Archive of Our Own

When Chip was sixteen, he’d been in his mom’s office at her school, reading through a paper someone had sent her about the power plant being built out on the coast. They’d been discussing the problem of switching from coal power to hydro-electric, and the challenges of scaling power flow regulation to the infinitely more variable tidal changes. Chip had read another paper a few months ago about streamlining data tables into decision trees in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery that seemed like it could apply to the problem, so for fun, he spent an hour with books on tidal movements in the library until he’d cobbled together a practice data table. When the big industrial computers were free, he’d used the time to type up a sample, notating the code with helpful [APPLY ELECTRICAL FUNCTION HERE] where it seemed like you’d need to actually affect the code of a power plant. Then he’d put the whole thing on a floppy disk, looked up the address in government records, and mailed it off along with an explanatory note before his mother finished her office hours and it was time to go home.

Chip had forgotten about the whole thing for the next few weeks, until a letter had arrived via certified mail addressed to Mr. Chip Chase, thanking him for his program suggestions. The systems programmers had looked it over and believed it would be a vast improvement on their current practice. Would he be willing to come along and consult on the installation? He would, of course, be paid for his time.

Dr. Charles Chase was on sabbatical this semester, so Chip went into the office to ask if it would be possible for him to give Chip a ride out to the coast in a week or so. His dad, clearly immersed in the Byzantines, agreed before coming back to the present long enough to ask “Why?”

“They want to pay me for my time,” Chip said, because he wasn’t sure the explanation would be interesting enough to hold his father’s attention when competing with Ancient Istanbul.

“Well, that’s good. Know your worth.”

What Chip was worth, apparently, was $9.35 an hour, which felt like way too much money on top of being handed permission to mess with and add to the capabilities of a huge computer system he’d never gotten to play with before. But he’d played too many rounds of poker with his siblings to turn down money when it was being offered to him so he just said thank you and tried to do $9.35 an hour work.

It must have been worth it, because a few weeks after that job finished up he got a call from that plant again. One of the programmers he’d worked with knew someone who was conducting a similar project out in Chip’s neck of the woods. Would he be interested in helping with that, too?

By April of 1980, six months shy of his eighteenth birthday, Chip had built up a solid reputation as a systems programmer for various large plants and manufactories around Northern California. He was making enough to be able to pay his older sister to drive him to places when their dad went back to work, and to invest in new editions of his favorite tabletop games, and even to pay for most of his very own personal computer.

And then there was a volcanic eruption, and aliens, and someone Chip knew in the federal government mentioned that they were helping co-construct a power plant to offset some of their energy needs. And, well. Since that was Chip’s specialty, he put in an application. He got a call from someone who introduced himself as Prowl and only spent five minutes quizzing Chip on his systems experience instead of the solid hour of doubt Chip was used to getting from new employers before informing him that someone would call him for a second interview shortly.

As soon as he hung up, Chip whooped in delight loud enough to startle the flock of crows outside his window into taking flight.

Chip’s parents had been much less thrilled about him moving two whole states away to go work with aliens.

“Look, they’re perfectly safe,” Chip had said. “All the geologists agree they weren’t the ones who made the volcano go off. It isn’t their fault they were under it.”

“We’re not exactly worried about another volcano, Chip,” his mother had said. “Maybe the robots that regularly attack these robots. But even that aside, you’re young to go that far from home.”

“I’m seventeen,” Chip reminded them, exasperated. “Plenty of guys my age go to college across the country, or join the military.”

“We know, we teach them,” his dad said, voice very dry. “That’s not an endorsement.”

“I’m very mature,” Chip protested. “This is just like the work I’ve already been doing, except it’ll be further away and they’ll pay my room and board on top of the consulting fees.” He didn’t point out that he had enough saved from consulting that he could’ve bought himself a bus ticket and just gone on his own. He had a feeling that wouldn’t make them any more inclined to agree.

“And there could be evil robots lurking around waiting for a chance to shoot at your workplace,” his mom said, tartly.

“I really think you’re focusing too much on the evil robots.”

What ended up winning his case was not actually any of his well-reasoned arguments but Naomi Witwicky. Her husband had been Chip’s second interview, over the phone, but Naomi came down in person from Oregon to meet with Chip’s parents, wearing a smart navy blazer like a visiting professor.

She had assured Chip’s openly skeptical mother and stone-faced father that she and her husband would be happy to board Chip at the house they were buying in Longview, Washington, that her husband had known the Autobots for several weeks already and trusted them completely, that she had a son only a few years older than Chip who had moved away himself to work for an old family friend so she understood the importance of having people you trusted near your kids.

“Well,” Chip’s dad had said, “That’s all good to know, but I’m sure you understand that we have...some extra reasons to be worried about Chip.” Like Chip hadn’t been in the room with him.

“Dad,” Chip had hissed. He’d had polio. He wasn’t even sick anymore, and people had been treating polio for years. It wasn’t like this was the 1920s, for cripes’ sake.

“I do understand,” Ms. Witwicky had said. “But Chip strikes me as a sharp young man who knows what he’s about.” Her mouth quirked as she took another sip of his mom’s terrible coffee without flinching. “Besides. I can assure you the workplace will be fully accessible to wheeled transportation.”

Chip decided he liked her.

Chip, a few years older and wiser to the ways of Cybertronians if not to the world at large than he had been at 17, could admit with the grace of hindsight that perhaps his parents had not been focusing too much on the evil robots.

Usually they weren’t his problem. The majority of his work happened at the Ark, and when he went to another site to work, he almost always had an Autobot with him. Or at least in the vicinity. And Chip was nowhere near as bad as Spike when it came to attracting Decepticon attention.

Really, if the Decepticons would stop regularly attacking power plants, Chip would almost never see them. As it was, he had gotten into the habit of paging whichever Autobot had come out with him today that yes, he would stay inside, making a note of where the nearest industrial elevators were, and going back to work.

“Shouldn’t we evacuate?” the government tech asked, nervously edging away from the computer banks, and Chip reminded himself that the mode number of Decepticon attacks experienced by the general population was zero.

“It’s fine,” Chip said, checking back over his line of code. “Either Huffer will win or he’ll call for backup, and either way our best option is staying inside. They can’t fit in here.”

The tech didn’t seem to trust Chip’s well-informed opinion, which was a bit frustrating. He went to go check the stairways muttering something about big flashlights. Chip kept working.

His pager buzzed with a message at an extremely frustrating moment and Chip almost ignored it out of spite, before considering the lecture he would get from Ironhide and Red Alert about procedure during combat situations. Not to mention his father.

The message read, FIGHT OVER WE ARE LEAVING EARLY COME OUTSIDE.

Chip paged back STILL WORKING.

It beeped back with that frustrating instantaneous transmission only the Autobots could manage. NOW.

Chip diligently initiated a save of his changes and scribbled a quick note marking the extent of his progress while they were backing up. He hadn’t expected Huffer to be so quick to run away, but maybe there’d been new information?

The industrial elevator took him directly down to the loading dock of the plant. With such a demanding message, Chip would have been expecting Huffer to be waiting in the driveway. Strangely enough, it was empty.

“Huffer?” Chip called out, rolling forwards. “Why are we going so soon?”

No answer. Chip heard a distant crash and rolled faster. “Did the Decepticons send reinforcements?”

He made it to the edge of the loading bay and looked up just in time to see one enormous blue hand descending.

“Hey,” Chip said, indignantly, before he found himself scooped up and tucked into Soundwave’s open chest for the second time in his life.

Working for the Autobots was a great way for Chip to realize just how far out of his depth he was, and also to make him sure that he never wanted to work anywhere else. Yes, they were aliens. Yes, there were moments when he found himself talking past Prowl and Wheeljack and Gears or they found themselves talking past him. Yes, Teletraan-1 couldn’t compile FORTRAN and attempts to make requests in English went about as poorly as one might expect and now Chip was having to develop compatibility standards for an alien programming language from scratch and get the Autobots to put requests in for him in the meantime.

But there were incredible things about it too. Teletraan-1 had a maneuverable satellite . Prowl and Wheeljack and Gears—and most of the other Autobots too!--all liked to talk to him, even though they sometimes miscommunicated. He and Prowl played games together while waiting to see if whatever program they’d cobbled together to try and make Teletraan-1 talk to the human power systems was going to work this time. They’d started with chess, which Chip figured would be the easiest to explain, and when Prowl had expressed interest in learning other games they’d moved on to Chip’s collection of tabletop war games. Chip was determined to find some way to make poker work despite the size difference.

It was also way easier to get in and out of cars when they could pick you up and transform around you. Chip had discovered he liked roadtrips.

Naomi was pretty strict about him and Sparkplug coming back to the Witwicky house in Longview to sleep and shower regularly. Grapple and Hoist kept talking about trying to get human quarters built but those were lower-priority that making sure no more of the Ark collapsed and that the generators ran. Also the ongoing river dredging aftereffects. Asking about the river dredging made whoever he was talking to start shuddering, unless it was Jazz or Seaspray. Jazz just started cackling and Seaspray pulled out riparian depth charts.

The humans that came in and out were usually more interested in whatever their current project was than talking to the guy in the chair muttering behind the main access bank for Teletraan-1, which suited Chip just fine. Maybe if he worked for the Autobots long enough to get his own apartment he wouldn’t have to talk to any humans ever again.

This ambition didn’t last very long, admittedly. Chip was taking a break from a latest attempt to get a Commodore-PET 2001-8 to talk with Teletraan-1 and on his way to Wheeljack’s lab when he ran into someone he knew scraping material off the wall.

“Dr. Alcazar!” Chip said, coming over to him. “Should you be—doing that?” The chisel was making a truly awful scraping noise.

“Ah, Mr. Chase!” Dr. Alcazar squinted at him. “Should’ve known you’d get involved with this. Furthering your expertise on power differentials?”

“I’m mostly in programming these days, actually,” Chip said, which was one way to put it. He’d rather be working with power differentials, but first he had to figure out how to communicate a command function to Teletraan-1. And how to keep it from cannibalizing and overwriting the code of any Earth computer he connected to it.

“Fascinating, fascinating.” Dr. Alcazar nodded and went back to chipping at the wall. “Yes, I have permission for this—Dr. Wheeljack contacted me about my materials work and expressed an interest in seeing what I could do if given permission to experiment with alien chemical compositions. He said no one would notice too much more damage over here.”

“What do you think you can do with them?” Chip asked curiously, and found himself drawn into a fascinating discussion about antimatter. Dr. Alcazar was always working on the weirdest stuff and he took Chip’s input gratifyingly seriously.

He also tricked Chip into coming all the way into the room where most of the visiting experts hung out, which Chip had avoided doing until now, but did soften the blow by providing introductions. And also demonstrating his famous broccoli juggling technique which went a long way towards making Chip feel less like the most out-of-place one in the room.

This interaction also made visitors a lot more comfortable about approaching Chip while he was working, which he didn’t know how to feel about. Sometimes it was helpful. Sometimes it was annoying. Mostly he just didn’t care. He quickly got into a habit of asking “Do you need anything?” if he heard footsteps getting too close.

“I heard this was where Teletraan-1 was?” someone asked, and Chip looked up from his keyboard to see a not-much-older man with nice brown hair and dark eyes smiling at him. It was a nice smile.

“Yes,” Chip said, after he realized he’d been staring for longer than he maybe should be.

“Groovy!” Chip reconsidered his distaste for surfer slang. “Are you in charge?”

Chip snorted. “Oh, no. If anyone’s in charge Teletraan-1 is. I just monkey around.”

“Literally, huh?” He had a very nice smile.

Chip laughed. “Yeah, monkey with a typewriter, that’s me.” He gestured at the keyboard in front of him. “Are you a programmer?”

“What, on computers? No, I’ve got a buddy who puts them together for fun but I like my machines a little bigger.” He shook his head. “You been here long?”

“A couple of weeks.” Chip pushed his glasses up his nose. “You?”

“Well, I’ve been in once before right when they opened up because I was helping with search and rescue, but this is my first time taking a good look around.” His eyes were bright. “It’s like something out of Galaxy Science Fiction. Does it get any less cool after a couple of weeks?”

“No,” Chip said, delighted. “You read Galaxy?”

He did, and Chip finally got the chance to talk about all the stories from last issue that his sister Bell hadn’t particularly enjoyed with another person. He was so excited it took him until the end of the conversation to realize—

“Sorry, I never asked—what’s your name? I’m Chip.”

“Hi, Chip.” The nice-looking man with good taste in science fiction who liked his machines a little bigger than computers and did search and rescue held out his hand. “I’m Spike.”

Spike, as in Sparkplug and Naomi’s son Spike who was in the area and who Naomi had mentioned would be coming to stay over in the guest room now that the house was finally moved into? Maybe not. Maybe it was another Spike who was wandering around Autobot HQ being handsome and cool and asking after computers for another reason.

His hand was warm, and Chip realized he’d been paused for a while holding it. He stammered and started to pull back, but Spike just said, “Wait, Chip, Chip Chase?”

“Yeah, yeah that’s me.”

“You’re staying with my parents, right? Naomi and Sparkplug Witwicky?” He was smiling again. An extremely unfair smile.

“Yeah,” Chip said, and rubbed his wheels to have something to do with his hands.

“Awesome. We’re having dinner together tonight.”

“Sounds great,” Chip said, and immediately had the urge to bury his face in his keyboard.

Not that anyone ever asked him, but Chip thought that he should be out of bad luck by now. Being one of the last people to catch a disease, from the thing that was supposed to prevent him from ever getting it, no less, seemed like the kind of thing that used a lifetime’s supply of misfortune in one go. He’d explained this theory to Dr. Diley once, at a teenage checkup to decide if Chip had to keep wearing leg braces.

Dr. Diley had considered this, and then pointed out that by living through paralytic polio with his upper body nerve function largely intact Chip had also probably used up all of his good luck for one lifetime and been reset back to a neutral state. Chip, who had a recurring nightmares where he was shut entirely into an iron lung that closed over his head and never let him out again, had reluctantly agreed.

Hearing Prowl’s voice coming from Chip’s home computer at the Witwicky place, seeing the plans for a design that absolutely could not fall into Decepticon hands download directly to his hard drive, and hearing the whine of distant jet engines through the open window had forced him to realize all over again that Dr. Diley had been absolutely right. This was probably another lifetime’s worth of bad luck right here.

He’d worked fast, confident that this was one thing he could do, moving the schematic file from his hard drive onto a floppy disk and deleting any traces of it. He’d stared at it on the screen, burning the components into his memory as deeply as he could—could he recreate this if he had to? Probably, all of the parts were ones he knew and the way they went together had a certain kind of symmetry.

The house was shaking. He’d have to.

Chip hit eject on the drive, yanked the floppy partway through its eject sequence in a way that made the computer squeal, and dropped it to the floor where he could run it over with his chair, back and forth until it was a useless pile of parts inside a cracked case. He was panting, almost boiling with adrenaline. And that was before the roof came off.

Large metal fingers had hooked under the gable of the roof, prying it upwards and leaving Chip exposed to the October air. His glasses had slid down his nose at some point. He pushed them back up, staring down a blank red visor and complete lack of expression. Teletraan-1 had files on all the Decepticons. Chip had glanced at them. This was Soundwave, the one who talked to machines. Today’s problem.

“You’re too late,” Chip said. He felt like a stray signal in a machine. An uncompleted line of code with no destination. “It’s gone. I destroyed it.” He rolled back, crunching the floppy again for good measure as he made sure Soundwave could see it. “The only place it’s left here is in my head. Nowhere you can find it. It’s gone. You lose.”

The robot considered him for a long minute. Chip felt like this one was even more alien than Hoist, even though the Autobot also had a mask and visor combo. He had no idea what was happening in Soundwave’s hard drives.

“Incorrect,” Soundwave said, finally, in a voice straight out of a synthesizer, and that big hand was reaching for Chip before he could even roll backwards.

Soundwave’s chest was already opening up as he lifted Chip out of the half-destroyed room, wheelchair and all. There was an open pocket of space inside, just the right size to fit him. A reflex deeper than bone told Chip that moving was exactly what he shouldn’t do right now.

As the panel closed on a darkness warm with the air expelled from a large machine system, Chip’s old nightmare of iron lungs rose up to swallow him.

Chip never quite remembered what came next. He never stopped dreaming about it, either. It had been warm, and tidy, and full of colors. He had been—sorting files? Remembering them? The world had opened and closed like the shutter of a camera, over and over, each time flashing somewhere new. Seen running on four legs, muscles working along his body from his nose to his tail. Seen from a chair, wheels spinning under his hands as he made his way down the library stacks. Seen from above, wings and antigravs beating the air away. Elephants at the zoo. The ground cracking under his feet and thrusters as he laughed with wild delight. Car rides along the ocean. They presented themselves in an incoherent jumble and Chip sorted them like he would a spiral of code, nudging each item into place, sliding them into slots like an alphabetized record collection on a carousel.

And then the world cracked open and the warmth faded and Chip was staring up into a bottomlessly blue October sky for roughly three seconds before Spike’s face got in the way. He looked really scared. Still kind of cute.

“Chip? Chip, say something.”

The words wouldn’t play from his chest. It took him a minute to remember how having a tongue worked.

The rest of the day passed in a blur. Chip was having enough trouble paying attention that he couldn’t even be embarrassed when the Witwickys got a couple of motel rooms and he was sharing with Spike. He just mumbled a warning that he might have nightmares and he was sorry in advance and fell asleep in the bed with his buttoned shirt on.

Surprisingly, there were no nightmares. Chip never dreamed about iron lungs again.

Chip managed not to embarrass himself too badly in front of Spike Witwicky at dinner that first night. Or any of the other Friday nights the guy came over. Or any of the other nights that weren’t Friday or times that weren’t even night, like when Spike would mow the back lawn on Sunday afternoons and end up flushed and sweaty with his sleeves rolled up. Because his apartment didn’t have a lawn and mowing was what he did for fun. Apparently. Chip managed, through great effort , not to embarrass himself too badly in front of Spike Witwicky. He would need to put in less effort if Spike would just stop talking to him every time, but that seemed to be more than he could hope for. Spike talked to everybody.

This was what Chip kept telling himself, at least. Spike talked to everybody. It didn’t mean anything that he kept talking to Chip.

This would be fine. Chip had crushed on straight guys before. He could be normal about this. He was being normal about this.

And then while he was being very normal about showing Spike how his progress on the geothermal conversion data was going he dropped the floppy disc he had been about to scan.

“I—sorry, let me just—” He had to just lean to the side, not willing to risk catching the disk under his wheels, and fumble around trying not to look at Spike. This didn’t work. He fumbled his grip and the disk skittered across the floor, under a data cart that someone had left at his workstation, and unless he found a wire coat hanger to get creative with, out of reach. “Ah, dammit.”

“Here, I can grab that for you,” Spike said, and before Chip could say anything he was kneeling on the floor, one arm under the cart, butt shown off by the curve of his jeans.

Chip was trying to be normal about this. Looking at another man’s butt probably wasn’t the way to be normal about this. Whoops.

“Got it!” Chip managed to fix on Spike’s face as he stood back up. He was smiling. That meant he hadn’t noticed anything, right?

“We ready for that test yet?” Wheeljack stuck his head back into the room. “Whoa! High temperature in humans is a bad sign, right?”

“Minor fluctuations are normal,” Chip blurted, grabbing the disk. Very normal. Like him.

By his second January with the Autobots, Chip had gotten very used to scientists and researchers coming in to the Ark one and two at a time. This made it extremely disconcerting when a whole flock of them descended at once.

The Autobots were hosting a mechanical engineering conference, which Chip had very little interest in. He took the chance to go back to California for a bit and visit his parents during the busiest part of it, but when he came back up ready to return to work there were still far too many strangers around the Ark for his comfort.

“Are you lost?” one of them asked him, after finding him in the north hallways collecting readings to try and figure out where exactly his signal for the power flow scans was getting corrupted. Wheeljack was too busy talking with the visitors and Red Alert too busy rechecking the security systems every five minutes for either of them to do it the fast way. “Lunch is over in the north auxiliary bay.”

Chip stared at the man, who didn’t seem to take the hint.

“That’s just three hallways to the—”

“I know where it is,” Chip cut him off, not caring how rude he was being. “I’m not lost.”

“Need help getting there, then?” The guy had dimples. He probably thought he was charming. “I can give you a push.”

“No thanks,” Chip said, dropping the scanner on his lap to free his hands for his wheels. He wanted to be able to back up to the wall quickly, if this guy got any bright ideas.

“I’m headed there myself. It wouldn’t be any trouble.”

“I said no thanks. I’m working.” He used his sharpest tone, the one he’d learned from listening to his mother work, and stared the man down.

“Alright, geez. Just trying to be nice.” Chip kept glaring until the man had turned around and walked away.

By the time Chip had actually found the fault, and marked it down so that someone with the strength to pull the wall off could take care of it later, he was feeling calmer. Almost magnanimous towards his fellow man, actually. He would be polite towards the visitors, if he saw any more today, because tonight was Friday which meant Spike would be over for Shabbos dinner, and would probably have all kinds of stories about the interesting people he’d met and talked to while Chip had been gone. The least Chip could have in return was one at least non-hostile interaction to talk about.

This resolution lasted all the way up until he came back to his station for accessing Teletraan-1 and found a strange woman bent over it, typing on his keyboard.

“Hey!” Chip snapped. “What are you doing?”

“I’m almost done, wait your turn,” she snapped back, not even looking up.

“Wait my—that’s my computer!” He wasn’t about to ram into her legs. He had some manners. He did contemplate it, just for a few seconds. It would be satisfying.

“Your—oh my god, you’re Chip,” she said, looking over her shoulder at him. Her eyes were very blue. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were back, this is just the only terminal that actually makes any sense.”

“It took me forever to set it up,” Chip said, baffled out of his frustration. “I—sorry, do I know you?”

“I’m Carly,” she said, and smiled at him. “I’ve been talking to Spike.” Of course she had. Spike would talk to anyone who held still long enough. “He said you’re brilliant.”

“I. Um.” Chip stared at his scanner, pretending to take a reading. “We’re friends.”

“He’s nice,” she said. “I’m upgrading Ironhide’s nitro coolers, so I needed to get into the system to figure out his parameters for temperature, and Spike showed me this terminal so I could get the right units. I shouldn’t need it anymore.” She stepped away.

“Ironhide’s letting you upgrade his nitro coolers?” Chip asked, forcing himself to focus on how Ironhide had let anyone look at his nitro coolers than on how Spike had apparently decided a week into knowing this lady that she could just put her hands all over Chip’s computer.

“He will when I’m done with the prototype,” she said, fiercely. “What about you? What are you working on?”

By the time Chip remembered he had been ready not to like Carly, he was halfway through escorting her to the hallway where he’d pinpointed the fault because she swore she had an idea for fixing it. And by then disliking her seemed like more trouble than it was worth.

The conference ended a couple days later, to Chip’s enormous relief, and Carly ended up staying—which, surprisingly, he was pleased by. She seemed to work in brief, intense bursts before wandering away and finding something else to occupy her time while she chewed through whatever problem she had in her teeth. It was kind of fascinating to watch. Sometimes that was helping Chip work through a project of his. Sometimes it was going off with Spike and Bumblebee on whatever they were up to. Sometimes, according to the gossip he’d heard, it was going on Ironhide’s patrols with him.

Today, it was cards, apparently. Chip was waiting on a shipment of copper so Wheeljack could replace the parts that had been set aside for the geothermal plant before they’d been used up in a fit of mechanical engineering inspiration, so he was willing to take a break.

“So,” Carly said, when they were several rounds in to a game of War. “Are you and Spike, like, a thing?”

Chip choked on air.

“It’s fine if you are, I don’t have a problem with it, I just want to know,” Carly said, apparently oblivious to his suffering. “I’m not going to be that annoying person who can’t read a room or stay out of other people’s relationships.”

“We’re not,” Chip stammered. “Um, I’m—we’re—no.”

“Is he gay?” She poked him with her stack of cards. “You won.”

Chip took the cards and put down another automatically. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said, helplessly. Over a year of pining and asking himself that very question had gotten him nowhere.

“Are you gay?” She took the cards this time.

“I don’t really think you need to know that,” Chip said, still flustered, because it seemed like a better answer than “sort of.”

“Sorry, I’m being rude, aren’t I.” Their next cards matched. They both set out three facedown cards in silence until she won the final draw and collected all of them. “I just—ugh. There are only so many ways you can try to tell a guy you think he’s cute before you start to wonder if he hasn’t noticed or is just ignoring you on purpose, you know?”

“Um,” said Chip, who did not know. “I guess? Have you just told him he’s cute?”

She eyed him. “Have you?”

“Point taken.” He collected the next round of cards. “I just...he’s the best friend I have. He always talks to me about things. He never makes me feel like a stupid kid, or…” Chip waved around his next card before putting it down, not exactly indicating his wheelchair but not leaving it out. “...anything else, you know?”

Something about the wry curve of Carly’s mouth indicated that she did know. “Yeah.” She scooped up his card along with her own. “And he’s cute.”

Chip sighed. “Yeah.”

They played in silence for a bit, never quite tipping the deck either way, until Carly finally set down her cards and stood up. “Tell you what. How about we agree that whoever figures him out, we’ll let each other know.”

“Deal,” Chip agreed.

Carly hadn’t stayed. She’d gone back to Massachusetts not long after that, to wrap up her classes for her master’s, but she’d promised she’d be back.

Chip had found himself looking forward to it, to his own surprise.

Chip had been lucky enough to be there for multiple steps of the Dinobots’s creation process. He was useless at building, of course, but he had gone with Spike and Wheeljack to the Natural History Museum in the first place—and Spike had suggested they go back sometime, which, Chip had tried to be subtle in his enthusiasm about that but had no idea if he’d succeeded at.

He’d also helped Ratchet close down or redistribute all the active processes on Teletraan-1 so that the majority of its generative databank was freed up for personality creation. And then he’d made the mistake of calling it that in front of Ratchet while they were waiting for it to work.

“No, no, no, it’s not creation,” Ratchet insisted. “We don’t have anywhere near the power for that. Teletraan-1’s good but compared to Vector Sigma it’s one of your little pocket calculators. All we’d be able to get wouldn’t even be a seed, it’d be a seedlet.”

“My mistake,” Chip said. “So what is it?”

“There are three ways to create a personality matrix, the thing that separates your average Cybertronian from a regular machine,” Ratchet began, and Chip braced himself for a lecture as only the child of university professors could. “Well, theoretically there are infinite ways to build one, but we don’t have time to get into that. The first is manual generation, taking some completely new scraps of code and adding to them over time until you’ve created a seedlet—” Ratchet frowned, cutting himself off. “That’s not a word, is it.”

“No,” Chip said.

His face took on the expression the Autobots got when they were checking through their translation softwares. “An even smaller version of a catalyst that’s already pretty small to begin with. A spark-ling.” Chip decided not to tell him that wasn’t really a word either. “Something with enough processing power to move around on its own and build up a personality core over decades. Sort of like what you humans do. For our purposes, that method would take too long. The second is by going to Vector Sigma and asking nicely. We can’t do that, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Chip agreed. Ratchet didn’t seem to notice that he was being facetious.

“The third is sort of a combination of the two. You can’t just clone a personality matrix, it’ll destabilize, but you can take two or more and layer them and let them recombine until the necessary parts accumulate. That gets you a matrix that isn’t fully mature, but is functional enough that they can manage transformation and the necessary cognition to be active and make decisions immediately after installation, unlike a sparkling.”

“And that’s what you need Teletraan-1 for? The recombination?”

“Yep.” Ratchet patted the side of the computer banks.

“So you’re using...yours and Wheeljack’s matrixes, as the base?”

“Well, ours, and pretty much everyone else around here who wanted to chip in.” Ratchet snorted. “Which was...everyone. It’s been a while since we’ve had even this much time and energon to spare to get some new folks around here.”

“That’s…” Chip had to completely recalibrate the expectation he’d settled into at the words ‘two or more’ of an equivalence to human parenthood. Every Autobot was contributing? “...a lot. Do you have any idea what they’ll be like?”

“Nope,” Ratchet said, sounding pleased about it.

“Alright!” Whelljack announced, driving up. “I’ve got the last of the spare databanks installed to make sure Red’s security systems don’t go down during the blackout. What’s our status here?”

“We’re set. Ratchet was just explaining how this works,” Chip said. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. Anyone can copy their personality into this?”

“Yep!” Wheeljack’s head fins flashed cheerfully. “Maybe even you or another human. We know your brains are all electric.” He tipped his head to the side, studying Chip. “I bet I could even reformat you into a body like ours if you wanted.”

“Right...now?” This was another thing to wrap his head around.

“Well, probably not in the middle of a big project like this.” He waved one hand. “But once we’re done here, anytime you want to be a tank, you let me know.”

Unlike the last time, Chip woke up semi-coherently after this trip in Soundwave’s chest. And upright. With a weight in his lap.

He blinked, fuzzily, down at the large black blob staring up at him, unsure what it was until an ear twitched and the shape resolved into Ravage’s head. His hands immediately clenched on his wheels.

Ravage blinked at him and yawned, showing off a set of very impressive teeth. Those could probably fit around Chip’s head with no trouble. He got the message and held very still.

There was a low thud and Chip very slowly looked away from Ravage to see Soundwave kneeling in front of him, far enough back they could make reasonably direct eye contact—visor contact?—with one enormous hand on top of a canvas-covered lump larger than Chip. There was the faint prickle of a scan passing over him.

“Inquiry: harm sustained during transport?”

“No.” Chip could answer that immediately. Taking stock of his own body wasn’t exactly an unusual experience for him. Soundwave tipped his head forward in acknowledgement.

Ravage huffed out air—from her neck, whooshing over Chip’s legs—and pulled back. “I’m going to patrol. I’ll be back soon.”

Chip wasn’t sure whether he was more surprised that she was talking, that she was talking to him, or that she seemed to feel the need to explain herself.

“Take care,” he said, inanely. There was a faint hum from Soundwave as Ravage padded off into the bowels of whatever cavernous building they were in. Chip stared after her, prickles spreading over his skin as he had a brief and vivid flash of exactly the way she was placing her paws to make absolutely no noise. He knew how to do it with his own paws. Which he didn’t have.

“Where...are we?” Chip asked, instead of dwelling on that thought.

“Shipping warehouse, Astoria, Oregon,” Soundwave said. That he was willing to tell Chip that immediately was either a very good sign or a very bad one. “Location: temporary. Suitable for transfer.”

“Transfer?” Chip said, slowly.

Soundwave pulled the canvas off and stepped back. Chip put his hands on his wheels and moved forward, slowly, keeping an eye on Soundwave the whole time.

Chip had seen a lot of robots since he came to work with the Autobots. The Autobots themselves, of course, but also human-made ones, drones the Autobots created for one-time tasks, frames being repaired, the Dinobots before the installation of their personality drives—there was a particular way they looked when the lights were on but nobody was home, so to speak. That was definitely what was happening with this one.

It was small. Maybe the size of two of Chip. Not even as big as Roller, or Steeljaw. The face looked like a bat, but the wings weren’t quite right, too spindly. Chip tilted his head to the side and suddenly the shape fell into place; the hinges on the wingtips under little claws, how those would fold into place around the boxy body and make the shape of—“A cassette.”

“Affirmative,” Soundwave said.

Chip kept looking and spotted the pair of helmets like the fancy dryers at hair salons he’d seen on TV shows, wires strung between them into a particular flashy machine. It took him a minute to remember where else he’d seen these. He’d been working elsewhere during the fiasco with Spike getting his brain transferred into the Autobot X project, but he’d heard about it. Mostly from Sparkplug. Spike had not wanted to discuss it.

Chip looked at the helmet, at the cassette frame, up at Soundwave, back at the helmet, back at Soundwave.

“Oh,” he said, realization hitting him like a fish to the face. “This is for me.”

“Affirmative.”

Chip circled the frame, looking at it again with new perspective. Trying to actually imagine what it would feel like—what it would be like—to have this body. To fly on those spindly wings—were there built-in antigravs? Probably. Laserbeak and Buzzsaw certainly didn’t hold themselves up through sheer aerodynamics.

It would be...different. He knew that. As far as he could tell after years of conversations with doctors, being different was something that went for all bodies, even if people only ever seemed fixated on how his body was different. Chip had spent long enough with the Autobots to know a robot body was no guarantee of anything, either. Bodies broke, whatever they were made of. Robots needed fueling and fixed rest cycles. They needed to network, physically needed it, cassettes more than most. They got rusty. Parts wore out and needed replacing. They still experienced pain.

But they were all so much less fragile than humans. And some of them could fly.

Chip let himself look over the metal form of this cassette frame that Soundwave had built, for him, and imagine it fully. What it would be like to fly with antigravs. Not needing glasses to see the world in visible light or even infrared. Networking with whatever computer he wanted with cables that could sprout from his hands. Folding through a transformation and hearing that familiar noise from inside his own metal bones. Curling up inside Soundwave’s chest, in that warm darkness full of machine noises and dreams, in a shape that fit perfectly against everything around it.

He let himself imagine it, closing his eyes to lock in the feeling while Soundwave watched, silent and patient as a starry night.

And then Chip opened his eyes, let the dream fall away, and said, “I’m honored. Thank you. I won’t take it.”

Soundwave’s silence stretched for a long beat, and Chip tried to dig up the conviction to repeat himself. He was still trying when Soundwave said “Chip Chase’s response: negative?”

“Yes. No, I won’t do the transfer. I can’t take this.”

“Issue: lack of wheels?” He sounded honestly confused. “Soundwave: superior. Frame can be reformatted to include wheels, if desired.”

Chip bit down a smile. “That’s very generous, thank you. But my answer is still no.”

“Reasoning?” Soundwave asked, after another long pause.

That was fair. He’d probably put a lot of time and effort into this. “If I went into that frame, I’d be a Decepticon, right?”

“Affirmative.” There was a little purple logo on the frame’s chest. Soundwave pointed at it.

“I have friends with the Autobots,” Chip said, gently. Prowl had long since passed the point of being able to beat him at chess, but there were always more games to play. He and Wheeljack had finally gotten the geothermal plant working and integrated with Teletraan-1’s power systems, and the Ark was slowly building up to full power again. Hoist told him jokes he collected from the radio. Optimus had called him a true Autobot at heart. He was helping Roller build and label a rock collection. “If I went with you, they’d be my enemies I don’t want that. And…” It was funny to realize that what he had to say next was true. He knew there were times in his life when it hadn’t been. “I have human friends, too. And family. I’d miss them.” Spike, who even if he might turn out to be completely straight was still the best friend Chip had ever had. Carly. On her last call she’d said that when she had her degree in hand she’d be driving right back across the country to the Ark. Dr. Alcazar had promised he’d teach him how to juggle. Naomi and Sparkplug who had taken advantage of losing part of their roof to a giant robot to remodel that side of the house to have flatter floors and wider doorways, and who waited until Chip was home on Friday nights to light candles and sing prayers Chip had finally learned the words to. Probably people he hadn’t even met yet who would, nonetheless, turn out to be good. What a concept. “I can’t. Or, I won’t, I guess. Not now.”

Soundwave stood there, processing this. Chip let him. He seemed nonplussed by this turn of events.

It at this point occurred to Chip that Soundwave could probably, whatever Chip’s own feelings on the matter, put him into place manually and run the process and there wouldn’t be a whole lot Chip could do about it. That was disconcerting.

Before he could dwell too much on this disconcertedness, Soundwave stepped forward and dropped the canvas back over the metal frame, hiding it away.

“Understood,” he said, and Chip had about five seconds to be relieved before he was being reached for, again, and put into Soundwave’s opening chest, again. Any complaints he made before being closed up were swallowed by the hum of machinery.

The last time Chip found himself carted around in Soundwave’s chest, he came out of it conscious, being set down in a parking lot of a motel. He grabbed onto his chair by reflex, but Soundwave put him on the pavement gently and steadily, without once wavering, before stepping back and launching into the sky.

Chip watched him go. Something in his chest was aching. Or buzzing. He wasn’t sure.

“Holy shit!” A woman in a floral print shirt had run out of the motel and was staring at the sky. “I—was that a Decepticon? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Chip said. “Could I use your phone?”

There was a step up to the office so she brought the receiver out to him outside and then went in to dial for him. He gave her the number for the Ark’s private call line first and the extension to hit to go straight to Teletraan-1’s answering machine.

“Hi, everyone, this is Chip, I’m in—where am I?” he asked the receptionist.

“Vancouver, Washington. Ellsworth Springs,” the receptionist said. “They need a zip code?”

“No, that should be good. I’m at the Wagon Wheel Motel in Vancouver, Washington,” Chip clarified into the line. “Soundwave dropped me off—”

That was about when Windcharger picked up the call and from there there was a lot of shouting.

Prowl was eventually the one who came out to give him a ride back to Longview. Chip heard his sirens coming.

“Have you had those on the whole way?” Chip asked as Prowl let him in.

“It was the fastest way to get here,” Prowl said.

“I’m fine,” Chip said.

“You haven’t suffered any injuries,” Prowl agreed and Chip sighed at the realization he’d been scanned, again. “But understand that from our perspective there was an attack on a facility that had no characteristics making it a Decepticon target that made no strategic sense and Huffer had a message from you saying you were going to a secure location with no pager reception. It took an hour from your disappearance, by best estimates, to coordinate enough with the on-site humans to realize you had been kidnapped. Huffer has been very upset.”

“Oh,” Chip said, chagrined.

“What did Soundwave want with you?” Prowl demanded. His wheel rotated a little sharper than necessary for the turn onto the highway.

“He wanted...to understand, I think,” Chip said, turning the day over in his head. “Earth, and humans. He wanted help.”

Prowl’s gearstick buzzed like somewhere in his innards his computer brain had just started working faster.

“He wanted to have me become a cassette,” Chip said, realizing that was probably important context.

“What.”

“He had the brain transfer thing Sparkplug and Wheeljack built and everything.”

“A cassette.”

“It was shaped like a bat.”

Prowl’s engine made an unidentifiable noise before he said. “Soundwave is an idiot. You would be very unhappy as a cassette. If you want to be reformatted we can help you.”

Chip found himself smiling. Attempting to squash it away didn’t work. “Wheeljack already offered to make me a tank.”

There was a pause before Prowl asked, “Would you prefer something with wheels? We could build you something with wheels.”

Chip let out a laugh. Just a little one. “I’ll stay human for now, thanks. I like my wheels just fine.”

Coda

Mirage carried the report back from the Victory. Jazz was the one who brought it to Optimus Prime and Prowl.

“He’s built another cassette, alright. Mirage says his name is Ratbat.” Jazz shook his head. “Almost impossible to get a look at him, Soundwave’s being real protective. Whole clade is. From what Mirage can tell it was a shuffle creation but Soundwave’s not saying where the other seed came from.”

“Do you have suspicions?” Optimus asked. “Either of you?”

His seconds-in-command exchanged a look.

“From what Mirage could tell…” Jazz repeated himself, reluctantly. “Ratbat’s on a slow maturity arc. No one’s expecting anything of him anytime soon. It’s not likely that the other personality donor was a full-grown Decepticon.”

“Blaster...believes he could create a brain scan of a human, if he was able to hold that human in his cassette compartment,” Prowl said.

They both looked at Optimus like it was his job to fix this. Which, he supposed, it was.

“We should tell Chip.”

Both of them made noises that meant they wanted very much to disagree.

“You think we shouldn’t tell him?”

“It’s not like we have proof,” Prowl said.

“It’s not like Sounders’d do anything different,” Jazz said. “He got his cassette. And he’s not letting the little guy out into the big bad world anytime soon.”

“If we ever do obtain proof, or Ratbat becomes active, we will tell him,” Optimus said, firmly.

“Sure,” Jazz agreed, far too confidently to ever expect he’d have to uphold this agreement.

“Chip chose to stay with the Autobots,” Prowl said. “That should be the end of it.”

Optimus decided to take this as tacit agreement.