Chapter Four: Her Hidden Image
One of the few things Padmé had unabashedly loved about the apartment when she and Anakin had moved in was the view. Living on Coruscant had never quite stopped feeling vaguely off to her—as someone who'd grown up on a planet full of farmland and open sky, the knowledge that the only greenery anywhere on this planet was artificial had prickled her skin like a rash. But at sunset, when its metal spires were set ablaze by reflected light and the sky they pierced turned orange, it was like she lived in the middle of a place from some distant fairytale. Often, when she and Anakin had run out of things to say to each other in the evening, they would simply sit together on the patio and watch as the sun dipped below the horizon.
The view was still there, but her access to it wasn't. Flimsiboard sheets had been hastily set up in place of the sliding glass window that opened to the veranda, which had been shattered by a stray blast of plasma a few days into the battle. There was no way of telling whether it had been a Confederate ship taking a potshot at their building or a Republic craft trying to shoot an enemy down. Either way, Padmé kept throwing glances at the board now, part of her convinced another shot would tear through it at any time. Every now and then she'd think of stepping out onto the patio, only to remember they didn't have one anymore—it had vanished entirely when the blast hit it, crumbling to the street miles below.
Liz, Padmé thought, would have been amused. In her fouler moods the droid had done her best to give the impression of rolling her eyes whenever her two owners had gazed out at the skyline. "You organics. Nothing about that view has changed in centuries! They're all the same buildings! Take a picture and you'll have it forever!"
Padmé snorted faintly. Gods damn it, Liz. If you'd left me more good memories I wouldn't have to have crap like this running through my head.
The droid hadn't left much of anything. Shattered glass, smoldering carpet, and a gaping hole where the veranda had used to be—where she'd been, claiming she needed some space from the two humans after being cooped up for days on end. Padmé and Anakin had been in the kitchen halfheartedly preparing dinner by candlelight to avoid being interrupted by the rolling blackouts—the backwash from the blast had knocked both of them off their feet like a hot hand pressing down on them.
As soon as Padmé had recovered, she'd sprinted for the veranda, stopping just short of falling off the sheer drop, bellowing Liz's name. When that hadn't worked, she'd started pinging the droid's built-in comm, simply hitting her own comm's call button over and over like she had when they were stuck in Had Abbadon's caves and it was the only way to get a signal out. She hadn't stopped doing it while she and Anakin searched the street immediately below the building, ducking into cover every now and then to avoid rescue personnel and soldiers.
"Maybe she went to the Dancer," Padmé had finally said after they'd both exhausted any possibility that the droid could be in the vicinity. "Made it to the ground, saw how things were heating up around here, and decided to hole up there in case the building got hit again."
The look Anakin had given her was one she recognized—so often it was her giving it to him, her eyes communicating how stupid his latest wild hope was. But he hadn't said anything. Instead, the two of them had broken curfew and booked it to the warehouse in the Works, snuck their way around its security system, and broken into their own ship. Nothing.
Collapsed on one of the galley chairs, Anakin had looked at her and blown out a long breath. "Bail's office, maybe?"
In that moment, she'd loved him. Wanted more than anything to hug him as tightly as she could, just sit there and hold him. But then her mind had flitted back to their apartment, where a gaping hole still opened to the air.
"We have to go back," she'd said, pushing up from the table. "Board things up before looters get to our stuff."
Maybe she'd known then, subconsciously, even before they found it as they were putting up the boards—a single finger from Liz's left hand, charred black, wires splaying out of one end.
Before Anakin could stop her, she'd chucked it at the ground below. "Gods-damned idiot hunk of junk, wandering outside in the middle of a warzone."
She'd thought that getting rid of the finger meant getting rid of everything Liz had left behind. But today, with nothing else to do, she'd been cleaning the place, aimlessly moving and rearranging junk. It was when she decided Screw it and started shifting her and Anakin's bed into a new spot that she'd seen it—a square of carpet, in the middle of the area the bed had covered up, that had a faint gap carved between it and the rest of the floor.
Cautiously, she'd bent down and peeled it back. And now, a few minutes later, here she was, scoffing to herself as she sifted through the box of stuff the droid had hidden away under their noses in their own damn bedroom.
Padmé reflexively jerked her hand backward when she saw the faint blue glow of memory lichen, only to realize it was safely stored in a tiny glass vial. Lucky she was never serious when she talked about screwing us over. All she'd have had to do was stick that against our necks and we'd've been out while she made off with the cashbox. For a moment, a part of her wanted to uncork the vial and brush her finger against the wisp of fungus, experience whatever memory Liz had encoded in it—then she remembered that, no matter how developed her personality, the droid had not been capable of imprinting anything on the flake of lichen. Whoever had left the memory had done so a long time ago—the droid had just swiped it from a cavern wall, or someone in the refugee camp. Best to leave it be.
Next in the pile was a much larger glass cylinder, one that sloshed with a deep burgundy liquid. There was a label around the base; Padmé raised it to the light to read it and then let out a snort of laughter. Theed Paddocks, Palpatine Proprietor, it read in a florid script. "You sneaky bitch," she said aloud, rolling the bottle back and forth and listening to the shifting wine within. "What, you bribe Ellis to lift this for you?"
She lifted similar mementos from the hideaway one by one. Some Huttese coin worth next to nothing in the Core systems; the ruined stump of the droid's old right arm, which Anakin had finished "borrowing" only for Liz to inform him she'd sooner go one-handed than use again; one of the Flamewind globes Oseon sold to tourists, filled with torrents of sand until you turned it to the right angle and the light caught shades of boreal colors. Gods only knew where the droid had kept this stuff before she had a convenient floor to hide it under; some cranny of the Dancer, Padmé supposed.
Maybe, she thought, looking at the assortment of junk sitting on her floor, she and her husband could split the bottle of wine next time they were both home for dinner. Add some spice to the camp-stove main course, toast to their erstwhile friend's memory. If he asked where she got it from, she could lie and say Bail had given it to her. Stolen wine, cooking over a crappy fire . . . just like old times, almost.
Except that in old times it had been just the two of them, camping out or on the run, stuck together whether they liked it or not. Nowadays she was lucky to get through a meal without Anakin getting called away by some duty he claimed was vital for holding the planet together.
It's not fair, she'd said to him a ways back, before all this happened. I'm the head of Bail's security and I still manage to keep a normal schedule. Palpatine has you busier than you were on the gods-damned front lines!
Bail runs one planet, he'd shot back, not exactly by choice. The Chancellor runs the galaxy. She hadn't been ready to start a fight for the sole point of defending her boss's honor, so she'd just let it go.
Sighing, she rolled the bottle of wine toward the nearest wall a little more forcefully than necessary—it hit the barrier with a loud thunk, mercifully refusing to shatter all over the carpet. The light coming in through the window was just enough to catch the name Palpatine sitting at the crest of the label. With a scowl, Padmé gave it the finger. Maybe drinking it was the wrong call after all. Maybe she'd throw it out the hole in her apartment. With any luck it would land on the head of one of the Chancellor's new Grand Army as they patrolled the street below.
As for everything else . . . probably best to just put it back where it had come from, shift the bed back on top to cover it up. Let's just make sure we've seen everything, she thought, and reached back in to sweep her hand around the compartment.
Huh. There was one more thing inside, something blocky and plastic. When Padmé pulled it to the light, she frowned. It was a tape unit—an old one, judging from the wear along the edges and the dent just above one of its spools. There was no text of any kind on the outer case's label, but as she tilted it through the sunlight she saw that something had scratched an Aurebesh numeral into the casing—2.
Well, that means there's gotta be a 1, then. And sure enough, when she felt along the bottom of the compartment a second hunk of plastic brushed against her fingertips. This one was slightly worse for wear than its counterpart—the tape within was spooled a little loosely, and a crack spidered its way along one side.
"So what're you?" she said aloud, running her thumbs along the ridges and indentations. Liz didn't seem the type to store music on analog. For a moment Padmé's pulse surged a little—maybe it was some kind of last message in case anything happened—but then she rolled her eyes. There was no way in hell irritable Liz would leave something like that, and sweet Liz didn't seem like the type to think much about her own death. Hell, maybe it's coordinates for the loot from a bank robbery or something.
It had been a long time since Padmé had played one of these things, but Anakin, she knew, had a tape reader in his workbench. Rising to her feet with a groan—her knees were getting sore a little too soon these days for her liking—she headed for the living room, where he'd set up shop in a corner shortly after they'd moved in. As she passed the boarded-up window, she willed herself not to speed up her pace.
Buried in the bottom drawer was the reader, itself rather battered—Padmé noticed with a wince that a couple of the spokes had broken off. Popping open the hatch, she slowly rotated the wheels with her thumb—they still seemed to turn properly, at any rate. She raised the gadget to her face, blew to clear out any dust, and then gently slid in Tape 1. For a moment it caught on one of the damaged spokes, but then the spools snapped into place.
She closed the hatch and looked down. The tape looked back, almost expectantly, the two spokes giving the strangely offputting impression of two eyes.
Welp, let's hear it. With a click, she pressed play.
For several moments there was nothing but the burbling hiss of static, the tape popping and clicking with imperfections. Then, with a sudden crackle, words became audible, and Padmé swallowed.
". . . been a long day, for all of us. Not that I can tire myself out the same way living beings can, of course." Silence, for several moments. Then: "Yes, Miss Padmé?"
She swore and punched the stop button before it could go any further, at the same time throwing a look over her shoulder as though expecting the droid to be right behind her.
Memories. These were Liz's memories.
Of course it made sense. Backup tapes were fairly common. If your droid's brain was irreparably damaged, you could just port their backup into a new chassis and have them back—up to the time the tape was last updated. The magnetic storage was efficient enough to keep a whole robot stored in one casing—but of course, Liz hadn't been one robot, not entirely. Which explained the pair.
Under other circumstances, maybe it might have provided some closure. But hearing the droid's voice now, not even two weeks after she'd gone—and especially hearing it address her by name . . . it was like a spectre had showed up in her living room. Especially since that hadn't been any sort of last testament—it was a conversation between the two of them. If she listened long enough, maybe she'd begin to recall what it had been about. Hear herself in the pauses. Two ghosts talking to each other.
Shuddering and swearing again, she punched at the eject button, extricated the tape, and tossed the reader back into the workbench as though it might burn her.
"Okay," she said aloud to herself—the silence in the apartment had been tainted, as though it were pregnant with an unseen presence. "So what do I do with you?"
Anakin, she knew, would march right down to the nearest droid dealer and buy a new chassis. Plug the tapes into it, spit whatever data was inside them into the empty brain, and fire it up in the hopes that when he spoke to it Liz would speak back. And maybe when she'd been searching frantically for any sign of the droid, willing her to appear on the street or at the Dancer, Padmé would have felt the same way. But now, the thought of an unfamiliar metal face lighting up, turning to her, and saying her name in a voice that was Liz's and wasn't gave her the damned creeps. Besides, she didn't even know if entering two personalities into a single brain would even work—Liz's brain had been cobbled together from parts, a special kind of broken that a factory-issue processor probably couldn't handle.
But he wouldn't listen to her if she brought that up. He'd insist there was a way to do it. And when that didn't work, he'd spend gods knew how many months hacking into the not-Liz, trying to make it the way it was.
And she'd love him for it. But there were some things you just couldn't fix.
So get rid of them. Do what you wanted to do with the wine.
She walked over to the boarded-up hole, wind whistling faintly through a place where she and Anakin hadn't sealed a seam quite perfectly. If she stuck her fingers in that slit and pulled back on the flimsiboard, she could lean in closer and look down through the nothingness where the patio had been—down the barrel of the building toward the street miles below. She saw herself pushing the tapes through that crack, then letting go—they'd plunge out of sight in the blink of an eye, hurtling to terminal velocity before the pavement shattered them into constellations of fragmented plastic. Liz's ghost splayed out along the duracrete, the magnetic contours of her brain getting trod on or corroded by rain and time.
An end to it. No more lingering maybes.
I could use more endings in my life right now, she thought.
And stepped away from the window.
The wine, the lichen, the globe, all the little knick-knacks and pilfered treasures, she returned to the hole in the floor. Gently lowered the carved-out square of carpet back into place. Shifted the bed back into its former position. Maybe she'd tell Anakin about them when he got home. Maybe she'd just leave them there, away from prying eyes, like Liz had wanted.
The tapes, she decided, could go on the Dancer next time she could make it out there without breaking curfew. Despite Liz's complaining, Padmé couldn't help but think the droid had always liked the ship better than the respectable residences she and her owners had wound up living in. They could stay there, until she'd decided what to do with them.
Maybe they and the ship would just stay there in that warehouse, together, old relics gathering dust.
As Padmé slid the memories into her dresser drawer for now, she couldn't decide if the thought was sad, or somehow comforting.
Republic Archives: Droid Personality Development
Droids that spend a significant amount of time around sentient beings are known to develop behavior patterns akin to independent personalities. These personalities can be erased with a simple factory reset memory wipe. However, if a droid is factory reset and then goes a significant amount of time without another memory wipe, the personality that forms will not entirely match the droid's previous one. The most commonly held hypothesis for the cause of this divergence suggests a combination of environmental factors and extremely minor variations in droid hardware are to blame.
The most controversial study of droid personality development involved researchers interacting with droids in highly controlled, isolated environments. Through repeated memory wipes and identical sets of stimuli, the researchers attempted to create the same personality in a droid multiple times over. The experiment was shut down prior to completion due to ethical concerns raised by synthetic rights groups, who believe that droids are sentient beings and thus fall under the protections of Republic law concerning treatment of citizens.
Shortly after, a similar experiment was started outside the borders of Republic space. Its results have not been made available to the Galactic Republic scientific community.