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Ratchet had been behaving strangely, these past few cycles. The old bot had always had “mother hen” tendencies, but recently he’d been downright hovering over the old members of Team Prime.
Bumblebee tried to recall if he’d missed some sort of anniversary, but nothing quite matched up. The anniversary of Tyger Pax had been a few deca-cycles ago, and while Ratchet still got a look of guilty desperation in his eyes around that time, it hadn’t been nearly as bad since Bumblebee’s voice box was restored.
And it definitely wasn’t the anniversary of Raf’s… of Ratchet coming home to Cybertron. Bumblebee couldn’t forget that date if he tried, even if he only marked it once a vorn rather than once an Earth Year, as was probably more appropriate. But time felt like it moved faster on Cybertron, and if Bumblebee mourned that deeply that often it would drive him insane. Primus knew that most vorns saw Bee needing to be scraped off the floor of Maccadam’s on that particular cycle.
It felt like Ratchet was waiting for something. He seemed almost excited, but also wary. Like he was bracing himself for news, and didn’t know yet if it would be good or bad. He ran diagnostic after diagnostic on the interplanetary comms systems and triple checked the placement of signal-relay satellites. Once, Bumblebee walked in on him running trajectory calculations for Cybertron with respect to distant celestial objects before Ratchet hurriedly locked his workstation like he’d been caught doing something wrong.
All that is to say, when a corrupted message landed in Bumblebee’s comms inbox, he regarded it with all the suspicion afforded to an unexploded bomb.
His wariness only grew when he encountered Arcee and Bulkhead outside Ratchet’s apartment.
“You got one, too?” Bulkhead asked.
Bumblebee paused, cocking his head in confusion.
“A corrupted message,” Arcee clarified.
“...yeah,” Bee said. “Didn’t want to try opening it without Ratchet, in case it turns out to be a virus or something.”
“Same,” Bulkhead said. “Especially since he’s been so jumpy about long-range comms recently.”
“Are they the same file?” Bumblebee asked.
“Bulk’s and mine weren’t. Different sizes and timestamps” Arcee said, “let me see yours, Bee.”
Bumblebee shared access to the strange message file with Arcee and Bulkhead as they shared access with him. They were all quiet for a few moments as they compared.
“Hmm, yeah, they’re all different.” Bumblebee examined the timestamps more closely before whistling. “Primus, these are old. No wonder they’re fragged six ways to Sunday.”
Bulkhead snorted at the way Bee hybridized the alien colloquialism, and Arcee gave a wry smile.
“ Last-days-of-the-War old, if I’m doing my math right,” she said.
“Actually,” Bulkhead jumped with a yelp as Ratchet suddenly opened his door, “they’re from the beginning of the Reconstruction Age. So if you’re all quite finished gossiping out there, come inside so I can get those files unscrambled.”
Ratchet’s ability to make seasoned warriors quail like newbuilds fresh out of the Well never failed.
“Wait, so you know what these messages are?” Bumblebee asked.
“And you were expecting them.” Arcee’s optics narrowed.
“Of course I was,” Ratchet said dismissively, pulling up several highly technical-looking programs on his home workstation. “We anticipated severe signal degradation and prepared these correction algorithms based on the conditions we expected them to travel through, but I may need to tweak them a bit based on the actual state of the files.”
“But what are they, Ratch?” Bulkhead demanded.
“And who exactly was ‘we’?” Arcee asked.
“Primarily, they were an experiment on the prediction of celestial movements and signal integrity over vast distances and time scales,” Ratchet said, not looking up from his screens.
A beat of silence passed as they waited for Ratchet to answer Arcee’s question, which he very conspicuously did not.
She tried a different tack. “So if they’re your signals, then why did we get them?”
“Yeah,” Bulkhead chimed in, “no offense, Ratchet, but I’m usually the last person you want helping with your experiments.”
“I didn’t send them,” Ratchet corrected, “but they were specifically addressed to each of you, so it’s good to know the address portion seems to be intact enough to reach the intended recipients, even if the signature line corrupted. Now, forward the files to me so I can determine which algorithm to use.”
Bulkhead nodded slowly in a way that made it clear just how little interest he had in a real-time demonstration of advanced data science, shifting from pede to pede. A notification pinged on the workstation, indicating that Bulkhead had sent his file.
“Well, uh, I’m glad your signals came in okay! I guess I’ll just leave it with you and—”
Ratchet whirled from his screen. “No, Bulkhead, wait!”
“—check back in with you later about how the uh, math worked out—” Bulkhead kept shuffling toward the door, reaching blindly for the handle.
“It’s from Miko!”
They all froze. Bulkhead stopped venting entirely.
“Ratchet,” Arcee said in a warning tone, “that’s not possible.”
Bumblebee felt blindsided. Had Ratchet lost his mind? The old mech may be an afthole at times, but there’s no way he would be so cruel as to use one of Bulkhead’s most sacred memories to get him to stay for a science lecture of all things. But there was something Ratchet had said earlier…
“‘Over vast distances and timescales’,” Bumblebee whispered, staring intently at Ratchet. “How vast? What timescale?”
Ratchet took a steadying vent. “The messages were sent from Earth. A few months after you all relocated to Cybertron for the rebuilding efforts.” He turned to address Arcee and Bumblebee. “Yours are from Jack and Rafael, of course.”
Bulkhead’s plating rattled as his knees started shaking. Arcee and Bee snapped out of their stupor to guide him over to Ratchet’s couch before he could collapse. A great rush of overheated air filled the apartment as Bulkhead’s venting started up again.
“We already have everything they ever sent,” he said, mostly to himself. “Years’ worth. Backed up with backups of the backups. I sent ‘em to Jackie, too, so they would be in more than one place. Pits, I’m pretty sure I’ve got most of ‘em memorized at this point.”
Arcee put a hand on Bulkhead’s shoulder before fixing Ratchet in her sights. “You wouldn’t be making such a big deal over old messages we’d already seen. Right?”
“No! No, of course not!” Ratchet exclaimed. “The messages are… well not new, obviously, but you haven’t seen them before. They were sent through deep space, not over the Space Bridge, so the travel time was significant.”
Bumblebee sat down gingerly on the edge of the couch, arms resting on his knees, bowed over his folded hands. Arcee stayed standing, leaning against the armrest with her arms crossed and her plating and EM field both clamped tight.
“Why?” Bumblebee pleaded. “Why would they—I mean we all messaged each other all the time! Why didn’t they just send these across the Space Bridge, too? Instead of…”
Instead of haunting us like this.
“I meant it when I said that these signals were experiments,” Ratchet said. “at least… they were at first. Though looking back, I realize our humans had likely always considered them to be more meaningful than that. Also, these signals are mostly audio-visual, rather than text.” His mouth tightened. “I know you messaged each other as often as you could , but you remember the restrictions on Space Bridge activity in the early days made things… difficult.”
Bee did remember. While the stabilization of the Synth-En formula was a miracle that had ultimately saved their species, it had taken a long time to get production to the level where it wasn’t strictly rationed for necessities only, especially as the population of Cybertron steadily swelled with far-flung refugees finally coming home.
Luckily, continued contact with Earth had been prioritized, due to both the practicalities of maintaining diplomatic ties with their allies and the religious implications of Earth being Cybertron’s sister-world. Still, they could only really afford to activate the Space Bridge for a few seconds at a time, once or twice a deca-cycle for data transfers. Actually travelling between the worlds was much more limited. As a result, the Autobots went from seeing and talking to the human children nearly every day to merely exchanging packets of text once every few weeks.
Bulkhead—who’d always had such a tactile relationship with Miko—practically went into withdrawal. Somehow, he’d rustled up some roughly Miko-sized chunks of uranium to carry around that were just radioactive enough to give off a little heat the way an organic body did. While the radiation wouldn’t have hurt him, he’d encased them in lead so he wouldn’t be radioactively contaminated the next time he went back to Earth.
Not that Bee had been doing much better. If Bulkhead had slipped him one of his smaller heat-rocks, then that was no one’s business but their own.
Ratchet gestured helplessly. “They knew you were doing invaluable work for our people, but they missed you. And… I could see how quickly they were growing up. I knew how much you all were going to miss, and I guess I wanted a way for you all to experience that privilege in as close to real-time as I could manage, even if in a rather delayed manner.”
To this day, one of Bumblebee’s biggest regrets in his life was the way he’d lost track of Earth Time after returning to Cybertron. Before he’d known it, years had slipped by since he’d last seen Raf with his own optics. On that first hastily-planned visit back to Earth, Bee had found the 12-and-a-quarter year-old boy he’d still been picturing had been replaced by a lanky and nearly-grown teenager when he wasn’t looking. His jealousy of Ratchet in that moment had only been eclipsed by his shame.
Arcee blinked, posture loosening slightly. “You’re saying we should expect more of these?”
“Arcee,” Ratchet gave a rare soft smile, “they sent messages nearly every day.”
She blinked rapidly, throat clicking as she reset her vocalizer once. Twice.
“What if the files are too corrupted?” she asked in a rush. “What if we can’t play them? What if all the other signals miss and this is the only message we receive?”
Bumblebee and Bulkhead both whipped their helms up in alarm, looking to Ratchet with wide optics.
“Calm yourself, Arcee,” Ratchet soothed. “Rafael and I considered that and prepared a contingency. I have copies saved of all the transmissions, but Rafael encrypted them such that they could not be opened until after the predicted reception date.”
The gathered bots all slumped in relief.
“Though I admit,” Ratchet continued, “I have been looking forward to testing these algorithms.”
Ratchet was trying to maintain an air of professionalism, but there was a melancholy waver to his EM field.
“Raf helped you write them,” Bee said gently, “didn’t he?”
Ratchet answered with a wry smile, his field edging further away from old grief and closer to warm fondness.
“Between the two of us, he was always the better programmer.”
“Well if it’s Raf’s math then it’s gotta work!” Bulkhead exclaimed, jumping up from the couch. “What are you waiting for, Ratch? Fire it up!”
Ratchet snorted and rolled his optics, fighting a smile as he led them all back to his workstation.
“Yes, Bulkhead that’s what I was trying to—”
“C’mon hurry up hurry up!” Bee squealed, grabbing Ratchet’s pauldron to pull him along faster.
Even Arcee was doing that thing where she was pretending to be too cool for their enthusiasm while also using her speed and smaller size to secure a spot as close to the workstation as physically possible.
The mood dipped a little when the first algorithm produced a pixelated mess with a garbled screeching sound.
“Sounds like one of Miko’s songs,” Arcee teased, trying to soothe the crushing disappointment threatening to saturate Bulkhead’s field.
“No way!” he shot back. “I’ll have you know that my girl’s music has been in the Polyhexian Top 100 for the last 20 vorns running! You just have no taste.”
The second worked a little better, such that a humanoid figure was sort of visible, with audio that was probably a human voice, albeit sounding like it was echoing up from the bottom of the Well of Allsparks.
Ratchet scowled, clearly starting to take this personally. He opened a third program, preemptively tweaked a couple variables, and ran the file through again.
And there was Miko.
All of 15 years old and wearing that outfit she had practically lived in when they’d first met, complete with pink-streaked hair pulled up in pig-tails. In the recording, she lounged casually against the folded-down plate of the Apex Armor.
Bulkhead melted, his hands pressed to his mouth, frantically blinking lubricant out of his optics so he’d still be able to see the video on screen. The rest of them nearly staggered under the emotions rolling through his field. There was grief, of course, but overwhelmingly there was love.
A lifetime ago, Miko grinned at the camera.
“Hey, Bulkhead! Hi from, like, a bazillion years ago! Didja miss me?”
That startled a wet laugh out of Bulkhead. “Yeah kid,” he said softly, “I missed ya.”