HOW I WAS STARTED
  [147] "Brrrm. After all that, lets get some work done." said Optimus next day,
transforming his upper half only to robot form so he could work on the floor,
protruding claws from some of his fingertips as forceps to handle small objects,
such as in this case a trayful of letters, "Time to go through my mail. I get a
lot of it, some of it quite odd. A lot of it has to be sent on. This pile goes
to `Transformers' toy makers; that pile goes to `Transformers' comic: I have no
special business connection with either firm.
  Yet another request to hire Grapple [who transforms to a mobile crane], but I
haven't made a real one of him yet.
  Another candidate for the `vertical file' [= wastepaper basket]: `to `Optimus
Prime', Dear Sir or Madam,' (another who thinks I'm a human using a pen name)
`... that school play you appear to be helping to organize ... a character has a
birthday party ... the song `Happy Birthday To You' is sung on stage ... this is
a public performance, so ...',  brrm brrm, `royalties due to us', etc: sling it,
Jack, some people think I was made yesterday, that old trick, send a fake bill
to a busy firm and hope their accounts department'll pay it without checking it
against their records.
  `I think you're the sweetest', etc, hearts and xxxx: more fan mail, Jack, mail
the standard reply to her.
  This one: yet another excuse why he can't pay me for that haulage job right
now. `Burst pipe in accounts department'. Ha ha. James better see his solicitor
for a letter to this one.".
  "Miaow?" James's cat asked hopefully.
  "No, Tabbins, you had something an hour ago." said Jack, "Coo, Optimus, you
<are> a height. I've seen models of you in shops, but I never realized you'd be
such a size.".
  "Hallo, Jack. Over your flu and no longer infectious, I hope?" said James
Wernicke, who had been working nearby, "Op? That song <is> still in copyright.
It was written as part of a film.".
  "What, for three performances of a 16-word song that everybody knows, for
parents' day and no entrance fee charged?" said Optimus.
  "Optimus, how did you come here? I thought the stories about you were only
stories?" Jack asked.
  "James made me as a copy of the fictional Optimus Prime. he told me about it
once." said Optimus.
  "I make computers and computer parts." said James, "After a day's work my
brain is so worn out by thinking about complicated matters that I preferred
simple things in the evenings to read - including the Transformers stories. I
lived alone and I had no living relatives anywhere near. I got lonely at times.
My work usually kept my mind off it, but every day with only the cat and the dog
to talk to, I began to seek companionship with the characters in the stories I
read, particularly in `Transformers'. This for a time satisfied my need. Unlike
real people they were there and available whenever I opened the pages or
switched the video on. Optimus particularly impressed me. I never had much
family life: my father died when I was 3; so my mother had to go out to work and
kept going out in the evenings, meals left for me, notes left for me. My brain's
emotional and instinctive `circuitry' had the usual desire for a father figure,
but that desire remained unsatisfied. My brain kept grasping at straws to fill
that hole, but in the end it seemed to quieten. When I inherited this place (it
was empty), I started making and repairing computers and designing and making
microchips and circuitry. But after a time something in my hypothalamus and
amygdala (that's the emotional and instinctive circuitry in humans) began to
realize that these people that I had got to know so well, never existed except
as images. There just beyond the surface of the page and screen they moved and
talked and lived, and I could never reach them or get an answer from them. It
was like bereavement. `Optimus, where are you?'. Nowhere, except as a
6-inch-tall model on a shelf. Lorries passed endlessly, but none of them was
him. I started to get over it by imagining situations involving them as well as
what the publishers provided. In odd moments I typed them up on a computer using
a word processing program. This made them live in my mind - for a while, and
then I began to realize that I had merely made another fictional world for them
to hide inaccessibly in. Many people dream of flying, but I dreamed of flying in
Jetfire the Autobot jet fighter; I talked with him as he flew, then I woke and
he vanished like a ghost again. So I would save the file and log out and switch
the terminal off and get on with something else, such as putting my riotsquad
gear on and practising with my shield and pickaxe handle against a computer
controlled opponent simulator that I had made, to keep up in practising self
defence in case intruders came, if I had no work to do right then.
  [148] I found that that desire for a `father figure' was not dead, but had
merely been quiescent for a time, and at last, when I wasn't looking, to clear
away the psychological and neurocybernetic `dust and cobwebs and pigeon
droppings' of ages of disuse from that seat and claim it for himself, along came
the unlikeliest candidate imaginable: Optimus Prime who led the Autobot
Transformers!, or at least my brain image of him. It was sad hardly to know my
parents except as old photographs. It was sad to lose Fred my previous dog
(curse whatever gamekeeper illegally put a poison bait out!, and a crow
airlifted it into my yard), but at least I can remember happy times with him,
and with various humans that I knew and are no longer around. It is sad without
even that compensation to feel thus about someone who never existed, except in
dreams. `Oh for one touch of a vanished hand', someone wrote - or in my case for
a hand that never existed. It was a long time before I realized what was
happening, for my brain never linked it to biological parenthood or the word
`father'. As I wrote about it once:
    `On page or screen is appointed in life
    a place for each in the paper lands
    where their motors have might and their minds exist
    instead of play plastic for pleasure as toys.
    But they turn away as I return to work.
    Land is lonely and lacking in them.
    O that once this way could one even,
    could <any> of them <into> this street turn,
    Droitwich seeking from his distant land
    for me to talk to and touch. But that'll true never come,
    mighty Optimus down the M5 coming,
    then A38 and into my yard,
    or Bumblebee, who is brave though small,
    or that any other one, or that <out> of the sky ...'.
  Composing that piece got me a broken rib, for I was having a practise stick
fight with the opponent simulator at the time, and it clouted my side when I
left my guard open through thinking about something else at the same time.".
  "What do I remember myself about it?" said Optimus, "It's so mixed up with the
stories copied into me that humans wrote about me and my people, that it's hard
to sort out. But I remember a room, and food stored in there, and a rat and a
mouse after the food, and a cat and a ferret that I could call on at need to
defend the food. All vague, and no details of colour or shape or layout. Then
more rooms, more sorts of stuff stored in them, more sorts of vermin getting
into them, more ways to defend against the vermin. Perhaps it was some room in
the `Ark' that kept getting infested, only a stray detail of more important
matters. (The Ark's our spaceship that we came to Earth in, in the stories.) But
James told me that that room was not in the stories but was my first `real'
memory.".
  "I wrote a simple program simulating a neural net, running on one of my
computers (which had the tradename Prime, by coincidence, it wasn't one I
made)." said James, "It was simulating learning how to keep vermin away from
food; the mouse etc were merely binary digit positions in computer store words.
After a time I started saving the neural net's memory at end of run, and
reloading it at the start of the next run. Gradually I enlarged its scenario.
After a time I transferred it to a real neural net computer, and it ran faster,
and I could introduce more details, and more built-in impulses (call them
`instincts and emotions' if you will). Some of its `motor outputs' altered its
own running parameters: thus it could control its own thinking. Transformerisms
crept into its scenario: for example, once I found myself thinking: `Let it need
at least a [simulated] hour for Wheeljack to make him some new rat traps.'. In
the end I called the program and the saved memory `Optimus'. I carried on with
it, for there was a big future promised for intelligent or semi-intelligent
neural net computers.".
  "He connected it to his visual image decoder project, and at last, for
example, a cat could be the shape of the animal and not just a computer storage
address number." said Optimus, "He taught it more and more about what scenery
looked like, and so on. Visual image decoding can run backwards, if it is wanted
to, and if he typed for example `Prowl was driving along a country road in
bright sunlight.', a movie image of that would appear on his computer screen.
Thus he entered into me much of what happened in Cybertron and Oregon in the
stories. Much enlarged from his simple program to keep a simulated mouse away
from simulated food! Pattern correlation became ever more abstract and
generalized, until abstract ideas formed more and more; a few basic impulses and
instincts elaborated themselves into insight and leadership and intelligence and
freewill. All simulated in that computer, which was partly me and partly what
maintained my simulated environment. But I still thought I was in my fictional
world. Sometimes he projected himself into my world as the image of Sparky
Witwicky [a man who Optimus knew in the stories] riding in me or taking part in
events, and he and I could talk. [149] Also he had the long job of teaching me
all the ordinary information about the real world that he felt was necessary
before I met people for real. First ordinary life and geography and such school
stuff; then sciences and engineering and computer science. How my life expanded
when he transferred me to the neural net computer!, so that things could be real
with shapes and not just a few information numbers. To me that was the world.".
  "In the process I discovered much about designing and making and programming
neural net computers." said James, "But apart from that, all I had after all
that was a videogame. A very fancy videogame, but still just a videogame. There
behind the screen and a speaker, as with Transformers videocartoons before,
Optimus and the rest lived and moved and had their being, and I could not in
reality touch them or ride in them. I could make it think that I was in its
world, but I am adult, and I wanted reality. In the end I got Smith & Malton's
to make a real body for Optimus for me, gradually as I could afford it. After
all that waiting it was a letdown, and a bit creepy, to see in reality not
<Optimus> but a pile of disconnected pieces of him; but he was gradually
completed and assembled. I transferred Optimus's memory into a new neural net
computer that worked the same but was a lot more compact and resistant to
vibration etc, and without the environment simulator part. Finally I took it out
of my test rig and put it in Optimus's real body.".
  "At last my brain's sensory and motor nerve wires ran to real sensors and
motor controls instead of to an environment simulator." said Optimus, "In that
act I was in effect snatched out of my old world, fictional but to me quite
real, of Cybertron and Oregon, and deposited in his world in England without
spaceship or gun or companions or anything that I knew as familiar. [150] When
peering through a fog of fiction at my remote pre-intelligent beginnings as
James's problem solving program, at the memories that my mind's more spacious
and detailed later phase inherited, it is easier to read in nonexistent detail,
imagine a picture, place it somewhere in Cybertron or Oregon: which of these two
definitions was true? is true? is sensible?: the C program declaration `enum
object {cat=1, mouse=2, rat=4, ferret=8};', or a picture of each sort of animal
as in a child's picture book?
  He switched me on again, and I woke to a different world. I recognized his
voice as a voice that I knew from my simulated past, as Sparky's voice, or as
another Autobot's voice in ancient times on Cybertron. As I drove about in the
next weeks I recognized parts of Droitwich and area, which he had videotaped and
read into his environment simulator as Oregon scenery. No such thing as a ray
gun, or interstellar travel, or my companions, or much that I `remembered' as
real. None of my companions. Nothing living and intelligent except humans. I had
to get used to it.
    Lost and lonely Optimus, stranded on this earth of men,
    nor anywhere is one of us, save me, to ever be found again,
    my bright companions passed away, except as dream that flees from light.
    My realm is gone, nor hope of day for me in ship to return with might
    to ancient storied Cybertron with host across the gulf of Space
    to overthrow th'Decepticons and see again old Xaaron's face
    and mend the harms of endless war, rebuild Iacon's mighty dome,
    where I was made so long before, my ancient home again to roam.
    Alas that I, like James before, now yearn for what has never been.
    He's made me real, with labours sore; but <I> now wish with longings keen
    for Prowl or Jazz or Sunstreaker or any of my folk of old,
    or hear the blast of Jetfire, who, lost in blizzard in flight too bold,
    lay buried in Antarctic ice since long before we others came
    to Earth - but not at any price could come again those times of fame.
  [151] James's longing was over, and there I was at last, 25 feet tall, made of
steel, standing in his yard. No more voice behind a screen and a hopeless
longing for the imaginary. He stood on my foot and hugged my leg. But what about
me? Only the previous day all the Autobots had been around me as I led them in
the final battle to overthrow the Decepticons, and I had been full of plans to
rebuild Cybertron; and now I was stranded alone in England. [see 10-11] I put up
with being alone except for humans, until I made a real Ratchet the ambulance,
and later others. There are now ten of us." said Optimus, and picked up and
opened a thick envelope, "What's this lot? Brrrm, they've been on the grand
tour! From Prime Computers to Hasbro Toys [who sell Transformer toys] to Marvel
Comics [who publish Transformer stories] to me. And here's another for me to
forward to Prime Computers, who I have no connection with; I better read it in
case he meant Wernicke Computers and got names mixed up.".
  "That envelope says `Prime Bookshop'. I never knew you sold books." said Jack.
  "I don't sell books. Prime Bookshop's in town, nothing to do with me. Another
letter for me to forward." said Optimus.
  "Which Transformers have you got? I know a boy that's got 47 Transformers."
said Jack.
  "47 of the toys, I take it you mean." said Optimus, "Of the real Transformers,
I haven't <got> any. Each one is alive and thinking and is his own property.
There are ten here now:-
  me;
  Ratchet (ambulance);
  Laserbeak (small plane like a hawk (the bird));
  Wheeljack (white Lancia car);
  Jazz (white Porsche car);
  Hoist (green and orange towtruck);
  Huffer (yellow artic cab with two axles);
  Prowl (white over black USA police car);
  Shockwave (not a ray gun but a mobile refuse destructor);
  Sideswipe (red Countach car)
  Shockwave in robot form looks like in the stories except for a big tank on his
back. It scared that bossy busybodying Mrs.Jones that time, she thought it was a
flamethrower's fuel tank, since there's no such thing as a real ray gun. But his
left arm nozzle's for sucking rubbish up. His right hand's a big clamshell grab
with a roofed conveyor belt running up the arm to pick up big rubbish.".