The lab was cold, despite the energy silently humming from the consoles. The holographic light of the Protocol Specter code bathed Kaelen in a blue glow, making his features seem carved from ice. Padmé stood in the doorway, the warmth and music of the celebration dying behind her, replaced by the frigid atmosphere of Kaelen's ambition.
"A next time?" she repeated, her voice barely a whisper. "Is that what this is about? Planning the next war when we've just survived this one?"
"You don't understand," Kaelen retorted, not with a hint of condescension, but with the frustration of a professor whose star pupil fails to grasp a fundamental truth. "I'm not planning a war. I'm ending all future wars before they begin. This," he gestured to the code, "is a deterrent. It's the guarantee that no one will dare touch Naboo, or any other planet we choose to protect, ever again."
His logic was impeccable, terrifying. "It's a weapon of mass annihilation, Kaelen. There's no other name for it."
"It's a vaccine!" he exclaimed, turning fully towards her, his eyes burning with fanatic conviction. "A dose of fear to prevent a plague of war. The Republic is weak, the Jedi are few. We saw what happened. They left us alone. Next time we won't be so lucky! Palpatine is on Coruscant right now, using this 'peace' to accumulate power you can't even imagine. This is the only language beings like him understand!"
Padmé took a step into the light, her face revealing deep sorrow. "No," she said softly but firmly. "That's the language he uses. It's the language of the Federation, of the Sith. And now, you want it to be our language too?"
She moved closer, until she was only a few steps from him. The holographic code reflected in her moist eyes.
"When I met you, you were the only person who could make me laugh in the midst of terror. You were a jokester, an impossibly brilliant problem-solver. You used your genius to fix a ship with junk, to advise a scared child, to confuse droids with wit—not to erase them from existence." Her voice broke slightly. "That's not you, Kaelen. This..." she gestured to the invisible weapon floating between them. "This isn't you."
System Crash
Her argument is purely emotional. Predictable. She doesn't understand the variables, the existential threat. Logic dictates my course of action. Survival isn't a popularity contest.
Response calculation: Dismiss emotional argument. Reiterate strategic necessity. Sentimentality is a vulnerability we cannot afford.
"That man was naive, Padmé," I tell her, my voice harder than I intended. "That man relied on luck. That man would have led us to our deaths if he hadn't evolved. The galaxy doesn't reward humor and good feelings. It rewards strength. This is strength."
She recoiled as if I had slapped her. The pain on her face was so sharp, so real, that for an instant, it cut through my cold logic. There was a heavy silence, broken only by the console's hum. When she spoke again, her voice was different. It had lost its debating tone. It was filled with a broken finality.
"You're right," she said, and my brain registered a victory in the argument. "That man isn't here anymore." She looked directly at me, and I felt the armor of my logic crack under the weight of her gaze. "This... this cold calculator who justifies annihilation to feel safe... is not the man I fell in love with."
The world stopped.
The hum of the lab faded. The holographic code became a meaningless blur. All the variables, all the projections, all the battle simulations in my mind evaporated, replaced by seven words.
The man I fell in love with.
System crashed. Error 404: Emotional data uncomputable. Infinite analysis loop. Fell in love? The probability of such an event was... I had calculated it. It was statistically insignificant. A situational infatuation, an attraction born of crisis. But fell in love...
My calculations were wrong. All my fucking calculations were wrong.
The Abyss of Choice
Kaelen stood completely still, his face, for the first time, devoid of its usual confidence or its new icy seriousness. It was simply... a mask of absolute shock. The surprise was so profound, so genuine, that it completely disarmed him. He had anticipated arguments, anger, disappointment. He had not anticipated a confession. He had not anticipated that the heart of the Queen of Naboo would be a variable he had entirely omitted from his equation for saving the galaxy.
"I..." he began, but no words came out. What could he say? His mind, capable of designing weapons that broke physics, could not formulate a response.
Padmé saw his surprise, and it gave her no pleasure. Her eyes filled with tears that she refused to shed.
"We fight for peace, Kaelen. For the chance to live without fear. And now you want to build an even greater fear and call it peace," she said, her voice trembling. "If you continue down this path, you will become the very monster we fought against. And I will not follow you there."
Without waiting for a response, she turned and walked out of the lab, leaving Kaelen alone in the blue glow of his creation.
He stood there for a long, long time. Slowly, he raised a hand and touched the holographic code. The data lines felt cold beneath his fingers. It was perfect. Logical. Elegant. An impeccable engine of death.
And for the first time, it looked monstrous to him. He looked at the door where Padmé had left, and then back at his weapon. The ultimate paradox was not in the code he had written for the droids. It was in him. To protect her, he had created something that was pushing her away. To save her world, he was destroying the small world he had begun to build with her.
With a trembling movement, Kaelen Ror closed the interface. The code vanished, plunging the lab into near total darkness. And in that darkness, the genius who had a plan for everything realized he had no idea what to do next.