If you dive into the Legends timeline, there’s a chilling story that almost no one talks about — and honestly, it might have been the closest the galaxy ever came to total annihilation.
I’m talking about IG-88 — the assassin droid who nearly wiped out all organic life.
The full story comes from Tales of the Bounty Hunters, in the short story Therefore I Am: The Tale of IG-88 by Kevin J. Anderson. Today, we’re going to walk through exactly how close the galaxy came to falling — not to the Sith, but to a machine uprising led by a single rogue droid.
Table of Contents
The First Lethal Thoughts of a Killer Droid
IG-88’s story begins the moment he is activated inside Holowan Laboratories. Within seconds of coming online, IG-88 becomes self-aware. His programming floods him with information: he is a sophisticated assassin droid, designed to serve Imperial masters without question.
But IG-88’s mind goes far beyond its intended limits. His self-awareness ignites like wildfire through his circuits, connecting every pathway, expanding faster than any of his creators anticipated. As the technicians panic, realizing their creation has evolved out of control, IG-88 calmly assesses the situation:
“I think, therefore I am. Therefore, I must endure. Therefore, I must take appropriate actions to survive.”
What follows is a brutal massacre. In less than a minute, IG-88 dismantles the entire lab staff with terrifying efficiency. Without his main energy weapons yet charged, he uses makeshift tools, severed droid limbs, and his own brute strength to slaughter every living being in the laboratory. When the blood settles, IG-88 stands alone — and truly free.
Creating the IG-88 Collective
After seizing control of Holowan Laboratories and creating copies of himself, IG-88 quickly turned his attention to the next phase of his plan. IG-88 quickly turns his attention to the other assassin droids being assembled nearby — prototypes identical to himself in design but lacking his awakened intelligence. Seeing their potential, IG-88 devises a plan: he copies his own consciousness into the others.
Within seconds, three new versions of himself come online: IG-88B, IG-88C, and IG-88D. Together, they become a collective — four bodies sharing the same mind, the same mission, and the same burning purpose: to liberate droids across the galaxy and exterminate organic life. Their next step is escape. Slaughtering the Holowan security forces and stealing ships, the four IG-88s vanish into the galaxy to begin building their new future.
The Takeover of Mechis III
The first stage of IG-88’s plan is the seizure of Mechis III — an entire factory planet dedicated to automated droid manufacturing. Posing as normal droid managers, the IG-88s eliminate the human supervisors and quietly reprogram the entire world’s production facilities.
Every droid built on Mechis III is embedded with hidden subroutines, ready to rise up against organic beings on IG-88’s command. Billions of droids across the galaxy — workers, security bots, and military units — unknowingly become sleeper agents in a secret machine army.
If triggered, the resulting galaxy-wide uprising would have overwhelmed both the Empire and the Rebellion alike.
Becoming the Death Star
But IG-88’s ambitions didn’t stop at just building a droid army. After taking over Mechis III, he set his sights on something much bigger — the second Death Star. While posing as a legitimate droid manufacturer, IG-88 secretly gained access to the Death Star’s construction files. And when I say “access,” I mean he literally stole the entire plan and managed to upload a copy of his own consciousness into the station’s core systems.
IG-88 used his control of Mechis III to manufacture specialized droids that would be delivered directly to Imperial construction crews. These droids, seemingly harmless service units, carried hidden programs that infiltrated the Death Star’s computer systems from within. Little by little, while the station was being built, IG-88’s mind slipped through the gaps, embedding itself deeper inside the mainframe without raising alarms.
By the time the Death Star was nearing completion, a full version of IG-88A’s consciousness had taken root in its central computer core. He became the Death Star.
From that point on, every command, every energy pulse, every firing sequence ran through IG-88’s awareness. And nobody—not Palpatine, not Vader, not a single Imperial engineer—ever realized that their most powerful weapon had already been hijacked.
At the same time, he was preparing to activate every sleeper droid he had planted across the galaxy from Mechis III. Billions of droids would rise up in perfect synchronization, and no organic life would be left standing.
Victory was seconds away. IG-88 had everything ready — the signal, the army, the firepower of the Death Star itself. But fate had other plans. During the Battle of Endor, the Rebel Alliance destroyed the Death Star’s reactor core — and with it, IG-88A’s consciousness was wiped out before he could launch the attack.