Curiosity killed the cat. Soundwave was not a cat.
He was Soundwave—Decepticon intelligence director, Megatron's right-hand commander. He and his unit occupied a position within the Decepticons that was simply irreplaceable. Not even Starscream could claim otherwise.
When Frenzy had uploaded the scanned data to his database, Soundwave had opened it on reflex—just to see what it was. Now he was fairly certain he'd made an error.
At first, all he saw was static. Black and white, flickering—the kind of image his optical sensors read as a hardware fault. Cybertronian vision covered a spectrum far beyond what humans could perceive. Monochrome output like this registered as either damage or malfunction. He ran a full diagnostic.
Then the image changed.
A floor blanketed in dead leaves. A lone well, stone and dark. A figure in white, ascending from inside it.
What is this thing?
The diagnostic results made no sense. Unidentified data had propagated throughout his database, and the origin point was the image in front of him. He reached for the controls to close it.
Nothing happened.
He tried every method he knew. Delete it from one node—it reappeared in another. The loop reproduced itself without end. It was completely impossible to clear.
Inside the image, the white-clad figure had paused.
She didn't act immediately. She brushed the hair away from her face, leaned against the well's edge, and surveyed her surroundings—left, right, behind her. Strange, all of it. Then she looked down, craning her neck over the edge of the stone.
She hadn't finished middle school, but she'd covered enough geography to recognize the shape below her: Earth. She was looking at it from the outside.
She had somehow ended up in space.
Through the internal display of Soundwave's data reader, she turned her attention to the source—to the thing that had opened the tape. She looked at it. Him. Whatever it was.
Her expression was somewhere between blank and deeply confused.
What is the original sending videotapes around at random now? Doesn't she have any standards anymore?
The curse, as she understood it, targeted human beings. Human lives. She wasn't even sure whether this viewer would die within seven days—because this thing in front of her simply wasn't human. Not hunks of metal and wire. Not whatever this was.
She leaned on the well's rim, resting her chin in her hands, and thought carefully. Looked again. The thing in front of her was, admittedly, some kind of life form—just not a biological one.
The question was whether she could survive in space. And whether she should even bother climbing out.
She was stymied.
Soundwave, for his part, was equally stuck. He couldn't purge the data. It looped endlessly. A stalemate had formed: she couldn't kill him, he couldn't kill her.
A new kind of equilibrium—and neither of them had asked for it.
Down in Los Angeles, Sadako had no idea what was unfolding in orbit. Her situation on the ground was already complicated enough.
"Get back here! I am ordering you to stop!"
One minute ago, she had watched one of her videotapes grow legs and bolt.
It had taken a baseball bat, several shouts, and a good deal of bewildered staring before she calmed down enough to examine it properly. The thing looked like one of her tapes. It carried some residual trace of her tape's signature. But it wasn't quite right—too animated in every sense of the word.
Meanwhile, Frenzy himself was barely holding it together. Soundwave was a hundred times more capable than he was, and Soundwave had been stopped cold. Frenzy didn't have a prayer.
When Sadako shouted, something in him halted—an involuntary response he hadn't chosen. Then came a wave of bewilderment: why am I listening to this Earth woman?
"Don't move. Don't attack me. Don't come any closer. Stay exactly where you are." She pointed the bat. "Understood?!"
Sadako had no psychic powers in the traditional mutant sense. But over thirty years as a vengeful spirit had built up a spiritual pressure that wasn't trivial. Through the residual link between herself and the tapes—the connection her curse depended on—she asserted herself. It felt something like a person reaching into a projection of their own consciousness. The copy wasn't cooperative, exactly, but the channel existed, and that was enough.
She used it to probe outward: Who sent this thing? What's behind it?
Her instinct made her look at the sky.
Something up there felt like her tape.
She held that sense for a moment, mapping the implications. Then she called Bella. No answer. She tried again. And again.
She was going to have to work this out herself.
Bella was completely unreachable.
"She's going, she's going right now—Natasha, grab her, grab her!"
The shout could have rattled windows. Natasha dove forward and took the infant. The two of them fumbled to help the baby pee, then fumbled through the diaper change—the barely-controlled chaos of people who had not been doing this for very long.
Earlier in the week, it had come out that they'd left the baby alone while they watched TV. Both parents had made their displeasure known—an event unprecedented in living memory. Since then, Bella and Natasha had been putting in visible effort.
When the emergency was handled and a fresh diaper was secured, Natasha transferred the baby back into Bella's arms without comment. The message was clear: your shift.
Bella still wasn't entirely sure whether her standing in the household had improved or declined over the past few days.
"Again!" Natasha suddenly announced, loudly enough that Bella snapped her head down in alarm—and found nothing. A false alarm. Little Kitty lay there perfectly undisturbed, watching Bella with wide, bright eyes and an expression that suggested several unanswered questions.
Bella turned a slow, flat look on Natasha. Really?
The two of them were in an odd domestic holding pattern: one attending online courses, the other avoiding S.H.I.E.L.D. with some success. Their original plan for the week had been to fool around at home. The baby had different plans.
When both parents finally came home from work, Bella and Natasha passed off the infant with relief and escaped into the evening.
They were seriously pent up. They walked to the park down the street and trained—a full two hours of serious sparring and drills, the kind they didn't get to do indoors. It helped. When it was over, Natasha fell into step beside Bella as they headed back, both of them straightening their hair.
"Bee, any water? I'm dying."
Natasha had long since settled into easy familiarity with Bella's extended circle and used the same casual shorthand without a second thought. Bumblebee—still faithfully maintaining the fiction of being an ordinary parked car—produced a water bottle from the trunk. Natasha tilted her head back and drank half of it in a few long, uninterrupted gulps.
"Hey." Her gaze snagged on the sky. She grabbed Bella's arm. "Look up."
Bella nearly stumbled. She'd been mid-shoe, one foot still bare after the session. She stood there off-balance and looked.
Across the darkening sky: several brilliant streaks of light, tight and fast, traveling in straight lines toward the ground. The impact point appeared to be roughly where they were standing.