REPUBLIC HOLONET · CORRESPONDENT SERVICE NOTICE Unit: KEE-4 (field recording / broadcast) Assigned: SOLLEN, M. (War Correspondent, Class II) Status: REPORTED LOST · Coruscant, lower levels Persons recovering this unit should contact the nearest Correspondent Service office. Do not attempt to access unit memory. Finder's reward: ████████████
I. The Stall
The droid's motivator had not so much failed as surrendered, and Namren respected that, because he'd seen the rest of it.
He had it on the workbench at the back of his stall by the time the market lights came up, flat on its back like a patient, with its dome propped on a folded coat. In the grey morning glow that passed for daylight on this level, the damage looked worse than it had in the alley, and more interesting.
"Look at you," he murmured. "Somebody really didn't like you."
The stall was three metres wide and four deep, a slot in a long row of slots along the floor of an old freight hall the locals called the Boneyard. Nobody remembered what the hall had been built for. Now it was two hundred stalls selling the insides of machines, lit by strings of salvaged glowbulbs that swung whenever a cargo hauler rumbled past on the level above. It smelled of hot metal and lubricant and somebody's breakfast frying three stalls down. Namren had rented his slot for two years. It was the only place on Coruscant he'd ever felt was entirely his.
He'd organised it the way he organised a set: so a stranger could walk up and get the joke in two seconds. Every bin along the front was labelled in his own hand.
ARMS — NOT FOR SALE TO WOOKIEES.
LEGS. ASSORTED. SOME MATCHING.
MOTIVATORS — ASK. (DON'T ASK.)
HEADS — HAGGLE AT YOUR OWN RISK. THEY'RE LISTENING.
The last one moved more stock than any of the others. People bought heads just to prove they weren't scared of them.
He worked the droid with a hydrospanner and a pick and the absolute contentment of a man doing the one thing that never argued back. Panels came off in his hands. He laid each one on the cloth in order, like cards. Under the plating, the build was beautiful: Republic work, the old careful kind, before the war started turning everything into cheap copies of itself. Doubled wiring where a cheaper droid would have single. A cooling fan with its own backup. Whoever had specified this unit had expected it to go somewhere dangerous and come back.
It hadn't quite managed the second part.
There were blaster scores along its left side, three of them, grouped tight. Not a stray bolt. Somebody had been aiming. The dome seal was cracked, and when he eased the dome back, fine grit trickled out onto the bench, pale grey, the dust of somewhere much lower than here. One ankle joint was twisted half round, so that the broad flat foot pointed sideways. He straightened it with a heat-pick and a lot of gentle swearing, and it clicked into place like a knuckle.
"Better?" he asked it.
It didn't answer. That was the part he was trying not to think about.
The red light was gone.
Sometime in the night, while he'd been asleep with his back to it, the lens had gone dark. He'd woken up and looked into the corner and found the big ringed eye black and empty, and he'd stood there in his socks for longer than made sense. It was a droid. Droids ran down. It had been running on nothing for who knew how long, and last night it had finally stopped.
He told himself it was stupid to find that sad. He told himself twice.
He found the problem where he'd guessed it would be, down in the chest cavity: the motivator, the little heart that turned power into movement and movement into life. It was black. The casing had split. A thin, bitter smell of burnt insulation came off it when he lifted it out.
"There it is." He turned it over in his fingers. "You didn't fail, did you? You just gave up. I've had sets like that."
He did the sums. A new motivator for a Republic unit this size was sixty credits at the cheap end. He had ten credits in his pocket, a carton of noodles' worth of goodwill with Throop, and a stall full of parts that didn't fit.
He looked down at the droid. The empty lens looked back.
"Don't give me that," he said. "I'm working on it."
II. Two Stalls Over
The stall two down from his had changed hands a month ago. Namren hadn't paid attention. Stalls in the Boneyard changed hands all the time; people ran out of money or luck or both, and someone else moved in with a different set of broken things.
He paid attention now.
The new occupant was a young woman, a year or two younger than him, maybe, with a pile of brown curls on top of a head shaved close at the sides, work goggles pushed up into them, a battered red jacket with the sleeves shoved back, and grease to both elbows. She was under a speeder's engine cowling when he walked up, only her legs sticking out, and she was talking. Not to him. To the engine.
"—no, no, don't you dare, I gave you a whole new coupling yesterday, you don't get to be tired, I'm tired, you're a machine—"
Namren stood there holding the dead motivator, split casing and all, still smelling faintly of burnt insulation.
"Excuse me," he said.
The legs didn't stop. "One second."
"I'm looking for a—"
"Motivator. Republic-spec, mid-size, probably a Correspondent unit or a medical frame." She slid out from under the cowling on a creeper board and looked up at him, upside down, then at the burnt thing in his hand. "I can smell it from here. And you've been banging around that droid since the lights came up and swearing at it in two languages. It's a motivator. It's always a motivator."
He opened his mouth. She was already up and digging in a crate.
She talked faster than he did. Nobody talked faster than he did. He found it impressive and slightly threatening, like watching someone else do your act better.
"Here." She held one out. It was scuffed and old and clean. "Pulled it out of a med droid last week. Works fine. Twenty."
Twenty was a gift. Twenty was her losing money. He knew what they went for, and so did she.
He looked at her properly then, the way he'd look at a table from the stage. She was holding the motivator steady, but her other hand had closed hard on the crate edge. Her eyes kept flicking to a datapad on the bench beside her, face-down. Face-down meant numbers she didn't want to see.
"You're underpricing," he said.
"I'm selling. Do you want it or not?"
"I want it. Why twenty?"
She was quiet for half a second, which he suspected was a long time for her.
"My sister owes money to the wrong kind of people," she said. "Down here that's all the people."
She said it flatly, like a joke, the way people did when it wasn't one. Then she lifted her chin, and the look on her face dared him to feel sorry for her.
Namren had a line ready. He always had a line ready. Something about the wrong kind of people, and how he was one of them, and could she tell. It was a good line. It would have made her laugh.
He didn't say it.
Proud, he thought. Scared. Working a speeder at dawn because the numbers on that datapad didn't care how tired she was. She wouldn't take charity. She'd throw it back at him. He'd have done the same.
"Twenty," he said slowly, as if he was working it out. "Twenty... Sorry, for a Republic unit, I thought you said forty." He counted it out of what he had, which was ten, and then went back to his stall and came back with thirty more from the tin under the bench that was supposed to be next month's rent. "Forty. That's the price. Don't argue with me, I'm terrible at maths, it's embarrassing for both of us."
She looked at the credits. Then at him. She'd caught it. Of course she'd caught it. She was the fastest person he'd met in a year.
For a moment something crossed her face that wasn't pride or fear. It looked, briefly, like somebody being surprised by a stranger. It softened her whole face.
Then it was gone. She counted off twenty, put the motivator in his hand, and pressed the other twenty back into his palm, closing his fingers over the credits with her own grease-black ones. Just for a second.
"I'm not that cheap, Gungan."
Namren opened his mouth. Nothing came out. A Gungan. He'd been called a lot of things on a lot of stages. He'd never been called a Gungan by someone who'd just been nice to him.
"Your soldering's going to be too hot on the housing," she said. "Keep it down a notch. Republic casings crack."
And she was back on her creeper board and under the cowling before he could answer, telling the engine exactly what she thought of it.
He never got her name. He realised that halfway back to his stall and nearly turned round. He didn't. You didn't ask for someone's name after you'd seen their datapad face-down. It felt like asking for something you hadn't earned.
He kept the soldering iron down a notch.
III. Live From a Workbench
The motivator went in clean. He'd cleaned the contacts twice, reseated the power coupling, rerouted the wire bundle that had been scorched through, and checked every connection with the kind of focus he usually saved for closers. When he finally slid the chest plate home and sealed it, his neck ached and the market outside had got loud with the midday crowd.
He sat back on his stool.
"All right," he said. "Your big entrance. Don't waste it."
He pressed the activation stud.
For three long seconds, nothing. Then a deep internal hum, rising. A series of clicks, like someone walking through a dark house flicking switches on. The dome turned a few degrees left. A few degrees right.
And the big ringed lens lit up. Not red.
Blue. A clear, bright blue, like the sky over Jedha at noon, which Namren hadn't seen in six years.
"—and in the lower levels tonight," said a voice.
It came from somewhere inside the dome, and it was magnificent. Crisp, warm, perfectly cadenced. The voice of a man in a very good suit reading very bad news to a very large audience. It did not match anything else in the stall.
"—conditions remain uncertain. This is KEE-4, reporting from—" The dome turned. The lens swept over the bins, the swinging glowbulbs, the half-eaten ration bar on the bench, and settled on Namren. "—a workbench. Sector unknown. The local population is one human male, early twenties, holding a hydrospanner incorrectly."
Namren looked down at his hand. "I'm holding it fine."
"The subject disputes the characterisation."
"I'm the one who fixed you."
"The subject claims credit for recent repairs," the droid informed no one, in the tone of a man noting a detail he'd look into later. "Independent verification is pending."
Namren put the hydrospanner down, because now he couldn't stop thinking about how he was holding it.
The droid tried to stand. It planted both arms on the bench and pushed, and its short legs swung down, and the broad flat feet hit the floor one after the other, clonk, clonk. The mended ankle held. It wobbled. It took a step. It swayed, like a man stepping off a transport after a long flight, and then it steadied and stood, knee-high and dented and entirely upright, in the middle of his stall.
Namren felt something rise in his chest that he'd have denied under oath.
"Look at you," he said.
"The subject appears to be moved," said the droid.
"I am not—"
"The subject denies being moved."
"Stop narrating me."
"Coverage continues." The dome swivelled, taking in the stall. "The subject operates a small salvage concern in what appears to be a former freight facility. Inventory is extensive. Signage is..." A pause, very slight. "...present."
"The signage is funny."
"The subject believes the signage is funny."
"Everybody thinks the signage is funny! People buy heads because of that sign!"
"Sales are reported," said the droid, "to be driven by the signage." It turned its lens on the bench, on the scattered tools and solder beads. "Your soldering is adequate. I say that for the record."
Namren opened his mouth, found nothing in it, and shut it again. He'd been heckled by dockworkers, spice-runners, and on one memorable occasion a Hutt, and he had never once lost an exchange this badly. He was losing to a droid he had personally rebuilt.
Worse, it was sort of funny. He could feel a laugh building in his ribs, and he refused to give it the satisfaction.
Then the droid stopped.
It didn't power down. It just went still, in the middle of a turn, the lens fixed on the entrance of the stall, on the bright, busy market beyond. When it spoke again, the announcer's voice was the same, crisp and polished, but something in it had gone careful.
"KEE-4, Republic Correspondent Service," it said. "Where is my journalist?"
The stall was very quiet. Out in the market, somebody haggled, somebody laughed, a hauler rumbled overhead and the glowbulbs swung.
Namren reached for a joke. That was what he did. He could feel one there, something about how he was the only journalist here and his only story was noodles. He had it right on his tongue.
It died there.
"I don't know," he said. "I found you in an alley. There was nobody else."
The lens stayed on the entrance. The droid said nothing at all, which was worse than anything it could have said.
Namren cleared his throat. "You need a name," he said, too brightly. "Can't call you KEE-4. Sounds like a tax form. Kee-four. Kee-for." He tried it out. "Keefer."
The dome turned back to him. "My designation is KEE-4."
"Everybody in this market has a stage name. You're lucky. Mine took years." He grinned at it. "Keefer."
"The subject has assigned an unauthorised designation," said Keefer, "which this unit declines."
"Too late. It's on the sign."
"There is no sign."
Namren picked up a marker and a blank bin label, wrote KEEFER — NOT FOR SALE on it in large confident letters, and stuck it to the droid's chest plate.
The droid looked down at it for a long moment.
"There is," it conceded, "now a sign."
IV. Partition Seven
The market emptied the way it always did, all at once: shutters rattling down along the row, glowbulbs cut stall by stall until the Boneyard was a long dark hall with a few islands of light. Namren pulled his own shutter halfway and sat in the back with the droid and did the sensible thing, which was sums.
A Republic Correspondent unit, working, fully restored, with its memory wiped clean, would sell for three months' rent. Maybe four. He could pay back the tin. He could pay his room. He could stop eating Throop's noodles and start buying his own.
He looked at the droid. It stood where it had stood all afternoon, at the edge of the stall, dome turned toward the market's far entrance. It hadn't moved from there in hours. Every time someone walked past, the lens tracked them until they were gone.
It's a droid, he told himself. Wiping it isn't killing it. It's resetting it. You reset things all the time.
"Keefer," he said. "Come here. I need to run a diagnostic."
Keefer came. It walked with a slight side-to-side motion, like a small, dignified man in heavy boots. It stood by the bench and let him open the access port on its back without comment.
Namren plugged in his datapad and brought up the memory map. Rows of partitions, labelled in Republic code. He scrolled down. Most were ordinary: motor functions, language packs, broadcast formatting, maintenance logs. And one, near the bottom, blinking amber.
PARTITION 7 — CORRUPTED — LOCKED.
He frowned at it. "What's this?"
"Partition seven," said Keefer.
"I can see that. What's in it?"
"Partition seven."
Namren tapped it. The screen flashed an access prompt, then an error. The file structure underneath was a mess, damaged and knotted like the wiring he'd pulled out of the droid's chest, but it was there, a big block of data held shut.
"Fine," he said. "Don't tell me. It's corrupted anyway. I'll clear it and we'll start clean." He selected the full memory wipe. His thumb hovered over the confirm key.
He pressed it.
The progress bar appeared. Crawled forward. Stopped.
Keefer's voice changed. The warmth drained out of it, the announcer's roundness gone flat and formal as a recorded message.
"Access denied."
The wipe failed. The screen went red.
Namren stared at it. He reset the datapad, reconnected, and ran it again. The bar crawled. Stopped.
"Access denied."
"It's corrupted," Namren said, to the droid, to himself, to nobody. "It's no good to you. It's broken data. It's just taking up space."
He ran it a third time.
The progress bar didn't even appear. Instead the droid turned its dome, slowly, until the blue lens was looking straight at him over its own shoulder, and it said, in its own voice again, quiet and very clear:
"Access denied. This partition belongs to M. Sollen. I will hold it until she asks for it."
Namren's thumb came off the key.
"M. Sollen," he said.
"Mira Sollen," said Keefer. "War correspondent. Republic Correspondent Service, Class II. My journalist."
The name sat there between them in the dark of the stall. Out in the hall, the last shutters rattled down. Somewhere far off, a maintenance droid was whistling a single note, over and over.
Mira Sollen. He'd never heard of her. There were thousands of correspondents. The war had a lot of stories to tell and a lot of people telling them. Some of them went to the Outer Rim. Some of them, apparently, went to the lower levels of Coruscant, to places low enough that the grit in a droid's dome was grey.
Some of them didn't come back.
He unplugged the datapad. He closed the access port, carefully, and sealed it.
"Where is she?" he asked.
Keefer's dome turned back to the market entrance. The lens held there.
"I was going to ask you the same question," said the droid.
Neither of them had anything to say after that.
Namren sat for a long time with his elbows on his knees. He thought about the sums, and three months' rent, and the tin under the bench. He thought about grit from somewhere very low, and three blaster marks grouped tight, and a red light that had stayed on all night in an alley because nobody had told it to stop.
Then he got up, pulled the shutter the rest of the way down, and locked it from the inside. He dragged a crate across to the back of the stall, where the view of the entrance was clearest, and patted it.
"You can watch from here," he said.
Keefer walked over, clonk, clonk, and stood beside the crate. Not on it. Beside it. Exactly where it wanted to be.
Namren lay down on the floor of the stall with his coat under his head, because it was late and the lifts home would be crowded with the kind of people you didn't want to meet at this hour, and because, although he didn't say so, he didn't want to leave it alone.
He fell asleep with the sums still unfinished.
At the back of the stall, Keefer stood all night with his dome turned toward the market entrance, his lens a patient, steady blue, waiting for a journalist who wasn't coming.
END OF EPISODE 2
Next: Episode 3: The Guide's Son