Darkness. Light. Darkness. Light. Darkness. Light.
Experiment 626 growled in annoyance and pulled his lower eyelids down, stretching the skin until it hurt. He let go and blinked his eyes. Darkness again. If they didn't let him out of this stupid container soon, he was going to die of boredom.
Most sapient species in the galaxy possessed an innate sense of time, even those that had evolved on planets with no cycle of day and night. But, as a rule, that sense was only vague, and could easily be disrupted by fluctuating levels of light, temperature, or other environmental variables. The few exceptions were mostly species that had cybernetically enhanced themselves with timekeeping chips in their brains. 626 was different. Instead of a computer chip, his brain contained a tiny gland, barely larger than a pinhead, filled with custom-designed oscillating macromolecules that gave him a precise internal clock. In Earth units, it was only accurate to about a minute per week, inferior to even mechanical clocks, but it was enough to let him know that he'd been trapped in the tiny chamber for six hours, forty minutes, and around nineteen seconds… twenty.
He'd let the security officers force him into the container at gunpoint believing he could easily escape. But the curved polyglass walls offered no purchase for his claws, and the metal underneath lacked even the slightest seam he could use to grip the glass and pull it free of the base. It was pitch dark, so dark that even 626's sensitive eyes couldn't see his brightly colored prison uniform in front of his face. His eyes could switch to the infrared spectrum by blinking, but this was of little use. All it showed was that the container's walls were cold, which he already knew. He was briefly able to entertain himself by using his body heat to draw patterns on the walls, but not for long.
Suddenly, the container jolted sideways, knocking 626 off balance. His ears perked up at the sound of motors whining, an automated door sliding open and then slamming shut, and the buzz of conversation.
"…Only theoretical, completely within legal boundaries," a familiar accented voice said. Jumba Jookiba, the scientist who had created him, and the only creature he'd really interacted with. Right… Jumba had been arrested. 626 had initially escaped, and led the police on a wild goose chase for a full day before finally getting captured.
"We believe you actually created something," said a harsher female voice.
"Created something?" Jumba laughed. "Ha! That would be irresponsible, and unethical. I would never, ever…"
The container jolted to a halt, then downward, and started to spin. The experience of being moved around without any sensory reference was profoundly disorienting. 626 didn't move from his upright position, but he dug his footclaws into the base of the container to stabilize himself. He felt the beginnings of nausea. Jumba had done his best to program 'space legs' into his experiments' instincts, but hours of sensory deprivation were enough to throw off even a genetically engineered monstrosity, as 626 had found out on the shuttle that had taken him from Kweltikwan to wherever this was. There was a reason passenger cabins on spacecraft were equipped with viewscreens. Prisoners were simply suspended upside-down during launches. This was worse, though. If he was sick in here, there was no room to get away from it. He wondered if the galactic council would feel sorry for him then. Probably not: they'd just blast him with a hose again. Luckily, the movement stopped after a couple seconds, and the metal cover over the glass was abruptly removed.
"…Make more than one?" Jumba trailed off. Evidently the trial was not going well.
626 squinted and snarled as the lights of the councilroom flooded his eyes. He dropped to all sixes, snapped at the walls, and threw himself against them, causing the floating platform that held his container to sway dangerously. The masses of beings lining the walls of the enormous chamber gasped and recoiled. They were scared of him? Good. Maybe one of them would fall out of its stupid chair pod.
"What is that monstrosity?" a deep voice boomed. 626 immediately pinpointed the source, and had to suppress a laugh. Monstrosity? Look who was talking! The being towered over every other creature in the chamber; he was at least three times Jumba's height. And what a face!
"Monstrosity?" Jumba repeated in an offended tone. "What you see before you is the first of a new species…"
626 rapidly tuned out Jumba's speech. It was nothing interesting, just the kind of stuff the scientist liked to mutter to himself while he worked. The experiment turned to climbing all over the walls of the container, staring at the assortment of aliens. How were they not bored?
"It is an affront to nature," the ugly giant said as if it were an obvious fact. "It must be destroyed!" 626 made a point of ignoring him. Let him come over and try it!
"Calm yourself, Captain Gantu," said the tall, thin female being 626 had identified as being in charge. Great. Big Ugly was a captain. "Perhaps it can be reasoned with." Yeah, right. 626 wasn't interested in reasoning with anyone who called him an 'it,' especially not when they had him trapped in a tiny glass jar so they could gawk at him like an insect. The thin being continued: "Experiment 626… give us some sign you understand any of this. Show us that there is something inside you that is good."
626 straightened up and cleared his throat, buying himself time to think carefully about his response. The councilors mostly looked surprised: evidently they all thought he was some sort of mindless animal! His first impulse was to say something insulting, but would that hurt Jumba's case? His mind rapidly pieced together the fragments of conversation he'd ignored. He noted the absence of a defense attorney, the conversations from guards claiming that the trial was over 'illegal genetic experiments,' and Jumba's admitting that he, 626, was a monster and gleefully bragging about his destructive capabilities. So… it was a show trial. Jumba had already lost, and he knew it. He wasn't even trying to defend himself because 626's mere existence was incontrovertible evidence of his guilt. Well, in that case 626 was going to lose the case in style. He paused for dramatic effect, waited until he was sure that every eye or other sense organ in the chamber was on him, and gave the Galactic Council his best innocent smile. Then he proudly said the rudest, most obscene phrase he could think of. "Meega nala kweesta!" (Untransatable).
The effect was better than 626 could have possibly imagined. Gasps of shock and horror filled the air, and some of the councilors even lost their lunches. He bounced up and down in his container, giggling at the chaos he'd managed to cause with just three words.
"So naughty!" gasped the thin creature.
"I didn't teach him that!" protested Jumba. This was actually true: 626 had learned the phrase and its particular obscene inflection from one of his arresting officers after he'd thrown a fire extinguisher in the bulky arachnoid's face.
Gantu didn't seem to care about this, though. "Place that idiot scientist under arrest!" he ordered. A larger polyglass case materialized over Jumba's platform. 626 thought it should have been there much earlier; Jumba had nearly fallen off the thing during his boasting.
"I prefer to be called Evil Genius!" Jumba shouted as his platform descended out of sight. 626 noticed him suppressing a laugh. At least someone appreciated his wit. He wondered how hard it would be to break Jumba out of prison.
As it turned out, the council's plans for 626 rendered such a rescue impossible. His pod was hovered away, then filled with choking gas that stunned him while he was roughly shoved into a restraining collar and loaded onto a shuttle. Half an hour being jostled around in a thunderstorm during the ascent to orbit caused the barely-edible glop he'd been fed before being shoved into the container to make an encore appearance, which led to an angry guard whacking him over the head with the end of a mop and spraying cleaning solution in his eyes. By the time the shuttle had docked to the main transport ship, the experiment was ready to bite the head off any creature that got near him. Unfortunately, the white-suited security officers kept well out of reach. One of them grabbed a large syringe on the end of a stick, maneuvering the needle away from 626's teeth, and jabbed it roughly into his neck like a soldier bayoneting a foe. 626 let out an involuntary squeak of pain and gritted his teeth. He could hear his blood gush into the polyglass vial, driven by gravity and his racing heart. That was it! He was breaking out of this place right now!
…or not. A guard placed the vial in a slot on one of two enormous guns hanging from the ceiling on either side of him, and both trained themselves on his head. 626 felt a twinge of fear. He knew he was supposed to be bulletproof, but each of the five barrels on the rotary cannons was the size of his head! When did it stop being a bullet and start being artillery?
Then he heard the voice he least wanted to hear. Big Ugly, AKA Captain Gantu. "Uncomfortable?" the Captain said mockingly. "Aww… Good." 626 wanted nothing more than to be free of the collar so he could show the giant the meaning of the word uncomfortable. He tugged at the restraints, and felt the metal creak ominously. He was pretty sure he could break it. The huge idiot was standing so close that he couldn't order the cannons to fire without getting blown up himself, and 626 could easily climb onto his back. The reason why became apparent shortly. "The Council has banished you to exile on a desert asteroid. So relax, enjoy the trip!" Gantu gloated. "And don't get any ideas! These guns are locked onto your genetic signature. They won't shoot anyone but you…" he jammed his fat, clammy finger into 626's face. Able to stand the indignity no longer, 626 snarled and bit down. He didn't use all his strength – if he had, he would have taken an enormous chunk out of the captain's fingertip – but it was enough to make Gantu bellow in pain and pull his finger back with a set of bloody toothmarks. "Why you…" the hand returned holding a gigantic blaster, large enough for Jumba to put his arm down the barrel. Said barrel was pressed against 626's head. Oops.
Luckily, the guard, a shark-like creature about twice 626's height, took the opportunity to remind the captain that he was on duty, and the giant stomped away, ordering: "Secure the cell!"
"Aye-aye, captain!" the guard said with a salute.
"Aye-aye, captain!" 626 mimicked in a sing-song voice as soon as the cell's iris door slammed shut. The guard glared.
Soon enough, the ship started to accelerate, thrusting clear of Planet Turo's gravity well in preparation to jump to hyperspace. It was smooth enough that 626 barely felt it over the ship's artificial gravity field, but there were small jolts as the engines roared to life.
626 waited until the guard had settled down in his chair before he started complaining. "Isa kaua tiki shan?" (Are we there yet?) he asked. "Isa kaua tiki shan? Isa kaua tiki shan?"
The guard rolled his eyes and spun his chair around.
"Aka boocha! Aka boocha! Aka-choota baquaa!" 626 whined.
The guard ground his teeth and swiveled his chair again. "If you're trying to talk to me, say it in Standard!"
"Uhh… okay…" 626 had to think for a second. While his brain could calculate trajectories, simulate combat scenarios, and just plain daydream with incredible speed, he wasn't very good at languages, especially not anything besides Tantalog. "Let… six-two-six out?"
"How stupid do you think I am?" asked the guard, pointing an accusatory finger at him.
"Six-two-six… gotta go… toilet?" This wasn't just an attempt to trick the guard into releasing him. According to his mental clock, 626 had been either stuck in a tiny container or suspended upside-down for close to ten hours now. It had also been ten hours since he'd drank any water, but his bladder was still starting to ache.
"Well, you should have gone before we left!"
626 pouted. "Didn't have to then…" He was quiet for a while, then started again. "Isa kaua tiki shan? Isa kaua tiki shan? Isa kaua tiki shan?"
The guard growled. 626 saw his fists clench and unclench, but his next words were calm. "Did you know my home planet has the largest waterfall in the whole Nu Quadrant?" he said. "It's over half a klick tall and four klicks wide. In the rainy season, enough water goes over it every five seconds to fill this whole ship!"
"Yuuga Isa Kaphong!" 626 protested, flattening his ears. The guns twitched.
"The only monster around here is you," retorted the guard. 626 replied with whatever insults he could think of. "You know what else we have a lot of on my planet?" the guard said with a sadistic grin, "Caves. With lots of stalagmites and stalactites. Do you know how a stalactite forms, you little trog?"
"Naga."
"Water leeaaaaksss out of the cave ceiling, and slowly runs down the stalactite all the way to the bottom, and drips off. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip."
"Naga! Naga! Aggaba! Aggaba!" 626 screamed, folding his ears back against his head and curling his antennae. "Six-two-six be good!" How could the guard be so cruel? It was obvious what the shark-faced alien meant. He was dangling upside-down from the ceiling of the cell! If the voyage to the prison asteroid took too long, he would end up like the stalactite!
Eventually, though, boredom set in again. 626 remembered the guns' slight movement when he flattened his ears, and realized he could make a game out of it. He waved his ears and antennae back and forth, and twisted his head as much as he could within the confines of the collar. Yep. They were following him. Then he had an idea. The guns were locked onto his genetic signature, Gantu said. Where had they gotten his DNA? From his blood! The wound in his neck had bled a little after the needle was removed, but his fur had soaked it up. What would happen if it dripped onto the floor? Were the guns smart enough to tell it apart from his body? The easiest way to make himself bleed would be to scratch himself, but he couldn't move his limbs. Digging his claws into his palm might still work, but a few drops of blood might not run down far enough. He would have to bite his tongue. Or maybe not… he already had a different bodily fluid in his mouth. Would it work the same way?
Opening his mouth, he let a thick ribbon of saliva dangle almost to the floor, then slurped it back up. He giggled at the stupidity of the cannons: they swiveled downward, following the saliva instead of him, and for the first time since they'd been activated their aim moved away from him. Up… down… up… down… up…. Down. Yep, it worked. And better yet, there was a slight, but noticeable delay in the guns' reaction to his movement. He had the beginnings of an escape plan. But there were still too many unknowns. The saliva was still attached to his body: the guns could have mistaken it for a tentacle or pseudopod. On the other hand, a tentacle that long could have reached out and touched the guns, potentially disabling them, yet they didn't fire to prevent it. That meant it was just a simple tracking algorithm. But what was the trigger for them to fire? When his saliva touched the floor? When the restraining collar broke? He couldn't safely test it; even if the guns didn't vaporize his saliva and then turn to the next genetic signature, him, the guards would be immediately alerted. The guns' reactions appeared to be slow enough that he could potentially spit on one and cause it to destroy the other, but too fast for him to do it to both at the same time. The remaining gun wouldn't have to swivel far to get him in its sights, either. He needed to make them shoot as far away from him as possible, then immediately force the collar open, jump down onto one cannon, jump to the other as it fired, destroying the first cannon, and then tear out the power conduit for the second.
The guard, who had pulled a pack of cards from his jacket pocket and was trying to play some sort of solitary game, rolled his eyes and swiveled his chair around again. "Quiet, you!" he snapped.
626 growled. He had to deal with the guard! He couldn't see a weapon on him; anything small enough to be concealed wouldn't be a direct threat, but even a tiny electrode gun could distract him for long enough to get him killed. The shark-like alien was fairly far from him, though. There wasn't going to be a better opportunity to escape. 626 gathered up as much saliva in his mouth as he could, and spat it out at the guard's feet. Sure enough, both cannons whipped around to track the glob, and all ten barrels fired the moment it hit the floor.
The blast shook the entire cell and blew a massive crater in the floor. The guard stood flattened against the doors, knees trembling as he stared at the smoldering hole where he'd been sitting a second before. "What's going on down there?" a voice said over the intercom. 626 laughed. Now the shoe was on the other foot. And while the crater was a mess of wires, pipes, and twisted, half-molten metal, useless for escape, it had given him a valuable piece of information. The cell wasn't built to withstand the weaponry installed in it. Never mind destroying the cannons: they could work for him! He spat again, scoring a direct hit on the guard's insignia-bearing hat.
The shot had gone higher than Experiment 626 intended: he's been aiming for the spot right between the guard's eyes. Even so, the alien would have died if he hadn't had the sense to abandon his cap and dive for cover. The cannons opened fire with all barrels, tearing through the iris doors like they were made of tissue paper. More and more shots landed, spraying red-hot debris around the cell and into the corridor beyond. 626 was glad he wasn't on the receiving end of the barrage. Now was his chance!
The crew of the prisoner transport ship Durgon had been made aware of Jumba Jookiba's claim that his creation could lift three thousand times his weight. Most believed the 'idiot scientist' was exaggerating, but they still selected the strongest collar available to restrain the experiment, one that should have been capable of withstanding the monster's attempts to break free, but only just. But they had made two critical mistakes. First, after capturing the experiment they had recorded his body mass, then calculated his strength based on his weight in Federation Standard Gravity (approximately twenty percent stronger than Earth's gravity). But Jumba had been referring to the gravity on his homeworld Kweltikwan, a large metal-rich planet with gravity a little over twice that strong. Second, Jumba had obtained the figure in the 'controlled' environment of his own lab, carefully subjecting his creation to greater and greater amounts of force with an industrial press. So when 626, faced with the prospect of having the plasma cannons that had just obliterated a solid steel door turned on him, pulled on the restraining collar with all his strength, it was simply ripped in half.
626 dropped from the ceiling, already calculating how to deal with the still active cannons. By the time he reached the ground, landing awkwardly on his head, he'd decided. He grabbed the solid metal pieces of the restraining collar and made a run for it, leaping over the crater in the floor. The collar prevented the plasma balls from hitting him directly, but he was still showered by stinging-hot molten metal, and the impacts knocked him sideways. No sooner was he out of the guns' range than he spotted a blast door, much thicker than the cell doors, closing in his path. Throwing aside the remains of the collar, he raced towards it. No… not quick enough, there wasn't space to fit through! But he got his paws under it, and pulling with all his strength he was able to force the door upward for long enough to slip under it. 626 was in his element; his brain was in hyperdrive, scanning every detail of his environment for danger, cover, obstacles, potential weapons, and somewhere behind him the guard rolling on the floor trying to put out his smoldering uniform. But it didn't feel like it. His heart was pounding in his chest so loud that his ears could pick it up over the blaring alarms, voices shouting over the intercom, and rapidly approaching footsteps. His ears rang from the explosions, his arms ached, and he felt like he would be sick again.
But there was no time to be sick. Just as the blast door slammed shut behind him, three white-suited marines rounded the corner, blocking his path. They opened fire, barely missing 626. He could feel more spattered metal from the blast door punch holes in his prison uniform and congeal in his fur. What now? Did he charge them? Climb up to the ceiling? No, on the left – a vent! He dived for it, ripping the grille off and scrambling inside just in time to avoid another plasma blast. Where now? Higher, and forward against the acceleration he'd felt when the engines started, towards the bridge! He heard explosions behind him. Someone was shooting the duct. He ripped through the top and climbed into a space between bulkheads. 'Bridge Primary Electric'… perfect. His claws made short work of the electrical cables. Now back into the vent, up through a floor panel, and into the docking bay. He scrambled up the wall and onto the ceiling, then dropped down on an unfortunate guard, tossing him aside and grabbing his gun. There were over a dozen fighter-sized ships to pick from – which one? The red one, of course. Red ships went faster, Jumba always said. Then again, Jumba had also complained about the police giving him and his red ship tickets for supersonic flight in the troposphere.
After sending every guard in sight diving for cover with a shower of blaster shots, 626 jumped through the open docking port of the red police cruiser and slammed the hatch shut. He'd never flown a real spaceship before, only sims, but that would only matter if he could get the thing started in the first place. Fortunately, single-pilot craft like this were incredibly easy to hotwire. The docking clamp released, both engines roared to life, and he rocketed away, scorching the paint off part of the Durgon's hull in the process. Engines? Check. Cabin pressure? Check. O2? Check. Siren and horn? Check. Now… Jumba had to still be on the planet they'd just left. Looking back, he recognized it from the maps as Turo, the capital of the Galactic Federation. Plasma bolts flying past him? Check? Seventy-nine police cruisers behind him? Check?
626 didn't care. At least he was off the transport! And now he could fly rings around the federation pilots just by throwing a couple of switches. Artificial gravity? Off. He needed all the engine power he could get! The cruiser surged ahead. G-limiters? Off. He pushed the control stick forward, pitching the ship over in a maneuver that would have burst the blood vessels in the eyes of many species. That was when he remembered he'd forgotten his seat belt. Luckily, he did have two more arms than he needed to operate the controls. Now he was upside-down relative to his pursuers, and they were below him. That would make their shots more likely to hit his ship's more durable underside, but it also put them out of his field of vision. He rolled the cruiser to the same vertical as the others and blasted forward. Cannon? Check. And it fired fast. 626 laughed with delight and exhilaration as the other cruisers scattered in the path of the crazy ship flying right in their faces. This was even easier than the sims! Once he was through the fleet, they'd have to turn around to keep pursuing him, and flying in tight formation they couldn't turn around as aggressively as he'd done without risking cooking each other with their exhaust.
There was just one problem. 626's aggressive flying had taken him right into the middle of the pursuing fleet, and he was too short to see over the control console! He realized his mistake and stood up in his seat, peering around the panel, but it was too late. There was a loud bang as one of the cruisers, attempting to dodge a shot from the red cruiser's cannon, veered straight into its underside. 626 was thrown against the canopy and the sides of the cockpit hard enough to turn a normal creature into a sack of broken bones, but landed back in the seat. Half the instrument panel went dark, and the other half filled with warning lights. Both engines were losing power, the left one had lost thrust vectoring and the nozzle was flopping around limply, and both hydraulic systems were rapidly losing pressure as the fluid inside boiled away into space. The side of the ship had been ripped open and was hemorrhaging thick black smoke. Lighter grey wisps started to curl from the panel. The cannon was offline, and based on his estimate of the angle of impact was probably gone completely. The other cruisers were closing in.
The experiment was still laughing, but more from relief and the rush of being thrown around than anything else. That was close! He knew if that ship had hit from the top, at best he'd be floating helpless in the vacuum of space, waiting for the other cruisers to pick him off. Actually, that might still happen: the ship was crippled and almost uncontrollable.
Then he noticed a yellow and black lever on the left side of the panel. Seriously? This thing had hyperdrive? Not bothering to open the safety panel, he simply smashed his fist through and pulled the lever out.
"Hyperdrive activated," said the computer. "System charging." Great, it still worked. "Warning: Guidance is not functional," the computer added. Uh oh. 626 looked out the window at the cruisers closing in on him. He didn't have time to fix this! But with his engines failing, he wouldn't have the power for a second jump! That meant a blind jump was nothing short of suicidal. The chances of getting anywhere near a planet were effectively zero, let alone a habitable one. All he could do was wait for his life support to run out. Unless… unless he input the destination manually. Coordinates leapt unbidden into the experiment's mind. Quadrant 17, Section 005, Area 51, and so on. He'd never heard of that: where was his brain telling him to go? It didn't matter, anywhere was better than here.
Unknown to Experiment 626, Jumba had programmed the coordinates and several other sets into his genome. They were the locations of several primitive backwater planets, not members of the Galactic Federation, which Jumba had selected as test sites for his experiments' destructive capabilities. From Turo, the closest happened to be the third of eight out from a mid-sized (for stars hosting inhabited worlds, at least) yellow-white star. It was the largest rocky body in its system, but was dwarfed by the outer four planets, all giants. It orbited near the inner edge of its habitable zone, along with one large moon. But all 626 knew were the basics needed for hyperspace navigation: the star and planet's orbital characteristics. Quickly crunching the numbers in his head based on the current galactic time, he determined where it would be at the time of his jump and tapped the numbers into the keypad. Ignoring the computer's repeated warnings to not activate Hyperdrive, 626 gripped the lever with all four hands and rammed it back into position, flinging the tiny spacecraft into the unknown.
Author's Notes:
Oh my god… Lilo and Stitch is a MASTERPIECE. Seriously, it is amazing. Most of the movie can be summarized as a non-stop ride on the feels express, but the opening? It's gotta be up there in the top 5 action scenes ever in a Disney film. Anyway, when I rewatched the movie I found myself asking: what exactly is Stitch thinking? That turned out to be a very interesting question, because throughout the movie we see very little of his destructive programming. The only things he destroys intentionally, and without some other reason behind it, are a pillow and some stuff in Lilo's room. Everything else is either self-preservation (Lilo and Nani's house when Jumba attacks), retaliation (that one guy's super soaker, some dude who got hit with a volleyball), accidental (various things during the job search montage, spraying a smoothie all over the kitchen while trying to find out what a blender does). He really does act a lot like a small child exploring his environment and learning how to socially interact with other intelligent beings. Even building a city and pretending to be a giant monster is normal little kid behavior (Calvin does this quite a bit). He also has a short attention span, and despite his incredible intelligence most of his behavior is driven by emotion. Emotionally, he's still the equivalent of a small child.
It might seem odd for an invincible alien superweapon to be scared of a few guns. But he looks visibly freaked out when Jumba shoots at him with a plasma blaster, despite later being able to catch its shots with his bare hands. The conclusion? Stitch doesn't know how durable he actually is. He's also pretty jumpy when he first lands on Earth, what with the shooting at raindrops. It seems odd… but fear is exactly what you WANT a living weapon to have, at least one like Stitch. A one-shot kamikaze attacker? Maybe. But being about to lift thousands of times your body weight is not actually that much in terms of destructive power: that puts his maximum strength somewhere around a couple hundred tons, which is scary but NOT apocalyptic. Even assuming his strength is based on extra-heavy gravity and doesn't account for the awesome power of adrenaline, Stitch would still lose a tug of war with a space shuttle orbiter (not counting the SRBs which add several times more thrust), or just ONE of the engines from the first stage of a Saturn V. For just one of him to be effective he has to use his durability and intelligence to stay alive, continue to cause havoc, and annoy the enemy into causing massive collateral damage in their futile attempts to get rid of him. Regardless of Jumba's boasting about his only instinct being destruction, 626's primary instinct is the same as any other intelligent creature: self-preservation. Fear serves a fundamental biological purpose. What sets Stitch apart is that he was created with something it takes most humans months or years of training to learn: the ability to be scared without panicking.
To add to this… it's misleading to say Lilo turned Stitch from evil to good. Stitch was NEVER evil. Nor is he much of a criminal. At best, the Federation wanted to ship him off to some prison camp for life for what's basically contempt of court. At worst, they wanted to do the same thing because he existed. There is no evidence that he was even given a trial – JUMBA was the one on trial, Stitch was just evidence. Apparently artificial organisms don't have any rights. The worst thing he did was use Lilo to keep Jumba, the one being who should have had his back, from shooting him. And IMO, by the first night at Lilo's house Stitch knew on some level that this was his home.
Stitch getting "spacesick" is completely plausible. His nervous system is hardwired to pilot spacecraft and to fight onboard them, including having a good sense of balance – and the inherent drawback of that is that he has to rely heavily on both his eyes and his inner ears. When your eyes and inner ears give you conflicting information, the body tends to suspect poisoning – which would be a major threat to Stitch because there are just plain too many molecules out there to be immune to all of them (and his eating habits don't help either).
Okay, seriously though… restraining prisoners upside-down like that is messed up. Even aside from the "how do they go to the bathroom" issue, blood would be constantly pooled in your head. This would be extremely uncomfortable, and could cause nasty health problems like strokes in creatures that aren't nearly-indestructible genetic experiments.
Watching the sequence of Stitch figuring out how to beat the plasma cannons over and over and the guard getting annoyed at him totally gave me the mental image of Stitch acting like a little kid on a long car trip.
The dino-like security aliens have a very good reason to be wearing those white jumpsuits and face masks, and it's NOT to be intimidating like Stormtroopers. Plasma blasters in L&S spatter molten metal everywhere if they hit a metal surface. I'm pretty sure the white suits are meant to protect them from being burned if someone misses and hits the wall behind them – this is similar to how a lot of modern military body armor isn't designed to stop you from getting shot, it's designed to protect against shrapnel. Stitch is heat-resistant enough that to him it's like getting hit by tiny drops of hot water; enough to sting, but not enough to cause actual burns. Pulling solidified slag out of your fur can't be fun, though.
The gravity thing is speculation, but it's based on Jumba's physiology. He has huge, beefy limbs, a squat body, and elephant-like feet, which is exactly the build you'd expect of a creature evolved to cope with high gravity. Also, without it Stitch would be quite a bit weaker than people think he is because most of the fandom seems to severely overestimate his weight.
It's interesting that Stitch's skin is tough enough to ignore plasma blasts, road rash, explosions, and rocket exhaust… but a needle goes right through it. Also, funnily enough that moment is a serious contender for the most blood ever shown in a Disney cartoon. There are a few red scratches and bloodstains on clothing, but otherwise you've got… Malificent bleeding a little bit when stabbed with a sword, Taran getting a cut lip in The Black Cauldron, and I think that's it. The moral? To get blood past the censors, just make it pink.
Regarding hyperdrive: the vast majority of the space in the galaxy is light years from the nearest star. The vast majority of space in the universe is millions of light years from the nearest galaxy. Forget Han Solo: the risk of flying through a star is infinitesimal. The real danger is being stranded with a broken hyperdrive in a location where your sub-light engines can't get you to safety. The problem with interstellar navigation to a planet with a single hyperspace jump, though, is that everything is moving at dozens of kilometers per second, so in a crippled ship with no propulsion you have to calculate exactly where your target will be. Fortunately, Stitch's brain has the raw processing power to do this in about a second and ignore the broken nav computer.
You might notice that at a couple points Stitch goes through a fairly extensive thought process in what's only about a second in the movie. Well, that's what "can think faster than supercomputer" means!