~ANNOUNCEMENT~

This fanfic is on permanent HAITUS.

A rewritten version is being posted, called BR0K3N, here on FFNET.

This older version will remain here for your reading pleasure.

-S.I.S.

T0RN: Genesis

Prologue

Awakenings

STASIS LOCK… CANCELLED.

Her vision flickered before her as she was pulled from the blissful darkness. Memories danced inside her cortex, but when she reached out towards them and searched for some rhyme or reason they scattering before her like dust thrown onto a rock before suddenly disappearing into the cracks of her mind. Confused and annoyed, she blinked away the tiredness which weighted her down, blinking at the the darkness and trying to figure out the dark twisting shadows in the night.

What hit me? she wondered, wincing as alien thoughts plowed through her mind. Computer responses snapped off at her in cold detachment, throwing up hundreds of bits of information she didn't ask for. Everything was written in a language she couldn't understand, but a small part of her was familiar with it.

She scratched her helm, thoughtfully. Who am I?

You are Rhythm.

Her first impulse was to say "No, I'm not!" It was a voiceless answer, and so matter-of-fact that she knew instantly it was just a piece of information and not an entity she could argue with. Instead, she turned her attention to the room around her. She was on a berth in what looked like a technologically advanced and entirely gunmetal gray hospital room. She reached out a hand towards the berth side tray, her optics locked on the moving limb with surprise as the tray wobbled under its grip. A dirk danced on the metal surface, glowing blue and polished metal blade gleaming from the darkness and highlighting her limb. She jerked her hand back, but halted when the limb in front of her echoed the movement. She raised her servo in front of her face.

What am I? she wondered, dreading the answer. She recognized the five digit servo of a Cybertronian hand.

Terran… came the response. She huffed, annoyed.

I didn't used to be metal, she rephrased, looking at the other berths in the room. Four bodies stood outlined on their surfaces, the softly glowing lines in the medical equipment highlighting sharp armor and kibble. She didn't recognize their subtle shapes, but did at the same time.

Do I know them? she wondered, confused at these conflicting thoughts. Do they know what happened to me? Did it happen to them?

Questions rushed through her mind; her curiosity perked. She rose off the table, stumbled and sat hurriedly back down. Her balance was off, and she felt something new on her back move. Turning her helm, she spotted the outline of a what looked to be a doorwing on her back. The winglets twitched in response to her emotions, calm curiosity echoing every fiber of her being. She tilted her helm, and watched the doorwings preform a similar action right back at her. She was amused, and watched her doorwings echo the motion.

She tried to arrest control of them as she stood, staggering forward a step as they struggled to comply and balance her. When she straightened, she wobbled a little but was pleased that she could stand. It felt right, but at the same time wrong, like she shouldn't be able to stand at all. It was a baffling feeling that caused her tanks to stir uncomfortably, and she found herself pushing it aside. She could figure that out later. Right now, she needed to know what was going on over there where the bodies lay. She put one pede in front of the other, wobbling slightly. Her servos spread and arms pulled away from her body to help balance her. Venting deeply, she took a few quick steps, wobbling when she halted mid-step. Something about speed helped her quickly get her balance and she was pleased that she didn't fall. She held her servos out, her doorwings spreading behind her automatically for balance.

CALIBRATING. . .

The words scrolling across her screen seemed unnatural, but right at the same time. How could she function without them? But there was something unsettling about it and an uncomfortable feeling lodged into her chest and she couldn't suppress it. Her body started moving and she distracted herself with everything else around her. One mystery at a time…

She groped the side of the berth and crawled up it to the side of what looked to be a seeker, throwing her legs over the side of the berth. She glanced over the slender figure, graceful but thick, and she knew it was a femme frame. That annoying little voice told her so.

She glanced down at herself, and her lip twisted into a sneer of distaste. She did not have a feminine body, but a bulky mech body. Slashes of black, white and a dead looking grey covered her whole body. If she looked in the mirror, she knew she wouldn't recognize herself, and that disturbed her. Everything about this was not right, regardless of that small part of her that believed this was right. This was unnatural. She was unnatural.

Her optics returned to the seeker on the berth and she carefully scanned her features, as if committing the other to memory. The slender elegant faceplate struck a cord in her memory banks and she frowned as images crawled through her mind. An organic fleshy creature looked remarkably similar to this seeker, and a part of her realized that she was related to this seeker. After all, she had been related to the organic.

What an odd thought, she said, but it was that small bit of her that was talking. She squashed it. Most of her memories had been from the view of an organic body, and that meant that she had been an organic. It was only logical she'd have organic relatives.

What happened to me? To us? she wondered, turning over her memories. A spike of pain sudden drove itself into her chest and she sucked in a gasp, but did not collapse. If she was human now, she would have gone very pale.

She remembered dying. She remembered the pain cracking through her chest and swelling agony spreading across her face. She was staring through the windshield of a car, mottled every shade of grey, which were turned blue in the strange unearthly light.

How odd, she had thought then, shock spreading fast through her system as she stared into the driverless vehicle. How odd I'd get hit by nobody. It was an unfocused, inane thought, before her fuzzy mind had remembered that someone else was in danger -

Of course now that her head was clearer, she realized that the driver had probably walked out of the car to check up on the woman who was plastered to his grill and hood. She gazed down at the seeker and almost remembered something else, but dismissed it.

So, I wasn't dead, she thought. Then what was she? How did she become like this? Was she in a coma in a hospital bed somewhere?

It was a nice distracting mystery and it made her wonder if something similar had happened to... Rhyme.

No, not Rhyme, she told the small bit of her that protested. Rhyme was not a human name and therefore this sister of hers could not be Rhyme. But the name was like a trigger word.

Another set of memories that weren't her own invaded her mind. Someone else was talking about how… They needed to be stopped. This someone else was talking to a group of male mechs. He-mechs, Tiny remembered. She couldn't remember their names, but they were not her sister. Rhyme was standing there before her.

No, Rhyme was not her sister.

She shivered. She didn't know who ended up in this mech's body but she didn't like being here. What was she? Half-dead? Half-alive?

"A monster like no other," said a memory and she shut it out.

Who am I? she wondered, but Tiny did not answer her. She realized that was good.

Her gaze fell on the other Cybertronians, and she recognized them too. They were more feminized versions of the mechs in the memory. Oracle, Hex, and Calypso. An entire gestalt team.

How did we end up here? And where is here? she wondered, staring suspiciously at the room. She didn't think her friends would be in stasis if their benefactor was a nice guy, especially if whoever had... transformed them into these… giant alien robots. She wasn't going to say Transformers. No, that was a flight of fancy.

Her optics landed on what could be a door. It was large and round with a familiar purple symbol on the front, though it was heavily scratched up, disguising its shape. Something had done a number on the door in an attempt to escape – another lab experiment? She hoped not.

She moved forward to press her servo against the door. A door panel blinked on when she neared and she changed course to investigate the buttons. Alien glyphs covered the panel, a lot like the ones that flew around in her cortex, and she intuitively understood them. Call it instinct, or some translation software, but she knew exactly what the glyphs were telling her. Most could be easily translated into numbers. Two were not.

She pressed her digit over the open glyph and the door swished apart. A long dark purple hallway greeted her, and if she wasn't already tense with the Decepticon-esque color then she was now. It was ominous and unsettling. Whoever had built this place had put a lot of effort into making it as authentic as possible. She glanced down at her chest reflexively, hoping there wasn't a Decepticon symbol there, and paused at the yellowish Autobot insignia that stared back at her. It was faded and covered with a thin layer of grey paint, but she could still see the yellow shining through.

What kind of psychopath would fail to get those little details wrong? she wondered. She had done studies of psychological profiles when she wasn't too busy training to be a business woman, and they usually had a theme about them, a quirk they were fixated on. Why mess up these little details? That made things even more unknown, more dangerous and more unsettling. She was tired of being unsettled.

She moved back towards the room, which was now referring to as the medical bay, and picked up the dirk and a hunting knife from the tray. Having no place to put them and unsure how to use her subspace, she simply kept them in her fists. They felt natural and yet unnatural; her transformer side had experience wielding these weapons.

The hallways were deserted, a few broken crates and datapads, lost various items just lying around, bespoke of life that had once filled the corridors long ago. A few of the rooms were filled with more equipment, all broken or unkempt, and a few of the rooms themselves were crushed, with slivers of rock shining through. She got the impression she was buried beneath tons and tons of land. All that weight pressing down on her from above… she was surprised the ship wasn't groaning beneath it all. Her dirk scraped against the wall, the vibration rattling through her digits.

Then, she stumbled upon the Observation Deck.

The Observation Deck was the command center of what had once been a very large and heavily manned Cybertronian vessel. The room was divided into two platforms, the smaller one raised over the first and connected to an entirely different level than the bottom one. A throne was rooted to the middle of the upper platform, raised so that not a single mech manning the room could be missed by the Captain's sharp optics. Underneath the platform was only enough room to stand and walk around in, with no equipment, and with an entire area cleared out and dropped away, slopping into a smaller clear area. Every chair in the room pointed towards the massive windows which looked outwards into greenish-blue water.

Her first thought was that she was inside a giant pool of water, because of the green tinge to everything. But it was too dark to be a shallow pool, and she didn't think a human would build a pool large enough just to put a Cybertronian ship in it. She could see the faint trace of sunlight in the water and coral reefs disappearing off into the distance. It was a beautiful world of color, with blue-gray fish and colorful fauna swimming leisurely around in the distance. The carpet of tangled, glowing moss at her feet rippled with the under water currents, bending to its own watery winds and swaying gently. The she-mech took in a deep breath, awed by the sight of so much beauty, so different from the world she remembered.

Where am I? she wondered, noticing a particular fish that reminded her of a deep sea bass though it was remarkably different. When am I?

How did I get here?

There were too many questions and no one around to answer them. It left a confusing whirlwind of thoughts in her mind and she didn't like that. Hoping to restore some peaceful thoughts to her head, she returned to the medbay where she had woken up. Her sisters were there, their perplexing position only causing more confusion.

Perhaps the answers lay in the past. She recalled the accident, remembering what it felt like and feeling the sharp burn in her spark, an echo of the damage done. She rewound the memory to a few minutes before.

It was raining heavily that night. Darkness so thick that she could eat with a spoon surrounded her. The drumming sound of the rain on the passing cars had always felt like a calming balm on the night. She recalled a childhood moment when she would curl up in the back seat of the car and let the sound of the engine drift her off to sleep. On the other side of the street, she knew was the dorm where her sister lived. She peered across the walk way and tried to hear the sound of the beeping walk light.

Her sister was not expecting her. She walked when the light turned into a green man, but then she saw a familiar figure appear out of the darkness of the rain. Her sister was always walking across the street, but in the opposite direction. It was uncanny.

Except, her sister never made it that far.

Her ears had heard the sound before her eyes had, and the instant she saw the lights approaching too fast, the silent slide of a car as it hydroplaned across the water - she had instantly sped up. Her sister had stopped in the middle of the road, looking up at the approaching danger as if it was the most fascinating thing in the world. Her sister was rooted to the spot. She saw this all in a glance and something her mind just clicked.

She slammed into her sister, pushed her aside just as the car appeared out of the darkness. The bright lights blinded her, just before the hood crushed her chest.

She shuddered at the memories, though she was pleased that she had reacted so swiftly to save her sister. It reflected a deep moral character, combined with someone who was proactive, and she liked that.

But she remembered dying. It wasn't horrifying in of itself. It was sudden, and then there was blissful nothingness. What could have brought her back from the dead, and why? What was she doing here?

An inane thought entered her helm. Perhaps… her entire human life was a dream, a simulation, conjured up because there was some horrible truth she couldn't reveal to herself. Perhaps she had watched too many movies or read too many books, but it seemed plausible…

No, too much had happened in her human life. There were too many details that were too much for an alien species to make about organics. It might be possible… but no. She just couldn't accept that thought. She needed evidence that it was that. It was just… she doubted that a Cybertronian would put that much effort into an organic simulation. Why would they make a simulation? What was the purpose? Was it some kind of punishment? She didn't really think living at a college was a punishment. She loved the intellectual challenge it offered.

If the idea was propaganda, then it wouldn't have bothered making her an organic. She'd have been Cybertronian, but forced to endure the propaganda at a young age. Young impressionable minds were more susceptible to change than older ones.

Frowning at this, she tried to recall every story she'd ever read on Transformers. There were a lot of them, but none of them were particularly helpful. They were, after all, fictional.

But then, another thought came to mind and she double checked them, making sure that she only had a complete story for the ones she had read instead of the ones she had just seen the summary for. She reasoned that if she really had been in a simulation, then it would make sense that the stories that she had only seen summaries for would also be in her databanks, as if she had already read them. There was no such discrepancies.

But that could just mean that she had been fed the simulation bit by bit. She didn't know how to access the control panels to figure out, which was extremely frustrating. She'd have to solve that problem first before she moved on to deal with the others. If she didn't find any conclusive answers then she didn't know how she would deal with this.

And if it turned out her human life was real, what would that make everything around her now? A dream, a hallucination? A simulation?

She returned to the oceanic view and sat sideways on the throne, her legs falling over the sides as she leaned up against the other arm rest, propped up on her elbows. The sea was beautiful, but alien to her. It was much more cleaner and lighter than it should have been from this distance, with almost no amount of salt content. It almost looked new.

She wasn't completely sold on Christianity, but it made sense to her that this would be the earliest parts of Genesis, before the flood happened, if this was Earth. It didn't match up with what evolutionists said ancient animals would be like, but when she looked at the animals she guessed that some form of adaptation was indeed involved, if any of these creatures were ancestors of the fish she remembered from her research as a human. They were so similar.

Am I in the distant past or in the future?

She climbed down from her perch, having her full of the strange beautiful sight before her. She dropped off the platform and sidled up to the arch of alien consoles before her. The strange alien language was quickly translated, and she palmed the computer online. A holographic screen appeared before her, giving her three dimension image of a familiar alarming insignia - the Decepticon insignia. She jerked her hands away, afraid that the Decepticons might have booby trapped the system and left something that would cause the ship to explode. When nothing happened, she struggled to put down the uncomfortable sensation in her tanks and palm through the computer data, wondering what had happened to the ship.

There was a spike of pain in her head and she reared back. Something… like a memory… sparked in her processor before it fizzled and died, excised like some ugly cancer before she could even properly react. The program – or whatever-it-was – which had done that had been swift, and it felt like it had reared up like a living thing and just purged that information from her mind. All she could remember was that she had started some kind of download which her mind had swiftly rejected. It didn't sit well with her.

She tried to recover the data, but most of it had already slipped away into the darkness, leaving her with a vague impression of something. She couldn't even remember how she had found it on the datapad. Just another mystery to add to the pile.