Before there was a body, there was a negotiation.
"I want the two of you with me on this," the soul said, and the two silhouettes surrounding it grinned in a way that had no mouths and needed none. Not because it wasn't afraid. Because it hadn't given itself time to be.
"You are an interesting one." The dark hummed, amused. The light hummed back, curious. Between them, the fabric of whatever passed for a place out here split open, and two cubes floated free of it — objects that didn't so much occupy space as edit it.
The soul stared. It didn't have eyes yet, and it stared anyway.
"You shall meet the Cybertronians when you turn seventeen," they said, together, in the specific way only things that have never disagreed with themselves can. "Until then — good luck."
Good luck. As if luck was going to be the operative variable.
Tranquility, 1990.
"Oh, look at him. I'm your mother, Sammy."
Judy Witwicky had blonde hair and tired eyes and a voice that cracked a little on Sammy, like she'd practiced saying it in the mirror and it still got her anyway. I didn't have words yet — wouldn't, technically, for another few months, if I paced myself the way a newborn was supposed to — but I understood warmth the second her hand found mine. Whatever else was true about the deal I'd made, that part wasn't a performance. That part I kept.
For the first few weeks the house didn't stop moving. Aunts, a grandmother who smelled like peppermint and something floral, a neighbor named Sheila who brought a casserole and stayed forty extra minutes to hold me. I faked being asleep more than I actually slept. Newborns are supposed to be inconveniences with lungs. I had opinions. It is deeply annoying to have opinions and no vocabulary.
What I did have, from the first night, was the notification. It didn't arrive with fanfare — no chime, no light. Just a fact sitting in my head like it had always been there.
{Multiplier} — Any deliberate action performed by the Host has its developmental effect multiplied one-thousandfold.
I tested it the way you'd test ice on a pond — carefully, and alone. At six weeks I held my own head up a beat earlier than the books say is normal. At eleven weeks I pulled myself upright against the crib rail and stood there for four full seconds before my legs, appropriately, gave out. Judy cried. Ron — my father, broad-shouldered, quiet in the specific way of men who talk with their hands instead — drove to the store the next morning and came back with a baby-proofing kit like the crib rail incident had been a near-miss with a table saw.
By four months I was walking. Not toddling — walking, in the sense of crossing a room with intent and stopping where I meant to stop. Ron caught me at it, dropped the mail on the floor, and didn't say anything for a full ten seconds.
"Judy." His voice had gone flat in the way voices go when a person is trying very hard not to sound alarmed in front of a child who might understand alarm. "Judy, come here."
They took me to Dr. Alvarez the following Tuesday. I remember it more clearly than a four-month-old has any business remembering anything, because I remember making the decision, in the waiting room, to be less — to fumble a grip on purpose, to let my eyes wander the way an infant's eyes are supposed to wander instead of tracking the exam room clock. Dr. Alvarez ran her tests, made her notes, used the word precocious twice and advanced motor development once, and told my parents that some kids just come out ahead of the curve and it evens out by kindergarten.
It would not, in fact, even out by kindergarten. But I'd bought myself time, and time was the only currency the deal I'd made hadn't priced in advance.
Being a baby, I decided early, is mostly an exercise in editing yourself down to a size other people can stand to look at.
Sleep, it turned out, was the loophole nobody had warned me about. One minute of it — genuine, chemical, REM sleep — did whatever a thousand minutes would do. So on the nights I "slept," I didn't. I sat inside my own skull and meditated instead, and somewhere around month seven I found the two currents running under everything else I was.
One ran blue. One ran a deep, low red. I didn't have the vocabulary for energon yet — that came later, from books, from a system readout that didn't waste time being poetic about it — but I knew, the way you know a held breath from an exhale, that these were not "mine" in the way my hands were mine. They were older. They predated the body currently learning to hold a spoon.
I circulated them anyway. Slowly. Carefully, the way you'd walk a tightrope made of something that could set you on fire if you let it slip. It took months of nightly practice before the system bothered to notice.
{Energon Manipulation Lvl 1} obtained. Multiplier applied. Host has attained {Perfect Energon Manipulation}.
That one landed differently than walking or crawling had. It came with a side effect I hadn't asked for: I could feel the planet under the house. Not metaphorically. There was a hum in the ground itself, ancient and enormous and not entirely dead, and every time I let myself listen too closely to it my skull would split with a headache that no amount of Perfect Memory made bearable. It took the better part of a year of controlled exposure before the system finally caught up and handed me {Mental Stability Lvl MAX} — a tidy little patch note for what had actually been six months of a toddler quietly gritting his teeth through migraines he could not explain to anyone holding him.
I decided, lying awake-not-asleep one of those nights, that the red current and the blue current weren't good and evil the way the stories liked to frame it. One built. One ended things. The planet needed both, the way a body needs both growth and decay, and it seemed like a waste to spend the next seventeen years being afraid of half of what I was made of.
(Four years later)
By four, I had a body worth training and a library card I'd talked Judy into getting me a full two years earlier than the branch's policy technically allowed, because the librarian, Mrs. Petrakis, had taken one look at the stack of chemistry and physiology books I was trying to check out and decided the rules were a suggestion.
"Mom, Dad — I want to do martial arts. And football, if there's a rec league that takes four-year-olds."
They looked at me the way people look at a dog that's just ordered off a menu.
Judy tried the diplomatic route first — maybe when you're a little older, sweetheart — and folded the moment she registered I wasn't going to be talked out of it, because by then she'd learned that my stubbornness ran on rails and arguing with it just delayed the inevitable by a week. Ron signed the enrollment forms without much comment, the way he signed most things, but I caught him watching from the dojo's viewing window more afternoons than not, arms crossed, jaw set in an expression I couldn't yet read as pride.
Sensei Marcus ran the dojo out of a strip mall between a nail salon and a place that sold vacuum parts. He put me through the same white-belt fundamentals he ran everyone else through — balance, breath, the discipline of doing one motion correctly a hundred times before you're allowed to think about the hundred-and-first. {Skeletal Optimization Lvl MAX} came in quietly, a side effect rather than a goal, my four-year-old joints and tendons reshaping themselves under repetition the multiplier turned into years of conditioning packed into months.
Marcus noticed the falls I stopped taking wrong. He didn't say anything for a long time. Then, one Saturday, watching me drill a breakfall for the fortieth consecutive rep without the wince every other kid in the class still had: "You've got old bones for a four-year-old, Sam."
I told him I read a lot of books. It wasn't technically a lie.
At home, in the evenings, Ron had the TV on more often than not — the Bulls were somewhere in the strange, quiet middle of the without Jordan years, the front office and half of Chicago publicly wondering out loud whether the man was coming back from baseball, and Ron would sit there with a beer he barely touched and grumble at the screen like the team could hear him. I liked watching him like that more than I liked watching the game. It was the only hour of the day he looked like he'd forgotten to worry about his son.
Between the dojo and the books, I started, carefully, in stolen minutes, on the thing I actually wanted: the red and the blue, folded into each other. Not mixed — fused, the way you'd temper metal instead of just melting two bars together. The first attempt put me on the floor of my bedroom for eleven minutes with my teeth locked shut so I wouldn't scream and bring Judy running. I limited myself after that. A ten-thousandth of my total reserve, once a day, always alone, always timed for whichever hour my heart rate was already up from training so the adrenaline could eat some of the pain before it reached anywhere that mattered.
It was slow. It was supposed to be slow. Seventeen is a long runway, and I intended to use every foot of it.
I was in the garden with Ron on a Saturday in early spring, both of us on our knees in the dirt doing the kind of work that doesn't need conversation to be worth doing, when a yellow Camaro went past the house at exactly the speed limit and not one mile over.
I didn't look up right away. That was its own kind of tell, and I was aware of it even as I did it.
Ron didn't notice. Ron wasn't built to notice; that was rather the point of the last four years of never once flaring more energon than a task required. But I let a thread of it loose anyway — small, deliberate, a knock on a door I knew was listening — and forty yards down the street, the Camaro's engine caught, stumbled, and stopped.
It sat there at the curb for six long seconds. Then it pulled away, unhurried, like nothing had happened at all.
So, I thought, going back to the tomato stakes like my pulse hadn't just done something complicated. They already know where I live. Good. Saves us both some time.