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“Jos,” I-Five said. Jos stopped, surprised. The droid’s voice hadn’t really changed—it still had that slight, indefinable touch that identified its origin as a vocabulator instead of a larynx—but it was different, somehow. He hardly ever calls anyone by name, he realized suddenly.

I-Five said, “From what I’ve studied of popular culture, I think this is the moment where I’m supposed to remind you of all the wonderful advantages you, as an organic, have over me, a mechanical. Unfortunately, I really can’t think of any. Yes, you are capable of creativity, of flights of imagination that I am not—because my core programming doesn’t encompass such ephemerals. But I don’t miss them. I don’t yearn to be able to understand beauty and art. The same goes for love—and existential life crises such as you seem to be currently experiencing.”

“I don’t believe that. You have, at the very least, a sense of humor—”

“I was programmed with one. Just about all droids that interact with organics on this level are.”

“You wanted to get drunk!”

“True. I didn’t say I wasn’t programmed with emotions. Loyalty is one. Curiosity is another. And my lack of creativity dampers and my expanded synaptic grid allow me to extrapolate feelings. Experiencing things that organics favor—such as mind-altering concoctions— would theoretically help me understand them. And, since I’m stuck in this galaxy with all of you, I need all the data I can get.

“But I’m not the little droid in the children’s tale that wants to be an organic, Jos. I’m a machine. A very complex machine, capable of mimicking the thinking processes of a sentient to an astonishing degree, if I do say so. But a machine, nonetheless. And I have no real desire to be anything else.”

Jos stared at I-Five. He couldn’t have been more astonished if the droid had just turned into a three-headed Kaminoan. Then, somewhat to his surprise, he started to feel angry. He’d just recently had his worldview twisted, was only now starting to get comfortable with the idea that maybe droids shouldn’t be treated like electrospanners with arms, and he was determined not to let I-Five mess with his head again.

He said slowly, “Do you remember, during one of the sabacc games, when we were discussing how a being knows if it’s self-aware?”

“I remember.”

“And you said something along the lines of, To be self-aware enough to ask the question is to have answered it. I think you’re aware enough to answer that question, I-Five. In fact, I think you already have. But now you’re pulling back—you’re denying your self,” Jos said. “I wonder if it might have anything to do with your memory returning?”

I-Five was quiet for what seemed a long time. When he spoke again, Jos could hear a definite tone of wonder in his voice. “I think—comparing subjective neural activity with internal files on the subject—” the droid said, “I think I’m having an anxiety attack.”

24

Sometimes the names did get a little confusing. Most of the time, it was the one the others in the Rimsoo used; after that it was Column, the op-nom bestowed by one of Count Dooku’s Separatist spymasters. Lens, the code name by which Black Sun knew its agent, was the one least often utilized. None of them, of course, was the name bestowed upon the spy at birth, and that was but one of a long list that had changed time and again, as circumstances dictated.

However, Lens was the sobriquet being used now, that being the one the spy’s guest was familiar with. The being sitting facing Lens was ostensibly human, but, in fact, concealed under the adipose rolls of a fat-suit disguise was Kaird, the Nediji assassin and enforcer. The two of them were in an empty office that belonged to a lab supervisor who had contracted a nasty, local form of pneumonia during the recent cold spell. The lab worker, an Askajian, was in the medical ward and wouldn’t be using her room anytime soon.

The ersatz human had just laid out what sounded like the bare essence of a plan to steal a major amount of bota—and a ship in which to transport it. This didn’t make any sense, and Lens was