"Strictly speaking, there doesn't seem to be any such thing as old age. You can keep chicken tissues alive indefinitely in a nutrient broth."

"You know, it's a funny thing," I said, "I never had the slightest desire to live in a nutrient broth."

Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

Prologue: Ducks in Time

For all his faults, Count Dooku was an educated man and an ardent supporter of advances in scientific research. After the activity surrounding the fall of the Republic settled down, Emperor Palpatine discovered that vast amounts of money were being funneled into unnecessary war research and promptly cut the grant funding available to the scientists at S3F (the Separatist Special Sciences Facility). At first, they just ran around screaming. They had gotten used to unlimited resources and most of the grad students could barely fix anything because they had the money to just order new equipment. After a while, they accepted their lot and curbed some of the more extravagant projects. Only a small group remained concerned, and not just about the funding.

The small group called a secret meeting of all the scientists. It was spearheaded by Kevin Nickells, a blue Twi-lek, and Kate Shuskey, a human.

"So they kind of just killed all the Jedi," said Kevin. "Doesn't that seem suspicious? What if they decide to kill all the scientists next? Everybody knows that after the Jedi, scientists are the most important."

The scientists knew all about Order 66 from their colleagues on Kamino, colleagues that were, for the most part, dead. When the Kaminoan scientists realized they had been growing and modifying clones meant to kill the Jedi, they protested that it was unethical. They ended up food for the fishes, literally, since Kamino is largely a water planet.

A medicinal chemist raised her hand to respond to Kevin's query.

"Before they kill us, will we get the funding back?"

So it was only a couple of dozen scientists that decided to do something about the dangerous conditions, and do something fast. Kate pointed out that now was the perfect time to take advantage of the leftovers from the war, namely, the droids and battleships. Over the next few weeks, Kate and her team stole a decent number of starships that were supposed to be de-commissioned and close to 800 droids. They packed up their research equipment onto the ships and used a rather finicky, never properly tested mind-wiping device on all the other scientists to make them forget the plan. Several scientists forgot who they were and one became incapable of turning to the left, but that didn't seem to impede their research activities too much.

The only person who almost gave Kate's team trouble was the director of S3F, Clare Myoollen. Clare threatened to go tell on them. Kate decided it was not worth their time to argue with her and hit Clare with a brick one day. She and Kevin dragged Clare to the room with the mind-wiping device. They shot her with the ray but it didn't seem to affect her at first. Clare regained consciousness and laughed at them, saying that their stupid machine did not work on her species. She was a red, squishy, floating octopus, so who knows? Kate pulled the handle and set the machine to its maximum setting. Something inside Clare's head popped, one of her eyes expanded to three times the size of the other, and she was never the same after that. Kevin and Kate took her with them on their stolen ship, not because they felt bad about making her mentally retarded but because they figured they could use her as a test subject for something.

After everybody was ready, the scientists left that galaxy far, far away and traveled to another galaxy far, far away. They went so far that Imperial forces could not be bothered to follow them. There were already rebellions going on and the Emperor did not have time to chase down a small group of people who had left quietly, peacefully, and taken things that were going to be thrown out anyway.

The scientists chose to settle in a system with habitable planets, but very few lived on the planets. Most continued to reside in their orbiting ships. Droids did everything. They collected fuel, fixed equipment, cleaned, cooked, and even gave haircuts. The scientists had a wry sense of humor and named their new home the Space Colony Disaster, or SCD. In a biological and evolutionary sense, the space colony was a disaster because nobody reproduced except the lab animals. In fact, one of the requirements for living at SCD was that everybody be sterilized. As Kate said, "We are here to do science, not create a new civilization. We know how that goes."

So that is how SCD came to be. Now we must go back in time to the Clone Wars. First, let's take a look at what transpired after the deaths of Nancy Tam and General Grievous. It was already hinted that Count Dooku decided to have Grievous cloned. Using his Sith mind tricks, he convinced the clone that it had been in a terrible accident that wiped its memory. Same old, same old, Count. The clone was basically like Grievous before he met Nan, only slightly more psychotic and, interestingly, better at military strategy. It wasn't built exactly like the former General and Obi Wan Kenobi didn't have too much trouble blowing its brains up.

The Jedi knew Count Dooku cloned Grievous and it didn't surprise them. The Separatists cloned everything, from deceased pets to Count Dooku's testicle1. Ahsoka Tano was rather upset. She encountered the clone when it was sent to bust up Hondo's place on Florrum. Ahsoka found the experience of battling somebody who looked almost exactly like a dead friend unsettling.

A few months before Nan and Grievous died, Kevin and Kate teamed up to work on an experiment involving a nutrient medium that could keep creatures alive after devastating injuries. Kate wrote Nan about this project and Nan responded with some sharply worded criticism about Kate's intellect, Kevin's lack of maturity, and the small likelihood of success. After a while Nan suggested several improvements that led to the first positive results. At the time, there was a problem getting lab animals and they were not able to order rats. Ducks, however, arrived in time for them to test the prototype of the nutrient medium. The medium only seemed to work on certain types of injuries. Kate found that a nice snap of the neck could be healed by the medium 80% of the time. At one point she suggested that Kevin injure the ducks himself.

Kevin looked at a duck in a cage. The duck looked at him.

"I can't!" He said. "Not when it's looking at me with those soulful eyes!"

Kate decided that it was time to test the medium on something bigger than a duck and looked meaningfully at Kevin. She got a hammer and chased him all around the building until he climbed into a ship and locked himself in.

"How could you kill me, Kate?" He asked. "I'm your partner."

"We both know that I'm the one who does the important work," said Kate.

Eventually she left him alone, but after more and more ducks were brought to life (only to be cooked and eaten) with different near-fatal injuries, the two scientists really wanted to try it on something bigger, something sentient. They considered killing many of their colleagues, of course, but people were onto them and started walking around with guard droids. Kate went to a hospital and upset lots of people by attempting to steal freshly dead bodies. She was arrested and put in jail for a few days. Kevin went to a battlefield and tried to obtain some dead clone bodies but he nearly got his head blown off and after that, complained constantly about his PTSD. It was not hard to obtain a body. The medical school did it all the time. They just needed the body to be very recently dead. They brought some dogs and cats back to life but their chance to be God came when Nan sent Kate an email.

"Hey Kate," it read, "I don't really like you but I'm on a Republic ship right now and I'm going to die in a few hours, so I want to warn you about something. I told the Jedi about S3F and they might come bomb you guys soon. Just FYI. Tell Clare I hate her. See you never, Nan."

Kate got excited and replied to ask Nan how, where, and when she was going die. She did not get a response but she ran up to Clare's office and got Clare to telephone Count Dooku's secretary, for it seemed likely the Count was involved. Clare was overjoyed to find out that Nan was going to die. Nan had given Clare a lot of trouble. Where was that Force-dampening machine she had been working on? Where were her progress reports?

Kate did not have time for Clare's grumbling and ran to get Kevin. They did not have a lot of time. They went to a janitorial closet and grabbed some overalls. Then they created some fake passes and took a shuttle to the End of Days, where they hid before anybody arrived. After the commotion died down, they looked around until they entered the prison yard and spotted some droids cleaning up Nan and Grievous' bodies. They high-fived. Yes, I know, there is something seriously wrong with Kevin and Kate. The fact that they could have, perhaps, saved Nan and the General's lives before they were killed never crossed their minds.

It was simple to convince the droids to let them, dressed as janitors, take the bodies. They had the nutrient medium on their shuttle and put the bodies in it. Grievous gave them some trouble because putting metal in the medium was bad for it. Once they got back to S3F, they did the best they could to remove it. They removed more than just the metal.

A few days after they did this, a package Kevin and Kate had been waiting for arrived. It contained parts for the mind-wiping device they would soon assemble and put to good use. Being fickle, foolish, and completely immoral, the scientists locked the nutrient broths containing Nan, Grievous, and 23 ducks in a cryo-chamber and started playing with their new toys. After they stole a ship to escape the Empire, they loaded the cryo-chamber on it along with other experiments they thought they'd come back to someday.

And Nan and Grievous remained on ice, frozen in time, for the next ten years.

1 One of them became numb and gooey after it got bitten by a millipede.