Stage 3: Creatures of Stone

'They were apes only yesterday. Give them time.'

'Once an ape—always an ape.'…

'No, it will be different. … Come back here in an age or so and you shall see. ...

– The gods, discussing the Earth, in the movie version of Wells' The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936)

0o0o0

-Extract: Personal Log, Elita-One-

I like having Orion back. Is that so horrible to say? Apparently it is, because I never do say it out loud. Not even – or especially – to him.

He probably already knows. But saying it feels like betrayal. Like selfish complaining. Like backing down from an unpleasant job. And that's not what I do. That isn't who I am.

I am Elita-One. I do the job that must be done. I make a point of - no, I take pride in - never complaining. But sometimes I wonder if I ought to be more honest. At least with myself.

So I write it secretly, in this private log where no one else will ever see it:

I am glad that the Matrix was destroyed, if it means I get Orion back.

But can he remember how to be himself again? Of that, I'm not so certain.

- Save / Delete ? -

"Evolution is fascinating to watch.

To me it is the most interesting when one can observe the evolution of a single man."
-Shana Alexander

o0o0o

He was not buried in the the Archive Ship - that hasty aggregation of rescued hard drives, piled helter-skelter where they'd been dropped by the armload - although the Cybertronian Archives had once been his most trusted refuge.

He was not perched atop the Pinnacle – Iacon's tallest tower – as he sometimes liked to do when feeling low. He'd loved the way it gave him a flier's optical viewpoint on the torrus-state - the closest thing to flight he could ever achieve as a ground-mech. But that glittering monument to Autobot ideals was broken, burned, and melted down into oblivion, along with Iacon and all the rest of Cybertron.

Packed as they were like retro-rats in some of Shockwave's cages, these days it took an extra dash of ingenuity to escape from one's fellow mechs. So Optimus had threaded his way down to the lowest storage hold of this shuttle, secured a hundred-meter cable to one of many sturdy lashing bars put in along the walls to help secure the cargo, looped its free end around his waist, opened the loading hatch, and jumped.

Now he floated at the end of his slim thread, his back to all those gathered vessels full of refugees - metal capsules as tiny and as frail as golden fire-beetles flickering in the darkness. He stared out at what he'd made of his homeworld.

I didn't mean for you to die, he said. At least, his vocalizer clicked; his mouth formed words; but no sound could carry out here. I thought I understood what I was asking.

There was no sign of either forgiveness or condemnation from the burnt-out planetary hulk which he addressed.

Did you know this would happen?

Nothing.

Only the immensity of space met his inquiry.

Prime flared into sudden anger. Why didn't you tell me? he cried out.

The dead planet spun slowly, inert.

How could you abandon your children? Optimus waited for a last, long moment. Then dropped his gaze, and turned around the pull himself hand-over-hand back to the too-small shuttle that was his home now. Why did you abandon me? he whispered.

There ain't no rules around here! We're trying to accomplish something!

– Thomas Alva Edison

0o0o0

The tunnel was too tight for anything bigger than a Recordicon to fly down through it without getting tangled in the drill's lead-lines. It seemed that Scrapper's dig about the long, long jump had been nothing but bluster – much to everyone's relief. And yet somehow a very long rope-climb seemed anticlimactic. Not to mention dumb - if ugly outcrops could pop up out of the barren ground, what could they find within the heart of this mysterious, death-haunted world? No one wanted to rappel down into the mouth of the Pit. (Or worse.)

Reflector had to all but jump and wave his arms, before anyone thought to ask the knee-high mech to lead the way. He was the only bot there small enough to maneuver quickly in the shaft. Looking huffy but validated, the pint-sized Decepticon jumped into the dark mouth of the shaft.

Making his way on slow thrusters, Reflector transmitted rapid-fire images of the things he saw along his way over an open comm-channel. The larger bots pored over them, getting in one another's way and/or shouldering each other aside with curt threats.

When he finally reached the dangling drill-bit, Reflector found that it had stopped after breaking through the "ceiling" of a vast, dark cavern. Not even his camera-flash illuminated its far reaches. You guys get down here! he commed. I don't want to be crunched by some remnant of Unicron's consciousness or a monster with a taste for metal!

Back on the surface, Scavenger tried again to be helpful: he passed around a can of axle grease. "For your hands," he explained, when one or two bots raised an eyebrow at him. "So you won't get stuck along the way, or wear grooves in your derma-plating."

"As long as we manage to stop when the time comes," Jetfire replied dryly. But he'd stared into the bore-hole long enough, and he had a mission to fulfill. He shrugged, and sat down on the tunnel's roughened edge, clunking his dangling feet against the slick, spiral-grooved sides. He reached back for a glob of Scavenger's thick blue-black grease and slicked his palms with it. Then he hunched in his wide, white wings, got a loose grip on two drill-cables, and then disappeared without preamble down into the blackness.

Everyone leaned in close to listen. The hissing whine of metal sliding against metal echoed loudly in the tunnel, like some alien rock concert heard from the sewer-system. After several tense kliks, Jetfire commed back to the huddled, waiting mechs. I'm not dead, he said. Come down if you're coming. Let's get this done quickly.

The eerie, morphing landscape added its own ominous urging to speed. While they'd been waiting, Beachcomber (tentatively scanning one of the most recent rock-thrusts), had been knocked aside as a second rose abruptly from the ground. Mixmaster gave a last, uneasy look around. "Slag this," he said, and leapt into the hole.

One by one, others followed, strung like beads along the hanging cables. Most of the bots were second-guessing this whole operation by this time. But right now more than anything they wanted to avoid some sort of a limb-cracking debacle at the bottom of this ridiculous slide.

When Jetfire had landed (with an undignified clatter and thunk) atop the free-hanging drill-bit, he'd leapt off quickly and transformed mid-air. Now he hovered, main hatch open, to receive each bot that scrambled from the swaying strand to jump into his cargo bay. The flight-capable Decepticons refused his hospitality, preferring to ignite their own thrusters instead.

"That's all of us," said Hound, as he brought up the rear. He pulled the hatch-gate shut behind him. "We're set, Jetfire."

"Acknowledged." The white jet-former circled in a slow descent, until he landed tentatively on a gently undulating surface. It was dull brown in color, thick-plated in a soft metal, and criss-crossed with inlaid piping. It was completely unlike the planet's outer surface; a whole new category of strangeness.

To say the cavern where the exploration team now found themselves was large would be an understatement. It was enormous enough to make even the tallest of the mechs feel small and insignificant. The atmosphere was cool and fresh, with no taint of charred metal, rot, or molten magma. (Hound even thought he felt a faint breeze brushing his cheekplates; this he duly reported.) They were in utter darkness: the bots' pale headlights - even Reflector's more powerful flashes - only cut a little way into the black. The glimpses he saw reminded Jetfire of the oldest, deepest tunnels in the old, familiar Cybertron - places he had only made his way to once, and that unwillingly. Those tunnels, however, had been small, cramped things - only as like this vast cavern as a lugnut is like a wheel. "All right, my fellow bots," he said. "Let's find out what we're dealing with down here."

Perceptor transformed and examined all the coppery-brown bits of this and that pushed helter-skelter underneath his lens. Bots scattered every which way, some bent almost double as they examined the strange surface on which they were walking. Those who could fly followed the floor as it curved up into the wall, and then became the ceiling. Sixshot stood guard, as he had promised, every light on his lofty chassis set to full. "Doesn't look much better in here than it did out there," the Phase-Sixer remarked dryly.

"Just get what we need for an accurate report," Jetfire reminded his team. "Then we can get out of here."

"Forever, if we're lucky," Bonecrusher added under his breath.

If not you, who? If not now, when?
- The Talmud

0o0o0

"Prime!"

There was no answer.

Megatron pounded a fist on the door. "Come out of there! Primes don't have time to pout!"

A voice inside proclaimed, "I'm no Prime, Megatron. Not any more."

Just barely, the Decepticon refrained from kicking in the door. He cycled three slow intakes, and counted to eleven. Then through his teeth, he said, "Let me in, Prime. I'm asking nicely."

The door slid up. Optimus confronted his former assailant nose-to-nose, arms gripping the doorjamb to bar entry. "I... am not... a Prime," he said slowly and distinctly. "Or is it just that you can't stand the thought of being bonded to anyone less?" He stopped, exhaled, and made a stiff, apologetic gesture. "I am not myself," he explained dryly. "But come in, if you will." He drew aside, leaving the doorway unblocked. "What is is you require?"

Megatron stood there in the shuttle's narrow passageway, silent. Then slowly his face closed up. Like a portcullis, the old mask slid down, narrowing his red optics to bright slits, and locking his mouth into a stark, uncompromising line. "It seems I don't require anything of you, Orion," he said stiffly. "You are right. You're not a Prime."

The big Decepticon turned on his heel, and marched down the hall, away.

Optimus... blinked.

He called after his bond-brother.

But Megatron had fled.

"Progress has not followed a straight ascending line,

but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

o0o0o

"My greatest creation." For something like the thousandth time, Grapple murmured the phrase to himself as he stared mournfully out of the window at the dead planet below. He spoke the words like a mantra; for they were his only reminder that he had ever been the architect of anything so wonderful as the Pax-Cybertronian Tower.

And indeed it had been a glorious thing. So tall it had been visible along the rim of Cybertron even from orbit, it had nonetheless seemed to swing weightless against the sky. Strung with carefully-calibrated solar sails, it had danced with the winds instead of standing against them. Sunlight that shimmered in the sheets sent power to the tower's grid, and to the surrounding city as well. "Will I ever build something half so lovely again?" he wondered aloud. He sighed as his gaze returned from the golden hues of the past, back to the dead gray of the present. "Will I ever get the chance?"

"I doubt anyone could stop you." There came a soft chuckle, and Hoist, who could be surprisingly quiet for so bulky a bot, appeared beside him.

But Grapple was too depressed to respond to his friend's old sneaking-up trick. "What will I build them with, may I ask?" he demanded in a flash of anger. "We didn't exactly bring a lot of materials with us. And even if we had, what would I build on? That?" He flung out an arm toward the charred coal of a planet floating beyond the thick-paned window.

For several moments, the only sound was the constant underlying rumble of the ship's slow-churning engines. Both Autobots stared at the featureless expanse of gray. Even the ever-upbeat Hoist doubted the exploration crew would find anything down there which would warrant a return to such a place. Their home was a floating cadaver; trying to scrape a life out from it seemed like ghoulish desecration.

You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

o0o0o

Shockwave was not a mech who had been blessed with much capacity for expression. But if he were, he would have smiled to himself as he correlated all the data coming in from the away team. He took a secret pleasure in the knowledge that the terse reports Jetfire was sending him were galling to the tall white Autobot. They had been forged as fellow scientists, but it was common knowledge that Jetfire disliked his purple counterpart. Their morals and their methods clashed.

Wheeljack, however, was another matter. No mech had yet been forged who could repress that bot's enthusiasm. Shockwave flinched inwardly as his thoughts were once again broken into by that ebullient nasal voice.

"Hey Shocky! C'mere an' look at this!"

Shockwave glanced in supplication at the ceiling, hoping that one of the ill-fitted tiles would fall on Wheeljack's head.

"This is the most fun I've had in ages!" the Autobot was crowing. "I ain't used to having mineral samples stand up and slaggin' waveat me."

"Mineral matter is not sentient, and does not acknowledge your observation," the Decepticon said wearily, "No matter how much moonshine engex you've drunk while I wasn't looking."

But the engineer kept babbling (his headfins flashing frenetically), as he all but dragged the taller bot over to the other exam table.

Reluctantly, Shockwave deigned to put his single yellow optic to the microscope's eyepiece.

He stared for a long, long time.

"Neat, huh?" suggested Wheeljack.

Then the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations. Then said I, Ah, Lord God! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child. But the Lord said unto me, Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak. Be not afraid of their faces: for I am with thee to deliver thee, saith the Lord. Then the Lord put forth his hand, and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth. See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant.

-Jeremiah 1: 4-10 (KJV)

o0o0o

"I take it that did not go well?" Elita said, entering.

"That's the understatement of the vorn." Optimus held his arms out to Elita like a supplicant begging redemption. After a moment, she went into them.

"He wants me to be someone that I don't know how to be without the Matrix. They all do." He looked down into his bondmate's fathomless blue optics, questioning. "Except, perhaps, for you?" He left it as a question.

Elita drew back a step and propped one hand on her hip, studying her bondmate. "What would you say if I asked you to run away with me?" she asked without preamble.

Optimus gaped. "Is this a trick question?"

Elita met his optics squarely. "No."

Optimus turned to stare out at the far-off stars, so crisp and cold through the small porthole window. He thought what it might be like to abdicate: to leave behind the burden of authority, the burden of his failure, the everyday reminders that he'd been demoted, rejected, unmade.

He tried to imagine doing that. But he could not.

"I don't know, dear one," he said at last. "Optimus or Orion, I don't think I have it in me to just walk away and leave them."

Elita's shoulders slumped. She shook her head and laughed. "No one but you is shocked to hear you say that."

Optimus crossed the room and drew her in, holding her tightly as he had on the long-ago night Orion Pax was reformed as the Prime. "Are you disappointed, sweetheart?"

"A little." She gave him a crooked grin. "But far less, I suppose, than I would have been if you'd said yes. We've never been quitters, you and I."

He gave a little rueful snort, conceding. "You certainly are not." His spark fumbled out along their bond, as his heart always did whenever he remembered their four million years apart. They had never quite recovered from that long, long separation.

"Orion," Elita called softly. "I want to remind you of something." With one hand drawing his helm down to touch her own, she pressed the other flat against his chest. "Try for me now. Please."

Optimus had always found it ironic that he, of all mechs, should be so inept at spark-to-spark communication. But he understood why she had asked. Sure, Elita could simply have jacked into one of his input ports and downloaded whatever files she wanted to share with him there and then; but there was always something so detached and clinical about such an exchange. Besides, any old bot could download things into his processor. It was Communication 1.0 in the Newling's Handbook of Instructions. A share down along their bond would be more intimate, more true.

"I will try," he told his lifemate. He drew her in, two-into-one, metal-to-metal, because, well, he loved her. And because there was a world-bound part of him that found spark-communing easier if Elita was physically right there. Then he shut down his optics and hearkened to her audible spark-pulse, his soul open in the unremitting trust of lifelong love.

He felt her thoughts like flitting fingers, gently rummaging through his old memories. When she'd found what she was looking for, she brought it to him delicately, as if in cupped, reverent hands. Following her suggestion, he opened the record she held up to him.

He'd come online sprawled flat on his back, looking up into a glorious sky.

He'd tried to lift himself, but hissed in sudden, searing pain. His arm was gone. He'd called for help, but only made some useless clicking sounds. His comm unit was hanging by a single wire from the open gash across his throat.

"Is this-?" Optimus lurched back a little, and for a moment the bond closed down. "Why would you want me to remember-?"

"Trust me, dearest," Elita repeated, holding his gaze with her own.

Warier now, Optimus tightened his hold on his bondmate, anchored himself in her still, blue optics, and opened himself up to the memory of Megatron's very first betrayal, so long ago, when he had been Orion Pax and she had been Ariel.

He'd rolled onto his other side, slipping in a pool of his own inmost energon.

When he'd finally managed to raise himself on his left arm, Orion Pax looked down at his body to assess the damage. A blast-burned hole cut through him, where his right arm and most of his right side had been up to a few moments ago. His right leg ended just above the knee.

His focus wavered, widened: Ariel, shot clean in half, was sprawled beside his torn-off stub of leg; and Dion lay a little way beyond, missing a head.

It was so tempting, then, just to lie down and die with them.

He shook his head, trying to make sense of the criss-cross message-fragments his buzzing processor was flashing at him. That flying mech whom he had so admired - that 'Metatron' or 'Megatron,' whatever his name was - had shot him and his friends. Orion had always been a trusting soul, eager to discover new things to love about everyone he met. Now he felt something like a shell close over his sputtering spark. He'd trusted Megatron. He'd wanted to be like him.

Ariel gave a tiny whimper.

And Orion Pax out of old Iacon raised himself up on one good knee, grabbed the femme's armor in his one functioning hand, pushed Dion's lifeless form ahead of him, and crawled toward the nearest first-aid station.

He had made it almost half a mile before he collapsed and did not get up again.

Optimus blinked and stumbled a little, surprised to have two working legs. Elita did not let him fall, but neither did she let him shrink away.

"You never left us," she whispered. She cupped a hand to his bared cheek. "Matrix or not, it's you, Orion. It's who you've always been. You take care of people, my love. And you never, ever, ever, ever lie down and give up."

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious—

it is the source of all true art and science.

-Albert Einstein

o0o0o

Longhaul was feeling irritated, and disinclined to contribute. So he found the most inane task he could think of: following one of the pipelines that ran in loops throughout the floor. He told himself he'd find out if it went anywhere interesting. But honestly, he didn't care. The Constructicon chased the thin duct into a wide alcove some way off from the other mechs. His shadow made the corner dark as pitch.

Except that it wasn't. Longhaul crouched down on hands and knees to look more closely. "Uh... guys?" he called. "Am I going crazy, or is this floor glowing?"

Scrapper and Jetfire hurried over, and bent down beside the burly green Decepticon. "Lights out!" the Autobot ordered. "All except you, Sixshot," he added as an afterthought. "We don't want any nasty surprises coming at us in the dark." Scrapper signalled his own team to follow suit. Silence fell as lights went out. Darkness pressed in around them - all around, except in one far corner, where Longhaul, Scrapper, and Jetfire stooped to stare.

The three mechs shot glances at one another, seeking confirmation. Was this just some optical glitch brought on by the darkness? But soon it became all too apparent that this was no delusion. What had been a barely-perceptible glow in one pipe strengthened to become a spreading surge of soft white light. Some chemical was flowing into the million large and small ducts running throughout every surface of this subterranean chamber.

The bots retreated, stepping daintily to avoid breaking open one of the mysterious pipelines half-buried in the floor. They huddled close around Sixshot's braced legs, standing shoulder-to-shoulder regardless of original team or faction, watching the creeping light come toward them with the horror they would usually reserve for a slow-spreading flood of metal-eating acid.

The glowing liquid flowed beneath their cringing feet, condensing in luminous pools at all the cavern's low-points. But some force from deeper down was pumping this strange substance up. in fits and starts, it made its way up walls and onto far-up ceilings, till finally the whole cavern was dimly lit in ghostly white. Now by the hundreds, half-glimpsed tiny beads of brilliance began surging through the pipelines, darting as if with swift, independent purpose. And although the mechs would have all said it was completely silent, they all shared a sense (or perhaps fear) that not far beneath their feet something immense was humming, pulsing, moving, breathing, waking.

"Where is this stuff coming from?" somebody whispered. "What's happening here?"

"Better find out," growled Hook.

Jetfire stepped with trepidation onto a particularly fragile-looking duct. Nothing happened. It simply pinched closed, and other nearby lines took up the flow. He shrugged. "It's further down and in, for us," he said simply. "We've got to find the source." He forged ahead, leading the way toward the steepest, widest slope downhill. "Come on," he called. "After this, we can all go back to our nice, safe shuttles."

"Oh, sure. If we can make it out alive," Bonecrusher grumbled.