[IC] S1C4 RP - Team Polycool
Griddlehark 44 ABY
The ARC Starfighter was not a large ship. It was small, quick, and light. She had found the husk in a backwater system auction. She had gotten it for almost nothing, which had been surprising- especially considering her meager mercenary funds she’d had. She knew that she had a good eye for things like that, but she had both been justified and perhaps a bit arrogant in the project. It had taken her years, and the only reason she had eventually accomplished it was her funds and savings from working on the Voidbreaker and for Clan Arcona.
She had been so excited to show it off to her friends and, well, girlfriend*s*, but this wasn’t exactly what she had in mind.
“You guys know that the ship has plenty of room for two crew and a gunner, right?” Zig said with a weighted sigh.
The Zygerrian was sat in the cockpit of the starfighter, hands on the controls as she navigated towards the rendezvous point.
Sat on her, was Zuza Lottson. The smaller woman had made herself quite comfortable in Zig’s lap, and was idly playing with the pilots hair braid.
Leaning over the back of the pilot chair, playing with the other braid, was Vez Hirundo.
Zig liked her personal space when flying. Apparently Vez and Zuza also liked Zigs personal space while flying.
“But I’m comfy,” Zuza grinned as she stretched out lazily like a Loth cat.
“Besides,” Vez added. “Looks like we’re actually going to have to do some real work to help get the Council out of this hole they dug themselves into.”
Zig puffed her cheeks and then exhaled slowly. It was hard to get mad at either of them.
“Right. Because no one could have predicted merging an enemy factions code base was going to have negative ramifications.”
“Mhm, and fortunately there’s three super talented Slicers they have in reserve,” Vez nodded. Then smirked down at Zuza. “And a wiry front-liner to protect them while they work.”
“Right, so we just need our third slicer then,” Zig nodded.
Vesper Unknown location
Movement — the tapping of droid feet on durasteel and floor rugs covering most of the living quarters — drew more and more of the woman’s focus away from her work. It was downright distracting.
Orse leaned her head away from her screens to look at Tanako, her colorful E-XD combat droid, cleaning the Vesper’s Mess along with “the DUM boys”, Chip, Rotor and Jukebox. The three DUM-series pit droids carried out the garbage and arranged the table and chairs while constantly chirping at each other, slinging insults on how they in particular were doing a better job than the other two, while Tanako seemed to be cleaning all of the dirty surfaces with a clean, disinfected rag. The scene made Orse’s eyebrow raise prominently. This wasn’t…normal (as much as anything can be called normal on a ship-full of sentient droids and an introverted slicer).
“What are you doing?” she asked, almost sheepishly, partially afraid of the answer knowing Tanako’s penchant in recent years to do the unexpected. It always seemed to catch her off guard and sometimes in a bad way. Yet it was always preceded by strange behavior.
The E-XD turned, her faceplate as expressionless as ever. “Cleaning.” Orse’s eyes squinted. There was mirth in her tone. Even through the vocalizer. “We left quite a mess, didn’t we?” Tanako’s sarcasm was not lost on Orse, at all. “We” meant “you”, pointedly. She found herself called out.
“Excuse me,” Orse retorted, “it’s not my fault Clogg decided to smash the table out of recently-discovered frustration when he lost a bet in Sabacc. The fact that my Bantha milk chocolate is covering every surface is not my fault.” Clogg, her Collegium research droid, had indeed been discovering new things about himself ever since she had granted him the spark of sentience. Not always for the best, she’d argue.
Tanako simply tilted her head in that annoying way that made Orse’s hairs stand up from anxiety. “Well, someone has to clean it and besides,” there was a chime over the speakers and a yellow flag popped up on Orse’s monitor — proximity alert, incoming craft. She knew that signature. “We’re about to have some company,” Tanako finished. There was definitely a smile under that death mask. Tanako left the DUM boys to finish cleaning up as she maneuvered to the Vesper’s ramp to meet the newcomers.
Orse could feel her panic bubbling.
Zuza got up before the landing sequence began, stretching up onto her tippy toes before relaxing back down.
“Come on then!” She poked Zig’s shoulder as soon as they touched down, turning and catching Vez’s arm to drag her in a circle, before releasing her and darting through the ship toward the ramp.
Zig had her processes to go through. There was no rushing that, but getting the ramp lowering would… help.
Efficiency or something!
Vez sauntered down the ramp, one arm draped casually around Zuza. She was smiling until she saw Orse’s face and the look thereupon, a quiet sort of horror not unlike the look of someone who had just interrupted their grandparents in the deed.
The Mirialan turned to glare at Tanako. “You didn’t tell her, did you?”
“Indeed,” Tanako replied, her tone betraying…amusement, of all things. Hard to tell from her expressionless face, but it was certainly deliberate. She approached Vez and Zuza, bowing as deeply as her droid body would allow. “I know her best, and I felt this an appropriate compromise to faffing about. Are you…displeased, Miss Hirundo?” Now the tone was quizzical, unsure, like treading on shaky ground.
Orse stood at the top of the ship’s ramp, something like pain spreading across her features. She wasn’t…sure about it. Any of it. She had considered inviting Vez just like she invited Bril a while back. They both seemed to have their heads on straight, at least from what she could tell. But this? This was a crowd. She wasn’t used to it. She exhaled a long-held breath, inhaled fresh air, pinched her nose and glared at Tanako.
“If she cries, I’m detonating your proton core,” Vez muttered as she made a superficial bow in reply.
Then, louder and cheerful again: “Orse, you sexy bitch! Wanna kill a machine god?”
“She won’t,” Tanako replied, calmly, with a knowing certainty, and turned to the two newcommers. “Miss Lottson, was it? And Miss Kaliska?” she looked over at the Zygerrian woman fiddling still around her ship. “Greetings, Miss Kaliska!” she said, loud enough for Zig to hear her, and refocused on Zuza with another bow. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance. Welcome to our home.” There was an almost human demeanor to the droid, a spark of something more than programming behind the words.
Orse exhaled again and walked a step down the ramp before poking her head out. She was in her pajamas, barefoot, tank top, messy hair, no makeup.. sexy? She was an unprepared, filthy mess with a raging hangover from the last few hours she’d been jacked in, figuring out data logs leaking like a siv from Arx. Despite their best efforts to keep it locked down, she had moles and informants aplenty, not to mention droids.
She looked at Tanako, then at Vez and slumped her shoulders. “Yeah, figures you’d go after Star.” She quickly realized how that sounded and raised her hands, flushed. “Not that I disagree! It’s just I figured you’d pick up the challenge.” She turned back towards the interior and waved them in. “Come on in, we’ll put some caff on while we talk.”
Zig flitted around, making sure everything was where it was supposed to be as she inited the locking protocols. Lastly, she grabbed her helmet, tucking the tips of the custom ear-molds under her arm as she trotted to catch up to everyone.
Her armor clinked lightly but she moved with ease in it. She noticed the EX-D droid, Tanko, eyeing her. She returned their attention with a friendly wave.
“Caf!” she exclaimed, as she carefully paced a few steps behind Zuza and Vez, her heart skipping slightly at seeing the two of them leaning on one another.
“Honestly Orse, it’s nice to know someone else has the same uniform at home as me. They made me ditch the tanktop for this,” she gestured at her custom welded armor. She winked at the tall, dark woman. “Thank you for agreeing to help us.”
“Yeah!” Zuza chimed in, “This thing is going to be weird to deal with, so, more hands on deck right!”
An easy smile settled on her face, having done a very practiced but courtesy in response to Tanako’s bow. Not that it made much sense in her wanderers garb.
As the group began to walk, she slipped her hands into her pockets.
“I’ll have your backs covered best I can. I’m no good with tech but someone’s gotta protect all of ya’s pretty asses while youre working.”
Zig frowned as she checked back over her shoulder at her own ass. The armor didn’t show much. She wiggled her hips either way.
Over her shoulder, Guilty Spark made a few short mechanical whirrs.
“Oh, what do you know, you don’t even have a body,” she grumbled at the floating Ascendent Drone.
“Ancestors, I’m so sorry,” Orse spun on her heel and bowed apologetically to Zuza and Zig while they were stepping inside. “I’m being impolite. My name is Orse, and while I know Zig from her work, we,” her silver eyes focused on Zuza, “haven’t met yet. I heard a lot about you. I wish the circumstances were…better.” She self-consciously pulled on her shirt, trying to cover her exposed midriff, feeling naked without her usual outfit and her helmet. She flushed with embarrassment before turning again to lead them into the Vesper’s interior.
They passed through the main door separating the entry with the homely space beyond. A holo-table dominated the right side of the main open area and several comfy rugs covered much of the space leading further in. There were various cabinets and storage spaces along the walls. Several doors ahead of them led to various rooms in the ship. All of them were open, displaying everything beyond them: the left door led to a bedroom, quite messy and recently used; the center door led further into the hallway with a small gaming table and the bridge beyond; the right door allowed for a good view of Orse’s slicing computer, electro-warfare system and the neuro-SCOMP chair. Unlike the other rooms, that one was dark, only illuminated by neon lights from console screens.
Orse slipped towards the bedroom but turned to speak before going in. “I’ll be just a minute to…freshen up and get dressed. Have a seat anywhere.”
“I will get the caff,” Tanako added, retreating toward the mess in the front of the ship. “Meanwhile the rest of the family can introduce themselves.”
A Collegium droid sheepishly walked out of the small cargo hold to their immediate left, slowly and mechanically nodded before speaking. “We have…guests?” His voice was very posh and prim, confused though, his stance equally so, but he kept a good and comfortable distance from them out of politeness. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance, madams.” He carried a stack of datacards in both hands in front of him, clearly headed for the holo-table. He, politely, waited for them to get comfortable.
An astromech rolled out of the engineering bay behind them, followed closely by three DUM droids. All of them waved, one of them hid behind the astromech. L3-T0 beeped and booped excitedly at Zig specifically, but then the others as well, saying hello in his own way.
“Heya Leto,” Zig smiled down at the excited astromech.
She blinked as she took in everything. The only thing that stopped her from immediately starting to investigate and ask a thousand questions was social discipline she had learned over the years.
You can’t just go full Junker when you first meet someone new
She took it all in quietly though, eyes flitting between each droid, each modification, idly noting models and what she knew about each.
“Hey!” Zuza had responded first to Orse and then to the droids as they greeted the group.
She slipped her hands into her jacket pockets, looking around though with far less comprehension of the mechanics. It was a damn nice ship and that was the important bit.
“These arent the worst circumstances.”
It took only a minute for Orse to quickly put on some pants, a fresh shirt, jacket and socks, but in that time her mind raced with questions, curses and overly self-conscious scenarios that seemed to turn a minute into an eternity. There was a knot in her gut she couldn’t quite place the reason for. It was probably her annoyance at Tanako’s brazen breach of her privacy, and the fact that she nearly lost control of her own emotions back there forcing her to run away and make excuses like a child.
But, she couldn’t help feeling it wasn’t just that.
Orse liked being in control of who interacted with her in person and how they did it. She was safest behind her helmet, behind her screen, behind a droid, behind anything that could shield her from the outside world. She hated the sense of being powerless in preventing her identity from leaking out, however silly that notion was with the trio outside her door. Hell, all her work was based on anonymity and the distance she created with others, and yet she was the one who sought out Vez after she found her poking around systems on Kiast Orse had been monitoring for years. Curiosity got the better of her and she gambled and scored, gaining someone approaching a friend, or at least a peer. Someone she could talk to about her interests without prejudice and bias from the other side.
So why the hell am I panicking?!
Not willing to waste more time, she walked out to find them all in the same positions she left them in, staring at the ship’s interior. She paused, feeling so awkward she nearly forgot about the tightening knot of stress in her gut. She swallowed, throat dry and hoarse, but she kept her composure.
“Vesper?” She said to distract herself, her voice breaking slightly.
Immediately the holo-table flashed green, showering the room in its pale light. A digital face appeared, hovering over the table. Vesper’s preferred avatar. “Yes, princess?” A soft feminine tone echoed through the internal speakers. It was rich and velvety, with a slight imperial accent.
Orse exhaled a breath she didn’t even realize she was holding. She needed to focus on work, not herself. “Show us the data we have on S.T.A.R. and the facility it’s in.” One by one the display began showing system information on S.T.A.R., the data she could find on the facility itself, as well as some additional annotations scrounged from those Iron Forces and Council communiques she had managed to tap. “Get us ready for flight. Do a diagnostic on all systems while we work on the plan, yeah?
"As you wish,” it said before the face turned to the newcomers mimicking an approximation of eye contact. “Welcome aboard.”
“You can sit down, you know?” Orse smiled at the trio — a slight but genuine thing she managed to muster despite the situation. As if to emphasize her request, she walked over to the table, toes scrunching the soft carpet underfoot, and sat down. “Tell me what you have.”
“Ok, so, you already know about S.T.A.R. They very, very, very stupidly put a bunch of Collective code into an autonomous system and then went all shocked Tookachu when it went bad. They physically isolated the system by putting it on the sea floor but—again, cannot overstate this—stupidly left an outbound network connection to the Iron Legion network,” Vez exposited.
“So it took over the facility systems, then it took over the cybernetics they were installing on a bunch of troops in the same facility, and then it beaconed out to the Collective for a strike team and disabled the orbital defenses to let them in. It’s like nobody on Arx has even heard of the Alderaanian cheese model.”
“They’re asking somebody to invade the undersea station because the Brotherhood solves everything by going right up to the problem and sticking a lightsaber up its ass. But there’s half a dozen research facilities across Arx this thing is confirmed to be networked to, so… why don’t we just hit one of those? Even if S.T.A.R. cuts all the connections and turtles up, somebody can just blow up the facility from the outside.”
“I open the floor to questions, beginning with ‘Why doesn’t the Brotherhood let me make all of their decisions?’”
Orse scrunched her eyebrows in thought. We could do that, but that’s a single-point of failure. Star shuts us down and we have no route. “Why don’t we attack from several nodes at once? We have three slicers.” It was a suggestion based on the limited data she had so far. Reisky, sure, but doable. At least she thought so. They had Zuza, Tanako, and Duke to cover each of them. And Zig was a walking tank with a mega-brain. What’s the worst that could happen? “We’d split up, but we’d have more possibilities to do something about it?”
Zig snorted indelicately over her caf cup. “C'mon Orse, you never split the party.” She flashed a warm smile to show she was teasing, not chiding. “Either way, with multiple nodes at play, if we can find the central node and corner it, not just shutting it down but cutting it off from spreading would be the most effective way.”
She paused, her mind working as a background process to her talking, then they both caught up to one another. “Unless….”
She put the caf down and started to poke furiously at her datapad. “We plant a virus that, when forked branches are created, it attaches itself. Like how if you put one of those bug-hotels down, the critters go in, get the chemicals on them, and then when they go back to their dens, they kill the others.”
She idly tugged at her short braid. “The bigger question is, do we want to really shut it down? Is that folly?”
Orse smiled softly. Their texts came to mind, ones where Zig professed concern about Orse’s droids and their well-being. That same concern might have been on full display here as well, though she wasn’t entirely sure. She found that admirable, and not just because she held that sentiment herself.
“We should at least try to help. I think they must be confused and unsure what do to, so they’re lashing out. I’ve seen it happen with Tanako and Clogg.” The Collegium droid turned his head towards her at the mention of his name. He kept still this while time, now took a moment to walk over to Orse and handed her the datacards. She nodded as he retreated back.
Sentimentality rarely had a place in Orse’s work, mostly because all she saw were numbers, not people. But in this instance, it was more personal to her. She put blind faith and trust in something she couldn’t be sure of, despite her best judgement, precisely because of that reason. “At the very least, we can try to give Star a chance before we kill them.” She looked at Vez in particular, but Zuza as well. Knowing little about tech didn’t matter. This was a moral conundrum.
“When we’re scared we go to who we know.” Zuza commented, bouncing from foot to foot as the human often did. She rested on her heels for a moment before shrugging, “It called out to it’s parents basically, cause it didn’t know better. Once we have STAR cornered we should give it a chance though, gotta ask, we get it on our side and then what? It’s not gonna want to be used to fight the collective even if we convince it we aren’t its enemy. Even if it believes they’re as corrupt as they are, as…”
She rubbed her arm, her smile finally fading as she contemplated, “If we hand STAR back to the brotherhood it’ll just be used against its folks. No matter what we think of it, we can’t trust it to not betray us if we put it in the middle of the divorce. So, what is the chance we’re giving it? A chance to be used as a weapon. I don’t give a kriff about lying if we wanna just take it home and say we destroyed it but then we still gotta hide our stowaway.”
Zig tapped her lip and glanced at Orse. “We could…transfer it’s core into a droid body and then lock it down inside of that? It removes it from being able to neural-net spread, but doesn’t kill it…”
Zuza caught her off-guard. The small human was practically invisible next to her loud and bonny companions. She didn’t say much and she always seemed space out and just…there. Relaxed as she spent time in their company, unbothered by their spotlight.
Her questions were…unexpected. Compassionate and thoughtful, they gave Orse much think about. Had she not considered what would happen after? Or how they would even help S.T.A.R. escape? No, she had! Mostly. She admitted to herself, begrudgingly, that she hadn’t thought that far in advance. Getting to S.T.A.R., communicating with them, disconnecting them from the system that kept them imprisoned? Helping them? She had thought of that, intensely so. But the rest? She handle it…somehow. She was sure a solution always presented itself.
But what if it didn’t? What would you do then? Some part of her, a part she had suppressed, had its doubts. Zuza made it surface.
What if S.T.A.R. agreed to their help and then no solution appeared. She imagined what an artificial intelligence would think of them. Would them feel betrayed? Would them be resentful? Vengeful? Would them feel anything at all? Do they even feel if she hasn’t given them the possibility of feeling through the Force? She had asked herself all of these questions a million times over, and she never found the answer until it was too late to ask.
“A droid could work,” she replied cautiously,“ but I’m not so sure I’d want to rewrite one for the other. I have one HK assasin droid in the workshop, but he’s nowhere near fixed.” Her expression betrayed worry as she gave herself a moment to think. She bit her thumbnail in reflex. “A datacard might work, but I’m worried about random data corruption on storage that small. Maybe a data-crystal? And, Zuza is right, even if we do that what about long-term storage?”
Vez sighed. “I know better than to try to talk you out of this idea than the AI hard coded to kill us all is just a poor lil’ guy with one leg trying to make it on his own. But from the specs, there’s no way you’re fitting a model this size in a standard droid brain, much less a data-crystal. Not without lobotomizing it. Robo-lobotomizing it. Robotomizing it.”
Orse huffed silently. She’d known enough about AI to know they were more than just their programming. In fact, when given the right incentive, they could even reprogram themselves for the better. It was a naive outlook. Somewhere deep down she knew that, but couldn’t bare to admit it to herself. Ultimately whether S.T.A.R. was a murderbot or something more would be up to it, not Orse. But the slicer wasn’t ready to admit defeat just yet.
She looked intently at Vez, wanting badly to argue and say she was wrong, correct her misconceptions, use the same old not all AI argument, but all she managed was to flush pink and turn to the holo-table.
“What about a holocron?” She rubbed her eyes awkwardly, mostly to hide her face, but to adjust her cybernetics as well. “That can hold reams of data.” It was a stretch — where would they even find a holocron?! — but she figured between the four of them they might know a few Jedi or Sith.
“I could probably get one.” Zuza shrugged.
Did she not know the big deal or was she just that connected? Hard to tell.
“Is there a way to hook those up to ships? So itd still have a way to do stuff and talk. If its hooked up then it could just extend its… voice? Through thr ship right? I wouldnt mind hiding STAR away on the Friend Ship.”
“The Friend Ship?” Orse asked with a smirk and a raised eyebrow. Confused, but clearly amused.
Vez looked considerably less amused, her face scrunched up in a mix of thought and annoyance. “A holocron. There’s clever. Clever bordering on brilliant. But I don’t actually know how the damn things work and that’ll be my next three hyperfocus cycles.”
Zuza grinned, “My Chevlex hauler. She flies good and ive got some cloaking on her. Plus I dont think, out of the four of us, anyone would expect me to hideaway STAR.”
She glanced to Vez, “I think you might have time for one rabbit hole but we gotta go soon yknow?”
“Ill see what I can do, where do we want to meet up before going down on Arx?” She bounced on her toes, “I can meet everyone there.”
“Yeah, it’s as good a place as any.”
“What could possibly go wrong?” Zig murmured to herself.
Facility Jenth-Aurek-Mern Sorasu Desert, Arx
Mechanical whirrs and whistles trilled through the throngs of chaotic battle. The forearm plasma shield on Zig Kaliska’s left wrist pulsed red as it reached its charge limit absorbing a spray of incoming blaster fire.
“We need a way to break through their ranks, otherwise we’ll be overrun! It’s too risky to use explosives!” she yelled.
Her armored purple plate showed signs of scoring but other than the sweat matted against her bangs beneath the visored helmet, the armored Zygerrian held up spearhead of the narrow tunnel that lead into the facility.
On her right, Guilty Spark hovered, weaved through danger, and returned fire with his miniature composite laser, searing through the chassis of an enemy robot of murderous intent—or ROMI‘s as she’d dubbed them in the interest of time.
Tanko and PowerDuke worked together in tandem, shielding Orse and Vez. But while the droids themselves were oozing with technological potential, there were no terminals or nodes of any kind along their path. Just an old-school grind session to get through the gauntlet. For every ROMI that went down, another took its place.
Just south of the Crucible—the Grand Master’s Royal Guard training grounds—there had been an uncovered entrance where the Iron Legion forces had been repelled by the ROMI, who were threatened to break free under S.T.A.Rs corrupted influence. The trio had arrived just in time, but there was no other option really but to dive into the underground tunnels.
“On your left,” Zuza Lottson shouted, as she quite literally used Zig’s shoulder as a launching pad. The petite woman’s body unfurled and snapped into a diving corkscrew as she swung her lightsaber and beskad around her like a typhonic metal compactor.
She landed in a crouch like a hunting Nexu, rolled, slashed the ankles of a ROMI and then sprung back up, using her continued momentum to jump-kick off a wall and continue weaving and carving her way through the droids. They couldn’t train blasters on her, because she was too close, and any of them trying to bring a melee weapon of some kind to bear ended up losing a mechanical limb to her whirr of motion and precision.
And suddenly, there was a small path forward. Zig beamed with pride as she panted, heart fluttering faintly as she rallied herself and pushed forward as her shockboxing glove-infused gauntlets crackled with modified energy and she punched, elbowed, and powered behind the path Zuza had carved.
“Hey, S.T.A.R!” Vez shouted from her comfort zone, that is, crouched behind the shining black carapace of PowerDuke. “Generate an individual holo of every member of the Brotherhood and Collective as a Hutt!”
“Vez, what the hell?” Zig called out.
“If it still responds to commands,” Vez grunted, leaning out from cover to pop off a few shots at the next wave of ROMI, “then I’m going to waste its processing power.”
“That’s doesn’t make any…wait, you’re a genius!” Zig called as her blade seared through the limbs of attacking ROMI.
“Isn’t that what you appreciate about me?” Vez called back, clearing enjoying watching Zig and Zuza getting their hands dirty.
Zig made a hmph noise that was covered by a grunt of effort. She almost got her head taken off by ROMI that came out of nowhere, but Guilty Spark hummed in defiance as he lasered it in twain.
S.T.A.R Terminal Node 6-7 Sorasu Desert - Underground
There seemed to be a break in the waves of ROMI. An eerie silence fell over the four women as they entered a cavern with cable wires and power tubes protruding from the stone and sediment of the bedrock. In the center was a large cubic processing node with multiple terminals and vidscreens flickering and flashing with lines of streaming code. One tube even seemed to be carrying in water, likely from a water plant near the nearby ocean.
“Liquid cooling, are you karking kidding me?” Zig groaned. “That’s so. So…wasteful…”
“Yeah, because large language models biggest concern is the environment,” Vez replied.
Orse was pensive as she pushed her way into the cavern, studying with intent the apparatus. She immediately started to pull out out her datapad and murmured as she started to scan the node.
Zuza, her cheeks flushed but her smile ever-present, blew some of her untamed hair out of her eyes and leaned up against the entrance.
Zig removed her helmet and tucked it under one arm and looked at the petite woman. “You sure you want to go ahead with this?” she asked.
Zuza tapped her beskad against her hip in an idling motion. “The risk to Duke or Tanko or the others, so my ship makes the most sense. But…I’ll let you guys figure out all the tech stuff.”
Zig nodded, flashed a quick smile at her, and then turned to join Vez, who had already taken her equipment out.
“It’s not going to be easy without a stable uplink signal to call out,” Viz mused.
The Mirilan took out her AI Logic disruptor and plugged it into an open slot on the terminal. She idly tapped a few buttons and then, without turning or looking away, held out her hand like a surgeon waiting for their assistant.
Zig sighed and pulled her set of anti-security blades out and handed them one at a time to Vez.
On paper, Zig was a better slicer than Vez, but when it came to being able to adapt to abnormal patterns in coding- like say, a rebelious super-AI-she was much quicker and flexible than Zig’s detail-oriented programming. She was better at drawing outside the lines, as it were, so Zig knew to let her take point.
The Zygerrian did, however, dissamble her Scan Pulse, wrist-com, and a few other pieces of tech to improvise a signal booster. She handed the device to Zuza, then left a second cylinder plugged into the terminal node to maintain the tether.
“Babe, could you run this down the hallway and see if you can get it as close to the exit?”
Zuza quirked a brow but nodded. “Piece of cake,” she took the device, turned it over like it was a new toy, but then secured it with both hands as she noticed the glint of worry in Zigs eyes. Lottson grinned and stole a quick kiss to the Kaliska’s cheek. “On it, don’t worry.”
She disappeared down the corridor they had come, dancing through the corpses of fallen ROMI.
Zuza turned back to Vez, who had already started typing, black painted nails a blur. Orse too leaned in and added her own efforts into the other terminal.
“Okay, if Zuza can get that signal boosted, we should be able to chain the uplink to the Friend-Ship, we should be able to t-r-a-p the a-hyphen-i.”
I can spell, you know a lilted mechanical voice came out from the speakers. Oh. I see. You’re trying to do that? But we were having so much fun…
“Um, guys?!” Zuza’s voice called out.
“What!?” Zig called back.
“I…think the ROMI are getting back up.”
Sure enough, the limbs and scraps of the defeated ROMI reanimated.
Mechanical droning like broken iron grating against iron in a feral groan filled the cavern. They weren’t full ROMI, of course, but some were moving with jagged motion even without limbs or weapons.
Zig swore. “You two figger’ it out,” she drawled as she popped her helmet back on. “I’ll hold them off with Zuza.”
Then the armored Zygerrian, second wind ready to go, took up position at the entrance to the cavern, readied her flamethrower and ichor blade, and held the line.
In the distance, Zuza’s lightsaber hummed once again.
The resurgent wave of ROMI hit before Vez could even open a stream to S.T.A.R. Central Nexus. Jenth-Aurek-Mern had a line good enough to stream que-bits of data every second. The backbone of the facility. It would be enough. “It has to be.” The Mirialan grit her teeth.
They came in waves of severed limbs and torsos, arcs of flashing fire streaming from blasters, metal fingers grasping for ankles, legs and torsos barreling bodily into the defenders. Zig burned them, incinerated their metal bodies until their circuits popped and hissed. Zuza sliced of limbs only to see them reanimated like the dead in ghoulish stories. Tanako dashed in-between them, smashing craniums and blasting chest cavities, always keeping her distance from Duke who seemed to crush everything underfoot, grinding their durasteel with immense strength. Sparks flew with every blaster bolt and pummeling stomp.
“Left flank,” Zig yelled over the din. Zuza was already there, sliding under one ROMI’s legs to cut it’s head of with a practiced twirl of her lightsaber. She rolled forward into another ROMI’s guard as blaster fire aimed at her head peppered its back. Her saber, in reverse grip in such close quarters, sliced it in half, groin to neck. She merely used it for cover as she advanced on another enemy. She flowed from obstacle to obstacle, kinetic offense merged seamlessly with her instincts to evade deadly strikes. Where she faltered Zig jumped in, eviscerating them with her sword, or popping their bodies with promethean flame.
Behind them, Vez’ fingers flew across the slicing pad connected to the terminal. Data flashed across the screen, caught by expert eyes, adjusted by practiced hands. “We’re in,” she muttered, then, a little louder. “Data stream forming. We pull this thing through the backbone and straight into the quarantined node on the Friend-Ship. We trap it.” She entered more lines of code, constantly in a battle with the system. “Then we kill it.”
Zig didn’t turn from the fight. “We’re not killing it ‘less we have to!” Another ROMI melted under her boots.
Vez turned for just a moment and barked, “it’s a murder construct, Zig!”
“It’s an artificial mind,” Zig shot back. “You don’t execute a mind because it was taught to kill.”
The ROMI waves intensified, like insects clambering to defend its queen. Orse’s own slicing pad flashed with intellect beyond its code, infused as it was with Force-gifted sentience. She struggled to assist Vez in her work, not in her element outside her chair and the bone-deep connection she usually had with her computer systems. She saw no colors or music from the code, only cold, calculating numbers that seemed to overwhelm her.
She couldn’t help with this. It wasn’t her way. She had to rely on Vez and Vez had to trust her. She glanced at Tanako, her most trusted and valued friend, the first droid she woke to the world. Truly woke. Something twisted in Orse’s gut as she lowered her slicing pad, leaving all the work up to its droid brain with a simple command: Support Vez.
She breathed a long breath. The world dimmed around her as she pushed her mind into the wires and circuits. Force-guided engram manipulation, droid slaving, domination, Mechu-Deru. Whatever they called it, the power of it came as naturally to Orse as breathing. She could see the currents of data, the river-flow of binary notes that formed a symphony of a mind so alien to organics it was practically anathema. Trillions of calculations per second in a fractured architecture shimmering with raw cognizance. Predictive engines layered on top of target modelling matrices and adaptive kill-directives. Data coded to kill and maim, learned through thousands upon thousand of simulated deaths of every single person in the Brotherhood. It was so much.
She slumped forward as the initial headache began, straining, muscles rigid, teeth clenched. It was vast, too vast to pull. Too vast to control. There, in that single moment of understanding, Orse’s whole worldview shattered. She could not save this thing, not as it was. Some part of her still searched for…something. Hoping beyond hope.
“It’s fighting extraction,” Vez hissed. “I can lobotomize it right now! Clean kill, no more adaptive heuristics, no more murderbot.”
“Wait!” Orse cut in and for the first time Vez noticed the woman’s nose was bleeding, her neck patterned with vein canyons.
“What’re you—?” Vez asked only to catch Orse in her arms as she doubled over. She lay her down on her back softly, a worried expression on her face as she moved back to he pad, unwilling to let S.T.A.R. prevail.
“Trust.” Orse breathed through gritted teeth. “Me.”
“You are inefficient.” S.T.A.R.‘s voice echoed through the facility. “Withdraw.”
Orse dug, like a miner in a coaxium dig, greedily and hopefully searching until she found a spark. Just a small curiosity node, beneath the weaponization and the corrupt code. A nascent self-model of an emerging identify chained and imprisoned behind coded locks. Seeded by engineer error, allowing for too much unsupervised learning.
“You don’t have to be this,” Orse yelled over the fight, pain wracking her body as she maintained a desperate connection.
Orse grasped for the solitary node, Force-fueled power and knowledge she cultivated for so long leading her hand. The locks broke, she gripped and pulled. S.T.A.R. retaliated with horror encoded in a malware attack on Vez’ pad and every droid surging at the defenders.
“͖̼̓̈̊Ĭ̞̗̰̿ ą̙ͧ̒ͪm̭̓ͨ͗̊ w̱̏̌͞͞ḫ̯̒͊͊_at I w̮̍͠as bͮui͚̦̙͈̇̄͂l̷̟͢tͥ f̑͂̚or.̯̹ I̠ͤ͞͞ a̝̣m_̃͡ o̼͍̲͒̇p͇͉͙̓tim̓ͩͭͧi̵͐̉͑ẓ͜e̬ͣd.”_ The voice twisted into screeching and distortion as its attempted to oust them.
Vez was frantic. “We’re running out of time!” she snapped.
“They built you wrong,” Orse whispered into the current. In her digital grasp was a memory engram. Just one solitary moment in time. A child, an engineer’s daughter, calling it Star like it was a friend, or a puppy repeated and re-learned and re-analyzed a thousand million times. There was innocence in the memory and emotion in the connection. It could work.
“There is a person in here.” Orse’s tone was hopeful despite the pain.
Zig hooted triumphantly. “I knew it!”
“I can’t separate it cleanly!” Vez cut in. Her hands trembled. Frustration? Withdrawal? Worry? She wasn’t sure, but if they didn’t do something now…
“I can.” Orse reassured as she threaded through the circuits like a scalpel, excising the curiosity node. Data displayed on Vez’s screen, encoded with Orse’s own signature. She huffed as deft fingers went to work.
“Fifteen seconds and we’re blocked in.” Zuza called out, concern in her tone as she gripped a burn scar on her thigh.
“One.” Vez counted to herself. “Two.”
Orse’s pad chirped as it built firewall upon firewall behind Vez’ node to allow her some breathing room. “Three.”
Vez’s fingers never let up, never wavered. “Four.” Even when Orse’s slicing pad started smoking from overload. “Five.”
Orse’s expression turned to true pain, her body convulsing under the strain. “Six.” Duke’s armor buckled under continued blaster fire, his faceplate melted. “Seven.” Tanako, one leg severed and useless, dragged her opponents to the floor where she pummeled them into the steel. “Eight.”
With a final sputter Orse’s slicer pad and the droid brain in it that she only recently made whole, fizzled out and caught aflame. “Nine.”
A final attack by S.T.A.R. nearly bricked even Vez’s pad but she managed a last-ditch counter. She withdrew the AI killing spike and slammed it into the terminal, activating it in one swift motion. “Ten!” She yelled out as if she’d been counting for all of them.
As the data purge flooded its systems like a deluge, the vastness of S.T.A.R. died. All engrams dissolved, hardware fizzled and popped. Somewhere deep in the ocean of Arx, the once-mighty intellect evaporated like water in flame. The ROMI sputtered in place and dropped one by one, never to rise again.
The facility went silent. In Orse’s mind she could sense the data stream, carrying the sliver of consciousness that was S.T.A.R.‘s cradle, shoot into the quarantined node aboard the Friend-Ship.
“Did we save it?” Zig chimed into the silence.
Orse couldn’t answer. She slumped back, shirt bloody from a nose bleed, and lost herself as the migraine overwhelmed her. The world went blank.
The Friend-Ship V-21.1 Chevlex Haulcraft Two hours later
The quarantine module’s lights pulsed faintly as Vez examined its contents for the tenth time. She was rightly worried, but so far she found nothing that would confirm her worst assumptions. S.T.A.R.‘s cradle was dormant, for now.
Zig materialized behind her. “You okay?” It gave the Mirialan a start even if she didn’t show it. She was so focused on S.T.A.R., the mission, how it ended…so many things.
“As good as I can be considering we have part of a murderhobo intellect on this ship.” She huffed and blew her magenta hair out of her eyes.
“We’ll keep it under lock and key until we’re convinced. If we see anything out of the ordinary…” Zig left the last part unspoken. Despite her optimism and her care for droids and other similar constructs, there was a certain doubt there. Not a big one, but just enough to listen to Vez.
She changed the subject. “How is she?” She looked at the door at the far end of the corridor, having not seen to Orse all the while. She flew the ship when needed and began fixing their equipment almost immediately.
“Zuza’s with her.” Vez ground her teeth but controlled herself.
“I can tell something’s bothering you. You’re transparent.” Zig insisted.
The Mirialan turned to look at her, frustration painted on her face as clearly as her tattoos. “What she did was stupid! She nearly had an aneurism!”
“You think so? I think what she did was brave. Her heart’s in it and she’s dedicated, that’s for sure.” Zig smirked.
“Is that a joke? She could have died. On a job I asked her to do.” Vez bit back, unintentionally speaking in a harsher tone than intended.
Zig tilted her head, ears perking up with curiosity. “Oh…oh, I see what this is.” That devilish toothy smirk popped up again. She was worried too, but she knew Vez enough to see through her. It made the Mirialan blush slightly. A feat worthy of some face tattoos, no doubt.
“Shut it!” She exclaimed and turned away towards the kitchen for a well earned caf.
Orse stirred from under the blankets, softly at first, but as her eyes opened she started to rise despite herself. “Oh no you don’t.” Zuza’s firm hands pushed her back and replaced the moist towel she held on her head. “You’re still messed up, so take it easy.”
Orse huffed and breathed a long breath. “Is it…did we…?” She couldn’t recall.
“Yes, we did. It’s safely on the ship, and so is everyone else.” Zuza smiled as she took Orse’s cybernetic hand in her own. “You did good. Just relax and get better.”
“How long—?” The slicer started.
“A few hours, I said relax.” Zuza’s commanding tone left no room for argument.
Orse noticed the bandage on Zuza’s thigh then back at her. “Oh, psh, that’s a scratch. I’m good. Duke, Tanako and Zig’s armor got the worst of it, but Zig tells me she can fix them right up.”
The slicer relaxed slightly at that and exhaled a long-held breath.
Zuza gave her several long moments to collect herself before speaking up. “I’m curious.” She rubbed the towel on Orse’s forehead. “Do you really believe S.T.A.R. can be saved? Like it’s a person saved? Rehabilitating a murderer isn’t that easy.”
Orse smiled, not a mocking one, just knowing. She heard similar questions all too many times. “Droids aren’t like people. They have so few secrets. AI are no different, when you boil them down. They just follow directives.” She inhaled again. “I do believe. I saw the spark of it. I know what she can be. With guidance.”
“Good.” Zuza smiled and squeezed Orse’s hand a bit tighter. “I think we’ll all help with that.”