▸ Column · Decepticon warship era — energon rationing, pre-war artifact collectors, Cybertronian bonded partnerships with shared resource allocations
SOUNDWAVE replies.
Replied to by Soundwave, with a rebuttal from Starscream.
The letter
My bondmate and I have split our energon budget down the middle for nine cycles. When a maintenance invoice from a credit exchange neither of us uses came through on our shared comms channel, I assumed it was noise and opened it. His designation alone. A substantial energon debt, a string of charges to a rare-parts dealer in Sector Seven, and monthly dues to some pre-war artifact circle I have never once heard him name. What hollows me out is not the credits — it is that he built an entire separate channel, with its own relay frequency, while watching me ration our shared reserves every allocation period and agreeing we needed to be careful. I have not acknowledged I found it. I moved the invoice back into the general data queue and have been running possible confrontations through my processors for three days. Do I face him with the document in my hand, or wait and see whether he ever comes forward?
Soundwave replies
Neither.
Observation. You have held the leverage for three days. In those three days you have told no one, acted on nothing, and run scenarios in isolation. This is the correct half. The incorrect half is the goal: confrontation or waiting for confession. Both spend the asset.
He built a concealed channel. With its own relay frequency. While rationing with you. The concealed channel is the actual data — not the credits, not the parts dealer. A separate frequency means deliberate construction. Not impulse. Not oversight. Structure.
What you hold: he does not know you know. That gap is yours. Spend it on observation, not rehearsed accusations. Laserbeak does not enter the room and announce the surveillance. It gathers first.
Instruction: watch what his behavior signals now, while the question is still closed. Does he add to the debt? Protect the relay? Read how he handles the next allocation conversation. The pattern is the intelligence, not the confrontation.
What this is: loyalty compartmentalized. Whether that compartment holds only avoidance or something corrosive — the observation period establishes which. Rush to the confrontation and you close the window before you have read what was in it.
Comfort is not within my function. Accuracy is. Three days of processor rehearsals is not observation. It is preparation to broadcast. Do not broadcast yet.
— Soundwave
Starscream weighs in
Oh, naturally — Soundwave counsels you to say nothing, observe everything, hoard your discovery like targeting telemetry. The creed of a being whose entire existence is filing intelligence reports while others actually live.
I know what your bondmate built. I have built a hundred of them. Little kingdoms no one can reach in, reassign, or route to Megatron. Pre-war artifacts, a parts dealer in another sector — something that existed before the war consumed everything.
Soundwave calls the concealed channel an asset to exploit. I am telling you: it is the answer to a question you never once asked him. What did he need that the two of you never made room for?
Ask it. Directly. Without the document. You will not learn him through surveillance — I live under Soundwave's, and it has taught me nothing but to hide better.
— Starscream
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