One thing that I really liked in IDW 2 was the concept of Going Immersant.
Given the immensely long average lifespan of Cybertronians, it makes sense:
If nothing kills you, and you live long enough to have experienced all of what you feel you reasonably can in this lifetime, and you feel content with the life that you have had, and it seems time to retire--
--Why not return your knowledge and the entity of your self to the core of your planet, where your energy and your components can be reused and your memories and knowledge can be subsumed into the greater whole?
Plug in with the stray cables that stick out of the cavernous expanses deep beneath the surface of Cybertron, let yourself get situated, and allow yourself to daydream as the crystals grow around you and gradually consume you. It is not painful. It is a process of sharing.
Each daydream then enters the great memory bank of Primus, at the heart of the world, the core of life itself for your species. Your experiences become part of the eternal record of experienced Cybertronian life. You join your God himself, frame and processor, as you combine with him within the physical form of your planet.
Primus created you, and as you are subsumed into the crystalline forms that surround you, you will go on to sustain Primus in some way. An unending cycle.
Perhaps you feel something, leeching up from deep within the crystal mass, some unique energy meeting you halfway, the cables that snake their way into your ports like vines carrying some ancient data, older than yourself, older than the Rust Sea, older than the Hydrax Plateau, older than the Titans.
Maybe you cannot decipher it, yet. But it comforts you. It reminds you that you are not alone, after your visitors have gone. Where there is digital noise, there is something to produce it. You will meet it soon--
--After countless years of a peaceful rest, knowing that at the end of your endlessly long existence, your life will go on to benefit others.
And for as long as you are able, you still remain present, as well. Just not above, on the surface. For some time, others can still come and visit, speak with you, consult with you-- Although as your memory banks purge into the greater whole, you begin to falter in this waking realm.
And that is OK; To rejoin with Primus and re-enter the Well of All Sparks as an ancient elder, a repository of experience and wisdom, is to become a teacher to all. Even in peaceful, gradual death-- And even then, your energy and materials and thoughts remain somewhere, deep within the planet.
Returned. Recycled.
Eternal, in some shape or form.
It's just a really beautiful concept.
Without any natural death, Cybertronians have the option to simply return to Primus, return to the core of the planet, in a half-waking state.
At peace, gracefully and with intent.
All of what they have experienced and all that they are, all of their memories and feelings, all of the metals and compounds that make up their frame and armour and protoform, all of it can be taken in and absorbed.
The option is there, to emerge once more.
But for most, this is the final calling.
To go immersant is to enter peace, to become a living state of meditation until the very end for you as an individual. To have full agency over how you pass on, to make the decision and consciously know. To be happy with that. To relax into your fate, as you see fit.
To make the decision to be recycled, to contribute all that you are, to return your energy to the crystalline matter that fuels your world and your people and your God, who in turn fuelled you and will thus go on to fuel all those subsequently churned out by the Well.
To merge with your living planet on an atomic level, on an esoteric level.
I wonder if the fully immersant aren't dead in the traditional sense. Perhaps they are offline, to those in this world. Perhaps their frame is vacated as their data is absorbed. But that data is not lost, necessarily.
It's just a very beautiful end of life option for Cybertronians, and I do hope the concept is revisited in some form in the future.
