Cybertronian Biology

Cybertronians are not truly 'robots,' they are extremely diverse destronium-based organisms that are mechanical in nature. A Cybertronian is born, not built. And is a fully autonomous and sapient being. A Cybertronian has several organs like most organics, but is able to survive for prolonged periods of time without most of them. The essential organs for Cybertronian life are the brain, spine, and spark. While one can temporarily be removed without killing a Cybertronian with proper methods and storage, a Cybertronian will go completely inert the moment their spark and brain stop communicating and the destruction of either will instantly kill them.

Hot Spots
Hot spots, also called spark beds, are a phenomenon created by the same pulses from Cybertron's core that create energon. When a hot spot is created, a sheet of Cybertron or one of its moons is chemically modified to become a swath of sentio metallico, peppered with living sparks. While most hot spots occur on the surface, many also occur underground and in some rare instances, spark beds are discovered while mining.

Under Senate rule, hot spots were heavily regulated and it was illegal for anyone other than the government to harvest them. They were unable to regulate the Insecticons and their harvesting of subterranean hot spots, however.

Sparks
The religious would call the spark a Cybertronian's soul, the scientific would sooner equate it with a heart and a repository for a Cybertronian's base CNA. (Cybernucleic acid, the blueprint of a Cybertronian's biology.) The entire Cybertronian is formed by the spark and the sentio metallico around it, starting with the spark chamber, spine, then brain.

A spark is necessary to jump start a protoform's life, and as the protoform's spark chamber develops it creates the body's innermost energon for cushioning and to power its first beats. The speed of a spark's beat is not effected much by mood, but is an excellent indicator of a Cybertronian's physical state.

Most sparks are orbs surging with bolts of energy which are blue to white in color. In some instances, a green spark is found instead. This is often called a Point-One-Percenter or a load bearing spark. Load bearing sparks take well to physical augmentation and can often handle controlling much bigger bodies than standard sparks, but all sparks will eventually reach a limit to the size of a body they can exert control over. In some rare instances, a spark will split to create twins who form from the same single spark and protoform.

If a spark is extinguished, the Cybertronian perishes. There have been many theories about replacing an extinguished spark, and many of the more religious groups of Cybertronians consider the very idea blasphemous, stating that even if it worked the resurrected Cybertronian would not be the same Cybertronian. But that didn't stop Tarantulas when he created the "Newforged."

Sentio Metallico & Destronium
Sentio metallico and Destronium are important components to a Cybertronian's structure that Cybertronians have yet to synthesize a stable form of. When a hot spot forms, the pulse that creates it also converts a sheet of the surface where the hot spot forms into a substance called sentio metallico. Sometimes, a hot spot will have either more or less sentio metallico than is needed to safely activate every spark born within it.

Sentio metallico must be harvested with the spark, and the spark will, when activated, begin the process of using the sentio metallico to form a spark chamber, spine, and protoform. (Alternatively, a spark may be placed in a pre-existing protoform.) As it modifies the sentio metallico on a chemical level to create the hard shell of the spark chamber and the spine, the modified chemicals removed are used to create destronium. This destronium is then used to create a brain and neurosystem. When a Cybertronian buds, they use an excess cache of sentio metallico left over from the formation of their own protoform. This is why asexually produced buds tend to be smaller and sometimes weaker than a forged Cybertronian or a cross-bud, and why Cybertronians have a very finite number of times that they can bud.

It's not yet certain if Insecticons can naturally produce new sentio metallico as they clone, or if they merely have massive amounts of excess sentio metallico. As loyal members of the Decepticon cause, experimenting on them is heavily limited to banned. And few Autobots are willing to cross that line with prisoners. Unfortunately, sentio metallico becomes inert and starts turning into a fine, useless powder within hours of a body's death if not properly stored. So it is very difficult to harvest the precious substance from fallen soldiers.

T-Cogs
The T-Cog is one of the few Cybertronian organs that can not be synthetically replicated. It forms naturally during the protoform stage of life, and is crucial to a Cybertronian's ability to transform or use any weapons or defenses built into their body. If damaged or destroyed, a T-Cog can be replaced. But only by transplanting an undamaged one from a donor. For this reason, it's not unusual for a victor to harvest materials like T-Cogs from a recent battlefield.

But like sentio metallico, T-Cogs won't last long without a living body or appropriate storage before they begin to degrade. A T-Cog becomes useless within 24 hours of being outside of a body.

Body Modification
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Budding
Cybertronians require two things to reproduce. A protoform, and a spark. While they can create the protoform through a process called budding or by harvesting sentio metallico, it is a blank slate until it has been implanted with a spark. While budding is something that can be done asexually, Cybertronians are also capable of sexual reproduction. Not through sexual intercourse like most intelligent organics, but from a mutual bud of the liquid-state sentio metallico from their own body's left over reserves.

The combination of buds mixes our CNA to create a new template, occasionally mutating a little in the process. It's known as cross-budding. But the protoform is inert until a spark has been harvested and placed inside. Under Senate rule, nearly all budding ceased as no private citizens had access to sparks.

Birth
While some have required much more rearing and leadership than others in youth, generally Cybertronians are born "adults" with at least a rudimentary understanding of their race and world. Core programming passed down in their protoforms. Some organics have coined the term "sparkling" to refer to a newborn Cybertronian. Cybertronians vary in whether they consider the term endearing or offensive. (The term has also been applied to refer to developing protoforms that became conscious early, before their bodies finished forming.)

Family
While it varies from culture to culture, most "common Cybertronians" do not think of their progeny from budding or cross-budding the same way as organics tend to think of their children. They are independent beings from birth who do not require individual care or guidance and they do not consider them anything special or personal. They are a continuation of the species. However, Insecticon culture tends to be very family-oriented with kinship and heritage carrying a lot of weight, and Predacons tend to consider all fellow Predacons some form of kin while behaving with a very pack-like mentality. As a result usually if you hear about family, it is from Insecticons, Predacons, twins, or triplets.

Twins and triplets are Cybertronians who formed from the same single spark and protoform. In some rare instances, a spark and protoform manages to split once or twice to create multiple nearly-identical individuals with a strong bond of kinship. Such split-spark siblings feel an intense bond with their siblings, and have been recorded knowing when their sibling has died or experienced extreme distress while in completely different star systems.

Split-spark siblings begin life identical to each other, but often choose different color schemes, different helmets, and other small body modifications to differentiate themselves. In some extreme cases, the only things the twins shared when finished with their modifications and personal life choices were their faces.

Cloning
There are a few different types of clones which exist, but they're all made with base CNA melded with or replacing that of an existing protoform. Predacons were created using recovered CNA infused into modern protoforms and given sparks. There have also been spark splitting clones created, which are all directly linked to their original progenitor and essentially an extension of their psyche.

These clones think and act like the Cybertronian whose spark they are linked to, and possess  a sort of pseudospark split from the progenitor's original. There have been numerous attempts to weaponize these clones known as Vehicon projects, but the feedback their pain and demise creates is often too much for the progenitor to bear. Suicide or death through strain of the spark was very common. Some Vehicons still exist, but face prejudice over their method of creation and derogatory slurs such as calling them "drones." They possess no innermost energon, but are capable of forming individual personalities through life experience.

Insecticons have the capacity to create clones similar to those of the Vehicon project, but they are of inferior mind and brawn to naturally budded individuals and subservient to all budded Insecticons. These clones tend to for the most part lack individuality, and instead operate under a hive mind lead by either their strongest warrior or a budded commander.

Insecticon clones form from small, organic looking eggs which draw materials in from their environment to form into a larger, metallic pod and construct the clone's body inside. These pods have a stasis mechanism for the spark to keep the clones inert until either the pod is forcefully opened, or it receives a danger signal from nearby pods becoming damaged. They were used as the basis for Cybertronian stasis pod technology.

Budding and Insecticon cloning are very resource-intensive and require excessive amounts of energon. So cloning projects have largely been deemed impractical to pursue. Today, most are Predacon programs run by Shockwave or Predacons themselves to keep up the race's numbers.

Sex & Gender
It is widely believed that initially Cybertronians were in fact genderless, though nobody from those times remains alive to anyone's knowledge. And that gender was a concept introduced to Cybertronians by other intelligent life encountered early in Cybertronian pre-history. This theoretically made many of their ancestors adopt the common male or female genders based on the typical sexes of sexually reproducing life. Some of them took so fondly to their new identities that they even modified their forms as they saw fit to reflect them.

Over time, being gendered became the norm. It has become such an integrated part of the species' collective psyche that it’s even become part of their core programming, most Cybertronians are born with a grasp of the concept and choose a gender early in life. They tend to form their bodies or have them modified to fit with what they think it means to be themselves and their gender.

Conflicting with this theory is the discovery that some groups of previously unknown Cybertronian races, such as the cloned Predacons or subterranean Insecticons, also possess a concept of gender. While it is possible that the Predacon clones have actually been corrupted by the modern Cybertronian protoforms used to create them, they do not know where the concept was derived from for Insecticons.

Some use it as further evidence for their religious belief that female Cybertronians descend from the legendary Solus Prime, whom religious scholars today like to paint as both a female Cybertronian and one of the first twelve of the species. Most female Cybertronians do claim descent from her tribe even today. Conversely, the Senate viewed the existence of Insecticons as a threat to Functionalism because their mere existence with no direct connection to the Twelve Tribes conflicts with conventional Cybertronian theology, rather than viewing their females as an affirmation of Solus Prime.

Cybertronians feel the same bonds of kinship as the other sentient races, and in some rare instances that can lead to what we call conjunx endura. Conjunx endura are a pair of Cybertronians who have ceremoniously bonded for life, humans might compare it to marriage. But the ceremony only requires the two partners, and the majority of Cybertronians go their entire lives without finding a conjunx endura. To add to that, while most organic races seek out members of an opposite gender with outliers who seek out the same or many, to most Cybertronians gender is irrelevant as not only are our relationships generally independent of reproduction, but even if they weren't it would not effect their ability to cross-bud.

Similarly, there is an amica endura. "Best friend." Amica endurae are very rarely seen apart, and their bond is seen as valuable tactically, often resulting in amica endurae being stationed or sent on missions together.