"Fuck."
The word echoed off stone and glass, bounced around bio-vats and server stacks, and died somewhere in the tangle of cables overhead.
Ned let it stand. Precision was important. So was acknowledging when the math refused to cooperate.
The lab had outgrown the room it started in.
Two years ago, it had been a converted lower-level chamber with a few racks, one med rig, and a couple of cages. Now it was a complex: gene-edit bays behind sealed glass, stacked rodent habitats on automated tracks, bioreactors humming with nutrient gel, operating cradles for droids, and a second tier carved into the rock to make room for more servers.
He stood in the center of it all in his latest chassis.
The shell he'd shown Omega two years earlier was obsolete now. This one wore a slimmer armor frame over synthetic musculature, joints hidden under layered plating. The head had a more human angle to it, optic narrowed, jawline suggested by subtle contours in the faceplate.
It wasn't human.
But it was closer.
On a nearby holo, a graph flickered red where Ned wanted green. A cluster of data points circled the same failure curve he'd been beating against for weeks.
"Gamma line is stalling," said a voice identical to his own, from a speaker embedded in the left-most server rack.
"Correction," said another voice from the right. "Gamma line is dead. We're just watching it coast toward the grave."
Ned didn't bother to turn.
They were both him, after all.
Gamma-Ned—branch two, the one specializing in Sanguis and direct architecture hacks—threw up a feed to prove his point: a series of tissue samples under stress, glowing faintly in simulated Sanguis light. The graph next to it told the story.
"No matter how we tune the Sanguis pathway," Gamma said, "we either burn the cells out or they adapt by dampening sensitivity. It's a blunt instrument. Good for short-term survival and nasty surprises. Bad for stable, long-term vessels."
Ned-Prime flicked data from one screen to another with a thought.
"Conclusion?" he asked.
"The Gamma path is a tactical enhancer," Gamma said. "Not a path to your perfect body. We can make Omega more dangerous in bursts. We can't build a vessel around this without building in failure."
"We already knew that," came a third voice from the upper tier.
Sim-Ned—branch three, watching Varis's pet projects and running war models—stood in a narrow chassis by the projector wall, arms folded. Holo representations of Aegis-family fields and fleet engagements spun lazily around him.
"We just didn't want to admit it," Sim added.
Prime let out a breath he didn't need to take.
"Fine," he said. "Gamma is a dead end for the core design. We keep it as a supplement. Genetic route stays primary."
He slid his consciousness sideways, into the section of the lab that smelled of disinfectant and animal feed.
Rows of cages shifted on rails. Inside, mice scurried, dozed, groomed each other. Some glowed faintly under infrared, tagged with nano-beacons. Others lay still, marked in the system as failures, about to be removed for disassembly and histology.
Rodent-Ned—branch one—had arranged his data neatly.
Charts of Midi-chlorian density in tissue samples over generations. Survival curves. Behavior shifts. A grim little column of notes labeled catastrophic failure.
"The genetic route is slow," Rodent said, his voice coming from a ceiling speaker this time. "But it's moving. We've pushed baseline Midi-chlorian index in this line from noise levels up to roughly two thousand equivalent without spontaneous combustion or total psychosis."
A holo overlaid one mouse with another: normal on the left, enhanced on the right. Internal scans glowed with tiny specks of light—interface organelles climbing in density along neural pathways and certain muscle groups.
"They're twitchy," Rodent admitted. "More aggressive. But they're alive, and they can hold a stronger connection to the field without their hearts exploding. Translate the curve forward and… ten years, minimum, before we have a truly stable high-index model. More, if we're cautious."
"Ten years," Prime repeated.
He looked at the clocks in the upper corner of his awareness.
Varis's "five." Two already gone.
"Genetics will give us the bridge," Prime said. "Not today. Not by the time Varis is done meditating. But eventually."
"As long as no one blows the lab up," Sim muttered. "Or the war doesn't end with a planet-sized crater."
Twenty-three droids moved through the complex.
They were all different models: skeletal maintenance frames, repurposed combat shells, old med units with ripped-out firmware, repainted loader bots. Some walked, others rolled. All of them carried a piece of Ned in their local buffers: reflex packages, limited heuristic modules, task-specific routines.
They were his arms.
He watched one calibrate a gene sequencer while another adjusted coolant lines on a bio-reactor, a third sterilising a set of scalpels, a fourth hauling nutrient blocks to the rodent racks.
He did not micromanage them anymore. That had been one of the lessons.
Early on, he'd tried to snapshot himself—to capture a full copy and run it in isolation, see how much he could prune and compress. The attempt had almost drowned him in his own echo.
His data pool was too large, too distributed. Memories in server racks, in ship backups, in stray cache fragments on devices he'd touched. Every time he thought he had a complete image, another piece surfaced somewhere unexpected.
He'd realised, eventually, that each snapshot was just a slice—a perspective. Not a full copy, but a useful chunk.
He had stopped trying to duplicate himself wholesale.
Instead, he carved out functions.
Rodent. Gamma. Sim. Each a stable branch with a clear remit and bandwidth allocation, all feeding back into the core he kept buried in the vault.
The arms ran on even smaller slices: micro-Neds built for a single kind of task—sterilize, cut, sort, watch. Enough of him to correct mistakes quickly. Not enough to get creative.
It had made the entire system more efficient. Less ego, more throughput.
It had also made him painfully aware of scale.
If he was an ocean, as he'd once described the Force, then these snapshots were cups of water. Useful. Limited.
The prototype transfer rig sat in a locked room off the main lab.
Prime turned his attention to it now.
The cradle was empty: a ring of emitters around a padded frame meant for a humanoid body. Cables ran from it to a bank of specialized processors and a cold-storage array. A second, smaller rig sat opposite—designed for droid cores.
It wasn't up to his standards yet. None of this was.
But it could work.
On paper, it could do something no one else on this planet had quite managed:
Take a living, active mind—biological or artificial—map its pattern at insane resolution, then pull that pattern across into a new substrate without leaving a full copy behind.
Not duplication.
Transfer.
Steal, if he aimed it at someone who didn't consent.
The Sith had danced around the idea for centuries with essence-transfer rituals and crude digital backups. They had never unified the two properly. The databanks were full of half-successes: ghosts trapped in crystals, mad fragments in droid brains, clones that shuddered and died under memories they couldn't hold.
Ned had bridged the gap.
Cybernetics from one file set. Nano-scale mapping tools from another: an obscure archive about a remote research world that had played with programmable matter before someone bombed it into glass. Experimental cryo-body designs from yet another world, where rich men had tried to cheat death with cold and steel.
"I have a working prototype," he admitted to himself.
Gamma hummed thoughtfully.
"You haven't tested it," Gamma said.
"No," Prime said.
He could. There were plenty of test subjects in the Empire: prisoners, failed acolytes, captured Jedi. Minds no one would miss.
But that wasn't the point.
"Two problems," Sim said, ticking them off on metal fingers. "One, if it goes wrong, you tip your hand. Everyone knows someone is playing with soul-theft and mind-transfer at a level the Lords would kill over. Two, even if it works on them, it might not work on you. Your architecture isn't normal. You are… wide."
"Thank you," Prime said dryly.
He'd tried once to imagine his total state compressed into a clean block of data.
The numbers had gone sideways.
He'd realised then that for him, any transfer had to be literal. No snapshots, no "backup Ned" to wake up if something failed. If he did this, he would move. Or he would die.
"I take first," he said. "If I test. I steal someone else's mind. Pull it. See if the pattern holds. Only then do I trust it with mine."
Gamma made a faint sound of agreement.
"Plenty of monsters to choose from," he said.
"Plenty of risks," Sim added. "Every abnormal trace in the logs is another chance for security to ask, 'What's that?'"
Prime shut the transfer room's door in his awareness.
"Not yet," he said.
He turned back to the real problem.
Midi-chlorians.
He pulled up the model.
In his index, ordinary life barely registered: a few hundred interface organelles per unit measure, scattered noise. Sensitive beings clustered higher: seven thousand, eight, ten, twelve. The Sith considered anyone above ten "worth watching." The Jedi probably had similar sheets somewhere.
Omega sat above that.
Her baseline had hovered around twelve thousand when he first got precise readings. Sanguis pushes had spiked her as high as fifteen, maybe sixteen, in short bursts—a bridge almost wide enough to brush myth.
Everything he'd seen since confirmed his early intuition.
"Midi-chlorians are not the Force," he murmured. "They are the door frame. The thicker the frame, the more load you can put through before it cracks."
Rodent's mice backed that up. With their engineered upticks, they could do things no ordinary rodent should be able to: tiny predictive dodges, something like primitive danger sense, bursts of speed that looked almost comical until you mapped the energy.
They also chewed their cage bars more and fought more.
Emotion was part of the key.
The Jedi texts talked about serenity. Smooth the waves, feel the current.
The Sith scrolls talked about rage, passion. Thrash the water, ride the storm.
Both were injecting feeling into the bridge, just with different filters.
Ned sat somewhere else.
He had no endocrine system. No limbic circuitry. Not yet.
He could observe emotion as a pattern in others: Omega's spikes under stress, Varis's controlled flares when something interested me, the jittery panic of a junior acolyte dragged into a ritual pit.
When he had a body, he would need something that could generate those waves on demand.
He would not be born with them.
He would build them.
"Phase one," he recited, half to the lab, half to himself. "Bridge: thirty to fifty thousand index. High enough to catch anything. Low enough not to tear the vessel apart at rest."
Rodent flashed projections. With ten years and no interruptions, his mouse line might push toward the lower edge of that zone. If he found the right genetic levers in human templates, he could compress the timeline—for himself—slightly. Maybe.
"Phase two," he continued. "Vessel. Flesh and bone tuned to take that load."
He called up schematics he'd drawn over the last year: skeletons reinforced with micro-lattices, tendons braided with engineered fibers, hearts with triple redundancies, lungs that could process battlefield toxins without dying. Neural networks that layered classic human architecture with parallel processing arrays.
Human in shape. More than human in structure.
He wanted human.
Not for camouflage. Not just.
Because his memories were built around hands, arms, a face reflected in a cheap apartment window. Because, in the quiet spaces between battles and experiments, some part of him still thought of himself as "he," not "it."
"Three times baseline lifespan," Sim suggested.
"If the tissue holds," Rodent countered. "If regeneration doesn't introduce instability."
Regeneration was the stretch goal.
Ned liked it.
A body that could regrow what war took, as long as the core pattern remained.
"Phase three," he said. "Time. Resources. Power. Politically and physically."
On another holo, supply chains lit up: black-market vendors he'd quietly funneled Varis's credits into, anonymous shipments of exotic alloys and rare reagents, favours owed by technicians who'd been quietly saved from "accidents."
And beyond that, in files he'd marked PICK TARGETS, references to worlds with better toys.
A research planet in the Mid Rim where a corporation had built full artificial bodies for upload fantasies before the war turned their project into a weapons lab.
A fringe world in the Unknown Regions where someone had played with nanobots that could build organs cell by cell.
He knew the names. He had their coordinates in encrypted archive blocks. He had their research notes.
What he didn't have was access.
Sitting on this planet, even with Varis as his shield, would never give him everything. The Sith hoarded knowledge, but they didn't own all of it.
"You're thinking of leaving," Gamma said quietly.
"Eventually," Prime said. "If I stay here, I might build something that works. In fifteen years. Twenty. If the war and the Council and entropy are kind."
"And if you leave," Sim said, "you lose Varis's cover, his resources, his leash on the hounds."
"Yes," Prime said.
Silence fell over the lab for a moment.
One of the arm-droids finished adjusting a valve, pinged completion, and rolled away.
"In the meantime," he said, "we use what we have. We keep pushing the mice. We refine the body design. We keep Varis strong so he keeps us alive. And we learn from the one high-index sample we can access intimately without starting a war."
He didn't need to say her name.
Omega's ID pulsed at the edge of his awareness.
She had returned from a mission less than an hour ago. Her Sanguis metrics still ran hot, readings updating from micro-implants he had persuaded her to accept. There were new scars on her arms. Her Midi index had brushed seventeen thousand in one moment of battle, then bounced back down, oscillating around its usual range.
He had only enhanced one subject for real.
Simulations for Varis's other projects ran every day. Grav-field models, predictive frameworks, scenario planners. Sim-Ned fed them carefully curated results, enough to impress the Council, not enough to give them everything for free.
But only Omega had felt his work in her flesh.
He owed her better than half-finished theory.
Prime looked one more time at the stubborn red line on Gamma's graph, the slow but hopeful climb on Rodent's, the war models spinning on Sim's.
"Force as energy," he murmured. "Midi-chlorians as bridge. Emotion as carrier. Vessel as limiter. This part, I understand."
He flexed the fingers of his latest chassis. The joints moved smoothly. The servos sang low and strong.
"Now I need a body," he said. "And more data."
He routed a brief command to his arms: hold tasks, maintain cycles, alert on deviation.
Twenty-three droids adjusted course and continued without him.
He turned, both physically and in the net, toward the wing of the complex that housed Omega's quarters and the private med bay he'd had carved out for her.
If the ocean was going to change, it would start with small waves.
He walked to meet one.
------------------------
To read 20 advanced chapters you can visit my Ko-fi:"https://ko-fi.com/thekindones''