Wonder World: Ignition

Import_File(Team);

They were pinned down, and Sam wasn't optimistic about their odds of survival. Sideswipe was crouched behind the anchor while Sam tried his best to keep a barrier around them with one hand and keep energy flowing through Alex's lifeline with the other. They were under a constant hail of javelins, and to make matters worse a horde of smaller clock-bots were scaling the legs of their gigantic counterpart. Time was running out, and if they failed all of his work in the past year and a half would be for nothing. "Or was it the first Sam's work?" he wondered. "Is he dead, and whatever I am just copied his brain and took over his life? Did I really survive?"

"Nova," Sideswipe said from Sam's right, "if I die here, you have to promise me something."  

"Anything," he replied.

"You have to promise me you'll go to South Central High and find a student there named Collin Mark."

"You want me to keep him safe?" Sam queried.

"No. You have to promise me you'll deck him in the face as hard as you can. Can you do that for me? It's really important."

"That is your final request?" Sam asked incredulously. 

"You'll understand when you meet him. One good hit right across the jaw. Don't hold back. Promise me, Nova."

"Sideswipe," Sam said, "I promise we'll get through this together, and then you can punch him yourself."

"You've got yourself a deal."

Sam's mind was racing, his thoughts jumbling together as he felt a surge of adrenaline, or at least a simulation of a surge of adrenaline. There were too many variables. Delta and Alex were gone and he had to figure out how to get them back, while maintaining two completely different projections simultaneously, without getting himself or his teammate skewered, or torn apart, or crushed, all while trying to keep civilians out of harm's way, and dealing with an approaching army of clock-bots. Oh, and then there was the 700 foot tall colossus that can repair itself threatening to level everything in its path that they had no clue how to stop. He was probably going to die. Again. "Can I even die?" he wondered. "Or am I just a machine that thinks too much? Are these even my own original thoughts, or has my algorithm already predetermined my every action?"

"I need to focus," he said out loud, trying to force his brain to stand still long enough for him to make a plan.

"We can't stay here," Sideswipe said, looking nervously down at the small army ascending towards them. "How's Bowman doing?"

"I don't know. I can only send information into the vortex, nothing comes back out. If there was a way to destabilize the chronal cocoon, I might be able to get a better idea of what's going on. But that would require an immense amount of energy, much more than I am capable of producing."

"Can't we just pull the plug?"

"It's self sustaining. It's giving off more energy than it takes in, and the excess energy gets dumped right back into the system, making it that much stronger. It's a feedback loop," Sam informed his companion. 

"Then can we stop it from feeding itself?" Sideswipe asked.

"What?"

"I'm not a genius or anything, I haven't even graduated high school. But you said it feeds itself. Can we, I dunno, suck out energy somehow so it can't get bigger?"

"Sideswipe, that might be the smartest thing you've said all evening." The kid was on to something. "Siphoning the energy won't be easy. We'll need a conduit for it to pass through, and a place to put it. I can't get a good look at the chamber from here, we need to get closer."