The following story is a fanfiction of a fanfiction. This means it s an AU of an AU. Transformers belongs to Hasbro and the rest to e-dowley. Please read Out of Necessity before reading this... other fanon tidbits from various forgotten sources are also included.
Mother Necessity
Chapter 1 Seven Years Ago
Ratchet, Chief Medical Officer of the Autobots, was pretty sure that the young woman on his table was going to die. Even Barricade, the former Decepticon, who had carried her unconscious body directly to him once again, probably thought so... if one were to judge by his silence when he turned her over this time compared to his threats in the event of failure last time. Evelyn's wounds were septic, but there was hardly any bruising. He'd gotten her fever down right away but the iron in her blood had been commandeered as part of the one thing the parasite had successfully built so far: a skeletal frame for an empty spark casing right next to her heart. In a weird, convoluted way, it made sense. The parasite was starving, and Eve presently had no need to ingest energon. If she were rebuilt as a functioning Cybertronian, she might seek the life-giving fluid of his people and provide the necessary fuel to bring more parasites online. Evelyn was already operating with a minimal amount of blood and her organs were failing from damage caused by its movements. If the parasite started to deconstruct them, Eve would soon die. Ratchet, however, had one option left to him.
Ratchet examined the recovered remains of the seeker found at the location he now knew to have been where the parasite had been found. He shuddered mentally at the thought of what might have happened had a mech been the one to reach the source of the signal first. A scraplet epidemic was no joke. Ratchet made sure none of the small pieces of Cybertronian metal he cut off the dead mech had the slightest bit of energon on them before processing them to be injected into Eve. As long as the scraplet had better materials to work with, Eve was relatively safe. Ratchet set his diagnostic scanners to display a real-time image of the scraplet's progress in construction. In a matter of hours, however, Ratchet would be forced to provide yet more raw material for its work.
Ratchet was forced to watch the parasite's progress very closely for the next two weeks on his monitoring equipment, forgoing recharge to a degree that would kill a human. The scraplet had completed the spark chamber and was busy building some sort of neural net to interface a complete processor to parts of Evelyn's brain. Her brain was under a great deal of compression from having to share space with both the scraplet and the processor. Were she conscious, she would almost certainly be screaming her agony. If Eve survived, her memory and calculating ability would become par with a Cybertronian newborn, a sparkling. It would be a vast improvement on her organic brain, but Ratchet couldn't help but wonder if Eve would still be Eve when all was said and done. The human brain was chaotic at best and any means the creature had of transferring her memory data to the processor was likely imperfect. If Barricade noticed the change he might presume that the woman he knew was dead and act accordingly. Ratchet was running calculations on how much time the scraplet had to live when Ironhide sidled up behind him to peer at the monitor over his shoulder.
"Is that what I think it is?" The weapons master sounded surprised.
It didn't matter if he was asking about the supposedly extinct parasite or the obviously Cybertronian spark chamber or newly forming processor. Ratchet's answer was an affirmative grunt in any case.
Ironhide understood the vague answer anyway. Evelyn, the human, had close to zero chance of coming out of this. Even he could run the odds through his own processor. They might get a techno-organic newborn if they only still had the all-spark. A new life to ease the tragedy of her loss, but without it, they were only likely to get an unresponsive shell with Eve s face.
"It isn't looking good, is it?" Ironhide asked, hopelessly.
The exhausted medic again answered in the affirmative. "She s been in a coma for two and a half weeks,"
"Perhaps it would be a kindness if we put her out of her misery?"
It was a mark of how bleak the situation was that Ironhide didn't get a dent in his cranial plating for even suggesting it. He found it shocking when Ratchet implied he had already thought of that course of action. Ironhide turned the conversation to Barricade but that was temporary, at best. The subject of discussion focused on Evelyn once more, and Ironhide left the doctor to his work.
As more time passed, Ratchet was amazed as metallic organs came online one by one, restoring Eve's condition closer to stable with each successive replacement. Her new heart was much smaller than the last...all her new parts were. They worked more efficiently and took up much less space. There were also several new components that Ratchet was sure he only recognized most of due to his age and profession. Some of those upgrades were now extinct. What was a budding drive anyway? The medic was forced to manually shut down several nascent functions for Evelyn's own good. Some of that coding didn't belong on an organic and would likely kill her if activated accidentally. Ratchet carefully kept track of her steady gain in mass. Any loss would indicate that the parasite might be deconstructing her. Throughout all this, visitors tracked in and out of his med bay. Robert Epps and Will Lennox were present when such an alarming and sudden decrease occurred.
"What s wrong? " Epps questioned the visibly agitated CMO.
"I was monitoring her body mass in case that thing inside her starts to break-down what it built. Any loss of mass is supposed to set off an alarm, the medic paused as he checked the readouts, this makes no sense! Every bit of material of every basic element is accounted for, but she still seems to have lost about twenty-one grams somewhere!" The medic checked another monitor that showed Evelyn s entire interior where the creature was now busily working on converting her extremities and stopped as what he now saw was impossible.
The two humans exchanged a significant look. Epps decided to offer his thoughts on the matter. "Some people think that 21 grams is the approximate weight of a human soul."
Ratchet noted the remark, but didn't respond. It only made sense given what he now saw. Evelyn's soul had been converted to pure energy to form the Cybertronian equivalent: a spark! None of the basic elements currently found in her body could convert to a sufficient amount of energy necessary for a spark to form. If the human soul had mass, but was otherwise undetectable to Ratchet's sensors, then it was the only available explanation. Who knew what a soul was made of anyway. It even had the correct pulse measurements for a true seeker femme. Both seekers and femmes were equally rare. A spark that was both was a treasure to the people of Cybertron. This was a freaking act of Primus and the doctor knew better than to try to explain it. Ratchet shooed away the human soldiers and called Prime to come in for an update. He arrived with Stealth a few minutes before Evelyn regained consciousness.
She wasn't up for very long before Ratchet had to sedate her for her own good, not that the young woman noticed. The old mech described in better detail to his leader what was going on.
"The parasite has coding, not only from the mech it was made from, but the mechs that were deconstructed to form the parasites that preceded it. There is probably even a Prime in there somewhere! It is using all this code along with that of this dead 'con here and what it has learned of human anatomy to build a completely new body. This is completely opposite of its original function so I suspect the so called human scientists may have tinkered and tampered with its basic programming. She has upgrades that died out vorns ago...I had to disconnect her new transformation circuits to prevent the destruction of her remaining organic parts. If that had activated, her left limbs and skin might have been ripped loose...and made a mess." Ratchet paused to see if Optimus was following along and continued when his leader hummed in understanding, "for all intents and purposes, though, she is effectively Cybertronian. Her...spark... is consistent with an adult femme and a new-sparked seeklet. You are aware that seekers are flightless the first few thousand years?" Ratchet waited for Prime's nod."If she remains stable she might upgrade to a larger frame, a flighted one, and become a full seeker. Her other aspects make her spark maturity more difficult to determine. Most likely, it is due to her origins as a human. She is an adult femme because she was a woman grown, but a mere seeklet because that aspect of her new self is all-new coding to her."
Optimus nodded, "That is for the best." he said wisely, "Evelyn Grey needs that time to grow into what she has become, but it would be an insult to tear away what she has already earned in life. I trust you, Ratchet, to preserve what is important to her well-being. Good luck, old friend." Prime then turned and left before Ratchet could properly process his use of the word "old".
Three weeks later, Ratchet was a happier medic. The scraplet had died only days after Eve had come-to and had her panic attack. While her distress could potentially cause her to harm herself, Her words upon waking had made it obvious that she had retained at least some of her mind. Immediately after the parasite's death, Ratchet boosted Evelyn's self-repair systems with his own nanites. His CNA would complete what remained of the seeker's CNA and stabilize Eve to a point where she could function. It amused him slightly that this technically made her his creation, or, as humans understood the term, her father. Today, Ratchet had just confirmed that her personality and memories were fully intact despite the fact that she only had the parts of her brain that controlled automatic functions Her ability to sense touch on her organic skin and motor controls for her left side. If Ratchet thought for a nano-second that she would approve, he would have fabricated limbs to match the ones on her left side and armor to replace her integumentary system. Humans were, however, unusually attached to their frailties. They assigned a ridiculous amount of their identity to their body parts in a way Cybertronians never did. Ratchet, himself, had had to replace most of his own body in the course of war. However, for Eve's mental health, he was forced to preserve the remainder of her human body: less than thirty percent, but it would have to be enough. Nevertheless, Ratchet submitted his medical report with a lighter spark just as Eve finally came online.