For Your Own Protection/Chapter I

"Taking responsibility is for fools; life’s always easier when you blame someone else."

- Unknown Imperial officer

'''[Welcome to the Imperial Archives, segment 2336. Regrettably, we have been forced to delete the holo-download history of seventy-two million Imperial personnel for reasons of personal privacy. Apologies for any inconvenience caused. Also, per request of the Moral Standards division, we have deleted the security footage of his majesty the Emperor reacting to the loss of the first Death Star. The following is an extract from the memoirs of Imperial Political Inspector Varris Tralen, placed here for posterity, pertaining to what has been dubbed the ‘Protection Incident’.]

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times (alright, frankly, it was the dullest of times) it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch belief (belief in your own imminent death of atrophy, granted), it was the age of Darkness (more of a beige color if you ask me)—in short, it was just like any other time the galaxy had experienced. I am referring to the time around the Battle of Endor, when Vader was blasting Black Sun out of the sky, when Jabba the Hutt was being strangled by a women in a metal bikini and little else, and when a Gungan resistance chief found out directly what happens when you tell an orbiting Star Destroyer demanding your surrender to go away in the roughest manner possible.

You see, I must confess that I lied a tad when I said in my previous memoir that the only interesting occurrence of my career occurred in the Sakmar Expanse around the time of the Battle of Hoth. I neglected to mention the one that I’m going to cover here, for fear of embarrassing a friend I made. However, he recently contacted me asking to publish the memoir of this incident anyway providing he got a share of the royalties, so I thought why not.

It began during the fallout from the battle over Xizor’s skyhook; you may think it was a simple matter of starships blowing things up, but the debris had to go somewhere. At least a few million people were killed by debris plummeting to the streets below, although given that hundreds of thousands of people die in traffic accidents and from falling off walkways every day on Coruscant, it wasn’t that big a deal for most people. However, crammed into my office in the headquarters of the Imperial Political Inspection Division, I couldn’t have been more annoyed if the rebels had shown up and levelled half the city for their amusement (and I’ll talk about that some other time). I had to deal with reports over missing security divisions, the destruction of planetary defence conduits…practically everyone in the building was drowning in mounds and mounds of incessant paperwork, mocking us with its refusal to just go the frak away.

Which is why I felt quite relieved for once when my assistant Jon Dorshak finally turned up two hours late as usual, wearing a costume that looked like someone covered in glue had just run through the wardrobe of a fetish store. At least he could provide me with some distraction from the piles of papers, datapads, and reports concerning random police forces that had the misfortune of having a giant chunk of starship fall on them while they were queuing up for a Bantha burger. “Hey, my main man!” he said, in his insufferable ‘hip’ accent. “You nearly done with all that?”

“No.” I snapped through gritted teeth. “In fact, given how much crap they’ve added to my workload in the last few hours alone, I won’t be surprised if I’m still confirming the death of some idiot who couldn’t grasp the concept of running away when a huge flaming chunk of metal comes down towards you from orbit by the time the universe goes through heat death.”

“Well, perhaps if you checked your inbox lately, you’d find out that you don’t have to.” Grinned Dorshak.

“Huh?” I looked up.

“Yeah. Commissioner Redis wanted me to tell you if you got that holomail pertaining to a mission to Travix Prime.”

“What? Oh, for…” Well, if you were worrying about being shipped off to Kessel if you didn’t complete the umpteenth report about Random Idiot Bystander #29232, such things would slip your mind too. Anyway, I finally got through to my desktop after pushing aside stacks of reports large enough to cause planetary extinctions if they toppled down and accessed my inbox. It was a mission report from Commissioner Redis: due to everyone else spontaneously developing the flu, as usual, he was offering me the job to travel to Travix Prime, a small dump in the Outer Rim, to check up on a high-profile Imperial sympathizer whose co-operation would supposedly help consolidate Imperial operations in that area. Beyond that, he gave little details, assuming as usual that I would use the telepathic powers he believed I had to reach into his brain for the appropriate information.

“Apparently, one of the Emperor’s backside-lickers in the Outer Rim thinks he may be in danger.” I mused.

“So, you takin’ the job?”

“Have you ever seen an Imperial sympathizer who thought he was in danger to actually experience any danger? I don’t think so. So as far as I’m concerned, it’s stacking datapads, or relaxing with some Outer Rim concubines. I think I know where I’m going.”

And so, we were checking in at the government-reserved section at the nearest spaceports. Of course, I hadn’t yet grasped that your level of optimism usually corresponds with the level of crap you have to go through shortly after; something I could have learned before we were taking the jump to Travix.