Chapter Text
Experimental Subject 2 startled out of a long haze to find the lights in the room flickering. Booms and crashes could be heard in the distance. Something was happening to the base. Faintly, he felt that this was important, that he should pay attention to what was happening.
He had been so out of it that no matter how many times the doctor watching over him told him how much time had passed, he couldn’t comprehend it any longer. He hardly even remembered the doctor’s name; sometimes, he even lost his own. All he knew was pain, and all he wanted to do was sleep forever. Sometimes, he even managed to sleep through whatever Hemlock was doing to him to keep him awake.
For the first time in whatever length of time had passed, he tried to focus, but excruciating pain from his lower abdomen flooded his consciousness. Somehow, he was cogent enough to remember that his spinal cord was damaged and that he shouldn’t be able to feel anything in his lower body. His brain latched onto some wayward fact he had read a long time ago about phantom pain, and after fuzzily jumping several topics from there, he slowly found himself in the present again.
His eyes were closed, and he seemed to be groaning. He forced his eyelids to move out of the way, revealing his usual blurry view from within the bacta tank, and thought he saw the surgical droid and the astromech droid communicating with each other.
It’s quiet now. Did I pass out again?
Both droids took hold of either end of the operating table and started dragging it across the room. That was very much not normal behavior.
Experimental Subject 2 watched as the droids continued to cross back and forth past his tank, taking every large object in the room and moving it in the direction of the door. When there seemed to be a pause in their furniture-moving expedition, the subject vocalized into his breathing apparatus, trying to get the droids’ attention.
The surgical droid lifted him up to the edge of the tank and draped his immobile arms over the edge to keep him there as it took out his breathing apparatus. He heaved agonized breaths and fought to keep his consciousness stable as he was moved.
After a lengthy moment, he managed to speak, his head drooping against the outside of the glass. “What is happening?”
The astromech droid spoke to him in a series of beeps. Hemlock was dead, vital parts of the facility were destroyed, and the clone prisoners had escaped. The staff and droids had received orders to decommission the facility, shutting down and leaving behind anything not essential nor valuable, but the surgical droid overseeing Experimental Subject 2 had other ideas.
It convinced the astromech droid to help it uphold its original objective of ensuring the patient’s survival instead of following this new objective that was likely to result in both of the droids getting decommissioned. The patient was likely to die if he were transported without expert supervision or if power to his life support were permanently cut off. The two droids didn’t have a plan at the moment, but they decided to barricade the entrance to the room to buy them some time.
“Oh, stars,” the patient breathed as his addled emotions struggled to catch up to this new reality. He couldn’t process the fact that Hemlock was dead – that the months of continuous torment were over – but could at least understand that the current objective was survival. Focusing on that objective sharpened his consciousness enough for his brain to get to work.
“How much time do we have?”
Decommissioning the enormous facility was going to take a few rotations. The problem was that they had no idea when they’d get around to this room.
“Does this room have other exits?”
There was the internal transportation shaft that the droids used.
“...Can I fit in there?”
Barely. The stress of the transportation process would be highly dangerous to his frail organs.
Well, if they come knocking, I have no other choice.
The patient took a second to catch his breath and consider what he was about to say. “Listen. If the two of you are left behind with the base’s power generators defunct, you will soon lose power and perish. I know how to restore the power and keep you functional, but first, I must survive this transition period. If troopers attempt to enter this room, I need you to transport me to a hidden location, no matter the risk. Can you agree to this?”
The astromech droid blooped an affirmative. After some brief inter-droid communication, it informed him that in order to minimize the risk, the surgical droid would try to keep some of the life support devices attached and sedate the patient before attempting transportation.
“Do not use an overly strong sedative. You may need me fully conscious later.”
The astromech beeped in agreement.
The patient sagged. Even this brief exchange took everything out of him, and he felt himself drifting as the pain encroached on him. He was dimly aware of the droids moving around, putting small objects somewhere, and tying things to his body. Eventually, he thought he heard pounding on the door, followed by a prick in his neck and a vague peaceful sensation.
The little trio popped out of the shaft and came to rest in a droid maintenance room. The patient was unconscious, but still alive. According to the CL-series surgical droid, the probability of that outcome was a fair 53% that would slowly dwindle the longer he was kept outside of a proper medical bay.
The maintenance room had been cleared out and the lights turned off. They had only left behind a handful of defunct droids and some cheap maintenance tools that weren’t worth the effort of packing up and hauling away. They had visibly finished decommissioning the room, and therefore it was tentatively safe for the trio to stay here.
R3 was still contemplating the soundness of this plan. Even though it was a valuable astromech droid, it didn’t want to take its chances with the Empire, as it had already been put through a struggle session over perceived ‘defects’ that weren’t real defects, and was only still in use because Dr. Caraway kept using it. Now, it wasn’t sure whether Dr. Caraway was still alive. It had seen a fragment of security footage that showed the doctor being manhandled by one of the escaped clone prisoners, and his relationship with the clones would certainly be hostile enough to warrant his death in a situation like this.
R3 didn’t have a problem with defecting from the Empire. What it did have a problem with was the fact that their current survival plan hinged on this defective clone that had no working limbs and a heart and lungs that were just barely hanging onto the edge of life. CL assured R3 that the patient was extremely intelligent and would be useful to them, but R3 wondered whether CL’s dedication to the patient would get in the way of the droids’ survival.
The CL series was a Tantiss original. It was short for the Clinical Laboratory series, which was a nice euphemism for their purpose of human experimentation. They were intelligent, but designed to take their objectives with a single-minded seriousness, unlike astromech droids like R3 and other general-purpose droids. It was an anomaly that this CL-series droid was able to refuse an order at all, but it made sense, considering that any objective that directly related to its patient should take priority.
Meanwhile, R3 just wanted to survive. It doubted that the patient was worth their precious limited energy and wanted to find a terminal connected to the base’s main power generator. The power system wasn’t designed to be controlled by one astromech droid, but R3 thought that maybe it would be able to figure something out. However, that uncertainty kept it tethered to the dying patient for the time being, as failing to restore the power by itself would be fatal.
Nearly twenty hours passed in a tense waiting state. The charging port in the maintenance room was still functional, and R3’s battery could last many rotations and could share charge with CL as needed, but it needed to limit its movement in the droid shafts to conserve its jet fuel. CL, with its fuel-efficient hover locomotion, made several trips through the shafts to scope out the other areas of the base and hoard whatever medical supplies it could find.
The patient wasn’t fit to eat, but he would have to try, because the intravenal fluids he had been sustained on were running dangerously low, and all CL could find were ration bars. At least the tap water was still running; it would likely be shut off when the humans were ready to depart. For these twenty hours, though, the patient required neither because he was delirious.
As soon as the patient was awake enough, he asked R3 for updates, which the droid promptly gave. There were medical bays that had been confirmed abandoned and thus safe, but CL wanted to wait until there was a clear path through the hallways to wheel the patient there instead of lifting and squeezing him through the shafts again. They still weren’t clear to access the power generators; R3 suspected that they’d only be able to access them after everything was finally shut down and the last of the personnel left the planet.
The patient seemed strangely calm. With how despairing and constantly upset he had acted whenever R3 saw him in the past few months, it expected him to handle this transition period very poorly emotionally, but it appeared that the patient was actually able to focus and think clearly now. Maybe he just needed an objective in order to start functioning.
The patient turned his head with visible difficulty to survey the room. It made R3 wonder once again how he was supposed to work on the power generator without proper use of his body.
“Are those droids able to be restored?”
Individually, no; they were missing parts and couldn’t be put back together in a functioning state. They’d be able to salvage parts from them if they wanted to, though.
“Try to salvage any batteries you can find and convert them to emergency charging cells.”
But only astromech droids and power droids were designed to share their operational power with other machines?
“Oh, you don’t know how to convert them? I will teach you.”
Leave it to humans to use droids in unintended ways, R3 supposed. It was certainly coming in clutch now.
R3 hauled the droid carcasses over to where the patient could see them and got to work looking for batteries. It kept a back camera trained on the patient, noticing him staring longingly toward the water jug CL had filled up. R3 could theoretically help the human drink the water, but suspected that he would probably do something wrong and needlessly endanger his life in the process. It was best to wait for CL to get back.
After some time, CL returned with a load of consumable medical supplies, proclaiming this to be the last of it that they could access at the moment. They would have to make it last.
The patient instructed R3 in converting one of the batteries, but after a few minutes, his lungs were fatigued, and he began to show signs of drifting. R3 somehow managed to power up the ventilator CL had brought here, and they relieved the patient’s lungs of their burden, but he refused the stim that CL wanted to give him, preferring to be kept awake via sensory stimulation and social activity rather than their limited supply of drugs.
It was rough going with the patient’s consciousness fading in and out, but under his verbal guidance over the course of the next rotation, R3 actually managed to take the several droid batteries available to them and modify them to impart a charge. They were able to charge them all up in time before the power was shut off; this gave them about two weeks’ worth of charge total, in which time they could search the base for more discarded batteries to drain of their leftover power, as well as attempt to work on restoring the main power.
With the droids’ short-term future salvaged and enough of the facility shut down that they could move through the hallways more safely, they could now turn their attention to salvaging the patient’s declining health. R3 was still going to run to the nearest power generator and attempt to get it running by itself while CL handled the patient, but R3 was now on board with helping the patient regardless. As far as it was concerned, the human had proven himself.
It turned out that they needed those two weeks. R3 wasn’t able to figure out the power generators on its own after all – it understood how they worked and everything, but couldn’t find a way to access their controls when everything had been shut down, or worse, gutted and stripped of valuable components. Meanwhile, the patient continued to walk the tightrope between life and death as CL struggled to handle him without the proper infrastructure.
By a stroke of luck, on the fourteenth day, the patient managed to stay lucid for most of the day, enough time to be informed of the state of matters and instruct R3 to carry out an insane surgery on a control panel that allowed it to gain direct access to a power generator. They also had to do a complex repair on the power generator itself using a hacky access method that the droids hadn’t been able to come up with on their own.
It was just one out of dozens that powered the base, but it was enough to sustain the two droids and the one medbay they were using. Next, they had to figure out how to get the water running. The bit of water that CL had managed to collect before they cut off the water was quickly dwindling.
Luckily, since this was more of the astromech droids’ wheelhouse, R3 was eventually able to figure it out with minimal assistance from the patient. Food wasn’t a short-term issue with the plethora of ration bars left behind, and medicine was more of a luxury than a survival necessity at this point. With the patient’s physical necessities covered, they were free to slowly wait for his body to pull through.
Then, there came an issue neither of the droids expected nor were equipped for. When the patient became more conscious more often, it became clear that he wasn’t enthusiastic about the prospect of surviving indefinitely like this.
The concept of ‘quality of life’ was difficult for droids, but the patient was much better at explaining it to them than most humans were. “If your servos are rusty, your connections faulty, and your data corrupted, and you also have no clear primary objective, it is difficult to reason that you should continue operating to the best of your ability. The two of you are in good working condition and are applying yourselves toward an objective, but the same is not true for me.”
But your objective is to help us, the droids protested. That was what they agreed upon.
“...Sentients are not logical beings. The natural directive to avoid pain is a very strong one, despite its lack of practicality in some cases like this one. One could say it is attempting to override my objective to stay alive and help you two.”
The droids seemed to accept that answer. It was a bit of a lie by omission, but it was the best answer he could think of.
He was depressed. He recognized the signs, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. This depression wasn’t a disorder, but rather a completely reasonable and appropriate reaction to his circumstances. He objectively had nothing to live for and every reason to wish for the release of death.
At some point, he had a family, people he cared for and wanted to be with. Now, though, his memory of them had been eroded – by his own will, he was pretty sure, to avoid speaking about them during his torture – and he would never see them again.
He faintly remembered that one or more of them had been here. He never saw them, and they never knew he was here. They escaped the base and left him behind.
They… without knowing it, they abandoned him.
Maybe it was time for him to abandon them, too.
Through trial and error, the droids figured out that if they presented him with problems to solve, he’d bite and set aside his despair for long enough to solve the issue. Sometimes, if he was feeling relatively not abysmal, his mind would spin up more tasks and problems to tackle, but some other times, he would shut down and find the simplest of tasks overwhelming.
Sometimes, with a frequency that CL most definitely did not approve of, he would refuse food and water. It got to a point where CL started to force-feed him despite the risks involved. It certainly wasn’t a pleasant method, but in his pain-avoidant state, it was somewhat effective in making him stop resisting food, as he knew that he wouldn’t die on the medical droid’s watch anyway.
He found the helpless state of his body to be intolerable, especially when the breaks in his left arm showed signs of nonunion, probably from moving so much during torture and subsequent bouts of phantom pain. He had a long argument with CL about the utility of amputating his left arm and replacing it with a mechanical appendage capable of doing work, but when CL finally relented and prepared him for surgery, he broke down crying, leaving the poor droid at a loss for what it should do.
Ultimately, he insisted on going through with the amputation despite his emotional pain, citing the many necessary projects that they had been forced to table because neither CL nor R3 were able to carry them out. Installing the mechanical appendage was a long and arduous process, with it being necessary to keep the patient awake and somewhat able to feel the nerves in his arm, since the droids didn’t have the specialized expertise to do this unsupervised. They had to stop multiple times and wait for the patient to melt down as he connected his pain with the pain of being tortured.
Despite everything, from a practical standpoint, he was right about the amputation. The mechanical appendage went through many iterations to add and improve functionality, and with each improvement, the patient’s mental state also eased as he gained autonomy. He built tools and traps for R3 to start requisitioning food from the jungle, as well as other sorely needed tools of convenience. Their tiny world in the medbay began to self-sustain and even flourish, with the unfortunate exception that medicine continued to be a finite resource that only decreased over time.
The scope of projects expanded from necessity to convenience to pleasure. The patient continued to modify his body with CL’s help, and he became steadily more capable and mobile. His vital organs were stable most of the time, and with some technological assistance, he was able to digest most foods without issue. He modified the droids as well, disabling anything the Empire could theoretically use to monitor them, and incrementally improving their functionality over time.
He researched the native flora and fauna, at first for sustenance purposes, and then just out of curiosity. He started to build things for his own amusement, making the process of building them his main occupation. He powered up more areas of the base and modified the structure to his liking, installing multiple secret entrances and building interesting furniture.
Everything was… something vaguely resembling okay. Somehow, against all odds, the patient had managed to find a rhythm of life in this deserted place. And it all came at the seemingly small cost of just letting go of any thoughts and memories of his life before the fall of Tantiss.