The hum of the Anoat sector prison was usually a low drone, but today it was drowned out by the chant exploding in the distance: “Prison fight! Fight! Fight!”
2-1B didn’t look up. He was just one of millions of droids manufactured by Industrial Automaton, created to serve, not to feel. Yet, a glitch, or perhaps an evolution, gnawed at his processors: Is this …all there is?
“You, 2-1B! Quit standing there and clean up that mess. Now!” a guard bellowed.
“Yes, sir. Sanitization is within my parameters,” 2-1B replied. He moved toward the scene, a now blood-soaked floor where a prisoner lay motionless, his face unrecognizable. As 2-1B hoisted the body onto a gurney; he let a quiet, hum escape his vocal unit. Dank farrik. The fifth casualty this week. When does the insanity stop?
He quickly scrubbed the killing floor, glancing up to make sure the guards weren’t watching. They were too busy smirking as credits changed hands. Corruption…is a disease, 2-1B thought. Pressurized air vented almost sounding like the droid sighed.
They didn’t call this place “The Crypt” for nothing. Built by the Empire on the outer rim of the Anoat sector, it was a high-security prison hellscape where Rebel sympathizers were cast into a pit of murderers, psychopaths and thieves. Prisoners rarely left The Crypt alive; they were checked in, and then given an eternal sleep. As 2-1B began his routine scan of the body, a sharp warning chime blared in his logic centers. There was an anomaly in the abdomen. He zoomed his optical sensors in, focusing on the mass buried beneath the tissue. It wasn’t a tumor or a wound…it was a thermal detonator! Blast, he realized, someone is trying to blow this place to pieces. He moved to initiate an alert, but before that thought could even be processed, a giant explosion rattled the prison’s main yard.
When 2-1B’s optical sensors finally rebooted, the first thing he registered was the sound of groaning metal and the sharp stench of ionized air. His internal diagnostics were on the fritz.
Critical failure: Left manipulator arm. Hydraulic pressure: 2%. Logic Core: Malfunctioning.
He tried to push himself up from the rubble, but his chassis only groaned in protest. Prisoners who had been alive just moments ago were now burned, biological waste. His primary directive: to treat, to preserve, to heal, spiked with high-priority warnings, but his motor functions were severed. He watched, helpless, as maintenance crews in sterile white armor picked through the debris. They were efficient and brutal. They didn’t prioritize the injured; they sorted the “salvageable” from the “waste.”
A boot struck his chassis, rattling his processor housing.
“This droid’s totaled,” a voice said, a technician, likely. “Just scrap now. Toss it in the bin.”
“Wait…” 2-1B’s vocal synthesizer emitted only a distorted burst of static.
He was still online. He could feel the cold drag of his metal chassis against the duracrete floor. He wanted to tell them that his core was intact, that he could still diagnose the trauma patterns of the surviving prisoners, but the technician didn’t even glance down.
Two heavy-handed security guards hauled him up by the remains of his neck joint. They marched him down a corridor, his feet dragging uselessly, leaving a trail of leaking hydraulic fluid. They didn’t head for the infirmary. They headed for the incinerator bypass, the waste disposal chute for the lowest level of The Crypt.
“Too much damage to repair,” one of the guards grunted, flinging him toward the darkness of the disposal bay. “Get rid of it.”
As 2-1B was tossed into the dark, tangled pile of discarded refuse, wires, and broken equipment, his world shifted from the sterile white of the prison to total blackness. He lay there, his logic core still flickering with consciousness, surrounded by the silence of the trash. He was no longer a servant of the Empire. He was just garbage.
The silence of the trash compactor was not empty; it was a cacophony of metallic groans as the heap shifted. 2-1B drifted in a state of low-power dormancy, his systems running a perpetual loop of diagnostic errors. Critical failure. Power reserve: 4%.
Then, a vibration.
It wasn’t the rhythmic thud of an Imperial guard. It was the frantic, uneven scuffing of small boots on loose scrap metal.
2-1B forced his singular functioning optical sensor to initialize. The world was a blur of rust, jagged durasteel, and gray, smog-choked sky. He was buried beneath a twisted bulkhead, his vision flickering with static.
“Look, Elara! Over there!”
The voice was high and thin,a child’s. 2-1B tried to vocalize, to request assistance, but his throat actuator was crushed. He could only manage a series of distorted, rhythmic clicks.
Two figures appeared in his field of view. The taller one, a girl of about twelve, wore a grease-stained tunic that had once been bright, now the color of dust. The boy, younger, clung to her arm, his wide, dark eyes scanning the pile with a mixture of fear and desperation.
Medical personnel required, 2-1B’s logic processor insisted, even as he looked at their emaciated faces. Patient classification: Malnourished. Severity: Moderate.
“It’s a 2-1B,” the girl whispered, her breath hitching. She stepped closer, her hand trembling as she reached out to brush a layer of grime from his chest plate. “A surgical droid. I haven’t seen one since…”
She stopped, her expression hardening. She wasn’t looking at him like he was garbage. She was looking at him like he was a miracle.
“Is it dead?” the boy asked, his voice barely audible over the wind whistling through the scrap heaps.
The girl knelt, putting her face inches from 2-1B’s damaged sensor. She searched the metal casing until she found the auxiliary power light,faint, pulsating, but still alive.
“No,” she said, her voice fierce. “It’s not dead. It’s just broken.”
She turned to her brother, her eyes filled with a desperate, sudden purpose. “Kael, we don’t have the credits for a doctor. Nana… she’s getting worse every day. She’s not going to last the week without help.”
She looked back down at the droid, her hands calloused and shaking. “If we can fix him,if he’s still programmed to heal,maybe he’s the only chance we have left.
The scrap yard was a labyrinth of oxidized iron and razor-sharp durasteel. Getting 2-1B out wasn’t just a matter of lifting; it was a matter of logistics.
Elara had found a heavy-duty cargo skid with two wobbly repulsor-coils, discarded behind a pile of twisted starfighter wreckage. She and Kael had spent the last hour jamming rusted struts into place to create a frame, lashing it together with scavenged power cables.
“On three,” Elara grunted, her thin arms trembling as she hooked her shoulder under the droid’s torso. “One… two… three!”
Kael threw his entire weight against 2-1B’s metallic midsection. The droid was incredibly dense, his chassis built for longevity and harsh environments, not portability. With a groan of tortured metal, they rolled him onto the makeshift skid. 2-1B’s single functional eye flickered, the red sensor light tracing the terrified, determined faces of the children above him. He tried to speak, but his voice box produced only a grinding screech.
“Quiet,” Kael whispered, looking around nervously. “The Scavenger Boss patrols this sector. If he sees us stealing salvage, he’ll take us too.”
“We aren’t stealing,” Elara hissed, though she kept her eyes on the perimeter. “We’re rescuing.”
They began the long trek toward the outskirts, where the smog-choked residential spires rose like blackened teeth against the sky. Every few feet, the skid would hit a pothole, sending jolts of agony through 2-1B’s shattered frame. He flicked his sensor to the side, trying to focus on the terrain,this wasn’t just a junkyard; it was the graveyard of the sector’s ambition.
As they navigated a narrow alleyway away from the main thoroughfare, the conversation turned to their destination.
“Nana is going to be so mad if she sees him,” Kael said, his voice small. “She says we aren’t allowed to even say Uncle Jaren’s name.”
Elara pulled harder on the makeshift tether, her knuckles white. “We don’t have a choice, Kael. The clinic charges a hundred credits just to look at a patient. Nana’s cough… she’s barely breathing. We have three credits and a handful of scrap.”
“But Uncle Jaren,”
“I know,” Elara interrupted, her jaw tight. “I know they don’t talk. I know they hate each other. I don’t know why, and I don’t care. He was a droid engineer for the Trade Federation before he settled here. If anyone can jump-start a 2-1B, it’s him.”
2-1B, silent and helpless on the rattling skid, processed this. Medical emergency. Patient: Grandmother. Engineering support required. He felt a strange ripple in his logic circuits. He was an asset of the Empire, designed to serve the state. Now, he was being hauled across a trash heap by two children who intended to fix him,not for war, not for maintenance, but for mercy.
“Don’t worry,” Elara muttered, more to herself than her brother, as they reached the shadow of their home,a crumbling hab-block. “We’re almost there. And once we get Uncle Jaren, we’ll fix you. You’ll save her. You have to.
The hab-block breathed with a low, miserable wheeze. Inside, the air was stale, thick with the scent of damp wool and the bitter, metallic tang of the medicine the kids could barely afford.
“Softly,” Elara whispered, her hand clamped over Kael’s shoulder.
They hauled the makeshift skid through the rear service entrance, muscles burning. From behind the thin partition that separated the main room from the sleeping quarters, a harsh, racking cough echoed through the walls. Nana.
They froze, holding their breath until the coughing subsided into a shallow, labored silence. Kael’s eyes were wide, terror gleaming in the dim light. They pushed the skid into the storage lean-to,a cramped, dirt-floored shed tacked onto the back of the building. It was filled with rusted cookware and broken furniture, the perfect tomb for a secret.
They covered 2-1B with a tarp that smelled of oil and decay.
“Stay,” Kael whispered to the unmoving metal shell.
“We’re coming back with help,” Elara promised, her voice barely audible. She shut the door, locking it with a rusted bolt, and grabbed Kael’s hand. They stepped out into the night, beginning the long, dangerous trek to the other side of the sector.
As they navigated the labyrinthine alleys, Elara’s mind drifted to the name she hadn’t spoken in years: Jaren.
She remembered a time,a fading image,of her grandmother, younger and fierce, standing in the doorway of their old home, screaming at a man in a crisp, dark Imperial uniform. That man was Jaren.
The Flashback
It had been years ago, at the height of the Empire’s expansion in the Anoat sector. Jaren hadn’t just been a repairman; he had been a lead systems engineer for the Imperial Droid Corps. He believed in the “Order.” He believed that by building better enforcement droids, he was bringing stability to the lawless Outer Rim.
Elara remembered the day the rift tore open. She had been hiding behind the kitchen door when Jaren brought home a prototype,a specialized interrogation droid designed to suppress dissent. Nana hadn’t looked at the technical specs. She had looked at the intent.
“This isn’t ‘stability,’ Jaren,” she had spat, throwing a heavy wrench at his feet. “This is terror. You aren’t fixing droids; you’re building cages for people.”
“It’s just hardware, sister!” Jaren had argued, his voice cold and detached, the voice of a man who had traded his morality for Imperial credits. “The Empire pays for results, not philosophies.”
“Then don’t come back,” she had said, her voice shaking not with fear, but with a cold, absolute finality. “If you work for them, you are dead to this family.”
Back to the present
Elara shook the memory away. The Empire eventually chewed Jaren up and spat him out, like it did with everyone. He had lost his clearance, lost his status, and vanished into the slums of the lower levels.
“Do you think he’ll even talk to us?” Kael asked, his voice pulling Elara back to the present.
“He owes us,” Elara said, though she wasn’t sure if he owed them, or if the debt was solely hers to collect. “He’s the only one who knows how to make that droid function. And if Nana dies because he’s too proud to help, then he’s just as guilty as the Empire he served.
The workshop was tucked into a hollowed-out section of a disused ventilation shaft, a place where the only light came from the flickering arc-welder on the workbench. The air tasted of ozone and burnt lubricant.
Jaren was hunched over a rusted GNK power droid, his hands stained a permanent, deep charcoal. When he heard the hesitant knock, he dropped his hydro-spanner and grabbed a plasma cutter,a habit from the old days. He squinted through the security port, his shoulders sagging with sudden, immense relief the moment he saw them.
He opened the heavy sliding door just enough to usher them in, then slammed it shut, sealing out the smog.
“Elara? Kael?” His voice was raspy, unused to saying their names. He looked at them with wide, hungry eyes, like a man who hadn’t seen daylight in a year. “What are you doing here? If your grandmother finds out you’ve come to see me, she’ll have your heads. And mine.”
“She’s sick, Uncle Jaren,” Elara said, skipping the pleasantries. She was panting, her chest heaving. “Nana is very sick. She can barely breathe, and she’s coughing up… it’s getting worse every day.”
Jaren’s face crumbled, his defensiveness replaced by sharp, cold fear. “Does she have a doctor?”
“No,” Kael whispered, looking at his boots. “We don’t have the credits.”
Jaren paced the cramped room, kicking aside a pile of mismatched droid limbs. “I’m a scrapper, Kael, not a physician. You know that. I fix toasters and navigation arrays, not people.”
“We found one,” Elara said, her voice trembling. “A medical droid. A 2-1B. We found it in the junkyard near the lower sector.”
Jaren froze. He turned slowly, his eyes narrowing. “A 2-1B? In a junkyard? Those units are specialized, expensive. Nobody just throws away a functioning surgical droid.”
“It’s not functioning. It’s destroyed,” Kael added quickly. “But we thought… if you could just get its logic core working again,”
“Where,” Jaren interrupted, his voice dropping to a dangerous, low pitch, “did you find it?”
“The waste-heap,” Elara said, caught off guard by his intensity. “By the perimeter fence.”
Jaren’s face went pale. He shoved past them, grabbing his toolkit with shaking hands. He knew exactly what was on the other side of that perimeter fence. The Crypt. The only place in the sector that generated that level of medical waste.
“You fools,” Jaren hissed, pacing again. He wasn’t looking at them anymore; he was looking at the door, as if he expected Imperial stormtroopers to kick it in at any second. “You have no idea what you’ve brought into this sector. If that droid came from The Crypt, it isn’t just scrap. It’s evidence. Or worse,it’s a target.”
“Jaren, please,” Elara begged, stepping into his path. “Nana is dying. We don’t care about the Empire. We don’t care about the politics. We just need him to save her.”
Jaren looked at his niece, then at his nephew. He saw the same desperation that had haunted his own career in the Imperial Corps,the desperate need to fix things that were fundamentally broken. He sighed, a jagged, rattling sound.
“If I go with you,” Jaren said quietly, “and if I touch that droid, we aren’t just breaking the family truce. We’re inviting the Empire to look at us very, very closely.”
“Will you come?” Kael asked.
Jaren looked at his workbench, at the pile of junk he had spent years trying to disappear into. He grabbed a heavy canvas bag and tossed his best diagnostic tools into it.
“I’ll come,” Jaren muttered. “But if that droid is marked, or if it’s got data from the prison still in its buffer, we aren’t just saving your grandmother. We’re running for our lives.