Disclaimer: Whilst this concept of the nature of Cybertron is my creation, I do not own the name, or any of the original ideas associated with it. Nor do I own any characters from Transformers, or any places or scenes. All these belongs to Hasbro and I make no money from this work.

Warnings: none in this chapter. Later story contains adult themes, domestic violence and drug use.

Forward:

I first wrote this story quite a while back now, as part of a larger work called “Awakenings” which it is still intended to make an appearance on here at some stage and is the prequel to all the G1 Mirage and Skywarp stories, told once again from their perspectives. This section of it sort of ran away a bit at the time, and I can also write better than this now I believe, but its an amusing story and so, appreciative of the positive comments I’ve had about Reconciliation even in its fledgling stages, I’ve decided to start putting it on here.

I am conscious of the fact that the Mirage/history/Towers etc theme has been tackled a few times now, and done well, so I felt a need to make sure that any of my forays into early Cybertron from the Mirage angle were extremely different. I think you’ll find this portrayal of the Towers as a corrupt and declining anachronism amidst a failing Cybertron democracy before the war is just that. I like to think of it as the Towers- as- never- seen- before.

One little warnings – for those who like Transformers to be absolute robot, and nothing but robot then this does definitely veer towards the humanizing end of the spectrum. But the main story probably worth reading for a laugh anyway.

DECADENCE

By Ayngel

Prologue

From “Data retrieval and recall: my early life and times” by Mirage D’Ligier; an excerpt from “on the nature of Iacon Towers, and other places”

..... I should start with dispelling some misunderstandings about Cybertron, It is often depicted by humans as such a tiny world whereas, in fact, it, is, by Earth standards, enormous. It orbits the bright sun of Toliman and its smaller companion sun, Hadar – or the Alpha Centauri suns - as you call them. Once a rugged orb composed of naturally occurring rocks with a high metallic content, of mountains and lakes and rivers and covered in entirety by thick swirling clouds of gas, it never had any life of its own. Yet, over millennia, it was settled and colonised by our race who were from elsewhere among the stars, and they tamed it and reduced the great gas clouds to a thin, pinkish atmosphere, and built great structures on the surface and within the core and above in the skies.

Eventually, over millenia, much of the surface was transformed into a procession of cities and suburbs, spaceports and transport depots, mines, factories and manufacturing plants, so that by the time of the war, with the population at some three hundred billion, many parts of the land bore no resemblance to their original state. But in the less tameable regions - the mountain ranges and the great rock plains of the equatorial provinces and the polar chasms – locations too remote and weak in resources to develop to any intensity – the natural bronze coloured rock still made up a landscape free of Cybertronian added adornments; as did the vast oceans to the North and South, apart from some of their more hospitable islands.

For many millions of years, Cybertron had a social system known as the Utopian Order. It’s Cybernetic beings were divided into castes and further subcastes, all with a designated place and purpose and all with a unique role. It was a stable, ordered regime, at the top of which sat the ruling Alpha castes, superior in construction and programming and rewarded with much of the planet’s wealth for the important role they performed in making the rules and ensuring the planet ran smoothly, and that all mechanisms operated according to their rightful designation. The Alpha caste lived in separate, insular communities and had their own culture and ways, the presence of lesser castes coexisting there only to serve their unique interests and idiosyncratic tastes.

These communities were scattered across Cybertron, usually in close proximity to the great cities and provinces over which they presided. Of all these cities, none was greater than Iacon, which was the capital; and of all the Alpha communities, none was more spectacular than The Towers, which made rules for all of Cybertron and presided over all of the others; and of all the members of the Towers community, no family was greater than the beings des Luminieres, the clan which ruled all the others and from which the Ultra Uno himself was ordained to ultimately rule supreme over every living mechanism on Cybertron.

Although the caste system was abolished - supposedly - I have never described myself as anything other than of the Alpha Caste, as this is what I am. I grew up in the Towers, which was in a state of flux and change by the time I begin this story, as the Utopian Order was long dismantled and the Democratic Equilibrium had existed for about a million sun circuits. The founders of the new world of - supposed - equality, shared resources and free trade, those heroes of the gamma castes, the brothers Prime and Megatron, had taken up the seat of Government in Iacon where they headed up what was a - supposed - representative ruling forum. The Ultra Uno’s descendant still lived in the old Towers Palatial Residence – but he was, in those days, a mere figurehead, a quaint anachronism and reminder of what had been in the past.

The Alpha caste no longer had the power to make decisions for Cybertron, yet their communities remained. They were in a state of confusion, torn between carving out new roles or, in many instances, redefining their old power bases through a new medium of corporate wealth and highly paid professions. I did not realize this as a sparkling, any more than I realised that Alpha Caste society no longer represented the pinnacle of Cybertronian existence, or that the harmonious coexistence which once reigned within had been replaced with bitter competition, rivalry and corruption, or that communities such as the Towers shuddered in social decay.

The Alpha communities were not alone. In fact, the whole of Cybertron struggled to cope with an order steeped in idealism but beset by impracticalities. The world which I entered as a sparkling was to be not without turmoil; for as the Equilibrium gradually failed to achieve it’s aim, crippled by scarce resources and the demands of a surge of immigrants from the outer worlds, the government floundered, together with the system it stood for; and, as it did so, there was misery and outrage, and the disenfranchised took desperate measures, and anger flared in dark and dangerous places.

But I did not know all this as I made my way happily and innocently around the halls of our ancestral home of Celestine Heights, or played in the crystal gardens, or looked across the waters of Lake Iyili from the viewing platform. I did not know that the great divide which would lead to war had already appeared and the fate of Cybertron had already been ordained.

...

But I have no wish to dwell further upon Cybertron’s demise. For now I think it only right to provide a description of Iacon, for it is most important in the scheme of everything, and besides which, no story can be properly told without an image created of its setting; such was I instructed as an Alpha, and so shall I always believe.

Iacon was a vast place - it is hard to convey the sense of sheer size compared to cities on Earth. When you took into account all of the suburbs, it covered an area about a tenth of the size of Earth. Situated on the shores of the Southern ocean, magnificent, colossal structures made up the central part; the newer architecture, the graceful square and cylindrical towers composed of white stone and silver metal and glass – some of them several miles high by Earth standards and all connected by multitudinous layers of walkways and rollways and flyways - interspersed with and transposed upon the great domes and orbs of bronze and gold which comprised the city as it had been under Utopian rule. East, the buildings sprawled away into the distance, subtly transforming into the less ostentatious forms of the residential suburbs whilst to the West, the Iron Mountains rose up, a mass now of civilisation, the only factor marking the presence of mountains being the fact that the lower levels of the buildings rose gradually higher than those on the plateau below.

The mountains curved around in an arc to the North so that they also formed Iacon’s northernmost boundary. There, they had been cut away to allow for the expansion of the city on the plain, so that their start was marked, some distance away by a sheer vertical scarp of golden coloured rock, about a mile in height by earth standards. A wall which ran along the top of the scarp served to dam the river as it flowed out of the mountains to the North and there what had once had been a series of great mountain valleys was now a vast lake, dotted with a maze of interlocking islands which had once been the tops of mountains. Water flowed always through the lake and various breaks in the wall allowed it to cascade spectacularly in a series of gushing waterfalls over the scarp and into ornate ponds below and so into the canals which ran in a network all through Iacon and out to the ocean.

It was from each of these islands that tall, exquisitely architectured buildings arose, a collection of gracious halls and arches topped by majestic spires which glowed many colours in the varied lights of day from the precious metals and stones from which they were composed. Connecting the islands were ornate and beautiful bridges under which many vessels passed through the soft lilac waters; Situated in the centre, adjacent to the scarp and rising majestically above them all was the Palace, an imposing collection of orbs and steeples surrounded by magnificent crystal gardens which spread across the large island it occupied. This was the Towers, by day, a beautiful place: civilised, tranquil and tasteful. By night – a magical realm of glittering colours as the light sparkled from billions of crystals embedded in the buildings, grown in the gardens and beneath the surface of the lake.

Each island home had traditionally belonged to a ruling family. Ours was called Celestine Heights , and was a fairly typical Towers residence, on one of a cluster of low level islands set off to the western side of the Lake and about midway between the scarp and the mountains, where water lapped softly on to gentle sloping rock beaches. Close by there soared the majestic spires which cast perpetual wavering reflections in the lake. From the shores of Celestine island, the only sounds apart from the distant hum of Iacon were the lapping of the waters, the gentle buzz of water craft and the occasional sound of faint music and voices or of mechs working on the estates. Smoke wafted lazily from the burning of aromatic tailings in many great urns, so there was always a gentle haze present, the constant sweet scent creating what the occupants of the Towers community considered to be a sacred domain.

On the Southern shore of Celestine island was a small marina, from which steps cut into the coppery rock led upwards and on to a sweeping entrance pathway lined on either side by gardens with delicate crystal beds and mighty structures, ponds, fountains, paths and statues and pergodas, whilst before and above the house rose majestically, a series of elegant spires the tallest of which were the three towers on which were etched images of suns and moons and which gave Celestine Heights its name. Eventually, an elaborate entrance hall gave way inside to a mass of lobbies and halls and rooms and offices. Then there were wide ornate staircases leading to chambers in the higher levels and then staircases which wound upward to the towers, either on the outside or the inside, to balconies and viewing platforms high above.

From these platforms and from the tops of the other tallest buildings, the view was unsurpassed anywhere else on Cybertron. To the South over the scarp could be seen all the magnificence of Iacon and, beyond the ocean glittering in the light of the twin suns, reflecting the delicate pink and indigo hues of the sky. Behind and to the South, the mountains rose, a procession of golden peaks fading away into the distance. A glow on some moonless lights which came from the closest city of Iacca Niara on the other side of the mountains was the only thing to indicate the existence of further civilisation in that direction.

The Towers became controversial in Iacon, because of the wealth it still contained and because it was still, to all intents and purposes, a segregated and parochial subculture, which did not sit well with the supposed “new way”. Yet, for all that, it, along with the other traditional districts, remained largely unchanged. Cybertronians, you see, had a secret affection for things Utopian, even though they had long ago rejected that system. Cybertron prospered under Utopian rule for many millennia and was the system which spawned the modern Cybertron – so despite the criticisms and the insistence of the virtues of the Equilibrium there was still a secret belief that to remove the old vestiges of power would have seemed to remove the very essence of Cybertronian existence itself. Thus the Towers and its equivalents remained.

And, as for me – as I said, I grew up having happy times in what I thought of as magical surroundings, and I wanted no interference with that. No dark stains of reality soiling my own perfect Utopia. Had I opened my optics and taken in what was going on around me, in my own family, I perhaps have seen otherwise; seen that that it was a microcosm of all the wider problems which beset the Towers and, indeed, all of Cybertron. But I did not see these things because I did not want to. So much better was it to take refuge in the innocent dreams of sparklinghood and I think, perhaps, that this is exactly what I did until forced to inevitably pay attention.