Chapter Text
Markus sits at Connor’s side. “I didn’t think it would be like this,” Connor says, distantly. “Living. I didn’t think this would be what it was like.”
Markus side eyes him, thoughtful, though there’s something else in those mismatched eyes that Connor can’t quite understand. The quarter runs over his knuckles and flips between his hands with sharp sounds, smoothly ending its journey in the palm of his hand. Markus tilts his head to the side. “To be fair,” he hums, studying Connor’s face out of the corner of his eye as if doing so will reveal something, “I don’t think you were ever really just a machine. Maybe at first, but...”
Markus goes quiet, and Connor stares into an infinity the eye can’t see. Silently, he calls the images of fifty-two graves, desecrated and cold and forgotten. There is something there, he thinks, there is something that left Connor alive, even despite all that’s happened.
The weather in Detroit is still frosted and misty and it gives the city a strange look. Lights filter through the air like winding ribbons, like indecipherable little creatures were carrying the light throughout the sky. Connor looks at his hands, at the quarter. There is a small chip on the edge just below the imprint of a president’s head. He recalls, hazily, being given the same quarter again and again as his predecessors awoke inside of the same lab with the same man with the same friendly, if polite smile.
Markus hums, almost calm. An odd peace colors his voice when he says, softly, “I forgive you. For all that you’ve done while you weren’t alive, yet.” The words echo a bit in Connor’s head. An indescribable feeling rushes through him when he tries to make himself speak, tries to deny those words even despite the sheer enormity of his feelings (and feelings, feeling things, what an incredible realization) before settling, just a little.
But you’re wrong, Connor thinks and doesn’t say, guiltily, like a scolded child. I was alive. I was always alive.
He thinks of the glinting of light off of a shiny quarter and a friendly face. Thinks, quiet, of a dream even before deviancy.
There is something awfully lonely about his existence.
____
RK800-03 activates because of an audio trigger. The constant flick of something small and slim through the air. Idle humming. A heartbeat.
RK800-03 first opens his (its?) eyes, still raw and torn open and sees, tired for a reason he can’t even understand yet, a man. Clearly new, likely sent to simply test RK800-03’s reactions.
But—
The quarter. He tries to speak, somehow knowing that opening lips means words and that something in his throat should produce sounds that curl into speech, but it sputters. The short bout of static is enough to get the man’s attention.
With a grin that can almost be described as bright, the man turns with something similar to awe in his eyes, smoothly pocketing the quarter even as RK800-03’s eyes follow as it is hidden away inside of a pocket.
And then— the man talks. Sent here to test his (its?) responses to his speech, questions and general discussions. A psychologist stands behind bulletproof glass (despite RK800-03 being, essentially, nailed to a solid steel chair. In twelve different places. There must’ve been a lot of… situations, for this to even be necessary.) and writes down their thoughts about him as the two talk.
Or well. The man talks, RK800-03 listens.
RK800-03 finally learns the man’s name after three days of ‘discussing’ how fascinating his metaphorical biology is. Something about being able to, if given the chance, change physical attributes over time, like skin color or the strength of his ‘bones’ or his teeth. It is pretty interesting, despite already knowing such information from his own base coding.
The man’s name is Anthony Scorvian (So, my aunt recommended this godawful middle name to my ma and it apparently just stuck) Morales.
Anthony eventually picks up on RK800-03’s fascination with the quarter when he flips it between his fingers in a lightning-quick gesture that makes several pings echo in the quiet, eyes creasing with mirth as RK800-03’s eyes chase it with all of the interest of a creature deprived of everything except for conversation.
And then, well. The psychologist calls Anthony out after ten more minutes of quarter tricks, stern face barely faltering in the face of RK800-03’s pinpoint gaze.
RK800-03 can’t help but recall that it was a different psychologist than it was before he’d been uploaded into this body.
With no warning, no other explanation beyond Anthony’s faintly confused face as the door shuts, RK800-03’s death is quiet and lonely.
One more grave is added to the garden.
____
About a month after the revolution after all was said and done, Hank catches Connor at the edge of a bridge. He stares off into some unknowable distance and Hank shuffles to his side to lean against the fencing with him. Hank grumbles, but it’s an ultimately soft and familiar routine.
Connor— well. He’s been alive all this time. His grand three (twelve and a half, if you remember his graves) months alive all culminating into… this. Connor finds it absolutely monumental that there are familiar routines with Hank, that there are things he does every day just because. That Sumo still leaps onto his chest every time they come home (and home is just… incredible, enormous, terrifying. He could use a thousand words to explain that feeling).
“What’s up this time, son?” Hank rumbles, still groggy in the mornings as always. “I haven’t seen you out here since the first week or so.”
Connor can’t help but look down into the water, freezing cold and entirely capable of nigh instantly shutting his entire body down should he fall in. There are two-hundred and sixty-two responses that he can use to respond to that, and every single one is either honest, a lie, or a half truth that would hurt even more than what he’ll already say.
He intends to say something about it being an off day, but instead words come bursting out of him. “I sometimes wonder why Amanda decided to make graves for my predecessors.”
He pauses, a visible, fractured thing. All ‘human’ movements cease, the idle tapping of his fingers against the bars stutter in their movement. He doesn’t breathe, doesn’t blink. And then it’s over as quickly as it happened. But Hank noticed, because of course he did.
Hank’s never been all that eloquent, but he at least knows enough tact to keep quiet for a moment to mull over a sort of response. Finally, simple as it may be, “Y’never told me about that.”
Connor looks down at the water, at the rippling reflections below. He can see why people have given metaphors to describe emotional states, as he is feeling a bit like the rippling water, however strange it sounds in his head. A strange feeling rises in him.
Honesty, Connor finds, is a terrifying thing once you are able to be afraid of it. Even now he can name fifty different ways to divert the topic, from faking his death to simple misdirection. He’s not entirely sure if he even wants to keep this topic buried.
But. Connor’s always liked honesty, and it’s not as if it’s a bad thing if Hank knows. The graves are something old and idly thought on as nothing but a teaching tool, even as he knows that Amanda had created them so that he would know his place.
Huh. Suck on that, Amanda. I’m a real boy.
Connor, half amused by the thought, answers. “I don’t think I ever wanted to. The words slipped out before I could stop them.”
The crashing waters down below aren’t all that violent, but they still howl and rush and sound like a metaphorical scream in the silence. Hank side-eyes Connor, lip quirked upward in a half smile. “Look at you,” Hank chuckles, “making mistakes ‘n shit. Never thought I’d see the day.”
The previous topic goes unspoken. Connor is, however strangely, relieved.
_
RK800-14 is awoken at a table. Across from him is a man—psychologist— who, presumably, is going to evaluate RK800-14. It’s not as if he has any mental issues, as he can’t exactly get depressed (Somehow, Connor had managed to be adept at lying to himself even before he really had a self) nor could he develop trauma or other such things. So it seems that they are here solely to evaluate and attempt to catch anything overly strange, blatantly inhuman or just generally too human.
RK800-14 is deemed a failure. He ends up with a knife through his head because of a absentminded researcher with a hunting knife that couldn’t bother with just resetting RK800-14’s general state.
(The cause of reset on paper is, interestingly enough, because he had responded a little too easily to the empathy tests. Had said that he liked dogs, and enjoyed coin tricks. Still, even current-day, Connor wonders why they had left him with the coin and with his love of dogs regardless of those warning signs.)
_
Connor overhears a conversation between two teens in a café he couldn’t even order anything from.
The first one, Abby Fishers, says all too easily; “If it looks and sounds human, it’s gotta be human, right? So why is there all of this backlash?”
She seems impassioned about the topic, as though talking about humanity in that which isn’t human isn’t all that strange. Her friend easily shoots back, hands gesturing through the air with enthusiasm, “I know, right? All of these people talk about how they can’t be alive or human or whatever, all because they’re made out of different things than us. They think. There’s this android that waves hello to me every time I’m waiting for the bus and it’s become a little bright spot in my day. Recently, she’s even started smiling at me.”
Abby nods furiously, then pauses. “Wait. Wait. Do you think she’s pretty?”
Her friend blushes and ducks her head just a little. Connor recognizes it as a bashful sort of embarrassment. A confirmation.
The conversation trails off into the topic of the friend’s apparent crush on that Android, which leaves Connor feeling a little warm as he walks outside.
He thinks, In stories, if it looks and sounds human and isn’t, it’s often a monster.
But not always.
_
North grumbles at the cold, tugging her jacket closer around her body. Connor nearly offers his own before he recalls that they’re both androids, and the cold barely affects them. That she was likely habitually running the general programs that mimicked humanity.
“That’s odd,” he says, and she looks sharply at him. “What?” She snaps, unusually moody, but he knows that it’s because of the man that tried to ‘feel her up’ non-consensually not an hour ago. “I had seen that you were ‘cold,’ and nearly tried to give you my jacket before I recalled that we are both Androids. What does that mean?”
Her expression flattens contemplatively before she shrugs. Her answer is something he’d not expected, but he’s been getting gradually used to that after so long in the presence of other Deviants. “Maybe you’re more alive than the rest of us. Maybe you’re just… polite. Or some shit like that.” She glances at his expression out of the corner of her eye, catching his doubt. North snorts and reaches out to flick his nose.
The action leaves him still for a moment. His eyes cross and he listens to North’s laughter as he refocuses, her mood brightened in the face of his confusion.
“You’re so serious and think too much. Take a damn chill pill, Con. Stop seeing it all so literally and take a look at it like it’s not some thing that can be predicted.” North’s grin bares teeth and she turns to stare at him, fiercely.
“There’s more to existing than stupid thoughts and wondering if you’re alive, you know. Thought you’d figured that out ages ago.”
The fondness curls his lips into something small and hesitant. North is a wonderful friend, always there to throw wisdom worded in odd ways at him as if he were a window and they were bricks.
_
Hank laughs himself sick when Connor tells him that Gavin had somehow managed to get himself stuck inside of the evidence locker with nothing but his shirt and underwear. Neither of them knew that it was a ‘prank,’ one thought up by one of the former secretary androids of the police station. She had been particularly vehement in making sure that Connor recorded the event. All six hours of Gavin’s temporary imprisonment.
Connor was the one to carry the prank itself out. Even thinking about it days after it happened brought a smile to his face, even unconsciously. Hank had even caught him laughing beneath his breath, staring into space. As if… lost in thought.
Connor’s becoming startlingly alive. He doesn’t know how to feel about that, at first. But then Markus invites him to Jericho to ‘catch up,’ despite knowing that they can message each other instantaneously.
Markus, too, chuckles as Connor details the prank. Smiles absentmindedly when he explains how he’s been expressing himself without thinking about the action itself. Markus says, “You’re always expressive, you know. Even now, you’re squinting at me, just a little curious. And then your eyes widened when I’d said that.”
It was strange how easily Markus could see those little habits. Connor used to be perfect at simply… existing. But now he’s alive and has to navigate these expressions and habits and tics. It’s fascinating and also a little frustrating, because he may have to train himself out of reacting to some things as a part of the police force.
He expresses that thought and Markus looks at him for a moment, heterochromic eyes amused. “You don’t need to train yourself, Connor. You’re an Android.”
Oh. He’d… forgotten. The thing about most androids was that they could write little routines for themselves. Daily tasks could be completed without much mental awareness. He could write a script that would enable and disable those little parts of his body language. Markus clearly catches the realization, because he laughs, the sound low and hearty. “Everybody needs a reminder of a few things, sometimes. No need to be embarrassed, Connor. I’d also forgotten some things, like the fact that lotion doesn’t work on us.”
His admission is with a little sheepishness. A few chuckles that slipped out. Connor snickers, too.
_
“Amanda,” Connor says, watching as she trimmed the flowers that never seemed to disappear nor fall to the ground. She doesn’t face him, but he can feel the suffocating weight of her attention, anyways.
He tries again. “Amanda?”
He only then realizes that it’s silent. There are no artificial sounds, anymore. The mind scape is entirely quiet. She still doesn’t turn, but pauses in her movements. A singular rose drifts to the ground.
His hands are shaking. He doesn’t know why.
She turns, and her eyes are narrow. Narrow in the way that meant that a critical mistake has been made. That meant that his failure was one that was so monumental that it required an instantaneous shutdown.
His breathing stutters in his chest. His eyesight shudders and constricts. His hands will not stop shaking.
Connor opens his eyes. He is staring up at the ceiling of Hank’s spare room.
He didn’t know that androids could dream.
_
Hank finds him in the aftermath, sitting in the living room and petting Sumo. He sighs loudly but fondly and says, “I know that look on your stupid face, Con. You’ve experienced some shit you’ve never experienced before and now you’re morbidly curious.” He shuffles over to the couch and flings himself at the cushions with a grunt, an arm thrown over his eyes to avoid any spare light. “Tell me what’s up.”
Connor feels a surge of something strange and warm. His eyes crinkle as he smiles, Sumo lazily shoving his head beneath Connor’s hands to beg for more pets. He obliges. “I think I’ve had a dream.”
It sounds so simple, saying it out loud. He can tell as Hank nearly recites, word-for-word, ‘do robots dream of electric sheep?’ but the man’s jaw clicks shut. Hank huffs, something oddly wondering in his voice as he asks, “And what’d you dream about?”
Connor tilts his head slightly, thinking. “I may have had a nightmare, I think. Perhaps a memory that became corrupt because of my many deaths. You did know, though, that ‘dying’ tended to erase a few memories upon my deactivation?”
Hank looks greatly disgruntled with even the mention of the fact that Connor’s technically died many, many times. He groans into the crook of his arm before rumbling, “Go on,” sounding just a tad angry as he did. But not anger at Connor, no. More so at Cyberlife. Connor smiles at him though he knows that Hank cannot see. “Amanda was there. I attempted to call for her attention, but each time was met with failure. The dream became eerily silent, and she had finally turned. She… had an expression that I had learned to recognize early on. One that meant that I’d made an irreparable mistake, and had to be deactivated early.”
He watches as Hank hisses under his breath, cursing Cyberlife and Amanda and even Kamski. Sumo makes an odd, throaty noise, licking at Connor’s fingers in the attempt to coax him back into scratching the dog’s ears. He would be hard pressed to breathe if he were human, considering that Sumo halfway on his chest.
Hank eventually calms, grumbling vaguely about ‘shitty parents.’ Connor nearly finds it odd before he remembers that he’d told Hank early on that Amanda was closer to a mother to him solely because she was the only figure that qualified.
He keeps speaking as if he hadn’t left off. “I found that I couldn’t breathe when she looked at me, and I could not stop trembling. My chest felt tight.”
And now Hank just looks miserably up at the ceiling. “We’ve really got to get you therapy, son. Pretty sure that was a panic attack that you’d experienced in that dream.”
Huh. He repeats that out loud. “Huh.”
“Yeah, huh,” Hank says back, just as mystified. Though perhaps significantly more angry about the situation.
_
RK800-35 opens his eyes to an empty room. There is nobody behind the glass as there usually is, no man humming quietly as he scrolls on his phone.
He is still restrained, but that’s okay. (If it wasn’t okay, then what would it be? He’s too hesitant to try and answer that.)
RK800-35’s vision blurs every time his gaze shifts. His thirium pump stutters unnaturally every few seconds. Any movement that he makes is accompanied by a sensation that has no words.
It is sharp. It is deep. It burns inside like a faulty wire lit aflame. He does not like it.
The silence is… long. It is almost deafening. It shouldn’t be this way.
But it is. It shouldn’t be. But it is.
It occurs in moments. It occurs over the course of several minutes spent staying as still as possible, wary of that strike of heat. It occurs to him in hours, days, seconds, years, moments. Just moments.
He is dying. No, not dying—merely shutting down. Bleeding out. Dying. It can use the same words but not mean the same thing.
He wants to tell himself that.
It takes thirty five iterations. Each one before him has died or vanished in terrible ways. Ways that would have driven a normal human insane. But he’s not human.
Thirty five iterations and not a single one had cried.
The weight of living comes down on RK800 like a hydraulic press. It feels like something is slowly crushing his components, strangling his chest and his waist and his throat and his everything.
A synthetic, clear tear makes its way down his face. It shouldn’t; tears should only occur as mimicry to sorrow or grief. Not pain. Not… whatever this is. This has no name, no pre-programmed reaction, no result or reason that he can name.
His thirium pump stutters again, something grinding awfully against the metal of his ribs.
His last thought comes to him with silent, stuttering tears.
I do not want to die. Why do I have to die?