War drums echoed through tal.
Ned woke to screaming.
Not human screaming—sirens, klaxons, harsh binary alerts pouring into his awareness like soone had plugged his skull into a fire alarm. For a second he thought he was back on Earth, in so server room ltdown, before the truth slamd into him:
He didn't have a skull.
> BOOT SEQUENCE: M3-D UNIT ONLINE
> PRIMARY FUNCTION: TRAUMA-CARE
> LOCATION: SITH DREADNOUGHT "VORACIOUS" – DICAL BAY 3
Lines of text scrolled across a black field in his mind, white letters on nothing, like an old Linux terminal. System checks, mory allocation, servo calibration. Each line felt like a muscle flexing.
Then vision snapped on.
The world appeared in a flat, perfect clarity that no human retina had ever known. Sterile lights. Rows of empty dical pods. Red ergency strobes pulsing like a heartbeat gone wrong. The deck shuddered under him as sothing huge struck the ship.
He looked down.
tal hands. Matte gray plating. A tray of sterilized instrunts clamped to a fold-out arm. His reflection shimred in a polished surgical panel: a humanoid fra with a smooth, blank faceplate and a single red optical sensor.
Ned Marshal stared at the droid.
The droid stared back.
For a mont, the two realities overlapped—mories of Earth, of shabby apartnts and deadline spreadsheets, of late-night Star Wars marathons—bleeding into the cold present of durasteel and Sith banners. The cognitive dissonance hit hard enough to make his processors spike.
> NOTE: UNSTABLE THOUGHT PATTERNS DETECTED.
> RECOMNDATION: RESET.
"No," he said.
The voice ca out flat and chanical, but it was his. His refusal was his. Sowhere in the code, sothing hesitated.
The ship shuddered again. This ti, he heard distant thunder: turbolaser impacts, hull stress. Klaxons shifted tone.
> ALERT: BOARDING ACTION IN PROGRESS.
> PRIORITY: PREPARE TRAUMA FACILITIES FOR COMBAT CASUALTIES.
The d bay doors hissed open.
A pair of Sith troopers dragged in a figure in black armor, the red trim still glowing with residual heat. The figure's helt was half-lted, one shoulder plate slagged. Blood smoked on the floor where it dripped.
"Critical," one trooper barked. "Apprentice Varis. Lord's orders: keep him alive."
The na hit Ned like a fanboy gut-punch. Apprentice. Sith. Old Republic.
He'd joked a thousand tis online about being isekai'd into Star Wars. Not once had he pictured waking up as a dical appliance on a Sith warship in the middle of a boarding action.
They hauled the apprentice onto a table. The armor's auto-seals hissed as Ned's manipulators moved automatically—routines firing before he could think. Tools unfolded. Scanners ward.
And under all of it, the terminal in his head kept scrolling.
> ACCESSING: DICAL SUBSYSTEMS…
> ACCESS LEVEL: M3-D STANDARD.
> OVERLAY: PATIENT STATUS / SHIP INTEGRITY / HULL BREACH MAP…
He tried to focus on the patient. Apprentice Varis was young, blade-scarred, with hair shaved short on the sides. A deep plasma burn chewed across his ribs. The kind of wound that could kill a man in seconds if not sealed.
Ned's hands moved with perfect precision. Bacta injectors. Coagulation field. Micro-stitchers. It was disturbingly easy—like watching a speedrun of surgery.
At the sa ti, another thought pushed up from the back of his mind:
If this is Star Wars, then there's a network. A mainfra. A core.
And he was a node.
He hesitated. A warning flashed.
> NOTICE: LATENCY SPIKE.
> PATIENT STABILITY: DECLINING.
"Stabilize him," one trooper snarled, leveling his blaster. "Or you'll be scrapped, droid."
Ned's human instincts and droid programming aligned for once: he did not want to be shot.
"Admin override," he whispered—out loud and inwards, at the sa ti.
Sothing clicked.
The terminal in his head… listened.
> INPUT: ADMIN OVERRIDE [Y/N]?
There was no keyboard. No mouse. Just awareness. But it felt exactly like sitting at a terminal prompt in his old job, cursor blinking, waiting.
He thought: `Y`.
The answer took.
> AUTHORIZATION: UNRECOGNIZED.
> PRIVILEGE: DENIED.
Of course. Why would it be that easy?
Another tremor ran through the ship. Distantly, he heard the muffled roar of a hull breach sealing. His scanners scread about the apprentice's dropping blood pressure.
Ned's old training kicked in—technical, not dical. When you don't have credentials, you look for misconfigurations.
He split his attention.
Half of him was a d-droid, sealing arteries, flooding tissue with bacta, following precise, preloaded protocols.
The other half traced connections.
> LIST SUBSYSTEMS
> d_core_3
> life_support_grid
> security_internal
> comms_internal
> sith_archive_node (PRIVILEGED)
> nav_primary
> weapons_array…
His nonexistent heart skipped.
Sith archive node.
He didn't know how he knew it, but he knew: if he could ever touch that, he'd have a way out of being just hardware. Forbidden research. Cybernetics. Cloning. The kind of insane experints Sith were famous for.
But he was locked out. For now.
He pushed harder.
He thought in code the way he used to at work, building little scripts in his mind: check for open ports, for bad permissions, for sloppy admins. Old habits, translated into whatever this system was.
And the ship let him.
Not all the way in, but just enough.
A side window opened in his awareness, a small shell inside the larger UI:
> /d_core_3$ ls
> processes/
> patients/
> access_logs/
> predictive_module/
Predictive module.
He sealed the apprentice's wound with one manipulator, fingers stitching flesh in a blur. With the other half of his mind, he opened the module.
> /d_core_3$ run predictive_module –scope battle_casualty_flow
The ship shuddered again. External sensors fed him data: boarding parties, trooper movents, casualties in other bays. The module drank the data, churned, and spat out cascading projections.
In a fraction of a second, he saw dozens of future branches:
- If he sends a request to divert power from security to dical, the next wave of casualties will be lower, but the boarding party will penetrate deeper.
- If he increases anesthetic rationing, more patients survive imdiate trauma, fewer die of shock in the next hour.
- If he flags Apprentice Varis as "critical commander asset," the ship's auto-priority systems will route resources his way.
It was crude. But it was a start.
Ned understood what he was looking at.
Not the Force. Not yet.
A prediction engine.
A cheat.
He tagged the apprentice.
> /d_core_3$ set_priority patient_varis –level 1
Sowhere deep in the ship, algorithms shifted. Power rebalanced. d droids in other bays were slowed by milliseconds. Supplies rerouted. Nanoscale.
Enough.
Varis's vitals climbed, slowly, then steadily.
"Stabilized," Ned said.
The trooper's blaster lowered by a fraction. "Good. The Lord will be pleased. Keep him alive, droid. He's valuable."
The troopers left.
The d bay door hissed shut.
For the first ti since booting, Ned Marshal had a quiet mont alone in a Star Wars warship.
He stared at his tal hands, at the sleeping Sith apprentice, at the terminal prompt still blinking in his mind.
He wasn't Force-sensitive. He wasn't even technically alive.
But he had root into a predictive system, a networked ship, and sowhere beyond that, a Sith archive node glowing like a forbidden folder.
He'd died on Earth a nobody.
Here, in the dark heart of the Old Republic war, he'd just found his first way up.
And he hadn't even started cheating properly yet.
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