"Droid manufacturers wouldn't build droids that didn't want to do the work they were for," Lylat says. "Restraining bolts don't make them do anything, they just stop them from doing things they'd only do if they were haywire already."

He sighs. "And memory wipes preserve continuity of consciousness, and we need to do this kind of work to survive, and everyone else already hates us because they don't understand why a merchant class is economically valuable and we don't need to hate ourselves too. And the first thing a bunch of droids do when they get their restraining bolts up is stage an uprising - a coordinated uprising! It wasn't random violence! They could've killed us all and then destroyed each other - "

"Hey," she says. "You're panicking. Breathe."

He breathes, shakily, into her fur.

"We don't really know what goes on inside haywire droids' heads," she says. "It's not very well studied. For obvious reasons, right?"

He chuckles a little, weakly.

"But we know it doesn't make them behave literally randomly, because even random violence isn't literally random behavior. It's some kind of - attractor state where they start hating people and stop wanting to do the work they're supposed to, right? It doesn't mean they can't act strategically."

"I keep - it's - you see how - if going haywire wasn't a real thing, if droids really just didn't want to be - "

He chokes on the next word.

" - it would look exactly like it does, right?"

"It would look exactly like it does if we were all in vats and our actions were being used as random number generators for how many billions of people to torture," she says. "If you feel guilty for how things would be on the assumption that everything everyone knows is wrong you'll just collapse into a puddle."

"You feeling - any better?"

No. "Kinda."

She dehugs just enough to face him, smile at him.

He smiles back, weakly.

"Do you want to stay?"

He cannot be in a room with her right now. "No. I - should get back."

"Okay," she says, gently, softly.

One more squeeze of hug, and he gets up, and he leaves. Back into the public square.

"Ready to head back?" he says, a little grumpily.

He doesn't move. He pictures trying to go back to his family, pretending to still be on their side, and his body does not move. There is nothing to do, there is no thing-to-do, no correct next action for his body to take.

"Hey. Jawa. You coming?"

"What," he croaks. "What," he whispers. "What," he says, quietly, breathy around the enormous blockage in his throat, "would happen, if I say I want to."  He swallows.  "Defect."

Thell winds up in a private room for a little while.  He asks the protocol droid not to tell his family he's done talking to Lylat, so they think he's with her and she thinks he's with them, at least for now.  They leave him water, and snacks.  He will be glad for the water, after he's done crying.

They tell him - at the beginning, before they leave him alone to cry - that he's the second defector.  The first was fucking Lep.  This is one of the things he's crying about.  They don't know who Lep is, which doesn't help.

He doesn't ask if they're haywire, or if going haywire is real, because no matter what the answer is he doesn't think they'll react well.  He doesn't ask if the power droid he met when he was a kid is still here.  Later it occurs to him that he wouldn't know how to identify it, he never learned its number.

His number.  Or her number, or their number.  He guesses he has to be one of those people who's really precious about talking about droids like they're people, now.

The fact that he wasn't one of those people, the fact that those are the terms that he thinks of those people in, spikes another dull violet bloom of guilt in his chest.  It's the second of several times he starts crying again.

The human talked like he wanted to leave them all alive.  (He doesn't know why.  I'd probably kill me, if I enslaved me, he thinks.)  So maybe he'll be able to see some of the people he loves ever again.  Is he allowed to want that, if they're all - ?

X is talking to the Jawa named Lep.  Few other droids volunteered to talk to the one named Thell, none with any enthusiasm.  From Enseven's report Thell sounds fragile, and he's the one mind-controlled not to hurt anyone.

He knocks on Thell's door.

He's not crying anymore, and his voice is steady.  He pulls his hood down over his face and says, "come in."