Human
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.
Overview
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 legs attached to a tall body, with two limbs attached at the shoulders. At the shoulders is the head, just like a Transformer's, which sports two eyes in the center at equal distance from the olfactory sensor array, above a mouth which opens for speaking and for ingesting energy. Aside from energy, they also ingest raw materials that they use in their self repair systems. This would seem to be a sensible system, as these 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. Damage is hard to repair, and as they have yet to develop a method of replicating these organs, replacement usually requires harvesting from compatible humans. Major systems include the brain (central processing unit), the heart (primary engine core), and the lungs (which allow intake of essential atmospheric oxygen). Humans are able to ingest other organic matter and internally refine it into a fuel they term blood. Blood is required by every organ in their body and an elaborate transport system is required to transport it throughout. Though blood is in some sense self-replicating, a tremendous loss will result in permanent deactivation.
A human's organic tissue will begin failing just one quarter into his or her lifespan, and will spend the next three quarters growing ever less efficient until the human's lifeforce can no longer sustain itself. As a result, 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.) Interestingly, 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 (or occasionally more than one, although this is rare) inside the female like a parasite until it emerges roughly three quarters of an Earth year later. (If it exits the female too early, the new human risks death.) The new human is very fragile and stupid; it will take years to acclimate itself to their society. Even a young human who stayed inside its female for the appropriate length of time is not capable of operating self-sufficiently without extensive training. Despite this limited intelligence and understanding, younger humans are often among the first to form bonds with friendly Transformers.
Initiating the growth of a new human apparently involves much rubbing, and also kissing. Humans are reticent to discussing 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 natural resources, Human technology is surprisingly primitive. They had only begun to experiment with outer atmosphere 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 ineffecient when fending off any attacking Decepticons. Their warhead weapons are slightly more efficient, though extremely primitive when compared to Autobot photon and plasma weapons.
Culture
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 sing songs at the ceiling, 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. Then they fight about which "translation" is correct instead of simply downloading the original encoding algorithm.
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 the two theories are mutually exclusive, many seem to fall in a categorization that somehow accepts both. Many human traditions are puzzling.
The most familiar breed of humans are native to the planet Earth, though they can be found practically anywhere in the galaxy. For example, Nebulos is such a place, though some reports claim these humans are of green texture rather than various shades of beige. Femax is populated by humans of Transformer size. Pz-Zazz is also home to Transformer-sized humans, but it is not known whether they are indigenous to that world. It is possible that the tiny version of humans found on Earth is the exception, rather than the rule.
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!
- According to Scorponok, a certain percentage of human physiology is composed of cowardice. This proportion increases directly according to the size of the individual. Pretender to the Throne!
