Your seat doesn’t have anything to do with SLI in a merger. It only matters moving forward after it is published. If already in the seat, you typically continue to hold it unless your base shrinks and there’s a displacement bid. If you bid down to the right seat prior to a merger your final seniority ends up in exactly the same place, you just get more relative seniority until you can later bid back to the left. Career expectations are weighed at the pilot group level and not individual.