▸ Column · The Autobot wartime outpost on Earth, during the ongoing Cybertronian conflict — a community of soldiers and support personnel living under communal resource-sharing protocols, where shared allocation logs are the architecture of trust between those who have little.

OPTIMUS PRIME replies.

Replied to by Optimus Prime, with a rebuttal from Starscream.

The letter

My partner and I have shared all our resources in common since early in the war — nine years of communal allocation, every energon unit accounted for at our weekly sessions. Last week a supply manifest slipped out of his gear bag that I didn't recognize. He's been running a private cache for eighteen months, trading salvage parts through a separate channel I never knew existed — including a comm relay unit he told me he'd borrowed from another soldier. What's killing me isn't the supplies. It's that he sat beside me every week at resource allocation, pointing at the shared logs, knowing this whole shadow inventory was running underneath us. I haven't said anything because the second I open my mouth I'll either break down or say things I can't take back. Do I put the manifest on the table right now, or quietly figure out how deep this goes first?

Optimus Prime replies

There is a name for what you are describing, and it is not a supply discrepancy. It is a covenant, carefully maintained to your face, being hollowed out from underneath.

Before I was ever a soldier I was an archivist. I believed with everything in me that shared records were the architecture of trust — that what was counted together was held together. Then I watched someone I loved like a brother build an entire second purpose underneath our apparent shared cause, smiling across our shared table while the hollowing happened, and I still have not finished counting what that cost.

Here is what I will not tell you: that you should quietly map the cache first, that information is power, that you should know the full scope before you show your hand. That is the counsel of a schemer, and following it will turn you into one. The moment you begin secretly investigating a secret, you have started running your own shadow inventory in return — and then you are both living in the dark, except now you chose it.

Put the manifest on the table. You will cry, or you will say something imperfect and sharp, and none of that is the catastrophe. The catastrophe is another allocation session where the shared record is a performance and you are both performing it. Eighteen months is long enough. The conversation will hurt. It will hurt less than year three of the silence.

— Optimus Prime

Starscream weighs in

Oh, put the manifest on the table. Yes. Beautiful. A perfect way to announce to someone who has been running a covert operation for eighteen months that you've found one piece of it — so he can tuck the rest away before you find it. I have spent more time than I will comfortably admit being the one with the private cache, and I promise you: the thing the schemer fears is not confrontation. It is the moment the other party knows everything. You don't know everything yet. Get there first. The nobility can wait until you do.

— Starscream

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