Robot in Disguise by ink FINAL

It is the perfect afternoon for a Sunday drive. Bumblebee rolls down roads shaded by rows of trees, their reaching canopies forming a tunnel over him. Alongside the road is a park where families are finishing picnics. Their children are playing together, making new friends. There are no signs of the Decepticons and under the late afternoon sun everything is washed in a yellow light of a kind only found on Earth. Moments like these remind Bumblebee how much he loves the Earth and humankind. He wishes he had lungs to expand, a stomach to fill, so he could take part in the world, take it inside himself, but defending the planet and its people is enough.

The road is coming to an end. Bumblebee does not care where he is driving, as long as his wheels are spinning and there are people around him. He turns left, away from the suburbs and towards the city. It will be evening soon and everything will light up brilliantly around him and he can drive all night. He will make sure the people are safe tonight.

Bumblebee stops at a red light, behind two more cars. He is on a road full of restaurants and bars and cafes and there are people outside each of them, overflowing onto the footpaths, standing with each other. He’s never been inside a bar or a restaurant before; he’s too big to fit inside.

Further down the road, there is a woman eating dinner at a table outside in the open air. Bumblebee zooms his senses in as she twirled her food around a fork. Her lips and eyes are painted to look darker. She’s sitting with her friends, chewing and laughing with her mouth closed. Her delicacy and beauty reminds Bumblebee of a soap bubble, with all its colours swirling together.

The light changes and the cars start moving again. Bumblebee moves with them, keeping his attention on the woman. He is thinking about bubbles, simulating them in the digital reality of his imagination. In his mind bubbles do not pop, they just bounce off each other and floated away again.

The woman is too far away to see now but she was the loveliest thing Bumblebee had seen all day. He decides to go back, so he turns left, off the main road. A recording of the woman is playing in his mind and watches her laugh again and again. He turns left once more.

Bumblebee considers the elemental nature of humans: they are both water and fire. On the inside they are mostly liquid, they are self-heating, self-repairing and self-replicating. They are alive, and while Bumblebee has a living spark inside his chest, his body is a solid, lifeless shell. He does not feel pain, he only registers a simple on/off understanding of pressure and damage. By human standards Bumblebee is not a alive, but being their guardian is enough.

He turns left and tries to stop his wheels from turning, his brake pads grinding down, screaming. A human rolls up onto his windscreen and tumbles back off. She did not pop and she did not float away; she cracked like glass. The digital simulations stop, and Bumblebee does not know what to do. His gears and actuators lock into place and begin the transforming protocol, but he changes his mind. He is frozen.

And he is still frozen. It was not his fault, she stepped off the curb right in front of him. He plays the impact again and his parts move involuntarily, his doors locking themselves and tires turning to one side. His brakes pump again and again but the recording does not change. The person he hit is a young woman in a black dress. In the recording he isolates the face and compares it to the woman at the restaurant, but they are not the same. For a moment he is relieved and is then sickened by himself; she was still human, she was more alive than him.

Is she dead? People are running towards her. A man kneels down next to her and calls for help. Another woman is standing with her hand over her mouth on the sidewalk. Bumblebee tells himself it was not his fault. He plays the recording again from the beginning, watches the young woman hold her skirt down at the sides as she looks both ways. That is when he came around the corner, he did not see her then. Her face did not have time to register shock or fear, or pain. Her head hit against the reinforced glass. There is still a small amount of blood still smeared across his windscreen. He did not see her.

If the humans found out that he was an Autobot, what would they do? They needed the Autobots to protect them. He could almost hear Optimus Prime’s voice, stern and saddened, commanding him to leave, relieving him of his duty. He wished he had lungs to fill with air and scream and scream.

The man is talking on a cellphone, his fingers to the woman’s neck. He looks up at Bumblebee, at the empty driver’s seat. They could not find out. No one could. Bumblebee reverses away from the man and the body of the woman. He turns sharply, his tires slide over the asphalt as he rotates completely and accelerates in the opposite direction faster than a real Volkswagen Beetle possibly could. They could not find out.

Bumblebee drives until the roads are clear of other cars and then stops. For a moment he thinks of going back, to find out if the woman survived, but he still has the her blood on him. Like a sigh, his parts whirr and separate as he transforms, his front splitting to become his feet as he puts his weight on them. Standing, head hung, he can’t quite see the smear on his windscreen over the curve of his chest. He wanted to be a hero, a beloved protector, but what does he know about love? He is just a heartless machine pretending, a robot in disguise.