2. The Human Child

Sleep did not come easy as of late, especially when night terrors got in the way.

It wasn't unusual for Allison to wake up in her bed in a panic, a thin film of sweat covering her body as she flailed beneath the heavy comforter in a last-ditch effort to fend off the phantoms of her sleeping mind. This morning was no exception, finding her partially sprawled out of the perimeter of her mattress with a face pressed into the downy pillows, heart rate faster than it had any right to be when just waking up. Half the week found Allison greeting the day this way, but it hadn't always plagued her; at least not since she was a child.

The dreams were always the same: cold, clammy darkness, an oppressive weight on her entire body like a vice was squeezing the air from her lungs on all sides. Movement and noise permeated the black around her awareness, but she could never make sense of the shapes she was seeing. There was only a ghostly light, blue and iridescent, and it advanced on her as quickly as the suffocating embrace tightened. She was scared, and confused, and only wanted it to stop, but she couldn't move.

Somewhere, in the recesses of her mind, the animal part of her brain would eventually kick in and jerk her consciousness out of the fog with a start, leaving her a flustered mess slick with sweat and fraught with lingering trauma. Of course, it was always minutes before her alarm was meant to wake her. The damn dream demons didn't even have the decency to let her get those last few precious moments of sleep.

Peeling her bangs away from her forehead, Allison edged her head up from the confines of her pillow to slap at the phone on the bedside table, just as the screen began to glow from her 7:00 am alarm. Swiping it away to silence with an awkward scramble of thumb and forefinger, she placed it face-down from where she'd grabbed it. Burying her face back into the pillow, Allison inhaled a heavy breath of fabric and faux goose feathers, before eventually managing to drag herself out of bed.

She was bone-tired. That was another symptom of the latest bout of constantly interrupted sleep, in that she wasn't getting much of it. Instead of being a crabby, bratty child who needed a nap, now she was an annoyed, exhausted woman who had run out of reasons to care for anyone's bullshit.

Dangling her legs off the side of her bed, Allison took several deep breaths to calm her thumping heart and clear her head of the last remnants of panic. It was an exercise her therapist had encouraged her to do, something about reactivating her frontal lobe, and it helped—minimally, but it would have to do. She didn't want to be late for work, even though her boss was relaxed and never minded when his employees walked in a few minutes past their start time. It was a perk to working for a private business rather than a big corporation, but Allison liked to be an exception to that rule. He'd always had her back when customers hassled her for daring to be female while working on computers, so she felt like she kind of owed it to him to prove that she deserved the consideration. Her ability to fix almost anything that was put down on the counter should have done that already, but unfortunately the world didn't work that way.

After brushing her teeth, a very quick shower, and making a modest attempt to put herself together by tying back her hair, she was finally starting to feel more awake. With a quick dig around in the various piles of clothes that littered her bedroom (had she really not done laundry recently?) Allison finally unearthed a reasonably clean t-shirt and button-up to put on over the jeans she found thrown over the top of her mirror the night before. The next order of business was caffeine.

Coffee had become a habit for Allison, the warm, intoxicating scent of the percolating brew a placebo addiction that didn't really have the intended effect on her anymore. She was still just as tired most days, but it certainly felt nice to think it was doing something. Allison supposed, as far as addictions were concerned, it wasn't the worst vice to have. Having drank it since she was 12 had probably strengthened her tolerance for it. If it had seemed strange to other people when she would order that diner coffee with her dad at the highway cafe she didn't care. Her dad had pretty much encouraged the habit, grasping at anything to get his daughter to sit still long enough at the table so that they could be together. Allison was kind of glad that he did, even if she was living with the very expensive habit on her own dime now, but she supposed he'd needed it—they'd both needed it—after her mom had died while she was already a wreck of a child.

Now that Allison lived in the city two hours away from home, nothing had changed. She still drank the damn coffee, but instead of sitting silently with her dad and a bowl of cereal before school, she used the time to sit with her thoughts.

Resting her chin in her palm, she fiddled with the handle of her mug while her eyes drifted over to the clock on the stove to her right. Odd. The time was blinking, the numbers way outside of the relative time she knew it should be based on when she woke up. Frowning, Allison looked at her phone again and noted that it wasn't all the way charged. At some point in the night she'd apparently lost power.

It had been a running joke between her and her dad to see who would be without power first, and so far Allison had been the winner every time. The frequent brownouts in the county recently seemed to disproportionately impact the more rural areas outside of the city, but it appeared they'd finally made it to her part of town. It was only a matter of time, as the aging infrastructure had clearly been on its last legs for a while.

Knowing her dad would be awake preparing for his classes, she shot him a quick message.

-u finally win. i lost power. my alarm still went off though… :( -

-Did you not sleep okay again?- Her dad responded almost immediately, as Allison knew he would. He was way more of a morning person than she was, though she at least had an excuse. The nightly interruptions of panic and fear were something her dad was intimately familiar with, having lived through them when they'd first started when she was seven. It had put hell on the entire family, and for a long time Allison had been convinced it had been the final nail in the coffin for her mother to finally give up. She had been battling her own demons, so she didn't need her daughter's. Finally, after years of misery she swallowed an entire container of pills with a bottle of whiskey and let the bath water do the rest. That was how Allison had found her.

That was also probably why her decision to leave home and work in the city hadn't exactly been one to celebrate, because it had taken so long to repair the broken relationship between her and her father that it was hard to let go. It hadn't helped that she was choosing to make such an impulsive, life-changing decision without any prospects lined up on the other side. Despite how close Allison had become with him, there were too many ghosts still lingering within the walls of her childhood home. She needed a fresh start, so with only money saved up from working in one of the aforementioned diners, and a self-taught intuition for fixing things that were broken, she somehow convinced an electronic repair shop owner to hire her.

Allison had needed to teach herself a lot of things growing up, because it was the only thing that kept her distracted from lack of sleep and the memories of a certain night that had changed the trajectory of her life for the worse decades earlier.

She didn't have many friends, as other kids generally didn't get along with the one that was messed up and going to therapy, especially when they sat in the corner doodling crude effigies of strange, blocky figures. Her knack for managing to get into fights at school meant that she certainly had a diverse selection of them on her resume, and she'd learned early on that even attempting to make interpersonal connections were pointless. That meant Allison generally had a lot of time on her hands, so she read. She read Popular Mechanics and Computer Digest magazines, using the old unused barn in the backyard to amass a collection of old machine parts and electronics. She used textbooks, computer coding books, and Internet videos to teach herself how to fix and augment old things, somehow managing to get quite good at all of it, while mastering none of it.

Even when she'd been little, growing up in a world surrounded by technology, she'd always had an affinity for it. Her father was hopeless, and was too busy dealing with her mom's latest outbursts and being the only adult holding down a job. That meant he really didn't have time to figure out why the Internet was down or why the wireless remote wasn't working. So that task had fallen to the youngest in the family, who had decided one night that she'd had enough, only to impulsively walk out the door during another maternal screaming fit. She'd just wanted some peace and quiet.

Allison didn't like to think about that night, mostly because years of therapy had convinced her not to. The stressors of home life, and a developing mind fraught with physiological changes in the brain and body, had conjured up a terrifyingly vivid lucid dream when she was just seven years old. Despite all of the attempts by the adults in her life to convince her that it was dangerous to cling to such delusions as giant metal men and flashing lights, Allison ascribed no danger to the event. After her father finally found her standing alone in the middle of a City Power facility, despite all the damage and ruin surrounding her, she had told herself that what had happened wasn't… something to fear. Years of alternative explanations—an explosion, or an overload of the massive circuit breaker causing total collapse of the structure—had slowly managed to convince her that she'd hallucinated something pretty major after being dosed with a hefty serving of EMF radiation. That was what everyone around her said at least.

Clearly, she'd "hallucinated" something that she'd needed, even if it was just a few minutes of talking to someone that made a little time for her. When she was a child though, she resisted the attempts of those who knew better to compel her to forget and move on. She fought tooth and nail to cling to something from that night, hoping beyond hope that he would come back and rescue her from her home life. Her mother deteriorated, the abuse escalated, and eventually, she took her own life. That left her father with a broken child who didn't know how to healthily communicate the misfires of her brain, telling her that there was a metal alien out there who had just been impressed that she knew how to fix a radio. Her father's frustration led to her frustration, and increasingly creative ways of acting out and making him miserable… until one day she just didn't.

One day, when she was a little older, Allison realized that maybe the therapists were right. She saw her father's pain, and her rapidly escalating spiral of delinquency and knew that wasn't what she wanted. She wanted her father to be proud, and if that large metal man had been conjured up from the mental anguish of her childhood years, she was going to put that to good use. Her home life improved, but her social life by that time was beyond repair. So, she kept focusing on the light at the end of the tunnel: the end of high school and a chance for a fresh start.

Allison never truly forgot, but rather compartmentalized the memories while focusing on teaching herself how to do something tactile and productive. It helped distract her from the nagging feeling that maybe… it had actually been real. She never really figured out what had made her remember the name Wheeljack for the character that slowly became nothing but a blurry shape receding in the distance.

Except, she wasn't sleeping again, and it was starting to re-open old wounds and dredge up memories that Allison preferred buried.

-i got a few hours, but i'll live- The power outages were becoming more and more frequent and covering larger areas, but they were also scattered and random. Nobody seemed to know how they were happening, except that it seemed like power was just disappearing. There weren't any surges, or malfunctioning infrastructure, and no computer glitches the utility could detect. The power was just gone, the meters detecting massive increases in use with seemingly no source.

After another quick text where her father compelled her to get to work on time, Allison finally placed her coffee mug in the sink, grabbed a protein bar for a paltry breakfast and walked out the door. She would deal with her clock later. After the door shut behind her, the key-fob lock chiming as it secured, Allison couldn't help but jiggle the handle a few times just to make sure. It was a compulsion that she had; one of many, exacerbated by the fact that she was a single woman living alone in a large city where lots of things tended to happen to someone of that identification. She resented the extra caution, but that was yet another reality of her life.

Despite the lack of interest in getting to work on time, eventually Allison picked up the pace and disappeared through the Exit stairwell. The elevator was broken again, and she'd grown wary of it after one memorable time riding it up to her floor it had made the loudest, angriest shriek of metal, absolutely convincing her she was about to plunge to her death. The extra exercise was welcome anyway, so she typically ran down the twisting, concrete staircase to the ground floor.

The walk to the train station was a brisk ten minutes, the traffic moving beside her with ease in the early morning hour. The light rain that pattered down over the city meant that each car left behind the sound of rushing water as it passed. Allison paid close attention to every one that traveled alongside her, noting the color and model, though she didn't really know why. It was like she was looking for something, though she couldn't really put forth any logical justification for why she thought that; she didn't like driving, and didn't own a car of her own so she definitely wasn't shopping for one. It was a tick she'd never been able to shake, though it was a means of distracting herself so that she wouldn't have to make eye-contact with anyone around her. It helped pass the time even with the music piping in through her earbuds as she made her way to her destination.

Her train was about to leave the station just as she made it through the turnstile, managing to squeeze through the doors just as they were shutting. There were no seats available, as no one seemed obliged to make room either by closing their spread legs or moving their handbags. Standing for the brief 15 minute ride wasn't too much of a hassle, so she found a somewhat open corner next to the door she'd narrowly managed to pass through. Holding the railing affixed next to the wall, she settled back with a slight lean and turned her attention back to her phone just as the train lurched away from the stop. Unfazed, and completely used to the jostling movement she began doomscrolling through her morning newsfeed, a collection of news articles and user-generated videos based on her location and browsing history.

Politics. Interesting but incessantly depressing. She didn't really want to see who was losing their rights today. She was surprised anyone had any left to spare.

Social media junk pages and entertainment tabloids. God no.

Local area news. What local software giant was moving in today to drive up the cost of living?

Her thumb scrolled further down, and her eyes came to a stop on a thumbnail of interest. She'd been wandering around the news stories about the brownouts for some time, so it wasn't surprising to see something related show up in her feed. What was unique about this one was it was filtering in from one of the most popular video hosting platforms, which meant that it wasn't content from a major news source. She scanned the title of the video and immediately rolled her eyes: More unexplained outages… Government cover-up? Shocking video! It was clearly some sort of conspiracy-driven crap that she tended to avoid, so why the aggregate Gods thought she was interested in such a video was beyond her. She gave the thumbnail another passing glance. It looked like a freeze frame of security footage, a tight cluster of buildings on either side and draped cables at the top of the frame that looked like powerlines. There wasn't really anything else of interest, so Allison wondered why it had initially caught her eye, until—

In the middle of the frame, sitting up against one of the buildings there was a white, vaguely car-shaped object that was somewhat blurry and initially nondescript. Something made her eyes pause on the object however, and she looked at it frozen for an amount of time she couldn't process until she realized she'd been holding her breath and needed air. Her hands began to sweat and she could almost feel her phone beginning to slip out of her grasp as a recognition pattern slotted into place deep into her subconscious, before slowly creeping into the forefront of her mind as her heart rate increased. No. Oh no. It can't be.

It wasn't a clear image, so immediately she wondered why she was experiencing such a strong, reflexive emotional response to what really amounted to a cluster of blurry white pixels, until she scanned over a break in the pattern: a splotch of what looked like dark stripes down the front, an obvious decoration on what must have been the hood of the car, and in one blisteringly terrifying, world-shattering second she realized she knew that car.

Nonsense. Lots of cars have stripes on them—but like this? The specific shape of the stripes, split down the middle with a gap and increasing in width near the front end of the car; almost like a stair. She'd… really never seen stripes quite like that on a car…

Allison was a seven year old girl again, staring after the sound of her father's voice as he arrived in their family sedan to pick her up from the power station she'd inexplicably wandered into. She should have been relieved, but she remembered now being frantic and somehow elated at the same time. She turned back around the way she had been facing, expecting to see something other than the white car quickly backing away from her and feeling confusion. That car hadn't been there seconds before... The red and green stripe on the hood previously affixed to—

While Allison stood in that train car, the world suddenly grew very dark and cold, the rattling noise of their travel dulling down to a murmur underneath the muddled noise of the conversations around her. Her vision tunneled, and suddenly she could only focus on one thing in front of her, and that was the phone in her clammy grip as her heart started to pound so hard in her chest she could feel it in her ears.

She'd seen this car, or a car like it, many years ago, and she'd worked so long and hard to forget it.

Wheeljack was nothing if not adaptive

It certainly helped having decades of practice, a routine that had mostly become second-nature as the earth equivalent of years passed by quickly; a being of his age and lifespan perceived the pace of time on this planet to be a mere footnote in his existence. To the human perspective, so much had changed that impacted their daily lives, from societal attitudes to technological advances. Some of it good, some of it bad—very bad, in a way that sometimes reminded Wheeljack of the way Cybertronian society had crumbled under its own weight of consumption, greed, and inequality.

They watched, from the shadows, and there was nothing they could do. It wasn't their place, or their responsibility to meddle. That was what Prime said, anyway.

Whereas the societal changes had seemed to move backwards in a lot of ways, technological progress was a different story. The humans had made significant upgrades in what was relatively a short period of time on a cosmic scale. It had forced Wheeljack to adjust his methods in order to become more stealthy when… borrowing energy from the humans, but his overall approach had not changed. It had become something of an enjoyable exercise, to be left to his own thoughts and something useful to focus on. That wasn't to say he wasn't useful in his own lab, but that was largely devoted to experimentation and research. This was real, valuable, tangible, results.

When the artificial energon stores ran low, that was Wheeljack's queue that it was time for a "supply" run. He kept meticulous records of which human facilities he had already visited, so as not to increase his chances of being caught once the humans had realized something had happened. He would then find some sort of excuse to remove himself from the vicinity of any Autobot who happened to still be lingering in what was left of the Ark's main crew areas. Or rather, any Autobot other than Ratchet.

Ratchet long ago stopped questioning his late night excursions, and Wheeljack didn't complain. There was an unspoken agreement between them that he was doing what was necessary. Ratchet had even spent time helping him attempt to perfect the artificial formula, so that it was at least a little more enriched, though it was still no replacement for the real thing. Eventually, this entire scheme was going to become a problem, one way or another. Foremost on his mind was that there was no guarantee that an artificial energon wouldn't have unforeseen side effects on their physiology. It had been a rarity on Cybertron, largely not even discussed until the war broke out, when it became clear that the one precious, dwindling resource was going to have to be replaced one way or another. Cybertronian scientists had been split on whether it was possible, or even ethical, so it was hotly debated. Wheeljack obviously had been on the affirmative side of that argument, though he wagered that those in dissent were largely doing so out of misplaced refusal to admit the inevitable.

Even so, this was not Cybertron, and while Wheeljack might have been the brilliant scientist to actually begin to crack the formula, it had been out of necessity rather than an earnest quest for discovery. They had no other options, and would die if he didn't. Over the decades, the way the humans produced power had become just a little bit more refined, allowing him to make even further alterations to the formula for the sake of efficiency. Their technology was still laughably archaic, relying on a dwindling resource of prehistoric dead matter that was controlled by only a few powerful hands. They seemed to outright refuse to adapt to cleaner methods of energy production, through a combination of helplessness and stubbornness. As far as Wheeljack was concerned, they were going to face the consequences of their folly eventually, so there was no harm in skimming off the top of something that was going to soon be useless to them anyway.

That's what he told himself anyway. Whatever helped him recharge at night he supposed. Wheeljack had long ago locked away the guilt in the deepest recesses of his processor, where he kept… things he chose not to dwell on. Optimus was still none the wiser, but he suspected Prowl was starting to get suspicious of where he was running off to. Ratchet had even covered for him a few times when he hadn't thought of an acceptable excuse and had simply bolted. He was eccentric anyway, so they wouldn't question it.

Wheeljack was not one to refuse the blessing that was Ratchet's compliance, because it was rare. Even one of his oldest friends understood the necessity of what he was doing, because oftentimes Ratchet was the one who needed it most. They refueled, obviously, as their functionality consumed energy, but it was also needed when things went wrong. On this particular night they were left with the dire need for a resupply thanks to Sideswipe becoming very intimately acquainted with a rockslide. The stupid aft would be fine, but Ratchet's repairs had used up a fair amount of the energon they had left from the necessary transfusions. When Wheeljack had gone to see if he could be of any assistance, Ratchet had given him an exhausted, resigned look.

So Wheeljack continued to seize every opportunity he could to sneak out. He needed to keep going, and perfect the formula, if they had any chance of saving Cybertron and their entire race. It was now a personal mission for him, so failure had ceased to be an option. Carefully rotating the different locations and spacing them out by distance became a strategy he mastered. However, he was running out of facilities closest to the Ark, and was needing to branch further out. That meant, closer to the major metropolitan hub further north.

So far, things had been easy. Routine. Wheeljack didn't like easy but in this case he would make an exception. The human means of security was easiest enough to get around despite their improvements in video and sound monitoring technology. Silently accessing their camera systems and locking them on an infinite loop wasn't the most subtle, but it kept his activities hidden, and it kept whatever security guards around none the wiser. He'd gotten so good at it, that it had almost become second nature to offhandedly send out a pulse through their code network. That was until, the night it was so second nature, that he completely forgot to do it.

Their Internet was a different story. When he'd started this little endeavor decades ago it was already widely used, but not as completely entangled in every facet of human life as it was in the present day. The humans put everything on the Internet, with no regard for whether something should be. This was made worse by the personal communication devices—cellular phones—that they carried with them everywhere, complete with the ability to record and capture anything. It certainly made things a bit more risky for Wheeljack, as any human could potentially snap a photo or a recording of him without him necessarily realizing it. So with this in mind, Wheeljack had obviously been carefully monitoring their Internet traffic, search algorithms and social communications to see if there were any whispers of his proximity to the power facilities in question. It was just a simple ping across their networks to see if his alt-mode had been photographed, described in a suspicious capacity, or caught on camera somewhere that he had overlooked. He had escaped their notice thus far, until now. Wheeljack had underestimated them, completely overlooking the possibility that a human manager illustrious enough to anticipate him would install back-ups to their security system. Not enough to see him, but just enough to catch the presence of the very obvious white car that was his alternate form. That at least, had been somewhat of a relief, because with just a few quick alterations to his form they would be none the wiser.

Now that meant, he had to be more careful, and plan for the humans to actually adapt. So this time, he was ready for it as he reached the perimeter of his current target. Not being in the mood for subtlety tonight, as he was still mildly irritated with his own carelessness, he opted to simply shut the entire security system down.

No additional organic signatures on the premises, which was a good sign. After a specific incident many, many years ago, he took several extra minutes to monitor the area to make sure he was completely alone. With nothing in his way, he could take what he needed. This was almost too easy. It felt like he told himself this every time.

This particular power station was closer to the city than he liked, but he was going to need to take much longer excursions if he wanted to avoid hitting the same place more than once. Eventually, that was going to be unavoidable, but Wheeljack just hoped he would come up with something else before he got to that point.

Making his way to the main power conduit, Wheeljack subspaced his usual empty energon cube and got to work. This part always made him just a little bit anxious, because it was in these moments he was more obvious and vulnerable. A car, you could explain away. A very large bipedal alien robot would be much harder to ignore, especially if you were a—

Venting with annoyance… and guilt, Wheeljack attached the empty cube to the conduit and let it do its work. The structure hissed as a number of nanotubes rooted into the machinery to begin the siphoning process. The process was automatic and had gotten much faster over the years, allowing Wheeljack to be in and out with ease. No more mishaps running into—

Wheeljack didn't know why, but something on this particular night was bothering him. He crouched low, paying attention to his systems as something panged in his spark. It was strong enough to make him wince. He wasn't detecting any errors in his coding, but he would need to talk to Ratchet later. Now, there was something else nagging at him making all his neuro sensors itch. For some reason a string of memories he'd locked away so very long ago kept creeping back into his awareness. Memories of a certain—

—A noise, somewhere off in the grid of structures knocked Wheeljack out of his processor's feedback loop and he snapped to immediate, and urgent attention. It was a slight sound, like the crumbling of stone as if being trod on. He remembered a low, damaged brick wall at the bottom of a grassy slope, certainly something that would not be a hindrance to any human passing by. But he had been so careful. No one had been around when he had searched for organic signatures, unless they'd just literally arrived.

There was no time to dwell on that now, as Wheeljack had to make himself scarce. A shadow flickered somewhere off in the distance but it was close, and moving in his direction. He was able to silently back away and get lost in the deep shadows of a gap between two of the structures. He was situated next to the conduit that supported the cube, so he could see anyone that approached from the way he came.

The cube.

He'd left the energon cube in full view, where it was now glowing brightly at max capacity. He thought to quickly dart out and snatch it, until he saw the small shape of a human round the corner in front of him.

Dimming his optics and stilling his intakes, all he could do was watch from his crouched position as the human stopped, obviously immediately spotting the energon cube pulsing brightly above their head like a beacon. The human turned off the small light they were holding and placed the rectangular device in their pocket, now fully transfixed by the aura in front of them. The glare from the cube only helped to obscure his form in the shadows, so he watched, trying to get a read on this human to ascertain if they were a threat, until something started stabbing the back of his processor, a warning demanding to be acknowledged.

–You've seen this human before–

That didn't seem right, he had not really observed many humans directly, and this particular human female he had definitely never encountered, except—

-You've seen this human before, but they were a child–

Oh no…

It didn't seem possible, but it was. The small human child—Allison—that was the only human to have seen him, and spoken to him, was somehow standing right there in front of him again. For a brief, nanosecond, Wheeljack feared the earlier pulsing in his spark had been a warning that he was truly about to go mad; that something was seriously wrong with him and he was now seeing things that weren't there. Except, that wasn't possible, because there was no way for him to know what that little human would grow to look like so many years later. The last time he'd seen her… she had been finishing what humans called a middle school. This Allison in front of him, who had still not noticed his presence, did not look like that barely mature human at the time. She had been bright and optimistic.

Even though he had been watching her at a distance, there was no mistaking the difference in her appearance now. Most notably her hair had completely changed, now a completely different color, but still long like he had remembered. Hair wasn't exactly the best means of identification for a human, because they changed it so easily and so often. That had certainly thrown him off. She wasn't completely different physically now that he spent more time watching her, though she was maybe more thinned out in her facial features. Her eyes were different, as he remembered them being brighter. He didn't know enough about human expression and physiology to really be able to tell, but he thought she looked more tired. There was also a… sensory impression of her that Wheeljack could detect now that she was closer and it was identical to other times he'd been near her without her knowing. Now that she was standing next to him, there was no mistaking her identity.

This was the child, now a fully grown adult, standing just below the energon cube in an almost absurd, mirror rendition of the first time they met. Wheeljack was not experiencing a glitch induced hallucination, but the incessant hammering in his spark was becoming a distraction that he was not going to be able to ignore. He was… scared, and he wasn't sure why.

Primus was testing him. There was no other explanation, as to why he would happen to run into the same human twice, so many years apart. There were billions of them on this planet. What were the odds?

Allison still hadn't noticed him somehow, but she seemed wary of her surroundings like she was expecting something—maybe him, he thought soberly. Were human memories that good?. Her eyes were darting around her as if she was searching for something else in the vicinity. Or someone.

Scrap.

Stepping forward in the soft glow from above her, Allison looked up at the energon cube as she began fishing in her pocket for the same rectangular device she'd previously put away. Wheeljack realized it was a mobile phone device, something she didn't have when she was a child. It hadn't been a concern at the time, but now it was going to be a problem, because she was about to take a picture of something she shouldn't. She would inevitably show it to people, and that would raise questions. Questions that were even going to make it to the audios of Optimus Prime. He had to stop her.

Without thinking, Wheeljack came out of the darkness.