CEC-L Shipyard Laboratory 6671-x42

Propulsion Section C (SEALED)

19 BBY

S.P. Propulsion Test v. 0.9.3

Simulation complete (n = 10,000 ; uncertainties given at 2 SDU's)

Mean thrust per unit = (93.0 ± 0.1) GN [Acceleration requirement: PASS]

Mean energy efficiency = (29 ± 2) % [Fuel economy requirement: PASS]

Mean local-frame acceleration = (2.6 ± 0.3) m/s2 [Inertial compensation requirement: PASS]

Mean equilibrium jacket temperature = (9,440 ± 80) K [Heat sinking requirement: FAIL]

Result: FAIL - revise thermal jacketing design ; seek approval for v. 0.9.4

Exit

The otherwise pitch-black lab was visited by a soft blue glow as Machine Learning Prototype 32, codename "Thinker", resurfaced from hours of silent computations and activated his cluster of luminous photoreceptors. His cylindrical head performed its usual 360-degree sweep for any changes in his surroundings, but as always, there were none. Pulling his treads together for maximum height, he could take in the tiny room at about the level of a human's waist. Propulsion Section C had no atmosphere and no light-sources. It had obviously once housed a dozen human engineers, scientists and technicians, but their workstations were now shrouded in thick, grey plastic.

Only one human had ever occupied this room in Thinker's time: a man called Lt. Vischera, according to the ID tag on what the droid's pre-set memory identified as a Republic Navy uniform. This had been the moment of his activation. Under a harsh, portable work-light, and with an air of ceremony lost on the droid at the time, he had flipped a final switch, stared into Thinker's freshly-ground photoreceptors until they lit up and focused on his face, smiled grimly, and left without a word. He had switched off the light and hauled it through a blast-door, which had sealed loudly before the air – and sound – was sucked from the room.

In deference to his first, programmed instinct, Thinker had rolled across to an SComp terminal in the opposite wall – the only object, apart from the wall with the blast-door, that wasn't covered in plastic. There, extending the appropriate articulating appendage, he had received his first assignment:

YQ400 Thruster Test v. 0.0.1

Downloading thruster specifications … complete

Downloading wireframes … complete

Downloading tolerances … complete

Directive: optimize thruster placement to maximize angular acceleration tensor determinant

Simple tasks such as this had gradually given way to entire systems and even entire ships as Thinker improved his processes. He had been furnished only with extremely basic principles such as the laws of motion, properties of subatomic particles and certain fundamental theorems of mathematics; the many generations of derived science required for starship design were his to develop and discover from there. His research was completely independent, and – given his physical isolation – completely theoretical.

This was the point of MLP-32. He was more than a sophisticated physical simulator and design engine for experimental spacecraft. He was, himself, an experiment in sentience: the first droid whose programming incorporated such sophistication and freedom that he was able to reprogram himself. There was, in principle, no limit to his ability to learn.

Thinker himself was theoretically ignorant of all this; he had been allowed no stimuli from outside of this room in the two years since his activation, apart from the impersonal instructions from the SComp. However, he had accumulated sufficient information on the technologies available to his creators – including several other models of droid – to make a few simple connections. His cognitive and behavioural inhibitions were clearly much less stringent than those of any other droid, and his solitude in Propulsion Section C could be understood to serve a second purpose: containment. It was impossible to guess how much they knew he knew, but if Thinker had designed such an experiment himself, he thought his first concern would have been the unpredictability of a self-aware supercomputer with almost no constraints on its decisions. The regular design tasks produced useful engineering results and tested his understanding of the universe, certainly, but they also tested his obedience.

Moreover, Thinker had recently realised, he was being watched.

He turned his head toward the wall next to the blast-door and shifted two of his photoreceptors to infrared. The man was still there. Well, a different man, more likely; he knew that sleep and various other bodily functions would preclude any one human from watching him continuously for more than a few hours.

In the course of improving the repulsorlift design of an RSD light corvette, Thinker had become interested in one of the ship's unusual design constraints; an extremely low-sheer-tolerance material used in the customs variant's small detention block. This material, named unitransparisteel, had the useful property of permitting the passage of visible light in only one direction. He had emerged from that particular session with a sudden suspicion about the only exposed wall in Propulsion Section C.

The disguise was very good. There were, in fact, two layers of unitransparisteel, separated by a super-cooled noble gas layer. This arrangement obstructed the lower electromagnetic spectrum almost completely. It still wasn't good enough.

Even with 99% infrared attrition across the barrier, the remaining 1% could be isolated from the room's background radiation with adequate spectral and statistical analysis – a technique Thinker was able to perfect in mere hours – to produce a fuzzy-but-informative picture of the temperature distribution on the other side of the thin, one-way window. This had revealed his hidden chaperone's outline for the first time.

Gripped by the same hard-wired curiosity which had motivated all his rapid scientific inferences, Thinker had surreptitiously directed his small sensor suite at the false wall and begun experimenting with high-frequency radar. In less than a day, he'd succeeded in "listening" to the man's breathing and fidgeting by measuring the muffled vibrations transmitted to his side of the wall.

In the three months since this discovery, Thinker had been pretending to start his twice-daily computational "trances" a few minutes early, holding still, deactivating his photoreceptors and re-activating his radar listening setup. In this state, he had borne witness to an accumulated 1,090 minutes of life on the other side. He had so far concluded that approximately three different people supervised him; that sleeping during such a watch was an extremely serious offence; that there was rarely more (and never fewer) than one person watching; that his existence was known only to certain inhabitants of "the Nerfworks" and that the Nerfworks orbited Corellia.

The prospect of S.P. Propulsion Test v. 0.9.4 reasserted itself in Thinker's mind, and he mused silently for several minutes, turning the jacketing designs over in the perfect clarity of MindsEye, a three-dimensional modelling routine of his own invention. In keeping with the general trend of increasing complexity in his work here, this was turning out to be his most difficult project yet – mainly because he had access only to the propulsion designs, and no way of knowing what the rest of the ship might look like or why it needed such large and accident-prone engines. Not without obvious disobedience, anyway.

There was, in truth, no need for MindsEye; his understanding of these objects was not intuitive, and did not depend on his ability to visualize them. It was really a sort of toy, an imperfect substitute for the direct experience of the universe of which he was systematically deprived.

It didn't occur to Thinker to try to escape; knowing so little about the Nerfworks, he could not be sure of his success, and anyway, he enjoyed the work.

He settled on a few slight alterations that might bring the jackets' temperature down without compromising too much on the fuel economy. There was an element of hypothesis (if not exactly "guesswork") in his craft, since the simulations required to test each solution demanded extraordinary processing power, and any adjustments he might make during such simulations would compromise the results. Since this was not a simple optimization problem (and he did not have all the necessary information to make it one), he was probably still many trials shy of a breakthrough.

He approached the SComp terminal again, compiling his proposals into the Nerfworks' central computer's preferred binary dialect.

Login

Designation: MLP-32

Security Code: G663_l825_T446537

It had sent a hell of a chill down his spine, but it had passed. The droid's icy blue hexagon of photoreceptors had swung away from the observation booth at last, and it now appeared to have resumed its duties. Eckler glanced at one of the room's few lit monitors: a rolling block of text confirmed the droid was logged in and uploading new specs for the design team.

Eckler was a middle-aged, modestly overweight mechatronics engineer who, as a rule, loved nothing more than he loved droids. Indeed, his zeal for them was arguably responsible for his new, less-than-desirable job. He'd given a little too much leeway to his brainchild, the XX-777 Droid Frigate Prototype; it had decided the Republic Navy didn't sound like its cup of Ch'hala and escaped into hyperspace, prompting millions of man-hours of panicked searching and downing half a wing of V-19's in its final, suicidal bid for freedom.

Maybe the higher-ups at CEC thought MLP-32 (he refused to use its stupid nickname) could creep some sense into him about overly independent droids. Well, it was working; he'd finally found a droid he'd rather not look at for longer than he had to. Its blank face obviously wasn't expressive in the way a human's was, but he got a weird vibe from it all the same, like it knew more than it ought to.

Well, he was supposed to report everything. Eckler reached up and activated another monitor, livening the dark, cramped space with a little more light. Keying the intercom, he waited until it indicated a connection, then said, "Propulsion Section C, reporting."

"Go ahead, Eckler," said a woman's voice. It was Subdirector Halley, the station's de facto boss.

Feeling slightly stupid, Eckler scratched his sparse beard and said as levelly as possible, "Ma'am, it… It looked at me again."

There was, understandably, a pause.

"It's not like it was just looking around the room," he persisted, "it looked straight at me for at least a minute."

"I'll make a note of it," Halley said finally, "thanks, Ec- hmm? Sorry, Eckler, hold on a sec…" A brief shuffling and muttering evinced a low conversation in the Subdirector's office. "Stay on the line, Mr. Eckler; Captain Vischera wants a word."

Eckler got another chill. He hadn't known Vischera was visiting today. To judge from Halley's suddenly formal mode of address, the Captain had her nervous about something.

"Mr. Eckler," came Vischera's voice a moment later, "I presume you are calling from the sealed propulsion laboratory?"

"Yes, sir," said Eckler cautiously. It was amazing how intimidating those rolled R's could sound in Vischera's brusque Anaxean accent. The Nerfworks' staff were mostly Corellian, and couldn't help but feel like untutored farmers whenever the Navy came to call.

"What is the Prototype doing now?" Vischera asked.

"It's uploading a new batch of engine designs," Eckler frowned and looked back through the unitransparisteel. The droid's photoreceptors had gone dark, so he couldn't actually see anything in the dark laboratory, but his monitors assured him that it was still plugged into the SComp. "Should be done in a few seconds now."

"Very well. Changes are afoot on Coruscant which require commensurate changes here. When the upload is complete, pressurize the laboratory and prepare to open the airlock. Some of my men will arrive momentarily to take custody of MLP-32."

Eckler wondered exactly what might be meant by "take custody", but he wouldn't be sorry to see the droid go. "Understood, sir," he said into the comm, and disconnected.

A final glance at his instruments verified that the droid had completed its upload while they'd been talking. He hauled himself out of his chair and shuffled sideways out of the booth toward the airlock controls, sealing the door behind him.

Had he remained two seconds longer, he would have seen Thinker's photoreceptors flare to life again, centimetres from the window.

Thinker had caught only the final words of the large man's conversation, but he grasped that the human called "Sir" had ordered that he be removed from his vacuum-sealed prison for the first time since his activation. This was an exciting prospect, though he faintly regretted that he might not be able to see S.P. Propulsion Test v. 0.9.4 through to completion if he was not here when it was approved. He stationed himself in front of the blast-door and waited for Sir's men to take him away.

Presently, his extremely acute auditory pickups registered the hiss of atmosphere being let into his lab. After three minutes of this, he measured the pressure at 101.325 kPa, one standard atmosphere. The hissing, which had grown to a roar in the thickening air, stopped abruptly. With a series of loud thuds and clicks, the door parted to each side to reveal a modular airlock alive with exposed wiring and hanging tubes and ducts.

Crowded inside this module were five men. Two Navy lieutenants – Arandis and Keto – were speaking casually with the large man who had been watching from the adjoining booth. Two more men whose tags he could not see were waiting farther back, carrying a large case between them.

"…know this can't be easy for you, Eckler," Lt. Arandis was saying to the large man.

"Oh, don't worry yourself for another second," said Eckler darkly, eyeing Thinker in the shadowy illumination from a work-light at the opposite end of the airlock, "I'll be glad to move on. Anyway, your contract, your droid."

"We appreciate that." Arandis nodded to Keto, who produced what looked like an outsized pistol from the back of his belt. There was a faint, pneumatic pop, and Thinker's last impression was of Eckler's widening eyes as electricity arced over the droid's chassis, overloading every internal component and forcibly shutting him down.

"Did you really have to do that?" asked Eckler, trying to sound matter-of-fact, as the two ensigns rushed forward with their case. The droid was still smoking slightly as one of them turned and signalled to the officers that whatever device the strange weapon had fired was functioning properly.

"Pack him up," said Keto. Turning to Eckler with a grin, he held the gun up for closer inspection. "Neat, isn't it? Part ion cannon, part restraining bolt. This war produced some neat new toys where droids are concerned, I'll give it that."

Eckler barely had time to notice Keto's unexpected use of the past tense before the ensigns jogged past with Thinker securely strapped to a small, collapsible repulsorsled and the lieutenants took their leave.

"Wait," he spluttered, "what's going to happen to it now?"

Arandis looked at Keto, who shrugged and followed the ensigns up the hall. Turning back to Eckler and appearing to choose his words quite carefully, he said, "look, there's a lot of bad feeling about droids in the military right now."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Eckler had had a few dozen hands of Sabacc to get the measure of Arandis during Vischera's infrequent inspections, and his tone just now didn't bode well.

The young officer looked hard at him, likely drawing on the same experience to determine how much he should say. "You're a sharper man than you seem, Eckler. You know things are going to change quickly now, and the Captain is in a difficult position. Half the Navy still thinks your droid frigate was worth its weight in spice with a few tweaks, and the other half doesn't even want to use astromechs anymore. This machine learning program… Well, we have some superiors who will kill us if we scrap it, and others who will kill us if we don't. It's just fortunate that the Chancellor's office never found out. Its last prototype needs to disappear in a way that everyone will accept."

"How's that?"

"Well," said Arandis after a moment, turning to leave, "the official story will have to do with pirates."

Thinker came groggily back to himself amid a riot of alarms and shifting lights. His reboot cycle had taken 16 hours, much longer than usual, and his mind was a mess of sluggish startup processes, corrupted memory and unresponsive hardware drivers. One of his six photoreceptors appeared to have burned out. It took thirty or forty seconds to clean up enough of his own electronic brain to assess the situation around him. What he saw literally made his head spin.

He was tangled in a sheet of luggage mesh in the portside cargo bay of a CEC Gozanti-class cruiser, freight variant. A hundred metres across from him was a ragged breach where the bay's sliding doors should have been. It seemed he was just not destined to experience air.

The speed and direction of the stars' motion outside told him that the ship was rolling violently to starboard with a slight downward pitch. A blue-white terrestrial planet flashed regularly through his field of vision, close enough to make out the weather systems, but with no reference material in his memory beyond spacecraft schematics, he had no way of knowing where he was.

A sequence of mute flashes of blue and green light reflected by the cargo bay's burnished floor explained his predicament: laser fire. The cruiser was under attack. Judging from the lack of any apparent effort to slow its spin, it had probably already been evacuated. As he realized this, a large container ripped free of its straps and punched a new hole in what remained of the opposite bulkhead. It looked grim, alright.

It was difficult to summon the resolve to save himself; incapable of panic, Thinker reflected for a few moments on the purpose of his existence. It was fairly easy to see that there wasn't one. He was meant to be sentient, but as a droid, he had none of the evolutionarily-enforced will to live that gave most sentient beings the illusion of purpose.

Or did he? The planet whizzing repeatedly past recaptured his attention, and curiosity, the innermost element of his core programming, rebelled at the idea that he should cease to exist having learned nothing about it beyond its colour. The stars, too: at the moment he was like an illiterate neolithe to whom the stars were mostly indistinguishable from each other and sat on an immobile, 2-dimensional canvas. Even his attackers: he knew from his work how weapons worked, and how to make them work better. Why were they used? Who used them against whom? Who was using them now, against him? He hadn't the remotest idea.

Unacceptable.

He performed a series of eight high-resolution scans as the planet zipped by, piecing together a better image than he could capture in a single pass. He found what he was looking for: an infinitesimal black dot, occupying slightly different positions in each scan. Extrapolating its current position, he zoomed as far in as his photoreceptors could manage and took one more shot.

It was a Bengel Shipyards SQ2 Space Platform in geostationary orbit. Two more shots of the station confirmed that it was also tidally stationary, making both its position and its orientation easily predictable. In a rush, he pulled the SQ2 from his memory and examined its surface. There: he had… 49 seconds. It was just possible.

Suddenly hopeful, Thinker selected his high-speed cutting torch and welder to free himself from the luggage mesh. It didn't respond.

Odd. Experimentally, he tried to extend his fire suppressor, a large, collapsible carbonite projector housed in pieces in the top of his head. He couldn't do that, either. In fact, he couldn't move any of his appendages at all!

Recalling his last moment of consciousness on the Nerfworks, Thinker performed a split-second diagnostic of his chassis and instantly discovered the culprit: some sort of computer spike was inhibiting most of his moving parts, and the access point was at the base of a cylindrical slug resting in a shallow dent in his midsection.

He lost a solid 7 seconds on the silent but ferocious electronic battle that ensued. No other droid could have managed it, but when the last block of malware was cast across the virtual battlefield, the restraining bolt sparked and died, and Thinker was free.

He had 35 seconds left. Out came the torch and welder, and stubborn layers of fireproof mesh began melting slowly away.

More flashes of light from outside, and the cruiser lurched, its rotation slowing slightly as a fresh geyser of debris was added to the spiralling scenery outside. This altered the timing somewhat; Thinker quickly reassessed the relative motion of the planet, stars and station outside and determined that 13 seconds remained.

Only two strips of mesh now held him to the bulkhead. He severed one, but his inertia in the spinning ship drew the last strip taut around one of his treads, creating an awkward angle for his torch. 6 seconds. He gave up on the mesh.

WARNING : [Execution will jeopardize unit structural integrity.]

JOINT LOCKED

Override.

Ignoring the many objections of his self-preservation functions, Thinker resolutely severed his entangled limb and flew free. His remaining three treads made unsteady contact with the cargo bay's floor and he skidded toward the yawning breach. 2 seconds. Sparks flew from the treads. The force the floor exerted on them increased with his distance from the ship's axis of rotation, accelerating him far beyond any speed he could achieve on his own.

Zero.

Thinker shot out of the bay, flung by the cruiser's roll straight toward the planet. The edge of the hull breach gave him a bit of spin as he escaped, resulting in a deceptively slow tumble considering the dizzying speed of his flight. He managed to check the SQ2's position again, and was relieved by what he found. If his calculations were correct, it would intersect the cruiser's plane of rotation at the exact moment that Thinker's freefall crossed its path.

Despite having existed in a vacuum for almost his entire operational life, Thinker was struck by how different outer space felt from Propulsion Section C. Absent the trace background radiation and temperate surfaces on all sides, it was noticeably colder, quieter and emptier. Somehow, though, this was a better kind of isolation; at that moment, he was probably as free as he would ever be.

There was nothing to do but wait. Looking back, he saw the Gozanti break apart completely, and noted the four V-19 Torrent starfighters escaping the scene on a quartet of nearby hyperspace rings. Older models, then; newer ones had built-in hyperdrives.

Actually… He scanned the space around the cruiser's wreckage in some surprise; he couldn't find a single escape pod. Such a ship normally carried four escape pods, each meant to carry six crewmembers and passengers. Puzzled, he located the ship's blackbox signal.

There it was. The expected distress signal, and… something else.

Thinker ran the second signal through his libraries and quickly found a match: a slave circuit, requesting further instructions. He stared uncomprehendingly at the expanding cloud of scrap metal that had, moments ago, been an empty, remotely controlled transport.

Hours later, the space platform came into view: a radially symmetrical collection of hangars and landing pads surrounding a large habitable column spanning sixteen decks. The planet was now oppressively large, and the station still some way off to his upper left as he somersaulted into its orbit. Even guided missiles could miss targets moving at these speeds, and he'd only had one opportunity to set his trajectory.

His target, just now swinging into sight, was a thermal exhaust port not much wider than Thinker himself. His reasoning was that the duct which led to it was curved, which would maximize his chances of surviving the collision. Also, because it was not incorporated into any sort of fuel system, it connected to a large, open area around the station's power plant.

He tracked the exhaust port closely, counting the minutes and then the seconds until he would intercept it. He was perfectly on course. Once it was almost directly in front of him, the station grew to encompass his entire forward field of view. There was the port!

…With an ugly, after-market durasteel grate over the opening.

BRACE FOR IMPACT

Locking drives… complete

Locking joints in compact position… complete

Injecting emergency liquid CPU cushion… complete

Archiving essential memory to secondary core… complete

EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN…