eugenesis-text

he saw Optimus being hoisted into the eves. Damage so recently sustained was being patched and patted, as
was meant to be.
He shut down the screen, took one last look at himself, and faced the wormhole. Not much of a
destiny, he thought, edging towards the brightness, but it was the only one he had. The portal reached out
with spindly arms and poked heat in his eyes.
The blindness came instantly. His optics boiled away and dripped from their sockets. For the first few
seconds, as the rush of heat devoured his sensornets, he was mentally and physically paralysed. But the
agony needed comprehension to exist, and as shock unlocked his flaming joints one by one he thought, ‘I
am the living dead, held upright by force of pain alone.’
He staggered through the portal and tried to shut the wormhole down behind him, unaware that it
was already closing. Thought patterns melted away as quickly as the steel skin on his fingers, face and chest,
and with an odd sense of relief he realised he was on fire. He transformed into his vehicular mode (now
little more than a rust-frame stuffed with gas and glycerine) and accelerated, not realising that his rubber-less
wheels had already left the ground.
The wormhole sealed itself up, but left one last parting message: an explosion that sprang so wide, so
high, that it seemed Cybertron would once again be knocked from orbit.
Over the next few hours, the explosion would fade; they always did. The lightning would cease and
the mists would lift to reveal a pink plain patterned with crushed ash and blast marks. Search teams wrapped
in heat-resistant alloys would prod the gelatinous surface and leave boot marks in the dirt. Detonation
circles would be counted and measured like rings on a tree trunk. The sky would regress in shade from
black to blue to green to yellow, and onlookers would finally see stars.
And at this point a lone figure with limbs like paper and a mouthful of cinders would stagger from a
crater where a temple used to be. His shorthand movements, so soft and small, would leave liquorice rings
in the air, and he would manage only a few awkward steps.
Then he would stop, look up, and smile.
A sad smile; a proud smile.