The system had three primary nodes, each with its own subnodes. All three main elements were assigned a different part of the overall calculation. The first was designed to create a computer simulation of the original disaster using all available data. The second modeled all the known Emergences thus far, and the third, by far the biggest and most complex, ran a particular algorithm designed to figure out where the next Emergences would happen.

That third node was the tricky one. The other two were just describing things that had already happened. The third one had to predict the future.

And if I can do that, Keven thought, I’m basically a Jedi.

But of course he wasn’t. A few actual Jedi were standing just a little distance away—the pair he’d met a few times before, who had helped with the San Tekkas. Avar Kriss and Elzar Mann. They seemed like nice people, but honestly, he was nothing like them. Avar was all quiet confidence and utter competence, and Elzar looked like someone out of a holodrama, with his olive skin and dark, wavy hair—just a beautiful man.

Keven Tarr was probably closer to a droid, or one of the navulators (though he didn’t have to wear those weird implants, thankfully). He liked systems, and rules, and the systems and rules behind those rules and systems. That’s what everything was, really. Systems and rules.

That statement was true of people, and it was true of droids, and it was true of the entire galaxy and everything in it. The deeper the systems you learned to access, or the rules you understood, the greater the change you could create. That was what had helped him rise so quickly on Hetzal, all the way to a prime posting in the Ministry of Technology before he was twenty-five. When he was still a kid, he figured out that four different crops were interacting in a complex sort of relationship, and that a routinely exterminated pest wasn’t a pest at all but in fact a symbiotic partner to the crops. If the plants were just allowed to occupy the same fields at the same time rather than being kept separate, and the so-called vermin were allowed to live, not only would overall yields be higher but the seeds and grain the crops produced would be of better quality. Beyond even that, a sort of hybrid fruit would emerge twice a year that couldn’t happen without the contributions of all four plants.