The germs of impossible

[Zee]

Following the unexpected announcements of the Jedi Order, Zee had spent five days alone, seething with the sort of pent-up emotions that were best expressed by teenagers in dark clothes slamming doors, shouting at you that you don’t understand (a typical image of a Sith Acolyte). Close enough. The world had gone mad and she lost the grasp on the little she thought she understood about it.

One should have a cynical view on these things.

Because she was a Jedi, that meant she’d spent a lot of time in the darkness, shuddering. You see, some bits of her subconscious waged an eons-old war against sensitive electronics, particularly indoor illumination. To glitch circuits had become a reflex of fright. She feared darkness. Therefore, it must have been psychological. But Zee, the insightful mathematician, couldn’t see that far into herself as she curled up under the blanket and shivered herself to sleep in the sounds of the bell chimes, cat-skin drums and the shuffling steps, the feather steps, the rippling and the fluttering of a parade of 100 demons going past her bedroom door. Very certain about numbers, mathematician people. It was something more than a child’s imagination; it was less than a mental disorder. It was the Force running haywire through a brain which had never made a clear distinction between story and reality.

The Force had made Zee uncannily good at avoiding danger. Her unconscious mind said ‘blast this, I ain’t evolved for that’, and build her own monsters.

Was she a Jedi, anyway? The announcement of the Order taking a more militarized role in the war had hit her straight between the temples. It shouldn’t have. It simply meant the Jedi were no longer a shield for Zee, and that she should fade out. Perhaps go to university. It was the details which shook her brain. Larik Novan, the man who’d showed her the whole Galaxy through the Force, had disappeared. Kai Sera, the one who’d supported her through coming to terms with her Force-sensitivity, was patted on the head for blowing up a Sith Temple, or so the rumors said. Zee was too confused to care about the truth. All she knew was that war was dangerous and boring, and that she needed some time alone.

So she simply got in her ship and left the Galaxy.

There was one place where nobody would find her, Zee thought. Somewhere that no one would think anyone idiot enough to visit.

Coruscant.

An almost-Jedi would have to be a complete moron to go there in the given circumstances. Which is exactly why no one would be looking for her. However, she had to act smart, and not announce the Hexacontagon’s presence on every radar, harmless-looking yacht or not. Yet that was difficult. It was impossible to travel to Core Worlds without multiple hyperspace jumps, due to the high density of stars. It made calculations difficult.

But what people often forgot was that mathematics weren’t just about finding answers, they were about finding the optimal path to an answer. You simply had to…tweak your perspective.

Imagine: the galaxy isn’t flat. Give it a spin.

People didn’t like to leave the ol’ galactic plane. Holonet waves didn’t reach much outside the spiral. If something broke down there, you were on your own. Alone. You died. With no one to hear you scream or whimper, by case. Not even a star in sight. Yes, the lack of significant gravitational sources made it easier to calculate hyperspace jumps, but the up-down detours made it not worth it. It took a special kind of mind to take the risk.

It took a special kind of mind to wait two day’s worth of computer time for the hyperspace coordinates of a one-day journey. And that was only part of the way. Can you conceive it? Normally, a hyperspace jump is executed in seconds, minutes.

With the computing power a two-day hyperspace run, Zee could hopefully materialize close enough to the planet to bypass most sensors. Let’s give you a term of comparison here. With the computing power a two-day hyperspace run, Zee could have calculated the trajectory of matter in a solar system down to pebble size. She could have calculated how to change the trajectories of, let’s say, a thousand of pebble-sized asteroids, in order to destroy an average-sized city after, let’s say, a month. Atmospheric shields were programmed to repel particles above a certain radius; they could do very little against a most improbable death by a thousand simultaneous cuts.

Zee was coming to realize that she could do things, frightening things, indifferent of how awful she was with the Force. For one reason or another, meeting Larik had given her the courage to try.

Zee Irving had decided that she wanted to make worlds.

Terraforming was a lost craft. For long, it had been far easier to steal a life-supporting (whatever that meant for your species) planet from those shameless neighbors who played music too loud, than to make your own.

What this meant was a string of dead planets. Alderaan, Honoghr. Coruscant. The planet-city of the brilliant corusca gem. Now a piece of trash.

Having landed (‘controllably crashed’) in what used to be a parking-space, as revealed by the half-molten speeders cracking like popcorn under the hull, Zee rectified that last comment. Coruscant was a treasure chest. But most people couldn’t see the treasure. No, it wasn’t the holocrons, the artifacts, the jewels, the metals, the still-functioning electronics.

The treasure was plants and mold. From the surface of a dead world, you could find the germs for a new one.

Zee stepped away from her ship to the edge of the platform, glancing at the ruined towers multiplying in vertical infinites. The destruction made them look bitten. Half of the floor-space was missing, which made the place even more of a labyrinth. The eye lost itself in scorched blacks, metallic sheens and dusty gray. The girl arranged her backpack on her left shoulder, and her skimboard on the right. She made sure her breathing mask was correctly fitted. All sorts of toxins could spread...

Whenever she found an interesting fungus, lichen, wall-alga, among the decay, Zee smiled, knelt down, or reached out, and collected it in special stamp-sized self-sealing sample envelopes.

 

[Intratec]

To say that someone of Zee's disposition heading to Coruscant was an understatement. It was quite suicidal. How she had slipped past planetary defenses, a fleet in orbit, neither of these things Ayindri could properly put into words. This person she watched from the shadows with a Squad of Stormtroopers was either incredibly lucky, or truly gifted at evading planet-wide sensor nets. Of course another three squads had surrounded the girl's ship, this one followed out of protective instinct. Her men from the Naboo Blitz. Originally she had decided to collect alchemical samples, those twisted by the Dark Side, those not. Experimentation, innovation; mistakes were all a part of the Sith Alchemist's art.

With a small hand signal to hold position, she hadn't needed to look over her shoulder at their acknowledgement. But the Pureblood stepped from the shadows a scant three meters away. Robes of rich violet in black strip adorning her dainty form, her cut in such a high-maintenance styling, but most unnerving was the fact she was red. And not merely red. Wide almond-shaped eyes of iridescent gold reflected her gaze in the dim light while staring. A sash hung about her wait, the silvered hilt of a lightsaber had been carefully hidden in its left arm sheath to which the sleeves of her robes covered even her hands.

"You are a long way from home, little Jidai," voice eloquent, lightly accented from some unknown land. But any Jedi (If they bothered in their studies) would recognize a Sith Pureblood on sight. The eye tendrils, right where her eyebrows should be would be enough along along with her skin. "Ahhhh, but forgive me," she said while flashing rows of dainty little razor fangs, her teeth. "Jedi, is the term in Basic. Now, if you please. Explain why you are on a Sith controlled world as if on holiday? I already have your vessel land locked, under guard and a marksman aiming for your head if you try to get flee. So do try to explain yourself."

 

[Zee]

Glowing irises sprouted from the darkness, their warm light merely outlining the crimson shadows on the stranger’s face. For a moment, Zee’s heart tightened, as if wishing to remain silent and unnoticed. The calm voice which followed, however, was enough to give the girl the courage to face it in a way in which her imaginary enemies never would.

She stepped forward.

The cobwebs of shadow, woven by the Zelosian’s terrible low-light perception, broke apart. Now, she could see! Some distance behind the stranger, light glistened in interesting white-and-helmet shapes that felt familiar. Her green glassy orbs focused on the closer; growing wide, in an attempt to gulp down information. When she understood that the stranger was three times too short and five times too narrow to be an oni-demon of the legends, despite the tell-tale skin and eyes, Zee felt the tension drip out of her. Perhaps she would have feared more if she knew the reality, but she had never been that interested in the socio-genetic history of the Sith Order. Or perhaps she wouldn’t have feared at all. Zee Irving was by no means a brave person. She was just, put simply, unimaginably stupid.

“Because I am on holiday.” She pointed out amiably. Indeed, this solitary journey had been planned for her enjoyment. “But I am not exactly a Jedi – I am too selfish for that. I guess…” She gazed at the broken ceiling. “I’m here because this world is collapsing.”

A thoughtful grin sparkled on Zee’s face.

“I doubt that there’ll be enough money to rebuild Coruscant very soon. War efforts don’t leave that many credits for unprofitable pride, isn’t it?” It was the accountant in her speaking. Her face shifted in a most relaxed and – disturbingly – non-sarcastic expression. “Thank you for guarding my ship, by the way! I was afraid that someone would steal it!” She chuckled. Zee knew about social skills as much as a rock, but even she could remember that smiles were positive. And the stranger had smiled.

“Anyway. Therefore, I expect that nature and decay will take over. Which can be fascinating to study.” Zee turned and made an ample gesture towards the spotted wall behind her. It was spotted by patches of sunlight, dampness and fluffy mold. At the bottom lay a broken speeder.

Never did she perceive it as turning her back to a (potentially lethal) enemy. But then, with Zee’s innate skills, it wouldn’t have made a difference.

That sentence above is derogatory.

“Look at these beauties! Early colonizers.” She reached out and poked a silky tendril with a fingertip protected by an impermeable glove. The thread oscillated lightly. “All they need is a film of bacteria to cling to and feed on – you see, that greenish gunk?” Point point. “I’m hypothesizing that the bacteria in the shadow of the speeder somehow use the window cleaning detergent to produce energy, but that’ll need more study.” She had the sincerely over-enthusiastic tone of a wildlife documentary presenter who’d found a rare and venomous cockroach in their sleeping bag. Some things she knew by sight, others through her strange Force-based microscopy. But all were wonderful.

“You might consider this useless.” Zee realized in rare a moment of social insight.

She took a deep breath, with the mask easily keeping up. Her voice suddenly became a whisper. A sad whisper.

“If Darth Vader returned to this galaxy today, he would see nothing at all that would amaze him. A thousand years, and nothing changed because the funding pressures for immediate results and war applications killed any real science.” Her exasperated words hit the wall like firestone. They shot off sparks. “Some technological improvements, but nothing world-changing. Nothing on the level of discovering the hyperspace.” Her hands spasmodically clenched into fists. She turned back, with the big eyes of a child and her hair fluttering.

“Don’t you think that this is saddening?”

 

[Intratec]

"On the contrary, Jidai I do not find it saddening at all. Would you desire your enemy to suddenly gain better communications and computational technology? Better Droids? Any technological breakthrough maybe used for war, if properly re-purposed." a stone, likely the base of a column rose from the ground, the detritus brushed away with the force to allow the Pureblood a seat. Rolling a hand as she sat.

"You stand on a world permeated in the Dark Side. Anything that grows here, will be changed by it. Just like your molds, of which I can tell the Dark Side seeps into them even now. But I digress, this world died the moment in history it was turned into a city world. Air filtration towers, factories belching chemical smoke and smogs, the water only purified by supposed Gree technology as well as waste. All of that now suffuses the crust and mantle. All will be changed. The Dark Side twists what it comes into contact with, little botanist."

"I care not whether Vader, the Skywalker spawn noticed no change. The dead are dead. And this world barely clings to the life the Dark Side allows. To grow plants and animals fit for alchemical purposes."

@Zee

 

[Zee]

“To allow that fear to stop one from thinking means a death of the mind. That’s petty.” Zee’s calm was incisive. “Wouldn’t it be fun,” she laughed, spinning on her heels, “to invent science that could make people live longer and longer until they’re bored of living, to build ships that could navigate through the coats of the suns, to wave hello at anybody who may live there, to check whether we can fold the universe until we get a ‘pi’ of precisely three?” Her voice had the ether of dreams and the bite of one who is willing to make them happen. With every spin, her outstretched arms flew higher, her enthusiasm shot up, her eyes raised to the sky. People would kill each other for a patch of cosmos, but she knew a secret they didn’t.

She knew that to understand the world was to tacitly own it inside your head.

And she knew that once you truly understood something, you could no longer hate it.

“It cannot be helped. The impulse to discover, to invent, is as old as sapience. Our ancestors are chronically guilty of it; otherwise, we two wouldn’t be here.” She stopped and winked. “Personally, I find it a far more entertaining game than war.”

Now, with her standing up and with the red-skinned girl sitting on her improvised throne (because her elegant manner made it difficult to imagine it anyway else), the conversation might’ve seemed awkward to a bystander. But Zee was too socially ignorant to ever care. She folded her gloved fingers in a little white tent with blue stripes.

“I disagree with certain details. Yes, it was a world of metal, and yes, it had replaced the planet’s previous ecosystems; but I cannot accept Coruscant not being an ecosystem in its own right. The artificial means of sustainment do not change that.” Occasionally she closed her eyes, trying to find her words. “It may not have been a pleasant place to live, particularly at the lower levels, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was a world full of life. Sapient life is still life. It was a metal-desert for most other species, true, but by no means a dead place. It had its own thriving extremophiles, like duracrete slugs, or like the millimetric smog-moth which doesn’t live anywhere else in the universe.”

She nodded when she heard of the Darkside twisting biology. It was something new to her, as the twinkle in her eyes and the ‘wow!’ under her breath suggested. Perhaps a proper Jedi would have reacted differently; Zee didn’t know. All she knew – all she had been told – was that the Darkside was some sort of antithesis to the side of the Force Jedi normally used. And something about negative emotions. Given that Zee couldn’t exactly grasp what the Force even was, that didn’t tell her much. She had her own hypotheses, but would need fair tests in order to check the facts. In a way, her tendency to approach the Force as a science, rather than a philosophy, made her more similar to the students of Hedion University on DSC Daedalus, rather than to the Jedi.

“It is natural of ecosystems to change.” Zee said. “But you seem to think too little of life. With or without the Dark Side, it would have thrived. It’s stubborn. But I admit that I am very intrigued – an influx of energy might result in a richer system, might support more trophic levels…Still…”

She did an odd gesture, as if trying to scratch her head and remembering half-way that one shouldn’t touch their hair with gloves used for samples.

“What does the Darkside actually do?”

The sole way to be a proper scientist is to never be ashamed of admitting your complete ignorance. This is why she admired Hedion University with only half of her heart, and despised it with the other. They had failed at scientists the moment that they had started to use sciency-sounding words like ‘PsiWave’ to mask how little they knew about the Force.

“And…What is alchemy?”

 

[Intratec]

Ayindri hid a snort behind one of her long sleeves, cleared her throat then crossed her legs underneath the robes. Her feet didn't even touch the ground but here stood one of the planet's predators, and prey sat before her. One of her bony eye tendrils rose a little as the seemingly zealous person continued her dialog. "Someone found a way to become immortal, there was a ship that could fly through stars, and I do not enjoy pie. . . it is messy. Emperor Vitiate killed an entire planet to become immortal, a ship called the Sun Crusher could fly through stars, the hulls of Imperial Star Destroyers, or blow up suns. It was eventually destroyed by throwing it in a blackhole I believe." reciting as if she'd heard it a thousand times, except the Pi part. She didn't like 'pie'.

"Innovation is its own war, little Jidai you constantly battle to attain your goal, or to defeat a rival to the end product." stating as she leaned one elbow against part of the column, resting a pair of fingers to her temple, and thumb to her jaw as if in considering what to do to the Zelosian.

"Rakghouls, Krayt Dragons, and other animals have lived here since the collapse of this pile of steel and stone. Even before that. Living in the ducts and tunnels. Yet that is not an ecology. That is the result of carelessness. People disposing of animal merchandise that did not sell, things smuggled, or smuggled themselves aboard as vermin and rodents often do so. This was not their ecology it was a mere transplantation of species."

Sniffing in derision. One of her nails tapped lightly against jet-hued hair. "On the contrary, if life were not meant to change, it would stagnate and die. The Dark Side will bring change, and eventually evolution. Whereas the Light Side is said to halt physical change. With the Dark Side, change and evolution can be controlled if one knows what they are doing. Yet it cannot heal as effectively as the Light Side which seeks physical balance and unchanging appearance." but it was the next question that brought forth a laugh. Not condescending, evil or maniacal or even hollow. The Stormtroopers in the trees began to move forward before she held a finger aloft, then another in some sort of sign and they backed off to the shadows again.

"Alchemy? You have never heard of Sith Alchemy? What do the Jedi teach their younglings and Padawans these days?" her sigh was more out of disgust then. "Alchemy, it is the art in which I study. I gather ingredients, such as your plants. Animal parts, insects or secretions and mix them. In the process I infuse my concoctions with the Dark Side, changing their individual characteristics and reconstructing them into new formulations. All bound together and empowered by the Dark Side. Poisons, Armor, Weapons, Poultices for Healing, or amulets of varied powers Sith Alchemy is only as limited as the individual's imagination. And goes beyond what I speak of."

 

[Zee]

There was enough innate superiority in the Sith’s manner to make a minor king blush. It brushed off Zee without leaving a trace, like a water-soluble poison trickling off the oily complexion of a nerd caught in an engaging hologame.

“Intriguing, though terribly inefficient.” She declared, her lips curling in a small sneer. “Also, many people agree that pi is messy.” Three and four are decent numbers, they argued, but the unnerving precision of three-and-a-bit defied decency.

Innovation is its own war?

“Yes, yes it is!” The girl exclaimed, her face brightening. She gestured widely. “The best war! For me at least. Science has the advantage that the toughest rivals are often also one’s closest friends. Competitors are those who share one’s enthusiasm for a common research field, and best understand the lingo that one is talking at scientific conferences. It sure beats waving pointy glowing sticks around.”

You have to get your priorities straight: you can’t kill people and prove them wrong.

Zee’s eyes flicked to the sides, as if expecting a krayt dragon’s maw to break through the remains of the windows. And Rakghouls…She hadn’t…considered that there’ll be so many dangerous things out here. Her lips narrowed. Her people had stories about Rakghouls. One lived in her uncle’s wine cellar. It sometimes staggered around the house with a bottle, and you weren’t supposed to bother it then. Her fists clenched, and unclenched, repeatedly.

“Uh…” She’d been almost too distracted to hear the Sith’s words. Almost. “An ecology is usually defined as a system composed of living beings and their environment. Evolution on the same planet, care and intentionality of the introduction do not factor in the definition. Otherwise we’d be forced to conclude that the majority of inhabited planets are not worlds, because their flora and fauna were brought by colonists. But I guess that’s me being ‘a bastard about details’.” As she developed her logical exposition, Zee let her worry subside. She had come all this long way, and nothing would happen if she explored a few more levels of the city.

The Hydean Way could probably be paved with the bones and exoskeletons of all the idiots who said that, along with ‘It can’t hurt me if I only take a sip’ and ‘Swoop bikes don’t kill people, colliding with the ground at 900km/h does’.

Zee shrugged.

“You’re making assumptions not necessarily supported by evidence. Perhaps you mean that the Dark Side accelerates evolution, because evolution will happen whether you want it or not. Fascinating stuff, either way!” Again, Zee’s pedantic nature, her focus on details, on words, came to light. “Although I must say that I don’t know how much the Light Side is characterized by stasis. For once, the Jedi that I met were pretty focused on improving themselves and their surroundings. Personally, I don’t have enough data to believe in ‘sides’.”

As she spoke, Zee made her point in a second way. Her hand gently stroked the air above the fungus on the wall, her mind sinking through the visible, reproductive hyphae, to the far wider microscopic lattice of the vegetative mycelium beneath. Her heart skipped a few beats. From her current perspective, the mycelium was an infinite array of marble-and-lace corridors, more complex and elegant than the city-planet Coruscant could have ever dreamed. Her mental projection rested, tired, against one of the hundred nuclei in the cell. She moved around. There, two fungi were shyly reaching out for their first hyphal meeting, unsure if to have sex or to kill each other – fairly common stuff, for fungi. Zee shifted between planes of focus a few times, zooming in and out, and then, she gave the fungus a poke.

It grew.

Plant Surge wasn’t a technique traditionally supposed to work with fungi, because fungi (often) weren’t plants. But then, the whole group of ‘plants’ simply referred to organisms that had chosen a certain lifestyle, commonly involving immobility and photosynthesis. Due to independent origins of life, plants weren’t necessarily related, even though similar evolutionary pressures had shaped them into similar forms. A human would be more closely related to a tomato than a tomato would be to a shuura fruit. Zee found it easier to work without preconceptions. In her lab, she had played around with yeast and similar molds enough to mildly suspect that she has a vague idea of what she was doing now.

Probably.

First it was the breaking down of pigment-producing pathways. If you stopped it there, the hyphae growing under your fingertips were crimson, rather than smoky black. Wreck a parallel pathway, and they turned purple. Stop it before it reached either of those points, and the young hyphae were clay-yellow or dirty white, depending on how you shifted the pigment’s final concentration. Interestingly, the latter were also evidently frailer, as if products of the pigment pathway had more roles in the cell. Zee didn’t understand exactly how she was doing things; she couldn’t see the enzymes at work. Her Force-microscopy – which, according to her lectures, might’ve been a weak form of something called ‘Art of the Small’ – wasn’t strong enough. It felt like contracting odd muscles outside her body and seeing what happened.

The second trick was the texture. She could change it by altering the fungal hyphae’s cell wall or, more easily, by changing how the hyphal filaments entwined with one another. Zee mainly worked with the larger reproductive hyphae, but kept the majority sterile – producing spores took considerable energy that could be directed towards growth.

Under her palms, a flower appeared. It was a flower of mold, with blood-red, fleshy petals, purple veins and snow highlights. It sprouted from the wall in three dimensions, like a piece of relief architecture. On a petal, like a solitary dew drop, there was a glistening red colony of bacteria. From the distance it would’ve looked genuine; closer than that, the flower acquired the smooth unreality of an oil painting. In the core, pale cotton-like fibers trembled lightly against the girl’s breath, together with long mimetic ‘stamens’. When Zee turned, eyes half-shut and palms pressed on her temples, an observant eye might’ve noticed the three streaks on her left eyebrow, or the eyebrow hairs on her cheek.

She’d only wanted to make the ‘stamens’ reflect light; the razor-sharpness only as a side-effect.

“I can’t gene-twist.” Zee explained, with the ragged breath of having rolled a stone up a hill. Was it just her imagination, or had the process gone easier than normal? As if the air was filled with potential energy, a river of sparks just waiting to be canalized. “Phenotype, not genotype. For now. But I’ll manage it one day. Even though I’m terrible as a Force-User.” She nodded self-amusedly.

Seeing things in details was practically the only thing that Zee could do.

She stood in place, fidgeting, her pupils swelling and contracting in an unhealthy manner. One moment they nearly disappeared; the next, their black ink filled the green well of her irises. Working her microscopy skills too intensely tended to leave Zee feeling lost among planes of focus. When the pulsation in her pupils desynchronized, the girl covered her mouth and wrapped an arm around her stomach to pin it in place. The Sith girl appeared on her retinas with crystal clarity, then a blur, then a single cell. Biting her lip, Zee tried to focus on her words. Alchemy…Soon, the oscillations of her pupils slowed down, and she felt a bit better. She even waved friendlily in the approximate direction of the Stormtroopers.

“So it’s…practically, organic chemistry. But…if you’d mix random complex things normally, you’d just get gunk.” She whispered weakly, almost to herself. Amazed. “However, using Sense would allow one to focus only on the combinations with chances of success, disregarding the others. In addition, the Force can be used as a catalyst…”

Zee’s voice broke.

“That’s.Brilliant.”

She grinned.

“I think I’ll try it too!”

Her grin grew, if possible, a bit wider.

“If you’re an alchemist, then you’re practically a scientist, like me! Would you like to go exploring together?”

 

[Intratec]

"You would need to use the Dark Side to try it. Also, it does indeed change. My species practiced Sith Alchemy for well over thirty-one thousand years. We know what it does, and does not do." chided the Sith to the Jedi, " 'Organic Chemistry' fails to comprehend what it may do. We have recipes, yes, however in all steps we utilize the Dark Side. But, I will not squabble over semantics. Your mind is set on what it is." staring down at her, the fingernail continued its constant, rhythmic tap. While it was true they had her ship 'land locked' in other words cordoned off, maglocked explosive charges along the engines and underside. While she was out here, a few of her troopers and a specialist would've been going through her navicomputer's jump list. She would have to have a word with the orbiting fleet on its patrol routes.

"If you so desire to try Sith Alchemy, you must use the Dark Side, for the Light Side will do nothing. And I may be able to assist with that along the way. . ." bringing her fingertips together in a posture of minor reflection, Ayindri thought on the offer. There could be much to gain by sewing the seeds of the Dark Side in this seemingly enthusiastic humanoid. And she had come to collect plant samples. The column lowered itself back toward the ground, Ayindri standing and brushing her robes off. With a snap of her fingers five Stormtroopers stepped from the brush guns in their 'At the ready' posture.

"We will be joining this young woman on her explorations and plant sample collecting. You know the drill, men." was all Ayindri said as all five branched off to encircle the two women with weapons raised. Not trained on them of course, but on their surroundings.

 

[Zee]

Zee stuck a corner of her tongue out.

“Magical organic chemistry, then. Happy?”

The more she discussed, the more she felt the effervescent energy of arguments coursing through her veins.

“Fun thing about science: thirty-one thousand years of Sith Alchemy, and your statement could still be toppled down by a single nudge. You know why? Because it would take only a single person weaving Alchemy without the Darkside, in order to prove it wrong.”

Her gesturing fingers were long and frail-looking, like dried sticks. When she snapped them, it seemed surprising that it didn’t start a fire.

“Don’t misunderstand. I’d like to know more about the Darkside. It just doesn’t seem like a thing I’d enjoy toying with.” A frown. Uneasy fidgeting. “From what I heard –may be biased – it is focused especially on negative emotions. I find that rather unhealthy. And I’m very selfish, so I wish to be happy.” Zee nodded heartily.

This was not the typical Jedi-Sith ideology clash. It was the clash of Zee’s twisted brain, with the additional genetic input of a species that could only be described as ‘chill, plant-loving storytellers’, with whatever came her way.

She’d never lost.

The Sith spoke, the pawns moved…Suddenly Zee was a step away from one of the Stormtroopers, chin up.

“You look familiar. Have we met before?” Her big eyes reflected off the black void of the mask’s eyes. She looked around, as if extending the question to all the armor-men.

One might have difficulties remembering how she got there, as if a magician had snapped their black velvet cape. Behind the helmet, the soldier’s shocked eyes had nearly popped out of their sockets. Zee herself was unaware of her performance. It was an instinctive mind trick that played on the cracks in one’s focus, that made Zee forgettable in the same way as one would ignore a pen-pusher in a bank. Hers was a trick of hiding in the shadows of the mind, and it seemed to work particularly well when in the presence of a strong personality – like the Sith’s – who tended to focus attention on herself.

One might wonder what Jedi skills she’d used to recognize people that she’d never met, and ignore the simple fact that for a childish, stupid brain like Zee’s, all Stormtroopers looked the same.

Silence.

“No? O-okay. Thank you for taking care of us.” Awkwardly, Zee looked around, trying to plan the exploration. She headed towards a place where the collapsed floor seemed to slope down onto the level below. Mysterious round holes dotted the duracrete, as if it were a very expensive sort of cheese.

“By the way, my name’s Zee. What are yours?” The girl asked, looking at no one in particular.

‘Are’. Because Zee was stupid enough to consider Stormtroopers as equal to the rest of sentients.

Or rather, she considered most fellow sentients as faceless as Stormtroopers.

She even considered ship thieves as sentient, potentially reasonable people. That’s why Zee had left a box of (half-eaten) cookies on the control panel, together with a purple note of ‘Please Do Not Steal Ship’. The first word was bolded and underlined three times – the sure sign of a deranged mind. Following the entrance through a light airflow (designed to keep the microbes, pollen and particles of a planet out, and as an unplanned side-effect making it difficult to judge previous destinations), a technician might come in for a little shock, finding the stupidest of computers onboard. It could do little more than execute instructions (and play Pacman). It couldn’t even calculate the hyperspace coordinates to the nearest canteen. It would only remember its very last journey, from somewhere above the galactic plane. One could find out more incriminating evidence in Zee’s room, including the fact that she was really fond of several Imperially outlawed songs.

It was a Givin ship. The Givin and the Siniteen were the only races in the galaxy known to calculate hyperspace coordinates as easily as 1 + 1 = 2.

Zee could, too.

In the greenhouse/closet, there was the external, portable navicomputer that she’d used for this journey. A rare occurrence – but days of endless calculations would have broken her down. On its hard-disk, it encoded complex mathematical calculations…

Her free-time exercises. The hard-disk with her travel from Kothlis had been gently disposed of with a blaster. That secret wasn’t hers to share.

Have fun.

 

[Intratec]

"And yet thirty-one thousand years later no one has done so. I digress, The Dark Side is not entirely based on negative emotion. Freedom and Passion play large roles within it." she however cocked her head to one side in thought at the odd manner of her words and overall speech. "I do not use negative emotion unless I must. Selfishness, is however a negative emotion. Your desire for happiness, commendable yet slightly selfish in context. But if you wish to know more of the Dark Side, I maybe able to assist."

All the Red Sith did while Zee stared at the Stormtrooper was observe her. "They refuse to reveal their names to potential enemies. Common part of their training." once they'd begun moving again she felt it prudent to at least give the girl a small bone by giving her a name. "Simply call me Ayri. It will do for now.

When they came to a stop near the slope, Ayindri observed the holes with the narrowed eyes of both suspicion and curiosity. "They maybe inhabited."

While much to their displeasure that they had only pulled one coordinate off the Navi-Computer, and with the remaining stormtroopers continuing to inspect things, the technician did the next logical thing. Accessing the computer and begun to download keystrokes, garbage and phantom data via a portable datastorage box. If there was next to no coordinates to be found computed by the Navi-Computer, then something else must have been in play or so they thought.

 

[Zee]

In her world, words had power.

In her world, there was no mindless war, no subterfuge, no suffering. There were pancakes and plants and numbers and words, words to cling to the universe and cut it into bite-sized pieces. A good discussion was food for thought for an infovore like Zee.

“I figured that it would be more negative to wish to be unhappy.” Zee stated with her usual candor. “I am passionate about my mathematics, and I enjoy the freedom to work on them. It’s curious, though. If the Darkside is about freedom, how come that the Sith are so focused on conquering people who don’t wish to be conquered? To rule over people means to be caged by responsibilities; the puppeteer is by definition bound with the same strings at the puppet. Ayri, do you feel that you are free?”

Perhaps Zee had the morals of a kindergarten kid; perhaps they were the best morals. The freedom to conquer, to burn, to torture, the freedom of seeing inferiors press their heads in the dust, was not a freedom that the Zelosian girl would understand. To be free meant to be free to do what made one truly happy; abstract goals like ‘galactic domination’ were absurd, if they interrupted one from toying with fun, solid stuff like mathematics.

It should be no wonder that someone with such a far-away conscience would, upon hearing Ayindri’s comment, look to the left, to the right, blink repeatedly, and ask:

“…who is the enemy?”

Her mind was, in many respects, a blank slate on which the stylus of stark realities promptly ricocheted. This was in contrast with a computer, in which practically nothing was ever ignored or lost. No information could truly be deleted – like an erased pencil mark that remained visible for those looking for it. With a good enough microscope, you could even piece information from the scratches on a memory card.

But Zee’s navicomputer was nevertheless a forgetful one.

Computers ‘forget’ their cache if it is replaced by other data. The best bet to forever erase something on a computer, is to over-write it repeatedly until the hard-disk cries uncle. And Zee had had five full days to toy with mathematics and run countless hypothetical hyperspace simulations…Data gathered from such a computer would likely be too jumbled to make head or tail from. Although, by chance, it might have just included some interesting insights in cryptography, a fragmented essay on photosynthesis, and a recipe for lightsaber crystals made out of sugar (together with a note specifying the caramelized and painfully explosive result).

Zee approached one of the larger holes, wide enough to effortlessly swallow two Stormtroopers hugging. A faint clickety-click passed her by as she bent down, cautious not to fall in – although not as cautious in regards to the Sith’s concerns. A thin layer of duracrete dust covered the interior. A wiry stem with black, thorny leaves clung precipitously to the edge. A hiss of surprise shot of through Zee’s lips. As it continued without signs of the surprise diminishing, the girl twirled it into a musical whistle.

“Sinner’s root from Kashyyyk! A fully aged root might be worth as much as a small planet. It’s illegal to transplant it. It burrows through Wroshyr tree bark, and, apparently, duracrete…It’s-“

But they didn’t get to find out what it was because, with the ominous whoosh of a Hoover of Doom, a sand-colored mass of armored carapace burst through the opening, sending Zee flying. Its upturned snout, resembling the one of the sturgeon fish, shook up and down in a threatening rattle. Its small, caviar-black eyes were blind to all but blotches of light and shadow; but its tentacles read the smallest vibrations in the duracrete, more skillfully than a Zeltronian DJ on a dance floor ever could. It crawled forward, forward, forward…It seemed never-ending.

It was a rather impressive specimen of duracrete slug.