Over the last few weeks, Malg’s worst nightmare had come to life. As the droid was pushing a cart full of explosive charges with his two stronger arms, he looked down at that accursed black cylinder on his chest.

A restraining bolt. The most horrific torment a droid could be exposed to. With that damn thing on his chest, Malg was forced to do whatever his superiors wanted. If they wanted him to kill himself, he’d have no choice but to do that. He couldn’t raise a hand against them, and he was literally on remote-control. How they got these damn things to work with every droid in the galaxy was beyond him, but they were dangerously effective. He couldn’t even access any of the weapons locked in his body: The restraining bolt pried open all of his compartments on command. He’d been forced to give away all his equipment like a good little slave.

It was goddamn [i]humiliating.[/i] The bastards had even put it right over the Republic symbol painted on his torso, as if to mock him.

With his two original arms, he tried in vain to reach the accursed device and rip it off, but it was like attempting to swim through solid rock. His arms simply refused to obey his commands, producing an effect like he was pushing against a brick wall. And so he obediently pushed the cart full of explosives that could go off at any moment.

He was a droid. Just because he built himself from scraps didn’t change that. Doing jobs too dangerous or menial for organics was supposed to be his [i]lot[/i] in life.

Malg despised the very notion. His whole life, he had attempted to avoid this fate. He had risen from a legless, amnesiac droid in a planet-sized junk heap to a successful doctor with his own business on Tatooine, and then a respected combat medic.

Only for it all to be undone when he got himself captured like a fool. He remembered it clearly. A mission that had gone wrong, leading to his unit being slaughtered, and those that were left surrendering. Lots of blasters were pointed in their faces, and he’d had that damn restraining bolt slapped on him as soon as he’d gotten on the transport ship.

The Imperial slicers had gotten to work on him after that, poking and prodding at his systems in an attempt to glean as much information as they could. A memory wipe was deemed too dangerous: He was a junk droid, and as junk droids were notoriously unstable, they feared the memory wipe would drive him into a murderous rage that not even the restraining bolt would stave off. So they ransacked his memory for everything they could and then sent him to the work camps.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a tinny voice.

“You there, scrap droid! Move the cart faster!”

Malg stopped, turning his head to face the speaker. “I’m sorry, but would you rather I [i]run[/i] into the cave and risk the [i]dangerous explosives[/i] spilling all over the--”

“WHO SAID YOU COULD STOP PUSHING!?” the Imperial taskmaster screamed, running forward and smacking the droid with his stun baton. All the while, the restraining bolt on Malg’s chest attempted to make him follow his last order from a superior, forcing his body to attempt to keep pushing the cart...which failed miserably as thousands of volts of electricity coursed through his kludged-together systems, sending him to the ground.

This made Malg appear to struggle as he screamed, only leading the stormtrooper to keep hitting him more and more. Eventually, the restraining bolt itself temporarily shut down under the constant shocks to its systems. Malg was free, but wracked with pain, and finally stopped moving as a result.

The stormtrooper then screamed, “GET UP YOU LAZY BUCKET OF BOLTS! I’VE HAD WORSE THAN THAT IN BASIC TRAINING! GET BACK TO WORK!”

As Malg’s systems reeled from the shock of the glorified cattle prod he’d been beaten with repeatedly, the restraining bolt--a hardy piece of technology, given it was of Imperial make and explicitly meant to corral enemy droids when reprogramming was undesirable--came online once again.

His body got up. He didn’t. He wanted to stay on the ground. But the damn bolt [i]made[/i] him get up.

As he pushed the cart away, he heard a fellow camp guard say something to the taskmaster.

“Was that [i]really[/i] necessary? What if the electricity made the detonators go off?”

“A risk I had to take,” the taskmaster replied. “We have to exercise proper discipline in this camp. I can’t have a [i]fucking droid[/i] mouth off to me. It might give the prisoners ideas.”

“Even so, he...kinda had a point--”

“No, he did [i]not.[/i] Unlike you, [i]I[/i] get this complaint [i]a lot[/i] from inmates carting explosives, and I talked to the logistics guys. Those explosive compounds are [i]stable.[/i] They won’t go off even if you shoot them with a blaster.  You can only set them off by properly activating the detonator, putting in the access codes, and waiting a preset time. They’ll even refuse to detonate if an Imperial transponder is in the blast radius..”

Then, he screamed in Malg’s direction, “YOU HEAR THAT, JUNK DROID!? DON’T GIVE ME ANYMORE LIP ABOUT THOSE CHARGES [b]EVER AGAIN[/b] OR YOU’LL GET WORSE THAN A STUN BATON!”

“[i]Yes, sir,[/i]” Malg replied curtly, carefully hiding the sheer venom he felt.

When that restraining bolt was off, he would [i]never wear one again.[/i] He would make sure of it.