J9 worker drone

[Marcus Starkiller]

"Greetingzzz, Master. How may Drone Beegee-Arfivetoo zzzervice the colony, hive, or zzzocial collective?"
— Start-up greeting from a new J9 worker drone.
The J9 worker drone was a droid produced by Roche, and was considered a crash-and-burn disaster for three reasons: Its personality was flat, its name was unappealing and misleading, and its bug-like appearance was a turn-off to countless mammalian species throughout the galaxy.

Very simply put, the Verpine had no idea how to market a protocol droid, and buyers avoided the J9 like a deadly virus. This caused Roche to slash prices to offset their mounting losses. When buyers did finally buy the droids at bottom basement prices, they often took the name worker drone literally, and placed the droids in factories and starports where their advanced cognitive functions were wasted. Roche tried to change this by advertising the J9 to fellow arthropods such as the Sic-Six, and the Flakax, but this really only caught on with the Xi'Dec, to a limited degree.

Even though most every J9 was stuck in a labor job, they were the most intelligent labor droids one could ever find, because of their Arjan II logic computer that had a processing capacity to rival SytheTech's AA-1 VerboBrain. This unit, when combined with the TranLang II Communications module that featured over one million languages, made the droid sophisticated enough to interact with organics.

The J9s were tall units that were equipped with the angular Roche signature piston-controlled arms and legs, identical to the 8D8 Smelting Operator. The hips were joined by awkward joint mechanisms and were the most vulnerable feature. The unit's large, streamlined head seemed out of proportion with the rest of the body. The J9's huge photoreceptors were keyed to the Verpine optical range, much of which was in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. The droid's excellent olfactory sensor and Torplex microwave sensor allowed it to perceive details far beyond visual wavelengths.