The Drive Home
Everyone makes mistakes.
Jennifer had lost her beauty. Maybe
it was the view from behind the perspex barrier, or
maybe it was because she no longer smiled. She was
quiet, peaceful, and silent. David pressed his palm up
against the window that separated them, and she did the
same so that their hands mirrored. It was as close as
they would get, physically, now for the next
twenty-five years. Jennifer had been sentenced to life
imprisonment for the murder of Wroblewski.
Her hair had lost its energy, the
warm autumn tactics it once possessed now lost to the
winter. There was no longer a fire behind her eyes, and
they stared regretfully at David. He felt differently
about her now. She had taken a life, and despite her
intentions and reasons why, David just couldn’t forgive
her. And yet he still loved her, and would continue to
love her for half an hour twice a week, when they’d let
him visit. The first time he came to see her, he made a
joke about smuggling a file inside a tomato. It was the
first time she had laughed at one of his jokes.
The guards called the end of visiting
time, and David let his hand slide down the perspex,
away from Jennifer’s. He kept his gaze on her, and
slowly left his chair. She bit her bottom lip and gazed
back. David’s eyes began to well up. There was
something he was keeping from her: the consequences of
his merge with Megatron’s spark. He made a comment
about the drive home and promised himself he would tell
her next time.
Everyone makes mistakes.
Apart from Speedtrap and
Speedbreaker, Fire Convoy’s Defence Force returned home
alive and well. The planet Cybertron was in a state of
political flux by the time the Brave Maximus returned.
Oilslick was incarcerated for treason as part of the
revenge-plot against Optimus Prime. Only Hot Shot,
group leader of the cadets, presented the evidence. No
one had guessed that he was the secret agent, using
Chicane’s surveillance equipment to transmit the events
of the globequake to Star Saber.
Pitstop arranged a small and personal
ceremony for Speedtrap and Speedbreaker. The two
Autobot’s remains were smelted down and used to make a
plaque that was laid at the main doors of the citadel.
Sideburn tossed the plastine model Speedbreaker had
made for him into the furnace, and thanked his friend
for showing him what it meant to have courage.
Optimus Prime made a public apology
to the Defence Force that was beamed across the entire
planet, and to Fire Convoy in spite of his and Ultra
Magnus’s absence. Still traumatised by Star Saber’s
plot, Optimus cut short the transmission and broke
down. He felt such guilt for the lives of the millions
of humans lost during the cyberforming of Earth and he
missed Ultra Magnus.
Everyone makes mistakes.
Megatron would have succeeded had he
built a bigger army. Or at least that’s what he told
himself. The Predacon vowed to create an unstoppable
army of Vehicons when he got back to Cybertron, so that
nothing would stand in his way of becoming a new
Matrix. After the Vok had returned the spark of the
original Megatron back to the crashed Ark, they made a
deal with the Predacon. He gave them back their
Transmetal Driver in exchange for transporting him and
his Megabolt Station to Earth of 2941.
Everyone makes mistakes.
David had been diagnosed with
non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer surely brought about
by the ionising radiation from Megatron’s spark. Many
people ask God why they get cancer, but David knew why.
He shouldn’t have let himself succumb to Jennifer’s
hatred. He chose to become Cryotek, to merge with
Megatron so he could have the power to seek revenge on
the man that killed his father.
It was a moment of weakness, and
David told himself he should have been stronger. His
punishment now was to spend the rest of his days
without his father or Jennifer. He looked at himself in
the bathroom mirror and wept, a broken man.
Everyone makes mistakes.
Ultra Magnus and Fire Convoy’s fate
had been sealed. They were destined to exist in a fused
body, their independence destroyed and a new
personality in its place. The unnamed Warrior took the
Aktirak to the cyberformed Earth. It was a journey that
lasted nearly five hundred years, giving the Warrior
all the time he needed to come to terms with his
situation.
Predacon satellites shot down the
Aktirak when it arrived in “New” Cybertron orbitspace
in 2873. The Warrior burned up in the atmosphere,
leaving only Fire Convoy’s original form, which was
able to survive the planet fall. The Maximal Elders
found him and they believed it was the second coming.
The Warrior was renamed Optimus by the Elders.
Everyone makes mistakes.
The Autobots should have weighed Star
Saber’s remains and compared it to his tech specs. The
Vok had only destroyed his outer armour, and the mass
discrepancy was actually his inner robot form; the
inner robot form that looked so much like Orion Pax.
The two brothers were birthed at the
same time from an Autobot who Star Saber later killed.
Of the pair, only Orion Pax was granted the gift of
being a true Matrix Bearer. Star Saber was not, and
blamed his father, and blamed Optimus Prime even more.
And now, Star Saber had all the time
to rebuild his outer robot mode and continue his way to
the EvoPeak.
Everyone makes mistakes.
The Axalon Prophecy was false.
Wroblewski and Lavelle didn’t quite translate the files
on the Axalon fully enough. The gaps of information
were filled with their assumptions. The prophecy only
told of the end of the Earth, and the involvement of an
Autobot known as Ultra Magnus. The globequake of 2002
only occurred on an Earth that was in an alternate
reality to that of the Axalon. The files onboard were
only a record of the cyberforming of Earth in the 24th
Century.
Not Wroblewski, or Lavelle, or even
Jennifer and David realised that the globequake was
never destined to be the end of the world. The end was
yet to come, and at that time there would be no Fire
Convoy to save them.
The planet Earth had three hundred and fifty seven years left, and counting.