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Chapter 33

Black Out the Ledger

Julian walked through the holographic data submerging stellar cartography. Blue-hued medical files lit up his face.

He was starting to get a picture of what happened on Mareth. But he still couldn't isolate where it began, or more accurately, with whom. Patient zero was the key. Did someone make this? Was it a mutated animal virus? This might be the greatest puzzle of Julian's career.

"What is your progress?" Quinn asked.

"Minimal," Julian answered without looking.

"Customarily, I would say, 'You are the best, so you will solve it.' But I know nothing of your talents. You may fail completely."

Julian replied mildly, "Customarily, I would tell you to go to Hell. But I know nothing of your mood."

The irascible Jedi walked through the data. "Have you ascertained anything?"

"I keep coming back to how quickly it spread. It ravaged the planet in less than a day."

"Indeed: confounding. Even airborne transmission shouldn't work that fast."

Julian swiped through file after file. "I entertained the idea it was spread through their cognators. But again: a day. It's simply not possible."

"Hmm. It moved like the Force."

Julian's palm froze in the air. It moved like the Force. He spun on his heel, leapt through a holographic haze to reach a discarded data set. He swiped like a mad man until finding his target. His eyes comically widened. He exhaled raggedly.

"What is it?" asked Quinn.

"You're bloody brilliant!"

Padme asked gently, "Why do you think it's real? What did it say to you?"

Obi-Wan pulled on his beard. A twitch in his stony profile echoed his mania. "It doesn't matter what it said. For most of my life, I believed Sidious was the apogee of evil. But what I felt—" He brought a fist to his mouth against rising bile. His face was pallid, and there was rime on the blood too slow inside him. "I think I met an Architect," he forced himself to speak. "With more death in his wake than you can possibly imagine."

Padme blinked. She nodded on delay, recalling the story. "Two factions: the Mercians and the Levolents. The Mercy Seat was made to counter the Levolents' power."

"This wasn't just a Levolent," Obi-Wan said. "It was him—The One, so steeped in the Dark Side he transcended solid form. He became an entity unto himself. Like the Force."

Padme didn't like the sound of that. "Then the Mercians didn't prevail. If they had, they would've destroyed him."

"How do you kill a god?"

She furrowed her brow. "A god?"

"What else do you call a being as powerful as the Force?"

"I call him my enemy," Padme said fiercely.

An appreciative smirk flashed on his face. "Then I hope he is afraid," Obi-Wan said, pushing some hair behind her ear. He quickly withdrew, lest he go any further. "Let's see if they're ready."

It's a common refrain: I wish I could see the world through another person's eyes. Every day is a struggle to understand other beings; there is, regrettably, a limit to empathy; and perhaps empathy is a thought experiment impossible to implement, born of our arrogance, or of our desperation to avoid conflict, which inevitably arrives in spite of our straining, because in the end, we can only project ourselves onto the lives of others, and so far as I can tell, every man and woman is so distinct they may as well be their own species.

Coda looked through Logan's eyes as displayed on a monitor. The recorder was fast-forwarding through his primary school years. It would be a few hours before they reached his career.

She propped her elbow on the table, placed her chin on her palm. "Do you ever wonder what it means?"

Brummel said, "I don't look for the meaning of anything."

Coda pressed on despite his indifference: "Our whole lives, we wrestle with anxiety over dying. But it all ends in a moment, like fizz in a drink. And then we're only what others makes us. Can you really be a ghost without mediation?"

"There's no such things as ghosts."

"I hope you change your mind," Coda said lightly. "I'll be awful lonely, if I'm left unconjured."

Something changed in Brummel's eyes, but she couldn't place it. "You're going to outlive me."

"How do you know?" She looked off to find Obi-Wan entering, Padme at his side. They spared a glance at the Master before turning to Coda.

Obi-Wan asked, "Any lucky yet?"

"It'll be a few hours," Coda said. "We can't go any faster without damaging data."

Outside the lab, at the end of the corridor, the clean hum of the elevator suggested a new arrival. Obi-Wan asked the Master: "Expecting company?"

"No," said the Kelbrian, "but you weren't expected either."

Obi-Wan's fingers rested on his belt. He released his held breath when a sprinting figure coalesced into Julian. "Doctor," he sighed. "What are you doing here?"

Julian doubled over, hands on his knees. Had he run the whole way?

"I know—" he hissed between breaths, "—how the plague spread."

Obi-Wan felt Brummel's anger leak through his shield. He'd never met anyone with a stronger mental barrier. That it failed Brummel now was deeply unsettling.

"It didn't spread through the air," Julian caught his breath. "It spread through the Force."

Padme's head jerked back. "What?"

"It attacks the midichlorians," Julian explained. "Every survivor has one thing in common: low Force sensitivity. This wasn't nature being cruel. I think it was designed," he said grimly. "And I've found patient zero. She's in this room."

She. A sudden coldness hit Coda's core. She stammered at the doctor: "What?!—That—that isn't true!"

"It's undeniable," Julian said. "You have an artificial antibody against the disease."

She looked back at Obi-Wan with doe-eyed panic. "Obi-Wan, I swear! I have no idea what he's talking about!"

"I do," Brummel said quietly. Something bordering on remorse colored his voice. He climbed to his feet, pushing through their stunned silence: "It's true she created it. But she wasn't alone."

"Who helped her?" Padme choked out.

"I did..." He gestured at the Master. "He did." Finally, Brummel turned to Obi-Wan. "And you did."

Only the Force kept Obi-Wan from staggering back. "Me?"

From anyone else, Brummel's earnest expression might have seemed kind. "A version of you," the Sentinel clarified. "A later iteration. One who became what you'll inevitably be. He said he came back in time, to fix what went wrong. And that he spent the last thirty years learning to see the future. That is: possible futures. He'd prevent, at any cost, the Republic's annihilation."

"But the plague—why?" Julian demanded.

"He said that in every future he saw, the Republic was destroyed, when the Sith came to realize Mareth's significance. Every time, the Sith found the tablet with coordinates to the super-weapon. There was only one future where their victory was in doubt. In that future, he cut them off from the planet by releasing a plague. He knew the Republic would quarantine Mareth."

Obi-Wan felt husked out, a shell for the taxidermist. For the moment, he was numb, but shame soon enough would feast on the shell. "I couldn't... I wouldn't..."

"But you did," Brummel said coldly. "You created the plague. I was young, and dumb, and I followed you. We're swimming in blood, Kenobi."

Julian looked at Coda, who was openly weeping. "What about her?"

"The plague was transmitted through the Force. He wasn't strong enough to do it on his own. He needed her..."

Coda swiped at her ruined mascara. Freckles peeked through her makeup, glistening from tears. She looked every bit the little girl she fought not to be. "Me? I'm no one..."

Brummel's gaze seemed to come from an impossible distance, though he was right there beside her. Completely unveiled, he stared into her eyes. "You're the last of the Mercians. The only surviving Architect. You're two million years old."

Obi-Wan asked Julian, "Doctor, is that possible?"

"Our cells regenerate perfectly—until the point they don't," Julian offered. "If that point never came, if regeneration perpetually continued, there's no good reason she couldn't live forever."

Padme demanded, "Why doesn't she remember?"

"She couldn't live with what she'd done," the Master said. "So she asked me for a reset."

"How could I do this?" Coda sobbed into her hands. "I'm a monster..."

"Were a monster," Brummel corrected her. "The woman who did that no longer exists. And she never held a candle to Obi-Wan Kenobi, contriver of genocide."

Obi-Wan turned away. His vision was fuzzy. He couldn't breathe. He grasped for a console. It barely held him up. Genocide. Genocide. By his own hand. It wasn't Sidious, Vader. He killed these people.

The Negotiator. The perfect Jedi. Myth and lies. Obi-Wan was evil. He always had been. It only took some trauma to finally turn him. Killing millions of innocents... if that's what it took to save the Republic, then it wasn't worth saving.

He felt Padme's eyes on him. Felt the contents of her mind like so much steam. There was none of the warmth she typically possessed.

Julian challenged the premise. "'A later iteration,'" he repeated. "You say he came back in time. How? Is time travel even possible?"

The Master said too eagerly, "Ah! Quite possible, I assure you. I tried to learn how he did it, but he was rather evasive. Still, I ran every test. He was, indeed, Obi-Wan Kenobi." He chuckled at a memory, absurdly serene. "I wish he'd stayed longer. Fascinating man! And our plague was a stroke of genius. It's some of my best work."

"Your best work!" Julian exploded. "You killed 600 million people! I'm glad you had fun, you bloody bastard! Tell that to the fucking parents of all the children you killed!"

The Master flinched back, genuinely shaken. "Doctor, you heard him say it. We didn't have a choice."

"And just how do you know that?" Julian growled. "Because he had a vision? Well, I hate to break it to you, but Jedi visions are bollocks. They thought bloody Darth Vader would bring balance to the Force!"

Obi-Wan's knuckles went white. The doctor wasn't wrong. Neither was Brummel. The Jedi trusted their instincts no matter the results. "Where is he now?" Obi-Wan croaked.

"No one knows," said Brummel. "He's a void in the Force."

"A void?"

"It took all your power to spread the plague. You burned out like a star. Keeping your connection to the Force would've killed you. Whatever you had left, it needed a release valve. Somewhere to go. So you channeled it into me. Just as Coda did."

Obi-Wan swallowed. "That's why you're so strong. You took their powers."

"It's a burden, I assure you."

Padme found her voice, or rather, she constructed it, the way she did on the floor of the Senate. It was even, calm, and terribly strained. "Our mission doesn't change. We need to find the tablet. The answer's still in Logan's memories."

"So that's it?" scoffed Julian. "You want to pretend this didn't happen?"

"Of course she does," Brummel sneered. "She's a lovesick puppy."

She didn't take the bait. Her mouth was a stubborn line. "I'm not pretending anything. I'm reminding you why we're here."

Obi-Wan couldn't force himself to focus on the task. He was living the same Hell as Brummel and Julian.

In his prepubescent years, Qui-Gon was a father. His master forgave him when he couldn't forgive himself. He'd say: "Obi-Wan, you are not your worst day." Yet I have to believe, some days are so bad, they black out the ledger.

Surely evil is some men's destiny. But it's a very small number. Most evil men were not fated to be so. It's the choices made that put you on a path. Now, there are certainly off-ramps, myriad opportunities to find another road. But it doesn't sweep up wreckage; that's there for eternity.

All of us are cruel, and most of us are kind. But again: the ledger. What is that kindness when measured against the pain we've wrought upon the world? Obi-Wan Kenobi killed 600 million people. Did his ledger have room for anything else?

"My time will come," Obi-Wan rasped.