What Makes No Difference Is No Difference (WMNDIND 23)
=0=In the building
They found their quarters, then some of them gathered in the rec room, a large steel walled room that was their informal gathering place. They sat down together with cubes to catch up.
"Tell me about this place, Bee," Bluestreak asked. "So far, its fine. I like desert worlds. Those kids … their mother … what's the story and where is Cliffjumper?"
"Cliff got killed by Starscream," Bee said.
It was stone silent in the room.
"Frag that fragger," Sunstreaker said with a venomous expression. "Cliff's too hard to kill."
"There may have been more to it, something about dark energon," Bee said.
"That's fables," Sideswipe said. "Something about Unicron, if I remember. Something about his evil blood." Sideswipe grinned. "Don't tell the little girl."
"I like her," Bluestreak said. "She likes us. The other kids I don't know so much but Ratchet and Arcee like them. Optimus treats them well so we will, too."
"What do you think about Monstructor hanging around?" Bee asked.
"I wish I'd been there," Sideswipe said with a sigh. "I've only been confronted by one combiner so far. Devastator on Talus 4."
"How did that turn out?" Sunstreaker asked.
"He's still running around. Those fraggers are nearly impossible to stop unless you strike at their joins. Hit them in their electrical attachments and they come apart. All you have to do is strike one joint in the Decepticon models and they lose their bonds," Sideswipe said. "'Con gestalts are crap."
Everyone nodded.
"Have you been to Prowl's redoubt?" Bluestreak asked.
"No. I don't even know where it is. I do know that its pretty big and ships with troops are showing up there from the messaging he's sending out through all the channels. Refugees are coming as well," Blue said.
"There's so many out there. Some of them are within reach of this place. I gave Prime a disk with the information," Sunstreaker said.
"What about him and Prime?" Sideswipe asked Blue. "They still together?"
Blue nodded. "Still in stuck mode. No bond yet. Prime seems almost superstitious about making it permanent."
"Well, it isn't like there's ever going to be a civilian life for any of us again at this rate," Sunstreaker said. "Superstition. Maybe there's something to it."
"Black cats are superstitious to humans," Sideswipe said. "I don't know what a cat is. Maybe we better be on the look out for them."
Sunstreaker grinned. "You do that. I'm looking at Blue."
A hard fist to the arm took care of that. Blue on the other hand sat back to enjoy the struggle.
It was real.
=0=Out there
Miko watched the bots as they went about their business. They were a strange group in form but as fabulous as anything she'd ever seen before. All of them were deadly, individual and totally blank slates. She knew a great deal about Bulkhead. They were close and talked about everything. That included her parents who she loved. They were conventional grown ups with great plans for their daughter, their only child.
Miko got into the best schools and she got advantages from her doting extended family. It was smothering, their expectations. They had a genuine rebel on their hands who craved excitement and adventure. Coming to America as a foreign exchange student had been a tussle that she finally won. She got to come to Jasper, Nevada.
Jasper, Nevada.
Desert, dry, small town with little to do, a good school but conventional. She was well ahead of the kids in her class because her own schooling had been accelerated and comprehensive. That was the way Japanese schools worked. Cram the education before college, then college was almost a vacation. However …
She had her own ideas, her own dreams, her own guts, smarts and desires. Coming to Jasper had almost quashed that until that afternoon when Arcee had turned things around. If she was superstitious and she was, she would have figured that the Gods had answered her prayers.
They had.
Primus had heard her prayers.
She walked down the stairs to the floor, passed Ratchet working away, then headed into the mountain to find the others. It wouldn't take long to find them.
=0=Fresno, California, not that far away
They poured over images on the internet, UFOs and all the possible sightings of odd goings on that couldn't be explained any other way by the media. There was a lot going on. Some of it involved holes in the ground, cars that could travel hundreds of miles per hour and ships that hovered with a few charring people unlucky enough to be too close to them.
As they perused the images they had found, some of them from the deep web, one of them held up a picture of a boy on a motorcycle, a blue one. "Have any of you ever seen a motorcycle that looked like this?" Shane Boone asked.
They were holed up in the apartment studying images to try to find out where everything odd was happening, then compile it on a program that Toby Simpson had made. Everyone gathered to look at the image.
"I've never seen one like that. It doesn't seem to have too many working parts," Marc Anderson said. "Have you?" he asked Shane.
"I've ridden bikes all my life and this is a strange one. I like it but … its odd," he said. "Where is it from?"
"I don't know. I'd have to look it up but I think its from somewhere in Nevada. I recognize the landmark hills around them. I drove through there once on my way to Utah. Remember?" Shane asked.
They nodded.
"Why don't we scan it in, remove the kid as best we can, then seek a matching image from the manufacturers that are on the web. See if we can match it to something or see if its an anomaly," Toby said. "Add it to the program."
They would be busy doing so all night long.
=0=Jasper
Miko strolled into the room where the mechs sat sipping energon and chatting. "Hi."
Everyone looked down, then grinned.
"Hi, Miko," Bluestreak said as he carefully put her on the table. "Tell us about yourself."
She looked at Blue, then the others. "I'm a foreign exchange student from Japan. I go to school with Raf and Jack. Jasper isn't much but it has the bots so that makes it rad for me."
"Tell me about what's going on with Megatron," Sideswipe said. "Tell me about the flyovers and the rest."
"Megatron was gone a long time but he's back. He's nuts. Something about dark energon but Bulkhead doesn't talk about it. Something about it being taboo or something," she said. "The Seekers flyover all the time. They're looking for us but they can't find us. They're too dumb. What's the deal with Starscream? I heard Megatron uses him for a punching bag."
The mechs laughed.
"He does," Bee replied. "He wants to command the Decepticons and the only way that you get there is to fight for it."
"Did Optimus fight for command of the Autobots?" Miko asked.
"No," Blue said with a chuckle. "He was granted the title of Prime by Primus Himself."
"Wow," Miko said. "That's cool. When do we go out on patrol?"
"We?" -all of the mechs at the table but Bee
=0=Late in the early morning in Fresno
"I got a hit," Shane said as he bent over the printer. An image was being printed. When it was complete, he picked it up, then studied it. He handed it to the others. "Its not a model that anyone makes. Unless someone made it from scratch, then its not made by us. Or anyone else we can find."
They studied the image, another shot of a motorcycle flying down a long lonely highway with a young boy riding on it.
"This is still in Nevada. Look at the hills. Maybe we can match them, too," Toby said. He took the image, uploaded it, then set a search engine on it. It wouldn't take long to discover the location. It was ten miles outside of Jasper, Nevada.
=0=TBC 01-26-2021
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