Two weeks into the flight, Dan learned two very important truths:
1. Space was beautiful.
2. Space was also boring as absolute hell.
He didn't sleep. He didn't eat. He didn't blink.
It was like being stuck in a silent movie theater with no exit door.
So he kept going back into Blastech's memories.
Not because he wanted to, but because the alternative was going insane.
By week two, he stopped easing into the files and started deep-diving like he was binge-watching the world's most violent documentary series.
The next archive he opened didn't begin with battle at all.
It began with a speech.
Megatron was standing on a massive stage.
He spoke to a crowd of soldiers—Blastech among them.
"We spilled energon for Cybertron. We defended Cybertron. And now our leaders would have us make peace with its enemies."
The crowd responded with a rumble like thunder in metal caverns.
Dan watched young Blastech stand straighter, listening with something close to awe.
"Vector Prime's death will not be in vain. We will finish his work. We will answer every attack. We will make ours the last world any invader ever dares to threaten."
Dan felt Blastech's emotions bleed through the memory.
Conviction.
Rage.
Pride.
Then the scene warped—jumping into battle.
Alien ships tearing across Cybertron's skies.
Decepticons diving in formation, transforming midair, unleashing hell.
Dan watched Blastech fire a full salvo into a cruiser and peel off as it exploded behind him. He was fast—holy hell was he fast. It was like seeing a hawk knifing through a swarm of flies.
The memory shifted again.
Different world. Different battlefield.
He saw an alien city burning, thousands fleeing.
Decepticons marching through streets with perfect military precision. Buildings collapsing under orbital strikes.
Genocide.
No heroic music.
No triumphant narration.
Just… systematic erasure.
Dan almost pulled himself out of the memory.
Almost.
But then came something strange.
A small group of aliens, running in terror, Most were adults. Two were tiny. Children. Whatever passed for children in their species.
The seeker commander's voice echoed in the comms:
"Kill them all, let none escape!"
Blastech hesitated.
Just for a second.
But Dan felt it—felt the conflict in Blastech's spark like a cracking plate.
Then Blastech spoke over comms:
"Sector Three is already cleared. No targets."
A lie.
A simple, quiet lie.
And he let them escape.
The memory ended abruptly, as if Blastech himself didn't like revisiting it.
Dan floated in silence for a moment.
"…Okay," he whispered to himself. "So Blastech wasn't a monster. Or at least, he tried real hard not to be one."
That didn't erase the rest, though.
Dan opened the next file.
The civil war.
Megatron rallying his forces.
Alpha Trion denouncing them as Rebels.
And then everything escalated.
The high council tried to put down Megatron's rebellion.
But the decepticon Army continues to grow.
Thousands of years passed in jumps. Dan watched them like flipping through a cursed history book.
And then came the turning point.
Alpha Trion fell.
Megatron killed him, splitting him in half.
Dan expected celebration. Triumph.
Instead, he saw Megatron standing over the battlefield, not victorious, Furious.
"Even leaderless, They still continue to oppose us."
He wasn't wrong.
Because someone else rose up.
A young RescueBot.
A nobody.
A glorified firefighter.
Chosen by the Matrix.
Chosen to be a Prime.
Optimus Prime.
The memory unfolded like the start of a new season in a long-running show:
Autobots forming around him.
Veterans who still believed in the Primes rallying to support him.
Civilians who feared Megatron's extremism joining their side.
Cybertron splitting wider, deeper.
And the worst part?
They were good at fighting.
The RescueBots weren't meant for war—but the moment they became Autobots, they adapted. Hard.
Dan saw Decepticon strongholds fall.
Saw cities Megatron had held for millennia crumble.
Saw Starscream's elite units—Blastech included—assigned to increasingly desperate operations.
It wasn't cartoon evil vs good.
It was bitter. Ugly. Stalemated.
Two ideologies caught in a never-ending meat grinder.
Dan let the memory fade and returned to the silence of space.
He felt… heavy.
Which was ridiculous, because he physically couldn't feel "heavy," but dammit, the word fit.
"Okay," he murmured. "Blastech… wasn't evil. He wasn't good either. Just… stuck. Just like me."
The stars stretched endlessly ahead of him.
Planet Dirt waited somewhere at the end of this trip.
And Dan wasn't sure which terrified him more:
The war behind him…
or whatever was waiting in front.