eugenesis-text

January 12 th 2013.
‘…and one day an Autobot shall rise from our ranks and light our darkest hour.’
Rodimus Prime froze the communicube and walked to the window. He was tired of listening to
Perceptor’s audio-archives. He leaned against the reinforced glass. Although the newly installed pane still
carried the clammy shine of wax and resin, glitter-blue and bounce-back, the Autobot leader of 2013 could
still see the Manganese Mountains.
He picked plexi from the windowsill and gave names to every knuckled peak and slope-line: Podux,
Nelia, Syriak, Voto, Spix, Thelius, and so on, and so forth. The mountain range arced into a notched spine
and ran flat against the horizon before his repository of tags and labels ran dry. The geology of this quadrant
had been deep-trodden into his subconscious after so long living in the old Autobase a few miles west.
At least he knew where he was. As for how he arrived here…
His memories followed a rigid linear order, but he found it difficult to swap or separate. A block of
missing time was bookended by painfully sharp flashbacks. One: the rank and file claustrophobia of a troop
inspection/the airtight handshake of a Decepticon named Doubleheader/the hair-thin grin on the traitor’s
face as a chest plate split wide. Two: blurred contours settling into the outline of a viewing
gallery/Cloudraker pulling a syringe from his forehead/being helped to his feet by Ratchet in an otherwise
deserted medi-vault.
The period in-between was lost to him, maybe forever.
He knew he hadn’t died, and he knew he hadn’t been entirely alive: was there a third state between
the two He tried to fill the blanks, but whenever his mind settled on imagery or metaphor he realised he
was using poetry to describe the unknowable. Even Perceptor’s scientific blitzkrieg, delivered with ravenous
aplomb the moment they’d met, had left him unconvinced. Had he really existed as a thought-form, an
echo-wave defined by outside properties And had all this been the precursor to a gradual lull towards
conceptual zero, towards total absorption into the Matrix And what the hell did any of that mean, anyway
He had no answers, no certainties to cling to, but he felt that it had been the prospect of Matrix
absorption that had kept him alive. Becoming one with the Matrix No. A thousand times no. Anything
but that. He already knew what was inside.
What about the outside world He’d wandered through Delphi and seen fragments of High
Command, cross-sections of Ultra Magnus’ Terran subgroup and a handful of AMC1 patients. He must
have asked himself the question a hundred times before he dared to say it aloud, and a hundred more before
someone answered.
Kup was dead.
Three words. Three words and he wondered why the sun was still in the sky, why Cybertron still
pushed against the soles of his feet, why language still had meaning, why the universe itself acted as if
nothing had happened.
He had shut himself in a room and stared at the walls until dust settled on his optics.
Kup was dead.
Other people were dead, too. But there were lots of other people, and there was only one Kup.
Then came the details. Packed into a shuttle bound for Edeus, the explanation began with one word
– Quintessons – and continued for hours. By touchdown at Novum Kahn he knew everything: the
Alliance, the wormhole, Optimus Prime, Aquaria, Thunderclash, the Inhibitor chips, Metroplex, the
Polyhex Massacre, Death’s Head, the destruction of Autobot City, the fall of Darkmount, the ransacking of
Autobase and AMC1, the new Smelting Pool, the new fortress, the Quintecons. How it happened, when it
happened, to whom it happened. He knew everything except why.
And here he was, an old player in a new game.
He stared at the sun until it was obscured by a passing Autoshuttle. His retinal filters pounced on the
focus shift, swapping solar-burn and flame-haze for his own pencilled portrait, gaunt and stilted, etched with
cartographic detail on the window’s tint and lean. Everyone else said he looked fine. Cloudraker was
pleased with his recovery, Fixit was pleased with the body repairs, Ratchet was pleased with how effortlessly
his body had accepted Matrix reinsertion. Everyone was pleased.
He was metalled and tinctured, physically reborn in a buffed bodyshell made from tendoflex
musculature and tensile adamantium. Yeah, he looked okay from the outside, but what did that prove He
felt he was hiding behind one-way glass, flashing back what the observer expected to see.