Fic
Title: Borealis 71/90: Will You Still Feed Me
Author: tainry
Disclaimer: Not mine, no money.
Rating: NC-17
Characters/Pairing(s): ensemble, Beachcomber/Miles
Warnings: Angst, explicit-ish xeno, mild language, uh, technically mind-rape of a non-sexual nature. Yoiks!
Summary: Wherein the Wreckers do demolitions; Mez's bacon is saved, sort of; certain Autobots have an important chat with their human friends, to which the humans react in different ways.
Notes: If you want to skip the xeno, don't read the scene starting "Miles was tired after his long hike..." and ending at a scene break doodad.
~5500 words.
BOREALIS: Will You Still Feed Me
2034 - January
Springer made tiny, flickering motions with his fingers and Roadbuster nodded, taking half the squad down a tunnel to the left. They didn’t dare tight-beam here, beneath the umbra of Soundwave’s senses. Even so, with Chaar seething like a kicked scraplet nest, the opportunity was too great to miss.
The planet Chaar was part of a young system, the planet itself barely past the Hadean stage. Fantastic for raw materials and volcanothermal energy generation - if you didn’t mind the rock vapor atmosphere, radiation from exposed, newly-accreted elements and heavy bombardment from inner-system asteroids. The Cons had shields over the more sensitive installations, and a web of hunter-destroyer satellites to keep large meteors at bay. The Wreckers were in the process of happily rigging quite a lot of that safety equipment to blow.
…
“I wouldn’t bother with that one if I were you,” Knockout said, waving a dismissive hand. “Gamma ray fry to both memory core and CPU to a depth of six micrometers. Even if he regains full function eventually, he won’t remember anything of the last half-vorn.”
Soundwave commanded the CR tank to uncover a port and jacked in.
“Suit yourself,” Knockout huffed. Galvatron stalked the visible-spectrum shadows of the med-lab/interrogation chamber/salvage depot, the dim light via some peculiar optical interaction giving his armor a strange, sickly violet cast. He was making Knockout nervous.
Alerted to Soundwave’s presence and activity by the medic, Shockwave entered, pausing at the doorway to assess the situation. “How close are their repairs to completion?”
“Oh, they’ll be out in an orn or two,” Knockout said.
“Very well.” Shockwave approached the CR tank on the opposite end from Soundwave and initiated his own cable link. Designation Mez - gender zhe et cetera et cetera - conflict and interdiction of Iceneedle, boring - marooning, cannibalization; yes yes whatever - Beta; already knew that - spark chamber mod; ah, I see, there it is, the Flay datalogs - does Turmoil know this mech downloaded them? - mech is intuitive, observant, ambitious; next - fervor centered upon Decepticon cause, loyalty to Galvatron personally, lust-motivated; boring - Hmm, firewalls, odd, cobbled-together, chaotic; during marooning must have had little better to do than rewrite self; typical; nevertheless, prudent to break them, see what lies beneath…
Turmoil charged in, optics blazing. “Kup’s gotten that rust-infested scow, the Trion repaired, and the Wreckers are on-planet somewhere. I want all available ensparked troops, Shockwave, no more drones, slag you!”
“The newest series-” Shockwave began calmly.
“Is too fragging stupid to be more than a hindrance,” Turmoil growled. “I want mechs. Including these.”
“The request is logical,” Soundwave said, disengaging his interrogation. “Autobot tactics of recent occurrence have become unusual, dynamic, unpredictable.”
Shockwave had already calculated this, and the cause. A change in roster had occurred; from Sentinel’s battalion, whose tactics had subsequently become routine and conventional, to the apostate Prime’s group, and there had been recent communication between the latter and the battalions led by Ultra Magnus and Kup, and the heavy spec ops team called the Wreckers. “Very well. Knockout, release them.” Attention, Decepticons: all personnel in assemblages 120 through 206 are to report to Turmoil on landing platform 7-helium for immediate deployment.
As the CR chambers emptied of colloid and opened, Turmoil grabbed Mez and shoved him ahead, trailing Snare, who was half-carried by Treadshot. “You’ve been promoted again, Mez. To the front line. Move!” Shockwave and Soundwave followed them out.
Galvatron emerged from the shadows and stroked fingers around Knockout’s waist, nuzzling the keen edge of his mandibular spar against the cables of Knockout’s neck. “Did you not notice something peculiar about that mech?”
“My Lord? Which one?”
“The one Turmoil was in such a hurry to reacquire.”
“What? The walking scrap-pile? Characteristic for last survivors of shipwreck, really.”
“Hmmm.” Galvatron wondered. What was Turmoil up to?
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
2035 - October
Bee, stop fretting and just tell them, Borealis tight-beamed from just outside the Oort. Only a slight flexing of her consciousness was needed to include Prime in their channel. You’re running out of time. Years are passing; they might already be too old to accept the idea gracefully. You’re going to have to decide sooner than you realize.
Cybertronians could think over huge datasets in microseconds, could process scores of tasks concurrently and rapidly; but there were some things their eons-long perspective ill-suited them to handle. And Bumblebee was not one of the few among them who had had such a close relationship to an ephemeral species before.
The time never seemed right. Bumblebee hated to interrupt their rare vacations together with morbid questions that were sure to be upsetting to his human family. How long did they have? Two decades? Four? He worried, watching each hour fleet by on his chronometer, irretrievable. They were having so much fun relaxing on the beach or playing with Dani and Nate, building sandcastles. Leaving footprints in the wet sand. They lived with such intensity. Even asleep their minds moved in dreams. He recorded everything, hated to recharge. If Seaspray replayed his memories of Alana, or Jazz of Tallaria, neither ever spoke of it. Loving ephemerals was risky, he knew that. He didn’t care.
He thought of Tracks, Hound, the unlikely Powerglide. They were in trouble too. And Prime. Prime had been built to love an entire world. He had lost one, gained another, more populous than Cybertron had ever been. There might be a kind of comfort for Prime in each Cybertronian death, Bee thought. He knew where they were, could with effort speak with their patterns, would, in a sense, never be parted from them again. But what of all the human deaths he could not feel? He didn't know where their patterns went. They were as lost to him as they were to each other. Oh, Prime, he thought. What are we going to do?
We should have told them years ago. We should have told them when it was done. We were too unsure. They would have had time to understand, to decide. What if it's too late now?
Ixchel was older… Bee said. He and his extended family were outside on a grassy hill in Cambridge, Massachusetts, enjoying an Indian summer on soft blankets with the sun warm on their skin and the scent of grass sweet on the air. He didn’t want to ruin their enjoyment, spoil the mood with a subject they probably should have dealt with decades ago.
Ixchel was, Borealis replied, pardon me, primed for the idea. She and Ratchet had been discussing a lot of different possibilities, some they felt were more fanciful than others. Ixchel read science fiction, y’know, like a lot of other scientists.
Bumblebee, Borealis is correct. You must, however, handle this in the way you deem most potentially successful. The least traumatic, if it comes to that.
Do you want me to come down and help? Borealis asked. I am kind of involved…
All right, said Bee, tight-beaming to Beachcomber, Hound and Tracks what he intended, so that they at least would not be blindsided. Mirage and Ironhide would later have to endure the same uncertainty with their particular humans. And Lennox and Epps were even older. Bee didn’t envy them.
On my way, Borealis said. Go ahead and start the party without me. ETA ninety minutes.
Oh fine. Bee stood carefully, setting Nate, who’d climbed to his shoulders, down gently on the grass. Even at five, Nate had the climbing skills of any arboreal primate. Bee walked down the hill a short way, door-wings low. He already had most of the adults’ attention; this wasn’t like him. When he came back to where he’d been sitting and resumed that posture, Mikaela and Sam fixed him with alarmingly similar stares.
“Well? What happened?” Mikaela asked.
“I…have to ask you something,” Bee said. “But I have to explain something first. And apologize for not doing this a long time ago.”
“Oh great,” Sam said, pretending to rub a headache out of his temples, but grinning a little bit, too. Sometimes the bots made a big deal out of nothing. The robots had adapted so thoroughly it almost wasn’t like having aliens over to visit any more, so it was fun when that veneer was set aside, revealing the true gulfs between their species. And Bee was just too cute.
Bumblebee clasped his hands in his lap. Optics worried but bright, he told them the tale of a human whose genetic heritage had confined her body to a wheelchair and to a progressively immobile frame; who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, falling offhand prey to the Decepticons as so many humans had. He told them what Prime and Ratchet had done and why. And by the time he finished, Borealis was on approach, to the aggravation of a new air controller at Logan International, who got an earful on a different frequency from the officer in charge of the tower at Hanscom.
She transformed and landed neatly on her feet at the foot of the hill, crouching down to put her head at a level with the seated humans. They stared at her.
What? she thought to herself. Do I have broccoli in my teeth?
Mikaela stood. She was trembling. "You. You did this to your...your first child. Your first child in billions of years and you overwrote her with a human brain scan? Why would you do something like that? You basically killed the person she would have been, just to be a...a crate for some pitiful human! I can't believe Dr. Chase would have approved something like that. Did you even ask her or did you in your infinitely greater wisdom just yank the scan as she was...oh my god, you didn't. You didn't ask her."
That was where they lost Sam.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. Are you serious? After all those speeches about freedom and choice, and...and... There was no consent. You didn't even ASK. You just did what you wanted. Took what you wanted and left the rest to die."
“That’s a little harsh,” Borealis said. She had meant to let everyone work through their reactions without undue interference from herself, but Mikaela had gone for the jugular. “It wasn’t explicit consent; Ixchel was dying, she wasn’t all that conscious for very long. Thankfully. But she and Ratchet had tossed ideas around. She wouldn’t have found it weird. She would have given consent if there had been time.” She stuck her chin out at Mikaela. “I know her better than you did, missy. Everything Ixchel Chase knew or thought or felt is up here.” She tapped her helm.
"Are you going to offer this option to the other six billion of us?” Mikaela asked, not backing down. “Huh? Or were you just going to pick your favorites? Your special pets. Make neat little copies and implant them in...”
“That’s the tricky part,” Borealis conceded.
“Always a catch,” Sam muttered.
“There are so many of you,” Bee said, “and we are not reproducing very quickly, by your standards. We simply cannot accommodate every human being now, nor into the future.”
“When you guys can build your own robot bodies it won’t matter,” Borealis said.
“Don’t you see?” Bee continued. “Once we knew it would work, we couldn’t withhold the idea, we couldn’t not ask. And yet we can only realistically ask a few of you. It makes sense that it would be the few who are close to us already. The few who… who it will hurt us the most to lose.” The static in his vocoder was no affectation.
Sam swallowed hard. Whatever reasons they’d had with Ixchel, Sam knew it was this last that was paramount now. He recalled how he’d felt when Mojo had died, silver-muzzled and arthritic, his tiny organs failing one by one. The longevity issue was similar, if greater in scale here. Didn’t most pet owners wish with all their hearts that their beloved companions lived longer than a decade or two? Could he blame Bee for wishing his beloved companions lived longer than a single short century? Sam had had the thought before. Now suddenly there was a lot more to try to fit into his thinking. A lot more to process.
“It’s just a copy,” Dani said quietly, hoping she wouldn’t get sent off to mind Nate while the grownups talked. “We still die.”
“Yes,” said Borealis. “I am not Ixchel Chase. I am Borealis. I am a Cybertronian Autobot, gender de, Seeker class, subclass delta. I’ve shared the Ixchel memories with most of the other Autobots, but for me, they are also integral to who I’ve become. Mind and body are one.”
Up in Oregon, walking through the damp, ferny, towering forest, listening in on a feed from Bee to Beachcomber and Perceptor, Miles was, as usual, distracted from the subject at hand. Uh, Miles tight-beamed to Beachcomber, if she’s “de”, like Skyfire, then why do we call her “her”?
Because when she was first decanted one of her basic assumptions about herself was that she was a “she”.
Because of the…the Ixchel memories?
Yes.
And none of you thought it was odd to call someone you look at and immediately think of as a “he” a “she” instead?
It’s…hang on let me ask Glyph… Yeah. It’s partly a translation thing. We’re already speaking in English or whatever other Earth language, right? So that’s already massively different from what we’d say in Cybertronian.
So you call her “de” in Cybertronian, not “she”?
Some of us do. Secondly, we pretty much use whatever pronouns a person wants to be used for them. It’s not that hard, you just pop it into a subroutine and whichever length memory storage seems appropriate.
Ah, got it. Must be great at parties, never forgetting someone’s name three seconds after you meet them.
Right. We came up with other faux pas instead.
I won’t ask.
You will later. Anyway, thirdly; since pretty much anybody can get reformatted to any “gender” they want more or less whenever they feel like it, calling someone by a pronoun that may or may not be technically appropriate isn’t a big deal.
Like Wheeljack. That’s…pretty cool, actually. Do you…did you, uh, download the Ixchel memories too, or whatever?
Heh. Yes, Miles. But I was, heh, an adult-
I dispute that allegation, Perceptor cut in.
-so to speak, Beachcomber amended, laughing, when I downloaded those files. Lissi got them right after she was kindled, so they formed a basic part of her personality.
Huh. So Kaela’s right. Whoever she would have been, if Prime hadn’t interfered, would have been a different person.
When they uploaded Prowl’s AI core and memory into the new body they built for him, they changed the person that body might have become if it had been kindled without him. It’s…not that different to us. It’s not that strange. Only the human origin of the Ixchel memories takes some of us aback.
And the Matrix thought it was that important.
Beachcomber chuckled. It was kind of cute, he thought, the way Prime had this squabbly bunch of old people arguing and faffing about in his chest. Must get noisy sometimes, but he couldn’t ever be lonely. I guess so.
In Cambridge, Mikaela was still standing, though she’d taken the heat of her glare off of Bee and Borealis. “How many others of the new kids have you done this to?” she asked, fists clenched beneath crossed arms.
“None,” Bee said.
“So you did it once, fifteen, sixteen years ago and never did it again. And you didn’t tell us about it until now, though some of us mere humans have known you were making new people for years.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re only telling us now because you’re afraid you’re running out of time.”
“…We didn’t mean to wait this long.”
“And yet you did. I don’t think you’re that forgetful. Any of you. I think you put it off because you know how morally and ethically and emotionally sketchy your cute little idea is. I think it’s telling that you only did it once.”
“Heeey,” Borealis said, blinking.
“No offense,” Mikaela said, nevertheless glaring, clearly keeping her composure only with great effort. “It’s not your fault, Borealis. They did this to you. You weren’t in a position to say anything or do anything about it. And I understand how from your perspective the person you are now wouldn’t want to change what happened. That doesn’t stop it from being wrong.”
Mikaela, blue eyes hot as any optics, looked back to Bee, who at this gathering represented Ratchet and Prime as well. “How could you?” Tears finally spilled down her cheeks. “How could you?” She strode down the hillside, hair a dark banner behind her. Sam knew she hated crying in front of people.
After a while, Sam rose as well. “It’s okay,” he said quietly. “More or less, I mean. She’s pissed off but it’s not like she’ll never speak to you guys again.” He looked up at Bee, hard pressed to categorize his own emotions at this point. The robots clearly hadn’t thought this was going to go over well. They’d been right. “We’ll come back to this, I promise, just give us time to think, okay?”
“Of course,” Bee said.
Sam trotted down the hill after his wife, careful to let her maintain a few minutes’ lead. He glanced back, thinking of pillars of salt and broken promises. Bumblebee shivered in Borealis' embrace, silent, wings down. Tracks, who was supposed to be on perimeter, transformed and joined the cuddle, stroking Bee's back and making faint warbling sounds on the edge of Sam's hearing. Dani was talking earnestly with someone over implant, helping Nate blow bubbles with the hoops and wands they’d brought. Borealis watched them, looking out of place, the curves and planes of her armor rutched at angry angles.
Damn, Sam thought. Mikaela was pissed off, shocked. The robots were hurt. And Borealis' stance - a person accustomed to being set apart - convinced him of their tale emotionally, though he'd had no trouble accepting it intellectually. Of course Ratchet could do something like that. Should he have? Maybe not. But Sam believed Borealis when she'd said that Ixchel would have consented.
…
Later, back in Nevada, Sam patted the Camaro’s hood. “All right, the yelling’s over. You don’t have to hide in car mode any more.” Not that Mikaela would have held off throwing big pieces of equipment at him just because he was a hot set of wheels. She knew his armor could withstand anything like that. She was more inclined to throw things only in the heat of rage, not when anger had settled into a cold, diamondlike lump in the middle of her chest.
Bee transformed. Sam climbed to his shoulder and the two ascended to the mesa top.
“I understand that we’re not pets to you,” Sam said, as Bee sat cross-legged and Sam settled into his lap, the back of his head just brushing the lower part of Bee’s chest. Sam couldn’t really feel the thrum of his spark, but he knew it was there. “I think I get it, anyway. We’re a lot more like children, aren’t we. You want to help us, protect us. You like to watch us leaning new things.” Sam thought vividly of Perceptor at one of the Nobel Prize ceremonies, when a cosmologist among the great brains gathered had asked Perceptor to give them a point-blank answer regarding something about one of the fundamental constants of the universe.
Perceptor had beamed at the audience with such love and eagerness in his optics and face, and Sam hadn’t realized someone could beam like that with their whole body before. “You are so close to finding out for yourselves!” Perceptor had purred, awe as clear in his voice as in his optics. “I so envy you now. On the brink of so many wonderful discoveries!” As the camera had panned, Sam had seen tears in more than a few pairs of eyes. Perceptor really meant it, and he really, really didn’t want to spoil humanity’s fun. It wasn’t about cheating, giving easy answers to questions humans thought were complex, or spilling Cybertronian secrets before the primitives were capable of comprehending and using that knowledge wisely. It was purely about not spoiling the fun. Damn. Even Perceptor understood humans that well. That was almost scary.
“And you get aggravated,” Sam continued, patting Bee’s leg, “when we misbehave. But you’re smart enough to let us make our own mistakes. As long as those mistakes don’t, you know, outright kill us or anything.” Sam scooched around and hugged Bee’s torso. “You haven't approached Bobby and Will with this yet, have you."
"No," said Bee, giving an excellent approximation of a relieved sigh and leaning into the hug.
"You know how they'll react, don't you? Military guys? This sounds too much like a really sneaky sort of takeover. You are the Borg, we will be assimilated; resistance is futile."
"But-!”
"I know, Bee! I'm just saying a lot of people, humans, are going to think that's what you're doing."
"Mikaela-”
"Mikaela's mad because despite what Ratchet and Borealis keep saying, she feels that they killed the child Borealis would have been. She likes to pretend she's this uninvolved, disinterested mother, but oh boy is she ever involved." Sam grinned. "Yeah, and don't tell her I said that."
"What do you think, Sam?"
"I don't know. Ask me again in twenty years. Right now, 44 doesn't feel so bad, y'know? It's not like you're going to plop my brain into a robot body physically. It's just a robot clone, kind of. Doesn't really affect me." He tapped his chest, making the physical emphasis clear.
“All right, Sam,” Bee said. “I’ll ask you again in twenty years.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
…
Miles was tired after his long hike, but he agreed to let Beachcomber piggy-back him to the top of Mount St. Hilary, to watch the bright, so close-seeming stars. Beachcomber spun up his spark, heating his chassis as Miles laid down on top of him. Hands clasped behind their heads, ankles crossed. Little, big.
He supposed he must have fallen asleep. He opened his eyes to a golden, misty dawn, with the lower slopes of the mountain shrouded completely. Beachcomber’s shields had kept the dew off; Miles felt pleasantly warm and even more pleasantly encumbered with morning wood.
He rolled over slowly, giving Beachcomber time to evade, knowing he wouldn't. He draped an arm over Beachcomber's midsection, letting his hand rest on an odd bit of abdominal plating. Beachcomber, he tight-beamed. l want to. The brain scan thing. It's ...okay with me if you do it. He knew it didn't mean he personally would live forever. It meant a lot that the robots liked him enough that they wanted at least some version of him to exist for as long as they did. He pressed his hand higher on Beachcomber's side, closer to his chest. But I want...I'm glad there's time to fill me up with human memories. Human feeling.
Beachcomber covered Miles' hand with his own. Hard metal but not cold. Warm metal fingers stroked Miles’ back and hair, the pressure no doubt calculated with exactitude but expressing calm acceptance and affection and, if the increased thrum of spark beneath his chest was any indication, a degree of matching arousal.
Miles didn’t really like dirty talk or theatrical moans during sex; Beachcomber’s melodic but wordless humming thrilled across his skin and through his blood, rousing every cell. Even his hair felt alive, as though it was waving above his head in warm seawater as Beachcomber’s hands moved slowly, steadily under Miles’ clothes, measuring by every curve and plane, every freckle or imperfection the geology of human embodiment.
The cold mountain air was no match for the heat rising from Beachcomber’s body. Miles felt as though his respirocytes were singing. He shifted to unfasten his shorts and found Beachcomber had already done so, a limber hand slipping between Miles’ legs. Touching, exploring, stroking with the rounded undersides of articulated fingers. Beachcomber’s visor had turned a deep peacock blue when he lifted his head to watch, to kiss, to direct that hum into all the tiny pieces of Miles that were now metal; illuminating them to Beachcomber’s senses and setting Miles’ senses alight.
The old volcanic throat beneath them was no match for the core of fire rising through Miles’ body. He curled and lifted, a wave on Beachcomber’s solid shore, Beachcomber’s fingers moving faster, deep spinning spark an ascending chorus, Miles' hands slipping on armor or shield, sliding over complex joints, hips moving faster, tingle of a scan breaking, rush of the wave breaking and Miles caught a breath and held it as light exploded in his mind and the sweet burst of completion shook him.
“You could’ve plugged in,” Miles panted, washed ashore but not stranded. He ran his fingertips along the irregular path of Beachcomber’s central seam. The ultimate Cybertronian intimacy they couldn’t share; not with Miles as he was. The entire surface of Miles’ skin felt electric. “What can I do?”
Beachcomber gave that gentle laugh of his. “Try to set aside notions of giving and taking, dominant and submissive, active and passive. Not everyone considers those opposites, or even the summation of possible…hmm…roles. Pleasure shared, no matter how, is always increased exponentially. Don’t tell Perceptor I put it like that. He thinks I don’t have any kind of head for math.”
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
“What…what was it like?” Maggie had waited until Borealis emerged from the recharge bay - had been lying in wait, really - before posing her question. Hound had broken the story to Maggie and Glen together. Glen thought it was awesome and had spent about an hour bouncing around their little pod apartment high in the embassy’s labyrinth, trying to decide what his future robot-self’s first alt mode would be.
Borealis looked at Maggie without answering at first, and lowered a hand. Maggie stepped in and held on as Borealis strode out into the lavender evening and climbed to the mesa top. She lifted her hand level with her optics. Maggie sat down, leaning against the base of Borealis’ forefinger.
“What was what like?” Borealis said finally. “Dying? Waking up something else? Adapting to being in a completely different body?”
Maggie grinned. “Yes.”
“Heh. Ratchet took the scan before she had actually died, so I can’t tell you anything about whether or not there’s a human afterlife or what it’s like.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, sorry. You guys have to work that out yourselves.”
“Knew it couldn’t be that easy.”
“As for the rest, I note you have the latest full-immersion sensory implant package?”
“Of course. A girl and her toys.”
“Then I can show you what the rest was like if you want.” Borealis extended a cephalic cable and wound the tip down to a tiny diameter. Maggie hesitated only a moment, then pulled her hair away from the jack at the base of her skull.
There were vague recollections from the tank, blurry emotions, half-heard, half-felt voices; then the giddy happiness of standing and walking, not remembering at first why such actions pleased her. How senses and feelings had been kept gently, carefully blunted, only slowly increasing to Cybertronian norms; falling into the swift fire/anguish of integration. The rapture of flight, the tumbling glow of the cloud mind, punctuated by the ecstasy of interface, spark to spark, sharing of wholenesses. And if atmospheric flight had been rapturous, the transition to space was beyond bliss, new senses yet again, reaching out across lightyears, feather-pull of gravity, flare of quasars, voracious cinders of black holes, the vast, moving map of the local universe expanding within her consciousness.
Maggie was glad she’d been sitting. She disengaged her side of the link and Borealis retracted the cable.
“Hound said they’d been careful,” Maggie whispered, blinking at the optics nearby, twice the size of dinner plates. “I…I believed him, but they really were. I mean they didn’t just throw a personality in there expecting it to be okay with a hugely different set of inputs.”
“Of course not,” Borealis said. “Weird is okay, but they weren’t aiming for insane.”
…
Even in his mid-40’s Raoul Aquino was an expert in the teenage martial art of Don’tgiveashit. “Okaaay,” he said at the end of Tracks’ explanation. “Whatever. You guys gonna do what you want, yeah? Me, I got inventory to check. Those Bernoulli brothers, man, you can’t trust ‘em.”
“Raoul,” Tracks huffed, “what I want is to know what you want.” Raoul smirked; that must have been a painful admission.
“Fine. Lemme get this right; you stick my head in Ratchet’s Xerox machine and plug that into a robot baby-kid.”
“Crudely put but essentially correct.”
“Snob. And you only do this when I’m dying already.”
“Not necessarily. We could make backup copies, as it were, during the course of your life. Updating would thus include the most current version of your experience.”
“Great. So why should I care? I’ll be dead anyway, me, the real me. Muerte.”
Tracks revved his engine in annoyance, stood up, walked away a few paces, almost hitting his helm on one of the warehouse’s structural beams. “Humans - in Western cultures - place a high value on individuality. Some of you don’t like the idea of replicating what makes you unique. Your fiction is rife with evil clones…”
“You read that shit?”
“Raoul…”
“No, man. Tracks, I seriously don’t care. Knock yourself out. I guess it’s flattering, but I don’t see why you’d want to do that, except to, like, big brains or national treasure people like Angelina Jolie or Gareth Lanier.”
“Jaron. His name is Jaron, not Gareth.”
“Whatever! You want me to sign a waiver? Make a video confession?”
“Raoul.”
It was amazing the depths and layers of meaning Tracks could spin on one word. Bad as Grandmama. Raoul laughed. “You really got your spoiler in a twist over this, huh? Well, go buff your hood somewhere else, man. I got stuff to do.”
…
“That’s not good.” Lennox watched the tracking vector on the missile headed for the moon. One of the countries in the Nuclear Club had panicked. He understood why - seeing the Autobots fight these Cons so close to Earth was terrifying - but using nukes had been relegated to very, very last resort status from the beginning. The risk that the Cons might hack the missile’s navigation was far too great.
On the moon, Hunger lifted his head, saw the missile, laughed. The Cons scattered, shifting to cometary if that was fastest. Skyfire glared at the missile, and from fifty kilometers out it detonated. Skyfire, Silverbolt and Borealis turned their backs, fanning their wings, spreading their bodies to shield the other Autobots whose armor was not as resistant to hard radiation.
The satellite video didn’t give Lennox sound, but he saw the way the deltas' armor smoked and sizzled, bubbling in places. He saw Borealis fall forward onto her hands. She was youngest, her armor had spent only a few years out in space. He was glad he couldn’t hear her scream. Knowing who she’d been, what a part of her had been once, he wondered what pain felt like to a human in a robot body. Maybe not that different, except usually it could be turned off.
Ironhide had been so brusque, and, well, grumpy about telling Lennox and Sarah what had been done it had almost been funny.
“Are you asking us if we want to undergo the same process?” Sarah had asked.
“…I’m supposed to, yes.”
Biting back a smile, Sarah patted his leg. “You don’t seem thrilled.”
Ironhide crouched lower, staring intently at Sarah’s face, probably reading her biometrics, Lennox thought. His wife was taking this much more easily than he was.
“And you don’t seem upset,” Ironhide said.
“Should I be?”
“Apparently,” he said, in his most overt what-are-those-tiny-little-squishy-minds-doing-in-there tone, “Mikaela did quite a bit of yelling.”
“I see. I also see by the clenching of his jaw, that my husband is inclined to agree with her.”
Lennox had had a lot of questions, mostly beginning with “why”. He supposed the others had already asked, but he’d wanted Ironhide to look him in the eye and answer.
Now, in the Pentagon basement HQ of what had been NEST and was now a branch of the EDF, Lennox watched the Autobots fight and die to protect his world. Twenty-eight years might not seem long to them, maybe they did have sinister plans that took longer than that to unfold, but Lennox had worked with them, fought alongside them, lived with them, surfed their cloud mind, and upon reflection he chose to believe they wanted the best for humankind, and would allow humankind to decide for itself what that best was.
…
“I knew it,” Epps said. “Space aliens always come here to eat our brains.”
“What? No! We only meant-” Mirage sputtered - aghast at the suggestion, but also revolted. Eating squishy brains!?! He stopped abruptly at Theresa’s quirk of a smile and Epps’ pointing finger.
“Gotcha.”
Table of Contents
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Author: tainry
Disclaimer: Not mine, no money.
Rating: NC-17
Characters/Pairing(s): ensemble, Beachcomber/Miles
Warnings: Angst, explicit-ish xeno, mild language, uh, technically mind-rape of a non-sexual nature. Yoiks!
Summary: Wherein the Wreckers do demolitions; Mez's bacon is saved, sort of; certain Autobots have an important chat with their human friends, to which the humans react in different ways.
Notes: If you want to skip the xeno, don't read the scene starting "Miles was tired after his long hike..." and ending at a scene break doodad.
~5500 words.
BOREALIS: Will You Still Feed Me
2034 - January
Springer made tiny, flickering motions with his fingers and Roadbuster nodded, taking half the squad down a tunnel to the left. They didn’t dare tight-beam here, beneath the umbra of Soundwave’s senses. Even so, with Chaar seething like a kicked scraplet nest, the opportunity was too great to miss.
The planet Chaar was part of a young system, the planet itself barely past the Hadean stage. Fantastic for raw materials and volcanothermal energy generation - if you didn’t mind the rock vapor atmosphere, radiation from exposed, newly-accreted elements and heavy bombardment from inner-system asteroids. The Cons had shields over the more sensitive installations, and a web of hunter-destroyer satellites to keep large meteors at bay. The Wreckers were in the process of happily rigging quite a lot of that safety equipment to blow.
…
“I wouldn’t bother with that one if I were you,” Knockout said, waving a dismissive hand. “Gamma ray fry to both memory core and CPU to a depth of six micrometers. Even if he regains full function eventually, he won’t remember anything of the last half-vorn.”
Soundwave commanded the CR tank to uncover a port and jacked in.
“Suit yourself,” Knockout huffed. Galvatron stalked the visible-spectrum shadows of the med-lab/interrogation chamber/salvage depot, the dim light via some peculiar optical interaction giving his armor a strange, sickly violet cast. He was making Knockout nervous.
Alerted to Soundwave’s presence and activity by the medic, Shockwave entered, pausing at the doorway to assess the situation. “How close are their repairs to completion?”
“Oh, they’ll be out in an orn or two,” Knockout said.
“Very well.” Shockwave approached the CR tank on the opposite end from Soundwave and initiated his own cable link. Designation Mez - gender zhe et cetera et cetera - conflict and interdiction of Iceneedle, boring - marooning, cannibalization; yes yes whatever - Beta; already knew that - spark chamber mod; ah, I see, there it is, the Flay datalogs - does Turmoil know this mech downloaded them? - mech is intuitive, observant, ambitious; next - fervor centered upon Decepticon cause, loyalty to Galvatron personally, lust-motivated; boring - Hmm, firewalls, odd, cobbled-together, chaotic; during marooning must have had little better to do than rewrite self; typical; nevertheless, prudent to break them, see what lies beneath…
Turmoil charged in, optics blazing. “Kup’s gotten that rust-infested scow, the Trion repaired, and the Wreckers are on-planet somewhere. I want all available ensparked troops, Shockwave, no more drones, slag you!”
“The newest series-” Shockwave began calmly.
“Is too fragging stupid to be more than a hindrance,” Turmoil growled. “I want mechs. Including these.”
“The request is logical,” Soundwave said, disengaging his interrogation. “Autobot tactics of recent occurrence have become unusual, dynamic, unpredictable.”
Shockwave had already calculated this, and the cause. A change in roster had occurred; from Sentinel’s battalion, whose tactics had subsequently become routine and conventional, to the apostate Prime’s group, and there had been recent communication between the latter and the battalions led by Ultra Magnus and Kup, and the heavy spec ops team called the Wreckers. “Very well. Knockout, release them.” Attention, Decepticons: all personnel in assemblages 120 through 206 are to report to Turmoil on landing platform 7-helium for immediate deployment.
As the CR chambers emptied of colloid and opened, Turmoil grabbed Mez and shoved him ahead, trailing Snare, who was half-carried by Treadshot. “You’ve been promoted again, Mez. To the front line. Move!” Shockwave and Soundwave followed them out.
Galvatron emerged from the shadows and stroked fingers around Knockout’s waist, nuzzling the keen edge of his mandibular spar against the cables of Knockout’s neck. “Did you not notice something peculiar about that mech?”
“My Lord? Which one?”
“The one Turmoil was in such a hurry to reacquire.”
“What? The walking scrap-pile? Characteristic for last survivors of shipwreck, really.”
“Hmmm.” Galvatron wondered. What was Turmoil up to?
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
2035 - October
Bee, stop fretting and just tell them, Borealis tight-beamed from just outside the Oort. Only a slight flexing of her consciousness was needed to include Prime in their channel. You’re running out of time. Years are passing; they might already be too old to accept the idea gracefully. You’re going to have to decide sooner than you realize.
Cybertronians could think over huge datasets in microseconds, could process scores of tasks concurrently and rapidly; but there were some things their eons-long perspective ill-suited them to handle. And Bumblebee was not one of the few among them who had had such a close relationship to an ephemeral species before.
The time never seemed right. Bumblebee hated to interrupt their rare vacations together with morbid questions that were sure to be upsetting to his human family. How long did they have? Two decades? Four? He worried, watching each hour fleet by on his chronometer, irretrievable. They were having so much fun relaxing on the beach or playing with Dani and Nate, building sandcastles. Leaving footprints in the wet sand. They lived with such intensity. Even asleep their minds moved in dreams. He recorded everything, hated to recharge. If Seaspray replayed his memories of Alana, or Jazz of Tallaria, neither ever spoke of it. Loving ephemerals was risky, he knew that. He didn’t care.
He thought of Tracks, Hound, the unlikely Powerglide. They were in trouble too. And Prime. Prime had been built to love an entire world. He had lost one, gained another, more populous than Cybertron had ever been. There might be a kind of comfort for Prime in each Cybertronian death, Bee thought. He knew where they were, could with effort speak with their patterns, would, in a sense, never be parted from them again. But what of all the human deaths he could not feel? He didn't know where their patterns went. They were as lost to him as they were to each other. Oh, Prime, he thought. What are we going to do?
We should have told them years ago. We should have told them when it was done. We were too unsure. They would have had time to understand, to decide. What if it's too late now?
Ixchel was older… Bee said. He and his extended family were outside on a grassy hill in Cambridge, Massachusetts, enjoying an Indian summer on soft blankets with the sun warm on their skin and the scent of grass sweet on the air. He didn’t want to ruin their enjoyment, spoil the mood with a subject they probably should have dealt with decades ago.
Ixchel was, Borealis replied, pardon me, primed for the idea. She and Ratchet had been discussing a lot of different possibilities, some they felt were more fanciful than others. Ixchel read science fiction, y’know, like a lot of other scientists.
Bumblebee, Borealis is correct. You must, however, handle this in the way you deem most potentially successful. The least traumatic, if it comes to that.
Do you want me to come down and help? Borealis asked. I am kind of involved…
All right, said Bee, tight-beaming to Beachcomber, Hound and Tracks what he intended, so that they at least would not be blindsided. Mirage and Ironhide would later have to endure the same uncertainty with their particular humans. And Lennox and Epps were even older. Bee didn’t envy them.
On my way, Borealis said. Go ahead and start the party without me. ETA ninety minutes.
Oh fine. Bee stood carefully, setting Nate, who’d climbed to his shoulders, down gently on the grass. Even at five, Nate had the climbing skills of any arboreal primate. Bee walked down the hill a short way, door-wings low. He already had most of the adults’ attention; this wasn’t like him. When he came back to where he’d been sitting and resumed that posture, Mikaela and Sam fixed him with alarmingly similar stares.
“Well? What happened?” Mikaela asked.
“I…have to ask you something,” Bee said. “But I have to explain something first. And apologize for not doing this a long time ago.”
“Oh great,” Sam said, pretending to rub a headache out of his temples, but grinning a little bit, too. Sometimes the bots made a big deal out of nothing. The robots had adapted so thoroughly it almost wasn’t like having aliens over to visit any more, so it was fun when that veneer was set aside, revealing the true gulfs between their species. And Bee was just too cute.
Bumblebee clasped his hands in his lap. Optics worried but bright, he told them the tale of a human whose genetic heritage had confined her body to a wheelchair and to a progressively immobile frame; who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, falling offhand prey to the Decepticons as so many humans had. He told them what Prime and Ratchet had done and why. And by the time he finished, Borealis was on approach, to the aggravation of a new air controller at Logan International, who got an earful on a different frequency from the officer in charge of the tower at Hanscom.
She transformed and landed neatly on her feet at the foot of the hill, crouching down to put her head at a level with the seated humans. They stared at her.
What? she thought to herself. Do I have broccoli in my teeth?
Mikaela stood. She was trembling. "You. You did this to your...your first child. Your first child in billions of years and you overwrote her with a human brain scan? Why would you do something like that? You basically killed the person she would have been, just to be a...a crate for some pitiful human! I can't believe Dr. Chase would have approved something like that. Did you even ask her or did you in your infinitely greater wisdom just yank the scan as she was...oh my god, you didn't. You didn't ask her."
That was where they lost Sam.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. Are you serious? After all those speeches about freedom and choice, and...and... There was no consent. You didn't even ASK. You just did what you wanted. Took what you wanted and left the rest to die."
“That’s a little harsh,” Borealis said. She had meant to let everyone work through their reactions without undue interference from herself, but Mikaela had gone for the jugular. “It wasn’t explicit consent; Ixchel was dying, she wasn’t all that conscious for very long. Thankfully. But she and Ratchet had tossed ideas around. She wouldn’t have found it weird. She would have given consent if there had been time.” She stuck her chin out at Mikaela. “I know her better than you did, missy. Everything Ixchel Chase knew or thought or felt is up here.” She tapped her helm.
"Are you going to offer this option to the other six billion of us?” Mikaela asked, not backing down. “Huh? Or were you just going to pick your favorites? Your special pets. Make neat little copies and implant them in...”
“That’s the tricky part,” Borealis conceded.
“Always a catch,” Sam muttered.
“There are so many of you,” Bee said, “and we are not reproducing very quickly, by your standards. We simply cannot accommodate every human being now, nor into the future.”
“When you guys can build your own robot bodies it won’t matter,” Borealis said.
“Don’t you see?” Bee continued. “Once we knew it would work, we couldn’t withhold the idea, we couldn’t not ask. And yet we can only realistically ask a few of you. It makes sense that it would be the few who are close to us already. The few who… who it will hurt us the most to lose.” The static in his vocoder was no affectation.
Sam swallowed hard. Whatever reasons they’d had with Ixchel, Sam knew it was this last that was paramount now. He recalled how he’d felt when Mojo had died, silver-muzzled and arthritic, his tiny organs failing one by one. The longevity issue was similar, if greater in scale here. Didn’t most pet owners wish with all their hearts that their beloved companions lived longer than a decade or two? Could he blame Bee for wishing his beloved companions lived longer than a single short century? Sam had had the thought before. Now suddenly there was a lot more to try to fit into his thinking. A lot more to process.
“It’s just a copy,” Dani said quietly, hoping she wouldn’t get sent off to mind Nate while the grownups talked. “We still die.”
“Yes,” said Borealis. “I am not Ixchel Chase. I am Borealis. I am a Cybertronian Autobot, gender de, Seeker class, subclass delta. I’ve shared the Ixchel memories with most of the other Autobots, but for me, they are also integral to who I’ve become. Mind and body are one.”
Up in Oregon, walking through the damp, ferny, towering forest, listening in on a feed from Bee to Beachcomber and Perceptor, Miles was, as usual, distracted from the subject at hand. Uh, Miles tight-beamed to Beachcomber, if she’s “de”, like Skyfire, then why do we call her “her”?
Because when she was first decanted one of her basic assumptions about herself was that she was a “she”.
Because of the…the Ixchel memories?
Yes.
And none of you thought it was odd to call someone you look at and immediately think of as a “he” a “she” instead?
It’s…hang on let me ask Glyph… Yeah. It’s partly a translation thing. We’re already speaking in English or whatever other Earth language, right? So that’s already massively different from what we’d say in Cybertronian.
So you call her “de” in Cybertronian, not “she”?
Some of us do. Secondly, we pretty much use whatever pronouns a person wants to be used for them. It’s not that hard, you just pop it into a subroutine and whichever length memory storage seems appropriate.
Ah, got it. Must be great at parties, never forgetting someone’s name three seconds after you meet them.
Right. We came up with other faux pas instead.
I won’t ask.
You will later. Anyway, thirdly; since pretty much anybody can get reformatted to any “gender” they want more or less whenever they feel like it, calling someone by a pronoun that may or may not be technically appropriate isn’t a big deal.
Like Wheeljack. That’s…pretty cool, actually. Do you…did you, uh, download the Ixchel memories too, or whatever?
Heh. Yes, Miles. But I was, heh, an adult-
I dispute that allegation, Perceptor cut in.
-so to speak, Beachcomber amended, laughing, when I downloaded those files. Lissi got them right after she was kindled, so they formed a basic part of her personality.
Huh. So Kaela’s right. Whoever she would have been, if Prime hadn’t interfered, would have been a different person.
When they uploaded Prowl’s AI core and memory into the new body they built for him, they changed the person that body might have become if it had been kindled without him. It’s…not that different to us. It’s not that strange. Only the human origin of the Ixchel memories takes some of us aback.
And the Matrix thought it was that important.
Beachcomber chuckled. It was kind of cute, he thought, the way Prime had this squabbly bunch of old people arguing and faffing about in his chest. Must get noisy sometimes, but he couldn’t ever be lonely. I guess so.
In Cambridge, Mikaela was still standing, though she’d taken the heat of her glare off of Bee and Borealis. “How many others of the new kids have you done this to?” she asked, fists clenched beneath crossed arms.
“None,” Bee said.
“So you did it once, fifteen, sixteen years ago and never did it again. And you didn’t tell us about it until now, though some of us mere humans have known you were making new people for years.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re only telling us now because you’re afraid you’re running out of time.”
“…We didn’t mean to wait this long.”
“And yet you did. I don’t think you’re that forgetful. Any of you. I think you put it off because you know how morally and ethically and emotionally sketchy your cute little idea is. I think it’s telling that you only did it once.”
“Heeey,” Borealis said, blinking.
“No offense,” Mikaela said, nevertheless glaring, clearly keeping her composure only with great effort. “It’s not your fault, Borealis. They did this to you. You weren’t in a position to say anything or do anything about it. And I understand how from your perspective the person you are now wouldn’t want to change what happened. That doesn’t stop it from being wrong.”
Mikaela, blue eyes hot as any optics, looked back to Bee, who at this gathering represented Ratchet and Prime as well. “How could you?” Tears finally spilled down her cheeks. “How could you?” She strode down the hillside, hair a dark banner behind her. Sam knew she hated crying in front of people.
After a while, Sam rose as well. “It’s okay,” he said quietly. “More or less, I mean. She’s pissed off but it’s not like she’ll never speak to you guys again.” He looked up at Bee, hard pressed to categorize his own emotions at this point. The robots clearly hadn’t thought this was going to go over well. They’d been right. “We’ll come back to this, I promise, just give us time to think, okay?”
“Of course,” Bee said.
Sam trotted down the hill after his wife, careful to let her maintain a few minutes’ lead. He glanced back, thinking of pillars of salt and broken promises. Bumblebee shivered in Borealis' embrace, silent, wings down. Tracks, who was supposed to be on perimeter, transformed and joined the cuddle, stroking Bee's back and making faint warbling sounds on the edge of Sam's hearing. Dani was talking earnestly with someone over implant, helping Nate blow bubbles with the hoops and wands they’d brought. Borealis watched them, looking out of place, the curves and planes of her armor rutched at angry angles.
Damn, Sam thought. Mikaela was pissed off, shocked. The robots were hurt. And Borealis' stance - a person accustomed to being set apart - convinced him of their tale emotionally, though he'd had no trouble accepting it intellectually. Of course Ratchet could do something like that. Should he have? Maybe not. But Sam believed Borealis when she'd said that Ixchel would have consented.
…
Later, back in Nevada, Sam patted the Camaro’s hood. “All right, the yelling’s over. You don’t have to hide in car mode any more.” Not that Mikaela would have held off throwing big pieces of equipment at him just because he was a hot set of wheels. She knew his armor could withstand anything like that. She was more inclined to throw things only in the heat of rage, not when anger had settled into a cold, diamondlike lump in the middle of her chest.
Bee transformed. Sam climbed to his shoulder and the two ascended to the mesa top.
“I understand that we’re not pets to you,” Sam said, as Bee sat cross-legged and Sam settled into his lap, the back of his head just brushing the lower part of Bee’s chest. Sam couldn’t really feel the thrum of his spark, but he knew it was there. “I think I get it, anyway. We’re a lot more like children, aren’t we. You want to help us, protect us. You like to watch us leaning new things.” Sam thought vividly of Perceptor at one of the Nobel Prize ceremonies, when a cosmologist among the great brains gathered had asked Perceptor to give them a point-blank answer regarding something about one of the fundamental constants of the universe.
Perceptor had beamed at the audience with such love and eagerness in his optics and face, and Sam hadn’t realized someone could beam like that with their whole body before. “You are so close to finding out for yourselves!” Perceptor had purred, awe as clear in his voice as in his optics. “I so envy you now. On the brink of so many wonderful discoveries!” As the camera had panned, Sam had seen tears in more than a few pairs of eyes. Perceptor really meant it, and he really, really didn’t want to spoil humanity’s fun. It wasn’t about cheating, giving easy answers to questions humans thought were complex, or spilling Cybertronian secrets before the primitives were capable of comprehending and using that knowledge wisely. It was purely about not spoiling the fun. Damn. Even Perceptor understood humans that well. That was almost scary.
“And you get aggravated,” Sam continued, patting Bee’s leg, “when we misbehave. But you’re smart enough to let us make our own mistakes. As long as those mistakes don’t, you know, outright kill us or anything.” Sam scooched around and hugged Bee’s torso. “You haven't approached Bobby and Will with this yet, have you."
"No," said Bee, giving an excellent approximation of a relieved sigh and leaning into the hug.
"You know how they'll react, don't you? Military guys? This sounds too much like a really sneaky sort of takeover. You are the Borg, we will be assimilated; resistance is futile."
"But-!”
"I know, Bee! I'm just saying a lot of people, humans, are going to think that's what you're doing."
"Mikaela-”
"Mikaela's mad because despite what Ratchet and Borealis keep saying, she feels that they killed the child Borealis would have been. She likes to pretend she's this uninvolved, disinterested mother, but oh boy is she ever involved." Sam grinned. "Yeah, and don't tell her I said that."
"What do you think, Sam?"
"I don't know. Ask me again in twenty years. Right now, 44 doesn't feel so bad, y'know? It's not like you're going to plop my brain into a robot body physically. It's just a robot clone, kind of. Doesn't really affect me." He tapped his chest, making the physical emphasis clear.
“All right, Sam,” Bee said. “I’ll ask you again in twenty years.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
…
Miles was tired after his long hike, but he agreed to let Beachcomber piggy-back him to the top of Mount St. Hilary, to watch the bright, so close-seeming stars. Beachcomber spun up his spark, heating his chassis as Miles laid down on top of him. Hands clasped behind their heads, ankles crossed. Little, big.
He supposed he must have fallen asleep. He opened his eyes to a golden, misty dawn, with the lower slopes of the mountain shrouded completely. Beachcomber’s shields had kept the dew off; Miles felt pleasantly warm and even more pleasantly encumbered with morning wood.
He rolled over slowly, giving Beachcomber time to evade, knowing he wouldn't. He draped an arm over Beachcomber's midsection, letting his hand rest on an odd bit of abdominal plating. Beachcomber, he tight-beamed. l want to. The brain scan thing. It's ...okay with me if you do it. He knew it didn't mean he personally would live forever. It meant a lot that the robots liked him enough that they wanted at least some version of him to exist for as long as they did. He pressed his hand higher on Beachcomber's side, closer to his chest. But I want...I'm glad there's time to fill me up with human memories. Human feeling.
Beachcomber covered Miles' hand with his own. Hard metal but not cold. Warm metal fingers stroked Miles’ back and hair, the pressure no doubt calculated with exactitude but expressing calm acceptance and affection and, if the increased thrum of spark beneath his chest was any indication, a degree of matching arousal.
Miles didn’t really like dirty talk or theatrical moans during sex; Beachcomber’s melodic but wordless humming thrilled across his skin and through his blood, rousing every cell. Even his hair felt alive, as though it was waving above his head in warm seawater as Beachcomber’s hands moved slowly, steadily under Miles’ clothes, measuring by every curve and plane, every freckle or imperfection the geology of human embodiment.
The cold mountain air was no match for the heat rising from Beachcomber’s body. Miles felt as though his respirocytes were singing. He shifted to unfasten his shorts and found Beachcomber had already done so, a limber hand slipping between Miles’ legs. Touching, exploring, stroking with the rounded undersides of articulated fingers. Beachcomber’s visor had turned a deep peacock blue when he lifted his head to watch, to kiss, to direct that hum into all the tiny pieces of Miles that were now metal; illuminating them to Beachcomber’s senses and setting Miles’ senses alight.
The old volcanic throat beneath them was no match for the core of fire rising through Miles’ body. He curled and lifted, a wave on Beachcomber’s solid shore, Beachcomber’s fingers moving faster, deep spinning spark an ascending chorus, Miles' hands slipping on armor or shield, sliding over complex joints, hips moving faster, tingle of a scan breaking, rush of the wave breaking and Miles caught a breath and held it as light exploded in his mind and the sweet burst of completion shook him.
“You could’ve plugged in,” Miles panted, washed ashore but not stranded. He ran his fingertips along the irregular path of Beachcomber’s central seam. The ultimate Cybertronian intimacy they couldn’t share; not with Miles as he was. The entire surface of Miles’ skin felt electric. “What can I do?”
Beachcomber gave that gentle laugh of his. “Try to set aside notions of giving and taking, dominant and submissive, active and passive. Not everyone considers those opposites, or even the summation of possible…hmm…roles. Pleasure shared, no matter how, is always increased exponentially. Don’t tell Perceptor I put it like that. He thinks I don’t have any kind of head for math.”
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
“What…what was it like?” Maggie had waited until Borealis emerged from the recharge bay - had been lying in wait, really - before posing her question. Hound had broken the story to Maggie and Glen together. Glen thought it was awesome and had spent about an hour bouncing around their little pod apartment high in the embassy’s labyrinth, trying to decide what his future robot-self’s first alt mode would be.
Borealis looked at Maggie without answering at first, and lowered a hand. Maggie stepped in and held on as Borealis strode out into the lavender evening and climbed to the mesa top. She lifted her hand level with her optics. Maggie sat down, leaning against the base of Borealis’ forefinger.
“What was what like?” Borealis said finally. “Dying? Waking up something else? Adapting to being in a completely different body?”
Maggie grinned. “Yes.”
“Heh. Ratchet took the scan before she had actually died, so I can’t tell you anything about whether or not there’s a human afterlife or what it’s like.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, sorry. You guys have to work that out yourselves.”
“Knew it couldn’t be that easy.”
“As for the rest, I note you have the latest full-immersion sensory implant package?”
“Of course. A girl and her toys.”
“Then I can show you what the rest was like if you want.” Borealis extended a cephalic cable and wound the tip down to a tiny diameter. Maggie hesitated only a moment, then pulled her hair away from the jack at the base of her skull.
There were vague recollections from the tank, blurry emotions, half-heard, half-felt voices; then the giddy happiness of standing and walking, not remembering at first why such actions pleased her. How senses and feelings had been kept gently, carefully blunted, only slowly increasing to Cybertronian norms; falling into the swift fire/anguish of integration. The rapture of flight, the tumbling glow of the cloud mind, punctuated by the ecstasy of interface, spark to spark, sharing of wholenesses. And if atmospheric flight had been rapturous, the transition to space was beyond bliss, new senses yet again, reaching out across lightyears, feather-pull of gravity, flare of quasars, voracious cinders of black holes, the vast, moving map of the local universe expanding within her consciousness.
Maggie was glad she’d been sitting. She disengaged her side of the link and Borealis retracted the cable.
“Hound said they’d been careful,” Maggie whispered, blinking at the optics nearby, twice the size of dinner plates. “I…I believed him, but they really were. I mean they didn’t just throw a personality in there expecting it to be okay with a hugely different set of inputs.”
“Of course not,” Borealis said. “Weird is okay, but they weren’t aiming for insane.”
…
Even in his mid-40’s Raoul Aquino was an expert in the teenage martial art of Don’tgiveashit. “Okaaay,” he said at the end of Tracks’ explanation. “Whatever. You guys gonna do what you want, yeah? Me, I got inventory to check. Those Bernoulli brothers, man, you can’t trust ‘em.”
“Raoul,” Tracks huffed, “what I want is to know what you want.” Raoul smirked; that must have been a painful admission.
“Fine. Lemme get this right; you stick my head in Ratchet’s Xerox machine and plug that into a robot baby-kid.”
“Crudely put but essentially correct.”
“Snob. And you only do this when I’m dying already.”
“Not necessarily. We could make backup copies, as it were, during the course of your life. Updating would thus include the most current version of your experience.”
“Great. So why should I care? I’ll be dead anyway, me, the real me. Muerte.”
Tracks revved his engine in annoyance, stood up, walked away a few paces, almost hitting his helm on one of the warehouse’s structural beams. “Humans - in Western cultures - place a high value on individuality. Some of you don’t like the idea of replicating what makes you unique. Your fiction is rife with evil clones…”
“You read that shit?”
“Raoul…”
“No, man. Tracks, I seriously don’t care. Knock yourself out. I guess it’s flattering, but I don’t see why you’d want to do that, except to, like, big brains or national treasure people like Angelina Jolie or Gareth Lanier.”
“Jaron. His name is Jaron, not Gareth.”
“Whatever! You want me to sign a waiver? Make a video confession?”
“Raoul.”
It was amazing the depths and layers of meaning Tracks could spin on one word. Bad as Grandmama. Raoul laughed. “You really got your spoiler in a twist over this, huh? Well, go buff your hood somewhere else, man. I got stuff to do.”
…
“That’s not good.” Lennox watched the tracking vector on the missile headed for the moon. One of the countries in the Nuclear Club had panicked. He understood why - seeing the Autobots fight these Cons so close to Earth was terrifying - but using nukes had been relegated to very, very last resort status from the beginning. The risk that the Cons might hack the missile’s navigation was far too great.
On the moon, Hunger lifted his head, saw the missile, laughed. The Cons scattered, shifting to cometary if that was fastest. Skyfire glared at the missile, and from fifty kilometers out it detonated. Skyfire, Silverbolt and Borealis turned their backs, fanning their wings, spreading their bodies to shield the other Autobots whose armor was not as resistant to hard radiation.
The satellite video didn’t give Lennox sound, but he saw the way the deltas' armor smoked and sizzled, bubbling in places. He saw Borealis fall forward onto her hands. She was youngest, her armor had spent only a few years out in space. He was glad he couldn’t hear her scream. Knowing who she’d been, what a part of her had been once, he wondered what pain felt like to a human in a robot body. Maybe not that different, except usually it could be turned off.
Ironhide had been so brusque, and, well, grumpy about telling Lennox and Sarah what had been done it had almost been funny.
“Are you asking us if we want to undergo the same process?” Sarah had asked.
“…I’m supposed to, yes.”
Biting back a smile, Sarah patted his leg. “You don’t seem thrilled.”
Ironhide crouched lower, staring intently at Sarah’s face, probably reading her biometrics, Lennox thought. His wife was taking this much more easily than he was.
“And you don’t seem upset,” Ironhide said.
“Should I be?”
“Apparently,” he said, in his most overt what-are-those-tiny-little-squishy-minds-doing-in-there tone, “Mikaela did quite a bit of yelling.”
“I see. I also see by the clenching of his jaw, that my husband is inclined to agree with her.”
Lennox had had a lot of questions, mostly beginning with “why”. He supposed the others had already asked, but he’d wanted Ironhide to look him in the eye and answer.
Now, in the Pentagon basement HQ of what had been NEST and was now a branch of the EDF, Lennox watched the Autobots fight and die to protect his world. Twenty-eight years might not seem long to them, maybe they did have sinister plans that took longer than that to unfold, but Lennox had worked with them, fought alongside them, lived with them, surfed their cloud mind, and upon reflection he chose to believe they wanted the best for humankind, and would allow humankind to decide for itself what that best was.
…
“I knew it,” Epps said. “Space aliens always come here to eat our brains.”
“What? No! We only meant-” Mirage sputtered - aghast at the suggestion, but also revolted. Eating squishy brains!?! He stopped abruptly at Theresa’s quirk of a smile and Epps’ pointing finger.
“Gotcha.”
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