Humans



Humans (also known as: fleshlings, meatbags, insects, squishies, noisy creatures, "puny flesh creatures", "dumb stubbies", Terrans or Homo sapiens as they prefer) are bipedal and usually tiny organic beings found on Earth and like planets. Though quite fragile and technologically backwards, they have at times aided the Autobots and thwarted the Decepticons once the Transformers' age-old war spilled onto the humans' primitive homeworld. "Disgusting!"

Physiology
Humans are suspiciously familiar creatures. Though they are made of soft, organic materials, they share remarkable physical similarities with Transformers as a species. Most Transformers and humans walk upright on two long ambulator limbs attached to a tall body, with two manipulator limbs attached at the shoulders. Atop the shoulders is the head, just like a Transformer's, which sports two optical sensors in the center at equal distance from the olfactory sensor array, above a mouth which opens for speaking and for ingesting various fuels and organic materials needed for their self-repair systems. This would seem to be a sensible system, capable of diverting the fuels directly or processing, while the spare materials can be stored anywhere in their bodies, to be used later when and if necessary. Like Transformers, they are social creatures, who trade and barter wares and develop emotional attachments to peers. Eerily enough, they possess an emotional spectrum nearly identical to that of Transformers as well, ranging from laughter, joy, and satisfaction to depression, anger, and cruelty. It is not uncommon to find Transformers who have even developed strong spiritual bonds with individual creatures. This is disgusting.

Humans are physically composed of several specialized units or systems called organs. The major organs are internalized, but extremely frail, susceptible to damage at all times as they lack natural armor, save for a few parts of their internal skeletal design. Most organs are capable of self-repairing minor damage, and are in a constant state of discharging and disposing of material which naturally becomes damaged through use. More serious damage requires the assistance of a medical engineer to open the human's organs for repair operations. Complete replacement of parts is considered an extreme option, as their organ replication technology is in its early experimental stages; replacement usually requires harvesting from compatible humans, sometimes from recently-deactivated ones who will no longer have need of their organs. In addition, their bodies are continuously invaded by miniscule foreign organic entities, such as viruses, bacteria, and parasites, which can disrupt the human's operation. Human bodies have their own automatic defenses to constantly seek out and destroy these invaders, but occasionally fail, causing the human to malfunction in various ways while its body resorts to extreme defense measures. Often, the human recovers and the body self-repairs, but some infestations result in permanent damage or a complete cessation of function.

Major systems include the brain (central processing unit), the heart (primary engine core), and the lungs (carburetor). Over sixty percent of their chemical composition is water, though they are not aquatic in nature. Humans primarily require three general substances as fuel: gaseous oxygen, liquid water, and a complex variety of metallic elements and carbon compounds collectively called "food," obtained by ingesting and breaking down other organic life forms for spare materials. Oxygen is the most essential of these, as a human's central processor cannot function for more than a few minutes without it. After processing and absorption, a liquid substance they call blood, carries these fuels throughout the entire body. Because blood channels are present everywhere in their soft bodies, humans are very susceptible to blood loss through damage. Fortunately, blood itself contains a sealant designed to close small openings and allow self-repair, and blood itself is self-replicating. Nevertheless, an immediate and tremendous loss will result in permanent deactivation, as a loss of blood means a loss of the essential oxygen fuel.

Not being a perfecly efficient system, a human body produces waste materials. Gaseous carbon dioxide results from their oxygen processing, and is expelled through the lungs in the same process that draws in oxygen. Liquid and solid waste is produced through orifices at the bottom of their bodies and are quickly disposed of whenever possible, as humans instinctively consider these waste products repugnant. In fact, the words for them are often used as expressions of disdain or resentment among humans.

A human's organic tissue will begin failing just one quarter into his or her lifespan, and will spend the next three quarters accumulating wear and damage while growing ever less efficient, until the human's body can no longer sustain its own function. As a result, even without catastrophic injury, humans are saddeningly short-lived creatures. (It is not known how they find the time to accomplish anything, though as a side effect it has made their wars mercifully short.) But this fact results in many humans having a valiant and admirable value of life.

Amazingly, humans do not build new members of their race. To the contrary, humans are what they have deemed "sexually dimorphic", categorized into sexes, wherein members of one subvariant of their species, classified as male, implants structural data, which they call "DNA", in the other, classified as female. This process grows a new human (curiously, much like the parasites their bodies normally destroy) from base substances inside the female's gestation chamber, which maintains the new human's life functions as its organs develop. Rarely, multiple new humans will grow together inside the female. After roughly three-quarters of an Earth year, the female expels the new human from inside her body, as its body is now sufficiently developed to sustain itself, and continued growth would harm the female. The new human is very fragile and stupid, able to communicate only with a shrill noise and incapable of any independant action. Despite this, the human experiences a period of accelerated learning and observation that can rival a Transformer's capabilities, rapidly developing an abstract understanding of its surroundings. Even so, it will take years to acclimate itself to their society, and will require even more time to learn to operate self-sufficiently. Despite their limited intelligence and understanding, younger humans are often among the first to form bonds with friendly Transformers, due to their natural acceptance of new ideas and change. After roughly the first quarter of its life span, the human is fully grown and capable, but experiences a sharp decline in its ability to learn new concepts, and will enjoy only a few years of peak operation before the aforementioned gradual tissue failures begin accumulating.

Initiating the growth of a new human apparently involves much rubbing, and also kissing. Humans are reticent to discuss the practice, and several attempts at accumulating further data were met with what they term as "awkward silence." This is quite confusing, as humans generally give the impression that they supremely enjoy it, and have refused all suggestions that they learn the technology to build their own from spare parts.

Technology
Although Earth is rich with elemental and chemical resources, Human technology is surprisingly primitive. They had only begun to experiment with trans-atmospheric travel at the time the Great War began on Earth, and they have limited communication methods. Although their locomotive devices, called "cars," are suitable for Transformation, they are quite crude, potentially dangerous, and incredibly energy inefficient. Despite this, the type of car is often seen as a status symbol among humans; apparently the larger the car, the more status achieved. Some humans claim that those with large cars are "compensating" for some other sort of size deficiency—unsurprising, considering how tiny humans are compared to the average Transformer.

Human military technology is equally unimpressive. They have yet to develop any form of workable energy weapons, and no shield technology either. Their primary weapons are devices called guns, which shoot small, metallic projectiles called bullets using a crude explosive called gunpowder. These are more than capable of killing other humans, but they are extremely inefficient when fending off any attacking Decepticons. Their self-propelled explosive weapons are slightly more efficient, though extremely primitive when compared to Autobot photon and plasma weapons.

In some universes humans have weaponry that is actually rather effective against a Transformer. In one universe the humans used explosive projectiles called "Sabots" that employ an incredibly high heat to burn through Decepticon armour and then detonate in the more vulnerable innards. A sufficient volley of these in the right places can bring down a fairly large Decepticon almost as effectively as our own cannons. The humans combine these with one advantage of their small size: hiding, taking cover in buildings or behind other obstacles then popping up to fire a few rounds before hiding and relocating before firing again.

Although their technology is fairly primitive, and they fail to intelligently utilize their plentiful resources, human technological advancement is impressive considering their circumstances, and accelerates at an exponential rate. Since the dawn of their existence, Cybertronians have had all the technology they needed to study inside of them, which made engineering more and new technologies very easy. The humans had to start from nothing, using a laborious process of observation and experimentation to learn anything about the universe they lived in.

Society
Like on Cybertron before the war, humans make up the fabric of their local (or global) economies. Some work as repairmen, some are drillers in search of un-processed lubricants, others are retrievers of rare mineral lattices and metals, a few accomplish all of these simultaneously. The humans strangely use the majority of the lubricant they extract as a highly inefficient source of energy, and adorn themselves with the harvested minerals and metals at exorbitant prices. Apparently the humans reason that because these objects are rare, they are incredibly beautiful, and therefore worth vastly more resources than were spent extracting and refining them. Instead of trading valuable energy directly for goods and services, a small piece of lumbered and processed planetgrowth is exchanged. This planetgrowth represents energy abstractly, and its worth is assumed on good faith, though it is usually backed up by various metals and crystals of economic value.

A number of unsavory humans subvert this established system to illegally or immorally obtain these planetgrowths. Many of these humans were involved in unusual accidents which empowered the individual specimen to levels above ordinary humans, while others are tempted by their relatively high intelligence levels or capacity for selfish acts. Encounters with these subversive humans happen at an alarming rate, whether they be mad scientists, or vengeful engineers. By sheer numbers, these humans must represent half of the known population.

Politically, humans are divided among various nation-states which seem to be divided primarily among ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences. On occasion, these nation-states will engage in conflict over territory and resources, but as previously stated, their wars are usually quite short. Most humans seem to prefer some sort of democracy where they elect individuals to govern and legislate their nation-states, although a number of them choose their leaders due to genetic inheritance and familial succession; others still hold power through a Decepticon style dictatorship, though the mental stability of a few have been questioned. At times, the Decepticons have exploited Earth's factional tendencies to manipulate them to their advantage, but the Autobots have usually managed to expose the Decepticon influence before a full scale military conflict occurs.

Humans greatly enjoy complex mathematical sound patterns, termed "music," and have devised innumerable mechanical devices to produce them throughout every known Earth culture. Sometimes, but not always, these sound patterns are accompanied with narrative poetry, either delivered with vocal inflections to complement the devices, or spoken with a measured pace. The Autobots Jazz and Blaster have taken a particular interest in music, though the chosen volume has overwhelmed most other Autobots, including the mighty Optimus Prime from time to time. Music is one of those few artificial phenomena humans have instinctive reactions to, as they often show an involuntary need to move about in concordance with the music they are experiencing. Some of these movements even become ritualized, which they call "dancing." Strangely, even the aforementioned Autobots have also shown a desire to move about in this manner. Presumably, a fear of blowback prevented the Autobots from utilizing human music as a weapon against the Decepticons.

Humans are also competitive creatures, engaging in a variety of physical contests that are designed to test their strength, stamina, and speed. While none of them could hold their own against even the weakest Transformer, many human physical games, or "sports," have been eagerly adopted by Transformers. The Autobot Eject is particularly fond of human athletics, and his vocabulary is littered with the human sports terminology. Likewise, they have devised games of cunning and strategy to test and advance one's mental faculties. "Chess," a ritualized and simplified interpretation of warfare, is the most widely played of these. Many other popular games use elements of random chance and deception, rewarding the ability to feign weakness or strength, seize advantages, and manipulate one's foes.

Religion
Despite their lack of the multi-dimensional transwarp Spark, a great number of humans believe in an analogous concept, the intangible soul. This has been confirmed to be the equivalent of a Transformer's personality program in an odd experiment, when the human Spike Witwicky's personality was uploaded to an empty Transformer body cobbled together from spare parts. The human's consciousness was not suitable for digitization, and quickly deteriorated toward psychosis.

Many also believe in supernatural beings, either singular or plural, who have a direct but intangible stake in their lives. Once a week the more religious humans will gather together and produce music directed toward the ceiling of their religious facilities, as the presumed direction of these beings is away from the gravity well of their planet. Unlike the historical Covenant of Primus, their holy books are not incorruptible encrypted public-key datatracks. Instead, they frequently re-encode the writings of multiple authors in an inefficient and apparently lossy process. Disputes often arise as they debate about which "translation" is correct instead of simply downloading the original encoding algorithm, which most fail to realize has been corrupted beyond recovery. More confusing still, many of these different beliefs insist that their supernatural patrons are ultimately benevolent and loving beings who wish for all humans to care for each other, yet some humans who worship them will eagerly use violence to enforce the supremacy of their being over that of others. This is highly illogical and contradictory, which appears to elude the understanding of such humans.

Despite having no concrete evidence these beings exist, and despite the records of the Beast Wars affirming their evolution from bipedal primates, the humans continue to assume these premises are true. This seems like a waste of spent attention, especially with such short lifespans, as no credible sources have substantiated that their alleged creator has ever transformed out of their world into a giant humanoid and fought its eternal enemy before their eyes. While some humans accept that they evolved from bipedal primates, there are others who maintain the divine intervention theory with a zeal that leads one to wonder if they are malfunctioning. Though some have contended that the two theories are mutually exclusive, many seem to fall in a categorization that somehow accepts both. Many human traditions are puzzling.

Breeding grounds
The most familiar breed of humans are native to the planet Earth, though they can be found practically anywhere in the galaxy.

Trivia

 * For reasons unknown, a substantial number of human Transformers fans appear to have a very drastic, dismissive position when it comes to the inclusion of representatives of their species in Transformers fiction, some even going as far as demanding that Transformers fiction should be devoid of any flesh creatures whatsoever, unless being depicted as helpless victims/casualties of Decepticon attacks.


 * Humans reproduce by shooting DNA into each other. I find that offensive!


 * Decepticons often confuse them with insects.