After the events of Transformers: Deviations, how was Optimus Prime able to deal with the Hate Plague without the Matrix Of Leadership?
Dear Anger Appraiser,
In the future of 2005, Optimus Prime and Megatron clashed for what would be the last time. The world was shaped by their deaths, and their subsequent rebirths. You wish to know the future of a world where things happened differently. In a world… where Optimus Prime never died!
It was the young Hot Rod who fell in his stead, sacrificing himself—and the Matrix of Leadership—to defeat the monster planet Unicron. Rodimus Prime never had the chance to lead the Autobots, and never grappled with his shame over Optimus’ death. The Autobot Mausoleum was never constructed. Optimus Prime’s body was never interred there, out of sight, behind the Veil of Remembrance. It was never sent into deep space, and never found by the Quintessons, who never exhumed his corpse, to engineer his dark awakening. The Matrix—destroyed so long ago—never stirred the fleeting remnants of his original personality, never prompting him to turn on the Quintessons. His body was never recovered, never repaired, never set adrift once more. The Hate Plague’s prison-sun never caught him in its gravity. Jessica Morgan never implored Gregory Swofford to help her retrieve Optimus Prime, never bringing them close enough to the eventual supernova to be infected by the hateful spores.
All’s well, it would seem, that ends well.
Unfortunately, fate is rarely so kind. The spores continued on their journey through the vacuum of space for centuries, undisturbed—until a temporo-spatial eddy, formed by two ships chasing each other through transwarp, guided a cloud of spores to a mysterious planet. The Hate Plague infected first the Maximals and Predacons, then all life on Earth—including the Autobots and Decepticons, comatose within the crashed Ark.
When Mount St. Hilary erupted in 1984, the already-infected Transformers awoke to a world where intelligent life had never evolved. They warred with each other ceaselessly, without regard for faction, until their energon reserves ran dry. Earth became a new tomb for the Hate Plague.
Those who had remained behind on the dying Cybertron never heard from their lost leaders again. They could never have imagined Pax Cybertronia uniting their embittered people once more. They never saw Unicron coming, and until their final moments, they never changed. There was no-one to remember Optimus and Megatron, who died at each other’s hands on a hateful alien world, and their names were never honored. The Golden Disk was never stolen—never even tasted by Unicron, never sent by humanity in the first place. The Maximals and Predacons never existed; their ships were never built, never crossed paths with that furious star, never carried the Hate Plague to their ancestors in stasis on that prehistoric world, who would go on to awake in 1984, and begin their war anew. And in the future of 2005, Optimus Prime and Megatron clashed for what would not be the last time. It never ends.
I watched from afar as history repeated itself, ripping scars across that misbegotten universe. Time would bend and yield, and then snap. But for all my power, there was naught I could do to bring closure to this tragedy. For if I was to intervene, I risked becoming infected myself—and by my nature, the Hate Plague would have a vector to spread across all of time and space. And so it lingers now, an infernal engine of suffering, quarantined in a distant corner of the multiverse.
