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By Root 1416 0

fixed her inner optic scanner on the golden droid. She knew how unnerving it could be to other droids when they noticed that she—a humanoid model—possessed that third optic scanner, just in from the standard left unit. It was not in the design specs of EVs or any other model. Some called it a design flaw. Proof that she had been put together the wrong way, as if that might explain her ambitions and her most undroidlike appetites. But Ninedenine understood that third scanner for what it truly was—the gift that allowed her to sense beyond what any other droid could sense, to never-before-quantified dimensions of experience, completely bypassing the signal-to-noise ratio of ordinary droid sensation.

Ninedenine made her third optic scanner blink deliberately out of sync with her main scanning cycle. “You are a protocol droid, are you not?”

The new prisoner did not even have to begin to speak for Ninedenine to know the answer to that question. His supercilious pose and posturing proclaimed him to be a protocol droid of the highest, most irritatingly officious order.

“I am See-Threepio,” the droid began, redundandy. Already Ninedenine was growing tired of it. “Human-cyborg—”

“Yes or no will do,” Ninedenine said sharply. Give a protocol droid its way and half the shift would be taken up with meaningless gabble. Binary was best in dealing with such units.

“Well, yes,” the golden droid replied more satisfactorily.

“How many languages do you speak?” Ninedenine called up the household’s duty roster on her command console. She hoped there would be no opening for a protocol droid. She would enjoy showing this one the wonders of her workshop …

“I am fluent in over six million forms of communication, and can readily—”

“Splendid,” Ninedenine snapped, cutting off the droid again as she saw an opening did exist. “We have been without an interpreter since our master got angry with our last protocol droid and disintegrated him.”

Ninedenine tried to detect any reaction to that news on the droid’s part, but was momentarily distracted by the snorting guffaw from the second Gamorrean guard sitting behind her, and then by the transmission of circuit-shivering pain from the silver courier droid on the traction-test bed, whose right-side appendages suddenly failed with twin bursts of live current.

“Disintegrated …?” the golden droid repeated, trying to make sense of what was going on. Ninedenine wondered if it too had picked up the pain transmission from the dismembered droid, and was experiencing the first touch of disturbance. Pain-simulator buttons were supposedly restricted technology, typically installed only in those droids who had to interact with organics at the most personal level. Strike a protocol droid on the head, for instance, and it would respond that the blow had hurt. Such empathy toward potentially damaging physical sensation was supposed to give them deeper understanding of organics. But as far as Ninedenine was concerned, it just made protocol droids better subjects for her experiments.

And Ninedenine did like to experiment.

“Guard,” Ninedenine commanded, “this protocol droid might be useful. Fit him with a restraining bolt and take him back up to His Excellency’s main audience chamber.”

The Gamorrean guard pulled the droid back toward the doorway leading to Ninedenine’s workshop—at least, what she had conditioned everyone working in the dungeon to think of as her only workshop.

“Artoo,” the golden droid bleated as he disappeared from view, “don’t leave me.” But by then, it was too late.

The companion to whom the protocol droid had uselessly appealed was a banged-up R2 unit which Ninedenine decided should have been recycled long ago. Surprisingly, in response to the protocol droid’s plea, it released a torrent of rapid binary invective that Ninedenine had to step down by a factor of ten to catch all the subtleties. The little R2’s insults were impressive and imaginative coming from one so insignificant, but ultimately of less interest than the possibilities the golden droid had presented. Ninedenine scanned the roster