Geosensus

Geosensus is an Autobot in the War Within portion of the Generation 1 continuity family

"No lesson to learn. No reason to tell."

- Prowl, "Parts"

Geosensus is highly specialized for his function as a fuel deposit scout. His job is all he cares about and he has extensively adapted and reconfigured himself for its sake, in the process sacrificing features both physical and emotional that most Transformers take for granted. These sacrifices have allowed him to help his teammates, but also alienate him from both major Transformer factions. That alienation will cost Geosensus everything.

Transformers Legends anthology
"Parts", by Donald J. Bingle

On a routine search for buried energon deposits, Geosensus discovers Megatron's underground death matches. He watches the grisly and senseless battle between Gripper and Sting and then tries to leave unnoticed... only to blunder right into Megatron himself. Megatron presumes Geosensus to be a volunteer for the death matches and thus a potential Decepticon recruit, and so he immediately "adopts" Geosensus, speaking to him in a manner that is both brutal, commanding, and strangely personable. When he learns his assumption was wrong and that Geosensus isn't there to fight, he becomes bitter and angry--and when Geosensus reveals that he has no weapons at all, having long since removed them to make way for more energy scanning gear (and besides, as Geosensus himself notes, "why would a Cybertronian need weapons on Cybertron? We have no enemies here") Megatron grows enraged and tries to kill him. He is interrupted by the arrival of police units, so he settles for brutally mangling Geosensus before making his escape.

Before going off-line, Geosensus had managed to send an emergency beacon to Autobot commanders. The Decepticons promptly attacked and devastated Kaon. While Geosensus' warning couldn't help the Autobots repel that attack (Optimus Prime would later sadly assert that nothing could have), it did give them time to evacuate many civilians to safety, and so Prime would always look favorably upon Geosensus after that.

Millions of years later, the Great War in full sway, Geosensus would join the Autobot crew aboard the Ark. En route to Earth, Prowl objected to Geosensus' presence among the crew. The surveying robot had by that point made such extensive modifications to his body, adding so many complex and extremely sensitive scanning and sampling devices that had to be permanently affixed into position, that he could no longer transform, and was permanently in his mobile all-terrain scanning and mining array mode. Geosensus was firm: he didn't believe in Cybertronians killing their own kind. Prowl complained that Geosensus not only couldn't fight, he also couldn't socialize and bond with his teammates. Optimus countered that Geosensus had made that choice millennia ago and in the meantime was fulfilling a valuable function.

When the Ark crashed on Earth, Geosensus was the first Autobot to be awakened by Teletraan-1. He promptly set about exploring the planet for energy. He marveled at the extreme abundance of carboniferous fuel sources, and in general enjoyed himself greatly as he took core samples and electromagnetic readings. His enjoyment was interrupted when he was attacked by newly-awakened Decepticons. To keep them from tracking him back to the Ark he deactivated his transponder, and then, as they closed in and blasted him, out of sheer desperate self-preservation he transformed into robot mode for the first time in millions of years and killed one of the Decepticons with frenzied flailing punches. Geosensus was horrified at having both destroyed his fragile sensory equipment and acting with violence--lethal violence--against one of his own species. He had little time to reflect on this, as the surviving Decepticon continued strafing him from the air.

Hoping to find reinforcements, Geosensus ran back towards the Ark, where by that time Optimus Prime and Prowl had been awakened. When they saw a known Decepticon and an unknown robot approaching their base, the two Autobots assumed they were under attack. Prowl killed the flying Decepticon with his shoulder cannons, and Optimus Prime killed Geosensus with repeated shots from his laser rifle.

On examining the wreckage they learned the truth, and Prime was shocked and despairing. He tried to think of how to explain this to the other Autobots, but Prowl insisted he should do no such thing. Prowl reasoned that with the Autobots already on the defensive and now stranded on an unknown world, they could not risk losing morale as well. His argument was that just as Geosensus had chosen to give up so much in order to specialize as a fuel scout, the lowly archivist Optronix had chosen to give up being a normal Transformer who could make mistakes when he accepted the Matrix of Leadership and became Optimus Prime. The Autobots needed an icon of heroic and infallible leadership at least as badly as they needed a dedicated fuel scout, and they would suffer much more for losing the former than the latter. Besides, it was unlikely any of them had even noticed Geosensus--a loner who was always in his altmode and often underground. Optimus Prime, humbled, eventually agreed.

Prowl recycled some of Geosensus' body parts and covered up all evidence of the killing, and swore that if it ever came to light he himself would take the blame for it.