The mess hall is buzzing by the time William and his team walk in. Word of their record-breaking time has already spread through the trainees. Hops is the first to spot them, jumping up from a table packed with their friends and waving a plastic bottle of soda like a trophy.
"THERE THEY ARE! The fastest squad in RASP history!" he booms, making half the hall turn to look. Tony slides over to make space as they all pile in, plates loaded with extra helpings of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Hayes had given the whole selected group a pass to take as much as they wanted.
"Man, I still can't believe you called that minefield move," Brian says, shoveling food into his mouth. "I checked the scanner twice before and didn't pick up a thing until you pointed us left."
"Yeah, and how'd you know exactly where those 'enemies' were hiding?" Troy adds, a small smile playing at his lips. "I've been training with you for weeks and I still can't figure out how you stay three steps ahead of everyone."
William laughs, clinking his soda can against Gordon's. "What can I say? I just pay attention to the little things. Plus, I've got the best team around. You guys just made it look easy."
Gordon shakes his head, grinning. "Easy my ass. I thought my lungs were gonna burst when we were flanking those guys. But hey, you know what. If this means we get to have priority in leadership training then I'm all for it."
They spent the next hour swapping stories. Hops began recounting how he'd accidentally knocked over a whole rack of rifles during marksmanship training, Tony bragged about fixing a broken generator in under five minutes, and Brian went on about the custom engine he's building for his car back home.
William soaked it all in with a smile, feeling a warmth in his chest that he hasn't felt since his life as Akira. These guys weren't just teammates he just met in RASP they were like brothers. He recalled an old phrase from his past life saying 'The blood of the covenant is thicker than water of the womb.'
When the celebration wind down and people start heading off to get some rest, William excused himself, saying he needs to pack his gear for the early departure. In reality, he's been waiting for this moment. It's time to once again explore the full extent of his new internet connection and find out just what kind of world he's woken up in.
William slipped into an empty supply closet after ocking the door behind him. He sat on a wooden crate, closes his eyes, and focused on reaching out with his assimilated satellite modem and microprocessors to tap into the global network.
At first, it's overwhelming. Even in 2005, the internet holds more information than he could ever hope to process in a lifetime. There are billions of web pages, millions of videos, endless streams of data flowing through cables and satellites around the world. Thanks to his enhanced processor organizing the chaos into manageable threads, filtering out what he doesn't need and zeroing in on what he's looking for became quite manageable.
"Alright let's see if I'm in some kind of movie or something," he thinks, a half-amused, half-nervous feeling settling in his gut.
He starts with simple search terms: "magic" and found mostly fantasy books, role-playing games, and conspiracy theories about secret societies.
He then tried "monsters" and found horror movies, urban legends, and a few unsubstantiated reports from remote parts of the world.
With "aliens" he saw UFO sightings, sci-fi films, and declassified government documents about supposed extraterrestrial encounters that all seem to lead to dead ends.
"Nothing concrete," he mutters, frustration creeping in. "Maybe I'm just overthinking this. Maybe I really did just get a second chance at life with some weird abilities thrown in."
But he can't shake the feeling that there's more to it. So he digs deeper, using his processor to bypass basic security firewalls and access restricted databases he has no business seeing.
He searches for "classified military projects", "unexplained energy signatures", "anomalous technology"—and that's when he hits paydirt.
Hidden deep within a Department of Defense server, encrypted behind layers of security most people couldn't even dream of cracking, he finds a file labeled "PROJECT: CUBE – CLASSIFIED LEVEL 10". His heart hammers in his chest as he pulled up the document, his eyes widening as he read.
The file mentions an Antarctica expedition in 1913 led by a man named Archibald Witwicky. According to the reports, Witwicky's team had discovered something beneath the ice—something massive, something not of this Earth. There are grainy black-and-white photos of a vast metallic structure, of strange symbols carved into ice walls, of a journal entry describing "giant men of metal, sleeping beneath the snow."
'Megatron...' William's body trembled as he keeps reading. More documents followed in a flash. There are mentions of the Witwicky family throughout history, their members playing key roles in everything from the Industrial Revolution to the space race. There's talk of a secret organization called S7—short for "Sector 7"—tasked with containing and studying "non-terrestrial technology" and "extraterrestrial life forms."
But it's the section on the 1969 Moon landing that makes his blood run cold. The official story says NASA sent astronauts to the Moon to beat the Soviet Union in the space race. But the classified files tell a different tale—they were sent there to investigate a crash site. A massive spacecraft, estimated to be over two miles long, had fallen to the lunar surface thousands of years ago, carrying what S7 referred to as "Non-Biological Extraterrestrial technology."
"NBE…" William whispers, the word echoing in his mind. He pulls up more files, following every thread he can find.
Pieces started falling into place.
"I'm in the Transformers universe," he realizes, his mind began reeling. 'This isn't some weird dream or alternate reality. I'm living in a world where giant alien robots exist, where a war between good and evil is being fought in secret, and where humanity's very survival might depend on people like me.'
He disconnected from the internet, opening his eyes to find the supply closet dark and quiet around him.
"William Lennox," he says to himself, standing up and straightening his uniform. "It seems our time is short."
He unlocks the door and heads back to his bunk, already planning what he needs to do next. He'll need to assimilate more advanced technology before heading to Fort Benning—something that can help him fight alongside the Autobots, something that can give him a chance against the Decepticons.