After two straight months of traveling at a speed that would've turned his old human body into microwaved spaghetti, Dan thought he'd feel awe.
Power.
Maybe even pride.
Instead?
He felt tired.
Not physically—his new body didn't get tired.
He meant the other kind.
The kind that lived in the mind.
The kind that felt like his soul was rubbing against sandpaper.
He wanted to sleep.
Proper, human sleep.
Blankets.
Pillows.
Brain-off-mode.
Instead he got the constant hum of engines and a navigation marker glowing in his vision like an annoying pop-up ad he couldn't uninstall.
> DESTINATION: DIRT — ETA: 12 DAYS
Twelve days until he reached a planet literally named after mud.
Thrilling.
The only distraction he had was Blastech's memory archive—an entire life belonging to someone far stronger, smarter, and more tragic than Dan Blazer ever was.
He opened another file.
And the universe immediately turned violent.
Blastech was in the skies over a dying city.
Ruins burned below.
Explosions lit the horizon.
Autobot and Decepticon fliers wove through collapsing towers, firing missiles that left afterimages across Dan's vision.
Blastech banked hard, debris scraping his wings as an Autobot streaked past. He returned fire. Landed hits. Took hits. The usual.
Except—
Something was wrong.
The Decepticons weren't pushing forward.
They were falling back.
Dan felt Blastech's confusion ripple through the memory.
Below, the ground forces collapsed.
Autobots advanced in perfect formation—swift, brutal, unrelenting.
A pair of red-blue flashes carved through Decepticon squads like a blade through cloth.
Dan knew exactly who it was before Blastech even zoomed in:
Optimus Prime.
But not the gentle, noble Optimus he knew from shows.
This was a warrior forged entirely from grief and fury.
Megatron met him with a roar that rattled Dan's entire sensor suite.
Their fight wasn't cinematic.
It was ugly.
Raw.
A brawl fought with desperation and millennia of grudges.
Prime slammed Megatron through a tower—Blastech flinched, and Dan felt the shock run through the cockpit-feel of his mind.
Decepticons swarmed to help, and Optimus swatted them aside like they were annoyances.
Even with Shockwave firing artillery support.
Even with Starscream circling in fear.
Even with half the Decepticon chain of command dogpiling him—
Optimus.
Did.
Not.
Fall.
The memory crackled.
Megatron limped away from the battlefield with half his chest caved in.
The order echoed through the ranks:
RETREAT.
Not a redeployment.
Not a tactical fallback.
A real retreat.
The Decepticons fled Cybertron.
And suddenly Dan was inside the cramped, metallic halls of New Kaon—once a colony world, now a desperate fortress.
That was when everything shifted.
---
Dan skimmed through Blastech's later memories like flipping through someone else's journal full of pages drenched in frustration.
Starscream pacing command decks like a bird on caffeine, desperately pretending he was in control.
Officers whispering about Megatron weakening.
Plans getting sloppier.
Morale getting thinner.
Victories becoming rarer.
And Blastech?
He was changing too.
Not outwardly.
Not loudly.
But Dan could feel the drift.
Hesitations.
Moments where he deliberately missed civilian transports.
Moments where he spoke up—and got punished for it.
Moments where Starscream demoted him, then pretended it was a "merit reassignment."
Then a meeting flickered into view.
Starscream stood before the Seekers, optics wild, talons tapping on the floor.
"Lord Megatron is recuperating," he hissed.
"Until his return, the Armada requires unquestioning obedience."
Blastech looked away.
Not out of fear.
Out of disappointment.
Out of realization.
Dan felt something crack inside the memory—quiet, brittle.
This isn't what we fought for.
And after that?
Every mission carried a bitter taste.
Every order felt wrong.
Every failure became a mark on his record—not because he was incompetent, but because he stopped being the weapon they wanted.
Dan let the memory dissolve.
He expected sadness.
He expected pity.
Instead he felt… responsible.
Uncomfortably responsible.
He was living in the metal shell of someone who slowly stopped believing in the cause he fought for.
Someone who looked at Starscream and saw a coward leading a collapsing army.
Someone who wasn't allowed to walk away.
Dan swallowed hard—even though his body didn't let him.
---
His nav-screen pulsed again.
> ETA: 9 DAYS
SYSTEM: APPROACHING
Stars sharpened into a glowing sphere—a pale yellow sun.
Planets appeared.
Orbit lines.
Trajectories.
The third planet lit up with an obnoxious targeting box.
> DIRT
Dan zoomed in.
Blue.
Green.
White spirals of storm clouds.
Then—continents.
Coastlines he knew by heart.
His reactor pulsed.
"…Fuck."
He zoomed again.
Cities.
Mountain chains.
Ocean borders.
No mistake.
Planet Dirt wasn't a backwater colony.
Planet Dirt was—
"Earth."
Dan hung there in silence, engines dimming instinctively.
He was five days away from returning to his home planet…
…as a Decepticon operative…
…in someone else's body…
…with someone else's reputation…
…in a timeline that made NO sense.
He let out the smallest, saddest mechanical exhale.
"Yeah," he muttered.
"Fuck me."