eugenesis-text

used to grant life to the lifeless, to resuscitate the burnouts and shutdowns – people like First Aid himself
Would Unicron’s presence impair or even distort the Matrix’s life-giving properties Could he take the risk
of spreading the Chaos Bringer’s influence
He wished he knew more about the Matrix, but then he’d been wishing that for millions of years,
along with every theoscientist and Circuitmaster. No one knew where the Matrix had come from (although
most people thought it had been forged in the Primal Chamber and teleported into Primon’s chest) or what
it was made of. On those rare occasions – the majority of them pre-war – when the Matrix Bearer had
surrendered his gift for inspection, metallurgists had declared that the material from which it was made was
unclassifiable, its molecular structure correspondent with no known metal or mineral. The tech-heads never
probed too deeply, though, in case they chipped a facet or put pressure on some invisible mould-line,
causing everything to collapse. Atheists used to say that the only thing keeping the Matrix together was faith
itself: a race-wide refusal to explore their origins.
He shared the view held by many that the key to unlocking these secrets lay within the Primal
Pentateuch, specifically verses 1-36: the Eugenesis code. These lines were believed to be the blueprints of
the Transformer race, every tendency and predisposition expressed as a string of digits. Extremists said that
the Eugenesis code could even ‘explain’ the Decepticons, but accepting that meant believing in a Primal
Plan that created Paradise and its Serpent simultaneously.
Theoscientists also used the 36 lines of program-code as evidence of Intelligent Design, arguing that
such insanely complex process-language could only have been written by a member of the Sentient Core.
Cybertron’s best computer engineers had spent centuries poring over the scripture but in the end declared
the Eugenesis Code painfully abstruse – believers still talked in mortified whispers about the renowned
code-breaker Herotese, who went mad and joined a Circuit Sect after spending two hundred thousand
years trying to unpack the indecipherable first line. So for the moment, whatever secrets lay underneath the
Matrix’s non-classifiable, pseudo-crystalline surface, they remained secrets.
Prowl put Section 11 to the back of his mind, but while he found it easy to forget First Aid’s words,
erasing the doctor’s face was more difficult. The message left on his office comm-screen was the last time he
had regarded First Aid as a living being (the moment they’d hit the utility ducts he had guessed – he had
known – what they would find in AMC1). He wondered whether his office in the Archives Centre had
been ransacked. If not, there was the possibility that First Aid was preserved electronically: a tidy file of vidbytes
stacked against a hundred other archived messages. Maybe he could say the same about Thunderclash,
Magnus, Sideswipe, Mirage, Ratchet – how many Autobots now only existed as messages on his machine
There was nothing to do with an old message except play and re-play. There was no way to
extrapolate a bio-code from a flickering screen; no way to flood a clone with second-hand personal data
(and even that would create a subtly different Vorcode, a branched sparkline: it was never truly the same
person). You couldn’t bring them back using thirty seconds of dialogue and a bad picture. And yet they
weren’t completely gone – they still existed as a collection of pixels, destined to say the same things in the
same way. And it wasn’t just the monitor screen that preserved their memory, either: their every spoken
word was retained on sound waves that would bounce and echo for thousands of years. Technology carried
them beyond death: the vidcaps and the analogue scraps, the snippets of dialogue on lost wiretap tapes, the
retrograde images burnt onto flimsy surveillance film - not to mention the panoply of sound and imagery
downloaded through the retnets and audiofilters of everyone who had ever seen them. Their personalities
had been encoded in the minds and memory logs of every Autobot and Decepticon with whom they had
interacted. Transformers had a voracious appetite for stimuli: they stored everything and forgot nothing:
they were walking web-cams, with apertures for eyes and microphones for ears.
Then there was time itself - the ultimate preservationist. Time ensured that they would never truly
die because everything that had ever happened to them was still happening to them; their every thought
and action was pickled in temporal formaldehyde. Time was not straight and flat: it had an infinite
topography that stretched in all directions, forever: everything was simultaneous and coexisting. He had
long maintained – and argued with Skids and Perceptor on many occasions – that the concept of temporal
linearity had been imposed by sentient beings to stop them going mad. In reality, past/present/future were
simultaneous. And so he was sitting at a desk/he was firing at Tridents/he was berating Thunderclash and
Rodimus for their childishness – all these things were happening right now. He couldn’t remember the
future, but all that was happening now too.