Chapter 1A – Early 960 ARR (40 BBY)
I wake up with a slight daze, my head sore as I regain consciousness. My eyes flutter open in a bright room, with metallic surfaces reflecting sunlight coming through a large window by my bed which I'm rapidly realising is not my own. I start to gather that I must be in a hospital after hitting my head, vague memories of a speeding car flickering in the back of my mind.
In this less than coherent state it takes me a while to notice the strangeness of the room I'm in. For one thing, since when do NHS hospitals have private rooms. For another, of to the side of the bed is a table with odd pieces of equipment and screen flickering with bizarre patterns and symbols, surrounded by various softly glowing buttons.
Before I can dwell too much on this, what I had not previously noticed as a grey door, slides open with a middle age bearded man, dressed in what looks to be off-white robes steps through. He's followed by a smiling younger woman, with shoulder length brown hair and blue eyes. Then third in line, in what must be hallucination, a blue-ish robot with what looks like an odd microphone for a mouth, spindly arms and glowing yellow eyes.
Staring at the robot blankly a hear the man begin talking at me in some completely unrecognisable language. "Hu? What?" I reply, before summoning up just enough awareness of the situation to say, "I'm sorry, I only speak English." It is at that moment it starts to dawn on me how odd it is that a man, not dressed like any doctor I've ever seen, is talking to me in a language I don't recognise, nevermind understand. As far as I knew, I was on my way home from class in North London. The woman hands me a cup of water, attempting to speak with me herself but no more effectively.
The two humans look at each other, speaking further in that strange language, before the woman walks out the room. The older man continues to try engaging me futilely in conversation, for a few awkward minutes of me repeating various forms of "I don't understand you?" and "where am I?". Later, I'd reflect that I was falling into the stereotype of increasing volume of English in the hope that a foreigner would understand me, but in fairness I still had a headache at this point.
The woman then returned smiling with another robot…wait, I'd somehow forgotten there's a robot in the room, and that's got to be the strangest thing about this situation. This new robot looked a bit more human than the other, its body covered in grey plates with round yellow eyes. It began speaking at me, in what seemed to be a range of wildly different sounding languages.
The woman, who now I was past the worst of my robot shock I'd realised was kinda cute, put her hand to her mouth and gestured outwards, which I took to mean I should speak to the robot. So, I started a one-sided conversation, talking to an expressionless face, that still somehow managed to convey confusion at not understanding me.
The robot eventually pointed at itself and said what sounded like oddly like a series of letters and numbers "JX-3PO", it then pointed at the man and said "Denor", then pointed to the woman and said "Kyla". Catching on I pointed to myself and said "John Smith, my name is John Smith".
Denor and the blue robot left the room, leaving me with the smiling woman and the JX robot, who seemed to be engaging me in continued conversation, pointing to various things and saying words to which I replied with my own. Kyla continuing to smile at me politely, with a mildly confused expression which mirrored my own thoughts.
After half an hour of exchanging sounds with JX, it starts imitating words that I've been saying. Incredibly it appears to be learning my language at an astonishing speed. Whatever language recognition software my new grey friend had was making ChatGPT seem little better than a faulty calculator.
As I was getting a bit more aware of my situation, I realised that I was wearing a two-piece white outfit myself, which certainly wasn't my usual jeans and t-shirt. I looked around my clothes, my keys, my phone, my wallet…none of which were to be found. Panicking, I tried to get an answer out of JX as to where my things were, but this only caused more confusion, with Kyla making some calming noises to get me back to communicating with JX.
As the sun went down, I was given a plate of odd-looking fruit to eat, before being encouraged to sleep by Kyla via JX. Exhausted and no less confused by the whole situation I easily drifted off for a long night.
---
The next morning, I wake up, of course firmly convinced that I'd had a strange dream before realising I was still in that odd room. Kyla smiling as ever, brought me a breakfast that seemed to include something tasting a bit like a croissant and with a drink akin to mango juice.
After eating JX joined us, and I continued attempting to teach him/it English. Impressive as JX's ability to retain and interpret language is, without a common language to work from it was still a slow process. I tried to pick up the odd word of the language Denor and Kyla used as I went along but JX was seemingly not overly interested in teaching, rather than filling this gap in its linguistic database which I represented.
I tried to ask what country and after a few attempts was given the answers "Theed" and "Naboo". I was never great at geography, but unless I was on some obscure island, this must be another misunderstanding. I also asked if I could phone my parents but even this seemed futile as none of my miming of using a phone made any sense to them. Asking again for my phone back, this seemed to insist that I didn't have anything. This made me quietly suspicious, had I been brought here after a mugging, or had these nice seeming people robbed me? Why was I in this strange place, is this all some elaborate con?
Why though? I'm a 19-year-old attending my local university for a qualification in Computer Science. I still lived at home, with my dad who's a plumber and my mum who looks after the local library. My second hand, three generation old Samsung phone and the handful of change in my wallet hardly worth stealing. Frankly, short of some sort of sewage-based vendetta against my dad, I could think of no reason why anyone would go to the trouble.
As I pondered my situation, Kyla brought what looked like a bulky version of a tablet computer, which displayed various items, though only blue-ish outlines rather than in full colour. It also oddly wasn't a touch screen but seemed to use chunky buttons on the sides. JX used this to learn more nouns from me, though some of the items it showed were particularly odd, including a car without wheels and what looked like aircraft without normal engines.
----
After a couple more hours Denor returned, this time joined by a woman dressed for what I could only assume was a weird cosplay. She had brown leathery plastic armour, over a yellow top and bottom layer, with a matching military officer's hat and a shiny thing that looked vaguely gun shaped at a holster to his side.
JX introduced her as Lynna, before she began asking me questions, which through JX's broken translation I couldn't fully understand. I guessed she was some kind of police officer, which given they were dressed nothing like any copper I'd ever heard of added to my overall feeling of wrongness about my situation.
When I tried to explain to them, I was from London in England, they seemed just as confused as I was. Eventually, they had the tablet display what looked like a picture of a galaxy, though not what I usually thought of as the milky-way. They zoomed in on a specific grope of stars, pointed to one and said "Naboo". Then seemed to ask me where I was from.
At this I could do nothing but burst out laughing. Surely this is all a mad joke. I looked round for the cameras, shouted the names of some of my school friends, who must have been finding this all hilarious. Maybe this was Mum's doing, she had a great imagination what with spending all her time around books, and saw tormenting (pranking) her only child for her amusement as something of a duty.
But the concerned faces of Denor, Kyla and Lynna didn't go away, the joke stopped being funny. These people and robots genuinely thought they were living on a planet called Naboo, somewhere towards the 'south' of this made-up galaxy. How scared should I be?