1992
Last time Ironhide spoke to Bob, the sprite (an unbelievably weird concept for the Autobot- how do you get a piece of code that small to behave that much like a living machine, anyway?) had just come out of enforced downtime. Ironhide locked his storage sector into stasis shortly thereafter and shunted the information about him to a low-priority processor thread. No reason to keep him active and in the top layers of memory when he didn't have to be.
There's still a fair way to go before they reach Earth, though. Without any Decepticons within scanner range (they're out there, oh, he knows they're out there- they'll turn up soon enough), the trip gets a little bit wearing. He's been going over his lower priority threads to get them out of the way and keep himself busy, and one of them, as noted before, was 'don't forget your passenger'. Some scanning and analysis on Bob's overall data structure gave him a few ideas.
When Bob comes out of stasis mode next, he'll find that Ironhide's constructed a nearly perfect avatar for purposes of internal communication. (Nearly, because Ironhide has no clue about Bob's height or overall scale.)
"Welcome back," the avatar (which is considerably more internally detailed and representative than Ecto's) says gruffly.
There's still a fair way to go before they reach Earth, though. Without any Decepticons within scanner range (they're out there, oh, he knows they're out there- they'll turn up soon enough), the trip gets a little bit wearing. He's been going over his lower priority threads to get them out of the way and keep himself busy, and one of them, as noted before, was 'don't forget your passenger'. Some scanning and analysis on Bob's overall data structure gave him a few ideas.
When Bob comes out of stasis mode next, he'll find that Ironhide's constructed a nearly perfect avatar for purposes of internal communication. (Nearly, because Ironhide has no clue about Bob's height or overall scale.)
"Welcome back," the avatar (which is considerably more internally detailed and representative than Ecto's) says gruffly.