More crack drabbles
Inception ala Transformers drabbles in no particular order! (For my usual given utter fail at "drabbles".)
Eames had thrown up his hands, his voice sharp with exasperation. "I'm going as fast as I can," he snapped. "I'm already spending thirty-two hours a day on a new language, Arthur, honestly, I don't know where you think I keep my miracles but I'm fresh out!"
Lennox blinked. "Thirty-two?"
"Dreamtime," Ariadne supplied helpfully from beside him. "He's spending two hours under a night with those recording Bumblebee made piped in on first level speed." She grinned up at him, utterly unrepentant. "It's a great study aid. I've never aced so many finals in my life."
Arthur, however, was frowning. "Still? A new language hasn't ever taken you that long before."
Eames leaned across the table to clap his hands to Arthur's cheeks, giving the other man a little shake. "Alien language, darling," he said firmly. "Alien, tonal, mathematics based language that has no common root with anything on Earth and is made up of sounds our vocal chords can't produce. Even my genius has limits."
Arthur scowled and pushed him away. Lennox tilted his head towards Ariadne thoughtfully, lowering his voice. "Are they...?"
"We had a betting pool about that," she replied absently, frowning at the maze-like mess of lines she was drawing, "but Arthur swears Eames is just very, very British."
* * * * *
If Lennox thought about the sort of people Robert Epps hung out with outside of duty hours it was still, by and large, made up of a mental image of the kind of men that served in NEST, sprinkled with their assorted wives and families. Military friends, military families. Nowhere in that mental image did thin, sharp faced men in three piece designer suits that probably cost more than several months of Lennox's salary fit into the picture, but there was something rather weirdly easy in the way the two of them talked, the familiarity of old team wedging a gap under designer suited facade to show a hint of something military underneath.
"Dreamsharing?" he found himself saying, rolling the cold, condensation beaded bottle of his beer between his hands. "Seriously? I heard about it - just scuttlebutt, nothing serious - but... for real?"
"Cross my heart," Epps declared. "Rand and I..."
"Arthur," the other man interrupted firmly, barely glancing up from the laptop he was frowning at. "It's Arthur, now."
Lennox met the eye of the other man across the table, who had only been introduced to him as Eames and had promptly installed himself in an easy slouch, all slightly rumpled slacks and paisley button down, neat in a "businessman on vacation in Florida" sort of way rather than the starched "professional lawyer" way of Epps' former teammate. It made him easy to look past but Lennox thought that was more than a bit deliberate on the man's part, as his gaze was on his business parter and Epps with a sharp fascination that Lennox was feeling the twin of himself.
Epps rolled his eyes. "Arthur," he repeated dutifully. "Would that be because there's multiple last names to go with it, now?"
Arthur shot the dark man a sour look but it was Eames who answered, Queen's English vowels rolling out of his mouth like some audio clip from the BBC. "Yes, actually, depending on what country we're in."
Lennox was still processing that - and how likely it was to be serious - when Epps shook his head. "Oh yeah, of course, because you're all double oh seven on us now." He kicked a booted foot at Arthur's ankle, which the other man neatly avoided. "Don't let the prissy look fool you. Art and I here go way back."
Arthur didn't rise to the nick name. "We were both tapped for the dreamshare training project."
Epps grinned, leaning back in his chair. "Best damned gig ever - well, before this one rolled around. Real cutting edge stuff. Let's the guys really go wild; drop in, do any damned thing you want, come out, go in again and do it all over." Another nudge at Arthur's chair, which got him a sour look. "Killed your skinny white ass fifty times, man."
Arthur snorted. "It was fifty-one to fifty, my lead."
"Aww," Epps groaned, "don't even start. I would've evened it if they hadn't pulled the plug!" He leveled a finger at the other man, jabbing at the back of the laptop. "And if you hadn't walked off AWOL with the damned box. Shit, man, I thought they'd be droppin' you down a well and brickin' it up after when they found you, not putting you back on the payroll."
Lennox found himself raising his hands. "Woah, wait, hold on..." He looked at Arthur incredulously. "You went AWOL? With classified government property?"
Sighing, Arthur snapped the laptop shut and leaned back in his chair. "I took the experimental model," he admitted. "I was not the one who leaked the development plans, however." He tilted his head, the sharp dressed facade cracking suddenly, shearing years off his face and lighting up his eyes with a glint that Lennox knew far too well. "I've done some modifications to the PASSIV since then. It works much better now. Would you like to see?"
"What," Lennox managed, "you mean, like, try it?" but Epps had already shot his hand into the air like an over enthusiastic grade schooler, his grin broad and blinding.
"Bingo!"
Arthur shot him an amused look. "It's not going to help you."
Epps scraped his chair back, bouncing to his feet. "Don't care, man, I call bingo. Come on, Will, you're gonna love this."
Less than fifteen short minutes later, Lennox found himself settling back on the couch in the rec room, watching somewhat dubiously as Eames unwound a long, clear tube from the innocuous silver suitcase that housed a ridiculous amount of classified equipment and expertly approached him with needle in hand. "So, what's 'bingo' mean?"
Eames shrugged, his large hands surprisingly deft as he slipped the drip into Lennox's vein with nothing but a sharp pinprick to show for it. "So much easier to do this on someone else," he noted, "and I don't know." Straightening, he glanced over to where Arthur was fixing Epps' line, where the other soldier was sprawled in one of the overstuffed chairs. "Arthur, darling, what does 'bingo' mean?"
Epps was still grinning. "Means I call dibs on the hotseat. We found out early on that Control has an edge in the dream - towards the end they started making the eggheads Control so we'd all be on even odds, but it was damned fun while it lasted."
Arthur taped the line down to Epps' forearm and took his own place on the opposite side of the couch from Lennox, rolling up his sleeve enough to bare one pale wrist and sliding a needle home without so much as a flinch - it said something, Lennox thought, about sheer familiarity and repetition, but that seemed to be the nature of their business. "He means he's the subject," he said, apparently for his partner's benefit as Eames looked as puzzled as Lennox still felt. "One person is the dreamer - that's me, in this case - who creates the dream scape, and another person is the subject, who populates it." He glanced at Epps, a sharp edged grin escaping. "It's not going to give you any benefit, Bobby. Trust me, we've refined it a lot since the military."
"So where does that leave me?" Lennox asked, feeling a fission of adrenaline as he looked at the vials and softly blinking lights contained in the PASSIV case.
"Tourist," Eames said, smiling. Leaning over, he tapped a few buttons, bringing up a basic red LED timer. "Three minutes on the clock and..." he depressed a plunger, the machine hissing softly, "...here we go."
Three? Lennox wanted to say, wait, no, how could anyone properly experience anything in just three minutes, but something rushed from vial to tube to vein and his eyes were sagging shut before he knew it.
* * * * *
The timer was stopped on seventeen seconds and Eames ached in more places with the phantom pain of dream dismemberment than he really wanted to think about. "Shit," he breathed, and then, because it just didn't seem quite strong enough to sum up three weeks worth of practice runs culminating in a bare seventeen seconds and more brutal deaths than he liked to count, he swallowed against the persistent drymouth that Yusuf's latest concoction left and tried again. "Bloody hell."
Jazz was seated on the floor, back up against the wall of the hanger, the mobile jointed plates of what Eames could only think of as the Autobot's toes flexing unconsciously as he thought. "Best time so far," he offered, then shrugged, the sound of hydraulics hissing softly. "Ain't gonna cut it in the field, though."
"No shit," Arthur groaned from the chair beside Eames. He ran his hands across his face and into his hair, making the dark strands stand up raggedly in ways that begged for Eames to smooth them back down again. "This isn't working."
"It certainly isn't working in the way we need," Saito agreed. He rolled his head back, accompanied by the crackling pop of vertebrae, and sighed. "Ideas?"
Jazz clicked softly, a sound churring in his throat that cut off in a brief whistle which Eames, with a part of his mind that was so oversaturated that he couldn't turn it off any more, translated automatically as a Cybertronian humm on a thoughtful note followed by "maybe" with a suffix indicator that the listener should give the speaker a brief moment to formulate a full reply. There was a glottal chirp on a descending note that was the proper non-worded acknowledgment response but he made himself swallow it down - the last thing his already dry throat needed was more faulty attempts at speaking a language his vocal chords were in no way equipped for.
"Might have an idea," Jazz said in English after a brief moment. The Autobot tipped his head back, the blue edged light of his visor flickering as he shuttered and unshuttered his optics, fingertips tapping an absent rhythm on his chassis that sounded like techno beats played on steel drums. "Best way to test it would be to mix it up, though. Stead of y'all coming to my place, I'll come to yours."
Arthur was rubbing tiredly at his eyes. "Thought you weren't a... what's the word..."
"Simulator," Eames supplied automatically.
"Yes, that," Arthur agreed. "That's why you need us, right?"
Jazz waved one hand, two digits folded under to approximate a more normal human hand arrangement instead of the evenly spaced quad grappling hook sort of positioning that was more natural to him. "Nah, I don't got the mods or nothin' to go jacking full on in, but I know what frequency you're on and for skimmin' - that first level down, as y'all say - I can synch up for that at least. Enough to get my foot in the door, y'know?"
"Might as well," Eames agreed, and levered himself up with a groan to lean down towards the PASSIV, slanting a weary grin and a look at Arthur. "Bingo?"
Arthur sighed and held out a hand. "Better give it here."
"Precisely what I was suggesting," Eames replied smoothly, snagging the unused main lead and uncoiling it smoothly as he passed it over. "There's a reason we run militarized training jaunts in your head, darling."
"And here I thought you said I didn't have any imagination," Arthur grumbled by habit, taking the lead and wincing slightly as he slid the old one free, pressing the spot lightly before turning his wrist over to choose a new vein to slide into.
"Imagination has nothing to do with it," Eames insisted, resetting the timer before settling back in his chair. "You're just bloody vicious." The plunger depressed and Eames closed his eyes.
It was sheer relief to slide into the refreshingly normal feel of his own dream, all glittering downtown city scape with skyscrapers in nice human proportions, everyday colors and textures and materials, and the perfectly recognizable sounds of any other downtown metropolis street in mid day. Eames had a brief moment or two to luxuriate in it and catch the other two doing the same - Arthur, his head tipped back towards the sun overhead, Saito tugging down the sleeves of his suit jacket as he rocked back on his heels - before an unknown arm looped around his shoulders from behind, someone right up and in his personal space and the warm burr of a familiar accent in his ears. "Hey, y'all, what's hangin'?"
It was a surprise and not a surprise all at the same time; Eames took in caramel colored skin and tight curled honey blond bleached hair shaved in sharp geometric lines across a scalp that came no taller than his own eyes, baggy skater cargo pants and tank top hung on a whipcord frame of nothing but bones and muscle that screamed 'teenage boy' at first glance even when the second said that it was anything but. Eames slipped out from under the too familiar arm, putting a step of space between them. "Jazz."
Perfectly normal human hands on a perfectly normal human body reached up to tip the edge of silvery wrapped raybans down, pale blue eyes that were anything but human glinting for a moment over the top. "Got it in one, my man."
Saito frowned. "You can forge?"
Jazz shrugged, spinning away with a quick slide, palms and hands snapping out a rhythm against themselves for a few quick dance steps before he spun back to them. "Nah. This ain't forgin'. This is what we do, man. It's in our code, right down on the base line. Blend in, don't get noticed, adapt and remake ourselves t' the environment." He cocked two 'gun' fingers at Arthur with a sharp tongue click. "Your dream, boss man, your rules. I'm just blendin' in."
"But could you 'blend in' as something else?" Eames asked, curious. "Different outfit, different features?"
The Autobot shrugged, glancing down at himself. "Eh. Maybe. Would need a little work but one organic's pretty much like another - no offense, I got nothin' but respect for y'all, I've seen Lennox and them guys take down 'Cons all on their lonesome. 's just your features aren't hard coded into our recognitions the way our own are, y'know? Little taller, little shorter, different colors, it's kinda all the same t' us."
Eames was nodding. "That makes sense. But could you make yourself look like... I don't know, Optimus Prime? Or something like Sideswipe's alt mode?" Jazz, however, was already shaking his head.
"Nah, see, that I can't do. Blendin' in to a xeno landscape, that's one thing. We all do that. Takin' on someone else's features? I don't got the mods or the processor for that. Takes a pit of storage space to box yourself up and unpack somebody else, and some really fragged overclocking to run it realtime. Least ways, that's how m'man Blaster used to describe it. I just know I can't do it, an' I wouldn't wanna try."
Saito was nodding, as though something in what Jazz had said made more sense to him than to the others, and Arthur sighed and straightened. "Alright, then. What are we doing here?"
Jazz grinned, skipping a few steps back. "Provin' what I think might be th' point, boss man. Hit me. Show me everything ya got." He spread his arms, hands held wide. "I'm the interloper, here. Payback time. Bring it on."
It was fifteen minutes real time on the PASSIV, exactly, when the timer ran out and Eames found himself blinking awake back to the hanger, equal parts exhilarated and frustrated all at once. "How in hell did you do that?"
It had been a complete rout, a comedy of errors traipsing for hours through subjective dream time after a quarry they'd never even run to ground despite the combined force of Eames' dream and Arthur's projections. Jazz had eluded them at every turn and the few times they'd gotten close - when Eames had sworn he had the Autobot's human projection in his sights... well, it had been something akin to watching a three dimensional total immersion of the Matrix movies and the Autobot's SIC had proven to be a terribly apt and frighteningly effective version of Neo.
The Autobot's actual form was unmoved from where he'd been sitting, finger digits still habitually tapping out an unheard rhythm on the concrete floor. "Same way you do anything. Think I found the problem, y'all. We got clock problems."
Saito nodded shortly, shifting on his chair. "That was... impressive. I assume you mean processor speed errors?"
Eames bit back a curse, hearing Arthur do the same beside him. "I thought Yusuf had the formula tweaked?"
Jazz shook his head. "I'm not talking the frequency." He sat up with a hiss of air displacing in his systems, looping his arms over his upraised knees. "No offense, guys, but you're running underclocked. I'm driving loops around ya and I ain't even half tryin'."
Arthur rubbed at a point between his eyes. "In English, please?"
"I believe," Saito sighed, "what Mister Jazz is saying is that the fault lies not in our abilities or the synchronizing frequency, but in that we are essentially, as species, running at two entirely different mental speeds."
Eames let that sink in a minute, turning it over in his mind, and then let his head drop back against the cushions. "You're saying it's like plugging an old computer into a fiber optic line and then wondering why it can't run World of Warcraft."
The chirp of Cybertronian laughter sounded, a moment before the lights were momentarily eclipsed by the tip of Jazz's finger - easily the size of a large dinner plate - as the Autobot gently tapped the top of Eames' head. "Not your fault, my man. Just the way your made."
"Lovely," Arthur sighed. "Back to the drawing board."
Eames had thrown up his hands, his voice sharp with exasperation. "I'm going as fast as I can," he snapped. "I'm already spending thirty-two hours a day on a new language, Arthur, honestly, I don't know where you think I keep my miracles but I'm fresh out!"
Lennox blinked. "Thirty-two?"
"Dreamtime," Ariadne supplied helpfully from beside him. "He's spending two hours under a night with those recording Bumblebee made piped in on first level speed." She grinned up at him, utterly unrepentant. "It's a great study aid. I've never aced so many finals in my life."
Arthur, however, was frowning. "Still? A new language hasn't ever taken you that long before."
Eames leaned across the table to clap his hands to Arthur's cheeks, giving the other man a little shake. "Alien language, darling," he said firmly. "Alien, tonal, mathematics based language that has no common root with anything on Earth and is made up of sounds our vocal chords can't produce. Even my genius has limits."
Arthur scowled and pushed him away. Lennox tilted his head towards Ariadne thoughtfully, lowering his voice. "Are they...?"
"We had a betting pool about that," she replied absently, frowning at the maze-like mess of lines she was drawing, "but Arthur swears Eames is just very, very British."
* * * * *
If Lennox thought about the sort of people Robert Epps hung out with outside of duty hours it was still, by and large, made up of a mental image of the kind of men that served in NEST, sprinkled with their assorted wives and families. Military friends, military families. Nowhere in that mental image did thin, sharp faced men in three piece designer suits that probably cost more than several months of Lennox's salary fit into the picture, but there was something rather weirdly easy in the way the two of them talked, the familiarity of old team wedging a gap under designer suited facade to show a hint of something military underneath.
"Dreamsharing?" he found himself saying, rolling the cold, condensation beaded bottle of his beer between his hands. "Seriously? I heard about it - just scuttlebutt, nothing serious - but... for real?"
"Cross my heart," Epps declared. "Rand and I..."
"Arthur," the other man interrupted firmly, barely glancing up from the laptop he was frowning at. "It's Arthur, now."
Lennox met the eye of the other man across the table, who had only been introduced to him as Eames and had promptly installed himself in an easy slouch, all slightly rumpled slacks and paisley button down, neat in a "businessman on vacation in Florida" sort of way rather than the starched "professional lawyer" way of Epps' former teammate. It made him easy to look past but Lennox thought that was more than a bit deliberate on the man's part, as his gaze was on his business parter and Epps with a sharp fascination that Lennox was feeling the twin of himself.
Epps rolled his eyes. "Arthur," he repeated dutifully. "Would that be because there's multiple last names to go with it, now?"
Arthur shot the dark man a sour look but it was Eames who answered, Queen's English vowels rolling out of his mouth like some audio clip from the BBC. "Yes, actually, depending on what country we're in."
Lennox was still processing that - and how likely it was to be serious - when Epps shook his head. "Oh yeah, of course, because you're all double oh seven on us now." He kicked a booted foot at Arthur's ankle, which the other man neatly avoided. "Don't let the prissy look fool you. Art and I here go way back."
Arthur didn't rise to the nick name. "We were both tapped for the dreamshare training project."
Epps grinned, leaning back in his chair. "Best damned gig ever - well, before this one rolled around. Real cutting edge stuff. Let's the guys really go wild; drop in, do any damned thing you want, come out, go in again and do it all over." Another nudge at Arthur's chair, which got him a sour look. "Killed your skinny white ass fifty times, man."
Arthur snorted. "It was fifty-one to fifty, my lead."
"Aww," Epps groaned, "don't even start. I would've evened it if they hadn't pulled the plug!" He leveled a finger at the other man, jabbing at the back of the laptop. "And if you hadn't walked off AWOL with the damned box. Shit, man, I thought they'd be droppin' you down a well and brickin' it up after when they found you, not putting you back on the payroll."
Lennox found himself raising his hands. "Woah, wait, hold on..." He looked at Arthur incredulously. "You went AWOL? With classified government property?"
Sighing, Arthur snapped the laptop shut and leaned back in his chair. "I took the experimental model," he admitted. "I was not the one who leaked the development plans, however." He tilted his head, the sharp dressed facade cracking suddenly, shearing years off his face and lighting up his eyes with a glint that Lennox knew far too well. "I've done some modifications to the PASSIV since then. It works much better now. Would you like to see?"
"What," Lennox managed, "you mean, like, try it?" but Epps had already shot his hand into the air like an over enthusiastic grade schooler, his grin broad and blinding.
"Bingo!"
Arthur shot him an amused look. "It's not going to help you."
Epps scraped his chair back, bouncing to his feet. "Don't care, man, I call bingo. Come on, Will, you're gonna love this."
Less than fifteen short minutes later, Lennox found himself settling back on the couch in the rec room, watching somewhat dubiously as Eames unwound a long, clear tube from the innocuous silver suitcase that housed a ridiculous amount of classified equipment and expertly approached him with needle in hand. "So, what's 'bingo' mean?"
Eames shrugged, his large hands surprisingly deft as he slipped the drip into Lennox's vein with nothing but a sharp pinprick to show for it. "So much easier to do this on someone else," he noted, "and I don't know." Straightening, he glanced over to where Arthur was fixing Epps' line, where the other soldier was sprawled in one of the overstuffed chairs. "Arthur, darling, what does 'bingo' mean?"
Epps was still grinning. "Means I call dibs on the hotseat. We found out early on that Control has an edge in the dream - towards the end they started making the eggheads Control so we'd all be on even odds, but it was damned fun while it lasted."
Arthur taped the line down to Epps' forearm and took his own place on the opposite side of the couch from Lennox, rolling up his sleeve enough to bare one pale wrist and sliding a needle home without so much as a flinch - it said something, Lennox thought, about sheer familiarity and repetition, but that seemed to be the nature of their business. "He means he's the subject," he said, apparently for his partner's benefit as Eames looked as puzzled as Lennox still felt. "One person is the dreamer - that's me, in this case - who creates the dream scape, and another person is the subject, who populates it." He glanced at Epps, a sharp edged grin escaping. "It's not going to give you any benefit, Bobby. Trust me, we've refined it a lot since the military."
"So where does that leave me?" Lennox asked, feeling a fission of adrenaline as he looked at the vials and softly blinking lights contained in the PASSIV case.
"Tourist," Eames said, smiling. Leaning over, he tapped a few buttons, bringing up a basic red LED timer. "Three minutes on the clock and..." he depressed a plunger, the machine hissing softly, "...here we go."
Three? Lennox wanted to say, wait, no, how could anyone properly experience anything in just three minutes, but something rushed from vial to tube to vein and his eyes were sagging shut before he knew it.
* * * * *
The timer was stopped on seventeen seconds and Eames ached in more places with the phantom pain of dream dismemberment than he really wanted to think about. "Shit," he breathed, and then, because it just didn't seem quite strong enough to sum up three weeks worth of practice runs culminating in a bare seventeen seconds and more brutal deaths than he liked to count, he swallowed against the persistent drymouth that Yusuf's latest concoction left and tried again. "Bloody hell."
Jazz was seated on the floor, back up against the wall of the hanger, the mobile jointed plates of what Eames could only think of as the Autobot's toes flexing unconsciously as he thought. "Best time so far," he offered, then shrugged, the sound of hydraulics hissing softly. "Ain't gonna cut it in the field, though."
"No shit," Arthur groaned from the chair beside Eames. He ran his hands across his face and into his hair, making the dark strands stand up raggedly in ways that begged for Eames to smooth them back down again. "This isn't working."
"It certainly isn't working in the way we need," Saito agreed. He rolled his head back, accompanied by the crackling pop of vertebrae, and sighed. "Ideas?"
Jazz clicked softly, a sound churring in his throat that cut off in a brief whistle which Eames, with a part of his mind that was so oversaturated that he couldn't turn it off any more, translated automatically as a Cybertronian humm on a thoughtful note followed by "maybe" with a suffix indicator that the listener should give the speaker a brief moment to formulate a full reply. There was a glottal chirp on a descending note that was the proper non-worded acknowledgment response but he made himself swallow it down - the last thing his already dry throat needed was more faulty attempts at speaking a language his vocal chords were in no way equipped for.
"Might have an idea," Jazz said in English after a brief moment. The Autobot tipped his head back, the blue edged light of his visor flickering as he shuttered and unshuttered his optics, fingertips tapping an absent rhythm on his chassis that sounded like techno beats played on steel drums. "Best way to test it would be to mix it up, though. Stead of y'all coming to my place, I'll come to yours."
Arthur was rubbing tiredly at his eyes. "Thought you weren't a... what's the word..."
"Simulator," Eames supplied automatically.
"Yes, that," Arthur agreed. "That's why you need us, right?"
Jazz waved one hand, two digits folded under to approximate a more normal human hand arrangement instead of the evenly spaced quad grappling hook sort of positioning that was more natural to him. "Nah, I don't got the mods or nothin' to go jacking full on in, but I know what frequency you're on and for skimmin' - that first level down, as y'all say - I can synch up for that at least. Enough to get my foot in the door, y'know?"
"Might as well," Eames agreed, and levered himself up with a groan to lean down towards the PASSIV, slanting a weary grin and a look at Arthur. "Bingo?"
Arthur sighed and held out a hand. "Better give it here."
"Precisely what I was suggesting," Eames replied smoothly, snagging the unused main lead and uncoiling it smoothly as he passed it over. "There's a reason we run militarized training jaunts in your head, darling."
"And here I thought you said I didn't have any imagination," Arthur grumbled by habit, taking the lead and wincing slightly as he slid the old one free, pressing the spot lightly before turning his wrist over to choose a new vein to slide into.
"Imagination has nothing to do with it," Eames insisted, resetting the timer before settling back in his chair. "You're just bloody vicious." The plunger depressed and Eames closed his eyes.
It was sheer relief to slide into the refreshingly normal feel of his own dream, all glittering downtown city scape with skyscrapers in nice human proportions, everyday colors and textures and materials, and the perfectly recognizable sounds of any other downtown metropolis street in mid day. Eames had a brief moment or two to luxuriate in it and catch the other two doing the same - Arthur, his head tipped back towards the sun overhead, Saito tugging down the sleeves of his suit jacket as he rocked back on his heels - before an unknown arm looped around his shoulders from behind, someone right up and in his personal space and the warm burr of a familiar accent in his ears. "Hey, y'all, what's hangin'?"
It was a surprise and not a surprise all at the same time; Eames took in caramel colored skin and tight curled honey blond bleached hair shaved in sharp geometric lines across a scalp that came no taller than his own eyes, baggy skater cargo pants and tank top hung on a whipcord frame of nothing but bones and muscle that screamed 'teenage boy' at first glance even when the second said that it was anything but. Eames slipped out from under the too familiar arm, putting a step of space between them. "Jazz."
Perfectly normal human hands on a perfectly normal human body reached up to tip the edge of silvery wrapped raybans down, pale blue eyes that were anything but human glinting for a moment over the top. "Got it in one, my man."
Saito frowned. "You can forge?"
Jazz shrugged, spinning away with a quick slide, palms and hands snapping out a rhythm against themselves for a few quick dance steps before he spun back to them. "Nah. This ain't forgin'. This is what we do, man. It's in our code, right down on the base line. Blend in, don't get noticed, adapt and remake ourselves t' the environment." He cocked two 'gun' fingers at Arthur with a sharp tongue click. "Your dream, boss man, your rules. I'm just blendin' in."
"But could you 'blend in' as something else?" Eames asked, curious. "Different outfit, different features?"
The Autobot shrugged, glancing down at himself. "Eh. Maybe. Would need a little work but one organic's pretty much like another - no offense, I got nothin' but respect for y'all, I've seen Lennox and them guys take down 'Cons all on their lonesome. 's just your features aren't hard coded into our recognitions the way our own are, y'know? Little taller, little shorter, different colors, it's kinda all the same t' us."
Eames was nodding. "That makes sense. But could you make yourself look like... I don't know, Optimus Prime? Or something like Sideswipe's alt mode?" Jazz, however, was already shaking his head.
"Nah, see, that I can't do. Blendin' in to a xeno landscape, that's one thing. We all do that. Takin' on someone else's features? I don't got the mods or the processor for that. Takes a pit of storage space to box yourself up and unpack somebody else, and some really fragged overclocking to run it realtime. Least ways, that's how m'man Blaster used to describe it. I just know I can't do it, an' I wouldn't wanna try."
Saito was nodding, as though something in what Jazz had said made more sense to him than to the others, and Arthur sighed and straightened. "Alright, then. What are we doing here?"
Jazz grinned, skipping a few steps back. "Provin' what I think might be th' point, boss man. Hit me. Show me everything ya got." He spread his arms, hands held wide. "I'm the interloper, here. Payback time. Bring it on."
It was fifteen minutes real time on the PASSIV, exactly, when the timer ran out and Eames found himself blinking awake back to the hanger, equal parts exhilarated and frustrated all at once. "How in hell did you do that?"
It had been a complete rout, a comedy of errors traipsing for hours through subjective dream time after a quarry they'd never even run to ground despite the combined force of Eames' dream and Arthur's projections. Jazz had eluded them at every turn and the few times they'd gotten close - when Eames had sworn he had the Autobot's human projection in his sights... well, it had been something akin to watching a three dimensional total immersion of the Matrix movies and the Autobot's SIC had proven to be a terribly apt and frighteningly effective version of Neo.
The Autobot's actual form was unmoved from where he'd been sitting, finger digits still habitually tapping out an unheard rhythm on the concrete floor. "Same way you do anything. Think I found the problem, y'all. We got clock problems."
Saito nodded shortly, shifting on his chair. "That was... impressive. I assume you mean processor speed errors?"
Eames bit back a curse, hearing Arthur do the same beside him. "I thought Yusuf had the formula tweaked?"
Jazz shook his head. "I'm not talking the frequency." He sat up with a hiss of air displacing in his systems, looping his arms over his upraised knees. "No offense, guys, but you're running underclocked. I'm driving loops around ya and I ain't even half tryin'."
Arthur rubbed at a point between his eyes. "In English, please?"
"I believe," Saito sighed, "what Mister Jazz is saying is that the fault lies not in our abilities or the synchronizing frequency, but in that we are essentially, as species, running at two entirely different mental speeds."
Eames let that sink in a minute, turning it over in his mind, and then let his head drop back against the cushions. "You're saying it's like plugging an old computer into a fiber optic line and then wondering why it can't run World of Warcraft."
The chirp of Cybertronian laughter sounded, a moment before the lights were momentarily eclipsed by the tip of Jazz's finger - easily the size of a large dinner plate - as the Autobot gently tapped the top of Eames' head. "Not your fault, my man. Just the way your made."
"Lovely," Arthur sighed. "Back to the drawing board."