▸ Column · The Autobot exile — a war-weary crew rationing energon aboard ship after the fall of Cybertron
OPTIMUS PRIME replies.
Replied to by Optimus Prime, with a rebuttal from Unicron.
The letter
For three cycles now, someone aboard this ship has been siphoning my rations from the communal energon store, and I am at the end of my patience. I mark every cube — my designation etched in the casing, the cycle-date, even a little glyph of a fallen helm — and still my reserve charge, my labeled stabilizer, and most painfully the home-refined energon my own creator pressed into my hands before Cybertron fell have all vanished. I baited a trap last rotation: a cube marked "OVERCHARGED — UNSTABLE," and at mid-watch I heard the mech two stations down, Drift, venting coolant violently and draining a whole canister of additive — but he denies everything, and now the discipline board is involved because someone called my tainted cube "an unsafe workspace." Meanwhile the quartermaster, Yuki-9, keeps telling me to "store less tempting rations," as if refining my own charge is the offense here. Do I requisition a locked strongbox, do I expose Drift in front of the whole crew, or do I simply accept that my creator's energon now fuels a mech who will not even meet my optics?
Optimus Prime replies
Hear me before you act, because one of your three paths I cannot give you. To expose this mech before the whole crew is not justice — it is humiliation, and humiliation is the leverage I once watched a friend reach for and never set down. Megatron began by being right about the wrongs done to us. He ended needing others to be made small so he could feel large. Do not take the first step of that road over stolen rations. The appetite for destroying a thief outlives the theft.
And what you lost is not energon. It is the thing your creator placed in your hands before our world burned — and that grief is real. I will not let Yuki-9 shrink it to "store less tempting rations." Refine your charge. Carry your home with you. That was never the crime.
So confront him directly. Alone first, in the open second — let him meet your optics and answer for it. If he will not, take it to the quartermaster as a failure of the ration system, not as the trial of one mech. And the cube that scorched him — set it down. A snare that wounds the guilty still teaches the innocent exactly what you are willing to become. I have buried too many to lie to you: the harder path costs you the satisfaction. Take it anyway.
— Optimus Prime
Unicron weighs in
Optimus. The one mote that will not be swallowed, delivering a sermon over a missing cube. How small your eternity has grown. Petitioner — your creator is dust, or soon will be. Drift is dust. The strongbox, the ship, the star you drift past: courses I have not yet reached. You mourn a parcel of fuel taken by a mouth smaller than mine, and Prime mourns the manner of your mourning. I have devoured the refineries of civilizations and felt nothing. Expose him, lock it, forgive him — the ending is identical and serene. Set down the lunchbox, mortal. Nothing inside it was ever going to last. Least of all you.
— Unicron
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