eugenesis-text

He assessed his features and decided that only the optics gave it away. If the texture of his eyes had
been reproduced across the rest of his body, he would have looked pained and ingrained, with skin
splintered at a near-molecular level: a final breath away from rust and breakdown.
He stiffened as High Command shuffled into the room. Ultra Magnus, Perceptor, Mirage, Red Alert,
Ratchet and Siren sat at the conference table, initiated a circle of sideways glances, and waited for their
leader to acknowledge them. Rodimus abandoned the view only when Mirage and Ratchet began chatting;
their conversation stalled as he sank into the only spare seat.
‘I’d like to thank everyone for coming,’ he mumbled, ‘to this, the first meeting in our new Edeus
Autobase. The conversion is complete. Thanks to the efforts of yourselves and your teams, this old asylum
has been successfully…’
‘Redecorated.’
‘Yes Siren, redecorated. All Decepticon corpses were shuttled to Helex for collection.’
‘What about the indeterminate bodies’ asked Ratchet.
‘Where possible, they have been reduced to their core torso.’ The words tasted horrible in Rodimus’
mouth; even the terminology was sickening. Breaking his self-imposed vow, he thought about his earlier
journey Downstairs.
A routine check of the basement level – albeit one frustrated by a padlock, cold-set and motion-frozen, with stateof-the-art
internal clampdown mechanisms and three layers of tenium alloy – had ushered horrors into his head that
would never leave. He remembered descending the stairs with Ultra Magnus and hearing the first sounds – mumbled and
backward, pitched between a scream and a sigh. Their torch beams fell across waves of pink-tint glass, and when the
overheads flashed on, everything became clear.
The Transformers (could you still call them that) were displayed in vertical test tubes, which in turn were
arranged like exhibition pieces among the bleached corridors and black ceilings. Blind with pain, pumped with artificial
light and digital hormones, they scratched the transparencies, chased their own movements and banged their heads against
their wrists.
He remembered hearing someone talk about experiments and gene-splicing, techno-alchemy, cross-fertilisation,
meld theory and something called ‘brute hybrids’. When he dragged his hands from his face and his face away from the
tubes he saw that Magnus was reading from someone’s datalog.
Another room, another set of monstrosities. He saw the half-forms, the works in progress, the bodyfreaks
suspended in sugary preservatives, condemned to decay at half-speed. Some had hands for heads and arms for legs, as if
they had fallen apart and been reassembled at random. Body parts were racked like missiles, tagged and alphabetised,
surrounded by instruments that seemed better suited to carpentry than surgery: hack-saws, hammers, cutters, welders.
There was a pneumatic drill in the corner. Tabletops looked like dressing tables; chemicals, acids and corrosive agents were
arranged like cosmetics - balms, moisturisers, unguents.
He heard smashing glass – Magnus dragging monsters from jars – and stumbled on, hoping for an exit or an
explanation. In the room furthest from the entrance, he found it. Trapped within a rigid scaffold and lit from all sides,
standing twice his height and staring straight ahead, was a hollow exo-suit; a freestanding shell of body armour stitched
together from then dead skin of countless Transformers. A new body, but for who He never wanted to find out.
‘The basement has been filled in with plasto-steel,’ Rodimus said out loud, eager to steer this
thoughts back on track, ‘but the rest of this place was ripe for reformatting. We have retained two cellblocks
for containment purposes, and used materials and equipment stripped from Metroplex’s bodyshell to
convert the other blocks into science labs, storage bays, Autoshuttle hangars
and workshops.’
‘And Metroplex himself’ asked Ultra Magnus, ‘How has he coped with the transplant’
Rodimus flipped a keypad on the tabletop. ‘Let’s ask him, shall we’ The main screen flickered into
life and clouds of pixels became Metroplex’s head. ‘How does it feel being the heart of another Autobase’
‘Wonderful, commander.’ Many present had never heard Metroplex speak, and did not know that his
old, thunderous baritone had been toned down. He sounded calm and relaxed. ‘I am humbled by the time
and energy expended in bringing me back on-line. Chief Engineer Wheeljack has excelled himself.’
‘Wheeljack used remote cerebral networking to connect Metroplex to every keyboard and electrobar
in this base,’ explained Rodimus, holding up his right hand. ‘Show us what you can do, Metroplex.’
On the runway outside, an anti-aircraft gun targeted the command room’s rectangular window and
drew circles on Rodimus’ palm.
‘Very impressive,’ said Red Alert. ‘It’ll certainly make my job a lot easier.’