eugenesis-text

‘Of course they are, Hoist. Think about it.’
About four seconds elapsed between Sunstreaker screaming and his teammates rushing into the
navigation room, weapons raised, ready to confront anything from a Class 1 Guardian (which Grapple had
somewhat gleefully pointed out had been loaded into the Ark’s docking bay moments before take off) to
the Chronarchitect himself. Instead, they found Sunstreaker huddled in the corner, rigid with shock,
standing over the disfigured remains of his 1984 counterpart.
Sunstreaker Mk II (or Mk I, depending on your temporal prejudice) was a mass of dull wires and
inverted bodywork, as if he had been parboiled and dripped onto the floor. His face had collapsed into
itself, having been eroded by a slow-burning acid pellet fired four million years previously.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Nightbeat, taking Sunstreaker’s hand and leading him away. ‘I shouldn’t have picked
you for this mission. I shouldn’t have chosen Autobots who actually crashed with the Ark. There was
always a chance that you could see yourself.’
‘I knew I was around here somewhere, I just didn’t know what I’d look like. In my version of events
the Decepticons tear on board, Skywarp shoots me in the back and it all goes black. A few micros later
someone drags me into the path of Auntie’s repair beams and everything’s okay again.’ He rubbed his face
as if looking for trace evidence of scars. ‘I never considered the in-between.’
‘This is the room,’ declared Hoist suddenly. ‘This is where the Decepticons breached the inner hull –
I helped Huffer repair the damage. And if the fight started here and spread through the control room…’ He
led them between the Tubes of Transference and into the science lab. ‘There. On the floor.’
Optimus Prime and Megatron lay side-by-side, Siamese twins conjoined by a pool of shallow
circuitry. Their hands were fused by a russet seam. Megatron’s big black fingers were buried deep in Prime’s
palm, as if he were being comforted.
To Nightbeat, the Autobot leader seemed too real, too solid. The tightened contours of his
bodywork twanged under a Möbius glow. Tongues of peeling paintwork, diamonds of dusted plexi, a hard
red chest plate loosening at the hinge – every detail shuddered with immediacy, with a keen clarity of line.
He had served under later versions of Optimus – the Powermaster upgrade, the Cyber-Nebulan hybrid and
the post-Swarm reconstruction – but none of them had looked like, or been, the genuine article. He
realised that now.
‘He’s much bigger than I remember.’ Nightbeat knew it sounded stupid, but it was true. This was not
the lithe Iaconian athlete he had recreated in his personal image archives; this was a Golden Age mechanoid
built with blocks and set squares - a hulking great energon-guzzling behemoth.
‘Grapple, Hoist, see if you can untangle him. We need to bring him back on line in 2012, not now –
we can’t risk him seeing his crew like this.’ Nightbeat took their grumbled reply as a cue to leave and
tiptoed away. He saw Prowl on the other side of the room, hunched up between console blocks, a lip-less
mouth rimmed with burn marks. He wondered how the Prowl of twenty-eight years’ hence was doing and
quickly snuffed the thought. He had to concentrate on the present. The past The present. He gave up.
‘He’s loose,’ called Hoist. ‘How are we going to get him, you know, through the wormhole’
Moments later, the Optimus Prime of 1984 was being balanced on the shoulders of four future
Autobots. Their eyes were fixed on the floor as they edged across the control room, but it was obvious that
the portal was nearby: the patterns of light spilling across the floor looked almost crystalline, as if someone,
somewhere was willing time itself to hold still. The Celestial Temple looked detached, like a reflection of a
reflection.
‘We’re doing the right thing, aren’t we Nightbeat’
‘Sunstreaker, that is not the kind of question I need right now.’
‘Wait wait wait…!’ cried Grapple. ‘We can’t take him back without his trailer – it’s practically a part
of him! By the Prime Program, can you imagine having your mind split between time zones’
‘Relax. The Ark hasn’t redesigned him yet. Optimus and his trailer are one and the same…’
Nightbeat shifted the robot in question to a more comfortable position. ‘Enough delays. Let’s go.’
And they did, crossing three decades in a single stride.