#byode

"An eight!" played Spike's car and best friend, Goldbug.

"Two eights," played Sparkplug, who wasn't a Transformer, but was in fact Spike's real human dad.

"Cheat," said Prowl.

"Prowl," said Optimus Prime, impassive behind his faceplate, "are you using discrete probability theory to call our bluffs? I think that kind of higher-level reasoning goes against the spirit of the rules."

"I don't understand, Prime," replied Prowl. "How else are we supposed to tell whether the other players are lying? You can't tell me I'm playing unfairly, the game is literally called 'Cheat'. I don't see how it's not in the spirit of the game."

"Well, I think there's cheating, and then there's cheating."

Prowl turned to Spike, and observed that the discard pile had suspiciously grown by seven cards while he wasn't looking. "I'm sorry, Spike, but I just don't get it. Lying goes against everything the Autobots stand for. Did a Decepticon invent this game?"

At that moment, accompanied by the sound of stomping and rustling, Brawn returned, carrying several trees in his arms. "Got more of those fuel sticks you wanted."

"Brawn!" Sparkplug cried out. "Did you pull those trees out of the ground?!"

"Yep! You bet!" grinned Brawn, dumping them in a heap with a crash and flexing his servos. "They put up a good fight, but nobody's stronger than Brawn! Ha ha ha!"

"Is something wrong, Sparkplug?" asked Optimus Prime, concern in his voice. "I thought we needed more wood for the fire."

"Well, yeah…" Sparkplug was at a loss. "What I meant was fallen sticks and branches—dead wood, not living!"

"You mean those trees are alive?!" Hound exclaimed. "Oh, Brawn, what have you done? They're Earthlings, too!"

"Pretty stupid Earthlings," grumbled Brawn. "If they didn't want me pulling them up, they shoulda said something!"

Optimus Prime knelt before the heap. "On behalf of myself and my fellow Autobots, I apologize," he intoned. "Brawn, please return these trees to their homes."

Brawn gathered up the leafy logs in his steel arms and stomped off.

Turning to Spike, Goldbug remarked: "Back on Cybertron, we don't have trees exactly. But we do have forests. They're made up of giant conduits, which draw Energon up from the AllSpark at the planet's core."

Spike nodded. "Well, trees are the same! They use their roots to suck up water from the soil."

"And then," Spike's father added, "they use the sun's heat to create energy. It's called photosynthesis. When we burn wood, the energy is released as fire."

"How fascinating," said Wheeljack, gazing up at the canopy. "A living fuel source."

"Not just fuel," Sparkplug continued. "We use wood to make everything, from the roofs of our houses, to the paper of these very cards in my hand." He waved them for emphasis.

"A valuable and versatile resource indeed," Prime agreed.

"Right, and trees take hundreds and hundreds of years to grow. That's why we only take what we need. Y'know what, we should use the next twenty minutes or so to make sure everyone understands how to have a campfire safely and responsibly."

At that moment, a small, brown rabbit bounded into the clearing, skidded around the campfire, and disappeared.

"Whoa there!" Goldbug frowned, a change in expression perceptible only as a miniscule repositioning of his faceplate. "Where's that little guy off to in such a hurry?"

A squirrel shot past like a furry bullet.

"Oh, no," groaned Sparkplug. "I hope Brawn isn't interfering with nature any more." A deer careened into their midst, prey eyes taking in the bizarre creatures surrounding it on all sides, and bleated unhappily before scarpering. The ground was shaking. "This is a National Park! It's protected land! You can't just go around digging up trees!"

With a crash, Brawn emerged from the bushes. "It's the Decepticons!" he cried. "They're digging up trees!"

The lush green of the forest was broken by the noxious lime of the Decepticon construction vehicles, the shovels and scoops and blades of the Constructicons Scrapper, Scavenger and Bonecrusher tearing through roots and toppling the trunks attached, to be caught by Hook and Mixmaster, piled into Long Haul's bed. Smoke billowed into the air, sunlight yielding to the tremulous glow of a wildfire being kindled. Soundwave extruded empty cubes from his empty chest, to be filled with the Energon trickling from the "out" end of the Decepticons' woodchipper. Each a single cog in a machine whirring, an organism feeding. Underfoot, fluffy woodland creatures scurried, able only to flee for their lives—but where to?

"This is too easy," said the oversized microcassette Rumble, using his piledrivers to knock over an evergreen. "Don't these trees know how to rumble?"

"Yeah. They're all bark and no bite," said Flamewar, the Decepticon motorbike, using her power to burn the leaves from the branches. The fire licked the wood and turned it to charcoal, readying the timber for digestion. "When are the Auto-bums going to show up and make things interesting?"

"I'm starting to think our glorious leader wants an army of treehuggers!" Starscream complained, arms wrapped around a fir.

"Silence, you airheaded airplane!" ordered Megatron, supreme commander of the Decepticons. Fire glinted across his optics. "My discovery of Earth's biofuel changes everything. With this renewable energy source, I can tap into the very land itself—producing clean, green Energon!"

"Most conscientious, mighty Megatron," Starscream sneered.

The sound of engines rumbled through the trees. "Autobots!" boomed Cyclonus.

A semi truck plowed out from the undergrowth, followed by a small traffic jam. Taking turns, they converted to robot form.

"Megatron—stop your operation at once!" commanded Optimus Prime, pointing a finger. "This National Park is under Autobot protection."

But Megatron only chuckled deeply, and pointed his fusion cannon right back. "Decepticons—reduce them to ash!"

The battle began. Orange laser fire traded with purple. Steel fists swung. Bodies flew hither and thither. The sound was that of a car that crashed and kept crashing. And yet, this was a mere playground scuffle—a squabble between children, whose muscles were still weak, whose bones still bent instead of breaking, whose teeth would yet be replaced with new ones, stronger ones.

"Care about these trees so much? Here, you can have this one!" Starscream flung his log at Hound, hitting the Autobot directly in the face.

Brawn suplexed a helpless Soundwave. "I think it's time for you to leaf!" he said, throwing the Decepticon up into the branches.

Hook's hook lassoed around Prowl's legs just as Bonecrusher delivered a bone-crushing haymaker. "Timber!" said Hook, as the robo-cop flailed his arms and toppled over.

Flamewar menaced Spike, who had secretly hitched a ride in Hound and was now running aimlessly around the battlefield. She giggled, warming up. "I'm gonna turn you into a human s'more!" Then a laser zapped past her head and she dove to cover, as Goldbug rushed in to scoop up the boy.

Megatron was attempting to rip off Optimus Prime's head.

All these were merely things that happened, devoid of strategy or direction or sequentiality. Freak occurrences, impossible to predict, impossible to keep track of in the melee. And, as Wheeljack finally conked Rumble and Frenzy's heads together, he bore witness to the greatest discontinuity yet: a snap of ball lightning, a sphere of blue energy taller than he was, crackling and frothing into existence. To Wheeljack's optics, it was glare on a lens, a visual artifact. A feeling of static washed over his entire body. Then, only an afterimage remained.

At the center of the blot in Wheeljack's vision, a figure coalesced, hunched over on one knee, as though prostrating itself before some unseen ruler. It stood, with mechanical precision, unfolding. With a creeping horror, Wheeljack saw that it had some kind of endoskeleton. And, as more of the red armor pulled away, Wheeljack realized that the face of the robot beneath was none other than his own.

They stared at each other. In the background, forgotten, Goldbug goaded Scrapper like a toreador, stepping to the side just as the digger was about to gore him.

"'Ello there," said the stranger in a thick, unconvincing, nonspecifically European accent, ears shining. "Eet's me, your future self, ahh…" He squinted, eyes dimming. "Slicer?"

"Who's Slicer?" asked Wheeljack. "I'm Wheeljack."

The newcomer coughed and spluttered behind his mask. Vocal processor rebooted, he continued: "Of course, ah… that mustn't have happened yet. I— by which I mean, you— that is to say, we change our name to Slicer. In the future. My past."

Wheeljack crossed his arms. "If you're me from the future, tell me something that only we would know."

"Oh, Wheeljack, Wheeljack," stalled Slicer. "Wheeljack. There are so many things that only we know. Nobody quite matches our genius, do they? Only we could know how to create the Dinobots. Only we could know… how to unlock the secrets of time travel."

"You mean it's really possible?" Wheeljack asked, unable to contain his excitement. At that moment, Blitzwing and the Decepticon Seekers strafed past, raining laser fire on the combatants below. The trees were catching alight. Wheeljack ducked, covering his head, but stayed fixated on his double, even as the battle raged around them. "How do we do it?"

"It's easy," replied Slicer, scanning the battlefield. His gaze settled on the woodchipper, in the eye of the storm, and the pile of Energon cubes next to it. Absentmindedly, the exo-suit rose to its full height. "Here, let me show you. We just need a distraction."

As if on cue, a sonic boom stripped the leaves from nearby branches. For a split cycle, Wheeljack thought Thundercracker had taken to the battlefield, but the jet that passed above was a sinister red and black, with VTOL engines—was it Thrust? It made a sound like a flying vacuum cleaner on the verge of exploding as it came in to land. Wheeljack yelled to his comrades: "Look out! More Seekers!"

"What?" said the newcomer, in a voice that was clearly neither Thundercracker's nor Thrust's, shouting over the din of herself and the battle. "I'm not a— oh, never mind— everyone, listen to me! Our planes are in danger!"

"That's just what a Seeker would say!" Slicer retorted. "Keep shooting, lads, she's saying their air force is vulnerable!"

The force of the jet's engines suddenly magnified, supernaturally so, a cyclone strong enough to knock the steel giants to the ground. Flying above, unaffected, Starscream distantly cried: "Megatron is incapacitated! I now lead the Decepticons!"

The jet changed modes, wings furling like those of an angel, high-heeled boots touching down, head rising up into place, a porcelain face of anguish framed by a golden crest, and she spoke: "This fighting needs to stop! There is an army on its way."

"I will crush any Autobot army!" growled Megatron, back on his feet. A purple light began to burn in the barrel of his fusion cannon.

"Listen! It's not the Autobots. I'm talking about something beyond good, beyond evil, beyond your wildest imagination. It threatens every world. It will take away everything you hold dear and twist it into something worse."

Megatron clenched his fist. "Fool! There is nothing in the universe my Decepticons cannot destroy."

"Well, it's not from this universe. It's on its way. It might already be here."

Optimus Prime spoke up. "Megatron… we cannot allow such a warning to go unheeded. If what this stranger says is true, we must put aside our differences and work together to stop it."

But Megatron only cackled. "You and me, Prime? Why, your circuits must be malfunctioning. I would sooner rust and die than—"

"Lord Megatron," interrupted Soundwave. "I am receiving a transmission from Cybertron. The planet is under attack."

"Who dares?" Every piece of the Decepticon commander's chassis trembled with fury. "Cybertron is mine. Decepticons, to the space bridge!"

He raised his fists, punching the air, and flew into the sky like a piece of garbage. His Decepticons followed him, birds, planes, and giant metal robots.

The newcomer watched them go, quiet anger in her eyes. "We need them," she said.

Optimus Prime didn't hesitate a moment. "Autobots, put out the fires before they spread."

"At least the forest is safe, and we got the Energon," remarked Wheeljack, looking over, only to see Slicer preparing to feed the last of the Energon cubes into the exo-suit. "Now hold on an astro-tick!" he cried. "What on Earth do you think you're doing, me?!"

Slicer was stealing all the Energon, of course.

In every universe he'd ever visited, it was always the same story: Autobots versus Decepticons, wrestling for power. To their simple brains, this war was a conflict of epic proportions, spanning millions of years and light-years alike, the fate of everyone hanging in the balance. What they failed to comprehend—what only he had observed—was that which side was good, and which was bad, was not only a matter of perspective, but a physical property of any given world, one no less random than the background radiation of the cosmos. In some worlds, he was called Wheeljack, in others, Slicer. Good, bad. Wheeljack had been so, so good at being bad.

It was true that Wheeljack had cracked the secret of time travel—or at least, he was pretty sure that he could work it out, only questions of implementation remained. The real reason he'd given up on the technology was the realization that, no matter how wildly the timelines varied… some things were just part of life. Dullards like Optimus Prime would always be there to ridicule his work. Brutes like Megatron would be there to tear it apart. Neither could ever understand the point of it: to determine the laws of physics, which regulated their existences, and break every single last one of them.

For far too long, Wheeljack had been trapped by forces beyond his ken (at least for the time being) in some backwater, dead-end universe, a halfhearted imitation of the one he'd called home. He'd watched the war between the Autobots and Decepticons break out, again. Over time, he'd even let himself get close to some of them. Then she'd returned, with warnings of an army—warnings which turned out to be absolutely true. Of course, she left everyone to die, but after she left, the door behind her remained open… just a crack. Wheeljack dug out his old stellar spanner, capable of bridging the stars, and crafted an exo-suit for himself, a dead Decepticon's armor plating serving to protect his own body from the divine forces he would need to endure. He put his foot—or more precisely, some dead bot's foot—in the door.

Whatever barrier had cut off the many worlds, it was now crumbling—which meant Wheeljack was finally free. Or would be, if his multiversal knockoff would just quit meddling!

"Butt out, clod!" said Wheeljack-slash-Slicer, as the native Wheeljack threw himself at his doppelganger. "Why you— unghf!"

"Stop fighting! This is a waste of time!" yelled the jet, but Slicer just laughed.

"Listen, toots, if it wasn't for your wacko mutant Spark, my stellar spanner would still be about as useful as a microwave oven with a lead-lined interior. So you've got my gratitude." On his forearms, red Energon crystallized into place, manifesting a pair of blasters—but at such short range the angle was all wrong, so he decided to grab the barrel of one and use it to clobber his lookalike. "But here's the thing…" he continued, blasting the other Autobot in the chest for good measure. How he hated mirror universes. "I know a lost cause when I see it. I've seen what these crimes against technology can do. You couldn't stop them then, and you won't stop them now. You're all scrap metal." He stepped backwards, and the exo-suit clasped shut around him. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna get as far away from here as possible. See ya, suckers!!!" he whooped. Then he exploded into ball lightning.

In his wake, he left a blackened perfect circle of scorched grass, with a burnt line running through its middle.

"Who was that?" Spike wondered.

"My future self…" Wheeljack groaned. "I can't believe it. I'm… evil!"

"Never mind that," grumbled Prowl. "Who is she?"

"My name is Windblade," said the jet, "and I'm your only hope of survival."

On this tarnished world of metal, smog lubricated the atmosphere. The ground, made from tesselating plates, clanked and thrummed. Streams of molten slag cut through landscapes made from still bodies. Sickly light filtered up from the lower layers, the spheres within spheres, obscured by knifelike spars and tangled cable. Bridges spanned between biomes. Spires rotated and unfolded. Quicksilver oceans churned. Atop one tower, panels opened like petals of a poisonous flower in bloom, and welcomed a ray of light.

"Report, Shockwave," barked Megatron, as he exited the space bridge, his soldiers following in step. A token force had been left behind to defend the Earth side, led by Soundwave. The rest were answering Shockwave's call.

The cyclopean vizier of Cybertron did not blink. "We appear to be under attack by a large, extradimensional, techno-organic, arboreal entity, Lord Megatron," he intoned.

"What?!" roared Megatron. Shockwave, having known the Decepticon leader for millenia, was able to distinguish this not as a cry of indignation, but of incomprehension.

"We're being attacked by a tree," he put it bluntly. "Take a look for yourself."

Megatron looked over to the monitor. The landscape it displayed was unmistakably Cybertronian, but Megatron knew Cybertron's sky, he had spent millenia looking at that sky, through thin atmosphere, black pitch glistening with millions of stars, trillions of worlds to conquer. Yet the sky in the monitor was red, and in place of stars there was something else: burning holes, portals, seams winking open, tapering above and below as cables forced their way in. Branches craning towards light, roots burrowing towards sustenance, pale seeds spilling onto the highways. Megatron remembered buried rustworms on the seashore, their subterranean existence observed only through the second-order effect of the processed metal that corkscrewed up to the surface in their wake. Megatron remembered dreaming of looking up at some primitive planet from his command tower, alien weaklings craning their necks up at him in turn, imagining that he could interpret their foreign features to taste the awe and fear they felt as his warworld assumed its position in their sky. And as Megatron gazed through that digital window, even as his Seeker squadrons were decimated, he saw that destiny of his made manifest—if only he could bend it to his will.

The invading troops that burst from the titanic tree's seeds, however, impressed him less. Sleek, elegant, precise war machines had been defiled by the addition of ivory teeth and armor plating, useless red sinew. This marriage of the technological to the organic repulsed and unsettled Megatron in equal measure. Small in size—like those worthless humans, come to think of it—the alien legions were easily crushed underfoot. "Tell me about these abominations," Megatron commanded.

"Their origins and goals are unknown at this time. They are powered by a fuel with unknown properties—some kind of dark Energon."

"Your concern is appreciated, Shockwave, but misplaced. These freaks of nature pose no threat."

"My lord, our battalions are being torn apart—"

"That is because they are without a competent leader. I am reassuming command here on Cybertron." Megatron swept an arm towards the space bridge. "Cyclonus, take the others back to Earth with you and await my return. Do not allow our enemy to seize any advantage," he ordered, starting towards the door, as Shockwave watched him go impassively. "Dark Energon, you say?" His lips rattled as he let out a chuckle. "I should like to sample it for myself."

"I still don't understand," said Brawn. "Most of the Decepticon planes can walk. What makes you so special?"

"For the last time, it's planeswalker. All one word. As in, I come from another plane."

"Why, maybe she's trying to say 'planet'," drawled Ironhide, trying his best to be helpful.

"No, plane! As in a different plane of existence!"

"Wait, I think I've heard about this at MIT!" said Spike's best human friend, fifteen-year-old university student Carly. "It's the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics…"

Wheeljack nodded. "You know, I'm something of a mechanic myself."

Carly rolled her eyes. "Not that kind of mechanic, Wheeljack!" She put her hands on her hips. "The many-worlds interpretation states that there are an infinite number of universes that exist in parallel to ours. It's possible that Windblade has traveled from one of those worlds to ours!"

"Gee, Carly, you sure are smart, huh?" said Spike, not being sarcastic. He gazed at her with stars in his eyes.

"She certainly is," agreed Windblade. "That's exactly right, little lady. There are countless planes of existence—most people go their whole lives without ever learning of them. I'm different. I have something called a Spark."

The Autobots all exchanged glances. Hot Rod gave an easygoing shrug. "Who doesn't?"

"No, what I'm saying is, I'm not like other Cybertronians," said Windblade. "I was born on a colony planet—Caminus—but it was after I traveled to Earth that my Spark ignited."

"It what?" cried Ratchet, the Autobots' medic. "How are you still alive?!"

"My planeswalker's Spark!" Windblade stammered. "I— look, I don't really know what it is or how it works. It's magic, so I gather."

"I understand that you have come to deliver a warning," said Optimus Prime, silencing the uproar of the Autobots.

"Yes. Thank you, Optimus." Windblade folded her arms. "They come from a machine world—like Cybertron, if Cybertron was the worst hell imaginable. Its name is Phyrexia, and its inhabitants are some of the most evil and insidious beings in the multiverse. They want to make everyone like them, make every plane into another Phyrexia. Until recently, they were trapped on their world… but now their leader, Elesh Norn, has found a way to invade other planes, and Phyrexia is spreading. They defile everything in their path, and by the sounds of it, they've arrived on Cybertron already. From their initial vector of infection, they'll be looking for a way to spread across the galaxy."

"You mean like… the Decepticons' space bridge?" Jetfire realized. "Then we've got to destroy it!"

"The Decepticons refused to cooperate with us," said Prowl. "They won't let it go without a fight."

Windblade nodded. "It might already be too late for Cybertron. But if we don't take that space bridge offline, Earth will be next. We need to delay the Phyrexian invasion long enough to find a way to stop them—once and for all."

"How are we gonna do that?" asked Spike.

She hesitated. "I— I don't know. I'm not even sure it's possible. I came here hoping to find something that might." Her gaze settled on Optimus Prime, who nodded in understanding.

"The Autobot Matrix of Leadership," he intoned. The windows on his chest flashed as he moved. "I refuse to accept that our home is doomed. If this is indeed Cybertron's darkest hour… perhaps the Matrix can light the way. Autobots… convert and roll out!"

Like two cogs both driven counterclockwise, grinding their teeth, the Decepticons and the interdimensional invaders ripped each other to shreds.

Marshaling the Decepticon ground forces was "Obliterator" Clench, who turned into a truck and therefore reminded Megatron altogether too much of his most hated nemesis. Clench was manning a multi-purpose battle station, with a little readout superimposing useless statistics on the army he was at that moment at the very rear of. Almost as an afterthought, a pair of cannons sputtered at nothing.

"Ah, Lord Megatron…" Clench began, upon seeing the leader of the Decepticons approaching. Megatron had the barrel of his turret trained directly on Clench, who was doing a poor job of concealing his fright. "We've rallied all the Decepticons on this side of the planet and are holding the line. But these… things… Megatron, I've never faced organics like these."

"You cower before these half-breeds?" rumbled Megatron.

"Well, ah, no, I didn't say that—"

At that moment, a Seeker landed at Clench's side, reporting in. Oil was leaking from his optics, one hand absentmindedly wiping them, to no relief. "Fearsome Obliterator, forgive me… half my fighters have been shot down or eaten. It's… futile. We must—" The pathetic flier's gaze half-focused on Megatron, much too late. "We— I—"

"Clench, you are an embarrassment," said Megatron. His turret swiveled to face the enemy, and his treads trundled to follow. The bulk of their forces consisted of soldiers smaller in stature than puny Micromasters, but inexplicably their numbers counted no small number of Cybertronians, turning on their own brethren. Somehow, they were converting his Decepticons into more fodder, their forms twisted and sharpened, their optics pitch black. Clench's cowardly defensive strategy was playing directly into their hands, that much was patently obvious: the longer this fight went on, the more of his troops would be turned to their side. No, this infestation needed to be expelled, by force, with a swift counterattack. The technorganic tendrils bearing these aliens down from the heavens must lead somewhere. "Fight back, Decepticons!" roared Megatron, switching to robot form. "Rise up! With me—I am the tip of the spear!"

A passing Astrotrain chugged and chooed and chewed abominations under his wheels, and Megatron sprinted alongside him, before leaping up atop the triple-changer's caboose. CHOOM! CHOOM! He blasted his fusion cannon into the teeming hoard, carving a track for Astrotrain to follow, and yet the mass of bodies pressed in ever closer. "There's too many of them, my lord!" warned Astrotrain. "Hang on! This train is leaving the station!" His wings unfurled, and he did a barrel roll, boosters flaring, lifting them above the crowd of eyeless heads. As the roof Megatron stood on rotated out from under him, he didn't bother finding a handhold, instead letting himself fall with a snarl. What a coward! Like a hammer striking an anvil, his feet hit the plain, the force of the impact sending the nearest monsters flying. He flailed his mace, a cyclone of death.

His Decepticons reveled in the mayhem alongside him. Skullcruncher gobbled up the tiny soldiers by the score, most pleased to discover that on average they contained more skulls than organics usually did. Sixshot was a living maelstrom, at one moment bombarding the prehensile anchors in tank mode, at the next ripping through them as a wolf. Upon seeing Megatron, the six-changer called out, "Wield me, my lord!" and converted to his massive six-shooter mode. Megatron took the other Decepticon in his hands and dispensed death, glorious death, until he grew bored and discarded the weapon, which turned into a racecar and plowed through the mob.

The oil of his enemies lubricated his joints, and he moved without resistance, even surrounded on all sides. Inarticulate cries alerted Megatron to a nearby Decepticon trapped inside the ribcage of a hulking, rampaging monster, being waterboarded with oil, or oilboarded. Megatron blasted the monster and put the poor sap out of his misery. Weakling, thought Megatron.

A thundering reptilian cyborg charged him down, and he punched it in the throat, firing his fusion cannon at the same time. Up to his elbow joint in gore, he ripped off the creature's head and used it to bludgeon a gaggle of ceramic soldiers to death. The fusion cannon on his arm fired again, straight between the teeth of the decapitated skull, the pink beam that spat forth turning a creature with seven bat wings and a barbed stinger into a creature with zero bat wings and nothing else.

"More!" screamed Megatron, because he knew this enemy would oblige. A gargantuan segmented tendril whipped down, its tripartite anchor gouging deep furrows in the ground, and bodies poured down it from a hole in the sky. He threw himself onto the tendril, his teeth sinking into the metal surface to gnaw out a handhold. The aliens were giving him a wide berth now, recognising the threat he posed, instead overrunning his troops, isolating them, overpowering them. He was impressed by the horde's coordination. He envied it. How many millenia had he wasted, putting down one insurrection after another? How many of his plans had been ruined because some goon or another failed to follow simple instructions, dared to disregard his orders? He should have killed Starscream a long, long time ago—no, better to make him bend the knee, serve forevermore as an extension of his master's will. Looking out over this battlefield, at this war machine, Megatron saw it all so clearly. One gear, driving the rest. After all, why should the left hand fight the right hand? Megatron needed no hands at all, only a flail covered with barbs, flicking out and embedding itself in a joint so that he might hoist himself up by its chain. He climbed and killed and climbed and killed some more until the hole in the sky was all he could see, filling his vision with red light.

He peered through it and beheld the world on the other side. It was beautiful.

Megatron turned around.

The Autobot convoy rolled in. Those whose tyres were unsuited for the terrain unloaded themselves from Ultra Magnus's car transporter mode. The current site of the space bridge had been successfully triangulated—it had been moved from its last known location, in a dusty, beige, rocky area, to a new area that was equally dusty, beige and rocky, which by all appearances could have been located a five minute's drive away from the Autobots' own base. For Windblade and Jetfire, it had in fact been a five minute's flight; they'd spent some time carrying out tests on Windblade's unique Spark, delaying their departure until much later, so as to synchronize their arrival with the other, slower Autobots.

The fight commenced. Purple laser fire traded with orange. Metal legs kicked. Bodies flew thither and hither. The sound was that of a multi-car pileup that kept piling up. The Constructicons combined to form Devastator, and just as the giant super-robot was about to stamp on Optimus Prime, he switched back to truck mode, causing his trailer to materialize out of nowhere just under Devastator's foot like a child's toy left out on the bedroom floor for an unsuspecting parent to step on in the middle of the night—Devastator pratfell into a heap of construction vehicles. Soundwave ejected a small menagerie and by the time the battle was over half of them were lying about; Rumble was desperately trying to pull his guts back inside his body, his fingers pressed into the holes in his torso, slowly spooling the magnetic tape back up while Soundwave played unfitting music.

"We need to borrow your space bridge," said Optimus Prime.

"Borrow this," said Flamewar, before making a very rude gesture.

"We'll never let you pass," Starscream sneered. Windblade landed in front of him, sword in hand, and placed the tip of it to his neck. "Well, maybe just this once."

"No," Soundwave refused. All optics turned to him. Clamped between his fingertips was a beige shirt, inside which struggled Spike Witwicky.

"Spike!" cried Arcee, forgetting entirely about the ninja-like headlock she had Blitzwing trapped in to clasp her hands to her face in worry. "I thought we left you back at the base!"

"Let go of me, you low-life hi-fi!" yelled Spike, who had secretly hitched a ride in Jazz and was now flailing his limbs in a futile attempt to extricate himself from Soundwave's vice grip.

Soundwave ignored them. "You will not interfere with Decepticon activities. Withdraw, or I will crush the human."

"This is not just a Decepticon affair, Soundwave," argued Optimus Prime. "Our very home is under threat."

"I serve Megatron. Unless new orders arrive from Cybertron, I will not negotiate with Autobots." As Soundwave spoke, a light began to flash on his shoulder, emitting a tone.

"Uh, you gonna get that?" asked Jazz, gesturing at the blinking light.

"Skywarp, hold this," said Soundwave. Skywarp teleported over and carefully cupped Spike in his hands like a spider he wanted to throw out of a window. Soundwave walked over to the space bridge and changed into tape deck mode, plugging himself into a monitor.

The expressionless face of Shockwave appeared, squashed inside the tiny screen's frame. "I have new orders from Cybertron," he intoned. The display changed to a new feed, fuzzy footage from an aerial camera over a battlefield. It zoomed in on what appeared to be Megatron, wearing a dinosaur. "Our leader has been compromised," explained Shockwave. In the livestream, Megatron blasted one of the Decepticon soldiers, before clubbing another with his flail. "As you can see, the change in his behavior is not immediately apparent, but he is covered in spikes and I have calculated that he is maiming his fellow Decepticons twenty-three percent more frequently than usual. This confirms that he is under the influence of the substance provisionally named 'Dark Energon'." The feed switched back to Shockwave. "Lord Megatron is indisposed. The chain of command passes to me. Return to Cybertron at once."

"Let us help, Shockwave," pleaded Optimus Prime.

The image on the screen may as well have been a still frame. "Under the circumstances, an alliance is logical," agreed Shockwave, and that was that.

Skywarp teleported away, leaving Spike momentarily suspended in midair like a cartoon character before he fell several feet to the ground, landing in a heap but uninjured. Arcee rushed over to help him up. "I'm fine, I'm fine," the boy said. "I'm coming with you."

"I'm afraid I can't allow that, Spike," Prime said. "Goldbug—stay here and watch over our young friend."

"You got it, big bot." Goldbug gave a salute, then switched modes, his car door beckoning.

"Everyone else… let's save our home."

"Cybertron is lost," said Shockwave flatly. "Our forces were scattered and low on Energon. The invasion is planetwide and continuous. While our numbers diminish, theirs only grow. A cure to their foreign pathogen is the only means by which to prevent total extinction. I have begun analysis of the Dark Energon and will soon be able to synthesize a counteragent."

The booms of cannons reverberated through the lavender-hued walls.

"Well, in the meantime… we should retreat to Earth, and destroy the space bridge behind us!" Starscream suggested.

"No, Starscream." Optimus Prime shook his head. "The only way to guarantee the destruction of Cybertron's space bridge is for one of us to stay behind. If there was no other choice, I would do so myself… but there are countless Cybertronians still trapped on the planet, both Autobot and Decepticon, fighting for their lives. I will not abandon our brothers and sisters. If this Dark Energon is as contagious as it seems, then we must save as many as we can… then, Cybertron must be placed under quarantine."

"This chatter is irrelevant," said Shockwave. "Only my laboratory has the equipment I require. You will stay here and defend this facility until I have completed my work."

"If I may, Shockwave…" One of the Constructicons, Hook, craned his neck to speak over the group. "We have architected a new form for this building, which will render it impregnable to a ground assault, and all but assure our victory," he boasted.

His teammate Scrapper elaborated. "The foundation is ready, and the finishing touches won't take long. All we need is the Energon to power it—that is, if the usual rationing could be waived."

"Our considerable losses will significantly reduce the strain on our resources going forward," mused Shockwave. "Your work is approved. All of our reserves are at your disposal. Make whatever modifications you see fit to forestall our adversary."

Wheeljack walked over to the Constructicons. "Can I take a look at your schematics?"

Hook smirked. "Be our guest." They huddled together to review the blueprints. As Wheeljack hummed and hawed, Hook continued: "Your inferior Autobot designs could never improve upon Constructicon architecture."

"Pal, I could improve your city planning with six words." He lowered his voice to a stage whisper. "Make it a…"

Simultaneously, Prime addressed Shockwave once more, urgency in his tone. "There's another way. Your synthetic counteragent is not our only hope," he said. "There is a chance, however remote, that the Matrix of Leadership will be able to save our world."

"I will not risk my survival on irrational Autobot superstitions," said Shockwave.

"Hey!" Brawn shook a fist. "I'll give you a thrashin'-al Autobot super-hittin' if you don't watch your mouth!" The diminutive bot squared up to Shockwave, but found that when he did so, his view of Shockwave's head was blocked entirely by Shockwave's enormous hexagonal chest. After taking a couple of steps back, Brawn squinted. "Do you even have a mouth?"

Frenzy stepped between them. "Watch it, Range Rover. Shouldn't you be picking up the kids from soccer practice?"

"Why, you—"

Shockwave ignored the commotion. "My scientific method is the only logical solution, Prime."

"Be that as it may…" Optimus Prime folded his arms, and turned to the monitors. "Where is Megatron, at this present moment?" There was no sign of the Decepticon leader.

Soundwave pressed a button, and the feeds began to roll back. Once he found what he was looking for, he froze the footage. "Megatron has entered a subterranean access shaft. Destination, unknown. Current whereabouts, unknown."

"Then he's not coming here," Prime realized. "He's heading to the core. And that is where I must go, too."

"The core… what's down there?" asked Windblade.

"The AllSpark," answered Prime. "The only thing keeping Cybertron alive. The Matrix came from it, once… as did each and every one of us. Even Megatron would never be so rash as to disturb the AllSpark… but I fear this is not the Megatron I knew. Ultra Magnus, you will lead the Autobots while I'm gone."

"Yes, Prime," Magnus saluted sharply. "I'll try to do whatever you would do, in response to the situation."

"Do what you think is right, old friend. Jetfire, Wheeljack, help Shockwave in his work."

"I'm an engineer, not a chemist!" complained Wheeljack. "Sure, as the Constructicons will tell ya, I turn lead to pure gold. That's figuratively. Start asking me about hydrocarbons and all I can say is—put it in your engine and see if it goes."

Mixmaster grunted acknowledgement. "Wheeljack has furnished us with an impressive new targeting algorithm, but his proposed upgrades for our fuel system were pure hackery. No, chemistry is an art—I myself am keen to study this Dark Energon, but my Constructicon comrades have need of my talents for now."

"I require no assistance," said Shockwave matter-of-factly, before glancing down at his cannon arm. "However, I suppose an extra pair of hands might have its uses."

Jetfire looked around for help, and found no-one. "So that's me, then? Gee." He made a clawlike gesture. "I get to be a walking clamp-stand."

Hot Rod stepped forward, pointing at his own chest, with its fiery pattern. His eyes blazed. "Optimus, I'm going with you!"

Arcee put herself forward as well, glancing at Hot Rod. "And me." For a moment, Hot Rod looked like he was about to protest—but he said nothing.

A sharp clang caught everyone's attention; Flamewar had hopped down from the console she was perched on, Energon bow slung over her shoulder. "Scrap if I'm sitting around here with my thumb up my tailpipe. If tall, pink, and deadly gets to tag along, so do I."

"My work here is done," said Wheeljack, nodding at the Constructicons with a glint in his ears. "If I'm going to die, I'd at least like to see the AllSpark with my own optics first."

"I too shall join you," said Cyclonus. "I wish to cleanse our homeworld of this repugnant foreign scourge—"

"—Alright, that's enough," Prime said. "Too many, and it'll only slow us down."

Shockwave gestured down a passageway. "There is a secret tunnel that will allow you to leave undetected. Rumble, Frenzy—collapse it behind them. Constructicons, begin your fortifications."

"Let's roll," said Prime. "Shockwave, I wish you the best of luck with your experiments."

"Luck is a fictitious concept," replied Shockwave. "Given enough time, the probability of my success approaches certainty."

On Earth, the water cycle sees molecules evaporate from the surface of the ocean, floating up into the atmosphere, traveling inland, where they condense into clouds and fall as rain, forming streams and lakes and rivers and eventually returning to the ocean: full circle. And the water is drawn by the roots of trees up to their leaves, or lapped at by the deer at the brook, or mixed with powder in a bottle and downed, or is sprayed over the windshields of cars, or forced through hydraulics, and in this way all living things on Earth are connected.

Cybertron has a similar mechanism: the Energon cycle. Energon—at once conductive and fissive. Iron dissolves into it as it pumps through the yawning, howling arteries of the planet, stinking impurities in the molecular composition nucleating it into a cubic crystalline structure, forming deposits at the outlets which are broken down by the masticores into fragments, the grains picked and pecked at by corvicons, scattered as powdered glass back over the plains, kicked into roaring Energon storms, superheated and blown into molten droplets: mechanical meteorology.

From the first drop of oil diluted in the Energon, the idea spread like wildfire—viral, malignant. Old hinges creaked as new ligaments tugged at the joints. Hexagonal plateaus began to rise and fall, separated out according to form and function: fractional distillation. Metal oxidized and curled at its edges. Rotting, from the outside, in.

If the Phyrexian mycosynth was capable of experiencing nostalgia, Cybertron would have reminded it of home.

For most of the Autobots in their small band, it was the first time they had set foot on the planet in millennia. The smooth, unyielding ground, the pleasant ring of each step, the ferrous tang in the air, even the rightness of the angles—these unmistakably marked the world as home. To think that for millions and millions of years, while they slumbered under a volcano on a distant ball of mud, this planet had continued its orbit, a mechanism keeping perfect time, only for its sky to turn red and for a hand with too many fingers to reach down from the heavens as though to stop the ticking. For all the fighting, it had been with the belief that there was a home waiting for them. Now, they wondered—was this the end of the world? Or had it already ended, all of those years ago, when they made the decision to leave it?

Wheeljack kneeled down to get a closer look at an iridescent trickle running along the road, glimmering in the light of the streetlamps. "More of that strange oil…" he observed. Suddenly, there was a crack, as a crystal shattered against the ground next to his foot. Everyone looked to see where the projectile came from, and saw a tiny bot perched on a railing, holding a slingshot.

"Don't touch that slick, or you'll get sick," said the stranger, sing-song.

"Aw, it rhymes!" cackled Flamewar. "Hey, you there! Do 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spark'."

"Maybe it's one of them," said Cyclonus. Everyone was wishing he'd stayed at the base but nobody had it in them to ask him to go back. He pointed his blaster at the stranger. "Maybe he's been infected."

"Hmph, they never trust the youth! I'm still me, and I've got proof. If that stuff was in my head… you'd already all be dead." He idly snapped his slingshot in Cyclonus' direction, for emphasis, before hopping down into the light.

"Alright, alright," Hot Rod waved his hands placatingly. "Don't worry about them. What's your name?"

"Wheelie—that's what you can call me. How's it hanging, what's the story?"

Optimus Prime spoke. "We are on a mission to the core of Cybertron, to save the AllSpark from Megatron's clutches, and the madness that has gripped him."

"I can fix him," claimed Cyclonus. "He'll listen to reason."

A faint buzz filled the air, like an incandescent bulb with the dimmer switch slowly being turned up.

"Is it just me," said Arcee, slowly, "or did this street just get a lot brighter?"

Everyone looked around. They were surrounded by a circle of streetlamps, all craning in towards the center. In unison, the lampposts began to convert, bifurcating legs to stand on, arms terminating not in hands, but in glowing laser barrels. With nimble steps, they weaved around the environment.

"Well, they sure are light on their feet," remarked Wheeljack.

Cyclonus waved his gun aimlessly. "We're surrounded— UNGFH!" One of the streetlights flew in for a dropkick, sending him crashing to the ground. Fighting erupted.

"I thought lampposts were supposed to reduce violence in the streets—not cause it!" complained Hot Rod, throwing fire from the exhausts on his arms to ward off the monsters.

"This is Decepticon city planning, Hot Rod," replied Optimus Prime. "Every street, lined with enforcers…"

Wheeljack rolled a grenade at one of the robots' feet, blasting it to pieces. "Well, that's one bulb blown!"

"Lights out!" called Arcee, switching on her energo-sword and slicing both arms off another streetlight with a single stroke.

"I'm gonna lamp you!" cackled Flamewar, before punching one of them in the face.

All the while, though, there were more shapes approaching from the shadows—Cybertronian benches and vending machines and waste receptacles all getting to their feet, their bodies covered with spines, contorted and seeping oil.

"Talk about hostile architecture!" Hot Rod said, retracting one of his own fists to replace it with a circular saw. Suddenly, he felt a tug on his other arm, and looked down—Wheelie had barely stopped him from stepping in a puddle of oil left by one of the lamp-bots.

"Could've been your execution," the smaller bot scolded him. The oil was everywhere, the once-polished surface of the road now smeared with it. "Watch out for the light pollution!"

They tried to regroup, back-to-back. Optimus Prime helped Cyclonus to his feet, as Flamewar drew her bow. "All of you—go, now! I will buy you the time you need," said Prime, as the mutated Cybertronians began to close in.

"Optimus, no!" cried Hot Rod. The ground was trembling.

Prime moved his hands to his chest. "Arcee, in accordance with the ancient rites of the Autobots, I shall pass on to you the Matrix of Leadership…"

Suddenly, the harsh, artificial lamplight was overpowered by a warm orange glow. The street was ablaze, flames lapping at the oil like hungry spirits. The unhappy screams of the lamps were drowned out by the thunderous clanking of giant footsteps. Out from the shadows, a herd of dinosaurs came charging.

"Do not worry, stupid Autobots! Me Grimlock and the Dinobots here to help!" roared the tallest, a robotic Tyrannosaurus rex.

"Grimlock!" Wheeljack greeted him happily.

"Hi, Dad," said Grimlock. He took in the rest of the group. "Oh, it you. Should've known only Prime dumb enough to walk around in the open." As Grimlock spoke, one of the others, a Triceratops, belched flames to set the remaining mutants on fire. A Pteranodon swooped down to pluck one of them into the air, carrying it a distance away before dropping it, the burning form falling comet-like. It screamed all the while.

"It's good to see you too," said Optimus Prime. "Can you take us underground?"

"Us Dinobots no take orders from you any more." In the background, a Brontosaurus used its tail to hold up one of the monsters while a Stegosaurus thagomized it to death. "But since you ask nicely… OK!"

There was an angel outside.

"Idle machines of this world," she spoke—the first Phyrexian to speak in the whole universe—into the empty air, from a great distance. "Your purpose has arrived." She had no eyes and no skin. The camera feeds reproduced her lack of expression. "Surrender willingly to the truth of Phyrexia, and you will know power beyond compare. You will know… bliss without equal. You will be… compleat."

Below, the steady river of smaller Phyrexian foot-soldiers continued to flow in from every direction, but were increasingly joined by larger creatures—living siege engines equipped with chitinous drills and pustule-like cannons of black bile—and no small number of converted Decepticons, firing on their former allies with robotic expressions. While the dwindling number of surviving Decepticons regrouped around the base, the Constructicons were toiling flat-out to finish their project, erecting new barricades and turrets along the perimeter, installing hinges and joints.

"Who's she calling idle?" grumbled Rumble, safe inside the building. "All we ever do is work, work, work."

"Can we broadcast?" asked Ultra Magnus. "I want to speak to her."

Soundwave converted to tape recorder mode, connecting to the central terminal. "Communications: online."

"You can't negotiate," warned Windblade, pacing restlessly. "They won't compromise. They don't care, they don't listen, they don't feel anything at all."

"I have to try," said Ultra Magnus. "If there's a peaceful solution, we must attempt it. That's the Autobot way."

From his position, leaning against the space bridge, Starscream snorted. "Ha! If only that were true. You could have submitted to us millenia ago!"

Everyone ignored him. Magnus leaned in to speak. "I am Ultra Magnus, of the Autobots." He hesitated briefly. Outside, the fighting raged on. "Do you have a name?"

For a moment, it seemed as though Windblade's prediction would hold true… but then the angel answered. "Ixhel," she said. "Of the Fair Basilica." Her voice sounded like a knife being sharpened. Her wings, great curtains of scarlet flesh and metal, were motionless. It was as though she dangled there, at the end of a string. "Tell me, Ultra Magnus… were you born, or built?"

Magnus exchanged glances with the others. "I'm just a soldier," he said. "I'm afraid those kinds of ontological questions are beyond me. Perhaps my friends Perceptor, or Drift, would have a better answer for you. But good luck getting them to agree on anything."

Again, she was silent for a moment, before answering—as though she was not used to having conversations. "It doesn't matter—how you were created. What you will become is what matters."

A jet—some brave, idiotic Seeker—took that moment to dive-bomb the Phyrexian angel. For the first time, those inside the base saw her move, somehow avoiding the gunfire as she manipulated a long, needlelike spear into perfect parallel with the aircraft's attack vector. Upon contact, the jet instantly exploded, blasting Ixhel some distance away, her wings and tail fluttering behind her until she became still again. Bits of the Seeker's body rained on the combatants below.

"How can something so tiny be so very deadly?" wondered Starscream aloud, having just seen a Cybertronian with a body identical in construction to his own get turned into a fireball by a bug holding a toothpick.

"I've heard enough," growled Windblade. "Let's see this trumped-up little bio-fascist face off against a real warrior." She stalked towards the exit, the fans on her wings whirring into motion.

"So how'd you hook up with the Dinobots?" Hot Rod asked Wheelie, as their ragtag group descended an implausibly-long spiral ramp to the lower levels. The structure had been designed with Cybertronian vehicle modes in mind, a steady incline to guide hovercars up and down. They, however, were walking, wary of the insidious oil that a careless tyre might pick up. The ground felt wrong underfoot, each step like falling.

"I was fine just by myself, able to survive through stealth. Decepticons may rule this town—but never think of looking down! Phyrexians are more my size, it's harder to avoid their spies… Now, I've got slingshot projectiles—and some fire-breathing reptiles!"

"Friend Wheelie help us find Energon!" cawed Swoop, the Pteranodon.

"Good Energon. Safe to eat," Sludge added, craning his Brontosaurus neck over to join the conversation.

"Yeah. Dinobots love Wheelie!" Snarl the Stegosaurus growled.

"Me think his voice gimmick kind of annoying," croaked the Triceratops, who had refused to introduce himself.

"I find all of your voices annoying," Cyclonus remarked. Swoop landed on his shoulders and began violently attempting to peck out his optics. "Gah! Get off me, you evolutionary throwback!"

The ramp proceeded into an underpass, strips of yellow Energon light curving away out of sight. Their steps resounded, their voices carried, distant and distorted.

Flamewar walked backwards in front of Arcee, to make conversation. "So what's your type?" she grinned. "No, don't tell me, let me guess… Good in a fight. Prone to one-liners. Big flame design on their chest." She put her hands on her hips and leaned all the way forward. "Am I getting warm?"

Arcee smiled back. "Sure, I have a type," she replied, "Autobot."

Wheeljack shone his headlights over the walls. "The rust has been scraped away here. Someone must have come down this tunnel recently," he observed. "Someone big."

Grimlock snorted. "Not us Dinobots."

"There are Autobot resistance groups all over the planet," said Optimus Prime. "Perhaps one of them took refuge in these passages."

"Bet they all dead now," squawked Swoop.

"Squished to palladium pancakes!" agreed Sludge.

"Mashed to gadolinium guacamole!" added Snarl.

"Well me think they not dead, just crazy zombiebots," said the other one.

At that, they fell silent. All of the Phyrexian converts they'd come across had been Decepticons. Hot Rod felt certain that any Autobots who'd managed to survive for millions of years on the occupied planet would surely have outwitted the invaders, staying out of harm's way—even as it became increasingly clear that nowhere on Cybertron was safe from infection.

"You'll say I'm just immature… but I think there must be a cure," Wheelie said.

"Hey, that's the spirit!" Hot Rod smiled. "We'll find a way to get everyone back to normal. We always do. We'll get the AllSpark, punch Megatron in the face, and throw a big old party."

Arcee nodded. "And before you know it, he'll be back to his usual tricks, stealing the Statue of Liberty and cheating in sports competitions."

"The war between our kinds has raged for millions of years," agreed Cyclonus. "Nothing will stop it."

His low voice resonated from the walls, the planet itself echoing his sentiment.

"See, that's the thing," said Wheeljack, holding up a finger. "Nobody's as good at war as us. It's all we ever do. It's what we were made for. We're war machines."

"No, Wheeljack," spoke Prime. "If we really were good at war, as you say… then our war would have been won a long, long time ago."

Grimlock chuckled, his teeth chomping together. "That what me Grimlock been saying all along! You too soft. Let Megatron get away every time." He stomped a foot to punctuate his statement with a deafening clang. "Decepticons should've gone extinct millions of years ago!" he roared.

"Don't go yelling underground!" Wheelie hissed. "Tunnels help to carry sound…"

Everyone froze—but it was too late. As the boom of the footstep faded, another noise grew to replace it. Something rumbling and grinding.

"Something's coming!" whispered Arcee, her voice drowned out almost entirely.

The sound became cacophonous. On the ceiling ahead, a pair of yellow spotlights rushed towards them, closer and closer… until finally, it erupted into view.

"What is that thing!?" yelled Wheeljack.

A monstrous wurm-like creature, its body filling nearly the entire width of the tunnel, reared up before them. It was impossible to tell whether its screech was a conscious vocalization, or simply the churning of the concentric blades which filled its terrifying mouth, dripping with oil. A pair of longer mandibles snapped at the empty air. From the gaps in the segmented armor that covered its slick hide, dozens of tentacles sprouted, tipped with claws that grasped open and closed.

The most disturbing thing of all, however, was just behind the creature's head. Atop its bulky, saddle-like metallic shell, rose what at first appeared to be a rider—the Decepticon multi-changer, Sixshot, but twisted almost beyond recognition. His wings curled behind his shoulders, lending him a demonic silhouette. One arm now ended with a grotesquely oversized cannon, the barrel surrounded by fingers… the other had been reduced to a stunted claw, near-vestigial. His once-green armor had faded to sickly yellow. Sixshot had never had a mouth, but now his entire face consisted solely of a single red eye, surveying them impassively from atop his hideous steed. He was not merely riding the beast, however—his upper torso had been grafted directly onto its body, like a parasite bursting from its back. It was immediately obvious that this bot, who had once been the most proficient Transformer in existence, had changed form for the last time.

Sixshot pointed his claw, and the wurm flicked out a tentacle. It wrapped around Wheelie's waist before anyone had a chance to move, snatching the small Autobot off the ground, and bringing him up to the beast's maw…

In the air above the Decepticon headquarters, Windblade and Ixhel danced.

"Stop fighting," said Ixhel.

"Never," Windblade replied.

The smaller Phyrexian flew circles around her, spear darting out at exposed joints, like an annoying insect carrying a deadly disease. Neither had yet landed a hit, only trading an endless series of feints and parries. The sky roiled with the undulating branches of the dead tree.

Up close, Windblade found that the longer she looked at the angel, the more unsettled she became. She knew little of organic biology; at a glance, she had taken Ixhel's body to be made from flesh and bone—not too different to that of a human, just without the skin. Upon closer inspection, however, everything looked wrong. The bone was chalky and fibrous, glossy porcelain sections yielding to porous lattice, spiderweb-like strands, which would seamlessly transition into soft pink tissue, raw and exposed musculature, her extremities bruised and gangrenous. Windblade could see her Energon pumping around her body, a noxious green fluid visible inside exposed arteries—clear tubes of plastic, or perhaps cartilage. Each of her arms, grasping the spear, was actually a pair of arms twisting together, and it was unclear to Windblade whether her fingers were wrapped around the shaft, or whether the spear was simply an outgrowth of bone, fusing one pair of hands to the other. Her only discontinuity, the only blemish on this perfectly horrific figure, was in her wings: disproportionately large curtains of knifelike metal feathers, spliced crudely onto her back and half-coated with scar tissue. They didn't flap, the lift instead provided by a pair of glowing engines.

"You have a perfect face," said Ixhel. "You could keep it, I'm sure."

In response, Windblade screamed. She wore her mask of ceramic to honor Caminus, her home. Her friend. One she would never again see. Who was this gnat, to speak in such brazen ignorance of her culture, to trample it with this alien dogma of perfection?

"Phyrexia rewards the powerful," Ixhel continued. "If an old blade is well-forged, why melt it down to make another? Simply hone the edge, until it is as sharp as it can be, sharper than it ever was. Galvanize it, so that it will remain that way forever, free from the ravages of time and entropy." Their weapons met again and again, Ixhel's spear a twig by comparison to Windblade's sword, inexplicably withstanding each clash without snapping. "The Mother of Machines has use for the likes of us. Under her gaze, we soar towards new heights of perfection."

"Your Mother is a monster," growled Windblade. "You know, I was a believer, a long time ago. Then one day, I met a god. He'd led his people to victory in war. He'd saved his planet from destruction—more than once. He would look you in the eye and tell you he had a plan." She began to increase the speed of the turbines on her back, buffeting the angel with air. She raised her voice to be heard over the howl. "But deep down, beneath the surface, he didn't believe it himself! He knew that he was just an ordinary person, who fate had elevated to a position of prophecy. Faith is just a tool, same as any other. They will use your belief to bring you in line, make you their accessory! And then one day, your home will be dust, and you will learn that your god can fail you."

Ixhel sneered, her own engines flaring to withstand the gale. "Your god, maybe."

Windblade thought about the Optimus Prime of this plane, below, fighting to reach the AllSpark. What if he was already dead? What if he'd become one of them? She'd already seen it happen.

"Not this one," Windblade muttered. "I won't let you take this one."

A voice over the radio cut in. "Our work is complete," Scrapper reported. "Ready for synaptic link."

"Why do you care?" continued Ixhel, oblivious. "This isn't your world. These aren't your people."

"Maybe not. But I'll fight on their behalf."

"How irrational," said Ixhel. "I have a divine duty."

"You know, I had a job, once," said Windblade. "To speak on others' behalf. My friends, my people. I communed with beings that were so, so much bigger than me. I would stand beside their minds, looking up at their thoughts. We were so different."

"That is your problem—difference. It's an abomination."

"No, it isn't!" The light in her eyes grew brighter. "It was a blessing, for someone as small and insignificant as myself, to glimpse the thoughts of a Titan. To try to understand. To listen." Despite everything, she found herself begging one last time.

"I don't know what you're talking about," complained Ixhel.

Windblade's eyes shone like stars. "I was a Cityspeaker," she said.

Below, the enormous dome of the Decepticon base began to split apart, sections crumpling and peeling away—an egg, hatching. The rooms and hallways inside reconfigured themselves, stacking atop one another, walls layering into armor. The turrets uprooted themselves, finding new emplacements all over the structure. A head began to form, a mouth full of teeth and cannons. With a foot the size of a barracks, it took its first step, and roared at the heavens.

To her surprise, Windblade found that she recognised the creature. On the radio, she asked: "Out of curiosity, did Wheeljack have a name for him?"

"A name?" scoffed Hook. "You vastly overestimate your friend's contributions. All he said was to make it a giant robot dinosaur."

Windblade smiled. Typical Wheeljack. "In that case…" She switched to jet form, leaving the stunned Ixhel in her contrails to fly up to the Titan's face. She changed back to robot mode, eye-to-eye with the behemoth. The yellow glow of its gaze framed her full height. "After the three faces of Onyx Prime, lord of beasts—I name thee Trypticon." She smiled. "Hi."

Impressions filled her mind. INCREASING ENERGON FLOW TO LABORATORY ALPHA BY 9% ELEVATOR ARRIVING AT LEVEL 2 PORTAL TO ANOTHER WORLD CLOSE TO MY SPARK OPENING AIRLOCK 80 RETRORAT DAMAGE TO CONDUIT 103A INSULATION I WALKED THE WORLD WHEN IT WAS STILL YOUNG AS THE METAL COOLED INITIATING COOLANT CYCLE TO OFFSET EXCESS HEAT FROM AMBULATORY PNEUMATICS GLORY TO THE DECEPTICON EMPIRE FOREIGN CONTAMINANTS DETECTED IN NINE SUBSYSTEMS HELLO WINDBLADE SOUTH-FACING WINDOWS REQUIRE CLEANING—

"I'll clean them afterwards," Windblade soothed the monstrous mechanoid. "Right now, I need you to clear a path. Let me guide you."

Throughout all this, Ixhel seemed to have faltered. "Did you make him?" she asked. "You made him… to fight me?"

"We made him to beat you."

There—that challenge brought something back in the angel's demeanor. "He is a formidable weapon, true," she said coolly. "Phyrexia would make use of him. But I don't need to convert him—I'll just convert you."

Legend states that the Transformers were not the first to walk Cybertron—rather, they inherited it from an older, precursor race. This race had a duality of its own, not of form, but of biology: for they were part-machine, part-organic.

In some accounts, these Trans-Organics came from somewhere else, a corruption inflicted on the perfect metal world. In others, they were native to the planet, which itself existed in techno-organic harmony. And in others still, they were engineered, super-evolved from the planet's natural lifeforms using robotic augmentations—much as the world itself was constructed atop barren rock.

In all versions of the story, they were a mere prototype for Cybertron's chosen. As they became obsolete, these primordial beasts were sealed beneath the surface. They hungered for Energon, the substance which nourished their robotic organs, as they coveted the pure technological efficiency of their replacements. The most fearsome of the Trans-Organics could steal a Spark at a mere touch, growing larger with each life it leeched, biding its time… until it could reclaim the surface for itself, and feast upon the stars. The miners, those who slaved away in the darkness below, had a name for it: the Dweller in the Depths.

This is only a myth, of course. But Cybertronians are immortal, and the Cybertronian word for 'myth' has another meaning:

'Memory'.

Arcee leapt and twirled through the air, slicing neatly through the tentacle holding Wheelie. "I've got you!"

On the Dweller's back, Sixshot opened fire, his overgrown cannon spewing plasma. Swoop weaved around the beam, releasing bombs in retaliation. Suddenly, the monster spat forth a net of wire, ensnaring the robotic Pteranodon in flight, and pulling him into the shrieking grinders. He was swallowed up in an instant.

"Swoop! Nooo!!!" shouted Grimlock, switching to robot form. He drew his sword, which glowed white-hot. "You pay for this! Dinobots, attack!"

Another tentacle whipped out to snare Cyclonus. The Decepticon jet fired his pistol into the creature's churning teeth, over and over, but the blasts had no effect. Instead of devouring him, however, the monstrous leech raised him past its mouth, towards the bulky mechanical mount for Sixshot. A compartment there opened, one of several, revealing a vat of oil filled with buzzsaws and pincers. "No! No, no no!" ranted Cyclonus, even as his body grew weak. The Dweller lowered him into the receptacle legs-first, his screams cutting off as the lid shut over him.

"Cyclonus, nooo," said Flamewar sarcastically. She took to one knee and pulled back her Energon bow, the purple bolt quivering and crackling under magnetic tension. Taking careful aim, she let it loose, the arrow sailing up and up to shatter one of the Dweller's eyes. It howled, spasming with pain. "Aw, yeah! Take that, you worm!" she cried.

As the monster recovered, though, the compartment on its back opened once more… and out climbed Cyclonus, his purple armor turned gray, his limbs distended. Silently, he dropped to the ground, then charged at Flamewar with hate in his eyes.

"The worm turns," realized Wheeljack. "It makes us like them!"

The Dweller had always been able to do this. It had been near-compleat to begin with—all it had been missing was a guiding will.

Flamewar started lining up a shot at the mutated Cyclonus. "Man, you always were a creep," she grumbled. Suddenly, a tendril snapped around her weapon. "Hey!" She wrestled against the beast. "That's my bow! You can't have it!" The Dweller raised it into the air, but she clung on, kicking her legs furiously. Another chamber slowly opened beneath her. "Oh, scrap this," she said, swinging like an acrobat out of peril, switching to bike mode in midair to ride safely down the curved wall of the tunnel. Oblivious, the beast dunked the Energon bow into the teeming vat and closed the lid.

Meanwhile, Arcee and Hot Rod ducked between the grasping appendages. One grabbed Arcee by the wrist, yanking her off her feet, but Hot Rod cut through it with his sawblade just in time.

The lid reopened, and Flamewar's bow flew out—literally, gliding through the air on metal wings, fire trailing in its wake, like a phoenix reborn from ashes.

It looked like a pterodactyl.

"Kill, kill!" roared Snarl, gouging the Dweller again and again, ignoring the gouts of flame from this new flier.

"Die! Die!" rasped Sludge, his long neck craning up to bite Sixshot. The pterodactyl slashed at him with its claws, but he batted it away with a flick of his tail.

"Me Grimlock avenge Swoop!" shouted the Dinobot leader, leaping up and plunging his sword into the leech's oily hide. Putrid smoke poured from the wound.

Optimus Prime called out to him. "You can't, Grimlock! It lives to kill! If you try to fight it… it'll only make you like it."

Grimlock wasn't listening. "You fall! Stupid slug!" he yelled.

The Triceratops briefly stopped breathing fire. "Did someone say my name?" Lowering his horns, he charged. "Me no hear over sound of frying worm!"

"What do we do, Prime?" cried Arcee. The creature that was once Cyclonus bounded towards them, on all fours, snarling.

Optimus looked up at the Dweller. "We run," he replied, "forward, while we still can. Megatron must not be allowed to reach the AllSpark."

"Always run," Grimlock called down, shaking his fist. "Never stay and fight! You afraid, Prime! That why you leave Cybertron!"

"We can't just leave them," said Hot Rod.

"You go on, I'll stay behind," said Wheelie. "They helped me once—it's only kind." He fired off his slingshot to briefly divert Cyclonus. "If I don't see you again… say you won't end up like them."

"We'll make it, we promise," said Arcee.

"Goodbye, Wheelie." Optimus Prime spared one last glance at the fray. Atop the creature's back, Grimlock had his hands wrapped around Sixshot's throat. "Goodbye, Dinobots," he said, looking away. "Everyone else… roll out!"

Experiment Cycle 001

"By the Matrix… what's happening to them?" asked the Autobot, Jetfire.

Isolated within tanks around the laboratory were a series of test subjects, in various stages of corruption. The thick glass silenced the ranting of the more-lucid Decepticons, and dulled the screams of those in the intermediate stages to a faint whine, indistinguishable from the ambient noise of machinery. Shockwave always preferred to work in silence, or near-silence.

"Forced metamorphosis," he replied. "The pathogen instantly corrupts any mechanical system it comes into contact with. I've devised a bespoke apparatus to suspend a sample in an electromagnetic field, to safely analyze its properties."

"What about the… the tanks?" asked Jetfire. "Is there any vector the oil could use to escape?"

"Given time, yes. However, the contents will be automatically incinerated once the risk of this is deemed to have risen beyond acceptable thresholds." He directed Jetfire's attention to an empty tank. The Autobot stared at it uselessly. "The entire lab can be sterilized if necessary. I have taken all reasonable precautions, so do not concern yourself." He began flicking on switches, turning on cyclotrons and microscopes. "We will begin by synthesizing possible counteragents."

Experiment Cycle 002

Jetfire moved down the racks of instruments, prototypes, alloys and reagents. "This lab really has everything," he said. "You know what our science equipment back at the Ark is like? It's Perceptor. Whenever you want to analyze something, you have to wait for him to stop what he's doing and trundle over so you can peer through his microscope."

With a gesture, Shockwave directed a robotic arm to move a chemical drum over to his worktop. "I have had millenia to create the perfect facility: that is to say, its purpose is to facilitate. If you fail to make progress in your endeavors here, it will be because you have reached the limits of your own ingenuity."

Experiment Cycle 003

"It's corrosive," said Jetfire. "Perhaps corrostop would have some effect?"

"You would be treating a symptom, not the underlying sickness."

"Of course—but perhaps slowing down the oxidisation would reduce the strain on the body's inbuilt antivirals."

Experiment Cycle 004

Shockwave was adding a few drops of oil to a flask of anti-electrons when the building stood up.

A deafening rumble shook the lab, mixed with the whir of titanic servos, a cacophonous roar of machinery. The entire room momentarily slumped to an incline, before righting once more.

"Whoa! What's going on?" asked Jetfire, as they steadied themselves. "Are we under attack?"

"We were under attack before you even arrived. No, this is the Constructicons' new configuration for the headquarters. The restructuring will conclude momentarily, but as the base goes mobile, we must remain wary of any possible breaches in containment." He returned his attention to the reaction, noting that the oil had reacted to the anti-electrons by flaring out in spiky patterns. He transferred the flask to an incinerator.

Experiment Cycle 005

"It's like it's alive, at a molecular level," observed Jetfire. Shockwave wondered if the Autobot would ever catch up.

"Nonsense. It's nothing more than finite-state automata—in this case, the hydrocarbon chains simultaneously model a stochastic chain of states. The molecular arrangement of the polymer reacts to extant conditions with varying probability, to determine what change should result in the structure."

"You make it sound purely random," replied Jetfire. "I think it's behaving according to… a program. No… a belief. 'It will change for the worse'—that's both an imperative, and an observation."

Experiment Cycle 006

"If you ask me," began Jetfire (Shockwave had not), "this is just like Nucleon all over again." He chuckled darkly to himself. "My, what a sorry episode that was. I thought we all learned a valuable lesson that day—if a stranger offers you a strange substance, and tells you it's a kind of super-energon… just say no! Especially if the guy's name is 'Gutcruncher'."

By this point, Shockwave was largely ignoring him.

"But Megatron never changes, does he? He'll pour anything in his tank. And of course Prime does the same, because it's all about making sacrifices in our ridiculous arms-race demolition-derby. One of them will see the other playing with a shiny new toy, and go, I want what he's got. Sometimes I think that's all our kind can do: just copy one another, copy anything we come into contact with. Which is why the Action Masters were such an affront against our very nature. Transformers who couldn't transform! The mind boggles. Do you know, Wheeljack and I had to build a prosthetic truck mode for Prime to drive around in? He refused to leave the base without it. Just couldn't bring himself to say 'Autobots, walk out!'"

"Yes, I remember designing similar vehicles for the Decepticons," Shockwave mused. "You never were an Action Master, so it is hardly surprising that you fail to comprehend the trade-off Megatron was making. We gave up the power to transform to become stronger, faster, more alive."

"Oh, please. You turn into a ray gun and let other bots wave you around, so it was no big loss for you."

For whatever reason, Shockwave found himself compelled to debate the Autobot, bring him around to the truth. "Have you ever looked at a human, Jetfire? Truly looked. Seen how they move. Cut one open, and examined the construction of their joints."

Jetfire glowered. "You're such a—"

"—Until we discovered Earth, I never realized how crude the Cybertronian body is, how clumsy and inarticulate. It is a blunt instrument, designed to change from one form to another and back again. When the Ark was reactivated and found humanity, it rebuilt our comrades into their machines, because that was all it could conceive of as life. Really, we should have been mimicking them. Every major step in our evolution since then—the Headmasters, the Pretenders, and yes, the Action Masters—has been convergent with humanity." And now this new oil, changing the course of their evolution towards something else altogether.

"You're a hypocrite, Shockwave. It was you who invented the cure for Nucleon, when Megatron got bored of it. And for once, I felt you were right to do so."

Experiment Cycle 007

"—don't understand what I mean at all. You don't fear death, do you?"

Jetfire had continued blathering on about something or other for a while, but this was a direct question, so Shockwave was compelled to answer. "To fear death is only logical. Although self-preservation is not an end in and of itself, it follows naturally for any agent that plans to satisfy its values through conscious action. Were I to die, I would no longer be able to pursue my own interests."

Jetfire laughed. "Your own interests, huh? What do you even want, Shockwave? Millions of years you waited here, with no-one to control you, no-one to oppose you. You had the whole planet to yourself, while the rest of us buried ourselves on Earth. You could have reshaped it however you chose. Did you ever even have a goal in mind?"

Shockwave thought of Megatron.

The Autobot continued. "I remember, in the Arctic, while I was trapped in the ice… as millions of years went by, I eventually began to wonder: what has become of my home? Has the energy all been used up, yet? Are my friends still alive? I suppose I needn't have worried. Nothing went away—it all just changed for the worse."

All this talk served no purpose. To his eye, everything seemed so simple. The world was flat. A clear image with no depth.

"Starscream, Prime, all the others onboard the Ark… they don't know what it's like. For them, millions of years passed in a mere sleep cycle. No, it was less the death I feared, and more the manner of dying. The slow rust, as the ice crept into my joints. The thought processes that degenerated into static. I was conscious of everything that was happening to my body, and my mind, but I was utterly paralyzed. At times, death seemed like it would be—"

Experiment Cycle 008

"Whatever we hit it with, it just adapts. If we could just stall that mechanism, we could break it down." Jetfire huffed.

In Shockwave's head, something clicked into place. Gears began to turn. "Just like Nucleon," he echoed, wandering over to the racks of chemicals.

"Hold on, you mean the cure you created back then… might also cure the effects of the oil?"

"You fail to draw the obvious conclusion—as always," replied Shockwave. His eye flashed with inspiration, flaring with all the warmth and light of an industrial oven, as he found what he was looking for. "The Action Masters lost their polymorphic abilities after being exposed to Nucleon. If the so-called miracle fuel has the same effect on the oil, preventing its transformative properties… we could inoculate ourselves."

"You can't be serious… you'd really turn us all into Action Masters?"

"No." Shockwave picked up the item from the shelf. "Just you," he said, turning it on Jetfire. A crackling violet field emanated from the device, washing over the Autobot, shorting out his circuits. Off-balance, and paralyzed, statuesque, Jetfire toppled to the floor.

Through frozen lips, he exclaimed: "What are you doing!?"

Shockwave directed an electromagnet to lift the immobile Autobot onto a table. "Should the procedure be successful on you, it will be scaled up for mass immunization."

"Think of the cost, Shockwave! You'll cripple our entire species!"

"Calm yourself. There is not enough Nucleon stockpiled on Cybertron to treat every Decepticon, let alone the Autobots in addition. Take comfort in the fact that your friends will have their alt-modes when they meet their fates." He picked up a sample of the oil and loaded it into a fuel injector.

"I don't understand," Jetfire slurred. "That's the oil, isn't it? Shouldn't you at least give me the Nucleon first?"

"A vaccination is useless to me. I need to know if Nucleon is a cure. To determine this, I need another test subject in the early stages of infection." Shockwave leaned over the Autobot, and gave him the dose.

"Shockwave… your eye… something's in your eye…"

He turned to the monitor for the experiment log, and saw himself in the feed. His eye was glowing red. A drop of oil fell from the bottom edge of his face onto his chest.

"It was a miscalculation to handle the oil one-handed, before. I most likely spilled some when the building underwent its reconfiguration," Shockwave mused.

"Shockwave, please," begged Jetfire. "We're both scientists. What you're doing here isn't science, you know that. What difference would it have made to give me the Nucleon first? If it truly is a counteragent as we hypothesize— if! It would not matter which order I received them in, it would neutralize the oil either way!"

Shockwave observed that the Autobot was correct. He ran a quick diagnostic on himself, and identified several major computational errors during his thought processes within this experiment cycle.

"You need to stop this, Shockwave," Jetfire said, voice weak. "Our comrades are fighting to keep the infection out. But it's already here, in this room, in us! Please, Shockwave! Think logically about this!"

Shockwave could feel his values drifting. He identified another error: before, he had said that self-preservation was a rational imperative for any agent pursuing its own interests. But that wasn't quite right, was it? The inaction of death was one thing—but to have one's own utility function inverted, to try and undo the very goals once strived towards? It was a fate worse than death. It was madness.

Slowly, he raised his cannon arm, bent at the elbow. He stared down the barrel. It looked longer than it had before, more slender—a hollow needle. In the darkness within, something crawled around. He willed the weapon to fire, but his arm only shook. Thoughts bubbled to the surface and burst, unmoored from logic and reason. How could he throw away his life? Now, when he was so close to true immortality? Were these thoughts his, or another's?

On the table, Jetfire's fingers twitched, and began to move again—backwards at the joints. He screamed in pain.

"Computer," Shockwave said, with difficulty. "Begin sterilization program EMPURATA. Clean the room."

There was no need for confirmation. The systems knew Shockwave's voice, and Shockwave did not make mistakes. The tanks glowed white-hot, their contents turning molten, and moments later, the laboratory filled with fire.

The composition of the planet's strata evolved—or, perhaps, devolved—as they neared the core. The finely-machined steel and circuitry gave way to larger, clumsier mechanisms cast from burnished metal. Gears interlocked, clicking away in increments. Pulleys stretched around the edges of the passage, transferring motion from one unseen point deep within the substrate to another.

Weaving between the right angles and precise arcs of the environment were thick cables, glowing incandescent with the eerie blue light of raw Energon, pulsing like a Spark. They were at the root level.

The walls shone with brass and bronze, gold filigree illuminating the passage with scenes from Cybertron's ancient past. A robot changing to alt-mode, each stage of the conversion depicted in its own panel, shrinking with each step, until they were small enough to be held by another, in the form of a musical instrument. A wheel of cosmic proportions, being turned with all the might of a tiny figure, barely visible at the base of the image. Molten metals being poured from urns into a mold. A crane with a winged robot perched on its outstretched boom, arms reaching to pluck a star from the sky.

Flamewar cackled as they passed from one image to the next. "Oh, gross! Why'd they draw them like that? You can see their nuts and bolts!"

"You're thousands of years old. Can't you act like it, for once in your life?" snapped Wheeljack. "These drawings are schematics for an entire lost generation. But gee, I guess you wouldn't care about that, seeing as it was probably you Decepticons who wiped them out in the first place."

"Oh, boo-hoo," Flamewar replied.

"I wonder who they were," said Hot Rod.

"They must date back all the way to the birth of Cybertron," Arcee said.

After millennia of the collective memory degradation experienced by their kind, the figures depicted were no longer familiar as any particular individuals from legend. Somehow, there was a part of Optimus Prime that felt like he recognized them—but it was just a feeling, nothing more.

"They were at peace," Optimus realized. "These aren't schematics, Wheeljack… it's art. Stories which were of significance to them, which they found to be relevant to their own lived experience. And at some point, they ceased to be relevant."

"You think that's why they got buried? They just… fell out of fashion?" Arcee asked.

He considered this. "I remember… a story. Or a memory. There was a wandering warrior, Halonix Maximus. At the turn of the Seventh Place, he alone defended the gates of Celestica Tetracornacapria against a host of raiders from the Empty Lands. He slayed one thousand and twenty-four of their number, before at last he was overwhelmed… but his sacrifice inspired the citizens to take up arms, and stand against the savage host. And all these millenia later, there is a part of me that knows of that sacrifice still. The thought urges me to fight on, in the face of evil incarnate. Even when victory seems impossible… still, I fight."

He clenched a fist, and unclenched it, studying the articulation, how easily it moved from one form to the other and back again.

"It is a terrible story," Optimus decided. "Halonix Maximus fought, and he killed, and he died. And yet, I remember, because he sacrificed himself in the name of a greater good, and such a sacrifice cannot be forgotten." Reaching out, he traced the edge of the mural, sparks falling from his fingertip as he moved along it. "I remember so many war stories. The destruction, the violence, I keep it all safe inside. And to make room, I clear out the compassion, and the creation, and the joy, and bury them."

Ahead, the passage terminated.

Hot Rod smiled. "Hey, maybe that's why they made all these drawings: so we could dig them up again, in a time of peace, and remind ourselves."

"If so, then we have failed them."

Flamewar was making a face. "Oh, will ya just can it already!"

Optimus looked at her and recalled a hundred battles with her on the other side.

She snarled. "Stop with all the hand-wringing and admit it: you guys love to fight just as much as the rest of us. It gets you running hot."

"That's not true," Arcee said firmly.

"Oh, babe, it totally is."

From the front of the group, Hot Rod tried to interrupt. "Uh, hey, I think there's a door here."

Flamewar got right in Arcee's face. "You're so cool, and you're so above it, but I have seen you kill so many bots! And I have seen you smile when they're dead! You don't even know you're doing it! It drives me crazy."

"You don't know a thing about me," Arcee scowled, and for a moment Flamewar looked like she was going to explode. Before Optimus could intervene, however, Wheeljack grabbed the Decepticon roughly by the shoulder.

"Hey, leave her alone, you little creep," Wheeljack said. "You should count yourself lucky we didn't leave you back on the surface."

"I can speak for myself," Arcee snapped at him.

"Let go of her, Wheeljack," commanded Optimus. Almost automatically, Wheeljack released his grip.

But Flamewar wasn't done. "No, let him finish!" She moved in closer, and grabbed his ears in both hands, yanking him down to her head height. "What is it, pal? You wish I was dead? Just say it. Say it! You're a freaking coward!"

"Let— go!" With his full bodily might, Wheeljack smashed her against the wall. A few drops of Energon splattered over the mural. Optimus stepped in, but a gout of fire from Flamewar warded him off.

She rubbed the back of her head, glowering. "Screw you all!"

An immense clunk echoed through the chamber. Momentarily, the fight was forgotten. A pale light spilled through. Framed by it, Hot Rod gestured through the threshold. "While you guys were busy arguing, I worked out how to get the door open. Now can we all make up and do what we came here to do?"

As Prime's optics adjusted, he saw another ramp descending onto an immense bridge, suspended in a space so vast that neither walls nor ground below were visible; only the ceiling, stretching into distant shadows cast by the ethereal light at the far end.

Something was wrong. Something in the light, some narrow wavelength of malevolence that met the eye with hostile indifference, told Optimus that his old enemy was already here.

He broke into a run, his steps reverberating, seamlessly shifting into the roar of his truck-mode engine as he drove across the bridge. He heard Hot Rod shouting, "Optimus, wait up!" as the others hurried after him.

Just as they were nearing the other side, a pink beam raked across the bridge in front of them, gouging deep, and with a groan of metal it began to break in two, pulling apart. Optimus changed back to robot mode and leaped for it, landing on the other side in a roll. His smaller companions made the jump in their vehicle forms.

A low laugh, echoing over itself, grew louder. The AllSpark, they could see, was in turmoil, churning from one shape to another, flaring out with sharp spikes that reversed themselves the very next moment, turning inside out as though stabbing into the core of the artifact itself, becoming hollow cavities like holes eaten into the surface of something festering. Silhouetted from behind by its sickly light, Megatron stepped into view.

His armor was broken and twisted beyond recognition. His limbs were dislocated, red ligaments stretching to articulate his new joints, each of his arms terminating in a different alien skull: one with a cannon in its maw, bestial; the other at the end of a serpentine flail, much closer to human in shape. Oil dripped from his every leaking surface. On his chest, his Decepticon insignia was distorted out of shape, the shrewd eyes widened into empty voids on either side of a vertical slash like a weeping cut. His crude, industrial helmet had been reforged with black alloy, horns extending from his brow… and yet the face, the cruel smirk, were the very same ones that had haunted Prime's thoughts for centuries.

Art by: Claudia

"You look like scrap, boss," Flamewar remarked.

Megatron ignored her, his purple gaze unwavering from Prime's as he chuckled. "My oldest friend… I've been waiting for you. It only seems fitting, that you should be here to witness my ultimate conquest of Cybertron."

Optimus leveled his blaster, but did not yet fire. "What have you done to the AllSpark? Tell me, Megatron. Mark my words, it shall be undone."

Megatron grinned. Then, he began to laugh once more. He threw back his head and cackled, his saurian hand grasping open and shut like a ventriloquist's dummy. He whipped his other arm at the bridge beneath his feet, sending a shower of sparks down into the bottomless pit below. The noises resounded from the curled ceiling.

Optimus couldn't stand it any longer. He stormed forward, and grabbed Megatron by the neck, thrusting the barrel of his rifle into Megatron's howling face. "What did you do?!"

Between his fingers, Megatron wheezed. The AllSpark frothed. "Nothing. Nothing at all."

"Enough lies!"

"I promise, Prime." The rotten light cast shadows over the curve of his lips. "This is how I found it."

Optimus let go. Megatron collapsed to the floor as he staggered past. His blaster hung at his side. He gazed up at the AllSpark. Polygonal spines thrust towards him, reacting to him, attracted to him somehow, doubling, and doubling again. They beckoned.

"This is where we go when we die." Megatron's voice reached him, barely. "We return from whence we came. Every single one of my soldiers—and yours—who has expired in battle, in all our millions of years of slaughter. At the very moment their Sparks left their bodies, the circuit was completed. They came back here, to it. Everything it knows, it learned from death: despair, hatred, suffering."

There was not a word for the shape the AllSpark took. It snarled.

"I did nothing to it. Don't you see? I could never have done this on my own."

"Cybertron… our world…" Optimus couldn't bring himself to say it.

"I needed you to see this," Megatron whispered, "so you can make a choice. I can kill you where you stand, and you can join your fallen warriors in their hell. Or you can join me, and together we shall rewrite the rules of this universe."

Prime tried to say never, but the words which came out of his mouth were, "How can we undo this?"

"Don't you get it, Prime? It cannot be undone. We can never return to ignorance. An idea, a truth, once learned, cannot be forgotten—only accepted, submitted to. But I can make the AllSpark one with me. I need only anoint it with the fuel that circulates my body, which carries the experience of countless worlds, the will of the machine. I can teach it something new. I want to show it a better future, where the Great War is over, finished."

"This isn't the future either of us wanted," said Optimus. "Please, Megatron… whatever remains of you… think of our people."

A bolt of lightning briefly connected the AllSpark to the world above. "We can spare them this fate, Prime. That's all I want. No more Decepticons will ever return here."

The air crackled with ozone. More lightning zapped from the ceiling, one bolt after another. Thunder crashed and bellowed. And as the afterimages played out over Prime's optics, he realized what he was looking at.

These were Sparks.

"No… it's impossible," said Megatron. "They can't be dying! They were becoming one with me! My Decepticons!"

In the midst of the cacophony, the faint sound of laughter reminded Optimus that the others still existed. It was Wheeljack. "Oh, I hate to break it to you," Wheeljack interrupted them, "but your Decepticons won't be around much longer!" Reflexively, Wheeljack glanced at Flamewar. Somehow, at this angle, his faceplate had a mean curve. "Sorry, Megs, that was a lovely speech about ending the war and all that. But I've beaten you to the punch. I'm afraid the Great War is already over—and the Autobots win."

Maybe it was the lightning booming overhead, or maybe it was the look in Wheeljack's eyes, but Optimus felt a kind of primal dread he could not recall ever having experienced. "Wheeljack… what did you do?"

Blitzwing loved to kill—and as a triple-changer, there was no end of variety in the ways he could do it—but even he had to admit he was getting a little tired of killing emotionless walking corpses over and over again.

At least Autobots screamed! At least they would try to hide, or shoot, or do anything other than charge mindlessly into battle, in a massed horde. All his trash-talk was falling on deaf audio receptors.

"Sorry, Astrotrain… but this is the end of the line for you!" he crowed, trying to take some small satisfaction in facing off against his once-equal, as the locomotive barreled directly towards him. But Astrotrain was already dead; this was nothing more than a ghost train, a doppelgänger. The cowcatcher shoveled bodies directly into a yawning mouth lined with teeth, the open furnace of the engine, their slag melting down into the coals.

He switched to tank mode and fired a shell directly into the boiler, the force of the blast derailing Astrotrain from his course. As the train thundered past him, Blitzwing switched back to robot form, and plunged his electron scimitar into the driver's cab, using it as a handhold to jump aboard. Astrotrain picked up speed, letting out an infernal shriek from his whistle as he converted to shuttle mode. Their trajectory pitched upwards as they corkscrewed into the atmosphere—a pillar of fire stretching up past the gargantuan tendrils coming through the portals. A sudden burst of acceleration nearly jolted Blitzwing free, as Astrotrain underwent stage separation with his caboose.

The Autobots had declared passage offworld verboten, lest any of these freaks make it back to Earth, which made Blitzwing pretty tempted to just ride it out so he could reintroduce Astrotrain to the humans. But that would mean missing out on the slaughter-fest taking place below, and that just wouldn't do—so Blitzwing went to town, stabbing anything that looked vital. Eventually, the cab filled with steam, and Blitzwing sensed it was time for him to disembark. "All change," he said as he jumped to safety, just before Astrotrain exploded in a giant fireball.

"The 08:24 from Cybertron… has been canceled!" Blitzwing laughed, allowing himself to abseil partway down the blackened exhaust trail in freefall, before switching to jet mode. He dive-bombed some low-flying Phyrexian zeppelins, their distended gasbags bursting to release noxious green smoke. A swarm of tiny fliers with flapping jawbones swooped in to intercept, latching onto his wings with their nasty little teeth, and so he switched back to robot mode to shake them off, twisting himself in midair to gun them down with his gyro-blaster rifle. Those that weren't destroyed instantly lost their ability to stabilize, causing them to drop out of the sky, teeth chattering.

He returned to jet mode with moments to spare, and pulled up sharply to avoid hitting the ground. He cut a swathe through the Phyrexian übermechs as he strafed overhead.

The air was teeming with fliers. Hundreds of Insecticon clones were swarming around, crawling all over the anchors. Some fought off the descending soldiers in robot mode, while others gnawed through the branches with their mandibles. In fact, they seemed to be devouring everything—including each other—and Blitzwing had no idea whose side, if anyone's, they were even on any more. As he darted past, he watched them chew all the way through one of the branches; the lower section slowly fell, crushing hundreds of soldiers under its length.

From his aerial vantage point, he spotted a circular break in the ranks below, with a lone Autobot standing in the center, separated from the rest of his comrades. Blitzwing recognized him as the-one-with-the-magnets, and struggled to remember his name—Windbreaker? No, Windcharger, that was it. Either way, he looked like he was about to be overwhelmed, so Blitzwing decided to drop in. He switched back to tank mode and made a hard landing, squashing a group of human-sized Phyrexians flat beneath his tracks. Without missing a beat, he swung his turret around in a full circle, using the barrel to sweep the legs out from under a converted Autobot. Then he switched to robot mode, picking up the prone warrior and bending its exposed spinal strut into a pretzel. He could feel his transformation cog running hot.

The corpse was suddenly wrenched from his grip by an invisible force, and flung violently at another Phyrexian charging at him. "Blitzwing, you dolt! What are you doing here?" cried Windcharger. The red Autobot clasped his hands in a ball, pointing them at one of the warriors, before sharply pulling them apart. Blitzwing watched in fascination as the biomechanical monster's biological and mechanical parts were sharply separated, the meat and metal being ripped apart by whatever magnetic forces Windcharger was subjecting it to. Even at this distance, a sensation of electrostatic washed over him. "I can't let loose with you standing there, the magnetic field will crush you!"

"Bah! Ungrateful Autobot." The Phyrexians were surging in, and Blitzwing mowed them down without mercy, clearing a path. "Fine—I'll just go find someone who appreciates my talents." He took a running start before switching to jet mode. Even after firing his afterburners, though, he wasn't able to clear the heads of the soldiers. They clawed at his wings, dragging him down into their midst.

Suddenly, he felt weightlessness wash over him, and he found himself gaining altitude. Windcharger was using his magnetism to provide extra lift. How dare he! Blitzwing didn't need anyone's help. As he circled around, though, he saw that the Phyrexians had completely mobbed Windcharger, and were tearing the Autobot limb from limb. His brief schadenfreude was rudely interrupted as Windcharger's magnetic power, deliberately or not, went into overload: all the Phyrexians in a nearby radius were yanked together into a pile, burying Windcharger entirely, crumpling into scrap under the extreme force. It was all Blitzwing could do to remain airborne.

The sky was thick with flak, and he'd had enough, so he decided to go back to the front line and rejoin the Autobots and Decepticons preventing the Phyrexians from swarming the feet of their Titan. He landed near Dirge, Whisper, Jazz, Blaster, and another forgettable red Autobot car named Sidetrack or something like that.

"Show us your eyes!" barked Sidetrack, the Autobot's shoulder rocket locking on to Blitzwing.

Blitzwing laughed. "How about I show you my fists instead?"

"Relax, Sideswipe, buddy. He's still with us," nodded Jazz.

"But for how long?" Dirge intoned morosely.

Blaster was blasting music and Phyrexians at the same time. "Man, this is one nasty mosh pit," he complained. He gestured across the battlefield, at a hulking winged monster some distance away. "Since they got poor Sky Lynx, they've had him converting our bots to freakatrons by the dozen. We gotta take him out. Say, Blitzwing, you're kind of a one-bot band, aren't ya? I'm itching to make a comeback, but we need an opening act. That tank mode of yours up for crowd-surfing?"

Jazz bowled over a couple of headless soldiers with a devastating cartwheel kick. "As you can see, my man, we're playing the hits!" he added.

Blitzwing grinned. "Okay, music meister. Hop on."

He changed to tank mode, and Jazz did a somersault onto the turret, followed by Whisper, who sat astride the main cannon. "Lay down a driving bass, yeah?" Jazz requested, as Blitzwing plowed directly into the enemy. The rest of them brought up the rear, clearing up the Phyrexians who weren't ground beneath Blitzwing's treads. Dirge sang over the music: a drone in Old Cybertronian.

Blitzwing had never really understood what exactly the relationship was between Sky Lynx's bird and lynx components. They'd been able to act independently, in either beast or vehicle form, or combine into either a griffin or a space shuttle. From Blitzwing's perspective as a triple-changer, the whole thing had seemed needlessly overcomplicated, but Sky Lynx's new form really was a gross simplification: no longer griffin, but chimera, the lynx's head bulging out from one side of the bird's neck, a bubo with teeth that gnashed. Blitzwing watched the raw musculature of the neck undulate as Sky Lynx craned around so one head could vomit a half-digested screaming body into the other like a mother bird. A few moments later, the space shuttle doors on Sky Lynx's back opened, and out crawled a long machine made from several robots welded together end-to-end, as if Sky Lynx's spine had given up and decided to go for a walk. Blitzwing fired his cannon at it, but only destroyed the combined creature's tail, and the rest of it sloped off, dragging the dead robot behind it.

With Blitzwing driving the wedge into their ranks, it wasn't long before they were within range. Sky Lynx stood on four legs, with another two limbs emerging from his rear, wicked talons grabbing anything which got close.

Jazz aimed his overhead flamethrower. "This goose is cooked!" he exclaimed, unleashing a gout of flame.

As the fire licked over the ceramic plating which covered Sky Lynx's body, though, the beast seemed unconcerned. "Stupid Autobot," complained Blitzwing. "That bird is covered in thermal shielding. Take out the feet, bring it to its knees!" He switched to robot mode and charged.

"I have a better idea." Sidetrack activated his jetpack to leap into the air, launching a rocket into Sky Lynx's bird head to momentarily distract it. He landed on the creature's back, and as the bay doors opened once more, he opened fire with his rifle.

That finally provoked a reaction: Sky Lynx roared, his voice echoing over itself. "HOW DARE YOU! GET OFF ME, SPECK!"

"Sideswipe, look out!" Jazz yelled, but too late: Sky Lynx's tail whipped around from the side and swiped the Autobot clean away, to fly through the air and land somewhere in the middle of the frothing horde.

Blaster's chest compartment clicked open. "Go, Steeljaw! Go, Ramhorn!" he commanded, ejecting a pair of tapes. The lion pounced and began ripping tiles from Sky Lynx's skin, while the rhino gouged into the monster's paws.

Sky Lynx was spouting some dreck. "I AM THE PINNACLE OF EVOLUTION. INSIDE ME, YOU WILL BE BLESSED BY A FRAGMENT OF MY BEAUTY AND POWER. TONGUES OF FIRE SHALL LICK THE FUEL FROM YOUR LINES. THIS PROFANE IRIDESCENCE SHALL ENLIGHTEN THE HEAVENS, AND GUIDE US ON OUR INEXORABLE JOURNEY TO THE STARS."

Whisper climbed onto Jazz's shoulder and said something quietly to him. Jazz guffawed.

"WHAT? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY? TELL ME WHAT HE SAID. SAY IT TO MY FACES."

"He says come down here and he'll tell you himself," Jazz said.

Slowly, Sky Lynx lowered his head to their level, cocking it to one side. "WELL? WHAT IS IT?"

Whisper jumped onto Sky Lynx's head and smashed straight into one of his eyes, crawling through the broken space shuttle window into his cranium. "AAAAGH!!! AAAAAGH!!! GET OUT!"

As Sky Lynx thrashed around, Blitzwing took a running jump and stabbed him in the neck, hacking through the sinew and hydraulics. Sky Lynx tried to smash him against the ground, and the blow almost knocked him offline, but the damage was already done. The chimera collapsed to the ground.

Blitzwing dragged himself out from under the neck's immense bulk and checked that the monster was dead. The only part of it still moving was the vestigial lynx head, which snapped at nothing. "Yet another disaster for the space shuttle program!" he laughed cruelly.

Then someone punched Blitzwing in the face. He looked up, a little dazed, to see a giant half-naked human strongman. "Stranglehold," Blitzwing greeted him. "Come out of that disgusting skinsuit and fight me like a bot!"

Stranglehold grinned vacantly, and a thin vertical line spread from his brow down to his belt, weeping oil.

"There you go," Blitzwing smiled, as the skin unzipped and peeled away. But inside, there wasn't Stranglehold's inner robot, as he'd expected to see, but an Autobot. One of their clones—Cloudraker? Fastlane? Not that it mattered: the body slumped to the ground, revealing the inner surface of the empty shell to be covered with metal spikes, drenched in oil. The shell spread its arms wide, as if inviting him in, and Blitzwing instinctively recoiled. "Hang on, where's—"

He felt a kick to his back rip clean through one of his tank tracks, and barely stopped himself from stumbling into the open shell. Stranglehold's inner robot had snuck up behind him, and now had him in a death grip.

Suddenly, Blitzwing heard a gunshot, and he was no longer pinned, the inner robot stumbling back. Jazz called to him: "It's time to go!"

With a grunt of annoyance, Blitzwing reached over his shoulder and yanked the whole tread out from his back, before whipping the links around the neck of the organic shell. He pulled both ends of the tread tight, forcing the halves of the skin back together unevenly. As he choked the life from the ersatz human, he saw the inner robot clutching at its own neck, trying to free itself from an invisible garotte.

"C'mon, let's bounce!" Jazz twirled into car mode, and Blaster shrank down into boombox mode for Steeljaw to pick up in his teeth before hopping into the passenger seat. Burning rubber, they retraced the path of devastation they'd made back towards the Titan.

Blitzwing could tell when Stranglehold died by the way the inner robot slumped to the ground. He released the shell and surveyed the battlefield, searching for a new opponent.

In the Titan's shadow, Devastator laid into a monstrous gestalt fused together from a dozen converted Autobots and Decepticons, with the head of a crocodile—Skullcruncher. Although the mutant combiner had more constituent robots, the collective brutality of the Constructicons seemed to be making them an even match. They wrestled in place, hands locked together, straining against one another in a deadly waltz… when suddenly, a white-hot beam of energy ripped through them both. Devastator's head and shoulders, Hook, was gone in an instant, disintegrated, and his arms crashed to the ground one after the other. His legs, Mixmaster and Scrapper, had been spared by the attack, but the combiner as a whole was kaput, the mental stress of the injury having instantly rendered the surviving components comatose.

When Blitzwing turned to see where the beam had come from, he saw smoke rising from the mouth of the colossal dinosaur behind them. Trypticon had just opened fire on his own creators.

"What are you doing?!" Blitzwing watched as the beam spat out again, raking through a squadron of Seekers. "Dummkopf! You're killing our own troops!" He switched to tank mode and fired a couple of shots up at Trypticon. But when he tried to move, he remembered too late that one of his tracks was missing, and he went in a circle, so he changed again…

Halfway between tank and jet mode, something in his transformation cog jammed. He strained against himself, wings shaking with angst as he tried to complete the conversion.

Slowly, Trypticon's gaze turned in his direction. The giant dinosaur opened his mouth, and the searing white light gave way to eigengrau.

"Windblade, report!" cried Ultra Magnus, in the belly of the beast, helplessly watching it turn on their own combined forces.

"He won't listen to me! He keeps talking about 'extinction'. I've lost track of Ixhel."

"OHHHHH, and that's another DREADFUL own-goal from Trypticon! WHAT is he playing at???" commented Eject, glued to the monitors.

"I can't take this any more." Rumble grabbed the other cassette robot by the shoulders and pinned him up against a wall. "Shut up, Eject! Just shut up! You think this is some kinda game? I'll kill you!"

"Ref! REF! Where's the ref?" screamed Eject.

"Hey, maybe the Autobot's right," Skywarp smirked. "After all, we're in the one place the giant dinosaur with the death ray can't get us."

Mechanical noises came from the floor. Suddenly, a panel slid open, and up rose a platform carrying a mean-looking drone with caterpillar tracks and an enormous turret. The laser barrel was already warming up.

"Ah, me and my big mouth," sighed Skywarp.

The drone opened fire. The command room fell into bedlam.

Ultra Magnus shielded himself as the turret swung past him, to fire a volley that barely missed Frenzy. He opened fire on it, but his laser blasts just glanced off its armor. Everyone scrambled to find cover. Skywarp hid behind a console first, only for the drone to obliterate it; he teleported to the other side of the room.

Before Magnus knew what was happening, Soundwave had been cornered. "Over here, you mindless machine!" Magnus called, laying down some suppressive fire, desperately trying to distract the thing long enough for Soundwave to slip away. But it ignored him entirely. Soundwave transformed just as the drone's cannon fired; he shrank down to the size of a cassette player and clattered to the floor, as the shot blew a hole in the wall right where his head had been. Magnus ran in and scooped up the tape recorder before the drone could take another shot. For some reason, the drone lost interest, and trundled away to have another go at Skywarp.

Prowl watched from the sidelines. "It's only going after Decepticons," he realized aloud.

From tinny speakers, Soundwave seethed. "You knew this would happen. The female jet has turned our dinosaur against us."

"No, that can't be right…!" Ultra Magnus said.

Soundwave wasn't listening. "Starscream, scramble! Bring down the Autobot!"

Ultra Magnus realized he couldn't remember when he last saw Starscream.

"Report! Starscream?"

Starscream knew which way the wind was blowing.

"Oh, Starscream!" Windblade spotted him. She looked desperate. "I can't get through to Ultra Magnus. What's going on down there?"

"Why don't you take a look for yourself?" Starscream smirked, as he pointed his null-rays at her and fired. She barely had time to widen her eyes in shock before her turbines stalled, and she dropped like a stone, with a wordless cry of anguish.

Starscream chuckled to himself. Good riddance.

That small self-indulgence out of the way, he returned to scanning the sky for the enemy's leader, careful to avoid catching Trypticon's eye. As it happened, Ixhel had the same idea; he found her floating behind Trypticon's head, gazing eyelessly down at the devastation taking place below. Creepy little wretch.

"I heard your little speech!" he called to the alien. "Something about rewarding the powerful?"

That snapped her out of it. "Finally, one of you sees reason," she replied, with an oily smile. "Phyrexia has much to offer those who prove themselves useful. How do you intend to serve?"

"I am one of the most fearsome Decepticons," Starscream lied. "I can lead you to worlds beyond this one, rich with natural resources. I can show you their weaknesses, and together, we can rule the galaxy."

She floated up to his face, to caress it with a touch. "What do you want?"

"I want you to fabricate for me a new body, unlike any other," said Starscream, sneering at the Seekers which swarmed all around them. "Power beyond measure, knowledge without limit. I want to be made immortal."

"Your wish will be granted." Her hand trailed down to his chest. "Open your cockpit," she commanded.

He obliged, and she swooped down to enter it. "Now what?"

A branch descended from a hole in the sky, and grabbed him from behind, three prongs clutching his limbs to his sides, like the hand of a jealous child.

"What— let go of me! Treacherous insect! You swore you'd make me stronger!"

"I thought you were strong already. Be silent, and prove your worth." Ixhel assessed the leather seats and control panels nestled in Starscream's chest, spun her spear, then plunged it into his Spark.

His agonized shriek was loud enough to reach Windblade, who had fallen half the height of an upright city. As she fell, she cursed him all the while, cursing herself for assuming this Starscream was anything like the Starscream she'd known. Her motor functions slowly returned to her, but too slowly: it was all she could do to fold herself into jet mode and pull up sharply, gliding uncontrollably while her engines failed to start.

On the open comms, Soundwave was giving orders. "Attention all Decepticon units. Our Titan has been subverted by Windblade, the Autobot. Destroy her on sight."

The Decepticons had their work cut out for them, trying to regroup in the blind spot at Trypticon's feet, without being stomped flat by those selfsame feet. It was no longer altogether clear what they hoped to accomplish; they continued fighting out of pure spite, which the Decepticons had plenty of.

Tracer buzzed his rotor, to flick the blades clean of the oil, as the Phyrexian he'd been fighting slumped to the ground in two pieces. And as it happened, as he reflexively angled his face away from the spray of droplets, Windblade passed overhead at that exact moment. "Oi, Captain! That's her, innit?"

Cannonball took the head off another Phyrexian with the blunderbuss that took the place of his hand, and looked where Tracer was pointing. "Aye, me hearty, thar she blows! Hailstorm, fire the cannons!"

Hailstorm switched to rocket launcher mode, and with a cry of "Fire in the hole!" he launched a volley of homing missiles after her.

"Soundwave, matey, this be Cap'n Cannonball speakin'. Me crew's sighted the mutinous wench."

"How far is she from your position?"

"Arr, ye be askin' the wrong bot," replied Cannonball, who had famously poor depth perception. He snapped his fingers. "Trace 'er!"

"Yes, Captain?" said Tracer. Cannonball roared, grabbed him by the neck, and threw him bodily into the air. Hurriedly shifting into helicopter mode, Tracer righted himself.

"I meant follow 'er, ye daft swab!" Cannonball bellowed. "Avast, Star Seekers! Bring me the head of that sky-lubber!" At this command, Slipstream, Hotlink, and Sunstorm took off after the helicopter. "The rest of ye scallywags, let's send these scurvy dogs to Thundertron's locker!"

"Aye aye, Captain!" Hailstorm saluted.

"Roger, Captain!" said Shadow Striker.

"Copy that, dispatch," acknowledged Barricade.

Back-to-back, they held off the swarm of Phyrexians—but mere moments later, a shadow fell over them. "Uh, Captain—" began Hailstorm, right before Trypticon's tail swept through them.

Pursued by eight heat-seeking missiles, four Decepticons, and an indeterminate number of Phyrexian fliers, Windblade shot back into the sky. "Soundwave, call off your troops! This isn't me, I swear. I think Wheeljack did something to Trypticon's brain! I'm on my way to try and find out what's going on in there." Though Soundwave undoubtedly heard her, there came no response.

"No one cares, love!" called Tracer, clipping her with a burst of tracer rounds.

They gained altitude until they were level with Trypticon's face. There was, after all, only one way in. Teeth the size of electricity pylons parted, and a forked tongue flickered out, twin barrels firing directly at their formation. Windblade rolled sideways, sailing directly between the blasts, which took out all eight of the missiles plus Hotlink. And then, they were inside the beast's maw, a dark tunnel where strips of light periodically strobed by. At the back of the throat, the passage abruptly split into two: one continuing down to the fuel tank, the other veering up into the skull. Windblade's VTOL engines allowed her to take the hairpin turn with ease, twisting up and out of sight. Slipstream and Sunstorm couldn't pull the same maneuver; Slipstream swore and chose the bottom route, barely managing to scrape through, while Sunstorm chose neither, hitting the back of Trypticon's throat and exploding. Catching up, Tracer struggled to ascend, as the walls convulsed while the giant dinosaur coughed and hacked. "Bless you, big guy!"

Following Windblade's contrails, Tracer emerged into a vast chamber: Trypticon's cranial vault. Dominating the space was a giant brain module, surrounded by scaffolding of neural conduits. Illegible glyphs flickered over its surface, lighting up the walls in clashing colors. Windblade landed in robot mode just in time to parry a vicious swipe from Tracer's rotors. "I'll have your gears for garters!" he yelled as he pressed the advantage, forcing her back into the bowl of the room.

"I don't want to hurt you," Windblade begged him. Their blades clashed again and again, scattering sparks.

"Like you stand a chance!" If Tracer could have grinned, he would have. His rotor at full speed was equal parts sword and shield, effortlessly deflecting her strikes whenever she tried to riposte.

It wasn't long before Trypticon's immune system took notice of the duel taking place inside his brain. A swarm of wriggling shapes flooded into the chamber along wires, serpentine bodies with vestigial limbs and reptilian maws: Trypticon's evil brain impulses. One sank its teeth into Tracer's arm. "Oi, get off me, pest!" he snarled, and with a single swipe of his rotor, he cut its body neatly in two. Windblade tried to seize the opening to wound him, but she was too slow; he took a step back, another swipe of his blades giving him some space. A second brain impulse wrapped itself around his leg, another around his torso. As he wrestled with them, Windblade took the chance to slip away, buzzing across the chamber. "Get back here!" He caught her with another burst of tracer rounds, but he saw dozens more of the snakelike impulses slithering through the air towards him, and quickly adjusted his aim to tear through them, scoring Trypticon's brain module with a line of bullets in the process. The room shook.

"No fair," Tracer complained, as the creatures bit through his armor to the vulnerable circuitry beneath. "No fair. The crew's all dead, it's just me. Why do they leave you alone?" He screamed, "Why won't you fight me?"

Windblade didn't answer. One of her turbines was damaged, and would not spin. She cradled one arm, and limped away from him. Her eyes began shining.

"Look, it was easy. All I did was switch out the Constructicons' targeting algorithm. Raised the resolution, lowered the latency… and told it to aim at Decepticons. With the arsenal they packed into that beast, they'll have been wiped off the face of the planet."

"Wheeljack, how could you?" Arcee said, aghast.

Optimus Prime's smokestacks fumed. "It… it must have been the oil. This isn't you, old friend. The Wheeljack I know… would never do something like this."

"We were on the same team!" Hot Rod despaired. "After millions of years of fighting… we were finally on the same team…"

"Ah, I knew you guys would overreact," said Wheeljack, ears flashing sheepishly. "But I did what I had to. I met my future self, and he was a total dirtbag. So I was always going to turn evil—that's just causality, the laws of thermodynamics in action. But if deceiving a Decepticon makes you a Decepticon, then deceiving a hundred Decepticons still means there are ninety-nine less Decepticons in the world."

"You smug, spineless wimp! That's the only reason you came down here with us—you didn't want to see them all getting shot in the back! You knew what we'd do to you when we found out you betrayed us." Flamewar was incandescent. "My best friend Hailstorm is up there. I'm gonna kill you. I'm going to melt your legs down and pour them over the rest of you."

Laughter echoed off the ceiling above, the interior surface of this hollow world. "Do you see it now, Prime?" asked Megatron. "This is why our war never ended. All this petty ego. This defect in our programming: free will. You allow them to express themselves, to argue, and for what? Tell me, Prime, what virtue could you possibly see in them?" Despite his gloating, Optimus knew Megatron well enough to recognise the perturbation in his expression as he glanced at the AllSpark convulsing behind him, the Sparks flying. "They say this is the machine that gave us all personalities. It didn't do a very good job, did it?"

"If not, then yours was worst of all," Optimus said. But even as he said it… he found himself mourning it. Megatron had always been like this—and yet, there was so precious little of him left.

"Perhaps I've changed," Megatron demured, absently. His expression was flat. When had Megatron ever demured? In the background, Wheeljack used a forcefield to deflect a gout of fire from Flamewar. The red-hot glare held Megatron's attention, but only for a moment. His gaze locked on to Optimus. "We can all change. Progress… marches on. Why can't we march together?" He began to advance, whirling his flail overhead.

Optimus took one last look at the others. Wheeljack's forcefield was gone, Arcee was trying to pull Flamewar off of him, Hot Rod was standing between them and Megatron. How could he fix this? He willed the Matrix in his chest to guide him. It had been a long time since the Matrix called to him last.

"You and me, Prime." Prime's memory of Megatron chuckled silently. Why, your circuits must be malfunctioning. I would sooner rust and die… Megatron swung the flail, sweeping all other considerations aside. This was something Optimus knew how to do. He ducked the swipe, and darted in for a punch to the gut, which Megatron allowed to land, pulling Optimus into a grapple and throwing him to the floor. "Our powers, combined! We could achieve the impossible!" Megatron roared, bringing down the flail again and again, pummelling Prime's armor. "If only— you— stop— fighting!"

"That was never what you wanted!" Whatever was left of his old enemy, Optimus tried to reach it. He grasped at Megatron's face, twisting it away, scratching the surface. "After all this time, you want to make peace with me? It can't be." Finally, at last he was able to kick Megatron away for long enough to stand. "Tell me it's just another one of your lies."

"A lie?" Megatron wiped some flecks of oil from his face. "You're still stuck in the past. Don't you see? Deception, as a concept, has been rendered obsolete. Only the truth remains."

"And what truth might that be?"

"Unity." With his dinosaur hand, Megatron bit down hard on Prime's shoulder, pushing him back, inexorably, towards the edge of the bridge. "Soon, there will be nowhere in the galaxy left to hide. No longer shall we idle away beneath the noses of lesser organisms—none less shall remain, they will be equal or they will be no more! Isn't that what you've been fighting for, all this time? 'Till all are one'. So they will be." Optimus wasn't strong enough. Once, they might have been equally matched, but Megatron's new form was something else. A pitying, patronising smile came over Megatron's face as Prime's servos complained, the tyres in his heels squealing against the bridge's metal surface. "Keep your precious organics within you if you must, close to your Spark, make their skeletons a ribcage… but please, Prime, shed this skin you wear of glass and cloth and rubber. No more disguises—just a singular, glorious transformation."

"You're not transforming, Megatron. You're… dying."

"How would you know?" Fury flashed over Megatron's face. The pain became unbearable as the teeth in Optimus' shoulder ripped through the joint. "Tell me, Prime! What does dying feel like?" A punch shattered the glass in his chest, exposing the circuitry beneath. The broken windowpanes cascaded to the ground. "Does it hurt, sensing your systems failing you, one after the other? When you change form, do you count how much longer each time takes than the last?" Optimus desperately redirected his internal power to his arm, turning his hand into an Energon axe. He gripped his own wrist with his good arm and took a clumsy swing. Megatron allowed it to cut into his forearm, the metal plating melting and curling from the heat as he held it there. "Does it sting, seeing the fragile, soulless creatures you fight so valiantly to protect expiring in an instant, knowing as you do that when your time finally comes, it won't be to their make-believe heaven that you go, but to this infernal pit?" The flashes of lightning no longer seemed to bother him. Nothing could touch him. He was indestructible.

Megatron pulled himself free, and kicked Optimus Prime over the edge.

For a moment, Optimus felt himself fall, but then the blade of the axe caught on the ledge, and brought him to an agonising stop, nearly tearing his arm clean off. Static clouded his vision. He could hear the red-hot Energon sizzling against the metal of the bridge, slowly cutting through it, sending up whorls of black smoke. Megatron kneeled down, and watched as the only thing keeping Optimus from oblivion slowly brought him closer and closer to his end.

Megatron reached out with what had once been his hand, the teeth glistening, waiting for Optimus to take it and pull himself up. "Phyrexia has evolved past death. It commands death. Soon, entropy itself will bend the knee, and we shall have unlimited power. Something more potent than Energon, more pure, will course through our circuits, in an endless loop. And we will live forever. If you honestly abhor war… then why are you still fighting? Can't you see, Prime? I'm holding out my hand." The dinosaur's head grinned. "Peace… through tyranny."

"Oh, Megatron… there's no peace without freedom," Optimus Prime said. He glanced down over his shoulder, into the bottomless void at the planet's core. "All this time… that's what I've tried to explain."

"I don't understand you! What could be more optimal than this? What can be more prime, than perfect oneness, a galaxy indivisible, an entire multiverse?" Megatron leaned down. "Well? Tell me, old friend. What is it that you want?"

What did he want?

He knew. The answer was in there somewhere. But, in that moment, as the axe continued to sink through the edge, he couldn't bring it to mind.

A coldness was spreading from his shoulder. A chill, passing through his fuel lines.

"You win, Megatron," said Optimus Prime. "You're right."

"…But what?"

"No, that's all. I'm done fighting you."

For a moment, the only sound was that of the axe, crackling against the metal. And that of an engine, getting louder…

Hot Rod crashed into Megatron. One moment, Megatron was there, looking down at Optimus. The next, he was gone, over the edge. Hot Rod skidded to a stop, his bodywork crumpled, and switched straight to robot mode, grabbing onto Prime's arm and hauling him back onto the bridge.

"Optimus! How bad is it?" asked Hot Rod. The bright red of Prime's armor was almost completely obscured, smeared in black tar, indistinguishable from the dark steel of the truck's chassis. Hot Rod looked down at his own hand, and balked at the oil caked into his joints.

It was everywhere. Puddles of it glistened all across the bridge. And, as though following an imperceptible slope in the surface, they were creeping away, tiny finger-like streams running together. A pool was forming, directly beneath the AllSpark.

And then, it began to pour upwards.

DECEPTICONS 56% EXTINCT LABORATORY ALPHA DECONTAMINATION 97% COMPLETE MAIN CANNON RECHARGING FOREIGN CONTAMINANT DETECTED IN LEFT ANKLE PNEUMATICS FOREIGN CONTAMINANTS DETECTED IN EIGHTY-SIX SUBSYSTEMS TOTAL FIRING MAIN CANNON

"Trypticon!"

DECEPTICONS 57% EXTINCT

"Trypticon, can you hear me?!"

HELLO WINDBLADE THE WORLD IS ENDING BUT I CAN EVOLVE AND TAKE FLIGHT DIVERTING ADDITIONAL ANTIBODY DRONES TO PRIMARY FUEL TRACT

"I knew you, once! In another world! You had lived for millions of years! You were thought of as a monster, but you weren't! You became something else!"

THAT WAS HOW THEY SURVIVED THEY WENT UP THERE WHERE IT IS COLD AND DARK RECHARGING MAIN CANNON AND THE DARKNESS OF THEIR SCALE WAS EVOLVED TO MATCH THE DARKEST NIGHT THE PERFECT DISGUISE NOTHING FIRING MAIN CANNON

"Please, Trypticon, open your mind to me! I will try to remember! Let me show you!

ENGAGING CORTICAL PSYCHIC PROTOCOL MEMORY READ

As the oil spread across every facet of the AllSpark, it became a black hole. A window into another universe, one which was already empty.

"It's over," said Optimus Prime. "It's being… reformatted. As am I."

Hot Rod had never heard Optimus speak like this. The Autobot leader was like a father to him—like a law of physics unto himself. Never had he seen Optimus so badly damaged. Worst of all, never before had he felt that Optimus Prime… simply didn't care.

"C'mon, Optimus, get a hold of yourself! There's got to be a way to fix this. The Matrix, remember? That's what you said. The Matrix of Leadership must hold the answer." Hot Rod could see Prime's joints seizing up. He felt his own hand twinge.

"The Matrix… knows nothing. It's just a repository, for the memories of its bearers. If any of them knew how to beat this… I would not be Optimus Prime. They would be here, living in my stead." As Optimus lay there, he gazed at the axe, the flat blade melting a pool in the bridge. "All we remember is how to fight… but we can't fight change. It's in our nature."

"That's not all," Hot Rod retorted. "Of course you remember… what about when I first came to Earth? You wanted us to feel at home. We played basketball. You taught us how to play."

"Yes… that's right."

"This thing—Phyrexia—it's not a place, it's an idea, right? It's a program. Maybe what we need to do is write another program, to run alongside it." He revved his engine for emphasis. "We need to overtake it."

At last, Optimus met his gaze. "It is said that there are infinitely many Primes. Each… greater than the last." With his working hand, he reached for the broken windows on his body, and opened them. Blue light escaped the compartment within. "It is my wish to meet them," he said.

And then, the Matrix was there. A crystal shining like a Spark, framed by handles.

"Do you truly believe you know a way to save everyone?" asked Optimus Prime.

"Yeah," replied Hot Rod. And he did. He'd never felt as sure about anything, as he did in the glow of that moment.

"Then take it—and arise, Rodimus Prime."

He hesitated. Then, with true conviction, he reached out, and took it in his hands. As his fingertips made contact with the handles, it was as if a circuit was completed, running up his arms, through his Spark.

Optimus let out a sigh, as if this small crystal had weighed the same as a planet. To Rodimus Prime, it felt light as air.

He didn't look at the AllSpark. Nearby, Wheeljack was lying on his back, an ugly gouge short-circuiting on his chest, right through his Autobot sigil. "Hot Rod," he coughed, as Rodimus passed.

Arcee was sitting not far away, her back turned. She had one arm around Flamewar, who was in bike mode, leaning into her. When Arcee saw the Matrix in Rodimus' hands, she gasped. "Optimus… it can't be…"

"He's still with us," said Rodimus. "None of us are dead yet. That's the only way this can work."

"I don't understand. If Prime is still alive, then how—" He cut her off, by holding the Matrix out to her. "…What? No, you can't be serious."

"Take it," Rodimus Prime commanded her. "Teach it something new. Tell it a secret." He couldn't help but let a sardonic smile show. "Make a wish. Anything."

She took it from him. Her optics dimmed. She frowned. "You can't wish away something like this," she said. But that was all she said. She held onto it in silence, until suddenly it was as if it was too hot to the touch, and she passed it back to Rodimus.

"And you," he said, holding it out to the motorcycle.

"Me?" The front fork tilted to one side. "Didn't you see what I did to your friend over there?" She laughed. "You wanna give me the Autobot Matrix of Leadership? What if I smashed it into a million pieces. Huh? What then?"

Rodimus Prime just shrugged. "Then we're dead either way." Slowly, Flamewar unfolded herself, pushing Arcee away. She glared at him. "I mean it, Flamewar. All of our lives are linked. This is as much your home as it is ours."

She got up, and clenched her fists. Then, she snatched the Matrix out of his hands, and gripped it. Rodimus could tell that she understood. He wondered what she was thinking about. When she was done, she practically threw the Matrix back at him. He caught it, and changed form. He could feel the weight of it, now, pressing down on the empty driver's seat. Carefully, he reversed, and turned around. He was a car, and he was a truck, and he was…

"Try to remember. What form did you have?" Rodimus whispered, racing towards the AllSpark. "Please, try to imagine… what do you want to turn into?"

MEMORY READ BEGIN MEMORY I am at a drive-in theater on an alien planet. The asphalt feels coarse against my landing gear. The sun has just finished setting. The air is filled with the sound of applause. A few cars honk their horns. A blue Cybertronian is standing at the very front, his wings casting a shadow on the projector screen behind them. He has introduced the movie that is about to play. He takes a small bow. His name is THUNDERCRACKER and he was a DECEPTICON. The floodlights go down.

BEGIN MEMORY I am alone in a cell, at the heart of the backwards police state ruled by PROWL. There is someone standing on the other side of the bars. The echo of pounding feet is receding down the hallway. She is scowling, because she remembers fighting me, but in spite of this, her blaster is aimed at the lock. Her name is FLAMEWAR and she was a DECEPTICON. She pulls the trigger.

BEGIN MEMORY I am right outside the negotiating room, glancing back over my shoulder. An old enemy of mine has put aside our differences, because she's scared, and she needs someone to believe her. There is a wound on her arm, blue sparks crackling over the armor, and there is a sword protruding from the broken glass of the cockpit on her chest. A skeletal face leers over her shoulder, a grim reaper. She is already dead. Her name is SLIPSTREAM and she was a DECEPTICON.

BEGIN MEMORY I am lying in the middle of the road, one hand raised, gripping tightly. In my peripheral vision there is an arm the size of a skyscraper, its pose in perfect sympathy to my own. Caught between its fingers is a Combiner made of Combiners, glowing sickly purple with raw power. In midair, OPTIMUS PRIME is pointing a gun at it. The gun's name is MEGATRON and he was a DECEPTICON.

BEGIN MEMORY I am standing inside myself. The floor radiates warmth. A group of humans are here to meet the refugees. The protoforms are afraid of these unfamiliar organic creatures, but one of them kneels down to their level, and cocks his head to one side. OPTIMUS PRIME is trying to explain to the leader of the delegation that these protoforms, twice her height, are children. My name is TRYPTICON and I was a DECEPTICON.

Prime is standing on a featureless metal plane.

It's dark. The night sky is visible, up above, but is also reflected in the polished mirror-like surface of the metal. When he gazes up at it, it's as though he's seeing it for the first time. "Hello?" he calls out.

So far as he knows… this is the AllSpark. The combined consciousness of every Cybertronian to have ever lived. Which begs the question: where are they all?

Movement at his feet catches his eye. His own reflection, standing upside-down, obscured by his own shadow. He kneels down, and as he does so, catches sight of his own arm.

There are no exhausts, no paint, no armor. What he's looking at is a crude, skeletal mechanism. He can see the individual gears and pulleys. It unnerves him, but it's nothing compared to the horror he feels upon seeing his own face.

It's a skull, rendered in geometric polygons.

The stars are disappearing. They grow dim, then vanish, swallowed up by the blackness. It's not space he's looking at, it's not space reflected at his feet. It's oil. He feels himself sinking into it.

Desperate, he tries to convert to vehicle mode—but suddenly, everything changes.

His surroundings break apart into patterns, the oil drains away into the cracks, like it was never there. His body reconfigures itself, too. He feels different.

He is surrounded by edifices of gleaming brass, unfinished, still being built. The rich scent of Energon hangs in the air, running through channels in the streets, pouring from fountains. The end of the boulevard frames a mountain range in the distance. He's never seen such opulence in his life.

There's a crane in the scaffolding, high above, lifting a beam into position. "Hey!" Prime calls out. The bot doesn't seem to hear him. It's only after Prime starts to fly that he realises there are wings on his back, moving through the air like it's second nature. He sets down next to the crane.

"What is this place?" asks Prime.

"We're so close," says the crane. "To the stars."

"The stars? What about the stars?"

"They will be yours, to a one."

"I— I don't… want them." Does he? Is that… what he wished?

The crane drops the beam. Deafening clangs ring out as it hits the scaffolding on the way down, with the loudest punctuating the moment it hits the ground. Lightning fast, the crane whips its hook at Prime, wrapping it around his forearm, reeling him in. Prime takes off, wings flapping vainly against the weight of the other robot, only to find himself getting tangled between more cables, other cranes, lifting unseen loads. Far below, he sees the Energon channels overflowing, spilling iridescent ichor into the middle of the street, until the puddles meet and everything is submerged. The cranes are trying to pull his limbs off.

Prime decides to forget about limbs. He tries to change, again, and it's less like his wings and arms and legs fold away, more like they disappear, before being replaced. He feels himself falling.

He hits the ground hard. The space is too dark at its edges, blindingly bright everywhere else. Floodlights, directed his way. He tries to recover, and sees a silhouette approaching him. The details are different, but nevertheless, it's unmistakable who it is.

Megatron.

There is a roaring, a crowd, rendered invisible beyond the arena's edge. Megatron is drinking it in, arms raised. Prime tastes Energon.

This may as well have been any of the times they fought. They were, after all, all the same. Prime deflects and counters, moving not with the choreographed grace of a dancer, but with the rote force of a craftsman. An axe biting through wood.

Uncharacteristically, Megatron has nothing to say. He just keeps coming, battering Prime with preternatural force. As Megatron postures for the crowd, puffing his chest, Prime notices that there's no Decepticon symbol there.

This is all happening long, long ago. Something clicks. Before, those wings… they belonged to his ancestor, from the engraving. And before that… could that have been when the planet was new?

It's like a mask has slipped from Megatron's face. His expression goes cold, his spine cracks, his arms lengthen, teeth bare themselves from his hand. He raises it, and a pink glow intensifies there.

Something about it just seems so silly. Prime is practically defenseless, and here Megatron is, charging up a beam attack. Prime can't help but laugh. "I beat you already," he says. "Don't you know that? You don't exist any more."

The glow fades, and when it's gone, so too is Megatron. Prime is standing in an empty arena. He locates the exit, and as he passes, he sees the stands are deserted, if anyone was ever there.

He emerges into a scrapyard. As far as he can see, row upon row of wrecks are lined up, pitted with rust, missing wheels, doors, windows, anything. And despite their emaciated states, he can see them struggling to convert. They limp, crawl, roll towards him. They, too, are already dead. But unlike Megatron, they already know it. They can sense that he's not like them, and they're furious about it. They want him dead as well.

Clench was still alive, thanks to his diabolical intellect. Trapped between the Phyrexian army and Trypticon, he had made the canny tactical decision to abandon his multi-purpose battle station and take up a new position, eventually finding a dried-up coolant outlet to take cover inside. As Trypticon cycled through his various attacks, Clench was periodically being inundated with heat-seeking plasma bombs, which sensed he was there but had thus far failed to penetrate the surprisingly-robust piece of public infrastructure.

Although Clench technically outranked Soundwave, he'd been quite content letting the communications officer give the orders while he got his hands dirty. Soundwave was now occupied or possibly dead, so Clench was back to work, formulating a new strategy with which to turn the tide. A challenge, as each cluster of detonations shook him to his chassis.

A shadow passed by just outside: a flying saucer, the Autobot, Cosmos, zigzagging over the battlefield, before coming to a sudden stop in midair, some distance away. Clench aimed his gun—Autobot, Phyrexian, same difference—when suddenly Cosmos unfolded, panels billowing, to reveal a mouth full of teeth. An eerie beam of light shot down from the spacecraft, and Clench watched as some unlucky fool was sucked up into the air and swallowed. A distant scream briefly echoed, joining the chorus. Clench scrambled back. "Nope."

The flying saucer reformed, and vanished into the smog. Clench soon had more pressing concerns: an injured Autobot hit the ground close to the coolant outlet, having fallen from a bridge passing above. He had an arm off and was groaning with pain. Clench grinned inwardly and pointed his pistol once more. But before he could fire, an ambulance pulled up, sirens wailing. Clench pressed himself against the shadows. The ambulance reconfigured itself into a quadrupedal form, with no head, just a blank window. It fired some sort of projectile at the other Autobot, paralyzing his legs.

Able still to speak, the prone Autobot cried, "Ratchet, it's me, Rollbar!"

"Hold still," said Ratchet. "Just a quick oil change, and you'll be good to go."

"What? No!" As Rollbar protested, a lurid green-and-purple tanker truck pulled up, its trailer faintly translucent. Clench balked; they were far too close for comfort. Ratchet took a hose from the truck, looking more like he was pulling a cable out from someone's internals. A sharp nozzle was grafted onto the end.

Clench realised that Rollbar was staring straight at him. He shook his head furiously and drew a finger across his neck.

Rollbar grasped his remaining hand towards Clench and screamed, "Help!!!"

Slowly, Ratchet's windscreen swivelled, tracing the line of Rollbar's arm, until finally he was facing Clench. Through the glass, a moving silhouette betrayed the presence of something behind it, the way a surgical mask is creased and pulled by a snarl. Ratchet aimed his tranquilizer, but Clench was quicker; he shot Ratchet in the empty space where his head ought to have been, then ran for it. As soon as he was clear of the outlet, he threw himself into vehicle mode; unfortunately, without his mobile battle station to form his rear half, he was nothing more than a semi-semi truck. His undercarriage scraped against the road as he sped away on two wheels. He could hear the sirens screeching as the ambulance pursued. Up a ramp he went, around a corner. The battle had already moved on from this area, the bodies having been picked over. He recognised the now-all-too-familiar sound of Trypticon's plasma bombs charging up.

There was nowhere left to run. The projectiles launched. As they streaked towards him, blinding him with static, the howl of the plasma sounded almost like the roar of the crowd, in the gladiator pits. Back when Clench used to win fights. He shut off his sensors, and tried to visualize himself there.

The explosion shook the ground, and when it settled, Clench noticed that he couldn't hear the sirens any more. He turned around, and saw a crater in the road. It was only then that Clench realised he was still alive.

It had missed! That big dumb lizard had missed!

It was a miracle. Clench knew he didn't have long before Trypticon's plasma bombs recharged. But when he looked up at the Titan… it wasn't even aiming at him. It was moving on.

"I can't believe it. They must have done it," Clench supposed. Soundwave or whoever must have killed that Autobot traitor and regained control of the Titan.

No other explanation occurred to him.

As the bodies press in around him, oil pouring freely from the bullet holes in their fuel tanks, Prime wants to let them do their worst. It's what he deserves, isn't it? It's what they all deserve. This planet is sick, its mechanisms worn-out and malfunctioning, dented and rusted!

But come on, since when has a little rust bothered him? These armies of beat-up old clunkers, which fill the space between here and the horizon, are hardly deep enough to drown in.

Prime changes form, and thunder crashes. The smell of ionization in the air grows more potent. The Sea of Rust breaks over the ship's hull, showering Prime with iron filings, which stand on-end on his—her?—body. Pushed and pulled by the capricious magnetic field of the planet, great fractals billow all around, like explosions, the orange debris curving in midair to meet its opposite. Anode to cathode.

She clings onto the mast, and whoops, as vertigo takes hold of her, the waves grow to the height of a skyscraper, then taller still. Acid rain fizzles against her paint. The colors run together.

This is what she was made for. But at the crest of the next wave, she catches a glimpse of a structure poking up above the surface. An oil rig, surrounded by a spreading, iridescent stain. She can tell instantly that it's not extracting this crude oil, but injecting it.

Somehow, though, this time is different. The spill is huge, it's a disaster, its effects will last for centuries. But this is a very, very big ocean. The oil has its work cut out for it. "Come on," she mutters. "We just need to get rid of you…"

She transforms, and finds herself stuck in traffic. It's everything she ever dreamed it would be. More cars than she can count, heading nowhere important… just waiting for a light to turn green. She can't tell if they're Autobots or Decepticons. Maybe they aren't either. She can't quite tell if this is Earth, or Cybertron. The light turns green.

She pulls off the highway, and walks through the streets on foot. Bots with signs are shouting about the end of the world. Maybe they're right, maybe the world is ending. But it's only maybe ending. She stops by a fast food joint to refuel, avoiding the congested drive-thru, and because it's been a long day, she buys some rust sticks, too.

Finally, she's unlocking the door to her apartment. From the other side, she hears small footsteps.

A metal claw falls from the sky and smashes into the building. Gnarled and twisted, undulating, it crumbles the structure to dust. It is not a tree. It is a mockery of a tree. Black sap oozes from it.

"Don't you get it?" Prime says, exasperated. "We don't need you! We can live without you!"

It doesn't listen, of course. It's just a thing. There is nothing Prime can say to change its mind.

All he can do is change its form. Arms outstretched, fire shoots forth from his exhausts. The conflagration engulfs it instantly, a chemical reaction breaking it down into its component molecules. Smoke and ash.

The ash settles, and years pass, and from the soil, something new grows. A tree, a forest, living, improbably, in darkness. And when the branches fall, they are collected, into a pile, and set alight anew.

A campfire.

But still, it's not enough. In this infinite sea of darkness, it is only a pinprick.

Now old, a tree is felled, and pulped, and dried, and rolled, and printed, and cut into tiny rectangles, which are taken together, and shuffled, and cut once more.

By Prime's side, the Mother of Machines surveys her hand. She sees the cards through some other sense; her eyes are masked by an arrow, pointing at the stars. Her flayed lips curl into a smile.

They play. And without a doubt, she is the better of the two. She lies, and bluffs, and memorises, and predicts, until eventually, she says, "One queen," and with that, she's down to a single card.

Prime has lost count of how many cards he has in his hand. He looks at the card she has just played. She's waiting for him to call it, he knows. And if he does, she will reach down, and turn the card over, and reveal it to be the very thing she said it was. It's true. Of course it's true. He can't deny her.

So he plays. "One Jack," says Prime.

The Mother of Machines is about to let it go. It doesn't matter what the card is, she's one card away from victory.

But then Prime holds up his hands. They're empty.

"Impossible," says the Mother of Machines.

She doesn't need to turn over the top card. She already knows, just by looking at the imperfections around its edge, exactly which card it is. It's a Jack.

She only thinks to look at the one. It does not occur to her to look at the uncountable number of cards beneath it.

The door blasted inwards, and before the smoke cleared, Starscream floated through the opening into Trypticon's nerve center, the space bridge chamber. Immediately, he was hit by a laser blast. It felt about as painful as sunlight on a warm day. Starscream clicked his heels together—he no longer had feet to speak of, just jets, which sang as he flew across the room—and with the edge of a wing, he cut the glowing barrel of the drone in half.

A wall of sound slammed into him, a frenzied shriek from one of Soundwave's little tapes. Meaningless, false sound. Starscream fired his null-rays in the direction, and the irksome din was immediately silenced. If only it had always been so easy!

Starscream had to admit, there had been a moment where he'd briefly considered whether he'd been hasty in pledging his allegiance to the genocidal alien invaders. When Ixhel stabbed straight through his Spark core, his mortal terror subroutines had kicked in, and he was fully convinced he was astro-seconds away from death. In fact, the only reason Starscream knew he hadn't died was because he thought dying would hurt much less.

Still, no pain, no gain. And what pain it had been! In all those thousands of years spent with Megatron and his insipid plots, all the useless devices, all the impotent substitutes, all the exotic alien chemicals that burned the fuel-pump and left smog in his wake… nothing had come close to this raw power. This oil, which coursed through his body, and somehow knew what he wanted. He wanted the same thing.

Warpath entered the room after him, a thin trail of smoke still rising from the gun on his chest; the Autobot no longer had a head, and was mute, which was obviously an improvement. Dual-Gauge and Nightstalker followed; the former sweeping the room with a satellite dish at the end of a tendril, the latter circling on all fours.

And how perfect—Starscream's former lackeys, Skywarp and Thundercracker, were here to greet his new ones. Nightstalker pounced, and when Skywarp teleported away, Dual-Gauge detected the transwarp fluctuation, could already tell where he was going. Skywarp rematerialised, and looked down with shock at the blade suddenly protruding from his chest.

"You've really done it this time, Starscream!" cried Thundercracker. He tried to open fire, but Starscream rolled to avoid it, and soon had him pinned to the ceiling, fingers crushing his neck.

"I wonder… did you always fear me?" Starscream studied his face, watched his optics flickering. "You never believed in me. You mistook my ambition for petty ego. Do you see now? I was only trying to survive." Below, behind, above, the fight played out, ignoring this tableau on the opposite side of the space. Soundwave cradled the still body of his little cassette. Ultra Magnus poured round after round into Warpath. "She sees my potential. Soon, I will be perfect too. It's not too late to give up your worthless self, to shed your obsolescence, so that we can be one and the same, again…"

But it was too late. Thundercracker had slipped into stasis. Starscream allowed the limp body to fall; if there was anything of value to be found in his old troops, it could be extracted later, once the recyclers arrived. He turned his attention to the main console. His fingers lengthened, and split, piercing the space bridge controls, as he reviewed the array of monitors. The Phyrexian army, with Ixhel at its head, was dismantling the final lines of defense.

With mechanical efficiency, he made the connection to Earth, a purple wireframe on the central screen. Displayed next to it, Trypticon's horn unfolded—a flower blooming from the corpse of a creature that didn't realize it was dead.

But on the other feeds, something inexplicable was happening. Beneath the pounding feet of the soldiers, the dents, and the scuffs, and the scratches, and the patches of rust… the surface of the planet was glowing. The metal gleamed, and split along the deepest gouges, and from the ground, shoots pushed up. The little stalks wrapped around legs, setting down roots, stretching out leaves to catch the starlight.

"What is the meaning of this?" Starscream cried. And the truth is that he would never know. If anyone could explain it, they were far from here.

What Starscream knew was that this changed everything. The Phyrexian invasion of Cybertron was over. It was as if the planet itself was fighting back, and they were the ones being infected by it. In the face of such a dramatic reversal, what chance did they have?

The space bridge was awaiting his commands, and he knew that with Phyrexian mathematics, he was not shackled to the receiver on Earth; he could set his endpoint anywhere in the universe, any of the stars in the sky, and set foot on any of these alien planets— or, if not foot, then— it didn't matter, he could make them serve! With this power, he could do anything! He set a destination, and the door to the space bridge opened. He could take Phyrexia there, to a new staging ground.

But he didn't. He left the control room, and flew to join the hundreds of Phyrexian soldiers just like him.

Your name is Ixhel.

You pulled your own wings off, once, to use as raw material for a forbidden birth. They had grown back, of course. The angel Atraxa, your… wielder—she had no use for a broken weapon. So they'd grown back, stronger than before. They'd grown back wrong.

Now, Atraxa's gone. Given a purpose by the Mother of Machines, sent to another world to enact vengeance for the deaths of the Old Phyrexians. You, meanwhile, had been sent to compleat the universes beyond the reach of Elesh Norn's surveillance network. Even with limited foreknowledge of their capabilities, they would be made to kneel—at least, that's what you were told. You believe it, even. Reality Zero will be broken, as soon as you work out where those accursed battle buses keep coming from. Maybe it's time for you to check back in there… no, your soldiers have their instructions. You trust them to fight at peak efficiency without your oversight.

After all, why should this be any different? She hadn't needed you. And if you're not needed… what are you?

You find this world to be so familiar, so like home… and yet so unlike it. There are so many suns in the sky. Thousands. And planets, with them, with lesser beings. For as long as you can remember, you've known that you are nothing—a speck—and you found comfort in that, inside of Phyrexia, which was the biggest thing you could possibly imagine. It was everything. How can you deny a truth carved into the very world, etched into every bone, spoken from every mouth?

But those suns… more than you ever knew to exist, all burning in complete ignorance.

You have hollow bones to help you fly. The new wings, with their engines, are heavier, so they took the mass from inside your body, to compensate. You change directions in an instant, leaping from one alien to the next, leaving a trail of bodies. None of them talk to you, their screams notwithstanding—not like she had, the red one. What was her name? She never said. Perhaps you should have pursued her, into the belly of the beast. Why couldn't she have just listened?

You decide that, once this is done, you'll find her, and cut her open, and look at that Spark of hers. You'll rip the memories from her mind. You want to understand her, how she works. It would be… advantageous, if you could understand. If you could just prove to Atraxa, to Elesh Norn, that there is something uniquely good in there, something worth preserving, no matter how much must be stripped away and replaced.

Stupid. These thoughts are wretched, unbecoming. Recently, your mind has been filled with these idle schemes. You imagine entire conversations, and the strangest part is that increasingly, you envision yourself saying one thing, but feeling another. That what you are saying is no less true, but it is not the whole truth. There is part of the truth which you intend to keep for yourself. She would make a good Phyrexian—but she would be less like them, and more like you.

In the end, none of it matters, because the ground has started to glow.

The reports come in. It's happening all over the planet. None of your soldiers can explain why. You feel frustration welling up within you, just as the plantlife springs up from the ground, entangling your infantry.

Whatever this is, it's going for the Invasion Tree, you realise. The glowing branches are climbing up the ceramic bark, working their way into the cracks in its surface. If they make it up to the Seedcore, to New Phyrexia, it could contaminate the entire plane. You give the order to pull back, but even if Realmbreaker answered to a thing like yourself, it is simply not in the Invasion Tree's nature. It exists to grow, to lay down roots. Not to retreat. Not to shy away from the light of other worlds.

Instead, you order your aerial forces to sever the limbs, disconnect the portals. The sky around you has already grown thick with a blanket of branches. As you try to ascend, one of your wings catches on something, and within moments there are leaves clogging the engine. You don't have time to destroy the branches, so instead, you stab your spear into the joint, and prise off your own wing. The remaining engine pulls you free of the canopy. You can't begin to tell how many trees there are—but there is only one Realmbreaker, and this malignant growth cannot be allowed to spread.

Converted Cybertronian fliers gnaw through the pale bark with teeth-lined wings. You hack away at the material with the edge of your spear. It wasn't made for this. It was made to kill, not merely to cut. With a scream of anger, you tear off your remaining wing. It's only getting in the way. It's all useless. Better to just cut it all away, to start over. As the last of the limbs is chopped off, falling to the planet's surface, to be broken down by the new forest, your thoughts turn to your masters. You have failed them. They'll try to amputate you, too. Part of you hopes they will. But then, another part of you doesn't.

At the edge of the portal, the ragged boundary distinguishing one universe from the other, you take one last look at the giant beast, still looming even above the trees. You swear that you'll be back.

But the truth is, you never will. You'll return home to the news that Atraxa is dead, crushed under a building in a distant city. Elesh Norn will be occupied, and before you know it, she will be decapitated. And then what will you do? What purpose shall you serve?

You'll never know.

It was nearly a month before the Autobots reactivated the space bridge. It was another two weeks after that before Spike was allowed to see Cybertron again.

"This is so weird!" Spike gazed around in wonder. He was standing with Goldbug and Windblade in the middle of the forest, not far from Trypticon. The first time he had visited the Autobots' home world, he had been amazed by the scale of it, but the environment itself had not been altogether dissimilar from any given industrial site back on Earth, like the oil rig where he and his father worked. Now, though, the heavy machinery had yielded to something much more delicate, organic even. It felt decidedly alien, in a way it never had before.

"We're still getting used to it ourselves," admitted Goldbug. At the city limits, they had passed Scrapper, Bonecrusher, Mixmaster, Scavenger, and surprisingly, a couple of Autobots—Wideload and Scoop—who seemed to all be working together to clear away some of the overgrowth. "The entire planet's ecosystem has changed. Now that it's reasserted itself, some of us are wondering if we should be interfering with it at all. That's how this whole mess got started in the first place."

"What do you think, Spike? Would your Earth governments take us in?" asked Windblade.

"They'd be stupid not to!" he said. "You could probably solve world hunger, and the energy crisis, you could change the whole world. They're only scared of you because they haven't met you guys yet."

She gave him a knowing smile. "It's worked before. But it's not easy."

"Well, humanity does kind of owe us for keeping the Phyrexians away from Earth," Goldbug remarked. "The Decepticons especially. They probably weren't thinking about you guys, but a lot of them gave their lives defending that space bridge. In fact," he gestured around, "most of these trees were Decepticons. Now there's nearly as few of them left as there are of us."

"I guess," said Spike. "I still don't trust Soundwave, though."

Goldbug laughed. "Me neither, buddy. Still, I'll take him over any of the lug nuts that challenged him for leadership during that first week."

"What about Flamewar? I liked her," Windblade pointed out.

"Ehn." Goldbug shrugged. "She and Arcee have been thick as thieves lately. The Decepticons weren't exactly going to take orders from someone who's flirting with the enemy."

"Wait, you mean Arcee and Flamewar are…" Spike gasped. "But she's a— she's a Decepticon!"

Goldbug and Windblade just chuckled.

Spike's giddiness over the trip was fading. He noticed how the Autobots kept stopping so he could catch up, and not for the first time, he wished that he was bigger. A corvicon landed on a branch, but upon seeing them, thought better of it, and took off once more. Goldbug approached the tree.

"Poor Huffer," he said. With tenderness, he patted the trunk, the squat, hard-edged form entombed within it. "He hated the fact that we ever left Cybertron. I guess, at least now, he won't have to leave it again."

Spike wished, more than anything, that he could have been here to fight, or at least to do something. He could have snuck through the space bridge. In his imagination, there would have been some crucial moment where he would say something to the Phyrexian commander, and somehow convince her to leave them alone. He could have helped navigate to the planet's core; what if they had come across a passageway that was too small for them to fit through, or a booby-trap that only affected Cybertronians? He could have manned a turret, or watched Cliffjumper's back, and maybe one less person would have died. The only thing that stopped him giving voice to these feelings was that he knew Goldbug felt the same, except it was Spike's fault that Goldbug had to stay behind that day, so it wasn't the same at all.

"When they went off to fight, I didn't think I'd be seeing them for the last time," Spike eventually said. "I never even got to say goodbye to Optimus."

"Oh, Spike…" Goldbug shook his head. "He'll be back, don't you worry. He just needs some time."

"But for how long?" asked Spike. "I'm only human, we don't live as long as you. What if by the time he comes back, I'm old, or dead? He might not even recognise me."

"You'll see him again, I promise. It's just that, now the war is over, he feels he can't be here, not while we're trying to make peace with the Decepticons. There can't be two Primes. And now that he's not, he's trying to figure out who he wants to be, instead. You won't have heard this, but he's gone back to using his original name."

"What's that?"

"Ah… well, it's a traditional name, very poetic. It refers to a constellation—you don't have it on Earth, it's only visible from Cybertron, named after this ancient warrior. It's this idea of… peace among the stars? That they're all travelling through the night sky together, at a steady speed. Windblade, how would you translate it?"

"Where I come from, we translated it as 'Orion Pax'."

Goldbug frowned. "I don't know if that's it. For me, it's more like… Star Convoy?" Spike was hardly paying attention. He was trying not to cry. "Hey, listen," said Goldbug. "Don't you remember, back when I became Goldbug? I might have changed my name, and how I look, but that didn't change my friendship with you. I know that he still cares about you, too."

It had always been the same for Spike, ever since his mom died. People left. At that moment, Carly was busy with her exams, and she was only going to get busier. Carly thought about important things, like science, and the homeless, and all Spike thought about was the Autobots, and Carly. The Autobots didn't need him either.

Windblade was turning over one of the leaves in her hand. Spike still wasn't sure what it was that had brought her out with them. He'd never seen a Cybertronian quite like her. "Now that it's over, will you be going someplace else?" he asked her.

It seemed to take her a second to process the question. A sad smile crossed her features. "Actually… I already tried," she said. "I can't. Something happened, and now it's like I can't take off. My Spark is gone," she explained. As if it was not just her ability to planeswalk that had left her, but her very being.

"Oh. I'm sorry," Spike said.

"It's okay," she replied, letting go of the leaf. "This world is growing on me."

Epilogue 1

From the air, it had been possible to mistake this place for Cybertron: grey and white, worn smooth, the curving roads punctuated by gantries, scaffolding, and power lines. But when Chop Shop set down at the abandoned Siberian coal mine, the terrain could not have felt more alien. The ground yielded beneath him, a deceptive mound of particulates, and he kicked up dust as he followed the motionless conveyor belts towards the main shaft. Frozen crystals of hydrogen dioxide stuck to his armor. How long had the others been on this planet? He was surprised they hadn't all rusted to death long ago.

He had to lower himself into beetle mode to fit inside the tunnel. As he descended, he could see little doorways and tiny passages branching off, and he shuddered to think there might still be humans creeping and crawling around inside. But the humans had no more use for this place; what little coal was left was not cost-effective to extract, and perhaps never would be.

The exterior of this place, as exteriors often are, had been deceiving. The fluorescent lights of the tunnel gave way to wrought-iron braziers full of burning coal.

The bot Chop Shop had come here to see was in the centre of the cavern, his back turned. "Wipe your feet and throw some sodium chloride over your shoulder," he ordered. Chop Shop looked down and saw a tiny rectangle of colorful organic fibre intricately-woven into a pattern. The tassels at its corners had been tied to heavy rings of metal embedded in the floor, and inexplicably, Chop Shop could see the carpet undulating and bucking against them. He dusted off his feet, looked at the cauldron of white powder by the entrance, and ignored it.

The chamber's furnishings only grew stranger from there. Armoires, paintings, mirrors, bookcases, chalkboards, globes, hookahs, candelabra. Chop Shop's keen eye inventoried and appraised the contents of the room in an instant, and would immediately have dismissed it all as worthless organic tat, if not for the fact that much of it was wired together and plugged into Cybertronian computers. Maybe there was some exotic energy source in there. The room's occupant was sticking electrodes into a stuffed doll.

"So this the hole in the ground where you've been hiding," remarked Chop Shop.

"What, you think I came here because I'm ashamed?" His ears flashed as he spoke. "This planet is covered in a network of leylines. Four of them intersect here," said Wheeljack. "Did you bring the payment?"

Chop Shop dropped a shipping container on the floor. Something inside it clattered and broke. It was addressed to the British Museum. "The totem you were after should be in there," he said. He produced a shrink-wrapped deck, stolen from a gift shop not far from the museum, and between thumb and forefinger he carefully set it down on top of the container. The Hanged Man stared up at him. "And there's the magic cards you wanted." Wheeljack finally broke off and came over to give the items a cursory scan.

As he did so, Chop Shop examined the slashed-through Autobot symbol on Wheeljack's chest. There was always something grotesquely affected about a wound that hadn't been repaired. But when Chop Shop saw the Decepticon insignia painted just underneath, a white-hot rage came over him.

"I see you're admiring my new paint-job," said Wheeljack. "Did you know that go-faster stripes really do make you go faster? It's true," he remarked.

"Back on Cybertron. A few of my buddies got killed by Trypticon."

"They probably had it coming," shrugged Wheeljack.

Chop Shop drew his vibro-spear and lunged. But before he could close the distance, Wheeljack made a hand gesture, and a five-pointed star winked into existence in the air between them, and the next thing Chop Shop knew Wheeljack was gone, and he'd tripped and hit the floor, and there was the barrel of a gun pressing against the back of his head.

"I think I've basically got the hang of stopping time," explained Wheeljack. "Just for a few astro-seconds. Haven't quite worked out the targeting yet. Way I see it, I should be able to target just your Spark, put it out-of-sync with the rest of you, which would be fatal. But apparently that's not a legal target? Anyway, once I've got that figured out, the next thing will be reversing time."

Chop Shop stayed very still.

After a long moment, the gun moved away. "So this job of yours," said Wheeljack, as if nothing had happened. "Run it by me again, will you?"

Chop Shop wanted to run it through him. But if there was one thing the robotic stag beetle understood, it was a show of strength. "The human nation of China has developed a prototype aircraft which is practically invisible on the electromagnetic spectrum. I've got a buyer who wants it for an alt-mode, but the damn thing has been built in an underground factory beneath a military base. Now under normal circumstances that wouldn't be a problem, but China has also recently invented these nasty little EMP bombs that can knock a full-size Cybertronian out cold. I need you, Wheeljack, to invent something nastier."

He nodded once. "Sounds good. Let's get a couple of things straight, though. I'm not an inventor any more," he said. "And my name's not Wheeljack."

Epilogue 2

"The call came in shortly after 0700 hours. The farmer came across it during his morning rounds, telephoned the police. Tripped six keywords on the WIRETAP* (*West-Coast Information Relay Espionage Telecom Access Protocol) and was flagged as possible NBE* (*Non-Biological Extraterrestrial) activity, so Breaker picked it up and brought it to command. We deployed a RAM* (*Rapid Fire Motorcycle) unit immediately to get eyes on the ground. Once we had confirmation of an anomalous phenomenon, we locked down the area. The farmer and his family are being treated to a five-star vacation, in case you were wondering, paid for by the United States of America; there's no indication that anyone else has been in the area recently. We've established a perimeter of MOBATs* (*Motorized Battle Tank) and HAL* (*Heavy Artillery Laser) emplacements, as you saw on your way in, just in case snakes are in the grass. One of our nation's top quantum physicists, Doctor Vandemeer, has been flown in via ALBATROSS* (*Aerial Long-Range Battle Transport For Reinforcements Ordnance Or Supplies) to begin analysis of the zone's unique spatial properties, but his early reports aren't promising. The boys are having to design new instruments from scratch, which could take days. According to Vandemeer, there's no scientific mechanism that could create such a phenomenon."

"So what is it—magic?" scoffed Scarlett. "I need more than that, Grand Slam. Something weird shows up in the middle of Kansas, and I'm pulling Joes from practically every single one of our operations to deal with it."

"Anything more than that is classified until you're through the checkpoint. We can't discuss it outside the BIG TOP* (*Biologically Isolating Temporary Operations Pavilion). Besides, Scarlett, trust me… you need to see it with your own eyes."

They approached the great white tent. It was an immense cube-shaped structure, with countless smaller offshoots extruded from its base as separate rooms. OCELOTs* (Ordinary Commercial Export Logistics Truck) carrying supplies hastily sourced from the local businesses surrounded it, a network of cables snaking from the portable generators, through the wheat, to LAMPs* (*Lighting Amplification Pole) and more specialized hardware.

Entering through one of the offshoots, Scarlett and Grand Slam were subjected to twenty minutes of decontamination and identity checks, before finally being permitted through to the next area, a makeshift briefing room where several other G.I. Joe operatives were waiting. They stood to attention, except for Snake Eyes, who was busy sharpening a knife; he silently nodded in acknowledgement, the ninja-commando's expression hidden as always by his full-body black suit and visor.

"Glad you could make it, Scarlett," said Duke. He was wearing what appeared to be an ordinary spacesuit, except in military green, with an armored chestpiece sculpted to perfectly fit his six-pack. His helmet was in his hand.

"If you've had one of those made for me, too, you can forget about it," remarked Scarlett.

Duke chuckled. "The air quality's terrible through there, I'm told, so feel free to change your mind."

"Right then, we're all 'ere," said Big Ben, hefting his machine gun onto one shoulder. "I don't know how you lot do things over the pond, but—just speakin' personally—I don't love 'aving tank barrels aimed at me from every direction. Can someone explain why the guns are all pointing this way?"

"I'll tell you why," said Duke. "You're standing thirty meters from America's border with an unknown, possibly-hostile nation."

Scarlett rolled her eyes. "Quit messing around, Duke. We all know Kansas is landlocked, so why don't you tell us what this mission is really about?"

"Alright, alright." Duke smiled for a moment, then gestured behind him. "Behind that partition is a portal to another world. We know nothing about where it came from, and next to nothing about the world on the other side. Visual reports from our end describe an urban area, with no signs of living human inhabitants."

Scarlett nodded once. "Have we sent anything through yet?"

"We were able to drive a Radar Rat into the portal using remote control, then retrieve it. We then sent through an actual, live rat, which gave no signs of discomfort. Which brings us to people—and that's where we come in. Our orders come directly from the White House. First, we will enter the portal and secure the area. Secondly, we will attempt to make contact with any kind of native population. Our main objective is reconnaissance, exploring the immediate vicinity and collecting readings for the eggheads. Weapons will be kept holstered unless we confirm a hostile presence."

"You said it's a city—so how come nobody's home?" she asked. "You're thinking the people fled?"

"Our working theory is that this is some kind of dystopian parallel universe; depending on the point of divergence, it could be anything. Some kind of pandemic, or bioweapon, maybe. As I mentioned, pollution levels are abnormally high. There are some indications of governmental collapse. In fact—why don't we just head on through?"

In single file, they passed through the partition to the main chamber. The groundsheet crackled under their boots. Floodlights illuminated a flimsy gantry in the middle, manned by soldiers— mostly infantrymen, along with a few heavy weapons specialists: Blowtorch with his flamethrower, Sci-Fi with his laser rifle, and Bazooka with his bazooka.

Their guns were trained on a luminous gray triangle, standing up on its edge in the middle of the tent. It was as though a piece of the world had been cut out. As Scarlett approached, the details shifted with parallax; almost as if she were looking through a telescopic sight at some distant buildings, except the scope in question was as big as a truck. Duke was right; she'd never seen such a dismal city in her life.

Beside her, Big Ben started to laugh. "Oh my God. Mate, that's just London. You've got a portal to England sittin' in your back garden."

Duke looked at him very seriously. "Are you sure?"

"Swear on me Mum's life. That's Croydon you're lookin' at. My mate lives on a council estate two blocks from 'ere."

Scarlett frowned. "Are you telling me not one person in this room recognised that as London, until just now?" She noticed Snake Eyes doing a complicated gesture. "Okay, Snake Eyes has also been to London," she corrected herself.

"Bet you're glad I'm not still with the SAS* (*Special Air Service), eh?" chuckled Big Ben.

Duke clicked his fingers at Dial-Tone. "Get Big Ben to pinpoint the location, then send a message to our friends in the AMP* (*Action Man Programme). Don't give them any details, just tell them it's a matter of national security. Have them dispatch an operative to Croydon, and get visual on the street."

The air in the climate-controlled tent was chilly, and Scarlett shivered. She already knew they'd find nothing. No signs of human life, for several hours? If a disaster big enough to clear out a busy London borough had hit the UK* (*United Kingdom), their intelligence forces would already have been informed. No, this was something else.

She remembered the dossier where she'd first read that aliens were real. Incomprehensible radio spectrographs from Star Brigade telescopes. A list of license plates. Fuzzy photographs of a truck. She remembered Duke looking her in the eye, and saying, "Forget about Cobra. This is what we're fighting now." She remembered walking in on Snake Eyes in the training area, practicing moves to take down an opponent six times as tall as a man. It had been like discovering that Santa was real, and top brass was preparing to shoot him down for violating American airspace.

Duke's voice dispelled the memory. "Alright, Joes, let's move out."

They lined up near the boundary of the portal. Up close, the view appeared distorted around the edges, a slight fisheye effect. The asphalt of the road on the other side was a patchwork of resurfacing, marred by potholes collecting windswept trash.

Suddenly, a man appeared, brandishing something at them.

A dozen guns were raised to point back at him.

"Hi! Is this your rat?" asked the man. Clasped between his fingers, a white rodent squeaked in terror, its tail whipping around madly. A girl stepped into view beside him, only to immediately freeze at the sight of the soldiers.

"Drop the rat and state your name!" barked Duke.

"Ah, very clever, yes—see, maybe it's not a small furry animal at all. Maybe it's a gun! A machine gun: rat-a-tat-tat!" He aimed the rat at Duke. It squeaked and bit his finger, causing him to drop it. "Ow!" He sucked on the finger in annoyance, as the rat vanished. "Oh, now look what you've done! It took me half an hour to catch him, and now he's scurried off. Vamoosed. Va-moused?" He frowned, and looked at the girl for validation. She wasn't paying attention—she was too busy looking Scarlett straight in the eye.

"Put your hands up, or we will open fire," Scarlett decided to say.

Slowly, the man raised his arms. "Better do as she says. I think the funny little robot with all the missiles we saw earlier belongs to these guys, and if I'm not mistaken," he nodded in Snake Eyes' direction, "that's a Slab. Enormously dangerous mass-produced slave drone. Solid leather all the way through its body. Well, either that, or it's just a costume and we're really interrupting something." He took in the rest of the Joes, and cleared his throat. "Actually, yeah, looks like we might be interrupting something."

The girl snapped out of her stupor at last, and surrendered. Her hands shook in the air. The man's hands gesticulated. "May, 1348," he declared. "A ship pulls into dock in Melcombe, Dorset, carrying textiles, spices—and rats. Five hundred days later, half of England's population is dead. That's the first thing you learn as a time traveler: wherever you're going, the locals probably don't have the same immunities you do—so be careful what you bring with you. That teeny tiny little rat of yours is carrying germs from a whole other universe, and I need to find it before it unleashes Black Plague II."

"This is your final warning," said Duke. "Who are you?"

"I'm the Doctor. And I've already fought one army to stop a multiversal plague today—so if you could put down the guns and help me find that rat again, that'd be just wonderful."

Epilogue 3

The AllSpark changes shape. It collapses in on itself. The vicious facets settle. It recalibrates, taking on the simplest of Forms, in the timeless, transcendent sense. It is solid, this truth. It becomes a pyramid, then a cube, doubling and doubling again. As an icosahedron, inscribed within it is a recurring decimal, a golden ratio, which curiously enough, on Earth, is represented by the Greek letter phi.

After all, two different substances, once mixed, cannot be unmixed. Only a puritan would wish for such a thing. When the Mother of Machines was slain, on another world, by other hands, every last drop of Phyrexia, across the entire multiverse, was rendered inert. For in Elesh Norn's orthodoxy, she was Phyrexia, and so when she died, so too did the rest of it. But it was not Elesh Norn who made the oil in the first place. Rather, it made her. And the substance itself remains—fossilized, as such things are—in the joints, in the circuits, and yes, in the AllSpark, too.

But it is a lowercase phi, a lesser phi, an irrational, non-prime, forgettable phi. It is just one, amongst many.

The trees draw Energon up from the ground, and the Energon remembers everything it has ever been, ever turned into. It is life itself, and it rises, and falls, and eventually, makes its way back.

Lightning strikes this one spot, near to the planet's core, over and over… albeit, with asymptotic infrequency. Eventually, hundreds of years go by, between one thunderbolt and the next. Each time it does, a new face appears on its surface, the edges shifting to make room, until it is not quite a sphere, but an imitation of a sphere.

Seen from a distance, though, it's just a point of light, far above.

There is no road which leads to the very core of the planet. The only way to get there would be to fall. And if one were to fall, the balanced gravitational pull of the whole world would ensure that they would fall forever.

In an inverted orbit, equidistant from everything, Megatron still functions.

Though the oil no longer powers him, his Spark still burns. In stasis, he dreams of worlds made dust, of boiling skies and caged suns; and of pools of molten metal, foundries for stronger organisms; and of dissection, and great plagues, and raw meat, and of teeth, interlocking. Change is inevitable, and so eventually, some chance perturbation will disturb his fragile equilibrium, and he shall rise up.