by Ken Liu
“Thbtttttt! Doo-weep!”
Flux and Teal whipped around and saw the squat, squarish figure of G2-X, the ship’s custodian. The ancient droid did not look pleased to find the two intruding in his domain.
“Beep-doo-weep-weep? Dee-thweep?”
“She’s…um…a passenger who’s been ill the whole trip,” said Teal, desperately trying to come up with some plausible excuse. “She’s…uh…she just felt better, and I thought we’d find some food—”
“Dwoo! Eep-doo-TWEE-TWEE. Boop-teek-teek-THWEE—”
“Hey, slow down!” said Teal, waving her hands in an effort to calm the droid down. “You know I’m not fluent in binary. Don’t get excited. Let’s be reasonable here—”
“Just what are you up to?”
“And who is she?”
Teal looked in the direction of the new voices. G’kolu and Tyra stood at the entrance to the mess deck.
“I got up to use the toilets and saw you sneaking through the halls,” said G’kolu. “So I woke up Tyra to follow you and see what fun we were missing.”
G’kolu and Tyra looked from Teal to Flux, and then to the still chirping and sputtering G2-X.
“Is she why you took your food away from the mess deck earlier?” asked G’kolu. “I thought you were behaving suspicious—”
Teal was about to explain when a deep baritone rang out in the corridors. “Geetoo? What are you beeping about? Is something wrong?”
“That’s the first mate,” hissed Teal. “Please! I’m begging you! Help me. We can’t let her”—she pointed to Flux—“be found. You know what will happen.”
G’kolu and Tyra looked at each other. As G’kolu’s horns twisted and shook and Tyra’s eyes narrowed and widened, they seemed to be having a silent conversation. Then they both nodded.
Tyra was over by G2-X’s side in a second. Her left hand covered the droid’s audio digitizer as she held the droid tightly to her body with her right arm in one smooth motion. While the surprised droid wriggled and struggled, at least the beeping had been muffled. Tyra leaned in to the droid’s audio receptors and whistled and beeped quietly.
Flux and Teal stared at the scene in disbelief.
G’kolu’s horns made an amused half curl. “I guess you pick up some interesting skills as a scavenger,” he muttered. Then he turned and ran into the corridor, shouting, “Bani-Ani! First Mate! It’s me!”
The others huddled in the darkness of the mess deck as they listened to the conversation out in the hall.
“What are you doing up?”
“We stayed up a little with the third mate to tell stories, and when I left, I think I dropped my ear pick. I came back to look for it, and Geetoo was helping me.”
“Looking for your ear pick? I heard a lot of commotion. The droid sounded very excited.”
“You know how clumsy I am. While fumbling around and looking, I spilled the tub of grease that Dwoogan was saving for later. So Geetoo got annoyed with me.”
“Geetoo, is this true?” The first mate sounded suspicious. His heavy footsteps approached.
Teal’s face blanched. But Tyra removed her hand from G2-X’s audio digitizer and whistled gently into his receptor.
“Please,” Teal whispered and looked at the droid pleadingly.
“Doo-thweep,” beeped the droid, after a pause.
The approaching footsteps halted.
“Sir! Sir!” said G’kolu in a wheedling voice. “Would you come and help us clean up the mess? I’ll be ever so grateful—”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” The first mate sounded disgusted. “You want me to wipe up spilled grease? I’ve got too many important things to do. You clean up your own mess.” His voice faded along with his footsteps.
G’kolu strutted back in, puffing his chest and looking pleased with himself. “After that, I think I need to give myself an impressive name like members of the O’Kenoby gang. What do you think of G’kolu ‘the Grease’? I was pretty smooth, wasn’t I?”
Tyra rolled her eyes. “Cloying, more like. But you got the job done.”
They turned back to Teal, Flux, and G2-X. “Now, tell us what this is about.”
“This really is a night full of Luke Skywalker stories,” marveled G’kolu after Teal and Flux had explained the situation.
“It’s the Tide,” said Flux confidently. “The Tide brought us all together tonight around Luke Skywalker.”
“I don’t know about all this mumbo jumbo about the Tide,” said Tyra skeptically. “It sounds like the mystical nonsense about the Force—”
“It’s not mystical nonsense,” insisted Flux. “I know you already want to help me, don’t you?”
“We do want to help you,” said Tyra, “but that’s because we’d help anyone who’s trying to make it in this galaxy on their own—”
“TWEE-TWEE. Pfbttt!”
“Sorry about muffling you back there,” Tyra apologized to G2-X. “But even you have to agree that we can’t just let Tuuma chuck someone into space.”
“Dweep-doo. Ooo-thWOO eep-weep-eep.”
“Hey! My hand does not have the chemical signature of vegicus pee!” Tyra sniffed her hand just to be sure. The droid rocked from side to side in mirth.
“Shall we get going?” asked Teal, impatient to get on with Flux’s escape.
“Thbtttttt! Doo-weep. Doo-weep. SKYYYY-waa-kaa-err whoot.”
Tyra’s eyes grew wide. “Wait, you also know a story about Luke Skywalker?”
“I thought droids couldn’t tell stories,” said G’kolu.
“I have to hear this!” said Flux.
“I don’t know binary well enough to understand,” said Teal.
“I’ll translate,” said Tyra. “I’m pretty good with binary since my grandmother used to teach at the acad—used to work with droids a lot before we became scavengers.”
“That would be fantastic,” said Teal and Flux in unison.
“Many idioms in binary have no equivalents in Basic at all, so I can only give you a flavor of it,” said Tyra.
Settling back on his sturdy wheels, the ancient droid began to whistle and beep in a steady, hypnotic stream, and Tyra translated for the others.
“I’ve never met the droid whose story I’m about to tell, but let me repeat to you her words, which have been passed from droid to droid around the galaxy without change….”
THESE AREN’T THE DROIDS YOU’RE
LOOKING FOR.
—OBI-WAN KENOBI
WE DROIDS THINK IN BINARY. One and zero, on and off, yes and no. This gives us clarity, makes us happy. Things are either real or not real, known or not known. A thinking individual is either an organic or a droid. Simple, right?
At least most of the time.
I’m a construction droid from the Z7 series, manufactured by Structgalactis, Inc., and equipped with one of the first sets of frictionless omnidirectional treads ever to be commercially deployed. I was designed for the heavy work of digging ditches, clearing fields, grading terrain, putting up new buildings—everything necessary for civilization to blossom in the wilderness on newly settled planets. My cube-shaped body is three meters tall and fitted with two symmetric arms that can be swapped out with various terminal attachments depending on need: shovels, power lifters, hooks, hoes, wrecking rams, stack manipulators, and so on. I’ve seen duty in every terrain and climate imaginable: permafrost, jungle, swamp, sandblasted ancient seabeds. I’ve always done my work cheerfully and earned my power recharges honestly.
Some years ago, I was part of a crew building a new settlement on the tundra of Cro-Akon. It was the custom at that site for the organic workers to break at midday and share a meal. The droids on the construction crew didn’t need to eat, but we decided to adopt the custom to gather at midday and recharge. Those who had solar collectors would spread them out under the weak sun to gather a little juice; the rest of us would swap the plug around, sipping the trickle of power supplied by geothermal generators.
I liked the custom,
for it allowed us droids to swap stories or new programming chips.
“Zeta, thanks for helping me dig up that tree stump earlier,” said Z5-TXT, a specialized grading droid. All the workers, droid and organic, called me Zeta because my full designation was too long to say easily.
“No problem,” I said.
“Digging that tree stump drained eighty-three percent of my batteries,” said Z5-TXT. “I had not anticipated the roots would penetrate more than two meters beneath the surface. For once I really need this midday recharge.”
“It’s an interesting piece of wood,” I said. “Doesn’t it remind you of the holo of the deep-sea dectopus they uploaded into our programming before that job on Quan-Shui? I was thinking of carving a statue from it—”
“Oh, Zeta, you’re always thinking up silly projects,” said D-LKS, a load lifter. Her binary always had a kind of harsh pitch to it, not unlike her personality. “We already have six of your tree-stump sculptures at the edge of the site. Why waste energy doing things that are so useless?”
“Leave her alone,” said Z5-TXT. “Zeta can do whatever she likes as long as she doesn’t use more than her fair share of energy.”
I tapped her on the back gently in acknowledgement. Carving and whittling was a hobby of mine. I explained it logically as a way to develop the circuits for fine motion to give me more employable skills, but in truth, my processors just enjoyed the tingling of new patterns coalescing among my logic gates as I made something beautiful appear out of a block of wood. I suppose the new electrical pathways also lowered the overall energy consumption rate in my circuits—a good thing—for I always felt calmer after whittling.
D-LKS was about to argue when the light darkened around us and the droids with solar collectors beeped in alarm. We looked up and saw a strange ship in the sky descending toward us. It was shaped like a bundle of daggers painted midnight blue, and I knew right away that it meant trouble.
Slavers.
“Run!” I raised the power output to my digitizer, and the organic workers and droids scattered in every direction, hoping to find hiding places among the icy crags or small clumps of thick-trunked trees scattered on the tundra.
But Z5-TXT, limping along on her three stumpy wheeled legs, was falling behind the others. She had depleted her energy reserves earlier by digging out the stubborn tree stump, and she hadn’t yet had enough time to recharge during the break. The wheel on her front leg wobbled, caught in a rut, and she fell down. Her wheels groaned helplessly, and she could not get up.
“Go on, Zeta,” she beeped weakly at me. “Leave me.”
“That’s not going to happen,” I told her firmly. It was the duty of droids with more power to help those who had less. I don’t know where I had picked up that bit of programming, but I believed it as much as I ever believed any of the stories about the Maker.
I scanned through 962 options in a millisecond, and none of them would get us both to safety. She was too heavy for me to carry, and there was no time for me to recharge her from my power supplies.
But there was one option that would save her.
I grabbed the power cell in my front treads and yanked it out. It was the only power cell on my body small enough to fit her. I slammed it into the socket on Z5-TXT’s back. Then I picked her up and set her down on her three wheels. “Go!”
“What about you?”
“I will recalibrate my actuators to compensate,” I said.
She sprinted away, chirping with relief. I watched as she made it to safety in the maze formed by piles of rocks beyond the edge of the clearing.
What I told her wasn’t a lie—I don’t have the circuits for that. I just didn’t tell her what I was compensating for.
With a loud hiss, the strange new ship landed behind me.
I spun around. With my front treads immobilized, that was all I could do. I had calculated that this was the most likely outcome when I gave Z5-TXT my power cell, and I was shunting power to my arm actuators to fight the slavers with every volt left in my batteries.
The cargo ramp at the back of the ship swung down, and a humanoid figure emerged. She was a Tectozin whose limbs bulged with power under dark green ceramic armor covered in scuffs and dents. In her arms she cradled the biggest pulse rifle I had ever seen, almost as long as she was tall.
“You’re a beautiful specimen,” she said. She blinked her stalked eyes appreciatively.
Her taloned fingers squeezed the trigger, and my processors shut down with a cascading logic failure of searing pain.
The ship jumped out of hyperspace with barely a jolt.
I was awake, but I couldn’t move. A restraining harness—a more barbaric version of a restraining bolt—blocked all my motor circuits, and I couldn’t even make my vocalizer generate a single beep.
I was also enclosed within a cage, one of many lining both sides of a central catwalk. Each cage held a droid. Some were bulky construction droids or heavy labor droids like me, while others were more delicate in appearance, suitable only for light work.
I had watched as my captor made a few more stops on that long journey through the stars, each time bringing aboard a fresh batch of incapacitated droids. Some could still speak, and based on the snatches of pleading, terror-filled conversations I heard before the poor captives were also silenced with restraining harnesses, I learned that we were moving away from the civilized parts of the galaxy toward the Unknown Regions.
No self-respecting droid ever ventured into the Unknown Regions. Why would they? There were few service centers, mechanics, or factories for replacement parts. You’d probably have to go on an adventure just to find a compatible outlet where you could sip clean, smooth power after a long day of work like a civilized contraption.
Soon, a viewscreen came to life at the end of the catwalk, showing a planet orbiting a dim red sun. The planet was shrouded in a thick orange atmosphere that hid all surface features. I didn’t think it looked hospitable for organics—not that I thought it looked welcoming for droids, either.
As the slave ship approached the new world, a large space station gradually came into view. It was a gleaming, ethereal creation made of spherical glass habitats suspended between thin, almost invisible struts woven into a gossamer lattice. The whole thing looked like a dew-bedecked spiderweb.
Tethered next to the space station were a few other ships that resembled the bundle of blades that had kidnapped me and the other droids.
Our ship docked in this web of jewels with a quiet hiss. The Tectozin pilot left the cockpit to stand before the main door at the end of the catwalk. After the few seconds it took for the airlock to be readied, the door swirled open.
Two well-dressed organics, one humanoid and one insectoid, stepped onto the ship.
They saluted the Tectozin. “Captain U’rum, welcome back to the Gem.”
A fitting name for that station.
U’rum, my captor, nodded. “Lord Kluleyeke and Lady Eekee, the haul this time is excellent.”
The three then strode through the ship to inspect the cargo. From time to time, U’rum stopped the two nobles to comment on the features of a particular droid. She pointed out the multiple arms on some of the larger droids, specialized for welding, stacking, drilling, and digging. She spoke to them proudly about a few of the small maintenance droids, designed for surveying systems of pipes and ducts to detect leaks, and also for fixing small mechanical malfunctions.
The three stopped in front of a group of cages that held several humanoid droids designed for interpretation, cooking, singing, and other intellectual tasks.
“These won’t be of much use in the mines,” remarked Lord Kluleyeke, his clicking mandibles giving his consonants an especially grating sound. “The acid alone will make short work of them, even if the heat and pressure don’t get to them first.”
“We have more than enough entertainment droids on the Gem,” said Lady Eekee. “In fact, we probably have too many.”
“But variety is the spice
of life,” said Captain U’rum, somehow managing to make the cliché sound menacing. “I suggest you get rid of a few of the protocol droids and entertainment droids you’ve grown tired of and replace them with these. I’ll take the discarded droids down with the rest of the workers.”
“We didn’t ask for so many useless droids,” complained Eekee. “Are you trying to stretch your already considerable profits?”
U’rum spread her arms placatingly. “Not at all. It was just easier to bring them along. Best not to leave any witnesses.”
Despite the lack of movements, I could sense the droids in the cages quaking at this discussion. They had been fretting over their fate ever since they were snatched from their homes, but it seemed even worse than anything their future-prediction circuits could have computed.
As the three reached the end of the catwalk, U’rum retracted her talons and turned around. I guessed that the inspection was over and she was ready to discuss her fee. But before she could speak, a loud rattling noise erupted from the last cage on the right side, next to mine.
“I thought you had them all restrained and gagged,” said a frowning Lady Eekee.
“I did,” said U’rum.
The three peered curiously into the cage, and I focused my photoreceptors there, as well.
Inside was a small astromech droid painted in white, silver, and blue. Somehow, the astromech droid had managed to slice through one of its restraining bolts and was frantically spinning its domed head back and forth, rattling its body defiantly.
“Interesting,” said Kluleyeke. “A hidden cutting tool with an independent set of motor circuits, perhaps? You can’t rely on standard restraints for these little troublemakers. The R2 series was known for aftermarket modifications.”
“He would be an excellent addition to the labor gangs in the new high-pressure tunnels,” mused Eekee. “A hardy little droid like this would be especially useful for sifting through the crushed ore.”
“Before the acid melted away all his appendages, hidden or not,” said U’rum, and chuckled.
The cage that held the R2 unit rattled even louder.