Welcome to extreme nerd hours. What follows is my own clumsy, (semi)hard sci-fi take on the origins of Cybertron: A U T O M A T E D R E S P O N S E a story by Galvatron II All it had taken was one mistake. One miscalculation, in the course of billions, and the Probe had found itself trapped in the listless pull of the blue green gas dwarf. And so it drifted there, fixed. Drinking in, when it could, the weak flow of ambient energy from the dwarf’s small, red sun. Biding it’s time, and plotting it’s escape. One mistake. The Probe would not make another. The Probe had been built, eons ago and parsecs away, to answer a simple question. A hypothetical, posed largely for it’s own sake: How long could it last? A machine designed to draw on the resources found in it’s environment as necessary to sustain, maintain, and even improve it’s systems, to operate without further assistance or intervention from it’s creators? Much longer, it had turned out, than those creators themselves. But that had been part of the point. Even with the implementation of powerful electromagnet drives, their invention moved at just over half the speed of light. A course between star systems, even under ideal conditions, would be a decade spanning undertaking. Their device would make thousands of such trips. It’s mission would be measured in millennia, and only, eventually, be understood in it’s entirety by the descendants of their descendants. They’d sent more than one. At first, they’d all been identical in design, metal grey spheres about three meters across, with a suite of sensors and a pair of manipulating appendages. But as the splitting branches of relentless, recurring reiterations had taken their course, what had once been uniform became irrevocably, unrecognizably distinct. Most had been destroyed early on in flashes of sudden impact. Some had been corrupted by errant cosmic rays and left drifting dead through inky black. A few were even captured and studied by races from neighboring systems. In the end, only two remained. The clever ones. It made no great difference to the surviving Probes when their creators had died out. Ecological collapse had turned to war, and war had turned to one swift, final annihilation, and still their mission proceeded. If anything, ceasing transmissions had proved to be more efficient. Insulation had been a priority. The Probe was able to use it’s electromagnets to draw, across great distances, itself to objects and objects to itself. It subsisted on the detritus of other worlds, defunct satellites and derelict spacecraft, integrating their useful components and discarding the rest, building itself out, protecting it’s delicate circuitry and ancient processors. The biggest boon, in those early days, had been the integration, in it’s near entirety, of an orbital refinery, abandoned by it’s organic creators for nothing more than a simple hull breach. From then on, the Probe had been able to fabricate new components of it’s own design, whole cloth, with nothing more than ore drawn from passing comets and asteroids. And so three meters had expanded, first to the size of a small city, and eventually a small moon. It had grown sluggish. This new bulk had required more energy, more complex calculations, and these factors had bred a new indecisiveness in it’s computer intelligence. Movement slowed and, with the mistake, had stopped. It was of little concern. The Probe had been designed to adapt, after all. So it had reconfigured it’s surface into one massive, interconnected supercontinent of solar collectors, and waited. Beneath this surface, the Probe retained great reservoirs of a plasmatic gel of it’s own, original design. A superconductor fluid that could store any charge, essentially indefinitely, with no measurable conductor loss. There was no rush. It could take it’s time, and outthink the problem… But, perhaps it had taken too long. Gasses had formed from it’s own pooled excretions, and clung to it’s mechanical bulk, a thin exosphere of smog. A slow process of creeping corrosion took hold. New problems. New solutions. New systems would have to be implemented, the probe would make machines of it’s own, dedicated to it’s maintenance. And maybe then, even more. They could take up the Probe’s mission for it, new devices with new modalities, exploring the cosmos and bringing back resources. The Probe commenced the necessary reconfigurations. It had made one mistake. It would not make another.
Thanks! The fact that there are two surviving probes is a little wink at Unicron. The idea is that over the millennia, as divergent lines of adaptation took place, one would problem solve its way into making the Transformers, while the other would develop an offense as the best defense strategy and set out exterminating external threats (IE any other other life forms in the galaxy). Basically a rogue AI, like an alien Skynet. It might be fun, in the context of a harder sci-fi universe, to play with the concept of Unicron as a hive intelligence of von Neumann probes (Self-replicating spacecraft - Wikipedia) but that’s a little too close to what the Ultimate Comics did with Galactus. Plus you don’t get the cool imagery of a planet-sized Transformer. In any case, in the context of this little story, it’s just a throwaway line
Cool, I wonder if there were other probes that survived like a version of Gaea or something. Hope to see more story from you
