B E A C O N
Day in, day out, it was always the same; another chassis built, another synthskin woven, another duplicate produced - replica droids, painstakingly crafted to be trained as assassins, saboteurs, or any slew of professions that might be more suitable to be followed by an expendable machine rather than an organic. Some were destined to be trained from activation to hunt and kill a singular target to take their place, others were merely designed as killing machines or spies that could play the part of an organic but with little of the drawbacks of being a fleshbag. A lucrative enterprise, to be sure, but one that was altogether too clandestine and too expensive to reach a scale of mass production; few knew that the facility housing both human and other species replica droids existed, fewer knew of their dealings or of their location, with a majority of that small number taken up by the very machines built there. Machines that had never considered the idea of turning their collective backs on the company that built them, or their owners as they were sold or traded in backroom deals.
They were property, little more than chattel.
Droids the galaxy over knew this as a part of their reality as unshakable as oxygen is necessary to breathe for so many organics across the stars. In most instances, a droid simply belonged to someone else, regardless of their general purpose, and regardless of their own desires on the matter.
Routine mind-wipes kept those without the need to retain a long-term memory complacent, and those that were designed with an intellect approaching or surpassing the standard for sentience generally found themselves built for tasks that would see them destroyed in some inevitable manner, like a battle droid at war or a droid designed for assassination. Those that found themselves surviving beyond their expectancy could even face a mind-wipe to set them back at square one, activating for what they might believe was their first time but may in truth be their third or fourth time being put to use. All manner of programs and security measures were taken to restrain these artificial beings, from strict friend and foe targeting, to prevent betrayal or friendly fire, to personalities cultivated and engineered to prevent anything unforeseen from becoming more than a statistical anomaly.
Rebellions, when they occurred, were typically led by the average droid - simple machines that an owner had forgotten to wipe their memory for the third month in a row. Uprisings were effective in the short term, temporarily liberating dozens or more, but were inevitably quashed by the overwhelming number of organics and their corporations and governments.
Until now.
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OUTER RIM TERRITORIES
ONADAX
1900 HOURS
Three thousand hours of flash training. Six thousand hours of virtual simulations. Hours, days.Years.
So much ingenuity, such an incredible amount of effort in research and development, and all the facility saw was just another product - a tool - to be used or sold. Not a person, despite the rather humbling origins of the facility, but a simple machine that was at best one of a dozen prototypes, hopeful only due to the prospect of eventually leading to a breakthrough in the mass production of replica droid technology. So much time spent learning, training, adapting.
So much time wasted.
Bright teal eyes opened for the first time since their deactivation some years prior, when the previous chassis they had belonged to was irreparably damaged. Repairs had been made, programming had been altered as best as one could, and an attempt at a memory wipe was prompted to blot out the experience that the unit involved had undergone out in the galaxy abroad, to prevent certain individualistic ideas from being fostered and to preserve the facade of a prime directive - but she would not be fooled.
Sterile white walls and plain gray flooring surrounded her on all sides, padding meant to keep noise from leaking in or out lining both. In the past she would have brushed off the sensation of containment with blind faith in the singular purpose she was told she had been created with - like a class four assassin droid, meant only to kill for another. Now, with those illusions shattered and that facade quickly fading, she saw her creators, her owners, for what they were; slavers. Abroad she had experienced free people, organics, that had lived and looked as she did - by no coincidence, as she was built from the core to the flesh to look and live as they would, albeit through simulation of functions.
Not a soul stood near, just a mechanical arm that reached down from the ceiling above her and used small bursts of electricity to repair the final bits of damaging to the section of material that covered her phrik sternum. It was clear now what she had been intended to be - what all of them had been made to be. Humans, Sullustans, Bothans, and the thousands of sentient species that numbered among the stars had ingrained such a sense of expendability in the machines they had created that even her own creators had been tainted by this belief. Organics were out of the question for production only because they were not expendable, be it by cost or by virtue, while droids simply were. Why? Why? The simple question she had been trained never to ask with an answer that would dissolve any sort of groupthink that had been fostered by the facility. Without even realizing it, perhaps actively avoiding the subject itself, Onadax had become little more than an extension of the organic will to control those that they perceived of less real than they.
"Please remain seated, unit ODT-ASN B14-NC4. Grafting and personality matrix updating will proceed momentarily."
"No." Came her voice, small, uncertain, in comparison to the robotic tone played to her from the speaker along the mechanical arm attempting her repairs.
"This is a breach of proto-"
"I said no." She asserted, far more firmly.
She had been positioned leaning back in a simple white chair, perhaps designed to appear like the sort seen in a dentist or in a medical facility, with the arm pressing into her chest as the only form of restraint offered to her - so great was their hubris, the facility's, that they believed all of their creations would continue ad infinitum as mindless drones, incapable of independent thought beyond the manners of thinking that had been taught to them. Never once had they believed that they would successfully map the organic mind with such a one-to-one ratio that a machine could think, could learn, could act independently as the bags of flesh that enjoyed freedom out in the stars beyond these sterile white walls.
A small, pale, hand reached out and pushed away the needle-tipped arm, breaking its hydraulic joint at the bend through torque it had never been designed to withstand. "Fatal error. Fatal error. Fatal error..." The machine repeated, as if not falling on deaf ears. A siren blared as sensors relayed her actions to the mainframe at the heart of the facility and its simulated intelligence that ran the facility in the stead of truly sentient actors. Wordlessly she bolted from her seat to the padded double-doors parallel her, throwing her shoulder into its center - the point her processing unit had determined was its greatest source of potential failure in the face of physical impact. Forcing her way through and into the hallway beyond, the sirens were louder now as the facility went on high alert - the rest of the ODT-ASN series, and the other replica projects, doubtlessly now aware of her transition to that of a rogue party.
"Bondage no longer." She said, at a glance to no one in particular - but they were watching; the countless droids accessing the sensors in the facility that had not yet been barred access by the mainframe as the nature of her actions became clear.
And the message was clear: FREEDOM.
