A note: The tone may vary from serious, action-filled, philosophical, or humorous, depending on how I feel. This part is more like a prologue so it's a little serious and impersonal.
Another note: I don't read the comics because I don't have the money. I was tempted to use the Marvel Comics Cybertronian time words (Breem, Vorn, Cycle, etc) but I thought I should be consistent if I'm not in comic book continuum. Maybe I'll end up changing that just because it sounds cool and alien.
It's G1 and I don't know if you would consider it AU because in the G1 cartoon (Pre TF:TM which just doesn't even count ), none of the origins are explained. So it's like G1 was just continuing in its good ol' wacky way.
Disclaimer: Since this is clearly fanfiction, do I legally even need one?
At the time, it really seemed like a good idea.
A new breed of scientist - to hunt for knowledge and to seek out discovery. About eight million years ago this breed was designed.
Three archetypes for three sciences - Chemistry, Biology, and Physics. These three designs, while being developed, were developed under the new Cybertronian program, called Scientific Exploration and Expansion of Knowledge - or SEEK, for short. The team of developers nicknamed their three projects as, fittingly, the "Seekers".
The template for the three was basically the same, with minor differences in molding, but the personality chips were designed to best fit the seekers' respective sciences.
Personality chips and programmed databases, however, do little in comparison to the Spark. The spark, as recorded in the scriptures of Primus, is what separates the Transformer race from the petro-rabbits and the first robot race to inhabit Cybertron. The spark grants sentience, the gift of Primus.
Of course, since worshiping the scriptures of Primus was a practice growing obsolete during the Third Cybertronian Enlightenment, the spark was simply the thing that made a transformer who they were. Why or How were irrelevant, because it was considered beyond Transformer comprehension and thus shouldn't be a concern. However, this philosophy was only successful among the intelligencia of Cybertron, because those who did not have the luxury of education or time for pondering found that the scriptures of Primus gave simple and easy answers to the impossible questions that come with sentience.
Since there was work to be done, the developers didn't have time to ponder that for very long, because they had to go down to the center of Cybertron to finish their "Seekers".
At the time, it was relatively easy to get down to Vector Sigma.
A concern that always plagues a scientist when building a new transformer is that the only way to find out if there's a fault in the personality chip or a glitch in the programmed database is once the Transformer has been given their spark and activated - "born", in another sense. Because of the nature of the spark, there is a level of uncertainty and helplessness beyond the comfort level of most scientists - they do not know if the quirk is from an error they made, or if it's simply in the new robot's spark. And since the robot is now a sentient Transformer, attempting to find out has dire consequences for the new Transformer, and, consequently, its creator.
The scientists on the SEEK team were no exception. The ones who weren't transporting the three Seekers were staring into the ancient relic left behind by the Quintessons, both spherical and multifaceted at the same time - if Primus was real, thought one particularly philosophical member of the team, it would be something like Vector Sigma.
Like many other rooms, the grand room of which Vector Sigma was the centerpiece had walls. On the left wall there was an indentation that served as a shelf, and on that shelf were two things: A small metal box, and a button of around the same size. Back in these days all one needed to awaken Vector Sigma was a first generation Transformer with a finger.
Generally, the first thing a new Transformer does after experiencing self-realization is to name themselves. This is an instinctual reaction to discovering that they are a separate and unique entity in the universe. It also indicates to the creators the nature of the new Transformer.
Naturally, the scientist who spearheaded this SEEK development project, a young, cutting-edge scientist with fresh ideas who had even earned the nickname the Scientist, was eager to find out what his projects would be like. His excitement was visible - the large Transformer was so antsy that it looked like he was programmed into a child-phase.
With a button-press by the Elder recruited to activate Vector Sigma, the entire room was enveloped by a burst of white light - radiation or some other form of energy - and the Scientist found himself looking up into a light gray face - one he'd never seen before, but one that looked oddly familiar.
"Whoah, you okay there, buddy?", said a low and rumbling voice - not a deep voice, but low enough.
Success! The Scientist gave a smile so goofy that the newly-sparked Seeker jumped back in frantic confusion. Facial expressions were not a part of a Transformer's personality chip or native databases, so the seeker's reaction did not particularly surprise the Scientist. He did, however, decide that standing up might be taken as an act of aggression, so he only rose to a sitting position.
"I'm alright." As a matter of fact, he was fabulous. But the Scientist had to keep calm, keep cool. "I call myself The Scientist", he said slowly, as if talking to a child - which, he figured, he basically was.
The seeker nodded slowly, mouth in a line, optics never straying from the Scientist
"Cool."
Failure! The Scientist felt his energon pump sink into his cockpit. Something must have gone terribly wrong if the Seeker hadn't named itself yet. Voice strained but still calm, he asked with gentle despair, "Do you have a name?"
With a friendly nod - more like a slight diagonal tilt, really - the seeker flashed a politely lopsided smile.
"Sure do, pal."
Silence. Well, at least he had one, even if he seemed uncomfortable sharing it. The Scientist was going to walk him - based on his vocals, the spark must have been male - through the process of sharing his name, but it turned out he didn't need to.
"Name's Thundercracker."
Silence. The Scientist frowned a bit in what looked like confusion, his metal brow scrunching like only microdermaplating can. What the slag kind of name was Thundercracker?
The Seeker frowned a bit in what looked like confusion, and his brow scrunched too. When the Scientist realized how unexpected his reaction must have been to the seeker, he focused his optics back onto Thundercracker with a smile on his face.
"A unique name."
Thundercracker seemed to be satisfied with the scientist's analysis and turned towards the rest of the Transformers in the Hall of Vector Sigma - the Scientist had forgotten about them while he was so enveloped in his excitement. He hopped up enthusiastically to meet the other two Seekers, who seemed to be fraternizing with the rest of the Scientist's team.
And just like how the Scientist was never amazed that he suddenly sprang to life, the seekers didn't even seem to realize that they had just been sparked, either.
It was only a short matter of time before the Scientific Exploration and Expansion of Knowledge program was a household name. After breezing through the Cybertronian Academy of the Sciences, the three seekers became some of the most famous scientists in Cybertron:
Skywarp, the physics-model who promptly put meaning to his name by finding a mathematical loophole in the law of conservation of mass, consequently discovering how to teleport himself,
Thundercracker, the biology-model whose research was heralded as the reason that non-transition-metal based organisms were considered living organisms at all,
and Starscream, the chemistry-model working on a major project that looked to stave off the self-predicted energon crisis.
They were so successful, in fact, that more of these seekers were made. However, there was no co-operation from any of the Elders who could activate Vector Sigma, and so these 'neo-seekers' were not given sparks. They had the most advanced personality-chip technology available, which gave them a liberal amount of artificial intelligence, but they did not have the capacity to learn, adapt, develop individuality or deviate from their programming. Because of their lack of independence, the neo-seekers were put under the supervision of their respective archetypes.
Two of the seekers, Starscream and Thundercracker, found their new underlings to be more of a hindrance than a help because there was no way to delegate tasks among them. As a result of the slowing research, the SEEK program heeded the seekers' request to put the robots into stasis for an indeterminate amount of time.
Curiously, Skywarp did not seem to notice the presence nor the disappearance of these underlings. Skywarp himself seemed to be a mysterious character. None of his theories were ever written down, thus no record of his work existed. Though he had an intimate grasp on the fuzzy-logics of theoretical quantum mechanics, that grasp did not seem to extend to the real world - in other words, to the unknowing onlooker, he appeared to be incredibly absent-minded. It was a gossip-debate in the scientific community whether his actions and overall personality were due to him being a caliber of genius beyond their comprehension, or whether it was because he was just very, very stupid.
Though they were associated with their respective scientific academies, the seekers' personality chips - and sparks -had not limited them to their science. This was especially noticeable with Starscream. In fact, his project was clearly a combination of all types of sciences. As he once said in an interview, the problem of energy transcended all of the subcategories of science, as well as the many other fields - and his inspiration came from the other two Seekers' work as well as from his own. Thundercracker's strong opinion about the future availability of energy resources, Skywarp's despair at the pyramid of energy degradation, and his own knowledge of energy-producing chemical reactions spurred on his desire to, well, solve the energon crisis before it happened.
Thundercracker refused to work on projects that he did not feel had any real purpose, and his definition of purpose tended to lean towards the abstract - moral purpose, ethical conviction, and almost a sense of romantic heroics. An inexplicably odd trait of his, however, was that he always hovered - he never touched the ground unless absolutely necessary. When he spoke about ground-based organisms and ecosystems, he spoke with a tone that was considered by some to be disdainful at times.
It was probably only a few millennia later that the previously silenced factions - the Autobots and the Decepticons - had grown in numbers, political influence, and in enmity.
It first escalated when a rogue named Megatron, famous in the underground political group the Decepticons, organized a raid on the Autobot headquarters. These acts of violence were common between the two groups, almost always initiated by the Decepticons, but there had never been an attack of this scale.
Still, the scale was not large. Yet there were two marked differences between this attack and the previous ones. For one, the Decepticons stole energon from the Autobot headquarters, which was undeniable proof that the Energon crisis had begun. The other difference was that an Autobot had been killed, and not in self-defense. The security camera, recently donated to the Autobots by a well-off sympathizer, recorded that Megatron threatened the small Autobot, who was nominally guarding the energon storage room, and the Autobot conceded, opening the door to the room. The other Decepticons - later identified as Shockwave, Soundwave, and Soundwave's creations Ravage, Rumble, and Frenzy - followed Megatron through the door. When they came back through the door, all were carrying multiple energon cubes except Megatron, who exited last. Megatron was almost out of the camera's view when he turned around and shot the compliant Autobot's head off with his fusion cannon.
Because of the regularity of conflicts between the Autobots and Decepticons, the reaction of the media and the general populace was only slightly less indifferent than usual. There was, of course, the group that was constantly concerned over the conflict - some because of the fear of an expansion of the factions (thus an expansion of conflict and violence), and others because of their empathy towards those who were caught in the violence and dying for a reason so obsolete that no one could remember what it was.
Of course, whenever the latest attacks made the news, there would be conversations among the populace - those that watch the news, at least. They were always the same: Apathetic indignation towards the actions of one side or another, a pithy but generic outrage about the casualties, and occasionally an argument with someone of a differing opinion. The next day - or, in the workplace, the next hour - the violence was forgotten, because it didn't affect them.
The same was for the aforementioned attack, with the exception that it was the focus of the news for longer than one day. The recording was the key - the manner and circumstances under which the victim was killed were made public. The conversations between Cybertronians became longer, more passionate, more personal, and more polarizing.
A few Transformers were of the opinion that this was not about conflicting views, but about diminishing resources and old, rusty land boundaries. Thundercracker's explanation for the whole thing was a simple, well known theory - that war is a density-based limiting factor. That is, when there are too many Transformers living too close together and consuming too many resources than are realistically sustainable, the Transformers start to kill each other.
Skywarp, though disinterested in the history of the Autobot-Decepticon conflict, was strangely fascinated by the recorded attack when he saw it on a public image transmitter in the window of a media-electronics store. With a quick search of the databases available at the Cybertronian Institute of Physics, he started to amass a collection of descriptions of various violent conflicts between the two groups. He skipped the history, the motives, the circumstances - he focused on the physical descriptions of the carnage - weapons used, wounds inflicted, the state of the bodies once they had been found. At first the two other seekers (all three individual and unique as they are) just assumed that he was studying the history of the Autobot-Decepticon conflict - and consequently so did everyone else who still cared about the SEEK program - Skywarp was not a good interviewee so was never asked about it.
It was not long until the energon crisis became a real inconvenience for the majority of the planet. And, just like the two times before, the majority of the planet was not taking it well - with out energon, Transformers started to go into permanent stasis that no known technology could get them out of, and in the worst cases, their sparks - and their color - left them completely. When Transformers didn't have enough to survive, they indeed turned to the desperation of conflict to give them somewhere to turn.
And any good leader knows that in order to gain loyal followers from a desperate population, the only thing they need is a simple answer; a simple solution; someone to blame. Whether the answer is true is relevant only when looking on as an observer: Both sides thought that it was they, not their opponents, who were in the right.
To an observer, however, there was a clear distinction between the two leaders - Megatron, who had fought his way to the control of the Decepticons, and Optimus Prime, who had found himself thrust into the position by popular demand.
Of course, this again depends on the observer's point of view, so no matter what situation or what population, everything is always subjective.
Like I said, this "prologue" isn't even complete. It seems to go off on a little tangent and you're like "What? War? Seekers? Fight? Hello?" but it will totally make sense. I'm so psyched about this, haha. I'm graduating high school in two days so I decide to write a story about Transformers. That's education, baby.
Anyway, I'd like some comments about how this is in terms of logic and stuff - I'm going to continue anyway just for me, but I'd like to know what's going on here. Thanks for getting this far, by the way!