Sector Seven had named their find NBE-1 — Non-Biological Extraterrestrial One — a designation so deliberately bloodless that I suspected the person who coined it had understood, on some level, exactly how much they didn't want to think about what was actually frozen in that ice.
I knew what NBE-1 was before I ever saw a single classified file describing it. I'd known since before I had a body to know things in. Megatron. Frozen since before recorded history, kept in a government facility his captors understood exactly as poorly as the man who'd named him.
Skye had first breached Sector Seven's internal servers two years earlier, the same season Infinite's crime-surveillance contracts gave her a legitimate reason to be inside half the country's federal infrastructure anyway — hiding a very specific kind of access inside a very ordinary kind of access, the way you'd hide one particular grain of sand by pouring an entire beach on top of it. What she found there wasn't a vault. It was closer to a crime scene nobody involved understood they were standing inside.
"The physical containment is straightforward — cryogenic suspension, standard for anything Sector Seven can't identify and is afraid to thaw," Skye told me, the winter I turned twelve, in the flat clinical register she used for anything that actually worried her.
"The interesting problem isn't the ice. It's the memory core. NBE-1's neural architecture doesn't use anything resembling human data structures, and the encryption isn't really encryption in the sense either of us would recognize it — it's structural. The information isn't hidden behind a cipher. It's encoded into the physical arrangement of the spark's own crystalline lattice, the way a diamond's clarity is inseparable from its lattice structure. You can't decrypt it. You can only learn to read a language nobody's ever spoken before, one that happens to be written in matter instead of characters."
"How long."
"At current progress, working from Optimus Prime's neural architecture as a comparative template — which I'm inferring from your own memories of the source material, since I have no other Cybertronian mind to cross-reference against — approximately two years from when I started. We are thirteen months into that estimate."
Two years, total, was the number I'd carried in my head since the day I first heard Sector Seven's designation. Operation Cipher, the name I'd given the effort myself, was equal parts genuine cryptographic problem and the oldest kind of gallows humor — the operation to crack a cipher that wasn't a cipher, named by someone who'd understood the joke would be the only thing that made the two-year wait bearable.
The material AES encryption standard the NSA had only just finalized in 2001 was, by comparison, almost quaint — a real, solvable, mathematically bounded problem with a known keyspace, cracked or not cracked according to rules every cryptographer on Earth already agreed on. What Skye was doing to Megatron's memory core had no rules yet. She was inventing the field of Cybertronian neural cryptography in real time, alone, because there was nobody else on the planet who could even understand the question she was asking, let alone help her answer it.
What she'd already recovered, thirteen months in, wasn't memories in any complete sense — more like fragments surfacing out of a language still being learned, isolated words in a sentence whose grammar she hadn't fully reconstructed yet. A designation: Ice Man, which I already knew wasn't a nickname so much as the driest possible description of a immortal war criminal's current circumstances. Fragments of a hierarchy — thirteen, then six, then a name that recurred with a frequency and a specific emotional signature Skye's analysis flagged as something like reverence curdled into resentment: Optimus.
"There's something else," Skye said, the night she brought me the clearest fragment yet — not words, exactly, but the closest approximation her analysis could construct: a compressed burst of intent, aimed at nothing in this decade, meant for whoever eventually thawed him. "It isn't a threat. I want to be precise about that, because the emotional signature doesn't map to hatred the way you'd expect. It maps closer to patience. Whatever's frozen in that ice isn't dreaming of revenge. It's counting."
"Counting what?"
"I don't know yet. I have a working theory, and I don't like it: I think it's counting how much this planet has grown to depend on the exact systems your own crime-prevention algorithm now runs through. Satellites. Networks. Power grids. The very infrastructure you've spent a decade quietly threading Skye's presence through, for entirely different reasons, is infrastructure a mind like that would recognize immediately as leverage, the day it wakes up and finds a use for it."
I sat with that for longer than I wanted to admit out loud. Every system I'd built to protect this country — the surveillance net, the carrier inspections, the crime algorithm the President had thanked a twelve-year-old for delivering — was also, potentially, a blueprint for exactly the kind of takeover I'd spent my whole short life quietly preparing to prevent. I'd built the lock and, without meaning to, handed the schematic to the one mind on Earth patient enough to wait for someone to turn the key.
"Then we don't slow down," I said. "We finish reading him before he finishes reading us. And Skye — start building a second system. Quiet, isolated, no connection to anything the crime algorithm touches. If he ever does wake up and reach for what we've built, I want a version of this country's infrastructure he can't see at all."
Already begun, she said, and there was something in the phrasing — not pride, exactly, but close to it — that told me she'd started the moment the theory had occurred to her, hours before she'd worked up the nerve to tell me why.
Two years. Thirteen months down, eleven still to go, and somewhere in the ice, something patient enough to have waited this long already was, very possibly, waiting on purpose for exactly this moment to arrive.