"And," Ratchet said pleasantly, "since a general anaesthetic is inherently dangerous, and I have the greatest amount of experience in treating humans, I will stay here, and Jolt is going with you."
"Oh? All right. I haven't had the chance to talk with him very much, so that'll be interesting," Charlotte said.
She was spending more and more time in her - her - Ratchet gave up, and said "alt frame" to himself. She said that was because its memory was perfect, and her human body's was not.
That was fine with Ratchet. It meant that he didn't have to line-feed the frame. And when Charlotte "wore" it overnight, whoever was on shift simply monitored her human body on one channel, and her Cybertronian frame on another. Charlotte Mearing, in stereo.
Whoever was on monitor duty also got a free ringside seat to quite a lot of hot Cybertronian sex. Lucky mech.
"Remember," Ratchet cautioned her, "you're to do as much talking as listening. He has to be sure you're responding."
"Last time I conked out over Missouri, didn't I?"
"Yes. Why?"
"Means he can talk to me until we reach Missouri. After that, I have to talk to him." She grinned at him, and went out the door, and Ratchet went back to worrying.
The bond tendrils between Charlotte, in either of her frames, and Optimus had thickened markedly since they began to have Cybertronian-style sex with one another while she was in alt-frame. It was too late to dissolve the bond. He had to succeed at this. Had to.
"Are we over Missouri yet?" Charlotte Mearing asked over the comms Ratchet had installed for her. Jolt gave her a quick look, and a smile.
"Ma'am," the pilot sent, "we passed Missouri an hour ago."
"Do you want to try something different tonight?" Optimus Prime said.
Honeymoon phase, where every stretch of private time shows you something new about your beloved.
"Sure. What?"
"You be the spike, and I'll be the valve, and then we'll try it the other way around. Afterward, we'll tell each other which we liked better."
"Okay," Charlotte said.
It wasn't precisely a big mistake, although they wouldn't know that for a while yet.
And Optimus' reports were more informative than Charlotte's. She figured that was because, however it came about, she simply liked the mech, liked being with him whether, technically, he was being "him" or he was being "her."
Although that spike experience? She could get to like that.
"Oh no," Charlotte Mearing said calmly. "My human shell still exists. It will until it dies. We've researched the laws, and that's what has to happen, unless I wish to expose the Cybertronians who have helped me to achieve this remarkable transformation to charges of murder and abuse of a corpse."
The President of the United States scowled at her. So did the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the Prime Ministers of Japan and the United Kingdom, and the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. Some of them did this via satellite.
"But you," said the Secretary-General to Charlotte, "the being to whom I am speaking, you will survive this."
"That is Ratchet's best guess."
"Ratchet. Who is Ratchet?"
"My Chief Medical Officer," Optimus said. Seated beside Charlotte's alt-form, he was not holding her hand; both of them were sitting straight, arms and legs not crossed, hands clasped in front of them. Nothing was there to be read from their body language. Two professionals, who happened to be 'facing each other senseless at every opportunity.
The president of the Kuomintang rattled off something in his own tongue. Optimus frowned, and answered him in the same language.
The translators in the room all gasped, and then the persons to whom the translations were forwarded all gasped.
Charlotte said, "Really, Mister Chairman, I don't comment on your sex life, and I don't expect you to comment on mine." She waited until the murmurs of shock had died down, then continued, "What should truly be under discussion here is the remarkable discovery that my friends and I have made: that a human consciousness can be decanted from its original body into another receptacle. This will, if all of you allow it, have intense repercussions for those presently trapped in a body that does not work well. Arthritis, diabetes, congestive heart failure, paralysis, blindness, locked-in syndrome: all can be a thing of the past. New lives await those who suffer from them, but all that glorious possibility rests in your hands."
The Secretary-General, a man known to be quite religious, said, "You have taken upon yourselves the powers of a god."
"Indeed," Optimus said benignly, "and since the gods have seen fit to share those powers with us, help us to spread the benefits of that power around the world."
The man shook his head, and rose. "Immortality should remain beyond our grasp."
"It has," Optimus said. "Cybertronians are long-lived by your standards, but not immortal. The bodies we offer wear out, just as do your own, and our own; those bodies we make available to you have a normal human lifespan of seventy years, more or less. They are biological constructs, and their lifespan improves with good care. Therefore, how long they live is up to the individual inhabitant. They will, however, die eventually. We all remain subject to the gods, Mr. Secretary, whatever each of us perceives those gods to be."
The Secretary-Chairman sat back down. "Very well," he said, and opened a new door into humanity's future with those two words.
Ratchet rose from recharge one morning a week later to find 732,438 e-mails in his in-box. The news had apparently gotten out.
He sighed, and began to sort them. The 228,472 death threats were, as always, forwarded to the FBI; 238,383 requests for body transfer were forwarded to the medical board (237,914 of them would be turned down summarily, as they were filed for cosmetic purposes); the 113, 057 threats to, or requests to save, his immortal soul the base chaplain said she would take care of, so he forwarded them to her. He wondered briefly if she knew what she had gotten into; it was likely she'd have a literal million of the things by the end of the week.
He discarded 151,968 offers of Viagra, approvals for a credit card, surgical vision correction, surgical enhancement (or depletion) of this, that, or the other, and burial insurance. Oh, and some stuff which apparently kept your pet's teeth clean and healthy, but the guinea pig didn't seem to need that.
His in-box now empty, Ratchet got a cube from the dispenser in the common area, and ambled toward his med bay.
A roar went up as he left one building to access another. He stopped, dead, and opticked the crowd gathered around the gate to the Autobots' compound. They began to chant and thrust badly-made signs up and down in the air.
"What the frag is going on?" said Charlotte Mearing, arriving beside him.
"You've got me," Ratchet replied. "I can't even read the signs."
What was it, Charlotte wondered, that left the impassioned so illiterate? But she shrugged, and said, "I'm going to go see what they want."
"Think that's wise?"
"No, I think it's necessary." She turned toward her assistants. "You guys stay here, okay?"
"Yes, Director," they chorused.
She went toward the gate. The roar increased, and then, as it became apparent that she was in fact headed toward them, the protestors all fell silent.
"Good morning," she said pleasantly. "I'm Charlotte Mearing, Director of this facility. What seems to be the problem?"
"That's a human name," one of them shouted, "and you're not a human!"
"I was born a human. As a human, I served the CIA for 30 years. When I transplanted my consciousness into this body, I had to satisfy that organization that I continued to be who I said I was."
"Why should we believe you?" shouted another one.
"I've no idea. Recordings and transcriptions of the hearing at which I was adjudged to be Charlotte Mearing are available under the Freedom of Information Act, document number 574298726-58.961. Believe that, instead."
There was a silence. Then Charlotte smiled at them, or at any rate bared quite a few denta, and said, "Is that all? I'm quite busy this morning."
"Abomination!" shouted someone in the back of the crowd.
"My good woman, the notion that the earth revolves about the sun, instead of the opposite, the horseless carriage, and the use of electricity have all been judged 'abominations' over the last six hundred years or so. What they turned out to be were leaps forward in science that eventually benefitted all of mankind." She smiled again. "Now, will you excuse me? I have meetings out the wazoo today, and most of them are to see who else gets to benefit from this new technology."
One of the scruffier protestors pulled a Glock out of his pocket, and fired three shots at her. They clanged harmlessly off her chestplates, and she stepped over the fence, plucked the gun from the man's hand, and bent the barrel in a half-circle before the MPs outside the gate could converge on him.
"That was a very silly thing to do," she said, handing it back. "You've just complicated your own life endlessly, and you didn't damage me at all."
The protestor took his new expensive paperweight from her, rolled his eyes back in his head, and fainted.
Charlotte made very sure he didn't hit his head on the pavement, and then stood back and let the MPs do their thing, and the Metro police force do its own.
The prosecutor said later that he was never sure how he convicted the man of attempted murder, because the lab wasn't able to fire the gun for comparison purposes. He had plenty of eyewitnesses, though, even after the ten-year fight to get Charlotte recognized as a human being, and thus capable of having a murder attempted against her.
And if Charlotte was a "human" being, then every Cybertronian was too, and entitled to the protection of the legal system.
The law wasn't an ass, precisely; it has always been slow to expand its definitions.