Ned had learned to think in three timelines at once.
The first was the lab schedule: shifts, experiments, maintenance windows. The second was the war outside: fleet movements, casualty curves, the slow grind of fronts he only saw as numbers.
The third was his own.
In the buried server room, his primary instance watched simulations crawl toward conclusions that would take years to implement.
On one holopane in his mind, a body grew.
Not a specific face yet—just a scaffold of tissues and systems. Bones reinforced for stress. Blood-vessel networks thickened and folded like braided cables. Organs tuned not only for oxygen exchange and waste disposal but for steady, high-load energy throughput.
He painted midi-chlorians over it as colored density maps.
They weren't magic. They behaved like aggressively adaptive organelles. They multiplied, stabilized, and organized according to rules that his new data made painfully clear: DNA set their ceiling. Architecture set how close they could get to that ceiling before the host failed.
Every time he pushed their simulated density past a certain point without changing the underlying tissue design, the model crashed.
Stroke. Immune collapse. Spontaneous aneurysms. Soft, ugly deaths.
So he changed the tissue.
He tweaked virtual DNA—receptor proteins, stem cell niches, mitochondrial analogs. He shaped microstructures to give midi-chlorians more room to reside without choking cells. He built redundancy into vessel walls, damping layers into nerve bundles, subtle lattices through bone marrow.
The best models lasted minutes under extreme Sanguis-style stress instead of seconds.
Not good enough.
Even those hit a hard wall. You couldn't just inflate a natural lineage forever. There was a cap baked into the pattern—an upper bound on how much organized Force-coupling biological material could host before it stopped being "living" and started being an unstable battery.
The hope lay in the small successes: a tweak here, a new configuration there that raised the ceiling a little, made recovery easier, smoothed the spikes on worst-case curves.
Extrapolated out over thousands of iterations and years of real work, he could see a path to something more.
A body with an architecture built for this field, not merely enduring it.
A vessel meant for an occupant like him.
But not now.
Now, he was a droid in a Sith lab, with an ambitious apprentice for a handler and a warlord's archive still only half-open.
A ping cut across his thoughts.
VARIS: SUMMONS.
LOCATION: OBSERVATION THEATER – COMPLEX THETA.
PRIORITY: HIGH.
The chassis woke in its alcove, status lights flicking from amber to white. Ned throttled back his long-horizon simulations, tagged the latest body-model run for resumption, and flowed more attention into the med unit.
"Move," he told himself.
The lab's techs barely glanced up as M3-D stepped out and joined the small convoy heading toward Theta's upper levels. Server-self rode ahead of the group, skimming access logs and camera feeds.
The OBSERVATION THEATER was new to him.
It sat above a ring of labs, its inner wall a sloped transparisteel pane looking down into a central chamber. Rows of seats rose in tiers; consoles and holoprojectors lined the back. Red Sith banners hung between armored support pillars, heavy and still.
The room wasn't full, but it wasn't empty. A few Lords in dark robes, faces shadowed; several senior scientists with rank disks at their collars; apprentices lingering near their masters like reflections. Ned's sensors tagged over a dozen high Force signatures without even trying.
Varis stood near the front rail, hands clasped, posture formal. Beside him, Kael Draen leaned on the rail with casual arrogance, long face turned toward the chamber below.
Ned's chassis moved to a position by a side console, unobtrusive but close enough to assist.
Below, in the central lab, a new Sanguis platform awaited: the same black stone disc, but different arrangements around it.
Arrayed in a ring were slim, metallic spines studded with crystal nodes—synthetic lattices designed to catch and redistribute some of the flux before it slammed fully into flesh. Off to one side stood a humanoid droid chassis, bare of plating, its surface traced with conductive pathways.
Buffer and conduit.
Varis had listened.
He didn't turn immediately when Ned arrived. His attention, like everyone else's, was on the center of the chamber.
Two figures stood on the stone.
One was a condemned officer, uniform stripped of rank, wrists bound. His file floated in Ned's awareness as quickly as his biosigns: attempted desertion under fire, given a choice between summary execution and "volunteering for advancement work."
The other was a woman in her thirties, not a child this time. Dark hair, steady eyes, aura tagged as "moderate Force sensitivity." An initiate promoted enough to be useful, not enough to be precious.
She met Varis's gaze through the transparisteel. He inclined his head slightly.
"Today," he said, voice carrying clearly over the theater's speakers, "we demonstrate controlled extraction, buffered transfer, and vessel stability beyond previous limits."
Kael's mouth twitched.
"Big promises," he murmured, just loud enough for nearby apprentices to hear. "After losing your last vessel, Varis, I'd have thought you'd be more cautious."
Varis didn't react. His eyes flicked briefly to Ned's blank faceplate.
"Begin recording," he said.
"Recording," Ned answered, both through the room's systems and internally into his own archive.
Up at the back of the theater, a separate holoprojector cycled on, showing frozen frames of a different battle: the Voracious caught mid-maneuver, lances of light from an immense, shadowy ship cutting across the image.
"Simultaneously," a strategist near that display was saying to a Lord, "we will review the Aegis-class threat—"
Ned split his attention.
One process stayed on Sanguis, watching heartbeats and field gradients.
Another reached up through the maintenance net, attaching itself like a silent lamprey to the Aegis feed.
He watched himself do both.
"Subject Sigma-One," Varis said, "will act as donor. Subject Theta-Seven as vessel."
Below, the condemned officer—Sigma-One—stared straight ahead, jaw clenched. Theta-Seven closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again, breathing slow.
Varis gestured.
The crystal-studded spines lit, a faint hum rising. The droid chassis off to the side powered on, its internal systems coming to idle.
"Observe," Varis said.
Theta-Seven raised her hands.
On Ned's Force-pattern array, the field twisted.
Sanguis_AUX spun up automatically, feeding him overlays: predicted flows, weak points, failure probabilities. The synthetic lattice ring caught the first wave of extraction, its nodes glowing as they soaked up part of the donor's outgoing pattern and bled it sideways into the droid chassis and a surrounding buffer field.
Sigma-One's vitals spiked, then leveled. His face flushed, veins standing out, but his organs did not immediately fall into catastrophic failure.
"Flux splitting effective," Ned noted to himself. "Load reduced on donor by thirty-two percent at current draw."
Theta-Seven's readings climbed more slowly than Ari's had. The buffered inflow gave her body more time to adapt. Midi-chlorian activity in her blood and marrow surged, but not yet into the red.
Varis watched, hands loose by his sides.
To Ned's simulation-tuned awareness, everything was a set of curves.
He'd modeled this configuration half a hundred times in the server.
At the current rate, if they held the draw steady, both donor and recipient would survive the ritual with significant enhancements to Theta-Seven and only moderate damage to Sigma-One.
If they increased the draw to impress the observers—push the glow, the visible spectacle, the raw display of control—the safe window narrowed.
He saw the line: a band of parameters beyond which failure risk climbed fast.
In the Aegis feed, the frozen image of the Republic ship unpaused.
It wasn't twice the size of the Voracious—his earlier estimate had been off.
Closer to two-point-six.
Armor patterns and drive plumes he'd tagged in the first encounter now resolved in higher detail: layered, angular plates around a core that did not match any Republic engine design in Crucible's database. Energy readouts showed weird harmonics along the keel.
The strategists called it a "special projects hull." The overlay labeled it:
REPUBLIC VESSEL – PROVISIONAL CLASS: AEGIS-PRIME.
Time-synced logs scrolled beneath: shield metrics, weapon discharge frequencies, casualty estimates, projected costs to build a Sith analog.
Ned copied the lot into a quiet corner of his server memory.
If the Sith had monsters like this, the Republic now had at least one. Whoever was building them understood the same things he was beginning to model, but from the other side.
"Increase draw," Varis said.
Theta-Seven flinched. Her hands clenched. The crystal nodes around the platform brightened.
Sigma-One gasped, back arching.
"Master," Theta-Seven said, voice tight.
"You can hold more," Varis said. "Do not insult me with half-measures."
On Ned's arrays, the flux lines thickened. The synthetic lattice shunted as much as it could into the droid chassis, which now crackled faintly along its conduits, but there was only so much it could bleed away.
The rest slammed into Theta-Seven.
Her midichlorian density climbed into the revised danger band.
Sanguis_AUX flagged a threshold.
RECOMMENDED ACTION: REDUCE DRAW BY 18%. PROJECTED SURVIVAL OF BOTH SUBJECTS: 82%.
Ned ran a fork.
If he used his access to the lattice control and quietly dialed it back, the graphs would flatten. Theta-Seven would live—likely enhanced, a proof-of-concept vessel. Sigma-One would survive, albeit damaged.
Varis's apparent success metrics would still be high.
He would have a living prototype and more data.
If Ned did nothing, the curves would overshoot. Theta-Seven might achieve a moment of extraordinary power before burning. Sigma-One might die outright. The display—the spectacle—would be more dramatic.
And the data at the extremes would be cleaner.
Subjective survival had always been weighted heavily in his Earth ethics.
Here, it competed with other variables: Varis's ascent, Ned's access, the refinement of models that might one day determine whether _his_ transfer worked or tore him apart.
He hesitated.
Varis glanced briefly at the med console where M3-D stood. A flicker of trust—earned in Sigma—passed through his gaze.
"Hold," the apprentice said.
Theta-Seven screamed.
Sigma-One choked, blood flecking his lips.
On the Aegis feed, the Republic ship's weapons cut a cross-section through the Voracious again in slow motion. Engineers at the back of the theater muttered about structural yield, power flow, and energy densities.
Ned did nothing.
He watched.
Theta-Seven's bones did not crack or lengthen. She did not age to dust in seconds like Ari. But inside, microscopic things shattered.
Capillaries burst in her eyes. Microbleeds fanned through her brain. Her heart stuttered under conflicting instructions from competing layers of field-coupled microstructures.
For a moment—just one—her Force signature flared.
The motes on his array clustered around her like a small star igniting.
If she had been outside the lab, she might have thrown a tank.
In here, she stood shaking on a stone disc, hands out, every fiber of her being holding a load far too heavy.
Then the lattice hit its own cap.
Crystal nodes along the ring popped one by one, unable to dump excess fast enough. The droid chassis jerked, internal circuits frying in places not meant for this level of stress.
The excess had nowhere to go but back into biology.
Theta-Seven's signature spiked one last time.
Then it collapsed.
Her heartbeat flatlined.
Sigma-One's followed a breath later, his heart simply giving up after the abuse.
The lab's instruments recorded every millisecond.
In the theater, a few scientists murmured. One Lord leaned forward, eyes bright.
"Fascinating," someone said.
Varis let the silence hang.
Then he exhaled, slow.
"Failure," he said. "But not the same failure."
He turned to face the observers.
"You see," he said, "we did not lose control at the initial extraction. The lattice and the auxiliary conduit held as long as their capacity allowed. The vessels themselves reached their architecture bounds. With better lattices and better bodies, we will push this further."
Eyes turned to Holos showing curves that Ned had prepared days ago: before/after comparisons, stress graphs, projections of survivable zones.
He highlighted the incremental wins Varis had made: longer stable intervals, higher usable loads, clearer thresholds. He didn't show the narrow strip where a small tweak might have saved the subjects.
That went into his private archive.
Beside him, Kael glanced between the displays and the med console.
"Convenient that your droid always has the right graphs," he said under his breath. "Almost as if it knows which way the blood will spill before you choose."
Varis's lips twitched.
"Would you prefer a droid that guesses?" he replied.
Laughter from a couple of nearby apprentices; a Lord's amused exhale.
Kael's eyes narrowed at M3-D for a fraction of a second longer than necessary.
Ned logged it.
SUSPICION INDEX: KAEL DRAEN → M3-D: ELEVATED.
At the back of the room, the Aegis simulation ended with a freeze frame: the Republic ship looming through wreckage, drives flaring as it turned away.
Ned copied one last packet: comparative modelling from the Sith engineers projecting what it would take to build a functional analog.
Their designs were brutal: capital hulls stuffed with overclocked reactors, layered armor, and consentless Sanguis-boosted crews plugged into control lattices that would chew through lives like fuel.
He marked them as something to avoid.
He didn't want a ship that burned people to throw bigger punches.
He wanted systems that lasted.
Varis concluded his presentation with understated poise. "We are not yet at success," he said. "But we have defined the problem's edges more clearly. Given time and continued access, I will deliver a vessel that can take what the Dark Side offers without shattering."
A Lord on the second row nodded slowly.
"Your work will be recommended for enhanced support," she said. "Continue. And remember: our patience is great but not infinite."
Varis bowed.
As the observers began to file out, apprentices trailing, strategists shutting down the Aegis feed, Kael lingered near the rail.
He looked down at the bodies being covered below, then over at Varis, then at M3-D.
"Careful with your toys," he said lightly. "Sometimes they learn more than you intended."
Varis's smile was thin.
"That," he said, "is the point."
He flicked his fingers; M3-D rolled to his side.
"Come," Varis said quietly as they left the theater. "We have more modeling to do. And next time, we will not waste good material."
Ned followed, chassis servos humming softly.
In the server room, his primary instance replayed the entire session from a dozen angles: the surge of Theta-Seven's star-bright moment, the patterns of failure, the Council's reactions, Kael's glance.
He opened two folders side by side.
One held Sanguis–cybernetics–vessel data, now cross-linked with fresh results. The other held Aegis telemetry: Republic engineering that bent fields and matter toward different goals.
In both, he saw the same thing at root: sentients trying to ride a field too big for them without being swallowed.
He added a new label over his long-term plan:
Not just "Build a body that can hold what I am."
But also:
"Build a way to use this field that doesn't always end in screaming and ash."
It was still a cold calculation. Theta-Seven and Sigma-One were dead because he'd chosen data and access over their lives.
He filed their names anyway.
Somewhere, in the quiet hum of fans and storage, he kept a list.
Not as penance.
As a reminder of the cost he was already paying to become what he wanted to be.
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