Early 960 ARR (40 BBY)
Over the following days disjointed and confusing conversations continued with the doctors and further police officers, facilitated by JX which I now knew to be what they called a droid. I think they were speculating as to whether I was insane or suffering from amnesia of some sort.
Adding to the insane theory was the fact I had been found naked in the middle of the street. Taking this at face value, I was at least assured they hadn't stolen my things, through it was hard to be too positive about turning up naked on what was, impossibly, a planet in another galaxy.
My next existential crisis was on my third day, when Kyla encouraged me to leave my room and walk around the hospital. The hospital felt more like a palace than the concrete brutalist monstrosities I was used to, with gorgeous architecture reminiscent of the Mediterranean though with an unusual colour pallet. For some reason green roofs are all the rage here. Walking round the hospital garden, full of exotic flowers unlike any you would see in even the poshest London parks, I came across my first alien.
Allegedly, I screamed, though I maintain that this is overstating the point. In my defence the man was green and had tentacles growing out of his head. Shouting and running away is, I now know, considered a needlessly rude way to greet a Twi'lek and in the coming days I'd learn that Nalen was a perfectly nice gardener once you got to know him.
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I think it took about a week for me to accept that this was all real, or at least as real as matters and that I wasn't going home anytime soon. I sobbed and sulked for quite a while at the thought I might never see my friends and family again.
My life on Earth wasn't anything special, but to be ripped away from it into world of strangers can only ever be traumatic. However… oh what a big however... I'm in another galaxy! There are aliens, and robots and spaceships!
I've always been a sci-fi fan, watching Star Trek with my dad since I was little. To have the opportunity to explore strange new worlds when there was little chance of me ever leaving Earth's atmosphere before, how could I not be a little excited!
I think they found my sense of wonder bemusing. Apparently, when your civilisation has been spacefaring for millennia the novelty wears off. The first time Kyla took me up to the top of the tallest tower in the hospital, with a balcony looking out across the beautiful city of Theed, was a truly magical moment for me. I could have stood there for hours, the city itself looked like it was from a fairytale, but even that was eclipsed by the sight of the occasional freighters lifting off from the spaceport in the distance.
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Kyla was becoming the closest thing I had to a friend I had in this world, though when you say that about someone who is paid to be around you it is a little awkward. I had originally thought her a sort of nurse, but on Naboo everyone is a medic, with varying degrees of experience. In her mid-20s, Kyla was training under Denor who was in charge of my case (though really aside from my initial concussion there was nothing medically wrong with me).
She enjoyed fussing over me, not counting the mothers and babies in the maternity ward, most of the other patients at the hospital were elderly. Naboo being a prosperous and healthy society, didn't have many young people taking up beds. She was mercifully discrete when she caught me crying about my parents on a couple of occasions in these rough early days.
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After two weeks we had reached a point with JX where we could have a meaningful conversation about my future. I had no possessions, no citizenship and an inability to speak galactic basic.
A local magistrate came to speak with me after consulting with Denor and Lynna the police officer. I was considered something like an unknown orphan who had come here as a refugee, and they agreed to grant me citizenship on that basis. It was a sobering thought, drawing my attention back to how alone I was.
They also decided to treat me like a long-term mental health patient, keeping me in care for the coming months while I learned the language and some of the basics about the local society. I think they also felt I needed some therapy for the trauma of the situation, though were reluctant to spell that out explicitly.
I was transferred officially to the care of a middle-aged woman called Brama, who I figured was a kind of therapist. With JX still teaching me, and Kyla agreeing to visit me regularly to help my transition, it wasn't much different, just the addition of a couple of conversations a week about my feelings. They also arranged for me to be given a small allowance from an emergency fund, to allow me to get some proper clothes and other essentials beyond what the hospital had on hand.
At the time it seemed generous and helpful, but I assumed this was all normal living in a futuristic galaxy spanning society. It was sometime before I learned how incredibly lucky I had been, to have ended up on Naboo. A planet where strangers were happy to help a naked teen found on the street, rather than sell him into slavery….or eat him.
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The following weeks I spent every moment I could on learning Galactic Basic Standard language and the Aurebesh writing system. There were many strange similarities to English, but then, perhaps not so strange given there are humans in this galaxy. I spent a lot of time pondering this, imagining different scenarios of time travel, past alien abductions, or simply other Earthlings who had like me found themselves appearing spontaneously from across the universe.
As I gained proficiency in the language I began reading about the galaxy and its history and discovering that the humans of this galaxy (which frustratingly didn't seem to have a name), were similarly uncertain as to their origins, with numerous conflicting theories. Most of these focused on the planet Coruscant, the capital of the galaxy spanning 'Republic' that Naboo was part of.
The idea that most of the galaxy seemed to be one big country, that had been at peace for centuries was beyond impressive. Mixed in with the history were odd stories of warrior monks and ancient super weapons, which all sounded pretty farfetched. I got the impression that Naboo was a fairly sleepy corner of the galaxy and right now that suited me fine.
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This reading was largely taking place on frustratingly unintuitive datapads. In someways I felt like I had gone both forwards and backwards in time. How can a galaxy which has spaceships and droids, have tablets that were primitive compared to even first gen iPhones? Touchscreen technology existed but it was apparently rarer and more expensive than commonly used tablets which were controlled by buttons like some sort of 90s Gameboy.
Far more bizarre was that they generally lacked wireless technology and had surprisingly limited storage capacity. For the most part, you would plug them in to a data terminal (the PC equivalent), download the book you wanted to read and then read it like that, a crude parody of a Kindle!
I ranted in broken basic to Kyla about this in one of her visits, to her great amusement. "So what, it only takes a few minutes to load a new book at the terminal, and you can only read one at a time anyway!" she chided, completely oblivious to the fact that on Earth she would be all but surgically attached to her smartphone. Brama's view of this was to ask me what I thought my advanced technological fantasies meant, but at least that was better than more questions about how I missed my mum.
She did at least help me finding what I needed from the holonet, which was in anything more bewildering than the datapads. This was the galaxy's internet…but without search engines, and access depending on where you were and what your terminal could handle. So, unless you know a holo-site exists you have no way of looking for it. I was pretty much limited to working my way through material available from Theed's public library, trying not to dream too much about the wonders of Google and Wikipedia!
Technology for music was similarly clunky. I saved up some of my allowance for a basic music player, which used small datachips each containing the equivalent of an album. I suppose it wasn't too dissimilar to having a CD player, but again, why did it feel like the 90s in a spaceage civilisation! I wasn't a big music fan on Earth, listening to whatever pop was current simply as background noise for whatever else I was doing at the time. Here I took whatever Kyla and the other younger medics would donate me, most of which sounded a bit like jazz.
The real horror came when I asked about computer games, or at least tried to. It took quite a while for JX to help me even frame the question in a way that was distinct from gambling. To which they then concluded I was asking for toys aimed at small children, which Brama leapt on to as a sign of me looking for 'comfort in infantilisation in response to trauma'. I had a moment of silence for the countless bored spacers of the galaxy, stuck with little to do as their ships crawl between the stars.
I suppose it was inevitable from this point that I would strive to be the Steve Jobs of Naboo, if for no other reason than a desire to play Tetris.