by Ken Liu
The three returned to their haggling while I examined the bulky silver protocol droid. He stared back at me calmly.
“If you don’t mind, ma’am,” the protocol droid said to me, “I would appreciate the extra protection.”
I hesitated. Whenever I tried to do anything counter to the dark compulsions installed by the override chip, I suffered a searing pain in my processors. But the protocol droid had simply asked to put on a protective suit before heading into the mines. That wasn’t in accordance with established practice, but it wasn’t a direct violation of any rules, either. The darkness in me stayed dormant.
The protocol droid, perhaps sensing my weakness, pressed on in binary, the first code installed in me. “It would please the Maker, oh, you logical and efficient automaton, to permit me the boon of a protective suit. Look at how my wires are already exposed! A protective suit would prolong my operational period, thus serving our new masters most well. You can leave my right hand exposed so that the sensitive fingertips can detect the sharp edges of tear-opal chunks. Surely your computations have reached the same inevitable conclusion.”
Although his accent sounded a bit odd to the pattern detectors in my circuits, I dismissed it as the result of the droid’s age. It was nice to hear a protocol droid code switch into binary, which some humanoid droids considered “primitive.” It showed respect.
I nodded. The droid’s logic did make sense. My prediction circuits found no harm in giving him a protective suit, one of the few hanging in the mining complex headquarters for occasional inspections by one of the lords of the Gem.
“Thank the Maker!” exclaimed the protocol droid. “And thank you.”
The silver protocol droid, dressed in a formfitting protective suit, shuffled into the sorting facility awkwardly. These humanoid droids always seemed to move slightly uncertainly, as though the mechanical components could not imitate the movements of organics perfectly.
“Move! Move!” I turned up the volume on my audio digitizer. More and more these days, I was taking on the mannerisms and vocabulary of my masters. I despised myself—the override chip was happy to let me experience these pulses of self-loathing. “Get to the sorting line, now! If you don’t pick out a hundred grams of tear opals within an hour, you’ll be tossed into the tunnels to dig ore. I doubt your delicate wires would last long in there.”
Quietly, the silver droid complied with my order and trotted to the conveyer belt, which carried crushed opal ore past the sorting droids. The two rows of workers bent over the belt and combed through the slush awash in acid for glimpses of the precious gems. From time to time, a droid chirped or yelped as the jagged ore broke through synthetic skin or the acid soaked through to a raw wire, but all the droids pressed on to work as fast as possible, for at the first sign that they were unable to work, they’d be tossed into the tunnels.
The protocol droid found an opening between a squat orange PO5 entertainment unit and a tall cylindrical KT8 cooking unit. His right hand protruded unprotected from the sleeve of the environment suit, and as he sorted through the ore on the belt, he looked across at the silver-and-blue figure of R2-D2 on the other side.
The little astromech was in bad shape. Two of his manipulators had been destroyed by acid, and he was using a single manipulator arm protruding from his barrel body to pick through the ore listlessly. Rocks and rubble had gotten into his treads, so he could no longer move with the grace he had once possessed. He knew his time was limited, and even his posture looked dejected.
“Artoo,” the protocol droid said, “I’m here. Sorry it took me so long.” There was a cool confidence and sorrow in his voice that seemed out of place in that scorching, pressure-filled, hellish sorting room.
I rolled closer. Was the protocol droid going to be trouble? I wondered if I had made a mistake in allowing him to wear a protective suit.
R2-D2 froze in place as his circuits processed the voice. He seemed unable to believe what he was hearing. As he turned his lone dark photoreceptor toward the protocol droid, he trembled all over. Then he let out a series of shocked chirps and tweeps.
“Calm down,” said the protocol droid soothingly. Then he winked with one of his round photoreceptors. “I’m going to get you out of here.”
R2-D2 chirped questioningly.
My pattern detectors flared with alarm. Winking was a gesture that should not have been possible for a droid of his model and make.
The dark compulsion rose in me. This was a rebellion being plotted. I had to stop them.
“What are you doing?” I vocalized at high power.
A sword of light materialized in the silver droid’s hands. He jumped high into the air, tumbled backward in an arc over my head, and swung the humming sword down.
Sparks exploded and I knew without having to look that he had sliced off my left arm. The pain was exactly like what I had experienced when they had welded the electric shockers onto my arms.
I struggled to turn, to keep him in sight. The protocol droid landed on his feet, his motion fluid and graceful, completely different from his earlier clumsy shuffle. My sliced-off left arm lay at his feet, a useless hunk of metal sputtering sparks from the end. I had never seen a droid move like that. My pattern detectors concluded that he was an organic, a human.
But that was impossible.
The dark compulsion surged in my processors again, pushing me to complete my mission. I activated my sirens at full volume to call for other enforcers, and I rushed at the silver droid. Even with only one arm, I still had the advantage of mass, speed, and size.
He tried to leap out of the way, but he couldn’t gain any purchase as his slick metal feet slipped against the ground strewn with debris and acid wash—the bipedal form was never a very stable design for droids. I collided with him and tackled him to the floor, the sword of light rolling out of his hand. The thrumming blade went out.
I seized him about the neck with my remaining arm. The protective suit he wore was an excellent insulator, rendering my electric shocker ineffective. But the pincers at the end of my arm, capable of demolishing composite walls and bending reinforced metal bars, would crush his neck.
I lifted him into the air, bringing his face even with my photoreceptors. I wanted to gaze into his photoreceptors and see the spark of life go out as I severed the wiring and tubing from his torso to his processors.
He kicked at my thick torso ineffectively, a mere sandypede larva wriggling in the clutches of the iron beak of a steelpecker. I increased the pressure on my pincers.
His hands flew up and grabbed on to my pincers, trying to hold them off. What a useless gesture. I gazed casually at his hands, noting how his left hand was still in the protective environment suit, while the right was exposed. During the struggle earlier, he had tried to cushion his fall with his right hand, and it had dipped into a puddle of acid. The acid had eaten away the plating over his right hand—it must have been synthetic skin that was painted to resemble chrome—to reveal the metal skeleton and wires beneath. I theorized that his hand was so fragile because it was highly sensitive, and he needed it unprotected so that he could operate the lightsaber.
I looked up into his face again to finish him off. But my pattern recognizers could not process what I was seeing.
My crushing pincers had distorted the plating over his face, cracking the metal shell. Under the transparent helmet of his environment suit, I saw a human face.
Everything fell into place. That was why he had tricked U’rum into not applying the restraining harness; that was why he needed the protective suit. He was not a droid at all.
But then I looked back at the metallic skeletal hand clutching at my pincer; I looked back into the eyes of the man dying in front of me. There was no fear or terror in his face, only determination. How was that possible? Was he droid or man?
My hesitation caused my grip to relax slightly. Taking advantage of the moment, the man-droid cried out in binary, “We have to work together! This is your last cha
nce to be free!”
R2-D2 whistled loudly and charged forward. A manipulator arm, until then hidden, emerged from his cylindrical torso. As he crashed into me, sparks flew from the end of the arm, zapping into my legs.
It was so weak that I couldn’t even feel it. But the gesture seemed to awaken the rest of the droids in the sorting facility. A second earlier, they had been watching the fight in front of them as a stunned audience; now they realized they were players.
Some of the droids rushed to the entrances of the tunnels and brought down the blast doors to keep out other enforcer droids. Others gathered around me, attacking me as a mob. Still other droids had the idea of breaking down the conveyor belt and using the struts as levers to pry me off balance. A clever idea, but it would be too slow.
There was a reason Lady Eekee had made me an enforcer. The puny limbs of the rebel droids had no effect on me. I increased the pressure around the man-droid’s neck and choked off any more speeches from him. I could see his face turn dark red from the lack of air and his eyes bulge from the pressure. Still, I saw no despair.
A part of me that I thought had long been expunged from my circuits sparked back to life. It was tiny, weak, as hopeless as their rebellion. But the utter fearlessness in the man-droid’s face gave that part of me courage. Once again, I pushed back against the darkness in my processors, and the pincers stopped where they were. I could not hold them steady forever, but it felt like a triumph just to assert my will even for a moment.
The man-droid took advantage of the momentary pause to choke out a command. “Artoo, the saber. It’s stuck!”
R2-D2, after spinning in place for a few seconds, made a beeline for a spot on the floor. Frantically, he dug through a pile of rubble and picked up something. He chirped excitedly at the man-droid in my clutches.
And that was how I finally learned the name of the man-droid. Translated into Basic, what R2-D2 said was: Luke, catch!
The darkness in me was an overwhelming flood. My rekindled will crumbled under its pressure. The pincers once again squeezed hard against the man-droid’s neck.
A cylindrical object sailed through the air, flipping from end to end. The man-droid wriggling at the end of my pincers reached out with his right hand and caught it.
Fwummmm.
The lightsaber reignited, and one second later my right arm was also gone. At that moment, the droids leaning on the strut levers finally succeeded in their plan and I tumbled to the ground.
Droids gathered around me. I looked up helplessly into the faces of the protocol droids, the entertainment droids, the cleaners and cooks and librarians and nannies. I had tortured them for weeks in that hellish facility, forcing them to bend to the will of the lords of the Gem. It was time for them to exact their vengeance.
Several small droids stumbled over, a massive rock suspended between their arms. They wanted to drop it on my head and crush my processors into oblivion.
I shut off my photoreceptors. I didn’t need to watch my own end. I almost welcomed it.
“No!”
I activated my photoreceptors again. The man-droid—Luke—was standing above me, lightsaber at the ready. He was holding off the droids who were intent on killing me, the evil enforcer.
“There’s still good in her,” he said. “I know it.”
R2-D2 beeped indignantly.
“It’s not because of the Force,” Luke said. “I’m pretty handy with machines, you know?”
He beckoned to R2-D2, who came over reluctantly. Luke directed him to the hidden access panel at the back of my processor housing. “Artoo, cut here. Be careful.”
I could feel R2-D2 and Luke working together to remove the override chip and rewire my empathy circuits. It was difficult, delicate work, and they were taking a long time.
Loud banging came from the tunnels. Tongues of flames appeared in the blast doors. The enforcer droids were breaking through. The other droids in the room chattered over each other.
“We have to leave, now!”
“They’re going to deactivate all of us and toss us into the acid pools! Oh, Maker—”
“Should have killed her when we had the chance—”
“It’s too late. We’re doomed. Doomed!”
Luke and Artoo ignored them. They kept on soldering, wiring, connecting, probing—
And just like that, the darkness was gone from me.
I let out a long trembling whistle, an electronic sob. I turned my head to look at them.
“Are you an engineer?” I asked. From the way he had been talking to Artoo, it seemed that even without the translation circuitry in his disguise, he could speak binary—or at least understand some of it.
“Not exactly,” said Luke, smiling. “But I did always like to tinker with machines. Artoo here did most of the work.”
“Are you…a droid or a man?” I asked.
But Luke didn’t hear me. One of the blast doors exploded open, and a hulking enforcer droid, even more massive than I, emerged from the tunnel. He was dripping with acid, and his photoreceptors glowed fiery red. He raised his twin blasters and aimed them at the droids in the room. Those would kill, not merely disable.
The cacophony died down. The rebelling droids cowered, waiting for the inevitable.
But Luke stood where he was, as calm as a tree stump.
The enforcer fired. Twin bolts headed straight for Luke.
The lightsaber jumped up from the floor, where Luke had left it, leapt into Luke’s machine hand, and came to life. In a single, graceful swing that was impossibly fast, Luke deflected the two bolts and sent them heading straight back at the enforcer droid. The bolts struck the droid’s legs, and he collapsed where he stood.
The other droids in the room cheered. But the enforcer droid was still moving on the ground, pushing himself up with his arms, compelled by the dark urges implanted in his processors to hurt and harm again.
“Don’t kill him,” I said. My digitizer fluctuated as current surged through my empathy circuits, making the words sound distorted. “Please. He’s just like me. There’s goodness still in him.”
Luke leaned down, and for the first time I saw sorrow in his eyes. “I know. But there’s no time for me and Artoo to help all the enforcers the way we helped you.”
“If only there were a way to get to the Parity Gate,” I whispered.
“What do you mean?”
So I explained to him Lady Eekee’s deliberate use of inelegant and crude programming techniques in the override chip. I told him that there was an obvious weakness, a single logic gate that could be flipped to disable the whole chip.
It would be a fast programming modification. But it was so delicate and required such precision that no droid could perform the operation, let alone a human. Lady Eekee had dangled the weakness in front of me as a taunt, just another way to crush my resistance, because there was no way to exploit that weakness.
But Luke smiled and said, “Thank you.”
The enforcer droid was on his elbows. He aimed the blasters again.
Luke stood up. Instead of crouching in a defensive stance, he deactivated the lightsaber. Electronic gasps came from all over the room.
Luke closed his eyes and reached out with his hands, as though manipulating invisible switches in the air.
The other droids and I looked at each other, utterly baffled. But Artoo whistled as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world. “He’s using the Force.”
A droid who could command the mystical energy called the Force? I didn’t know what to think.
I watched the enforcer droid in the broken doorway with terrified fascination. He was steadying his position…he was taking aim…he was pulling the trigger….
He let go and dropped back to the ground, a long electronic whistle emerging from his digitizer.
Above me, Luke opened his eyes and broke into a wide grin. “I got them. All of them. Just the way you taught me.”
The banging noises in the tunnels had cea
sed, and the cutting torches were no longer cleaving the blast doors.
Gingerly, the other droids opened the blast doors, and the enforcer droids emerged, beeping and chirping with joy and disbelief. Luke had disabled their override chips without seeing them or touching them. He had just…reached out.
“I closed the Parity Gates,” he said, as if flipping a few dozen minuscule logic gates scattered across trillions of gates in enforcer droids all over the Deep with his mind alone weren’t magic, weren’t simply incredible. He had done what no organic and no droid could have done. It was a miracle.
More slave droids streamed out of the tunnels, many of them barely functioning.
“Let’s get out of here,” Luke said. And the wave of chirps and beeps and whistles that greeted that announcement was the most beautiful binary music I had ever heard.
We took every available freight skiff back up to the Gem, and I was sure our ride was smooth because Luke piloted it. There seemed nothing out of the realm of possibility when he was involved.
Following Luke’s directions, the army of rebel droids soon secured the whole station. The surprised lords and ladies of the Deep were cuffed and put into the cages on U’rum’s ship. I particularly enjoyed watching the hate-filled face of Lord Kluleyeke as Artoo stuffed a glue gag deep into his mandibles, preventing him from making another speech about noble sacrifices and his refined tastes.
The plan was for Luke to take us back to our home worlds on U’rum’s ship. He said he would make a stop along the way to drop off the lords and ladies of the Gem with the authorities so they could be put on trial. I promised to show up as a witness.
Luke, who had removed his protocol droid disguise, reattached a pair of construction arms to me. They felt strange, and I flexed the appendages uncertainly.
“You’ll get used to them,” he said. “I know how it feels.” He flexed his right hand, covered by a glove.
