Private The Broken Console

[Meri Vale]

The console had not been touched in a long time. Meri could tell before she even reached it.

Dust clung to the edges of the housing where fingers should have worn it smooth, and the screen's glow pulsed unevenly, as if it couldn't quite decide whether it was awake. Old academy terminals had a particular feeling to them: half-forgotten, stubborn, and quietly offended at being asked to function again.

She liked them for that reason.

Meri knelt before the console, skirt tucked carefully beneath her knees, fingers hovering just shy of the cracked interface. The screen flickered when she leaned closer, responding more to proximity than touch. Lines of outdated Aurebesh scrolled, paused, then jumped backward as if the system had lost its place mid-thought.

"That's…not right," she murmured to herself.

She tried again, pressing a sequence she remembered from orientation: basic access, nothing invasive. The terminal emitted a dull chime and promptly locked itself, the glow dimming in what felt suspiciously like irritation.

Meri exhaled slowly through her nose, not frustrated so much as intrigued.

Old systems rarely failed randomly. They failed specifically.

She shifted her weight, scanning the casing, the seams, the faint scratches around the lower panel. Someone had tried to fix this before. Not well. A patch job, rushed, probably done by a student who had more confidence than patience. The kind of fix that worked just long enough for the problem to become someone else's.

A shadow crossed the floor beside her, and Meri glanced up just as a familiar presence stopped nearby.

"Hi," she said softly, almost apologetic, as if the broken console were her fault by association. "It doesn't like being told what to do."

She gestured to the screen as it flickered again, briefly displaying a star map that was at least three revisions out of date before collapsing into static.

"I think it's looping between protocols," Meri continued, thinking out loud now. "Like it can't decide which version of itself it's supposed to be. Or…it knows something's wrong and keeps trying to correct it the same way every time."

Her fingers traced the air near the interface, careful not to touch yet.

"I don't think forcing it will help," she added, quieter, glancing sideways toward Elian. "But if we can figure out why it's stuck, it might let us in on its own."

The terminal hummed, low and uneven, as if listening.

Meri tilted her head, attention fully absorbed, the noise of the academy fading into the background as the problem settled into place, unfinished, patient, waiting to be understood.

Elian Abrantes

 

[Elian Abrantes]

Meri Vale
​

Elian had been half a corridor away when the terminal's uneven pulse snagged his attention, faint, wrong, like a heartbeat trying to remember its rhythm. He slowed before he ever reached her, eyes already clocking the dust on the housing, the cracked interface, the jitter in the screen's glow.

Meri was kneeling like she belonged there, calm in the face of stubborn machinery. Of course she was.

At her soft greeting, Elian's mouth tugged with something that wasn't quite a smile, more an acknowledgment, of her, of the console's attitude, of the problem that had just become theirs.

"It doesn't like amateurs," he teased, voice low, as if the terminal might take offense.

He leaned in without crowding her, hands clasped behind his back out of habit, eyes tracking the scroll of outdated Aurebesh as it stuttered and snapped backward. The brief flare of the star map, three revisions out of date, made his brows lift a fraction.

"That's not just old," he said, more to the machine than to her. "That's…misfiled."

His gaze dropped to the casing, to the scratches around the lower panel, the seam that didn't sit flush. Someone had been inside. Someone had put it back together like they were racing a curfew. Elian crouched beside her, careful with the space between them, and angled his head to catch the hum, low, uneven, almost reactive when Meri spoke. He didn't touch the interface. Not yet. He'd learned, the hard way, that old systems responded better to respect than force.

"Looping protocols," he repeated quietly, testing the words against what he saw. His eyes narrowed, sharp with the kind of focus that made people forget he was still young. "Like it's stuck choosing between identities."

He reached to the lower panel, stopping short of contact, fingers hovering over the seam.

"If someone patched it, they might've left a bridge in place," he said, glancing at Meri with a quick, assessing look, trust and invitation in the same breath. "A bypass that keeps kicking it back to a recovery state."

The terminal flickered again, static crawling across the map like frost. Elian exhaled, controlled, and shifted his weight slightly closer, still careful not to jar her. "We don't force it," he agreed, voice softening. "We convince it."

His fingertips tapped the casing, once, light, near the seam, not the screen. A technician's knock, more courtesy than command. This was where he excelled, this was what he was good it. The place where he could be the most cocky and he had every right to be, because he was usually right.

But it wasn't just knowledge, it was the love he had for the craft. It was incredibly fascinating.

"Alright," he said under his breath, almost fond. "Tell us where it hurts."

 

[Meri Vale]

Meri watched him work with the same quiet attention she gave old stone or weathered script, not because she did not understand what he was saying, but because she wanted to understand how he listened.

The terminal's flicker made her wince just slightly, and she shifted her weight back onto her heels so she was not crowding it either. When he said it was misfiled, her brows knit together, thoughtful rather than surprised.

"That makes sense," she said softly. "It keeps trying to be something it used to be and something it was told to become later."

She leaned closer, eyes tracing the same seam he had noticed, the uneven line where the casing did not quite belong to itself anymore. Her fingers hovered, mirroring his restraint, never touching.

"It feels confused," she admitted, then paused as if checking herself. "Not like a person. More like a hallway with too many signs pointing different ways."

At his glance, she met it briefly, then looked back to the console, grounding herself in the problem. "If it's stuck choosing," she continued carefully, "maybe it needs help remembering which version came first. Not the newest one. The original."

The static crawled again, and Meri inhaled slowly, steadying. She placed her palm flat on the deck beside the console, not on it, close enough to feel the faint vibration through the floor.

"What if," she said, uncertain but curious, "we don't ask it what it's supposed to do, but where it started?"

Elian Abrantes

 

[Elian Abrantes]

Meri Vale
​

Elian's gaze flicked to Meri when she said where it started, and something in him settled like a switch finding its groove.

"Yeah," he said quietly. "Origin, not instructions."

He slid the thin pick to the lower seam and tested it with a careful pressure, feeling for the spot the casing wanted to give. No prying, just persuasion. The panel shifted a hair.

"Good," he murmured, more to the terminal than to her.

He angled his head, listening to the hum's cadence, then glanced at Meri's palm on the deck. Smart. Less contact, less resistance.

"If it's looping, the patch is winning the argument," Elian said, voice low. "We make the oldest file speak first."

He eased the panel open just enough to see the internal port and the frayed bridge someone had added, sloppy work, rushed. His jaw tightened.

"Whoever did this wanted it to recover forever," he said. Then, softer: "Or never recover at all."

Elian pulled a short lead from his pocket, clipped it in, and waited for the screen to twitch.

"Alright," he breathed. "Start from the beginning."

 

[Meri Vale]

Meri watched his hands more than the console, the way he moved with it instead of against it. When the panel shifted, just barely, she let out a breath she had not realized she was holding.

"That makes sense," she said quietly. "If it keeps choosing the patch, then it never has to decide what it is. It just… stays stuck."

She shifted her weight slightly, careful not to crowd him, and rested her fingertips flat against the deck again, grounding herself in the steady vibration beneath the terminal. Her eyes tracked the flicker on the screen, the way the light hesitated, as if it were trying to remember something important.

"Old systems usually care about provenance," she went on, voice thoughtful rather than certain. "Who recorded something first, not who edited it best. If we let the earliest entry surface, it might reframe everything that came after."

Her gaze lingered on the frayed bridge, brows knitting faintly. "That feels deliberate," she added after a moment. "Not malicious exactly. More like… fear. Someone was afraid of what it would say if it ever finished waking up."

When the screen twitched, Meri leaned forward just a fraction, notebook forgotten at her side. "If it starts at the beginning," she murmured, almost to the machine, "then maybe it will remember what it was meant to be before someone told it otherwise."

Elian Abrantes