The Becoming of Things

3: Chinese Room

"We should get out and explore," Dahlia commented as her hand flipped a coin up and down a few days of no commentary other than my slow extension of senses. For those interested in the experience of the feminine orgasm, please turn elsewhere, for Dahlia had firmly set me out. "For the sake of the narrative, if anything else."

"Aren't we experimenting already?" I pointed out as the coin made a back-flip on our palm. "This is a handy trick. And you wanted to keep a low profile first."

"Given that I don't exactly trust you, this is the exact thing we should have avoided," Dahlia commented, as the coin returned from our palm to the edge of our fingers, as her other hand scribbled out a bar of notes. Since it was our left hand, essentially the body was playing a duet.

"One would think," Dahlia's voice issued out from our shared mouth, "that motor control would come to the right side of the body first."

"Yes," I rebutted with her voice, "well, it's a bot like that Crowley fellow."

"You've been going on about Crowley since you read the book," Dahlia sighed. "Be careful with my body. It's ridiculously fragile compared to anything else you have, even if alien nanites are currently bleeding through my bloodstream to fix it."

"Anything I have is currently yours," I answered, flipping the coin straight up and letting it fall onto the table. "Let's rehash what we know, and what we have to do."

"We know that your people are working together with the US government to take down Decepticons," Dahlia dutifully ticked off. "We also know that they're covert ops, if the faulty gas-line excuse is anything to go by. Personally, I'd just post blurry pictures on the Internet and be done with it. What it does mean, however, is that they have a means of tracking Decepticons, and by extension Cybertronians. We have possible location spots for Decepticon lairs. Are you sure we don't have any human contacts?"

"Last I checked, the human male was under eighteen," I replied. "And the other female has a juvenile record."

"Yes, the infamous Sam Witwicky and Mikaela Banes," Dahlia used our eyes to consider the frankly illegal dossier we stole from the local war ministry. Oh wait, defence department. Mispronouncing the name five times had garnered some grudge for it. She had complained that only robots and similar organisms could pronounce the name correctly on the first try. "Not a good idea, involving minors in this. Right, so what can we do?"

"We have my mad skillz," I deliberately mispronounced the word, sticking out my tongue to the lacquered table surface. "And your gaming skills, but I don't know if we can RP our way back to Autobot central, wherever it is. And I'm not keen to try out cardiac arrest again. It's not fun."

To be honest, it felt like ripping a spark out, and considering that humans could and have survived them made me find new respect for their species on a whole.

On the other hand, we did establish quite firmly that I was in her pacemaker. Very painfully, and very firmly. And that was a fake heart attack.

I cursed as the coin dropped. For all the manual dexterity and grace in her fingers from the piano, and the form of her body from that human Circuit-Su, it was clear that Dahlia had hardly ever fought for her life. This was a body soft in peacetime, and should not have to be hardened except by choice, and Dahlia had not chosen to fight. She probably couldn't make the cut by her health anyway, but the fact remained that the soft human body was not easily repairable like my old metal one.

"We need to get to the Autobots before your government gets wind of it, possibly breaking some laws along the way," I cautiously commented.

"Ideally, we can turn up at one of these Decepticon spots and find your friends,"Dahlia shrugged. "It's not like they're going to roll out a whole convoy for one Decepticon."

"I really don't think this is a good idea," Dahlia had commented when the suspected building that was scheduled for demolition came into view.

"It's the only thing we got to go on," I commented in answer.

"What about me?"

"What about you?" I rebutted. "This is our only chance to get to the Autobots!"

"And the Decepticons?"

"We'll leave it to them and their convoy."

Them, whoever the eponymous identities were, did not bring a convoy. They did not even appear. The slagging 'Con, however reluctantly, did.

Long story short: we had rented a car, driving from the Fog City to this backwater part of Arizona to find the 'Con, armed with mainly a Taser. We'd found the abandoned building where weird accidents happened, and a Geiger counter Dahlia had bartered for beeped. The lone foreman on site had been the 'Con, and it hadn't been happy, and Dahlia probably would have made the sequence of events into a slagging epic poem or something in dactylic hexameter or something, but I'm the one telling it!

Hence, our impromptu escape with any and all things that we found.

Dahlia's footsteps pounded as she ran down a derelict hallway, flinging bottles left and right that smashed, releasing their liquid contents on walls and floors. "I really should look into death by genre savviness..."

She paused, doubled back, and grabbed the fire extinguisher by breaking the plastic tie that held it there, checking along her belt for the glass bottle hanging there.

"Screw you, screw that, and screw him!" Dahlia tossed the lit home-made smoke bomb. Earth videos are a scary, scary thing, even if this game called NERF was present to facilitate it.

Eventually, Dahlia skidded to a stop when the red optics of a – thankfully small – 'Con flickered by, invisible once more as we sidestepped and backed behind into a side hallway.

"Where are you, fleshy?" it growled, advancing with crunches of broken glass and everything, even the goop of liquid gasoline and the acrid smell of it burned at our nose. It sounded like a wood chipper in a sea of gasoline. That... sounded like bad news. For it.

"It works, or we fix it for free," Dahlia commented, lighting the cloth stuffed in the last bottle before flinging it there. As predicted, the 'Con batted it away, and the fiery projectile lit the whole hallway into a blaze as the 'Con flickered, its phase generator unable to compensate for the heat.

Dahlia stepped forward, and loosed the fire extinguisher into its optics. She brought the red canister down on its helm next. The canister was dented, knocked from her hands when she let it go, to bring up the Taser, right into its spark. Pain shot up our arm- my arm, and I disregarded it to help her keep the electrical weapon there. She lashed out, right to tear into its weak spot, the spark-

"Fleshy scum," the 'Con brought its claw down, breaking our shoulder with its scream of rage. Not even the courtesy to keep up the banter.

"Haaa!" Dahlia shifted as the 'Con was about to strike, the forms of Decepticon momentum, human Circuit-Su, and the boiling cocktail desperation in my- her- our body allowing the relatively weak human to fling a Decepticon over her shoulder and rip out its spark.

I didn't know that human martial arts could do that.

Sounds, like 'pop-pop' rang loose, loosely like bullets, rang out. Grimly, Dahlia crushed the spark chamber under her foot, arcs of energy and delicately strong circuitry so much under a rubber shoes called a Croc, nearly melting from the building heat of the hallway. "Then, you are no longer a sentient being."

A bell started ringing, and soon sprinklers engaged to flood the hallway with foetid water. The fire extinguisher was let loose on the hallway, setting up an ultimately futile effort as Dahlia took the remnants of the spark chamber out with her.

Neither of us paid it any mind, more devoted to the small spark-chamber and whatever circuitry we'd managed to salvage before the heat got too much. Neither of us spoke until we got back into the rental car, heaving huge gulps of sweet, clean Earth air. The door thudded closed, and the locks clicked into place with the touch of a button.

Dahlia reached for the paper bag by the side. I had no idea why until we threw up, the sour bile curdling on the tongue even as the waste was set aside and we drank deeply from the bottle of water inside, leaning back into the car seat.

Then Dahlia sighed, and the exhaustion of her- our body was overwhelming. "I don't suppose we could build a... something out of what we cannibalised? Going through the whole rigmarole again will be tiring."

I considered. We'd been too damn lucky, and cut it too damned close. Spec-Ops operative, hah! I'd forgotten the weaknesses of the human body, no matter how much of a hidden ass-kicker my main gal is. "Maybe... there's another way of getting into contact."

"Good. Because I think we're going into cardiac arrest soon."

I immediately let go to focus on the electrical conduction system. "Say so earlier!"

Human tools were rudimentary, sure. They were also sufficient for building a Cybertronian-tuned radio out of a broken spark chamber from the 'Con. Good news, the Decepticons probably didn't know that their bug got squashed. Hah, geddit?

Never mind.

Dahlia clucked our tongue, an odd sound I'd never heard before, and twisted the crystal dial. "Hmm... speakers at maximum..."

The speakers crackled, and then, I heard Prime's voice:

"With the All Spark gone, we cannot return life to our planet. And fate had yielded its reward, a new world to call... home. We live among its people now, hiding in plain sight, but watching over them in secret, waiting, protecting. I have witnessed their capacity for courage, and though we are worlds apart, like us, there is more to them than meets the eye. I am Optimus Prime, and I send this message to any surviving Autobots taking refuge among the stars. We are here. We are waiting."

Permanent message, placed on standby to all Autobot transmissions. Given that most transmissions could be hacked by Soundwave, the Decepticons probably knew as well. Optimus Prime, don't get me wrong, was a great leader, but he tended to be-

"Very prone to speeches, your boss," Dahlia commented. I hadn't the heart to agree.

So, I needed to contact the Autobots. Specifically, Ratchet. Prowl, maybe, because while Dahlia was a great strategist, she was also a blood-filled body ruled by hormones. I didn't even know if the slagging tactician was on the planet!

I twirled a dial, listening intently before I figured out the transmission and set something up. One good news about being transplanted by spark was that I kept most memories on some level, which meant that I could look back on my death by Megatron at some distant level without any associated horror. This included any number of engineering tricks needed to hard-wire the radio to type out a command to all Autobot frequencies, with the following message:

Code: 1MAESTRO. Autobot Meister currently planet-side. Am stuck. Still in active service. Till all are one.

Comm silence. More silence. Silence that stretched until daylight and we had to continue driving on back to San Fran and the tiny apartment after dropping off the rental with few questions.

Dahlia laid out, efficiently changing the bandages from the few gunshots and the lacerations on arms and legs and body, and I felt slightly more guilty. "What do we do?"

Dahlia drew a long, tentative breath. "We know that they must have some form of scouting, or some priority of scouting. From your description of size differences, and from the scale of reports that you flagged, clearly the Autobots are targeting larger Decepticons first. We lucked out this time because it was small for its kind. We also know that, whatever a spark is, my body can hide it, because the Decepticon explicitly called me a human. There are two choices, given the currently limited information we have.

"One: we find your friends, seek asylum, and hope that they can provide that asylum safely. I can detail to you the dangers of jumping in unprepared, up to your friends getting evicted from the planet for wilful endangerment of a human being, technical identity theft, etcetera."

I winced as the cotton swab pressed, and the ethanol bit into the wound. Human pain seemed like a constant companion, one that defied all pain-dampening protocol and elongated it by however long it took the wound to heal. How did they survive this thing every stellar rotation of their lives?

"Two: we lay low, amass information, and infiltrate from the human end. Assuming that yes, the Autobots and the American government have formed a permanent alliance of sorts, then they must have a liaison office of some way, shape or form, primarily staffed by humans."

I blinked. And blinked some more. And some more. Somehow, on the way back to Fog City, she'd thought up a plan of approach with quite a fair bit of tactical thought. It was impressive. "How," I said, "in the whole galaxy do you always manage to outsmart the Jazzmeister? Where did you learn it?"

She thought. And thought. And thought. Finally...

She looked straight into the mirror ten minutes later. "I got myself a library card."

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