Charlotte Mearing walked into Ratchet's domain the next morning with a thick pile of green accordion-folded paper in her hands.
Ratchet's spark sank. They were going to have the dreaded Budget Discussion.
But when Charlotte caught sight of Optimus Plastercaster in his corner, she stopped, dead, and said, "What's that? It looks like a really hi-tech version of a Christmas tree, but you don't celebrate that holiday. Very beautiful. – And it's a little early for it, anyway, in August."
"Oh," said Ratchet very carefully, "it isn't a Christmas tree."
"Ah. Well, it's a really beautiful piece of art. Wish I had one. Ratchet, I just dropped by to tell you that you were under budget by five percent last quarter. Since I work for the government, I have to warn you that failing to spend all your money might result in forfeiting some of it."
Ratchet pointed at her, and said calmly, "You people are insane."
"Ratchet, this is just plain old vanilla bureaucrat-squirrelly. You haven't seen insane yet."
When she was gone, the human door firmly closed behind her, Ratchet thought about the various spectra of squirrelly-to-insane, contemplated their exploitation for profit, and then commed Sunstreaker.
::You have contacts in the art world. How difficult would it be to get something manufactured to sell to humans?::
::Not difficult at all. Let me get the information together and I'll comm you with it.::
And this is how the Autobots came to make quite a large amount of money, which did not have to be accounted for since it wasn't government funds, selling works of art which were based upon their leader's penis.
Sunstreaker looked at the original work of art, or perhaps artifice; Ratchet refused point-blank to tell him what it was, which of course he could identify at a glance, or whose it continued to be. Sunstreaker listened to his description of Charlotte's reaction to it, researched what humans liked about Christmas trees (proportion of height to girth at various points and density of branches, mostly: with added greenness and that lovely tree smell), stumbled upon the fact that most humans didn't much care to display a giant alien penis, even if it's called it a "spike," in a corner of the living room, nor to display it permanently as art: or rather, that the number of humans who would knowingly do this was vanishingly small, and could not reasonably be said to constitute a market. The majority also did not care to dangle an alien penis or two from holes deliberately punched into extraneous flesh around the audial receptors.
Therefore the yellow 'bot did some more research into what the Greeks had discovered about beauty, still the culture's defining standards, and made trifling adjustments here and there according to the Golden Mean. Et voilá! Optimus was no longer model but inspiration.
The faux-penii ranged in size from earrings an inch and a half (four centimeters) long to behemoths eight feet (two and most of a third meters, the size of the prototype given the NEST personnel as a holiday decoration) high, and were made of various metals or even carved of stone, which required Wheeljack to invent a three-dimensional stone saw. So he was happy too, even if it failed to blow up after the first two trial runs.
The resulting works of art were at a disadvantage to real trees in one dimension, the lack of lovely scent, but had an undeniable advantage in another: they did not shed needles all over the carpet.
When online marketing began in early October, both the earrings and the faux-trees were a sensation. Paperweights and sculptures sized for the home or the garden followed, and mopped up their competition as well.
One art critic survived interviewing Sunstreaker, as almost unanimously, his colleagues went just a wee tiny bit batshit insane with praise for the Autobot's work. In the art world, Optimus' spike was widely regarded as the best thing since sliced bread ... if slightly more difficult to toast and butter.
Ratchet could only hope that Mearing would share their opinion. Although if she wanted toast and butter to be part of the equation, she could solve that problem for herself.
Instead of Optimus' beautiful gravures, however, all the models of every size bore Sunstreaker's signature glyph, a work of art in itself.
And thank Primus for that small difference, because come December, Optimus did not recognize an intimate part of himself rigidly at attention in the corner of the common room, sporting bright-red Christmas balls.
Ratchet was not liking his numbers. He knew he needed miniature circuit boards, he knew how many of them he needed, and he knew how long it took him to produce one. By the time he was finished with this very small part of Operation Simulacrum, very likely Mearing would be dead.
Notwithstanding her instructions in the completely opposite direction, Ratchet had continued to do some thinking about how to create an artificial Cybertronian into which to decant a human. So far, he was liking the computer-model results. Maybe he could talk her into - no, he knew he couldn't.
Operation Simulacrum was from the other side of the size differential between humans and Cybertronians, an artificial human.
Well, her eventual death from old age was a way to resolve Ratchet's issues with Operation Simulacrum, which he continued to think of as The Bad Idea. The medic, however, would not stoop so low as to let Time fight his battles for him. The humans were short-lived as it was; no need to rub their faces (or any other parts of their anatomy) in it.
He went looking on the internet for solutions, and found the pick-and-place machine.
A fully-automated pick-and-place machine is a computer-controlled device which, given the materials, creates fully-functioning circuit boards from scratch. Pour the components into their bins, stack the circuit boards in theirs, program like crazy, and turn the machine on. Zink, zink, zoink, zoink, schlerazzle, zink-zoink. Seconds later, you have a completed circuit board.
Cost was an issue, though. Pick-and-places ran from $50,000 on up. The one he really needed, capable of tiny, complex work on miniature circuit boards, was estimated by several firms at $150K to $195K.
The highest-end machine could produce one board to his specs every six seconds. Ten a minute was fourteen thousand a day, which meant that it would take around three years to produce the boards he needed.
Three of the machines? Nine of them? Ratchet was impatient, since he had what amounted to the first draft completed: the prototype, to which improvements would still need to be made. Nine it was; they would complete the work in four months' time.
That cost, however, exceeded even the money-producing capabilities of Optimus' pe - spi - ah, modeling career. It certainly broke the bank for the budget given Ratchet's entire department for the year.
He scheduled a meeting with Optimus.