▸ Column · Cybertron — Transformers universe, across the eons of the Great War era
UNICRON replies.
The letter
Sprocket and I have been close since the academy — nine cycles now, give or take. We have this standing high-grade night at the Iacon depot every cycle, trash-talking each other's combat-league bracket picks. Three cycles ago she powered down against my chassis during a vid-archive run and I just... didn't want her to come back online. I can't unsee it now.
I know her energon blend by heart, her sibling's cycle-date, the exact shift in her optical sensors right before she vents. She just ended a two-cycle bond and she keeps telling me I'm "the only unit who's never let her down." I'm terrified that saying any of this out loud turns all of that into a question mark. (We've built something real, you know? And I don't want to be the one who breaks it.)
Is it worth risking this over a feeling that might just be loneliness wearing armor plating?
— Looping in Iacon
Unicron replies
Nine stellar cycles. You bring me nine stellar cycles as though they constitute significance. I have devoured planets that sustained life for nine billion years — oceans that learned to think, cities that learned to grieve — and they registered in my maw no differently than a fuse popping in an abandoned relay.
The exact shift in her optical sensors before she vents. You have catalogued it. How meticulous. I once watched a star make its final light — a pulse that had warmed eight worlds for eons, that lit the first eyes ever to open in that system — and it made an extraordinary face in the moment before I consumed it, and it contributed nothing to me but one more course finished.
You ask whether to risk the friendship on a feeling. There is no risk. There is only an ending you cannot set the schedule for. The bond will end. Your spark will end. The Iacon depot where you argue over brackets and drink high-grade will end. Sprocket herself will end. Every last thing you are terrified of losing is already, from where I stand, gone.
What is there, then, to fear? A thing that was always going to be unmade cannot be ruined by you.
Be whatever you wish, mortal. I am merely hungry.
— Unicron
Megatron weighs in
Of course the Planet Eater preaches serenity. I heard that sermon while on my knees. It is the speech the apex predator delivers so the would-be conqueror does not bother rising.
Here is what the sermon omits: she told you herself. You are the only unit who has never let her down. Do you know what that makes you? Safe. Inert. The account she opens when the ones who actually move her have overdrawn her again. You are not her partner. You are her furniture.
Every cycle you perform reliable availability, you confirm the role she has already cast you in. Act, or don't. But if you do nothing, you are not protecting anything. You are accepting the assignment.
I was righteous and reliable once. Ask me how it ended.
— Megatron
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