Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights 01_ Jedi Twilight - Michael Reaves [16]
Along with nearly everyone else in the galaxy, Den had believed that droids were nothing more than machines. True, they were machines that could process enormous amounts of data, and some of the more humanoid ones could mimic sentient behavior to a startling degree. But that was because they were programmed to. Given their memory capacity, and the speed of their neural networks or synaptic grid processors, they could be outfitted with basic responses and reactions and from there heuristically extrapolate the behavior of humans, or Falleen, or Geonosians, or whatever species one wished. But it could only go so far. Creativity dampers, behavioral inhibitor circuits and software, and other built-in limits kept droids from reaching true self-awareness. Thus, they had the same status in galactic society that an electrospanner did. Even slaves on the benighted worlds of the Outer Rim were treated better.
It had been a comforting theory. For most people the same had applied, to a lesser degree, to the clones who made up the majority of the Republic’s army. They were dismissed simply as “meat droids” by most sentients, little better than beasts with the power of speech, because they’d been genetically and psychologically modified to embrace battle and not fear death.
A comforting theory, indeed. The only problem was that there were exceptions. I-Five was such an exception. Oh, yar, bloodline, as the Ugnaughts said. ’Deed he were. The acerbic droid and the cynical reporter had become boon companions during their stint in the hothouse that was Drongar, where the two armies had battled over possession of the miracle plant bota until a mutation of the crop had rendered it useless, and the struggle pointless.
Afterward, Den had accompanied I-Five back to Coruscant to help on a mission that had been the droid’s equivalent of a blood oath. It had taken them several months and many layovers on various and sundry worlds—there was, after all, a war going on—to reach the capital planet, and in the time they’d been here I-Five had made little, if any, progress in his quest, which was to find the son of Lorn Pavan, his former partner. He had come to the reluctant conclusion that Lorn was dead, although he could find little documentation on the particulars; it seemed the facts had been buried deep, in unknown graves. The boy, however, had been raised as a Jedi, and so shouldn’t have been that hard to find—except that, right after they arrived on Coruscant, what had been a Republic suddenly became an Empire, and what with the fighting and the fleeing and all the various other forms of unpleasantness, Den and I-Five had been hard-put just to stay alive. Finally, when the smoke had cleared—as much as it ever did downlevel—they’d learned, to their dismay, that the Jedi had been almost completely massacred.
A few had escaped, it was rumored. It was also rumored that some of them were in hiding right here on Coruscant, and this was what kept I-Five here and searching.
But did it make any sense to keep looking? Den thought about it, somewhat laboriously, one neuron blindly groping through the alcoholic fog to link with another. Though he hated to say it, hated even to think it, he couldn’t help reaching the same conclusion over and over: No. It didn’t. Lorn Pavan’s son was either offplanet or akk chow by now. Either way, there wasn’t a lot that could be done about it. The remaining Jedi had scattered to the four solar winds—a prudent move, in Den’s opinion—and even if Jax Pavan was still somewhere on Coruscant, the odds of bumping into him on a street corner weren’t too good in a planetwide city with trillions of inhabitants.
I-Five’s loyalty to his erstwhile partner, and his determination to honor Lorn’s last request by watching over his son, was commendable. But it was also pointless. “Even his