eugenesis-text

PART TWO
a posteriori
Four million years ago, when the war was progressing from infancy (tantrums, spittle, tears) to
adolescence (lethargy, pessimism, melodrama), there was only one God, and His name was Primus.
Before Creationism, before Epistemological breakaway sects, before Cults of the Meta-realm, before
the Ultimate Warrior, before Little Earthers and clone-cultures and Evopeakers, before Servion and the
Brotherhood, before Combat Disciplines such as Metallikato and Circuit-Su and Crystalocution, before it
all got so confusing, the Laws of Primus were all that mattered. Primus was Everything and Everything was
Primus. Cybertron’s Promised Land was Lonium, a small city-state protected by the Neutrality Agreement,
famous for its Temple of Knowledge and its High Circuitmaster, Boltax.
Following the actions of a young Autobot lieutenant and the founder of the Decepticon movement,
the Temple of Knowledge was razed to the ground. Boltax was killed along with legions of his disciples.
The Autobots had breached the Agreement and Megatron eventually secured the region.
The few remaining disciples fled and secularism swept across the planet. As time passed, faith in a
benign Creator was lost, and Primus, Unicron and the supporting cast (the Last Autobot, the Keeper, the
Pentacore, the Covenant et al) became part of a colourful but deliberately remote folklore. A nut-and-bolt
nihilism diluted Cybertronian culture, until only a handful of old timers like Protomede and Alpha Trion
practised the ascetic way of life described in the Primal Pentateuch. It was these old timers, these ancient
whiskey-priests and god-lovers, who knuckled down and formed the Circuit Sects.
The Great Exodus, when the Cybertronian Empire abandoned the planet, and its aftermath, the
Straxian Holocaust, claimed the lives of many Neutrals, Empties, pacifists and ascetics, and soon only a few
Circuit Sects remained. And while Unicron’s attacks in 1991 and 2006 should have rekindled faith in the
Primal Prophecies and the Omega Point, the existence of ‘Dark Gods’ and ‘Light Gods’ was explained in
scientific terms, in trite tracts and formulas devised, with lab-like detachment, by a new breed of radical
theoscientists.
There were still some areas of doubt, however: the Matrix remained unknowable, the Eugenesis
Code indecipherable.
And no one – no one – dared use the Killswitch.
By 2006, the First Church of the Primal Trinity had become the last Circuit Sect. An architectonic
cult formed after the Great Schism of 3 rd Cycle 198 to prepare for the Second Coming, the First Church
studied the divine revelations of Primon and the Cybertronic Triumvirate: Primus, the Last Autobot and
the Creation Matrix. Optimus Prime himself had called upon them on many occasions, the most recent
being in 1994, when they had helped to interpret apocalyptic premonitions. Since then, the 70 disciples had
settled in a disused temple in Lonium, on the edge of the Acid Wastes. Only now, in late December 2012,
was it beginning to feel like home.
The temple itself was squat and straddled, but it did its best: it tried vainly to smarten and spruce, to
correct its sagging posture. Its pre-Grapplean architecture – fussy and wrinkled, like loosening skin –
trapped more shadows than sun.
Inside, archways met furtively among darkened eves, groping for mutual support. Seven circular
windows ran down the two longest walls and channelled light through spirals of tinted glass. Between each