Download Chapter One

Sam looked at the apartment and nodded to himself. He lived in a separate apartment from the house, over the garage. Everything was in order and all the backup plans were up to date. He trotted down the stairs and paused to look at the house. It looks a lot like my parent's home, he mused.

The house did not show its special features. It was armored against anything that a Decepticon could throw at it; it had a basement that was a real bomb shelter, and it had its own generator, run by energon. The back yard had could be covered by a shield if the scanner found a threat. They lived on three acres in a small town where the closest neighbors were energon processing plants.

He and Mikaela had raised their three children here, and his daughter Poppy lived here now with her children. They were all in California on vacation now with Bumblebee as their ride and guardian. Bumblebee made him promise not to go far without Optimus or another Transformer ride. Sam walked over to the huge truck waiting for him and climbed in. "Morning, Optimus." He put the backpack on the seat beside him.

"It would be a better morning if you did not do this, Sam. Are you sure this is necessary?" Sam had wondered why Optimus volunteered to give him a ride. He sighed. Sometime in the last sixty years in which Sam accepted that his life would always be intertwined with the Transformers, Optimus had learned that repetition would sometimes get his human allies to actually listen to him, if only to make him stop. Sam had learned to deal with it a long time ago. He marshaled his arguments again.

"Yes, I'm sure. There's not going to be a better time. There's no current crisis. The kids and grandkids are all as settled as humans can get. The device is ready, and all the tests have gone well. And this is just the first trial, Optimus. I'm only going in for an hour to see if this works. If it does, then we'll go forward."

The engine started and the truck moved. "There is risk involved even in the trial."

Sam closed his eyes and sighed. The Autobots, one and all, got jittery anytime there was the least risk to their organic Cube. After Optimus Prime died defending Sam all those years ago, Sam promised himself that an Autobot was not going to die because Sam was selfish. "Look, I've known-all of us know- that all it takes is one bullet, one bad slip, one serious car accident, one freak of nature, and the ball gets tossed in the air about where the information goes. I've been looking for a more durable substitute ever since the Cube loaded me with this thing, and now there a chance to get all this back into something safer than my brain."

I could have a stroke, he thought, like Dad. I could start getting Alzheimer's, like Mom, or cancer, like Mikaela. I could have a heart attack, like Will. There could be another firefight coming from nowhere, like the one that killed Leo, or a terrorist that killed Simmons and the Twins. How Simmons would have hated getting killed by a normal human, if he had a chance to think before he died. That was unlikely, since the suicide bomber had been standing right next to him.

With an effort he dragged his mind off of all the deaths he had witnessed over the years. He looked out of the window as they went down the driveway, noting absently that Wheelie was mowing the grass. The little 'bot that attached himself to Mikaela all that time ago was the best servant anybody ever had. He learned to do housework and yard work, and had been a playmate to the children. He said the work was easy and fun compared to his prior drone work.

There was silence as the truck reached the road and slid into traffic. Flars whizzed by, flying more smoothly than the wheeled vehicles like Optimus' prefered alt mode ever managed. Sam watched them absently. He did not like the flars, though the kids loved them.

"You are much easier to communicate with than the last Cube," the Prime pointed out. Sam laughed. "That was not a joke. Once you learned to access the knowledge, you are much easier to deal with than an inanimate box. For one thing, you can defend yourself."

"It would be a little hard to upload me into your chest, true." There was a rumble from the engine- Optimus' laughter. "You remember how Will promised you that if he could get me for nine weeks, I would learn to defend myself as well as most humans?"

"You agreed."

"I sure did. It was a good idea, though I could have killed him that first month." During Sam's first college summer break, therefore, Will proceeded, with help from an amused Secretary of Defense, to plop Sam into boot camp at Parris Island without telling anyone where he sent their precious human Cube. Sam managed to survive, and then got whisked off to further weapons training. He remembered how relived the 'bots had been, after losing sight of him for nine weeks. His return to the base lifted morale for weeks. Bumblebee stayed miffed for over a month and pretended Will did not exist until Mikaela coaxed him out of his sulk.

Will, backed by Ironhide, nagged Sam to stay in shape. Sam still ran an obstacle course at least every other day, swam most days, and went to the firing range weekly. Bumblebee kept up with his schedule and bugged him if he fudged. "Anyway, the idea is to copy the information, not transfer it. It's a trial run. How much can happen in an hour?"

"I do not know, nor does anyone else. That is my concern. I know that accidents can happen, but they have been avoided thus far. There is no hurry. Let there be more research done first. Rachet says that he only needs a few more years to perfect the storage device he told you of, the one that would take the information should you die suddenly. Why not wait for that?"

Sam tried the door, which was locked. If he couldn't convince Optimus, the Prime was perfectly capable of sitting here for hours to talk him out of it, and keeping the doors locked while he was at it. A few more years to Optimus was twenty or more. The Autobots lived for centuries, barring death from accident or battle. Sam had learned to live with the loss of people he knew and respected from the war.

What really hurt was losing his father eight years ago, his mother nine, and Mikaela five years ago. He had existed in the last few years, not really living. The children tried but needed to deal with their children and their own busy lifes; the friends who survived the fighting retired and some of them gone.

He stayed busy with lots of worthwhile projects, working sixty to seventy hours a week. He worked to keep the numbness at bay. While he loved his robotic friends, they simply were not human. He felt cut off from life, empty and alone.

While his parents and the bots never had better than an uneasy relationship, Mikaela and Will had been just as close with them as he was now. Losing two human close to them from non-fighting causes made the bots afraid for the one most important to them. He just could not get through to them that being wrapped in cotton wool the way they wanted was as bad as eating too much sugar or not getting exercise. Thely only saw that he alone of their fragile human friends remained alive. In addition he held all thier history. They wanted to protect him from the word, and in the end he felt stifled.

"I'm going to be monitored from here to Sunday, Optimus," he said. "If the least little tale-tell goes off, they'll yank me out, and I'll dump the whole thing, promise. A decade is a long time for us, and I've carried this worry for six of them. Can you understand that I want that burden gone?"

This time the Prime was silent, before the door swung open. "I will wait for you."

It was the best Sam was going to get. He climbed out. "Give it about two hours before you call in the army," he said, joking.

"Agreed," the Prime said, not joking at all. Sam walked into the building.

While this might be an experiment, it was a medical experiment in a way, and that meant a medical exam. Sam undressed and waited while the nurse practitioner, a handsome young man with dark curly hair, soft brown eyes and a body of a runner, asked questions about his medical history and surgeries, about his nonexistent medicines and any drug or smoking past, about his family history. He reviewed the history, and looked at Sam again. He went over the name and date of birth again, then oddly enough asked for ID. Sam found his work ID and showed him, annoyed. "What's the problem?"

"I don't see how this can be you," the nurse blurted out. Sam looked at his work ID and saw his name was Jeremy. "You're in better shape than I am, and I'm a third your age. You don't look your age or anywhere near it. You don't have a wrinkle or an age mark anywhere."

Sam looked at him steadily and sadly. "I'm really Samuel James Witwicky. "

"Yes, sir. In that case, let me go over this consent with you."

He did, in detail. He emphasized the risk of losing touch with reality, of coma or death from stroke or heart attack. "I'm talking about these things happening to perfectly healthy young people,"Jeremy told him. "It has to do with brain damage. That means altogether there's somewhere about a five percent chance something can go wrong, or one in twenty."

"I understand that." Sam remembered everything he read in perfect detail now. He shifted in the hospital gown. Let's get this show on the road here. My butt's going numb on this table."

Jeremy discarded tact."Why are you doing this?"he asked bluntly.

"What I have in my head needs to be recorded and this is the only way to do it," Sam told him. Jeremy sighed and found a pen. Sam signed the consent and dated it. After putting the paper in a folder, the nurse led Sam to the next room.

The idea was to use a sensory deprivation tank to bring Sam into a state where the information in the Cube could surface and be recorded. Scalpel, who tried to take out his brain sixty years ago, was the only Transformer on either side that could access information directly from the mind. Sam discovered this means to find and transfer the Cube memories when looking for a means to build a better lie detector. That project remained unreleased because Sam and the bots kept debating the ethics involved.

Then an Autobot found the material to make another cube on a asteroid and harvested it at great risk to himself. The moment Sam heard of the find, he started working on the download project, abandoning others in his intense focus and frightening his Autobot friends. To downlead the information, Sam needed to enter a theta state, and to this end was climbing into a sensory deprivation tank.

Some of the risk came from the tank itself and some of it came from the machine. The tank would record every vital sign through the blue-ray chip in his body, one replaced every decade since the technology developed. The transmission device fit over his wrist like a watch.

In the peace of the tank, Sam fell into the meditation state that enabled him to access the Cube memories. As he submerged himself into nothingness, he felt the state where he remembered reach him. Images flowed and something more began to touch him, something familiar. No words, only pure information flowed into him, and he knew that this was the force that had been sustaining him at his peak condition.

Memories came as the information flowed, snapshots of joy and pain.

In the next room, the machine began to hum. Dr. Levi Spencer and two technicians stood over the machine and the screens. Before the session started, Jeremy went to Dr. Spencer and questioned Sam's state of mind. Instead of argueing, the white haired, plump researcher pulled out the psychological study already done, and showed it to the nurse. He chose Jeremy for this experiment because he showed an instinct for distress.

"What it boils down to," the researcher told Jeremy, "is that if he chooses to take this risk, it's his right." Jeremy nodded and went to his station in the room with the tank. There were two technicians with Dr. Spencer. Walter was a blond overweight man who looked like the geek he was, and worked with Dr. Spencer from the beginning of this project; Steelman had been on the team only a year, when the other tech got hit by a car. Dr. Spencer gave an inward sigh at the memory of the hit and run. Carl had been a good man and a personal friend. Steelman was good, but cold as a damned fish. He was short and balding, with bulging amber eyes that led Dr. Spencer to wonder more than once about the state of his thyroid.

"He's in the tank," Jeremy said, his voice clear on the linkup. "Everything is working, systems all go."

"When the hour's up, you go ahead and get him out," Dr. Spencer said. "Call for help if you need it, and call me if anything so much as hiccups."

Five minutes later, Jeremy called. "He's reached theta state already," he announced. Walter and Steelman sat up and punched buttons. They were just in time, as the screens lit up.

"Would you look at that?" Walter marveled. Dr. Spencer came over quickly. "What are those-things? Writing? I've never seen script like that before! And look! Not only is there script, there's images- those are memories!" The images went far too fast to really see, but they saw people in glimpses.

"Jeremy, any problems?" The speed of the theta state induction bothered Dr. Spencer. The answer was negative.

"We're getting the images from both screens, I think- if the machine can handle it. God, the speed!" Walter was almost quivering in excitement.

"This is going pretty fast," the researcher said, delight and concern warring in him. "Do you think we might overload the storage in an hour?"

"Is there any way to screen out the personal memories?" Steelman asked in his cold voice. He was intent. "That's an invasion of privacy, isn't it, and a waste of computer memory, when we need it for the other." The two other researchers gave him an odd look.

"It's covered by the release, and at this point we need to see how the recording goes before we mess with anything." Walter said pointedly, and turned his attention back to the screen. "It looks like the machine is handling the transmission just fine, and it looks like it's saving fine. What the hell is that script, though? "

There was a knock on Jeremy's door. He got up to open it. "Sorry, we're in the middle of testing-oh, it's you, Lester. Come in. "

"Fraid we ran into a problem with one of the folks with your project. That Steelman Smith? There's something wrong with his background checks. Will it hurt Sam to put him out if we need to?"

"As far as I know, the physical part is just the tank- no drugs or anything. You'll have to deal with Dr. Spencer, though " Jeremy's calm voice was at odds with the twisting of his stomach. Part of the reason he had been chosen for this assignment was that he was familiar with Sam and the Transformers but had never met Sam in person. He was good friends with Oscar, one of Sam's grandchildren, and when the assignment came open, Oscar's mother Poppy had sought him out.

"Dad's been pretty down since Mom died," she told him. "She was always his anchor to reality with all of the bots. I've tried, God knows I have, but nothing seems to bring him out of it. All he does is work, ever since Mom died." She bit her lip. "Look, Jeremy, it's a good assignment, and could give you a boost to any work you want if you want that. I'd take it as a favor if you'd make sure Dad's okay when all this goes down."

Jeremy was more than glad to do a favor for Poppy, who also happened to be the head of nursing at the local major hospital. Now that he'd met Oscar's grandfather, he wondered if it bothered Poppy that her father looked younger than she did. She was in decent shape for someone in her fifties, too. "Project's only supposed to last an hour," Jeremy told him, "and most of that's waiting for Sam to get into the right mental state."

"You don't know these bots when it comes to Sam," Lester said. "He's special to them, been in this since he was a teenager and they first came." Lester was a husky man, a prior Nest member whose age added a little bulk to his body but letft his mind sharp.

"A long time ago," Jeremy said.

"Considering he's twenty years older than me," Lester agreed. Jeremy gave him a quick glance. Lester looked to be in his late fifties, early sixties. So other people were noticing Sam's unusual good health, too. "So I'm telling you now. You keep that line open. If anything happens, you get him out of here and to the side door. We've got his friends there already. They'll get him to safety."

"He's got to get a shower and get dressed..." The salts in the bath were heavy enough to make a person float, and without a shower Sam would itch.

"Haul him out dripping and naked and he can hose down when he's safe. Unless you want the building ripped to pieces with everyone inside? Remember we're dealing with bots the size of houses here."

In the other room, Infiltrator watched the Cybertronian symbols race across one screen, and a blurred video across the other. It enraged him that the memories of one of the insects that crawled on this planet were being intertwined with the history of Cybertron, but he did not want to reveal himself yet. The Pretender knew he was doing a good job mimicking a mechanic of these machines.

For decades the Decepticons tried to get their hands on Sam Witwicky, if for no other reason than to get the Cube's knowledge from the Autobots. The plan was to keep the human Cube prisoner until a suitable repository for the information was found, then kill him so that the information would download where it should be. Infiltrator had to admit that a suitable container was never found, and in fact, it seemed that having an organic container made the information more accessible. With Scalpel, they could have harvested the brain and still accessed that information.

In fact, Megatron had everyone suitable looking for a way to keep the brain alive and let the body of the human die, but no luck. Then the news came that an Autobot had found more of the material the original Cube was made from. Sam Witwicky was driving the creation of a new Cube as fast as he could. Barricade killed the technician human called Carl after they had managed to create the Steelman Smith identity, and they managed to block or modify the search program for a replacement so that Steelman was the only suitable candidate for this position.

He gathered a tremendous amout of information, though much of it was not immediately useful and much of it was enraging. The humans made energon from their trash, the garbage of the insects. There was grim delight in the information that the close family members of Sam Witwicky died. Soon he would follow, and the information from the Cube would be in another inanimate Cube, with the Decepticons where it belonged.

But this would not happen quickly, thought Infiltrator as it watched the screens. Yes, the information was downloading at a fast rate for these inadequate human machines. He had been able to add modifications, so that the load was moving much faster than any other mechanism available to the humans. Yet there remained the organic limitation. The Cube had downloaded that information to the human almost instantaneously, from what he could discover, but the human accessed it only with difficulty and downloading stayed impossible until now. At this rate it would be days of straight download to get all the information if the human did nothing but download. Humans needed to refuel and recharge and void waste regularly or they would not function very long. For Sam to achieve and maintain the state of mind needed to download, he needed the chamber, and his human skin tolerated the environment in the chamber little more than an hour.

He was going to be stuck with these humans for some time. "I need to use the restroom," he said. Dr. Spencer glanced over and waved permission. He passed into the corridor and headed for the lobby, turning the corner just as Lester walked into the hall from the other side. "Infiltrator here," he commed.

"What are you doing?" asked Megatron in his harsh voice.

"The human Cube is downloading the information in Cybertronian too fast for me to record myself, but it is not clear yet if the proto-Cube is recording. The problem is that the human's memories are being recorded as well, and there is no way to screen out that information." Infiltrator looked around at the lobby. He could see cars and trucks, including a huge red and blue rig with flames.

For a moment he tensed, wondering if Optimus Prime knew he was there. Then he remembered seeing four of these same vehicles with the same paint job, just in the way here. It was popular now, that was all. Optimus Prime had better things to do than ferry Sam Witwicky to a medical experiment, he told himself.

"As soon as you know the prototype is recording, kill Sam Witwicky. The information should record to the proto-Cube as it downloaded to him in the first place. Bring it and his body to me."

"I will let you know when the testing is done. He will return if the machine works, and it can be done then. His guard should be down. I will need help."

"You will have help."

"I will not fail you."

"See that you do not."