Tales of the Intermezzo - Sentinel A Transformers Universe Story copyright 1999 by Dave Van Domelen based on properties owned by Hasbro ============================================================================= "intermezzo - n. A brief entertainment between two acts of a play." - American Heritage Dictionary "There's something wrong. I can feel it in my bones." An old cliche, but in my case it's literally true. My bones are laced with thousands of meters of micro-optical fiber and processors, plus special field generators that define my role in life. I'm a Witwicky, and we're the Sentinels. By birth and by the miracle of science, we're forever cut off from the world in little ways, watchmen who can as yet do little but act as modern-day Cassandras, trying to make ourselves heard by those in charge. "Time blister?" my friend asks. Her name isn't really important, especially since there's a good chance she won't even remember me in a few minutes. I pull out a small monitor and clip it to electrodes on my wrist. A small holographic display lights up the room, showing Earth in schematic. An ugly purple bruise is spreading over a spot I've been watching my whole life. "Yes. The Ark. It's finally catching up to us." A hundred years ago, Dr. Fairborne and her colleagues discovered something that came to be called Narrative Time, an extra time-like dimension allowing time travel. All she could do at the time was monitor the disturbances caused by Cybertronian incursions into the timestream, but that was enough to scare a LOT of important people. We'd thought that we were safe from Cybertronian interference after the Great War ended and the Maximal Elders proclaimed Earth off-limits. Now it turned out that the effects of Autobot and Decepticon time travels were slowly propagating up though Narrative Time. When a particular "Wave" reached us, time would be altered and we'd never know the difference. Especially if we were all dead. "I've got to get back to the ChronArk," I say, hurriedly grabbing my gear. I'm on duty, the only Sentinel within a few minutes' travel of the ship we'd constructed from the remains of the old Autobot Ark. The rest of my cousins and aunts and uncles are all out gathering information and transmitting it back to the ChronArk, trying to pin down all the changes from the last Wave. They won't be able to make it back to the ChronArk before this one hits, so they're desperately updating their personal logs. Standard procedure...they had to deactivate their shields before the Wave hit, so they'd be changed along with the new timeline. They'd still fit in, it was just the poor sap on duty who got to live the next few years or decades as a stranger. Time alteration was a weird thing...my own father was on duty once when a Wave hit, and came out to find he was married and had a son in the new timeline. To me, it was as if my father had suddenly forgotten me and mom, and since I was only a kid, it hurt. A lot. It's a real no-win situation when it comes to relationships. You can fall in love and get married, only to find that your wife died as a child when you come off duty. Or you can be stuck like my dad was. "I'll see you later," my friend grins weakly as I dash out the door and to a waiting hovercraft. Bad joke. But the sad fact is, we Witwickies MUST get into relationships and have children. Thanks to the binary bonding our ancestors went through during the Great War, we're the only humans genetically capable of accepting the huge amount of opticware needed to maintain the temporal shields around us, the technology that lets us remain unchanged when a Wave hits, so we can go back and talk about the changes. We've been lucky so far...every Wave has left our mission more or less intact, with only details of the world changing. Only once has a lone Sentinel had to rebuild the program from scratch, hunting down his relatives and subjecting them to the opticware implantation. It's a short ride to the ChronArk, but it always felt long when you were on duty. I've only been on duty three times before, and the Waves were all trivial (once we decided that someone really had stepped on a butterfly several million years ago, and the main change was that the particular species of butterfly was wiped out). But this one could be big enough to take my own potential wife and son from me...or give me a different set, or even worse, make me into a Man Who Never Was. Sometimes a Sentinel would get back from duty and find he'd died years ago. That was always awkward. "Adrian, this is Carl," comes a voice over my internal comunit. "I'm in the area, I think I can make it to the ChronArk before the Wave hits. Want company?" Don't think I didn't appreciate the offer. Having someone along you knew would stay unchanged was tempting. "No, Carl, start powerdown now. You don't wanna get caught out there in a Wave if you can't get to the 'Ark in time." Did I mention that a Wave hitting isn't pleasant? After the original Sentinel barely survived his first Wave, the ChronArk was built to shield him. It also had the advantage of letting him survive any hostile environment he might be plopped down in...once a Wave resulted in the Earth having been slowed by a miniscule amount in its orbit, and the ChronArk was dumped into deep space. I didn't want to see Carl go splat if this was another case like that. I arrive at the ChronArk. Golden and gleaming, it retains the same basic form as the original Ark, mainly because nothing short of a nuke would reshape that seamless frame. Well, a few things would, but they weren't cost-effective. The ChronArk was designed to allow a small number of people to survive indefinitely, via hydroponics and stored food. But most of the giant ship's space was given over to archives. If civilization was destroyed by the time blisters, someone would have to rebuild it. And today I'm that someone. It's always bugged me that we still haven't cracked the secret to time travel ourselves. If the Wave was major, the Sentinel would be stuck, unable to go back and fix things. The best we could hope for would be to fly the ChronArk to Cybertron and hope the Maximal Elders still existed and would help us set things right. Mind you, any major blister would probably be aimed at wiping out the Elders. "ChronArk, recognize Sentinel 32, ident Adrian Witwicky." "Recognized. Enter quickly, Wave imminent," the computer responds. It was almost human in its responses and tones, nothing like the cold Teletran 1 they had rebuilt it from. Were the Cybertrons simply unable to build a computer with a personality, or was there some reason they refused to? Either way, since the computer was likely to be a Sentinel's only company for long stretches, it was made as human as possible. "Report status of other Sentinels," I bark as I race towards the control room. "All have transmitted final reports and powered down temporal shields," comes the reassuring response. Whatever happens next, my family would still be a part of the new world, even if they would never again be a part of MY own world. "Strapping in. Power up antigravs, I don't wanna fall if the ground moves a few meters," I add pointlessly. The computer knew that, it was standard procedure. There was almost always a slight shift in ground level, although sometimes the ground didn't move, it was buffeting by the Wave that moved the ship. "Blister in five...four...three...two...one...NOW!" The ChronArk rocks as the external sensors go black. The latter is normal...the timestorm of even a minor Wave could short out sensors, so the shutters closed to protect them. But this impact is a lot nastier than I've ever felt. I can hear structural members creaking. "Status!" I shout. "Structure holding, but stress levels 32% higher than any previously recorded." ANY? Ohhhhhh boy. "Wave passing," the computer tells me. "External sensors being brought back on line...detecting extreme heat." "We come out in the middle of a forest fire or something?" "Negative. Further readings indicate active vulcanism." I blink. "We're in a volcano? Okay, THAT is a big change. Take us up for a better view, and try to establish uplink with the satnet." I'm taking a risk. Making the ChronArk a big, juicy target by gaining altitude wasn't generally recommended until the situation had been better assessed. Especially if this Wave had left the Great War still a going concern. But staying in the lava to be cooked wasn't a good idea either. "Satnet unavailable. Adrian..." the computer pauses, its artificial personality breaking through the mask of professionalism it normally maintains. "I have external view now, but I don't think you want to..." "Give me external view," I whisper, my heart in my throat. Earth...is dead. In all directions as far as sensors could penetrate through the caustic atmosphere, the land's reduced to a cracked plain, with lava seeping up through fissures and bubbling menacingly. As the ChronArk rises higher and higher, I can see that nothing remained alive. This wasn't a localized disaster, it was the destruction of an entire world. "Adrian, I have a signal, in high orbit. It's faint...some kind of repeater beacon, I think." "Full engines, close with the beacon. Maybe it can tell us...what happened." I slam my fist on the arm of the control chair. Not that it would matter. There isn't a damn thing I could do. No way to undo this change without traveling back in time. And odds were pretty bad that I'll even find out enough to be able to reverse it even if I *could* go back in time. I wish there *wasn't* been a beacon out there...then I could maybe try to pretend for a while that.... "Computer, check star patterns once we have clear sky. I wanna be sure we didn't get tossed into the past by the Wave." "Adrian, you know that's not possib..." "Yes it IS," I cut it off. "Half the known time travel events on the books were accidental. Maybe a really big Wave hitting a temporally shielded craft sometimes triggers time travel." There's an uneasy silence as the ship clears the smoky atmosphere. Finally.... "I'm sorry, Adrian. Astrometric survey indicates that we're within ten thousand years of our starting point at worst. I can be more precise in a few minutes, but...." I let it rest. The starry sky looks too familiar for this to be during the era when Earth was cooling down billions of years ago. "Beacon within visual, transmission is indeed a repeater on all radio frequencies." "Let me see it. Full magnification. And if the transmission has an audio component, let me hear it." A tiny speck in the distance suddenly grows into a clearly-identifyable form. The shattered legs and caved-in head of a Decepticon. My jaw drops. "Most of the message is directions and coordinates, in an Autobot cypher. Here's the audio," the computer announces. A familiar voice echoes out of the speakers, a voice I'd heard hundreds of times in old history vids. The voice of my distant ancestor, Spike Witwicky. "I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away." There's a pause, then Spike concludes, "Here lies Starscream, last Emperor of the Decepticons. Look upon *his* works and despair." Five weeks later, I land on New Earth...and the waiting starts anew, for the Wave that might bring back the Old. Someday that Wave will come, I just know it. I can feel it in my bones. ============================================================================ Author's Notes: In case you haven't read it yet, this story is a sequel to "Time's Blister," a previous Tale of the Intermezzo. While I was writing "Time's Blister," I had an idea for a time watchman who could see when changes happened but was helpless to do anything about them. But I put it off because I wanted to tie it in with the Timestorm at the end of Season 2 of Beast Wars. Then I ended up putting it off until I found out about the events of Nemesis, the Season 3 closer. Without going into spoilers, I have reason to believe that those events might leave Starscream in command of the Decepticons in 1985. His aggressive tactics would yield success for a while, but eventually he'd go too far, not plan ahead enough, and something would go horribly wrong. And Earth would pay the price of his short-sightedness. "Ozymandias" is by Percy Bysshe Shelly, 1818, and I'm pretty sure it's public domain by now. [UPDATE: Okay, the series finale played out a little differently than I expected, and it looks like they probably put things back the way they found them at the end. Which means that Adrian got another Wave a little while later, taking him back to the proper reality.]