Chapter Text
“You wanted to see me?” Jango asked.
“Yes,” Lama Su answered, gesturing at the chair opposite his own. “We have an offer we think you might be interested in.”
Jango sat down, back straight, resisting the urge to cross his arms. “I’m listening.”
“Please understand,” Lama Su said, in his smooth, politician voice, “that whether you agree or not, the content of our discussion cannot leave this room.”
Jango nodded. “Noted.” As a bounty hunter and the genetic template of the clone army, he understood confidentiality.
Lama Su slid something across the table towards him. The light caught the edges of the protective transparisteel casing. Jango leaned forward and picked it up to inspect it. It was a microchip. He raised his eyebrows in a silent question.
“This is an experimental technology,” Lama Su explained. “When implanted in the medial temporal lobe, it records and stores memories and the neural map. Upon the subject’s death, it sends the data to the paired chip. When it loads, the new subject will have the old subject’s memories and personality.”
“It works in laboratory conditions,” Nala Se added, “but we need to test its range and capacity in real life. You have decades’ worth of memories, and you travel often. You are likely to die somewhere far from Kamino. You would make an ideal test subject.”
Jango blinked. “You want to implant a… memory-recording chip in my brain,” he summarised, trying to make sense of it, and put said chip back on the table.
They nodded.
“And this thing will store my memories—”
“And your neural map,” Lama Su pointed out, interrupting him.
“And what exactly does a neural map do?”
“Simply put, it captures your personality, habits and emotional responses,” Nala Se explained.
Jango leaned back, unsettled. “Right. And when I die…?”
“The data will be transferred to another chip, implanted in the brain of a cloned body grown specifically for this purpose. Ideally, you will wake up in a new body remembering everything that has happened.”
“Will it still be me?”
“Yes,” Lama Su said, with a faint, unblinking smile.
Jango swallowed hard. This was… immortality. A second chance at life, yes—but more than that: if it worked and could be repeated, it was potential immortality.
“Why?” He asked finally. “What do you get out of this?”
“Data.” Lama Su leaned back, his hands folded over his stomach. “Unfortunately, the memory transfer chip is too expensive to mass-produce. Estimates indicate it will take ten years of training until the clones are ready to be deployed. With this chip, we could shorten that to zero. Future generations could be decanted as adults, memories of experienced soldiers loaded, and sent back into the field, no training required.” He sighed wistfully. “But even outside the military application, there are clients who would be very interested in this kind of… life insurance.”
Now that, Jango could believe. Fear of death and desire for immortality were pretty much a universal trait, transcending species. His eyes strayed to the innocuous looking chip. It sounded too good to be true.
“And what will it cost me?” he asked, narrowing his eyes. He had learned long ago that everything had a price.
“Nothing,” Lama Su assured him.
“Nothing,” Jango repeated sceptically.
Nala Se inclined her head slightly. “As we said, the technology is experimental. The result is not guaranteed. You would be a source of valuable data, regardless of the outcome.”
Jango considered that. He wasn’t in the habit of making important decisions rashly. “What are the risks? Could it fail in a way that—”
“That cannot be predicted,” Nala Se said simply, her tone clinical.
“And the side effects? Pain? Mental… fragmentation?”
Nala Se’s expression didn’t change. “We are monitoring every variable. There is a possibility of neurological disruption, but it is within tolerable limits.”
Tolerable limits. Were tolerable limits worth it when the alternative was permanent death?
“I need time to think about it,” he said finally.
“Of course,” Lama Su replied silkily. His eyes held Jango’s too long, with an intensity that made him shift uncomfortably. “Take all the time you need.”
Jango was definitely planning to think long and hard about it. He couldn’t see any drawbacks yet. In theory, there was nothing to lose. If the chip worked, he would live again. If it didn’t—he would already be dead anyway.