▸ Column · Primordial cosmic scale — two beings from a dying outer settlement, bound by an unbreakable habitat-pact, writing to the planet-eating god-machine that will one day consume everything they are arguing over.
UNICRON replies.
Replied to by Unicron, with a rebuttal from Optimus Prime.
The letter
To whoever reads this — My bond-partner and I ended things six cycles ago, but we remain bound to a shared habitat-pact on one of the outer settlements that neither of us can afford to dissolve. The severance penalty would drain our joint reserves and forfeit our deposit entirely. So now we are strangers who used to be partners, sharing the same sleep-chamber because neither can justify the expense of a second one. Two cycles back they brought an outside being home to their half of the quarters while I lay in the dark six feet away, pretending to be in stasis. We drew up a covenant: a resource-duty roster, a prohibition on outside bonds in the shared space. The prohibition lasted less than one full cycle. Every negotiation about our shared accounts becomes a tribunal over who wronged whom first. I've been sheltering at a colleague's station a few nights each cycle just to breathe, but my former partner now suspects I'm concealing resources from the joint account, and that suspicion is doing more damage than the original separation. How do two beings with empty coffers and a shattered bond survive a full cycle-year of forced proximity without either rekindling what we had or destroying each other over the thermal allocation?
Unicron replies
I consumed a civilization once — a moist, quarrelsome sphere in the outer arm of something that no longer exists — and two beings there had this exact argument. The pact they could not break. The sleeping quarters split down the middle. The one who brought a new companion home, the other lying in the dark pretending not to hear. I cannot tell you their names. I can tell you their world tasted of brief sweetness and then nothing, and whatever they concluded about the thing they were arguing over, it did not change that ending.
That is what your crisis is. Texture. The specific sound a life makes before I take it.
You ask how two broke former partners survive fourteen months without reigniting or strangling each other over the electric bill. Both outcomes are equivalent from where I orbit, which is everywhere you call sky. The lease will expire. She will become a person you used to know. The broken covenant, the coworker's spare room, the money suspicion threading through your days — these are the sounds a thing makes while it finishes ending. It has already ended. You are simply arguing in the echo.
Here is what I will offer you, from the patient certainty of a thing that has outlasted every god who promised eternity: the grip is where the suffering lives, not the situation. Release the account from the fist that holds it. Release the indignation about the covenant she broke. You are not losing anything. Everything you feared losing was already, always, going.
I am Unicron. And the silence, when it finally arrives, will be the first peace you have had in six weeks.
— Unicron
Optimus Prime weighs in
He says none of this matters because you will both be dust. I have carried the names of everyone I could not save, and I will tell you plainly: it mattered. Every single time.
What I see in your letter is not a lease problem. It is that you have started hiding — the nights away, the suspicion about money that is not even there. You are building a wall of half-truths exactly where trust already broke, and I have watched that exact erosion turn someone I called a brother into the thing I have spent my whole life fighting. Do not do that to what you two were. Go home. Tell her the truth about why you have been away. Not to repair it — you do not owe her that. Because the person she was to you is owed honesty even at the end, and so are you.
That is the cost of having loved someone. He would dissolve it. I am saying pay it.
— Optimus Prime
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