Tales of the Intermezzo - Repro Men
                       A Transformers Universe Story
                     copyright 2000 by Dave Van Domelen
                     based on properties owned by Hasbro
===========================================================================

     "intermezzo - n. A brief entertainment between two acts of a play."
          - American Heritage Dictionary

     Two figures coughed to clear their vocalizers as they staggered out of a
dusty tunnel and into a poorly lit underground vault.
     "You *kaff* okay, Varimax?" asked one of the figures, dwarfed by the
scale of the tunnel, a tunnel that had been made to accomodate Autobots and
Decepticons, not Maximals.
     His companion nodded.  "Considering the lack of organic life at these
levels, there certainly is a lot of dust, Promax."
     Promax chuckled.  "You should be used to dust, what with all the old
vaults you lurk in.  Well," he turned to look back down the tunnel the two
had emerged from, "hopefully no one got trapped under that.  But it looks
like we're cut off from our support team."
     "Then let's stop here and wait for them to join us," Varimax decided,
his voice tinged with the querulousness of age.  He sat on the floor of the
darkened vault.
     "Nonsense!" Promax snorted, holding up a device.  "I still have the
mapper, we can always come back later.  I doubt anything's going to be
cleared there for a cycle or two...and we have a job to do."
     The older Maximal sighed and stood.  "Very well.  It *was* my research
that found this ancient pathway to Vector Sigma, I suppose I can go to the
end now and confirm it.  Although there's only a five percent chance that the
folklore analysis I performed was incorrect."
     "Var, we're not just doing this to confirm your ethnographic theories,"
Promax chided as the two left the vault, entering a slightly smaller tunnel.
"We're trying to save the race here."
     Varimax shrugged.  "The birthing chambers are sufficient to rebuild the
population of Cybertron.  And Vector Sigma has not been much of a boon to
population levels in recent eons.  In fact, the odds are strong that Vector
Sigma was never intended to be a primary source of Sparks in the first place,
and it was merely a tertiary function of his that later generations exploited
when the secrets of the Creation Matrix were lost."
     "Maybe so," the younger scientist admitted.  "But we suffered a major
population crash in the last century of the war.  Only the invention of the
protoform transfer protocol kept us from being almost wiped out once we and
the Preds joined the Great War in full force.  Too many birthing chambers,
both Maximal and Predacon, were destroyed, along with the knowledge required
to make more.  We're doomed unless we can find another way to rebuild the
population.  Maybe Vector Sigma can't do that for us directly, but he might
know how to create more birthing chambers."
     "Suppose I accept your arguments, and your usual alarmist insistence
that another war looms that could destroy us all.  What do you propose we do
if Vector Sigma cannot help?  Or if...despite all my work...Vector Sigma
simply isn't THERE?"
     The two walked in silence for a short time, then Promax offered, "Well,
we could always attempt sparkless Cybertronians.  Look at the Dinobots!  They
had no sparks, they weren't even built on Cybertron, yet you'd never know it
unless you opened up their chests and looked around.  Sure, they had
intelligence and communications problems, but we could fix those."
     Varimax's face contorted in disgust.  "If we're going to populate the
world with a sparkless race, we might as well hand the planet over to
HUMANS.  I thought you wanted to *save* Cybertronians, not supplant us.  The
Dinobots may have been noble warriors, but they were not truly Cybertronian."
     "Fine.  I don't suppose you know of any reproduction method other than
the Matrix, Vector Sigma or the birthing chambers?" Promax challenged.
     "In fact, I do.  Many older Autobot legends refer to the Splitting.  The
stories are very vague, but I believe that this Splitting was how the
population was raised so quickly at the very beginning, out of the first
handful directly created by Primus."
     Promax broke in.  "Wait, what about the Quintessons?"
     "PLEASE," Varimax sneered.  "I've studied the stories about them, they
were clearly injected into our lore at least a hundred thousand vorn after
our race was born.  The mythoclades are clear.  The Quintessons couldn't
build a Dinobot, much less an Autobot.  Anyway, the older legends say Primus
did not create all Cybertronians from the planet itself...rather, he created
a small number which than divided.  Like a self-replicating cell, but
resulting in two unique individuals."
     Promax furrowed his brow.  "How would that work?  I mean, a simple
nanoprobe or an organic bacterium I can see reproducing like that, but
something as complex as a Cybertronian?  Come on...."
     Varimax shrugged.  "I'm not a physiologist.  But I brought this idea up
with a colleague in the medical school once, and she said it was plausible.
You know how our internal repair systems can replace small components that
get damaged or removed?  And Autobot and Decepticon repair systems seem to be
far more efficient than ours.  What if, in the far past, Cybertronians could
replicate not just single components, but entire new bodies if given enough
energy?  And it's theoretically possible to split a spark between two
bodies...if these primordial Cybertronians had 'supersparks,' they could have
split off many copies before being forced to stop by the weakness of the body
and of the spark."
     "I don't see how that would be useful *now*, though," Promax shrugged.
"If you're right, we long ago passed the point where we could simply split a
spark in two and get two whole beings.  And our repair systems couldn't even
come close to creating a body from scratch."
     Varimax nodded sadly.  "It gets worse.  There's stories that tell of
grave danger accompanying the attempt to split further.  These are probably
just 'preserve the unit of the culture' warning myths, but they may have a
kernel of truth.  A half a spark could go mad."  The two walked for a short
distance more, then he added, "I didn't say I knew a method that would work,"
apology tinging his voice.
     After several clicks, Promax broke the silence.  "What about sex?"
     "I BEG your pardon?"
     "No, I don't mean with you, Var.  I mean, in general.  Organics too
complex to just split in two use sexual reproduction to procreate.  They pool
their genetic material...their sparks...and the combination of the two is
strong enough to generate a third genome, a third spark if you will."
     "Promax, while we may have gender as a social construct, we do not have
sexes in the procreative sense," Varimax scolded.  "An old human song says
that love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, but we have
neither horse nor carriage here.  Certainly, there have been great loves in
legend and lore, and they are usually between a male and a female, but there
are no reliable tales of marriage, of sexual reproduction, ever taking place
on Cybertron."
     Promax waved a hand to get his companion to shut up.  "Yes, yes...I
know.  I mean, Maximals don't even always have obvious physical cues to
gender roles like the Autobots and Decepticons did.  Look at Strika and
Obsidian, our High Protectors.  You'd *never* guess which one was female just
by looking at the two.  I'm not saying we *can* reproduce sexually.  I'm
suggesting we might be able to figure it out."
     Varimax looked at the younger Maximal like Promax had just suggested
rebooting Unicron.  "Why would we WANT to?"
     "Not everyone's a stuffy academic like you.  Some of us are romantic
academics.  Just listen to me for a nanoclick on this.  In theory, two sparks
can comingle briefly.  It might be pleasurable, it might be agony, we won't
know until we try.  But while comingled, assuming it's not horribly painful,
the two sparks could draw strength and inspiration from each other, and
potentially generate a third spark, which could then be placed in a waiting
protoform.  Or stored for later installation, I suppose.  I don't expect this
to be as simple as sex is for organics..."
     "If you studied human literature, you'd know it's never simple."
     "Granted.  I meant the procedure, not the emotional fencing that leads
up to it," Promax amended.  "THAT is simple for organics.  Might not be for
us.  But so long as it's possible, we'd have another source for population
replacement.  And who knows...maybe it'd be fun."
     Varimax sighed.  "Now I desperately hope we find Vector Sigma.  The idea
of Maximals...and Predacons...gaining carnal urges and acting on them makes
my mechfluid run cold.  Can you imagine what might happen if a Maximal and a
Predacon become attracted to one another based on this sexual reproduction?
Even someone who avoids 'dusty vaults' like you should be familiar with the
human story of Romeo and Juliet."
     Promax smirked.  "Shakespeare wrote tragedies like that because the
audiences wanted to see people die.  I can see only good things in the long
run for the product of such unions.  Any new Cybertronians born of those
mixed matings would be neither Maximal nor Predacon, but something new.
Eventually, we might all be a single people.  As the Autobots say, until all
are one, yes?  And if sexual reproduction can bring us together, I say it's a
good idea even if we find Vector Sigma."
     "Well, that should happen momentarily," Varimax noted, pointing at the
mapper his companion held.  "Around the next bend should be the chamber
holding Vector Sigma."
     Their pace picked up a bit, and they quickly entered a huge vault with a
bridge running into the center of a vast emptiness.
     With nothing at the center.
     "He's...not here," Varimax said, disappointment coloring his voice.
     "Maybe the rumors are true, and the Decepticons managed to destroy
Vector Sigma in a last-ditch act of revenge?"
     "No...look.  There's no signs of a fight in here.  See, those markings
on the walls...they match ancient Cybertronix texts about Vector Sigma.  This
is where he should be.  But he...isn't."
     "Maybe he's hiding.  He's always been described as enigmatic."
     "In that case, we'll need the scanners the support team was carrying.
Come on, back to the cave-in," Varimax ordered.
     "Okay.  But..." Promax grinned as they left the chamber, "in case we
can't find him, do you know any femmes interested in some experimentation in
the interests of advancing the cause of science?"

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Author's Notes:

     This one was inspired by a current thread about Transformers porn.  I
did *briefly* consider trying to write a good "Transporners" story, but then
I got over that bout of insanity.  Still, many points were raised in the
thread that I wanted to address, and hence this piece.
     "Varimax" and "Promax" are both tools used in factor analysis.  Varimax
is a more traditional method preferred by academics but generally wrong,
while Promax is somewhat more progressive.  I figured they'd make good names
for a pair of academics, one stodgy and the other innovative.