Day One

Diego Garcia, 0214H

Hangar F3

The hangar bay door groaned in protest. For possibly the first time since its installation, the door was being opened, and it didn't seem too happy about it. Jennifer Silver, graduate student in comparative linguistics, who had been, grudgingly, given a back corner of Hangar F3 for her research, muffled a curse as she rolled out of her cot.

The night gaped beyond the open door. A squad of NEST soldiers trooped in, just like they owned the place, Jennifer thought sourly. And in a way, which didn't improve her mood much, they did. "What the hell are you doing here?" she asked, trying to bundle her wavy hair into a ponytail. She winced as one of the soldiers hit the lights. Thirty feet overhead, fluorescents bloomed.

"You oughta be happy," the squad's leader said, "It's like Christmas morning for you." He gestured into the blackness beyond. "Got you your own subject."

"My own…? Is that a Decepticon?" Still blinking at the sudden wash of light, she could dimly make out a massive, blocky shape on one of the shift-pallets the NEST soldiers used to load and unload heavy equipment.

Another soldier laughed. "What's left of him, at any rate."

"And you're bringing him here?" She knew the soldiers didn't think much of her or her research, but this was really a bit much. Around her, more soldiers poured in, restacking boxes, clearing a space in the center of the hangar big enough, she presumed, to accommodate the robot.

The sergeant shrugged. "Orders from on high. Maybe they figure you'd leave the rest of our guys alone."

It was too late at night to go over this old ground again. Her university had ponied up bunches of money and resources when the DoD had requested engineers, robotics experts and the like. Part of their deal had been, well, her. While her engineering friends happily studied specs and schematics gleaned even from the simplest of robotic designs the Autobots decided were safe to share with the humans, she'd made the case that study of their language was essential. The DoD, which had thrived for years through proactive paranoia, had approved with enthusiasm—maybe they didn't trust their Autobot 'allies' as much as they said they did. But the NEST team didn't seem to share the DoD's enthusiasm.

Jennifer pinched her mouth at the sergeant. "I don't mean to question orders, of course," she had no patience for all this military hierarchy nonsense, "but a Decepticon? Isn't it going to try to kill me or something?"

The sergeant was unimpressed. "Just use your magic language hoodoo on him," he said. Behind him, a few others laughed. "Or your charm," added another. "You must be saving it up somewhere."

Jennifer felt her hands ball into fists. Classic anger response, she told herself. Don't let yourself get riled. You're not going to punch him. Especially because he's in full body armor. She forced a smile onto her face, and said, "Well, let's just see what I have to work with, then."

The robot was in awful shape. In her unprofessional opinion, that is. Most of its right leg was missing, the left bore some blackening and pitting from a large explosion. The appendages of the right hand had been crumpled together into a half-crushed, half-welded flipper, and barrels on a large chain gun on that arm were half melted. The chassis was pocked with the circular hits from the NEST soldiers' guns, and the left side of the jaw hung slackly, several metal plates hanging loosely, leaking some whitish watery fluid. Engineers had already been at the 'bot—she could see their handiwork in the hose clamps and the blobs of insulating foam capping off the ends of the robot's injuries.

The robot showed no sign of recognition of anything. Its eyes irised inward a little, probably an involuntary response to the bright light, but it showed no curiosity, didn't look around. Jennifer wondered about the jaw injury—had it damaged the creature further up into the processor? A brain-dead subject would be useless to her.

One of the soldiers slapped her deliberately too hard on the shoulder. "Don't worry, he'll make it through the night," he said.

"What the hell did you do to him?" She'd seen the Autobots come back injured, but never anything like this.

The soldier stepped away from her as if her stupidity were contagious. "Umm, it's a war? They try to kill us, we try to kill them?"

"Yeah, but…."

"Awww, getting all soft on the bad guys," another soldier said. "You know how it is with those soft college types. Sympathy for the devil and all that."

"That's an Ozzy album, not philosophy," she shot back. And immediately regretted. Nothing worse than playing into their 'intellectual snob' stereotype. "Anyway," she said, walking up to the creature's face, careful to step around a puddle of the white…whatever it was drooling, "Can it even talk?" She reached a hand up toward the robot's face, trying to get, if nothing else, an ocular response.

The red eyes suddenly snapped into focus, first on her outstretched hand, then back to her face. The jaw worked, the dangling plates clattering. She heard a sound like gears grinding from deep in the thing's throat. It gave a sudden heave and splattered her with a thick yellow goo.

Jennifer could hear the soldiers laughing, even through the thick stuff. She tried to wipe it off her face. It stung into her eyes. Not as much as the soldiers laughing stung her pride. This little story would make it through Diego Garcia before breakfast. She could hardly imagine the nicknames they'd come up with for her. She cast about in her brain for something to say that would seem dignified, that would negate the whole absurdity. Nothing. How many years of education and you can't even come up with a face-saving comment?

Her shoulders slumped. "I'll just get the hose, then, shall I?" she said, mostly to herself.

The sergeant stepped back as she crossed his path, dripping yellow gunk. "Looks like the start of a beautiful friendship," he grinned.

0308H

She'd hosed herself off, top to bottom, and spent some time squinting at her skin, trying to see if the yellow goo had been some sort of corrosive. It left a rusted-iron kind of smell, but seemed otherwise to have no lasting effect. The next reasonable thing to do was to clean the robot up a bit. After all, she was going to be left in a 6-foot reinforced concrete walled hangar with the thing for days on end. Better to try and find some way to make the thing not want to kill her. Him, she corrected herself. Not thing. Stop calling him a thing.

Step one, she said, don't even respond to the previous incident. Maybe he'd been unable to control himself. Maybe it wasn't deliberate. Don't judge. She forced her brightest smile. Autobots recognized human facial expressions, even though they couldn't mimic many of them. She didn't know about the Decepticons. There was so much nobody knew about their enemy. She felt a kind of excitement. If she could just get the thing—him—to talk, how much could she learn! Not only about the robots in general, but about the real cause of the fighting between the two factions. Or were they races? See, she didn't even know that much!

"Hi!" she said, brightly. She gestured to the floor next to her. "I've got some stuff here for you. This," she held it up, "is a hose. I'd like to at least rinse some of that gunk off you." She spoke slowly, carefully, the way one spoke to a small child. "And this," she gestured to the hip-high barrel the soldiers had left her with, "is…well, it's some sort of analgesic, they tell me. Fancy word for painkiller. If I put it on parts that hurt, they won't hurt as much. Okay?" She paused. She was definitely getting an ocular response—the eyes had tracked to each item as she'd indicated it. But it didn't say or do anything, not even twitch. Okay, ask direct permission. "Is it okay if I do these?" Maybe he didn't understand the word 'okay'. How to say it more simply? "I'm trying to help. May I help?" Then, more bluntly, "Please don't try to kill me." It blinked, once, slowly, as if tired.

She sucked in a deep breath and scooped up the hose. She approached his head slowly, acutely aware she was well within the reach of his wicked looking barbed hands. She began a nervous babble. "That yellow stuff didn't taste very good to me, and probably not to you, either, I'm guessing, So I'm just going to use this," she hefted the hose again, "to wash it away." She opened the nozzle and hesitantly, keeping one nervous eye on the robot's good hand, began spraying the parts of the face, neck and upper chest that she could see had the yellow goo on them. The goo had dried around the edges to a thick crust, like a fried egg. "There, that's not so bad, is it? That's better, right?" She sluiced water around the robot's mouth, half afraid he might sputter. No, she told herself, they don't breathe. You can't drown one of them, especially not with a modified garden hose. If they were that easy to kill, Diego Garcia would be collecting cobwebs. When the water finally ran clear, she shut off the hose and scooped up a double-handful of the analgesic gel. The robot's large red eyes focussed on her hands as she raised them. "This is the pain killing stuff I told you about. I'd like to put some of it on your jaw."

The red eyes tracked her as she approached, as if measuring the threat she represented. She held up one gelled hand. "I'm going to put this on you. It's not going to hurt." She reached slowly toward one of the twisted plates. Her engineer friends told her that the robots, at least the Autobots, weren't made of dead metal plates—that the metal somehow had something like nerves in it that transmitted messages to the central processor. In other words, that they felt pain.

She slathered the plate with the gel. She heard a mechanical sound, like a servo preparing to fire, but the robot didn't move. "Again?" she said, gesturing toward the face. The huge eyes followed her. This time she went for a plate a little deeper under the surface, and the complicated system of gears and wires that were connected to it. When she finished, she stepped back again. "Is that helping?"

The robot blinked at her again.

"More?" She gestured back to the tub of gel.

The robot moved with a loud groan of metal and the sound of sliding servos. Jennifer jumped back, nearly tripping over part of the hose. She landed heavily on her hands and backside. And now it kills me, she thought. And my last action will have been falling on my ass. Great.

But when she looked up, the robot was trying to reach its injured arm toward her. When she jumped back, it had frozen, midmove and was watching her, almost curiously.

"Oh," she said. She pushed to her feet, hands slipping a little in the bits of gel. "I see." She laughed, nervously. "I get it. Yes. Of course." She scooped another amount of gel onto her hands. "I'll just come around, okay?" She was careful to walk where the robot could see her for as long as possible. He lowered his injured arm down to the ground next to the shift pallet.

Up close, the damage looked even worse—the long hooked spikes on the robot's hands had been bent, as if hammered flat. One had been pushed down and was puncturing the finger next to it. One side digit—did this robot have two thumbs per hand?—had been twisted around and melted back against the wrist. She plopped the mound of gel she'd scooped up on the back of the hand and got to work spreading it around, trying to work it as best she could into the spaces between the plates. The robot, who had lifted his head to watch her, lowered his head back down to the pallet. Jennifer took this as a positive sign.

When she'd finished and walked around to the robot's head again, the eyes had flickered closed, large metal shutters covering the red sockets. They snapped open, as if he'd been caught napping. Suddenly Jennifer felt achingly tired too. She managed another smile, a little less textbook this time. "They said they'll come in to help suspend you in the morning. That's supposed to help. Right now, though, I need some sleep, and I think you do too. If you even sleep. Okay?" The robot blinked at her again, inscrutable. Well, the blink had meant 'okay' in thus far—or at least it hadn't been a warning or a no-signal. Jennifer washed her hands in the industrial sink and hit the lights.

0852H

"Well, well. Look who made it through the night."

"They told me they were sure he would," Jennifer said.

"I was talking about you, Barfy. From what I heard he was seasoning you up or something."

"Shut up. And do your job."

"Fine, fine." The engineer turned his attention to where his team was rigging a suspension harness from the ceiling braces. "You just too nasty to eat," he added under his breath.

Jennifer decided to let that one pass. She was too tired. It wasn't as easy as one would think to sleep in the same room as a hostile and injured alien robot. It hadn't help that he made weird noises half the night too. Not any words she recognized, though her Cybertronian lexicon was still pitifully small.

Instead she watched the engineers measure the robot, and retire to do some quick calculations of where to place the hanging straps. The Decepticon's chassis was broader than the Autobots, and, apparently, his suspension points had to be adjusted. Still, the engineers worked with ruthless efficiency, and before the morning was half over, they'd managed to hoist the robot into something like a sitting position. Jennifer was somewhat relieved to see that the robot looked around him as they lifted him. He seemed a little more…with it today than yesterday. Maybe today she could get him to talk.

She waited until the engineers had cleared out, simply because she didn't want to fail in front of witnesses. She gathered up her oversized notepad and black marker and stopped at what she hoped was a respectful distance.

"Remember me? From last night?"

The robot turned his head away. This was not going well.

"Yeah, well, I don't want to remember last night either, to be honest."

He kept his head fixed at a pile of crates on the far side of the hangar.

"Don't even pretend you don't understand what I'm saying," she said. "I know you do." Still no response. "Okay, I'm going to talk, and you're going to pretend not to listen. That's how it's going to be, right? Fine." She straightened up. "I'm a researcher in comparative linguistics. I'm not associated with the soldiers who brought you here or anything. I'm just interested in languages. In particular, I'm interested in your language." Though he kept his head turned away, Jennifer saw his eyes flicker down to her. Encouraging sign. She hoped. She ran with it.

"Every language has a mechanism for making new words, and for stringing those words together into sentences. There's a theory called Universal Grammar that says that these mechanisms are innate—that every creature who can access language not only has a grammar, but that all the grammars play off basically the same rules—all of them have nouns, and adverbs and conditional tenses and stuff like that." This was all Linguistics 101 stuff, but the robot was definitely listening.

"You, I mean, all of you from Cybertron, well, your our first chance to really test that. Is Universal Grammar universal? That's what I'm interested in. How you make language. I'm not interested in all this war stuff. Just language." He was still listening. She opened her palms. "Will you help me?"

He turned his head toward her, looking down at her over the buckle of the suspension harness. "Go slag yourself," he said in Cybertronian.

Jennifer cocked her head for a moment. She'd trained her ears enough to pick out the sounds. And she'd definitely heard this phrase before. Delightful Ironhide.

She picked up her pad and pen and scribbled a response. Human throats wouldn't ever be able to make the sounds of the language, but she'd made some good headway on the written form. "After you," she wrote, and flashed it at the robot.

A quick blink this time. Surprise. Ha! She thought. You didn't expect that, did you?

"Why don't you get your Autobot friends to help you." Still in Cybertronian.

She poised her pen over her paper. Lowered it. "Can I answer in English? I don't have enough of your words."

The robot lowered his chin. Listening, but his eyes narrowed.

"It's not really a big secret. They don't like me very much. They resent that I'm here at all—obviously. I mean, you can see the luxury accommodations they've given me. They think my whole project is stupid. And, of course, I dared question their great leader."

The robot cocked his head. Jennifer had always been pretty good at reading body language, but sooner or later she'd have to make him do more talking. Still, right now she needed him to agree.

"Well, I kind of told him that he had no right to pull some moral superiority thing. He pulls it all the time with us here, like he knows what's best for everyone. And he gives all of these speeches—they're really boring—about rights and duties and living in peace, and what's the next thing he does? Turn around and rip the guts out of a Decepticon. It just seemed kind of hypocritical. That whole 'peaceful warrior' line. I mean, I get war is war, but it seems that all this talk about living in harmony is just garbage—like his idea of 'harmony' means that all the bad guys are dead." She shrugged. "Seems a bit fascist to me, that's all. Peace built on the bones of one's enemies and all that. It's repressive. But he acts like it's morally pure, and it's not. I just wanted him to acknowledge that."

"He did not." In English. Jennifer looked up, startled.

"No, of course not." He was finally speaking, like an actual conversation. A surge of hope.

"That is why, I think, he did not kill me." The robot spoke slowly, as if having to choose his words carefully.

"What do you mean?"

He lifted his injured arm. "I was injured. I was out of ammunition. I was helpless. He came at me. If he killed me, I told him, he would be no better than a Decepticon." He dropped into Cybertronian, adding, softly, "Than me."

Jennifer struggled for something to say. Should she show sympathy?

"I will help you with your research," he said, abruptly.

1510H

By midafternoon, she was jubilant over her progress. She'd set up her kiddie pool filled with sand where the robot could trace the strokes of the written form of a word for her and they'd gone over three of her lists of vocabulary words. This was more progress than she'd made in the last month, trying to catch the Autobots in slivers of their downtime. She'd have to get another of her oversized sketchpads soon. And find some time to actually memorize her new vocabulary.

And they were just getting to the harder words now, and her brain was tired. Her first lists had been words that she'd figured would be universal across sentient species, like body parts and basic descriptors of the physical world—colors, shapes, numbers. Up next were the words based on concepts she wasn't sure robots even had, like 'friend' and 'child' and 'eat.'

She stretched her arms up over her head. "Well," she said, "I need a break. You too, probably."

"You have learned?"

She flipped back over her notes. "Well, one thing that's odd: you use different words for colors if the thing your describing is inanimate."
"Is that interesting?"

"Well, it's part of the puzzle. At this point, I need all the pieces I can get."

The robot slumped back in the harness, almost as if relieved. "That is good."

That was a heck of a turnaround from this morning. "You want it to go well?"

The facial plates shifted into an expression she couldn't read. "As long as you are learning, they have a reason not to terminate me."

"I'm not sure I'd count a lot on that."

"It is," he said, "something."

The side door clanged open again. The engineers again? Jennifer clutched her sketchpad. The robot turned his head, but his view of the door was blocked by his suspended shoulder. NEST soldiers boiled in again. What were they doing here? Strange how they'd leave her alone for weeks at a time, and now they were making Hangar F3 into quite the hotspot.

"Just checking up?" Try to take control of the situation—these military types hated it. Her fake smile crumbled as a yellow vehicle rolled in behind the soldiers. Her robot's good hand clenched.

"Your new friend needs some adjustments to make him safe," the team leader said.

"Adjustments?" She took an involuntary step closer to her robot. His eyes had stayed locked on the yellow Autobot as it rolled to a stop and transformed. Of all the Autobots, Ratchet was the least hostile to her. Possibly because he was interested in studying humans the same way she was interested in studying his kind. Her robot did not seem to have the same reaction. He gathered his injured limbs to him warily.

"Our kind," Ratchet explained, "regenerates certain weapons, the same way you grow your hair or your fingernails. I think you understand that we would all feel more comfortable if we made sure he didn't have the ability to shoot any of us. Including you." Behind him, two NEST soldiers dragged in a pallet laden with odd shaped pieces of metal, like a suit of armor someone had broken into pieces.

"I suppose," she said. "But what's all that?"

"Other items to make him safe." That was unpleasantly vague. She stepped in between the two robots.

"He doesn't need them."

"Really?" The NEST team leader tapped a wrench against the pallet. "What, did he promise to behave?"

"He won't—"

Ratchet cut her off with a shake of his head. "You do not know them, Miss Silver. Now, step aside. Please."

"Not until you tell me what you're doing. Exactly."

"I told you. We will neutralize his armaments."

"Like milking a snake," the NEST soldier added.

"And?"
Ratchet shrugged in a very human gesture. Ironhide would doubtless tell him he'd been around humans too long. "These," he gestured, "are blocks. They're to prevent him from transforming. This over here is a governor to keep him from setting off those jets of his."

"This can't be legal," Jennifer argued. A NEST soldier planted his hands firmly on her shoulders, hustling her out of the way. "Hey!"

"Stand aside, ma'am," the soldier said in some thick accent. Tennessee, her training told her. Not that she cared at the moment.

"Get your hands off me." She tried to twist out of his grip. "You can't do this," she cried out. "It's not right. It's not humane."

"He's not human, ma'am," the soldier said, clamping both of her hands in one of his gloved hands. "Let them do their work."

"They'll hurt him…"

The soldier grabbed at her shoulder with his free hand. "Listen here, ma'am. What you think his side would do with one of ours?"

Her mouth gaped open. She didn't have an answer for that.

"Come on," the soldier dragged her to the interior door. "Maybe better y'all don't have to watch."

1645H

"Look," she said for about the fifth time. "I'm sorry!"

He looked, she admitted, miserable. Plates of metal had been inserted over and through some of his joints. The governors perched on his jets like sullen parrots. He hadn't spoken a word since she'd returned. She'd tried her best—gone straight up to the Colonel himself and gave him what she'd hoped was a diplomatic, but impassioned, piece of her mind. It hadn't done any good. Didn't even make her feel the least bit better. Just one more thing she'd failed at.

"I have no control over what they do," she said, lamely.

It might have been her imagination, but she could have sworn the robot shot her a sarcastic glare.

"If I'd known what they were going to do—"

"Yes?"

She dropped her hands to her sides. "Nothing, I guess. Look, I don't know what I can do to apologize…."

"This 'apology' is a word we do not have." At least he was speaking again. She didn't mind if he was mad at her—she was pretty mad at herself. She just needed him to talk. And better yet, he was talking about language.

"Apology. You tell someone how bad you feel that something happened."

"And what use is it to inform the other of your feelings?"

"Not much, I guess. But at least the other person knows you feel something about it. That's better than nothing."

"Is it?"

She laughed. "Not really." First she'd lost an argument with the CO, now she was losing a philosophical debate with an alien robot. Her day was just getting better and better. "Okay, then, what do you do?"

"What do I do? I should think that would be obvious." He raised his good arm, flexing the barbs on his hands. He looked like he wanted to, like he could do something more with it, but the metal plates Ratchet had installed prevented it.

"I mean when you do something wrong. When you screw up or things don't turn out the way you expect. Surely you say something?"

The robot considered for a moment. "Normally, I stay quiet and hope someone else gets the blame."

"And if they don't?"
"Failure deserves punishment."

"Really?" Her turn to be sarcastic.

"Of course." The robot looked at her as if she were stupid. Which he probably thought she was. "Look," he said, and quickly traced a character into the kiddie pool of sand. "The word itself—you see the root for 'penalty' right here."

She copied the word down quickly. "That's a stupid way to run things."

"It is how we run things."

"But doesn't it make you afraid to try anything, because you might fail?"

"That is the point. It motivates us. What we do, we must not fail to do." That sounded as idiotic as some of the NEST commander's speeches.

"And how's that worked out for you?"

"It works fine," he said, hotly.

"So…you're okay with getting beaten up because maybe something entirely beyond your control prevented things from working out the way they were supposed to?"

"It is how we run things," he repeated, smugly.

Jennifer had an uncomfortable thought. Maybe Ratchet was right. She didn't know their kind. And she certainly didn't know him. Just because he'd spent a few hours tracing out nursery-level words for her didn't make him an angel. He even said so himself—he was presuming his usefulness would keep him alive. "And so when someone under you screws up, you have no problem beating them up."

"It is," he said, though sounding a little less sure of himself this time, "how things are."

"So," she said, hesitantly, not really sure what she was doing, and trying hard not to think about it. "So. I let you down. Are you going to punish me?"

"No." He looked a little shocked at the suggestion.

"Why not?"

He sagged back against the harness for a moment, thinking. Rationalizing. "First, in the long term, it would do me very little good to harm you at the moment. If I damaged you, they would likely terminate me."

"Oh, that's encouraging."

"Second, you are too puny for me to waste my time with."

"Except, of course, wasting your time with me right now."

He paused to glare at her and then continued, sounding a bit more sure of himself, "Third, you are not in a position to safeguard me—not that I would tolerate protection from one of your kind." It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that hiding behind her project was exactly that. She thought better of it.

"I imagine not. So, how often do you get punished?"

"I do not often fail," he said. "And there are not many above me."

"So you're pretty high up, then?" He nodded. "I thought you guys believed in all of that 'never surrender' stuff?"

He made a grating sound that might have been a laugh. "Surrender is a tactical option. For some."

"Not everyone?"
"I can serve my purpose better alive than dead," he said. "Others may not be as vital to the cause."

"But you're important?" She wasn't convinced: if he was so important, why did they chuck him back in F3 with her?

"Yes. Do you not know who I am?" He looked a little hurt.

She snorted. "Yeah, like they let the researcher with no security clearance at their profiles? Good one."

He drew himself up. "Write this down, little human." He traced two phoneme sets in the sand, one after the other.

She copied, hurriedly. "Let me guess," she said, and drew the signifying set the Autobots used for a sentient being. "Like this?"

Faster than she could even register to flinch, his enormous clawed hand sliced over her shoulder, cutting clean through several sheets of paper. Her marker went flying. He traced the first two phoneme sets again, and paused, tapping her pad with one of his finger-barbs. "Copy," he ordered. She grabbed for another marker and copied the sets down again, trying not to notice that her hands were shaking.

"Now this." He sketched out three more sets of characters, pausing between each one to make sure she'd copied them correctly. "That," he said, "is my name."

She looked at what she had written. "The phonetics are star and scream." She'd actually heard of him. He must be important. She wondered again, even more uncomfortably, why they'd given him over to her project. "And these…?" She squinted at the last one. "That's a number, right?"

"Correct." It was a big number, too. "The number of cycles I have served the cause."

He tapped the back of his finger barb over the next character to the left. "And this?"

"That's what? Wait. That's 'air' or 'heaven' or something, right?" She pointed to a cluster in the set.

"Air…commander." His barb traced the two parts on her paper with more motor control than she would have credited.

She lifted an eyebrow at him. "That sounds impressive."

"I am."

"Modest, too."

"Modesty is for the weak." It was probably some sort of reverse Stockholm Syndrome, but she found his arrogance kind of endearing.

"And the next?" he prompted.

"What are you, my teacher now?"

"Human, if you wish to learn, you must learn as I instruct." He must be a pain in the ass to work under, she thought. She'd like to see him in a room with a few of the NEST commanders.

"Let's see. This is the character for someone who does something. So this is also a title or rank or something, right?"

"Yes. Figure it out." He seemed to be enjoying this.

"This is…I've seen this before. It's to chase? No, to look for, right?"

"And together?" She shot him a look. "Human," he managed to sound long-suffering, "if you do not figure it out yourself, you have not learned it." She was going to argue that he'd given her all the other words this afternoon without this kind of runaround, but then he might decide to use this approach even more tomorrow.

"Searcher? Quester? Something like that?"

"Seeker," he corrected. He paused, obviously waiting for her to be impressed. "You do not know what that means?"

"I told you, they don't let me look at their files." She couldn't help but feel a little defensive. She was tired of feeling stupid and out of the loop.

"I wonder what else they hide from you," he said, though he didn't really seem to be talking to her.

"So, what's a Seeker?"

"I will tell you later, little human." He gave her a measuring look. "You must also have a name, correct?"

"Do you know how our names work?"

"I know they have only sounds and you have more than one of them. I do not know what they mean."

"Okay. Mine is Jennifer Silver. Silver is a family name, meaning that's the same name my mom and dad and sister have." She paused, realizing he might not know family terms.

"Your progenitors."

Close enough. "Yes."

"And the Jennifer?" He stumbled slightly over the name.

"That's my specific name."

His eyes unfocussed for a second. "There are many Jennifers according to statistics. It cannot be your specific name."

"It is."

"It is an imprecise system, Jennifer Silver."

Okay, and now the glamor of his arrogance had worn off and he was just annoying. "At least we have a word for 'apology.'"

"A useless word, as I have told you." That strange appraising look glinted across his face. "You may, however, acquaint me with a subsidiary concept more clearly."

"And what might that be?"
"If you wish to compensate me for your perceived fault—this is 'amends', yes?—then I require energon."

She laughed. "That's not how you're supposed to do it. I'm supposed to offer something."

"What if I do not need or require what you offer?"

"Then we negotiate."

He thought for a moment. "Consider, then, Jennifer human, that I have merely omitted the useless steps in the process and come to the end of our negotiation."

"It has to be in my power to get for you."

"Is it not?" A sort of look that told her he'd think her even more puny and weak than he already did.

"Uh, I'll see what I can do." She knew a guy who could help her—a fellow grad student. And he did owe her a favor. "Anything else while I'm at it?" she asked, sarcastically.

Sarcasm was apparently beyond him. "I can also utilize coolant. Seventy of your gallons or so."

Oh, this guy was too much. "And I suppose you want this now."

"I am not unreasonable, Jennifer human. Tomorrow will suffice."