Fic: Outbreak 4/?
TITLE: Outbreak, part 4
Imperfection Deviation
SERIES: Imperfection
AUTHOR: Macx
RATING: PG-13
DISCLAIMER: None of the characters belong to me, sadly. They are owned by people with a lot more money
Author’s Voice of Warning (aka Author’s Note):
English is not my first language; it’s German. This is the best I can do. Any mistakes you find in here, collect them and you might win a prize The spell-checker said everything's okay, but you know how trustworthy those thingies are....
FEEDBACK: Loved
It proved to be a challenge to help Sam with training what Ratchet had soon dubbed ‘technopathy’. Everything mechanical and electronic was subject to Sam’s power to understand it, look into it, and if his powers spiked, systems glitched because he didn’t access them correctly. Ratchet timed the spikes and found that prolonged ‘exposure’ to one of them had Sam log onto a particular machine and his mind became somehow interested to delve deeper.
“Sam can’t change machines,” the medic reported to Optimus. “What he can do is interface with them. It’s like our natural ability to uplink to a system and download information, talk electronically to each other, and so on. Sam creates a mental interface with computer data.”
“With us,” Prime stated.
“Yes. But since his human brain is unaccustomed to the data input through his new senses, he starts harming the other side. He doesn’t want it, but it’s a natural defence against the unknown.”
“So all we can do is get him accustomed to us?”
“Yes.”
And that was proving more and more difficult.
Human machines were easier to ignore for the young man than the more complex Cybertronians. It was as if his power was like a curious child and wanted to look deeper into the complexities.
Staying home over night at the Witwicky house was less problematic than feared. Sam didn’t cause too much trouble electronically. A microwave sputtered and died, but his father claimed it was age, and there was a power flux a week later, but since it encompassed most of the neighborhood, no one wondered about it. Sam used the time he was at home to avoid falling into a trap laid out by an interesting mechanical device, like the TV, his clock, his computer or anything else, and soon learned to ignore the soft pulses.
The Autobots were more difficult.
Training that was hard and intense for both sides involved. Sam would get headaches and the mechanoid in question would have system failures. Never anything important, but it wasn’t good either. And whenever he used too much of his power, his food intake doubled or tripled, mostly high caloric nourishment, like chocolate.
Sam felt bad about each and every time he unconsciously hurt one of his friends, and soon he refused to use any of the Autobots as ‘practice’.
“Sam, we’re the most advanced machine life forms,” Ratchet told him, looking at the depressed young man. “Yes, your mind can hurt us, but you need to work on this. You need to control what you can do.”
“But you said it yourself, I can hurt you!” Sam cried.
“Not if you train.”
“I’m trying, Ratchet! I really am! But I hurt you and I don’t want that anymore!”
“You need control. To learn you have to make mistakes.”
“Not when they are harmful to you.”
“Sam…”
But Sam turned and left, walking out of the medical area.
If Ratchet had wanted to, he could have easily followed, but he didn’t. Instead he went back to the files he was already studying and in the end he dialed Mark Keyron’s number.
* * *
Mark Keyron was no fool. He knew the Autobots only trusted him as far as they knew his file - and that had a Sector Seven marker on it. Not all Sector Seven employees had been sadistic bastards or wanna-be dictators. Many had just done their job. He had been hired because of his extensive medical training and because accidents happened while working on the Allspark. Like many he had had no idea what had gone on behind the scenes. He had never truly understood the depth of the experiments, had only seen the results in form of injured people. Some had even been killed by the out of control machines. But the truth about it all had been as top secret as the whole organization.
Tom Banachek and Secretary of Defense John Keller had personally screened the people remaining on the staff that dealt with the alien presence. Some more personally than others, he mused. Major Lennox and his team were as close and personal as things got. Keyron had been cleared and he was back in government service, just in a different department. Banachek was still his boss, though.
Now he puzzled over the case of Sam Witwicky. Keyron had treated people working with the Allspark and none of them had ever exhibited such symptoms, let alone changed their genetic make-up.
And that was exactly what was happening to the boy. His genetic code was… altered.
Keyron leafed through the extensive print from the DNA sequence analyzer, something he had run three times, just to be sure, and then marked the differences to normal human DNA. This wasn’t about having a small defect, this was major. There were a lot more marks than was truly healthy - and Sam was still alive. He had the boy’s history and it was unremarkable until the day he had met the Autobots.
The doctor leaned back and rubbed his tired eyes. He had a million questions, but one stuck out and he had to talk to the one person who had been with Sam at that time.
Using a special cell phone, he dialed the unregistered number of the Autobot base, particularly the extension that would get him Optimus Prime.
* * *
For Sam, normalcy had gone out the window pretty fast the day he had ‘bought’ the old, beat-up Camaro. Within a few days he had been introduced to the fact that there was alien life on other planets, that this alien life came in form of giant robots, that these giant robots needed him, and that he had then saved his whole planet from destruction by the Decepticons. Yes, normalcy was something other than killing the leader of the bad guys with an alien artifact that had created a whole race.
Sitting on a low wall across from an ice cream shop, sharing a fabulous day with fantastic ice cream with his ex girlfriend was almost too boring to register on his expectation scale. Other guys would fall all over themselves to win Mikaela Banes back. They would beg and plead and whine and make fools out of themselves. Sam didn’t even try.
Mikaela was still as stunning and beautiful as he remembered her. She hadn’t changed much in the past weeks.
Unlike himself.
Freak.
Sam concentrated on his ice cream and tried not to think too much about the truth and reality of his life right now.
Mikaela was watching him, looking rather shocked and thunderstruck after he had stopped explaining to her what had happened to him.
“Sam…” she finally broke the silence.
He shook his head. “No, there’s nothing anyone can do,” he answered the unspoken question. “And it’s not some cheesy way to keep you here. I just… needed to talk to someone. Someone who’s cleared.” He gave her an apologetic smile.
Mikaela reached for his hand and squeezed it gently. “I’ll always be your friend, okay? I know what I said in Vegas was… dumb. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t mean it to come out the way it did.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
Sam smiled briefly. “Hey, I say a lot of stupid things. I know what it’s like.”
She laughed softly, then grew serious. “So, it’s all because of the Allspark?”
He nodded. “And it’s there to stay. I just have to train it, but it’s like… showing chocolate to a chocolate addict. Just being around them… I want to be closer. It’s difficult, Mikaela, and I hurt them.”
She gave him a sad look. “But if you run away, won’t that make it even more difficult? You can be around Earth technology, you learned how to. You can learn how to be around Bumblebee and the others.”
“I blew several machines before I learned how to not harm a DVD player,” Sam argued. “I can’t just go around tearing their systems apart!”
“If I understood you correctly, Ratchet and the others actually volunteered to help.”
Sam opened his mouth, then snapped it shut again. “I won’t do it!”
Mikaela squeezed his hand again, sympathetic. “It won’t solve anything,” she stated.
“I know.”
“Then do something that solves it,” Mikaela only said.
Sam’s eyes were on the traffic on the street. Everything looked so normal.
“Sam?”
“Hm?”
“Promise me to do something about this,” Mikaela said softly. “You can beat this. You can be around them without harming any one of them. They are your friends.”
“Which is why it’s so hard to know that my training is painful for them,” he answered truthfully.
Mikaela hugged him. A few months ago it would have sent thrills of delight through him, now it was just a platonic gesture.
“You can do it,” she told him with conviction. “Believe in yourself.”
* * *
Optimus Prime had been around long enough that he didn’t judge a person by his past alone. Dr. Mark Keyron had been working for the very organization that had tortured Bumblebee and would have killed the Autobots if they a) could have done so and b) should they post a threat. He understood humanity’s reactions, of course. Alien invasion was scary and dangerous. Giant alien robots were frightening for this organic race. And battling out their war on the humans’ planet hadn’t helped. All life protected itself first. If that meant killing someone or something else, it would be killed.
Survival. Reactions born out of fear.
Keyron had proven to be a valuable person and Banachek had vouched for him, which was good enough for Prime - after he had extensively studied the man’s background.
“Thank you for talking to me, Prime,” the man now said respectfully.
“You said you had questions about the battle against Megatron, as well as his death.”
Keyron nodded. “Sam was with you at the time, correct?”
“Yes.”
“That was after Bumblebee gave him the Allspark and after the Allspark gave brief life to Earth machines by accident.”
“Correct.”
“Sam gave me a brief version of what happened and he mentioned you told him to push the Allspark into your chest.”
Prime nodded.
“The Allspark would then react with yours and destroy both you and Megatron, correct?”
“Yes.”
“You, as a Cybertronian, can trigger the Allspark? I know that Bumblebee activated its own transformation sequence, having it shed weight and size. But could you get it to self-destruct?”
Prime was silent for a moment. “Not directly,” he then said. “But the energy contained in my spark would react with the Allspark, where it came from, and it would then be destroyed.”
“Your spark,” Keyron confirmed. “What about the Allspark?”
“It would most likely perish, too. The resulting energy cascade would be too much for it to remain stable and by becoming unstable, it would react with the energy released by my spark, destroying us both.”
“So how did Sam activate the Allspark to destroy Megatron?”
Optimus gazed at the human, confused. “He didn’t…”
“He did, Prime. I talked to Sam at length and he said he didn’t want you to sacrifice yourself, he wanted to help since he felt responsible for a lot of things that happened, and when Megatron tried to take him, he held up the cube and it released its energy.” Keyron met the blue optics levely. “How could the Allspark self-destruct without touching a life spark?”
“It must have…”
“Did you tear Megatron’s chest plate off? Did he have any injuries that concerned his spark?”
“No.”
“Then what happened?”
Optimus accessed his memories of that moment and he was stunned to discover that there had been indeed no direct contact between his brother’s spark and the Allspark. The Allspark had simply… dissolved into a ray of pure energy. It had been a tight, intense beam that had erupted right into the Decepticon leader’s chest. In his memories he saw the moment the symbols glowed, he saw Sam’s determination, he watched him push the Allspark up and then… annihilation. There had been no trigger for the cube. None at all.
“You have a theory?” he asked of Keyron.
“Currently I only have a lot of different ideas, but none based on scientific facts. What I can tell you is that Sam was changed through the Allspark energy. In the past two years his body underwent this change and the first manifestation is the technopathy.”
“So there could be more.” It wasn’t even a question any more.
“Possible. Likely. I don’t know.”
Optimus gave an electronic sigh. “This should not have happened.”
“But it did. And whatever you think, you had nothing to do with it.”
“How do you know?”
The human smiled. “Because no one can foresee the future. You did what you thought best for your people and your planet. You didn’t know the Allspark would eventually end up on our world. You didn’t know Megatron would find it. You didn’t know he broke through the ice and spent millennia underneath the surface, to be found by our ancestors. All of that you didn’t know and no one could have foreseen it. It’s impossible.” He smirked a little. “And we humans tend to be unpredictable in our behavior. What Sam did, he wouldn’t have done if he had thought about it. He reacted by instinct and blew logic into the wind.”
“I noticed,” Optimus said wryly.
Keyron smiled at him. “We protect what we see worth protecting. We will do whatever is necessary to survive. For Sam, the moment he had to make that decision to help you in your suicide became the turning point for everything. He didn’t want to kill you, so he did something no one can explain.”
“I have been surprised by your kind quite often in the last two years,” Optimus agreed. “You are quite fascinating.”
Keyron chuckled. “Thank you. As are you.”
“What do you want to do now?”
The human looked surprised, then caught himself. “There is nothing I can actively do but monitor Sam’s development. He isn’t physically ill. His DNA has changed and with it his body’s working order, but nothing is making him sick in a way that a pill or an injection would cure. No one can undo what the Allspark has done. We can only try to help Sam understand and handle it.”
Prime nodded, not happy. Very clearly not happy. It was one thing to know a friend had been injured, another to come to terms with the fact that there was nothing anyone could do.
“Thank you,” he finally said.
“You’re welcome. I’ll keep you up to date.”
“We appreciate your help.”
For a moment Keyron looked a bit wary, then he just inclined his head and left. Optimus understood the man’s hesitation since they had made no secret of their distrust because of where he had worked before. The past was the past, though.
He had to tell himself that little fact over and over to stop the guilt. Sam was just another victim of a war his people had had nothing to do with. Too many humans had died in Mission City and before that in Qatar. They were another number to add to the total death toll and Optimus Prime mourned every single one of them.
The arrival of Jazz jarred him out of his thoughts.
“Hey,” his second in command greeted him. “Bad news?”
Jazz had always been good at reading him, especially in his moods, and Prime sighed softly.
“I can’t say. Dr. Keyron and I talked. He made me think about some things.”
“Like?”
“How could Sam activate the Allspark to kill Megatron?”
Jazz was silent. He hadn’t been there, hadn’t witnessed it. Actually, at that time, he had been quite dead.
“Megatron didn’t trigger it. I didn’t either. My memories of the moment are very clear,” Optimus continued. “He pushed the Allspark over his head and it exploded into a beam of energy. Just toward Megatron. It didn’t harm Sam either. He had no burns, nothing.”
“Bumblebee shrunk the Allspark inside the Sector Seven facility. He later gave it to Sam,” Jazz thought out loud.
“But Bumblebee wasn’t there when Megatron was killed. None of us were near.”
Jazz leaned against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, looking thoughtful. “Damn mystery,” he muttered. “Never really gave it a thought.”
“Me neither. Now Sam has been changed by what happened that day. None of the humans working with the Allspark ever exhibited any changes, only Sam.”
“Because they only bled off small amounts of Allspark energy, Prime. They never had it go up around them.”
He nodded. “And none of them ever had it react to them.”
Jazz frowned a little. “You think Sam… made the Allspark do it? He willed it to kill Megatron?”
“No. I think he was aware of the potential, knew my plan, and he somehow triggered the explosion without harming anyone else.”
“But why him?”
Prime was silent for a moment, then, “Chance or fate. A lot of factors played together to let him meet us. His grandfather found Megatron, he inherited the glasses, he needed the money and tried to sell them off, and the Decepticons had found Earth. If just one factor had not worked in our favor, we might either be too late, too early, or would never have found this boy. Sam was never special, but when the Allspark was given into his care, something happened to him.”
“Genetics?” Jazz hazarded a guess. “You think some organic beings react to the Allspark?”
“Possibly. We don’t know where it came from. We don’t know who created it. We used it, we came from it, but we never found out the truth about this powerful device. Maybe an organic race created it,” Optimus added. “Maybe it recognized a pattern and went with it.”
“We’ll never know,” Jazz agreed. “So… what about Sam?”
“Dr. Keyron said there is no treatment for DNA changes. All we can do is support him, help him as much as we can, and I know Bumblebee will do all that and more.”
Jazz grinned. “Yeah. You can bet on it.”
There was a beeping noise and Jazz activated his communicator. Suddenly his optics flared and he spat a Cybertronian curse.
“Jazz?” Prime asked, rising quickly.
“It’s Barricade. Something happened involving Sam and him,” the silver Autobot answered quickly. He was already out the door and Prime followed him.
Something cold settled in his fuel pump. Whenever Barricade was brought up he felt slight apprehension because a part of him expected the worst. The former Decepticon was part of his unit, but he knew tensions remained, especially with Ironhide. Barricade only came into the base when he had to, mostly to recharge after Jazz dragged him in, and once to have his mistreated systems cleaned out by Ratchet. His medical officer had told him in what shape the black mech had been.
Now it involved Sam, too. A Sam who was a technopath. Barricade and Sam had developed a strange relationship that baffled Prime. Whatever caused Barricade to protect the human, he didn’t know. He just appreciated it.
Following his first lieutenant, he tried not to think of worst case scenarios, but they came unbidden.
tbc...
Imperfection Deviation
SERIES: Imperfection
AUTHOR: Macx
RATING: PG-13
DISCLAIMER: None of the characters belong to me, sadly. They are owned by people with a lot more money
Author’s Voice of Warning (aka Author’s Note):
English is not my first language; it’s German. This is the best I can do. Any mistakes you find in here, collect them and you might win a prize The spell-checker said everything's okay, but you know how trustworthy those thingies are....
FEEDBACK: Loved
It proved to be a challenge to help Sam with training what Ratchet had soon dubbed ‘technopathy’. Everything mechanical and electronic was subject to Sam’s power to understand it, look into it, and if his powers spiked, systems glitched because he didn’t access them correctly. Ratchet timed the spikes and found that prolonged ‘exposure’ to one of them had Sam log onto a particular machine and his mind became somehow interested to delve deeper.
“Sam can’t change machines,” the medic reported to Optimus. “What he can do is interface with them. It’s like our natural ability to uplink to a system and download information, talk electronically to each other, and so on. Sam creates a mental interface with computer data.”
“With us,” Prime stated.
“Yes. But since his human brain is unaccustomed to the data input through his new senses, he starts harming the other side. He doesn’t want it, but it’s a natural defence against the unknown.”
“So all we can do is get him accustomed to us?”
“Yes.”
And that was proving more and more difficult.
Human machines were easier to ignore for the young man than the more complex Cybertronians. It was as if his power was like a curious child and wanted to look deeper into the complexities.
Staying home over night at the Witwicky house was less problematic than feared. Sam didn’t cause too much trouble electronically. A microwave sputtered and died, but his father claimed it was age, and there was a power flux a week later, but since it encompassed most of the neighborhood, no one wondered about it. Sam used the time he was at home to avoid falling into a trap laid out by an interesting mechanical device, like the TV, his clock, his computer or anything else, and soon learned to ignore the soft pulses.
The Autobots were more difficult.
Training that was hard and intense for both sides involved. Sam would get headaches and the mechanoid in question would have system failures. Never anything important, but it wasn’t good either. And whenever he used too much of his power, his food intake doubled or tripled, mostly high caloric nourishment, like chocolate.
Sam felt bad about each and every time he unconsciously hurt one of his friends, and soon he refused to use any of the Autobots as ‘practice’.
“Sam, we’re the most advanced machine life forms,” Ratchet told him, looking at the depressed young man. “Yes, your mind can hurt us, but you need to work on this. You need to control what you can do.”
“But you said it yourself, I can hurt you!” Sam cried.
“Not if you train.”
“I’m trying, Ratchet! I really am! But I hurt you and I don’t want that anymore!”
“You need control. To learn you have to make mistakes.”
“Not when they are harmful to you.”
“Sam…”
But Sam turned and left, walking out of the medical area.
If Ratchet had wanted to, he could have easily followed, but he didn’t. Instead he went back to the files he was already studying and in the end he dialed Mark Keyron’s number.
* * *
Mark Keyron was no fool. He knew the Autobots only trusted him as far as they knew his file - and that had a Sector Seven marker on it. Not all Sector Seven employees had been sadistic bastards or wanna-be dictators. Many had just done their job. He had been hired because of his extensive medical training and because accidents happened while working on the Allspark. Like many he had had no idea what had gone on behind the scenes. He had never truly understood the depth of the experiments, had only seen the results in form of injured people. Some had even been killed by the out of control machines. But the truth about it all had been as top secret as the whole organization.
Tom Banachek and Secretary of Defense John Keller had personally screened the people remaining on the staff that dealt with the alien presence. Some more personally than others, he mused. Major Lennox and his team were as close and personal as things got. Keyron had been cleared and he was back in government service, just in a different department. Banachek was still his boss, though.
Now he puzzled over the case of Sam Witwicky. Keyron had treated people working with the Allspark and none of them had ever exhibited such symptoms, let alone changed their genetic make-up.
And that was exactly what was happening to the boy. His genetic code was… altered.
Keyron leafed through the extensive print from the DNA sequence analyzer, something he had run three times, just to be sure, and then marked the differences to normal human DNA. This wasn’t about having a small defect, this was major. There were a lot more marks than was truly healthy - and Sam was still alive. He had the boy’s history and it was unremarkable until the day he had met the Autobots.
The doctor leaned back and rubbed his tired eyes. He had a million questions, but one stuck out and he had to talk to the one person who had been with Sam at that time.
Using a special cell phone, he dialed the unregistered number of the Autobot base, particularly the extension that would get him Optimus Prime.
* * *
For Sam, normalcy had gone out the window pretty fast the day he had ‘bought’ the old, beat-up Camaro. Within a few days he had been introduced to the fact that there was alien life on other planets, that this alien life came in form of giant robots, that these giant robots needed him, and that he had then saved his whole planet from destruction by the Decepticons. Yes, normalcy was something other than killing the leader of the bad guys with an alien artifact that had created a whole race.
Sitting on a low wall across from an ice cream shop, sharing a fabulous day with fantastic ice cream with his ex girlfriend was almost too boring to register on his expectation scale. Other guys would fall all over themselves to win Mikaela Banes back. They would beg and plead and whine and make fools out of themselves. Sam didn’t even try.
Mikaela was still as stunning and beautiful as he remembered her. She hadn’t changed much in the past weeks.
Unlike himself.
Freak.
Sam concentrated on his ice cream and tried not to think too much about the truth and reality of his life right now.
Mikaela was watching him, looking rather shocked and thunderstruck after he had stopped explaining to her what had happened to him.
“Sam…” she finally broke the silence.
He shook his head. “No, there’s nothing anyone can do,” he answered the unspoken question. “And it’s not some cheesy way to keep you here. I just… needed to talk to someone. Someone who’s cleared.” He gave her an apologetic smile.
Mikaela reached for his hand and squeezed it gently. “I’ll always be your friend, okay? I know what I said in Vegas was… dumb. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t mean it to come out the way it did.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
Sam smiled briefly. “Hey, I say a lot of stupid things. I know what it’s like.”
She laughed softly, then grew serious. “So, it’s all because of the Allspark?”
He nodded. “And it’s there to stay. I just have to train it, but it’s like… showing chocolate to a chocolate addict. Just being around them… I want to be closer. It’s difficult, Mikaela, and I hurt them.”
She gave him a sad look. “But if you run away, won’t that make it even more difficult? You can be around Earth technology, you learned how to. You can learn how to be around Bumblebee and the others.”
“I blew several machines before I learned how to not harm a DVD player,” Sam argued. “I can’t just go around tearing their systems apart!”
“If I understood you correctly, Ratchet and the others actually volunteered to help.”
Sam opened his mouth, then snapped it shut again. “I won’t do it!”
Mikaela squeezed his hand again, sympathetic. “It won’t solve anything,” she stated.
“I know.”
“Then do something that solves it,” Mikaela only said.
Sam’s eyes were on the traffic on the street. Everything looked so normal.
“Sam?”
“Hm?”
“Promise me to do something about this,” Mikaela said softly. “You can beat this. You can be around them without harming any one of them. They are your friends.”
“Which is why it’s so hard to know that my training is painful for them,” he answered truthfully.
Mikaela hugged him. A few months ago it would have sent thrills of delight through him, now it was just a platonic gesture.
“You can do it,” she told him with conviction. “Believe in yourself.”
* * *
Optimus Prime had been around long enough that he didn’t judge a person by his past alone. Dr. Mark Keyron had been working for the very organization that had tortured Bumblebee and would have killed the Autobots if they a) could have done so and b) should they post a threat. He understood humanity’s reactions, of course. Alien invasion was scary and dangerous. Giant alien robots were frightening for this organic race. And battling out their war on the humans’ planet hadn’t helped. All life protected itself first. If that meant killing someone or something else, it would be killed.
Survival. Reactions born out of fear.
Keyron had proven to be a valuable person and Banachek had vouched for him, which was good enough for Prime - after he had extensively studied the man’s background.
“Thank you for talking to me, Prime,” the man now said respectfully.
“You said you had questions about the battle against Megatron, as well as his death.”
Keyron nodded. “Sam was with you at the time, correct?”
“Yes.”
“That was after Bumblebee gave him the Allspark and after the Allspark gave brief life to Earth machines by accident.”
“Correct.”
“Sam gave me a brief version of what happened and he mentioned you told him to push the Allspark into your chest.”
Prime nodded.
“The Allspark would then react with yours and destroy both you and Megatron, correct?”
“Yes.”
“You, as a Cybertronian, can trigger the Allspark? I know that Bumblebee activated its own transformation sequence, having it shed weight and size. But could you get it to self-destruct?”
Prime was silent for a moment. “Not directly,” he then said. “But the energy contained in my spark would react with the Allspark, where it came from, and it would then be destroyed.”
“Your spark,” Keyron confirmed. “What about the Allspark?”
“It would most likely perish, too. The resulting energy cascade would be too much for it to remain stable and by becoming unstable, it would react with the energy released by my spark, destroying us both.”
“So how did Sam activate the Allspark to destroy Megatron?”
Optimus gazed at the human, confused. “He didn’t…”
“He did, Prime. I talked to Sam at length and he said he didn’t want you to sacrifice yourself, he wanted to help since he felt responsible for a lot of things that happened, and when Megatron tried to take him, he held up the cube and it released its energy.” Keyron met the blue optics levely. “How could the Allspark self-destruct without touching a life spark?”
“It must have…”
“Did you tear Megatron’s chest plate off? Did he have any injuries that concerned his spark?”
“No.”
“Then what happened?”
Optimus accessed his memories of that moment and he was stunned to discover that there had been indeed no direct contact between his brother’s spark and the Allspark. The Allspark had simply… dissolved into a ray of pure energy. It had been a tight, intense beam that had erupted right into the Decepticon leader’s chest. In his memories he saw the moment the symbols glowed, he saw Sam’s determination, he watched him push the Allspark up and then… annihilation. There had been no trigger for the cube. None at all.
“You have a theory?” he asked of Keyron.
“Currently I only have a lot of different ideas, but none based on scientific facts. What I can tell you is that Sam was changed through the Allspark energy. In the past two years his body underwent this change and the first manifestation is the technopathy.”
“So there could be more.” It wasn’t even a question any more.
“Possible. Likely. I don’t know.”
Optimus gave an electronic sigh. “This should not have happened.”
“But it did. And whatever you think, you had nothing to do with it.”
“How do you know?”
The human smiled. “Because no one can foresee the future. You did what you thought best for your people and your planet. You didn’t know the Allspark would eventually end up on our world. You didn’t know Megatron would find it. You didn’t know he broke through the ice and spent millennia underneath the surface, to be found by our ancestors. All of that you didn’t know and no one could have foreseen it. It’s impossible.” He smirked a little. “And we humans tend to be unpredictable in our behavior. What Sam did, he wouldn’t have done if he had thought about it. He reacted by instinct and blew logic into the wind.”
“I noticed,” Optimus said wryly.
Keyron smiled at him. “We protect what we see worth protecting. We will do whatever is necessary to survive. For Sam, the moment he had to make that decision to help you in your suicide became the turning point for everything. He didn’t want to kill you, so he did something no one can explain.”
“I have been surprised by your kind quite often in the last two years,” Optimus agreed. “You are quite fascinating.”
Keyron chuckled. “Thank you. As are you.”
“What do you want to do now?”
The human looked surprised, then caught himself. “There is nothing I can actively do but monitor Sam’s development. He isn’t physically ill. His DNA has changed and with it his body’s working order, but nothing is making him sick in a way that a pill or an injection would cure. No one can undo what the Allspark has done. We can only try to help Sam understand and handle it.”
Prime nodded, not happy. Very clearly not happy. It was one thing to know a friend had been injured, another to come to terms with the fact that there was nothing anyone could do.
“Thank you,” he finally said.
“You’re welcome. I’ll keep you up to date.”
“We appreciate your help.”
For a moment Keyron looked a bit wary, then he just inclined his head and left. Optimus understood the man’s hesitation since they had made no secret of their distrust because of where he had worked before. The past was the past, though.
He had to tell himself that little fact over and over to stop the guilt. Sam was just another victim of a war his people had had nothing to do with. Too many humans had died in Mission City and before that in Qatar. They were another number to add to the total death toll and Optimus Prime mourned every single one of them.
The arrival of Jazz jarred him out of his thoughts.
“Hey,” his second in command greeted him. “Bad news?”
Jazz had always been good at reading him, especially in his moods, and Prime sighed softly.
“I can’t say. Dr. Keyron and I talked. He made me think about some things.”
“Like?”
“How could Sam activate the Allspark to kill Megatron?”
Jazz was silent. He hadn’t been there, hadn’t witnessed it. Actually, at that time, he had been quite dead.
“Megatron didn’t trigger it. I didn’t either. My memories of the moment are very clear,” Optimus continued. “He pushed the Allspark over his head and it exploded into a beam of energy. Just toward Megatron. It didn’t harm Sam either. He had no burns, nothing.”
“Bumblebee shrunk the Allspark inside the Sector Seven facility. He later gave it to Sam,” Jazz thought out loud.
“But Bumblebee wasn’t there when Megatron was killed. None of us were near.”
Jazz leaned against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, looking thoughtful. “Damn mystery,” he muttered. “Never really gave it a thought.”
“Me neither. Now Sam has been changed by what happened that day. None of the humans working with the Allspark ever exhibited any changes, only Sam.”
“Because they only bled off small amounts of Allspark energy, Prime. They never had it go up around them.”
He nodded. “And none of them ever had it react to them.”
Jazz frowned a little. “You think Sam… made the Allspark do it? He willed it to kill Megatron?”
“No. I think he was aware of the potential, knew my plan, and he somehow triggered the explosion without harming anyone else.”
“But why him?”
Prime was silent for a moment, then, “Chance or fate. A lot of factors played together to let him meet us. His grandfather found Megatron, he inherited the glasses, he needed the money and tried to sell them off, and the Decepticons had found Earth. If just one factor had not worked in our favor, we might either be too late, too early, or would never have found this boy. Sam was never special, but when the Allspark was given into his care, something happened to him.”
“Genetics?” Jazz hazarded a guess. “You think some organic beings react to the Allspark?”
“Possibly. We don’t know where it came from. We don’t know who created it. We used it, we came from it, but we never found out the truth about this powerful device. Maybe an organic race created it,” Optimus added. “Maybe it recognized a pattern and went with it.”
“We’ll never know,” Jazz agreed. “So… what about Sam?”
“Dr. Keyron said there is no treatment for DNA changes. All we can do is support him, help him as much as we can, and I know Bumblebee will do all that and more.”
Jazz grinned. “Yeah. You can bet on it.”
There was a beeping noise and Jazz activated his communicator. Suddenly his optics flared and he spat a Cybertronian curse.
“Jazz?” Prime asked, rising quickly.
“It’s Barricade. Something happened involving Sam and him,” the silver Autobot answered quickly. He was already out the door and Prime followed him.
Something cold settled in his fuel pump. Whenever Barricade was brought up he felt slight apprehension because a part of him expected the worst. The former Decepticon was part of his unit, but he knew tensions remained, especially with Ironhide. Barricade only came into the base when he had to, mostly to recharge after Jazz dragged him in, and once to have his mistreated systems cleaned out by Ratchet. His medical officer had told him in what shape the black mech had been.
Now it involved Sam, too. A Sam who was a technopath. Barricade and Sam had developed a strange relationship that baffled Prime. Whatever caused Barricade to protect the human, he didn’t know. He just appreciated it.
Following his first lieutenant, he tried not to think of worst case scenarios, but they came unbidden.
tbc...