Work Text:
44 BBY
The holocron landed on Findo’s desk just after lunch. She saw the problem instantly - one of its facets had sheared away from the central mechanism, clearly because someone had been too hamfisted in opening it - but the fact of it was that she did not repair holocrons, and Master Jinn had not submitted a ticket.
Jinn gestured to it with an apologetic shrug. He never put in a ticket. Somehow she never minded too much. He was nice about it. He seemed to have an innate sixth sense for her workload and general mood, only dropping by when her to-do list wasn’t too long, and when her outlook on the world was at its most cautiously optimistic. It was strange that the other Jedi Masters didn’t share this sixth sense, given that they were galactic specialists in precognition.
She slid the holocron back across the table. ‘I don’t look at these,’ she said. ‘Not my area. Try Jocasta in the library.’
Jinn cocked his head to one side. ‘You don’t? It’s mechanical. My padawan was rather excited to open it, you see.’
Findo sighed. She was far from the only support technician in the temple. There were thousands of others like her, all assigned to a litany of esoteric roles with names like Outer Rim Tundra Botany Cultivating Specialist or Core Lightsaber Emitter Mechanical Technician. There were hundreds of Jedi who worked on computing and mechanics too, some of them versed in an obscure force practice called mechu-deru which had been explained to her once, but she’d never quite grasped.
Findo’s role was mundane by comparison, and didn’t extend much further than the everyday peripherals that most Jedi took for granted.
‘Mechanical it may be,’ she said, ‘but it’s not my jurisdiction.’
Master Jinn nodded. ‘I understand. Please accept my apologies for wasting your time.’
He had wasted her time - and he still hadn’t put in a ticket, which she could annotate to indicate that her time had been wasted and then close, never to be thought about again - but she felt strangely embarrassed by his apology. ‘No, not at all,’ she said, hurriedly, waving him away. ‘Any time. Sorry I can’t help.’
Master Jinn bowed and left, smiling, stuffing the holocron into his pocket. Padawan my ass, she thought. He’d clearly dropped it and was too afraid to face Jocasta Nu himself.
42 BBY
For an organisation as old and broad as it was, the Jedi temple had vanishingly little IT support. Besides a small army of basic chore droids, there was only one Jedi Temple IT Support Technician - JTIST, for short, or just ‘her’ for shorter - and that was Findo Gask.
Findo had, once upon a time, worked somewhere that was not the Jedi Temple, although the Temple, like most workplaces, had a way of making you feel like you’d been there your whole lifetime, as if you’d emerged into consciousness fully-formed on the floor beneath your desk. Her career had begun on her homeworld of Tholoth, where a teenage hobby tinkering with long-range communicators had led to a job in a local repair shop, then to her district’s municipal library, then Tholoth’s northern Jedi Outpost, freelance work and favours aside. But it didn’t matter where you worked. All techs, regardless of their experience or their specialism, had the same office.
Findo’s office was a tiny room crowded with piles of broken devices that she was saving for spare parts, if she could only find the tools to disassemble them. Those tools were either buried somewhere in the piles or had been ‘borrowed’ by maintenance droids. If she found them, she would invariably have misplaced the device she was hoping to fix in the first place. She had a desk with just enough clear space to access her holoterminal and reach through to the constantly-bubbling pot of tarry black caf in the corner. Her office did not have a window. A sign on the door read No ticket = no fix. Most people who visited her office seemed to forget how to read as soon as they saw it.
It adjoined a storage room about ten times the size of the office, but she hadn’t been able to get more than three steps past the door for several years. Shelves were stacked high to the ceiling with obsolete datapads, bulky old wrist communicators that were the size of a forearm, or interface units for starships that would have been called vintage by her High Republic predecessors. She had cleared just enough space inside the door for a sagging recliner armchair and a mini food preserver. Findo had an apartment on Coruscant, and it was the nicest cupboard that could charitably be called an apartment her salary could afford, but inevitably, when you worked at the Jedi temple, it became your life. More often than not, she slept in the storage room armchair. The temple had dormitories in one of the lower levels specifically for support staff, but the only people who ever used them seemed to be the loudest snorers.
Findo had just poured her third caf of the morning when the holoterminal’s screen refreshed and a new alert slid upward onto the screen. She retrieved her magnifying lenses from where they were propped on her headdress and clipped them to the bridge of her nose, leaning in to read.
The alert was automated, generated by the barebones database she’d built to use as an inventory system. Uncontacted Datapads, read the header, before a list of names and device IDs. It took her five full minutes to scroll to the bottom and find the latest addition.
Name: Dooku, Count.
(Was Count really his first name, Findo wondered, or just an honorific? The problem with building a database designed to serve an organisation that operated galaxy-wide was that not every being in the galaxy fit into one neat set of parameters, but systems generally liked their neat parameters.)
Device ID: #63926545976
Device type: JoganTech Datapad (1313th Gen)
Last contact: Unknown
Location: Unknown
Knowing it was futile, Findo pinged the missing datapad from her terminal, sighing in resigned frustration when the request timed out. She didn’t need to check her database to know that this was the fiftieth datapad that’d gone missing in a year, and that, contrary to her requests to raise the tech budget’s limit to infinity, it was not equipped to cover this steady depletion of her stocks.
Her holoterminal refreshed again. A new ticket had slid into the queue. She ignored it, pocketed her most essential tools, locked up the office, and took the elevator up to the Jedi Council’s reception.
She had never got on with Sudo, the Council’s receptionist, although she had a begrudging respect for him. He was a tall, pale Pau’an man who looked to be at constant threat of passing out, held up only by endless cups of caf and the padded cushion of his desk chair. She did not envy his job - being the gatekeeper to the Jedi Council meant dealing with more bullshit than a bantha herder - but then again, she did not envy her own job either.
Findo sidled up to the reception desk and rapped her fingernails against the countertop. Sudo looked up from his holoterminal, his hooded, sleepy eyes raking over her.
‘Do you have an appointment?’ he said.
‘I do not. Has Master Dooku left the order?’ she replied, before Sudo could tell her to get lost.
‘Yes, yes, very sad,’ he said, sounding bored.
Findo folded her arms. ‘According to my inventory, Master Dooku was issued with a Temple Datapad and stylus four standard years ago to assist with research work.’
Sudo blinked at her. ‘And?’
‘Did Master Dooku return these items before he left?’
'How should I know? You’ll have to submit a request to the Council.’
‘I just want to ensure the Temple’s equipment is returned.’
‘The Council’s next meeting is in two rotations,’ Sudo continued. ‘Although the current backlog for minor points of discussion - such as yours - is two hundred rotations.’
‘I have regulations to abide by,’ Findo said. ‘There could be confidential Temple data on that datapad. I could be subjected to an audit.’
The second part was a lie. Findo had been threatened with audits several times during her tenure, but none had ever come to pass. Sudo bared his needle-thin teeth, a gesture that was probably very normal on Utapau, but made the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand up.
‘You should consider if this is a matter that is worth the Council’s time.’
‘I think a potential data breach is an urgent matter.’
‘Do you really?’
‘The republic could fine us a lot of credits for one.’
Sudo had turned back to his terminal. ‘Could they now? How inconvenient.’
‘Could you submit it as a point of discussion?’ Findo said. ‘And please ensure I’m copied in on all communications.’
Sudo hit a key on his terminal with a certain sense of finality and looked up.
‘Sure. Done. You’ll get an update in…oh, sixty to eighty business rotations. Don’t hold your breath.’
Findo nodded. She was about to leave when Sudo lifted a thin hand, his spindly fingers gesturing to his desk.
‘Oh, while you’re here…the flimsiprinter is acting up…’
‘Put in a ticket,’ Findo said, and left in search of lunch.
32 BBY
Findo missed Master Jinn’s funeral. Most people had, because it had been a funeral held out in the field, where he’d died, on Naboo. There was a memorial event in the Temple that she’d gone to, but it hadn’t been the same. She wished she’d been able to say a proper goodbye. It was a dull, small pain that she nursed for a week, carried around with her toolkit and her datapad and her travel cup of caff. Oh, he’d never put in a ticket, but he was so nice about it. He’d always left her such good feedback.
Master Jinn’s padawan had been promoted. She wasn’t sure she recognised the tall, sandy-haired man who stopped by her office to pick up his replacement comlink, but he was polite, just like Master Jinn had been. Unlike Master Jinn, he’d put in a ticket first, and his language in the request had been as formal as if he was inviting her to speak in front of the Council. He then did the unthinkable: he’d turned up on time, conducted the equipment handover with brusque professionalism, and then written concise feedback once she finally got around to closing the ticket nearly a hundred rotations later.
Equipment collected and functioning as expected, he’d written. Findo wanted to print that one out and frame it above her desk, because her usual feedback was more along the lines of I had to wait several weeks for a response, or the com link frequently loses connection, or I wanted a JoganTech Datapad, not this sodding ViewScreen tech.
It wasn’t unusual to lose a Jedi Master. It was, by nature, a dangerous profession. Far more dangerous than hers was anyway, despite the frequent risk of concussion IT professionals faced from all the time they spent crawling around under desks running cable.
Master Jinn turned out to be only the first of many.
22 BBY
Findo had just started her lunch break three hours late when her comlink beeped. She palmed her display surface, which she’d tinkered with to screen her comm calls, over from the other side of the desk, leaving a smear of turbodog sauce on the bevelled edge. The comm was from Master Yoda. She sighed and lifted the comlink to her mouth.
‘Yes, Master Yoda?’
‘An urgent issue in meeting room three, there is,’ Yoda said, his voice made high and crackling by the comm static. ‘Have time to attend, do you?’
Findo was already beginning to shovel tools into her bag one-handed. Yoda was also one who didn’t respect the ticketing system, but he was senior enough that she could pretend not to be bothered by it. ‘What’s the issue?’
‘Not working, the holoprojector is,’ Yoda said, and before she could speak, quickly added, ‘turned it on and off again, we already have.’
‘I’ll be right down,’ Findo said, stuffing the remnants of her turbodog into a desk drawer.
Meeting room three was the furthest possible meeting room from her office. She took four different turbolifts to get there, including one that went sideways through the temple. It gave her time to ruminate on what the issue might be, although she didn’t feel confident in any of her mental diagnostics. Holoprojectors were not her speciality. Findo was good at almost everything but holoprojectors and flimsiprinters, the latter of which nobody was good at, because flimsiprinters were almost universally designed to break the moment anyone so much as breathed within a klick’s radius of them. The temple really needed to hire someone who just did holoprojectors. She made a mental note to bring it up in her next performance review.
Findo’s last (and only) performance review at the temple had taken place five years prior. Five Coruscant years, and not Tholoth years, which were generally about fifty rotations shorter. This shift in calendars meant that the popular galaxy-wide celebration known as Life Day, observed in the bigger habitations on Tholoth, took place in a different month every year. Life Day was a strictly low season festival on Coruscant, where the chilled desserts and hot spiced drinks were laid on as thick as the novelty knitted garments, but the last Life Day on Tholoth had fallen at the very peak of high summer. Findo was still not used to this discrepancy in calendars, mostly because, in Tholoth terms, she was much older than her official Coruscant ID card said she was. Devices in the temple didn’t like it either. Jedi tended to travel all across the galaxy, and a datapad arriving on Mokivj that thought it was on Alderaan, upon syncing up with the local holonet, usually dealt with the discrepancy in time by proverbially shitting the bed.
The Jedi at the other end of the holocall in meeting room three was Master Kenobi, and he was on Christophsis. Or so Master Yoda told her (On Christophsis, Master Kenobi was.) The meeting was supposed to have started fifteen minutes ago, and due to give an important update on negotiations there, Master Kenobi was. Standing around the holoprojector, all the Jedi Masters were. Bright red, Findo felt her face turn.
The Jedi never made her feel bad, not on purpose. No, the embarrassment she felt was completely unintended, and completely in her head. The Jedi were always calm, steady, collected. They never seemed stressed, or harried, and rarely raised their voices. A Jedi was like one of the ancient mainframes that lived in the temple’s basement. Decisive, and razor-sharp, but steadfast, always present, never offline for maintenance. Findo thought of herself as being more like a datapad: portable, flighty, and prone to crashing.
Then there were some people - such as Sudo - who were like flimsiprinters.
She made her way to the holoprojector desk in the centre of the room, head bowed. The susurration of discussion in the room had dipped on her entry, but now it picked up again, the assembled Jedi Masters turning back to their conversations.
The projector was in standby mode. A bright blue beam of light pierced upwards from the lens to the ceiling, and Findo shielded her eyes as she leaned in to inspect the settings. Even if she didn’t really get holoprojectors, she felt fairly confident in giving this one a clean bill of health; the lens moved from side to side when she jiggled the controls, and a test call she placed to her own communicator cuff went without a hitch.
A bead of sweat trickled down her back. She heard the tap-tap-tap of Master Yoda’s walking stick on the tiled floor.
‘Any luck?’ he asked.
Findo swallowed, trying not to look at the revered, mythical, legendary Jedi master, who was patiently waiting for her to fix a perfectly working holoprojector.
‘Uh, where did you say Master Kenobi was?’ she asked.
‘Christophsis.’
‘Oh. And…do they use Galactic Standard time there, or…’
Yoda was silent for a moment.
‘Use Galactic Standard Time, they do not,’ he said.
Findo only realised she’d been hunching her tense shoulders when they finally sagged in relief.
‘Okay. There’s your problem. Master Kenobi’s equipment is probably set to GST, and the local comm relay on Christophsis isn’t, so when the two signals try to interface, and the times don’t match…’
‘I see,’ Yoda said.
‘If you can get a message to Master Kenobi - well, you probably can’t - he just needs to, uh, power cycle his comm unit.’
Yoda stared patiently up at her, his eyes glistening with reflected holoprojector light.
‘Turn it on and off again,’ Findo said. ‘He just needs to turn it on and off again. It’ll sync up with the local relay when it reboots and tries to call home.’
‘Thank you, Technician Gask,’ Yoda said. ‘See a way to solve this issue in the longterm, do you?’
‘Well, as long as travelling Jedi know to power cycle their devices when crossing into new systems, it should all happen in the background.’
‘I see,’ Yoda said. ‘Have documentation available on this, do you?’
Findo groaned internally. Documentation was great as long as people read it. In her experience, most people preferred to dive headfirst into a problem and solve it backwards rather than read the neatly bullet-pointed list telling them how to do it frontwards. For the interstellar communicuffs issued to travelling Jedi, the documentation was, in fact, engraved on the unit’s metal underside.
‘I’ll forward it on,’ she said. ‘If you could share it with your colleagues, that would be appreciated.’
Yoda bowed his head. ‘It will be done. For your time, thank you.’
‘You’re welcome,’ she said, and hurried from the room, thinking, with sadness, of the unfinished turbodog in her desk drawer. It would be cold by now. They always went weirdly rubbery when they got cold.
Ah, well, she told herself. The Jedi were in the middle of a war. Some people had bigger problems.
21 BBY
All Jedi Masters carried an air of toughness - a steely determination that burned through any facade of mysticism or whimsy and said, do not fuck with me, so help you - but none carried it better than Master Windu. As a human, he was not, physically, the largest or most imposing person in the temple, but when he stood in Findo’s office, his presence swelled to fill the entire space. Findo sat straight-backed in her chair as he set his datapad down on her desk, wondering if all the droids he cut down in the field felt like she did.
Master Windu never put in a ticket, but she wasn’t about to bring that up.
‘It crashed on me while I was in a council meeting,’ Windu said, rapping his fingers on the datapad’s smudged screen. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t been able to switch it back on. How quickly can you turn it around?’
‘It depends,’ Findo started, then caught sight of his piercing eyes, and added, ‘officially, my service level agreement gives me a three-day turnaround.’
His lips pursed. Wrong answer, she thought.
‘I’m travelling to Bardotta tonight,’ he said. ‘Can we come to a solution?’
A bead of sweat ran down Findo’s back. There was a pile of flimsiwork as high as her shoulder on the desk. Not that she planned to do any of it, but it was certainly there.
‘Come back in a couple of hours,’ she managed to say. ‘I’ll do my best.’
Master Windu thanked her and left.
Her shoulders dropped, the tension in them spreading into the rest of her body. It wasn’t as if Master Windu would be angry with her if she didn’t fix his datapad - that wasn’t exactly how the Jedi operated - but she felt an unconscious impulse to make things right when he was around. Findo had a habit of bending over backwards to help the more senior Jedi ('you’re too accommodating,' her manager had said when they’d last spoken, which was over a year ago) but this was a habit she’d always had, right from her childhood on Tholoth. From an early age, she’d made the vital connection between prioritising those with the fanciest job titles and the ensuing advancement of her career.
She poked the datapad. It did nothing. Sighing, she reached into the tangle of cables in a basket beside her desk and withdrew a spare charging cable, the plastene wrap of it yellowing with age. The datapad was JoganTech. The Jedi loved JoganTech, which was routinely much more expensive than the more common ViewScreen branded alternatives, but JoganTech case finishes looked nicer with Jedi robes.
With the charger inserted, the datapad suddenly flickered to life, the minimal jogan fruit logo stuttering onscreen. Findo felt a surge of joy, then trepidation. Had it just run out of battery? Did she want to explain that to Master Windu - no, could she explain it without sounding patronising?
She chewed her lip. The screen flickered again, and she let out a sigh of relief. Something was wrong with it. She didn’t care what, so long as she didn’t have to summon Master Windu back and explain to him that all he’d done was let the battery run down.
The screen blinked several more times as the datapad powered up. A loose display connector, probably. Findo pulled a new one from the shelf behind her, unwrapped it, and logged it in her voluminous inventory database. The JoganFruit tech always came with a free sticker of their logo, so she dutifully peeled it off and slapped it onto the several-inch-thick pile of other stickers on the side of her filing cabinet.
She set the two datapads side-by-side on her desk, preparing to copy the data over, when the old one finally finished booting up. Instead of the default wallpaper, which was a tasteful rendering of the Jedi order crest, there was a picture of a fluffy lothkitten, low-resolution and surreally stretched beyond its original aspect ratio.
Findo smiled to herself as she began the backup process. The lothkitten stared up from the screen with wide, vacant eyes. There had been a lothcat at home growing up, gingery, with white strips of fur along its back. She was at the temple too often to keep a pet, but she thought to herself: whenever I leave, I’ll get myself a lothkitten just like this one. A fluffy, vacant lothkitten.
Her smile grew broader as the data backup progressed. While she didn’t want to pry too much into Master Windu’s data - most of it would probably sail over her head anyway - she checked the odd folder here or there, just to make sure it had all copied over intact. It turned out that Master Windu didn’t have a whole lot in the way of sensitive temple data anyway. He had hundreds of binarbits of virtual image puzzles, cryptic word games, and brainteaser applications that she’d charitably call timewasting.
The transfer was finished long before Master Windu returned, looking tired, dressed for travel, a sheaf of flimsiwork tucked under the crook of his arm. Findo presented him with the new datapad, and then showed him the old one, which had already been wiped and disassembled.
‘Faulty display connector,’ she said, poking the tiny cable on the datapad’s inner with her little finger. ‘It happens sometimes.’
Master Windu gave a slight bow and added the new datapad to his stack of flimsi. ‘Thank you.’
‘Lovely lothkitten,’ she added, as he made to leave. ‘Is it yours?’
He was silent for a moment, and she felt her insides clench. But then the corner of his mouth twitched in a smile.
‘Unfortunately not,’ he said, and took his leave.
It would be a long flight to Bardotta. Findo contented herself with an image of Master Windu at the helm of one of the Republic’s transports, steely-eyed and straight-backed, a squadron of clone troopers at his back - and an image puzzle on his datapad to pass the time.
20 BBY
The Padawan Master Tapal brought in was tiny, his legs barely reaching the floor when he sat down in the chair opposite Findo’s desk, even after she’d showed him where the lever was to lower it. He had a mop of amber hair that sprung into curls next to his rosy, freckle-patterned cheeks, and his robes were just a little too large.
‘And this is?’ she asked.
‘Padawan Kestis,’ Tapal said, resting one of his huge purple hands on the Padawan’s shoulder.
Findo looked across at the boy, who was staring intently at the floor. ‘What can I do for you, Padawan Kestis?’
There was a protracted silence, during which she could hear the fans in her holoterminal straining.
‘Go on,’ Tapal said.
‘I broke a comlink,’ the boy said. ‘I’m sorry, Jedi Temple IT Support Technician Gask.’
Tapal set the offending comlink on Findo’s desk. ‘My Padawan will assist you in the repair, if that is a suitable proposition. It will be a useful lesson in the value of objects.’
Findo stared down at the comlink. She had at least twenty in a similar state of disrepair in a box somewhere in the midden of her office. ‘Oh, no, it’s fine. It’s not worth repairing.’
‘It is my view that all things are worth repair, even if we believe they cannot be fixed,’ Tapal said. Something in his voice reminded Findo of her old schoolteachers. ‘It is also important to understand what it takes to create and maintain even the smallest tools we carry with us.’
‘That’s a very noble belief,’ she said, in the most diplomatic tone she could muster. Master Tapal sounded like he was fun at parties, even by the Jedi’s standard. ‘But it really isn’t worth repairing.’
‘Perhaps he can assist you with another repair?’ Tapal suggested.
Findo looked at the box at the end of her desk, where the most urgent repairs were chucked. Almost everything required reference to an instruction manual, several very fiddly precision screwdrivers, and would probably give her cause to use a lot of swear words she wasn’t sure a Padawan should hear.
Padawan Kestis looked up for the first time and said, with an earnest innocence that broke her heart a little bit, ‘I would be honoured to help you repair a different broken item, Jedi Temple IT Support Technician Gask.’
‘Please just call me Findo,’ Findo said.
‘Thank you for your time, Jedi Temple IT Support Technician Gask,’ Tapal said.
‘Please, just Findo,’ Findo said. ‘Alright, Padawan Kestis, you sit tight, and I’ll find you something you can help me fix.’
Master Tapal gave a low bow and excused himself.
Findo sighed. ‘Listen, kid, it’s going to take me a while to dig up something for you to work on. I don’t mind if you just sit quietly for a bit, I’ll make up something to tell your master you helped me with. I’ll see if I’ve got a book for you, or a datapad with a game on it, or something…’
She wrenched open her desk drawer and pawed through a year’s worth of flimsiwork, instruction manuals, and receipts from the turbodog stand. None of it was appropriate reading material for a kid Padawan Kestis’ age. On Tholoth, she reflected, a little sadly, kids like him would be out playing games in the streets, tossing a ball around or riding their dinky speederbikes with the safety thrusters still on. Not serving alongside their masters in a war. It was something she would never forgive the Republic for.
‘I don’t want to lie to my master,’ Padawan Kestis said in that same earnest, heartbreakingly innocent voice.
‘Aw, kid, we don’t have to lie.’ She kicked the drawer shut. From the other side of her desk she lifted a broken portable holoprojector, dropped off earlier that day by a junior knight called Pebcak. The lens had dislodged from its moulded plastene housing. According to Pebcak, it had just ‘done that’. She slid it across the desk. ‘Here, Padawan Kestis, I don’t think you’ll be able to fix this, but you’re welcome to have a look.’
The padawan hesitated, then picked it up with the tips of his fingers. Almost instantly, his eyes fluttered shut and his face went slack. Findo tensed, her mind jumping to the worst scenario - that the poor boy had received some sort of electric shock - but then he blinked, chewed his lip, and set the holoprojector carefully down on a desk.
‘It got dropped,’ he said. ‘From the top of the stairs. In the north wing, I think. Someone was carrying it with wet hands and lost their grip.’
Findo gaped at him. ‘What, were you there?’
‘Kind of,’ he said. ‘I’ve got this weird force ability. I can sometimes sense what happened when I touch an object.’
‘That’s amazing,’ Findo said, just as he added, ‘It’s really annoying.’
‘Annoying?’ she said, thinking of how much simpler her life would be if she could divine the history of an item through touch. All those comlinks that mysteriously stopped working that later turned out to be full of caf residue…
The boy’s shoulders sagged. ‘I keep picking up forks and spoons in the canteen and seeing the inside of the dishwasher. Or people’s food. Or the inside of their mouths. I hate it.’
Findo had already grabbed a broken datapad from the pile at her side. ‘Can you do this one?’
Padawan Kestis touched the datapad’s cracked screen, then frowned. ‘It doesn’t work all the time. Sorry. I can’t really choose when it happens.’
Findo felt her face go hot. The part of her brain that registered the boy saying I hate it about his powers had only just caught up with the rest, which had immediately shoved another object into his hands to use his powers on.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘You’ve been a really big help. Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome, Jedi Temple IT Sup - I mean, Findo.’
‘Does it work on food? Your power, I mean. Do you get to see how it gets made?’
The padawan scrunched his nose. ‘No. Not yet, anyway. Why?’
Findo reached for her keys. ‘Would you like to come with me and get a Turbodog?’
19 BBY
Gradually, Findo’s workload diminished. More and more Jedi were being sent off to the far reaches of the galaxy. Her stock of comlinks depleted faster than bottles of revnog at the annual Temple summer staff party. For the first time in living memory, at least one of the shelves in her office was empty.
Her support callouts dwindled, with fewer Jedi left behind at the temple to use the things she supported, like the temperamental flimsiprinters or conferencing holoprojectors. There were fewer knocks at her door, and even fewer instances of people simply barging in. She suddenly found she had time to clear out her ticket queue, although everytime she opened it she would see how the total still hovered at five digits and promptly close it again.
Then, one day, there was nothing. No tickets, no callouts. No equipment handovers. Nobody at her door. She took the hour-long lunchbreak mandated in her contract for the first time since starting, ate a turbodog in silence, and then sat and twiddled her thumbs.
An hour before her official finish time, when she’d just completed the holonet daily quick crossword she’d been working on for the better part of four months, the alert arrived on her terminal.
NOTICE TO ALL TEMPLE STAFF, it began. Findo clipped her glasses onto the bridge of her nose and read on.
The temple will be closing early today at eighteen hundred galactic standard time. All non-essential support staff should leave as soon as possible, and be clear of the building by closing time.
Essential support staff should report to their line manager for further updates. Thank you for your cooperation.
Findo checked the message headers. It had not come from the Jedi Council, or even the facilities team, but the executive office of the Grand Army of the Republic. Did they have the power to send her home? She wasn’t sure about that, but it wasn’t like she was going to turn down a chance to leave early.
She swiped her bag from beside the desk, but then paused. Essential support staff should report to their line manager. By virtue of being the only IT Support Technician in the temple, that meant her. And it’d been years since she’d spoken to her manager. Her manager could have been dead in the arse end of Batuu for all she knew, although it was more likely that he’d just been stuck in meetings.
Another alert chimed. Then another. Findo groaned. Two major servers had just toppled over. One was unimportant - all it did was run a couple of public-facing holonet repositories about Jedi history - but the other played host to the main storage system for the temple’s security imaging. It had never fallen over before. It wasn’t supposed to fall over. Nobody had ever got around to building a backup for it, because it wasn’t supposed to need backing up. The cameras would still be running, but the footage they recorded would be going nowhere.
Neither would she.
Cursing the clause in her contract that designated her as essential staff, Findo picked up her toolbag and travel cup of caf, and headed for the server room.
19 BBY