Craving backstory for "Dead End"? Have a high (like, REALLY high) tolerance for Starscream Fangirl gooshiness? Have we got a treat for you. (Something to tide you over while I whip out some Barricadey goodness for y'all--want to set the bar for that one nice and low....)
Hey, it's a prequel. Dig it. It was actually written *before* Dead End, and is not quite, *I* think, as good a story, though N_V seems to think otherwise. Maybe y'all can help settle this debate. I'd be happy to hear from you.
True story: Entire story written in 3 days, entirely under the influence of flexoril and pain meds. Not reread by me until tonight, not retconned at all. Honestly, it's not very good, but it does have its moments. None, alas, in the first section. Altogether too many humans. But still, I figure, meh, why not? Oh, there really is a Jennifer Silver, and she is a comparative linguist. She'd kill me if she ever read this, though.
Posting with
'nice' titles, AND the
titles of the sections as they are in the original file. Just for the hell of it.
1.
Maybe that's how they say hello where he's from?Day One
Diego Garcia, 0214H
Hangar F3 The hangar bay door groaned in protest. For possibly the first time since its installation, the door was being opened, and it didn’t seem too happy about it. Jennifer Silver, graduate student in comparative linguistics, who had been, grudgingly, given a back corner of Hangar F3 for her research, muffled a curse as she rolled out of her cot.
The night gaped beyond the open door, warm and tropically wet. A squad of NEST soldiers trooped in, just like they owned the place, Jennifer thought sourly. And in a way, which didn’t improve her mood much, they did. “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked, trying to bundle her wavy hair into a ponytail. She winced as one of the soldiers hit the lights. Thirty feet overhead, fluorescents bloomed.
“You oughta be happy,” the squad’s leader said, “It’s like Christmas morning for you.” He gestured into the blackness beyond. “Got you your own subject.”
“My own…? Is that a Decepticon?” Still blinking at the sudden wash of light, she could dimly make out a massive, blocky shape on one of the shift-pallets the NEST soldiers used to load and unload heavy equipment.
Another soldier laughed. “What’s left of him, at any rate.”
“And you’re bringing him
here?” She knew the soldiers didn’t think much of her or her research, but this was really a bit much. Around her, more soldiers poured in, restacking boxes, clearing a space in the center of the hangar big enough, she presumed, to accommodate the robot.
The sergeant shrugged. “Orders from on high. Maybe they figure you’d leave the rest of our guys alone.”
It was too late at night to go over this old ground again. Her university had ponied up bunches of money and resources when the DoD had requested engineers, robotics experts and the like. Part of their deal had been, well, her. While her engineering friends happily studied specs and schematics gleaned even from the simplest of robotic designs the Autobots decided were safe to share with the humans, she’d made the case that study of their language was essential. The DoD, which had thrived for years through proactive paranoia, had approved with enthusiasm—maybe they didn’t trust their Autobot ‘allies’ as much as they said they did. But the NEST team didn’t seem to share the DoD’s enthusiasm.
Jennifer pinched her mouth at the sergeant. “I don’t mean to question orders, of course,” she had no patience for all this military hierarchy nonsense, “but a Decepticon? Isn’t it going to try to kill me or something?”
The sergeant was unimpressed. “Just use your magic language hoodoo on him,” he said. Behind him, a few others laughed. “Or your charm,” added another. “You must be saving it up somewhere.”
Jennifer felt her hands ball into fists. Classic anger response, she told herself. Don’t let yourself get riled. You’re not going to punch him. Especially because he’s in full body armor. She forced a smile onto her face, and said, “Well, let’s just see what I have to work with, then.”
The robot was in awful shape. In her unprofessional opinion, that is. Most of its right leg was missing, the left bore some blackening and pitting from a large explosion. The appendages of the right hand had been crumpled together into a half-crushed, half-welded flipper, and barrels on a large chain gun on that arm were half melted. The chassis was pocked with the circular hits from the NEST soldiers’ guns, and the left side of the jaw hung slackly, several metal plates hanging loosely, leaking some whitish watery fluid. Engineers had already been at the ‘bot—she could see their handiwork in the hose clamps and the blobs of insulating foam capping off the ends of the robot’s injuries.
The robot showed no sign of recognition of anything. Its eyes irised inward a little, probably an involuntary response to the bright light, but it showed no curiosity, didn’t look around. Jennifer wondered about the jaw injury—had it damaged the creature further up into the processor? A brain-dead subject would be useless to her.
One of the soldiers slapped her deliberately too hard on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, he’ll make it through the night,” he said.
“What the hell did you do to him?” She’d seen the Autobots come back injured, but never anything like this.
The soldier stepped away from her as if her stupidity were contagious. “Umm, it’s a
war? They try to kill us, we try to kill them?”
“Yeah, but….”
“Awww, getting all soft on the bad guys,” another soldier said. “You know how it is with those soft college types. Sympathy for the devil and all that.”
“That’s an Ozzy album, not philosophy,” she shot back. And immediately regretted. Nothing worse than playing into their ‘intellectual snob’ stereotype. “Anyway,” she said, walking up to the creature’s face, careful to step around a puddle of the white…whatever it was drooling, “Can it even talk?” She reached a hand up toward the robot’s face, trying to get, if nothing else, an ocular response.
The red eyes suddenly snapped into focus, first on her outstretched hand, then back to her face. The jaw worked, the dangling plates clattering. She heard a sound like gears grinding from deep in the thing’s throat. It gave a sudden heave and splattered her with a thick yellow goo.
Jennifer could hear the soldiers laughing, even through the thick stuff. She tried to wipe it off her face. It stung into her eyes. Not as much as the soldiers laughing stung her pride. This little story would make it through Diego Garcia before breakfast. She could hardly imagine the nicknames they’d come up with for her. She cast about in her brain for something to say that would seem dignified, that would negate the whole absurdity. Nothing. How many years of education and you can’t even come up with a face-saving comment?
Her shoulders slumped. “I’ll just get the hose, then, shall I?” she said, mostly to herself.
The sergeant stepped back as she crossed his path, dripping yellow gunk. “Looks like the start of a beautiful friendship,” he grinned.
You never get a second chance to make a good first impression0308H She’d hosed herself off, top to bottom, and spent some time squinting at her skin, trying to see if the yellow goo had been some sort of corrosive. It left a rusted-iron kind of smell, but seemed otherwise to have no lasting effect. The next reasonable thing to do was to clean the robot up a bit. After all, she was going to be left in a 6-foot reinforced concrete walled hangar with the thing for days on end. Better to try and find some way to make the thing not want to kill her. Him, she corrected herself. Not thing. Stop calling him a thing.
Step one, she said, don’t even respond to the previous incident. Maybe he’d been unable to control himself. Maybe it wasn’t deliberate. Don’t judge. She forced her brightest smile. Autobots recognized human facial expressions, even though they couldn’t mimic many of them. She didn’t know about the Decepticons. There was so much nobody knew about their enemy. She felt a kind of excitement. If she could just get the thing—him—to talk, how much could she learn! Not only about the robots in general, but about the real cause of the fighting between the two factions. Or were they races? See, she didn’t even know that much!
“Hi!” she said, brightly. She gestured to the floor next to her. “I’ve got some stuff here for you. This,” she held it up, “is a hose. I’d like to at least rinse some of that gunk off you.” She spoke slowly, carefully, the way one spoke to a small child. “And this,” she gestured to the hip-high barrel the soldiers had left her with, “is…well, it’s some sort of analgesic, they tell me. Fancy word for painkiller. If I put it on parts that hurt, they won’t hurt as much. Okay?” She paused. She was definitely getting an ocular response—the eyes had tracked to each item as she’d indicated it. But it didn’t say or do anything, not even twitch. Okay, ask direct permission. “Is it okay if I do these?” Maybe he didn’t understand the word ‘okay’. How to say it more simply? “I’m trying to help. May I help?” Then, more bluntly, “Please don’t try to kill me.” It blinked, once, slowly, as if tired.
She sucked in a deep breath and scooped up the hose. She approached his head slowly, acutely aware she was well within the reach of his wicked looking barbed hands. She began a nervous babble. “That yellow stuff didn’t taste very good to me, and probably not to you, either, I’m guessing, So I’m just going to use this,” she hefted the hose again, “to wash it away.” She opened the nozzle and hesitantly, keeping one nervous eye on the robot’s good hand, began spraying the parts of the face, neck and upper chest that she could see had the yellow goo on them. The goo had dried around the edges to a thick crust, like a fried egg. “There, that’s not so bad, is it? That’s better, right?” She sluiced water around the robot’s mouth, half afraid he might sputter.
No, she told herself, they don’t breathe. You can’t drown one of them, especially not with a modified garden hose. If they were that easy to kill, Diego Garcia would be collecting cobwebs. When the water finally ran clear, she shut off the hose and scooped up a double-handful of the analgesic gel. The robot’s large red eyes focussed on her hands as she raised them. “This is the pain killing stuff I told you about. I’d like to put some of it on your jaw.”
The red eyes tracked her as she approached, as if measuring the threat she represented. She held up one gelled hand. “I’m going to put this on you. It’s not going to hurt.” She reached slowly toward one of the twisted plates. Her engineer friends told her that the robots, at least the Autobots, weren’t made of dead metal plates—that the metal somehow had something like nerves in it that transmitted messages to the central processor. In other words, that they felt pain.
She slathered the plate with the gel. She heard a mechanical sound, like a servo preparing to fire, but the robot didn’t move. “Again?” she said, gesturing toward the face. The huge eyes followed her. This time she went for a plate a little deeper under the surface, and the complicated system of gears and wires that were connected to it. When she finished, she stepped back again. “Is that helping?”
The robot blinked at her again.
“More?” She gestured back to the tub of gel.
The robot moved with a loud groan of metal and the sound of sliding servos. Jennifer jumped back, nearly tripping over part of the hose. She landed heavily on her hands and backside. And now it kills me, she thought. And my last action will have been falling on my ass. Great.
But when she looked up, the robot was trying to reach its injured arm toward her. When she jumped back, it had frozen, midmove and was watching her, almost curiously.
“Oh,” she said. She pushed to her feet, hands slipping a little in the bits of gel. “I see.” She laughed, nervously. “I get it. Yes. Of course.” She scooped another amount of gel onto her hands. “I’ll just come around, okay?” She was careful to walk where the robot could see her for as long as possible. He lowered his injured arm down to the ground next to the shift pallet.
Up close, the damage looked even worse—the long hooked spikes on the robot’s hands had been bent, as if hammered flat. One had been pushed down and was puncturing the finger next to it. One side digit—did this robot have two thumbs per hand?—had been twisted around and melted back against the wrist. She plopped the mound of gel she’d scooped up on the back of the hand and got to work spreading it around, trying to work it as best she could into the spaces between the plates. The robot, who had lifted his head to watch her, lowered his head back down to the pallet. Jennifer took this as a positive sign.
When she’d finished and walked around to the robot’s head again, the eyes had flickered closed, large metal shutters covering the red sockets. They snapped open, as if he’d been caught napping. Suddenly Jennifer felt achingly tired too. She managed another smile, a little less textbook this time. “They said they’ll come in to help suspend you in the morning. That’s supposed to help. Right now, though, I need some sleep, and I think you do too. If you even sleep. Okay?”
The robot blinked at her again, inscrutable. Well, the blink had meant ‘okay’ in thus far—or at least it hadn’t been a warning or a no-signal. Jennifer washed her hands in the industrial sink and hit the lights.
(N_V double-dog dared me to do this.)