Human

A typical human.

Humans (also known as: fleshlings, organics, 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.

They're such undependable creatures. Inferior lifeforms.{{#if:|{{{quote2}}}}}{{#if:Sunstreaker on the humans"Megatron's Master Plan, Part 1"|Sunstreaker on the humans{{#if:"Megatron's Master Plan, Part 1"|, "Megatron's Master Plan, Part 1"|}}|}}

Overview

Physiology

Humans come in both Tall and Venti.

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, data storage), the heart (primary engine core), and the lungs (fuel tank). Over sixty percent of their makeup is water, though they are not primarily aquatic in nature. Humans run on two types of fuel: gaseous oxygen, which is absorbed from their surroundings, and liquid fuel they call blood, created from organic matter and internally refined. Blood and oxygen are required by every organ in their body and an elaborate transport system is required to transport them throughout. Though blood is in some sense self-replicating, a tremendous loss of the liquid will result in permanent deactivation. Oxygen is equally required, and if deprived of oxygen for long enough, they run the risk of suffering major processor damage or permanent deactivation.

Optimus Prime learns of human reproduction.

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 (or perhaps as a result of it), 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. Though the required interactions have been hinted at in popular media, humans are reticent to discussing the physical mechanism, 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

The humans of Earth wear hard hats regardless of their profession.

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" (now superseded by a similar compound called "Cordite"). These are more than capable of killing other humans, but they are extremely inefficient when fending off any attacking Decepticons. Their warhead 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 "Sabot rounds" 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 Cybertronian 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.

Society

Humans require tokens representative of energy, and are not above humiliating themselves to retrieve them.

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 failed entertainers who claim to own all Transformers, mad scientists, or gifted archers who dress in homage to Earth folklore. 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 taken advantage of 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 come in a variety of shapes, sizes and colors.

Humans greatly enjoy sound patterns, termed "music". The Autobots Jazz and Blaster have taken a particular interest in this music, though the chosen volume has overwhelmed most other Autobots, including the mighty Optimus Prime from time to time. Humans have often shown an involuntary need to move about when music is broadcast, and even the aforementioned Autobots have also shown a desire to move about. Presumably, a fear of blowback prevented the Autobots from utilizing human music as a weapon against the Decepticons.

Humans are also athletic creatures, engaging in a variety of athletic events 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 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 quotes.

Religion

Common human depictions of gods incorporate long flowing facial hair, staffs and other kingly apparel.

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, many humans continue to assume these premises are literally true. This seems odd, as few 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. The few sources available claim that their creator is quite at odds with their views on him, and is apparently totally displeased with their existence.

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. For example, Nebulos is such a place, though some reports claim these humans are of green colour 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.

Notes

• 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.

• Perhaps most bizarrely, humans can hear the trans-sonic signal known as the Omega Frequency, emitted by the Omega Lock and other sources of Primus's power, while Transformers cannot.

• 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!

External links

• Humans like to write about themselves. This, too, erupts into war.