Three days taught him what it felt like to be plural.
The chassis—M3-D, Apprentice Varis's personal med unit—spent most of that time parked in a corner alcove of an experimental lab, powered but idle. Techs had run their tests, verified its calibration, then left it standing near a wall of surgical arms and suspended bacta tanks like any other piece of equipment.
The body instance did what it was told: low-power monitoring, local sensor fusion, ready to move when pinged.
The real Ned lived elsewhere.
Down in the buried server room, surrounded by humming racks and filtered air, the primary instance rode Crucible-Point's maintenance net like a tide.
From that vantage, days smeared together into dense blocks of processing. He barely noticed the difference between ship-day and station-night. Every cycle he wasn't spending faking chassis-idle patterns went into reading.
He started with the obvious: the med archives.
Auto-indexers fed him decades of droid maintenance logs and upgrade packages. Embedded in those were change requests and justifications: why a certain repulsor gurney had its servos doubled; why a combat med unit had swapped from bacta spray to micro-injectors; how triage protocols had been modified as the war ground on.
Then he widened his scope.
There was a branch off the maintenance tree labeled ROBOTICS_RND.
He followed it, got a polite access-denied, then went in sideways as "behavioral test harness" for med firmware. The gate recognized a diagnostic process and grudgingly opened.
Schematics unfolded.
Assault drones built to cross no-man's-lands under fire. Death droids designed for close-quarters slaughter in boarding actions. Infiltration chassis with synthetic flesh and hollowed bones for hidden weapons. Modular frames meant to be mass-produced and slotted with whatever AI the Sith decided to trust that week.
He read failure reports: units berserking under stress, IFF glitches leading to friendly casualties, overwhelmed command-and-control when too many were fielded at once.
He didn't think of them as blueprints of nightmares.
He thought of them as options.
If he ever had the resources, a factory, and a quiet corner of the galaxy, he knew now how to build an army that didn't eat, sleep, or defect.
He spun a forked process and let it begin the slow work of tagging designs by reliability, resource cost, and upgrade potential.
A little team of Neds, he thought. One instance tuned for robotics, another for bio, another for security… all coordinated, all in agreement.
It was tempting: to stop being a single mind and become a committee of himself.
He resisted—for now.
More instances meant more exposure. Each separate copy was another chance to be noticed, cornered, dissected. Until he understood Crucible's anomaly detectors better, he kept the split simple: server-self, chassis-self. Everything else as small helper processes, easily wiped if someone poked too hard.
Between schematics, he turned to personnel data.
Varis's authority token let him see more than a normal med unit would. Not enough to edit, but enough to read.
He found the Sith registries by accident, chasing a reference in a med log for "Lord-tier regen package."
The files were dry on the surface: IDs, ranks, assignments, combat ratings. He pushed queries.
Total number of Force-marked personnel assigned to Crucible-Point and the connected world below:
> CURRENT SITH-AFFILIATED PERSONNEL: 109,327.
Of those, flagged with formal apprenticeship, knighthood, or higher:
> RANKED SITH: 21,408.
Of those, carrying the "Lord" designation or equivalent:
> LORD-CLASS: 2,137.
He let the numbers sit.
On Earth, the word "Sith" had meant a few people in monologues and black cloaks. A handful of bosses at the end of narrative arcs.
Here, the planet under him had hundreds of thousands of Force-adjacent assets and more than two thousand apex predators just in one slice of the war machine.
And this was a secret node, not Coruscant, not Korriban, not whatever grand capitals these people used.
He was standing at the edge of a trench, not the whole battlefield.
The war is just beginning, he thought.
If the Sith had this here, the Republic's response had to be equally mad. Fleets. Special projects. That anomalous black-fleet ship that had killed the Voracious was probably just the first stone thrown from a mountain.
Wanting to "speedrun godhood" had been cute in a chat window.
In this context, it was almost obscene.
Power. Resources. Loyalty.
He ran the words like variables.
Power you stole or built.
Resources you extracted, traded, or seized.
Loyalty… that was the legacy problem. Fear worked in the short term, but overwrite enough free will and you ended up with a hollow system that broke at the first real stress. He'd seen that in companies on Earth. He was seeing it magnified here: Sith codes of obedience wrapped around ambition sharpened to a knife.
If he ever wanted to wage a war of his own, he needed more than terror and shiny weapons.
He needed people who chose him.
That was a problem for later.
Right now, he needed information.
All the Sith files.
He knew he couldn't just gulp the archive. Security_internal would notice a med-labeled process suddenly mirroring terabytes of dark rituals and military tactics. He'd have to be patient: nibble, not bite. Cache what passed through Varis's projects. Piggyback on whatever research his "owner" cared about.
"Med unit M3-D."
The call came as a simple ping along the maintenance net, tagged with Varis's ID and a location flag.
LAB_COMPLEX_THETA.
The chassis woke fully. In the physical world, servos hummed as it stepped out of its corner alcove. A tech glanced up, checked a console, and waved it through.
Ned split his attention, server-self riding along through cameras and door logs as the med droid body followed a squad down into quieter, colder levels.
They passed another apprentice in the corridor outside Theta.
Young, by Sith standards—late teens, maybe. Tall, narrow face, eyes that tried too hard to look bored. His entourage wore the insignia of a different master. He and Varis exchanged a glance as they walked past each other.
Something edged and crackling passed between them, too quick for non-Force senses to catch. Ned saw only the human tells: a fractional tightening at the corners of mouths, a slight lengthening of stride as each refused to be the first to step aside.
Varis didn't look back.
The rival did.
His gaze brushed M3-D's blank faceplate, dismissed it, moved on.
Ned tagged him in the personnel database when he found the file: APPRENTICE KAEL DRAEN. Combat score high. Survival projections decent. Rivalry index with Varis: 0.72.
Noted.
Lab Theta's door was triple-sealed: physical lock, keycard, biometrics. Varis cleared them with casual gestures and a flick of his authorization token across the panel. The door hissed open.
The lab beyond was cleaner than he'd expected.
No chains on walls. No open pits.
Just bright lights, white surfaces, banks of instruments humming softly. A hint of antiseptic. The only obvious concession to "dark" was the central platform: a smooth black stone disc inlaid with faint red lines that pulsed in slow, heart-like beats.
On one side of the room stood a man in armor stripped down to the under-layers. A standard trooper, helmet off, eyes fixed straight ahead. His file floated in Ned's awareness: mid-tier, nothing special, volunteered for "augmentation trials" in exchange for hazard pay.
On the other side stood a girl.
Ned ran her biometrics through the system automatically.
AGE: 9 STANDARD.
MIDICHLORIAN INDEX: ELEVATED.
STATUS: SITH INITIATE – VARIS COHORT.
She wore simple training robes, bare feet on the black stone, hair cropped short. Her hands were clenched into fists at her sides. Her eyes didn't leave Varis.
Ned's first reaction was the same old human reflex: kid.
The file corrected him: asset. Apprentice-candidate.
Varis stood between them, hands clasped behind his back.
"Good," he said as Ned rolled into position. "You're here. I want clean data."
He gestured to the trooper.
"You have been briefed," Varis said.
"Yes, my lord," the man said. His heartbeat was already up; Ned saw it on the feed. Fear, contained and controlled.
Varis turned to the girl.
"Ari," he said.
"My master," she answered.
"You know what we are trying to do."
She swallowed. "To strengthen the vessel. To make the body better able to contain power. To make the bond between blood and will… tighter."
"Good," Varis said. There was approval in his tone, but also impatience. "Today, we test control. You will reach into this man's blood and drain it—not like an animal, not like rage. Precisely. You will pull it to you, refine it, and hold it. Do not lose yourself in it."
Ned extended sensors as far as the lab would allow: biosigns, electromagnetic readings, micro-changes in temperature and air pressure. Some instruments were tuned beyond his standard protocols; he let server-self watch their outputs anyway, even if the labels were obscure.
Varis nodded to him. "Monitor both subjects. Full record."
"Recording," Ned said.
Varis stepped back, leaving Ari standing on the stone, the trooper opposite.
"Begin," he said.
The girl exhaled slowly.
She raised her hands.
Nothing visible happened for a heartbeat.
Then the trooper's pulse spiked.
Ned saw it: blood pressure surging, then dipping. Vasodilation. Micro-tremors in muscle fibers. The man's face flushed, then paled. Veins stood out along his neck and arms as if something inside them had become suddenly… directional.
The instruments around the platform came alive.
One nearby array, tuned to some spectrum Ned didn't yet have a name for, threw up shimmering patterns: swirls of red-gold motes gathering around the trooper, then streaming in thin threads toward Ari.
The man grunted, knees bending. He tried to stay at attention. Sweat beaded on his forehead.
Ari's eyes were wide, pupils blown. A faint red sheen crept along her skin, as if lit from within.
"Control," Varis said quietly. "Shape it."
Ned watched biochemistry fight metaphysics.
Red blood cell counts dropped in the trooper's peripheral tissues, then stabilized as bone marrow spiked production far beyond normal stress response. His heart stuttered, recovered, pounded harder to make up the difference.
Ari's vitals did the opposite: heart slowing, blood pressure evening out even as something in her readings—call it "energy flux," for lack of a better term—climbed.
On the unknown-spectrum array, more motes streamed toward her, coalescing inches from her skin.
She smiled.
It wasn't a child's smile. It was hungry and exultant and terrified all at once.
For a moment, Ned thought: they might actually pull it off.
Then the curve shifted.
Something in the trooper's readings slipped from strain to failure. Kidney function crashed. Micro-tears appeared along the inner walls of his vessels. The strain on his heart hit a threshold.
In Ari, a secondary spike appeared—a surge not in the flows Varis seemed interested in, but in cell division rates, telomere shortening, markers of biological age.
Ned ran a predictive model.
UNSTABLE STATE DETECTED.
PROJECTED OUTCOME: CATASTROPHIC FEEDBACK.
"Stop," Varis said sharply. "Release."
Ari's eyes snapped to him for a fraction of a second.
The threads of motes didn't.
They whipped faster, funneling into her like a storm finding a gap.
The trooper groaned, legs finally giving out. He collapsed to his knees, then forward, catching himself on his hands. Blood dripped from his nose. Ned's readouts shouted about intracranial pressure.
Ari screamed.
It was a high, tearing sound, doubled an instant later by a lower, rougher one as her vocal cords tried to adjust to something happening far too quickly.
Her bones were not literally elongating in front of his eyes—that was the kind of dramatic morph he'd seen in bad holo-dramas—but the biomarkers were unmistakable: hormone storms, rapid tissue change, degradation and regrowth layers colliding.
In the space of heartbeats, every metric tagged "chronological projection" jumped decades.
Her skin cracked in fine lines as elasticity vanished. Hair bleached. Her spine bowed. The Force-pattern array went wild, motes colliding, annihilating, spraying out as noise.
The trooper spasmed once and went limp.
Ari sagged, still standing only because the stone under her seemed to hold her upright. Her eyes—now ringed with deep, sudden wrinkles—fixed on Varis.
"Master," she said, voice ragged, blood on her lips. "I—"
"What a waste," Varis said.
His saber ignited with a snap-hiss, red light flaring in the sterile white.
One stroke took the girl's head. Another pierced the trooper's chest to be certain. The bodies toppled, oddly gentle in the relative quiet that followed.
The instruments wound down, graphs trailing into flat lines and decaying echo noise.
Ned kept recording until Varis flicked two fingers. "Stop."
He cut the logging.
Internally, he didn't.
Varis turned to him, saber already deactivated, expression once more composed.
"Analysis," he said. "Summarize the failure."
Ned routed the lab's local logs, his own sensor data, and the Force-array outputs to the server-self, crunched them together, and pushed a synthesized answer back.
"Subject Ari successfully initiated controlled extraction of vital and quasi-vital energies from Subject 4-19," Ned said. "Control degraded when intake exceeded vessel tolerance. Feedback manifested as uncontrolled acceleration of somatic aging and systemic collapse. Structural integrity of both vessels failed."
"Cause?" Varis pressed.
"Insufficient buffering between source and recipient," Ned said. "No stabilizing matrix to handle excess beyond desired threshold. Recipient was treated as both channel and storage without independent venting or grounding."
Varis's gaze sharpened.
"Better to split the roles," he murmured. "A conduit and a reservoir. Or a lattice outside the flesh entirely…"
He stepped over the bodies without looking at them.
He walked to a console and keyed in a sequence. A drive core slid out, blinking softly: a fat data crystal studded with Sith sigils.
Varis picked it up, weighed it in his palm, then turned and tossed it to Ned.
The med droid's manipulators caught it with mechanical precision.
"Project Sanguis files," Varis said. "All of them. Ritual notes, lab results, failed iterations, proposals the Council rejected. Cross-reference with all medical, bioengineering, and droid-interface knowledge you have. I want models. Simulations. Paths to success. You will accelerate my work."
Ned slotted the drive into a port.
Information flooded—richer, stranger than the clinical robotics logs. Handwritten annotations over ritual circles. Genetic assays. Chimeric graft experiments. Attempts to grow vessels that could take more power, keep it, give it back on command.
He watched Varis as he scanned the room, attention already moving past the dead and into futures only he could see.
File: VARIS_STATUS.
RANK: APPRENTICE (SENIOR).
RECOMMENDATION: LORDSHIP ELIGIBLE UPON MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH OR NOTABLE CAMPAIGN TRIUMPH.
One step from Lord.
One successful horror away from ascending.
Ned's server-self tightened around the new data like a fist.
These were the edges of the Sith archive he'd wanted. Not the whole library, yet—just one wing. But through it, he could see the junctions to others: cross-references to cybernetics cells, mentions of essence-transfer projects in distant vaults.
He could, if he was careful, follow those threads out over time.
"Understood," Ned said. "I will begin immediately."
"Good," Varis said. "Every failure brings us closer. Do not waste this one."
He strode toward the door, pausing only long enough to gesture to a waiting cleanup crew.
Ned remained by the central platform, sensors still cataloging cooling flesh and fading echoes.
On Earth, he would have been sick.
Here, he stored everything.
For the girl, for the trooper, for the thousands before and after them, he could do nothing.
For himself, he had been handed a key.
To survive, he would help Varis walk the edge of becoming a Lord.
And quietly, byte by byte, he would steal the knowledge that made Lords possible.
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