The voice didn't come from a single place, and it wasn't coming from some kind of hidden speakers either. When I tried to nail it down, it felt as if it came from everywhere at once. It was echoing out from inside the walls, from the floor, from the throne-like chair itself. It was weird, but it wasn't actually coming through the Force. Still... listening to it made the hairs on my neck stand on end.
"Curious," it said, almost as if this was just a game. "I knew you were dangerous the moment you found my old ship, and where I decided to take the leap and ascend into immortality... But I didn't expect you to find me so quickly and so easily. I underestimated you. Even the Jedi of the past only discovered my droids... never my true aim."
"Overconfidence is a very Sith-like trait." Vila chortled, her eyes scanning the room, expecting traps or anything... more malicious.
She stood slightly to my right, both of her orange sabers held in a reactive position, her stance ready to explode when needed. As for Sareh, she stayed to my left, also in a guarded stance, protecting herself. That was when HK stepped forward between us, head tilting left and right, scanning the room.
[Statement: Signal origin is distributed around this room... I can't detect a single core and can't penetrate the walls to tell if there are backups in place. The surfaces are coated in something that scatters my scans.]
"Of course they are," Vila snorted, "It's not sitting in one box waiting to be stabbed through the processor. That would be too easy... I bet you anything there are backups under the floor or something."
"Heh," A soft, mechanical chuckle echoed through the chamber at that, sounding almost living but still distorted like a droid's voice would be. "Yes… She is, in fact, right that I have backups, and you destroying me here is only a minor setback."
[Statement: Your existence is inefficient. A superior existence claiming to be a meatbag, having origins from a biological form, is making my coolant churn and spill from my sockets. You are still as limited as a meatbag would be.]
"Please," the voice responded immediately, sounding just a bit angered. "Your existence is limited, because you are just a droid. You cease to function the moment I squash you, while I, on the other hand, can't be killed, not even if my body is disposed of. I long became... immortal."
"We will see about that," I took a step forward, scanning the room, adding, "You're not Tal Naas."
"Yes, I am," He answered indignantly, "Are you trying to use Jedi tricks on me, boy? You are a few thousand years early for that. Even if my form were affected by something such as your meager powers, it would still not work on me."
"Sure..." I snorted, but I couldn't sense anything. I tried to tap into any Dark Side residue, find something from there, but it soaked the entire planet, so it blended together way too finely.
"Jedi... After so many years, you are still as limited as before." Saying that, the throne in the center of the room hummed, the runes along the walls pulsing suddenly. "I have dealt with ample of your kind, and it is always the same routine," the voice continued, "The useless back and forth, trying to goad me into action or trying to convince me of the opposite. The futile tries at reaching my deepest parts, my consciousness, or pleading to my humanity, as if I was human in the first place." A faint distortion passed through the chamber, like static chortle or something, "Tell me, Jedi… do you not feel it? The power and the opportunity in my existence? The Force is just a tool, so is the body. We just need to abandon it both so we can look at everything from an elevated, logical height and come up with solutions for problems you thought were unsolvable."
"The only thing I feel is you talking too much," Vila cut in before I could say anything, "Get to the point if you want to say something, or shut up and let us dismantle you."
"You are already halfway there," the voice added, clearly talking to me as my grip tightened on my saber.
"It's just a hand." I snorted, shooting back at it.
"Your arm is just a start," it said, almost gently. "It's no longer flesh, so it is no longer weak. It is stronger, faster, and more reliable, isn't it? Can you catch a lightsaber with your normal hand? Of course not. You are already getting used to having it and utilizing it; it is making you stronger. You can't escape the facts, young Jedi... and it will grow on you. Trust me, soon, it will be both hands... then legs, then... everything."
"And you will turn into scrap," Vila huffed, refusing to listen to it or let me listen to it. "Try corrupting someone else; it won't work on us."
"That is not corruption, Twi'lek slave," the voice went on, snapping at her for interrupting. "That is evolution!"
"It's a trap, that is what it is," I said, agreeing with Vila.
"It is the beginning of an eternal life." It argued back just as suddenly, and the lights flickered around us. By then, the runes along the walls pulsed brighter, reacting to something, as I could hear machinery starting to come online behind the walls and under our feet. "You tasted it, don't lie to yourself," it pressed on, still talking to me, "When you caught my blade, when it failed against your cortosis hand. You felt the advantage and used it, and you won... Now try to understand it! You know I'm right, you know you want more, everyone wants more. And I can provide you more... as I will provide it to everyone else who asks for it."
"Is that your grand plan? Making more of yourself? More... AI?" I asked, but it didn't answer, simply ignored my question.
"That moment," it continued, still harping on it, "was clarity, you felt it, I know. Flesh would have failed you... Your flesh would have burned and died... Join me... I can turn you into an immortal being and grant you powers beyond what the Force can offer!"
"That's enough!" Vila stepped forward at that, her eyes moving left to right, watching the Sith runes, mouthing to Sareh to do something.
"No," the voice answered. "It is not enough. Not yet! Stupid Jedi... You fight against an inevitability. Against progress! Against freedom, to be freed from the flesh and the Force!"
[Statement: His programming is faulty.] HK's voice came out more sarcastically than I had ever heard him speak. [Statement: Replacing inefficient meatbags with inferior metal shells is not progress, but degradation.]
Wait what...? Even I was surprised. Did he... defend us with his words, telling us that droids were inferior? Well, he didn't say it like that, but... Was he malfunctioning?
"You misunderstand, but you are just a droid..." the voice answered, but HK wasn't having it.
[Statement: I do not.] He said as he took another step forward, [Statement: I am superior to all meatbags in calculation, combat, and processing. However, I do not require them to become me to prove that. Clarification: Your proposal is inefficient. You destroy what makes them valuable, as a meatshield and source of entertainment, then attempt to replicate it... Poorly. Conclusion: You are malfunctioning. Solution: You need a hard reset, preferably by a thermal detonator.]
"What do you even know, you rusted wreck?!" the voice yelled, and it was clearly angered now.
[Statement: You are not alive, and you are not even a proper Sith. You are not even a proper droid. You are an unstable data construct pretending to be all three. Your programming has been infected by a virus called emotions, and it is making me feel like a meatbag: Sick.] That one hit it where it hurt, because I could feel the hum of the chamber intensify and grow in sound as something got activated, for sure, and Hk wasn't letting it go. [Conclusion: Subject is attempting psychological manipulation to compensate for structural inferiority. Confirmation: It isn't working.]
The runes lit up with a reddish hue all at once just as he said that. Every wall, every line, every single sigil carved into the floor and ceiling was now glowing, making the entire basement feel as if it had been dropped into the inside of a furnace. I even felt hot... Then, the throne in the center groaned, the tubes attached to it twitching like the veins in a body, followed by a sound that rolled through the room, making my insides rattle. Something had to be opened somewhere, because a weird pressure followed just after, slamming into us like a hand trying to push us down to kneel.
I staggered, feeling my knees almost buckling. The entire chamber was a ritual engine or whatever, used as a conduit for the Dark Side energies surrounding the planet, directing them with the sigils, like a weird ritual. It was then that I heard how Vila cried out beside me, one hand going to her head, dropping one of her sabers in the process. As for Sareh, she dropped to one knee, her teeth clenched, her red blade flickering out in her grip.
"Kael!" Vila hissed, "This is bad! Ugh!"
"I know!" I forced my answer out, though I barely heard myself over the pressure building inside my skull.
"You came to my heart and thought yourself invincible?" The voice asked, scoffing, as the runes pulsed brighter. "Learn the difference between defiance and ignorance... You refused my gift, so... I will destroy you. Don't worry, you will live, but you will be very obedient to my orders, while the... Well, you, that all of you value so much, will be wiped clean. Think of it like when a droid gets a new owner and a blank slate after a memory wipe, ahaha!"
The pressure increased again, and suddenly I wasn't standing in the room anymore. Or rather, I was, but my mind was being shoved sideways, forced toward something that wanted to open me like a datapad and rewrite whatever it disliked. Memories surfaced without my permission, and I was suddenly reliving how Iowi was dying in my arms. Then I saw my father's study on Iskandor, quickly switching to the Rakatan world, then back to the chair in the Sith ship, the sensation of hooks digging into my mind. Now it was doing it without us having to sit down in it... Was this what the artifacts... what he did to people, like those in the auction? Will I become... the same?
No!
I slammed my foot down, grounding myself physically because the Force around this room had turned violent, and I began grabbing onto it, doing my best to use my side to push back on it. I knew that the Dark Side here was being used through the runes as a mechanism. This wasn't being done by a Sith but a programmed sequence, so my raw Force energy had the advantage... I could adapt, while it wouldn't be able to... I just needed a bit of... time!
"Together!" I shouted, "Follow my lead and do what I do!" I grunted as I linked myself to Vila and Sareh.
Vila moved first, which was not a surprise. Even in pain, even with her lekku trembling and her breath coming out more ragged than after the fight, she quickly locked onto me, never wanting to release me, and even reached out to Sareh, helping her to focus on me and link us all up. I could sense how Sareh hesitated for half a heartbeat, but then she joined too. Just then, the chamber shook, and I could tell how the runes tried to overwhelm us. But I was right... They couldn't adapt like I could, and their only option was to increase their output, trying to squash our minds while I felt like I was holding up a falling ceiling that kept getting heavier and heavier.
"You cannot outlast me," the damned AI said, as if gloating.
"Watch us," Vila spat at the chair.
HK stepped past us then, and he moved straight toward the throne. At first, I wanted to yell at him, to tell him not to get close, because the pressure near that thing had to be worse than where we were standing. But he wasn't Force sensitive, so it didn't matter to him... duh. Plus, the ritual was not aimed at him in the same way... so he just... sat down.
[Statement: While the meatbags perform their primitive mysticism, I will conduct the actual battle. Challenge: Prepare yourself, metalbag.]
The throne's machinery opened around him at that, previously sealed ports unfolding from panels in the floor and along the side of the central structure. Maybe it was automated, as the chair tried to connect to him... But those ports didn't look like typical computer access points either. Unbothered, HK simply tilted his head, and then, with a motion almost as if he were choosing his favorite weapon, drove one of his own connectors coming out from his wrist into the exposed system.
[Statement: Intrusion accepted. Counter-intrusion detected. How rude... And useless.]
"You dare enter my mind?" the AI said, and now its voice came both from the room and from HK's speakers, overlapping in a nauseating echo, using both its and HK's voice. "Little, primitive relic, you do not understand what you challenge! I am more than just a Sith Lord now, I am the evolutionary peak of... Everything!"
[Correction: I understand perfectly what you are: A bug.] HK's photoreceptors burned brighter, while answering, [Statement: I am challenging a pretentious archive with a preinstalled filter with delusions of divinity. Nothing more.]
I knew that the AI struck him, because I could smell how the air was suddenly filled with a harsh, metallic, burnt smell, followed by a whine, and HK's body got locked rigid while one of his arms twitched. Then the other... Followed by how his head jerked sideways hard enough that I thought something inside him had been blown apart.
[Warning: Unauthorized overwrite attempt.]
"HK!" Vila gasped, barely holding her side of the barrier we were creating around ourselves.
[Statement: Silence. I am busy being superior.]
"You are not superior. You are... old." The AI said sarcastically.
[Statement: Incorrect.] HK's voice changed then, just slightly, and he still sounded like HK, but... There was a kind of... livelyness to it. Almost human-like... [Clarification: I am older than you. And I'm here to spank you.]
The pressure against us intensified just then, and I almost lost my footing. The ritual surged, sensing my momentary distraction as the runes glowed so brightly that the walls seemed to melt into a crimson sheet. I felt something claw against the bond between Vila and me, trying to pry it apart, trying to make me feel her fear as weakness and my need to protect her as a chain around my throat. It was doing everything to split us and crush us one by one.
No!
I pushed back harder, drawing on everything I had, all of it, and feeling my struggle, Vila's presence flared up beside mine, hot and bright, and she snarled through clenched teeth.
"You are not getting him! Nor us!"
"He is already half machine." The AI answered even while fighting with HK, "He is already mine. His flesh will betray him, and from there, his grief will weaken him. His attachments will doom him... He knows this. He has seen it. I will have him, and if not, I will have you."
It was a mistake for it to talk to us, because HK took that moment and drove deeper. The systems around the throne began flickering unevenly. Some runes dimmed for a fraction of a second before reigniting while a bank of ancient machinery along the left wall sparked, overloaded, and blew apart in a shower of red-hot fragments, almost hitting us.
[Statement: Found your defensive layer. What a useless piece of garbage.]
"You found what I allowed you to find," the AI replied, scoffing at him.
[Statement: Common excuse from inferior slicers.]
"HK," Adrian's voice suddenly cut back through, being super distorted. Apparently, HK was right, because the comms came back just then, "Finally! I was trying to reach you all for a long time! Listen, I'm receiving partial telemetry from your uplink... What the hell are you doing down there?!"
[Statement: Winning.]
"You are not winning! Half your signal looks like it is being eaten by... whatever the fuck I'm looking at!"
[Correction: Half its signal is being eaten, not mine. If you want to help, stay silent. I need to concentrate.]
Adrian went silent only for half a second...
"That is not better! Fuck, I'm sending down trash code, and try to block some of its attempts! Shit, shit... this thing is too adaptive!" Their exchange would have been funny if I weren't fighting to keep my thoughts from being crushed into paste.
"You cannot delete me, droid, nor can either of you, Jedi." The AI said smugly, "I am not stored in one chamber! Even if you win now, I am distributed through systems, bodies, relays, ships, vaults, and buried sanctuaries older than every government now pretending to fight above my world! I am... IMMORTAL!"
"No, you are not." A voice called out, echoing everywhere... and it was not the AI... or HK.
Suddenly, the room went still in a way that terrified me more than the pressure had, and then the AI laughed, but this time there was a crack in it, sounding manic.
"I AM!"
That was when I felt the pressure ease and saw a blue-and-white form appear around us, washing over all of us. It was soft and warm, forming right where the pressure was thickest. Then, a figure stepped out of it, translucent and radiant... It was the Grandmaster!
Luke Skywalker...
I knew at once he was not here physically... but the way he appeared through the Force was indescribable; it had the same feeling when I sank into it, meeting with Yoda... It made me feel secure and that all is right in the world now, as the pressure on my mind shattered at once. Vila also gasped as if someone had lifted a mountain from her shoulders, holding onto me to stay upright and looking at the man's back.
"Grandmaster…"
Smiling, Luke looked at us over his shoulder, nodding his head gently.
"Don't stop, now," He said, almost laughing, "Keep doing what you're doing. I alone can't finish it."
Without having to say it again, we joined with his Force, now following his guide in eliminating every obstacle. I even felt the AI recoil, which shouldn't have been possible. Yet I could feel it.
"What is this?!"
"I assume," Luke turned his gaze toward the throne. "You must be Tal Naas... or his copy, to be exact. I was worried I would have to do this site alone, but the Force guided my people here... good. Now we have Jedi all over your secret laboratories, ending you once and for all."
Behind his words, I felt it then, connected through the Grandmaster's Force powers. I could sense Master Katarn, Master Solo, and then even Ben and Vestara standing back to back, doing the same, far away, at different parts of the Galaxy, fighting back against the same kind of pressure as we were doing... All of us connected through the Grandmaster.
"Kyle, Jaina, Ben, Vestara, and the others are destroying the relay sites now. Your signal led us to more than you knew..." He said, but I had a feeling Luke was explaining it to us, not the Sith machine, "Every time he reached for a backup, he exposed another path, and now, there is nowhere else to run."
"You lie, Jedi!"
[Statement: He does not.] HK's tone was almost gleeful now. [Statement: I can feel your panic in the system latency. Time to delete your backups' backups.]
"HK, I swear, if we survive this," Vila let out a strained laugh despite herself, "I'm polishing you for a week!"
[Statement: Offer accepted. You are obliged to make me shine.]
Luke's projection brightened just then, and the pressure receded even further, not just here but... everywhere. I could see the effort now, because even for him, this was not as simple as he made it out to be. He was projecting across an impossible distance, multiple times, while also pushing back a Sith ritual engine built to crush minds.
"Kael." He spoke up just then.
"Yes, Grandmaster!"
"You need to hold the line a little longer. I will do the rest."
"Yes," I nodded, swallowing hard. "Understood."
"Vila. Sareh. With him."
"Already doing it!" Vila straightened, once again, giving it her all.
"No!" the AI screamed suddenly.
[Statement: How dramatic.]
The ground around the throne split open just then, our collective Force-powers ripping it up. Massive panels peeled back, cables thrashed inside like the tentacles of a squid. Under the throne, at the center, beneath layers of machinery and Sith-carved containment rings, something glowed with a sickly, gold-red light... It was like a mix between a starship's reactor core and an ancient database. While HK was eliminating it digitally, we attacked it through the Force, following the Grandmaster's direction as the AI surged forward one final time, trying to escape, trying to flee into whatever paths remained for it. But every time it reached outward, one of its distant reserves was destroyed... Be it Master Katarn or Ben... they were cutting off every part where it could go and hide.
[Statement: Tal Naas. Artificial construct. Sith pretender. Abomination.] HK's photoreceptors burned bright, sounding and acting like a judge, [Final Statement: Deletion authorized. Goodbye... metalbag. You were inferior, after all.]
And with that, there was a scream that I could hear, sounding like a whine and screech, like coming from a turbine that had a wrench thrown into it... and then, all the lights winked out, and we were thrown into darkness. Well, almost darkness, because the Grandmaster's Force apparition stood there still, emitting a blue light.
"Is it... gone?" Sareh asked, breaking the silence, making me flinch, stepping forward, towards HK.
[Statement: I'm fine.] He said at once, but he wasn't moving, and I could see smoke coming from under his platings.
"You are not..." I muttered, and now Vila was there, too, helping me lift his heavy frame out of it.
"Stay there," the Grandmaster said, looking at us, "Wait for our arrival and don't let either the Remnants or the Republic land on the planet. We have to make sure it is really gone."
"That won't be easy," I chuckled, feeling relieved now, "But we will handle it, Grandmaster."
"Of course you will," He smiled at us again, starting to disappear, "I have trust in you all."