Before there was a body, there was a shameless ask.
"I want the two of you to accompany me on this," the soul said, and the two silhouettes surrounding it grinned.
The soul instinctively shuddered.
'Seems like a trap', the soul thought. It could feel the grin when there was none visible.
"You are an interesting one." The dark hummed, amused.
The light hummed back, curious.
The two looked at the soul in amusement.
They had existed since the break of dawn - when time and space remained non-existent.
Space and time existed to cure boredom. Wills created for their amusement. Yet there was one before them who seemed to think outside the script they had written.
The soul stared at the two ancients. It was sure that the dark was feminine in nature. It didn't have eyes yet, but it stared anyway.
The two ancients agreed anyway. "You shall meet the Cybertronians when you turn seventeen," they said, together. "Until then — good luck."
Good luck. Maybe luck was the deciding factor needed.
Tranquility, 1990.
"Oh, look at him. I'm your mother, Sammy."
Judy Witwicky had blonde hair and tired eyes and a voice that cracked a little on Sammy, like she'd practiced saying it in the mirror and it still got her anyway. 'Seriously Sammy? That trouble magnet?' I could only mentally cry!
I didn't have words yet — wouldn't, technically, for another few months, if I paced myself the way a newborn was supposed to — but I understood warmth the second her hand found mine. Definitely my mother.
And then comes the embarassing act of being fed milk. Oh mah gawd!!!! Why couldn't they have reincarnated me into this body when I become a teen physically????
For the first few weeks the house was absolutely chaotic. A child's birth draws a swarm of ladies cooing. 'Awww' — now that was a phrase I heard constantly.
Aunts (Seriously, just how many aunts do I have?), a grandmother who smelled like peppermint and something floral, a neighbor named Sheila who brought a casserole and stayed forty extra minutes to hold me. That was just the start of visitors!
I faked being asleep more than I actually slept.
If I was a germaphobe, I would have fainted, revived and then fainted again.
Newborns are supposed to be inconveniences with lungs. And it is deeply annoying to have opinions and no vocabulary.
However, I did have a cheat! What I did have, from the first night, was the system. Just a panel sitting in my head like it had always been there. It's name was displayed in bold hovering over in my mind.
{Multiplier} — Any deliberate action performed by the Host has its developmental effect multiplied one-thousandfold.
I tested it the way that happens when a child is given a new toy. And the results spoke for themselves.
At six weeks I held my own head up. Mum was astonished when it went beyond the norm of parenting books.
At eleven weeks I pulled myself upright against the crib rail and stood there for four full seconds before my legs gave out. 'Seriously lack of muscles. Ughhh' I can only groan but Judy cried.
Ron — my father, broad-shouldered, quiet in the specific way of men who talk with their hands instead — drove to the store the next morning and came back with a baby-proofing kit like the crib incident had been a near-miss with a table saw. Do we even own a table saw?
By four months I was walking. Not crawling — walking, in the sense of crossing a room with intent and stopping where I meant to stop. And that was usually the television. Huh, color telecasts were on at this period?
Ron caught me at it, dropped the mail on the floor, and didn't say anything for a full ten seconds.
"Judy." His voice had gone flat in the way voices go when a person is trying very hard not to sound alarmed in front of a child who might understand alarm. "Judy, come here."
They took me to Dr. Alvarez, the pediatrician the following Tuesday. I remember it more clearly than a four-month-old has any business remembering anything, because I remember making the decision, in the waiting room, to be quiet and remain alert.
Dr. Alvarez ran her tests, made her notes, used the word precocious twice and advanced motor development once, and told my parents that some kids just come out ahead of the curve and it evens out by kindergarten.
'Haha, she could not be more wrong. But well seems like she is a good pediatrician by the crowd that comes here.'
It would not, in fact, even out by kindergarten. But I'd bought myself time. Otherwise next stop — Psychiatrist. Bruh. They will think am ADHD or something.
Turns out multiplier worked in absolutely broken ways.
Sleep, it turned out, was the loophole nobody had warned me about.
One minute of it — genuine, chemical, REM sleep — did whatever a thousand minutes would do.
So on the nights I "slept," I didn't. I just meditated. And around month seven, et voila! I found the two energy pools located within me.
One ran blue. One ran a deep, low red.
If I did not know, I would have said some random name. But these were energon. I am sure of it. They sat there like ponds and I decided to carefully experiment with them. Nothing good comes out with these energies anyway.
I circulated them anyway. Slowly. Carefully. It took months of nightly practice before the system bothered to notice.
{Energon Manipulation Lvl 1} obtained. Multiplier applied. Host has attained {Perfect Energon Manipulation}.
Just a few tries and the system did its job. However, the moment this skill went active, my brain was overclocked. This is? I could sense the entire earth laden with a reddish hue and it resonated strongly with my energy reserved.
The ground was humming. Or is it breathing? Is that even alive? That was definitely the same being. And sensing it gave me an unbearable headache that no amount of Perfect Memory made bearable.
It took the better part of a year of controlled exposure before the system finally caught up and handed me {Mental Stability Lvl MAX}. Damn! That hurt. But now the pain could be subsided or rather, my pain receptors had grown accustomed.
If the blue embodied creation like Primus, the red embodied destruction similar to Unicron. However, the cycle of life required both. When something is created, its assigned the value = 1. When its destroyed, 1 turns to 0 which gives space for a new object of value 1 to replace it.
Maybe the world itself is binary.
Perhaps, Growth and Decay were two sides of the same coin. Just different perspectives.
(Four years later)
By four, I had a body worth training.
I also had a library card I'd talked Judy into getting me a full two years earlier than the branch's policy technically allowed.
Because the librarian, Mrs. Petrakis, had taken one look at the stack of chemistry and physiology books I was trying to check out and decided the rules were a suggestion. Yes, free pass!
"Mom, Dad — I want to do martial arts. And football, if there's a rec league that takes four-year-olds."
They looked at me the way people look at a fool. Maybe coming off so strongly made them hesitate.
Judy tried the diplomatic route first — maybe when you're a little older, sweetheart — and folded the moment she registered I wasn't going to be talked out of it, because by then she'd learned that my stubbornness was off the charts and arguing with it just delayed the inevitable by a week.
Ron signed the enrollment forms without much comment, the way he signed most things, but I caught him watching from the dojo's viewing window more afternoons than not, arms crossed, jaw set in an expression I couldn't yet read as pride.
Maybe he was just lamenting whether paying for the classes was a good use of his money. He was a miser afterall. He would be the most miserly person who had ever lived.
Sensei Marcus ran the dojo out of a strip mall between a nail salon and a place that sold vacuum parts.
He put me through the same white-belt fundamentals he ran everyone else through — balance, breath, the discipline of doing one motion correctly a hundred times before you're allowed to think about the hundred-and-first.
Damn, Bruce Lee was right. 'I do not fear a man who knows thousand ways to kick. I fear a man who has practiced a kick a thousand times.' or was that Jet Li?
{Skeletal Optimization Lvl MAX} came in quietly, a side effect rather than a goal. Joints, tendons and ligaments reshaped themselves to allow maximum efficiency and energon circuits became more refined.
And Marcus was the first one to take notice.
Marcus noticed the falls I stopped taking wrong.
He didn't say anything for a long time. Then, one Saturday, watching me drill a breakfall for the fortieth consecutive rep without the wince every other kid in the class still had: "You've got old bones for a four-year-old, Sam."
I told him I read a lot of books. It wasn't technically a lie. I had years of martial art theory drilled into my neurons.
At home, in the evenings, Ron had the TV on more often than not — the Chicago Bulls were somewhere in the strange without Jordan years, and Ron would sit there with a beer he barely touched and grumble at the screen like the team could hear him.
I liked watching him like that more than I liked watching the game. It was the only hour of the day he looked like he'd forgotten to worry about his son.
He would spout stupid nonsensical strategies which if the team would have heard, they would beat him up.
Between the dojo and the books, I started to work on a seperate task, to merge the blue and red energy streams.
Not mixed — fused.
First attempt — sprawling on the floor of my bedroom for eleven minutes with my teeth locked shut so I wouldn't scream and bring Judy running.
I limited myself after that. I was a fool thinking of going at it in a one-shot attempt.
A ten-thousandth of my total reserve, once a day, always alone, always timed for whichever hour my heart rate was already up from training so the adrenaline could eat some of the pain before it reached anywhere that mattered. That was the plan for now.
It was slow. maybe it was supposed to be slow.
Seventeen years is a long runway, and I intended to use every foot of it. Doing it slow was maybe the right way.
I was in the garden with Ron on a Saturday in early spring, both of us on our knees in the dirt doing the kind of work that doesn't need conversation to be worth doing, when a yellow Camaro went past the house at exactly the speed limit and not one mile over.
'They have got eyes on me. Seems like a scouting attempt. Did he sense the energon?' I thought. I didn't look up right away. That was its own kind of tell, and I was aware of it even as I did it.
Ron didn't notice. Ron wasn't built to notice; that was rather the point of the last four years of never once flaring more energon than a task required.
But I let a thread of it loose anyway — small, deliberate, a knock on a door I knew was listening — and forty yards down the street, the Camaro's engine caught, stumbled, and stopped.
It sat there at the curb for six long seconds. Then it pulled away, unhurried, like nothing had happened at all.
So, I thought, going back to the tomato, 'They already know where I live. Good. Saves us both some time.'
The plot starts now.
It's showtime.
-Samuel James Witwicky