The Thing in the Valley
Disclaimer: If it's in this fic, I don't own it.
Chapter 3: The Valley
The next day was damp and cold. Cody said it was going to rain tomorrow, so they had to get in the best part of the Boxing Festival before they got stuck inside all day. The Rescue Bots had their share of complaints about the whole thing, and rightfully so after a bunch of punching bags exploding led to most of their insides being replaced. Cody told them not to worry and instructed them to drive to The Bluff Where You Can't See Town. He'd tell them about the best part of The Boxing Festival.
He did.
Blades wished he hadn't asked.
"OW!" The copter turned his face away, shielding his delicate ears with his arms. "Stop it, Heatwave!"
"Aw, come on" Heatwave kept his dukes up and bounced lightly on his toes. "This is the best part!"
"Only if you like getting hit in the back-" Heatwave's fist glanced against Blades's belly, and he yelped.
Heatwave smiled wide. He loved fighting. He loved moving around. He loved being the big, strong, tough leader Rescue Bot. He liked his team, and any chance he got to scuffle with them was... was just a perfect day. He play-punched at Blades again, and when his knuckles met a rotor, he bit back a laugh. Poor little Blades hated fighting, but he still tried, and Heatwave knew it. It warmed his spark to know it, although he'd never say it out loud. "If you don't like getting hit in the back, then face me and fight!"
"Nooo!" Blades just barely uncurled. "Why don't you go punch Boulder instead? He doesn't feel it as much!"
"I do too!" Boulder corrected. He didn't get out of his "seat", a nice wide rock. He'd sat aside to watch, thank you, and he was comfortable there. Boxing was so needlessly violent, even if Heatwave liked to do it for fun. "Besides, I can't. I'm holding Cody right now." He held up his hands, displaying their small human friend.
Blades squawked as Heatwave punched at him again, and he nearly started to transform just to keep his head safely tucked away. "Cut it out! I give!"
"Point goes to Heatwave!" Cody cheered. Chase marked another little tally on the bluff wall. "Man, you've got a big lead."
Chase noted, "Any lead over zero points would be considered a 'big lead'."
Heatwave punched the air in victory and laughed. Blades just sighed.
Boulder suddenly dug his feet into the ground. "Somebody's coming up the mountain! I feel them on the seismometer!"
"What? How could-" Boulder's seismometer wasn't that sensitive. Either there were a lot of people coming, or something big was coming up to meet them. Cody waved his arms ridiculously and whisper-yelled. "Robot mode! ROBOT MODE!"
With an apologetic sound, Boulder dropped Cody to the ground and snapped upright, adopting the "humans are around" posture necessary to keep their cover. The other Rescue Bots followed, Heatwave stilling last out of spite. Cody hurriedly patted the dirt off of his clothes.
From the tiny side road, around the corner of The Bluff Where You Can't See Town, appeared Doc Greene. Cody sighed in relief and nearly said hello.
Something followed him.
It was taller than Heatwave. Barely covered here and there with plate metal to suggest a female form, it walked with loose and jerky steps on too-human feet, its upper body staying rigid, its head never moving. It was thin, unhealthy thin, the waist only as big around as Cody was. Multi-colored knotted cables lay exposed to the open air. Gangly arms ended in three needle fingers. Two wide flood lights were its eyes, and they were too small for its massive, incomplete face.
It looked like it hurt to be it, and that thing smiled as it towered over Doctor Greene.
Cody yelped and jumped back, falling against Chase's foot.
"Oh my goodness!" Doctor Greene ran to help Cody to his feet. "I'm very sorry to scare you! I didn't think there would be anybody here."
"Yeah... me neither." Cody shook himself, collecting his pride. He checked the thing over Doc's shoulder; it was still smiling a toothy smile.
He knew stuff like this. Cody had been places. When he was a little little kid, it was Chester Cheddar's Pizza Place. When it was Dani's birthday, it was the amusement park's Bald Mountain Ro-buddy Jamboree. Whenever he visited his grandparents, it was the Civil War Wax Museum. He knew these robots. The minute he looked away, it would move. It would come at him and make a loud noise and he would get scared and scream in front of Doc Greene. He wouldn't let it happen. He just wouldn't.
He asked, and he winced at the small whimper in his voice. "What's that?"
"I haven't named it yet, as it's still in the very early stages," Greene stated. He held his chin in his hand, contemplating. "But currently, it is my experiment in self-balancing bipedal humanoid robotics."
Cody knew Greene well enough to know that meant "robots that walk on two feet", but something felt... off about the explanation. Cody kept his eye on the robot. "Why does it have teeth?"
"For investors!" Greene started pointing to parts on the robot. "I'll have to fill in the missing cheeks, lips, and eyebrows, round out the waist and the hips, and maybe add an extra finger, but by the time I'm done, she will be a beautiful robotic lady!" Doc Greene chuckled warmly. "And investors do like to buy products from a pretty lady!"
"Um..." Cody hadn't noticed the missing eyebrows. The rest of its missing face must have distracted him. It still stared at him, shifting at the hip to maintain its balance but otherwise staying perfectly still. Those wide eyes stared vacantly past him.
Greene laughed again. "Then again, you probably aren't quite old enough to think like that, are you? I bet you'd like it better if it came with a rocket booster and laser cannons."
I'd like it better if it left, Cody thought to himself. It just kept staring through him, never blinking, face completely still. Part of him thought about the Rescue Bots, and how they never blinked either. Their faces were always showing an emotion, though, even when they were trying their best not to. That thing just kept staring with perfectly round, white eyes. Cody felt his stomach turn slightly, and he backed up against Chase-
Chase was vibrating. Cody looked up, trying to find out why, when the wind whipped past him and a shadow came over his face. Cody's eyes snapped back to see that thing, that robot, suddenly right above him, blocking the sun, glaring right down on him with those wide blank eyes.
He jumped back again, and hit the ground, and screamed.
From behind him, he heard Doctor Greene urgently ordering the robot back three steps. Cody was enveloped in dark hands- Heatwave's hands- and lifted into the air.
"COD- Cody is in distress!" Heatwave announced with no small amount of terror in his voice. "We must return him to base immediately, uh, citizen!"
"Yeah! To, uh, prevent accidents!" Blades lost his robot voice, a quiver of real fear leeching into his vocalizer. Cody wrapped his arms around Heatwave's thumb and grabbed his wrist, expecting to be thrown into the fire truck's cab at any moment. "Good day, Doctor Greene!"
The Rescue Bots didn't transform, they just ran from The Bluff Where You Can't See Town at full speed. Doc Greene sighed, thinking to himself how this was exactly why he didn't test his robot in the middle of town. He didn't even wonder why his robot had decided to step forward without his permission. He chalked it up to a loss of balance, like the earlier tests. Resigning himself a long day, Greene began instructing the robot to walk down to the shore.
Back at home base, Chase shut the door behind his team mates and locked it with a shaking hand. "W-we are home."
"Welcome back," snarked Charlie. He kept his smirk until Heatwave dropped a shivering Cody into his arms; he immediately hugged his son and stroked his hair, shushing him.
"What happened to you guys?" asked Dani. She surveyed each Rescue Bot: Blades was hugging himself; Boulder was fidgeting from foot to foot; Chase kept checking the door out of the corner of his optic; Heatwave paced the long wall of the room like a caged tiger. "... see a ghost?"
"Greene has mad- He put- gragh!" Heatwave stopped pacing for only a moment, and his shoulders shook from withheld energy. "He took our parts and put them together into some Primus-forsaken ghoul!"
"Its optics..." Blades gestured towards his face. "Its optics were all wrong! They were white and dead and bright and-" His voice devolved into a horrified shriek, and he buried his face into Boulder's back. "-and it wouldn't stop staring at us!"
"We apologize for our irrational fear," said Chase. His optics flicked back to the door, the windows. "But seeing a living creature-"
"It wasn't alive!" Heatwave snapped. "It was just playing at it!"
"-made out of our discarded components was a bit disconcerting."
The Burns family stayed quiet for a moment.
"No, that's perfectly understandable." Charlie gave Cody one more hug and ushered him towards Kade. "Kade, go upstairs and put on a nice movie for Cody. That one with the gray fuzzy thing and the little girls, he likes that one." Nothing scary in that one, nothing robotic. Kade nodded in agreement and walked a distressingly silent Cody out of the room. "Bots, I'm sorry about what Greene's done."
Boulder shook his head. "I-it wasn't... that bad. Maybe it'll get better when he's finished."
"Still, he's overstepped his bounds." Charlie grabbed his keys off a hook on the wall. "Come on, Chase. We'll go-"
Thunder rattled the dark windows of the base, rain following quickly after. The Rescue Bots immediately clumped together in the middle of the room, far away from the walls. The Burns family had been warned about this. The Rescue Bots had a pre-programmed fear of rain, a leftover from the heavily polluted atmosphere of Cybertron. While they knew by heart (by Spark, whatever the equivalent was for them) that the rain on Earth was much less acidic, they still feared circuit damage and shied away from thunderstorms.
Graham laid a hand on his father's shoulder. "Dani and I will watch some movies with them, calm them down. We can go in the morning."
In Doctor Greene's lab, the theme was the same. Greene was tired, slightly wet from catching the beginning of the thunderstorm, and frustrated. With a touchpad under one hand and his daughter folded under his free arm, he made his complaints known. "I've gotten the same response from every person I've come across. Its waist is too small, eyes too wide, unnecessary teeth. It walks, but it doesn't walk properly, and its center of balance keeps shifting."
Frankie understood, but wasn't worried. She was no stranger to her father's half-finished and odd-looking robotic contraptions. They just fell into the Uncanny Valley, and she'd gotten over her knee-jerk reaction to humanoid robots when she was a little girl. She knew others hadn't, but she also knew her father was capable of amazing things. He just needed a little encouragement.
"You've done a lot of work today, Dad." Frankie leaned harder onto her father, close enough to where she could hear his heartbeat. "Maybe your brain is all addled and stuff."
"I probably am just tired." Doctor Greene sent the last command to the new bot, refilling its dwindling fuel cells with the purple energy he found at the bottom of the ocean. From its resting place in the balance cradle (a frame of metal rods and cable supports to keep robots from accidentally falling), the new robot plugged into the mainframe with a series of thick wires sprouting from its head like hair. Its lines glowed purple as it recharged. "We'll all go to sleep and try again tomorrow."
"The investors are gonna love her," said Frankie. "Once she's pretty, anyway." Frankie paused. "... that was a bad thing to say, wasn't it?"
The implication finally hit Doctor Greene. "Well... kind of. It would be if it were a person."
"Because all people are pretty, even though they're not perfect," Frankie recited.
The two geniuses hugged. Doc patted Frankie's head, mindful of her ponytails. "Just like Mama always said."
The robot rocked on the cradle, finding its balance. Its eyes switched on, flooding the room with light.
Doc Greene pulled away from the hug. "That's... odd." He tapped his touchpad, trying to find the command that switched on the robot. "I thought I'd turned that off."
The systems within the robot began to whir, humming, echoing loud in the metal lab. Its fingers clenched, one by one, alternating each hand as if it was testing its grip. It jaw opened and shut slowly.
"Does it do like my mp3 player?" Frankie asked. The robot's head snapped upright, and its cables slackened as it rose to its feet. Frankie shivered; she'd gotten used to a lot, but her dad's inventions turning on by themselves was never a good sign. She hopped off of her dad's lap, moving slowly to stand behind his chair, away from the robot. "Where it turns back on when you recharge it?"
The cables were completely slack now. It pulled forward, the wires falling out of their sockets and leaving it with gaping holes reaching deep into its skull. Somehow, its eyes focused on Greene and Frankie.
"Well, it did that the first time I put the liquid energy into it..." Doc Greene couldn't find the command, and even as he tried to turn the machine back off, it clicked online, limb by limb. "I thought I'd..."
It screamed, and it lunged for them.
NOTES TO BE SAFE:
Note 1: I have mentioned Frankie's mother. I'm not sure if she exists, so I'm keeping references to her to a minimum.
Note 2: Charlie Burns is talking about My Neighbor Totoro.
Note 3: I've never actually written a scary story before, so please, be critical. I have to know what I'm doing right and what I'm doing wrong so I can improve.
Note 4: The Uncanny Valley is the phenomenon where humans become less comfortable around an inanimate object as it become more and more humanoid. For examples, see the TV Tropes article on The Uncanny Valley. They have a helpful selection of links.