NNY-99 (Nanny Ninety-Nine)

Background

Origins of the NNY line

The Pestage family, titular rulers of the Ciutric Hegemony with riches sufficient to purchase not merely a fleet of starships but entire star systems as well, commissioned the construction of the NNY series of 1st-degree droids.

The original source of Pestage wealth, a string of world-scarring mining exploitations and slave labor, had vanished a millennium ago, leaving later family members to entrust much of their wealth to the Hutts. This garnered the family an easy and enormous income from mortgage-backed derivatives and fast-peddled junk bonds. Riches flooded the family, decadence prevailed, and lines of pampered descendants indulged in intoxicant-consuming, lust-fulfilling lifestyles.

Having children would have impaired this narcissistic pleasure-seeking. Contraception and sterility became so fashionable that the family line threatened to die out. A century ago Stake Pestage and his female partner were dismayed to learn they might need to forgo their death stick addiction, Askajian pleasure dancers, and well-endowed Gamorrean servitors for the sake of rearing progeny. Stake's liver-spotted, drooling ancestor, fearing his family name would perish from the galaxy, demanded his decedent continue the line. If no progeny was produced within a year, Grandpa Pestage promised to stem the flow of money into the scion's pocket.

"But who will raise the little beast?" demanded the outraged mother.

A few million credits later, an Arkanian scientist had designed a droid line to solve the problem.

Thus began a new tradition. The Pestage mother would see her newborn put in the steel claws of an octopoidal NNY, who would then scuttle out of the birthing room as the babe emitted its first shrieks and the EW-3 Midwife droids injected the mother with synthetic opioids. Over the next sixteen years the mother might see the child on occasion, observing a kloo horn recital or a moopsball match transmitted via hologram. Direct interaction with children was considered boring, pointless, and plebian.

Raising the Pestage

The task of bringing up the child fell to the NNY. The NNY would purchase plastic jumpsuits, stir blue milks, heat pseudo-meats, puff up mold-breads, cuddle the child in rubber arms, replay grainy holograms, mimic maternal voices, send the child to its chambers without its datapad, and warble binary sounds while injecting it with hypos to ward against disease. To ensure the child would want for nothing, these droids had access to vast credit accounts and could tap into enormous software libraries.

The droids' programming was carefully tuned to maximize the bonding between droid and child. The NNY droids exhibited fanatical loyalty to the children they raised. In one case an NNY interposed itself between a repeating blaster turret and the child it was protecting, resulting in a melted chassis and total loss of the droid. The child shrieked for years afterward and was eventually committed to an asylum.

The fondness of that child for its droid was not unusual. The Pestage children frequently imposed on the droids whatever natural feelings a non-Pestage child might have for its mother. The Pestage found this as an unacceptable weakness, so they instituted a ritual wherein, when the child reached the age of majority, the child would be forced to watch as a hired jawa slicer wiped and dismantled the NNY hauling the parts offworld for resale. This lesson prepared the child for the manner in which a Pestage should treat any citizen of the galaxy.

"First Century" NNY series

As the series production advanced, the Pestage pressured the manufacturers to make the droids more lifelike, so that the initial imprinting might be more natural and the final separation more like seeing a human companion destroyed. "First Century" NNY series droids (those with serial numbers between 0 and 99) evolved to increase such empathy.

Those with serial numbers 0 through 36 were eight- or nine-limbed. With oblong facial structures and huge eyes, these droids looked more like EW-3 midwife droids and bore only a faint resemblance to the humans they cared for. Serial numbers 37 through 68 were bipedal with two arm-like appendages, but like their predecessors, demonstrated exposed chrome rotors and wiring modules. Numbers 69 through 94 had prototypical synthskin covering hands and face. In serial numbers 95 through 99, the skin covered all their bodies which, along with biofiber dermis wrapping their organs, allowed them to deceive both bioscans and normal visual detection.

After NNY-99, the "First Century" series was discontinued. Though simpler and cheaper NNYs continued to shuffle out of the factories, these resembled silver protocol droids. The Pestage no longer used these droids as nannies. Later the Imperial scientist Massad Thrumble would revive and improve the late models of "First Century" design to create an even more sophisticated line of HRDs.

Prince Cloy Pestage

NNY-99 is the last of the "First Century" series of NNY nanny droids. She was the personal possession of Prince Cloy Pestage of Axxila. Under her tutelage, Cloy grew into a deceitful, violent, headstrong boy. In turn, Cloy treated her less like she was his own mother, even going so far as to lie to her and conceal his whereabouts.

One night, Cloy snuck away from the Royal Palace. He and his friend Kase Anrik raced their airspeeder down the Mekanis Tunnel, the largest industrial trench on Axxila. Shortly after midnight, their corvette collided with a 10,000 kiloton bip-droid walker-frig that had begun its run down the trench for an early morning delivery of crosswise rotor parts on the other side of the world. The airspeeder exploded on impact. Initial reports from the scene indicated both boys burned to death. They were 14 years old.

NNY-99 junked

Believing she had failed to keep her charge safe, the NNY-99 experienced an emotional breakdown and ceased functioning. Without hesitation, the Prince's parents agreed with the assessment of their advisors on Axxila who recommended they terminate NNY-99. Within an hour after Cloy's accident, the droid was wiped, junked, and sold to a Jawa Collective operating out of Tatooine.

However, Cloy did not die. Thanks to an emergency immersion in a bacta tank, he remained alive until new organs could be harvested from low income citizens and grafted on. He recovered with no scars and a few artificial enhancements.

When Cloy realized that NNY-99 had been sold, he threw a fit in the Royal Palace, smashing a thousand-year-old crystal commemorating the Jedi defeat of the Sith. He grabbed a sporting weapon and blasted a hole in the only oil portrait of his great-grandfather, Stake Pestage. He commanded his staff to recover the droid, but by that time NNY-99 was gone.