Reha

"Oh my God," Reha managed to say through the shock. Some huge… thing, had come through the light portal she had created.

What was called a Groundbridge faded into nothing, and she was left in the tense dim light of the moon with the metal being. It was motionless after coming through the Groundbridge, laying in a crumpled heap in the parched Nevada dirt. It was a robot of some kind, that much was clear. Her estimate from a safe distance; it was 18 feet tall.

Picking up a pipe for some semblance of self-defense, Reha approached the massive robot. Her sneakers squished into liquid. Something was leaking from the robot and pooling around it. Standing in the electric blue oil, Reha's eyes watered from the fumes. Whatever it was, she assumed she shouldn't be breathing it.

Movement from what looked like the robot's torso scared her backwards. Something that resembled a bird, metal as well, flapped over the larger form. Two pronged tentacles extended from the bird's body and attached to the robot under it. Electric sparks traveled down the tentacles. The robot's body jolted, like a human would have when shocked by a defibrillator. Despite the bird's multiple attempts, the robot didn't stir beyond the involuntary movement caused by the electricity.

The bird chirped, pulling its tentacles back into its own body.

"Is it, dead?" Reha asked, inching closer yet again. She scratched at her arms until they burned; her fear making it impossible to keep her hands still.

The metal bird didn't answer, or even give a glance her way. It struggled back into the air and flapped off into the desert.

"Wait! What should I do?" she pleaded. She almost rushed after it, but even damaged, it was faster than her. Reha turned back towards the metal creature its smaller friend had left behind. She approached again, this time with more confidence. It wasn't moving, and she assumed it wouldn't anytime soon, just going by its condition. Military weapon, alien or both, the robot was damaged. It had a basic human shape, and she ventured close to what she assumed was its head. It had no face, only a cracked black screen that reflected her own scared expression. She reached out and placed a gentle hand on the face screen of the robot. "Are you… alive?" She received no reply, but it was warm to the touch. The texture was smooth, but not like normal metal like she assumed.

Reha felt helpless. She took in the broken metal body, having no idea how to help. She didn't even know what she was looking at.

But she had a means of finding out.

She left the robot's side and rushed back to her laptop. She scoured the military files she hadn't had a chance to read before she opened that portal and threw her already hectic life upside-down.

As she read through the top-secret documents, she was enthralled.

What she was looking at was what the US military called a Cybertronian. It was a living machine not of Earth. "An alien…" she was standing a stone's throw away from an actual alien.

According to the files, a group of Cybertronians called the Autobots made contact with humanity a few years before. They were seeking asylum from an ancient war. As fate would have it, the other faction of Cybertronians, the Decepticons, followed them to Earth. There was a secret war going on, unnoticed by the public. Of course, the United States government was in on it. That was the only fact Reha didn't find that hard to believe.

She read over the files pertaining to the Autobots with amazement. They had asked for asylum on Earth but had spent every moment they had been there protecting humans from Decepticon activity. They fought, struggled, and died, all in secret, to keep Earth safe.

She looked back at the alien robot, the Cybertronian. "So, you're an Autobot?" she whispered. This one must have gotten separated from the others of its team, trapped in the flux energy field she had located. It probably was sending out the SOS to the other Autobots, or the US Military. But she had intercepted it first.

The pool of blue oil continued to spread. The files mentioned the substance as well. Energon. The Cybertronian life blood. This Cybertronian was bleeding out. "Stop the bleeding," she rushed into the shack to get her welder, her welding mask, and a few monster energies to stay up through the night.

Memory of her dad's voice was ringing in her ear, whispered from beyond the grave. They would talk for hours under North Carolina's night sky, their small trailer in a rural part of town where the encroaching light pollution hadn't corrupted the view of the Milky Way yet. Her fascination with space and potential alien life matched her dads.

"You're smart enough to meet them out there, kid. Make sure to leave a good first impression." He said.

"I'm bad at talking," she had said back. "Even my speech therapist think's I'm a lost cause."

Her dad had laughed. "Sure, humans are hard to talk to. But we're talking about alien's, kid. Totally different."

It seemed her brain had picked the right thing to obsess over. She was a programing and robotics expert. It was either luck or some divine providence that somehow involved both her nerdy hobbies.

She had come this far, and now she was all in. She had to help if she was even able to. After reading everything the Autobots had done to help humanity, she felt it was her duty to pay them back somehow.