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engineer’s idle dreaming. It had a face, sort of. Only vaguely humanoid, it was as full of menace as an inanimate head-sized object could be.
    Entering the basement shop and switching on the last of the lights, Simmons smiled as he walked over to the worktable and patted the head on its head. “And how is my homicidal little friend today? Dormant as ever, I see. That’s good.” Whistling the old standard “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” Simmons strolled over to the workbench that dominated one wall, checked one of three computer readouts, tapped afew keys, and turned back to regard the object that was at once his prize and prisoner.
    “I think today we’ll work on adjusting controlled response as opposed to reflexive hostility. By next week I think I’ll have gained enough sway over your cognitive processors to take a chance on restoring visual perception. Then we’ll see if we can have a conversation where every other word out of your mouth isn’t ‘Kill!’ What do you say?”
    There was no reply from the object on the table. There would not be until Simmons made the necessary repairs and hookups to what he had salvaged from Sector Seven’s ruined facility inside the base of Hoover Dam. He was completely convinced that understanding what he had saved (“stolen” was such a pejorative term, he thought) and learning how it functioned would allow him to discover a means for dealing with the invaders.
    All of them.
    Because despite their actions in defeating the Decepticons and their subsequent insistence that they would forever stand up for the defense of humankind, he trusted the Autobots about as far as he could throw Optimus Prime. If he could learn how they worked, unearth the secrets of their cybernetic brains if not their bodies, then he would know how best to deal with them. How best to protect the planet and its
original
inhabitants. He would see to it that they would cease to be functionally independent organisms and return to being what they were at base. Simple machines, and nothing more. Tools that could be used by mankind, instead of aggressive entities determined to drag the population of the Earth into anancient intraspecies war being waged by soulless mechanisms. He, Seymour Simmons, would see to that eventuality.
    In between taking sandwich orders, of course.
    He punched out a few commands on one of the computer keyboards, picked up a small wireless controller, and pointed it at the object on the worktable. “I think I’ve tapped into the correct synapses. Let’s try it and see, shall we?” He depressed a button.
    Something sparked in the air above the table and the object atop it twitched slightly. It could not look at him angrily or glare by way of response because its visual perception had yet to be restored. Nor could it speak. It could only fume silently and impotently. It had no choice but to cope as best it could with whatever crude mechanical and electronic manipulations the human chose to inflict upon it.
    That would change one day. Change when perception and mobility were restored. Then there would come a reckoning. The human thought he had complete control. At the moment such was indeed the case. But it was only a moment, and the object of Simmons’s experimentation was patient. Time was a quantity with which it was far more comfortable than the short-lived organics. Time was a human’s enemy and a Decepticon’s friend.
    Imprisoned securely atop the worktable, deprived of any means to strike back, the partial head of Frenzy tolerated the antics of the disturbed human. While the ongoing delay in defeating the Autobots irritated him almost as much as did the absence of his body, he was not overly concerned.
    He knew he was not alone.

    The underground chamber that had been allocated to the Autobots was the single largest open space in the entire NEST complex—or for that matter anywhere on the atoll. It was larger even than the hangars on the main island that had been built years