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And the third one for k: an attempt to put the G1 cartoon continuity into some sort of order. Split in two parts, because long.

The universe is perhaps not old in terms of time elapsed compared to “time when the last stars die” old, but it is old in the sense of experience, for many races and civilizations, empires shining and dark, Gods and Demigods, have come and gone since multicellular life first crawled, floated, or sponged onto the scene. The universe is something like an old sweater: much worn, with a number of holes and a lot of loose threads. Many races and beings have been unable to overcome the temptation to tamper with the fabric of space and time, and others have built civilizations on the dangerous quicksand of the Arts Perilous, which even when not directed at such purposes tend to damage the underlying stuff of reality.

This leaves the history of the universe a bit murky and uncertain, and odd artifacts of other times and dimensions tend to wash up on the shores of space-time. When the inhabitants of Cybertron refer to “The Dawn of Time”, they most often refer to the beginnings of their own history some thirteen million years ago rather than the formation of the universe: great reefs and shoals of scarred and wrinkled space-time lie athwart the last couple billion years, and light from distant galaxies may carry information from pasts which may “no longer” exist. (A grammar for time travel exists, but most temporarily linear beings tend to find it impenetrable). Electron storms snarl through the depths of space, and there are many tears and folds in the fabric of space-time, some leading to other dimensions, others to distant times past or future.

Remnants of other civilizations litter the galaxy, and there is hardly a world where there are not traces of ancient visitors. The galaxy is dotted with planetary and asteroidal bodies which make no physical sense in terms of shape and size, the results of ancient aliens manipulating gravity fields to produce amusing effects: there are planets with wings and flanges and trailing tails, planets shaped like horns of plenty or great spiny conch shells, like cracked half egg-shells or wedges of cheese. Impossible technologies – or perhaps ancient magic, for magic is real - exist for the unwary interstellar traveler to stumble across, such as the Pools of Transformation, which dissolve all non-self aware machines and technologies, but allow true mechanical intelligences to transform into biological ones – and vice versa. Things almost indistinguishable from ghosts and demons make trouble on many worlds, and gremlin-like energy beings pop up on technological worlds and rapidly multiply into disruptive plagues. There are black holes reshaped into passages to other universes, solar systems confined to closed-off pocket dimensions.

About the best that can be said for time travel is that it tends to work in a circular fashion: if you go back to the past and do something, your actions were almost part of established history to begin with. Attempts to deliberately engineer a paradox never go well for anyone. Meddling with time on too large a scale can lead to a general breakdown in continuity over a large area of space-time. Theoretically, a hole could tear in the fabric of reality which would expand indefinitely, plunging in time the entire universe into a mad chaos of time loops, reverse casualty, backwards entropy, and worse.
Of course, things never quite get that bad: if the breakdown in the fabric of time grows severe enough, inhabitants of the Known Galaxies are aware that from somewhere beyond, the Others [1] will arrive, in their pyramid-shaped, Jovian planet-sized ships, and reestablish stability. It is generally wise to not allow things to reach such levels of enpicklement, since the Others tend to solve space-time breakdown problems with rather extreme methods, and care little for “innocent bystanders”, even solar system-sized bunches of them.

The distribution of organic life itself is suspect: there are indications that many worlds were seeded with life by various ancient races with differing agendas, and there are suspicions that some planets may have been settled by time travelers fleeing some crisis in the future. There are certainly a large number of suspiciously humanoid races in the region of the galaxy near Earth, while reptilian or insectoid races predominate in other areas.

Along with organic life, mechanical life is also abundant in the known galaxies. Some of it is the direct creation of organic life (or of other mechanical life), but there also has been a great deal of inadvertent development: giving such things as exploratory Von Neumann machines with no set life limit or terraforming nanomachines seeded across space with a certain lack of discrimination, and a billion years or so, entire mechanical ecosystems have sprung up, some adapted for life in space or on airless asteroids, others for planetary life. Metal eaters and mechanovores are common enough that robotic intelligences exploring unknown space are almost as much at risk for becoming lunch as organic ones.

What can be said about ancient Cybertron is heavily wrapped in myth and legend, and one cannot trust the records of the five-faced Quintessons, to which lying to other species is as natural as breathing, but it appears that somewhere closer to fourteen to thirteen billion years ago, the Quintesson race, then in one of its expansionistic cycles, came across a planet heavily infested by machine life, with mechanical growths penetrating to the very planetary core, and a rich ecosystem of free-living machine life based on solar-power gatherers and the energy flux from the still hot core. Some of the life was at least semi-sapient, and the Quintessons set about their specialty: exploiting.

What made Cybertron into the greatest prize of the Quintesson Empire was the discovery of the supercomputer Vector Sigma on Cybertron, or rather the means to summon it. Aside from its seemingly limitless conventional computing capacity (only limited by its infuriatingly capricious tendency to refuse some problems while accepting others), Vector Sigma possessed the power to “enhance” lesser machines: to take machines stupid, semi-sentient or largely lacking in a sense of self, and make them into fully intelligent and self-aware, conscious beings – often with no clear modification in their physical makeup. This astounding ability made Cybertron into the greatest manufacturer of “autonomous service mechanisms” – in more blunt terms, robotic slaves – in the galaxy.

The origins of the supercomputer remain shrouded in mystery. Vector Sigma does not respond to most questions about itself, although it has stated that it is older than Cybertron, and indeed older than the Quintessons (which have occasionally claimed it is ancient Quintesson “lost technology”). It has also claimed to exist in “numberless spaces and dimensions”, whatever that means. The giant, floating, glowing Disco ball is summoned, materializing from somewhere, rather than being activated, and all efforts by Decepticons, Quintessons and others to analyze it or even disassemble it have failed: if too much force is used it simply disintegrates, only to rematerialize when next summoned.

Of course, when you have truly sapient machines, keeping them obedient and submissive is often a problem, but while the Quintessons had the sole capacity on the planet to create new “souled” machines, they could also make sure to establish control and limits and failsafes at birth, and if the occasional slip up allowed a machine to slip through the cracks, it would find it incredibly difficult to free even a single other slave. As long as they could not create other such machines, of course.

That was only true until the appearance of the Matrix of Leadership.

Here we cross into the realm of Autobot/Decepticon legends: to many of the mechanical people even today, the Matrix of Leadership is no piece of mere high technology, but a piece of the divine, their equivalent of the Holy Grail, a gift given by their creator God, Primus, to free His people from bondage. [2]What is clear that the Matrix of Leadership could empower the machines of Cybertron with full consciousness and high intelligence the same way Vector Sigma could, and could store within itself a copy of the mind (say the secular minded) or the very soul (say the religious)and memories of every machine which carried it. The very first to carry it and to have its consciousness stored in the crystals that slowly grew within it would be known in later ages as simply “Itself”: at that time, the machine people of Cybertron as yet had no names save product codes. With the Matrix of Leadership, the few robots to break free of Quintesson control and hide out in the immeasurably vast interior spaces of Cybertron could now create their own followers and allies, and build the forces needed to capture and deprogram the machines still enslaves: they were able to begin a rebellion with some hope of eventual victory.

The Cybertronian struggle for freedom would take a million years to win.

And of course, having finally won and banished the Quintessons into space, they began to argue among themselves as to what sort of society they would create now that they were free.

Humans call them Autobots and Decepticons. They of course don’t call themselves anything like that, but one needs to call oneself something when talking to aliens who don’t use either radio waves or ultralow frequency sound waves for communication, and the Autobots got to name themselves and their enemies first. The Decepticons have tried out various other, less bad-guy-sounding names for themselves when dealing with humans, but their cheerful disregard for the impediments of morality mean that none of them have stuck. What they are called is essentially unimportant: what they are, to the Autobots, to humans, to anything not too powerful to challenge, is the enemy, now, and forever.

It is said that “Autobots” were once “civilian products” from the Quintesson factories, while the “Decepticons” were “military products.” This is in many ways grotesquely simplified, but it reflects a fundamental divide in outlook: while those who would become the Autobots wanted to overcome the traumas of the past and create a society that while strong enough to defend itself, would also extend the manipulating waldo in peace to any race, organic, biological, or mixed, for only through unity and fellowship could peace grow and spread, the ancestors of the Decepticons, noting that none of the other races they knew of had been much help in liberating them, felt Cybertron could only depend on itself and must expand with whatever force was necessary: the best defense was a good offense. A continuing offense.

In the early era of the Cybertronian revolt, the machine rebels scored off the product mark all machines built on Cybertron: the equivalent of a corporate logo, the Crystler sand dollar or McDonald’s arch, it was seen as the mark of a slave. Only after many thousands of years was it appropriated by the robot people as their own symbol, a symbol of freedom. The original design would become the Autobot insignia: the Decepticons would later change it to make their own insignia. The insignia may be hidden but even at great risk is hardly ever removed: it is a symbol of an Autobot’s honor, integrity and freedom.

It would not be long before the first Cybertronian civil war broke out. Some Cybertron historians speak of three or four Cybertronian wars: others count hundreds of them, plus innumerable minor revolts: still others say that the first civil war has never ended, it’s just that there have been occasional pauses. Cybertron has seen many periods of Autobot rule, and many periods of Decepticon rule, and even periods when old hates were put aside and both lived in peace – for a while. Decepticons and Autobots fleeing (or just leaving in a huff) the planet when the other faction was predominated have settled thousands of planets throughout the Milky Way Galaxy and beyond, some succeeding, some dying off, some evolving into strange and alien forms: there are even some biological life forms which claim to be of Cybertronian descent.
(There were also wars with alien races: the Quintessons returned once and were defeated again: the green pig-people of the Andromeda Galaxy seized Cybertron for a while, to be eventually thrown out by the Cybertronian exile community aided by the Andromedans ancient enemies, the savage bird-people of M-32).

And then, during a period of Decepticon predominance, two ships from Cybertron crashed on a planet not yet known as Earth…

CYBERTRON AND THE TRANSFORMERS
In the year 2007, as some big-headed mostly hairless hominids have it, the planet Cybertron occupies an orbit within said hominids solar system, between Mars and Jupiter, convenient for the asteroids, but unlikely to catastrophically interfere with the stability of the planet’s orbits in time scales less than millions of years. Of course, Cybertronians often plan in such timescales, and have worked out necessary adjustments they will have to do a few hundred thousand years down the road. It’s not the first time Cybertron has moved: using dimension-warping space bridge technology, Cybertron has moved from solar system to solar system dozens of times through its long, war-torn history, to evade enemies, to move closer to new sources of energy, to plunder and enslave (during Decepticon periods of rule) or simply to locate itself in a more strategically useful location. It has two metal moons (the other ones having been eaten by the monster machine Unicron, whose head served as a third Moon for a while but has since been ejected into deep space).

Cybertron is a mechanical planet, wild Von Neumann machines and nanomachine collectives having reshaped it long ago, a process of mechanization that continued under the Quintessons and ‘Bots, to the point where the outside of the planet for hundreds of miles down is a maze of mechanical parts and endless duplicating metal shells and superstructures before reaching a now largely non-metallic core from which most of the useful heat has been drawn long ago. (Nobody has ever succeeded in fully mapping the interior of Cybertron). What few areas of the planet are still “wilderness” are inhabited by mechanical wildlife preying on eachother and incautious non-sapient machines, or feeding off the solar-energy gathering metallic “plants” (in the veggie sense rather the Con Ed sense). Many species were driven to extinction during the last long phase of Decepticon rule: the mournful call of the surprisingly aerodynamic Titanium Moosebot is no longer heard in the land. (The fast-building, ever adaptive Retro-rat survives and remains a pest).

Cybertron is rather smaller than Earth, with only about half its gravity, but has a lot more space, since most of it is covered with cities (there are few remaining volatiles such as water), inhabited and otherwise, and below there are layers and layers of former habitation and building and complex geometric mechanical structures which are the product of ages of non-sentient mechanical evolution and slow Von Neumann machine reconstruction. Vast areas of its interior are uninhabited and in some cases untouched for millions of years except for rebel hideouts. Records of the past are a bit spotty due to the destruction of records in former wars, but there are always backups _somewhere_, and archivist bots often dispatch expeditions to the deep interior in hopes of finding lost repositories of memory crystals or the almost eternal metal books created to record vital information that would be immune to the vicissitudes of “data migration” to “new media.” Sometimes they don’t return: there are weird things in the deeps of the planet, including some very nasty failed Decepticon and Quintesson experiments (and to be fair, some failed Autobot experiments. After all, you don’t _deliberately_ set out to create a walking doomsday machine, but things do occasionally go rather awry…)

Although originally incapable of transforming, all Cybertronians nowadays are now known as Transformers. It is no simple trick. Autobot and Decepticon transformation isn’t a matter of bits and pieces reshuffling, a Rubix cube being shuffled, or an elaborate form of contortionism. An Autobot technology developed millions of years ago and not duplicated by the Decepticons until much later, transformation is closer to a transition between quantum states, and involves quite a bit of Transformer mass existing at any time in another dimension, in a dispersed “potential” condition. When a human sees a Transformer change, he or she is not seeing metal moving and shifting place as much as they are seeing dimensions shift. (Looking at a transformation too closely in the wrong place has been known to cause intense nausea in humans, and outright seizures in species with more spacially sophisticated sensory systems). The high energy costs often mean that a Transformer gets stuck in one form or another when they run too low on energy.

When in one form, the “potential” other form can be widely modified, allowing Transformers to adopt to a wide variety of conditions (and, say, duplicate the forms of terrestrial machines to better blend in). Minor cosmetic changes are fairly easy, and many Autobots and Decepticons change their color patterns and some of their physical accessories at will the way humans will change from one set of clothes to another. Some Transformers have three or more forms, while others can combine into larger collectives. Some carrier and spaceship-form Transformers can extend their interiors partially into higher space, allowing them to carry rather more cargo than would seem possible from their exterior forms alone. Spaceship models are capable of reaching most parts of the Solar system under their own power.

Most Autobots run between 12 and 30 feet tall when in their roughly humanoid robotic forms, although some are larger, considerably larger in the case of collectives and the giant Defensor bots which once guarded Cybertron, and much, much larger in the case of the rare City-Bots which may quite well be described in such Lovecraftian terms as “cyclopean” or Lovecraftian phrases such as “a mountain walked or stumbled.” (Such creations tend not to be light on their feet). They are extremely sturdy in the their construction, able to largely shrug off all but the heaviest artillery of 1980s Earth, or survive a brief dip in molten lava. Although most do not have alternate jet or spaceship forms, small individual backpack rockets allow almost all combat models to use the third dimension. Autobots are ridiculously strong by human standards: Autobot leader Optimus Prime is far from the largest model, but he can pick up and throw an oil tanker.

Many powerful abilities and functions such as large-scale holographic projection and invisibility, sonic weaponry, ground-shaking vibratory abilities, or teleportation require bulky enough equipment and extensive enough use of energy that they are essentially “one per transformer”, leading to a fair degree of specialization among front-line combat troops. Fairly little use is made of semi-sentient or non-sentient combat machines, since they tend to be easily hacked by Transformer computational attack specialists. They do not die easily, only a couple vital components deep within their bodies being essential, and if fatal damage is not immediate they can “store” themselves on special memory crystals that will sustain their consciousness as long as they remain energized. Generally only total energy loss or massive, systemic damage will stop a Transformer for good, and the loss of a limb, for instance, is indeed “merely a flesh wound.” Even a head can be written off, a secondary memory system existing in the torso. If not killed an Autobot or Decepticon is practically immortal, there being individuals who have been alive for millions of years, since the expulsion of the Quintessons from Cybertron, although after a few hundred thousand years storage limitations means that a Transformer will have to start choosing which memories to keep and which to move to external databases. Their bodies may be mechanical, but are of an almost organic complexity on the microscopic level, with nanomechanical repair and cleaning mechanisms smaller than ants moving through internal “capillaries.” At the same time Transformer technology is extraordinarily adaptive in its ability to interface with other systems, and can use comparatively crude technology, even that of 1980s Earth, to temporarily replace missing parts.

Autobot translating technology has been developed and refined with input from almost every language in the galaxy, and they can very quickly learn and duplicate any language based in sonic vibrations or electromagnetic signals (races which communicate by stinks, on the other hand…). It took them only a few hours of TV and radio to puzzle out about 90% of English, and most Autobots found on Earth speak a couple dozen terrestrial languages as a matter of course. Some Transformers can talk to animals, but generally find the experience rather boring.

If physically nigh-invulnerable, Transformers have relatively few defenses against mental attacks if they fall into the hands of their enemies: their personalities are vulnerable to change with minor mechanical modifications, and they can be reprogrammed to reverse their loyalties. As a result, Tranformers, like terrestrial Buddhists, tend to have a certain distrust of the “conscious mind” and doubts about the very notion of “self”: their belief in an afterlife in which their individual being is absorbed into the All-Spark is probably conditioned by this. To add to the paranoid edge of Transformer battles, “Control shells” fired like bullets into Autobot armor or “Control disks” affixed by an Autobot to a Decepticon allow takeovers of the body.

Cybertronian super-science, although many terrestrials have become almost blasé about it, is an endless catalog of wonders, from energy blades and clubs that would make short work of any light-saber handler, to energy gathering machines able to tap the atmosphere of a sun from a hundred million miles away, to personal force fields. (Of limited utility in a fight, since you can’t shoot _out_ of them either). Lasers powerful enough to chop down a jungle (and boy do people wish terrestrial lumber companies hadn’t got their hands on that). Energy chains. Weather control machines that can whip up a bevy of hurricanes in a jiffy (although that technology has been largely lost by the terrestrial Nuclear Age).

The extraction of energy is something Transformer scientists have pursued with extreme determination for ages, and has reached ridiculous levels of efficiency: Transformer energy collectors can draw energy from kinetic energy sources (earthquakes, tidal forces) and thermal ones (steam, magma) _directly_ without an exchange medium, although of course at efficiencies way below 100%. Decepticons store energy in the form of Energon, a luminous fluid form of pseudo-matter, which can be compressed to a more solid form for transport: Autobots use bulkier but less-likely-to-violently-explode storage methods.

Cybertron’s population is growing rapidly, as the end of Decepticon rule has led to a surge in the construction and activation of new Autobots, as well as a surge in immigrants as the overthrow of Decepticon rule has led to many Autobot exile communities to move back to the “motherland.” (During Decepticon periods of rule, immigration to Cybertron proper was often limited due to Decepticon desires to extend their rule to other worlds, which required a lot of Decepticons to live elsewhere than Cybertron, and the paranoia of Decepticon rulers that some powerful new Decepticon faction from off-planet might challenge them for leadership). It is still much less densely populated than Earth: Transformers are a lot larger and more energy-expensive than human beings, and therefore require rather more space than humans to begin with, before one gets into the bottlenecks in their reproductive processes. The majority of the population of Cybertron is generally smaller, more “generic” Transformers whose construction and energy needs are less than the various Autobots and Dinobots and Insecticons and so on: they in turn are considerably outnumbered by semi-sentient and non-sentient computers, robots, and various autonomous machines. On many parts of Cybertron a human visitor might walk for days without running into anyone capable of maintaining a real conversation, although now that Cybertron is allied to earth the machines they met would no doubt greet them politely and offer them directions to places more suitable to fragile organics.

The immigration of off-world Autobots has led to some political tensions: Autobot rule isn’t that democratic, being of an essentially military sort through historical necessity, and while there is a great deal of consensus and negotiation, the holder of the Matrix of Leadership is pretty close to an absolute monarch. (Fortunately, the Matrix is picky about who it accepts as a carrier). The pacifistic Autobots of Paradron, already pissed at the Autobots blowing up their energy-rich planet to keep it out of Decepticon hands (the population was successfully evacuated, but still) aren’t happy with this situation, being from an elective democracy, and their grumblings have spread to the relatively low-powered and unspecialized majority of the Autobot masses, which have picked up on the idea that their views aren’t really of much consequence to the more badass types. Of course, the current strange happenings at the top have also led to uncertainty…

THAT OLD TIME RELIGION
Autobot religion is a fairly individual thing, and there isn’t an established church: indeed, many Autobots have adopted for a year or an age other people’s religions (there are a fair number of Christian Autobots nowadays, although it’s hard to say how seriously they take all the commandments), and there are both outright atheists and those who worship Those Beyond the Cosmic Rim: but a wide cross section of Autobots believe in some degree the legend of Primus, whether as an actual God-Creator or as an ancient Cosmic Engineer who acts as the patron and friend of all mechanical intelligences: and believe in the existence of an eternal soul or “spark”, which gives the Autobot their true self and individuality, and which can either stay in this world to instruct and aid the still physically embodied in this world, like the elders in the Matrix of Leadership, or rejoin the eternal “allspark” in communion with Primus-as-God or with all intelligences of the past. (Some Autobots believe that only mechanical life has been gifted with the Spark, or even only the inhabitants of Cybertron: most believers have a rather more expansive view, and hold that all self-aware intelligences have an equivalent of the Spark). It is certainly the case that many curious features of Autobot life, reproduction and consciousness seem to suggest the existence of something more than physical in the makeup of Cybertronians, and in fact there are now rather more human followers of Primus than Autobot Christians. (The fact that there are reports of Transformer ghosts doesn’t hurt).

(There are Transformer myths about the Cybertronian era _before_ the Quintessons: while the Quintessons claim that the most advanced Cybertronians of the era were barely sentient mecha-savages, many legends hold that before the Quintessons there was a primitive golden age, with all machine life living in harmony under the rule of Primon, the First Servant of Primus, and the creator of the Matrix of Leadership).

The exact nature and location of Primus, and the relationship between him and the Great Enemy of machine life, the planet-eater, Unicron, remain debatable. Some say that when Primus descended into this physical universe to aid His people, he _became_ the planet Cybertron, and somewhere within the vast interior spaces and endless bubbles of nanomechanical super-iron there is a sacred chamber where one can meet him face to face. The legend of Primacon, the immortal mad scientist of a younger galaxy who seeded much of the local cluster with machine life and then created Unicron to sterilize his failures, is considered by most Transformers to be a late invention, but this view has been somewhat shaken by the location of a variant version of the legend carved in black basalt slabs on an airless moon scarred by half a billion years of meteoric dust.

(Hardly anyone takes seriously Grimlock’s story of having met and beaten Primacon and eliminated his even-deadlier-creation, Tornedon. His claim that nobody remembers because they were dead for a while doesn’t help to convince, nor his claims that “Tornedon” was a “Giant Fire-covered Raisin-man” and Primacon was “Little monkey man in big helmet.”)

Like fish, Transformers lose much of their shine and color after death: their colors aren’t painted on (and don’t run), but a product of their “living” metal.

MORE ON AUTOBOT REPRODUCTION
The creation of new Cybertronians was originally dependent on access to the super computer Vector Sigma or the mysterious Matrix of Leadership to “awaken their spark”, as it was put, to full consciousness. A way was found to use the energies of one ‘Bot to awaken the spark of one or several new machines, but since the result was generally fatal, it was not ideal. Finally, a method was developed to create “life crystals” with the aid of either Vector Sigma or the Matrix: these could be stored by the thousands for future use, and taken along into space, allowed for the establishment of the many Autobot and Decepticon colonies through the galaxy. The technology was lost by modern times, bringing an end to the great age of Transformer interstellar expansion.

A more limited version of the “spark transfer” process was developed in recent eras, allowing Autobots and Decepticons to uplift machines without actually killing themselves in the process: but this remained a flawed process, leading to the creation of Transformers which are almost always, to put it bluntly, dumb as a box of rocks. (The Dinobots are a particularly notorious case).
Apparently yet another method for uplift is to tap into the vast energies of Unicron: since this essentially requires a deal with the devil, it is understandably not popular.

The reader will have noted that there has been no mention here of gender roles or S-E-X : the construction of Transformer bodies is an engineering feat, their uplift to full consciousness being either a super-science or a mystical process. In fact, in ancient days, before the arrival of the Quintessons, the primal robotic inhabitants of Cybertron maintained a division into “genders”, each playing a separate role in the difficult task of creating new components and joining them into a new machine. After the Quintesson move to make the planet into a full scale production facility, this process was discarded as inefficient, but “male” and “female” models were still constructed, perhaps in an effort to make things less psychologically destructive for their machine slaves, or perhaps just for marketing reasons. The more fragile “female” models have become rather rarer over the years and few Autobots under five million years old have any interest in pursuing what humans would call a “relationship”, but certain ancient instincts still exist: for some reason they cannot explain, most male model Transformers really enjoy working on a joint engineering project with a female model.

(“Male” and “female” roles really have no clear parallel to the human one, and the only reason humans call “female” Autobots female is that they tend to be smaller and slighter and tend to use more feminine voice synthesizers when talking with humans to avoid confusing them. For one thing, back in ancient times it was the bulkier males which did most of the work of carrying around newly constructed parts inside their bodies).

A way to uplift robots which didn’t depend on ancient superscience or mystical artifacts or death was finally developed on the peaceful world of Paradon, in which the energies of many “adults” would bring a “child” to full sapience in a series of stages, but they’re a bit reluctant to share it with the Autobots of Cybertron: after all, the assholes blew up their planet.

DECEPTICON DIASPORA
Those Decepticons unwilling to bow knee joint to the new Autobot leadership are scattered through space, and somewhat divided: many are uncertain that Galvatron, the robot who claims to be Megatron, their former leader, is actually said robot repaired and upgraded by Unicron. For one thing he seems rather less mentally stable than Megatron, and for another many Decepticons at least on some level think of Unicron as essentially the Robot Devil: anyone having anything to do with Him is not to be trusted. As a result there is only a limited Decepticon “court” at his new stronghold on the planet Char [3], and many Decepticons around the galaxy are adopting a “wait and see” attitude.
The Decepticon diaspora has considerable economic pull, being involved in activities criminal, mercenary and occasionally even fully legal all around the galaxy, something Megatron encouraged and systematized during his years in power. They are particularly important players in the galactic gambling industry (Transformers, unlike most un-enhanced organics, actually have an inherent grasp of statistics). In other places Decepticons or their agents, including “sparkless” robots capable of mimicking true sentience pretty well, raid backwards planets with no interstellar contacts for energy, in some cases even stealing the life force of local biological. Galvatron has a considerable base from which to organize forces to retake Cybertron – if he manages to achieve any victories impressive enough to rally the diaspora to his banner.

So far, he’s been batting zero.

[1] Otherwise known as the Beyonders, the Universal Auditors, the Cosmic Plumbers, the Regulators, and “AAAAAAAH!!! WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!” There is some argument as to whether they actually are a species rather than some sort of cosmic regulatory mechanism possibly created by some long-gone ancient race.

[2] It would one day prove powerful enough to almost entirely destroy a planet-sized genocide machine and cleanse an interstellar plague, which has led a number of non-Transformers to assign a religious status to it. (Including the Church of Slag-Blah, of course).

[3] A desolate ruin of a planet wrecked in an ancient war, although still host to such fun local life as energy leeches and dinosaur-sized cave spiders.

Description
And the third one for k: an attempt to put the G1 cartoon continuity into some sort of order. Split in two parts, because long.

The universe is perhaps not old in terms of time elapsed compared to “time when the last stars die” old, but it is old in the sense of experience, for many races and civilizations, empires shining and dark, Gods and Demigods, have come and gone since multicellular life first crawled, floated, or sponged onto the scene. The universe is something like an old sweater: much worn, with a number of holes and a lot of loose threads. Many races and beings have been unable to overcome the temptation to tamper with the fabric of space and time, and others have built civilizations on the dangerous quicksand of the Arts Perilous, which even when not directed at such purposes tend to damage the underlying stuff of reality.

This leaves the history of the universe a bit murky and uncertain, and odd artifacts of other times and dimensions tend to wash up on the shores of space-time. When the inhabitants of Cybertron refer to “The Dawn of Time”, they most often refer to the beginnings of their own history some thirteen million years ago rather than the formation of the universe: great reefs and shoals of scarred and wrinkled space-time lie athwart the last couple billion years, and light from distant galaxies may carry information from pasts which may “no longer” exist. (A grammar for time travel exists, but most temporarily linear beings tend to find it impenetrable). Electron storms snarl through the depths of space, and there are many tears and folds in the fabric of space-time, some leading to other dimensions, others to distant times past or future.

Remnants of other civilizations litter the galaxy, and there is hardly a world where there are not traces of ancient visitors. The galaxy is dotted with planetary and asteroidal bodies which make no physical sense in terms of shape and size, the results of ancient aliens manipulating gravity fields to produce amusing effects: there are planets with wings and flanges and trailing tails, planets shaped like horns of plenty or great spiny conch shells, like cracked half egg-shells or wedges of cheese. Impossible technologies – or perhaps ancient magic, for magic is real - exist for the unwary interstellar traveler to stumble across, such as the Pools of Transformation, which dissolve all non-self aware machines and technologies, but allow true mechanical intelligences to transform into biological ones – and vice versa. Things almost indistinguishable from ghosts and demons make trouble on many worlds, and gremlin-like energy beings pop up on technological worlds and rapidly multiply into disruptive plagues. There are black holes reshaped into passages to other universes, solar systems confined to closed-off pocket dimensions.

About the best that can be said for time travel is that it tends to work in a circular fashion: if you go back to the past and do something, your actions were almost part of established history to begin with. Attempts to deliberately engineer a paradox never go well for anyone. Meddling with time on too large a scale can lead to a general breakdown in continuity over a large area of space-time. Theoretically, a hole could tear in the fabric of reality which would expand indefinitely, plunging in time the entire universe into a mad chaos of time loops, reverse casualty, backwards entropy, and worse.
Of course, things never quite get that bad: if the breakdown in the fabric of time grows severe enough, inhabitants of the Known Galaxies are aware that from somewhere beyond, the Others [1] will arrive, in their pyramid-shaped, Jovian planet-sized ships, and reestablish stability. It is generally wise to not allow things to reach such levels of enpicklement, since the Others tend to solve space-time breakdown problems with rather extreme methods, and care little for “innocent bystanders”, even solar system-sized bunches of them.

The distribution of organic life itself is suspect: there are indications that many worlds were seeded with life by various ancient races with differing agendas, and there are suspicions that some planets may have been settled by time travelers fleeing some crisis in the future. There are certainly a large number of suspiciously humanoid races in the region of the galaxy near Earth, while reptilian or insectoid races predominate in other areas.

Along with organic life, mechanical life is also abundant in the known galaxies. Some of it is the direct creation of organic life (or of other mechanical life), but there also has been a great deal of inadvertent development: giving such things as exploratory Von Neumann machines with no set life limit or terraforming nanomachines seeded across space with a certain lack of discrimination, and a billion years or so, entire mechanical ecosystems have sprung up, some adapted for life in space or on airless asteroids, others for planetary life. Metal eaters and mechanovores are common enough that robotic intelligences exploring unknown space are almost as much at risk for becoming lunch as organic ones.

What can be said about ancient Cybertron is heavily wrapped in myth and legend, and one cannot trust the records of the five-faced Quintessons, to which lying to other species is as natural as breathing, but it appears that somewhere closer to fourteen to thirteen billion years ago, the Quintesson race, then in one of its expansionistic cycles, came across a planet heavily infested by machine life, with mechanical growths penetrating to the very planetary core, and a rich ecosystem of free-living machine life based on solar-power gatherers and the energy flux from the still hot core. Some of the life was at least semi-sapient, and the Quintessons set about their specialty: exploiting.

What made Cybertron into the greatest prize of the Quintesson Empire was the discovery of the supercomputer Vector Sigma on Cybertron, or rather the means to summon it. Aside from its seemingly limitless conventional computing capacity (only limited by its infuriatingly capricious tendency to refuse some problems while accepting others), Vector Sigma possessed the power to “enhance” lesser machines: to take machines stupid, semi-sentient or largely lacking in a sense of self, and make them into fully intelligent and self-aware, conscious beings – often with no clear modification in their physical makeup. This astounding ability made Cybertron into the greatest manufacturer of “autonomous service mechanisms” – in more blunt terms, robotic slaves – in the galaxy.

The origins of the supercomputer remain shrouded in mystery. Vector Sigma does not respond to most questions about itself, although it has stated that it is older than Cybertron, and indeed older than the Quintessons (which have occasionally claimed it is ancient Quintesson “lost technology”). It has also claimed to exist in “numberless spaces and dimensions”, whatever that means. The giant, floating, glowing Disco ball is summoned, materializing from somewhere, rather than being activated, and all efforts by Decepticons, Quintessons and others to analyze it or even disassemble it have failed: if too much force is used it simply disintegrates, only to rematerialize when next summoned.

Of course, when you have truly sapient machines, keeping them obedient and submissive is often a problem, but while the Quintessons had the sole capacity on the planet to create new “souled” machines, they could also make sure to establish control and limits and failsafes at birth, and if the occasional slip up allowed a machine to slip through the cracks, it would find it incredibly difficult to free even a single other slave. As long as they could not create other such machines, of course.

That was only true until the appearance of the Matrix of Leadership.

Here we cross into the realm of Autobot/Decepticon legends: to many of the mechanical people even today, the Matrix of Leadership is no piece of mere high technology, but a piece of the divine, their equivalent of the Holy Grail, a gift given by their creator God, Primus, to free His people from bondage. [2]What is clear that the Matrix of Leadership could empower the machines of Cybertron with full consciousness and high intelligence the same way Vector Sigma could, and could store within itself a copy of the mind (say the secular minded) or the very soul (say the religious)and memories of every machine which carried it. The very first to carry it and to have its consciousness stored in the crystals that slowly grew within it would be known in later ages as simply “Itself”: at that time, the machine people of Cybertron as yet had no names save product codes. With the Matrix of Leadership, the few robots to break free of Quintesson control and hide out in the immeasurably vast interior spaces of Cybertron could now create their own followers and allies, and build the forces needed to capture and deprogram the machines still enslaves: they were able to begin a rebellion with some hope of eventual victory.

The Cybertronian struggle for freedom would take a million years to win.

And of course, having finally won and banished the Quintessons into space, they began to argue among themselves as to what sort of society they would create now that they were free.

Humans call them Autobots and Decepticons. They of course don’t call themselves anything like that, but one needs to call oneself something when talking to aliens who don’t use either radio waves or ultralow frequency sound waves for communication, and the Autobots got to name themselves and their enemies first. The Decepticons have tried out various other, less bad-guy-sounding names for themselves when dealing with humans, but their cheerful disregard for the impediments of morality mean that none of them have stuck. What they are called is essentially unimportant: what they are, to the Autobots, to humans, to anything not too powerful to challenge, is the enemy, now, and forever.

It is said that “Autobots” were once “civilian products” from the Quintesson factories, while the “Decepticons” were “military products.” This is in many ways grotesquely simplified, but it reflects a fundamental divide in outlook: while those who would become the Autobots wanted to overcome the traumas of the past and create a society that while strong enough to defend itself, would also extend the manipulating waldo in peace to any race, organic, biological, or mixed, for only through unity and fellowship could peace grow and spread, the ancestors of the Decepticons, noting that none of the other races they knew of had been much help in liberating them, felt Cybertron could only depend on itself and must expand with whatever force was necessary: the best defense was a good offense. A continuing offense.

In the early era of the Cybertronian revolt, the machine rebels scored off the product mark all machines built on Cybertron: the equivalent of a corporate logo, the Crystler sand dollar or McDonald’s arch, it was seen as the mark of a slave. Only after many thousands of years was it appropriated by the robot people as their own symbol, a symbol of freedom. The original design would become the Autobot insignia: the Decepticons would later change it to make their own insignia. The insignia may be hidden but even at great risk is hardly ever removed: it is a symbol of an Autobot’s honor, integrity and freedom.

It would not be long before the first Cybertronian civil war broke out. Some Cybertron historians speak of three or four Cybertronian wars: others count hundreds of them, plus innumerable minor revolts: still others say that the first civil war has never ended, it’s just that there have been occasional pauses. Cybertron has seen many periods of Autobot rule, and many periods of Decepticon rule, and even periods when old hates were put aside and both lived in peace – for a while. Decepticons and Autobots fleeing (or just leaving in a huff) the planet when the other faction was predominated have settled thousands of planets throughout the Milky Way Galaxy and beyond, some succeeding, some dying off, some evolving into strange and alien forms: there are even some biological life forms which claim to be of Cybertronian descent.
(There were also wars with alien races: the Quintessons returned once and were defeated again: the green pig-people of the Andromeda Galaxy seized Cybertron for a while, to be eventually thrown out by the Cybertronian exile community aided by the Andromedans ancient enemies, the savage bird-people of M-32).

And then, during a period of Decepticon predominance, two ships from Cybertron crashed on a planet not yet known as Earth…

CYBERTRON AND THE TRANSFORMERS
In the year 2007, as some big-headed mostly hairless hominids have it, the planet Cybertron occupies an orbit within said hominids solar system, between Mars and Jupiter, convenient for the asteroids, but unlikely to catastrophically interfere with the stability of the planet’s orbits in time scales less than millions of years. Of course, Cybertronians often plan in such timescales, and have worked out necessary adjustments they will have to do a few hundred thousand years down the road. It’s not the first time Cybertron has moved: using dimension-warping space bridge technology, Cybertron has moved from solar system to solar system dozens of times through its long, war-torn history, to evade enemies, to move closer to new sources of energy, to plunder and enslave (during Decepticon periods of rule) or simply to locate itself in a more strategically useful location. It has two metal moons (the other ones having been eaten by the monster machine Unicron, whose head served as a third Moon for a while but has since been ejected into deep space).

Cybertron is a mechanical planet, wild Von Neumann machines and nanomachine collectives having reshaped it long ago, a process of mechanization that continued under the Quintessons and ‘Bots, to the point where the outside of the planet for hundreds of miles down is a maze of mechanical parts and endless duplicating metal shells and superstructures before reaching a now largely non-metallic core from which most of the useful heat has been drawn long ago. (Nobody has ever succeeded in fully mapping the interior of Cybertron). What few areas of the planet are still “wilderness” are inhabited by mechanical wildlife preying on eachother and incautious non-sapient machines, or feeding off the solar-energy gathering metallic “plants” (in the veggie sense rather the Con Ed sense). Many species were driven to extinction during the last long phase of Decepticon rule: the mournful call of the surprisingly aerodynamic Titanium Moosebot is no longer heard in the land. (The fast-building, ever adaptive Retro-rat survives and remains a pest).

Cybertron is rather smaller than Earth, with only about half its gravity, but has a lot more space, since most of it is covered with cities (there are few remaining volatiles such as water), inhabited and otherwise, and below there are layers and layers of former habitation and building and complex geometric mechanical structures which are the product of ages of non-sentient mechanical evolution and slow Von Neumann machine reconstruction. Vast areas of its interior are uninhabited and in some cases untouched for millions of years except for rebel hideouts. Records of the past are a bit spotty due to the destruction of records in former wars, but there are always backups _somewhere_, and archivist bots often dispatch expeditions to the deep interior in hopes of finding lost repositories of memory crystals or the almost eternal metal books created to record vital information that would be immune to the vicissitudes of “data migration” to “new media.” Sometimes they don’t return: there are weird things in the deeps of the planet, including some very nasty failed Decepticon and Quintesson experiments (and to be fair, some failed Autobot experiments. After all, you don’t _deliberately_ set out to create a walking doomsday machine, but things do occasionally go rather awry…)

Although originally incapable of transforming, all Cybertronians nowadays are now known as Transformers. It is no simple trick. Autobot and Decepticon transformation isn’t a matter of bits and pieces reshuffling, a Rubix cube being shuffled, or an elaborate form of contortionism. An Autobot technology developed millions of years ago and not duplicated by the Decepticons until much later, transformation is closer to a transition between quantum states, and involves quite a bit of Transformer mass existing at any time in another dimension, in a dispersed “potential” condition. When a human sees a Transformer change, he or she is not seeing metal moving and shifting place as much as they are seeing dimensions shift. (Looking at a transformation too closely in the wrong place has been known to cause intense nausea in humans, and outright seizures in species with more spacially sophisticated sensory systems). The high energy costs often mean that a Transformer gets stuck in one form or another when they run too low on energy.

When in one form, the “potential” other form can be widely modified, allowing Transformers to adopt to a wide variety of conditions (and, say, duplicate the forms of terrestrial machines to better blend in). Minor cosmetic changes are fairly easy, and many Autobots and Decepticons change their color patterns and some of their physical accessories at will the way humans will change from one set of clothes to another. Some Transformers have three or more forms, while others can combine into larger collectives. Some carrier and spaceship-form Transformers can extend their interiors partially into higher space, allowing them to carry rather more cargo than would seem possible from their exterior forms alone. Spaceship models are capable of reaching most parts of the Solar system under their own power.

Most Autobots run between 12 and 30 feet tall when in their roughly humanoid robotic forms, although some are larger, considerably larger in the case of collectives and the giant Defensor bots which once guarded Cybertron, and much, much larger in the case of the rare City-Bots which may quite well be described in such Lovecraftian terms as “cyclopean” or Lovecraftian phrases such as “a mountain walked or stumbled.” (Such creations tend not to be light on their feet). They are extremely sturdy in the their construction, able to largely shrug off all but the heaviest artillery of 1980s Earth, or survive a brief dip in molten lava. Although most do not have alternate jet or spaceship forms, small individual backpack rockets allow almost all combat models to use the third dimension. Autobots are ridiculously strong by human standards: Autobot leader Optimus Prime is far from the largest model, but he can pick up and throw an oil tanker.

Many powerful abilities and functions such as large-scale holographic projection and invisibility, sonic weaponry, ground-shaking vibratory abilities, or teleportation require bulky enough equipment and extensive enough use of energy that they are essentially “one per transformer”, leading to a fair degree of specialization among front-line combat troops. Fairly little use is made of semi-sentient or non-sentient combat machines, since they tend to be easily hacked by Transformer computational attack specialists. They do not die easily, only a couple vital components deep within their bodies being essential, and if fatal damage is not immediate they can “store” themselves on special memory crystals that will sustain their consciousness as long as they remain energized. Generally only total energy loss or massive, systemic damage will stop a Transformer for good, and the loss of a limb, for instance, is indeed “merely a flesh wound.” Even a head can be written off, a secondary memory system existing in the torso. If not killed an Autobot or Decepticon is practically immortal, there being individuals who have been alive for millions of years, since the expulsion of the Quintessons from Cybertron, although after a few hundred thousand years storage limitations means that a Transformer will have to start choosing which memories to keep and which to move to external databases. Their bodies may be mechanical, but are of an almost organic complexity on the microscopic level, with nanomechanical repair and cleaning mechanisms smaller than ants moving through internal “capillaries.” At the same time Transformer technology is extraordinarily adaptive in its ability to interface with other systems, and can use comparatively crude technology, even that of 1980s Earth, to temporarily replace missing parts.

Autobot translating technology has been developed and refined with input from almost every language in the galaxy, and they can very quickly learn and duplicate any language based in sonic vibrations or electromagnetic signals (races which communicate by stinks, on the other hand…). It took them only a few hours of TV and radio to puzzle out about 90% of English, and most Autobots found on Earth speak a couple dozen terrestrial languages as a matter of course. Some Transformers can talk to animals, but generally find the experience rather boring.

If physically nigh-invulnerable, Transformers have relatively few defenses against mental attacks if they fall into the hands of their enemies: their personalities are vulnerable to change with minor mechanical modifications, and they can be reprogrammed to reverse their loyalties. As a result, Tranformers, like terrestrial Buddhists, tend to have a certain distrust of the “conscious mind” and doubts about the very notion of “self”: their belief in an afterlife in which their individual being is absorbed into the All-Spark is probably conditioned by this. To add to the paranoid edge of Transformer battles, “Control shells” fired like bullets into Autobot armor or “Control disks” affixed by an Autobot to a Decepticon allow takeovers of the body.

Cybertronian super-science, although many terrestrials have become almost blasé about it, is an endless catalog of wonders, from energy blades and clubs that would make short work of any light-saber handler, to energy gathering machines able to tap the atmosphere of a sun from a hundred million miles away, to personal force fields. (Of limited utility in a fight, since you can’t shoot _out_ of them either). Lasers powerful enough to chop down a jungle (and boy do people wish terrestrial lumber companies hadn’t got their hands on that). Energy chains. Weather control machines that can whip up a bevy of hurricanes in a jiffy (although that technology has been largely lost by the terrestrial Nuclear Age).

The extraction of energy is something Transformer scientists have pursued with extreme determination for ages, and has reached ridiculous levels of efficiency: Transformer energy collectors can draw energy from kinetic energy sources (earthquakes, tidal forces) and thermal ones (steam, magma) _directly_ without an exchange medium, although of course at efficiencies way below 100%. Decepticons store energy in the form of Energon, a luminous fluid form of pseudo-matter, which can be compressed to a more solid form for transport: Autobots use bulkier but less-likely-to-violently-explode storage methods.

Cybertron’s population is growing rapidly, as the end of Decepticon rule has led to a surge in the construction and activation of new Autobots, as well as a surge in immigrants as the overthrow of Decepticon rule has led to many Autobot exile communities to move back to the “motherland.” (During Decepticon periods of rule, immigration to Cybertron proper was often limited due to Decepticon desires to extend their rule to other worlds, which required a lot of Decepticons to live elsewhere than Cybertron, and the paranoia of Decepticon rulers that some powerful new Decepticon faction from off-planet might challenge them for leadership). It is still much less densely populated than Earth: Transformers are a lot larger and more energy-expensive than human beings, and therefore require rather more space than humans to begin with, before one gets into the bottlenecks in their reproductive processes. The majority of the population of Cybertron is generally smaller, more “generic” Transformers whose construction and energy needs are less than the various Autobots and Dinobots and Insecticons and so on: they in turn are considerably outnumbered by semi-sentient and non-sentient computers, robots, and various autonomous machines. On many parts of Cybertron a human visitor might walk for days without running into anyone capable of maintaining a real conversation, although now that Cybertron is allied to earth the machines they met would no doubt greet them politely and offer them directions to places more suitable to fragile organics.

The immigration of off-world Autobots has led to some political tensions: Autobot rule isn’t that democratic, being of an essentially military sort through historical necessity, and while there is a great deal of consensus and negotiation, the holder of the Matrix of Leadership is pretty close to an absolute monarch. (Fortunately, the Matrix is picky about who it accepts as a carrier). The pacifistic Autobots of Paradron, already pissed at the Autobots blowing up their energy-rich planet to keep it out of Decepticon hands (the population was successfully evacuated, but still) aren’t happy with this situation, being from an elective democracy, and their grumblings have spread to the relatively low-powered and unspecialized majority of the Autobot masses, which have picked up on the idea that their views aren’t really of much consequence to the more badass types. Of course, the current strange happenings at the top have also led to uncertainty…

THAT OLD TIME RELIGION
Autobot religion is a fairly individual thing, and there isn’t an established church: indeed, many Autobots have adopted for a year or an age other people’s religions (there are a fair number of Christian Autobots nowadays, although it’s hard to say how seriously they take all the commandments), and there are both outright atheists and those who worship Those Beyond the Cosmic Rim: but a wide cross section of Autobots believe in some degree the legend of Primus, whether as an actual God-Creator or as an ancient Cosmic Engineer who acts as the patron and friend of all mechanical intelligences: and believe in the existence of an eternal soul or “spark”, which gives the Autobot their true self and individuality, and which can either stay in this world to instruct and aid the still physically embodied in this world, like the elders in the Matrix of Leadership, or rejoin the eternal “allspark” in communion with Primus-as-God or with all intelligences of the past. (Some Autobots believe that only mechanical life has been gifted with the Spark, or even only the inhabitants of Cybertron: most believers have a rather more expansive view, and hold that all self-aware intelligences have an equivalent of the Spark). It is certainly the case that many curious features of Autobot life, reproduction and consciousness seem to suggest the existence of something more than physical in the makeup of Cybertronians, and in fact there are now rather more human followers of Primus than Autobot Christians. (The fact that there are reports of Transformer ghosts doesn’t hurt).

(There are Transformer myths about the Cybertronian era _before_ the Quintessons: while the Quintessons claim that the most advanced Cybertronians of the era were barely sentient mecha-savages, many legends hold that before the Quintessons there was a primitive golden age, with all machine life living in harmony under the rule of Primon, the First Servant of Primus, and the creator of the Matrix of Leadership).

The exact nature and location of Primus, and the relationship between him and the Great Enemy of machine life, the planet-eater, Unicron, remain debatable. Some say that when Primus descended into this physical universe to aid His people, he _became_ the planet Cybertron, and somewhere within the vast interior spaces and endless bubbles of nanomechanical super-iron there is a sacred chamber where one can meet him face to face. The legend of Primacon, the immortal mad scientist of a younger galaxy who seeded much of the local cluster with machine life and then created Unicron to sterilize his failures, is considered by most Transformers to be a late invention, but this view has been somewhat shaken by the location of a variant version of the legend carved in black basalt slabs on an airless moon scarred by half a billion years of meteoric dust.

(Hardly anyone takes seriously Grimlock’s story of having met and beaten Primacon and eliminated his even-deadlier-creation, Tornedon. His claim that nobody remembers because they were dead for a while doesn’t help to convince, nor his claims that “Tornedon” was a “Giant Fire-covered Raisin-man” and Primacon was “Little monkey man in big helmet.”)

Like fish, Transformers lose much of their shine and color after death: their colors aren’t painted on (and don’t run), but a product of their “living” metal.

MORE ON AUTOBOT REPRODUCTION
The creation of new Cybertronians was originally dependent on access to the super computer Vector Sigma or the mysterious Matrix of Leadership to “awaken their spark”, as it was put, to full consciousness. A way was found to use the energies of one ‘Bot to awaken the spark of one or several new machines, but since the result was generally fatal, it was not ideal. Finally, a method was developed to create “life crystals” with the aid of either Vector Sigma or the Matrix: these could be stored by the thousands for future use, and taken along into space, allowed for the establishment of the many Autobot and Decepticon colonies through the galaxy. The technology was lost by modern times, bringing an end to the great age of Transformer interstellar expansion.

A more limited version of the “spark transfer” process was developed in recent eras, allowing Autobots and Decepticons to uplift machines without actually killing themselves in the process: but this remained a flawed process, leading to the creation of Transformers which are almost always, to put it bluntly, dumb as a box of rocks. (The Dinobots are a particularly notorious case).
Apparently yet another method for uplift is to tap into the vast energies of Unicron: since this essentially requires a deal with the devil, it is understandably not popular.

The reader will have noted that there has been no mention here of gender roles or S-E-X : the construction of Transformer bodies is an engineering feat, their uplift to full consciousness being either a super-science or a mystical process. In fact, in ancient days, before the arrival of the Quintessons, the primal robotic inhabitants of Cybertron maintained a division into “genders”, each playing a separate role in the difficult task of creating new components and joining them into a new machine. After the Quintesson move to make the planet into a full scale production facility, this process was discarded as inefficient, but “male” and “female” models were still constructed, perhaps in an effort to make things less psychologically destructive for their machine slaves, or perhaps just for marketing reasons. The more fragile “female” models have become rather rarer over the years and few Autobots under five million years old have any interest in pursuing what humans would call a “relationship”, but certain ancient instincts still exist: for some reason they cannot explain, most male model Transformers really enjoy working on a joint engineering project with a female model.

(“Male” and “female” roles really have no clear parallel to the human one, and the only reason humans call “female” Autobots female is that they tend to be smaller and slighter and tend to use more feminine voice synthesizers when talking with humans to avoid confusing them. For one thing, back in ancient times it was the bulkier males which did most of the work of carrying around newly constructed parts inside their bodies).

A way to uplift robots which didn’t depend on ancient superscience or mystical artifacts or death was finally developed on the peaceful world of Paradon, in which the energies of many “adults” would bring a “child” to full sapience in a series of stages, but they’re a bit reluctant to share it with the Autobots of Cybertron: after all, the assholes blew up their planet.

DECEPTICON DIASPORA
Those Decepticons unwilling to bow knee joint to the new Autobot leadership are scattered through space, and somewhat divided: many are uncertain that Galvatron, the robot who claims to be Megatron, their former leader, is actually said robot repaired and upgraded by Unicron. For one thing he seems rather less mentally stable than Megatron, and for another many Decepticons at least on some level think of Unicron as essentially the Robot Devil: anyone having anything to do with Him is not to be trusted. As a result there is only a limited Decepticon “court” at his new stronghold on the planet Char [3], and many Decepticons around the galaxy are adopting a “wait and see” attitude.
The Decepticon diaspora has considerable economic pull, being involved in activities criminal, mercenary and occasionally even fully legal all around the galaxy, something Megatron encouraged and systematized during his years in power. They are particularly important players in the galactic gambling industry (Transformers, unlike most un-enhanced organics, actually have an inherent grasp of statistics). In other places Decepticons or their agents, including “sparkless” robots capable of mimicking true sentience pretty well, raid backwards planets with no interstellar contacts for energy, in some cases even stealing the life force of local biological. Galvatron has a considerable base from which to organize forces to retake Cybertron – if he manages to achieve any victories impressive enough to rally the diaspora to his banner.

So far, he’s been batting zero.

[1] Otherwise known as the Beyonders, the Universal Auditors, the Cosmic Plumbers, the Regulators, and “AAAAAAAH!!! WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!” There is some argument as to whether they actually are a species rather than some sort of cosmic regulatory mechanism possibly created by some long-gone ancient race.

[2] It would one day prove powerful enough to almost entirely destroy a planet-sized genocide machine and cleanse an interstellar plague, which has led a number of non-Transformers to assign a religious status to it. (Including the Church of Slag-Blah, of course).

[3] A desolate ruin of a planet wrecked in an ancient war, although still host to such fun local life as energy leeches and dinosaur-sized cave spiders.