>>Initiating Access to BLOODLINE ARCHIVE // VON STRAUSS // PRIMARY NODE
Data Vault 1-A // #$! #$%& Sector // Clearance: KARL-PRIME
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CAUTION: This Archive contains highly classified material. Genetic drift logs, experimental ancestry records, indoctrination transcriptions, and classified memories extracted from generational implants.
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RECORD TYPE: Progenitor to Obedient
ACCESSING SUBJECT: File Designate [TVR-1V-A]
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WARNING: Audio-visual logs may cause psychological destabilization in uninitiated recipients. Proceed at your own risk.
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Location: Kaas City, Dromund Kaas
Date: 3,604 BBY
Author: Dr. Aurtorius Von Strauss, Personal Log
I wasn't born, not in the traditional sense. There was no mother to scream to, no father pacing in the adjoining room. When I was 'born,' I was removed from a tall tube and was met by fluorescent lights and dozens of doctors. I wasn't breathing, but they accounted for that and had a machine on standby to kick-start my lungs.
My designation was TVR-1V-A: Tavor'ii, First Variant, Alpha. I was the inaugural specimen of the Von Strauss genetic line, an offshoot from a respected house that didn't produce offspring. I was cut from the ovum of Arya Tavor'ii herself and scribed upon by the scalpel of Sith-Imperial intent. My purpose was made clear from the moment of conception: be precise, obedient, and useful.
I fulfilled all three.
The laboratory that raised me was buried beneath Kaas City, underneath the dense duracrete and between the wet hum of power conduits. My first tutors were droids, my first lullabies were the whir of centrifuges. After a while, the scientist decided to give me a name to simplify their tests; they named me Aurtorius. Based on an archaic text on forgotten kings. There was dignity in the syllables, a sense of gravity I found agreeable; I rather liked my name.
~~~~ Of Perfect Steel and Hollow Hearts ~~~~
From the beginning, I was taught that emotion was inefficiency. Curiosity was permitted, even encouraged, when it served a measurable outcome. Compassion, however, was a defect; a failure of insulation between systems. I learned quickly to speak in results, to think far in advance and outside the most plausible vectors, and to sleep only after solving two equations and an ethical paradox. I rarely slept.
By my tenth year, I was composing white papers on cognitive reconditioning techniques. By my thirteenth, I had overseen the neural grafting of an infiltration agent. When
And yet. In the quiet moments between experiments, when even the droids were shut down and ceased their movements, I would find myself tracing the edges of my reflection in the lab's surgical glass. There was something in my eyes, something human for a creature designed to be sterile. Not physically, no. But a question kept resurfacing in my thoughts in those quiet moments:
"Who am I, when no one is measuring?"
They never conditioned for self-awareness. They assumed that purpose would smother doubt. In this, they were mistaken.
It was not rebellion that took root in me. I never thought of raising a hand against the Sith. I owed them my existence, my education, my function. But what I began to question, in the stillness between experiments, was permanence. Did loyalty endure after utility ended? Was obedience still virtuous when the architects grew senile and blind?
Eventually, when I was given a program to run, I began my own project. Quietly. Off the record. With surplus code and redacted gene-maps.
I called him Darian.
He was not born to serve, but to survive. Not to submit, but to endure. I refined the genome, filtered the social inhibitors, adjusted the empathy thresholds. I kept the strategic gifts, after all, what is a child without teeth?
I was unable to hide the project forever. When I was found out, I was treated as an outcast, for a while, and then they realized what I had done. I had created, to them, a perfect soldier. I was allowed to keep him, as long as he was conscripted when the time was right.
When he was old enough to ask, "Why did you make me?" I lied, as all fathers do.
"To preserve our house," I said. But what I meant was, to preserve our choice.
It is a bitter thing to realize on your deathbed that your legacy is not your name, nor your work, but the questions you leave behind in the minds of your offspring.
And so I enumerate this chronicle not in glory, but in admission:
I was forged by perfect hands. I was given every gift save one: freedom.
My son will not suffer the same.
>>End Log.
