Chip and Silicon

[Carmelita]

The desert heat beat down on the formerly Imperial compound. The air was as still as a months old pile of paperwork, and just as stifling. Left to their own devices, the only two occupants of the base worked at a leisurely pace. The AI that occupied the computer bank in the central control tower quietly browsed through the Dataverse, looking both for interesting requests to flag for Carmelita’s use and leads on the paper trail he wanted to eliminate from the Coruscant databanks. The trieye, meanwhile, dedicated her time to invention. Or at least, she tried to...

“Ow ow ow ow!”

Chip retracted her hand from the workbench and nursed it tenderly, glaring with all three of her eyes at the solenoid that had decided to suddenly prod a metal rod into her hand. She stroked her purple fur to one side, grimacing as she saw the skin beneath already beginning to bruise.

“All I want,” she growled, “Is for you to regulate the extension and retraction of the rod without sending it flying. Is that so hard, damn you?”

The solenoid, being an inanimate electromagnet, did not reply. Chip took the awkward pause to realise she was talking to her work again, and used her uninjured hand to pinch her eyebrows. Spinning around on top of the stool she perched on, she grabbed a bottle of water.

The cool liquid rejuvenated her a little, but she was still frustrated. Abandoning the solenoid, she instead crossed the workshop to where she had assembled a small cylindrical shell. Attaching a few wires to their relevant couplings, Chip picked up the laptop it was connected to and began clicking buttons on screen. The cylinder began to raise itself on stubby wheeled legs, before Chip made it begin rocking back and forth by alternating the extension of the legs.

“Thank goodness for pneumatics,” she muttered as a smile crept onto her face. “They’ve yet to let me down. If only I could fit some in the head. Now, to test the air cushion.”

She lowered the cylinder back onto the floor remotely, and activated another button. The whoosh of air quickly filled the room as the cylinder rose on a bed of air beneath it. Chip smiled.

“Yes! It worked!” she called out as she switched the fans off. She began detaching the wires, tucking them away inside the large open space inside the cylinder, while simultaneously calling Al3x with her headset.

++Hey Chip. You fixed the solenoid you were moaning about?++ The AI’s voice, laden with sardonic wit, sounded bored, but Chip had known its owner for almost a month at this point. Recognising the hidden curiosity for what it was she smiled to herself.

“Not so much, but I did get the air cushion working. At a test weight of twenty pounds too!” She couldn’t help but give a little fist pump at that, though she knew the AI probably wouldn’t see it.

++Sweet. I set up one of the machine shops to make that quantum deployment beacon you asked for, by the way. It should have finished… three minutes ago.++

Chip finished tidying up after her test run. “Thank you. I’ll pick it up after lunch. Speaking of, do you want to join me? There’s a few amusing raps about Palpatine that one of my old friends sent me.”

++Eh, why not.++

---

As she waved goodbye to the mobile projector Al3x used for telepresence, Chip smiled. The guy was a real piece of work sometimes, his snark and overly elaborate metaphors putting down online commenters or ragging on news articles, but he’d never turned that on her. They’d struck up a sense of camaraderie, alone out in the desert, and she enjoyed the talks they had when they took breaks.

She hummed a tune under her breath as she walked out of the mess hall and into the building’s shadow, avoiding the boiling light of the sun overhead and sticking to the relatively cooler shade as she made her way to the automated workshop. The quantum deployment beacon, a large cube that weighed enough to require her to bend her knees to pick it up, was waiting, and she carried it slowly across the base to her workplace.

The relief of air conditioning swept over her as she re-entered the lab. She placed the beacon down on a workbench next to the solenoid and looked at the two components.

Chip got back to work.

[Carmelita]

The next morning brought an unexpected message.

“I mean, I know what she does. She rescued me, for heaven’s sake… but to be just sitting here, while she’s in the thick of it…” Chip shuddered. “It just doesn’t feel right.”

“You’re worried because the boss woman doesn’t have back-up. That sound right?” Al3x’s avatar, an anthropomorphic dust devil, swept his hands wide. “She’ll be fine. She’s got the recall, and she’s a prime. Heck, she’s already died once.”

“You saw how restless her sleep was!” Chip yelled, striking the table and sending her water rippling. “It’s not even that though. She was in danger saving me, she was in danger saving my brother, and now she’s in danger saving someone else. I know that’s her job, but-”

Chip bit her lip, biting back what she was about to blurt out. Al3x was looking unimpressed.

“Carmelita’s going to be fine, you worrier. I’ve had a look at the service record she’s put on the servers, and if there’s only one set of crooks she let slip, and then only some of the time, then she’s got this in the bag stored in a barrel for shooting fish. Would you rather she just sit back, save only those you care about? Only help those who the risk is worth it for?”

Chip screamed in frustration.

“That’s not what I’m worried about! I’m worried about her because she’s hurt, I’m worried she’s not on top of her game!”

A pause.

Chip held her hands clamped over her mouth.

Al3x’s glowing eyes were wide.

She fled the room.

---

Chip had lunch in the lab for the third time, and laid her head down on the desk. After her accidental outburst, she had taken to sleeping in the dormitories rather than the control tower, and conversation between her and Al3x had dropped to simple requests for parts and confirmation they’d been made.

It wasn’t that she felt any animosity towards the AI. Though it hurt that he’d taken her words to indicate a certain selfishness inherent within her, she understood the conclusion he’d leapt to. What had prevented her from returning to how things had been was a deep seated uneasiness in her gut. She’d been pondering it between her long stretches of work that she’d been throwing herself into. It was how quickly she’d risen to her own defence, how easily she had let slip something personal that Carmelita had, if not shared in confidence, obviously not put on file. Chip had never considered herself thin-skinned or prone to bursts of emotion, and sometimes her part in the printing of rebel pamphlets had required her to walk steadily past Stormtroopers with bags full of dissident material without batting an eyelid. That Al3x seemed to be an exception to this trend was deeply unsettling.

Still, if there was one good thing to come out of this, it was that she had made progress in leaps and bounds on her current project. The quantum deployment beacon had been fitted and tested, the sensor ring and computing capabilities had all passed muster and the addition of electronic clamps and self-righting levers had solved the dangers of her creations falling over. The droid had taken shape, and now all she had to do was to get the blasted shield projector working.

Said projector was currently lying on the floor in fifteen pieces. It was the sixth prototype in as many hours.

“Oh come on!” Chip muttered to herself as the laptop nearby flashed red. “Again? What am I doing wrong?”

She looked up at the screen, swiping the parameters of the simulation and attempting to find a solution. As she cursed, an email notification popped up on screen. Chip opened the message from Carmelita.

“She wants a design for what.”

[Carmelita]

Designing, of all things, a lion costume, had given her a much needed chance to break from the project. After the blueprints had been sent, she had returned to the problem refreshed, though her discomfort had been eased only a little.

She smiled to herself, the trieye activating the handheld devices clamped to the desks with the push of a button. A blue and orange line traced itself through the air between them, slowly blooming out into a large shield of glowing energy. Chip dropped a spanner, and gave a little grin as it bounced off the surface. She crouched close to the floor, and threw another spanner up. It passed straight through the shield.

“A one-way shield. A… hmm.”

She wanted to think of a witty name for the shield. The acronym for the STAPLER and the inspiration behind the Fisti-Cuffs had been a way of putting some humour in her work, a signature if you will.

Putting it to one side, she turned and installed the device into the prototype drone, fitting the shield to a thick antenna that rose from the top of the conical top. She buffed a few scratches from the ring of lights that lay near the top of the cone, and stood back.

The drone didn’t look like much when it was inactive, the stub of some fancy pencil that had been sharpened one too many times. The outer shell was sturdy and the cone had fitted seamlessly to the surface. Black with gold lines and lettering, the only deviation from the color scheme were the ring of blue and red lights near the top of the conical upper portion of the bot.

Chip admired it for a good few minutes before putting the numerous electronic blueprints together and mailing them in one fell swoop to the workshops. She needed more, lots more.

---

A day of rest, spent avoiding Al3x and catching up on the news, and the bots were ready for programming.

Chip pursed her lips.

She now had ten identical drones, the prototypes needed to form the Police Containment Drone Squad 001. Each of them had been given a name and a number, but the principle was for them to be simple automata, a non-sentient hivemind directed by police in the field to limit the risk of casualties. The lack of armaments was a purposeful design choice, allowing her to increase the strength of the drone’s shells and siphon all power directly into the co-operative containment shield.

It would be ideal, she thought to herself, if she could get the squad done in time for Carmelita to utilise them for her current operation.

Chip sighed. She was skirting around the issue that stopped her from doing so, and she knew it. She needed Al3x to build the hivemind programming, and since she was avoiding him…

She’d bite the bullet. But not today.

[Carmelita]

Chip was in the lab again, still fine tuning and tweaking and not getting Al3x to help with the programming. She’d been there for most of the morning.

As she made a minute adjustment to the paint job on one of the drones, her eyepiece buzzed quietly. She swiped it across the screen: it was Nimo.

++Hey Fish and Chips!++ came his voice, the childhood nickname slipping from his lips.

“Hi Nimo.” She tried to make it sound enthusiastic, but her ill mood leaked through. She hoped he hadn’t noticed.

++Hey, you alright?++ Damn. ++You sound less bubbly than you should be.++

Chip gave a sigh, dropping to sit on the floor and leaning back against a rack of tools, wrapping her arms around her knees.

“There’ve been some… difficulties in the workplace. One of my co-workers got under my skin, I overreacted, and now things are… awkward.”

++You? Overreact?++

“I know, I know, but I don’t know what it is about this guy.”

++Is he a friend?++

“Yeah.”

++Then it’s probably instinctual. You never really connected with the others, back when we were in the printing business. If you’ve been getting on well with this guy, I can imagine you not knowing how to handle it. It’ll get better in time.++

“Nimo,” she asked, finally admitting to herself that there was a problem. “How do I fix this?”

++Bite the bullet, little sis. Go and apologise. Maybe take a break, clear your head a little.++

“Thanks Nimo.”

++No problem.++

Chip wiped away a few grateful tears that were forming at the corners of her eyes.

“So, Nimoanie, what’s going on in Coruscant. You kept your head down?”

++Yeah, I got the all clear from a mate a few days ago. But listen, I heard something that I think your boss would be interested in. Wanted to pay her back for saving my skin.++

“Oh?”

++Yeah. There’s this academic in the upper levels who’s been gathering primes to stop some nefarious company and their mind control chips or something like that.++

Chip frowned.

“Carmy’s currently undercover. She wouldn’t be able to follow up in person…”

++Really? Hmm… hey, does she have these eyepieces you’ve designed? If she does, I could go with my tablet and let her video conference with this guy.++

Chip nodded, then gave a hum of assent.

“That might work. I’ll go give my co-worker that apology and hand your details over to him. Then I’ll go clear my head. Don’t get into any trouble!”

Nimo laughed, and ended the call.

Chip got to her feet and made her way to the control tower through the baking heat. There was a light breeze today, bringing little in the way of coolness but plenty in the way of small sand devils that sprung up from the packed ground and quickly whirled away to nothingness. She couldn’t help but wonder about Al3x’s avatar. Was the sand devil his choice, or something he was designed with? What did it mean?

Shaking the thoughts from her head, she began climbing the stairs. At the entrance to the control tower, she paused before steeling herself and knocking on the door.

“Come in.” Al3x’s voice seemed amused, but there was an almost organic hint of strain beneath the tone. Chip pushed the door open.

The AI’s hologram was deactivated, his avatar currently on the screens with visual representations of the programs he was running in the form of weather patterns. The anthropomorphic sand devil seemed tense, the shoulders back and the head tilted slightly away from Chip.

“I’m sorry.” Two voices, speaking at the same time. They both looked up in shock, before genuine, amused smiles came onto their faces.

“I shouldn’t have gone so far,” Al3x said.

“I overreacted. If anything, it’s my fault for not just saying it was a confidential issue that had me worried.”

Chip twiddled her thumbs.

“Speaking of,” she continued. “I’d really like it if you waited to ask Carm about it until she’s here in person. It wasn’t shared in confidence exactly, but we were in the middle of the desert at night. It’s not the sort of thing to ask her about in the field.”

Al3x gave a nod.

“So, what have you gotten up to since last we met?”

“I’ve finished the PCDs,” Chip smiled, only hesitating a little. “I just need the programming.”

Al3x grinned, a glowing line on the swirling, pixelated sand.

“Programming?” he asked, chuckling slightly. “Now whoever could write that? If you’ve got the ways and means of printing in blue, I’ll toss up together some code.”
“That’s not all,” Chip added. “My brother found something Carm’s going to be interested in. I need you to handle the communication between them.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Now we’ve cleared the air, I think I need a break. I’m synced to the recall, so I should be safe to take a trip out to Nippur. I want to see if the situation there is as bad as the fundraisers say it is.”

Al3x frowned slightly, but nodded.

“Keep your eyepieces on and at the first hint of trouble, find somewhere to hole up for five minutes. You taking a car?”

“Yeah. Give me a call if you get lonely,” Chip replied, with a teasing grin. It felt good, to be able to engage in witty repartee again.

“Off with you, scallywag!”

“See you later Al3x.”