Some thoughts on the nature of Energon

[yvannairie]

(Reposted from Tumblr)

So, okay.

Since Dark Energon is shown in the first episodes of the show shown to have the ability to give non-sentient machines “life”, and we know that Dark Energon is way more potent than normal Energon by a factor of Oh No

and synthetic Energon has the property to generate cybermatter based on instructions when reacting with CNA (or, well okay, more likely, when reacting to with catalytic solution used for cloning, which is probably not unlike the protomateria that forms around sparks when they start to gestate b/c if it reacted with just CNA, Ratchet would have been immediately f u c k e d during his initial trial)

And since sparks and Energon both emanate from Primus

I don’t think it would be a stretch to argue that Energon itself is somehow protoconscious, and sparks are just Energon in some stable, self-regulating state – stable enough to form a consciousness, and to have a full set of assembly instructions for a frame (CNA) along with whatever root processes are necessary to make sure the two integrate properly.

So, theoretically, if you just put enough Energon in the right place, under the right conditions, eventually it’ll stabilise into a new spark.

That spark would have very little in way of personality, though – since sparks emerge in clusters, they probably interact through EM fields with each other during the gestation process. Under normal circumstances, this means that by the time newsparks are ready to emerge, they’ve developed a sense of self, and enough of a personality to direct their physical development. A spark created from distilled Energon wouldn’t get the chance to go through that development until later – and its development would probably be further informed/constrained by the kind of frame it was housed in.

(Also, to borrow from Jupiter Rising of all places – if Energon contains the information for the assembly code and conscious processes of Cybertronians, resurrection suddenly becomes a possibility, since there’s no reason other than probability for certain cybernetic sequences to re-emerge. Hell – if information actually returns to Primus when a Cybertronian dies, having generational memory becomes a possibility, as that information would probably just end up in the general circulation of Energon. I don’t know how that would actually work, though, it seems likelier just to be a belief.)

We actually see something like this happen with Predaking – he starts out with a very rudimentary consciousness that develops the longer it spends in the Predacon frame, and unless Shockwave split his spark between all the baby Predacons (the way Starscream presumably did with his clones), his and the rest of their sparks must have come from somewhere.