Too Many Epic Bunny Thoughts

[surefall.livejournal.com]

The Canary and the Queen

Movie!verse element AU sorta

First there was a general bunny:

"In which Optimus decided that the well-being of ALL sentient peoples in the universe was of lesser value than the well-being of ALL Cybertronian people." And the long term fallout that comes after that decision. As told through the interpretation and experiences of Optimus' human pet -- a pet he believes is not sentient.

Mainly there was a lot of M/OP porn and politics and maybe not too obvious manipulations of Prime by his Protector ... from the unfortunate voyeur POV of the pet.



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But then I thought about it too much, lol

Then I had fifty bajillion thoughts and the bunny became Unicron:

Long Before Earth Entered the Picture, Decisions Were Made

Faced with growing civil unrest and a Lord High Protector being driven to ignite that unrest into a conflagration, Optimus Prime foresaw a future in which the coming conflagration could end in an horrific civil war. There might not have been a simple internal solution, but there was an external one: expansion. Through exploration if possible, through conquest if necessary. The building of a galactic empire would channel all of that unrest into 'productive' activities ... and save Cybertron, even if at the expense of other planets.

So Optimus gave up on the perfect ideal and decided he loved his own people more than peoples he had never met. He set Megatron loose to build a Cybertronian Empire. Megatron was /thrilled/. His soft sparked brother had finally seen some /reason/ and Megatron was pleased to lay the wealth and submission of the stars at the pedes of his Prime.

The Building of an Empire

[Many of the "space" suppositions here are not of my own devising. They were taken from the logic of the Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell. How fleets would conduct war against planetary targets is one of them. How travel between stars would occur is another, although in this case I have replaced jump points and jump drives with spacebridges.]

The Cybertronian Empire does not span the universe. It doesn't even span the Milky Way galaxy. Both Cybertron and Earth are on the Orion–Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way, but while Earth is closer to the exterior end of that arm (farther from the center of the galaxy), Cybertron is very very close to the interior end (closer to the center of the galaxy). Cybertronian expansion has mainly been moving outward along that arm (with some effort to move into the neighboring arms as it becomes convenient to do so).

Expansion is limited by some major technological barriers: The only known means of faster than light travel is by spacebridge. All other travel is at a fraction of the speed of light. There's no way for a ship to jump from star to star on it's own, they can only pass through spacebridges or make the long long crawl through empty space between systems. So every star system has to be traveled to the hard way first.

The leading edge of expansion is spearheaded by scout!formers (seekers? shuttles?) who travel the vast distance between stars (a short trip in the life of a Cybertronian). They build the spacebridges, usually on an outer planet, and use it to report back to Cybertron. Or just fly back if building a bridge is too dangerous. The method of actual conquest varies from there depending on the actual content of the system in question.

The Policies of the Empire

Megatron might have been inclined to be more ruthless, but he was could accept Prime's soft-sparked directives regarding the disposition of star systems, of which there were three general situations:

1. Those that have no significant life of their own are generally open for resource exploitation, colonization, and cyber/terraforming. While Cybertron might have first dibs, there's more than enough to go around for any of the species of the empire.

2. If significant non-sentient life exists, the life-bearing planets should be left mostly alone, but the rest of the system is open. The life-bearing planets might be opened up later, but only after a thorough examination/survey/review.

3. If sentient life exists, the systems's resources are to remain mostly untouched. The sentient species, however, would submit to Cybertronian rule and become future productive citizens of the empire. They could do it peacefully or they'd join the empire by force of conquest.

Sometimes People Fall Through the Cracks

For reasons no one has yet managed to decipher, there are dead zones in the galaxy. Star systems where no life of any significance exists (in something almost like artificial bands if viewed on a map). All the circumstances are conducive to some sort of life, yet ... nothing. (Unicron, devourer of life force, but not planets, wandering around)

Sol System lies on the opposite edge of one of these bands, brushed past and left untouched by whatever affected her neighboring stars. The scouts that built the spacebridge on Pluto were surprised to find life there.

Since humans on Earth are basically planet locked, only a single small military unit was required to subjugate them. Planetary targets can't run away from starships and there are plenty of major cities to hold hostage. The surrender of Earth is accepted by the conquerors, who learned how to dictate terms in languages Earth would understand from the Internet. Earth and the all the riches of the Sol System are promptly enfolded into the empire.

And everything might have turned out alright ... except for one small problem.

The military left, and the appointed civilian governor took control in their place. The Sol Appointee was corrupt and in Sol saw an opportunity to use his time there to get very very rich ... and when his time was up, get very far away from the potential servos of justice.

This was a system on the fringes of the empire, on the fringes of a dead-zone at that. The only native sentience had no true space capabilities, no means of communicating FTL, and no one listening for them anyway. NO ONE except a few scouts, the exiting military unit ... and the Sol Appointee ... knew humans were sentient. If no one important ever knew, or at least didn't find out for a very long time, the appointee could loot the system nearly indiscriminately by pretending that only life had been found in Sol, not sentience.

To that end, the Sol Appointee proceeded to commit fraud on the formal documentation and then bribe those who might be inclined to contradict him. He drafted only his equally unscrupulous friends to work with him. They devised a cruel scheme to cloud the issue of sentience in the future: make humans pets. Terrarium pets. The pet equivalent of hamsters/gerbils/mice/lizards/frogs/birds. The further dispersed the pets, the further dispersed the lie.

They collected humans from the native population. Since the population of humans on Earth is documented in the billions, no one casually viewing Earth's statistics would protest taking a few thousand or so humans out of that population to become pet stock. They proceeded to sell them to every Cybertronian pet shop in the galaxy that would take them.

The Sol Appointee took particular personal joy in making the pet habitats of the humans resemble the habitats they provided their own pet rodents ... just to help rub it in. A cruel little joke between himself and the intelligent species he's humiliating. If he was especially evil, he might implant every human with a biotech chip that allows them to understand some Cybertronian (but not speak it) so they can despair while their owners unknowingly talk down to them.

In Which a Canary is Captured

[It could be any human already in the Transformers verses, I just happen to like Mikaela. Chip/Carly/Spike/Raoul/Lennox would be rather fun too.]

Mikaela Banes is kidnapped off the street by one of the terrifying mechanical overlords. She thought she would die -- or be eaten.

Instead, she suffered something that was arguably worse than any slavery or death or devouring. She was stripped naked, shaved, doused in something horrible (to clean her of surface grime and organic contaminants), stabbed with needles (to prevent common galactic infections), and dumped into a glass tank. The tank was lined with some sort of softer shredded material (wood shavings? raw cotton? shredded synthetic textiles?). There was a large tube suspended from the covered roof of the enclosure that seemed to filled with water. There was a small pile of vegetation in the corner: heads of lettuce, pile of potatoes, heap of carrots.

Mikaela is never told why this happened. She is never told anything at all, and never spoken to like she can really understand ever again. The Cybertronians who run the Sol System pet facility speak only Cybertronian, what sounds to Mikaela like the mating of a modem, microphone feedback, television static, and a typewriter. She and perhaps others are eventually shipped through the space bridge to Cybertron, light years away from home, (though she doesn't know that). Her tank is installed in a high class pet store for exotics.

There, Mikaela is bought by a massive and scary looking silver robot who takes her covered tank home and presents her to an almost as massive but not nearly as scary red and blue robot. Which is the start of Mikaela's life as a Optimus' pet.

To be Owned by a Queen

Perhaps Megatron frequents this particular pet shop for a variety of reasons. Their stock is healthy and well cared for, they don't deal in forbidden articles (not even for him), intelligence has vetted the place thoroughly, and they treat him with respect rather than pedelicking. He has no reason to suspect that the newest available exotic is anything more than what it appears to be (shameless marketing lies aside).

Optimus Prime always likes getting presents from Megatron. In this case, one of the first exports from a newly annexed star system.

Optimus does not know that Mikaela is sentient. (Megatron doesn't know either.)

Optimus is a conscientious owner. Having received the pet as a gift from a loved one, he is very careful to make sure her needs are met ... as much as Optimus understands those needs. Clean water, variety of fresh "pet" food imported from it's native planet, a soft warm place to nest with organic particulate matter, exercise wheel or squishy toys, etc.

Optimus is carefully tactile with his pet. He holds her in his hand and strokes her hair with a finger or cautiously experiments with letting Mikaela sit on a shoulder. Provided she's disinclined to use these opportunities to try to escape or bite him (it hurts them more than him poor dears), he'll continue to do so. The more affectionate/tolerant Mikaela becomes towards her owner, the more likely it is that Optimus will take her to more places or hold her more often.

Mikaela is hard pressed to communicate her own sentience. Talking is animal chatter. Even birds and whales sing. Waving her hands around is just activity. Weaving her bedding -- if it was big enough to weave -- only proves she's on the level of spiders or birds or beavers. Spelling things out with bedding just looks like organized littering (if that) when no one knows what human letters look like. She's not the outdoorsy survivalist type, able to make fire. There are no tools and no way to make them.

Learning Cybertronian and finding some way to coherently replicate it is Mikaela's only obvious way of attempting communication ... as long as Optimus doesn't think she's just a clever parrot. (There are perhaps other ways to do it without learning the language. Perhaps she yells at Optimus when someone tries to attack him, warning him in time ... thus bringing up speculation about how she might have known something was going to happen? But then again, dogs can warn people without being sentient ... )

Of course, for all Mikaela knows, her giant robot owners DON'T CARE that she's sentient. Does she merely endure under that assumption? Or does she hope for more or discover through observation that there IS more?

Mikaela may assume things about her captors that aren't necessarily true, but is the best guess she has with how little she knows. Although her owner Optimus is more God-Emperor/Pharaoh/Priest and Megatron more his Soul-Bound-Guardian/General as humans would understand it ... that's not necessarily how Mikaela interprets it. It may seem more like Megatron is the Husband Who's Busy With Work bringing baubles and trinkets and presents to Optimus his Stay At Home Wife. Or Married Man (Megatron) with a Mistress (Optimus). (This interpretation might be exasperated by the physical and behaviour differences between the two. It might also be exasperated by vocalization since Optimus and Megatron have not chosen 'human' voices, but speak Cybertronian all the time.) She may not realize she's the pet of the supreme ruler of the empire and his brother/bondmate/general so much as just the pet of well-to-do married pair of giant alien robots since the terrarium is in a private part of Optimus's private residence rather than public grand throne room/receiving hall.

As Optimus interacts with more Cybertronians in Mikaela's presence (perhaps after she decides that she wants to be carried around most often and so clings to him instead of letting herself be put back in her tank), there might be a slow but steady change in her worldview. There could be a staggering series of realizations as Mikaela figures out that Optimus is not a Wife but a Queen (and the added complexity of Megatron as King). And then the further realization that Optimus is not a Queen but the Supreme God Empress of the whole damn galactic empire (and what the hell does that make Megatron anyway? booty call?). And then the realization the Optimus is not even a female at all, but a male ... or completely genderless as humans understand it, which might be more shocking than the previous gender confusion because it's more alien and Mikaela may want to cling to any similarities their races seems to share.

Some Potential Unfortunate Repercussions

Unfortunately, the fact that the Prime himself has a human pet makes humans quite popular as pets ... much to the unchecked glee of the Sol Appointee and the despair of the humans as more and more of them are taken from Earth to meet the galactic demand.

As demand increases, it's possible that the transformers on the Sol System pet processing facility start to use human slaves to make their own pet bedding, pet toys, transport the small organic food into larger packages, etc. Those human slaves, not much more than pets themselves, and now much more numerous than their overlords, might start to write messages on the bedding or hide small tools inside toys. Tools to aid escape or simply aid suicide, messages with the latest news or words of comfort and hope or despair. Mikaela might receive some of this compromised bedding or find a hard knot in a toy.

The pets endure extreme privation and isolation in comparison to their previous existence. They lived (mostly) in a modern civilized world on Earth, had clothes, entertainment, indoor plumbing, a variety of cooked food, conversation and contact with other humans, etc .... now they live naked and exposed in a hopefully climate controlled glass tank with only some bedding to burrow in for warmth, there's some water to drink but no place to wash or bathe or maintain basic hygiene, there's some food but it most likely raw vegetables of the most common and easily transportable sort, there's no toilet except the bedding on the floor of the cage, there's no other human being to cling to or talk to at all. If female, they endure monthly pain and bleeding without respite. There's no 'vet' or medical service of any kind, because they're the kind of small short lived pet that gets replaced if they get sick and die. If considered to be "lonely" and lucky, the owner might purchase another of their kind of the same sex. Worse, the owner might decide they want baby humans and will purchase another human of the opposite sex. This could go sorta okay if they meet each other with good intentions ... but it could also have terrible consequences. Rape, pregnancy and childbirth in privation, death by childbirth followed by the death of the children ... even the rapist might not enjoy the fruits of his actions when he's in a tank with the corpses, waiting for them to be removed by his owners.

If a happy ending could be wrested from this horror ... it is through Mikaela. She is uniquely placed to speak into the audios most able to change the fate of her species, planet, and solar system ... if she could only manage to communicate her sentience to Optimus in a way he could understand.