Set roughly at the beginning of Season 5 of House MD.

Only Human

Chapter 2

Near-silence reigned on the private military jet that was crossing the country to Diego Garcia. The passenger area was more of living area, with tables between each spaciously placed swivelling chair. Kutner was making a rudimentary weapon out of a deconstructed ballpoint pen, Taub was reading The Times, Thirteen was trying to sleep and Foreman was making no pretence about pretending to read but really only giving himself something to do between giving House long-suffering looks.

House was happily oblivious to his team's activities, flicking backwards and forwards through the file covered in enough red stamps as to make it comical. He hadn't shared it with them yet, though was making a point of pursing his lips in exaggerated interest and 'hmm'ing periodically. He'd insisted on bringing the diagnostic white board, now propped between Thirteen and Foreman against the curved wall of the spacious plane.

After four hours with the same newspaper, Taub folded it down onto the table between himself and Kutner and interlaced his fingers atop it. "Alright, I'll bite: Where are we going?"

"That's classified."

A beat as the other doctors were roused, twisting to regard the slight man sat towards the back of the jet, cane spinning in a vertical circle between his knees. Taub's expression was as arid as his tone. "You said that, on the plane, you'd tell us. We're on the plane and we've signed the forms. Furthermore, we're nearly at our secret destination for our secret case that, guess what, we need information to go on so that it doesn't turn into a deceased case."

House smirked with only one corner of his mouth, showing no inclination of handing over the lone file. Instead, he nodded to Thirteen and the whiteboard. "Differential diagnosis: four secret patients present plural effusions. Go."

Foreman and Thirteen exchanged a long look before she simply stood and scrawled the symptom as directed. Kutner slouched back in the beige leather chair, rubbing the spring from the pen between his fingers. House seemed to want shots in the dark at this point, which whilst a waste of time might be a way towards him enlightening them about this case. "Pneumonia?"

"No."

"Lupus?"

"It's never Lupus." House frowned and glanced at the ceiling. "Well, sometimes."

Kutner only needed a peripheral glance to see that the other doctors were too embroiled in irritation at being flown across the country with no given reason, and then presented with a single symptom for patients unknown, to play along. Setting the metal spring aside, he considered the two words in slanting script on the board. "Pleural effusions are hemothorax, pyothorax or chylothorax. Have they had any serious blows to the chest or infections?"

First ports of call, all of which he'd skipped through at great speed. House flicked open the file, though predominantly as a prop. "No blood, no pus and no lymphatic fluid. No lungs, even… It only -looks- like a pleural effusion. We're looking for zebras not horses today, kids."

Thirteen thumbed the cap of the board marker, her small brow furrowing. "Are the patients wheezing or breathless?"

House shrugged. "Don't know. Haven't met them yet."

"This isn't enough to go on – we don't know anything about the patients," Foreman snapped, shifting with a brief intent to physically take the file from House but thinking better of it. Instead he shook his head with a harsh exhale, hands flaring helplessly in his lap. "Age, lifestyle, have they been out of the country recently-"

House grinned at that outright, brows rising for emphasis. "Oh, these boys are from about as out of town as you can get."

Taub sat forward a little, the equivalent of raising a hand. "What does that mean?"

Cane stilling for dramatic effect, House paused before holding the manila file out. He watched Taub's expression morph from a frown to confused astonishment, repeated when Thirteen, Kutner and Foreman gathered to see. "It means that E.T's a robot, and four of them have got colds."

Kutner took two of the glossy photos from the file and dropped back into his seat with them, elbows on his knees and eyes wide. "Whoa – these things are real?"

Sitting back again, House used both hands to ease his leg up onto the closest table. "Really real, really big and really pissed off that they can't figure this out themselves."

Foreman took the file from Taub's hands with renewed scepticism, shaking his head as he flicked through the pages of classified reports and A4 photos. "This is a joke."

"Not a joke. You saw the guys with no personalities and the confidentiality forms so thick that even the biggest administrative tool would faint at the sight of them." All humour gone from his voice, House gestured to the file being taken apart and passed around. Thirteen was the one most closely scrutinizing the contents. "These… 'Autobots' exist and we're being paid, and possibly blackmailed, into treating them at their base."

Taub held up a photo of a yellow mech standing alongside a soldier for scale. "They're really aliens?"

House crinkled his nose and cocked his head with feigned disappointment. "Not little green ones. More like Truckasaurus, but yeah, aliens.

Turning over to the next page of the bundle she'd taken, outlining physical characteristics in far more detail than she could absorb in one read, Thirteen squinted at a long table of figures. Fuel pressures, neural line speeds, protoform weight verses armoured weight… "They're a biomechanical organism?"

"No, just mechanical, but their systems mimic a lot of organic structures," House explained, pushing himself to his feet with a grimace and limping cane-less to the whiteboard. Taking the pen from Thirteen's unresisting hand, he started a new column on the bottom left of the board.

Human / Truckasaurus

Lungs = Intake Manifolds / Vents

Brain = CPU

Blood = Energon/ Type O

Neurons = Circuits

"Their lungs, for lack of a better word, filter gasses as well as keep their engines from overheating. They adapt to the atmospheric chemical cocktail of their environment as they travel around, which in theory is supposed to keep them running smoothly no matter where they are or what gasses they're taking into their bodies." Capping the pen, he returned to his seat and considered the beginnings of an equivalency system. "It didn't work this time and now their lungs, vents, whatever, are filling with robot goo, and it's accumulating faster than they can scoop it out."

"This is so cool," Kutner grinned, setting a photo down to pick up one of a much slimmer being that seemed to somehow project a regal aura. "Do you think they'd let me keep this?"

Retaking his seat, Taub put his fingers to his mouth as if in prayer as the enormity of what they had been handed began to sink in. "Who else knows about this?"

"Quite a lot of people do," Kutner replied, his mouth quirking when all eyes switched to him. He shrugged a little, gesturing to the photo. "There's been a lot about giant robots on conspiracy theory websites for years. Weapon malfunctions, terrorist attacks, that meteor shower in Egypt – all these guys, if you believe the rumours."

Taub arched a brow, though his expression was otherwise unreadable. "Do you believe the rumours?"

A scoff. "I'm holding a picture of a walking truck that I want to blow up into a poster for my apartment – damn right I believe."

"'Prowl'? Foreman read aloud from the file with mounting incredulity. "'Ironhide'?"

House rolled his eyes, though he'd thought that the names were pretty stupid too. "What? You thought the aliens at Roswell were called Tim and Dave?"

Taub blinked and held up a glossy photo of a black mech, jerking it in the air for emphasis. "These guys were at Roswell?"

Foreman ignored the question. "No, but something a little more alien and unpronounceable would have been… expected."

"We can't pronounce their names in their language – these are literal equivalents," House explained with a sweep of his cane to the board, underlining just how much of this case was going to be done through equivalency.

As if wholly accepting that their patients were alien robots whose heights could be measured in storeys, Thirteen finished an initial read of the case file and looked to House. "Can they communicate with us? I mean, are we going to have a translator?"

"Well," House began in a drawl, reaching into his jacket pocket for the plastic cylinder therein. "Given that they've managed to make their way here from across trillions of miles of the unknown majesty of space, it's not a stretch to suppose that they've gotten a handle on our primordial grunts and pick-up lines. They're advanced, but apparently not so advanced that they don't need help from our tweenage species, from which they asked for me by name. Which makes me a nuclear theorist amongst termites, or something." He tossed the Vicodin back as punctuation.

Setting the photo down, Taub sat back with crossed legs and picked up the coffee that he had left stone cold almost an hour ago. "If they're so confident that you'll be able to help, why bring us?"

"Probability," House declared, as if it should have been obvious. "Five minds, even if four of them pale to my fifth, are better than one, and the government is as keen as they are to get a diagnosis and a cure. So with that in mind, I present to you a mechanical being with an organic symptom." He sat upright and expectant, eyes bright with challenge as he flicked a hand at his team. "Go."

When no one spoke, Foreman pinched the bridge of his nose with closed eyes. "You've just told us that there are aliens, on Earth, being sheltered in secret by our government, and you just expect us overlook the fact that we're not alone in the universe and treat them like any other patient?"

House shifted, appearing equally hurt and surprised. "All patients deserve equal treatment. Well. Unless they're supermodels, in which case they deserve excessive treatment."

"Bacteria," Kutner broke in, his gaze on some middle point between the picture in his hands and the carpeted floor. "Germs in our atmosphere, their systems aren't used to it. Makes them sick."

"They're Transformers, not Tripods," House scolded, his face twisted in disappointed disgust. "Don't make a diagnosis based on anticlimactic film endings, and definitely not from the remake by Steven - since Schlinder's List I can't kill a kid - Spielberg. And it isn't Jeff Goldblum's 'cold', either. It's not a virus, technological or otherwise so far as we already know, but they've been pretty strict on who can look at these guys, hence flying us over under cover of confidentiality."

"How are we even going to begin treating them?" Foreman asked with raised hands, looking to each doctor in turn. If they accepted that these life forms were real and not a particularly expensive hoax on House's part, the idea of treating them alone was still ludicrous in his mind. "We can't exactly put them in an MRI machine, or take a PET scan. Or anything else we can do with a human."

A shared concern, House conceded as drew his cane up and began to spin it alongside the seat. "They've got their own medic who'll be collaborating with us: Ratchet. He thinks that a little lateral thinking across the species can get to the bottom of this before they end up dead and dissected."

Thirteen gave a slow nod. "If some of their systems translate to ours, then some of our treatments should translate back."

"Right. So are you in?" He looked between the doctors, all now past the shock of the case and able to start making decisions about it. He'd been keen to get this part out of the way before they arrived, as fun as it had been to watch. "I mean, you're stuck here anyway because of those forms you signed, but you've still got a choice between sitting in a little room with a camera or playing doctor with R2-D2's kick-ass uncles."

Predictably, Kutner answered first and with no little enthusiasm. "I'm in."

"Just out of curiosity, me too," Thirteen replied, though her tone was distracted as she leant over to pick up Kutner's photographs. "I mean, just look at these things…"

Foreman shook his head when Taub gave a short nod of assent, leaving him feeling as though he possessed the most sanity inside the jet. "This is insane, you know that? Your level of insane."

House fluttered his lashes, the cane still spinning. "Thought that was part of my charm."

"Hell, we've had weird cases before," Taub murmured, taking Thirteen's file with a frown of concentration already firmly in place. To Foreman's silence, he gave the taller man a frank shrug. "What's another one on the pile? Besides, it's always a good idea to get in good with super-intelligent beings big enough to kill you without noticing."

Next chapter, the Autobots…