Light of the Jedi(72)
The system had three primary nodes, each with its own subnodes. All three main elements were assigned a different part of the overall calculation. The first was designed to create a computer simulation of the original disaster using all available data. The second modeled all the known Emergences thus far, and the third, by far the biggest and most complex, ran a particular algorithm designed to figure out where the next Emergences would happen.
That third node was the tricky one. The other two were just describing things that had already happened. The third one had to predict the future.
And if I can do that, Keven thought, I’m basically a Jedi.
But of course he wasn’t. A few actual Jedi were standing just a little distance away—the pair he’d met a few times before, who had helped with the San Tekkas. Avar Kriss and Elzar Mann. They seemed like nice people, but honestly, he was nothing like them. Avar was all quiet confidence and utter competence, and Elzar looked like someone out of a holodrama, with his olive skin and dark, wavy hair—just a beautiful man.
Keven Tarr was probably closer to a droid, or one of the navulators (though he didn’t have to wear those weird implants, thankfully). He liked systems, and rules, and the systems and rules behind those rules and systems. That’s what everything was, really. Systems and rules.
That statement was true of people, and it was true of droids, and it was true of the entire galaxy and everything in it. The deeper the systems you learned to access, or the rules you understood, the greater the change you could create. That was what had helped him rise so quickly on Hetzal, all the way to a prime posting in the Ministry of Technology before he was twenty-five. When he was still a kid, he figured out that four different crops were interacting in a complex sort of relationship, and that a routinely exterminated pest wasn’t a pest at all but in fact a symbiotic partner to the crops. If the plants were just allowed to occupy the same fields at the same time rather than being kept separate, and the so-called vermin were allowed to live, not only would overall yields be higher but the seeds and grain the crops produced would be of better quality. Beyond even that, a sort of hybrid fruit would emerge twice a year that couldn’t happen without the contributions of all four plants.
That little project had gotten him all he really wanted: access to bigger and better systems he could spend his time trying to understand. The Hetzalian authorities gave him increasingly important assignments, from developing crop rotation algorithms to modeling weather, all of which he found deeply engaging and rewarding. The only thing he found frustrating was how slow it could seem. He couldn’t just dig into anything he wanted, even with his high-level role in the system’s Ministry of Technology—there were still many things he could not access without permission.
That was his choice, though. Keven knew he could be one hell of a slicer, breaking into computer cores of all types, but he didn’t hold with that. He believed in law, and he believed in the Republic. He had decided long ago that the only way he would ever work with the really significant systems was if he could earn those privileges through his skill and dedication.
Well, now that moment seemed to have arrived. It didn’t get much bigger than what he was about to try to do.
He, Keven Tarr, was going to slice hyperspace.
A soft, cool breeze touched his face, drifting across the plateau overlooking the array. A good sign.
Keven glanced at the other observers standing not far away, chatting quietly among themselves. If he’d had his preference, the first test of his machine would have happened in private in case something went wrong, but it was all too important, time was too short, and too much had been invested in creating the array. Many people, powerful people, had chosen to back Keven’s idea, and they all wanted to be present to see whether that idea was worth a damn.
Senator Noor and his aide, Jeni Wataro. Secretary Lorillia. Minister Ecka. The two Jedi, of course, who were chatting with Marlowe and Vellis San Tekka, who had, honestly, been incredibly helpful. Beyond supplying the twelve navulators, they had also provided hyperspace modeling tools far beyond anything Keven would have been able to access on his own. He’d signed all sorts of agreements with their company’s legal department saying that he’d never use the tech for anything else, but that was no problem. Actually, he thought he might see if the San Tekkas wanted to work with him after this was all over. Hetzal was his homeworld, but he was ready to move on. The planet was a system, too, and he’d sliced it about as well as he could. Onward, to bigger and deeper.
Of course, if he couldn’t make the array work, none of those exciting possibilities would happen. If you said you would try to do something, people heard that as you would do something, and if you didn’t achieve the goal then they thought you had failed. And blamed you for trying at all. It wasn’t exactly fair, especially because predicting the future with a massive computer array made from wired-up droid brains was basically impossible. But that was how the system called society worked, and Keven Tarr would never be powerful enough to change that set of rules.
His situation was binary. Succeed or fail. He’d done everything he could to make sure it was the former, and that was all.
He lifted a comlink and spoke. “You guys got that last batch of droids linked up?”
A crackle—this many droids in one spot was causing interference. You could taste it in the air, like touching your tongue to new metal.