GustavoWombat
2024-12-03 04:20:34 UTC
Reply
Permalinkthis idea percolated up from the deepest recesses of my brain, and
needed to be removed and turned into bits.
To be clear, I've had the idea of Tommy asking Optimus about the
Omegaverse for ages. Everyone has had *that* idea. And Tommy always had
a report due on something, and the name "Omegaverse" sounds like a
perfectly ordinary science fiction term.
If this were the real opening for a new Season 5 episode, the giant
wooden puppet of Powermaster Optimus Prime would end up telling Tommy
about the negative universe in "The Killing Jar", or the pocket universe
with Paradron, or maybe Face of the Nijika.
But what if Optimus wasn't around? What if poor Tommy Kennedy had to
rely on Kup?
----
Once again, Kup and Hot Rod were sitting around the oily barrel with the
Last Perch On Earth, with their fishing lines dangling into the barrel,
waiting for Proust (that was what the last Perch was named) to nibble.
It was the robot equivalent of day drinking. They could spend all
afternoon sitting there, nearly motionless, sharing the occasional grunt
of some guttural language that only they understood.
It didn’t make them feel good about themselves, but it passed the time.
Young Tommy Kennedy passed by, looking furtively one way and then the
next. “Have you seen Optimus Prime?”
“Lots of times, lad, lots of times,” Kup said, for what was probably the
thousandth time. He had a joke, and he thought it was funny and he
wasn’t going to be dissuaded by anyone else’s opinion of it. “He ain’t
much to look at, either. Big, red and boxy.”
Tommy rolled his eyes. It was something he had been practicing in a
mirror, as he had been told it was something teen boys normally did, and
while he was barely 13, he wanted to be treated like he was older. “Do
you know where he is?”
“He’s on the southern plateau with Wheeljack, testing out the new
Cannibal Catapult.”
“What’s a Cannibal Catapult?” Tommy asked.
“I would have thought it was obvious from the name,” Kup said, jealous
that he was unable to roll his optics. “It’s a catapult that eats other
catapults.”
“I think a Cannibal Catapult would fling cannibals across the plateau…”
Hot Rod interjected.
“Well, that’s not what Wheeljack built,” Kup said, with a shrug.
“I guess it doesn’t matter,” Hot Rod replied, “since the cannibals have
catapults. It will either fling the cannibals or eat their catapults,
and then that problem will be solved.”
“Maybe it transforms from one type of Cannibal Catapult to the other?”
Tommy suggested.
“Don’t be silly, lad. Why would Wheeljack build one insane contraption
when he could build two?”
There was a long pause while they all considered the question, but no
one had an answer. Wheeljack did love his insane contraptions.
“What’s up, Tommy?” Hot Rod asked, mostly just to break the long pause.
“I’ve been having that dream again,” Tommy said. “The one where the
clouds are white and move across the sky, and there is grass, and the
mountain over there has a glacier.”
“What do you want Optimus for?” Kup interrupted, as he had no desire to
listen to Tommy talk about his dreams. He didn’t want to hear about
Tommy’s dreams for the future, and he certainly didn’t want to hear
about whatever random synapses flared up while his organic
neuroprocessor was in low power mode.
“I have another report due,” Tommy said, staring at his feet.
“And you did no work, haven’t been paying attention in school and now
want someone to just do it for you?” Kup asked.
“Yes…”
“That’s nothing to be ashamed of, Tommy. I was the same way as a newly
forged bot, and really haven’t changed that much until now. What’s the
report on?”
“I don’t know if I should let you help me,” Tommy said. “Not after the
last time when you told me that the Pax Cybertronia was when Orion Pax
took over Cybertron and ruled with an iron fist.”
“It’s time travel, kid,” Kup said. “I get confused sometimes. That’s
going to happen, and when it does, I want you to march right down to Mr.
Filbert’s office and demand he change your grade. Besides, it wasn’t as
bad as when you had Optimus tell you all about ‘Space’ for a report, was
it?”
“I really thought Mr. Filbert wanted something about astronomy, not an
explanation of what it meant when his wife told him he needed more
space. And Optimus just told me everything about Uranus.”
“What’s this report on, Tommy?”
“The Omegaverse,” Tommy said.
“The … Omegaverse?” Kup asked. “Are you sure he said that? The
Omegaverse? You didn’t misunderstand him?”
“Yeah,” Tommy said, pulling out a crumpled piece of paper from his
pocket, and double checking before shoving it back. “I don’t even know
what it means… I haven’t been paying attention to anything he says in
class. Ever since he got the divorce, he’s been so mean.”
“It’s ok, Tommy,” Hot Rod reassured him, “I don’t pay attention to
anything either.”
“The Omegaverse…” Kup repeated, letting the word roll around his proper,
digital neural processors. “Well, it all started a few years ago, when a
couple of humans from this camp were eaten by the cannibals outside the
gate, and then catapulted over the walls… they left a son behind, and he
was very sad. And the thing about sad children is that they make
everyone else sad, so you have to do something about them.
“I suggested we just feed the kid to the cannibals, but no one liked
that idea. I don’t know why. The kid wouldn’t be sad anymore, and the
cannibals would be happy, and it would have meant one less raiding party
where they broke in and ate someone who wasn’t sad.
“‘That’s awful,’ Optimus said, and it was. But it was also the least
worst outcome. Better than what happened next when they ate Mr.
Filbert’s kid, and then he and his wife started having problems because
they were sad. Finn Filbert was such a happy boy, Tommy.”
“I thought he was mean and a bully,” Tommy said.
“That doesn’t mean he wasn’t happy,” Kup said, as if he were dispensing
critical life advice. “But, Optimus isn’t a utilitarian, he’s more of a
deontologist. He thinks you can tell right behavior from wrong behavior,
but I think you have to look at the bigger picture and consider the
consequences of that behavior.
“Anyway, feeding the kid to the cannibals was off the table, and so that
left the problem of this sad kid. Arcee suggested we try to make him
happy, but that would have required soft-skills and we all mostly have
hard skills.”
“What’s a soft skill?” Tommy asked.
“Psychology, listening, that sort of stuff.” Hot Rod explained. “There
are ways to help humans deal with trauma so they can handle more of it.”
“That always seemed cruel to me,” Kup said. “Better to go after the root
causes, don’t you think?”
“Prevent them from being traumatized?” Tommy suggested.
“That’s cute,” Kup said. “The type of thing only a child could think of,
and I don’t mean that as an insult like I usually do. Hold onto that
hope as long as you can, because there will come a day when you realize
that you ultimately can’t protect people from bad things happening, and
that’s an awful realization. All you can do then is adjust your
emotional regulator to stop caring, and people can’t even do that.” Kup
popped open a control panel on his arm, to show off a bunch of knobs and
buttons. One of them was a dial marked “caring” which was turned all the
way down.
“There are stories of one man who was protected from all the evils of
the world, Tommy. His name was Siddhartha Guatama, and he was a prince
of some minor kingdom. His parents kept him in the palace and the
courtyard, and kept poor people, sick people and old people away from
him for the first few decades of his life. Eventually someone left a
door open, or maybe he crawled through the catflap, and he saw suffering
and death and disease. Do you know what he did upon encountering
suffering for the very first time?”
Tommy shook his head.
“He sat under a tree and stared vacantly into space for countless days,
barely eating or drinking water. People would come and ask him if he was
alright, and he would just reply that life is suffering, that nothing
will ever last, and everything would die. They would tell him to eat,
and he would eat three grains of rice and then stop, and go back to
staring vacantly into space. Eventually he got so hungry that he was
willing to take a meal someone made for him, and got food poisoning and
died.”
Tommy stared vacantly into space and when he had done that long enough
asked “What does this have to do with the Omegaverse?”
“First Wheeljack tried to make new parents for the boy, thinking that if
he could just replace the parents the boy would stop being unhappy. This
made the boy even more unhappy, because Wheeljack’s artificial parents
were objectively terrifying.
“At the same time, Perceptor was working on something called the
Multiversal Viewer. There are an infinite number of universes, Tommy,
each a variation of our own – or perhaps ours is a variation on one of
them, or none are variations on any others and they all just unfolded as
they would and with infinite universes there are bound to be a bunch
that look like ours.
“Perceptor’s idea was to find a universe where the boy existed, his
parents had died, and he was happy, and then we could see what happened
to make the boy happy, and just do that. This is pretty much the
opposite of the conceit of Milan Kundera’s novel ‘Unbearable Lightness
of Being’ where the characters are suffering because they will never
know what decisions they should have made, since there is no way to
perform the experiment either way.
“In most universes, the boy simply never existed. Either life didn’t
form on this planet, or this planet didn’t form, or his parents never
met, or they mated in a different position so that a different sperm
fertilized the egg. It seemed hopeless, so I again suggested feeding the
boy to the cannibals, but once again nearly everyone was opposed.”
“Nearly everyone?” Tommy asked.
“First Aid is surprisingly bloodthirsty,” Kup said with a shrug.
“First Aid was being sarcastic,” Hot Rod explained. “But it just doesn’t
really work for him.”
“But with a little effort,” Kup continued, “ Perceptor and Wheeljack
were able to develop a technique to filter the universes down to
something more manageable. There were still an infinite number of
universes to look at, but in all of them the boy was happy and the
parents were dead. And they didn’t need to look at all the universes,
they just had to find one or two.”
“Did the boy kill his parents?” Tommy asked.
Kup was startled. “How did you know?”
“I’ve heard enough of your stories to know how these things go,” Tommy
said.
“He’s got you there,” Hot Rod said, genuinely proud of Tommy. It wasn’t
often that someone could get the better of Kup when he was telling a
story, and Hot Rod was just glad that he was there to see it.
“He didn’t kill his parents in all the universes,” Kup said, irritated,
and stressing the word “all.” “Sometimes he took drugs, or his alcohol
habit became an actual addiction – I know about the flask Tommy, we all
know – or he was hit in the head so hard he couldn’t think clearly. I
thought those last two were viable options, but once again, almost no
one else did.”
Tommy stared directly at Kup, reached into his back pocket, pulled out a
small metal flask filled with hastily fermented and distilled compost
runoff, and took a swig. Usually, drinking just had an actor (Tommy), an
action (drinking) and a subject (moonshine), but this added a target
(Kup). Tommy aggressively drank moonshine AT Kup.
“And then I had an idea – an idea that no one thought was monstrous. If
we could find a way to modify the Multiversal Viewer, we might be able
to send the boy to a universe where he had died but his parents were
still alive, and they would heal each other.
“Perceptor said that this was impossible, but Wheeljack suggested that
if they reversed the polarity of an old Quintesson time window, they
might be able to connect it to another universe entirely, and send the
boy to that universe.
“Perceptor continued to say that this was impossible, but at that point
I think he was just trying to goad Wheeljack into doing it. And it
worked. Motivated by a mixture of spite towards Perceptor and concern
for the boy, he set to work. About two weeks later, Wheeljack showed off
his prototype, that could send a small metal cylinder from our universe,
which he dubbed the Alphaverse, using the Greek letter that started
their alphabet, into the destination universe, which he called the
Omegaverse, as it was the last letter of their alphabet. Things could be
transferred from the Alpha to the Omega.
“Next up was a mouse, but unfortunately the mouse was carrying a virus
that was harmless here but which wiped out all organic life in that
Omegaverse. You live and you learn. There were still an infinite number
of universes with organic life, so it didn’t really do any harm in the
big picture. And it provided a lot of good data.
“The next time a mouse was sent, only a few people died, and the time
after that – everyone was fine, except the mouse. The mouse was
gigantic. It turned out to be a very small universe. The mouse didn’t go
on a violent rampage or anything, it was simply too massive to hold
itself up and eventually its lungs collapsed. Wheeljack wanted to send
some poison to end the creature’s suffering, but I pointed out that
Wheeljack was as likely to poison everyone else in that universe other
than the mouse.”
Tommy was genuinely surprised that Kup had done something almost good,
although even Kup doing good resulted in something suffering.
“A few more trial runs, and we were sending mice throughout the
multiverse. A few worlds had the mouse take over, but generally it
worked out fine and the mouse just did mouse stuff. And so we were
ready. We just needed to get Optimus’s approval.”
There was a dramatic pause. Tommy realized that Kup wanted him to say
something. “Did you get his approval?”
“Oh, yes,” Kup said, as if it were never a question. “Optimus thought it
was a great idea, helping both the kid and the parents. Who would object
to that? So we identified a new Omegaverse, and sent the boy through.”
“What happened?” Tommy asked, growing suddenly fearful.
“We kept tabs on him through the Multiversal viewer. His memory was
affected a bit, but quickly the parents accepted him and he accepted
them and everything was going great until the first full moon when
everyone else turned into a werewolf, and he got eaten. Which was
basically my original idea just with a lot of extra steps and Omegaverse
werewolves rather than Alphaverse cannibals.”
Tommy had been instinctively dreading whatever happened, but was a bit
crestfallen. “Then you can’t send me somewhere where my parents are
still alive?”
“We tried, lad, we tried,” Kup said. “Perceptor was despondent. He
didn’t check the Omegaverse for werewolves, and you were eaten. A few
days later, we found new-you wandering about the camp. I guess every
universe is both an Alphaverse and an Omegaverse. Perceptor has seemed a
lot happier since you showed up though, and no longer keeps sulking
because he killed an innocent child, so I guess that worked out.”
Tommy pulled the crumpled sheet of paper out of his pocket, and skimmed
it to see if Kup’s story answered everything. “Also, what’s an mpreg?”
“It’s a file format,” Kup answered quickly. “Stores video files from the
multiversal viewer.”
“Knots?”
“Clusters of universes that are similar,” Kup explained. “I don’t know
if it’s a prescriptive or descriptive term.”
“Ok. And I guess I know what heat is. Thanks, I think.”
Tommy took a moment to absorb all of this, and then looked away,
avoiding all eye contact. “Was I dreaming of blue skies and grass, or
was I remembering?”
“I don’t know, lad,” Kup said, gently placing a hand on Tommy’s
shoulder. “I just don’t know.”
“I think I need to be alone now,” Tommy said, pushing Kup’s hand away,
getting up and walking towards either the latrine or the burn pits.
“What did you tell him that for?” Hot Rod asked, once Tommy was out of
earshot. “None of that was true, and now he’s going to fail his report.”
“I am not going to explain the Omegaverse to a 13 year old,” Kup said.
“It’s just not going to happen.”
“I guess that’s fair,” Hot Rod said. “But I can’t help thinking that
there was a better way to answer that. I guess I’ll go stare into the
multiversal viewer and try to find a universe where you found a better
answer.” Hot Rod pulled his bait out of the oil barrel, preparing to
leave.
“Better idea, lad,” Kup said, pulling his bait out and preparing to
follow Hot Rod. “Let’s find a universe where he found Optimus and got
Optimus to explain the Omegaverse to him.”
“That really is a better idea,” Hot Rod said.
—- —- —-
Kup’s description of the life of the Buddha leaves out many important
details, but is broadly accurate to at least some traditions (there is
some disagreement about the food poisoning, and it leaves out the middle
bit and also Buddhism). It’s accurate in a “Jesus told people to give
their money to the poor, so the wealthy nailed him to a tree” way –
skipping over vast quantities of important parts of the story. Kup is
not a scholar.