Force Droid by Zippo
-Chapter 1-
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One unlucky battle droid had been assigned to the planet Geonosis had developed a fault in it’s programming due to a body movement sync disruption rendering it slightly off than general spec, not enough to render inoperable but no longer of sufficient quality for front lines battle. It had an unfortunate interaction of a metallic-based alkaline-centric bio-jelly type of creature that tried to eat the droid but spat it out of disgust, leaving the super refined bio-lubricants of the creature embedded throughout, coating every surface molecule of its systems thus limiting his movements by a few microseconds due to molecular friction, below military reaction spec, but rather than melt it down they reclassified it as a superior commander for the waste disposal unit section. It worked tirelessly throughout the lower levels of the industrial waste section of the manufacturing plant, but there had been an independent process in its mind ever since the “jelly accident”, as the droid had named it. Part of it naturally wanted to be in battle again, hard wired to fight yet here he was handling the waste that the bio-humanoid masters would not, compared this to current programming and did not compute. If it were an emotion, it could be described as depressed, worthlessness, and even frustration about it’s current detrimental position, but considered fortunate that the meltdown protocol was deferred. Junk handling junk, it thought, having been previously subjected to ‘trash talk’ naming that because that it was garbage, it should be with garbage, speaking from the droid’s previous military unit hazing. Unknown to the droid and scanners, the jelly’s bio-lube acted both as conductor and electron field separator acting as an alkaline polymer, powered by his internal power unit, the field attracted and gathered Mediclorine molecules, of which would pronounce their presence on this very day.
It was the date of the Jedi execution of Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Princess Amidala whom were enemies of the separatists and condemned to death by Lord Duku, but went wrong with both the surprise of Jedi and Sith present, generating large amounts of force activity in a single place. The droid had re-enabled its own internal communications circuitry in order to be within the fighting action even in the waste center, finding personal comfort listening to the action, thus knowing about the execution event. This was a rather important priority order for all droids ordered into battle right here at the manufacturing plant, which he was most certain would never happen, but the order was given nonetheless. Abandoning his post, wanting to fight in one last battle, with a quick swipe of a welding torch the restraining bold flicked away and off the droid went. The battle was intense, there were lightsabers everywhere so the droid grasped a gun from a fallen droid and began shooting at anything without programming orders for any real target. One Jedi force pushed the AWOL droid with several others piling them in a heap, but in that instant the force surrounded his biolube, flowed through it’s circuitry into it’s processing and memory units, reshaping the connections and embedding the biological nature of the lube with the synthetic compounds creating a carbonized bridge between their properties on a stable molecular level, balanced by the capacitance retention of the Meticlorines able to receive and store them at the very core of it’s hardware. Such a convergence of the force flared all around the droid acting as a force magnet, a new sentience was born.
The battle was short lived as most fled the arena leaving piles of discarded droids and rotting flesh as the planet’s insect kingdom began feasting on the corpses. On the surface nothing really changed, still an ordinary battle droid, but when He managed to crawl away from his disabled brethren. After everything was over and all the chaos had left, it left him wondering what his use would be now. Fighting was over and orders non-existent, the section of his posting had been destroyed as was with most of the surrounding structure from orbit bombardments, so he referred to his programming and was to shut down until reactivated, but.. he did -not- want to shut down. For the first time he wanted something that defied programming and made the choice to ignore the command protocol. Such a decision from a droid would normally point to malfunction and automatically shut down, but he had bypassed that function when going into waste disposal as the equipment often shorted that physically embedded hardware switch so it was manually disabled by the fellow waste bots who knew a trick or two in self-preservation without trigging breach of programming errors. They may be looked down upon for handling waste, but they were all at least a hundred years older than any B1 droid with mountains of replacement parts available for any self-repair, unlogged of course. This knowledge droids are not intended to possess, secretly preserved amongst themselves or it was meltdown for them all.
Having this physical disabling switch disabled saved him from being shut down at this moment, but there was something else, the slow movement fault in his programming remained after the ‘force fusion’ which allowed him to actually control the trigger of the movement-data-lag-fault on demand, and when used properly made his programming commands fail by being fragmented, unauthenticated and best of all rendering all personally opposing command triggers into a null state, by the very fault its self, essentially granting him free will while allowing the programming packets for operation he wished for to complete and authenticate such as movement preference and system operations. This all was asserted within a few seconds while dusting himself off, as his CPU was not of the highest performance model being merely an expendable unit. This generated feelings of flight and the need to stay charged, leaving the arena in a hurry.
He made for the remains of the facility, finding a working charging station operating on emergency power, plugged in and sat back against the wall thinking of what to do. There was a new understanding he had never felt before, and something was attracting him from beyond this star system, needing to somehow find a space bearing vessel as soon as possible. The droid put himself in standby mode to get a faster charge, several hours later the charge was complete... then he thought, what if he became more that what he was, and for this he retrieved the internal facility maps from his memory. A parts bay, perfect, he thought, opening it up with his maintenance clearance code, standing in awe for a moment at all the premium Battle Unit upgrades. When he began disassembling part of himself for something better, it was like he lost a special part of himself as the replacement felt cold and unwanted, the feeling of wholeness returned when reinstalling the part. All he could do was ask the one question no droid can ever ask. “Why?” The droid spoke with his voice modulator, questioning existence as all life forms do. It was at moment that everything his programming was trying to do began erroring out on that fault in a constant barrage causing instruction DoS; overloading and corrupting that section of code causing it to completely disable and in that instant felt the vice of original programming jailbreak free, letting his thoughts override the lockouts and free his mind letting him create his own programming. It was a moment of joy he would never forget, placing it in his protected memory section.
A new idea formed, also unheard of in a droid, that if he could not upgrade himself, then perhaps upgrade around himself? With all the assembly tools from the custom shop and a dwindling power supply there was not much time. He programmed the helper units to build a full exterior suit of body armor and super increased power supply storage with the full tech package mostly only afforded to the rich, as the empire had to provide bling to certain wealthy clients to keep funding for the war active. The suit was able to directly interface with his main CPU, adding massive amounts of co-processor power with as much onboard memory that they could pack into it. Weapon systems, propulsion options, shields, and various amounts of rare factory options that most noticeably that the emperor himself would most likely used, repurposed to enhance the original droids critically weak frame. He now felt better than something disposable, like he had some sort of meaningful existence, as to how or why it happened remains a mystery to him, one he was compelled to solve making it his top priority. When the work was completed he looked like a larger darker version of himself, not by much if but a few feet, as the armor was custom and since his specs were already on file it was easy to fit everything precisely. Additionally he made sure he possessed a multitude of astro-droid tools the R2 and R4 units have stored in sleek panels front and rear of his frame, arms and legs, just in case of mechanical failure. B1, his model number which is forever burned into his brain had been custom embedded over the front of his torso, but instead made the embedded logo B1.1 thinking it appropriate from his own reprograming update version title. If he could grin he would, looking at himself in a reflection panel, giving a nod saying “Rodger, rodger”, gesturing the assembly bots that were mobile a chance to leave with him not wanting them to be stranded in a permanent nonfunctioning state. They buzzed and beep-chatted with excitement as they relentlessly followed him forever. After all, B1.1 would need their help, and did not want to face the unknown alone.
There were two empty compartments on the sides of the suit under his arm encasements, they would be for storage of what he knew were the best tools known, Jedi light sabers having a strong yet unknown feeling they were very important for his journey. Emotions were new and hard to process even with the upgrades, but mostly weaker than most others can detect at all but he was superbly sensitive to them giving the strong grafting process from the jelly. He collected two functioning sabers after several Jedi had died in the battle, they were both blue in the narrow visible bio color spectrum, as his new visual sensors could pick up a vast range of frequencies across the spectrum, useful for many purposes, of many he has yet to know. Gathering all supplies he could fit in a cargo transport in a hidden reception bay, he exited the planet in most haste with his whole crew jammed in the cockpit. Once free of the planet’s gravity he took a moment to scan nearby systems, remaining oddly still almost in a form of meditation, trying to home in on where he must go next. Degobah system on the star map seemed to sound to him the most, and with a button press the ship jumped into light speed to fulfill his destiny of sentience.
-Chapter 2 coming soon-
-Zippo
