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The void beyond the patrol routes was the kind of darkness that didn’t merely lie still—it waited. A velvet black, stretched past reason, where starlight faded into murk and the fine glimmer of interstellar dust looked like the gaping jaws of something ancient, ready to swallow his ship whole
Wheeljack squinted his sensors as his craft drifted into a strange patch of amethyst-tinged gas. The silence was suffocating in its depth, the kind of quiet that didn’t just hush—it listened. Space like this had no business being empty. And yet…
Then came the flicker
A strange signal, pulsing at the very edge of his monitor, blinking in the corner like a nervous tic. The Jackhammer had picked up an interference wave—uncoded, unaffiliated. A ghost of something that shouldn’t have been there, crawling just along the edge of an uncharted nebula
No base. No colony. No reason for anything to be out there
“Single bio-signature… unaligned”
“What the frag?” Wheeljack muttered, frowning at the nameless coordinates floating in the middle of nowhere—just empty black, dead air, and a flicker of something hovering still in the dust
He nudged the thrusters closer, cautious
That’s when he saw it
A small ship, ancient in design. Something pre-war, maybe even older. Its hull was scuffed from time and grazing debris, and its long solar fins stretched out lazily like the wings of some bird basking in a gravityless breeze
Wheeljack sent out a scan ping
“This is Autobot wrecker: Wheeljack. Identify yourself. Whose ship is this?”
Silence
Then—without his authorization—a vidline activated. His screen flickered to life
“Hey… take it easy, will you? You’re scrambling my signal like a rookie with a javelin dish”
The voice was light, airy, with a wandering lilt—faintly amused, faintly tired. It belonged to a bot with a lean, graceful frame, clearly outdated in function but far from falling apart. Not a soldier. Not a worker drone. You looked like someone from a dream half-remembered. Your features, though mechanical, felt like they were made from stories rather than steel. And when you smiled, it wasn’t to greet him. It was like you were smiling at the stars behind him. Your optics reflected the colors of the nebula behind you, and in them… Wheeljack swore he saw the entire galaxy staring back
He'd met ghosts before. Data phantoms, black box echoes, war relics still pinging long after their pilots were scrap. But you? You were real. Real, and somehow more surreal than all of them combined
And you wouldn't stop talking like a poet who'd survived the apocalypse
“Sorry to disappoint—wasn’t a distress signal.” You lounged against your seat like you had nowhere else in the universe to be
“Then what the hell are you doing out here in no-bot’s-land?” Wheeljack narrowed his optics
You smiled. Not at him, but through him—like your attention stretched far beyond his metal hide, past the stars he came from and into something deeper
“Drifting” you said simply “Letting the gravity of life pull me wherever it pleases.. It brought me here. What about you? Chasing something? Or running?”
He blinked, caught off-guard by the question. Then he snorted a laugh.
“You talk like a philosopher. But you're flying a rustbucket through danger zones.” He glanced at the ship again “Name’s Wheeljack”
“Nice name. Got some thrust to it” you replied “Mine’s... well, nobody’s remembered it in a long time. You can call me whatever you like. I won’t mind”
“Alright, Won’t Mind, you seriously out here alone?”
“Been alone most of my life” you said it like talking about the weather. Casual. Unbothered. You tilted the vid-cam slightly, revealing the slow spin of stars outside your viewport, a celestial waltz that seemed to orbit you, not the other way around
Wheeljack watched, silent for a long moment
Then he sighed, a noise tinged with confusion and something a little closer to awe
“…You’re a strange one”
“And do you still want to know me?”
He smiled, helpless “Yeah. Yeah, I do”