by Renee Ahdieh
On the uppermost deck of a sandcrawler stationed in the Western Dune Sea, a sloped bulk belt carried scrap hoisted from the sands below to a salvage bay seated at the vessel’s peak. Underneath that belt was a small hidden gap measuring one meter long and, at the incline’s tallest point, half a meter high, with a width most non-Jawas would find oppressive. It was an unintended compartment in a vehicle shrewdly designed for maximized efficiency of space.
In this wedge-shaped gap, a Jawa named Jot dreamed of starships.
Jot had discovered the compartment by accident while working an intake shift, sorting the unceasing flow of metallic debris that the sandcrawler sucked up into its powerful magnetic maw. A particularly lustrous thermal dissipater had caught his eye as he pushed ancient alloys into piles according to their worth or usefulness to the crew. But as he reached to pocket the dissipater, Jot watched it slip sideways, between the bulk belt and the ship’s hull, tumbling downward and out of sight.
Jot searched for the missing dissipater during his limited break time over the next nine days, hoping not to attract the attention of his peers during his tireless hunt. By pressing his slight frame behind the maglift’s pneumatic servos, he could edge his way prone, then pry a flimsy, rectangular aluminum panel from the bulk belt’s housing, giving him an entryway he could just scrape through, so long as his slightly round belly never, ever got any rounder. It was a clumsy act of contortion, but luckily for Jot, he was likely the only Jawa aboard the sandcrawler who could pull it off.
This was because Jot was very small, even by Jawa standards.
When Jawas first learn to walk, they’re given the insulated, moisture-regulating robes that will sustain them their whole lives. As infants, their robes are hemmed nearly to the armpit, the fabric doubled and folded within. As Jawas mature, the hem is lowered to better cover their newfound height. Most Jawas measure themselves by the number of hems they’ve had put in; the average Jawa has five or six by the time they reach adulthood, leaving telltale striations in the thick brown canvas of their life-giving garment.
Jot’s robe had been hemmed twice.
After several months of practice, Jot could slip in and out of his space in seconds. It was vital he keep the maneuver fast and surreptitious. He couldn’t let anyone know about his gap.
To say the compartment wasn’t especially comfortable would be a disservice to the very idea of discomfort. It was, as the previously mentioned dimensions suggest, cramped, especially when filled with the various baubles Jot had tucked away while on salvage duty. During his shifts, he could simply push items that caught his eye off the side of the belt and directly into his collection. Due to the relative ease of this process, his already sizable hoard had grown exponentially.
That one benefit nearly outweighed the gap’s drawbacks, of which there were many.
The rolling belt that served as the gap’s ceiling occasionally sagged under the weight of particularly heavy pieces of salvage, flirting with (but never quite) buckling. The starboard wall of the gap was actually the sandcrawler’s outer hull, which grew unbearably hot to the touch fourteen hours of the day. There was enough room in the gap for Jot to sit without leaning against the starboard wall, so its searing heat wasn’t an issue, so long as he didn’t absentmindedly try to stretch out and get comfortable while admiring his hoard.
Unfortunately for Jot, losing his concentration was one of his most honored pastimes. It was not uncommon for passersby to hear a muffled yelp coming from the gullyworks of the lift’s machinery, followed by the uniquely unpleasant smell of singed Jawa fur wafting down the sandcrawler’s corridors.
Those faults didn’t hamper Jot’s contentment with his secret dwelling. Silence, privacy, and solitude weren’t just in short supply on the sandcrawler; the ship was overstaffed and bloated with cargo, both of which created an environment where the concept of personal space was foreign.
Jot never knew how much he needed that space until he had it; now the idea of living without it was unthinkable. He did not dislike his life on the sandcrawler—it was certainly preferable to the monotony of fortress living—but his hours spent working salvage seemed longer, emptier since finding the gap. Every minute he spent sorting sandblasted metal was a minute he spent away from himself. Away from his home.
Away from Storyteller.
—
The dunes of Tatooine look barren to most offworlders who, for some (typically illicit) reason or another, find themselves visiting. That appraisal isn’t completely unfair; life on Tatooine is as difficult as you’d expect from a planet where moisture is scarce to the point of deserving its own economy.
But every Jawa, especially those who ship out on a crawler, knows the truth: The surface of the dunes is lifeless, yes, but the sand stretches downward forever. Entombed in the endless, gritty expanse were more downed ships than there were ships in the sky. More droids than any ten factories could produce in a century. More wealth, more resources, more history than could ever be excavated or recorded.
There was not a Jawa on Tatooine who did not believe wholeheartedly that there was more sand below them than there was sky above. The sand, Jawas knew, was more fertile than any offworlder could ever guess; and the wind was its constant farmer.
Most Jawas could tell you tales of unimaginable relics exhumed by a sharp breeze, assuming you spoke fluent Trade (or even Jawaese, which you almost certainly don’t). Strange meteors buried in their own glass-crusted craters. Ancient cruisers the size of small cities. For that matter, actual small cities: entire civilizations that had long since dried up and died of thirst, lost to time.
Jot had told the story of his discovery more times than he could count. Every moment of it remained crystal clear in his mind—the small protrusion of bone poking out of the ground several meters from his family’s cramped clay dwelling. The shock of pain that shot up his arm as he cut his hand on something under the dirt. How the wind that night, matching the frenzy of his curiosity, revealed Jot’s discovery in full the next morning.
A krayt dragon. A big one—the biggest Jot had ever seen, he would interject forcefully with each telling.
Immediately below the home in which Jot was born—and thousands of years before that—a krayt dragon had died and been pristinely preserved by Jot’s front yard.
There were very few Jawas who had ever met Jot who hadn’t heard that story. Most on the sandcrawler had heard it more than once, and very few had the patience for further retellings.
As important as it once had been to him, Jot was also growing tired of the tale; the scenes he once recounted with exuberance seemed less remarkable with each performance. He had leaned too hard on his story, and he knew he was robbing it of its luster.
Several weeks after Jot discovered the gap below the bulk belt, the wind blew fiercely over the dunes near his sandcrawler, pulling a new story up from the depths.
—
The sandcrawler’s crew was asleep, enjoying a rare off-duty night while the ship rode out a massive windstorm that threatened to flood their engines with grit. The next morning, a long-dormant freighter had been uncovered so completely on a nearby dune that the first Jawas to see it would have sworn it had crash-landed while the ship’s crew ate breakfast.
It was the biggest score the sandcrawler had found in months, and every Jawa on board delighted in ransacking it. Within the hour, the freighter had been thoroughly shucked; small hands ripped and sawed and pried at every panel, every cable, every millimeter of circuitry within. The species of the ship’s long-dead pilot was unidentifiable, but their profession was evinced by the cockpit’s less savory salvage: a modified blaster rifle, thermal detonators, ancient Mandalorian armor, and a still-functioning datapad that held several hundred expired warrants for criminals throughout the galaxy. This pilot was a bounty hunter and, based on the quality of their gear, an awfully successful one.
Jot was bullied into scouting the dig site’s perimeter while the rest of the crew picked the ship clean for va
luables—most of which would end up squirreled away in the spacious pockets of their robes. It wasn’t the first time Jot had been buffaloed into an unwanted task by his clan—he was of a size that was terribly convenient for bullies.
During his halfhearted reconnaissance, Jot noticed a figure partially buried on the opposite side of the dune from where his team found the crashed freighter.
Embedded up to its midsection was an astromech droid: an outdated, bulky black bucket that had not been nearly as well preserved as the bounty hunter’s other belongings. A large, rusted hole in its central hull showcased telltale signs of fusion cell corrosion, which inevitably meant every component in its core chassis was well beyond repair.
The droid’s dome, however, was intriguing. Jot had seen several astromech droids tumble down the salvage line to be repaired, cleaned, and sold. This unit was clearly a custom job. Its holoprojector was installed onto a secondary processing unit, complete with its own discrete data drive and internal power source. All this custom hardware was housed in a single, detachable fixture, which, as near as Jot could tell, also made this processor completely redundant.
For some reason, that long-dead bounty hunter had given his droid a second brain.
Working carefully, Jot ran his driver across the shallow seam under the droid’s domed head, granting access to this peculiar construction—which, to Jot’s delight, could be easily slid out of its socket.
Jot tucked the whole holoprojector unit into the folds of his robe. It was only fair that he took home a prize, too, he figured.
Jot raced back to the sandcrawler, back to the privacy of his wedge-shaped compartment, grateful that his shipmates were too occupied with the freighter to notice his clumsy attempt at smuggling. He cleared a place for the device in the center of the compartment, giving it more space among the scrap than he gave himself.
Jawas are not known for their sense of aesthetics, and Jot was no exception—but he appreciated the fit of the holoprojector unit in his tiny space. He had thought of this room as his own, and had been fiercely secretive about it since he first discovered it. Now the gap belonged to the projector. They felt intended for each other, pieces that interlocked by design.
After several minutes of meticulously sorting his collection into neat piles, Jot dug up a memory core that he had found in the gap during his very first visit. He lifted the core to his mouth and pressed his tongue gently against its metal contacts—and felt a harsh, sour jolt course through him. Good. The core’s internal battery was still functioning, meaning the data inside was probably still intact.
He nervously inserted the memory core into the holoprojector unit’s drive, and the device immediately whirred to life.
Beneath the device’s visible interface—not that Jot would have been able to decipher the process, even if he could see it—complex subroutines simultaneously examined, counterprogrammed, and decrypted the memory core’s contents, displaying them seconds later through the holoprojector’s lens.
Jot wasn’t aware of this, but this decryption software was as sophisticated as it was illegal—exceptionally, preposterously illegal.
For a moment, the gap was flooded with formless gray light. It caught Jot by surprise, momentarily blinding him, sending him reeling, panicked, into the compartment’s blistering-hot starboard wall. Within seconds, the light retreated to a few centimeters in front of the projector, taking shape with remarkable clarity.
Jot’s vision cleared. He saw stars. Not the remnants of the flash—stars.
He saw the soft curvature of Tatooine near the bottom of the projection, its surface lined with bloated stripes of muted orange, amber, and tan, punctuated with an enormous red crater. He saw the bow of a starship peeking up into the projection, the back of the pilot’s head barely visible in the bridge. The ship was rolling slowly counterclockwise, but the pilot jerked it back into alignment. Then another roll, then a correction, and so on.
The ship was crashing, but it had not crashed, which meant—for the next few minutes, at least—Jot could continue to witness its descent. This custom droid component had given Jot a firsthand account of a ship’s final, doomed flight through the stars.
When Storyteller first flashed this image into existence, Jot’s eyes flooded with stinging tears. Seeing this story—seeing stars, and flight, and the only planet he’d ever lived on from kilometers above—his eyes would not dry for some time.
—
Jot couldn’t recall when his desire to leave Tatooine first surfaced. As a child, he’d loved to tinker with whatever busted gadgets the sands of Tatooine proffered—holo-chess boards, landspeeder engines, droid servomotors, and the like. He was encouraged to pursue his experimentation, but it wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy his curiosity. He hungered for the opportunity to bury himself in the guts of a Corellian corvette, to optimize the thrusters of a starfighter, to repair the hyperdrive motivator of a galactic cruiser-carrier.
Jot, of course, did not have the first clue how to do any of those things. But that wasn’t really a concern. Starships, like everything else, were just parts. They might interlock in inscrutable ways, but, by Jot’s calculation, when broken down the requisite number of levels, everything in the universe was made of connected parts.
Sandcrawlers comprised specialized systems that let them operate in Tatooine’s harsh environment. Those systems were made of complex and simple machines, all of which were made from interlocking parts.
The bright-white bones of Jot’s krayt dragon were just parts of a skeleton engineered over countless generations by unforgiving biological imperatives.
The stars, too, were parts, of a sort. Jot knew as much about astronomy as he did about galactic carrier-cruiser hyperdrive motivators, but he knew the stars moved through the sky in a set, immutable order.
If it had parts, it could be understood. Jot knew that, given enough time inside a starship, he could learn its parts, learn how to make them behave. And if he could learn how to make them behave, Jot could earn his place in the sky.
—
Jot was insatiable, now.
With Storyteller and a private place in which to enjoy its tales, Jot’s lack of enthusiasm for his work on the sandcrawler had become problematic. A few days after discovering Storyteller, Jot had missed an entire shift poring through his salvaged memory core. He had looped through its contents countless times, watching archived business transactions, slideshows of exotic vacations, and messages exchanged with loved ones. He couldn’t understand a word of those messages, but their sender—a bald, cheerful older man—was almost always belting out a warm, deep laugh that brought a smile to Jot’s face.
And then he would watch the core’s final recording, breathless and sick as this cheerful man’s ship careened downward to its final resting place deep within the dunes.
Jot treasured the stories on this memory core. But he knew that stories, when told exhaustively, lose their magic. He refused to ruin these recordings with overexertion.
Storyteller needed new stories to tell.
Jot requested a transfer off the salvage line, which his supervisor, frustrated with Jot’s recently spotty attendance, was more than happy to grant. Jot was placed on the final prep team, operating out of the ship’s loading bay. It was a few decks away from his gap, making it difficult for Jot to take Storyteller breaks during his shift, but the position offered a benefit that made up for that inconvenience.
The job Jot carved out for himself was in firmware repair, a role he performed by “optimizing” the loading speed of memory cores within droids that were ready to sell. Most Jawas aren’t exemplary computer scientists, but reformatting a memory core to clear its cache was an extremely straightforward operation.
This kind of reformatting was standard practice on salvage ships like this one. Customers wanted to believe their products to be as new as possible, despite purchasing them from an enormous, mobile dumpster.
After two days of on-the-job training, Jot excelled at inc
reasing performance for the ship’s outgoing product. His new supervisor was delighted with his efficacy, but was confused by Jot’s refusal to do his work in the loading bay alongside the rest of the prep team. Had she really stopped to think about it, Jot’s supervisor would realize she didn’t quite know where Jot was doing his work.
—
Jot’s days in his new position were filled with uninterrupted delight. He was able to spend a majority of his time in the gap, where he’d spirit away a new memory core for Storyteller to decrypt and explore. He watched the new stories with rapt attention, trying to memorize each and every detail, making silent promises to remember them to the best of his ability.
He had to remember, because after viewing each memory core, Jot gently removed its casing and carefully detached its internal battery, instantly erasing its contents in the pursuit of optimization.
Jot deplored doing it, but if his work performance suffered, he would be cut off from this infinite supply of stories. He could view the projections only once; then he destroyed them forever, spending the following hours reintegrating the memory unit back into the droid that had housed it.
The heartbreak Jot felt with each erasure was worth it given the wonder of the preceding hours. Jot’s secondhand memories took him to the far reaches of the galaxy, to places few Tatooinian eyes had ever witnessed:
A forest of towering, pointy trees that blanketed an entire planet in lush greens and crimsons.
The pristine bridge of an Imperial freighter, bathed in even lines of white neon.
A city of glowing lights hidden under the waters of a perfectly still sea.
And into the stars. Astromech droids’ memory cores were filled with the most spectacular logs of their owners’ flights. In those stories, Jot would push back the hood of his robe and lift his face into the hologram, surrounding himself with the illusion of passing stars. He would close his eyes as he approached the image, then open them, and for a moment his mind could trick itself into thinking this was his flight, his ship, his sky.