Disclaimer: Yes, I used select passages from Legacy of the Force: Betrayal by Aaron Allston in this chapter. But with enough modifications, I think it's fair to say that there's enough originality here, especially since I switched Ben Skywalker with Jacen Solo here.

Through his Force-link to Corran, Jacen could tell that the Jedi Master had run into a spot of trouble with the local security forces that had been guarding the way to Centerpoint Station's gravity control room. And, apparently, Thrackan Sal-Solo had also been part of the group that had cornered Corran; and while Jacen wouldn't have minded helping the Master apprehend his first cousin-once-removed, he and Corran both agreed beforehand that getting to the control room and initiating the self-destruct sequence to the station was the higher priority. Thus, Jacen had opted to take a different path after he entered the same hatch that Corran had taken—he had been hiding in a hovercart fifty meters behind the Master as part of the infiltration plan—but, eventually, he was discovered.

But as a powerful Jedi Knight in his own right, Jacen was able to deflect and redirect the bolts that were fired at him by the very security officers who fired upon him as he ran toward the control room. Unfortunately, he wasn't as efficient as he could have been, given that the Fallanassi illusions that he cast either became too scrambled or they flashed out of existence against his will; as a result, because of the forces that he had to counter, Jacen, more often than not, found himself taking a few nicks and grazes along his arms and legs as he ran, and eventually stumbled, toward the control room.

The constant reminder of his newfound inefficiency as an illusion-caster was something that he tried desperately to put out of his mind lest he lose focus and get himself killed. It had started not long after he felt Jaina die a year ago; since then, no matter hard he tried to refine his skills in casting White Current illusions, Jacen found himself unable to improve in any significant way in that area. The same went for the other non-Jedi techniques that he had learned during his post-Yuuzhan Vong War sojourn; it was as if the severance of his twin bond had weakened his abilities in an undefinable way, like a scar that could never be fully healed.

Nevertheless, Jacen was still powerful even as a relatively normal Jedi in his own right, as he still appeared to be a whirling green vortex of death and destruction to all those who came in his way. Indeed, in embracing that dark part of himself that Vergere had said was part of all life—and that included the still Forceless Yuuzhan Vong—Jacen was using every bit of his own power to keep himself up and able to not only work through the pain that was coursing through his body, but also by taking it and adding it to his own power.

Time became irrelevant as he made it to that control room, as well as the number of lives that he took from the security officers. All there was to Jacen were his lightsaber, the opponents who tried and failed to get in his way, and his own single drive to get to his destination so that the galaxy had one less threat against it.

Within less than a quarter of an hour, he made it to the control room. And after mowing down the two guards there and using one of their security passes to enter, Jacen slashed at the door controls with his lightsaber before he turned to face the chamber. There, he saw a massive droid, about the size of six or so Hutts, with mismatched colored parts of various makes and designs. It sat before him, where the main control table for the station should have been, like a lazy student with poor posture.

Jacen stopped in his tracks as he looked at it; with the door leading inside shut behind him, Jacen didn't feel as if he were in any immediate danger from whatever remaining forces would be coming here soon.

"Jacen?" the droid asked in a voice that was as familiar as it was heartbreaking. "What are you doing here?"

The Knight froze in shock once he heard that voice; indeed, his lightsaber deactivated and fell out of his hand before he spoke. "Anakin?"

"Of course it's me, Jace!" the droid replied. "I mean, I know I'm a lot bigger than when we last saw each other, but surely, you can still pick me out in a crowd, right?"

"Anakin," Jacen said as he took a step forward. "What... what..." He gritted his teeth as anger overcame him. "What the hell are you?!"

The droid tilted its head as it regarded Jacen with its large holocam eyes. "I just told you, Jacen. It's me, Anakin, your younger brother. What's gotten into you, man?"

"You're not Anakin," Jacen intoned.

The droid's whole body stiffened. "Yes, I am! What makes you think I'm not?"

"Because Anakin died nine years ago!" Jacen practically shouted. "I watched him die! I felt him die! Whoever—whatever—you are, you're not him!"

"Jacen... I think you need to calm down."

The Knight quickly looked around for his dropped lightsaber, and when he found it, he lifted up a hand and reached out for his weapon through the Force.

But then he convulsed, his entire body twitching in pain that he couldn't utilize as part of his strength, as his vision blurred. After Jacen shook his head when he felt an opportunity to clear his senses, he found himself floating a meter off the deck with the air around him shimmering.

"I'm sorry about that," the droid with Anakin's voice said. "It's an anti-Jedi defensive feature installed by our cousin, Thrackan. You remember him, right?"

Jacen levelled a hate-filled gaze at the droid. "He's not your cousin, and I'm not your brother!"

"If you think that's gonna convince me to let you down from there, big brother, you're sorely mistaken. You gotta be a bit nicer to me, and explain why you think I'm not Anakin."

"Because you're not! You're just a droid with his voice! You're probably even the reason this whole station is operating the way it is right now! They probably harvested Anakin's DNA from the times he was here somehow and put them in you to-"

"I'm not a droid, Jacen," the thing interrupted sharply. "I'm your brother. I'm a human, just like you, born and grown as such. So where do you get off saying things like that?"

Jacen looked at the droid with an incredulous expression. "How can you not know what you are? Have you ever looked into a mirror? Or just look at your arms, your legs! Do they look human to you?"

The droid regarded said appendages for a moment before returning its gaze upon Jacen. "I don't see how they're not," it said with a curious tone.

Jacen sighed in frustration. "You've been programmed not to recognize yourself for what you are. I can see that now. You probably also see me as a kid or teenager, don't you?"

"Well, yeah. How old are you supposed to be, Jacen?"

The Knight shook his head. "It doesn't matter. But what does matter is that I think I can help prove to you that you are what I say you are."

"Is that so? Well, I'm gonna love hearing from you how I'm just some machine programmed solely for the purpose of operating this station while your real brother has been dead for nearly a decade."

Jacen nodded. "If you'll let me, I have a holocam. I'll record you and then you can look at the footage; maybe your programming won't overcome the reality of what you're about to see."

The droid was silent for a moment before it said, "Fine. But no funny business, Jacen. You can't use the Force here, and anything else you might try might end up hurting you more than anything else in this room."

Jacen said nothing before he pulled out a holocam, as promised, from within the folds of his robes. But before he could activate it, it flew from his grasp and into the droid's.

"Relax, Jacen," it said before the human could voice a response. "I'm just making sure it's not a weapon." It placed the holocam into its opened mouth-slot; once more, Jacen got the image of a Hutt, though, this time, it was a member of that species devouring some kind of eel in one gulp.

A few moments later, during which Jacen said nothing—not even to point out that what the droid did was impossible for a human to do—the holocam exited the mouth slot and returned to the droid's hand.

"I'm satisfied that this isn't a weapon, or programmed for any activity that a holocam wouldn't do." It then floated the device back into Jacen's grasp, as if it had the Force.

Of course, Jacen still didn't say anything; he doubted that this thing could access the Force. More than likely, magnets or some other kind of mechanism had been installed in this room to give the droid the impression that it had the Force.

Putting the technicalities of what could be happening here out of his mind, Jacen activated the holocam and held it up before the droid.

"Okay, Anakin," Jacen said the name in a mocking tone, "say hi to Mom and Dad."

The droid waved an arm. "Hi, Mom, Dad. I'm workin' hard but havin' a good time. Hope I'll see you soon."

"Alright then," Jacen said evenly as he shut the holocam off. He kept his feelings in check for what would happen next; having heard his dead brother's voice coming from this thing, addressing their parents as if it was a normal teenager on a student exchange program, had added a bitter tinge of sadness to the anger that Jacen was trying to hold down. He held the holocam up again. "Now look at what was just recorded."

Again, the 'cam flew from Jacen's grip and into the droid's so that it could be inserted through its mouth-slot. Upon taking it out moments later, and just as Jacen started hearing voices outside the room, the droid said, "It's a lie."

"You know that can't be. There's no way I could have altered the footage; all I did was just press play and stop."

"I must have missed something."

"No, you didn't," Jacen replied firmly. "What you just saw is the reality that your programming won't let you see."

The droid's somehow stiffened even further. "This... this can't be."

"It is. You're not Anakin Solo. You're not my brother. You're just a droid made from his biometrics designed to operate this station for my cousin Thrackan Sal-Solo so that all Five Worlds of Corellia can use it as a giant gun to back up their secession from the Galactic Alliance. And if you really are anything like the real Anakin, you'll know that's a bad thing. Centerpoint Station cannot be in the hands of a madman like Thrackan, especially not when he can use it while the Galactic Alliance is in the middle of a war. So many lives can be lost, and not just for the Five Worlds' defense. So if you know what's good for the galaxy, you will let me free from this prison and allow me to destroy this station so that there can be one less danger to the galaxy."

Silence fell in the control room even as the voices outside seemed to get louder; no doubt the surviving guards who had yet to even be injured by either Jacen or Corran were trying to open the door manually. Jacen thanked the Force in his mind for the Corellians' arrogance in not having any easy manual controls to get the doors on this station opened in case of a systems failure, like the one that he had made with his lightsaber after entering this room.

Finally, the droid with Anakin's voice said, "If you were really Jacen, you would have protested the destruction of this station. There are a lot of innocent people here. They don't deserve to die."

"Those lives wouldn't be lost. An emergency evacuation code is sent and then the self-destruct sequence doesn't occur for another ten minutes."

"Ten minutes?" The droid sounded offended. "You expect everyone on a station this large to evacuate in ten minutes?"

"It's not ideal, I know," Jacen said with a genuine note of regret in his tone. "But it's all the time that could be afforded without, in turn, giving the security here ample time to find a way to deactivate the self-destruct program."

"Can you please give me that data, Jacen?"

"Why?"

"I want to see if there's another way to make sure this station isn't a threat to the galaxy again without destroying it. In other words, I'd do something that you would've done back then."

Jacen felt caught off-guard by the droid's accusatory tone. On the one hand, he felt offended that this thing would dare presume moral superiority over him. But on the other... he couldn't help but wince internally at just how correct it really was.

Jacen's teenage self would have found another way to make sure Centerpoint would have been neutralized without jeopardizing or sacrificing so many innocent lives; or, at the very least, he would have tried. He missed that part of himself even as he looked back at it and thought about how naive he was.

He also thought about just how right his teenage self had been, too, even if there were so many things he now knew were wrong.

"Well, Jacen?" the droid asked.

The door behind the Knight opened by a meter, only for it to promptly slam shut right back down.

"Don't worry," the droid said. "I can make sure you have time. Now, please, give me the self-destruct data, Jacen."

He looked warily at the thing for a moment longer before sighing. "Fine." He reached into the folds of his robes again and produced the datacard that would have sealed Centerpoint's fate.

Said card flew into the droid's free hand—the one that wasn't still holding the holocam that revealed its true nature to itself—and it inserted the small object into its mouth-slot.

Moments later, it said, "I can't destroy this station, Jacen."

The Jedi looked in horror at the droid.

"But I agree," it interrupted before the Knight could say anything, "that Thrackan can't use it. So I'll compromise."

Jacen then dropped to the floor, now freed of the stasis field that had been keeping him afloat. He landed in a crouch before he looked back to the droid with his dead brother's voice.

"But first, tell me... how did the real Anakin die?"

Jacen's lips firmed as painful memories of what happened over Myrkr, mixed in with his continued grief for Jaina, surfaced their way into his mind. "He gave his life... so that..." He did his best to keep his voice from breaking. "Jaina and I... and our friends... could live."

A moment later, the droid said, "That's all I needed to know. I'm installing a procedure that will scramble what the station thinks Anakin Solo is. And another one to purge my memory in me and all my backups. Without those files, I doubt they'll be able to reconstruct what I've done and they can never operate Centerpoint properly again."

"You're giving your own life," Jacen said in realization.

"Just like the real Anakin did. Or, rather, what Anakin Solo did. In that case, I shall die as Anakin Sal-Solo, since Thrackan can be seen as my father in a way. Fitting, isn't it?" He then had the holocam returned to Jacen's grasp, who promptly returned it into the folds of his robes.

Jacen didn't realize that tears were forming in his eyes. He didn't even realize just how, in the past few minutes, he had gone from hating this droid just for thinking and sounding like Anakin to now feeling a renewed sense of pending grief, as if he were losing his brother all over again.

The droid pointed to a door a few paces to Jacen's right. "There's an unguarded chamber right over there. It leads to a corridor that parallels the one outside. You should leave now."

"Thank you," Jacen found himself saying. He turned to leave.

"Oh, and, Jacen."

"Yes?"

"How are Jaina and Tahiri?"

Jacen's breath caught in him. "They're fine, Anakin. They're both fine."

The droid then said, "That's the one lie that you've told me the entire time."

Jacen grimaced. "I'm sorry." He turned again and didn't look back.