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sakon76March 28th, 2012. Diego Garcia.
Waiting for Mirage's replacement parts to synch up to her originals, Ratchet killed time by running a fine-toothed analytical algorithm through his comparison samples, automatically flagging the minute differences between before and after.
It would help, of course, if he had a complete set, but he hadn't thought to take any blood, skin, or hair from the organics when he'd first met them. He hadn't thought there would be any kind of need to. He'd expected that the human boy would have the glasses, their team would extrapolate the coordinates from them, give the boy and his companion a polite farewell, retrieve the Cube sans incident, and head back to Cybertron.
Life certainly hadn't gone that way.
But he had samples from Sam and Mikaela taken late the next day, initially used to evaluate the effects of their exposure to Allspark radiation. He'd taken another set, primarily interested in Sam's but not leaving Mikaela out for the sake of a base comparison, upon the successful conclusion of the battle in Giza. And he had a third set taken more recently, after his apprentice started developing abilities that, while not on the level of her mate's, were certainly beyond the human norm.
Their DNA was changing. Slowly, subtly, but unmistakably.
Rewriting bits of code for smoother functioning was well within the realm of Cybertronian ability. Jazz, for instance, had been a master of altering his own lines to suit his purpose. But humans, though they were starting to broach the idea, were not there yet. And had plenty of quandries beyond the scientific to work through first.
His fingers drummed on the counter in an unconscious human mannerism. "Hmm...."
Deus Ex Machina: Wind of Change
by K. Stonham
released 3rd October 2011
Maggie irritatedly slapped away a tentacle. "No touchie!" she told the giant robot, glaring at him to drive her point home before turning back to the terminal.
"But how--"
"Man, you gonna plug in and catch yourself an aftload of viruses?" Glen agreed with her, adjusting his glasses and looking up at Trailbreaker, and, behind him, Red Alert. "You leave this to the experts." Meaning, for once, humans.
Before them, the body of the Decepticon lay on a metal table. Lennox's men had carried it in this morning and laid it out for them. Maggie resolutely denied that she had any kind of crush on Captain Graham. They just the only people on base who properly understood the appeal of Branston Pickle, that's all! And their mutual under the table agreement to bring back decent snacks for one another whenever either got leave in their home countries was perfectly platonic.
After Casey and Graham had left (without Maggie ogling any fine military rear ends, thank you very much!), Wheelie and Mikaela had aided Maggie and Glen in plugging the corpse into their sandboxed system. Which, Maggie wistfully sighed, yanking her thoughts back to the present, would probably have to be burned after this dredge to prevent any accidental future contamination.
The problem, of course, was that the Autobots were too used to doing for themselves and also didn't fully trust Glen and Maggie's hacking skills. Like they hadn't been spending the last four and a half years in full immersive study of Cybertronian coding!
"Until you lot whip up some giant keyboards," Maggie told the Defensive Tactician and the Security Director, "you leave dredging hostiles to us. Capiche?"
Glen sniggered. "Like to see aliens touch-typing," he said. Maggie rolled her eyes and shoved at his shoulder.
"Stay on target," she reminded him.
"Right." Glen cracked his knuckles. "Ready?"
"Ready," she confirmed, and started the retrieve.
Sam sat on the roof edge of a Quonset hut, nearly on eye level with Optimus, who leaned back against the structure, arms crossed as the Autobot leader watched the horizon. "So, no secretarial schools on Cybertron, huh?" Sam asked.
"No." There was a trace of humor in Optimus' voice. He was remotely monitoring the dredge, Sam knew, trusting the expertise of Red Alert and Trailbreaker to guide the human hackers over any rough spots. "Have you come to any conclusions?"
"Not yet." Sam looked down at his hands where they lay in his lap. "I mean, I don't want to put any of the other students in danger. They didn't choose this, you know? It's not fair to them. But to humans... I gotta have a piece of paper to give me some kind of playing ground if I'm going to pull off this whole ambassador thing."
Optimus ventilated steadily for a moment. "It's possible that Rumble didn't know anything beyond his instructions to retrieve you," he said. "Megatron... always was a bit secretive. I fear his condition may only be worsening."
"Going crazy does that to you, huh?" Sam thought about it. "Runs in your family and mine," he pointed out.
"Indeed."
Sam took a deep breath. "When I did my genealogy report on Great-Great-Grandpa Archibald, years ago, you want to know what I found out?"
Optimus turned his head to look at Sam. "What did you discover?" he asked.
"I'm descended from him after he went crazy," Sam confessed. His smile felt a little tight, forced. "His wife was like twenty, twenty-five years younger than him. And he didn't go crazy all at once. So after the Intrepid limped back into harbor, Great-Great-Grandma Jane spent a couple months taking care of him while his eyesight and mind went. It eventually got to be too much for her, and she had to have him committed. Four months later Irving Scott Witwicky, my great-grandfather, was born. The last of Archibald Witwicky's kids, and the youngest, by about seventeen years."
Optimus waited.
Sam released his breath in a great rush. "I guess I always worried that it was something I might've inherited, you know? That it skipped a couple generations and hit me."
"I don't think you're crazy, Sam."
"No." Sam looked up at his friend. "I don't either, really. But I've been afraid of it for a long time." His gaze dropped. "I think it's part of why I blew you off last fall," he admitted. "I wanted to be normal. I didn't want to be extraordinary. Extraordinary Witwickies go to the nuthouse."
"But you're not afraid now?" Optimus asked.
Sam thought about it, turning the idea over in his mind. "I don't think I am," he said finally. "I do crazy things all the time, I hang out with giant robots who could squish me just by stepping wrong... I room with Leo," he added for good measure, "and you know what? It feels right. I'm not worried about losing me, and there're too many people who'll yank me back if I start losing touch with reality. Even this," he said with a knock at the side of his head to indicate the Encyclopedia Cybertronica that lived there, "has a vested interest in keeping me sane. So I'm not scared of the crazy anymore." He looked over at Optimus. "What about you?"
The mechanoid smiled. "After several vorn of running the Autobot army, I think any pretense of sanity left me. Now I just go with it."
"Oh, come on," Sam protested. "They can't be that bad."
"You know NEST's ongoing prank war?" Sam nodded. It seemed to be a fixed facet of the military group to live as hard as they could and play as hard as they could, because they never knew who might not make it back from the next mission. "Multiply that by several hundred times as many individuals, and several thousand years' duration."
Sam calculated that out.
"Slag," he said.
"Precisely."
"S! S! S!" the music blared. "M! M! M!"
Leo stared out the window of Simmons' office at the pair of robots doing the skankiest dancing he'd ever seen. And he clubbed in Miami, so that was saying something. "You seriously put up with them 24/7?" Leo asked, turning back to the man who had proclaimed himself Leo's new boss.
"Ha!" Simmons dismissed, looking up at him and gesturing emphatically with the pen he was using to fill in the paperwork. "You wanna see something, kid? Watch this."
The agent stood, walked over to the door, and yanked it open.
"You two!" he bellowed. Skids and Mudflap stopped and looked at him. "Take it elsewhere or I sugar your tanks again!"
"Aw, man, that ain't playin' fair," Skids complained.
"Hatchet won't let us play it around his squishie and her spit-swapper," Mudflap added.
"I do not care about the hot criminal or her boytoy," Simmons snapped. "I care about my sanity, and mine alone. Scram!"
Leo stared, amazed, as the pair actually skulked away, muttering to themselves. "You teach me that," he demanded, turning back to Simmons.
"Stick around and we'll talk about it." Simmons went back to his desk to continue with the paperwork necessary for Leo's future employment.
And Leo's phone buzzed. Again.
"I can't keep holding them off, you know," he told the man.
"You can and will," Simmons directed, not looking up. "Until somebody talks, it's all just rampant speculation and no one knows anything. And you," he said, spearing Leo with a glance, "will not be the one to talk."
"They're my roomies, my buds, my employees," Leo said, aware he sounded like a whining teenager.
"And," Simmons said, pointing the cap of his pen at Leo, "they are your entrance exam. Start thinking of a cover story."
"Gloves," said Mikaela, holding her hands out before her and wiggling her fingers. "Long gloves, up to mid-arm or something."
Ratchet looked over at her consideringly. Mirage lay on the medical table between them, fully repaired but still in stasis to give her systems time to integrate the new gears and tubing. Perceptor, having aided Ratchet with the emergency surgery, was running a diagnostic of Mirage's systems to determine if she was ready to be let up yet. Mikaela privately thought it was a little bit creepy the way he used his scope to look through Mirage's metal and plastic and then holographically project his view, but then she'd never been fond of looking at the insides of friends and family. "Energon-proof gloves?" Ratchet asked, then shook his head. "They would need to be thin enough not to compromise your dexterity, Mikaela. That would be tricky."
"Ratchet, I'm no good unless I can treat anything that might happen to your guys," she told him. "Maintenance is one thing, but what if somebody's really hurt again? You can't be everywhere, Ratchet, and I need to be able to help."
"Commendable as your intentions are," Perceptor said, finishing up and standing, "I feel that you are perhaps overestimating your capabilities and thus your requirements at this juncture." He turned to walk away.
That... was it.
Something snapped inside Mikaela. She and Sam and Lennox and all the humans had had to put up with Perceptor's more-advanced-being-than-thou attitude for months now, and she was sick of it! Sick of being dismissed for not being mechanical, for not being Cybertronian, for not being perfect. Like everyone else in her life up until Sam and Bumblebee had dismissed her as only a girl, only a pair of tits and the ass to go with them.
She was a mechanic, a nurse, she was competent, dammit, and she was not going to put up with this shit any longer!
Snatching up the nearest tool to hand, Mikaela threw in a blind fury.
The scientist fell.
She glared at the downed form.
"Mikaela," Ratchet said after a moment's silence, "I think I need to test you again."
Major William Lennox generally, when there wasn't an emergency going down, loved his job. So he was stuck on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean seventeen thousand miles away from his wife and daughter. As compensation, he got to work not only with the best team (human and robotic) that he'd ever been privileged to serve with, but also with his two best friends (again, one human and one robotic).
Thus, when he picked up the phone in his office and it was Epps on the other end and Ironhide in the background saying "Tell him to get his aft down here - he needs to see this," he hustled down to the shooting range.
Suffice to say he wasn't expecting the crowd three deep around Mikaela, who was calmly taking shot after nigh-impossible shot and nailing them all.
"Primus," Arcee said to Ratchet, "I want to get her up against Bluestreak."
"What's going on?" Will asked the medic, sidling up to the chartreuse form.
"Perceptor made the mistake of torquing her off," Ratchet replied. "She picked up a wrench, threw it at 98.2 miles per hour... and nailed him directly in the actuators of his right knee."
"A wrench," Will repeated, wanting to be sure he'd heard correctly.
"A wrench," Ratchet agreed, nodding. "Thus, these tests."
Will looked up at the medic. "Anything you need to tell me, doc?"
"Not just yet, Major," Ratchet replied. "I haven't figured out her new parameters any more than she has."
Will watched a beaming Mikaela hand her weapon back to Epps and rush into the arms of her somewhat shocked-looking boyfriends. Well, Sam was shocked. Bumblebee looked unaccountably pleased with Mikaela's apparently infallible aim. "Just as long as Annie Oakley there isn't going to go Terminator on us in the meantime."
Ratchet snorted. "Hardly. But this afternoon she's going to be repairing those actuators. Preferably while he's online."
If it wasn't for the knowledge that Cybertronians could turn off their pain sensors, some days Will would have sworn Ratchet was a sadist.
"Do you know," Ratchet asked Perceptor much later than afternoon, while his human apprentice was off in the storage shelves looking for a replacement gear to one she'd apparently dented, "that they have iron in their blood?"
"I beg your pardon?" Perceptor admitted he was disquieted, not only by the way which the human female--Mikaela, he corrected his thoughts--had taken him down, but by the way Ratchet had been quietly handling a wrench of his own all afternoon, turning it over and over as though newly discovering something about the tool's potential.
"I am saying that they are not that different from us, Perceptor," Ratchet replied, turning his head to look Perceptor in the optics. "They are smaller, yes. More fragile, definitely. And not as scientifically advanced, no question of that. But," he said, putting down the wrench and poking Perceptor in the chestplates, "they are driven to survive and adapt no less than we are. I expect you to pull your head out of your aft about them, and start treating their species with the respect they deserve."
"They cannot compare--"
"I've heard that before," Ratchet interrupted. "Want to know who said that slag?"
Perceptor was silent.
Ratchet leaned in close. "Megatron," he growled. "Either shape up, Perceptor, or ship off planet. There's no room here for an attitude like the one you've had in relation to the humans."
The Autobot medic moved away as Mikaela came back into the room. Perceptor watched her climb the steps that put her on the table where he laid. She didn't look at him, instead asking Ratchet a question. But her touch was cool and professional as she resumed her work. And from what little he had seen of her work, she appeared to have some natural bent toward the task.
How difficult would it be, Perceptor found himself considering, to make her gloves that would protect her fragile organic components from raw energon? Perhaps if he adapted some of the compounds that made up Cybertronian tubing....
March 29th, 2012. Diego Garcia.
Optimus waited. Sam was, for lack of a better English term, fidgeting. And he had sought out the elder Prime's company of his own volition, his body language indicating he had something he wanted to ask about.
Optimus decided to be diplomatic and take mercy on the boy. "Have you decided about college yet?"
Sam's breath whooshed out in relief. "Not... really," he replied. "I know I need to. By Sunday, I guess."
"Missing classes is not good for either yourself or Leo," Optimus agreed. "Even if," he jibed gently about Sam's enhanced reading skills and eidetic memory, "you can make it up by reading the textbook."
"Would it be easier if I didn't go back?" Sam asked, looking up at him. "I mean, if I stayed here and did... NEST stuff, or whatever, Mirage and Hound and Trailbreaker and Bumblebee wouldn't be stuck on the other side of the planet, and you wouldn't have to be fetching me back and forth every weekend."
"We are not so shy of forces that every Autobot need be gathered at a single point to make a stand," Optimus told him. "As to 'fetching' you...." He allowed himself a chuckle. "I find I greatly enjoy exploring New Jersey," he confessed. "It is a very different environment from this island."
"Pfff," Sam snorted, looking around. "I apologize again for human governments sticking you guys on an island in the middle of nowhere."
Optimus shrugged. "It is a universal trait to be wary of beings one perceives as threatening."
Sam just looked at him. "Don't tell me there's something you guys are scared of," he said, voice half disbelieving, half curious.
"Many things," Optimus told him. "Our own people, other sentients we've dealt with in the past...." He stopped, flooded by bad memories of battles long before Megatron had turned away from him. "Quintessons," he forced himself to say, and took a deep inhalation to cool and center himself, tamping down images of horrors not even the Decepticons had ever chosen to emulate. Sometimes, he mused distantly, gathering himself, the human habit of breathing was an excellent thing to model. It gave one time to think. He looked back at Sam. "Humans," he admitted.
"Oh, come on," Sam groused, but it was half-hearted. "Seriously?"
Optimus nodded. He would give the boy nothing less than truth. "Your bodies are small and fragile compared to ours, but... your people burn so brightly, Sam. And there are so many of you. We are few, and scattered, and... vulnerable. And we will never again be able to replenish our numbers the way you can." It was a truth that hurt to admit, and one he didn't wish the other Prime to truly comprehend the meaning of. But Optimus was ultimately and always unable to protect anyone from the cruelty of the universe.
"Because the Cube is gone."
"Yes."
There was silence between them for a moment, then Sam spoke again. "This is going to sound kind of stupid, but... what exactly is 'bonding'?" He tapped the side of his head. "Encyclopedia Cybertronica keeps giving me the tech specs, but none of the cultural stuff."
Optimus willed his disquiet and sadness away. The past was the past, and Sam was asking about something joyous and sacred. "It is, at its core, nothing more and nothing less than a miracle...."
Maggie sighed, straightening in her chair until her back and neck cricked into alignment. She'd gone through three pots of coffee with Glen, and despite their shared hacker ways meaning three-day runs had happened in the past, she was personally getting close to crashing.
Cybertronian symbols swam across the screen and she wasn't sure if it was her being tired or them being beyond her meager vocabulary, but they made no sense at all.
"I," she decided, "am going to crash."
Glen adjusted his glasses and looked at her incredulously. "You quitting so early, Mags?"
"I'm knackered," she told him, pushing back from the terminal. "You," she told Red Alert, who had remained lurking behind them the whole time even after Trailbreaker had gone off to check up on Mirage, "keep your tentacles out of the system. Glen, make sure of it! And," she added after a moment's thought, looking at Red, "you make sure he doesn't OD on the powdered donuts."
The mech blinked at her.
Maggie stumbled off to the bed that was calling her name.
Optimus waited as the first screen lit up, followed narrowly by the second. One showed a tall, thin human of racially mixed heritage; the other a smaller Asian man with neatly combed hair and a pleasant countenance. "Good afternoon, Mr. President, Mr. Secretary-General," he said, nodding in acknowledgement. "Thank you for taking the time to meet with me."
"The pleasure is mine," the President of the United States replied, with a nod of his own.
"Indeed," said the Secretary-General of the United Nations, "it is always an honor, Mr. Prime."
Optimus vented heavily. He was not sure of his course, but he knew that there were very few ways left to him to try to save his planet. "As you know, gentlemen, a team of NEST operatives and Autobots discovered a working space bridge in England a year ago, and we successfully rescued several stasis-locked Autobots from Cybertron." Both of the humans were nodding. "We have recently been able to begin reviving a few of them, among them some of our scientists." He left Sam out of it entirely; if anything should go wrong, he did not want retribution to fall on the boy's head. "They have let me know that there may be a way to revitalize our planet. In short, by moving it into a joint orbit around your sun."
Were he slightly pettier, Optimus mused, he might have gotten a little pleasure out of watching both the world leaders choke on that idea. Each recovered beautifully, though.
"We would not, of course, proceed on this course without obtaining permission from your people."
The president spoke first. "I'm assuming that suddenly moving a whole new planet into our solar system wouldn't upset life for the rest of us?"
Optimus shook his head. "To have minimal impact, Cybertron's orbit would be placed perpendicular to Earth's, only crossing when your world was at its furthest."
The fact that Cybertron's solar orbit would be at right angles to nearly all the rest of the system's planets would forever mark it as an orphan and latecomer to the system. So long as his world lived, Optimus would happily accept those implications for the rest of his functioning.
"Would we need to worry about attack from the Decepticons?" the Secretary-General asked, adjusting his glasses. "They have done quite enough damage without bringing a planet full of weapons into our system."
"Oh God, interplanetary WMDs," the President murmured.
"I find the possibility remote," Optimus said. "We have been at war for a very long time, and as you have seen, we are reduced to guns and swords. Bombs, space freighters...." He sighed. "Those were once within our grasp. But that was a very long time ago."
"I cannot countenance any possibility of weapons being aimed at us from space," the Secretary-General insisted. "It is something against which we would have no defence."
"I am aware of this," Optimus replied, nodding. "However, we do not have such capabilities now... and with the level of devastation that Cybertron has suffered, it is likely that Earth will attain such weapons before we are able to build them again." He smiled at the surprised look on the Secretary-General's face. "You are far more advanced, and far closer to many things, than you realize."
The President rifled through papers on his desk. "So this is what you bounced at the JCS," he said with a slight sigh. "I have to admit, Prime, you never do quite what we expect."
"The feeling is mutual, Mr. President," Optimus replied.
"Have you spoken with anyone else about this yet, or are we the first?"
"The British Prime Minister made time for me this morning," Optimus admitted. "Unfortunately his secretary was not able to coordinate a meeting at this time."
"And his feelings about it?"
"He said he would need time to consider the consequences."
"Have you a timeline for this... move?" the Secretary-General asked.
"We are hoping to be able to enact it within the next eighty years."
Both men looked relieved at the reprieve. Then the President's expression turned thoughtful. "If this comes about," he said, "there'll be no way to hide your presence from the rest of the world."
Optimus looked steadily at the man, remembering how he'd once spoken of integration. "Indeed."
The President of the United States smiled at him. "What did you have in mind for revealing aliens to the human public?"
Author's Note: According to the Transformers Wiki, Archibald Witwicky's middle name is Amundsen, the writers' way of honoring Roald Amundsen (...who didn't reach the South Pole until 14 years after Archibald ran into Megatron). Thus I took the liberty of amalgating his son's name, Sam's great-grandfather, from two sources... Irving being one of the given names for G1 Sparkplug, and Scott being for Robert Scott, whose doomed expedition reached the South Pole 35 days after Amundsen. The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, which appeared in Antarctica in this series, is named after those two men.
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Date: 2011-10-05 01:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-05 03:30 am (UTC)I think I could read an entire Encyclopedia Cybertronica's worth of Sam and Optimus talking. <333333333333333333333333333
And GET 'IM, MIKAELA!!!!! <33333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333
::nods:: Perceptor really needed to get his clock cleaned. u_u
no subject
Date: 2011-10-06 11:39 pm (UTC)OMG this is a new chapter!
I'm so glad =)
And there will be next one. this is soo goood
thank you very much
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Date: 2011-10-06 11:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-07 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-09 07:23 am (UTC)There's a mental image, Maggie teaching the humans on the base how to do the Tim-Tam Slam (which basically consists of using a Tim-Tam as a straw to suck up some sort of drink - ususally tea or coffee, I do it with plain milk personally, and frozen Tim-Tams).
And Mikaela taking down Percy with one wrench is hilarious!