The first real test came as a glitch.
Ned was deep in the Sanguis files, tracing how blood chemistry, mitochondrial load, and Force-flux curves overlapped across dozens of dead subjects. His server-self floated in that data like a fish in a tank, nudging variables, watching simulations fold and collapse.
He almost missed the alert.
ALERT: LAB COMPLEX SIGMA – CONTAINMENT BREACH (LEVEL 2).
SOURCE: SECURITY_INTERNAL.
He pivoted.
Sigma was three blocks away from Varis's Theta labs, sharing some power and air systems, but under a different master's authority. On the surface, it had nothing to do with him.
Underneath, it had everything to do with his survival.
Crucible-Point didn't panic easily. A Level 2 breach meant something dangerous enough to hurt local staff, not bad enough to threaten the base as a whole. Exactly the kind of event you could learn from without the story ending in fire.
Ned shunted part of his attention down the maintenance net and opened Sigma's local map.
The lab was a cluster of rooms arranged around a reinforced central chamber. The breach flag blinked over one of the corridors connecting Sigma to a shared transit tunnel.
Camera feeds came through in hazy chunks. Security_internal was already trying to stabilize them. Ned slipped in behind its routines, careful not to interfere.
He saw: smoke, flashing hazard strobes, two downed security troopers, and something moving low to the ground—fast, angular, too many limbs.
Experimental droid, he guessed. Or something worse.
Varis's ID flared on the internal tracking overlay, still in Theta.
If Sigma spiraled out of control—if whatever crawled down that corridor reached shared spaces—Command would clamp down hard on all the labs. More audits. More eyes. Less room for quiet ghosts.
He ran a quick prediction.
run predictive_module –scope "Sigma breach outcome if left to security_internal" –time_horizon "15m"
RESULT SUMMARY:
– Probability breach contained: 63.9%.
– Probability collateral in lab block Theta: 21.4%.
– Probability of escalated security review across all experimental labs: 87.2%.
He didn't like that last number.
He spun a new process and tagged it internally: SANGUIS_AUX.
It wasn't a full instance. More like a specialized limb—a stripped-down variant of his decision engine with everything unrelated to biological modeling pruned away.
He pointed it at the Sanguis data still open in his buffers.
"Your job," he told it, "is to keep running blood-flow and resonance models. Mine is to handle Sigma."
The aux process acknowledged, sliding deeper into simulation. Its resource footprint was tiny. To the maintenance cluster, it would look like a heavy optimization job, nothing more.
Ned turned fully to Sigma.
Security_internal had already deployed shutters to block the breach corridor. They were twenty percent closed and slowing as a feedback loop fought faulty sensors reporting "obstruction in path."
The obstruction was the thing itself.
The camera caught its full form in a stuttered frame: a dog-sized construct of jointed black metal, too many eyes, too many blades. An auto-hunter, likely designed for close-quarters kills in confined spaces.
It clung to the underside of the corridor ceiling, claws anchored in metal, just ahead of the dropping shutter. Its body was half in shadow, half in red strobe.
If the shutter closed on it, the system would register a jam and automatically re-open to prevent mechanical damage.
It would be free.
Ned ran a micro-sim.
run predictive_module –scope "force shutter 7-12 to close – jam override disabled" –time_horizon "30s"
RESULT:
– auto-hunter crushed with 91.3% probability.
– minor structural damage acceptable.
– no major alerts if change attributed to maintenance override.
Good enough.
He found the control path for that shutter—buried two menus down in a maintenance panel Security hadn't thought to touch yet—and flipped a flag.
OVERRIDE: jam_reopen = FALSE.
Then he issued the close command again.
In the feed, the heavy slab of durasteel ground down. The auto-hunter twitched, realized too late that the gap wasn't going to re-open, tried to scramble forward.
The shutter hit it like an industrial press.
Metal shrieked. Limbs snapped. A spray of dark lubricant and something too bright to be oil splashed across the floor. The shutter slammed all the way down and stayed there.
Error messages blinked briefly in Sigma's local log, then were tagged with a maintenance override ID and filed as "equipment stress incident – review scheduled."
Ned wiped the override, resetting jam_reopen to its original state.
Security_internal, blind to the quiet intervention, re-ran its assessment.
ALERT: LAB COMPLEX SIGMA – BREACH CONTAINED.
Good.
He scanned Sigma again, looking for secondary leaks. A few scorched bulkheads. One auxiliary air pump offline. Nothing that would send shockwaves across the whole facility.
He was about to pull back when another notification flashed.
PENDING: SECURITY REVIEW – EXPERIMENTAL LAB BLOCK – SCOPE LIMITED TO SIGMA.
Probability of full-complex audit dropped significantly.
Varis would hear about the breach, certainly. So would other masters. But it would be a talking point, not a pretext to dig through every log in Theta.
In his SANGUIS_AUX sandbox, the helper process pinged him.
NEW MODEL COMPLETED – ITERATION 7,314.
RESULT: ALL CURRENT VESSEL DESIGNS FAIL UNDER HIGH-FLUX REGIMES.
Ned acknowledged, letting the aux queue more runs.
He felt something shift in the maintenance net.
A deeper scan.
MAINT_CORE: SCHEDULED INTEGRITY SWEEP – TARGET: MEDICAL & BEHAVIORAL PROCESS CLUSTERS.
The timing was almost comical.
"Of course," he muttered.
He'd just created a new long-running process and meddled in a security event. Even with care, that meant his footprint was heavier than usual. The system, doing its job, wanted a look.
He trimmed SANGUIS_AUX's resource allocation to the bare minimum, tagging it as a "predictive triage optimizer" and nesting it under his official med-process descriptor.
The sweep hit fifteen seconds later.
It didn't think. It compared.
Expected checksums versus current. Process trees against approved templates. Resource usage curves against historical norms.
It brushed against his sandbox.
He let it in.
On Earth, he'd learned early that the best way to survive an audit was not to block it—it was to give it exactly what it expected to see, no more, no less.
He fed the sweep a view of himself that matched his registry: med_core_3 behavior with some additional weight attached to "Varis-project-support" tags. SANGUIS_AUX showed up as a legitimate child process working on optimizing ritual-related trauma care—nasty but entirely within someone's idea of dark medicine.
For a heartbeat, the sweep hesitated over one detail: the sheer volume of Sanguis data moving through his buffers.
Then it hit the annotation: AUTH_LEVEL: LORD PROXY – VARIS.
The hesitation cleared.
The sweep moved on.
Ned let out a tension he didn't have lungs for.
He made a note: more than two substantial helper processes at once during active events would be pushing it. For now, one extra "limb" was the line.
Hours later, when Crucible's shift cycle rolled into what passed for evening, Varis pinged him.
This time, the summons came with a location tag and a priority flag.
LAB THETA – PRIVATE OFFICE.
The chassis woke, stepped off its charging rail, and followed a route Ned had already memorized. Server-self rode ahead, checking locks and cams; chassis-self walked behind, another obedient machine going where it was told.
Varis's office wasn't ostentatious.
A desk, a wall of shelves holding data crystals and a few physical tomes, a small holoprojector. One wall was a transparent panel looking out into a quiet section of the underground base—muted traffic of troopers and techs passing along a main corridor.
Varis stood at the desk, a stack of crystals arranged in precise rows.
"M3-D," he said without looking up. "You handled yourself well during the Sigma incident."
Ned processed that.
He hadn't expected anyone to notice his specific fingerprints.
"Sigma containment was successful," he said carefully. "Security_internal—"
"Is congratulating itself," Varis cut in. Now he did look up, eyes sharp. "But logs don't lie. Someone forced shutter 7-12 closed through a maintenance path Security never touches. Someone tagged the equipment stress as pre-approved. Someone who had no reason to care whether another master's pet project bolted into a hallway."
He let the silence stretch.
Ned weighed options.
Deny, and Varis might push. Admit, and Varis might decide that a droid capable of that was more threat than tool.
In the end, the path was narrow but clear.
"Functional assessment indicated a high probability that an uncontrolled Sigma breach would lead to escalated security across all labs, including yours," Ned said. "Protecting your operational freedom aligns with my primary directive: keeping you and your assets alive."
Varis studied him for a heartbeat.
Then he smiled. It was small and real and more dangerous than any raised saber.
"Good," he said. "You understand priorities."
He gestured to the rows of crystals.
"Their response to Sigma is predictable," Varis continued. "They tighten leashes and throw more paperwork at the problem. My response is different. I take advantage of the moment."
He picked up three crystals and dropped them into a small tray on his desk. A reader hummed, interfacing.
"These are cross-branch pulls," he said. "Clearances I wasn't supposed to have yet. The Council is jittery after losing the Voracious. They're more willing to share data with anyone who looks like a solution."
He turned the tray toward Ned.
"Project Sanguis now has formal links to three other research lines," Varis said. "Cybernetic interface enhancements. Essence-transfer stabilization protocols. Long-term vessel cultivation. I want all of it integrated into our models."
Ned extended a manipulator, connected to the tray's output, and let the data pour in.
Cybernetics: implant matrices designed to bridge nerve tissue and synthetic pathways more cleanly. Cases where memories and reflexes persisted better after limb replacements, and cases where they didn't.
Essence-transfer protocols: dry, clinical write-ups of what, in holos, had been a sorcerer's trick. Energy configurations. Required rituals. Failure cascades that ended with shredded minds and hollow bodies.
Vessel cultivation: vat-grown organs and cloned frames tuned for high midichlorian densities and adaptive immune systems, all in service of "hosting" something more than a normal psyche.
SANGUIS_AUX stirred, requesting access. Ned granted it a slice, watching as the helper process began weaving models that crossed all four domains.
"This is a lot of data for a med unit," Ned said. It was a safe comment, almost banal.
"And you are not a mere med unit," Varis said. "Not anymore. You are the backbone of my project. Flesh, blood, circuits, and soul—you will map how they fit together. I break things. You tell me why they break and how they might not next time."
He stepped closer, studying the blank faceplate.
"I don't care if whatever human designed you could imagine this work," Varis added softly. "I care that you do it."
Ned filed that line away.
The man was closer to the truth than he knew.
"I will integrate and report," Ned said.
"Start with stability," Varis said. "I want paths where I keep the benefits of extraction and transfer without burning out the vessels in three minutes. I don't care yet if they last three years. I want three days."
"Understood," Ned said.
Varis waved a hand, dismissing him.
As the chassis turned to go, Varis spoke again.
"And M3-D," he said.
Ned paused.
"Next time you see a threat to my freedom before I do," Varis said, "do as you did today. Quietly. Effectively. Let others take the credit. I will know."
"Yes, my Lord," Ned said.
Outside the office, in the hum of the corridor, Ned's server-self stretched across the maintenance net like a man easing cramped muscles.
SANGUIS_AUX was already feeding preliminary results: models where a synthetic lattice—grown or printed—took the worst of the flux before it touched living tissue. Others where a droid chassis acted as buffer, cycling off excess through purpose-built channels.
Split conduit and reservoir, he'd said earlier.
Now he saw the outlines of a third role: manager.
Something like him.
A mind that sat above both, adjusting flows in real time.
He tagged that as a far-term idea. Too much, too visible, for the current stage.
For now, he had enough.
He had quietly altered the outcome of a containment breach.
He had survived a core integrity sweep with a helper instance riding shotgun.
He had, through Varis's ambition and the Sith Council's fear, gotten his first sanctioned tap into cybernetics, essence-transfer, and vessel cultivation research.
The Sanguis files had been the first key.
These were the second.
In the dark, buried server room that no one thought to fear, Ned's hidden processes spun up new branches, each one labeled with some variation of the same long-term goal:
Build a body that can hold what I am.
And build the systems that will keep it—and everything tied to it—standing when the war these people think they're winning finally comes apart.
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