What can I say?
Dying is an unpleasant experience.
Though I suppose I got lucky.
I did not realize I was dead until after it had already happened.
Then again, what else could you expect when either a mortar shell or an artillery round slammed into your vehicle?
In hindsight, driving an old van through an active bombardment had probably not been my brightest idea.
Still, that belonged to a previous life now.
There were no voices.
No darkness.
No light.
One moment I ceased to exist, and the next I found myself inhabiting a new body.
Calling it a body was generous.
It belonged to a newborn infant.
Everything felt wrong.
Too small.
Too fragile.
Unfamiliar.
The world around me seemed impossibly vast, while my own body barely felt like it belonged to me.
My senses worked differently.
My eyes could barely focus, sounds arrived as distorted noise, and every smell was strange and overwhelming.
It was hardly surprising that the baby I currently was could make no sense of the world around him.
All I could do was cry, venting the flood of emotions overwhelming this tiny body.
And there was something else.
Something new.
Something impossible to comprehend.
It felt like an entirely new sense, as though I had gained another organ of perception.
It was just as undeveloped as my eyes and ears, yet undeniably there.
The sensation left me disoriented, almost blinded in a way that had nothing to do with vision.
Combined with a newborn’s endless need to eat and sleep, it was enough to leave me completely overwhelmed.
The first thing I truly remembered was a man.
He was enormous, bearded, and somehow impossible to ignore through that strange new sense.
Describing it in ordinary words was impossible.
It was like trying to explain sight through touch.
At first, the new perception merged with colors inside my mind.
The man appeared white, predominantly so, yet at the same time he possessed another quality, something that belonged to the strange spectrum of this sixth sense.
Later, I stopped thinking of it in terms of color, but during those early days, with my eyesight still blurry and unreliable, it was the only comparison I could make.
At first, I worried my new body might have vision problems.
Or worse, that an infant’s brain simply could not support an adult consciousness.
In short, I was enjoying childhood to its fullest.
No eight-hour workdays.
No five-day workweeks.
Life was wonderful.
The diapers, however, were not.
The man seemed to be either a kidnapper or a single father.
He mixed formula, fed me from bottles, and changed my diapers often enough that I could only hope he was not planning to sell me for organs or into slavery.
We spent a long time traveling.
Sometimes by ground vehicle, sometimes by air.
Every so often he introduced me to other people.
Eventually, he carried me somewhere, placed me in a woman’s arms, and left.
According to my sixth sense, she was far kinder than the bearded giant.
That was where my journey ended.
And where several long, painfully slow years of childhood began.
What could frustrate an adult more than helplessness?
Uncertainty.
Of course, relearning essential life skills such as holding up my own head, sitting upright, and not wetting myself had some practical value.
It just was not particularly entertaining.
At least my senses gradually improved.
Not that it helped much.
My caretakers rarely took me anywhere beyond the nursery and the communal dining area, where my aunt occasionally carried me.
Still, it was something.
When my hearing finally caught up with the rest of me, I made two important discoveries.
The first shocked and delighted me at the same time.
The people around me were speaking the same language I had spoken in my previous life.
At first, I assumed my brain was simply translating everything automatically.
Then one day my uncle dropped something heavy on his foot.
No matter what universe you happen to be in, there is no mistaking genuine profanity.
From that point on, I accepted one of two possibilities.
Either this new world somehow spoke English, which honestly did not bother me, or my mind was filtering everything through the framework of my native language.
The country itself, however, was clearly unfamiliar.
My caretakers were Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru Lars.
The surname meant nothing to me at first.
The first seed of suspicion appeared when I realized my name was Luke, not Luka as I had initially assumed.
Beru’s accent was subtle, but whenever she became emotional, it grew much more noticeable.
The bearded man visited from time to time.
There was something oddly familiar about him.
One day Uncle Owen shouted at him and practically threw him off the property.
By then, my eyesight had finally improved enough for the pieces to fall into place.
Because who else could a bearded Ben possibly be, especially one who looked suspiciously like Ewan McGregor?
Welcome to your new life, Luke Skywalker.
The moment I realized just how catastrophically screwed I was, I did the only thing available to me.
I burst into tears and ruined my diaper.
I wanted everyone responsible to crawl into a hole and stay there.
The friends who had convinced me to visit a combat zone.
The entire enemy artillery battery.
George Lucas.
And that damned Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Then, before my infant brain could even process what was happening, an empty formula bottle lifted off the table and shot straight at the departing Jedi’s head.
The shock made me soil my diaper again.
Then I passed out.
…
Little Luke, meaning me, was now five years old.
You know, being a child is surprisingly difficult.
The biggest problem was boredom.
What exactly is a small child supposed to do all day?
Perhaps younglings in the Jedi Temple spent their days receiving wisdom directly from every Jedi Master in existence.
As for me, my two greatest achievements so far were learning to read Aurebesh, the standard alphabet used to write Galactic Basic, and earning permission to leave the house whenever Uncle Owen did.
Aurebesh was amusing.
It was essentially an alternative writing system for a language that felt perfectly familiar.
Adjusting to it took time, especially since reading material was scarce.
Whether the HoloNet simply did not exist on Tatooine, whether the Lars family could not afford access to it, or whether nobody trusted a five-year-old with unrestricted information, I had no idea.
Reasonable, really.
A child might accidentally stumble across videos of Twi’leks.
Why would a five-year-old even think about something like that?
Try spending years trapped in childhood with the mind of an adult.
Apart from Uncle Owen, Aunt Beru, and a not-yet-elderly Obi-Wan Kenobi, I rarely saw anyone.
Once, Owen took me to watch a group of Jawas selling their latest collection of stolen droids.
They looked exactly as short, creepy, and unsettling as they had in the movies.
Beru’s sister and her husband visited several times as well.
The Lars family was not especially social with outsiders, but among themselves they were an entirely different story.
Someone really should have installed soundproofing.
I lived at the opposite end of the moisture farm’s underground home, yet I still heard far more than any child ever should.
That sort of thing could leave lifelong psychological scars.
So what exactly did I spend those years doing?
First and foremost, I focused on preserving information.
The human mind has an annoying habit of discarding anything it considers unnecessary.
I spent years reconstructing everything I could remember about the Star Wars universe from my previous life.
The original six films.
Fragments of long-forgotten Wookieepedia articles I had read years before my reincarnation.
Every scrap of lore I could drag back from memory.
Fortunately, my memory worked differently now.
Better.
I suspected that improvement was connected to the second great focus of my new life.
The Force.
Once the pieces finally fell into place, and former Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi had finished picking shattered bottle fragments out of the back of his head, it became obvious that my mysterious sixth sense was the Force.
Between learning how to walk, eat, and sleep, I had an extraordinary amount of free time.
Five uninterrupted years devoted to a single discipline, with no teachers, no guidance, and no distractions.
Give an adult mind five years to concentrate entirely on the one skill most likely to determine its future survival, and the results can become frightening.
Especially when that mind knows it has decades ahead of it.
So I studied the Force.
Fortunately, Luke Skywalker, meaning me, possessed greater Force potential than any Jedi of his generation.
The real challenge was making sure neither my father nor his master experienced any inconvenient visions about me.
During my first year, I devoted myself entirely to perception.
I learned to sense the Force, then to see it, gradually transforming the chaotic whirl of colors and sensations into something resembling a coherent picture.
First came differentiation, then recognition.
Eventually, I could perceive the Force in people, objects, and the world around me.
Living beings proved far more complicated.
Even now, I had not completely deciphered what I was seeing, though emotions clearly played a significant role.
It was probably not the orthodox Jedi approach, but the only Jedi within several kilometers spent his days hiding somewhere beyond the borders of our cozy little moisture farm.
Later, I began experimenting with the currents of the Force itself.
That was when I discovered a crucial distinction.
The Force flowing through living beings was not quite the same as the Force permeating the environment.
When I was around three years old, I consciously influenced one of those currents for the first time.
Everything changed.
For years it had felt as though I were pushing against an immovable wall.
Then, without warning, the wall simply disappeared.
Progress accelerated almost overnight.
I learned to draw the Force into myself, push it back out, and feel it flowing through every part of my body.
Hundreds of experiments followed.
Most accomplished absolutely nothing.
The few that succeeded produced breakthroughs so dramatic they bordered on the miraculous.
My control improved steadily.
Unfortunately, performing something once through instinct did not automatically reveal the principles behind it.
I could throw objects with telekinesis, but understanding why it worked, or how to reproduce and refine the technique consistently, remained maddeningly difficult.
One of my more recent experiments involved drawing the Force inward while simultaneously creating a thin region around myself where the surrounding Force became noticeably weaker.
After lunch, I spent several hours pretending to read a children’s story about womp rats and banthas while secretly conducting the experiment.
The results were immediate.
An aging Jedi came sprinting toward the farm.
He practically kicked the front door off its hinges.
Before entering, he paused just long enough to use some kind of Jedi technique on Uncle Owen.
It looked like a subtle application of mental influence.
These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.
You may allow me to enter.
Watching a Force-sensitive manipulate another person’s mind in real time gave me the opportunity to observe every subtle movement of the Force involved.
I committed the entire process to memory.
Honestly, it explained quite a lot.
Canon always suggested Owen’s hostility toward Obi-Wan stemmed from his feelings about Anakin Skywalker.
Now I suspected otherwise.
Owen had barely known his stepbrother.
No, his dislike was probably the result of incidents exactly like this.
You could take a Jedi out of the Temple.
But you could not take the Temple out of a Jedi.
Without bothering to brush the sand from his boots, Obi-Wan strode straight into the nursery, only to find a small child sitting quietly with a battered old datapad.
Pretending to be a frightened Force-sensitive child was surprisingly easy.
A thick, ancient book immediately launched itself at the bearded intruder.
To his credit, Obi-Wan dodged it.
A few moments later, another shouting match erupted.
Like every previous encounter, it ended the same way.
Aunt Beru arrived as reinforcements, and Uncle Owen threw Obi-Wan Kenobi out of the house once again.