There is a saying...that the lower you walk into Kaon, the closer you get to the Pit.

The first time I heard this was when I was but a small youngling of just six vorns. My creator had been speaking with a business associate, unaware or perhaps just unconcerned that his creation was playing behind his desk and listening. I never quite forgot the disdain in his voice, because my creator had always been a gentle and soft-spoken mech. Perhaps he was a little bitter after the death of my carrier, but he had seemed to me an infallible pillar of wisdom and justice, and so I remembered all the more clearly how poisonous he sounded then.

I didn't understand what he meant that day, but I remember thinking, with the simplicity that only a child is capable of, that any place likened to the Pit had to be a terrible and sparkless place indeed.

It was a sentiment that only grew with time. I had been sparked and created in the Towers, the high pristine spires that arched across the sky above the mortal filth in the lower sectors of the city. We Tower mechs rarely saw the other side of existence. Hunger, poverty, and the desperation of simply surviving another orn were mere abstractions to us. Life in the upper sectors was just a game--a frivolous, extravagant game in which the worst loss you could suffer was a second-rate alt mode or the embarrassment of a poor paint job.

What is out of sight is out of mind, and so for much of my youth I rarely gave a thought to the happenings outside of the upper sectors. On the odd occasions I did, however, it was to spare a derisive sort of pity towards the nameless, faceless slum drones I saw on the evening holovids. How filthy they were, I would think to myself as I sat comfortably sipping a full cube of premium energon. How ugly, how stupid, and how terribly sad.

My upbringing in the Towers was a comfortable, easy existence. My creator hoped for me to one day take his seat in the Senate, and so I spent much of my early life training in the subtle art of politics and governing the masses. The masses were incompetent, too stupid to govern themselves, and given the means, they would steer themselves into an early extinction. They needed mechs of intelligence and willpower to lead them, and if those mechs were to live more comfortable lives than the governed, then that was the proper reward for their services. This was the philosophy my education was built on, and it was what I believed.

It was not hard, looking upon those wretched, brutish masses, to believe them incapable of self-governing. The middle sectors, at least, were capable of forging a livelihood and decent standard of living for themselves. But for those who toiled in the filth and decay of the lowest sectors of Kaon, whose armor was rusted and soiled from the grime of working the energon mines and whose skin was blistered from the heat of the smelters...they were truly helpless to help themselves. They were the ones forgotten by all, forsaken even by Primus the Creator, and owed their very existence, as pathetic as it was, to the charity of Tower mechs like my creator.