Guri

Guri is a character in Steve Perry's book, Shadows of the Empire. Shadows of the Empire is set in between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

Guri is a rare example of a human replica droid, or HRD, created as an assassin. She serves as Prince Xizor's assistant, one of the few individuals the necessarily paranoid crime lord believes he can trust. Guri may be considered a foil to Xizor, especially as his plans grow more grandiose. Although often terse, Guri exhibits a sometimes playful sense of arrogance. For example, when she massacres a group of Xizor's rivals, she takes the time to allow one victim, knocked out in the initial fray, to regain consciousness so that she can have the last word before killing him.

This smug attitude and apparent enjoyment of power are further illustrated when Leia and the others interrogate her, through her dry and self-assured responses. At the end of this interrogation, when her captors move to remove the metal bonds they have trapped her with, she bursts them herself in a dramatic show of superhuman strength.

Towards the end of Shadows of the Empire, Guri seeks out a duel with Luke Skywalker, having become bored with her thus far relatively helpless prey. This wish is granted as the two flee Xizor's palace, which is about to be destroyed by planted explosives. She persuades the young Jedi to throw aside his lightsaber and fight unarmed. Luke defeats her, but rather than killing her, extends an offer to come with him and join the Rebel Alliance. Guri fatalistically (or perhaps merely realistically) declines, explaining that overcoming the controls implanted in her programming would be impossible for the rag-tag band of revolutionaries. Luke reluctantly abandons her to the palace, though he later comes to (rightly) suspect that she has escaped.

In the comic book mini-series "Evolution," Guri pursues a new beginning. She is herself hounded by the last surviving relative of Xizor, Savan, who wishes to capture the vital data stored in Guri's memory. Guri manages to evade Savan, and make her way to a droid programmer who is able to free her of some of her initial constraints. At one point, she knocks Savan unconscious, but decides not to kill her, arguably as a parallel to her earlier encounter with Luke.

The series ends with Guri walking into a bar, where Dash Rendar offers to buy her a drink.