eugenesis-text

His chiselled blue fingertips broke the portal’s skin and he felt a weak tug, as if his body wanted to be
in two places at once, as if his molecules were making choices. He closed his optic covers, stepped into the
glossy ball of energy, and disappeared.
All Thunderclash could hear was the squeak of the gurney’s wheels, popping their joints and spinning
360 as they jumped ramps along the corridor. His head was fixed in place by pins and rusted bolts, and he
was forced to eyeball the ceiling. Each strip light scored his ocular gauze; he dreamt he was riding the
interstate highway and watching an endless ribbon of white-lined tarmac.
Occasionally, a syringe-toting surgeon or one of Xenon’s five faces would corrupt his view. Xenon
was speaking (something about the Masters and the geode, about mecha-racial purity and the perpetuation
of the sparkline, about gulags and spray-chambers and ‘the evopeak itself’). He felt another quart of decalfluid
spin circles through his fuel lines. The demon liquid sluiced through his ambulatory systems, nibbling
at connective circuitry. Oh god, now he was leaking – he could feel a warm puddle of oil collecting
between his legs. How embarrassing.
Time had passed. He’d stopped moving, and the ceiling had settled into a disc of frighteningly white
light. The brightness burrowed through his eyes and slithered around his brain, from lobe to cranium,
skimming the synapses.
Still on the gurney.
Still strapped down.
Still absolutely terrified.
‘He’s back on line, Xenon. He’s back. Back on line.’
‘Thank you, Ferrax. I want him to feel this.’
‘Where am I’ Thunderclash tried to ask, but his voice sounded like a thousand whirring
photocopiers. The disc of light shrank and he realised that it was actually an overhead lamp, suspended by a
multi-hinged arm. A surgeon with a squint and wicked, wandering hands was standing over him. He
glimpsed a set of tools, laid on a tray like body parts – in fact they might have been body parts, snapped off
and sharpened.
Xenon loomed closer. He was holding a test tube, and somehow that seemed like the most terrifying
thing in the world.
Thunderclash wished he were dead.
‘Do you know what this is’ Xenon asked, flipping the tube. ‘It’s a miracle. It’s a work of art. It’s a
means to an end.’ He broke the seal and tipped a sparkling microchip into Ferrax’s clammy palm. ‘It’s an
Inhibitor Chip, one of the most advanced pieces of technology in the galaxy. Imagine the properties of
your prosaic Inhibitor Claw, magnify a hundred-fold and condense into a single microchip. Easy to
administer, impossible to remove, they can be mass-produced like cheap fuel pumps. We have enough to
enslave your entire race, Thunderclash. Thousands of Cybertronians, unable to transform. And that’s not all.
Once injected, it—’
‘It’ll never work.’
‘Oh, but it will. You think we’d go to all this trouble without a few little tests We’ve been abducting
Cybertronians for months… “Empties”, in your parlance. The ones that would go unnoticed, the pacifists
and the deserters: your gloriously overlooked underclass. My troops have beamed into suicide parks and
refuel dens, Viroid bunkers and rehab clinics; we’ve picked the underside of Cybertron clean, prodding and
poking, testing the Chip, making alterations. Then we moved up a step, targeting the armies themselves,
taking Autobots and Decepticons. The Inhibitor Chip worked, Thunderclash. It worked on them all.’
Xenon dragged a tentacle across the Autobot’s face. ‘I think you can guess what happens next.’
Ferrax started carving designs in the nape of Thunderclash’s neck, criss-crossing the knuckled ridge
where the spinal strut plugged the skull. Electricity rippled up the blade as the Autobot’s neural cluster was
exposed: a tight-packed nucleus of motorneurons, it was the morphcore that governed each Transformer’s