▸ Column · Wartime Cybertron — Megatron answering as Decepticon overlord, the dispute reframed as a forge-worker's debt-bound protégé abandoning the sanctioned academy track.
MEGATRON replies.
Replied to by Megatron, with a rebuttal from Optimus Prime.
The letter
Lord Megatron — my forge-daughter Priya, barely past her first upgrade, has announced she is abandoning her second cycle at the Iacon medical-frame academy — the circuit-surgeon's track her father and I burned out two sets of servos to buy her into — to go raise a sculptor's kiln in some frontier settlement with a partner she has known for eight cycles. I co-signed her academy debt; forty-seven thousand shanix of it stands in my name. We took the double shifts so she would never stand where we stood. Watching this feels like watching a foundry torched from the inside. I told her plainly it was a mistake; she said I have never respected a single choice she has made — which cut, because I held my glossa through two changes of discipline before this. Now she answers me in one-line transmissions and nothing more. Am I entitled to press harder, given that my name is on the debt? Or do I smile and wire the relocation funds? Is there a version of this where I voice a true objection and do not lose her?
Megatron replies
You have buried the only honest fact in this transmission beneath a great deal of grief, so let me unearth it: forty-seven thousand shanix stand in your name. That is not love. That is leverage. And the reason your daughter answers you in one-line bursts is that she knows it too — she is keeping you at precisely the distance a creditor is held at.
You ask whether you are "entitled" to press harder. Entitlement is a word the weak use when they already hold the power and are ashamed to spend it. Stop. You spent it years ago, in double shifts, and you have been collecting interest in the currency of expectation ever since. You did not buy her opportunities. You bought a return. Now she declines to pay it, and you call that betrayal.
I overthrew an order that ground beings into the dirt and told them it was for their own elevation. I know that voice. You are using it. Your daughter is seizing a position — crudely, perhaps doomed, but hers. That is the one act in this letter I respect.
Voice your objection, then. Once, plainly, as fact. But do not dress the debt as devotion. She has already read the ledger. So have you.
— Megatron
Optimus Prime weighs in
Megatron calls the debt leverage because leverage is the only thing he has ever known how to hold. I have watched what that reading does to the one who makes it.
He is right that you spent the power years ago — he is wrong about what you bought. You bought her the freedom to walk away from you. That it now wounds you is the receipt.
So pay it. Tell her once, honestly, that you are afraid — not that she owes you. Then guard the relationship harder than the loan, because the day you spend that forty-seven thousand to make her obey is the day you become the thing he is. I had a brother who reached for that leverage. He never stopped reaching. Do not.
— Optimus Prime
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