Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Cumberland County, NJ, September 2007

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Setting: parking lot near a grocery store. Kat DeLuna's hit summer jam "Whine Up" is playing from one of the two-story, 1920s-era rental houses along the block. A yellow, strikingly modern, hatchback is parked behind it. Inside, a young man with shaggy hair is repeating interview questions endlessly to himself while a 5-year old girl fidgets in the back seat.

"My name is Jesus Garcia Aleman. I'm new here and I'd like to work at your farm. Maybe help out with some traducción."

A voice comes out of the radio. Slightly tinny, but more advanced than the GPS voices of 2007. "Sounds good, bud. You speak English very well. Where did you live before?"

"I thought I was born in Chiapas, but my parents and I lived in California for a couple years and she made sure to teach me English both there and when we got home. When I turned 18, I couldn't find my birth certificate and she says that she thinks she had me in 'Nueva Jersey', a couple months before she married my father. She didn't tell me because she didn't want anyone to know I was the product of an affair and that she was already pregnant when she married my dad. I came here to try to find my real birth certificate and my family. Maybe work and get some money to send home to the family." He silently thought to himself that Bumblebee can come up with a damn convincing cover story if you give them enough time.

"Good work. Are you concerned about the war?"

Flashes of a drone war, him being swept into a semi-autonomous robot car and living out of it, and eventually them adopting an orphan girl briefly consumed his memory. He closed his eyes and shuddered.

"No, not our war. Iraq."

"No, not my problem. México wasn't involved in that war I don't think and they don't have the draft even if I did get my citizenship worked out. What the hell kind of interview question is that?"

"Doesn't count; that's me speaking. I'm just being overly protective, Jay. Next interview question: Do you have a place to live?" The car slightly pitched their voice up after 'question' to indicate that they were once again speaking in the character of another person.

"I'm living out of mi carro for now. 'Til I get my first paycheck then I'll find somewhere to rent." True. He didn't mention that his car and home were actually also his best friend, his romantic partner, his phone charger, and his legal guardian during his last couple years of childhood.

"Last question. What number should I contact you at?"

"867-555-5309." He still had his phone from the old country. Most of the apps no longer worked, but he could still text and make calls, which was enough to function in late-Bush-era New Jersey. As Jay sat in Bumblebee's front seat, he was both nervous and yet completely prepared for the new life that waited ahead.

Chapter Text

Pittsburgh, PA, August 2019

"Jules, I don't like the way this new Black Bottom movie is shapin' up. Don't watch it; it's boring."

Julius "Jules" Kowalski had recently moved to Pennsylvania from parts unknown with his foster parent, an AI system residing in a heavily modded multicolored 1970s Porsche 911 using the nickname "Anthony Miraggio." Or at least that was the cover story; Autobots are good at coming up with ways to explain the existence of transforming robots in civilizations that don't have them yet. It also gave Enrique and "Anthony" an excuse to explore the late-2010s English-speaking world as the bot would appear often at county fairs and in movies. Jules had been left in "Anthony"'s hands after his foster dad, a small-time criminal named Enrique "Reek" Gates, had been shot to death with impunity by police in New Jersey. Mr. Gates's final will and testament had stated that his robot buddy would have first dibs to look after the boy in the event of a something tragic happening. Anthony's human copilot, who had contacts on both sides of the law, was able to arrange for them to settle in somewhere that didn't really have much of a history of police violence...a sparsely populated island off the coast of New Zealand way back in the 2010s, where Anthony, his human partner, and Jules could work as a covert spy while publicly helping with lighting and cameras on the Hobbit trilogy.

By August 2019, this mismatched family was well established in the film industry, and were spending the summer in Pittsburgh working on the film "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," and "Anthony" didn't like what he was seeing. "They completely miss what's so cool about Ma Rainey," grumbled the Autobot, "and why I told you to read her Wikipedia page before your senior year starts."

"Well, is it because she's queer, Black, her weight, her Christianity, her ability to sing? Mirage, I got none of those things."

"No, Jules. The most important thing is this -- she was her own boss. Owned her own show. Ma, Bessie Smith, a lot of the more commercially successful old blues musicians were that way." The Porsche's radio began to play a snippet from the 2000s movie American Gangster.

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Denzel (as Frank Lucas): "The man I worked for had one of the biggest companies in New York City...he didn't own his own company...He just managed it. Nobody owns me though."

Denzel: "The most important thing in business is honesty, integrity, family, hard work, and never forgetting where you came from. Either you're somebody or you're nobody."

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"You see, Ma could easily have wound up like so many other great singing stars, dead before her 30th birthday or completely broke. Nope. Natural causes, age 53, as an independent homeowner...in the 1930s, a very tough time for an unmarried Black woman in the south. And they don't go into that at all in the script I read. Who's gonna inspire the youth to be better, to take control of their own destiny, to have a stake in society? It's a massive waste of a movie and a buncha talent, and it's boring."

Chapter Text

Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn, NYC, 1994

Beckie had never met a young man who seemed to have as bad of a temper as John Min. "Always seems to carry a chip on his shoulder," she thought as she walked by his house, a slightly overgrown rental. Gerritsen - along with the other villages in the nearby Rockaways like Broad Channel and Roxbury - felt a thousand miles away from the rest of the Five Boroughs. This marshy area of shotgun shacks and volunteer firehouses barely even felt like part of the same state, even the same country. As far as Beckie knew, John Min was an orphan from one of the periodic civil wars in Vietnam or Cambodia - Min himself wouldn't tell which. Heck, Beckie wasn't even sure who Min's legal guardian was, just that whenever they rode the MTA bus to school he seemed pissed. Pissed at the world around him, pissed at humanity, pissed at what he must have gone through back in the old country. He constantly muttered or grumbled to himself and had gotten suspended at one point for writing an essay about why the world is Hell and therefore why we must focus on escaping it - a nearly Calvinist worldview that conflicted sharply with the Catholic clerics who taught them. As Beckie rounded the overgrown house, she was greeted by what looked like a giant robot statue sitting on the backyard.

"I didn't know he was a sculptor," she said, under her breath. "Nice Voltron statue."

"What's your name?"

She didn't recognize the male voice she heard. It seemed to be coming from inside the house.

"It's me, Beckie Russo."

The statue moved, and began walking towards her.

"Wo-wha-what?"

"Hello, Beckie. My name is Star Saber, and I'm working to help test new lifesaving technologies and drones with the volunteer fire department."

"You're a robot?"

"Indeed, I am a robot."

"Who's looking after you? And Jon?"

"I am a grown man...er, mech, and I'm Jon's guardian. He lost all his family in a war and I'm trying to help him get back on his feet. And his name isn't John. It's Jan. Slightly different vowel." Star Saber signed out some Japanese characters - ジャン.

'Wait, you're...Japanese?"

"I am a robot, with no nationality. At least not on that planet. He is half Japanese."

Chapter Text

Somewhere in Costa Rica, 1959(ish)

"Muy interesante. Such a beautiful and peaceful country."

The two machines - one aerial, one bipedal - followed the Caribbean coast of the neutral, disarmed Central American country, which had recently ended its long history of segregation and granted full equality to the thousands of Jamaican descendants living in towns like Cahuita and Limón. "Jeffrey" and "El Robot Caballero" were the names that they had used when they were introduced a few months back to the inhabitants of Limón, where the national government had sought to create a peaceful counterpart to the USA's 3205th Drone Squadron. "Jeffrey" - full callsign "Jetfire" - would be locally used for civilian surveillance and rescue purposes as well as to deter potential Communist or CIA threats to the republic. "El Robot Caballero", on the other hand, would at least publicly present themselves as an entertainer, along the lines of Leonardo's Automa-cavaliere that was rediscovered earlier in the decade. The so-called "Robot Knight" would appear at Carnaval and other festivals in the country and would hopefully drive tourism to the Caribbean coast, and the city government of Limón had expressed near certainty that the drone and robotics cluster would make the port city into Costa Rica's richest and most advanced - what today would be called the Silicon Valley of Costa Rica.

However, everyone involved had secrets. Maybe it was easier to keep secrets in the 1950s, in a small neutral country still emerging from decades of state-sanctioned apartheid. Indeed, probably it was easier to keep secrets. "Jeffrey" was in fact a futuristic, fully autonomous fighter jet that had surrendered their weapons in order to gain permission from the government to reside in a country with no military, and who claimed to be either of alien build or from the distant future. And "El Robot Caballero" was in fact a certified alien, capable of transforming into a form that resembled a knight and one that resembled a horse. In the old country, they had gone by the name "Battle Unicorn" and been a member of a faraway planet's special forces. And the massive amounts of wealth that Limón was expecting to reap from the technology industry? Well, that was actually going to come from a mixture of legal and illegal sources, including counterfeit goods and drugs that the President himself had approved for transport to the Canal Zone and possibly even the US mainland.

Because nobody's going to look that hard for drugs when there are fully robotic fighter jets flying around in 1959.

Chapter Text

East New York, 1955 (or a re-creation thereof)

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"As far back as I could remember, I wanted to be a gangster." Joe Patrick thought as he sat looking out the window of his family's apartment. "To me, being a gangster was...better than being the president of the United States."

The boy looks down to Rosa's Pizzeria and Mediterraneo Bakery. "For now, at least, I work down there. At the bakery. When I'm not in school that is. My parents wish I'd try harder at school, but they understand. The guy who manages it - that's him, Sammy Witwicky - he isn't even Italian but they let him in somehow. That's not the way the books I checked out say that gangsters operate, but he's special."

"My father, who's Irish, was sent away to work at the age of eleven. He liked that I got myself a job. He always used to say American kids were spoiled lazy. And when my mother found out that the Witwickys came from the same sort of Transformers robot war that she did...to my mother, that was the answer to all her prayers."

A heavyset, middle-aged man walked out of the bakery. "That's Cicero. Sammy's partner. He runs the neighborhood and Sammy manages the bakery for him. They also have a taxi company and a few junkyards out just over the borough line, in Queens. You see, in the preceding decades there were a lot of drone and robot wars over in Europe and Asia and a lot of people came here, to the Big Apple, and they formed...groups in order to protect their interests, and to fight against corrupt corporations while remaining just outside the scope of anti-terrorism laws. You see, if you rob a corrupt bank and leave a manifesto, you're a terrorist or worse a goddamned Communist. A threat to the system. They'll either execute you or beat the shit out of you in jail if you even are captured alive. If you rob the same bank, take half the money for themselves, and donate the rest to charity while maybe phoning in threats to the executives to clean things up or else the robberies will continued, you're a gangster. Maybe you'll get pinched and end up in jail for a couple years, but you're not a Communist or a terrorist. And when you get out, as long as you don't rat, you're special. A somebody in a planet full of nobodies."

"You have a team behind you."

"You can do whatever you want, and the law is much more likely to leave you alone as a 'legitimate businessman' than they would some poor fry cook with dreams of a revolution. Maybe they haul you before Senator Kefauver to testify on 'organized crime in interstate commerce'. You can wear suits in the middle of summer and nobody looks at you like you're some starched-up idiot. And that is where the Don Luigi failed, and why instead the Ciceros run this town. Don Luigi tried to be a revolutionary instead of a gangster. Don Cicero was a gangster and proud of it, while also trying to make New York a slightly less terrible place with the money he didn't spend on wine, cars, and three-piece suits."

Chapter Text

February/Fevrier 2002

Hull Gatineau Hull Gatineau Somewhere in Quebec

"It'd take some getting used to," Juliette muttered to herself as she once again manually changed the name in the database to reflect the newly restructured municipalities on the Quebecois side of the Ottawa metropolitan area. Microsoft Access was a pain in the buttocks on even the best days, and when you have to change the records of hundreds of people all at once because the goddamn PQ insisted on merging several different municipalities into one, it was not fun at all because any more than a few edits at a time would cause their antiquated computers to freeze up. And that's not even getting into the fact that she had to do it in an application that was never fully optimized for Quebec French. At least they were getting BlackBerrys (Canadian made) soon so they didn't have to use those antiquated green-screen pagers and the goddamn payphone that clearly was made by Tabarnak Communications based on how much she swore at it. "For security reasons" the municipal government would not allow them to have cellphones.

The pager alerted. "G-MAN" appeared on the contact screen. Juliette ran down to the payphone in the lobby, her hoop earrings and necklace jingling. She almost got her blouse tangled in the stairs; hopefully this year the boss man would finally discover casual Fridays and let her wear sweatshirts and sweaters (forbidden), jeans (verboten), pink ("it's unprofessional") and during the summer miniskirts (interdit) to the office instead of these androgynous pantsuits. I mean, for the first fifteen years of life she'd lived on the edge of a drone war, raised by a guy who's basically Space MechaGodzilla, so Juliette would like to actually be and feel pretty for once instead of being sucked into the beige vortex of professionalism. Juliette inserted her coins into the phone and it rang. She responded in lightly accented English, a far gentler accent than was typical of Canadian francophones.

"What's up, big guy?"

"Me, Grimlock, hears that you, Juliette, have found a man in your life."

"I told you yesterday, pops. Why do you need to interrupt me in the middle of my workday? I'm trying to herd cyber-cats here. The databases don't generate themselves, you know, it's not 2025."

A brief flash of "Microsoft Access has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience" came up in her memory, traumatizing her.

"Okay, okay. Me, Grimlock, would like to ask if you, Juliette, would like two tickets to Jewel's next concert in Toronto!"

"Z. O. M. G. Count me in! And if I'm still seeing Luc I'll take him as a number two...You can't fit in the seating area."

Chapter Text

Out Islands, Bahamas, 1988

Tori sat in a folding chair at the small airstrip. He's late, she thought. I should comm him. Pulling out her bulky cellular phone, the multimillionaire American heiress called up her boyfriend.

"Callsign Powerglide here, what's happening?"

"You're running late again, that's all. Did you fly to American airspace to flirt with Maverick Mitchell?"

"Sorry. Doing some USAF business. Ronnie Ray-Gun wants to restart the 3205th Drone Squadron and is asking if I can help them with some programming. I'll be there in a couple hours."

"Sure thing, chico."

"Over and out, Callsign Ritz Cracker."

Ugh, that's kinda insulting. Yes, I am of European descent, and we do have Florida residency, but I do not consider myself a Florida Cracker by any means.

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34 minutes elapse

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A red warbird lands at the airstrip. It has an Autobot insignia, even though he wasn't expected back for another hour-plus, and the tail number doesn't match Powerglide's.Tori walks behind the small cement-block "terminal" and makes a call.

"Callsign Powerglide, are you back early? Or should I say, are you back less late than usual."

"Nope. Still at Eglin. That might be one of my colleagues; let me ping the Aerialbots-"

Tires squeal, and a pearl-white Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham zips down the middle of the airstrip.

"Hide."

Tori chucks the phone into some tall switchgrass, ducks further behind the cement walls and hears the sound of the cockpit open, animated conversations in Andean Spanish, and the sound of a duffel bag hitting the tarmac. She continues to wait until the car drives off and the plane leaves, before picking up the phone and calling her boyfriend again.

"What was that? They were talking in Spanish."

"Tori sweetheart, next time we're together we should rent Scarface, if you know what I mean. Let me just say that we call that kind of plane a Snowbird and they've started painting Autobot insignias on them to avoid getting busted by the Feds."

Chapter Text

A couple miles from East New York, a couple years after 1955 (or a re-creation thereof)

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Ding dong! An Amerindian man with slicked back hair rang the doorbell to the tenement complex on 7B West 57th Street. He knew when he bought it that, like many others on the West Side, it was packed full of refugees from a region convulsed with drone wars and that he'd likely have a 'bot or two on the property, but he wasn't expecting that he'd have Space-Mecha-Godzilla who claims to be a knight and who refuses to speak English as one of his tenants. Thankfully, he was able to transform into just a rather chunky suit of armor in order to fit in the bi-level "duplex" apartment on the seventh and eighth floors, but damage happened occasionally. He heard the sounds of a Cuban mambo band playing on the record player in the unit and knocked firmly to get his attention.

"Señor Grimlock, you owe me $350. For the Oldsmobile you smashed."

The door opened and he saw himself staring at nearly a metric ton of Dinobot.

Grimlock spoke something into their (his? its?) left arm.

"Ese mojón quiere dinero de mi. ¿Puedo quemar a él por favor?"

(Translation: This turd wants money from me. Can I please burn him?)

The landlord, whose familiarity with Castilian was enough to tell that Grimlock was not talking nicely about him, snorted to get the Dino's attention. He'd heard a bunch of the 'bots had had to travel through Cuba to get to "Nueva York", although whether they literally meant Cuba as in the Caribbean island that Eisenhower was embargoing or simply another historic yet crowded banana republic was not a matter for him to pry into.

Through Grimlock's left arm, a tinny voice could be heard emanating from a speaker. "I'll be there in five minutes, Chief."

The landlord grunted. He was not the chief of any tribe (currently, as he had resigned his chiefdom because he liked the bright lights of the big city) and considered it borderline a slur coming from this Boston-Irish-German-Texan-Cuban-Swedish(?) human that was technically Grimlock's co-signer on the lease. If it wasn't for the steady flow of cold, hard cash (and the occasional gold brick), he'd have evicted Grimlock and his "Kraut-Mick friend" long ago. Still, whatever "Mr. C" did had made him a pile of money, enough to put 75 Autobots and 130 human refugees just in buildings that he owned, so it wasn't his problem. Maybe when Bumpy Johnson gets out of Alcatraz he'll have to have a conversation with Mr. C. For now at least, the "Five Families" as well as the other gangs in town - The Jets, The Sharks, the B.U.K. - seemed to have no problem with Mr. C or his compatriots.

Again, that's not his problem. He's just the landlord, here to make sure the apartments are in working order and the rent gets paid. And yes, he'd lost a couple of tenants who complained that the newcomers were "loud" and "smelled funny", but on net his books had more money coming in this month than he'd seen in almost two years.

Chapter Text

Province of Cáceres, Spain, January 2014

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"¡€32,000!" It wasn't much, but in post-housing-bubble Extremadura it was enough to buy a small flat or townhouse (adosada) and was in line with similar properties on idealista.com. "'Twas all that Sir Cade was able to scrounge up for us," muttered the heavyset, seemingly elderly Englishman using the name Connor Burton as he handed over the bricks of hundred-euro banknotes he would be using to purchase the small village end-unit townhouse, a marooned leftover of the housing craze that swept the Iberian nation in the 2000s and had led to it being among the worst victims of the European debt crisis of the early 2010s. Thankfully, both Mr. Burton and his caregiver Isabela had been able to find jobs working in call centers, servicing British and Latin American customers out of their phones and computers. Officially, they were immigrants from Britain and Peru, respectively.

Unofficially, a few officials in the Administración General del Estado knew full well that they came from a war-torn foreign land, plagued with killer autonomous drones and tyrannical governments and having a feel of scruffiness, decay, and consciously retro technology and styles reminiscent of Old Havana. They knew that an MI6 agent had given them a cover story as well as several tens of thousands of Euros and pounds scavenged from the world on the far side of January 2020. And while they probably didn't know that Connor Burton was himself the Headmaster robot Cogman wearing a Hollywood-style prosthetic old age costume, they did know about the existence of self-reconfiguring modular robots and autonomous vehicles that were beyond anything that serious engineers were working on in 2014. So, just as Eleanor Rigby stored her public face in a jar by the door, "Connor Burton" stored his tanned English pensioner's face and documents in a locked safe in his new home.

Chapter Text

Marshall Islands (?), 2019

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"This is a maze." Marlene Lee walked through the tangle of footpaths and narrow lanes that divided the wood, concrete, and metal houses of her new hometown. She was still working on deciphering the language; the textbooks she had were kinda poor quality, but her squad knew that it was Austronesian in origin and had been supplementing their studies with the better-documented languages of Tagalog and Hawaiian. Most of the natives spoke English anyway.

Marlene and 33 other school-age students had been brought to this little speck of the Kwajalein Atoll, close to the local Micronesian town of Ebeye (where she went to school) as well as a US military base and a SpaceX presence, with land ownership being a complex mix of native Marshallese clans, Americans, and companies with many layers of ground leases. "Seriously not liking having 'Megatron Elon' breathing down my neck," her classmate Isaiah Parker had said. But these islands had their merits. Most people speak English, the cars drive on the right side of the road, there is nearly-free immigration to and from the 50 US states, the local government and police are unarmed or lightly armed, and aside from typhoons - hence all the concrete houses! - the weather is mild. On top of that, the pace of life is a lot slower and less "action movie" than their homeland in spacetime. Marlene still remembered the speech from the principal, six months ago, when her class had been introduced to the locals:

Greetings, students. Our homeland's compact of free association with the USA has brought us both complex issues and a bounty of good fortune. And today, our big sister nation has provided us with new transfer students from a unique and foreign culture. One with drone warfare, self-transforming Optimus Prime, self-driving robotaxis, an entirely robotic Mars population including at least one helicopter, and a private lander on the moon. But also one that shares languages with us and is very interested in, and appreciative of, our way of life. So I hope you will welcome our 34 newest students:

Marlene Lee, Isaiah Parker, Gilbert Wong, Steven Faye, Iris Pérez, Ottilie Pierre....and a bunch of other names that Marlene didn't recognize from her friend group.

So far, she liked this place. It was definitely poorer and scruffier than the mainland USA, but it was also lacking the existential fears that had dogged her the first 12 years of her life. And indeed, Marlene had been allowed to keep her (open source) bipedal robotic companion, powered by an (open source) large language model from the old country, alongside her local Marshallese host family.