Imagine waking up as a Spacecraft.
No no—don't imagine piloting a Spacecraft.
Imagine BEING the The Spacecraft.
That's where Dan was at mentally:
somewhere between "this is the coolest thing ever" and "I'm going to vomit, but I don't have organs anymore."
His vision was full of alien symbols scrolling by like the world's angriest HUD. It felt like being trapped inside a holographic PowerPoint presentation designed by someone who hates him.
"Alright… brain… focus," he told himself, as if giving his neurons a pep talk would help. "Let's just figure out what all this cybertronian alphabet soup means."
His visual feed zoomed into one cluster of glyphs.
They rearranged on their own.
Like a foreign language going,
"Ugh fine, let me dumb it down for you."
It translated into:
>CURRENT VELOCITY: 0.7c (70% OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT)
Dan stared.
"…No way."
Another second.
"…NO WAY—"
Then he screamed internally because he still didn't have a functioning mouth:
"I'M LITERALLY GOING FAST AS FUCK BOIII."
If he had arms he would've dabbed.
But he didn't.
So instead he accidentally deployed his landing gear.
Which felt like flexing a muscle in the wrong direction and discovering you have additional limbs you don't even remember ordering.
"Okay, cool, cool cool cool. New rule: don't think about anything below the waist. Or above the waist. Or at all."
He tried laughing, but laughter as a jet didn't exactly happen. It came out as a mental hiccup.
Okay. He could work with this.
He was… flying?
Traveling?
Being propelled?
Whatever the term was for hurling through space at two-thirds the speed of light.
He tried moving something. A wing, maybe.
It worked. Sort of.
The left wing twitched and his whole trajectory adjusted. He panicked and corrected too hard, then overcorrected the correction, then panicked again. Eventually he steadied himself and pretended it was intentional.
"Alright. So. I'm a shitty pilot of myself. Fantastic."
He decided to explore the rest of his interface, mostly because he couldn't do anything else except panic, and panic was getting boring.
A blinking icon caught his attention, and suddenly a massive map unfolded in his vision. Stars. Clusters. Vectors. Routes.
A waypoint pulsed in a distant arm of the galaxy.
DESTINATION: DIRT
ETA: 0.18 Cycles
He frowned.
Who names a planet Dirt?
It sounded like a middle-school insult.
Look at this primitive dirt-ball. Its name is literally dirt.
Dan zoomed in on the map, and the closer he got, the more the system looked familiar in a way he didn't want to think about yet.
Nope. Not dealing with that.
Not ready.
Instead he looked at the ETA.
0.18 cycles.
He had no idea what a Cycle was, but something in his brain translated it into about two months of travel time.
Two. Months.
Alone.
As a jet.
"Oh god," he muttered. "It's just me and… me. For two months."
He swallowed, or tried to.
His body did nothing.
Right. No throat. Cool.
He needed something to do. Anything.
He poked around the systems until he accidentally opened something with a label he didn't recognize but instinctively understood:
MEMORY ARCHIVES: BLASTECH
He hesitated.
He didn't know if he wanted to see this.
Blastech wasn't him.
Blastech was the guy whose body he stole.
Or inherited.
Or possessed.
He wasn't sure which verb hurt less.
But he also had nothing else.
And two months in your own skull was a prison sentence.
"Alright," he sighed. "Roll the tape."
A clip played.
Not like a movie , it was like standing inside someone else's memory.
A battlefield.
A metallic skyline under alien bombardment.
Blastech soaring through the clouds, dodging enemy fire with movements so smooth they felt practiced over centuries.
Next clip.
Another battlefield.
Then another.
But then the memories shifted.
He saw ancient Cybertron — tall, shining spires, streets alive with metal giants moving in harmony. A golden age, the kind that made everything after look like ash.
Then the shattering point.
Alien fleets.
Invading.
Destroying whole cities.
Millions dying.
He watched Vector Prime fall.
He watched Megatron rise, not as a tyrant but a soldier who finally snapped.
He watched Alpha Trion call for peace talks…
…and Megatron refuse.
It wasn't the cartoon war.
It wasn't Autobots good vs Decepticons evil.
It was a mess
Dan lingered on those memories, because for the first time since waking up in a metal body, he didn't feel completely alone.
Blastech wasn't there. Not exactly. But his life was. His choices. His fears. His mistakes.
Dan didn't know if he admired him or pitied him.
Maybe both.
He closed the files, letting the darkness of space wash over his vision again.
Two months to Planet Dirt.
Two months of flying, thinking, replaying memories that weren't his.
Two months to figure out who the hell he was supposed to be.