Early 961 ARR (39 BBY)
Kyla and Gavin's parents were away in the countryside visiting old friends, leaving their house free for a few nights. This made it a perfect venue for my pseudo birthday party. Having no way of really comparing the calendars of Earth and this galaxy, I had decided that I would turn 20 on the anniversary of my unceremonious arrival on Naboo. By any measure my actual birthday must have already passed, but there was little point being fussy about dates in an entirely different calendar system.
"So is your girlfriend coming tonight?" Kyla called out coquettishly from across the kitchen where she was preparing some snacks for the party.
"I've told you a dozen times now, she's not my girlfriend but yes, Rana is coming tonight".
Maybe, I was protesting a little too much at this point. Since our initial awkward introduction, Rana and I had sat together every class, had lunch together regularly, but perhaps most importantly, tinkered together. Rana loves taking apart machines and putting them back together, which is pretty much my main hobby now, so it was great to have someone to share this with, the fact she was so very pretty didn't come into it at all…really.
---
Kyla's favourite space jazz tunes were blaring out from the house mixed with the sounds of chatter, mostly from Gavin's spaceport colleagues. Gavin was surprising popular at his work, I can only assume doesn't leave his dirty socks in hyperdrives, just our living room. Rana and I were sat out in the garden, having found a quiet bench out of the way to talk while watching the sun creep down over the horizon.
Rana had moved to Theed from a small village on the other side of the planet, one of many communities that existed purely to support a small plasma mine. Naboo was sort of like a small oil rich nation on Earth, plasma mined here was used across the galaxy for many applications and is highly sought after. Rana had been keen to do literally anything with her life other than mining, and had found her calling in tech, so long as she didn't have to repair mining droids.
She sighed and leaned against me, gazing off into the distance, "Do you like it here?" she asked vaguely. "It's a nice house." I replied completely missing the point. "No silly, Theed, Naboo, this galaxy, as opposed to… Orth?". "Earth" I corrected, stalling while I considered the question.
"Yes, I think…the people here are nice, I have friends, Kyla, Gavin, you…and there's all these incredible things, spaceships, droids…but so much I miss as well."
"Do you think about your home much? Did you have anyone special?".
"I used to think about my parents a lot, but as time wore on, I got used to the idea that this is my life now. I had friends too, some guys I played games with after school, but no one…special."
"I've always wanted to leave home." she replied "To be anywhere else than that tiny village where nothing ever happened. Coming to live in Theed is a dream come true, but now I'm here it feels like just a first step, like I have so much more to see. You have by accident, what I've always dreamed of, an adventure somewhere far far away."
I really don't know how to respond to this. Is this a grand adventure and a dream come true? I remember thinking that when I first arrived, my sci-fi fantasies come to life, but at the cost of everything and everyone I knew. And now what, I have an ordinary life working in a shop, is that really such a wonderful adventure? Am I really living some amazing fantasy?
Thankfully, she saves me the trouble of responding by turning to face me and pressing her lips against mine.
---
I had spent two months messing with the Intellex III droid-brain from R4-B8, really not achieving much of anything. The code remained meaningless, and I couldn't find a way to communicate or utilise the brain through a data pad. I decided I needed more data, or really in this case, more brains.
Collecting brains might be a somewhat zombie-esque pastime on Earth, but using what money I could save and making copious use of my employee discount that Zomir granted me (now to his slight regret), I gathered a number of droid-brains from a wide range of droids. I also splashed out on my most expensive purchase so far, 600 credits for a very second-hand data analysis terminal, which had spent most of its life keeping inventory for a small shipping firm.
My idea was this, compare the source codes of different droid-brains, using the analysis terminal. Find out what was consistent and different between different types of droid. What were the software differences between an astromech and a medical droid, a cleaning droid and a lifter droid? At least then I could understand what different sections of the code is for, even if I can't read it.
I'm not sure Zomir understood my strange new obsession and certainly didn't believe it could achieve anything. Rana was fascinated, though I think more enthusiastic in the physical disassembly of broken droids that my brain harvest necessitated.
After another month and frightening number of credits, I had twenty-three seemingly functional droid-brains to play with. There were no protocol droids among this as they were in a different price league. Most of them were from droids even more budget than R4-B8, but if anything, that was ideal. The simpler the droid, hopefully the simpler the code, and the better chance I had of discovering something useful.
---
On reflection, I should have realised that this would be a painstaking process. My precious analysis terminal could only compare two sets of code at a time, and would take more than a day to do even this. Once it spat out a result, it was necessitated many hours of my own staring at the baffling data to even begin to make any sense of it.
Rana tried to help, but it is easy to forget just how alien the whole concept of coding was, to even tech enthusiasts like her. Zomir had spent decades of his life working with droids and all he really knew, is that it is unknowable. The information available on what tech sites I could access on Naboo's holonet, read more like mythology than technical guidance. I tried to take this as a positive; that what I was doing was groundbreaking, rather than futile. Though at this pace I had real doubts.
At least Rana would keep me company, sitting on my bed reading or messing with my own projects, while I glared intently at datapads, demanding answers emerge from them. She would distract me intermittently with make-out sessions too, making her an excellent girlfriend to her rather distracted boyfriend.
---
At Kyla's instigation (threats of bodily harm), I did make efforts to take Rana out now and then. Some of these outings were less than successful. The Naboo Puppet Theater is famous not just on the planet but attracts visitors from far and wide. I still haven't the faintest idea why, it was painfully cringeworthy to watch, making Sesame Street look like Shakespeare by comparison.
I had enjoyed going to the simulator arcade. This was the closest thing to a gaming experience you could really have on Naboo, where anyone could use a flight training simulator and pretend to be a starfighter pilot for an hour or two. Turns out I'm terrible at it and really should not be left at the controls of a fast-moving vehicle, but it was still cool. Rana was much better and had greatly enjoyed the first dozen times of blasting me to bits.
Perhaps best of all, were times we had enjoying each other's company alone together. The most memorable of these where we walked right to the outskirts of the city for a picnic, looking out over the rolling green meadows stretching for miles, with the edges of the Gungan swamps on the horizon. Sitting with a beautiful woman, in this idyllic setting, did I really need anything more from life?
--
Gavin's strong and silent routine had started to make an impression on a number of young ladies and gentlemen of Theed. The pair of us made a point of going to the Leaky Hyperdrive at least one night a week, joined at times by Rana, Kyla, Asherré and any number of Gavin's spaceport colleagues and aspiring lovers.
It is amazing how popular he could be with so little to say, while his sister could natter for hours but was only with those close to her. It meant that our small apartment was getting quite the rotation of late-night visitors, so I found myself spending more time at Rana's even tinier home.
Still, I didn't mind too much given she would let me continue my code deconstruction while she lay resting beside me, watching some holodrama series about an ancient Naboo princess, torn between love and duty in painful cliché. It really pained me how poor the entertainment industry in this galaxy seemed to be, but then on Earth we had reality TV so who was I to judge.
It was on one of these quiet nights in together that it finally happened, I had a breakthrough! I almost couldn't believe it when I finally noticed the pattern. All the droid-brains, from a tiny mouse courier droid to a heavy industrial lifter, had a common segment of code. It was even present on a centuries old cleaning droid, that may even have predated the Ruusan reformation! It was the most jumbled and non-sensical section of the lot, and had all sorts of interconnections with other code segments across the droids.
The only thing that would make sense for this to be, was a common core operating system. From this small but diverse sample this common operating system was being used but most, if not all the droids in the galaxy. This was the thing that enabled droids to seem alive, with animal-like intelligences, with the potential to emerge as sentient. This code was the key to true AI far beyond anything that had been achieved on Earth, and as far as I had been able to determine, something no one in the galaxy had even thought to look for.
I grabbed at Rana beside me and began gushing to her my delight at this great discovery, only eliciting a fond bemused expression in return. After a few minutes of this, she said "Okay, okay, that's great babe, so what can you do with it?"
I stopped and stared at her, my mind spinning with delusions of grandeur before remembering the key point that Zomir had made at the beginning of my quest. The code is almost certainly written in at least one truly ancient language that I couldn't hope to translate. It was doubtful it could even be made readable at all given the array of glitches that occurred on the datapad screen that was simply trying to display it.
In effect, all I had really done is moved from vast block of unreadable code to a single smaller, though still huge, block of unreadable code. Perhaps someday, working with an army of protocol droids and dedicated researchers it might be possible to break the code down line by line, but right now it was of no practical value.
Just like that my euphoria had faded, rapidly moving from feeling like a groundbreaking researcher to someone who had wasted vast amounts of time despite Zomir having forewarned me that it was a pointless endeavour.