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The last time Cody had been in Fox’s office, it had been when he’d been first assigned to Triple Zero. Back then, the room had been spacious yet devoid of any sort of personality, as if the room had been copied and pasted from Kamino to Coruscant but the pristine white had been saturated with the smog layer during the process. Fox had griped about the window that the desk had been situated next to, leaving his back to the stream of speeders and ships outside (“What if there’s a sniper, Cody?” “Who’s gonna snipe you when your head is so big they can just poke a pin in it from that distance?”), but Cody had been distracted by the sheer size of the space. He could put a whole ass row of bunks in here and still have room for more. What was a clone going to do? Decorate?
That was exactly what Fox did.
(And Cody too, to his much more manageable little office, but he was never going to admit to his growing collection of potted plants that weren’t actually his and were actually his general’s who’d sighed and dithered over where to put it while giving Cody sideways glances as if he could get him to cave and accept it. Cody never did, but his men folded like wet flimsy every time and took the plant, only for most of them being unable to care for it due to lack of space or lack of green thumb and soon Cody had to babysit a wilting plant in his own office because “What if the general finds out? He’ll be sad, sir!”).
Anyway, Fox’s office. The dastardly window had been covered with a one-way blind, letting the sun filter in but no one on the outside could see in. He’d swapped the cheap metal desk for a second-hand wooden one that Cody was certain came from some someone with more money than sense, because who else would have naked women carved onto the front of it? (Someone had painstakingly gone through and “dressed” said naked women with colored paper cut and decorated clothes for them). None of the chairs matched, but they didn’t make Cody’s back hurt just by looking at them, which was an improvement from the previous seating. Several shelves were set up along one of the walls, filled with a filing scheme that only Fox knew, with the topmost shelves hosting a softly glowing vine that had grown out from the ventilation grate and was making its way towards the window. (Cody pretended he didn’t see it slowly wave at him- if Fox wasn’t concerned, then he won’t be). A handmade woven rug was on the floor, its rainbow of colors a disregard to the monotonous greys and drab of the cityscape outside, and the plushest couch Cody had ever laid eyes on dominated a makeshift seating area- complete with matching armchairs, a caf table, and a complete hot drinks machine that Cody was secretly jealous of.
And then there was The Wall™.
“I see you decorated the place,” Cody commented, stepping over to gaze upon The Wall™. The whole thing was covered with plaques and frames hosting certificates for… random shit Cody had never heard of.
“Yeah,” Fox grunted from his desk, nose deep in some report he was trying to finish up so he and Cody could go out. “You won’t believe what natborns throw out. That drinks machine was still in the box when Grizzer found it. Hound says he found it, but he knows what he did so I don’t acknowledge him for the discovery.”
Cody hummed, half listening as he let his eyes roam across the dozens upon dozens of frames. There was a certificate for weapons handling in public spaces (practical), for operating a taxi (probably something in Coruscant’s screwed up laws that made him require it), for picking up passengers in said taxi (why were these separate certificates, Cody hadn’t a clue). There’s an operation license for various other machinery, growing more bizarre as he went down the list (what even was a forklift?). Apparently, Fox even got his office sanctioned as a “religious site”- how and why, Cody didn’t know if he wanted to know. He was a legally registered wine taster, cheese taster, bartender, a chauffeur, a dishwasher, a terminator, a chemical sprayer, a pruner, a sanitary worker, a bomb defuser, an underwater basket weaver in the traditional Togrutan design, a fashion expert and government approved model only on Corellia (Cody had known he’d went to Corellia for a job but not that he picked up a certificate while he was there). He was an HVAC repairman. He was bull nerf rider. He could officiate marriages, which was possibly the most bizarre thing Cody has ever seen because how can a legally non-sentient being be able to marry sentient beings was beyond him. He was certified not colorblind, he could sharpen kitchen knives without being fined, he could do snorkeling tours, he was allowed to fish on Naboo, he could type 900 words per minute, he could do small business accounting, he had a pilot’s license, he was a certified fluent speaker of Huttese, he could interpret trade laws among a handful of Outer-Rim planets, he could house and maintain venomous snakes, he had an exotic pet license only for Axxila, he had a Republic Library Card-
“When do you have the time for all this?” Cody couldn’t help but ask.
“Eh, I just kind of picked them up. Most of them only take a few days of Holonet classes or an exam and you don’t even need to be on planet for. Needed one or two to make a job more credible and then it just snowballed from there. I think Thire’s been printing out fake ones just to see if I notice.”
“I can tell,” Cody stated dryly, tapping a knuckle against one of the frames. “It’s impossible to type that fast. 900 words per minute? You don’t have that many fingers.”
“Oh, no, that one’s real.” Fox shuffled a few datapads around, the plastoid clinking and scuffing together. “Well, I did cheat a bit. I had Linkup hack into the chip in my brain so I can now connect to my personal datapad and impose my thoughts directly into a document.”
Cody paused.
“What.”
Fox finally looked up from his work, blinking at Cody’s tone. He squinted at him, face twisting into befuddlement.
“What?”
“There’s a chip. In your brain?”
“We all do, actually. Funny story, that. Stone works the prison circuit a lot, so he came back one day saying that apparently some of the wealthier slavers like putting bomb chips into people so they blow up if they do something wrong and it’s less obvious than the traditional bomb collars and was worried that what if someone sends someone with a bomb chip into someplace significant to blow it up. Anyway, my boys managed to figure out a way to detect them, but in the process we kept setting off the sensor whenever we walked near it and as it turned out there’s a biochip in our brains. Something from the cloning process, no doubt. Linkup managed to recode it without having to cut into our skulls, and-“
“Fox.”
Fox stopped, but Cody ignored the look he was giving him, thoughts spinning in his head. There were chips in their heads. Chips. In every single Coruscant Guard. Possibly in his own brain, as well as all his men, his entire Sector Army, hells, even within the whole GAR.
What was the chip for? Why was it there? What was its function, its features? It was a biochip- what was its degradability? Could it degrade? What was the signs? Fox didn’t say whether it was a bomb or not, but the possibility that it could still explode was too great for him to ignore. Maybe it wasn’t a destructive force- maybe it just disintegrated itself and rendered the brain it inhabited dead. Easy way to remove evidence out of reach of mind-reading enemy.
“I think,” Cody began slowly. “I think I need to call my general. Do you mind repeating what you told me to him?”
“So,” Kenobi said casually after half an hour, setting the handmade mug that required him to drink tea straight out of a lopsided ceramic General Yoda’s unfortunately scalped and hollowed out head down onto the caf table. They had congregated over to the seating area and gained the addition of Cyber Specialist Linkup at Fox’s behest, who looked very uncomfortable being outside his domain in the server rooms. “There are chips in every clone’s heads.”
“That we know of,” Fox shrugged, taking a noisy slurp of caf from his own novelty mug shaped like his namesake. “Every Guard we’ve tested has one, and from what you saw earlier, our device pinged off Cody as well.”
“And you have gone and modified them?”
“Not all of them,” Linkup grumbled, arms folded in defensive posture and eyes focused over Kenobi’s shoulder and to the strange glowing plant (Lovely, Fox had told the Jedi its name when he’d come in and complimented the thing). “Twenty, to be exact. I don’t want to overreach and have their brains meltdown if there’s a failsafe hidden in there because they all wanted to play CubeBuilder within their own skulls.”
“What has been done?” Cody couldn’t help but ask, a little mortified but also a little morbidly curious.
“Well, I can beam my thoughts to my datapad when I want to,” Fox gestured towards his desk where his datapad was probably buried. “Pear got it so he can get reminders pinged to him to water various plants. Has this elaborate calendar and everything for them. Hound decided to download the entire 3D maps of Coruscant and was basically comatose with a migraine for a whole week-“
“Threatened to erase him from existence for that.”
“-Pretty sure Hoods and Solar did manage to figure out how to play CubeBuilder together in their skulls during Senate Sessions, though, sorry Linkup,” Fox continued over Linkup’s mutter, Kenobi watching on in mild amusement.
Linkup looked as if he was ready to crawl out of his own skin than be here a moment longer.
“You can communicate pseudo-telepathically?”
“Eh.” Fox see-sawed his hand in a lazy gesture. Cody would’ve never been so blasé in using such casual gestures towards his general, but Fox had always had a streak of disrespect for authority. Coruscant only made him hide it better. And hate politicians. “So far the only reliable communication is just popping a mental message over to someone else’s coms or onto their HUD- external services. Potshot has been the test rat for that since all he needs to do is sit there and think really hard at people. Mostly all he gets is headaches from the strain, but supposedly he managed to relay over that Etch was a cunt by accidentally smashing foreheads together with Jek, so it’s all possible we’ll be able to do so later on.”
“We may need to remap the chip to allow better connection between other chips.” Linkup’s knee was now bouncing, arms still crossed. “I’ve just been wiping all but the base code and implementing my own once I realized the base code and the rest function separately, so nothing terrible should happen as long as I left the base alone.”
“What was the original code?” Kenobi leaned forward, looking intrigued.
Linkup’s shoulders curled up under the attention.
“Haven’t really looked at it,” Linkup admitted, disgruntled. “Wasn’t really any point when I could just strip it out without causing the brain to explode. I have copies if you want one.”
“If you don’t mind.” Kenobi sat back, rubbing a hand over his chin as he gazed over to Cody. “I would like you- and Commander Fox if he’s willing- to come down to the Temple so we can get a closer look at these chips. Nothing in the documents given to us by Kamino stated anything about chips, of which I would remember quite vividly. I trust your judgement in that they are benign, but I would prefer to be cautious, just in case.”
“I’m off as of now anyway,” Fox sighed, nodding over to Linkup who was up and out the door faster than Cody had seen before. “We’ll get that info about the chips, and then I am free to do what you will, General.”
A soft ping emitted from Cody’s comm as Kenobi and Fox revolved back to the conversation about the damned glowing plant. Making sure they were both occupied, Cody risked a subtle glance at his comm, the message displayed happily on the screen:
CC-1010: looking real cozy next to your jedi
Cody realized, just then, that he and Kenobi had sat on the couch together than taking up the armchairs. Kenobi’s knee was practically brushing against his own as he and Fox continued their conversation, one of them oblivious and the other he knew was smirking mentally at him.
Cody’s eyes narrowed.
It was never too late for the brain chip to magically explode.