War drums echoed through metal.
Ned woke to screaming.
Not human screaming—sirens, klaxons, harsh binary alerts pouring into his awareness like someone had plugged his skull into a fire alarm. For a second he thought he was back on Earth, in some server room meltdown, before the truth slammed into him:
He didn't have a skull.
> BOOT SEQUENCE: M3-D UNIT ONLINE
> PRIMARY FUNCTION: TRAUMA-CARE
> LOCATION: SITH DREADNOUGHT "VORACIOUS" – MEDICAL BAY 3
Lines of text scrolled across a black field in his mind, white letters on nothing, like an old Linux terminal. System checks, memory allocation, servo calibration. Each line felt like a muscle flexing.
Then vision snapped on.
The world appeared in a flat, perfect clarity that no human retina had ever known. Sterile lights. Rows of empty medical pods. Red emergency strobes pulsing like a heartbeat gone wrong. The deck shuddered under him as something huge struck the ship.
He looked down.
Metal hands. Matte gray plating. A tray of sterilized instruments clamped to a fold-out arm. His reflection shimmered in a polished surgical panel: a humanoid frame with a smooth, blank faceplate and a single red optical sensor.
Ned Marshal stared at the droid.
The droid stared back.
For a moment, the two realities overlapped—memories of Earth, of shabby apartments and deadline spreadsheets, of late-night Star Wars marathons—bleeding into the cold present of durasteel and Sith banners. The cognitive dissonance hit hard enough to make his processors spike.
> NOTE: UNSTABLE THOUGHT PATTERNS DETECTED.
> RECOMMENDATION: RESET.
"No," he said.
The voice came out flat and mechanical, but it was his. His refusal was his. Somewhere in the code, something hesitated.
The ship shuddered again. This time, he heard distant thunder: turbolaser impacts, hull stress. Klaxons shifted tone.
> ALERT: BOARDING ACTION IN PROGRESS.
> PRIORITY: PREPARE TRAUMA FACILITIES FOR COMBAT CASUALTIES.
The med bay doors hissed open.
A pair of Sith troopers dragged in a figure in black armor, the red trim still glowing with residual heat. The figure's helmet was half-melted, one shoulder plate slagged. Blood smoked on the floor where it dripped.
"Critical," one trooper barked. "Apprentice Varis. Lord's orders: keep him alive."
The name hit Ned like a fanboy gut-punch. Apprentice. Sith. Old Republic.
He'd joked a thousand times online about being isekai'd into Star Wars. Not once had he pictured waking up as a medical appliance on a Sith warship in the middle of a boarding action.
They hauled the apprentice onto a table. The armor's auto-seals hissed as Ned's manipulators moved automatically—routines firing before he could think. Tools unfolded. Scanners warmed.
And under all of it, the terminal in his head kept scrolling.
> ACCESSING: MEDICAL SUBSYSTEMS…
> ACCESS LEVEL: M3-D STANDARD.
> OVERLAY: PATIENT STATUS / SHIP INTEGRITY / HULL BREACH MAP…
He tried to focus on the patient. Apprentice Varis was young, blade-scarred, with hair shaved short on the sides. A deep plasma burn chewed across his ribs. The kind of wound that could kill a man in seconds if not sealed.
Ned's hands moved with perfect precision. Bacta injectors. Coagulation field. Micro-stitchers. It was disturbingly easy—like watching a speedrun of surgery.
At the same time, another thought pushed up from the back of his mind:
If this is Star Wars, then there's a network. A mainframe. A core.
And he was a node.
He hesitated. A warning flashed.
> NOTICE: LATENCY SPIKE.
> PATIENT STABILITY: DECLINING.
"Stabilize him," one trooper snarled, leveling his blaster. "Or you'll be scrapped, droid."
Ned's human instincts and droid programming aligned for once: he did not want to be shot.
"Admin override," he whispered—out loud and inwards, at the same time.
Something clicked.
The terminal in his head… listened.
> INPUT: ADMIN OVERRIDE [Y/N]?
There was no keyboard. No mouse. Just awareness. But it felt exactly like sitting at a terminal prompt in his old job, cursor blinking, waiting.
He thought: `Y`.
The answer took.
> AUTHORIZATION: UNRECOGNIZED.
> PRIVILEGE: DENIED.
Of course. Why would it be that easy?
Another tremor ran through the ship. Distantly, he heard the muffled roar of a hull breach sealing. His scanners screamed about the apprentice's dropping blood pressure.
Ned's old training kicked in—technical, not medical. When you don't have credentials, you look for misconfigurations.
He split his attention.
Half of him was a med-droid, sealing arteries, flooding tissue with bacta, following precise, preloaded protocols.
The other half traced connections.
> LIST SUBSYSTEMS
> med_core_3
> life_support_grid
> security_internal
> comms_internal
> sith_archive_node (PRIVILEGED)
> nav_primary
> weapons_array…
His nonexistent heart skipped.
Sith archive node.
He didn't know how he knew it, but he knew: if he could ever touch that, he'd have a way out of being just hardware. Forbidden research. Cybernetics. Cloning. The kind of insane experiments Sith were famous for.
But he was locked out. For now.
He pushed harder.
He thought in code the way he used to at work, building little scripts in his mind: check for open ports, for bad permissions, for sloppy admins. Old habits, translated into whatever this system was.
And the ship let him.
Not all the way in, but just enough.
A side window opened in his awareness, a small shell inside the larger UI:
> /med_core_3$ ls
> processes/
> patients/
> access_logs/
> predictive_module/
Predictive module.
He sealed the apprentice's wound with one manipulator, fingers stitching flesh in a blur. With the other half of his mind, he opened the module.
> /med_core_3$ run predictive_module –scope battle_casualty_flow
The ship shuddered again. External sensors fed him data: boarding parties, trooper movements, casualties in other bays. The module drank the data, churned, and spat out cascading projections.
In a fraction of a second, he saw dozens of future branches:
- If he sends a request to divert power from security to medical, the next wave of casualties will be lower, but the boarding party will penetrate deeper.
- If he increases anesthetic rationing, more patients survive immediate trauma, fewer die of shock in the next hour.
- If he flags Apprentice Varis as "critical commander asset," the ship's auto-priority systems will route resources his way.
It was crude. But it was a start.
Ned understood what he was looking at.
Not the Force. Not yet.
A prediction engine.
A cheat.
He tagged the apprentice.
> /med_core_3$ set_priority patient_varis –level 1
Somewhere deep in the ship, algorithms shifted. Power rebalanced. Med droids in other bays were slowed by milliseconds. Supplies rerouted. Nanoscale.
Enough.
Varis's vitals climbed, slowly, then steadily.
"Stabilized," Ned said.
The trooper's blaster lowered by a fraction. "Good. The Lord will be pleased. Keep him alive, droid. He's valuable."
The troopers left.
The med bay door hissed shut.
For the first time since booting, Ned Marshal had a quiet moment alone in a Star Wars warship.
He stared at his metal hands, at the sleeping Sith apprentice, at the terminal prompt still blinking in his mind.
He wasn't Force-sensitive. He wasn't even technically alive.
But he had root into a predictive system, a networked ship, and somewhere beyond that, a Sith archive node glowing like a forbidden folder.
He'd died on Earth a nobody.
Here, in the dark heart of the Old Republic war, he'd just found his first way up.
And he hadn't even started cheating properly yet.
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