The military-industrial complex had never warmed to the Black president. The White House crisis had killed off a vice president and a Speaker in quick succession—and even with capital flowing through every artery of the state, the fallout had bruised enough powerful people to keep them quiet for a while. Now, with approval ratings cratering and reelection odds looking grim, the grumbling inside and outside the party had started back up, and the complex was getting active again.
The Pentagon was caught in that current. They had quietly buried the story of the Qatar military base—the one that had been attacked and leveled by a massive mechanical entity—and were planning to handle it themselves, bypassing the president entirely.
As far as the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex were concerned, that enormous robot was a research goldmine and a potential economic jackpot, just like the alien command ship before it. The fewer people who knew, the better.
Sam Witwicky was dead.
He had been in class when the earthquake hit. A section of ceiling came down directly on his head. He was gone before anyone could reach him.
Trent DeMarco—rich kid, built like a linebacker—didn't fare any better in the chaos. A rebar rod shot out of a crumbling wall and pinned him to the floor.
But he came back.
Because of the Flying Dutchman.
He wasn't stupid. When the earthquake rolled into a tsunami rolled into an alien invasion, he made a decision: stay dead. He stayed in soul form and didn't resurface until Los Angeles had gone quiet, until survivors started emerging from the rubble and walking the streets again. Only then did he return to his body.
The fear hit him afterward, once he was standing in the ruins of the school looking at the carnage. He was deeply, profoundly relieved to be in that contract with the ghost ship. Without it, he'd be in a body bag.
His girlfriend, Mikaela Banes, had survived—injured, but alive.
Trent joined the city's recovery teams and spent two days clearing wreckage. When they found Sam Witwicky's body—disfigured beyond recognition—he stood there for a long time, unable to move.
Something nudged at the edge of his perception. The Flying Dutchman granted its crew a mild sensory enhancement; nothing dramatic, but enough that he noticed: someone was watching him.
He turned. Looked left, looked right. Nothing.
What he didn't notice was that his phone was no longer his phone.
Sometime during the chaos, his original device had been swapped out for something else—a mechanical lifeform from Cybertron.
He stood at Sam Witwicky's side for the final goodbye. The death toll was too high for individual burials. Cremation, memorials later—it felt like the opening of Avengers: Endgame, that scene after Ant-Man returned to a world still counting its losses.
He and Sam had never been close. He'd pushed the guy around more than once, genuinely looked down on him. But he'd known him. That meant something, apparently. The hollow feeling in his chest said so.
"Can you come over tonight?" Mikaela asked, her voice quieter than usual, almost pleading.
After what the city had been through, he knew what she was asking for. Men and women who survived something that big tended toward the same instinct afterward. He understood it.
He just didn't have it in him right now.
Every time he died and came back, something in that department went a little quieter. By now it was nearly silent.
He declined. Flatly, without much explanation.
Sitting in his car, he pulled out his phone and dialed the woman whose name he wasn't supposed to say out loud—the one who'd given him the Flying Dutchman contract in the first place. He wanted to know if there was any way back from this, whether it was permanent.
It wasn't exactly a taboo subject. Even Eastern countries hadn't flinched from discussing it openly. He was American. He said it plainly: things weren't working, and he wanted to know if anything could be done.
Bella was stumped. Multiple resurrections causing that kind of damage? If so, Jason was probably already...
She thought for a moment. "I have a friend who just got back to LA. Go see her, mention my name."
She gave Trent Sadako's number. Whether Sadako could actually fix the problem was entirely Sadako's business—Bella had a baby to deal with.
Trent found Sadako quickly. She had spent the past stretch of time filming in Europe, but with Los Angeles looking the way it did—the Hollywood sign itself had shaken off the hillside—production was dead. The film's producers and director were still on calls with the studio. Sadako had joined the city's rescue efforts.
She moved through the worst-hit areas quietly. When she found someone in critical condition, she slipped close and helped—nudging someone from the edge of death back to merely badly hurt. The rest was up to them.
When Trent showed up invoking Bella's name, she felt obligated to take a look.
Japanese films might open with an FBI warning plastered across the screen, but Sadako was, personally, quite conservative. She didn't lead with her abilities. She suspected the issue was psychosomatic—a common enough problem, and often fixed through conversation—so she settled in and they talked, low-key and easy.
Trent's phone slowly crawled out of his bag.
There was a sound of shifting parts—and then it wasn't a phone anymore.
The Decepticon that stood there was small. Compact. Built for infiltration rather than combat, capable of taking the form of common human electronics—the kind no one looked at twice. He served in Soundwave's forces. His name was Frenzy.
Soundwave, in orbit, had seized control of a human military satellite. While mining its database, he'd picked up a trail: the AllSpark, and Megatron. He'd dispatched Frenzy to Earth to follow it—to track down a human teenager named Sam Witwicky. But the trail had ended at a body.
Frenzy's mental state had always been unstable, prone to sharp, erratic spikes. Sam Witwicky's death made it worse. Then Trent had appeared, and Frenzy had followed him here without much deliberate thought, riding the thread to see where it led.
Both Frenzy and Soundwave believed the lead was worth pursuing. So Frenzy shifted targets—from Trent to the woman sitting across from him.
That was when he heard the verdict.
Sadako's assessment: not a medical condition. Psychic abilities can't repair this. I'm sorry.
Frenzy moved without hesitating. He made straight for the plastic storage chest in the corner—the one with visible fingerprints on the lid from regular use.
He opened it.
Inside: more than a dozen dark, unlabeled videotapes. Sadako had collected them from Europe and brought them back with her, intending to destroy them all at once.
Frenzy's optical sensors swept a beam of light across one of the tapes, scanned it in seconds—then transformed. His body collapsed and flattened into videotape form, indistinguishable from the others.
The moment the transformation completed, something felt wrong. He couldn't identify it, couldn't name it, but the off-feeling was there. Given that his baseline mental state was already compromised, he didn't flag it. He opened a channel to Soundwave using Soundwave's unit's long-range communication protocol and waited.
High above, controlling a human military satellite, Soundwave received the incoming data stream—and spotted a segment of corrupted code buried inside it.
Highly unusual. Out of pure curiosity, he opened it.