Knowing more of the truth than he wanted to know, Leo stared at the tiny screen as Sam looked on beside him. “Official dissembling. Public might buy it, might not. Take it from someone who’s spent plenty of late-night hours studying this kind of stuff. One thing I do know for sure.”
“What’s that?” Sam wondered.
“Dude, our lives are so over.”
A pair of Autobots joined them: Skids and Mudflap. Although it would stretch the human definition of the word, these were the Twins. Having abandoned their combined alt-mode of an ice-cream truck, they now sported the guise of sporty, albeit compact, cars.
“We twied to contact the rehth of the Autoboth, but their frequenthieth are currently nonoperational,” said Mudflap, his thick lisp making him difficult to immediately understand.
“They got orders to stand down!” his counterpart barked. “Gov’mint won’t let ’em bust any heads! It’s outrageous, bro!”
Sam couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “But that’s—insane. Are you telling me that the Autobots are taking the fall for this?”
Mudflap nodded. “Yup. My geth ith they’re being ordered back to baythe . . . againtht their will.” “Then what?” A fretful Sam looked from one identical Autobot to the other.
“Lockdown in the crib, baby,” declared Skids solemnly. “It’s what happens when the Man steps on you.”
Leo directed their attention back to his phone. “Hey! Check it out.”
The steady drumbeat of confused reporting was interrupted as the channel broke into a live FBI press conference. Sam winced as his picture filled the
screen. The shot had been lifted from his college application. Though such a thing did not seem possible, it made him look even geekier than usual. Drawing back from the image, the screen shot made room for additional photos of Mikaela and Leo. The current director of the FBI was standing beside what must have been the country’s least-imposing trio of mug
shots.
“... all we’re prepared to say at this time is that we believe they may have information relating to the tragedies. It’s for their own safety that they be found. The FBI, the CIA, and Interpol are seeking the cooperation of law-enforcement officials worldwide ...”
A sudden realization caused Sam to reach out and snatch the phone away from its owner. A startled Leo tried to take it back, only to see Sam slam it to the floor.
“Hey! What’s the idea?”
“They can track us.” Unwilling to trust the impact, Sam proceeded to use his heel to stomp the components out of the phone’s case.
Throwing up his hands, his roommate rolled his eyes skyward. “Oh, great—they can track us!” Lowering his head, he stared back at his friend. “Look, I—I’m not with you guys ... you forced me into that car . . . technically I’m a hostage—this is kidnapping!”
Observing the verbal exchange between the two humans, Mudflap was moved to comment. “Doth thith guy ever thut hith twap?”
“Let’s pop a cap in his ass,” suggested his counterpart. “We do it fast, he’ll feel nuthin’.”
Frustrated and fearful, Leo turned on the two Autobots. “Yo, bumper cars, I’m hearing you. No one’s popping any caps in anybody's ass.” He buried his head in his hands.
Sam had had just about enough of his friend’s wailng. “Hey! You’re the one who wanted ’em all to be real. Well, are they real enough for you? Kinda different from pushing captions around on a webpage, huh?” He nodded toward the nearest way out. “You wanna run? No one’s stopping you.” Turning, he stalked out the corridor doorway without looking back.
Leo watched him leave, started to follow, then stopped. It was bad, all bad, but it wasn’t Witwicky’s fault. With the Twins watching him, he sat down and let his head fall forward.
Planning on computers was all very well and good until it turned out that the computers were trying to kill you.
In an open area around a near corner, Mikaela was tending to Bumblebee. One panel and its covering armor had been snapped open to reveal the interior of a portion of his left arm. Having followed his directions and extracted the necessary sealing hose from the interior, she was working to close the gashes on his left hand. An electrical interrupt that would have to be fixed later had prevented the internal healing and repair tube from doing its own work. The human, the Autobot reflected as he silently watched her work, was a very adequate and extremely flexible substitute for a jumper line.
“Try and hold still,” she was telling him as he twitched slightly. “Pm good, but I can’t fix a coolant line if somebody’s jiggling it, either.” Obediently, he
froze in place.
“There—that’s the last of it, I think.” Rising, she let the tube rewind into his arm. Flexing the damaged fingers, he nodded appreciatively. Movement caused Mikaela to turn as Sam entered. His expression was anguished, and she did her best to try and reassure him.
“Don’t take it to heart, Sam. There’s nothing you could’ve done.”
His gaze met hers, his tone downcast. “I could’ve listened.” Continuing on past her, he stopped as close as he dared to the silent Bumblebee. He started to say something only to find that he could not. He could not look his car, his friend, his guardian, in the eye— even if it was only a flat plane composed of inorganic optical sensors.
“I’m so ...” He tried to find appropriate words, gave up, and found himself rambling helplessly. “I’m so sorry. I messed up. I thought I was doing the right thing. Seemed so important.” He laughed hu- morlessly. “Being in college, being normal. Important, yeah—for who? For me? Talk about selfish! I thought—I thought I deserved it.” His throat started to constrict and he swallowed, trying to control his emotions.
“Optimus fell. Because of me. He came back here to protect me. To look out for one lousy, immature, self-centered human child. And on top of that, now the rest of the Autobots are getting blamed for what’s happening.”
The yellow-and-black Autobot listened to all this without comment. Now his radio crackled with the voice of a familiar television character intoning a brief snippet of dialogue from an old film.
“I have been, and always shall be, your friend. ”
That said, even if it was not in his own voice, he shifted shape back to his sleek, four-wheeled terrestrial guise. Sam looked over at the idling car.
“I let you down, Bee. I let all of you down. And I gotta make that right. No matter what the consequences. That’s part of growing up, too, right? Dealing with the consequences of your actions? Taking responsibility? I can’t let you guys continue to take the blame for something that I might’ve been able to prevent.” He looked toward the exit. “I gotta turn myself in.”
Bumblebee responded in a different radio voice this time, harsh and insistent: “No, no, no! ”
Sam smiled affectionately at the car. “We don’t know that there’s anyone else left but us. You, me, ’Kaela, Leo, and those crazy Twins. We can’t stop Megatron alone. How can you deny that my life isn’t worth saving the planet?” He paused, waiting, until the silence had run on long enough to make his point. “You can’t, can you? Say something.”
The car radio finally responded, utilizing bass so deep that the speakers shook the interior. Because it was speaking in the voice of Optimus Prime.
“I believe there is greatness in you, Sam. Even if you don’t. ”
The words didn’t affect their intended recipient half so powerfully as did the expertly reproduced voice of the Autobot leader. Mikaela came up behind Sam.
“If Optimus hadn’t saved us, do you really think the Decepticons would have just taken you and then left the rest of the world, the rest of humankind, alone? I don’t know nearly as much about this rivalry as you do, Sam, but from what I’ve seen of the Decepticons and how they function, I think you’d be the last person on Earth to trust them to leave us alone after they have you—and I’d be the second to last.”
Bumblebee followed her observation
with another broadcast of his own. This time the radio’s speaker was unidentifiable, but the words were immediately familiar.
“It is for us, the living, to resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain."
Old words, Sam thought. Words that he and every one of his fellow students had been forced to memorize in high school. Words that had to be correctly recognized on one of a seemingly infinite number of written tests. How boring they had seemed at the time! How archaic! And now, suddenly, how relevant.
Much subdued and perhaps also a little matured, Leo confronted his angst-ridden roommate. “You’re the leader now, bro. So? LeadHe gestured at their grim, silent surroundings. “If it comes to it, I’d rather end up in a place like this than under some invader’s metal foot.”
Off to one side, Bumblebee revved his engine. It was a sound that had become as familiar to Sam as his own heartbeat, one that had served to inspire and energize him on more than one previous occasion. It did so again now. The rumble, and the words that had been spoken over the car’s radio.
“Okay—okay. Let’s think this through. When I killed Megatron by jamming the Cube into his chest, it must have affected me as well. I think some stuff must have gotten transferred into me. Stuff from the Cube. Knowledge of some kind.” He looked over at
Leo. “All those symbols and equations I was writing on the walls of our room, stuff like that. I don’t know what it all means, but I knew how to write it out. How to transfer it.” Reaching up, he rubbed his forehead. “All that knowledge went into my head, right?”
“Not just alien symbology, either, I expect.” Mikaela was eyeing him with a mixture of sympathy and wonderment. “No wonder you aced your SATs and got a scholarship to an Ivy League school. ”
Ideas were flowing through him now, coalescing, starting to make sense. He had never taken the time to really think about them before. Or maybe his perception of himself had been blocked. Such blockage could be removed by all kinds of things, he realized. Drugs, diet, environment. An emotional crisis . . .
“So when I touched the splinter, got proximate to it, got shocked, that stored knowledge got activated. I started seeing symbols, which is what they’re after— no,” he corrected himself as fresh comprehension struck home. “Not the symbols—it’s what they represent. ” His gaze grew distant, his voice faint.
“He’s drifting,” Leo remarked warningly.
Reaching out, Mikaela took Sam by the shoulders and shook him. “Sam! Stay here! Stay with us— focus!”
“What?” He blinked, turning away from the distant mysteries he had been viewing and back toward her. “I just—understood. Focus, yeah. Concentration. I know, I realize—the symbols? They’re a message. A
message—or a map. Or maybe both, I dunno.” Reaching up, he grabbed his head. “This is hard. It hurts. ”
“That’s thinking for you,” Leo told him. “Gets you every time. Okay—say you’re a map. We don’t know what you lead to or where you’re starting from, but first things first: how do we read you?”
“Read, yeah. Translate what’s in my head. A map can show, but it can’t interpret. For that we need ...” He shifted his attention to the attentive Bumblebee and the silent Twins. “You guys, any of this make any sense?”
Turning and using a forefinger, he started writing in the dust that caked the nearest wall, tracing arcane symbols in the grit and grime. The method and the medium were far from perfect, but the results were legible.
Mudflap spoke up almost immediately. “Oooh— ith the wangwadge of the Pwyimes! We don’t know how to wead that!”
Mikaela made a face. “The—‘language of the Primes’?” Skids explained. “Old school, like way far back. Long before the time of li’l punks like us.”
Bumblebee, as always, had something to add, his radio warbling from yet another old film. “You say to-mayto, I say to-mahto....”
Sam was thinking hard. “Well, if none of you can read it, we need to find someone who can.” He took in their surroundings. “But first we gotta find a safe place to hide out. We can’t stay here. There’s no power, so we’ve got no way to stay warm, and no way to know what’s going on. And we’re gonna need food and water, and ...”
Leo interrupted him. “I think I might know someone who can help: Robo-Warrior. ”
Mikaela responded with a disapproving look. “That a friend of yours?”
He returned her gaze, shaking his head sadly. “Y’know, someone looks like you shouldn’t be so touchy. ”
For the first time in a while, Sam smiled. “Better watch what you say, man, or she’ll reach out and touch you—with a torsion wrench.”
No one bothered to look twice at the green and orange cars traveling in line, though the lustrous black- and-yellow Camaro in front of them drew the occasional envious stare from several passing commuters. Their ogling didn’t last long. Drivers approaching the bridge exit to Manhattan had to pay attention lest they take the wrong off-ramp and find themselves heading in the wrong direction—or worse, crosstown.
Such important last-minute decisions did not appear to weigh heavily on the Camaro’s driver, perhaps because the hands he was resting on the wheel were positioned there only for show. For all the actual control he was exercising over the car he could just as easily have been riding with his feet up on the dash and his hands behind his head, except that that might well have attracted more than a little unwelcome attention from the other drivers. Allowing the vehicle to drive itself did, however, permit him to concentrate on the ongoing conversation with his fellow passen- gers.
“You’re sure about this guy?” Sustaining the necessary fiction that the car had a human driver, Sam
continued to face forward even as he addressed himself to the occupant of the passenger seat. Relaxing sideways in back, Mikaela listened intently to the continuing discussion.
Leo’s reply was confident, but mixed with bitter acknowledgment that he was recommending his rival. “The ‘Robo-Warrior’? Well, he’s not a friend, he’s a frickin’ archrival. But he claims he’s the Holy Grail on this stuff.”
“He runs that ‘Giant-Effing-Robots’ site?”
“The dude swears he works outta some bot-proof bomb shelter in the middle of New York City— posted specs on how to fight ’em and everything. We tried to revenge-hack his firewall one time and I saw some junk on his site that looked like those symbols.” Suspicious from the start of every move Sam’s roommate had made and everything he had said, Mikaela wasn’t about to let his assurances pass unquestioned.
“So in other words, you’re saying that you’ve never met him.”
“So? I never met Jesus and he obviously looms large in our society. That’s the beauty of the online world; you can be anything and do anything without exposing yourself. I mean, think about it: if the Sermon on the Mount had gone viral throughout the Roman world, wouldn’t things have maybe gone differently? This dude we’re going to see is the Holy Grail of alien mythology. The Matthew and John, if you prefer. Or Mohammed, or Buddha. Pick your Messiah. He feeds me and the rest of us in our worldwide group ultra-top-secret files, he’s posted specs on how to fight ’em and everything, and he’s got some kind of bot-proof bomb shelter in the middle of New York City—so if he can’t help us, no one can.” “Maybe,” Sam conceded, “but what’re the odds ‘Robo-Warrior’s’ just a ten-year-old girl with an X-box and a talent for improvisation? Or maybe somebody who wants to be a game designer and is trying out plots on unsuspecting viewers, pretending that their scenarios are based in reality?”
“Save us, Obi-nobody, you’re our only hope,” an unconvinced Mikaela muttered.
Sam’s roommate shook his head condescendingly. “Ponce-de-Leon is on the case. Trust me.”
Bumblebee kept driving throughout this exchange. The signpost up ahead read “Brooklyn,” but Leo couldn’t help but feel that he had crossed into a different dimension.
Trailed by the Twins, the Camaro s
lowed as it passed the restaurant. After confirming that they had indeed arrived at the indicated address, all three vehicles made a block to check that their destination was not under surveillance. Satisfied, they began to look for a place to park on the busy street. Enshrouded in their terrestrial guises, the Twins had no trouble. Finding a place for Bumblebee to settle in proved more problematic, but eventually that was done with a little creative rearranging of parked cars during a lull in pedestrian traffic.
As Leo led the way toward the busy restaurant entrance, they passed a newsstand whose owner was watching a small TV. The headline on one paper shouted, “5,000 DEAD AT SEA—CAUSE STILL UNDETERMINED.”
The announcer on the compact set looked none too composed. “Though many people continue to doubt that what they saw in the now-infamous television broadcast was in fact real and denials continue to be issued by numerous governments, we are starting to see cases of stockpiling, looting, and panic, as the manhunt continues for this boy.”
Sam’s face promptly appeared on the screen. The same lousy photo, he noted as he pulled his hoodie farther down over his head and lowered his gaze. At least they didn’t have far to walk. Halting outside the restaurant door, Leo double-checked the street number.
“Deli—good front. Low-tech, lots of customers. I’m starving.” As they entered, he whispered to Sam and Mikaela, “You guys wait here. I’ll check it out, give you the go/no-go. Shouldn’t take long.” Pushing his way through the milling, anxious crowd, he began working his way toward the counter.
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