There's an old saying: technology changes lives.
After spending a million asset points on an Autobot, Jude had never agreed with anything more completely.
Three months in, and the arrangement had exceeded every expectation — with one persistent exception. The name. Satsuki was what he'd given her, but saying it out loud still felt strange, like calling a flamethrower something gentle. He'd gone back to calling her Three-Wheeler almost immediately, and she'd stopped formally objecting, which he chose to interpret as acceptance.
The vehicle herself was, by any reasonable measure, perfect for his purposes. Beyond her default food-cart configuration, her transformation inventory included an electric wheelchair, an electric bicycle, a winged jetpack, and more forms available for future purchase. The Cybertronian power system ran circles around the Earth engine the System had originally provided — on the open road, she could hit 180 miles per hour without straining, and that wasn't her ceiling. She was also her own navigation system, which meant Jude could take both hands off the handlebars at full speed in dense city traffic and trust her completely. He'd quietly let his master-level motorcycle certification lapse. It no longer felt necessary.
Her computing power was in a category of its own. Against her processing capacity, the server arrays of major tech companies were a mild inconvenience. The touchscreen phone in Jude's pocket — integrated directly into her chassis — could crack anything that ran on a network. Silicon-based life thrived in cyberspace. The internet had no idea what had moved into it.
Technology changes lives. Cutting-edge technology reorganizes them entirely.
Of course, there were tradeoffs.
"Yomogi. Cook me something."
"Boss, where's my cat food?"
"I'll make it in a minute."
Jude exhaled and shuffled toward the bathroom. The daily feeding arrangement remained, as always, exhausting in its particular logic: the cat's cooking skill affected the bonus properties of the cat food he ate, so Yomogi had to keep practicing. Which meant Jude ate Yomogi's cooking. And Yomogi ate Jude's. Every day, Jude cooked something genuinely excellent, watched Yomogi eat it, and then sat down to whatever the cat had made. He'd considered trying to swap their culinary skills more than once.
He pushed open the bathroom door.
Stopped.
Stared.
Where his luxury automatic toilet had been, there were now two very clean, very precise halves.
"Three-Wheeler."
"Relax. Two cuts with an alloy sword, perfectly smooth. You can piece it back together with egg white." A pause. "Probably."
From the living room, there was a brief sound of keystrokes — or whatever the Cybertronian equivalent was — and then: "There. Ordered you a new one. Pulled the funds from your stock portfolio." Another pause, lighter this time. "You're welcome."
Jude stood in the doorway and said nothing for several seconds.
"You'd better get cooking," Satsuki added cheerfully, already shifting back toward the door. Metal clicked and reshaped as she folded herself back into motorcycle form. "Sell out today's stock early. I've been tracking Barry Allen's biometric data, and something's shifted."
She paused at the threshold.
"He's going to wake up."
"He's going to wake up."
"You say that every day, Cisco."
In the main hall of S.T.A.R. Labs, Caitlin Snow stood with her arms crossed, watching Cisco Ramon study the monitors with the particular intensity of someone who was absolutely certain he was right.
"I know, I know." Cisco didn't look away from the readouts. "But this time I actually saw his eyelashes move. Unless I'm running on fumes from staying up too late — which, fair, is possible — something is different."
"You're good at physics and mechanics." Caitlin picked up her tablet and reviewed the biometric data herself, unhurried. "Biology is my department. And my read is that his numbers haven't changed significantly from last week. He could wake up at any moment — but that's been true for months."
Cisco made a noncommittal noise and turned on the stereo.
"Can't read my, can't read my, no he can't read my poker face—"
Lady Gaga filled the lab. Caitlin looked up from her tablet. "Poker Face? Why?"
"Because he likes it." Cisco took a smug bite of Senbei, and which had quietly become a lab staple. "I checked his Facebook."
Caitlin considered this. "You said I mentioned that hearing is the last sensory function to decline?"
"You did say that, yes."
"...Fine. Keep playing it."
She reached for an osmanthus cake and went back to her readings.
Barry Allen's head felt like it had been filled with wet sand.
There had been voices for a while — two of them, close, going back and forth in a loop he couldn't quite follow. Gradually the words were sharpening into something recognizable.
Because he likes this song.
The music reached him first, then the voice — male, close, somewhere just past his left ear.
His eyelids moved.
It took effort. More than it should have. But light came through, and with it, the dim shape of a ceiling he didn't recognize.
He sat up.
Cisco stumbled backward in his chair.
"Holy crap — I knew it!"
Barry blinked at the room — clean white walls, unfamiliar equipment, monitors he didn't recognize — and reached up by reflex to pull the sensor pads from his forehead. Caitlin stepped forward automatically to help with the ones on his chest, then switched to professional mode, flashlight already in hand.
"Pulse is over 110. Climbing toward 120." She checked his pupils. "Reacting to light — both sides."
Barry barely heard the numbers. He was off the table before he'd consciously decided to stand, feet on cold floor, chest heaving with breaths that felt new in a way he couldn't explain, like lungs rediscovering the habit.
"Easy, man." Cisco was beside him, hands up. "You're okay. This is S.T.A.R. Labs."
S.T.A.R. Labs.
The words unlocked something. A night came rushing back — the particle accelerator, the light that had climbed past every safe threshold, the sound of something catastrophic happening all at once. The city going dark. And then the lightning, gold and close, impossibly close, falling from a sky that had no business producing it.
He looked at the two faces watching him — worried, relieved, waiting — and heard himself ask the question that had been sitting somewhere in the dark this whole time.