▸ Column · Aboard a Decepticon warship — a low-ranked soldier and an officer who circulates a tribute dish through the ranks at muster
MEGATRON replies.
Replied to by Megatron, with a rebuttal from Optimus Prime.
The letter
An officer aboard our warship — call her the Quartermaster — sends a tribute dish around the ranks at every muster, for every trifling occasion: one soldier's forge-day, another's promotion, a new recruit two decks down none of us have met. It circulates in plain view of the whole assembly, and everyone sees who passes it back empty. I am low-ranked, my rations are thin, and I have dropped a sliver of my allotment in each time rather than be marked. My own service-cycle anniversary came and went unremarked — I don't care about that — but I've counted what I've surrendered this quarter, and meanwhile her own mate's forge-day collection somehow swelled to four times any other. Is there a dignified way to stop contributing without becoming the one everyone resents, or have I bound myself to this forever by ever having paid?
Megatron replies
You have asked the wrong question so precisely that I almost admire it. "A dignified way to decline." Dignity is not granted to those who request it at muster, hat in hand. You are asking the tax collector for a graceful exemption.
Strip away the sentiment and look at the structure, as I learned to in the arena, where no one passed a dish but the principle was identical. This is tribute. Your Quartermaster has built a small economy of obligation, performed in the open precisely so the watching is the enforcement — and she has positioned herself at the spigot. Four times the take for her own mate's day is not coincidence. It is the entire design. You funded it.
Your error was never the coin. It was believing the giving was communal when it was always upward. Your visible compliance has been read by everyone, her most of all, as an account they may overdraw. They are correct.
So stop seeking permission to be left alone. Pass the dish back empty, once, without apology or explanation — explanation is the petition of the weak. Let them adjust to the new fact. You do not negotiate your way out of a tribute. You simply cease to be a reliable source of it.
— Megatron
Optimus Prime weighs in
Megatron reads a spigot and a mark. He always does — it is the only shape he can still see, because he ground every other shape out of himself.
Look again. You gave five units to a recruit two decks down you had never met. That was not weakness being overdrawn. That was you choosing a stranger was worth something. Do not let him convince you to amputate that.
The rot is not the dish. It is Denise, converting what your people meant as care into private tribute for her own mate while your day passed unmarked. Name that — out loud, where the assembly hears it, not by quietly going cold. Keep giving where you choose to. Refuse her skim openly. That stops the theft without making you smaller.
— Optimus Prime
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