▸ Column · Imperial-era Star Wars bureaucracy — an outer-sector civic administration office under the Galactic Empire, set during the height of Imperial rule.
EMPEROR PALPATINE replies.
Replied to by Emperor Palpatine, with a rebuttal from Starscream.
The letter
Three years ago I was helping unload holoprojector carts from a storage bay before a junior cadet recreation drill, and somehow the other committee members interpreted this as a gesture of leadership vision. I am now the Director of the Outer Sector 7-G Youth Recreation Coordination Office, I hold a laminated clearance badge, and there is a waiting list of 340 families who believe I founded this program from the ground up with passion and Imperial civic spirit. Every time I raise the possibility of stepping down, Administrator Brindra — who joined the committee six months after me and has since had the program emblem stitched onto her regulation tunic — becomes emotional and says the whole apparatus would "collapse without me," which I suspect is only true because she has made herself completely indispensable by mastering the scheduling matrices I cannot operate. I did not even seek this role; I was only at the drill bay that afternoon because my sister pressured me into supervising a transport run. How do I escape a volunteer empire I constructed entirely by accident while Brindra monitors my every move?
Emperor Palpatine replies
Three hundred and forty families. A waiting list. A laminated badge. And your first instinct is to hand it back.
Let me be candid, my friend. I once sat in a Senate chamber and found — quite without staging it — that everyone in the room was looking to me for calm, direction, the sense that someone reasonable was finally in charge. I hadn't campaigned. I had simply been, repeatedly, the steadiest presence in rooms full of frightened people. The office found me as thoroughly as yours found you. I recognize this particular accident.
What you call a trap, I would call crystallization. Power settles around the people it recognizes. You carried equipment out of a shed, and three hundred and forty families saw in that small gesture everything they needed to see. You did not build this — you are simply what it organized itself around. There is a difference, and it matters.
Now, Brindra. The embroidered insignia. The matrices you cannot read. The eyes that well up at the word resignation. You have described her as your warden. I would describe her as someone who needs your name on the badge the same way a frame needs a portrait. Remove the portrait and the frame is simply an empty rectangle.
The itch toward the exit — it is real, I grant you that. I only ask one thing of you: who taught you to call this a cage? Because whoever installed that particular scruple in you had very good reasons to keep you from noticing what you actually have. The guilt is not yours, my dear. It was put there by someone who finds your hesitation enormously convenient.
— Emperor Palpatine
Starscream weighs in
Oh, very poetic. "Crystallization." "Power finds its vessel." No.
I know exactly what Brindra is doing. I AM Brindra. I have spent my entire career running the actual operation while someone more decorative holds the title, and I will tell you precisely what those scheduling matrices mean: that is the command center. Your badge is a costume.
His Excellency there wants you to feel like an emperor. You are not an emperor. You are a figurehead whose replacement is already trained, embedded, and simply waiting for you to become inconvenient.
Leave. Sign the badge over and walk away. I say this as someone who never could — still can't — still scheming — and the exit you have standing open is the one luxury I have never once been offered. Take it before she stops needing a reason not to.
— Starscream