“Under no circumstances are humans to be harmed!”
“Got it, boss.”
When Bu Yuanyue was twenty-five years and two months old, he opened a Taobao shop selling smuggled BlackBerry phones. By the time he was twenty-five and a half, he had already saved nearly fifty thousand yuan. Bu Yuanyue lived on the outermost ring of a city made of one ring road wrapped around another. Going to Shangxiajiu or Huaishu Village was an enormous hassle. So he decided to buy a car. But his online business was booming, and he badly needed cash to expand his inventory, so the car budget had to be squeezed down to the bone. After wavering for a long time, Bu Yuanyue decided to buy a secondhand QQ.
Early the next morning, he rushed off in high spirits to the city’s biggest used-car market, located by the eastern freight yard. He discovered that a secondhand QQ was harder to find than a brand-new Hummer. “What’re you buying that thing for? After two years those junk heaps are already falling apart. Where would you even find a used one?” one dealer said disdainfully, a cigarette butt wedged in the corner of his mouth, leaving long-settled brown-yellow stains on his skin.
Bu Yuanyue refused to give up. He widened his eyes and rummaged through the enormous used-car street. He discovered that secondhand cars were nothing like he had imagined. They were not dusty, weather-beaten, or sadly aged. The dealers had dressed them all up till they gleamed, spotless and shining. Want to see the engine? Sure, it looked just like new, or at least it looked that way. Bu Yuanyue found this hard to understand. If people came here to buy used cars and even thirdhand cars, why dress them up like new ones? And why were the other buyers strolling around with such serious, formal expressions, as if they were shopping at a 4S dealership?
At a tiny parking lot at the end of the street, right up against a dump, Bu Yuanyue finally saw a used QQ, squatting there in foolish misery. He also finally understood why nobody bought secondhand QQs. The thing looked like a popped balloon that had been weakly puffed up again, like an old woman whose breasts sagged all the way to her waist. Bu Yuanyue could not work up the slightest desire to get behind its wheel. He squeezed his wallet and decided to shelve the car plan for the time being and go back to riding Bus 82.
Just as he was about to leave, a gas station a kilometer away exploded, nothing all that strange by local standards. Bu Yuanyue and everyone else were knocked to the ground by the blast wave. Car windows shattered in a dense chorus of cracking, and the alarms of any vehicles with working speakers began shrieking. Bu Yuanyue climbed to his feet and dusted off his jeans. Then he suddenly noticed a car at the edge of the parking lot, covered with an oilcloth tarp. Its lines were so sexy, even through layers of grimy stains. He ran over, yanked away the tarp, and there it was: a blue-gray SC7080F, windows intact, sitting there in silence.
Perfect! That’s the one! Bu Yuanyue shouted inwardly. “Boss, how much for this SC7080F?” he called out at full volume, sounding involuntarily as if he too were in a 4S showroom.
“Weird. How come its glass didn’t break?” The owner had just been drowning in grief over the destruction of all his other vehicles, but seeing that one lone survivor remained, and that someone wanted to buy it, he brightened immediately. “Twelve thousand. It’s a good car, first-generation model, way better than the fuel-injected ones now. Mileage isn’t high either.”
“Eight thousand. I’ll take it right now, no receipt.” Bu Yuanyue said it with absolute firmness.
“Eight thousand it is. Deal.” The owner was already thrilled that this old car, which had been sitting here under wraps for four years, could be sold at all, though he still wondered why it had been polished so clean and why the tires hadn’t gone flat. “Must’ve been Zhao Si sneaking it out to drive. Where’d that bastard get gas money?”
Bu Yuanyue pulled out his wallet, then suddenly hesitated again and asked in a low voice, “Uh… do you support Alipay?”
“The hell? You’re buying a beat-up used Alto. What kind of ‘bao’ are you talking about?”
Bu Yuanyue drove his blue-gray Alto SC7080F down the outer-ring expressway in perfect exhilaration, demolition houses and chemical plants sweeping past on either side. Over the previous three days he had patched up and decorated his new car till it looked entirely renewed. He removed the cassette deck and installed an iPod car unit and speakers. He pried off the Alto badge and replaced it with a bull-head emblem chosen from a stash of things he had stolen and pried loose as a child. He hung a portrait of Chairman Mao from the rear-view mirror and even added an in-car ice pack. While cleaning the interior, Bu Yuanyue unexpectedly discovered embroidered designs on the backs of the two front seats. They looked like two faces, one with a broad chin, the other with a pointed one. He had a vague feeling he had seen those designs somewhere before, but having grown up in the countryside, Bu Yuanyue had barely watched any cartoons at all. Still, he thought the designs looked cool, so instead of putting seat covers on them, he sat directly on the leather seats. God knew why an Alto would have leather seats.
One evening, Bu Yuanyue came back from picking up stock through a former classmate at the airport customs office. He had drunk a bit too much over dinner with that classmate, and the moment he entered the house he collapsed onto the bed and passed out. The advantage of living in the suburbs was space: there was even a farmhouse courtyard, where the Alto could be parked. In the middle of the night, Bu Yuanyue was dimly awakened by a bladder-overcapacity alarm and vaguely heard something clanking in the yard, like the sound of people stealing railway tracks in the countryside. A thief! He instantly tensed up, grabbed an iron bar from the wall, and crept out of the house on tiptoe. With the faint creak of the door opening, two blinding beams of light struck him full in the face.
“Who’s there?” Bu Yuanyue cried, instinctively covering his eyes. A few seconds later, before he dared open them, he suddenly realized that the beams were coming from a point about three meters above the ground. But there was nothing in the yard except a stone table, let alone a streetlamp. Slowly he opened his eyes and stared outside in disbelief. A metal giant more than three meters tall stood in the middle of the courtyard, with a portrait of Chairman Mao hanging on its chest.
“You… you’re… some kind of Trans-whatever?” Bu Yuanyue stammered incoherently. As mentioned earlier, he did not have much of a cartoon-viewing history.
The metal giant spoke. “Hello, my friend. I am Alupi of the Autobots. I am a Transformer from the planet Cybertron.”
“Weren’t you a used Alto? How’d you turn into an Autobot?” Bu Yuanyue was neither excited nor frightened. What he cared about was what he was supposed to drive now that his car had come alive.
“I am a CF09e12 mass-produced Transformer. I have been lying low on Earth for a long time. No one may command us unless he is my friend. And now, you are my friend.”
“If you were lying low as a used car, fine, but why transform and come scare people in the middle of the night?”
“The world situation is changing fast, and things are not peaceful in this corner of China either. The Decepticons are coming. Our leader Optimus Prime has ordered all Autobots to awaken and protect you.”
“Protect me?” Bu Yuanyue was baffled. He had no idea how he had become a target of the Transformers.
“Remember that chamber pot at your grandfather’s house? The one you secretly took and now keep in the side room?”
“Yeah, I remember. What’s that got to do with me? Don’t tell me my grandpa found out and got mad, so he summoned the Decepticons to teach me a lesson.”
“On it is a star map made thousands of years ago by the first Transformer to reach Earth. Only by obtaining that star map can one find the coordinates of the Cube and gain the power to drain Earth of all its energy.”
“Whoa! That awesome? By the way, who’s Optimus Prime? Is that ‘Transformer,’ ‘Transforming Steel,’ or ‘Trans-gender Steel’? How do you write it? And why are you called Alupi? And will you still let me ride you? Uh, no, I mean drive you?…”
“Young man, you ask far too many questions. Let’s go back inside and talk about world peace.” Alupi lightly picked Bu Yuanyue up, set him inside the house, then stooped and squeezed in after him, breaking the doorframe in the process. The Alto had been better. At least it could fit through the door.
“When are the Autobots getting here? They’re not all going to squeeze into my house too, are they? You don’t mind that I’ve been feeding you diesel, right? Where exactly is your face?…”
A fake iPod transformed into a tiny robot and slipped quietly out of the Bu family courtyard. “Report to Lord Megatron: we have found the whereabouts of the chamber pot.”