I have been deaf for almost two million years.

There is radio contact still, though fewer and fewer voices speak to my mind. I can hear, in a way, the crunch of the ice under my feet as the sound waves ripple through my frame. There is no other way for sound to travel - the ice I walk on is the atmosphere of Cybertron. I walk in a vacuum.

It is cold - not absolute zero, nothing is - but close. Steam plumes around my feet as I walk, the heat of my body causing the sublimation that freezes again near-instantly. The ice is patterned with my footprints.

The light is strange. Shadows have knife-edges. If I were to shine a light, there would be no beam, just a sharp patch of light on a wall. If it is bright enough and the surface polished enough, if the angles are right, it can light a room, a building, a city. I have long since tired of such tricks and instead live with the darkness.

There are stars, always stars, sharp and clear. They are not enough to see by. I can see the towers, but only as an absence of stars. Infravision and energy-sensors both leave me blind to all but my fellow Cybertronians - no power flows in the walls, and everything is cold. I walk without stumbling. I know my territory, and I have other senses.

Days and nights exist only in the abstract - by the numbers of my internal chronometer and by the position of the stars. Night flows into night flows into night. Sometimes I will stand on my balcony for days, and slow my vision so that the stars turn into wires that encircle my planet. Cybertron spins, but orbits nothing.

I am alone. Other people exist only as radio frequencies. We do not talk to each other often. We have nothing to talk about any more.

This is nothing horrible to me - I am a spacecraft, and I am built for these conditions in mind and body. Still, it is strange to experience the cold and vacuum and utter isolation while standing on my own balcony, in my own city ...

Others could not handle these conditions. Their bodies struggled to fight the cold without and the heat within, their minds struggled to accept the sensory deprivation. I am not a cruel master - I released those in my service to the comfort of stasis when they could no longer handle the strain. I had no use for them, anyway - our enemies are worse off than we are. I fear no attack.

There are few of us left. Shockwave, of course, because he must. Myself and Frostalon because of our design. Vapourblade and Eidolon because they are stubborn. Soon, we will join the rest in hibernation. What else is there to do? Cybertron is so depleted that we cannot even generate the heat needed to have a gaseous atmosphere.

I will sleep soon, to wait for heat and life to return.

I can wait forever.

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