Author's Notes
Apparently, this chapter has been sitting on my harddrive for the last... eight years.
I had plans for this story, but I've long since moved on, despite my continued affection for the partnership between Arcee and Jack.
Maybe I'll return to them one day.
Thank you kindly to the new readers and reviewers of this story.
Arcee gently tilted the rounded piece of metal held with the tip of her precise fingers, rolling it. The thick film of fat derived from the fruit of the Olea europaea over its surface welcomed the hunk of animal flesh grasped between the forefinger and thumb of her other hand, the suddenly alive oil sizzling and popping. She could smell their union, the viscous liquid sparking up, frying in. It was something, a recognizable scent, but indescribable for a being to whom it meant nothing, a being that could not salivate, taste, or eat. Bursting bubbles sent tiny flecks of fat splattering across her fingers and one landed against the palm of her hand to trail down the smooth metal.
A black-brown-gray sear penetrated upwards into red meat. Her sensors recorded the shifts in temperature that crept and radiated alongside the colors before she gently turned the sputtering flesh to its other side. She waited, not needing her internal chronometer to judge, going simply by changing temperature. That was everything. Time could be fickle, but she could judge the very heart of the matter.
Her mechanical irises contracted as she felt Ratchet's stare, not of sight but of sense, as it reflected off of her back. The medic, standing at his workbench in their headquarters' annex, groaned like stressed metal at her reciprocal scan while fumbling with his tools. They clattered as he fussed over them. She hunched down to get a better look at what her hands were doing, though she did not need it, growing smaller, covering herself.
And then the flesh's overall temperature was right. She lifted the pan up and opened the box below. The hunk of flesh entered, and her clumsily large finger brushed the red Nichrome element when she withdrew. Rubbing her fingers at the sensation, at the heat that was enough to cause a being of flesh to withdraw with a screech and a sizzle of flesh, she pulled back gently. Again it was just a matter of temperature.
The human preoccupation with food was incredibly odd. It seemed that ancient tribes, nomadic hunter gatherer societies, sedentary, iron age cultures with codified laws, and modern human civilizations obsessed over their consumption of fuel.
The world over, peoples placed stigmas on certain foods; laws forbade the consumption of particular animals. Even those which tradition allowed were subject to dietary regulations regarding their slaughter. What bearing did the manner of death have? It was dead. It was fuel. Consume it. Even the former was not strictly necessary. It would die at some point during the process.
Those with whom you could eat, the times at which you could eat, and the services required before and after and during consumption were all laid out in exacting, exhausting detail by dozens of secular and religious organizations over all the world and all the eons of human existence.
Even when they were not providing actual laws, they had cultural hang ups, certain stigmas about the way things should be done, but not the way it was required that they be done.
There were significances well beyond the purely rational. Their food had become integrated into the very systems by which they worshiped their various gods. The treatment of food was somehow reflective of relationships between people, families, and tribes.
For instance, in some cultures the provision of food for a family spoke to a mother's noble character.
There were deep set ideas about how a family was to be ordered during the early to mid twentieth century among Western nations, tendrils of which were still visible today; the female was to have the evening meal prepared. To fail to provide was somehow shameful, a shirking of responsibility. It was just one of those strange concepts buried deep inside humans, inside certain human cultures, that was irrational, but was there nonetheless.
She tuned back to the stove-top, sensors splitting their attention between the metal box's inside and out. Obscuring steam rose from an open pot, and she grasped the sides between her thumb and finger. The vaporous cloud billowed outwards, hissing, blown back and up when she tilted the iron pot over a nearby sink. Water poured out over the finger of her other hand which held back the pot's solid contents: a collection of pealed, white tubers. Water impacted metal, the noise overwhelming the sounds of steam. The pot returned to the stove to rest on a cool element.
She twiddled her grooming and long fingers. It was now time for the part that required the greatest delicacy. She raised a pitcher on the counter-top and gently allowed the seventeen degree centigrade, creamy, white liquid to slosh out into the pot. A previously prepared collection of cheese, parsley, and various spices followed, tipped out from a metal bowl. Miko had dealt with the smaller ingredients after finally convincing Arcee to accept the help. It had, of course, taken several failed attempts on Arcee's part.
Fragmenting, smashing, and mixing the starchy, edible tubers was easy in comparison.
There was a second pot and a second process that mirrored the first, though the edible stems and florets required no seasoning or extra work.
Turning to the sink once more, she delicately flicked on the tap with the back of a silver-gray finger and ran water over the tips of her sullied appendages, scraping them together. When clean, she returned to the stove. Gripping both sides of the door with her thumb and forefinger, she pulled downwards. Air seemed to blow onto her open palm, the sensors therein registering the change in temperature and sending lightning-fast electrical signals into her secondary and primary processors. She withdrew the stove's contents, the flesh, and flicked the door closed. Miko, sitting off in another corner, obviously feigning interest in her obnoxiously loud video-games, would deal with actually turning the stove off and with the mess left by both her successes and her mistakes. She could not feel the girl's gaze, not as she did Ratchet's scans, but she knew she was being watched. She understood the girl, and together they had an understanding.
She placed the flesh onto a waiting sheet of tin, machined into thin foil, and then covered it delicately, wrapping heated flesh with cool metal. The gleaming foil cradled its contents gently. Juices reabsorbed, settling, the flesh growing tender.
What followed was a sequence of clumsiness and dexterity, gentleness and precision and inaccuracy despite her perfect, exact body and processors. Size was an impediment in so many ways.
And then she was done, a package in hand and a mess behind.
Stepping towards the ground-bridge, she couldn't help but feel that it was strange to have enough energon to waste, to have nothing to fight.
How could someone survive the end of a war that had raged for a million years and then be reduced to nothing? For a fleshing, the answer was so simple: a moment of distraction, a spill out, and the human inability to weld together again. Humans were such strange, fragile little things.
The moment she reached the portal's threshold, she looked down at the objects in her hands. Groundbridging was a surreal experience. There was no solid surface within the portal. Rather, the body fragmented, was transfigured, so that the swirling energy underfoot, a maelstrom of electrical green fire, seemed like solid matter. To walk through the portal and to travel the tunnel was to move in a space where space did not exist, or, at least, did not correspond to anything that actually existed. Around the world or to the house next door, the space covered in the act of transitioning through the tunnel was exactly the same. Thus even on a short-range ground-bridge, she had enough time to reflect while her particles hurtled through a higher level of space.
Food meant something to them; preparation, consumption, and expulsion meant something else, something more. Food was fuel, but it was also a symbol that carried meanings and significances. As symbol, it communicated meaning.
And that was, of course, the nature of all symbols, chief among them the symbols of language. Images painted on cave walls, elemental residue left behind on pulped trees, and ink soaked into the skin of dead animals that had been stretched taught, scraped, pressed and dried, the flesh it once covered consumed, were all the same. Words, language, speech, the articulations of the tongue and the hand, they had no meaning, but all of them meant something more than what they were. They were just symbols, meaningless in themselves until given meaning; until the meaning was known.
These things were different for machines and men. For her partner and his race, communication of meaning in symbol was tragic. A fleshling only realized the need for communication when he was taken out of his mother, when the mother ceased to be an extension of himself, when he realized that there were things and people in the world other than himself. Language, symbol, was the acknowledgment that the mother was no longer a part of him, and he was no longer part of her. Speech, entering into the universe of symbols, being born into it, was leaving behind the safely and intimacy of the womb, the perfect little garden in which a seed was planted and grew. It was knowledge, the knowledge of the other, that demanded communication and forced separation, expulsion. Humans communicated to draw closer, to understand one another, but the very means by which they did so was a testament to separation.
As soon as they realized their personhood, their minds growing, humans lived behind walls, under the tyranny of symbols.
For a machine, everything was symbol. There were only two symbols: on and off, yes or no, one or zero, presence or absence. Therefore, there was only one. A machine understood itself, could break everything, every thought and every sensation, into a pattern of presences and absences. Everything was language.
She knew how machines thought, and she knew how they did not think. Machines did not think in terms of gardens, seeds, and births.
And that was all the time she had for thought.
She found him sitting in his garage the moment she stepped into his home through the bridge. A screwdriver dug into his arm, and a collection of more advanced instruments, mostly Cybertronian in nature, lay scattered around his work bench; leaves fallen around a tree, withered and discolored. What a strange association. Leaves: little organic solar-power plants, they produced fuel, provided life, but withered, rejected, in the cold of winter. That was their thanks, their inevitable fate.
He was keeping his hands busy and his mind occupied. Light gleamed off his slick, oily hair that hung low over his forehead, partially covering pinched and rutted flesh. Sparks glittered bright off random silver strands. There was a patchy film of bristles over his cheeks and strong jaw. Sagging eyelids rose at her appearance, but he looked down to his work immediately.
Her body contorted, transforming in an athletic, limber, humanoid way, deft limbs rearranging until she was scrunched down into the corner with him, as close as the limitations of her material and her size would allow.
Settling next to the fleshling, she laid her pleasantly warm package across his table and spread it out. Meat dripped, its fatty sheen thick. Steam released and rose. They were in the moment that dragged, and in its size and weight, projected into the future.
Processors ran on the edge, shifting between incomplete calculations, uncertain contacts never culminated, willy-nilly. Chickens with their heads cut off – a typically grotesque human expression, a metaphor, one thing standing for another, utterly foreign to a Cybertronian. A dead machine did not twitch or move to make mockery of its non-life. That was an irrational thought. A dead machine was not dead; a dead machine was simply broken, nonfunctional.
He stared down at the plate, seeing that which she had prepared, and that which she too observed not with her eyes, which focused on him, but with tertiary sensors: the seared steak that deformed, oozing with thick red juice, when he jabbed at it with a forefinger as if he had never seen food in his life, the chlorophyl-packed florets, like papillae on the tongue of a man with a cold, and the lumpy stodge trying to pass itself off as mashed potatoes.
Then, ignoring the plate and the food and the tools before him, he turned to her and reached out his arms, held wide apart like those of the audience members she had seen on televised evangelistic programming, who, caught up in ecstatic rhythms of human hymns, lifted their hands to the sky.
He stretched out to his utmost, hands coming to rest on her upper cheeks and head resting just below her nose, hugging her to him.
The grip shifted to draw her closer, or to accommodate her as, somehow, she crouched lower, calculating the volume of air expelled from his lungs given distance, the formula for the expansion of gasses, and the pressure of his breath on her cheek and on her lips. Only his back and the table were properly visible now.
There was, of course, one pertinent question that remained unanswered – one persistent uncertainty among a multitude of unknowns: how did humans think? Did they, like her race, think in terms of language? Were words etched into their minds as if chiseled into rock?
She knew that the fundamental building blocks of their thoughts were sparks of electricity. She had known that, but it was really only an answer to the question of "how" they thought, the physical process. What she pondered now was a question of shape and character.
It seemed strange to believe that humans conceived of the world through internal language; every act of speech was in fact an act of translation; the abstract became the concrete. Even still, feeling his soft flesh and cold metal all at once, she thought that, perhaps, they both thought in nothing more than absence and presence.
