The Truth About Blurr

++ Skyline Tower ++
Every apartment inside the Skyline Tower takes up half of an entire floor, 
and every last one of them has a magnificent view of Translucentia Heights,
and Iacon, outside. The building has its own security team to keep out the 
riffraff.                                                                  
                                                                             
Blurr's hab suite at the Skyline Tower is quiet for tonight, the racer standing alone in front of the large floor-to-ceiling windows at the front of the main room. He's staring at his reflection in one of the panels, which has temporarily been converted into a mirror of sorts.
Surprisingly enough, he isn't admiring himself as per usual, in fact he looks rather distraught. The racer lets out a long sigh, and turns away from it finally as if he's not sure he likes what he sees any more. Shaking his head, he reaches over to the table and picks up a tube syringe that had been sitting there...
The door chime goes off, indicating that someone with access to the apartment is on their way up. There's only one person that's likely to be -- sorry Blurr, you'll have to shoot up later.
Blurr looks up at the sound, then back at the tube in his hand. He makes a decision. Quickly he plunges the needle down and the auto-injector does its work, then he tosses the empty container into a waste receptacle. For him it's only a few seconds, and he's sitting in front of the videopane watching some entertainment programming.
Feint comes in through the door, looking annoyed. Maybe it's at Blurr. "Ugh, the NERVE of that -- that -- Oh I don't care what caste he is, he is JETWASH!" she fumes. Nope, not Blurr. She walks over to Blurr and flops down on the couch next to him, rubbing the rounded front of her helm. "Ugh. I'm going to have to have my face refinished just to stop feeling his lips on me."
Blurr's optic ridges go up and he peers at Feint. "Someone getting on your tailpipes?" He chuckles, and throws an arm around her. "Need me to punch him?" The racer teases, half-jokingly.
"Emirate Starscream thinks he's just something terribly special and thinks that his lips belong on my face," Feint complains irritably. "If it weren't for protocol I would have scared him good!"
"Heh, oh Starscream." Blurr laughs. "Yeah, he's a real slagface. Don't let him get to you. He thinks he deserves -everything-. He knows he can't have you though." he smirks.
"He was -trying- to cut a deal with me concerning you. He's hinting that he knows something about you and your mental state, and about us. He gave me the contact number of someone he says is a 'specialist' in mental issues," Feint muses, gaining a rather sly smile. "The thing is, I happen to know who this person is, and their records. Sending me to an Insecticon Warper -- who does he think he's kidding?"
"A warper?" Blurr's optics widen momentarily before he relaxes again. "Haha. Guess he underestimated you. Does he even know what you're capable of? Maybe he needs to find out the -hard- way." he chuckles at the thought of this.
"I have a sneaking suspicion he's more than just arrogant. I'm going to investigate him, and if he's aiding and abetting the enemy, I'll snag them both," Feint assures Blurr. Oh the thought of turning the tables on Starscream is making her engine purr. No one kisses her without permission, especially if that someone is not Blurr!
"Yeah he's a traitor." Blurr replies, shrugging. Truer words have never been spoken, truer even than the racer himself realizes. "And with your abilities it won't be hard to catch him in the act, either." He pats rubs her back. "So how's your training and stuff coming?"
Feint cuddles up to Blurr a little more, enjoying being near him and leaning up against him. "Very well. The only thing left now is hands-on training and fieldwork." She looks up at him and smiles. "I'm glad I decided to do this. I don't know what I would have done if I'd found you damaged as I did, and not known how to stabilize you."
Blurr cuddles up against her as well, their bodies a sort of mesh of blue on the sofa. "Good, I'm glad you like it. So when does the hands-on work start? You nervous at all?" he chuckles. "Well, technically you already had -some- field work, right?" He remarks. "So you're gonna do -great-."
"I've already started with a couple of patients, and I'm glad to be able to help people." She pauses to vent contentedly. "How about you? Are you feeling all right these days?" She pats his thigh. "I worry about your well-being, you know."
Blurr shakes his head, putting his hand over hers. "Hey, don't worry about me, okay? I'm sure you have a lot more patients to deal with who are a lot worse off than me. I'm doing fine." he grins, stroking her hand. "I'm a lot more resilient than I look."
"Wanna test that theory?" Feint coyly asks.
"What do you mean, exactly?" Blurr laughs, poking playfully at Feint. "You want to spar or something?"
"Actually no. I was just wondering if you might be up to something more... intimate?" Hopefully that hint won't go over Blurr's head. He's still a little fresh of the manufacturing floor.
Oh, it doesn't go over Blurr's head this time, at least that much. But he seems a little hesitant. "I--well--" he stares at the floor. "I don't know, Feint, last time we did it you almost got hurt. I--I could never forgive myself if you did, what if it happens again and you can't get out in time?" He looks back at her, genuine concern in his optics.
Feint reaches up and caresses the side of Blurr's face with a delicate hand. "I'm not as helpless as I was before. I'm supposed to get hands-on training, correct? I can't think of a more enjoyable way to practice than with you."
Blurr purses his lips, looking nervous, but relents. "I guess, yeah, you're right..." He nods, and pulls out the interface cables. "Well--here goes nothing."
Feint giggles playfully and slips over into Blurr's lap to face him, taking the cables in her hands and slipping them into the right ports. "Nothing /indeed," she murmurs as she pours affection into Blurr's sensors.
At first it's nothing beyond the usual, Feint encounters Blurr's many racing thoughts all traveling at crazy speeds. Most of them are associated with how much he loves her and cares for her right at the moment, but then again, as before, there's something lurking beneath the surface. Like a shadow that follows her around but always seems to hang around on the periphery of her vision, never really coming into full view...
Feint is patient and allows herself to dive into the stream of Blurr's consciousness, immersing completely and spreading her ardent affections through it like ripples of shimmering emotional color. She's circumspect of that dark space, but doesn't move towards it or away from it. She proceeds as normal - and who wouldn't want to in her position?
The deeper she goes, the bigger the shadow gets. It's like a dark, fluid entity that seems to slither around her, and suddenly it appears -under- her, opening like a big black hole to swallow her up. Immediately there's the feeling of falling, a distinct sensation that overtakes her sensors. Is that air rushing past her audials? Or is it less a feeling of falling and more of just being out of control, with nothing to grasp onto?
Feint's enormous sensor processing capacity allows her to split her consciousness into two separate feeds - one ghosting over the interface and observing from a code level, while the other half continues to let the "trap" spring on it - a honeypot waiting to receive the brunt of the malicious code. The primary 'ghost' above the interfacing sets to work tracing through Blurr's program structure, looking for the enactor of this code, and where it's stored.
The enactor is a a set of foreign code that has nearly fully assimilated itself into Blurr's neural network. In fact, it's somewhat difficult even to differentiate between him and it. It's been there for a while, and that mysterious toxin that she'd found him taking that one day has made this assimilation even more seamless...
Meanwhile, the 'honeypot' feed perceives a series of images from Blurr's memories. The darkness fades away, and images of the Forge form around her. Blurr can be seen clinging to pipes in the ceiling. A dead disposable falls out of it, shot through the chest. But that scene is whisked away quickly, and another takes its place...
Nyon, where Shiftlock was captured. She's forced to watch as Blurr murders three low caste refugees as they attempt to escape, though if they thought they could outrun him, they were sadly mistaken.
Swiftblade, on a transport in Thunderhead Pass. Blurr holding her hostage. Nyon again. This time it's Hot Rod being threatened. Then there's Rung being attacked as well. It's all becoming convoluted, and difficult to distinguish one instance from another....One thing is constant though, it's always Blurr harming or threatening someone, usually someone he once called friend.
And then, all their faces fade away. They are gone, and there is nothing but despair in their wake. A raw longing for times when things were simpler...
She finds herself in a large whitewashed room. It's the very room Blurr spent the entirety of the first few meta-cycles of his life in. Where he was isolated, cut off from the rest of the world. Only this time, there are a series of empty tubes and needles on the floor. And not for from the pile of tubes, is Blurr himself. He looks...battered and bruised, as if he'd been beaten. His vibrant blue hues are faded, appearing greyish in color like the day Feint had found him near Altihex, bleeding and near death.
He cowers in a corner of the room, looking small and terrified.
Removal of such deeply ingrained code is presently beyond Feint's level of skill to deal with. She studies it carefully and makes all kinds of mental notes - literal ones - on what she'll have to do to defrag this level of corruption. As she does so, her secondary self wades through the memories, not surprised by them really - she'd suspected - but she continues to pulse empathy and comfort out from herself into Blurr, as she attempt to interact with this deepest memory - she tries to 'appear' to that youngest Blurr, in that white room, through the door, walking towards him and crouching down low to meet him at his level.
Blurr's younger self gazes up at Feint, looking slightly comforted for a moment at the sight of her. But then a dark shape passes by the rectangular window at the front of the room, and the terror returns to his face. Yep, it's that same elusive shadow...
The sound of a weapon discharging rings out, the door starting to buckle. It is forcing its way in, although Blurr doesn't seem to do anything to try to block it.
Feint allows it to come, and puts herself between Blurr and this mysterious 'something'. The Primary Feint is recording all of this to a data slug, and is watching the code changes going on in Blurr's neurocircuit pathways.
The door finally crumples inward, and in the doorway stands...Blurr? Only this version of him isn't ragged and beaten, and wears a blank, emotionless expression. He advances into the room, headed for his less healthy self, who doesn't try to run but merely continues to cower in fear.
Blurr reaches for himself, but the other self cringes away. Then he starts reciting something, over and over again, almost like a chant:
        "Justice is over all...order must be maintained...sacrifices will be made..."
Again, and again the words are chanted.... and the cowering stops. Slowly, the sickly racer stands up, his optics fixated upon his other self's face---as if he can't look away...as if hypnotized by it somehow. He begins to chant them as well, in unison with himself.
        "Justice is over all...order must be maintained...sacrifices will be made..."
        "For Cybertron...for the good of all..."
Blurr reaches for himself once again, but this time there is no further resistance. He places both of his hands on the other's shoulders...
Something strange begins to happen. It starts to become harder to determine where one version of himself ends and the other begins. The weaker one is fading slowly into the stronger, lines blurring and boundaries vanishing....two will become one.
Or rather, the weaker manifestation will be fully assimilated, and cease to exist...
Feint braces herself. She's not about to let this happen, and she is willing to let herself be destroyed alongside Blurr's original being to try to save him. This will take everything she has, and as such, she dangerously untethers the 'ghost' of herself and merges in fully with it. She will no longer safely observe from a distance. She will fight.
Feint's image in Blurr's mind gets brighter, haloed with energy, and from her sides two prehensile tentacles shoot out. The ends open into mnemnosurgical needles; the tendrils attempt to lasso around the stronger, false "Blurr" under his arms like full nelson hold, and pull him away from the weaker self. If successful, mental Feint will insert those needles into the back of false "Blurr"'s neck.
She pulses a wave of love and apology to the weaker true Blurr, as real life duplicates neurological landscape - Feint's side cables extend, needles ready, to inject into the back of Blurr's neck.
The stronger version of Blurr whirls around when Feint's tentacles wrap around him, and suddenly another device appears in his hand. It's something that she might even recognize...yes, that rudimentary mnemosurgical machine that Blurr had used on Shiftlock all those cycles ago, the one that had frightened her so much that she'd run away for a while and gotten herself captured and carted off to the Institute. He raises it, the tip of the thing sparking ominously...
The 'real' Blurr suddenly looks terrified...and she can feel he is intensely afraid that Feint is going to get hurt or worse yet--killed.
        N-no....don't do this...please...pleasejustletitgo...getoutwhileyoucan... he begs.
"No," Feint refuses solidly. "I -love- you, Blurr, and I'm not leaving you. Even if that means I die - I'd rather die trying to save you than live without you. You're my everything."
Without a trace of fear, she engages in psychological warfare with this other self, not afraid of the device in its hands as she attempts to connect within the connection and confront the code directly. She hammers it with access phrases in rapid succession, a mental DDOS intended to both slow it down and try to gain access to the shell script that is residing in Blurr's mind.
Combining this with her outlier abilities, she pours strength, courage and resolve into the beleagured core of Blurr's true self, to lend him strength. Code has no psychic self to battle with, so she wastes no time on trying to intimidate it.
NoFeintno...noNODON'T!! Blurr cries out desperately, despite her attempts to comfort him and give him courage. The other 'Blurr' brings the device down hard into the back of Feint's neck, and the battle is on. Surprisingly enough, despite all appearances the program's attacks aren't all that potent. Sure, it starts to bombard her with scrambled code, but it seems Blurr's fears were unwarranted. And thanks to her training, the outlier is able to gain access to the shell script. It has Cipher's signature written all over it. He did this. He -made- it. He made the toxins, too. He so very carefully and delicately crafted this entire setup. It's strange though, despite how elaborate the plan is, it seems easily undone. Anyone with even a single dram of resolve should have been able to resist its influence...so why isn't Blurr able to? Or why hasn't he?
Feint suspends the damaging code completely, sending it a halt command - she intends to pause it and its effects so that she can figure out where it ends and Blrur begins. She had a feeling this was Cipher's work all right, and she knew the toxin wasn't any good for Blurr. Now, perhaps, she might be able to give the mech some space to think, move and breathe on his own.
Feint's mental image phases and the device that hits her neck goes on through. Symbolicly, her tentacles go far longer than they should and cocoon around the other 'Blurr', stopping him, at least for the moment.
"It's all right," Feint reassures Blurr. "I've got it under control, love. It's over, if you want it to be."
Feint's efforts seem to pay off--at least for the time being. The foreign code's manifestation of Blurr suddenly goes limp and seems to shrink and then finally dissolve in her grasp, once again turning into nothing more than a fleeting shadow that slithers away into the cracks of the floor.
Meanwhile, the other Blurr, or perhaps the 'true' one, is still cowering in a corner, hiding his face for fear of being forced to watch his loved one perish. But once she begins to soothe him again, he looks up at her, calming down slightly. He glances about, finding that the shadow is gone. Y-you'restillhere... He's surprised and relieved at the same time.
"Yes. I've been learning how to deal with this, learning medicine and mnemnosurgery, so that I could help you," Feint says, going over to Blurr mentally to embrace him. "All of this was for you. Everything I've done has been for your good and wellbeing, becauase you mean that much to me! I can't even put into words how much I love you."
Oh...thankPrimus... Blurr very relieved now, and he quickly wraps himself around her presence. He looks up at her though, his optics wide and pleading just like a child's. But promise me you'll never do that again. I couldn't bear to lose you. You're the only one who understands me. No one knows me like you do...no one.
"Blurr, I want you to be -free-. You can't reach your full potential if you aren't free, inside and out. That means not having people trying to 'fix' you. You aren't broken, you never were. They just didn't take the time to understand you - putting this code in your head, the toxins you inject with -- they aren't helping you get stronger or better. They're weakening you and killing you in front of my eyes."
Feint holds Blurr, inside and out, stroking the side of his helm tenderly. "You gave me freedom, you gave me a chance to live and become something more than just a disposable drone. How could I not want to do the same for you?"
But... Blurr looks confused. He said I -needed- it in order to see my full potential. In order to do my job right, because it's such a hard job, I could never hope to do it right without help. Presumably 'he' is referring to Cipher. Or someone at the IAA, or perhaps the Senate. Or perhaps both. He looks so...small in here. Even as small as Feint is physically. I couldn't argue with that. I -want- to do this. To make the world right...
"That sounds like someone who has no confidence in you at all. If they have to -weaken- you and -think for you-, how can you be /you/?" Feint asks gently, enfolding Blurr in her arms. "I look at you and see someone who was smart and brave enough to save me not just once but -twice- from being killed, or worse. YOu decided to do that on your own. You stormed in past armed guards and fought off enemies just for a helpless little thing like me. Think about it, sweetspark ... why would someone so brave and strong and capable /already/ need to have someone hold their hand and put them on autopilot?"
She smiles warmly at him. "Yes, there will be mistakes along the way, but that's how we learn. The more you experience, the stronger, wiser, and better you will become. If you want, I can show you, through what I have experienced."
For a moment, Blurr seems to see her reasoning. It's certainly something he'd like to hear. I-Iguessyou'reright...
But at the mention of mistakes he tenses again. N-no! I can't make mistakes. I never could. And especially not now, with this kind of work, I can't afford to hesitate otherwise what's the point of being so fast why would they use me anyway if I'm not fast! And if they couldn't use him then why would he -exist-.
"Blurr."
Feint looks him right in the eyes. "-No one- is perfect. You'll make a mistake now and then. It's -okay-." They're still connnected, so all of his worries and fears are coming across to her as if they were written in large block letters across his forehead. "You are more than your speed, beloved, just like I'm more than my sensors."
Blurr stares up at her, confusion written all over his face and emotions. This was just so contrary to everything he'd been preached his entire life. He was -made- for the sole purpose of multiplying the IAA's profits and benefiting the Senate's research efforts. If not for that, he wouldn't even -exist-. I...whatdoIdo...
"You try to do your best every day. Go ahead and listen to your superiors, work the function that is given to you for now, and you be the best possible Blurr you can be, but listen to your spark, too. Never let your emotions control you, but never crush them - think of them as advisors. Listen to what your feelings are saying, then look at the facts and situation around you, and then decide what you should do. You are fast enough that you can do that quickly. You don't need to inject anything, or any special programming to think and act quickly, and to have control of your emotions -- you just need practice and time."
"Blurr, I would move the entire planet to prove how much I love you. If that doesn't tell you how valuable you are, I don't know what will. You are a precious living spark no matter how you were ignited."
Ah, but that is the problem, isn't it? They don't -want- Blurr thinking too hard for himself. Besides, all of that just sounds so -complicated-! Yeah I'm fast but I don't -have- time for practice! I want to make things right, Feint. And I want to do it -now-!
He calms down a bit when Feint tries to describe how much she loves him. Th-thankyou...I don't know what I would do without you. I-I'll try.
Feint smiles. "As long as you're trying, I can't ask for much more than that, because I feel the same way about you."
"I'll show you."
And with errant programming disabled, and the two of them still fully interfaced, Feint can finally and completely do just that.