Transformers: Prometheus

CHAPTER 5

How long had it been since he’d awoken and faced the day with a sense of purpose, without his first thought being how tired he was? To Jack, it felt longer than three months, although he knew it wasn’t true. Something beyond finding jobs, the endless battle to stick it out for one more day, to honor the fallen and the memory thereof. But when he climbed off Maggie’s too-small couch, he didn’t feel fatigued, and the kink in his neck felt almost pleasant. It was a slight amount of pain, and that told him he was alive, and if he was alive then he could fight.

And he would. Because, for the first time in three months, he had a mission.

He skipped breakfast and went straight for the garage. Maggie had an old whiteboard there, and he’d need it. Arcee said nothing as he wandered around, looking for markers, found a little bucket of them in a cabinet. Left, raided Maggie’s living room for some paper, and returned. Did Autobots sleep? He had no idea, but Jack figured that Arcee would speak up if she wanted to talk.

So, he got to work.

It’d been a while since he’d had to put together a briefing, but it was a relatively simple matter: accuracy, brevity, clarity; facts, formality, flexibility. Glen and Maggie might’ve been civilians, but he only had one shot to illustrate everything. To make the existence of walking, talking robots appear entirely logical.

Eventually, Maggie arrived with Glen. By then, Jack had dragged a pair of chairs in front of the whiteboard, and arranged what he could based on his memories. A map of the SOCCENT base, a printout of an MH-53 and an attempt to model a sketch of Blackout from it. It looked nothing like how Jack remembered him.

“Hey, thanks for coming,” Jack said. “I’ve prepared a bit of a presentation.”

“It sure looks like it,” Maggie said.

“Hey, cool bike,” Glen said, and reached out with one hand toward Arcee’s handlebars.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Jack said quickly.

“Alright, jeez, touchy,” Glen replied, and settled on one of the chairs. "Guy buys a motorcycle, knows to protect the merchandise, I get it." Maggie stood behind the other one, her eyes on everything Jack had thrown together. She glanced at him but said nothing.

“Three months ago,” Jack began, “the SOCCENT forward operating base in Qatar was attacked and destroyed. The official death toll stands at two-hundred and sixty-seven, but it’s a bit higher than that.

“When it comes to combat, there’s typically a four to one ratio of casualties to fatalities. That’s to say, for every four people wounded, one of them will die. But in this case, there were no wounded—except me. Short of a nuclear device, there’s no weapon in human history that could achieve such a ratio.”

Jack paused, considered his sketch of the base. He couldn’t quite imagine the path Blackout would’ve taken. By the time he had seen him, he was in his humanoid form, and he was ripping the base apart with weapons Jack had never seen before. A great blue flame that struck a C-130 and bent it over itself, shredded it into pieces...

“The official story is that there was a bomb smuggled aboard a MH-53.” He tapped the print out of the Pave Low. “But that’s the kind of story that only sounds like it makes sense to people who don’t know anything about the military. You can’t just smuggle a bomb aboard a military vehicle. If their story is true, then wherever that chopper came from, it came from one of our bases. If someone did sneak an explosive onboard, then they got it past a lot of people—the ground crew, the flight crew. That would mean a massive conspiracy.”

The suggestion of a conspiracy theory got a nod from Glen, as Jack had thought it might. Maggie, however, was less engrossed: “But it’s not impossible, Jack, is it?”

“Not impossible,” he replied, “Just improbable. But there’s other things that people aren’t asking about. Other things that are a bit odd. The official report omits any identifying numbers that might point to which MH-53 was involved. There’s only about one hundred and seventy of these helicopters in service. Even if they didn’t know which one it had been at the time, they could’ve tracked it down through a process of elimination.”

“Why would they omit that?” Maggie asked.

Jack took a breath. Here he went. Leading the way.

“Because it didn’t have one,” he said. “Or it was a duplicate.”

Maggie's brow narrowed, figuring out what he was implying.

“You can’t just build a whole fake helicopter,” Maggie replied.

“You don’t need to build one, if you can become one.” Jack tapped the sketch of Blackout. “There was no helicopter involved. The base was attacked by something the world had never seen before or since. A humanoid weapons system—a walking tank, a Decepticon. An alien robot that can take the form of a vehicle and shift between modes. One mode to hide, and another to attack.”

Neither Glen nor Maggie were nodding.

“This one is called Blackout. This is what he looked like—kind of, there's some artistic license. Thirty feet tall and capable of immense destruction. A Gatling gun, rocket pods, and some kind of directed energy weapon...” Physical strength enough to fling an Abrams through the air. “I think he attacked the base, and there’s something he was looking for there. I don’t know what. Maybe the government knows. But it was first contact with a form of life that’s like nothing we’ve ever seen.”

They still weren’t nodding. “Alright,” Jack said. “Fine. I know this because last night I was attacked by another one of them—but this one was a giant panther named Ravage.” He raised his arm. Ravage’s teeth marks were still there, raw and red. “And then I was saved by another one. A good one. She calls herself Arcee, and she’s an Autobot from the planet Cybertron.”

("Cyber-wha," Glen muttered.)

Jack turned his head, and gave Arcee a pointed look. “Arcee, do your thing.”

Nothing happened. The motorcycle remained a motorcycle. Jack felt the warmth drain from his face. “C’mon, Arcee," he said, chuckling, "don’t leave me hanging.”

Glen glanced to Maggie. She bit her cheek and said, “Jack, thank you for the presentation and everything—but please, listen to yourself. Alien robots. Two which happen to be evil, and then a... motorcycle-lady-bot who happens to protect you?”

Jack gritted his teeth. “I’m guessing she thinks this is funny.”

Maggie exhaled. “Jack. I had a friend run the license plate on that motorcycle. It’s an exact match to one over in Illinois. Same color, same make and model. You said you met someone named Sadie. Did she give you this bike?”

Jack opened his mouth to reply and then, a metallic cacophony, the oddly musical sound of metal sliding against metal—and an electronic yelp as Arcee banged her head against the ceiling.

“This is getting exponentially worse,” the Autobot said, hunching low. “Both of you—listen! And assume that, unless I correct him, that all of the Sergeant's statements are accurate.

“And, yes, it was funny, soldier boy.”

Then, she shifted back into her motorcycle form. It was about then that Glen started screaming.

It took a little while to calm Glen down. Jack wasn’t sure if it was fear or excitement and settled on ‘both.’ With her point evidently made, Arcee settled for hunkering down on the far side of the garage. Glen had dragged his laptop out and had muttered something about research, but not before blurting out, “I’m so sorry that I almost touched you! I didn’t mean anything by it! I’m still a virgin! I mean, I thought you were a motorcycle, and—”

“I am a motorcycle,” Arcee replied. Then, to Jack: “Your friends are strange.”

“How did you learn to speak English?” Maggie asked.

“The World Wide Web.”

“Really?”

“Really. That, and the transmissions you’ve been beaming into space.”

“People have been saying that’s a bad idea for years,” Glen muttered, typing away.

It was going about as well as one could hope, Jack figured.

“So, what are your thoughts on cats, then?” Jack asked.

Arcee wavered her left hand in a so-so motion.

“And where’s my hospitality!” Maggie said. “Can I get you anything? Like, uh, petrol?”

Arcee turned her optics on Maggie. “Refined hydrocarbons? Do not insult me.”

“Apologies. What do you run on, then?”

“Energon.”

“Never heard of it,” Maggie replied.

“I have,” Glen put in.

"Oh my God, zip it! First contact with an alien lifeform and you're all, 'been there, done that, got the bloody t-shirt.'"

Everyone paused.

"It'd have to be a big t-shirt," Arcee murmured.

"Man, I said I was sorry about the handlebars! I didn't even touch them!"

Arcee held up a hand. "Relax, fleshling. We're even now, I believe, is the saying."

Glen returned to his work, muttering. Jack felt a little smile on his face, watched as Maggie stepped closer to Arcee, and indicated some of the unusual silver characters on her plating. It struck Jack then that, under the bright lights of the garage, that Arcee’s paintwork was more scratched and worn than it was when she was a motorcycle.

“These symbols are interesting,” Maggie said. “Do they have any particular meaning?”

Arcee glanced down at herself. “Tribal tattoos.”

Jack stepped up to Maggie’s shoulder. The symbols were scattered along Arcee’s arms, one of her shoulders, and up one side of... Jack couldn’t tell if that was a jaw guard or a cheek.

“They make me think of kanji,” he said.

“Not really,” she replied. “I mean, I can see the resemblance, but they’re not the same. I took a whole course on languages, and I don’t think I recognize them. Those glyphs on her armor, they make me think of Linear A.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s one of the oldest forms of writing, and it’s never been deciphered. Which is pretty crazy, when you think about it.”

Jack nodded. “You’re saying there’s a connection?”

“I don’t know? Maybe? Before today, I never would’ve expected any of this. But if I squint, it also starts making me think of some of the indigenous scripts from the Arctic—”

“That’s it!” Glen shouted. “The Arctic! I knew I’d seen those symbols before, I knew it!” He tapped away at his laptop, then spun it around to show them both the screen. On it, was a portrait of a bearded, bespectacled man.

“Back in the 1800s, there was this expedition to the Arctic Circle. The National Arctic Circle Expedition.” The caption of the portrait read Archibald Amundsen Witwicky. Jack had never heard of him.

“They say,” Glen continued, “They say that this guy, Captain Whittiker, found a giant ‘ice man’ buried there, and the sight of it made him go blind and lose his mind! Look, here! They say this is what he was drawing, those strange symbols—those same ones on the motorcycle! They say he spent the rest of his life drawing them, over and over, in some mental hospital. Over and over, on the walls, in his journal...”

The image on his laptop certainly looked similar to the symbols on Arcee. But...

“Um, Glen,” Maggie said. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great story, but if he was blind and crazy, then how was he drawing those symbols repeatedly?”

“They say it made him psychic, granted him that ESP shit, and that led into all kinds of government research.” He started counting on his fingers. “The Philadelphia Experiment, the Montauk Project, Project Prometheus, Project Athena, Osiris and Thoth, the Ghost One...”

“Okay, okay—but psychic, really?”

Glen spluttered. “I just watched that motorcycle turn into a robot lady and then back again and back again and diss me about my shirt size, and you’re trying to tell me that this stuff is too far? Just look at the information, Maggie! People say it’s linked to this whole thing back in the eighties—”

“Hey, Arcee,” Jack said, glancing over his shoulder. “Can you take a look at this?”

Arcee clambered over on her hands and knees, optics narrowing as she studied the laptop. “What am I looking at here?”

“You don’t recognize this guy?”

“No. Why would I?”

“Have any of your people been on Earth before you?”

“Not that I’m aware of. Your world is quite far from Cybertron.”

Not impossible, Jack thought, just improbable.

“I think I’ll follow this up,” Jack said. “I’m going to go check out the library and see what I can find.”

“Nice pun, Jack,” Maggie said.

“Unintentional.”

Arcee looked between them. “I don’t get it.”

“You don’t get what a pun is, really,” Maggie asked, incredulous. “Ar-cee?”

“Yes? Is there something wrong with my designation?”

“Forget I said anything,” Jack replied, pretty sure that exchange was leading nowhere good. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”

He glanced to Arcee. She raised one of those eyebrow plates and shook her head.

“Don’t even think about it,” she said. “Where you go, I go.”