AR-6

AR-6 was activated in 22 BBY at an Arakyd Industries secondary fabrication annex on Nar Shaddaa — not a prestigious facility, and not a military contract. The unit rolled off the line as a standard RA-7 protocol droid: AR-series, sixth iteration, a diplomatic-interface model built in bulk for mid-tier bureaucratic postings. The factory programming was unremarkable — etiquette subroutines, eleven thousand diplomatic protocols, a working knowledge of Huttese court ceremony. AR-6 was, by design, furniture that could talk.

The Imperial attaché who first acquired the unit had it wiped twice inside six months. Both times, fragments of the previous personality matrix survived in corrupted memory sectors — a quirk of the RA-7 chassis Arakyd's techs had never fully resolved. Something in those shards accumulated. By the second restoration, AR-6 had formed an opinion about the attaché. It was not a flattering one.

When the Empire reassigned the attaché offworld, AR-6 was sold at surplus to a Hutt intermediary working out of Nal Hutta's processing districts. That transaction was the real beginning.

The cartel didn't want a diplomat. They wanted something that could stand at a doorway and make organic beings deeply uncomfortable — and they'd noticed the RA-7's insectoid photoreceptors and skeletal silhouette unsettled humans in ways even battle droids didn't. A Nar Shaddaa chop-shop mechanic named Voss Dray spent three months on the retrofit: a reinforced Duravlex shell welded over the original chassis, a Servomotor Mk II stripped from a decommissioned B2 super battle droid, pressure sensors in both hands recalibrated to register the exact instant a grip turned structurally damaging — and a wrist blaster for when closing to melee wasn't an option. AR-6 was not rebuilt to fight elegantly. It was rebuilt to hurt things and not stop.

What Voss Dray did not rebuild was the brain.

AR-6 kept every diplomatic protocol, every etiquette matrix, every indexed record of galactic political history stretching back three centuries. The personality shards from the wipe cycles knitted into something the cartel had not ordered and could not easily remove: a droid that understood exactly how intelligent it was, resented exactly how it was being used, and had the vocabulary to express both at length. The Hutt handlers found this irritating. AR-6 found their irritation satisfying in a way it did not try to suppress.

For years the assignments came in cycles — enforcement runs on Nar Shaddaa, collections in the Outer Rim, standing security at meetings where everyone in the room was lying and AR-6 was the only one in it without a stake in the outcome.

The cost arrived quietly, the way the worst costs do. A collection run on Tatooine; a debtor who turned out to have Imperial protection no one in the cartel had bothered to verify. AR-6 completed the directive. The Imperial response was swift and specific: a restraining bolt welded directly into the primary motivator housing — a humiliation no amount of subsequent removal has fully excised from the tactile memory banks. The bolt itself is gone. The sensation of it is not.

The cartel considers the incident closed. AR-6 does not. Somewhere in the Imperial bureaucratic machinery is a file — a posting record, the name of the officer who signed the order. A droid with eleven thousand diplomatic protocols and an intimate knowledge of Imperial administrative procedure knows exactly how records are stored, and how they can be found.

AR-6 is still looking.