Star Wars_ Tales From Jabba's Palace - Kevin J. Anderson [107]
The corridor barricade swept open and a snuffling Gamorrean guard shuffled in with two new prisoners. But that did not distract Ninedenine from hungrily observing what happened as the glowing energy inducers were lowered onto the GNK’s appendages. In response to the sudden application of heat, coolant fluid vaporized and the relief valves in the Power Droid’s outer covering bled off the resultant vapor with a satisfying hiss. Sensing an impending loss of function, the GNK broadcast a futile, wide-spectrum, multiband signal for assistance, some of it actually in the audible frequencies to which most organic life-forms were limited. It was programmed panic, pure and urgent. Like higher-dimensional music to Ninedenine’s exquisitely tuned acoustic sensors.
Ignoring for the moment the Gamorrean guard and the new prisoners, Ninedenine racked up the gain on her internal receptors, savoring the intensity of it all. She concentrated her meta-analytical functions on the high-frequency carrier wave generated by the pain-simulator button newly connected to the GNK’s central circuits. That signal was … delicious. It was an organic term, Ninedenine knew, but apt, so apt—calling up associative memory files of texture and flavor and shifting densities of sensory input that no self-inflicted rewiring could ever achieve. Ninedenine could be sure of that. She had rewired herself many times in the past, all to no effect, much as an organic life-form might draw a cutting implement against its outer covering to delicately release the oxygen/energy transfer fluid circulating within.
Ninedenine had studied closely that organic act of somatic rearrangement, and knew that it was often undertaken by the organic creatures who were caged in the corridor walls of Jabba’s dungeons. Given a year or two or five or ten within this dark domain, even the best of them would succumb to ravaging their own tentacles or clawing at their own light sensors.
To Ninedenine, such actions were the addictively elegant expressions of a higher-dimensional logic pathway which only she among droids had the gift to comprehend—first by an accident of manufacture, it had seemed, but now augmented by her own deliberate and ongoing modifications. To organics, such acts of self-inflicted, physical alteration were second nature, a state which Ninedenine yearned to achieve and often felt maddeningly close to experiencing. Indeed, there was much within the organic mind which Ninedenine felt certain was comparable to her own. Not in quality of intellect—she was positive she had no equal among cellular-based processors in that regard. But in appreciation of sensation—that was how Ninedenine preferred to characterize her avocation. The savoring of the sine waves of discomfort. Plunging into the algorithms of despair. Racing through the oscillating peaks and valleys emitted by circuits strained far past their design and logic loads. True, for now, her internal receptors allowed her only the binary nature of droids to work with, but once she had accessed enough datastorage space and enough co-processors at sufficiently wide bandwidths, there would be no limit to the sensations she would be able to induce, record, digitize, and play back to the nth repetition, all exactingly coaxed from her mechanistic brethren.
Simply put, and Ninedenine did cherish simplicity, she knew that what she did was an act of creation—an art form. Though trying to explain to an organic that a droid such as she could appreciate art was like trying to explain that a droid could feel pain.
Droids could feel pain, of course. One of the two new prisoners coming her way was proof of that—a golden protocol droid from the looks of it, buffed to a courtly gleam, completely out of place in this warren of dank tunnels, decaying power conduits, and scurrying, fur-covered, organic scavengers.
“Ah, good,” Ninedenine said as the prisoners approached, “new acquisitions.” She