Work Text:
The message comes at the start of his rest shift, and Cody doesn't recognise the notification type at first the way he does with commnet messages or priority alerts; OpenNet isn't the kind of platform where people tend to chat. It supports the feature, but in general, you log on, do your work, and log out. Collaboration comes on specific pages, task-focused. It's something he likes about it.
You're not anonymous. You can be, but Cody isn't. It's just that there's nothing there except what he's contributed, a history of good, solid additions to pages, reliable work, one or two whole pages from scratch, one that had been so good it had made the landing page. It's not much. But OpenNet is the third most visited database on the whole Core World Net, with millions and millions of contributors and editors, some of whom, he thinks, spend their whole lives on it.
For Cody, it's something he chose to do, just for himself. Just because he believes it's a good thing and he enjoys the process of research. And nobody can quibble with his work because of anything about him. It's not that it renders him invisible, it's just that the only thing about him that matters there is his work.
It's from 1_23_7931, with the good formatting and the purple usertag.
'I saw that you were doing source help on the OpenProject Hyperlane,' it says. 'It's a different subject matter, but would you be willing to lend a hand? I'm having some trouble with the Massau Moon Skirmish article.'
There's no salutation, but Cody isn't bothered by that—he considers them fairly well introduced by the Masia Wilder living-person-article-standards debacle already. Purple Usertag has typed up the formatting in the chat window, so that Massau Moon shows up as a link; he's skimmed the battle summaries, but that was a few months ago, and it's not something he'd personally overseen.
Well. That doesn't look quite right.
It's a bare-bones article, the kind done by someone working in blocks, just a vaguely worded summary of objectives, the date, the casualties, and so forth. Things retrievable from interstellar news summaries. It deserves the name skirmish—it wasn't notable in any real way, except for the fact that fifty-three troopers had died in battle.
War changes your definition of 'notable,' whether you want it to or not.
Something's bugging him about the order of events, but he can't quite remember what.
'Sure, no problem,' he replies, 'What were you looking to add?'
Then he stalls, in some kind of confused politeness, because the original message was formal, and this isn't generally a friendly platform, but he has a garbled urge to be friendly. It's still so, so strange, talking to people without a defined structure of command. 'Also, hi,' he adds. 'Good work on the Moreau Bat cleanup job.'
The typing indicator flashes on and off for a long few seconds, but all that comes back is 'Thank you.'
Another, longer, pause, and then: 'I have a draft extension of the body of the article, but the current version says that it took place inside Vorne River City. The troop base was stationed at Vorne, but all the fighting took place outside the city borders.'
There are two reasons that someone asks for sourcing help; either they've just forgotten where they learned a fact, in which case sourcing is a matter of finding the original source or concluding the fact to probably be apocrypha or mismemory, or the fact is from personal experience, which is harder; you can't cite yourself, unless you're published somewhere reliable and reference-able saying the thing. It's a matter of finding things that say what you already know, and that can be difficult. It's why Cody stays away from articles on current events. And, of course, when it comes to the war, sometimes there are perfectly good sources that meet all the reliability guidelines that also happen to be classified to high heaven.
He can't remember much about Massau, and the exact location of the battle is lost to the murky mists of forgetting useless information. In another tab—his terminal screen is beginning to grow irritated at fitting so many pages into the space, but these things happen during research—he finds the original battle summary, buried in the index of the command reference database. 1_23_7931 is right; fighting had threatened the city, but CT-3484 had set up a clever lure-and-withdraw running pattern, and drawn fire away from the city limits and out over the canyons. No name listed in the files.
'Gotcha,' he replies. You can't, of course, mention the contents of classified documents over unencrypted net-chat with anonymous people, even if you really like the way they format their infoboxes. 'Where'd you pick that up, do you think? For somewhere to start.'
A long wait. Cody corrects several cases of vandalism to miscellaneous articles, and considers finding a better header image for the Coruscant Standard Rotational Year file.
'I was involved personally,' 1_23_7931 replies.
Huh.
Number usertag.
Cody doesn't know any other clones on OpenNet, but then, it's not something he really talks about. It's a thing he likes to keep just for himself. Something private, just because he likes it.
(Besides, it's a little embarrassing. What are you up to this evening, Cody? Oh, just another few hours of formatting bibliographies. After spending all day writing reports, I'm going to spend some time voluntarily writing reports on different things.)
Maybe Purple Usertag is from Vorne River, and the numbers have some sort of personal significance beyond a designation number. Maybe they're civvie support staff; they might even be a Jedi, you never know, they let all sorts of riffraff use the holonet. But maybe they're another clone.
The thought is kind of nice.
He starts in on a database search. He's very good at these; it's a skill that is totally, totally useless for his position in the GAR, which might be why he's so proud of it. There's a reason people ask him for help.
He runs off a script to narrow results to local news data from the time, with a search radius around Massau itself, and then to also add a second axis of closeness, this time searching by economic reliance on the planet Massau orbits, because he knows that news goes where the money is.
The next rest-shift, 1_23_7931 has finished reading all the articles that Cody's search threw out, and the finished edit has gone live.
Whoever they are, they write nicely. OpenNet doesn't require feats of journalistic brilliance, just clarity, and Cody always finds that reassuring, that he doesn't need to make people amazed, just informed. It's a style that comes naturally to him, within the confines of clearly-laid-out formatting rules and 'site patterns. No pressure to captivate.
'7931, he thinks, has a hidden streak of drama. He suspects it wouldn't be noticeable if it weren't for the strict format, but they like slightly daring sentences, descriptions just a little more noticeably poetic than standard. Still, of course, firmly within the style guide.
It means the page is, now, almost interesting to read. Not actually interesting. That really would be a violation of the style guide. But almost.
At the bottom of the article:
'Lieutenant Shara, of the G.A.R, led a coordinated effort to drive Separatist forces away from residential areas, and received a posthumous Republic Seal of Service for lives saved due to his bravery.'
It isn't much at all. But Cody's read all the sources they were working from, and none of them mentioned Shara's name. The medal, yes, and his CT number once or twice, but not his name. That wasn't on the internal report, either.
He is suddenly very, very grateful for '7931. Until now, as far as Cody could tell, Lt. Shara's name was recorded nowhere at all, and now it's listed forever in the historical record, the smallest memorial he's ever seen. Like a cairn of pebbles by the side of the road. Like an initial on a wall, or drops of paint on the inside of a ship's hull casing.
Nothing's ever gone from OpenNet. All revisions are stored, back-referenced forever. Even if they're removed, even if they're invisible, they're there, and anyone can find them.
It would be absolutely insane to message a stranger and say, you mentioned the name of a man I've never met, once, in a single sentence, and I almost cried when I saw it.
But he wants to keep talking to them.
He tags a single typo edit, sends it on to Purple Usertag. Says 'Could you take a look at the draft I have for the North Guimla Temple City Waterway for the transport logistics project? I'm not sure it's clear how it meets the notability rule and I could use a second set of eyes.'
Then he goes back, painstakingly edits in the formatting for the link the way that that '7931 had done.
Cody squints at the news holo in the corner of the bar. Specifically, at the scroll bar at the bottom.
He and '7931 have been talking intermittently for a while—talking more than he would previously have thought two people could talk, sticking solely to the topics of their mutual preoccupation. But only in the hours he allots himself for editing and research, not just at random times. He doesn't have the spare time to spend like he did as a cadet, blinking at the HUD of his helmet all through patrol rotations.
It's late in the evening, he's had half a glass of something too sweet and bribed Waxer to finish the rest of it, and the celebration of being back on solid ground for the first time in a month is beginning to wind down. He does, for once, have a little spare time that doesn't come in an hour he ought to spend sleeping.
He fishes his compact datapad from his pocket and waves off Boil's protestations about work on his night off. "Texting a friend," he says, distracted, and then makes an obscene gesture or five in response to the suggestions made.
'Hey,' he sends, 'Odd question—is your usertag a date?'
The reply takes a few minutes; he's expecting it to take longer. The music is unexpectedly good, and if he's honest, it's just nice to see Ghost having a nice time, for once. For fucking once. He's danced his fair share, and it's pleasant to be tired like that, in some safe way.
'Yes,' the reply says. That's all, and Cody thinks that sufficient, just leaning up against the bar soaking up the last of the peaceful evening.
Then: 'What else could it be?'
He laughs, a little. 'I had no idea,' he sends, tapping the words out with his thumbs, his stylus having gone the way of all styluses, in the end. 'I'm used to dates all in one code, YYYYMMDD. The standard way.'
'7931 sends him the article on variation in interstellar dating methods, one section highlighted, Galactic Standard, because '7931, it turns out, is also just a little obnoxious. Just enough to be likeable. Teases in a stilted sort of way, like he's heard of mischief and likes the idea, but isn't quite certain how it's done. He only started recently.
Cody knows quite a bit about him, now. By accident. Just things he's picked up. He's a man, for one. From the Core. He likes complicated political history, but doesn't like thorny moral questions, which makes his reading list eclectic. He does have a dramatic streak—he's the unfaltering guardian of two dozen pages on Rodian and Coruscanti theatre. Has an affinity for the ridiculous, or at least ridiculous people, but pretends he doesn't.
He's stern, with himself and with everybody else, and about as stubborn as an old-growth tree, roots sunk all the way to the bedrock; he describes himself as easily irritated, but he doesn't seem to mind Cody giving him a little obnoxiousness back, so Cody isn't so sure about that.
He knows that '7931 and Cody have exactly aligned views on the notability guidelines, and the proposed changes to the bibliography format, and, thanks to an endlessly amusing late-night argument two weeks ago, exactly opposing views on what constitutes original research.
Cody's pulling on his jacket to leave when another message comes. He ruffles Wooley's hair, informs him very seriously that he's in charge of the rest of the rabble for the rest of the evening, and then slips out the door into the cool night air while the rookie panics. It's not Coruscant—you can tell by the smell of the atmosphere, the lack of stink, the air missing the characteristic ozone put out by the magcon shields on every Coruscant window. It's just some backwater planet in a pool of peace, a stop-over point between battlefronts, and the air only smells of saltwater.
He stands under a street-light, takes in deep lungfuls, soaks up the light. Listens to the sounds of the street, the doppler-sounds of vehicles on the water-dark blacktop tar that shines the rippled reflections of headlamps bright in the night, the cheerful muffled sounds of joy from behind him, the calls and clatter of the tourist-ships out on the waterfront.
'People usually ask why I picked it,' the message says. That's all.
'Figured you'd tell me,' Cody replies. 'If you wanted me to know.'
The typing symbol comes back again. It'll stick around for a while. '7931 types fast, but he likes precision, is careful with his words, judicious. Edits. Is worried about being misconstrued or misunderstood. Cody almost wants to hear what he says when he can't edit, if he's quiet or if he just speaks, unguarded. He can't really imagine either. He thinks that that edge of suppressed melodrama that tints his typing disappears, that he goes focused and serious—that it's something he doesn't allow himself to indulge in all the time.
Maybe something that he chose to show Cody.
He takes his time, walking back. Detours down a dirt road to the water, is careful not to get sand on his one pair of civvie boots, grins like a fool at the tide-pools. On some impulse, he finds his holo rig in one pocket, messes with the settings until it'll take a still image and tries to pin down in pixels the way that the wind blows white peaks onto the shallow waves, how they spark white in the lights from the shoreline against the sweet blue black of the horizon. How tiny purple plants bloom in the hollows between the rocks, little sanctuaries above the tideline.
'The analogy is not perfect,' 7931 says, eventually, and Cody can almost hear the dryness of it, the almost-sarcasm, in a voice that shifts the more he learns. 'But for a comparison that won't take a dozen pages of exposition—it's the date on which I met my daughter.'
Analogy. Not his daughter, then, but something very much like, and maybe not met, but some other word which requires cultural context that he expects Cody to lack. Still, an attempt to explain something he doesn't need to, just so that Cody will understand him a little better.
His chest goes liquid, somehow. Warm.
'That's,' he types, and tries to find a word which doesn't make him sound like he's contemplating re-sizing his vambrace in a very-slightly-tipsy moment of madness, 'Really sweet.'
He drops low, balancing on his toes to keep his knees clear of the sand, and rests his fingertips just above the surface of the widest, stillest pool of water, watches as tiny living things come seeking just below the surface, watching him in return, trying to see what he's going to do.
'Tabalut,' he says eventually, in an attempt at equal exchange, 'Is 'patrol'—so Babalut is ungrammatical 'net Mando'a for 'on patrol.' Nothing complicated, not as nice as yours, but I picked it a half-dozen years ago, so.'
'I confess,' '7931 says, 'I did look it up.'
'7931 is clever. He's not brilliant, not whip-quick or particularly incisive like some people Cody knows, in spite of moments when he talks like a champion fencer fights, but he applies himself steadily and works things out and hauls out the truth, slowly but surely, from the mess of papers. Cody thinks he finds it reassuring, that there are things where the truth, the right way, is possible to find. And he'd looked up Cody's usertag.
Cody is sure, by now, that he isn't a clone. It's not just that the date is too early; he'd twigged before that. It's the way he writes, the things he focuses on. But he's not disappointed. It would have been nice, sure, to find another out there on the 'net, but he likes '7931 the way that he is.
'I used to read pages while I should have been working,' he says. 'Stuff I was interested in; we never really got off-planet media, where I grew up. Up on the HUD during patrol rotation, when I was younger. And some of it wasn't quite right, so I traded all my nice off-planet food hoard to a friend and got myself a one-handed keyboard disc and I was writing articles while I ambled along. So: on patrol. Just as a description.'
'That surprises me,' '7931 says, which Cody understands.
'Yeah,' he says. 'I know. But I hadn't really realised, then—I wasn't taking my work as seriously as I should've been. I don't know, it didn't seem real. Now I keep it to off-hours. Not that I get put on patrol rotation, any more; now I get to tell other people to do it.'
A long wait. 'Fighting Corps?'
'Something like that,' he replies. He doesn't want to lie—but he also doesn't want to talk about the war, fend off the endless questions he gets from nat-borns. 'The analogy isn't perfect, but I think it's the best we'll get.'
Then he sends, just on some whim, the picture of the tide pools, with the night-tide and the shore-lights and a distant ship hovering on its hull shields over the sea. 'Headed home,' he tags it.
'Don't text and drive!' '7931 says, without much of a typing pause at all. 'It's the leading cause of traffic accidents.'
He never uses exclamation marks. Cody suppresses another rush of fondness, quiet and sweet like the waves coming in, and then wonders why he's pushing it down; lets it come. Lets himself enjoy it.
'Don't worry,' he replies. It is, after all, a valid concern. 'Just walking; it isn't far.'
'Glad to hear it.' Some kind of flying animal, not a bird, with a spined frill across the back of its neck and colourful, short-furred wings, darts across the path from the dark of the tree-line, and starts up a series of wavering calls from out over the water, a piping song, some kind of stumbling harmony. 'It's beautiful.'
'Bad day?'
Cody blinks at it, fixes his posture from where he's hunched forward over the datapad, settles back against the window.
'Yeah,' he says, rushing stars glowing in the screen reflection. 'How'd you guess?'
He's only put aside his work half an hour ago, two hours later than he should have, and he already knows he won't be able to sleep. So he'd gone wandering, found a room that ought to be a meeting room but is currently empty, curled up against the glass with the whole void of space behind him. He'd hoped it would be grounding, somehow.
'Your edit notes,' '7931 says. 'You started swearing twenty minutes ago. And you're on vandalism patrol, so.'
This would be easier if he'd just stop paying attention to Cody. It's a heady sort of feeling. He doesn't know anything about Cody, not really, doesn't know his sim scores or his tactics aptitudes or his casualty reports, doesn't want to wring privileges or good assignments out of him. He just pays attention because he wants to, because he's the kind of person who likes to pay attention.
'I swear a lot,' he says.
'Not proper swearing, just 'kriff,'' 7931 says, and the amusement comes through even without anything to suggest it. 'I've not seen you use the actual words before.'
He laughs, and the sound startles him in the quiet room. Maybe this is what he's been missing all day—a connection with someone that isn't for work, through the filter of hierarchy and procedure. He likes hierarchy and procedure, likes that it's reliable—but you can't live on it forever.
'True,' he says. 'You're right. It's all been shit.'
The engines hum up through the metal of the ship, louder here than in his quarters. If he leans up against the window, he could fool himself into thinking he can hear rushing, the roar of empty space, electromagnetic singing, but if he can hear anything it's just static crackling on the hull. Hyperspace cuts you off from the rest of space; the subspace comms connection is the only link you get.
'I don't regret where I am,' he says, tired, maybe a little too tired to self-moderate properly. 'I worked hard for my position, I'm proud of it, I enjoy it, mostly, and I do think I'm well suited to the responsibility. But sometimes I do wish I'd slacked off just a little bit more. I could just be moving things around, or organising paperwork, or translating whatever, and there wouldn't be all these people relying on me.'
He doesn't add, do you know what I mean? Do you get it? Because that's perhaps a little much, even for an un-asked-for message about his petty frustrations with his position. Just watches the message blink, listens to the static.
'Responsibility is a privilege,' '7931 says, and he's responding quickly today, less of his usual time spent revising. 'But it is, sometimes, one that I would like to return with a polite refusal. Not often, but sometimes.'
He huffs another half-laugh, tapping finger against thumb one after another in a calming rhythm. 'Here's to success,' he says. 'It's awful.'
'You will have to imagine me making my toast. It's caf, but I still think it counts.'
'It definitely counts.' Then he frowns. Different planets spin at different speeds, of course, but in general, '7931 is on the same schedule as him, GAR-standard Coruscant time. It might be that he fits in his time in the morning, instead of in the evening like Cody does, so it would probably be a little too much to check, make sure he's not overdoing it on the caffeine.
Then something else occurs to him, just a little twinge of something changed, the kind of instinct that makes him so good as a supervisor and also is the source of ninety percent of his current problems.
'What about you?' he says. 'You're not doing too hot, either.'
'7931 sends a link to an earlier message, where Cody had said 'How'd you guess?' It takes him several seconds.
'You're not typing,' Cody explains. 'You're on speech-to-text—it reads different. But you like typing. And you're up later than usual.'
'True,' he says, and Cody imagines the sigh that the software filtered out, feels a little more like a conversation. Like someone sitting with him, up against the glass with the universe all on the other side. 'Not necessarily a bad day, but certainly a long one. And I might've overdone it, and got medical advice to rest my hands.'
'You work with them? Repetitive strain?'
'Yes,' the reply comes quick, and then a pause, 'But not quite. Sparring, and percussive impact.'
Something stupid and animal in the back of his brain makes a very loud noise, beats on the inside of his skull and repeats to him that he fights. Maybe in the casual way that civilians do, maybe not the way that Cody does, not in the way that immediately rose to the front of his mind in a formless sort of way without even knowing the man's species for certain, but it's still a relief, that he can defend himself.
'Hit less hard, then, c'mon,' he teases, like he might tease some rookie who busted up their knuckles before hammering into their head, again, how to wrap their hand properly. Then he finds, somewhere back in his files, the little booklet that the medics hand out all the time, with the stretches for a half-dozen types of training. It doesn't say GAR issue, not that he can see, because he thinks Bones wrote it up himself. It's mostly guns, and somehow he can't imagine '7931 with a blaster, but there's boxing and bladework too, so hopefully it's useful.
'Nork,' '7931 says. Cody blinks. The message is quickly deleted.
He grins to himself. Voice-to-text, deciphering a noise it isn't programmed for. '7931 snorts when he laughs, and now he knows that. He feels like he's been let in on a secret.
'Thank you.'
They've got the article structure all laid out neatly, and '7931 has got the lead section and the infobox set out; it's satisfying to look at.
The whole project is really '7931's, and Cody hadn't expected to enjoy it quite this much. But '7931 is getting increasingly interested in the old Sith wars, the kind for which all extant information is dubious, and it's a challenge, the kind of satisfying challenge that makes his brain work but doesn't have lives hinging on the outcome.
The approximate structure is finished. But there's a hole in the three different accounts they've managed to dig up from the Archives about this particular obscure Jedi splinter group, and while '7931's encyclopaedic and slightly suspicious knowledge of shifting Jedi perspectives on the Dark Side has been useful, it's still irritating Cody, because the information really ought to be there.
The Crown Order had struggled with funding, struggled with recruitment, then bolstered due to a specific twist in intergalactic politics that favoured them, decided to join the war in response to increasingly aggressive sentiment among members, and then... what? Tangled with some Sith. They were always doing that. Tangled with some Sith, who was doing something with neurology, some kind of twisted research into the brain and application of the restraining bold technology that had just been invented for droids, none of the accounts say what, specifically. They should.
It's almost like the information's been removed.
'Maybe,' he says, tentatively, 'Foul play?'
'7931 is silent for a long time. 'It's a possibility,' he admits. And he's cautious, conservative with his suggestions, determined to believe that things work properly most of the time, so what that really means is, probably. 'But you can't change the Jedi Archives base file. If updated versions were added, the original is still there, just not on the holonet.'
Hm. 'Good practice,' he says, approving; for once, some good sense from the Jedi. 'If you don't mind waiting on going live, actually, I can check properly next week, when I'm on-planet. I've got access.'
'You're going to be on Coruscant? Upper layers?'
'Sure,' Cody says. 'Closest thing to home, now.'
The typing symbol comes back, disappears, appears again. Cody is... Surprised that it's news, but, then, when they'd just started talking he was much more guarded with information, nervy about operational security.
'I thought you lived in the mid-Rim,' '7931 says, and then goes to explain, 'You sent a picture from Derra-15, once.'
'I don't live there, no,' he says, not sure why it's so important that he corrects this particular misunderstanding. 'I move around a lot, but I was only there for a week or two.'
'I see,' '7931 says. Then, 'If you'd like to check in person, I could go with you. When you're here.'
When you're here. Where '7931 is.
'Yes,' he sends, immediately. 'Yes. That would be,' he backspaces, searches for a word, and ends up just filling in the perpetually insufficient 'Nice.'
He feels weirdly buoyant. He's not just headed back to the barracks for debrief and R&R before going back out into the black—he's going to where '7931 is, to visit.
'I shall look forward to it,' '7931 says, and Cody kind of wants to project it onto flimsi and pin it up onto the wall.
"You all right, there?" Rex says, leaned up against the doorframe, eyebrows raised. "You made a... a noise."
"Doing just fine," Cody says, which is so much an understatement that it's almost a lie. "Doing just fine, Rex. I've just got a good feeling about something, that's all."