step. One more…

And then he can start again.

---

There are no shards, nothing left buried beneath sand or hidden away inside cliffs. 13 has scavenged and scavenged and taken and now there is nothing left for him to take. Nothing left for him to offer.

It’s the project, the relic, the stolen technology he almost died to save, and the tech that’s taken his sacrifice and twisted it into something more.

He can feel it. Lose pieces, liquid metal, something alien slithering inside him. Coolness pressing against bones, tight rings squeezing muscle, particles drifting past barriers and seeping through fluid till it reaches grey matter and turns it silver.

He is not the tool. The tool is not him. But neither are what they should have been.

Something is wrong, and it isn’t 13.

He’s never felt so right, so hollow, so whole, so unnecessary. 

Perhaps it's the energon, slipping past his rubbery mask, staining his hands even if he knows it will disappear by the next scene. The world doesn’t disappear in favor of The Dream, but 13 knows it all by heart now. He knows many things now.

The vehicon that he sits by for instance. Frame still, energon pooling out of dents and slices from an Autobot raid, an empty frame. Burying his face in the lacerated abdomen of the creature, 13 knows that this creature was an empty frame long before it died. No name, no story, no identity, no purpose other than to stand in the background or die.

For now, he’s too pleased with the relief the energon brings to consider any more than that. But the high doesn’t last long.

Soon 13 is craving again. Soon 13 is searching again. 

This time it's for a reason just as much as a high.

---

Ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is joy. A simple child-like understanding, a purity in the fragile and fading pursuits of life, but so, so easily broken.

13 can feel his mind cracking like broken glass, and no matter how he tries, he can’t fit the pieces back together without them decaying back into sand.

It was all a lie, it was all fake, it meant nothing.

The Dream never goes away, the voices never fade, and the euphoria never comes. It plays and it plays and it plays over and over and over again. The timeline, the plotline, the beginning, and the end, because it is the end isn’t it?

A fade to black and it all starts over again.

Again and again and again.

Nothing exists outside the plot. Everything exists for the plot.

Does he?

---

Energon does nothing now. The Hollowness craves and it can’t be filled. The mind sees and it can’t understand. It doesn't want to understand.

But they do. And it changes nothing.

Nothing.

What is it to live in a world where that is what you are? The agent meant nothing. What were they? A nameless suit with a mask, a body to fill the background. Did they have a name? Had they ever? They never pulled up the mask, they never removed the suit. Would there even be a body hidden beneath, or empty air, flesh unrendered and unneeded?

No. No, because they weren’t worth that much. Only vague gashes and sensations are created from expectations, only ideas, and concepts for what should be. Perhaps a haunted suit if they even had a spirit capable of such a thing.

But fiction does not have a soul. It only borrows from what its maker provides.

That's what this all is, fiction. A fabrication. A falsehood. A lie. 

They all existed to serve the plot, the vision of a maker to the entertainment of an audience. Value was in the story, worth was in a role. Silas was an important character, the Surgeon was the only one who came close but not even he was granted a name, a history, or a motive. They were nothing.

Nothing.

Even then it was all for the aliens, for the Transformers. It was their story, their tale, and M.E.C.H. was nothing more than a prop. A subplot. A distraction. A filler.

Did the betrayal even matter then? Bodies burning, conscientious abandoned as men played god, but they had never been men in the first place. Never been human. Never had a choice.

It was a program, graphics constructed within a screen, puppets playing to directions, and voices inserted that weren’t even their own.

Did anything even matter anymore?

It was fake, false, it was… a TV show. 

All that death, everything they’d given up, everything they’d sacrificed and bleed dry. Treason, murder, betraying nation and family alike because they’d believed they’d bring about humanity’s salvation. Heroes of a new age. The bringers of a new century of progress, of power.

They were nothing but empty vessels. Body counts. Puppets are not worth gifting a flimsy story or half-assed voice.

Nothing.

Just one more step. One more shard. One more sip. Just one more piece of energon and maybe, they could forget. Maybe they could be Agent 13 again.

Maybe they could dream and finally wake up.

---

Choking back the energon, the graphic’s form seized as their mind flexed and burned. The world was too small, too tight. The effects of the apparatus amplified beyond what should have been possible. The unstable tangle of energy was pooling, coagulating, forming a positive feedback that just kept building, and building, and building upon itself. What was an identity to a concept? What was a name to an idea? This world existed for the Titans, for the story. Its ending was set, but M.E.C.H. wouldn’t even last that long. Death lingered by, but could it claim things that had never been alive?

Why was 13 so different? No apparatus, no relic like this was shown in the plotlines. It was all nuclear engines, aliens,  vivisections, organs, a broken body in a metal corpse, and fire. Burning flesh, melting flames, screams, and cooked meat.

The suits all looked the same. No identity. No individual. No reality… no Agent 13.

Oh

Oh. They don’t belong in this world at all, do they?

No. They’re different.

You made them.

You.

And he’s alive here. A fake world, a voiceless, formless world. It’s changing. Heartbeating with every glance of a foreign eye, for shifting with every new mind. 

He doesn’t belong there.

Send him back.

Send me back.

Send me back.

I don’t want to know these things.

I’m not supposed to know these things.

No.

That’s not true.

You created me to know.

You created me to drive me mad.

𝐀⃥⃒̸𝐫⃥⃒̸𝐞⃥⃒̸ 𝐲⃥⃒̸𝐨⃥⃒̸𝐮⃥⃒̸ 𝐝⃥⃒̸𝐨⃥⃒̸𝐧⃥⃒̸𝐞⃥⃒̸ 𝐰⃥⃒̸𝐢⃥⃒̸𝐭⃥⃒̸𝐡⃥⃒̸ 𝐦⃥⃒̸𝐞⃥⃒̸ 𝐲⃥⃒̸𝐞⃥⃒̸𝐭⃥⃒̸?⃥⃒̸