INTO THE REAL WORLD
  [1] I am Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobot Transformers, and once ruler of
the faraway planet of Cybertron, leading the war against the tyranny of the
ruthless Decepticon Transformers and their leader Megatron. Both my and his
parts in that war, and the parts of my and his followers, ended when our
spaceship, called by a name that approximately translates into the languages of
Men as "the Ark", in which my forces were fighting desperately against
Megatron's forces who had boarded it, crashed into a volcano called Mount
St.Hilary in the Cascades Range in Oregon in the USA on Earth. There both armies
lay, damaged and deactivated by the fighting and the crash, for four million
years, until the 1984 eruption there chanced to reactivate the Ark, whose
automatic systems repaired and reawoke us. Then our war resumed, on Earth and on
Cybertron, as many tales tell, until the final battle around my base between my
forces and those of Megatron's current successor. They attacked suddenly. I did
not think we would win or even survive. But we managed to deactivate or capture
all the Decepticons on Earth and end the war at last. It was a hard battle, and
even I was badly damaged and under repair by our chief medical officer Ratchet.
I planned to soon finally liberate our ancient home world Cybertron.
  Suddenly I woke alone and without even my trailer, in James Wernicke's
computer factory's garage in Droitwich south of Birmingham in England. I could
find none of my followers or friends or enemies, robot or human. There was
nothing on inter-Autobot radio frequency except a foreign human pop music
station. I can directly receive television signals: I looked through the
channels, but none of the news programmes mentioned my recent battle in Oregon,
despite its size and noise and spectacularness which men could hardly have
missed. Nothing, emptiness, nothing. I tried inter-Autobot radio frequency
again, where "Kai epiousa hypo toon Seekers:" said a silly-sounding human voice,
and yet another harsh jangle of pop music, followed by "Priasthe Transformeras
peperasmenous hypo Hasbro kai ...", which despite the foreign language was so
clearly only a commercial for the simplified toy models of us made by men that
with a tired "brrrm" I switched off and drove to a window and looked out at the
traffic. Ambulances from a nearby hospital passed; none of them was Ratchet.
Nextdoor's towtruck came and went, but it was the wrong colour, it was not my
maintenance expert Hoist in his vehicle form. A white Porsche car passed, but it
had no figure 4's on it, it was not Jazz my agent. It was if my previous life
had never happened.
  I noticed that there was a human in my cab. Perhaps he could tell me where
everybody was and how I got there. I asked him.
  "I'm James Wernicke." he said, "I own this factory. I haven't got the
resources of J.B.Blackrock who you knew. You must pay your way while you are
with me." he said, and explained the truth, which was totally unexpected, and
took some time to sink in. There was no Decepticon menace to my people or to
Men, nor had there ever been. I had no need to hurry back to my people at our
base in Oregon, for my previous life, as I remembered it so well, never
happened, but was fiction stories written by humans, and he had made me as a
copy of my fictional original with artificial memories of that nonexistent past
which was so real to me. As I drove to my first of countless haulage jobs, and
rain beat on my windscreen, he told me of my true beginnings.
  [2] "I guess I've lived alone too long, reading books for company, instead of
meeting people, except for at work." he said, "The book characters seemed so
real to me while I was reading about them, but them I shut the book, or the film
or videocartoon finished, they vanished. I felt I had to meet you in person, not
merely see you out of reach behind the surface of a page or a screen. But unlike
fleshling - I mean human - fictional characters, your brain is a special sort of
computer, and I make computers. To cut a long story short, as I gradually
developed a sentient computer, Transformerisms kept finding their way into its
scenario, until I more and more thought of it as being you. Then at last I got a
nearby heavy engineering factory called Smith & Malton's to make your body,
which I put your brain into yesterday, taking it off the environment-simulator.
I remember what finally got me to get your body made:-
  (Thank goodness the rain's easing off.) Like many times before, I was flying
in the big white Autobot jet-fighter called Jetfire. I was strapped into his
small cockpit remotely high above the world, driven by his jetmotors blasting
like giant blowlamps a few feet behind me. Only a few thin high clouds and
remote mountains reached my height. Forests and fields passed far below. `How
far now to Autobot City?' I asked him.
  `40 minutes flying time now.' Jetfire replied, `Everybody'll be there, even
Emirate Xaaron [Autobot resistance leader] from Cybertron, and G.B.Blackrock,
and ... Stak! Lightning! That's as dangerous as Circuitbreaker! I'm going round
that lot ahead.'.
  `I don't blame you.' I replied. I knew of the woman called Circuitbreaker, who
in some of the stories hated robots and had built a powerful artillery-sized ray
gun's circuitry into her skin, to fire disruptor rays from her fingers with. An
routine science fiction idea technically impossible in the real world, thank
goodness. But I knew what Jetfire meant, for ahead loomed the huge mass of a
powerful thunderhead, whose top expanded into a huge anvil shape of cirrus.
Lightning darted about and thunder roared. The sun shone beside the thunderhead,
since I was far above the spread low cloud that thunderstorms cause. `No point
risking that stuff unnecessarily.' said Jetfire as he banked and turned to go
round the danger. Gusts of gale blew him about, and he seemed to lose shape and
soften and flatten. The thunder, added to the blasting of his jets, seemed to
change. The thunderhead changed shape - and became Timmy my Alsatian dog. It was
morning, and I was in bed, and he had woken me jumping up onto me panting and
barking wanting to be taken out. The sun was now my bedroom clock. A trail of
detached cirrus was now a picture on my bedroom wall. The landscape far below
Jetfire's wings was now my bedroom floor. [3] I told Timmy to lie down, and
tried to bring Jetfire and the Oregon sky back for a few minutes more, long
enough to reach the fabled Autobot City for once, but it was no good. The
morning and the sun had evaporated him like a overnight mist. I shook off the
residue of yet another Transformer dream as I dressed and took Timmy for a walk.
I should have realized that something was wrong, for the exclamation `Stak!'
never occurs in Transformers stories but only (but often) in a different
unrelated science fiction scenario. I would have given a hundred of those dream
flights to meet him in reality for once. The previous night I had dreamed of
riding in you, but as morning came you vanished as usual. I dreamed of real
Transformers about once each three nights. It was no good, I had to make a real
one of you. I went back to work. Neural net computer technology is developing
fast. It was a long job, but I and Smith & Malton's Ltd made your body and brain
and mind, and gave it the memories of your fictional original, and at last here
you are real and full sized and alive in my garage, not just a model.".
  "So you've managed to gain your `lost' friend." I said to him, "I've in effect
lost twenty friends, left back in my unattainable fictional past. Ratchet,
Wheeljack, Mirage, even Starscream or Rumble, where are all of you? Gone like
ghosts.".
  "In this world where there are so many fictional robots, you will be the first
real one." he said, "You will be famous. I'll make sure the Armed Forces don't
get hold of you, to keep you as a secret. I'll go public first.".
  "In effect, you suddenly teleported me from my own world where I belong and
where my people meet me, and put me in someone else's world in someone else's
life." I replied, "Is this the place we are going to first?".
  I arrived at GEC in Trafford Park in Manchester. There I picked up a big
flatbed trailer which carried a huge metal box shape called a `transformer'. For
a moment I forgot my loneliness, then realized that it was the other meaning of
the word, an inanimate device to change the voltage of AC electricity. I must
haul for men to pay my keep. I went onto the M62 over the Pennines. The bare
treeless wilderness of moor reminded me not at all of either Cybertron or
Oregon. V-formations of wild geese flew over below tattered cloud. I reached the
site of a new electricity substation and waited for the men and their crane to
unload me.
  [4] Their crane revved its hardest. My load felt lighter but didn't lift off.
Delay and complication on my first real action.
  "Crane won't take it. I <told> you to hire the big one." said a workman.
  "Can I help you?" I said, startling the workmen, for there was nobody in me,
for James was stretching his legs.
  "Look, Daddy, there's Optimus Prime, real, and he talked!" a passing boy
exclaimed to his father.
  "You silly ass. It's just a truck. It's only painted to look like him." his
father replied, then stood rigid from fright as for the first time in reality I
separated from my trailer and transformed, and said "Crane lift one end and I'll
lift the other end.".
  I was not as well known among men as now. People gaped while I used a spare
girder as a crowbar to help move the transformer to where it was to be
installed. A man-shape 25 feet tall, made of steel, with oversized diesel
exhaust pipes blasting upwards behind its shoulders, was not quite what they had
expected. But the foreman plucked up courage to approach me and thank me.
  "I bring you greetings from Cybertron." I started to say, but stopped myself
in time.
  By the time the job was finished, flocks of starlings were flying over to the
towns to roost, and when I got the flatbed back to its depot it was dark. The
traffic kept reminding me of my lost followers. The yellow truck-crane at the
site reminded me of Grapple. A passing police car reminded me of Prowl. [5] And
the same when I was taking James home over the moors under the stars. Men long
ago had classified the stars into groups named after people and animals, but
some of them seemed to me to outline other figures. When I looked south I again
saw Prowl, my faithful second-in-command, standing huge above the bleak hills,
this time in his humanoid robot form, as the constellations which men call
Ophiuchus and Serpens, and bright red Antares marked his left foot; Grapple the
architect, also in robot form, lay on his side further to the right due south as
Virgo, and the bright star Spica marked his left knee; between the two was
Tracks (as Libra; Mu Serpentis was his head); below Grapple was Trailbreaker the
black van as Corvus and Crater. Also I saw two who I was not sorry to know that
they did not exist in reality: the ruthless powerful Megatron, complete with his
fusion-cannon, as Bootes, with Arcturus marking his left knee; and his follower
the pantherlike Ravage as Leo about to start sinking again below the rim of
Earth. But above Ravage's back, Leo Minor seemed to outline heroic hapless
little Scrounge of Polyhex on Cybertron who never made it to Earth, but he
carried a vital message to Blaster's Autobot resistance group in Polyhex the
Decepticon capital of Cybertron. Some star groups had less connection with my
past: Ursa Major (all of it, not just the Big Dipper) looks to the life like a
bear, as its usual name says; but above Prowl, high and due south, Hercules
looked to me far more like the left side view of a kneeling man wearing and
firing a flamethrower (Corona Borealis was the bottom of the bulky rounded-ended
fueltank strapped to his back) than like the usual figure: a symbol of summer
heat and drought? or an omen of future trouble? Looking north showed more
Decepticons: Shockwave (Cassiopeia) and Soundwave (Cepheus) and Laserbeak (part
of Draco) looked down at me alone in this exile-land.
  It was the same later that night, and later that year as the stars passed over
me in my many long lone journeys hauling goods for men (the stars, passing from
east to west, are in the same position 4 minutes earlier each next night). Often
James Wernicke stayed at the works. By now Men knew me and did not fear me, but
oh! to meet even one of my old companions in reality even once. As Prowl reached
his highest due south and started to sink, friendlier figures around the `Summer
Triangle' rose higher: little Bumblebee (Lyra) adorned with the bright star
Vega; huge powerful Jetfire (Cygnus) with the strange varying star Chi Cygni in
his cockpit, following delta- winged Silverbolt (Aquila and Scutum) along the
Milky Way; Deneb and Altair were on their rear ends. Below Silverbolt's nose,
driving to the right at a downwards angle, his front wheels scarcely clearing
the distant hills even at his highest, was Hoist my maintenance expert in his
towtruck form (bright part of Sagittarius). Below Jetfire a patch of small
groups of stars could be seen as a blowtorch, such as Hoist may have used in his
work in his workshop in the Ark (Equuleus and Delphinus (ends of cylinders),
Vulpecula (tubes), Sagitta (torch head)). I often saw their images, irrelevantly
high and remote, as summer passed and autumn came. Often I arrived from these
lonely night journeys to find Wernicke's garage locked, and I had to park in the
street till morning. Full moon hid them, except the bright stars, and lit my way
better.
  One moonlit night I arrived after midnight and parked quietly outside, and was
surprised to hear James over my onboard radio. "Optimus, do you copy?" he said
sleepily into a walkietalkie. Timmy his Alsatian slept by his bed. Why he was
awake was obvious, for nextdoor's two Alsatians were howling at the moon loudly
and continuously, as they often did when the sky was clear. "What a miserable
noise those two make. I'll let you in. At least that contraflow's finished." he
said.
  "But another's started." I replied, "That motorway's like painting the Forth
Bridge. Finish it and it's time to start again. Leaves making roads slimy. It'll
start to freeze soon.".
  I went in and changed my engine oil and hosed myself down. I was glad to rest
after hauling machinery from Glasgow to Bridgnorth - and I was back in my base
in Oregon in USA. Around me were many other Autobots who I knew of old: Huffer
the engineer (transforms to an orange artic cab); Mirage (transforms to a blue
and white racing car); Ironhide (transforms to a red van); Bumblebee (transforms
to a yellow Volkswagen Beetle); Skids (transforms to a blue van); Powerglide
(transforms to a red Fairchild jetplane); Ravage! Decepticon spy! How did he get
in here? Although he is expert at keeping out of sight. (In the stories he
shrinks and transforms to a black tape cassette.) [6] He at once jumped at me
roaring, knowing that I knew that he had overheard our plan, and I grappled with
him.
  "Skids!" I called out, "Help me catch him so he can't get away and tell
Megatron!". Skids came. For some reason he transformed into his van form; I
feared harmful delay while he transformed back. But Ravage seemed to shrink, and
his roaring became higher pitched. The other Autobots disappeared, but
thankfully not Skids. "Ohhh." I said, for as usual the fading dream left me
alone, deprived of my kin, in James's garage as Cybertron or Oregon evaporated.
By my right front wheel James's cat held a large rat in its mouth: the noises of
the fight between the two had obviously intruded into my dream world and them
woken me. A distant shut-in or shut-out dog barking continuously somewhere made
an irrelevant graffiti of useless noise on the night silence. Then to my
amazement I saw that I was not kin-less after all, for Skids had come back from
the dream world with me and was parked there in James's garage! But I realized
my mistake almost at once, and revved my engine loudly to blow the rest of the
sleep out of my brain. It was only James's blue delivery van, brainless and
inanimate. The only real Skids that I knew of was James's nephew's toy model of
him.
  I picked the cat up gently and stroked it. "Caught a rat, Tabbins?" I said to
it, "They're worse than mice among circuitry, gnawing things. As long as you
don't sharpen your claws on my tyres.". Ravage was a feared enemy in my world;
many cats are a feared enemy in their world of rats and mice, which is smaller
that Man's world, even as Man's world is smaller than my own world of Cybertron.
The land of Polyhex, Celestial Spires, Iacon's dome! Oh once again to walk there
in my ancient land of home! But there's no such place.". I put Tabbins down and
went back to sleep, for my brain circuitry has to settle itself after the day,
same as with people.

        Time passed. I hauled loads and lifted heavy objects and did miscellaneous
work for men to pay for my fuel and oil. G.B.Blackrock visited my dreams a few
times, but benefited me nothing in waking life. One evening in November I saw
flames and smoke over the roofs where the shops are and hurried there. One of a
row of shops was on fire. The street was pedestrianized; at its entrance stood a
fire engine, whose driver was blaspheming loudly and long at a large three sided
advertisement hoarding holder which blocked the entrance to anything wider than
a motorcycle. "Fly to Majorca" the near face of the hoarding idiotically
advised. "@#$%$#@ that hoarding!!" he was shouting as I quickly pulled up, "The
chief warned the Council that this may happen, the back way in keeps getting
blocked with parked cars, and now it's happened! But the &^% planners wouldn't
listen.". In his desperation he tried to ram the hoarding down, but it was too
strongly built.
  "A neighbour had a heart attack," Mr.Johnson, the shop's owner, replied
angrily, "and the ambulance couldn't get in for that stupid hoarding. Planner's
in the pay of the advertising company, I bet.", and then looked at me
sympathetically and hopelessly, for delivery vehicle drivers had the same
nuisance sometimes. [7] "Holy Cybertron!" he yelped as I transformed, there in
front of him in England in reality, instead of on the TV screen where he had
often seen me before. "It's no good, I can't get past those cars." I overheard
the fire engine driver's radio message to his base, as swinging a heavy
ball-and-chain I smashed the hoarding holder and kicked the bits aside. Any
respect for the ad company's property went where scrap metal ends up as my
exhaust pipes blasted upwards and with crashes of splintering concrete the heavy
steel ball reduced "Fly to Majorca" and "Eat Fry's Chocolate" and "Buy Fluffo
dolls: she has every fashion accessory" to fragments summarily as a fireman in a
hurry hoses aside a tout who has chosen the wrong place and time to pester. The
fire engine bumped over the stump of the hoarding and reached the fire, which
was quickly put out. "I don't know what that thing is, but if it hadn't knocked
that obstruction down ..." said a fireman to another.
  I went on my hands and knees to talk to Mr.Johnson. "The cleaner woman's
vacuum cleaner plug broke, so she makeshifted ..." he said, "... arced across
catching bedding on display, and she cut-and-ran ... `Sorry' won't bring my
stock back, if she tries apologizing. They caught the fire just in time. I'd
have asked you in for a cup of tea, but ... It's hard to believe, you're only
mechanism and electronics, but thinking and alive. I've seen models of you, and
in cartoons, but to meet a real one!".
  A fireman hammered on my left leg with the back of his axe and shouted:
"Quick! Someone's upstairs and the stairs've gone!". I quickly stood up and
cleared away the remains of the front upstairs window, my steel skin unhurt by
the glass, and reached in and took out a teenage boy. "You said there was nobody
in the premises." a fireman accused Mr.Johnson as I put the boy on the ground.
  "You told me you were going to the pictures." Mr.Johnson said to the boy.
  "I changed my mind." said the boy.
  "Right. That's it." said another man watching, "If they try to put that
hoarding back, we'll run their workmen off the site. Lives and property matter
more than shouting traders' wares. The ambulance couldn't get in that time and
still they wouldn't listen.".
  [8] The event trailed its inevitable rat's-tail of petty consequences. In war,
half a town can be flattened and it is written off as necessary. In the real
world in peacetime, even so much as an advertisement hoarding knocked down ...
  James was out. His garage phone rang, so I unfolded an arm and plugged in a
cable connecting my brain to the phone wires. "He's out. Can I take a message?"
I answered.
  "Mr. Wernicke." said a managerial-sounding voice, "About what your performing
lorry did yesterday, my firm lives by hiring ad space ... I'm not a rich man ...
brute force and a demolition ball ... I want from you the cost of hiring those
three spaces from yesterday until the hoarding is rebuilt and back in use. Plus
the cost of replacing the hoarding ... solicitor ...".
  "No. Tell Fluffo Dolls etc that fires and illness and injury don't wait for
permissions to be applied for." I replied.
  "Meaning that you want me to treat it as fire damage." said the ad firm man,
"I'm sure my insurers'll back me up. Fluffo Dolls, Jetsave Holidays, Fry's
Chocolate, they all hired that ad space off my firm, and they expect ...".
  The Indian who ran `Abdulmalik Kitchenware', who was in Wernicke's for
something, took the other phone extension and interrupting said, "Varunaputra
Abdulmalik here, I'm nextdoor to Johnson's. Half the block might have burnt down
if Optimus hadn't ...".
  "Optimus Prime?" the ad man interrupted, "He's only toys and in a comic. It's
nowhere near April the first, not funny - solicitor - police - damages - three
prime site ad spaces gone west ...".
  "There was a disco party here recently, " Varunaputra interrupted, "cars
parked everywhere, the din gave my old father a heart attack and the ambulance
couldn't get in for ...".
  "I get enough nuisance from gales and pop music groups flyposting and the
like, without this sort of thing as well." the ad man interrupted, "Last month a
building contractor drove a bulldozer crash through a prime site hoarding to get
access to a site. I went there with my solicitor in person, and all we got was
lip from site navvies, and one of them drove a dumper at us.".
  "No, you're not putting it up again, he nearly died. The whole block's
together about this." said Varunaputra. The hoarding was not rebuilt, and the ad
firm said nothing more. I helped Mr.Johnson to clear out his damaged interior
and rebuild. People photographed me doing such things as standing by Johnson's
front with an armful of floorboards passing them in to him one by one as he
fitted them upstairs. ("Now then, Johnny, leave workmen alone when they're busy.
Mr.Prime'll tell you about Cybertron later." a woman shopping said to her small
son who started to ask me questions.) The event inspired the inevitable
political cartoon in the local newspaper, then retreated into the past as the
days kept on getting shorter and colder.

        My brain, like fleshlings' brains, sometimes while I sleep runs in `garbage
collection' mode to find and delete inappropriate connections between remembered
ideas. This causes many odd dreams. Many of these are set in my fictional past;
but one was set in the fictional world of the Fluffo doll, who has a comic in
which she appears as a scatterbrained and fashion-mad teenage girl. Petty pretty
young children's stuff; I know as much as I want to know about her fictional
scenario via across the road's children settling in my cab to read comics
including that one, exposing me to them whether I want to read them or not. I
found myself, shrunk to human height, flying to Majorca in an airliner with the
fictional Fluffo. Between us two on the seat was a large box of Fry's chocolates
which we two were sharing. I wondered briefly how the nearby notice "Dilarang
Merokok" (Indonesian for `No Smoking') applied to my exhaust. We flew over
France and out over the Mediterranean. A tall three-sided rock islet loomed up,
and proved to be an exact enlarged copy of the hoarding. I never arrived, for
suddenly the plane started to fall towards the deep sea, accompanied by a
continuous loud alarm signal, which rapidly changed into the telephone bell in
James's garage. I felt confused, then revved my engine hard to clear the sleep
and dream scenario out of my brain. After that I was thinking clearer; I
connected myself to the phone line. It was the police wanting me as a court
witness, for the fire brigade prosecuted Mr.Johnson's cleaner for causing the
fire by negligence; they wondered how the court could cope, for my size and
exhaustyness are not intended for Men's rooms; and how far the law would go in
treating sentient robots as independently responsible people. At the trial, the
magistrate let me look in through a window to give my evidence. The cleaner got
three weeks prison for gross criminal negligence. Mr.Johnson was paid by his
insurance, who decided not to try to recover the cost from the cleaner. Nothing
more was heard about the hoarding.

        As Christmas approached, I tried to turn my dreams away from my lost fictional
companions by making or buying in spare moments toys to give to a nearby large
council children's home. Perhaps if I made them happy, at <my> expense and not
by pestering half the town, my nights might bring more cheerful thoughts to me,
as I hauled yet another tanktrailer of acid from Wolverhampton to Shrewsbury
under stars and a crescent moon past windblown leafless trees far from Oregon
and Cybertron. [9] The next day was 21th December, the shortest day. Four days
to the big festival - for fleshlings. What for me?, deprived of the pleasures of
the table, far too bulky to enter men's houses or take part in many of their
games? Likely only to be asked to carry people and presents, what the ancient
Greeks called being a "donkey at the festival". It pelted with rain. The
seasonal lights in towns made confusing reflections in wet roads as I
accumulated presents. At Lewis's stores no.2 goods entrance, I unfolded my right
arm and loaded cartons of train sets and Care Bears into my cab as a storeman
barrowed them out to me. I gave him the cheque. If Wheeljack had been with me,
he could have ... oh forget it. But, with aid from tools which I made, I made
some toys in spare moments. I bought a big batch of orange artificial fur cloth,
and kapok stuffing, and gradually a pile of teddybears grew in a corner in
James's garage, with no help from Tabbins who kept playing with loose arms and
legs before I could fit them. At least it made a change from hauling
tanktrailers of acid. Once Birmingham was the world's toymakers. Now most toys
in Britain are imported. What has happened to Tri-ang, or Chad Valley, or many
other once-famous British toy tradenames? Chad Valley is a real place in the
south of Birmingham, not a fictional Toyland as James used to think in his own
childhood from seeing the name on toy boxes. After the festivities I was booked
to haul more acid, for at least a month - I must earn a living - not a carefree
load with frost about, and I didn't like the sound of the weather forecast.
  But now the great day dawned. I drove into the children's home's yard and
unloaded myself and gave the toys to the children. I brought a big handnet with
me: one look at it told the inevitable bossy or greedy minority not to spoil the
other children's pleasure. James came with me: the home's director let him have
Christmas dinner there. "Pity you can't eat like us." said the director to me,
"I've got 20 gallons of diesel for you round the back. I sympathize with you, a
friendly caring mind trapped in that great mechanical body.". The sky cleared.
The sun passed briefly low across the south. For once I could go in with them,
for the room (it was the ballroom before the old duke died and his heir had to
sell the building to pay death duties) was about tall enough for me to stand on
hands and knees. The floor rested straight on hard ground without a cellar, and
they well padded it against my weight. I brought a garage extractor fan and
connected it to my exhaust pipes to blow the fumes through a wide flexible pipe
out of a window. They had the Christmas dinner. I stood still and let them talk
with me. One of them had a toy model of me. They wanted to hear about the time
in the cartoon stories when the Decepticons attacked a hydroelectric power
station, and Hound (who transforms to a dark green jeep) and Spike Witwicky (a
boy in the stories) each saved the other. I tried to sound cheerful and told the
story, but all that bringing up of my fictional past raised the old longing
again. I missed Spike. The party ran its course and finished. I drove out. The
caretaker brought some cake and mince pies to me, forgetting that I am not a
fleshling: he meant well. I set off back to Wernicke's. It was a clear starry
night, the first for weeks. I was glad that helping to bring seasonal happiness
to humans had somewhat lessened my old longing for my lost followers. But out of
town and away from street lights it was different, when the road turned due
south under the cold stars.
  [10] The Autobots! High and remote I saw them, twelve of them in the bright
display of the winter stars which encrusted the frosty sky. To the west below
Pegasus the Horse (including part of Andromeda as his hindleg), were the four
smaller Aerialbots in a perpetual break-display: Slingshot and Skydive as the
west and north ends of Pisces, leaving jet-trails of stars; Air Raid (a bit of
Andromeda) beside Skydive; and Fireflight (Triangulum). Above the Horse my
engineer Wheeljack lay on his side, his legs and chest parabola clearly
outlined, as the rest of Andromeda, plus Lacerta. Due south was the bright form
of Huffer, my other engineer, as what men call Orion, holding a long gun or tool
in his left hand. To his right was Jazz in his car form as Aries and Taurus; the
Pleiades shimmered on his hind roof. Mirage (Gemini) with Castor and Pollux
bright on his shoulders, Skids (Lepus), Blades the helicopter (Auriga), and
Gears the pickup truck (Canis Minor as his windscreen, and Monoceros) added to
the gathering. From Huffer's left foot, The Road (Eridanus) meandered right then
left and vanished below the horizon. One Decepticon intruded: overhead
Starscream the F15 jet fighter shone bright (Perseus) (as well as Shockwave
(Cassiopeia) and Soundwave (Cepheus) which I had noticed before). The autumn
stars were lower in the west: Pegasus's head was nearly setting, and the lower
ends of The Blowtorch's cylinders had touched the horizon. I had never seen so
many of my people at once before, high above the leafless countryside. I stopped
and could not help staring at them. Lower, the stars that had more of Earth's
air to shine through, flashed and twinkled, including Ratchet's eye, Sirius, the
brightest star in the sky. Ratchet (Canis Major) seemed to wink at me
continuously, as if calling to me. In the lonely empty silence, earth and humans
seemed less and less real, and my mind returned to Oregon and Cybertron, as it
often before had in dreams - but this time even more so. I drove a few miles
further, but these images wouldn't go away. James had said once "If an idea
infests my head and won't go away, I write it out on paper as a story. That gets
it out of my head.", and that is why he had made me, not on paper but in
full-sized steel and electronics. I could take it no longer. I shouted up at
coldly glittering Ratchet and Wheeljack: "All right! You win! I'll make real
ones of you!".