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--call-ing 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 coprocessors 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 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.
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, redundantly.
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 work-shop--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-u
p 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 again and found another duty opening.
"You're a feisty little one," she told the R2 unit, "but you'll soon
learn some respect. I have need for you on the master's sail barge, and
I think you'll fill in nicely." As if to underscore Ninedenine's
pronouncement, the GNK sent out another series of circuit-melting,
high-pitched squeaks as its cooling system was cruelly challenged again.
Then the R2 unit silently rolled away with the second guard to the
workshop, to be fitted with its own restraining bolt. Ninedenine paused
as she watched the little droid roll through the doorway, puzzled that
after such a strong first response, it had said nothing more in protest
or in insult.
Almost as if it wanted to be assigned to Jabba's sail barge . . .
Ninedenine's central processors accelerated their clock rate to sift
through the data again. Her third optic scanner blinked erratically as
all possible probability permutations were analyzed.
It was, she at last concluded, almost as if the R2 unit had expected to
be assigned to Jabba's sail barge.
Ninedenine shut all the doors to her dungeon. She needed time to
consider this most unexpected development as her self-preservation
programming loops began to run through several of her peripheral
coprocessors, letting their presence be known. She even filtered out
the seductive distractions of the dangling courier droid as she tapped
precise commands into her console, rescanning the duty-roster listing
for any sign of tampering. As far as she knew, there were at present
fifteen separate conspiracies under way with the goal of eliminating
Jabba the Hutt as Tatooine's preeminent ganglord, though none of them
was Ninedenine's concern. In truth, the season's total for attempts
against Jabba's life was down a bit from previous years, perhaps a
distressing sign that the blubbery green slug was slowing down in his
old age and just wasn't inspiring the manic blood feuds of old. In any
event, as long as whoever replaced Jabba continued to allow Ninedenine
unrestricted dominion over the droids of the palace, as any replacement
was sure to do, Ninedenine simply recorded the plots against her
employer and did nothing to interfere with them.
This new playground she had come to was the perfect place for her, and
she did not wish to jeopardize her position or her work by becoming
involved in palace intrigue.
However, her heuristic subroutines had long ago learned that she must
constantly be on guard for threats against her own existence. The
incident in the mining colony on Bespin had taught her to pay even
closer attention to seemingly inconsequential anomalies.
In an organic life-form, the tendency might be called paranoia.
But in Ninedenine, it was simply efficient programming, and she played
that program over and over, just to be sure that someone wasn't after
her.
Ninedenine reran the roster list, expanding the data contained in it to
see who among Jabba's court had entered specific staff requests.
Then she correlated those entries against staff vacancies caused by all
the usual means--murder, unexplained fatal accident, ceremonial limb
deletions, rancor-taunting, incendiary devices, food poisoning, and
Jabba's own whimsical sense of humor and pranks. A separate search
function pulled up droid deactivations as well, of which there were
many. Not all of them were the re-suit of Ninedenine's private
explorations, either.
Ninedenine reviewed what the search revealed, then tapped a manipulatory
extension against the side of her console, deep in data processing.
Quite clearly, Jabba had a habit of disintegrating his protocol droids.
Some time ago, Jabba's protocol droid had been involved in a scheme with
a pair of petty thieves, which had resulted in the burning ofJabba's Mos
Eisley town house. That droid had been punished.
Severely.
Then, just last season, its replacement had suffered a similar fate.
From the watch report, it appeared the droid had mistranslated a Partold
envoys compliment about Jabba being a constant giver of immense charity,
confusing the ritual Partold greeting with a Hutt-ese medical term
having to do with excessive flatulence. When the last snicker had died
away in the audience chamber, the mystified Partold envoy had found
himself face to fang with the ever-obliging rancor beast. The next day,
when the Partold tithes were not paid by a justifiably upset delegation,
the mistrans-lation was revealed and the protocol droid was
disintegrated circuit by circuit over the course of the next ten shifts,
all the time protesting indignantly that it had been reprogrammed by a
palace guard.
Ninedenine didn't quite know what to make of the droid's reprogramming
story. Jabba had discounted it.
And Ninedenine had heard many strange things herself while she had
disassembled still-functioning droids-though mostly they had been
stories of a light and a tunnel, which she attributed to the standard,
random cross-connection of failing circuits. Why would a palace guard
reprogram a protocol droid to make it mistranslate compliments?
Ninedenine could see no logic in it.
She next called up the case of the bartender droid required on Jabba's
sail barge--the position to which the R2 unit had just been assigned
with a noticeable lack of protest.
Again the data Ninedenine accumulated were unusual.
She recalled the previous bartender had been a barely sentient C5
unit, one wheel, five arms, and a single optic scanner on a stalk. It
had had trouble keeping its balance and mixing a clarified bantha-blood
fizz at the same time. But Salacious Crumb had enjoyed riding it during
festivities, so Jabba had kept it around despite its shortcomings.
Then another watch report of considerably more interest flashed up from
the console. Not five cycles ago, that same bartending C5 unit had been
found in a little-used corridor in the west wing with its power circuits
yanked out, beyond repair. It appeared someone had purposely terminated
the bartender droid, but what could a C5 unit have done to merit such a
fate? It was in no way clever enough to have made enemies of its own.
Ninedenine tapped command after command into the console, activating
worm programs long dormant in Jabba's main household system.
Her logic filters detected anomalies here and she would not reduce her
clock rate until she had isolated and understood them.
More watch reports flashed by on the console, followed by surveillance
records; accounts owed, paid, and stolen; personnel assignments;
nonvoluntary organ transplants-Ninedenine suddenly paused, then rekeyed
her previous request and backed up to the personnel records again. A
palace guard had been fined five credits for being late to report for
duty in the same service cycle in which the C5 unit had been terminated.
Ninedenine's processors moved into a hyperacceler-ated phase, examining
each datum on a bit-by-bit basis.
Datum: Two terminated droids whose Work duties exactly matched the two
new prisoners brought in today.
Datum: A palace guard circumstantially connected to both terminations.
Inference: Coincidences were rarely computable.
Conclusion: But conspiracies were.
Ninedenine swiftly accessed the name of the guard who had been late for
duty. Tamtel Skreej. He had been with the palace force for less than a
season. His background ID had been found to be forged, though according
to his duty file that was taken to be a good sign by his commander.
Ninedenine didn't like the way the data were sorting themselves. She
called up Skreej's identity file. A humanoid organic face began to form
on the console display: a dark outer covering, a narrow ridge of fur
above his ingestion/communication orifice, a-Ninedenine's internal
processors missed a refresh cycle.
She recognized the organic's face.
Baron-Administrator Lando Calrissian of Cloud City.
Ninedenine gripped the side of the command console as her gyros