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The polymer swamps lurk below the surface of Cybertron, most notably under the harsh and unlivable equator zones that separate the hemispheres from one another. Detritus will filter down here from the surface. Sometimes, it is simple waste, left to rot by living mechs- but more often what falls is the dead and deactivated who have tried to cross the equator. By the time it reaches the swamps, most metals will have been corroded by the harsh conditions above, and glass and crystal will have been smashed to bits by the long, tumbling fall. What's left is mostly sludge, dust, and tangled knots of wires and tubes.
It falls down here to the swamps, to float along with the rest of the sludge. There's nothing solid to stand on for miles in any direction, including straight down. Fluids run together and then separate into layers; gases bubble up above the coolants and light oil, which floats on top of the lubricants and rancid energon. Below them all is the true sludge, the crude oil, not bled from any living machine but slowly built up by the voracious creatures that call this place of constant rot their home.
While nothing in the swamps is truly solid, floating rafts of corpses and scrap metal can support small mechanoids like the turborats and the chronoroaches. The rats feast on the thick cables and wiring harnesses of recently-living mecha, and the roaches crawl over whatever circuits and power cells they can reach to sap any remaining static charge. The worst of the pests on the surface are the scraplets. It's said they'll eat anything made of metal- and given time, they certainly will- most of the time those metals are ejected soon after as dust or powder. The scraplets hunt nanites, the nanoscopic machines inside the machines, that allow life on Cybertron to be self-repairing and self-replicating. The creatures near the surface continue in this fashion- small, fast, and hungry, they reduce whatever falls into the swamps into its base materials in short order.
Beneath them, where the light and thin oils give way to thicker and heavier fuels, larger, more omnivorous creatures roam. Some of them, like the ferocious sharkticons, have become legend among transformers on (or closer to) the surface. These creatures readily devour the mecharrion left over by the pickier eaters above, grinding apart plastic shells, rubber tires, discarded insulation, and anything and everything else. The powerful recyclers inside these opportunistic hunters can spend weeks breaking down and extracting useful materials from a single meal. When they're done, whatever's left over is simply released into the swamp alongside whatever caustic solvent dissolved the rest. It filters down towards the sludge.
Nobody knows what lives in the sludge. Something must; there must be something recycling the recyclers, after all. When the sharkticons and metalvorers die, something must get rid of what's left. But nobody has seen them. Nobody tries.
The largest of the polymer swamps exists beneath the equator, encircling the planet in a band of constant rot and decomposition. Some say that this is where it all happens, that all the discarded detritus on Cybertron eventually finds its way here, to the equator, to be broken down, only to spring back up again as fresh energon or crude oil. They're fools- any mech who's explored below the outermost layers, where the solid plates lock together and energon wells spring up, could tell them. The most frightening thing about the polymer swamps is how many there are- how many there must be, perhaps is the better phrase, since no one who knows anything has ever thought for a moment that they've all been found and mapped. They've been found at the bottom of the crevices where Kaonians dispense of their dead, and they've been found drinking the runoff from Iacon's undercity.
Wherever life exists, death must follow; and so wherever living machines roam Cybertron, something is waiting to transform them back to their base elements. And there you'll find
the Polymer Swamps.