The Seven Things That (Almost) Made Me A Sith

[Jade Hart]

The Seven Things That (Almost) Made Me A Sith​

There were seven things that almost made me, Jade Hart, a Sith. Well, eight if you include the beskar blaster. Let’s not talk about the beskar blaster. So the seven things that nearly did me in were the talking tree man, the Kowakian monkey-lizard, and a dummy of Emryc Thorne getting glitterbombed on Late Night. But I only talk about that silly stuff with my therapist. That leaves four– one of which was a bottle of champagne on an empty stomach (by myself). Down to three. The next is of the blazing ballsacked Wookiees. Yeah, we’re not going there. That leaves two: Mom, and that which unMom’d her– The Stain.

CAUTION
Safety Goggles Must Be Worn For The Duration Of The Reading.
(This story has been known to cause seizures)

—​

In my mind, we were a nuclear family with a white picket fence who only happened to live on Nar Shaddaa. My dad died in some dumb swoop race accident (legal pod racing) when I was 7. His racer exploded for some inexplicable reason, but that’s not what killed him. His death machine then went careening off the track, clipped some statue, and slammed 500 kilometers per hour into the Hutt whom he owed 25000 credits. Mom joked it was his way of giving us something back. Gee, thanks Dad.

Mom was an engineer, a widow, and an alcoholic, in that order. But she was also my mother. She worked at a big, black complex that built engines for starships. On days off, she and I would make chocolate brownies and dog biscuits and walk to the underground droid park together. But after Dad’s death, Mom took lots of sick days to tinker in her garage.

Ka CHING, dada TING, Ka CHING, was my lullaby growing up.

Going outside alone wasn’t safe on this mooncity, so my home became a bird cage; my nanny taking care of me, teaching me breathing exercises. Mom wouldn’t tell me what she was working on so I concocted fantastic stories to justify her absence– a giant hammer to flatten the Hutts, a robotic Wampa to protect me, a machine which could make millions of brownies in minutes. There were nights I’d just stare up into the dark and pick a white dot, any dot, streaming across the sky. I’d focus on that dot and tell myself Mom was building us a spaceship to carry us off to the stars.

Seven years of this.
Seven years to sith.

—​

Mom: “Jade, come here. I’d like to show you something for your birthday.”
Jade (14): “Finally, it’s happening. This is our spaceship, right?”

Mom opened the padlocked garage door to a flight of winding stairs and into the alchemist’s lab we descended. The cold draft nearly knocked me over. An acidic, sweet-sour taste filled my mouth, like if some nut tried to ferment a pitcher of lemonade by steeping it with lithium batteries. We entered a large room made small by hoarding. Fifty flasks of liquid mercury lit the room silver. Sharp, green, metallic things embalmed in shadow.

“It’s freezing,” I said. Mom took off her oily scarf and wrapped it tight around my neck, ruffling my hair. We turned a corner. Bats flew overhead.
“Here we are,” she said, and ripped a blanket off her masterpiece. It looked like someone had fused an X-wing with a praying mantis and got it pregnant. Mom pointed at its belly. “That is how we do it, Jade. Right there.”
“But that’s not a spaceship,” I said.
“This is faster. It travels through other dimensions.”
“Faster than Dad?”
Mom gazed at her creation and took a drink from a flask.

—​

We still owed the Hutts money. Turns out King Hutt took great offense when Dad nicked his statue in his free-wheeling death spiral. In addition to demanding all swoop racers be retrofitted with self-destruct sequences, he raised our debt to 100,000 credits to repair his larger-than-life colossus. A Dear Leader monument whose slobbering tongue lolled a hundred feet from mouth to ground. Mom didn’t have the money, but she did have a mind. Her idea was to fit a custom swooper with a hyperspace drive built to travel super short distances on a planet’s surface, and use that to win a swoop race. This would win credits, but also attract attention and be the proof of concept needed to sell the engine design and pay off our debt.

But there was one problem.

Hyperspace; the vast, ancient forest. We make our maps, and stay on our dotted line. We pave our roads, and stay in our lane. Then there are those who wander off. The lucky ones are found by passing ships. The unlucky are devoured by the hyperspace itself. The force is an old soul, but not the only one with a dark side.

—​

The swoop racecourse was a long and meandering track of dirt and sand built with jungle gym logic and the frenetic energy of a popping popcorn bag. I wanted no part of that. The day of the race, I was seated at the very end of the course, sitting way offside on a boulder, looking at the final tunnel. I heard the roaring audience in the distance, bangs, crashes; it had begun. My nanny was seated beside me, looking nervous. She offered me a piece of bubble gum. It was cotton candy flavored.

“And down the stretch they come!”

Five swooper motorcycles zoomed out the tunnel, kicking up dust as they approached the finish line. Then I saw her– my Mom encased in a mutant aluminum bug. Her swoop instantly hopscotched from point to point, dis/reappearing, unstuck, reglued, a blinking star. It was like someone had recorded her race from A to Z, but cut out every second letter.

“Woah woah, what is this? The widow is in front and takes the lead!”

The other swoopers revved their engines and plowed forward, kicking up sand and spite. Some even lost control, triggering the self-destructive sequences and randomly blowing up. Mom teleported past them, here, there, gone. She crossed the finish line and vanished. For a moment, I didn’t breathe. The cheers from the crowds, the curses of the racers, all heard by another set of ears.

BOP
She came back.

BOP
And came back.

BOP
And kept coming back. In a series of loud bubblegum pops, she teleported from spot to spot to spot.

She instantiated towards me.

I froze. Maybe she wanted to pick me up?

Her machine reappeared in a crowd.

She had taken half the crowd with her upon disappearing– hip to clavicle.

Closer.

The machine appeared in the eyeball of the Hutt statue.

Closer.

The eyeball– surgically removed.

Closer.

My muscles locked. I curled up.

… She didn’t reappear. All of the 14 in me wanted to look up at the sky for a ship.

BOP
Facing me in her cockpit. Her gray faded face, shallow and severe.






















BOP

 

[Jade Hart]

(To be continued)

 

[Jade Hart]

—

I awoke in outer space.

I saw the galaxy, an engineer’s blueprint turned fresco. Red bulges and blue disks pierced with arcing lines connecting planets together in a sparkling cobweb. I saw hyperspace; tiny ants shuffling along streetlamped railroads. I saw the force; deep sea tentacles spraying gray ink. I saw a gloved hand reach out, grab this painting, and flip it around.

It was the same galaxy, but it had been corrupted, jaded. Molten hyperspace rivers sizzled and screeched in colors uncharted and uncaged. Colors which if buried in the deepest cores would still shine through the crust to end all night. I shut my eyes. I shut them again and again, but these colors demanded to be seen. Demanded to be crowned king.

I turned to flee and there she was– Mom. The lava lanes snaking up her arms and legs; her skin blooming ash flowers; her body strobe-flashing. Those scraped out eyes, the sockets colonized by the paradoxical. She beamed. The hyperspace colors flowed into me. I stumbled. They seized my hand, wrapped my neck, squeezed. I looked up for a ship among the stars and screamed.

—

BOP

Sucked out a vacuum, I fell to the ground and gasped. It was like someone had tied a lasso around my waist, fixed it to a swoop, and drove off in the opposite direction full throttle. I vomited. Night– warm grimy night out a tailpipe– hugged me in its embrace.

“Are you alright?” my Nanny asked. She was hands-on-knees panting.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I pulled you back.”
“Where’s Mom?”
Nanny bit her lip and surveyed the race wreckage.
“Tell me!” I shouted.
A shockwave bounded out of me, blasting away trash and sand, dislodging an overturned metaloid carcass formerly known as a swoop from a soon to be former swooper bleeding out his mouth. Nanny analyzed me. The swoop race arena was like a mining-themed Halloween party– swiss cheese holes drilled in bleeding places. Dozens of moaning people laid in twos, threes, fours, with big holes icecream-scooped out of swoops, ambulances, bleachers, benches.

“We need to see some ID. State your name and your business. No one leaves,” shouted some helmeted goons, riding up on bikes to survey the carnage.
Nanny took my hand and led me away through a tunnel.
“Hey what did I just say?” A man with a big blaster on his hip ran up and placed his hand on Nanny’s shoulder.
“You said we could leave. In fact, you never even saw us here,” said Nanny, in a smooth voice.

My Nanny booked us passage on a ship ASAP. Up in space in a small private room, I looked down at Nar Shaddaa, my home, for the last time. Holonews showed the devastation– which in their mind consisted only of the maimed, one-eyed Hutt Statue– construction workers hastily trying to stabilize and repair it. Acid rain doused the statue until it seemed to cry. But not all the hurt Hutt statues in all the worlds could fake cry as much as I did for real that day.

—

The next day, I reflected. My Mom was gone. Her “experiment” had worked. It had worked too well. I wiped my eyes and tried to find my star in the black expanse out the window. The stars were all distant and unfamiliar up here. The prospect of abandoning everything to chase some distant fleck of light now seemed childish. But I always had childish thoughts. They kept the nasty world out.

My neck itched. I was wearing a tall, zipped up coat, and took it off to see my throat. I gasped in the window’s reflection.
There was a mark, or a stain on my neck. To me, it looked like two monster hands had gripped my throat in hot wax. I staggered back, and the stain changed shape into butterfly wings, phosphorescent in hot turquoise. Everytime I shifted my position it changed its form– from crinkled orange leaves to scaly dragon skin– a funhouse mirror from hell. And for a second, but the briefest of seconds, I swear I saw an alternate version of myself in that window reflection– a dark twin glaring back.

I screamed– my voice pushing a chair over. Nanny ran into my room and by her look I knew I was in trouble. She stared at me while covering her mouth.
“What is going on? My neck? My voice?” I asked.
“Listen, Jade,” and Nanny spoke with the authority of the North Star. “I don’t know what that is–” pointing at my neck –”but I know people who can help you.”
I looked at her skeptically, then at my reflection again in the window.
“Give me Mom’s scarf. I’ll hide it. Actually, give me scissors. I'll cut it out!”
“Jade, come here.”
“No. What is going to happen to me? Tell me the truth.”
“Well, your voice..."
"It can move things now..."
"I believe you are using the force through it to affect your environment.”
Wringing my hands, I took one small step towards her.
“Can I only do that because of this–” I pointed at my neck –"does it give me like, special powers?"
“I don’t know. But you need to calm down if you want answers. It does you no good screaming your head off and panicking.”
I sat cross-legged on the ground.
“How am I supposed to not worry? My Mom is dead. I’m hunted by the Hutts. Now there’s this thing on my neck–”
“I learned this at the Jedi Temple many years ago,” said Nanny.
She took a deep breath in. Held it. Exhaled slowly.
“I don’t know what you experienced in hyperspace, but I believe the Jedi Order may be able to assist you,” said Nanny.
I nodded.
"Do they bake brownies on the weekends?" I asked.
Nanny patted me on the head. "We are good people."
I couldn’t breathe in hyperspace.
I could breathe in here.

—

“Nanny” was a Jedi who had been sent to watch over my mother due to rumors the Sith were interested in her hyperspace tech. She watched over me until I was accepted into the Jedi Academy. Team Jedi, although boring as trees, helped me regulate my emotions to control the force and the mark that hyperspace left on my neck. I call it The Stain.

Until I was exiled… Cut off from the force… All for doing my duty as a Jedi– but that’s another story.

Why do I persist? Because my Mom’s still out there somewhere, drifting, dreaming– a hypermare in hyperspace. It is up to me to find her.

The Jedi might say it’s all a dream. My collective unconscious, a flesh-eating fungus, delusional parasitosis. I hope so. I cover the stain with a scarf, but it still has urges, wants, needs– a grand plan that will unite the galaxy. And sometimes, staring up after dark, I think of those colors out of time and space; colors which no one was meant to see; colors which stole my Mommy.

Is it wrong if I find them beautiful?