eugenesis-text

‘That’s the last one,’ said Jolup matter-of-factly. He dropped the guard’s body, wiped his hands on his
chest and wandered over to Sevax and Ryknia, who were surveying the fruits of their frenzied labour. The
last guard topped a pile of cadavers that seemed to contain more Quintessons than Cybertronians.
‘What a mess,’ said Ryknia.
Jolup caught the ambivalence in his voice. ‘Hey, it was fun while it lasted.’
‘Fun’ snapped Sevax. ‘What was fun Our stewardship of this place, the rank and power we enjoyed,
or the mindless slaughter of 50 of our own troops’
Jolup snorted. ‘What’s 50 in a force of thousands Perhaps this will make Quantax realise that we’re
not be trifled with, that we’re not just going to sit around backstage while he hogs the spotlight. Right,
Ryknia’
‘Right. He’s washed his hands of us, Sevax. He’ll isolate us and then, when Xenon arrives, have us
removed from the picture. Think of this as a pre-emptive strike.’
Somewhere above their heads, another Transformer dropped dead in his cell.
Sevax shook his head. ‘How did it come to this’
‘This isn’t how it ends,’ said Ryknia adamantly. ‘This is just the beginning.’ The others followed him
into the control room, where Cybertron’s sun threw late-day light against the viewing window.
‘Quantax doesn’t know about our little spring clean,’ continued Ryknia. ‘I say we press our advantage
and overthrow him.’
‘What, and run the planet’ Jolup laughed. ‘Sure, why not’
‘I’m serious. Three against one. The troops will follow whoever’s left standing. I’m not spending the
next 60 million years babysitting brain-haggard Cybes or kow-towing to a fading Imperial Majestrix. We
are the future: Quintesson minds in Cybertronian bodies! Quintecons!’
‘What about this place’ asked Sevax.
Ryknia spun on his comrade. Whatever the future held, he thought, Sevax wasn’t part of it. There
was no room in the new hierarchy for prevaricators. ‘We abandon this pit! Now!’
‘Right away’ Jolup thought of work-in-progress Downstairs. ‘I’m, er, not prepared.’
Ryknia picked up a chair and hurled it through the window. A high wind swept into the room.
‘It begins now! Quantax dies tonight, and by daybreak we take our place at the vanguard of the new
order.’ He dived through the serrated frame, transformed, and flew towards the setting sun.
In marked contrast to the earlier summit, the clamour in Delphi’s conference chamber was frenzied,
almost orgiastic. Alliances had been blurred once more; old boundaries were being crossed and remapped
by Autobots and Decepticons too canny and adaptive to let anything undermine their impending
counterattack. The multiple generations of mechanoids filling the chamber had become a global tribe,
Cybertronians, their name and nature dictated by their homeworld, a planet now at risk.
Optimus Prime did not know how to react to the crowd in front of him. Such comradeship and cooperation
was necessary if they were to survive the coming battle, and yet it chilled his fuel to see Autobots
mix so freely, so casually, with murderers and tyrants, with people whose self-centred ideologies ran against
all 31 Articles of the Autobot Code.
But then how different were the two armies now, four million years after he had deliberately crashed
the Ark In his day, from the Flying Corps to Strikeforce Alpha, the dividing line was not so much drawn
but trenched into the collective Autobot consciousness: Decepticons killed, Autobots did not; Decepticons
attacked, Autobots protected. Why did he feel as if the Autobots of 2012 had survived four million years of
continuous conflict by learning to love if not the enemy, then the methods and tricks of combat:
ruthlessness, deceit, propaganda: all the things that gave the enemy its hideous strength.
Perhaps it was this symbiotic tug-of-war, this hate/hate symmetry that had bred, over soul-sapping
lengths of time, to an unspoken co-dependency.
It sickened him.
As the last of the crowd filtered into the chamber he took to the stage and sent up a silent prayer:
forgive. To speak to them, to communicate effectively, he would need to appeal to an aggressive nature he
despised.
‘Autobots,’ he began, and held the pause as long as possible before adding, ‘…and Decepticons. The
waiting is over.’