"Boredom"
                         A Transformers Universe Tale
                      copyright 1998 by Dave Van Domelen
                 Transformers properties owned by Hasbro/Takara
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     Unicron was bored.

     Think about that for a moment, will you?  Unicron is not some ephemeral
fleshling that lives to see only a few dozen revolutions of its planet around
the local star, or even a "merely" million-year-old Cybertronian.  Whether he
was built by another, a being who evolved into godlike status, the survivor
of the previous universe, or even a natural force given form, Unicron has
been along longer than any race now alive can say for certain.  Unicron
himself may not know his origins, but if he does, he's disinclined to give
interviews on the subject.
     The point is, Unicron is as close as one can functionally get to
eternal.  Eternal beings don't *get* bored in the way a fleshling might,
impatiently waiting for the next impulse to come along or waiting to satisfy
an urge.  For millions of years, Unicron felt only one sensation of
consequence: hunger.  Any other sensations he might have experienced were
simply variations on this theme...more hunger, less hunger, anger at being
unable to reduce his hunger, and so forth.
     Unicron IS hunger.
     So for Unicron to be bored, for a single-minded force of nature to
develop a second train of thought...well, the universe might very well
tremble at the prospect, might it not?  So long as Unicron merely hungered,
the universe knew how to react to him.  Flee or be eaten.  Simple, safe in
its own way.  Unicron was no more to be feared than death itself, and just as
impartial and inevitable.  Some day, Unicron would devour your world, these
sort of things happened.
     But a BORED Unicron?  Who could say *what* he might decide to do?

     Fortunately, Unicron was rarely bored.  The hunger usually was strong
enough to drive such thoughts from his mind.  But it was several million
years ago that he was sated long enough to contemplate this new sensation of
boredom, and resolve to do something about it.  So he contemplated his navel,
as it were.
     Unicron ate worlds to survive, converting their mass into energy.  But
certain worlds had a thin veneer of processed metals, silicates and other
substances he usually had to create himself.  After a while, he started to
seek these enriched worlds out, peeling off the surface in his jaws and
setting it aside for later use while he digested the molten or solid cores of
the worlds.  Eventually he had noticed that some tiny parts of these worlds
could move on their own, and often survived the destruction of their homes.
Tiny pinpricks of a new sort of pain...a not-hunger pain...would plague him
for some time after eating a world.  
     Now Unicron turned his attention inward, to these little moving things.
They seemed fairly amusing, but they died very quickly (at least on the time
scale that Unicron perceived), too quickly to give much diversion.  Still, he
passed a few idle lightyears of travel analyzing the bodies left behind, and
he was fairly sure he could create his own.  
     Creation.  Such a novel idea, for a destroyer like Unicron.  Oh, of
course he could create parts for himself, but that wasn't quite the same as
creating an external life.
     Using the parts of the dead bodies which he had not yet recycled for his
own use, Unicron assembled new life.  Not wishing for them to damage him, he
placed them outside himself on a small planetoid fashioned from some
leftovers.  A singularity placed at the center provided them enough gravity
to keep them from floating away, and monitor systems left behind would let
him look in on them from wherever he was, should he be bored again.
     The experiment was something of a failure.  Unicron had brought the dead
bodies back to life, but they didn't seem interested in doing anything, and
as such provided poor entertainment.  He was too far away to bother with
going back and rebuilding them from scratch, so he tweaked their minds
instead, making them curious and impressionable, and letting them access the
monitor system to experience the wash of communications that spread over the
galaxy, connecting the tasty developed worlds.  Perhaps they would find
something worth watching, Unicron mused, before the hunger surged within him
and he forgot all about his little planet of junk.
     Another million years had passed, and Unicron was bored again.  The
planet of junk had ceased to bring him entertainment, for its inhabitants
were too imitative, they lacked any imagination (which was no surprise, for
Unicron himself had little of that quality) and ended up repeating the same
things over and over.
     Still, Unicron wasn't prepared to abandon the idea of a planet full of
"court jesters" entirely.  He simply had to create more amusing playthings,
was all.
     So he watched the inhabitants he devoured more carefully.  They were
boring, always trying to escape or destroy him...with a few exceptions.
There was a concept called "madness" that many of these races possessed.  And
while those afflicted with madness were shorter-lived than the rest, they
were also more amusing.  They were creative, unpredictable and often quite
energetic in pursuing their bizarre goals.
     Yes, madness was worth creating, as far as Unicron was concerned.  It
seemed to arise most when a being had conflicting drives and desires which
could not be reconciled.  As Unicron had only one drive and one desire
(boredom aside), it took a long time for him to understand this, but
understand it he did.
     His new creations had not two, not three, but five minds in one body, in
an attempt to guarantee insanity and inventiveness.  He placed them on a
bizarre, twisted world of his own creation and gave it the ability to remain
always near at hand, should he want to physically adjust this group.
     And it was a success.  Any time Unicron was bored, he had only to look
in on his five-minded creations and they had found a new insanity to amuse
him with.  At turns they thought themselves gods, demons, judges, creators,
destroyers, scientists, poets, children, adults...never the same.

     Unicron was easing his boredom, amusing himself by watching these
Quintessons (which is what they had called themselves for five million years
now, the only fixed thing in a sea of change) pretend to know about justice,
dealing with the remnants of worlds which slipped from Unicron's maw, when an
old urgency flared up.  IT was moving again.  A force which Unicron neither
understood nor even knew the name of yet, but which he had felt while moving
through a system millions of years ago.  IT had caused him to spare the
worlds of that system, and to avoid it ever after.  But now IT was moving,
and it would be a danger to him soon.  Perhaps as soon as twenty planetary
rotations...a mere eyeblink.
     Unicron would have to take steps to deal with this threat.
     But that would be later.
     For now, he was hungry.

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Author's Notes:

     I was musing on the Quints yesterday, thinking about their conflicting
origins and how pathetic they were as Major Villains.  In the comics, they
were scavengers who followed Unicron and dealt with his leavings.  In the
cartoon, they were supposedly the creators of the Transformers, but seemed
too inept to have pulled that off.  So, who were they really, and why did
they exist?
     Court jesters, the answer popped into my head.  Unicron created them for
amusement, and they're quite insane.  They *think* they created the
Transformers, but that's just their delusion of the hour.
     And while I was working out the details for the story, the idea that the
Junkions were a trial run suggested itself, so I put them in as well.