PART I: KATIE

Chapter 3

 

          The day had progressed and dusk was falling. The sky was a thick orange and a few patrolling jets flew by, leaving streaks behind them in the sky. Katie shivered, not with cold, but with fear; she knew Megaton was gone, but there were rumors that he had a second-hand man by the name of Starscream that had an alt-mode of a jet...She curled in close to Sprocket, who was roasting a marshmallow for her. He looked at her with such kind eyes. “Do you like them kind of black?” he asked her. “No, more of a caramel-brown…just slightly cooked.” Sprocket grimaced behind his facemask and put out the flaming marshmallow, then tossed it over the fence into the trees. Katie gave him her I know what you did, and I don’t like it, but I still love you anyway look. Sprocket chortled. “You seem very thoughtful tonight. You know, I’m well over ten thousand years old…I’m full of wisdom! You can feel free to ask me anything,” he said.

            “Oh, just thinking about what you were saying earlier…” the young woman said. A bit taken aback, Sprocket raised the metallic parts above his eyes; something he’d learn from humans: the curious lift of an eyebrow, he noted, could mean many things, or it could simply mean nothing at all. He hoped he had used this tactic wisely. “Oh? Which part?” he asked, his voice a slow droll. “Well…” she paused awkwardly. “You said you had true love. But then she…she…well, she left you.” Sprocket nodded. “Everyone leaves you at some time, Katie; Silvershot just went sooner than she should have.”

            Katie nodded. “I was wondering…well, I get all these e-mails that say mushy stuff to try to cheer me up. I got one around noon, after we got back from our nap in the glen.” “You mean, after we were done getting sun-burnt in the glen,” Sprocket said with a wink. “Oh, shush, you; you can’t burn!” The human teased back, trying to hide the freckles that had come up on her cherry-red burnt arms. “Anyways, I got this one e-mail about life and I thought it would be interesting to talk about. It said something like, ‘it isn’t about the numbers of when you’re born or the numbers of when you died, but the dash in between.’”

            Sprocket put another marshmallow out of its fiery misery. “Dash in between?” he asked, trying to clean the gooey marshmallow gunk out from between the wires that connected his fingers to his hand. “Yea…you know…Human cemeteries. When a human dies, we bury them and we give them a headstone with the date they were born and the date when they died. We separate them with a—” “I know what the dash means; but what does it represent?” Sprocket scratched his head confusedly, getting more gooey gunk on the side of his face where his mask was attached. Katie giggled.

            “It’s supposed to be like a metaphor, I think…like, the dash represents what you did after you were born, lived, and before you died. The dash sums up all you did that was important while you were alive.”

            Sprocket frowned. He felt very forlorn suddenly. “You want to know about Silvy, then, I’d take it?” The human looked down at her feet, not able to meet Sprocket’s eyes. “Well…you’ve lived such a long life…I bet you have tons of stories you could tell. That’s all.” Sprocket smiled. He knew that it wasn’t all she wanted to say, and that she missed Juan and Bertha, but he gave in. Maybe talking about it…finally letting it out…would do better than keeping it in, letting it grow…He was getting older, after all.

            The fire crackled as one of the logs on the brass fire pit broke, sending up sparks that illuminated the robot’s face and body like a beacon. He suddenly didn’t look like the old beige Subaru who was in constant repair…he looked like the Lieutenant Colonel who had lost as many wars as he won.

Katie shivered again with a slight anxious feeling; he suddenly looked like the alien that he was—that he was something foreign—like a robot that could desecrate the whole neighborhood if he wanted to—and he could, but she knew he wasn’t evil, and realizing this, she relaxed. Too many years under the reign of Captain of the Civil Decepticon Fleet, Nox; only ‘civil’ and ‘Decepticon’ did not go well together; and remembering her reign of the northern part of California terrified Katie, even though she was younger when Nox reigned supreme and could not recall much. That in itself was a blessing…

            But then she remembered Sprocket’s face, how he had looked when he was declared Main Pacifier for the Humboldt region of California, and the pledge he took to do all he could to maintain the peace he and his troops had brought. It was with that voice he started to, finally, tell his story.