eugenesis-text

Processing… 81%… 87%… Haxian was lost in a world of figures, of stat-curves and split projections:
an ordered, clinical world a thousand miles away from torture, neuro-chipping and colonisation. 90%…
94%
‘3… 2 …1.’
Galvatron stopped and stood and stared.
Xenon pressed the release pad.
As the sun rose over Iacon, 270 Autobots were running for their lives. They fell into pairs and packs
and headed for the drop-down hatch, which was little more than a mineshaft hacked into the crater floor.
Prowl guarded the entrance and moulded early arrivals into a tight defensive circle while Perceptor and Kup
lowered off-liners and brain-deads onto a blanket of outstretched arms. Worst of all were the burns victims,
the Autobots who had been semi-slagged by belching Tridents: their bodywork was still wet and bubbling,
their gelatinous faces alive with tides and geysers and molten eruptions.
When the last of his men were through, Prowl jumped. He landed hard and rolled to a standstill.
Chromedome lobbed a handful of grenades through the hatchway and slammed it closed.
Thanks to all the pre-battle reinforcements, the Archives Centre was now a mass of intersections and
elaborate dead ends. The first escapees were already far ahead, pinned against the injured, chasing their
shadow down spiralling stairwells.
Outside, the battle entered its final phase.
Another Autobot aircraft was pulled to the floor by enemy fire.
Another one of Sideswipe’s men was murdered.
Another stream of Sharkticons foamed into the gutter.
This wasn’t right. This wasn’t right at all.
Where was the sky full of laserbeams and jet streams and never ending fire-fights Where was the
ocean thick with dumped bodies, with nuke-subs and bomb-pods and freshly capsized ships Where were
the raging banks of pea-green flame, the stuttering neutron bombs, the trenches turning deserts into
diamonds of battered metal Where were the scattered remains of billion-strong armies, reduced to cinders
by the atomic blizzard, by the spiralling fringe of a nuclear wind Where were the cityscapes, the technoutopias
so tall they poked holes in the troposphere, so deep they glowed at the base
Cybertron was not what Centurion had expected. Thank God.
Instead of the above there was a cloudless sky; vast metallic tundra, endlessly blue, like concrete
wrapped in tinted tinfoil; creases of land, pinched like pastry between finger and thumb; grease-thick liquid
lapping against a skittish shoreline, inching forward, inching back, the tide having long since escaped any
lunar grip.
Arriving on Cybertron, Centurion had experienced the full spectrum of emotions, a giddying sprint
from Awe to Zeal. To him, a mechanoid who had travelled as far as London, it was the most unnatural
place in the universe. For a few hours, at least…
Now, he was bored. He was bored of listening to his own footsteps, bored of the featureless plain and
its alternating shades of blue and silver. To Wheeljack and Mainframe, this was home, plain old home:
thrilling and depressing, full of hope and hopelessness. 820 surface-based quadrants, 26 city-states, two
(contesting) capitals, two trans-continental mountain ranges, one artificial sea, the Rad Zone, the Acid
Wastes, the Scud Run, the Sonic Canyons, and all the skewed geology inbetween.
That had been his geography lesson. After that, he was expected to keep quiet while his companions
talked shop.
In short, he had expected the trek to the Sonic Canyons to be a Technicolor voyage through a
vibrant, war-torn world; a world forever pitched on the brink of desolation. Instead he was stunned by the
desolation, by the deafening silence. In its absence, war was everywhere. This was a world that was forever
being killed, hour after hour, day after day. Even as an alien, as a dumbstruck stranger, he could easily
imagine The End, that bleakly tender moment when Cybertron would at last be free, when the everdecreasing
population would suddenly hit zero. The sun would be black and silent, fogged by the glare of a