eugenesis-text

He felt like an auteur. His life was a widescreen biopic where his every success was edited into a
fleeting pre-credit resume. The film was set in 2012 and featured a string of failures catalogued by a director
privy to his every nuance. Even as he watched excerpts, bridging sequences and cutaways, he was sketching
out the final scene, storyboarding every shot. There was only one way the film would end.
He started seeing ghosts:
Up ahead, Soundwave closed his cell door and nodded goodbye. He kept on walking, rheumy and
light-headed. The film spun in his head.
He approached his office and noticed that the door was wide open. Continuity error: he always
locked the door. The inconsistency troubled him. He moved on and saw Hot Rod propping up his desk
like a papier-mâché sculpture. He kept on walking.
There was Thunderclash, soaking up the shadows, stripped to a wiry loop of slim-limbs and ball
bearings. He waved and kept on walking.
Sideswipe passed him on the stairs, his back a blizzard of split-end circuitry and fist-deep craters.
Prowl trip-toed downstairs.
The film jerked towards the finale. Prowl relinquished the world, casting off everything except the
stretch of subterranean corridor. Nothing existed beyond the camera’s unblinking eye, beyond the letterbox
frame. To his left, he noticed a stack of Autobot corpses piled high. He recognised faces last seen in AMC1,
looked away, and kept on walking.
Rev-Tone and Quark appeared from an adjacent corridor, heads turned to each other, their
conversation embellished with hand movements and fleeting smiles. It was only when they walked past an
electric light that he noticed the golden bullet holes riddling their bodies.
He passed the main hangar, with its cold walls, its sub-zero temperatures. Up ahead was a boarded
entrance. The lettering had peeled into scraps so that the words ‘In Progress’ were no longer legible. He
scraped aside the slab of metal he had positioned earlier. The windowless room hummed with recycled
power. Natural daylight had never found its way to these monitors or worktops. Stasis pods lined the walls,
glowing pink and lime. These were the works-in-progress, the incompletes.
He walked to the largest tank and stared at the body inside, where for thousands of years it had been
percolating in a warm chemical bath. “Number Nine” was little more than a motor engine bobbing in
carbonated engex. The body-husk was pimpled with rust. Underneath the patient’s name, painted in
modest lower-case, it said: corrodia gravis.
Prowl pressed his fingers against the glass. His pale reflection, pulled across the curvature, stared back
with wide-eyed glee. It was smiling. A proud smile. A sad smile.
He pressed harder, testing the resistence. The first cracks appeared under his fingertips.