eugenesis-text

But why the Eugenesis Wars He wasn’t best placed to answer that, having been absent from much of
the post-war soul-searching. The word itself had come from Ultra Magnus, who had used it to describe the
process by which a group of seemingly unconnected Autobots and Decepticons had given birth to
Quintessons. Perhaps the physical connection between Cybertronian and Quintesson, however
unfathomable, seemed to symbolise the way in which the fate of the two races had, for four weeks, become
intertwined.
‘In Memory of the Autobots Who Died…’
Kup, Centurion, Rad, Mainframe, Ammo, Rewind, Grandslam, Longtooth – he ran his hand over
three columns of names, wondering how so many people could be reduced to imprints in stone. They were
randomly arranged, listed without rank and function, and so Thunderclash shared a column with Emyrissus,
Warpath with Wheelie. Only Rev-Tone and Quark had escaped random separation: their names were sideby-side,
inches above the climbing snow.
He was reluctant to leave so soon after having arrived. A few miles west, Ultra Magnus was
overseeing the final phase of the clean-up operation, but here it was silent; the sound of heavy-duty
machinery was not carried on the thick winter wind. Soon the last fragments of Autobot City would be
ready for transport back to Cybertron, and he was expected on one of the shuttles. Rodimus Prime’s orders
had been explicit: no more contact with Earth. Ever.
He rubbed grit from the scar where his name had been. The old Nightbeat might have shrugged off
Rodimus Prime’s orders, hung around for a few weeks, taken a sabbatical. But he wasn’t the old Nightbeat.
Not anymore.
How did he feel He felt no different. The question and answer were inseparable, he realised, and
they had plagued him since he’d opened his eyes to Ratchet’s smile yesterday. Perhaps he would keep
asking himself the same question without ever being certain whether the response rang true.
His last memory: leaning over Teletran-1’s mixing desks and splicing together a perfect copy of his
personality: every nuance, thought, reaction, emotion and speech fragment. A lifetime had been transferred
into electronic data and stored on a hard disc.
He could only guess what happened next. The disc – along with Muzzle and the cure – had been
placed inside a probe and launched. He’d not had time to choose a location, having to rely on the last set of
co-ordinates in the computer’s memory; lucky for him the probe was sent to the Savage Land, where it had
remained hidden for almost thirty years. And yes of course it was a gamble.
One thing was certain: appearances. It wasn’t the first time he’d been rebuilt, although admittedly the
brain module had never been started from scratch. Thanks to Ratchet and Wheeljack, he looked exactly the
same, right down to the cavity in his chest for the orb. He mirrored his old self in every detail, every edge
and curve. Well, there was one key difference: he looked brand new. A lifetime of wear and tear had been
undone, and he was free to collect another set of scars and war wounds. Otherwise, he was a perfect replica.
A fake.
Fake. The word lingered in his mind. That’s what he was now: an expensive copy, superficially
identical but with false origins. His life had begun with the press of a transfer key in 1984, and his memories
belonged to someone else. The real Nightbeat had died on a slab inside Delphi. He was a Nightbeat 2.0, no
more original that the Optimus who had walked out of a Nebulan laboratory
in 1988.
He had come here to erase his death certificate, to wipe all evidence of his past self and officially
resurrect himself. Looking at the ugly scar where his name had been, where his old life had been, he
wondered if he should have come at all.
He looked at the others that had died, and wished someone, somewhere could have pasted together
discs and crystals for them all. One name held his gaze so tightly he crouched down to its level. Near the
bottom left corner, approached by the soft wave of fresh snow, five letters meant more right now than any
others.
It was not the inhuman efficiency of chiselling Prowl’s name onto a gravestone before he was actually
dead that sickened him, but the fact that Prowl could have been saved. The cure was inside the probe. The
tatty metal plate: wasn’t it obvious Why had no one used Megatron’s tissue sample to rehabilitate
Cybertron’s latest corrodia gravis victim
He knew why: because everyone had been too preoccupied with rebuilding him, Nightbeat, to
consider a piece of cerebral casing found with a hard disc and a bauble. He remembered Ratchet’s smile
fading when he’d asked what had happened to Prowl, and being told of ‘irreversible deterioration’. He