Chapter 4: ETA…

For Daddy :D


"'Boy,' he said to me,

'I see your future,

Though, you long for peace,

The sword is your brother!'"

"In the Valley of the Dying Sun" - House of Heroes


Almost half an hour later, I dumped out my school bag. Going through what fell out, I stuffed stuff back in that I felt like taking, mostly for mom's sake once we got there (she'd be sure to check my bag as soon as she had the opportunity). I packed a change of clothes, a text-book, a couple of writing utensils, some blank paper (even though they were a little rough-looking), my toothbrush, toothpaste, and a bunch of snacks for the trip. My phone should still be in the side pocket, where I had left it. Keys to the car - not that it would be any help - were in my lower right pants pocket, along with the house keys. After checking all this, I grabbed a few papers that had just finished printing: the MapQuest to the small town in Arkansas we were heading for, since I wasn't sure either Cam or Grill knew the way. I rifled through the papers. "Looks like everything's here," I mumbled.

A beep came from my bag. The only times my phone beeped were when I had a message or it was dying. Regardless, I grabbed the charger for the phone, knowing it would eventually be needed. I'd check the phone for messages once I got in the car.

Finally, I zipped up my bag, and grabbed my wallet off my desk, sticking it in my back left pants pocket. I walked outside to find Cam had backed out of the garage into the driveway again, where he and Grill sat parked side-by-side.

"Ready?" Cam asked brightly.

"Yea, I got some maps and stuff," I replied, getting into the Camaro's passenger seat and closing the garage.

"So you know where in Arkansas we're going?" he asked.

"I know the town they went to, but I don't know where they're staying at street-wise."

"Good, 'cause Grill was saying that we should just stay home if we didn't know where we were going."

"I'm assuming you were talking about their trip while en route to the airport?" Grill asked before Cam shut his door.

"Yea," I answered, one eyebrow cocked in the Ford's direction as I set the MapQuest papers on the other seat.

"Then Seether knows as much as you do," he informed me as Cam shut the door and started his engine.

Not that we needed to be reminded of that… I thought grimly.

My phone beeped again, reminding me to check it as Cam rolled out of the driveway. Being a slide-open phone, the screen was always visible, but only lit up when I opened it, pressed a button, or it was telling me something. After I pulled the phone out of the backpack's side cell-phone pocket, I noticed the iridescent blue background of the main screen was in place, but the navigation was missing. In its position was a large face-like emote- right side up. The phone sprung out of my hand and transformed as Cam began down the road.

"Whoa!" I said, recoiling.

"Whoa, is right," Cam mused. "He's so small."

The tiny transformer quickly crawled under the unoccupied seat.

"Hey-" Cam protested, "That…. Get out of there!"

The seat slid forward, revealing the phone (it had transformed back).

"He looks scared," I remarked, bending closer. When the phone did not respond, I reached over the center console and picked it up. Cam's seat slid back after it was removed, and I let the phone sit silently in my open palm, which was hovering over the center console. "Why hasn't it done anything 'til now?" I wondered aloud. The phone vibrated slightly, like a shiver.

"It was too scared to come out of your bag?" Cam suggested. "Or maybe it couldn't get out on its own - though I doubt that."

"Well, he was beeping, so he must not have been afraid of me."

"How's that?"

"I think he's afraid of you," I added as an afterthought.

"Why?" Cam asked, sounding affronted.

"Perhaps it's the seemingly omnipresent voice that's suddenly appeared a few minutes ago," I mused sarcastically.

"Hm," grumbled Cam. "Look," he paused, "little beeping Transformer," he paused again, "what are you afraid of?"

A short, staccato string of beeps followed.

"Ha," Cam laughed shortly.

A few more beeps - though this time more musical, and even a little upset-sounding.

"No, no, that's cool," Cam said.

"I'm assuming you guys are holding a conversation?" I said as I looked between the phone and the front of the car- presumably the head/center of Cam.

"Yea. You didn't catch that, V?" the Camaro answered.

"He's beeping," I mumbled indignantly.

"Yea, there's only a few tones, so it's pretty easy to pick up."

"Mmm," I decided not to ruin Cam's simplistic view- apparently I was supposed to be able to translate the random sounding beeps. "So what did he say?"

"He was afraid when he saw everyone was bigger than him."

Two low, long beeps ensued. The phone transformed, again jumping out of my hand. This time it ran up the center console to the front, over to the cigarette lighter, beeping all the way.

"No, I don't want to c-" Cam was cut off as the phone came into contact with the cigarette lighter, a small shock ensuing. Cam swerved, the little phone-bot jumped back, and I grabbed a hold of the armrest on Cam's door in surprise. An angry horn blared outside. "Sor-sorry," Cam blustered tiredly, correcting the swerve.

"What was that?" I asked, watching the surrounding cars, outside the window, getting away from our vicinity. Some of the people inside them could be seen with mouths cursing angrily, and one went blazing past with the birdie held up. I don't think any of them looked long enough to realize I was on the wrong side to be driving. Meanwhile, the phone had started charging toward the front again, this time with more care towards the lighter than before.

"Hey minibot, I will pull over if you-" Cam began angrily. But again, he was cut off as the phone caused a ruckus. This time, it had successfully used the cigarette lighter as a step to reach the radio. Pressing the "eject" button, the radio faceplate fell off.

"That's it," Cam growled, "V, stick him in the glove compartment."

Said compartment opened in front of me, and the phone transformed in surprise. But not into a phone. I leaned over and picked up the object. On the still in-tact screen read:

"XM satellite radio"

It had become a replacement. Realizing this as I turned the new faceplate over in my hands, I went to stick it in.

"No!" Cam cried, "You're giving in to what he wants! I told him I didn't want-"

I paused for only a moment to hear Cam's argument. As the former phone clicked into place, Cam shivered slightly and reduced his speed.

"Oh," he said quietly. "That's…cool, I guess."

I sat in silence as Cam continued to drive us further from home. He slowly regained the speed he had lost, and Grill stayed persistently behind us.

"V," Cam said suddenly, "Beeper taught me something new today."

"His name?" I was surprisingly sarcastic when bored.

"Hnn, well, that too...but what I wanted to show you was this-"

A silvery screen appeared before me, shimmering. I poked it, and the affected area vacillated and blurred. "What is it? What's it do?" I asked, withdrawing.

In response, the screen, about one foot high, and a little wider than it was tall, opened the main page of a popular news site. It scrolled down, and a link (Mission City Incident) highlighted for a moment before going to the affiliated page.

"You can connect to the internet?" I asked the car. Before he could reply, however, my thoughts reached another conclusion: "So the maps I printed off the web are useless now?" I groaned.

The phone, Beeper, beeped in what sounded like a sad manner.

"Yea, I'm sure you're sorry," I joked, smiling. "As long as we get there, I don't care how."

Another silvery screen appeared, this one with a map and statistics of the trip at the top. It hovered over the unoccupied seat.

"ETA: 17.8 hours….Now I remember why mom and dad flew…this is going to take forever." My spirits fell as the prospect of an 18 hour trip sunk in.

"Just do whatever you've been doing," Cam said optimistically as the view of Mission City disappeared behind the dry-brown mountains we passed.

"I don't sleep well in the car…it's probably the only place I can't sleep. That and planes."

"You were sleeping? The entire time?"

I was surprised that Cam was surprised. "I only slept for…today is Monday, right?" - I counted since the beginning of break - "Three days…That's not bad…" After a moment's silence, I continued. "…for me. Look, I was just making up lost sleep that I missed from school."

The web page in front of me switched from the news site to a medical site with information about sleep.

"Ugh, look, all that sleep will be cancelled out by this trip." I waved my hand through the holo-screen, making it blur beyond recognition. When I stopped, the news page returned, and I browsed through it again. "Hah, they're claiming to be the first site that's recovered from the blackout. And, says here they've got a growing list of reports of the 'bots activated by 'a blue, electrostatic wave'."

"So now it's not just a 'blue-wave thingy'?" Cam laughed. "it's electrostatic? How do they figure that?"

"Dunno'," I murmured, pointing at the map of America with little images of pins stuck into it. Supposedly, each pin was a reported transformer. Bunches of pins were clustered around Mission City in Southern Nevada, with the pins growing sparser as the distance from the city increased. The farthest pin was in the state of Washington.

"Well, there're no reports in Arkansas," Cam whispered hopefully and almost seemingly to himself. "Seems like there's no real danger….yet."

"Do you think we can beat Raizer there?" I asked equally quietly. "It looked like a fast car."

"It's not Raizer we have to beat," Grill suddenly said, an audio equalizer replacing the map on the screen that floated over the other seat. Unlike Cam's voice, it didn't sound like it was coming from everywhere at once; I could trace back the sound to the speakers. It was also surprisingly clear.

"But I think Beeper would be better qualified to answer that." Cam's voice had taken a lighter note, and was at a near normal volume again.

"He's never seen Raizer though, I thought." I looked at the phone-radio in the middle of the car questioningly.

"Didn't stop him from tapping into my memory banks, the little-"

Beeper broke out into a frenzy of beeps in defense.

"Less talking, more driving," Grill spoke again, the audio equalizer reflecting the wavelengths of his voice.

"Oh, that was our turn, wasn't it?" Cam said sheepishly.

I leaned back in the seat; it was going to be a long drive.


End Chapter Four


ETA Acronym: Estimated Time of Arrival