Productive Cycle: From the Autofac Network to Cybertron...
A Wold Newton Article
by Joshua Falken
Special Thanks to fanboyimusprime2009, EmarZero and Andrew J. Brook for the info.
We all have heard about Cybertron, the home world of the astounding robots knows by the man in the street as "Transformers", lifelike A.I. machines that had come to the Earth four million years ago, escaping from a civil war between the factions known as "Autobots" and "Decepticons"... We know the Cybertronian Mythology about their origin, about Primus, the Quintessons, Vector Sigma and the Matrix - a story that the Transformers themselves believed - but could it to be the truth?
Actually the real origin of Cybertron and the Transformers isn't in the past in the depth of the Space but in the future of our planet...
By 1980-2020, the American, British and Japanese Governments began to reverse engineer Cybertronian Technology, recovered from the battles between Autobots and Decepticons, and this led to a quantum leap in the development of A.I systems, with the same lifelike characteristics of the Transformers... and just in the nick of time too:
For in 2025, the Leonid Meteor fell on the Earth, bring the menace of the Phantoms, invisible energy alien beings that feed on the bio-electrical energy of every live being... For forty years, Earth's civil population sole defense was the force fields around the cities, that prevent the entrance of the Phantoms, but it also prevented the direct access to the natural resources necessary to made life possible in these isolated cities... if at the beginning of the War against the Phantoms, specialists in cybernetics had not use the reversed-engineered Cybertronian Technology to develop the Autofac Network - a network of automated factories, independent of human control and able to go after the resources necessary to keep production going...
By the year 2065, bio-energy researchers Dr. Sid and Dr. Aki Ross, with the help of the Team Deep Eyes (composed by Captain Gray Edwards, Sgt. Ryan Whittaker, and Officers Neil Fleming and Jane Proudfoot), found a way to defeat the Phantom Aliens, by using the the Spiritual Wave Theory, as related in the movie "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within". But what should have been a moment of joy for mankind was cut short by a problem - instead of shutting itself down as was planned to happen at the end of the War against the Phantoms, the Autofac Network instead stayed working...
Apparently, the code to the network deactivation was lost when the scientists of the Institute of Applied Cybernetics were killed when the Phantoms invaded New York City when its force field failed. Now Mankind was had hostage in a way of speaking of a totally independent system, whose single goal was to keep producing the needed goods for human population - even at the cost of consuming every single natural resource of the planet. Five years after the end of the War, a group of three men, O'Neill, Morrison and Ferine, seeing the danger that the existence of the Autofac network meant for the world, tried to shut it down by all means, until they reached their last resource and provoked a war between the autofacs, over the last scraps of a certain raw material. But during the 13 month-period of this war, one of the autofacs, Kansas City Plant, developed the replicating nanotechnology and began to produce miniaturized autofacs and began to send them around the world and into the space, to recreate the autofac network... One interesting fact is the autofac network is almost life-like in its reactions to keep production going and its creativity to restart the productive cycle: characteristics very close to the Transformers...
But now could Philip K. Dick known of the events related in his short story "Autofac"? And how could they explain the existence of Cybertron, at last four million years into the past?
The answer for the first question maybe could be found in his novel "Now Wait for Last Year", where he describe a compound that he named "Frohedadrine" - able to crack the linear cronological feeling of a person and allows his consciousness to travel through Time... Maybe the use of such mend-bending substance explain why he described the effect of the War against the Phantom as a Nuclear War. (of course, the simples fact of Philip K. Dick having access to such substance is a fact that deserve to be investigate by itself).
A piece of the mystery of the second question might be solved by the events that surrounded a family in New York, the Sullivans. By the testimonies of Frank and John Sullivan, father and son, they affirmed that they managed to talk with each other... separated by a period of 30 years. Somehow their HAM Radio worked as a transtemporal communicator, allowing such communication. Their claims are corrobated by Lt. Satch, Julia Sullivan, and the events involving the discovery of the identity of the Nightgale Killer in 1969... One possibility is that the solar maximum activity periods in 1969 and 1999, created a wormhole, connecting both times...
Now, a leap of imagination...
Let's say that the Kansas City Autofac managed to launch its seeds - the nanotech autofacs into space. The sun was at a solar maximum period, affecting an Earth whose magnetic field was several shaken by the EMPs of the Hydrogen Bombs against the Phantom used in the war five years ago ("Autofac" period). Some of this seeds - maybe several - entered in a wormhole not bridging 30 years, but million years... this way they went back to the past, and reached a metallic planetoid or an asteroid with great amounts of metallic elements. The autofac "seeds" began to grow, developing an autofac network - but since it had no human begins to consume it products, the network began to work *on itself*, improving more and more its own
internal workings, until it reach a critical point - the autofac network itself reached a kind of self-consciousness and named itself "Vector Sigma".
This "Vector Sigma" entity was contacted by an alien civilization named the Quintessons, who began to utilize what Cybertron, the world built by "Vector Sigma", produced, through its products, by force of its hardwired programs, still remembered their Earthling counterparts. After a certain time the control and the interference of Quintessons over Cybertron's Autofac Network forced Vector Sigma to try break off such control, beginning a war with its "adoptive masters" Vector Sigma won the war, but a connected event deserves mention: during this war, Vector Sigma produced several giant robots, in the molds of the "factory representative drones" that it used in Earth. One of them was lost and sent into the deeps of the space. This Lost Robot fell on Earth, close to Rockwell, Maine in 1957, where it befriend a young boy named Hogarth Hughes - this and the following events were reported in the movie "The Iron Giant". Using part of the directives left by the Quintessons, Vector Sigma created two kinds of completely sentient robotic beings, able to transform their own form: the Autobots and the Decepticons. These two factions began to war over the control of Cybertron, being the infamous Cybertronian Civil War, that was the reason for the escape attempt by the part of Autobots from the home planet and their fall on the Earth together with the Deception who are after them, four millions years ago.
There are rumors that Vector Sigma still working on its project to improve the internal processed of Cybertron, and keeping such project, it applied it to a space probe of the Voyager series, creating an Intelligent Being named V'Ger... The results of a completed production cycle through Time.
References
"Autofac", by Philip K. Dick
"Now Wait for Last Year", by Philip K. Dick
"Frequency", by Gregory Hoblit
"Transformers", TV Series
"Star Trek - the Motion Picture"
"The Iron Giant"
"Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within"