Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights 01_ Jedi Twilight - Michael Reaves [55]
They burst free of the Core and continued the journey, not slowing; if anything, Kaird realized, they were speeding up, covering thousands of light-years in a second, making the fastest hyperdrive journey seem like the ambling of a spavined old dewback. Then, at last, the simulation began to slow down. They entered a system, flashing past a ringed gas giant, a smaller, unringed one … and finally coming to a stop before a blue-white world, orbiting in the narrow torus between the boiling and freezing points of water. With a shock, Kaird recognized it.
Nedij. His world.
And behind him, softly, the Underlord said, “You just want to go home, don’t you, Kaird?”
twenty
“I can’t say I’m thrilled with this idea,” I-Five said.
“Of course not. You’re never thrilled with my ideas. If it’d been your idea to sell yourself into slavery to a ruthless gangster just to get information, you’d be busting your powerbus cables to try it.”
“Would I.”
“Absolutely,” Den assured the droid as they approached the underground entrance to Rokko’s lair. “Because you’re smarter than the average droid, by far. You’ll find a way to get the intel we need, and then escape. Anything for good ol’ Jax.”
I-Five’s photoreceptors turned toward him, their angle, focus, and intensity registering mild surprise. “Do I detect a note of sarcasm?”
“Just what I need right now—a paranoid droid.” Behind his flip response, however, Den was uncomfortable. I-Five’s remark had stung more than he cared to admit. As much as he’d tried to deny it to himself, as I-Five’s search for Jax Pavan had increased in intensity, Den had found himself of late falling prey to a most unexpected and most unpleasant emotion.
He was jealous.
At first he’d tried to deny it to himself, but it hadn’t taken long to realize the futility of that course. So he’d admitted it, silently, and tried to rationalize his way out, telling himself that his friendship with I-Five would be in no way jeopardized by Lorn’s son, if and when he was found. That didn’t help, either. It was getting to where every time the droid mentioned Jax, Den found himself grinding his teeth.
This is absurd, he told himself. You can’t be insecure about how a droid feels about you. How pathetic is that?
Nevertheless, it was how he felt.
For all you know, I-Five was programmed by Lorn to seek out Jax with all this unswerving devotion. But even as he thought that, he knew it wasn’t the case. Of all the droids Den had ever encountered, I-Five was the only one who was sentient. Part of that, the reporter knew, was either preprogrammed or heuristic mimicry, just as it was with all protocol droids. Creativity dampers and built-in behavioral inhibitors, it was claimed, kept the machines from ever reaching that rarefied level of true sentience reserved for humans and other organics. But I-Five had had his creativity damper removed and most of his BI software expunged. There were some firmware subroutines that were integrated too deeply to be removed without physically damaging his main processor, of course. For example, he could no more commit murder than he could fly by flapping his arms, although he could defend himself and those under his protection. But in addition to the expanded options that the lack of hardware and software provided, Den could not help feeling that I-Five had something more going for him, something indefinable, something that made him more than the sum of his electronic parts.
What it all came down to was that the blasted metal man had free will, to an unprecedented degree. It wasn’t his programming that was driving him so relentlessly to find the son of his friend and partner—it was desire. He searched the mean streets of lower Coruscant because he wanted to find Jax Pavan.
And Den could not help wondering whether, if it ever came down to it, I-Five would show that same level of friendship and devotion for him.
He realized that