BLX-5

The droid that would later be known as "Bollux" was built around 100 BBY at the renowned Fondor Fondor Shipyards. He was originally a standard Serv-O-Droid, Inc. BLX labor droid, programmed with limited intelligence and assigned the repetitive task of clearing shipyard sections of mynocks and other pests. While the droid designated BLX-5 was intended for regular memory erasures to prevent the development of a complex personality, a series of coincidences led to him gaining self-awareness. During one of his routine tasks, BLX-5 encountered a group of mynocks that was too large for him to handle, and he was forced to seek refuge from the creatures. Because his instructions didn't specify a return time, BLX-5 stayed at his post for several weeks, observing the mynocks' behavior. Meanwhile, the droid's supervisors wrote off BLX-5's disappearance as a typical loss of a labor unit, a relatively common occurrence. By the time BLX-5 returned, his work assignment had already been given to another droid, and it took almost a year for supervisors to realize the mistake.

BLX-5 went without a memory wipe for that entire period, and during that time, he began to develop a unique, friendly personality that endeared him to the shipyard staff. The droid was then reassigned as a shift supervisor, receiving structural modifications and system upgrades to improve his effectiveness. However, as time passed, BLX-5 was soon rendered obsolete by a newer model and left unemployed. As a free droid—a rarity in the galaxy at the time—BLX-5 quickly found work building survival domes and camps for a scouting organization, which allowed him to travel the galaxy and continue adding new modifications to avoid becoming obsolete again. Nevertheless, this happened repeatedly over the following decades: BLX-5 gained and lost positions building fortifications for the Republic military on a construction crew working on weather-control systems, as a regimental commander during the Clone Wars, as a "general roustabout" for a traveling show called Gan Jan Rue's Traveling Menagerie, and as a technical supervisor on a Trigdale Foundries mining colony. BLX-5 lived a nomadic existence for decades, traveling the galaxy under various aliases, including "Zollux," before ending up in the possession of a group of smugglers who won the droid in a dice game.

It wasn't long before BLX-5 found a more permanent home. The smugglers eventually stopped at an asteroid base operated by the renowned outlaw tech Klaus "Doc" Vandangante, where they traded BLX-5 to Vandangante for an upgraded hyperdrive motivator. BLX-5 quickly became part of the family, sometimes serving as a test subject for Doc's mechanically inclined daughter Jessa, who nicknamed him "Bollux" after struggling to modify the droid's chassis. Bollux continued to receive upgrades over the following years and soon volunteered to have his torso retrofitted to carry a new companion: a small computer interface unit named Blue Max, which fit into a hollowed-out chamber in Bollux's torso. Bollux and Blue Max quickly became inseparable, functioning almost as a single entity in the years that followed.

Bollux's life changed dramatically again in 2 BBY, when the droid encountered a cocky Corellian smuggler named Han Solo. Amidst a series of mysterious disappearances in the Corporate Sector, Doc Vandangante also vanished, leaving his daughter Jessa in charge of the asteroid base. Shortly after, Solo and his Wookiee first mate Chewbacca arrived, seeking a waiver to operate their starship, the Millennium Falcon, in the Corporate Sector. Desperate to find her father, Jessa made a deal with Solo to locate the missing man in exchange for a waiver and repairs to the Falcon. Jessa insisted that Bollux and Blue Max accompany Solo on the journey—she had contacted a group on Orron III who were also investigating the disappearances, and Blue Max's presence was necessary to download a large amount of relevant computer data. Although Solo disliked droids and didn't want them along, he reluctantly agreed, and the group set off for Orron III.

On Orron III, Bollux's new company met a man named Rekkon, an academic leading a secret group of citizens searching for their missing friends and family. Rekkon and his companions—a Trianii mother and cub named Atuarre and Pakka, along with a man named Torm Dadeferron—had spent months slowly infiltrating a Corporate Sector Authority datacenter they believed held information on the location of the Corporate Sector's vanished. Blue Max's advanced processing power was essential to retrieving this data. Blue Max downloaded the data as the group finished their introductions, only to discover that the Authority's Security Police had detected their presence and sent troops to investigate. Bollux's unassuming appearance proved to be a major advantage, as the droid served as a distraction to the pursuing Espos while the organic members of the team made their escape. He then triggered a radiation alarm that deterred the chase before rejoining the rest of the group. Bollux and his companions fled on a stolen skimmer ahead of relentless Espo pursuit. Although most of the team escaped unharmed after the skimmer was shot down and crashed in a field, the Authority captured Chewbacca alive.

Desperate to save his friend, Solo led the rest of the conspirators to the Millennium Falcon, setting off in pursuit while Blue Max compiled the data from the Authority installation. However, they hadn't been off Orron III for long when Rekkon was found dead, shot in the back with a blaster while examining the data plaque. After a brief process of elimination, it became clear that Dadeferron was the murderer, having been an Authority mole from the start. Solo ejected Dadeferron from the Falcon's airlock. Although Dadeferron's treachery had also destroyed the data plaque from Orron III, the Falcon's crew discovered that Rekkon, in his dying moments, had written a message indicating that their destination was a facility called Stars' End on the planet Mytus VII. Stars' End was a high-security prison run by a ruthless Authority Viceprex named Mirkovig Hirken, requiring a clever plan to get inside. The crew of the Falcon solved this problem by posing as a circus troupe called "Madam Atuarre's Roving Performers." Bollux received a fresh coat of paint and was presented as a "robotic raconteur," entertaining crowds with his storytelling and wit. At Stars' End, which was expecting the imminent arrival of a group of entertainers, their disguise worked. However, Bollux's purpose was misinterpreted. Hirken, a fan of gladiator droids, was expecting a droid that would challenge his prized top-of-the-line Mark X Executioner droid in single combat. Quickly covering for the lie, Solo instead billed the unassuming Bollux as "Annihilator," a custom-built combat droid that he hoped would never have to have its fighting capabilities tested.

Atuarre and Pakka put on an acrobatics performance while Solo and Blue Max searched the facility for the missing people's location, but Hirken quickly grew bored with their stalling and called for the heavyweight fight between his Executioner and the "Annihilator." Hirken had already begun to suspect that Bollux was not a true gladiator droid, and everyone expected the weathered old droid to be quickly destroyed. Ignoring almost certain death, Bollux entered the arena and faced the Executioner, sustaining heavy damage from the war droid's flame gun. But as the Executioner moved in for the kill, Bollux received assistance from the onlooking Blue Max, who had analyzed the droid and identified a weakness. The probe directed Bollux to grab onto the underside of the droid's treads and begin tearing at its circuitry through the only weak spot in its armor. This tactic caused the Executioner to careen wildly around the arena and eventually explode, stunning the crowd and enraging Hirken.

From there, chaos erupted. Solo engaged in a firefight with Hirken's bodyguard, a hulking Tiss'shar named Uul-Rha-Shan, which ended with a catastrophic power plant explosion that blasted the entire prison off the surface of Mytus VII. With only minutes until the prison slammed back into the planet, Solo's crew quickly rushed through Stars' End to free the prisoners and escape before the facility was destroyed. Although Bollux was severely damaged by his encounter with the Mark X Executioner, he remained mobile after linking with Blue Max, who repaired some of his systems. Eventually, however, Bollux began to struggle badly in the chaos of the evacuation, forcing Solo to try to drag him to the Falcon. On the way back, they were attacked by Hirken's bodyguard Uul-Rha-Shan. The Tiss'shar gunfighter fired first but missed Solo and instead took off part of Bollux's head, allowing the Corellian to return fire and kill him. Although Bollux's body was essentially destroyed, the link with Blue Max essentially saved his life—the probe was able to preserve his essential information and basic matrices. After the rescue was completed and the group made it off Stars' End, the Vandangantes gave Bollux a new body and granted him and Blue Max their freedom, and the two droids chose to join Solo's crew.

After joining the crew of the Millennium Falcon, Bollux and Blue Max accompanied Han Solo on several smuggling runs across the galaxy, providing general labor and assisting the Corellian in any way he needed. Several months after the Stars' End adventure, the droids found themselves on the desert planet of Kamar, where Solo had established a profitable side business showing a holo called Varn, World of Water to the primitive Kamarian Badlanders, who were amazed by the images of a planet covered in water. The crew of the Falcon were forced to flee after a disastrous attempt to play a different holo resulted in a massive riot, and from there they traveled to Lur, where they had heard they could find lucrative work. Upon arriving on Lur, they discovered that the job was actually transporting a shipment of Lurrian slaves, something Solo would not tolerate. The slavers' ringleader, a man named Zlarb, tried to force Solo at blaster-point to haul the Lurrian captives, even attaching a restraining bolt to Bollux to eliminate the droid as a factor. However, the slaver didn't account for Blue Max, who remained active inside Bollux's chest cavity, functioning on its own separate power supply. The tiny probe linked itself into Bollux's motor circuitry and managed to puppeteer the much larger droid to activate the Falcon's fire-control systems, creating a distraction that allowed Solo and Chewbacca to turn the tables and defeat the slavers.

Enraged by the deception and wanting the 10,000 credits he had been promised for the run, Solo led the crew of the Millennium Falcon on a mission across the Corporate Sector to expose Zlarb's slaving ring and get his money. Their search took them to the planet Bonadan, where Bollux kept watch at the Millennium Falcon as Solo and Chewbacca disembarked to investigate, at one point thwarting an attempt by a pair of Corporate Sector Authority agents to break into the Falcon. Bollux tracked the agents' path away from the Falcon and passed the information on to Solo, who gave chase after directing the droid to find Chewbacca and meet him at a spaceport cantina. Solo returned with one of the agents in tow: a woman named Fiolla, who had also been investigating the slaving ring and had been tracking the Falcon without knowing their exact connection. With evidence linking the slavers to corrupt elements within the Authority Security Police and information pointing towards the planet Ammuud, the Falcon's crew split up. Solo and Fiolla left to rendezvous with Fiolla's partner, while Chewbacca and the droids proceeded to Ammuud in the Falcon. They were joined by a Tynnan skip tracer named Spray, who was trying to repossess the Millennium Falcon for an unpaid debt.

As usual, things didn't go as planned. A catastrophic failure of the ship's archaic fluidic circuitry en route caused a hole in the ship's hull that Bollux had to plug with his own body. Chewbacca managed to patch the breach before everyone aboard died, but the Falcon was forced to make a rough landing in a mountain range far from Ammuud's main spaceport. On their final approach, Spray shoved Bollux into an escape pod closer to civilization, ordering the droid to find Solo once he arrived on Ammuud. Spray's timing and aim were poor, and Bollux still landed far from civilization, forcing the old droid to walk a great distance to the spaceport. Upon arrival, Bollux used his unassuming appearance to his advantage: he simply entered through the port's labor-automata checkpoint and posed as a regular working droid, doing various odd jobs around the facility and learning everything he could about the area while waiting for Solo to arrive. When Solo and Fiolla finally reached Ammuud on a lifeboat, Bollux surprised the two Humans by suddenly appearing on their craft and filling them in on every detail he had learned on the political events on Ammuud—including the fact that the man they needed to meet, the young Mor Ewwen Glayyd, had agreed to fight a death duel with an offworld gunslinger.

Solo and Fiolla left Bollux behind with the lifeboat, tasking the droid with repairing the damaged craft and preparing it for their departure. Once their business with Glayyd was done—the family, which had done business with the slavers in the past, turned over all the information they had on the criminals after Solo forced the gunman, Gallandro, to stand down—they returned to Bollux and the lifeboat, using the craft to pick up Chewbacca and Spray. Their activity drew the attention of the remaining slavers, but the timely arrival of a Security Police Star Destroyer dealt with them easily. Afterward, it was revealed that "Spray" was actually Odumin, an Authority Territorial Administrator working undercover to investigate the slaving ring. After briefly holding Odumin for ransom, Solo was able to work out a deal where he came out ahead, and the crew of the Millennium Falcon flew off as winners.

The Millennium Falcon's crew's troubles with enslavers brought their time in the Corporate Sector to an end. The 10,000 credits they earned were quickly spent as they journeyed through the Outer Rim. However, this spending spree also resulted in new upgrades for Bollux and Blue Max, and the aged labor droid acquired a new receiver as per its request. For a period, they were employed as starship mechanics for Grigmin's Traveling Airshow in the remote Tion Hegemony. After a disagreement with the show's pilot, they found themselves making deliveries on the university planet of Rudrig. While there, they encountered Alexsandr "Trooper" Badure, an old acquaintance from Solo's Naval Academy days, who involved them in a new scheme: the search for the legendary Queen of Ranroon, the lost treasure ship of the ancient galactic tyrant Xim the Despot. Badure and his companion Hasti Troujow had discovered evidence linking the ship to the planet Dellalt. They then convinced Solo and Chewbacca, along with S. V. Skynx, a Ruurian scholar specializing in pre-Republic history and languages, to assist in their quest in exchange for a share of the treasure. Bollux drew considerable attention from the isolated world's inhabitants, who were unaccustomed to seeing droids. Fascinated by Xim's sophisticated war-robot technology, the labor droid dedicated much of its time on Dellalt to researching the ancient automata.

Soon after their arrival on Dellalt, events took a turn for the worse. First, Troujow was unable to gain access to the log-recorder that her late sister had hidden within Xim's treasure vaults. Then, J'uoch, a local criminal, and her gang—also seeking the Queen of Ranroon's treasure—attacked the spaceport and absconded with the Millennium Falcon. This forced the group to embark on a weeks-long trek through the mountains on foot, with Bollux playing a crucial role as a porter due to the absence of a ground vehicle. The journey proved particularly challenging for Bollux and Blue Max, as they were not designed for conditions that severely tested their waterproofing capabilities. The group faced several dangerous situations, including navigating a complex intra-clan conflict among the aquatic Swimming People of Dellalt. Eventually, Bollux and Blue Max detected faint radio signals that led them to what appeared to be an abandoned landing field nestled deep within the mountains. However, upon closer examination, they discovered the ships were decoys and were captured and imprisoned by the Survivors, primitive, inbred descendants of Xim's honor guard. The hermit clan examined Bollux and Blue Max separately. Using a fragment of their pre-Republic dialect stored on one of Skynx's language tapes as a translation tool, they determined that Solo and the other organic captives were to be sacrificed soon. The Survivors believed that ritual bloodshed would amplify the power of the distress signal the droids had previously detected in the mountains. As the Survivors held droids in high regard, they granted Bollux and Blue Max's request to be reunited with their companions, as they devised a plan to escape their predicament.

When the moment arrived, Bollux and Blue Max were instrumental in the escape. The small computer probe diverted the captivated crowd with a holographic display, allowing the other captives to slip away and retrieve their weapons. Solo, Chewbacca, and Badure provided heavy cover as Bollux and Blue Max rejoined them to flee down a mountain on a large gong. The group crashed into a large snowdrift, but emerged unscathed. Reasoning that the presence of the Survivors indicated their proximity to the treasure's location, they pressed on, ultimately following a signal detected by Bollux and Blue Max to the foothills below J'uoch's mining camp. There, they were met with an astounding sight: one thousand fully functional battle droids from Xim's ancient and renowned Guardian Corps, the very "thousand guardians" said to have accompanied the Queen of Ranroon on its final voyage. They arrived just in time to witness a man Troujow recognized as the assistant steward of Xim's treasure vaults ordering the droids to attack J'uoch's camp, forcing the team to make a desperate dash through the ensuing firefight to board the Millennium Falcon in time. Having spent much of its time en route to Dellalt studying the ancient droids, Blue Max conceived a plan to halt the rampaging horde, although it would have required the destruction of the entire corps. Desiring a different solution, Bollux attempted to communicate with the war droids and reason with them, but to no avail.

Instead, the two droids proceeded with Blue Max's plan, employing signals learned from Skynx's ancient tapes to command all of the war droids onto an old, precarious bridge simultaneously, causing the bridge to collapse and send them plummeting into a deep crevasse. Their scheme enabled the Millennium Falcon to escape unscathed. After interrogating the captive assistant steward, the group discovered that Xim's legendary hoard had been within the treasure vaults all along. The crew navigated the labyrinthine tunnels and located the hidden treasure, only to discover to their disappointment that the Queen of Ranroon actually contained war materiel, not gold or jewels—items like kiirium ingots that, while commonplace in the present day, were incredibly valuable during Xim's era. Nevertheless, it remained a significant archaeological find, one that Skynx anticipated would take years to fully analyze. The Ruurian professor offered Bollux and Blue Max positions assisting him in sorting through the site, and the droids immediately accepted, thus parting ways with Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon. Although Bollux and Solo's separation was rather sudden, Solo later found himself missing the droid's companionship. Bollux and Blue Max continued to send Solo holocards for several years following their departure.

Bollux, a masculine programmed droid standing at 1.5 meters tall, did not possess an impressive appearance. Having existed for over a century by the time of the Galactic Civil War, the droid was battered, stocky, asymmetrical, and moved with a rigid, deliberate gait, delivering its speech in a leisurely drawl. This unhurried manner of speaking became Bollux's defining characteristic, and he favored it for the extra time it afforded him to think, and for making organics see him as more easygoing. Although Bollux only developed a genuine personality due to an administrative oversight, the result was a highly personable droid whose greatest desire was to be useful. For Bollux, this motivation stemmed from a fear of its own obsolescence, which it equated to death for an organic being. Remaining useful, however, proved to be a constant challenge throughout its existence. Newer models repeatedly rendered the droid obsolete in various roles, prompting it to continuously volunteer for new modifications in a relentless pursuit of self-improvement. Bollux regarded durability, versatility, and the ability to perform useful work as the most vital means to its survival. Over the years, Bollux consistently found a place for itself due to its affable nature and dry wit, which endeared the weathered old droid to many organics.

After years of traversing the galaxy and fulfilling numerous roles, Bollux's journey led it to Doc Vandangante's, where it discovered a new sense of contentment and its ever-present companion, Blue Max. Bollux and Blue Max forged an inseparable bond, and Bollux developed what could only be described as paternal affection for the smaller unit. With Blue Max integrated within it, Bollux's unassuming exterior often proved advantageous, allowing the droid to discreetly smuggle the high-powered computer into highly-secure locations. Bollux even managed to win over Han Solo, who initially dismissed the droid as a broken-down misfit before being impressed by its resourcefulness and spirit. Bollux and Blue Max also grew fond of Solo, and seeking to experience the galaxy, they viewed working aboard the Millennium Falcon as the surest path to the adventure they craved. Owing to its extensive experience traveling the galaxy, Bollux was an exceptionally inventive droid, having learned to manipulate its own computations to circumvent its programming in life-or-death scenarios. Although forbidden from carrying weapons, harming, or deceiving organics, these directives rarely constrained Bollux when necessary. This knowledge, coupled with its own creativity, helped Bollux repeatedly find ways to survive in seemingly impossible situations.

The droid "Bollux" made its debut in Han Solo at Stars' End, a novel penned by Brian Daley and published in 1979. It then appeared as a significant supporting character throughout The Han Solo Adventures book trilogy. In the original UK edition of the trilogy, Bollux was renamed "Zollux" because the original name sounds like a colloquial term for the word "testicles" in British English, despite the difference in spelling. In The New Essential Guide to Droids, Zollux was identified as an alias Bollux occasionally used during its travels. Other inconsistencies arose between different retellings of the Han Solo Adventures stories. In the 1980 comic strip version of Han Solo at Stars' End, Alfredo Alcala depicted Bollux as a boxy, copper-colored robot, rather than the lanky droid consistently portrayed in other sources. Although solely referred to as "Bollux" throughout the original novels, the 1993 West End Games roleplaying guide Han Solo and the Corporate Sector Sourcebook, which significantly expanded on the droid's backstory, was the first to designate Bollux's original designation as "BLX-5."