Establishing Avenues

29.June.09

Bethany was out in the open world, but she had not yet left her Jeep. She sat reminiscing over the news she had heard that morning. All of the students had been told to sit down in the cafeteria for some rather surprising news.

“As some of you may know,” the college president’s voice rang through her head as she stared into an overcast west, shaded with grey above, and toned down yellows and greens of the grasslands below “Mr. Montreal did not check in last night.” He sighed and seemed to bow his head a little.

It was a strange trick. The sun had hardly risen three hours ago, and still it looked as though it had already disappeared beyond the horizon, and the illumination left on earth was merely from whatever light was being reflected from above- a perpetually held twilight. Approaching storms will do that.

“It appears that he has met an extremely unfortunate death. We have reason to believe he was attacked by a predatory animal.” A strong wind was coming through, and Bethany began to feel a bit of a chill. “Please know that we are looking to employ another security guard, especially in light of this tragedy. We would also ask that if you find the need to research outside that you don’t cut corners when it comes to safety. Mr. Montreal’s death is a sturdy reminder that nature has its sharp edges.”

Bethany slowly opened her door and stepped onto the grass below. She walked a bit to get a better a look at what she had stopped her car for. Upwind of her, further to the west, a group of Zebras were standing rather anxiously and whinnying to each other, as they had spotted a lioness coming closer to them. Bethany kept close to the Jeep.

“We understand the disconcerting nature of this news, and nobody expects anyone to continue on with their independent studies today. If you do choose to, however, that is your prerogative. Also, if anyone needs it, we do have counselors on hand.”

It seemed uncertain whether or not the lioness was going to strike. Then out of the herd strutted the stallion, heading directly for her. For a moment, she seemed taken aback, even flinching. But she stood her ground as he got closer and closer. The herds whinnying diminished a bit, but seemed to get more agitated.

“But please understand this was an isolated incident, and this is a secure campus.”

The stallion was face to face with the lioness. They were eyeing each other for a few moments, when the zebra reared on his hind legs. The lioness growled and hunched for a moment, and the zebra’s forelegs came crashing down on her. She sprang into the air in anger and pain and landed a few feet back. The stallion reared his head, letting out a powerful bark before charging her again. But she would have none of that, and ran away much further south, eventually getting behind trees where Bethany could not see her.

“You may all return to whatever it is you wish to do. Everything is going to be fine.”

The stallion turned around, back to his herd, and slowly trotted into it again as if nothing had happened.

* * *

“Well, sir, your credentials are rather impressive.” the head of security told Kenneth McGuinty.

As promised, the search for a replacement for Mr. Montreal was begun quite soon. After applications were sifted through, three men were accepted for an interview, and Ken turned out to be one of them.

“Thank you.” he replied.

“So tell me,” the head inquired, “of all the places to inquire for a security guard’s job, why here?” McGuinty stared for a while, and allowed a small smile to cross his features.

“I’ve been interested in wild life for a while. I guess you could say it’s my thing. But I was trained for security, so I guess this is where those two interests match best.”

The head leaned backwards in his chair as he pondered this. A noise came from McGuinty’s right- that of a car trying desperately to activate, but consistently failing. He looked to the window and saw an exasperated student looking under the car’s hood.

“May I assist him?” McGuinty inquired and was rewarded by a nod from his interviewer. He got up from his chair and went out the door at the end of the office. A few moments later, he was at the car.

“Excuse me sir. Can I look at it?” he implored the student, who replied to the affirmative. The student watched McGuinty survey the contents under the hood. His head remained stationary, as his eyes periodically moved to look at different parts of the engine.

“Your connections look solid.” He reached for the handle to the oil level gauge and unscrewed it. He observed the level. “Oh,” he announced in recognition “You need to put in 2 and 3/4ths quarts of oil.” From inside the building, the head of security was watching and smiling.

* * *

“The metal stays outside!” Stacey shouted. She wasn’t exceptionally strong looking, but the struggle of the resistance had made everyone stronger on the inside. It was actually one of the greatest ironies caused by Skynet- while humanity battled on against Cybernetic organisms that tried their best to look human on the outside and had an indomitable strength on the inside, humanity itself was forced to adapt and become stronger. It didn’t matter whether you were a human or a machine, you were still easily underestimated.

In good faith, and healthy fear of the pair of Barrett M82’s mounted and pointed at him by entrance guards, the Cybertronian stood in his place while Bill and Jeff ventured into the Resistance establishment. It was a well concealed bunker in a desert region of the land humanity had formerly labeled as New Mexico. Once the two soldiers ventured inside, the emissary stared awkwardly at the guns trained on him, and the people who held their fingers on the triggers.

Once the door was closed, and Bill was on his way to a med bay, Stacey grabbed Jeff and slammed him against a metallic wall.

“What could you possibly have been thinking?” she shouted. “You know as well I do what the orders are. The only cyborgs to come here are deactivated ones.” She stared over at a screen which portrayed the view outside the door from a surveillance camera. “What model is that anyways?” She looked back up at her quarry. “Do you know what it could be doing, even right now? For one, it could be observing our location, sending radio communications to some machine-base in the desert. And that’s thinking optimistically.”

“Technically, isn’t that why we put up jamming technology here?” questioned a distant voice.

“Shut up, Mac!” she said turning away from Jeff for a moment to stare menacingly at the man who offered the inquiry. Then she turned back.

“What if we let it in? It could be housing a nuclear weapon, just waiting to detonate on entrance! They used to try that you know- save a few soldiers in a battle, so the people bring home the valiant, confused and tormented thing, and when it goes in, wait- big surprise for you all!”

“In my defense, he didn’t claim a change in programming. He says he hails from a different planet.” He saw her face tense in disbelief. “But I can… see how… that… would… be a… flimsy… excuse.”

“Flimsy…” she muttered to herself “And just where did it say it was from?”

“A place… called… Cybertron?” he offered cowering as far against the wall as he could to be away from her menace.

“Cybertron? And you believed it?”

“Well, Cybertron is a real place. And it didn’t kill us. And I suppose we came back with it which means yes- I thought there was a chance.”

“Have you ever even seen a Cybertronian?” she asked. Jeff shook his head. “Have any of you seen a Cybertronian, hmm, one of the ‘transformers’?” she asked turning around to everybody who had been attracted by the lecture. In response, Mac stood up. Stacey rolled her eyes. “Great, well then, inform us- does that look like a Cybertronian to you?”

Mac walked to the surveillance screens and gave the ‘bot a few glances.

“Um… nope. It doesn’t appear to hold to Skynet’s general lack of color, but none of the transformers were ever this small.”

“There, are you satisfied?” Stacey asked Jeff mockingly. He merely shook his head in response. “Well then, you lose. Mac, tell the guards to blast that thing to kingdom-come already.”

“Team DP,” Mac spoke into a microphone with a laid back tone, all the while rubbing his eyes “Commander Stacey requests that you ‘blast that thing to kingdom-come already.’”

“Funny Mac, funny.” Stacey said as she stared at him. Outside, the guards tensed and readjusted their aim, which had become lax from the pointing of the weapons for so long in one direction. The robot saw this readjustment, and flinched backwards.

Inside the bunker, a man ran up to Stacey, still wearing his medical gloves.

“You didn’t kill it already did you?” he asked with minor interest. Stacey huffed and held up her arm.

“Wait!” she shouted. Mac repeated this word into the microphone. The ‘bot outside relaxed gratefully.

“Well, what is it Rickey?” Stacey demanded.

“Well ma’am, it appears that the thing outside got a few scratches on the battlefield. When he was coming back with the patient, he spilled some of his own circulatory fluid onto his clothes.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Well, we analyzed it for a bit- we wanted to see if it would have any biologically threatening effects on the bunker. We didn’t find anything pathogenic, but there are chemicals, even a few free floating elements, that none of us have ever seen before. It’s… well, it’s a foreign substance. Whatever that is, it wasn’t constructed on Earth.”

“Sparky over there claims it said it was from Cybertron.” Stacey told him.

“Well, we are cross referencing the new compounds we found in its… well, if you want to call it ‘blood’- with previous records of Autobot body structures. If they are similar, well then, that’s the strange truth we’ll all have to accept.”

“How’s Bill holding up?” she asked.

“The tourniquet Jeff made for him worked pretty well. We just have to clean his wound and give him enough time to heal.” Rickey explained. Just then, the base’s chemical analyst, Regina, came down the hallway. “What news?” asked Rickey.

“We’ve got ourselves a Cybertronian.” Regina replied.

Then something occurred to Stacey. Cybertron had returned to Earth. Could this mean assistance against Skynet? The thought made her excited.

“Thank you Regina.” said Stacey as she continued looking at the surveillance screen. “I will go outside and talk to it.” At this, Jeff was a bit surprised.

“Wait- just like that? I thought you didn’t trust it.”

“I don’t exactly. But that’s what the M82’s are for.” She replied. “Open the door Mac.” Mac pulled down a lever and the heavy steel doors began separating. “Oh, and Mac- you’re the transformer expert. I may need you to help me with the some things. Come on.” She beckoned. Mac stood up and walked out the door with her. The doors then slid back into place behind them.

“Greetings.” she said to the ‘bot. “I’m Stacey, commander of this station, and this is Mac, my tech man. Who might you be?”

The warrior was slightly surprised by the sudden shift of moods, but responded in turn.

“My name is Cheetor.” he replied. He was slightly disappointed by the disapproval written on the faces of his two greeters. “I know, quack name right? My parents were both heterozygous for a recessive disease which hurt my nomenclature circuits. I have two sisters- and they both designed wonderful names for themselves. But I come to earth for one second, and my glitch decides I should take off the last two letters of the animal I’ve become and replace them with an ‘or’.”

“The animal you’ve become?” Mac inquired with intrigue. “You mean your alternate mode? I thought you were stuck with vehicles. But that brings me to another point. You are an Autobot, right?”

“As opposed to a Decepticon?” Cheetor asked.

“Yeah- that’s right.” Mac confirmed.

“Well, if I was a Decepticon, what are the chances I would tell you? But I am not an Autobot or a Decepticon. I am a Maximal.” he explained. Stacey decided to intrude.

“Look, we can talk about this later. There are more important things right now. Uh… Cheetor, how many others came with you?”

“None. I came alone.”

“For what?” At this question, Cheetor suddenly remembered how awry his mission had gone, and how sad the answer to the question he came to answer was.

“It’s a long story…”

From there, Cheetor went on to explain the transwarp time travel employed by Megatron, and how his actions threatened Optimus Prime in a manner that would have affected the Great War. He explained that while on earth, the Cybertronians had to adopt beast modes, and thus he was what he was. He explained that after re-entering real time in 2357, the time traveling was developed for fifty years, and that he was sent to check in that everything had gone as it had before in the Great War.

“But I think,” he concluded “that Earth has run into a problem. I need to know how this all began.”

And then it was his time to hear a story. Stacey went on in agonizing detail about the honest intentions of a man named Miles Dyson, the head of Cyberdyne Systems, and how his artificially intelligent computer built itself into self-awareness and began its war on humanity by nuclear assault. The rest of the attack from Skynet, as this system was now called, was what Cheetor had immersed himself into.

“So what happens to you now?” Stacey asked.

“My ship is totally thrashed. I hardly managed to escape it when it went up in flames. So there’ll be no leaving at this point. Besides…” he said turning around. He looked to the south. Everything was dusty or dry or dead. This was not the planet he remembered. “Humanity saved the Autobots in the Great War. We are indebted to your race.” He turned back around to Stacey.

“I wouldn't dare leave you. So I guess your question is really mine. What would you have me do now?”

* * *

Skynet was always learning. Humanity was on the brink of destruction, but it fought back and even managed to turn Skynet’s weapons on itself. And that was a game Skynet didn’t like to play. New technology was needed. The system would force its metal warriors back onto its side.

Humanity reprogrammed machines, and now it was the Skynet’s turn.

And there was yet another threat for it to deal with. Reports coming back from a desert in the Midwest indicated a shocking reality- Cybertron was involving itself in the war.

Well, Skynet would have an answer for that nuisance too.