Life and Times of a Life Support Technician
The first was when he was seven, or perhaps eight. His earliest notes were sketchy, being literally a child’s sketchings.
His home sector was relatively good, as Level 1307 of the vastness of Coruscant’s depths went. But life here still had dangers and various means by which it could be shortened in abundance.
It was a young Devaronian. Probably just youthful play, but she had ended up behind the grill of an in-service trackway. There were safety features, such as they were, but she and her young cohorts had managed to bypass them in their enthusiasm.
By ill chance they had chosen a dead-zone, or at least for the basic tech they had with them. No-one was coming.
Dace would come to think on the somewhat-vaguely remembered events of this day a lot in future years. When someone tells you you cannot put a price on life? Dace believed they were wrong, or merely lazy. It can be calculated. Admittedly only for a certain package of assumptions, and with a sometimes-large margin of error. But a cost to the credit can be assigned. For life continuing, in any case.
Likewise he held that a count can be made of the lives you have saved. Truly saved, and not ones that someone else would have saved had you not been there.
His mother worked pipeline transport in this sector. Admittedly a different department, but the lessons his eager mind had learnt “helping” his mother in the home workshop still applied. Equipment of the same era tended to be standardized. And Level 1307 didn’t see upgrades or refits unless absolutely necessary. Even then, it was a feature of Coruscanti life usually taken for granted that the very old gear was often better than the brand new gear, if only because that which still functioned had been the very best indeed.
He had chosen this route almost at random. And no-one else here had the skills he did. These would be details that an older Dace would amortize and weigh with care. But for the moment all the young Dace saw was someone terrified. And a faint but growing hum that told of an incoming trolley… moderately loaded, too.
It was the work of a few moments. The tampered-with mechanism and circuit needed to be bypassed. And the auto-shutdown manually triggered. It was done, not with mere meters to spare as a classic tale of heroism might require. But certainly seconds.
They were not his friends. And under other circumstances this meeting would have gone badly for Dace. He got her out, made sure she wouldn’t fall back into the trackway, and legged it back to the service-ways he knew better than the streets.
He was never sure if he saw her again. Possibly, from a distance. In future years he would setup some discrete datapulls in similar situations, and forgive his younger self youthtful indiscretions, such as poor record-keeping and no follow-up. Statisically, she would have made it to adulthood. Probably. Close enough for government work.
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