eugenesis-text

‘I’ve seen enough,’ said Ultra Magnus, piloting the Trident away from the horror-show, away from
the wasted food. ‘There’s only so much you can take in one day.’
‘I agree,’ said Siren. ‘We’ll soon get you back to Delphi and have Cloudraker patch up your – oh!
Your fixed! When did you find the time to do that’
Ultra Magnus looked down and saw his new arm for the first time. ‘I – I don’t know… It just – it
just…’
‘You’ve had enough excitement for one day,’ said Siren, climbing into the pilot’s seat and pushing
Magnus aside. ‘Let me take the wheel.’
Ultra Magnus climbed into the back seat and hugged the Matrix. ‘Yes, let’s go home. Please.’
Galvatron was already way ahead, afraid that a homing Scraplet would latch onto his outer hull. Soon
the Autobots caught up with him and the two ships flew side by side. When they had travelled as far as
their meagre fuel supplies allowed, when the flakes and shavings of Scraplet-studded cadavers had
decongested into a loose, dark-particle fog, a beautiful arc of light outshone the distant stars.
Aquaria had exploded.
Death’s Head knew, from the moment he had escaped the water, from the moment the pearls of
moisture had evaporated in the Trident’s screaming retro-jets, that he wasn’t going to make it. In this
meteorological purgatory, where the wind blew the rain horizontally, where chunks of tarred rock leapt
from the sea itself, there was no such thing as a second chance.
While the others had steamed ahead, he’d simply stopped moving. The Trident’s thrusters were
kicking sparks, struggling through force of habit. In less than three minutes the fuel tanks would choke on
red dust and he would back-flip to his death, sucked towards the planet’s collapsing core and
crushed/snapped/boiled by whatever obstacles lay in-between.
Still, there was always Plan B, he thought, pulling open his chest plate. Underneath was a device that,
although small enough to sit snugly in the palm, contained some of the most advanced technology in the
galaxy. The only one of its kind, the summation of years of work, painstakingly pieced together by
Decepticon scientists: a bona fide time-trigger.
Just over a year ago, going by his internal clock, he’d returned to Cybertron with Rodimus Prime,
Kup, Blurr and Wreck-Gar after a disastrous foray in 1987. He’d stolen the time-trigger from Wreck-Gar,
who in turn had stolen it from Galvatron – fair’s fair, right Okay, so maybe he’d used a little more force
and a little less stealth…but the Junkion had been rebuilt, no harm done.
He congratulated himself on his foresight, resealed his chest and checked the box for dents. It looked
okay. He could return to 2007 at the touch of a button.
The engines yawned, the last of the fuel smeared an empty tank, the thrusters gave way and he found
himself being dragged towards the ocean. He held Plan B against the faint dashboard light, flipped the lid
and stared at the reassuringly oversized button – big and bright and red.
He pressed the button. Nothing happened.
He pressed it again.
And again.
And again.
My name is Nightbeat. I’ve led an interesting life.
Function: Investigator. Biocode: A/000007. On-line: 3 rd Cycle 270 (Matrixed). Autobranded: 3 rd Cycle 892.
I was constructed cold – you know, without biomorphic reproduction. The first of an experimental breed, nonaffiliated
to any genecode or bioline. Robots that cheated nature, we were built outside the bleep and cold-pulse of a metal
womb. Manufactured without morphcore division, we rejected the birth body. An Antimorph, they called me, and worse.
My brain module was pieced together from scratch, made from test sounds and discarded parts; it was creased and knitted
in a lab somewhere, on a table somewhere, a very long time ago.
They say something went wrong at the programming stage: a rudimentary error affected my logic centre. Basically,
I was wired-up wrong. Is that why I feel the way I feel and think the way I think Did some thin white scientist, some
long dead tech-head, plug A into C instead of B Was he daydreaming about maths and paradigms when he should
have been making me normal