Syntax Sub Rosa

Sam and Mikaela were as good as their word about the homework. Moved in part by their own interest, and in part on 'Bee's behalf, they were ruthless. They spent their lunches in the library with their heads together, eating with one hand while doing as much of the homework from their morning classes as they could. As soon as the last bell rang, they were back in the library until they were shooed out by the librarians. 'Bee would take them to Sam's house, where Mikaela would call her grandmother to tell her where she was and when to expect her home, before joining Sam at the table to hit the books once more. Sam's parents were ecstatic.

As soon as they finished, usually after dinner, they would head out with Bumblebee again to spend a few hours on the base before racing home just in time to make curfew. It was exhausting, but there were far worse ways to spend an evening, after all.

Blaster's arrival had everyone excited, for one thing – hard as it could be to read Cybertronians, there was no mistaking the charge to the air. One hesitated to say "giddy" of beings that weighed in the tons, but...

"It's true," Mikaela said, lips twitching as she watched Ratchet and Blaster at work on their main console's communications grid on a Saturday afternoon. Sam nodded his agreement. The two humans were taking a quick break from their shared labors, observing as their cybernetic friends pressed on, and comparing whispered notes on recent changes to the atmosphere around the base.

The tangible proof that the Autobots were not alone, and the news that there were more 'bots inbound, had had even Optimus walking a little taller (if that was actually possible). There was definitely a sense that everyone was counting down 'til the next signals should shout down their comm lines. Blaster himself no doubt contributed more to the mood than just news – he seemed a fundamentally cheerful sort and the effect was a palpable uplift on base. 'Bee and Ratchet had obviously quickly been won over by their new comrade's sunny disposition; for his part, Blaster seemed quite pleased, not just to have company again, but to have their company, chatting easily with both of them on whatever seemed to come first to mind.

He even managed to charm Ironhide, though "charm" was perhaps as poor a choice of word as "giddy": there was nothing charming about a pair of Cybertronians in an all-out sparring match, complete with "safety" modes engaged so close-range "fire" could be "exchanged." Ratchet, who had assigned himself the task of refereeing and keeping track of weapon-inflicted "damage," had provided Sam and Mikaela with a perch on his light mountings that Friday afternoon. From that safe position, the pair of them had watched, holding their breaths, worried that the round was tipping over into hostility.

For Blaster had all of Optimus's height, and then some, and if he wasn't as heavily armed as Ironhide, he was definitely no Ratchet. Not that Ratchet was so bad a fighter, so far as either Mikaela or Sam had ever been able to tell, but he quite evidently didn't go at it with the relish that his more pugnacious brethren did. Blaster, apparently, was more a 'bot after Ironhide's metaphorical heart. Ratchet might have denied the comm officer even the restricted use of his electronic warfare capabilities for the sake of vulnerable human organs, but Blaster seemed simply to take this as an excuse to hit harder, and especially once Slidesign was deployed, the weapons specialist had had his hands full.

Not that this appeared to have upset Ironhide – on the contrary, he'd rarely seemed so pleased, even to the point of giving Blaster a brief nudge with a rather battered shoulder guard afterwards in what was possibly the most overtly chummy gesture the two humans had ever seen him make. Mikaela and Sam, each seated over one of Ratchet's shoulders, had exchanged rather surprised glances over the medic's head at that. They had been even more surprised when Ratchet hadn't snarled at his two comrades for pummeling each other right into his repair bay for the night.

But in addition to bringing good tidings, to say nothing of a night's work for Ratchet, the communications specialist had been preoccupied since landing with improving the Autobots' comm system. Almost as soon as Ratchet had cleared him for duty, he had begun setting his domain to rights, or rather, getting the communications array up to the standard he considered minimally acceptable. That was proving something of a challenge given the technology that was available to him, but he'd declared himself in need of a challenge.

"Sixty solar years riding down the back end of space with nothing more interesting than microwave white noise and degraded old telecast signals?" He'd shaken his head, and electricity had arced between his fingertips as he'd powered up some tool. "Gotta blow the rust off!"

Thus far, they'd been working on the primary processing for almost three days to accommodate incorporating Blaster and his gear into the works during his shifts, and not even getting smacked around by Ironhide was slowing him down. Indeed, the comm officer was eager to try getting a few more upgrades in place for the secondaries, too, provided he and Ratchet could manage to fabricate the parts on budget out of what they could get from human suppliers.

As usual, Ratchet had happily taken the opportunity to draw Mikaela into the job, and Sam had tagged along in order to hold the flashlight, as he'd said. Not that it was needed – Ratchet alone had enough lights and wattage to illuminate a small parking lot, and he and Blaster, as they worked, would occasionally blinker messages at each other. At which points, Mikaela would sit back and remind them, "Guys? Strobe lighting."

"Sorry," they would apologize, and quickly redirect a steady set of beams.

That left Sam to struggle to follow the technical shop talk and respond whenever an actual conversation turned his way. Other than that, he marveled at Mikaela happily crawling around in the wires with the two 'bots. She might be far from understanding everything, but she clearly understood a great deal more than Sam, to whom a transistor was as good as a transformer and both were indistinguishable from a transducer.

Now, though, Blaster began disconnecting himself from the various wires and 'jacks, as Ratchet rose from crouching by an open panel.

"Break time," Blaster announced, running a finger around the edges of a data-port at the back of his neck and seeming to wince slightly. Slidesign, whose place on the comm officer's person had finally been discerned as right over his 'spine', tail and legs 'socketed' into 'ports' that radiated out from that central column, gave a short chirrup. He then pulled free of his partner and dropped to the ground. Electricity discharged into the floor, making Sam's hair stand a bit on end as he watched current arc from leg to leg, all the way down Slidesign's body as Slidesign shook them out in pairs, in succession. Apparently, the symbiont was just as grateful for the rest as his partner and Ratchet were.

"I need to check those patch-welds I did last night on Ironhide anyway," Ratchet said, as he closed the panel. Eying Blaster, he added, "Now that you two have gotten each other's measure, I'm restricting full combat simulations – we don't yet have the tech-base here for a regular parts supply, and especially on hydrocarbon rations, my internal fabricators can only generate so much! And I'm definitely ill-equipped to supply a Kemtex model with replacements."

Blaster, whose plating was still quite as dented as Ironhide's after yesterday's match, gave a contrite hum and flash of lights. "Didn't think of that, doc. Sorry!"

"Just don't kill each other, is all I ask," Ratchet replied, then nodded to Sam and Mikaela and took himself off to find their weapons specialist. Blaster looked over at the two humans, then asked:

"Speaking of hydrocarbons and rations, I think I'm going to take advantage of the sun while it's still up. Want to join me 'til 'Bee gets out of that tactical simulation he and Prime have going?"

"Sure," Sam replied, and Mikaela nodded, cracking her back a bit.

Some little while later, therefore, the three of them – or the four of them, Sam still wasn't sure how to count Slidesign and Blaster – were seated out beneath a late afternoon's sun, on the edge of 'the range.' That put them a little further out of line-of-sight telecommunication signals and so made for a bit more of a break for the comm officer, whose armor, they'd learned, contained a set of layers designed to be especially sensitive to those sorts of transmissions. Slidesign almost immediately hunkered down, tail curling about himself, and his blast shield snapped shut to the attendant sounds of electronics powering down. Blaster gave his symbiont a smile and a low thrum emanated from him as he ran a finger lightly down his partner's back plating.

"You and me, both, Slider," he declared.

"Is he okay?" Mikaela asked, frowning a little.

"Yeah, just it's been a heavy few days and you may have noticed," and Blaster's tone grew wry, "we both got a bit dinged up last night."

Mikaela wrinkled her nose. "I'm still surprised Ratchet didn't blow a fuse over that," she replied. Blaster lifted a back-beam – the equivalent, apparently, of a one-shouldered shrug.

"He was probably expecting it. New squad members usually get tested by everyone to see how they fit into the team in the first couple of days. 'Hide wouldn't have been doing his job if he'd pushed me any less hard than he did – not that I'm complaining!" Brilliant eyes and a low, wicked hum underscored what probably counted as an evil grin among Cybertronians.

"So how are you? Fitting in, that is?" Sam asked, as he dug around in his pocket after a packet of peanuts. Ripping the top off, he shook a few out, then held the bag out to Mikaela. "Brain food," he said in an undertone, and she gratefully accepted.

"Pretty well, I'd say. Prime's got a tight, top-rate team – wouldn't expect otherwise, especially when he had Jazz to back him up," Blaster said, a note of sadness entering his voice. "Wish we'd been lucky enough to meet up again."

There was a short, respectful silence at that. Though Sam and Mikaela hadn't really gotten a chance to know Jazz, beyond a few words and his obvious courage at Mission City, they had also been around his surviving comrades long enough to have a sense of what they'd missed – of what everyone missed. Blaster let his vents cycle once, but then seemed to put that grief carefully to one side.

"Anyway, if you can hack it, there's nothing better than working with a unit like that. They haven't had a real comm officer for some time, and I haven't had to do much heavy lifting since my little trip down the wormhole, so it's a good match," Blaster concluded, then added a little ruefully: "I just have to get my power relays used to the amp-load again!"

"I gotta say," Sam chuckled, "it's kind of nice, in a small, petty way, to know that you still have to practice to be good at what you're doing, 'cause I was really starting to feel inadequate, here."

"'Become every day, in all things, your own way,'" Blaster intoned, eyes glowing with amusement, and gave his chest a tap. Or rather, he gave one of the glyph-swirls a tap. Mikaela cocked her head thoughtfully.

"Is that what that says?" she asked.

"Yup."

"Is that, like, some kind of fortune cookie thing?" Sam asked.

Blaster was silent, apparently running "fortune cookie" through Google or some other search engine. After a moment: "Ah. No, not quite, though thanks for that one – in the history of worldview collisions, this has to be one of the funnier ones!" he said, chortling a bit. "Guess that's proof positive I'm no poet!"

"So it's a poem?" Mikaela was clearly intrigued, and Sam, too, sat forward a little.

"Mm-hm. A line out of a poem. One of Cybertron's preeminent poets composed it, oh, about a hundred years before the war officially broke out. It wasn't all that popular at the time, but I always liked his more obscure stuff. Unfortunately," and a low growl made the words grate on each other, "so did Megatron once he found it. Alethionix always had an edge to his writing, and the rebels really picked up on it for awhile. You can imagine what happened."

"What did happen?" Sam asked.

"What always happens when some dangerous faction gets its claws on art – everyone else starts wondering what's in the work that makes it fit so well with the radical crazies." Blaster shook his head, back-beams twitching slightly in an agitated fashion. "But like I said, I'd always liked his work, and damned if I was going to let the 'Cons just have it. Slaggers already had some of our best voices in their ranks, they weren't getting this one." He brushed at one of the swirls lightly, eyes blazing intensely at the memory. "Used to get me quite the few looks in the ranks, especially with the decal right in the center where, you know, no one could ignore the juxtaposition.

"But," he said, the blaze fading to a more reflective glow as the sharpness drained from his voice, "that was a long time ago. People cared more about that sort of thing, then – it's hard to fight for a few lines of poetry when you're just looking to survive."

"Where does it start?" Mikaela asked, after a short, slightly awkward silence. Blaster looked a question at her, and she gestured to the swirls.

"Oh. In this form, here." Blaster indicated his right ankle, then followed a line as it wove up his leg. "Got the qualifier here, then you go around to my back and under Slider, then up the left arm, across my chest and down my left leg."

"Can anyone even read that when you're a robot?" Sam asked, skeptically.

"Sure. Trans-scan technology can do more than just transform us. We're good at putting shapes together – you should see what we can do with Rubik's cubes!"

Sam snorted at that.

"But you don't always write like that, right?" Mikaela asked.

"No. And actually I didn't form them to be like this – I formed them to make sense on my alt-mode, since I spent more of my shifts in that form than in this one," Blaster said. "What you see now is just the result of transformation shifting plating and parts around. But some people used to use it for artistic reasons, and you can use this sort of 'scramble' effect in certain kinds of layered encryption."

"Huh," Sam grunted. "Cool."

"Do you think we could learn to read them?" Mikaela asked suddenly, looking up at Blaster. "When they're not scrambled?"

The comm officer shook his head. "I've been over the work Prime and Ratchet have been doing with your AI labs, and I've talked to the couple of military linguists assigned to us since I got here. You don't have the technology to implement automatic transl – " he began.

"Not computer translators," Mikaela interrupted. "I mean, could you teach us?"

Blaster frowned. "You want to learn Cybertronian? Directly, without an interface?"

"Well, Ratchet's always running that holo-screen – he tells me what's on it, but..." She shrugged. "It'd be nice to learn." The comm officer gave a contemplative little warble.

"It's... an interesting thought. I've never had to teach anyone Cybertronian before – not sequentially, in real time, though I suppose there isn't a reason why you couldn't learn to read it..." Blaster mused, back-beams lifting as he considered the idea, though he warned: "You realize you couldn't ever speak it unless you had a prosthesis of some form? Your vocal apparatus is completely unsuited to the language."

"That's okay," Sam quipped instantly. "Ask Mikaela: Three years of French and I still suck at pronunciation anyway." Mikaela rolled her eyes and gave him a light smack on the arm.

"Football, French – I didn't push you into those, 'ladiesman,'" she replied, though she was smiling as she said it. Sam just coughed and ran a hand through his hair.

"If you're truly interested in learning to read, then let me think about it." Blaster seemed to brighten at the notion of a new project. "Maybe we can try tomorrow. For now, though," he lifted his chin, flashing his light at Bumblebee, who was approaching, "I think you two are wanted back at your homes." He rose, and so did they, dusting off their jeans.

"See you tomorrow, then," Sam said, and Mikaela waved to him.

"I look forward to it," Blaster replied.

The next morning, the pair returned to the base to find the communications officer as good as his word, and twice as enthusiastic, despite his uncertainty.

"So how come you've never had to teach anyone Cybertronian before?" Sam had asked, curious, as he and Mikaela had settled themselves on the roof of a 'small' storage shack onto which Blaster had lifted them.

"When you have a translation program like ours, once sufficient data points have been input and processed, the major structures and vocabulary are all there for you almost instantaneously," Blaster had explained. "It's like a Turing machine, in a way, except... well, never mind." He waved away what had promised to be a lengthy and complicated explanation. "The point being, we don't consciously learn languages sequentially, in real time, like you do. So when we deal with non-Cybertronian societies, we learn their language first just because it's faster. If we find that their AI has made the break-through to complex quantum processing, then we can feed them the translational keys from our own program, and they can use their AI to understand us just as easily as we understand them. The major work is done."

"And nobody's ever asked you to teach the language otherwise?" Mikaela asked.

"Can't say they have. Maybe someone, somewhere has asked some Cybertronian to do it, but – " this being said with a flick of back-beams that seemed to dismiss such hypothetical endeavors and persons " – if you've got the ability to translate like we do, why bother? And there really hasn't been much opportunity since the war for that sort of pursuit. Everyone's just been trying to survive." Blaster hummed softly. "Anyhow, the long and short of it is that code-cracking is probably the closest analogue to learning or teaching a language in my experience, so you'll have to bear with me."

"You can't be worse than Monsieur Franzen," Sam had assured him.

"We'll see," had been Blaster's reply.

Some hours later, Sam and Mikaela wandered off to eat lunch, shaking their heads and rubbing at their ears.

"Wow," Mikaela said, pressing at the point just before her ears to stop the throbbing.

"Yeah," Sam agreed, as he sank somewhat dazedly down onto the grass in the shadow of Hangar D and pulled an apple out of his lunch bag. Somehow, listening to Blaster lecture all morning left his throat feeling dry and scratchy!

The comm officer had spent much of that time going through the three glyph series of written Cybertronian, with occasional input from Bumblebee, who'd hung about, intrigued by the project. As the two teenagers had quickly discovered, Cybertronian made Japanese, with its three scripts, appear as the very image of simplicity. Sam had attempted to take notes and had ended up with the following:

- ideograms: 64 basic, 512 'extended'

- syllabic glyphs: 96 vocals (incl.s vocal clicks BUT no eng./generator noises-- emo's)

- word brackets – holds syllables in single word together

- military series – short-hand, pictographs for common words, none of below...

- scale notation – 'polyphone' voice, what note(s) per syllable

- rising (´)/falling (`) /rise-then-fall (~)/fall-then-rise (u) notation

- timing notation 1 – between syllables

- timing notation 2 – duration of syllables

- Pentatonic... base five... harmonics ... slang????????

All in all, it was a writing system that made practical sense only if you didn't have to learn it, Sam thought.

Blaster, in his enthusiasm, had tried to explain everything, which was admirable but resulted in a chaotic, indigestible flood of information. At about the point where he'd gone off about pentaves, harmonics, and tritonic 'slang', he had utterly lost both of his pupils, neither of whom were musicians, and consequently hadn't had the faintest notion what he was talking about.

Sam gathered in the end that every syllable symbol could take every scale note, that the ideograms didn't take timing two notations, and that if you put it all together in columns, you got different words that sounded more or less like an electronic opera going off somewhere close at hand. As Blaster and 'Bee had amply demonstrated, when you had two 'bots talking together, even something as simple as introducing oneself could sound like a minor key aria, and how they knew where one word stopped and another one started, Sam had no idea.

But they'd said they'd wanted to learn, so at the end of the day, Mikaela and Sam had dutifully gone home with their notes, such as they were, determined to return the next weekend to see what else Blaster might have to say.

And their instructor had gotten better, actually. After that first session, Blaster had done a little more thinking and research, and had drawn up a chart that showed English letters paired with their approximate Cybertronian glyph equivalents. The rest of the glyphs he had ended up associating with numbers or else with letters from other alphabets.

"But you can't say that," Mikaela had protested, staring at an example word with its alpha-numeric equivalents hovering beneath it in an unpronounceable consonant cluster.

"Of course you can. Don't think of it as your kind of phonics – think of every letter's or number's name as the 'sound' of the glyph," Blaster had instructed. "Since you're not really learning to speak, it doesn't matter what sound you associate with these, so long as there are no repeats. Trust me, this will be easier than trying to mess with your IPA to describe something I'm not even sure your auditory system can isolate enough to recognize."

That made a certain sense, though it had still taken them almost a month to memorize the whole series, excluding most of the ideograms. Fortunately, Blaster, despite his obvious eagerness, didn't seem to be the impatient sort. Good thing, Sam thought, as he tapped a pencil on his math homework and stared at the printout of the glyphs that he'd made and taped to the wall over his desk.

It wasn't until after their graduation that they even began working on learning words: they first learned how everyone wrote his given, Cybertronian name. Blaster had attempted to break those down into the ideas or components that had led to each 'bot's adoption of his English name. He'd also written out the translations of the translations of their names, which the 'bots apparently used whenever they spoke among themselves.

"How come you don't just use 'Sam' and 'Mikaela'?" Sam had asked. "I don't even know what my name means – or I didn't. Not 'til now, anyway."

"All our names are descriptive in some fashion or another," Blaster had answered, and lifted his back-beams gently. "Why should we treat your names differently from our own when we speak our own language? Which, by the way, is called —" an indescribable set of sounds followed "after —" another indescribable set of sounds "—or 'Cybertronian' and 'Cybertron,' as 'Bee ended up christening them in English."

"And how do you spell those?" Mikaela had asked, and gotten a bright-eyed look and a set of glyphs on the holo-screen. Then Blaster had knelt down and held out a hand to them.

"Come on," he'd said, "let's take a walk!"

Once they'd gotten settled on his shoulders, Blaster had wandered around the base with them, spelling out the names of different objects on his holo-screen, along with the words for different body parts, the word for "wetware," all the Decepticons' names who had been at Mission City, "Mission City" itself, and "Tranquility," "home," "city," "sun," "song," "music," "sky," "earth," and "stars."

Of course, when Sam or Mikaela tried to repeat any of that, Blaster's fluid pronunciation became "Te-e-a-a-de-omicron-kappa-aleph-thirteen," but it worked out well enough.

Weeks passed. As their lessons progressed, Blaster had the help of the other 'bots, who were fascinated by the whole notion of "real-time language acquisition." They would wander over to listen or offer advice, and to rattle off lists of words pertaining to their own fields of specialization on request. (An endeavor fraught with a certain amount of hazard: one of Ratchet's contributions had led to his being banished for corrupting the youth. "She asked!" he'd protested, pointing at Mikaela; "And you answered," had been Blaster's response.)

And despite the fact that they technically were only learning to read, Blaster did end up demonstrating how everything would sound, if only they could say it. As Sam and Mikaela began learning to read short, simple sentences ("'Simple,'" Sam said, and made air quotes; "Do they really need all this?" Mikaela asked, staring in bewilderment at the list of some sixteen case tenses), the comm officer especially made an effort to involve his fellows so that his pupils could test their skills listening to an actual, if rather artificially constructed, conversation.

Such tests required Blaster and his conversational partner du jour to craft short exchanges, while carefully restricting themselves to the word lists Mikaela and Sam were learning. And as they spoke, Blaster would project the words in written form onto his holo-screen, so that Sam and Mikaela could read off whatever it was that the two 'bots were saying more or less in real time. He even wrote in a program for his holo-screen that would highlight each glyph as it was spoken, which rather gave the whole exercise the feel of a Close Encounters of the Third Kind sing-along.

But it worked well enough. It gave human beings, whose ability to discriminate spoken Cybertronian words was limited, a fighting chance at figuring out what was being said.

It also allowed for Sam's inadvertent discovery of the 'second mode' personal pronouns one day.

"Whoa, wait, wait, what's that?" he asked, staring at the screen at a word he didn't recognize. Blaster and Bumblebee, who'd been their instructors of the hour, paused and both of them glanced over at the screen.

"What is what?" Bumblebee asked.

"That." Sam stood up and pointed to the unknown word. Mikaela joined him, nodding.

"Yeah, we haven't had that one before. What is it?" She looked up at the two 'bots, who did not answer immediately.

"It's a pronoun," Blaster said, after a moment. "It means 'I.'"

"I thought 'e-l-theta' was 'I,'" Mikaela said, brow knitting.

"It is," Bumblebee confirmed. "This is just another way of saying 'I.'"

"What's the difference?" Mikaela asked, then frowned. "Whose line was that, anyway?"

"It was mine," Blaster admitted. "My mistake."

"So what's the difference?" Sam repeated the question, looking from one 'bot to the other, then to Slidesign, even, for good measure. Slidesign just clicked softly, antennae pricked forward and fixed on the other two 'bots.

"Well, the one we've been using is 'I' for transports," the comm officer explained, slowly. "The one I just used is 'I' for structures. 'I' or 'we' or 'one' – any of those, really. You'll find the same distinction in every pronoun class that refers to Cybertronians."

"Oh." Sam scrunched his brow, thinking this revelation over. "But what if you're not in your alt-mode?" he asked after a minute, glancing from one 'bot to the other. "How would anybody else know what to use?"

As an answer, Blaster just gestured at Bumblebee, whose tires were clearly visible. "Your primary mode does undergo some adaptive modification when you trans-scan. But even if you haven't, your primary mode will reflect to a degree what your alt-mode is – jet engines are usually pretty obvious, as are treads or wheels or hover pods."

"Even if they aren't," Bumblebee added, fanning his sensor panels slightly, "you can usually tell – a structure just comes off differently than a transport."

"Huh." Sam paused, then, something tugging gently at his thoughts. "When you say, 'comes off differently'," he repeated, trying to puzzle it all out, "like, how?"

Before either 'bot could respond, however, Mikaela shook her head, as if to clear it or shake some thought into place. "Wait, just wait a second," she said, fixing Blaster with a puzzled look, eyes narrowed.

"What is it, Mikaela?" the comm 'bot said after moment. Mikaela held up a hand, gesturing to herself and Sam.

"Like, I get how Sam and I could screw up, but how'd you make that mistake?" she demanded. "I mean, it's not like you don't know you're a structure, but you've been using the transport word for 'I' every other time. And if all the pronouns for Cybertronians have structure words and transport words, how come we haven't had any of the structure words yet?"

Which was a good question, Sam thought, wondering why he hadn't thought of it, and wondering, too, about the rather uncomfortable silence that seemed to be its answer. "Um, guys? What's the problem?" he prompted after a minute or two.

"Yeah, guys," Mikaela said, stressing that last slightly, her tone suddenly sharp as she folded her arms across her chest; Slidesign actually hissed. "What's the problem?"

Still, the two Autobots did not respond, until finally, Blaster fanned his back-beams up, his generator giving a low, inquiring hum. 'Bee's panels twitched, but he just spread his hands. Blaster appeared to take that as a recommendation of some sort, for his vents cycled, then he spoke into a newly-opened comm channel: "Ratchet, this is Blaster. I need you on deck by the main hangar, sir. We've got a Protocol Two issue."

There was a pause on the other end of the line, then: "On my way."

The four of them waited in rather tense silence for Ratchet to arrive, which took all of two minutes. The medic slowed slightly as he approached, pausing at the edge of the group as he took stock of 'Bee and Blaster both stiff as swords, of a restless, uneasy Slidesign, of Mikaela's glare, and Sam's anxious confusion. Optical ridges canted upwards as he asked, after a few moments: "What's the issue?"

"Well, I don't know what yours is," Mikaela replied, rather acidly, lifting her eyes to meet the CMO's as she continued, "but I can't wait to hear why nobody wanted to tell us Blaster's a girl!"

There was a brief moment of silence after Mikaela's accusatory declaration, when the proverbial cricket could have been heard, then everyone seemed to start talking at once.

"Whoa, what?!"

"Situation report, Blaster – now."

"He's not – not really – "

"I didn't intend to break cover, sir, it was a slip – "

"Well, if he's not, then you are – "

"Are you kidding?"

"It's a complicated – "

" – just been out there too long, got a little careless – "

"Ke!kt-!t-t-tkt-ssssssstchak!"

"Autobots!" Ratchet spoke over them all. "Sam, Mikaela – please! Blaster, settle Slidesign, if you would." That, plus the glare, quieted everyone. The CMO looked from one to the other, as if assuring himself he had their attention, before he addressed himself once more to Blaster in a more normal tone: "I'll log the disclosure and discuss it with Prime upon his return. By way of mitigation, it might certainly have happened in worse company." Blaster, who had his hands full of agitated symbiont scorpion, merely flashed an affirmative, even as Mikaela said sharply:

"So it's a disclosure?"

Ratchet's vents flared briefly, but his tone was calm enough as he turned to look down at her. "Mikaela," he cautioned, "it's not quite what you imagine."

"So what is it, then?" she demanded, clearly still offended on behalf of her gender. "'Cause, I gotta say, I'm seeing a pretty big closet here."

"Um, Mikaela, maybe we – " Sam began, only to cut himself off mid-sentence in response to the glare his girlfriend leveled at him. Ratchet, fortunately, chose to take advantage of the silence to speak once more.

"If you wish to view it in those terms," the CMO said, "then you should understand that Blaster is not the only one 'in the closet.' We all are – it's protocol."

"Like Don't Ask, Don't Tell?" Mikaela retorted caustically, and Sam winced.

There was a long moment of silence, save for Blaster crooning softly at Slidesign, as 'bots stared into space, checking on-line for an explanation.

At length, Ratchet gave a two-toned hum. "I see," he said, glancing sideways at Bumblebee, who just flexed his panels slightly.

"Do you?" Mikaela asked archly. Ratchet's vents flared gently once more.

"I realize," he said steadily, leveling a stare back down at her, "that it may look as though Blaster is the only one to whom Protocol Two applies, but you need to understand: Blaster as a structure is no more female than any of the rest of us are male insofar as we're transports. I know," he said and held up a hand, forestalling the objection, "we all say 'he' of ourselves – that's what Protocol Two requires. In any foreign arena, especially one we've had no previous ties with, if the species is sexually differentiated, we adopt the gender that will be least problematic in terms of enabling us to move in the society."

"I guess that does kind of make sense," Sam mused, only to find himself once more the object of anger.

"Oh really?" his girlfriend demanded, folding her arms across her chest, eyes flashing.

"Well, doesn't it?"

"You tell me," came the sour reply. Sam held up his hands defensively.

"Look, I'm just saying I can see the point," he replied. "It's easier, that's all."

"Oh like you'd know!" Mikaela snapped. "It's not that bad, being a girl, okay?"

"Hey, I didn't mean – " Sam began, only to have Ratchet cut him off again.

"You two do realize that you are just reinforcing my opinion that we made the right choice in maintaining the gender regs portion of Protocol Two?" he demanded bluntly. In response, Mikaela drew herself up a bit, as she lifted her chin just a little higher.

"So all right, you've got regs. And it just so happens that that means it's okay to talk about transports and not okay to talk about structures? What's the big secret?" she demanded, sweeping a hand towards the comm officer. "It's not like we didn't see Blaster transform!"

"It's not a secret," Blaster began, only to have Ratchet wave him silent, causing Mikaela once more to bridle and Slidesign to hiss softly. Blaster hastily quieted him, shooting a quick look in the CMO's direction, who ignored him, intent upon meeting Mikaela's objection.

"It would be better to say that it is not the fact of different alt-modes that is the secret, just as it's not a secret that you're sexually dimorphic. That isn't the problem," Ratchet said firmly.

"So what is the problem?"

"The problem is how you read those facts off," the medic replied. "We're not male or female. But if we have to pass as one or the other, with everything that that drags with it, in order to speak your language and fit into your world, then we'd rather not put ourselves – any of ourselves – at a disadvantage."

Mikaela's mouth tightened at that, but she wasn't ready to give up the argument yet. "That doesn't explain why Blaster can't say he's a structure!"

"He can say he's a structure, Bumblebee can say he's a transport – what neither of them can do is say it so that it appears to mean something more than just a different alt-mode. All we've done is to suppress a distinction in our language that invites an unwarranted and unwanted comparison," Ratchet replied, before adding, somewhat severely: "In our experience, for every species there is some difference that matters, but translating one to the other is not a light undertaking: we would prefer that your troubles are not made ours."

"And what about your 'non-translation' playing right up to our problems?" Mikaela demanded. "How fair is that?"

Sam had the impression, then, of 'Bee and Blaster both tensing a bit, and if they'd had breaths to hold, they'd have been holding them. Slidesign emitted a low, anxious sounding hum. For his part, Ratchet stared at Mikaela a long moment, then his vents cycled a third time.

"I'm sorry, Mikaela," he said then in a much gentler tone, and seemed to mean it, though there was no hint of yielding in his voice, "but Protocol Two is not about justice. It's about survival, and we can't take that lightly." Ratchet paused, then nodded slightly at 'Bee and Blaster as he finished: "Take it, if you will, as a measure of their trust in you and in Sam, that they admitted the protocol breach instead of trying to cover it."

Mikaela followed his glance briefly, frowning and skeptical, but Sam could see her waver in that instant. "And what happens," she asked, voice taut, "when anybody else you don't trust figures out that you've got two –"

"Modalities," Bumblebee supplied quietly from the sidelines.

" – modalities?" she finished. "What then?"

"Then we do as our operational orders require – lie," Ratchet replied without hesitation.

Mikaela was clearly unhappy about this, wanting to argue, but apparently she recognized intransigence when confronted with it: nothing stood its ground like a twenty foot-tall robot who didn't want to be moved. Nevertheless, she met Ratchet's gaze, and stared and stared – and Sam could feel that silence dragging by like an injury – until finally:

"It really looks that bad to you?"she asked softly, and Sam, hearing the plea in the tone beneath the words, shifted a little, unaccountably feeling his face heat. The Autobot CMO, however, said nothing, just cocked his head at her, eliciting a sigh.

"Right," she said, and seemed to deflate. She paused, then: "I'm, um, I'm just going to be over there for awhile." Mikaela waved vaguely beyond the little group. She glanced around at them all, gaze halting last on Sam, who felt his blush deepen, and she seemed on the verge of saying something. But she apparently thought better of it. "'Scuse me," she muttered instead, and slipped off, heading towards the range.

'Bee gave a low rumble of concern, looking after her. "That really could have gone better," he said after a moment. Ratchet vented air once more.

"Yes, it could have. And it could have gone worse," he pointed out, before pinning Sam with a look. "Speaking of which…" Before he could continue, though, Sam held up a restraining hand.

"I won't say anything – I don't get it, entirely, but okay. It's your call," he said, in a rather subdued tone, and wondered why he felt tired suddenly.

"Thank you," Ratchet replied, then looked over at 'Bee, Blaster, and Slidesign. "I've got an incident report to log – call me if necessary."

So saying, the CMO turned and headed back toward Hangar D, leaving behind two uncomfortable 'bots, an unhappy symbiont, and one confused boy. Sam shook his head, blew out a sigh that turned into a low whistle.

"Weirdest argument ever," he declared, with feeling. Then, sensing several tons of metal cringe in tandem at his words, he grunted and looked up at his guardian and at Blaster, and gave them a slight smile. "Relax, guys, I'm not going to go all Jerry Falwell on you about... whatever it is you're about, if you're about anything gender-ish," he finished, somewhat lamely.

Blaster appeared to be looking that reference up, but 'Bee apparently got it, for his panels did ease forward a bit. But he did cock his head at Sam, and ask, "You would characterize what just happened as 'going Jerry Falwell'?" And as he spoke, one panel flicked backwards, along the path Mikaela had taken.

"What, with Mikaela? Well, no, not that part. I just meant – " But here, Sam paused, hesitating over the sudden sting of a new guilt that burgeoning awareness had given birth to. And after a moment he snorted softly. "I was going to say," he said slowly, "that you don't have to worry about me trying to cram you into some box you don't want – making you live up to something you're not. But that's kind of your point, isn't it? That we've all been doing it already, just we put you in the cave, not the well."

"The cave?" 'Bee repeated, as he and Blaster exchanged a confused look.

"John Gray. Worst board game ever. Never mind." Sam sighed, looking unhappily after Mikaela.

Getting caught in the middle of an alien war, he thought, had changed a lot for both of them. And there were times when he admitted, if just to himself, that without that, they probably would've been finished before there'd ever been anything truly begun. Mikaela would have been polite, but she wouldn't have seen much more than the awkward, if persistent, outsider trying to worm his way into her good graces... and other things. As for Sam... well, he wouldn't have come to realize just how much lay beneath the surface.

And he wouldn't even have cared, whispered that newborn guilt, because he wouldn't even have been looking for it, now would he?

"I don't know how to fix this," he said, and realized he'd said it aloud only when 'Bee replied:

"No one's asking you to."

"Yeah. I mean, no – I... both." Bumblebee and Blaster regarded him blankly for a moment, but then 'Bee gave a soft noise, as of understanding.

"You'll think of a way. We all will," he assured him.

"Hope so," Sam replied. Boy, do I hope so!

TBC...