eugenesis-text

shelf identikit drone, thankful for anything that could give me the edge in battle. I spent a few months
undercover as a Pretender – don’t ask – before joining a band of Autobots for an unscheduled galactic tour.
During that mission I was seriously injured and awoke with a regular head.’ He looked up for the first time.
‘Sorry, I’m sitting here giving you my life story. This must be incredibly dull.’
‘Not at all. Carry on.’
‘In 2006 I volunteered for a new type of binary bonding. Bioengineers had, over the years, discovered
that the process ultimately led to total cross-absorption: Transformer and carbon-based life gelled on every
level – physically and mentally – and two halves became one inseparable whole. Anyway, they found a way
to accelerate the process. I was dubious, but volunteered – well, I say volunteered. High Command knew I
had experience with mekanids and it was “suggested” that I put myself forward.’ He paused at a fork in the
conversation, trying to decide the best way to continue. ‘Optimus, there’s an organic species – they call
themselves Homo sapiens – that eventually populate the planet on which you crashed.’ Prime’s eyes widened;
Nightbeat did not notice. ‘In 2006 I was binary bonded to one of these organic creatures. I nicknamed him
Muzzle.’
Nightbeat’s shoulders slumped into a convex curve, robbed of tension. Just saying Muzzle’s name –
surely that was progress; surely that was something. He placed the orb on the floor between them.
‘I won’t waste words trying to articulate how I felt about him and vice versa. I wouldn’t know where
to begin, I really wouldn’t. Muzzle was my best friend. Our minds overlapped seamlessly. Right from the
outset it was difficult to know where he ended and I began. The biotechnicians said we were the most
compatible partners ever; they said we represented some blip, some loosely pencilled equation way off their
probability charts. They did everything they could to prove that we weren’t a scientific anomaly - anything
to translate their wide-eyed wonder into something explainable, something with cosines or compounds or
decimal points. They composed scientific mantras, they scribbled strings of binary, they filled a thousand
databoards with waves of seasick numerals. And all the while Muzzle and I just weren’t interested.’
Nightbeat tapped his forehead. ‘You can’t imagine, Optimus, what it’s like to have someone in here,
someone who shares your every feeling – someone who feels the very joins between your thoughts.
Everything about me was laid bare, and it didn’t matter – because everything that was Muzzle was open to
me too. We were reflected in each other.
‘It lasted three years. In the summer of 2008, Muzzle was diagnosed as suffering from an unknown
strain of colorectal cancer. Tuesday 3 rd June… He returned from routine surgery – it was the first time we’d
been separated since the operation – and I knew as soon as we re-engaged. I knew everything.
‘Over the next few months I became familiar with hateful human terms: Adenomas. Dysplasia.
Metastasis. Ad enocarcinomas. And of course the doctors couldn’t do anything to help him because by this
point he was practically half alien. Three years with me and his DNA had been branched and tweaked and
tinkered: new buds had been cultivated or hacked off by the blades and clamps and nanos of my neuranet –
hell, we were lucky that High Command even allowed the tests to continue. Our biotechnicians were
powerless too – in fact they were convinced he was proof of a new strain of humanity, Homo extremis.
‘In the end, all anyone could give him was a projected date of death. Muzzle insisted on maintaining
the binary bond. Can you imagine I knew I was immortal. I knew I would go unharmed; it didn’t matter
if his immune system collapsed, it didn’t matter if twitching pockets of lymph nodes and stromal tumours
jostled for space on the wall of his colon. No weakness of the flesh could affect me.
‘As a Transformer, death it is eternally remote - in fact it’s practically an abstraction. Look at us! We
get blown to pieces; we get rebuilt. We self-destruct and wake up inside a stasis pod. Bombed, brutalised,
beheaded - we never stare Death in the face because we’re never sure what he looks like. Humans see him
every time they look in the mirror.
‘Muzzle and I lived through his illness as one: billions of emotions filtered through our shared
consciousness, shades of feeling I had never experienced. In a way, I think I came to recognise mortality.
And yet all the while we knew that one would die and one would not, and so I could never truly say that I
understood. We were together until the end. During the last few days, when Muzzle was drifting in and
out of consciousness, I was forbidden any enemy contact. We were shuttled to Antarctica and left alone
with a communicube and a homing device.
‘At 4.14am on Sunday 18 th October 2009, my best friend died. There was no warning, just a sudden,
infinite silence in my mind.