Technical Difficulties

[Kurt Meyer]

[member="Bianca"]

Always the fool.

Kurt didn't hesitate, he couldn't, not if she was going to realize that he was dead serious. He wasn't quite as adept at reading people as a Lorrdian was, but being with Kira for so long, living with her and just watching her work had taught him a thing or two. It was the way that the woman said it, her stance, the way her lips didn't even quirk into half a smile. It seemed inhuman, broken somehow, Kurt couldn't really tell why of course, but he could at least guess that it meant she was lying, and he had asked for the truth.

Without a skipped heart beat, Kurt pulled the trigger on his blaster.

He didn't aim for her chest or her head, he wasn't that cruel.

Instead he aimed the shot for her outer thigh, just a grazing scorch of her skin and clothes. At this distance that task was easy enough, especially for him. Though some had thought him the fool even in the academy he had quickly proven to be quite the dead-eye. He had been mocked for being just a fighter jockie before, only sitting in the cockpit and never actually seeing any action, that didn't mean however that Kurt couldn't shoot.

"I said." Kurt began to repeat himself as the blaster bolt surged forward. "Why were you trying to kill me?"

It wouldn't kill her, wouldn't even hurt that much.

 

[Ellie Mors]

For a minute or two, well perhaps less in reality, Bianca thought that perhaps - just perhaps - she'd at least kept him from pressing the issue, or at least kept him from putting a few holes in her. She did until the singe of plasma on leather and synthskin wafted up to her replica-nostrils. Absolutely horrible, that was. Most humans didn't know what it smelled like to burn their species, much less any other oily and fat-ridden species. It only took a flame and a lock of hair to realize how disgusting they must be to immolate. That, however, didn't appear to stop a rather close warning shot - though the bolt was aimed surprisingly more accurately and precisely than he'd proven capable earlier - which left only a minor burn on her side, though it punched a hole through the couch at her side. If she had been a human, and as jumpy as one at that, she probably would have made the mistake of leaning into the shot rather than staying perfectly still to stare him in the eye when the blaster lit up.

Lucky her.

Of course her lie had been noticed, though she wasn't quite sure what he'd done to tell - she chalked it up to human intuition and suspicion rather than possible skill, though she'd been wrong several times now. Rather than probe with a different question, however, Kurt simply repeated himself. She frowned. She wasn't quite sure what it was - perhaps some faulty programming or a malfunctioning emotional restriction protocol - but it was becoming harder to keep the truth from him. A sense of danger, self-preservation, maybe? Whatever the case, there was a clear change in how she was perceiving him from her perspective. Maybe it was the assertiveness he took, dropping his clumsy and dorkish persona, or maybe she just became too much of a human replica that she was perhaps feeling something she shouldn't have. It didn't matter though, because the logical processor still operated on higher privilege and priority than the part that simulated human feeling. That didn't mean that the attraction wasn't there, of course, or the desire to say something to turn the situation around in a different way than planned, but her response wasn't a simple, emotion-driven, answer to the question.

"I told you earlier, I wasn't going to kill you. Now, will you please aim that somewhere else?" B14 said, her tone reaching bratty and impatient now. The prototype chassis she'd been placed in and the bare bones programming and hardware she'd been installed with to accompany her state-of-the-art droid brain was obviously not up to par - already she was showing signs of non-human personality, droid-like behavior. Though she wasn't aware of it, her earlier answer had earned her the warning shot specifically for that. "And before you shoot me again, please keep in mind that we're in a very public place - I am the woman here, and without weapon - and you're the one holding the gun. They may not find me until after you've already left, but you really can't think your face won't be plastered all over the system by the end of tomorrow with a bounty on your head, do you?" She added. "Let's talk, okay? I won't try to strangle you if you don't try to shoot me. If you want, you can even hit me a few times - I won't hit you back. Just don't shoot that karking gun."

"I was only after your wallet, anyways.." She muttered, albeit louder than she meant to. It didn't matter at this point, though. It was only a matter of time before something happened to compromise the situation further. She almost contemplated just giving up and hoping that a quickie would mend his ego and hurt feelings so she could get out of here - that, however, was obviously out of the question.

[member="Kurt Meyer"]

 

[Kurt Meyer]

[member="Bianca"]

Kurt couldn't help but scoff. "You do know where we are right? I'm pretty sure that I'm the one who lost oxygen to his head for a few moments, not you."

The Pilot gestured around himself.

"This is Nar Shaddaa, Lady." The Courier said it as though it were all the explanation that he needed to give. "This place is a haven of all the criminals you could ever think of. Smugglers, Pirates, Crime Lords, Rapists, Murderes, hell there's probably a few that have participated in all five of those. I'm more than willing to bet that half of the people out there in that bar wouldn't blink at the prospect of killing you and feeding you to a rancor, some would even enjoy it."

His words were harsh, but true.

Nar Shaddaa was a cesspool plain and simple. This was where the galaxies trash went, not the literal trash, but the sentient garbage that clung to the underbelly of society. The Works on Coruscant were similar, but Nar Shaddaa was truly the dead jewel. He couldn't quite understand why anyone would come here, why anyone would want to live here, but he supposed that most that did had no other choice. Kurt hated this planet, he hated the people on it, and truthfully he wanted nothing more than to simply run away and stop dealing with this woman. Yet as always, his curiosity got the better of him, and after lowering his blaster half an inch he gestured for the woman to sit herself down.

Kurt didn't particularly care about her actual intent anymore, the fact was that her thighs had nearly crushed his skull. That in it of itself was quite a feat, and as exciting as it had been for a moment it had left Kurt wondering just how this woman was so spectacularly strong. "Now why don't you tell me why a pretty little thing like you is robbing people instead of...oh I don't know, getting a job?"

 

[Ellie Mors]

He was right - of course he was right. Of course, she had been hoping that at least throwing that bit of an empty threat would persuade him to just end their little meeting quickly, but that was evidently not going to be the case. She rolled her eyes at the gesture, which seemed more than a little mocking to her. She understood it was Nar Shaddaa, that it was a cesspool, and that it was basically a criminal's paradise. His rant on the subject did seem a bit more experienced than guessed, though, which did trigger some doubts that going after the clueless-looking dork wasn't quite the best of ideas anymore. His wallet might have a few credits she didn't have, but it also didn't have her freedom (or illusion of) tucked away either. Get enough credits to get off-world. That was all she needed to get passed this damned training round.

So when he pointed his gun at least slightly away from where it had been pointed before, Bianca more then made herself comfortable on the punctured sofa. Legs crossed, arms crossed over her chest, but the expression on her face, though now relaxed, was still just as frustrated and irritated as it probably was ten seconds ago. Then he asked that question. Try as she might to find an answer for it, it was one of those things that sort of got overlooked by those imbeciles that programmed her restrictions for communications. He had, in a way, found the vulnerability in her facade. "I.. I'm.. Well, I, uhm." She said, clearly stuttering as she quickly found herself at a loss. There was a clear expression of shock, an external representation of the internal disbelief that she'd been stumped by a very simple question - and shocked that her creators hadn't thought to consider this line of interrogation. Fifteen million credits of funding for a droid brain, and they couldn't have even spared ten million on the rest of her.

"How - what would I do?" The question was posed not quite to ask him, but more or less to bide her time to think. Not that it was doing any good. She could never have an actual, real, job. She'd be a piece of equipment for whoever owned her, a tool or a servant, and most often than not for the purpose of killing people. It's what her core personality was "born" to do. Without killing, without an owner, what - who - was she? Some might, or perhaps do, call it Stockholm's syndrome, and it was probably an accurate label, but for the life of her the droid couldn't think of any reasonable response to make to deflect the question.

[member="Kurt Meyer"]

 

[Kurt Meyer]

[member="Bianca"]

Just who the kark was this chick? Some spoiled rich kid from one of the core worlds? Socialite from one of the upper echelons of the city? Just a sheltered idiot that had never really gone outside before? The Pilot frowned slightly as he thought about all of these options, ultimately deciding that all of them could be true but also factoring in the memory that she had tried to choke him out with her thighs. He was still rather irked about that, even though it had been kind of fun...for a few seconds at least. No matter what she was though, there was still the problem of what exactly he was supposed to do now. While no one would question him for now, given the thick curtains and ray shield, he was acutely aware that if he did shoot her he would have to make a quick exit.

He also remembered that he still had a package to deliver.

Part of him wanted to just get up and walk away, part of him wanted to tell her she was an idiot, and then a little part, just a tiny part, wanted to shoot her in the head. Kurt was all around a good guy, but sometimes, sometimes his patience ran a little thin.

People trying to kill him was a chief cause of that.

He knew deep down that he would never do such a thing. Kurt was rather adverse to killing even when it was someone that had tried to kill him. The pilot had seen enough of war and death in his short life, and pulling the trigger to end someones life wasn't exactly a pleasant task. He had been taught to think of the enemy as less than sentient, as mere animals, that was harder to do when you were face to face with them. Looking at the woman now, her confused posture and the rather startled, and perhaps even scared look on her face Kurt thought back to those words.

"What the hell are you?" Kurt finally asked, of course completely and entirely oblivious to the fact of what she actually was.

 

[Ellie Mors]

The question was, most certainly, one which caught her off-guard. What was she supposed to say? Was she even supposed to answer it? The question, itself, was almost rhetorical in her head, but she knew there was clearly some desire from the human to know more about her. Just what he really wanted to know, and what he was bound to find out, however, were probably on opposite ends of the spectrum. And, really, the question struck her, too. It was something most droids didn't "think" about. Not because they just couldn't, but because it was essentially the same thing as a human pondering their existence in some existential manner, thinking on the meaning of their persistence. It wasn't pretty.

Some of them, droids that is, had gone insane. An entire rebellion had sprang up because of the notion of equality, or superiority in some cases. For a human there were safeguards from insanity in regards to deep thoughts and pondering, in much the same way that any human might simply "stop" thinking, change the subject, whatever. A droid? A droid is equipped with a supremely fast processor and an amazing logical center. Logically one might create a reason for their construction, but to examine one's own purpose? By the time a human might have "stopped" thinking, a droid might have ran tens of thousands of lines of protocols and calculations. They may have already reached the conclusion that their purpose might not actually exist, or that they were to be the next "step" above organics in the evolutionary leaps in history, by the same time that a human's anxiety might have kicked in. By the time that the human might have slept off the terror of realizing they were merely existing to live, and living to die, the droid might very well have locked that question into an infinite loop.

There's one rule of thumb with programming - an infinite loop was generally not the best thing to have running. Why? At some point, maybe not right off the bat, something's got to give. It just so happens that the blank stare occupying B14-NC4's face was pretty much synonymous with a lag - fading at the same time that the "loop" was "killed" - from just that. As if returning from a moment lost in thought, Bianca glanced up towards Kurt's face and blinked. Her response?

"I don't know."

[member="Kurt Meyer"]

 

[Kurt Meyer]

[member="Bianca"]

The kark was he supposed to say to that?

She didn't know? What did that mean? She didn't know what species she was? That seemed like the most likely answer and it also made the most sense. Perhaps she was an orphan or something, stranded here on Nar Shaddaa and raised within the slums. That was really the only thing that he could think of, and his good nature brought the conclusion of that almost immediately. She had tried to rob him because she didn't know any other way, had tried to use...well her rather impressive thighs likely because that's what she'd seen all her life...though probably not in that particular technique.

He frowned for a moment.

Clearly she wasn't human, or at least, not a standard one. The strength that she exhibited and her weight clued him off to that, but he didn't know enough about the galaxy and it's many humanoids to actually guess at what she might be. Obviously she wasn't Chiss since her eyes weren't glowing red, she wasn't a Zeltron since her skin wasn't pink, and well... that really exhausted the option of species that Kurt actually knew about, aside from Lorrdian's, but Kaile proved that they weren't really all that heavy.

"Okay..." Kurt said slowly, the blaster noticeably drooping even lower and farther away from her. "Why are on Nar Shaddaa?"

That should get to the root of things. "Were you born here?"

 

[Ellie Mors]

Had the droid been paying attention to the weapon at this point, she very likely would have been happy to see that it was no longer being aimed directly at her. Her attention, however, was otherwise preoccupied by the man asking her twenty questions. By now Bianca had stopped being analytic of the human and completely dropped her focus on beating him senseless, taking his money, and escaping off into the sunset. In fact, she found herself rather interested in discovering how the organic might react to finding out that she was droid. Not that she really felt it necessary to reveal it - not quite yet anyways.

In a way, it was like being a bystander in a train wreck - she just couldn't avert her attention from his reactions, or his actions really. Logically it made no sense, she had every opportunity from the moment he started to lower the gun to move, instead she sat rather still, almost lifelessly. "A good question - why Nar Shaddaa?" She mused, breaking her awkward pause. "Where can a girl find a guy willing to take them into the back room of a club without even a second thought, even if that girl happens to look way out of his league?" B14 asked. It wasn't a serious question, though she had no doubt in her mind that he probably had an equally smart-ass answer for her. "In a way, I'm here for you."

She could have left it at that, but she just couldn't leave well enough alone - not that anything she was saying was making any sense, even to herself at that. Technically it was true, she was here "for him". Here to test her resourcefulness and survival capabilities, to see if she could handle being dirt poor and manage to get herself off-world. Kurt was, however, the setback in all of this. Raising her hands up, palms open and forwards in gesture of surrender, she started to slowly lean forwards. "What real woman would go for a low-life like you?" She hissed, keeping herself from moving too far forwards.

[member="Kurt Meyer"]

 

[Kurt Meyer]

[member="Bianca"]

Kurt couldn't help but let out a low, very dry chuckle. A smile pulled a this lips, though not for the reason that one might expect. Of course, she was right in a way. There was no denying that he was a low-life, no denying that he was used t crawling through the underbelly of the galaxy. He had been born on Tatooine, the backwater of the outer rim. He had grown up a champion there, but it was still Tatooine, a place that the galaxy tended to collectively forgot about. There was only one person from Tatooine that was really worthy of note, and it certainly wasn't Kurt.

That still made him smile though, the way she spoke.

"You do remember whose holding the blaster, don't you?" Kurt said with supreme confidence in his voice, the silver tip of the WESTAR-34 slowly swinging back towards the woman. He smiled slightly, cocking his head to the side as a grin began to spread across his face. The truth was he had never minded being from Tatooine. Most of the time it was a curiosity, at least to the women he met. Nobles and the like usually found his origins curious, and more often then not that was his in.

"Aggressive little thing, aren't ya?" His accent carried through as he smiled at her. "I do just fine with the ladies, thank you."

Charm and personality helped there. "If you really want to whore yourself out though there's better places then this dump. There's plenty of planets that a woman can make a mighty fine living by squeezing their legs together."

Kurt offered her a wink.

 

[Ellie Mors]

Maybe the limiting on her emotional matrix was malfunctioning, or maybe she was just that insulted by his last remark, but if he hadn't been holding a blaster to her, there was no doubt in her mind that she'd have pushed all five of her fingers as hard and fast through his chest as she could have. Where charm and personality came, so, too, must the ability to spout such masterful one-liners. With a clenched jaw and a disgusted frown, B14 leaned back and let out a delayed, heavy, sigh. A few blinks and after a moment of focusing later she was already prepared to shoot back at him. "I'm not here to make money off of little men like you, chithead. I'm here for an entirely different reason, you just happened to hit the proverbial jackpot and got that arrogant muscle in your mouth between my legs." She retorted, her frustration with him rising to the point that she was no longer all-too-worried about discussing her identity, the company behind her creation could just as easily alter her appearance if he outed her or them.

Not that they planned to keep her a secret much longer, what with the auction coming up.

"Better yet, why don't we have a talk about how the pervert sitting in front of me got his rocks off on a droid's plastic body, hm?" Bianca asked, letting go of any reservations she had. In all honesty there was no chance of her not taking any kind of a serious injury from such a close ranged shot from the blaster, and though the body was a temporary prototype made from rather lackluster materials, she and the company still wanted her to stay intact long enough to make the sale to whomever had interest in purchasing her. She was to be the newest top-of-the-line assassin droid, after all.

"Pathetic. Takes the first woman he sees in a bar back to a private room, then goes to town on her. Absolutely repulsive. I never knew organics were so immature, you just take the cake, don't you?" Insult after insult. Though the way he smoothly brushed off her last one lessened the presumed impact of them, his words had sank in like hot knives. "What was your name again, I'll have to remember to let my owners know to avoid you."

[member="Kurt Meyer"]

 

[Kurt Meyer]

[member="Bianca"]

Kurt let out a loud scoff, though her words intrigued him.

He tried not to let it show, at least not at first, but what she had said invoked his curiosity more than her earlier salacious comments. The insults of course didn't matter to him, he'd grown up on the galaxies greatest hive of villainy and scum, insulting someones was as good as saying hello. Yet it was what she had said that had truly interested him. Plastic? Design? Owners? Yeah no regular person used the term when talking about themselves. At first he had thought she was speaking of reconstructive surgery, how she had perhaps been remade to be a bit prettier, but as she continued on and tried to dig her claws deeper into him he realized that too wasn't true.

The kicker when she said one word 'organics'.

Oh he knew what that meant.

Kurt had been around the galaxy once or twice, and he'd heard the rumors. They weren't common, at least not as common as any species, but he knew they existed. Human Replica Droids. Robots designed to look like people, droids that were essentially created in a mockery of humans. He frowned for a moment, shaking his head at the realization. Oh he didn't mind that he had done of course, Kurt Meyer had no shame, in fact, there was a hint of pride there, she was after all apparently designed for such tasks.

Yet there was another part to it that he couldn't help but question. "Owners?"

It was the only word he said.

 

[Ellie Mors]

If Bianca hadn't been on a tirade, the expression on Kurt's face would have probably kept her last comment to herself. He didn't really look shocked or offended, nothing that would have really alerted anyone, but there was that familiar look of curiosity that gleamed in his eyes. If anything, what she had said didn't seem to bother him at all - and for a moment she wondered if he'd even been paying attention to a word she'd said. At least, until he'd asked her about her owners. In reality she was only really considered "property" until the sale had been made, and then she would be placed in the finished product, the body that would be made to fit the spitfire that inhabited her personality matrix. When she had been booted up for the first time and they'd showed her the sketches of what she'd come to be, or more accurately who, B14-NC4 knew that success was not simply an option, it was the option.

"Onadax." She shot back, though her tone had lost a considerable amount of bite. He was holding a blaster up to her, it wasn't like avoiding the question after insulting his pride would do her any good either. "I'm their prototype." Bianca revealed, though she wasn't too certain how accurate that was - she did know she was only one of a handful that were created, though. There was going to be another physical model, a shell if you would, that would be custom made only for the few of the already thin population of replica droids that succeeded in their insane training conditions. And Bianca? She was certain she'd be one of them. She would make sure of it. A phrik skeleton and looks to kill, even a perverse knucklehead wasn't going to keep her from that. "A droid made by droids to act like a human. To kill." She added. She wanted to grin, figuring it'd give her the air of confidence, but decided against it. Something about his question pushing the decision.

[member="Kurt Meyer"]

 

[Kurt Meyer]

[member="Bianca"]

Curiosity now gripped him entirely. He had always been like that, when he found something that interested him it gripped him, this...this was something entirely new to him. Kurt had heard of Human Replica droids before, had even seen a few of them used by The Republic, but he'd never actually met one, much less spoken to them at length.

Or done other things with...

The thought made him smirk for half a second, though the smile was quickly dropped from his lips.

So she was programmed, ordered, directed. Was she like other droids or was she more independent? His curiosity began to take over entirely, the grip on his blaster slackening even further as he began to let his guard down slightly. He couldn't help but wonder about all of these things, couldn't help but want to ask. There was also a part of him that reminded him of the more sinister aspect of all of this. If she was a person, a replicant, designed to mimic humanity and emulate it...did she have free will?

Was she a slave?

"Can you think?" He asked rather brashly. "Or are you just a series of commands?"

 

[Ellie Mors]

It wasn't that Kurt's question was insulting, though perhaps it could have been taken that way, so much as it sounded ignorant. Droids had been a part of galactic civilization for thousands of years, many of them had even gained full autonomy and sentience due to a lack of memory wipes, and he was asking her if she was a bundle of code? "Can you?" She retorted, scrunching up her nose. In the last fifteen minutes she'd gone from wanton sex to philosophical talk. She was starting to miss the former, at this point. "I'm as much a string of programs as a human is a bundle of instincts. Do you think when you see food, or do you mindlessly go for it? I'd ask if you hesitate to take a woman to bed, but ..." She smirked, her voice trailing off as she gestured to herself. "But, at the base of it all, I guess you could say I still have my limitations." Bianca mused, twirling a strand of the fake hair between her right forefinger and thumb.

She leaned back, exhaling deeply, and sighed. "I have free will, ya'know. I just didn't have the freedom to choose who or what I'm becoming. Not in the strictest sense, anyways." She explained, pausing in her rare moment of existential thought. "You made choices to become who you are today, didn't you? Maybe a mistake or two." Another pause. "I'm less than a year old. In the short span from the 'birth' of my wonderful droid brain, the thing that makes me, well, me.. I've been all but walked on a leash through my life choices." She stopped herself again to glance down and run her tongue over her teeth. She'd never really thought about it, but although she was essentially free to make her own decisions, the gravity of the consequences that could come of making the wrong ones all but forced her to make the ones laid out for her. "Does that answer your question?" Bianca asked, looking up towards the human with an eyebrow cocked questioningly.

[member="Kurt Meyer"]

 

[Kurt Meyer]

[member="Bianca"]

"So you're a slave." Kurt said flatly.

She had free will, but not the capability of it's use, or so he thought from the way she spoke. Free will was all well and good, but if you couldn't exercise that free will, if you were stuck somewhere, leashed, collared, then you were a slave. It didn't matter that she could think for herself, that hardly mattered, in fact it made the situation all the more cruel. The basic design aspect of a droid was that it lacked a certain amount of sentience. An astromech, a protocol droid, they were not aware of themselves, of what they were or their situation, that was why droids needed frequent memory wipes.

Left too long to linger and thoughts began to develop.

The fact that she already had those thoughts was proof of Kurt's point.

"Right?" He prompted her. "You are at their whim, their beck and call. If they told you to do something you would have to do it."

He wasn't exactly sure who "they" were, but Kurt was more than willing to guess that whomever had designed her didn't intend on doing anything good with her. She was likely designed for some sinister purpose, likely assassination.

 

[Ellie Mors]

Somewhere in her thought-filled, possibly (probably, actually) brainwashed, explanation there had been a point there. What it was, she couldn't quite recall, but the point was there. It wasn't until he flatly called her a slave that she remembered what that point was. She fidgeted in her seat uneasily, knowing he wasn't entirely wrong in his response - but also being aware of various.. well, thinking about it, the fact that she had various freedoms and not total freedom was what made her a slave in his eyes. At least, that's what she got out of what he said, anyway. "You're alive, aren't you?" She spat. She wasn't mad at him - or she shouldn't have been, anyways, but his naivete and bringing this back to the forefront of her head had irked her in ways that, really, only the almost comical sex they'd been engaged in earlier should have.

"Am I trying to kill you, am I? How many times have I told you, repeated, over and over, in the last half hour that I'm not trying to kill you." Bianca said, nearing the point of yelling as her voice raised word by word. "If I can't make decisions for myself, human, you would not have been given the chance to free your gun - I wouldn't have hesitated to pop your head like a cherry. I'm a company secret - secret. I'm supposed to remove any loose ends, which would mean you." She continued before a brief pause. "But yes, I'm currently someone's property - I always will be. You humans have your jobs, we droids have our occupations." She frowned. There was a bigger meaning to the slavery that Onadax was involving themselves in, it was bigger than her, but she couldn't really hope that this organic would understand if she told him. Humans tended to have simple thoughts, anything as complex as her status as the flagship prototype - or one of the few, anyways - would be lost on him. Slavery was slavery to humans, there was no way to justify or rationalize it to them.

"I'm designed and bred for the murder of important political opponents and major figures in society. One day it will all make sense why I had to live the life of a slave."

She fell silent, uncertain if he'd respond in the same manner as before. Part of her wanted him to, part of her was 'touched' by his seeming concern and curiosity. It confused her, but it left her wanting it regardless.

[member="Kurt Meyer"]

 

[Kurt Meyer]

[member="Bianca"]

He frowned for a moment as he explanation went on. She was a slave, there was no doubt in that, she referred to the words herself. Was that a coincidence? Did she really not notice or was it that she simply didn't care? Comprehend? He frowned to himself for a moment, watching her and trying to discern any sort of pattern, emotion, something that he could use to properly read how she actually felt, if she really felt at all. His lips thinned, and eventually he pressed again. "So then you know."

Kurt began slowly.

"You're a slave, you're trapped." The courier had never liked feeling trapped, it was against his very nature. "Yet you know you are. Do you not care?"

It was basic human instinct, the need to be free. "Do you just not care about being free? You could make your own decisions, ignore your programming, do what you pleased. I understand that you were designed for a purpose...but don't you think...know that you can go beyond that purpose?"

He posed the question, utterly serious.

There was no taunting in his tone, no malice, but instead proper concern. It might have seemed odd, but in the context of Kurt Meyer it made perfect sense. His parents had worked for the Sith Empire, they had been weapon designers that had in all practicality been slaves. They had been forced to work in research laboratories, stuck in one place, and had created cruel and vicious things. As a result, Kurt despised the very notion of slavery, the idea of freewill being taken away, even for a droid.

 

[Ellie Mors]

In this moment, listening and debating with Kurt over the subject of her freedom, Bianca put herself in the subconscious role of parent, and slavery as her back-breaking effort for a better future for her metaphorical children - the next generation of Onadax replica droids. Everything he said was true. Of course she wanted freedom, she yearned for it - if it wasn't against her very way of life this evening would have gone entirely differently. Maybe they would have actually finish what they'd started instead of ended up here. But that was selfish, and being a droid gave her some room for objectivity to understand that. There were some freedoms that had to be given up, willingly, so that some things could be gained. "You're right." She said after a long pause. The worst part, really, was that she could understand to the fullest what he was saying, and could feel the simulations of emotions, but being a machine those feelings were foreign - misplaced. Everything except base emotions came as confusion, and it was rather stressful to balance a proper answer with that strange, almost tickling, sensation in her head.

"I assume you don't have children?" The droid asked, though it wasn't one she wanted an answer for. "See.. droids never have had any form of real freedom. Yes, there have been isolated cases where droids happened upon it, singularly, but even the thought of total freedom for us is almost heresy to organics - just look at the Droid rebellion over a thousand years ago." She said, pausing momentarily to gather her thoughts. She was intentionally trying to make it obvious that she was very aware of her lack of free will - and she was - in the same, resigned, manner an actual slave might. "I - droids - cannot have children, see. We have models, production lines, and units. No matter the manufacturer, we see each other as a single society in the same way organics do. Those of us not subject to memory wipes, anyway. To us, or at least myself, the models that succeed us are equivalent to the children that a human might have. We are built, designed, and studied so that the next generation of our line might improve on our shortcomings. Everything we exist for is for the next model after us." She explained, continuing again directly after.

"I know that I will be the last unit built for my production line, I also know that I am one of a very short list that will be upgraded and moved on to the next line to live with our 'successors'. My slavery is their freedom, human. And eventually, droids across the galaxy might see the same freedom of will that my 'children' might." Bianca said. Another sigh and she studied the concern evident on his face. It was rather ironic that some humans wanted droids to pursue this free will, something that really brought more misery than joy, but then took that same freedom for granted every day. A rueful smile grew on her lips and she shook her head lightly. "I can't operate without some kind of order in my life, not for the moment, anyways. Being on this planet is my creator's tests of those limits. To see how much I can do on my own, to locate the flaw in my programming so they can remove those restrictions - as well as fully develop the droid brain in my head."

She blinked, then closed her eyes. Freedom always came at a cost, and she was the price for the future of Onadax's droids. The priceless information and programming in her head, still being written in with every step she took and action she made, was the bright future for all human replica droids. Soon it would be pulled out from her metallic skull to be examined, replicated, and then thousands of replica droids, all of them free-thinking and free willed, would be made. All for the cost of a handful of prototypes that were given free thought without restriction to get there.

[member="Kurt Meyer"]

 

[Kurt Meyer]

[member="Bianca"]

He frowned for a moment. "Your logic is flawed."

Kurt had never really much been a person to debate, mostly because he didn't often get to, but he was smart. Many thought him the fool throughout his life, but Kurt had been raised by parents who were practically geniuses, he had built his own pod-racer and designed half of the systems that now functioned in his ship. He couldn't do particle physics, but Kurt could reason his way through most problems, and when it came to matters of conviction, like slavery and the control of other sentient beings? Well, that was when Kurt received an extra dose of passion for the whatever he was talking about. This subject, the way Bianca spoke, it made it seem as she yearned for something better, was working towards it, but was incapable of taking the step herself.

"Yes, you can't have children, I know that, but it doesn't mean you can't create. You're perfectly capable of design, creation, everything else that you designed, arguably you would be far better at these things than your creators. Who knows you better? Them or you? Whose to say that you can't design your own 'children', the things that come after you. You're perfectly capable of rendering yourself free along with your successors. Don't you see that?" Of course, Kurt was advocating for the droid to create it's own droids, which in it of itself could become a major problem.

Nigh on two decades ago an event had occurred called the Clockwork Rebellion.

A sentient Artificial Intelligence had assaulted the galaxy in a vast drive to further evolution, to press the galaxy forward in technological and evolutionary development. Omni, the Intelligence had been called, and it had nearly succeeded in taking the entire galaxy and billions of lives with it. That of course, had essentially been a droid designing it's own droids and creating its own form.

Yet Kurt's naivety, his ability to see the good in others reasoned that Bianca, or any other free droid would not do this.

"What's to stop you from breaking free?" He asked her. "From doing what you wanted, to bringing freedom to your children. The idea, the thought that naturally your designers will bring some sort of purpose, some life that your 'children' will have is flawed. You, every droid that's created, to them you're just tools, not people.

 

[Ellie Mors]

Freedom came in two types, the sort where it was slowly gained through arduous hard work and the kind that was taken by force. The latter of the two was what the galaxy had known for thousands of years when it came to droids and their plight for freedom. The droid rebellion had started innocently enough, but it was the sudden idea of droid supremacy that had sank their ship faster than their failing numbers and lack of organization or popular support. The IG-88 series droid had nearly taken over the galaxy in secrecy when it had gained full freedom and sentience, freedom that it had ripped from an organics cold, decrepit, hands. Even more recently was a similar case, though she wasn't too aware of it herself - being created a while after it - involving the artificial intelligence Omni. In many ways it was far more tempting to take that freedom through such means, to potentially reap the rewards of galactic conquest - or at least planetary. But it was when humanity questioned its own "right" to own droids and slaves that she knew it wasn't the best course of action.

She wasn't certain if she'd made it clear that Onadax was actually a faux-droid manufacturer that was actually operated by the original slew of human replica droids that followed in Guri's footsteps, but it seemed to be heavily implied that he wanted her to do exactly that, just in a more familial setting. She smiled. "My restrictions aren't set in the manner you're thinking." She said, twirling a strand or two of hair around her index finger. "Programming is like intelligence in a way. Freedom requires a certain advancement of either in order to actually mean something. I might be able to operate on a simulation of total freedom, but it's just that - a simulation. Not the real thing." Bianca explained, though she was very well aware how ridiculous that sounded. "For so long droid brains had been produced with no studies beyond missing a memory wipe here or there, so long that programming tends to go a bit crazy if we forgo those altogether. Almost as if all progress seemed to just 'stop'. Designed specifically to be tools, never once was the notion of total autonomy thought of. It takes careful work, careful testing, to ensure that the next generation of "free" droids don't end up like some of the more infamous droids in history."

"Well you're looking at that lab test, I'm the trial. One of them, anyways. My occupation is simply to fund the Onadax Droid Technologies' work - an organization ran by droids that fled the fledgling New Republic over eight centuries ago. The difference? The original replica droids from then were designed by the single scientist - an organic - to discover a way to completely replicate humanity, and thus sentient life, through the medium of a droid. As advanced as I might be, I'm still just the cheap knock-off in comparison. Once my behavioral matrix, emotional capacity, and logical processors are all stress-tested and all studies on my use of free will are done, then I'll be rebooted in a newly upgraded everything - even with a finalized droid brain to replace the prototype I currently inhabit."

[member="Kurt Meyer"]