Chapter Text
———————————— There is More than One Type of Truth ————————————
Prologue: What Jazz Read
THE CYCLIC REPORT
An Editorial on the Recent Funding Proposals by the Counsel for a Restored Cybertron:
There have been a lot of questions about the appropriate use of resources in the rebuilding of Cybertron. It has been stated by the mechs in charge of such things that there simply is no funding or supplies for anything more than “essential projects.” I don’t know about you reader, but who is it that gets to decide what is essential?
The restoration of public data and access terminals has once more been pushed back. Their argument is that the majority of important news data is broadcast over open channels twice a day and that anyone who misses the downloads can just get them from a friend.
Dear reader, I implore you to see that this is not enough and to do so, I am going to share with you a story. I have never hidden the fact that I am, or was, depending on who you speak to, a Decepticon. Within cycles of my onlining I was thrown into battle with a blaster in my servo. I watched my fellow soldiers offline before I even had time to fully process what it meant that I was online. I didn’t understand what it meant to have a spark before I was extinguishing the sparks of others.
For many years within the Decepticon ranks I never dreamed of anything else. Everything was about the next battle, the next kill, because that seemed like the only way to prove you existed, that you mattered. If you were killing then you weren’t being killed, you weren’t forgotten.
What else was there to dream about, when all any of us knew was war? I wanted things, but they were particle things. A good berth, a few cubes of highgrade for my off shifts, and to online the next cycle in as little pain as possible, those were the extent of my ambitions. I didn’t know anything was missing from my life.
I learned how wrong I was the first time I saw something awe inspiringly beautiful. I had seen war, and death, and violence and I had so many words for them, but not for this new beautiful, fragile thing.
I didn’t have the words to describe it then, and it is still my most precious memory now. It brought me comfort after battles, taught me in some wordless way that there was more to life than the life I was living. However, I was unable to share it with my brothers in arms. It just wasn’t in my vocabulary.
I was sparked to be a warrior, I was sparked to fight and die for the Decepticon cause and despite all the access I had to open channels and data files from them, they couldn’t help me. It is impossible to learn new language when you are deeply entrenched in the current one. How could I learn to talk about beauty when all everyone spoke about was death?
I started collecting words after that, reading old data pads on the off shift. Anything I could find I read, searching for the words that were missing from my vocabulary. My brothers in arms thought it odd, but I was more than strong enough for them to know not to mess with me and some of them even helped me.
Raids on bases and old forts brought new, sometimes cracked and static filled, data pads into my quarters. The words of old poets and writers taught me about a better Cybertron, they taught me to hope for a better future to not be satisfied to just live one more cycle.
Mechs ask why public terminals are important. The public terminals are important because they would provide access to all mechs to copies of those works and more. I am not saying that it is more important than fixing energon converters or repairing buildings for habitation, I am just saying that old works changed the life and outlook of this sparked Con.
How many others are out there struggling to come to terms with peace. How many are struggling every cycle to come to terms with something they just don’t have the words for? How can we change as a race if no one knows how to speak about it?
There are other reasons to repair public terminals of course that I will go over fully in the remainder of this editorial…(Continued on page 5)