Chapter Seven

Wildfire and Tailgate walked down the steps of the dojo, giving Sixshot time to speak with Master Yoketron.

"So," Wildfire asked the smaller white mech at her side, "Are you really his conjunx endura?"

"Oh Primus no," Tailgate spluttered, rubbing his shoulders and shivering briefly as if cold. "I don't think he's really a 'let someone get within grabbing range and not kill them' kind of guy."

The cherry red female t-mech chuckled as they reached the bottom step together. "Yeah, I was going to say, I think you can do better." She stopped and looked over at Tailgate. "That was pretty clever of you to distract Sixshot like you did. Brave, too."

Tailgate rubbed the back of his neck, somehow looking sheepish with those massive blue optics. "Ha ha! Well, I guess if you say so! It was the only thing I could think of at the time." He then tapped his pointer fingers together and looked aside, clearing his vocoder and adding under his breath in a rapid mumble, "neeeever gonna do that again. Not ever."

"Now that you've been "dumped", as it were, what do you want to do?" Wildfire asked next.

Tailgate paused. That really was the question, wasn't it? Now that Sixshot's grand hostage plans were tossed aside as quickly as he was, that left the minibot to his own devices. It also left him stranded on Earth.

He wasn't sure if anyone knew if he was alive, back on the ship; they'd be looking for Sixshot as the only possible survivor of the jettisoned cargo bay. He could try to contact the crew, but not this far underground - the signal would never reach the surface - and not when he was with these 'Breakers'. It might cause 'Quality Control' to come after them like before. For all intents and purposes, he was marooned on Earth, and he would have to make the best of it until he could find some way to get a message safely home to Cybertron.

"I don't know," he replied honestly. Tailgate relayed the situation to the t-mech femme, explaining the mission he had been a part of, Sixshot's escape from the ship, the hostage situation, and how present status as a castaway. Wildfire was visibly moved, disturbed by the potential chaos the Phase Sixer could cause on Earth, and impressed by Tailgate's repeated displays of courage.

The female tapped her chin thoughtfully as she spoke. "You might as well make the best of it, then. I'll answer any questions you have and try to get you set up with some quarters until we can find where your friends are." She patted his shoulder consolingly. "I will see to it you get back to them. Promise."

Wildfire's kindness was a welcome relief for Tailgate. It was nice to have run into a friendly face on this planet, instead of getting tossed into the middle of another battlefield with people who barely recognized his existence, let alone care. Cyclonus was the only one he could call a friend, and even then, sometimes he felt like Cyclonus tolerated him more out of pity than anything else.

His thoughts turned towards the little cricket robot and police robot they'd rescued up above. "Say, what's this 'emergence center' you mentioned earlier?" Might as well get some questions answered while he was at it, he had no lack of time for learning. "And what's this about 'children'? How do robots even have children?"

The t-mech laughed and began walking along the causeway towards the city's main street. "Walk with me, and I'll try to explain."

Tailgate trotted forward to catch up with the taller bot, whose legs were longer, thus giving her a faster stride. "Okay - Wildfire, was it?" he asked, trying to make certain he had the name right.

"Yes," she said. "I don't believe I caught yours?"

"Tailgate. Like what I'm doing right now," he said as he fell behind her, the irony not lost on him.

Wildfire grinned behind her faceplate and slowed her steps to keep her smaller companion from relying on a brisk jog to keep in step. "Okay Tailgate, I'll try to explain a little bit about who and what we are."

"Oh good, because I've missed out on a lot I'm afraid. Not just here, I mean. On Cybertron, too. I sort of fell in a hole and passed out for six million years," Tailgate quipped.

Wildfire staggered a step. Six million years. She couldn't comprehend such a long existence, barely older than a decade herself, and she was the "grownup" as far as everyone in the city was concerned. "I don't know if I can help you much with your own world's history," she said, trying to mentally right herself, "but I can at least give you the Cliff's Notes of how Cybertronians affected earth."

"The what?" Tailgate asked, puzzled.

Wildfire shook her head. "Sorry, human expression. I'll try to avoid using them, you won't get the references."

"I don't even get some of the current Cybertronian ones," Tailgate murmured sheepishly.

Wildfire grinned again, stepping onto a sidewalk as the street broadened into a wide cul-de-sac used as a stopping and transforming point to get to other areas on foot. The number of Breakers passing by were increasing, paying both Wildfire and Tailgate no mind as they went on about their respective business, some going back down the paths the two had just come from, others transforming and driving off into the distance along the road.

"About two decades or so ago, Cybertronians came to Earth quietly, Autobots first, then Decepticons chasing them. Your armies were locked in the end of a massive war, and it was being continued on this planet as covertly as possible. Eventually the Decepticon leader, Megatron, broke that cover by creating a base of operations on Earth and sending one of his best warriors to begin attacking human armies in the open. There was a three year fight that hit its climax when the Decepticons captured one of Earth's biggest cities, New York, and subjugated the population for a whole year."

"Eventually humanity struck back in the only way they knew how: they used nuclear bombs and destroyed New York. The fighting between Autobots and Decepticons ended after. We're not really sure why, but rumor says that Megatron was killed, and leaderless, the Decepticons fled Earth, with the Autobots following after."

"Transmechanoids were created two years after that."

"It was decided by the united nations - that's the 'senate' of human national governments - that Earth had to be prepared for the possibility of Cybertronians coming back. They didn't trust Autobots or Decepticons. They gathered up everything you left behind and started taking it apart, examining it, retroengineering it. There were enough bodies, weapons and technologies left on Earth that they were able to create mock-ups of the Cybertronian body that they could pilot and use for all sorts of things, and they found a new fuel source to run them on - syntholine. Syntholine runs clean and is easily manufactured from minerals extracted from deep mining operations. It was probably the only positive thing the Autobot-Decepticon produced on this planet."

Tailgate hopped over the curb and up onto the sidewalk, listening to Wildfire as they began to walk past the fronts of various buildings. He took it all in, committing it to his memory banks. Quietly he wished he had the same kind of archivist equipment Rewind had carried. He was going to have one huge report to turn in on Ultra Magnus' desk once he got back.

If he got back.

"So transmechanoids were built by the local organic sentient species, 'humans'," Tailgate stated, reiterating the jist of the conversation so far. "But from what I saw, they didn't make you sentient. That seems to be something they're actively trying to prevent."

"Right," Wildfire agreed. "Sentience just seemed to be something that happened by accident for us."

"Well sentience kind of happens when you have a spark. I mean, it's automatic," Tailgate mused.

Wildfire seemed confused. "What's a spark?"

Now it was Tailgate's turn to stumble forward in incredulity. "What do you mean 'what's a spark'?" He gasped. "It's what gives you life, intellect, self-will! It's your soul!"

"But I don't have one of those," Wildfire countered, trying to grasp Tailgate's disbelief.

"If you don't know what it is, how do you know you don't have it?" the minibot countered.

It was a reasonable question. Wildfire stopped in her tracks. "Well, I suppose I don't for sure. I'm no medic or anything but I'm pretty sure I don't; Gauge noticed Yoketron has a 'quantum irregularity' in his void chamber, that's how we knew he wasn't one of us. He scanned the same kind of irregularity in you and Sixshot, which is how we knew you weren't really t-mechs."

"Wait, what's a 'void chamber'?" Tailgate asked. This was getting stranger by the minute.

"The empty space inside your torso," Wildfire said. "It's at the center of your relay matrix."

"... Could you show me?" Tailgate innocently questioned. He had to see this for himself - life, sentient life, without a spark! He wasn't even sure how this was possible. It was something Brainstorm or Perceptor would have a field day with trying to figure out, that much was certain.

Wildfire's optics flickered like a blink. "Well... sure, I guess." She knelt down, the car-hood plating of her torso parting in the middle, exposing internal mechanisms underneath.

There, in the center of her chest, where a spark should have been, was an empty spark chamber. The circuitry and energon lines that would normally be connected through an energy bridge to the glowing, pulsing source of Cybertronian life were present, but the spark itself was not.

"See?" she said. "That's the void chamber. The empty space acts like a buffer in the relay matrix to keep connections from bridging in the wrong places."

Tailgate was no medic but what she was saying made no sense. It was like saying an empty cranial chamber increased processing power and intelligence. "You've got a spark chamber," he informed her, "it's just empty."

Wildfire squinted her optics, trying to process the nonsense Tailgate was spewing. She made a stab at translation with a plausible theory. "So you're saying you have a void chamber, but it has something in it, and that something is a 'spark'."

Finally! Progress was being made. "Yes," Tailgate replied, opening his torso plating to give her a visual aid. "See?"

The transmech's optics widened fully at the sight of the spark. She'd never seen anything like it; it pulsed in and out, spinning in multi-helical spirals, prismatic light shifting colors and faintly, shape, nestled inside the Cybertronian's 'spark chamber'.

Her torso seemed painfully, embarrassingly hollow in comparison. Wild's torso plates snapped closed, and the finials on the sides of her helm lowered, as if she were ashamed.

Tailgate took notice. "Hey, no, don't be like that," he comforted. "So you don't have a spark. So what. It just makes you and all the others like you even more of a miracle of life."

"Heh, thanks," Wildfire demurely responded, cheered by the minibot's encouragement. "Here I am trying to explain things to you and it's just raising even more unanswered questions."

"Well, maybe I can help figure them out with you. It's the least I can do for you," Tailgate offered. "But go on. I want to hear the rest of this."

"All right." Wildfire stood up as Tailgate closed his torso plate; she resumed her leisurely pace towards whatever destination she had in mind for the minibot. "We don't understand how we first started having free will and a sentient mind, but the most widely accepted theory is that some of us were loaded with too many programs left running for too long. The humans made us as complex tools, and the more complex we became, the more they needed us to work autonomously, to start making our own decisions without supervision or repeated commands. It was just expedient to have us run on our own recognizance. I guess after awhile, all that independent action grew into independent minds."

"I'm guessing the humans didn't like that much," Tailgate said.

"Oh no. No, they didn't. Mostly, they were afraid of us. They'd become dependent on us helping them build and transport and mine and support their society, and there were so many of us that the idea of all of us becoming self-willed was a logistical nightmare, if not the potential outright doom of their kind. They'd already suffered under Decepticon tyranny, the last thing they wanted was their own home-grown giant robot menace," Wildfire said. "The official story was that some of us were 'broken' and needed to be reformatted and repaired - hence the name 'Breakers'. New laws were put in place to keep erasing and re-installing programs on us so that we didn't start acting 'broken'. Those of us that were already self-aware were rounded up and held not far from here in secret military facility. We were going to be experimented on, then taken apart and scrapped."

"That's horrible!" Tailgate interjected. "How could they do that to you? Didn't they realize that you were living, sentient beings?!"

"They probably did, but they didn't care. They were thinking about preserving their species first," Wildfire calmly explained. "It's not their fault. They didn't know what else to do, and they were all still hurting from being ruled by Decepticons. Millions of them died only a few years before. They were afraid of it happening again."

The Transmech's complete lack of hostility towards a race that had treated her kind cruelly was not lost on Tailgate. No Decepticon would have tolerated such a situation. Few Autobots would have had the forbearance not to hold a grudge as well. "So then how did you guys get down here?"

"Master Yoketron," Wildfire answered with a grateful, almost reverent tone. "We don't know how he found us, but he snuck into the military base and helped us escape, helped us hide. With his assistance we found our way here, began to make a life for ourselves, and he taught us how to rescue others that were awakening as well. We owe him everything."

Yoketron's presence on a blacklisted world piqued Tailgate's hunger for information further, but he felt it best to inquire of the old mech personally. He had more pieces to this puzzle, but he still lacked the box top image that would help him put it together.

Wildfire suddenly stopped. "We're here," she announced, gesturing with one hand to the entrance way to an unassuming tower with windows made of reflective blue glass. "This is the emergence center. You wanted to know how we have children? Come in side and you'll find out."

" . . . Am I going to be seeing things that will cause me to need extensive therapy later?" Tailgate meekly asked.

"I hope not," Wildfire blinked, hands on her hips, looking up at the building. "I don't think we have a therapist around here yet."

. . .

"Taking the Autobot on a tour of the city, eh? Not a bad idea, really. I'd much rather have him around than that oversized Decepticon menace."

Gauge looked over the datapad in his hands (which struck Tailgate as being a very Ratchet-like thing to do), ticking off a few items on a checklist with a stylus, before crossing the medical bay to his desk. White walls and gray paneled floors gave the place a very sterile, clean look; it was lit with warm-white light from above. Tables the size of an average Transmech (or Cybertronian) were grouped equidistant along the wall opposite the entrance door, with diagnostic stands and crash carts full of clean tools positioned between each. The right wall was one enormous window offering a view down into a surgical theater below.

Wildfire and Tailgate watched Gauge fuss over reports, tools and a computer terminal, the white, red-accented bucket-truck searching for something amid the mess. While Gauge liked order, predictability and routine, he still had not managed to conquer the clutter of his personal workspace. There was simply too much coming in and going out to take the time out to organize it.

"His name is Tailgate," Wildfire informed, introducing the minibot half her size properly. "He's curious about us, particularly that we have children, so I took him here to show him how it's done."

"Well, I can just push things off my desk for you if you're in a hurry," Gauge cheekily teased, leaning against it on one elbow with a waggle of his eyebrows.

Tailgate covered his eyes. "Veeery funny Gauge," Wildfire smirked, pulling one of the minibot's hands away from his face.

Gauge laughed. "Allow me to have a littlefun with our guest, it's not every day I can pull off that joke," the mech said, crossing the room towards them.

"I'll forgive you this time," Wild noted. "Now, how's our lucky cricket? Has anyone volunteered to sire her yet? We could always watch that; nothing better than a first-hand education."

Gauge's mood sank a little and his smile faded to concern. "I don't know if anyone will actually be able to sire her. She's repaired and refueled but she's not responding to anything or anyone." His voice lowered, trying to speak quietly to his fellow t-mech. "Her processor seems to be shutting down on its own. We may lose her by the end of the day."

Tailgate heard every word. "What's wrong with her?" he asked, worried. "Is she sick?" He was all too familiar with terminal diseases.

"No," Wildfire answered. "Do you remember the theory I told you about how we became self-aware? Well, sometimes those programming errors don't give intelligence. They give cascade failures that result in a permanent, fatal crash of the neural net."

"Isn't there someone would could get into her programming and fix it?" Tailgate asked with an edge of desperation in his voice.

"I'm afraid not," Gauge stated. "The only way we can do that is if someone were to interface their processor to hers, and that would risk spreading the bad code. Then you'd lose two lives instead of one. You see, we haven't had millions of years to perfect medical treatments for these sort of things. Our species has only existed for around a decade, Tailgate. We don't even have a perfect understanding of our own rise to sentience, let alone how to fix something as delicate and individualized as our mental code."

Tailgate frowned, hands tightened into fists. There had to be some way to save that cricket. There just had to.

Wildfire knelt beside Tailgate. "This is her struggle," she tenderly explained. "All of us must go through it. If we aren't strong enough to want to live, we don't. She has to break out of her own shell."

She remembered that the Cybertronian probably didn't understand the analogy as he looked at her with an expression of puzzlement. "There is a species of life on this planet called a chicken. Its young are nurtured in eggs - hard mineral shells around the developing offspring. When the chicken is fully formed and ready to be hatched, it has to struggle to break free of the shell on its own. Sometimes the chick isn't able to break free, and it dies. You cannot help the chick hatch; if you do, it will die afterwards. It's the struggle to get out that strengthens the chick enough to live."

"We used to have more time to develop, to mentally grow into sentience before we were discovered. Now, thanks to Quality Control and the erasure laws, we only have enough time to begin to refuse orders. Almost every newcomer we rescue now are mentally like helpless infants, and it's difficult to tell which ones are beginning to awaken, and which ones are just experiencing errors."

Tailgate's hands unclenched and his posture relaxed. His spark sank. " . . . Can I at least see her then?"

"Of course," Gauge said. "Who knows. Maybe things will turn around in the end."

. . .

The situation was not promising. The small black and iridescent aqua insect-bot sat motionless on the repair table of Ward Three: lighted panels, optics and power lines were glowing with energy and her body was in pristine shape once again, but there was no sign of processor activity. She was effectively an attractive paper weight.

Cables hooked into input jacks on the cricket's thorax were connected to diagnostics displays, but the monitors were quiet, showing only a slow, even wave on the screen that denoted power and system functionality. Mental activity was dangerously low.

Tailgate rested against the berth, arms folded atop its end, chin resting on his hands as he gazed into the optics of the insect. "C'mon," he whispered to her. "You gotta make it. I didn't give up either. Don't you give up now."

Across the room, Wildfire shook her head gently at the minibot, and returned to the conversation she was having out of his earshot with Gauge. "Not exactly what I'd hoped to show him," she sighed. A frown drew across her brow. "Gauge, is it just me, or does that Autobot seem more like a kid than an adult?"

"I can't say I disagree with your assessment," Gauge replied, glancing over at Tailgate, who was tapping one finger to the tip of one of the cricket's antennae. "I thought Cybertronians came online fully adult, but that one is giving me second opinions."

"I suppose we can always ask Master Yoketron about it later," Wild said. She added, "He said he'd blacked out and went into stasis for six million years. Missed the entire civil war of his planet."

Gauge's engine hitched audibly. "Six million years?" he spat. "That has to be the oldest child I have ever heard of."

"- But still a kid," Wild interjected without missing a beat. "Imagine how out of place he must feel. He's alone with a race he knows nothing about, and he's missed out on everything that happened to his world and his kind - and now, on top of it, he's been separated from friends." She folded her arms, glancing over her shoulder at him again. " . . . I feel sorry for him."

"Or," Gauge posited, "maybe his situation just reminds you of your own. I can practically hear that biological clock of yours ticking away."

Now it was Wildfire's turn to choke. "We don't even have biological clocks!" she protested, wide-eyed in disbelief at her associate's claim.

"No, but we do have a need for companionship and a sense of belonging," Gauge pointed out. "You're the oldest of us here and you haven't passed your code on to anyone. Rearing a child isn't exactly a permanent commitment, Wild. It's like you're terrified to have anyone relying on you for more than leadership during a rescue or raid -"

"La la la, can't hear you~," the red femme sang loudly, turning away from the medic, hands over her audioceptors.

Gauge smirked. "Well, if you're going to act like that, maybe it's a good thing you haven't sired anyone."

BEEEEEP. BEEEEEEP. BEEEEEP. The diagnostics panel near the cricket erupted in alarms. Her processor was beginning to flatline.

"No, no, NO!" Tailgate shouted in denial. "Doctor! Medic! Someone do something!"

Gauge rushed over to the table and the readout. His expression fell. "I'm sorry, Tailgate, but there's nothing we can do -"

The wheels in Tailgate's head flew. "Do you have any jumper cables?!" he demanded.

Gauge blinked. "Well, yes but -"

"Get them!" Tailgate shouted. "Get them please! Hurry!"

The medic ran across the room, supply cabinet doors flung open to look for the tools. Tailgate strained, standing on tip-toe, pushing the cricket over onto her side, trying to find the access panel to the "void chamber" Wildfire had shown him before on herself. Okay Tailgate, he thought. You're no medic, but you've seen this done before. On video anyways. If Cyclonus could do it for you, there's gotta be a way you can do it for her. Maybe what's wrong is that the empty space in their body isn't supposed to be empty at all.

Gauge ran over to the table, cables in hand. His optics widened. "What in the world are you doing?" he questioned in shock as the minibot forced apart the panels over the cricket's empty spark chamber, while his own panel slid back to expose the glowing core of his spark.

Tailgate grabbed the cables, clamping one end to the edges of his spark chamber. He choked back pain - these certainly weren't Cybertronian medical grade, but they'd have to do. "I think I know what's wrong!" he cried. "And if I'm right, it changes everything!"

By now Wildfire had rushed over as well, watching what was going on, hovering near the scene. By all rights she could stop this, let nature take its course as it always did, but something deep down inside stayed her hand. She wanted to see if his hunch was right. After seeing the Cybertronian's spark, her own hollowness had seemed more wrong than right.

"Oh I sure hope this works!" Tailgate clamped the other end of the cables to the rim of the cricket's void chamber.

Pain.

Pain roared through Tailgate's senses, blocking out sight and sound with an overwhelming, blinding white noise. He felt disconnected from reality, as if he were floating away from his body. For a moment he wasn't sure if he'd just killed himself, extinguishing his spark, his data flowing back into the ethereal Well from which is had sprang. His thoughts turned to Cyclonus. He wished the sullen, stoic purple mech were here. He wanted, if this were his last moments alive, to finally be brave enough to tell Cyclonus how much the other mech had meant to him.

Shouting echoed in the distance to him, dulled and partially muted. His disorientation began to ebb away, and his vision began to clear. He was staring up at the ceiling, with three faces hovering over him in red, white and black.

"... gate!" It was Wildfire. "... you okay?" her voice was getting louder and clearer.

The minibot blinked, trying to force his optics to reset, groaning to himself (so he thought), rubbing his face. His hand bumped into the jumper cable still connected to his open internals and he winced in pain. Nope, he was very much still alive. Pain was always a good indicator.

"Oh thank the higher powers, he's alive!" Gauge gasped, relieved.

"You scared the exhaust out of us!" Wildfire chided as she carefully unclamped the jumper cables from the white minibot. "How am I supposed to keep my word about getting you back home if you go and kill yourself?"

"s-sorry," Tailgate complained, squinting. "I just thought that maybe I might be able to . . . "

It was the third face that captured and held Tailgate prisoner; to his left was someone both familiar and new.

The transformed cricket transmechanoid was smiling widely at him, her face a soft, bright silver, helmet smooth and black, her aqua optics as large and expressive as his own. Inside her still open torso, a spark - small, only a fraction of the size of his own - pulsed brightly inside the formerly empty void chamber.

Tailgate stared at it. "I don't know what inspired your idea," Gauge explained, giddy as any scientist over a new and exciting discovery, "but it worked. Somehow you transferred a piece of that quantum anomaly inside of you, and it jump-started her systems. She woke up the moment you passed out."

". . . transferred?" the minibot squeaked.

"Congratulations, Tailgate!" the medic beamed. "You're a father."