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From Dorian's perspective, his mind simply snaps on. His only clue of time passing is the jarring ping of his internal clock, which updates with an accompanying alert: Now2049.04.26.23.12.58, Deact2049.04.25.13.08.14, Time_elapse34hours.04minutes.44sseconds. Nice of the alert to do the kindergarten math for his executive controller. He knows that externally, in the real world of John and Rudy and Rudy's robot graveyard lab, his eyes are filling to functional blue.
It takes close to another second before he fully boots up, before all of his personality modules kick in and he feels like an actual person. There's a quirk in his neural net in which he always compulsively scans his shot-holed memory upon awakening, looking for signs of the missing data. It runs into the great yawning four year gap, that black hole of memories stolen from his mind, and he pulls the inquiry away.
“Heyyyy, buddy, how do you feel?” he hears John say, drawing out his words with real concern. Another two hundred milliseconds and his visual input activates, and he turns towards his partner's face. For whatever reason, vision's always the last in the series to turn on. Maybe it's to prevent him from leaping off the table and ripping Rudy's wires out of his head before everything's properly booted.
“Fine,” Dorian says evenly. In these situations, he tries not to speak until the sound can come out correctly. The response is perfunctory; he's still running scans over his body to find out if he's really all right or not, and what bits may have been replaced. “What happened?”
“What do you remember?” Rudy drawls from sideline, before John can babble the truth. Not a good sign. They are testing whether a memory wipe has been effective.
“At home with John. It was the weekend. We were … hanging out,” Dorian says. Actually he remembers something considerably more athletic in the morning before they finally ambled out of bed, but they have been trying to keep their relationship on the down low. Officially at least; there's no way Rudy does not know.
It occurs to Dorian to be grateful that he still remembers that. He sure that one day, he'll wake up and it'll all be erased. Maybe just his off-reg sexual relationship with John, but more likely John altogether, this entire second stint with the police department filed away in a database somewhere. Sometimes Dorian engages in morbid fantasies where he imagines what what he'll be reprogrammed for when he opens his eyes one day – galley slave on an automated container ship? space station grunt? All the lonely tasks that require a human's problem-solving skills, but are too tedious to burden actual humans with. Or maybe it'll be nothing, just oblivion as he's stripped for his parts. Like humans, his consciousness can be eradicated with a single twist of metal in the wrong place.
Dorian pushes these musings aside. He needs to focus on the problem at hand.
“What happened?” he repeats, with more urgency. John will spill it all later, but he wants to Rudy to put up for once.
“You, uh … malfunctioned,” Rudy says, stuttering in normal Rudy fashion. “I mean, not you you Dorian, but one of your parts. Ah, part number 5F-3372-PG.”
“You you” in Rudy-speak probably refers to his executive controller, the module responsible for his human-like intuitive thought patterns. 5F-3372-PG, on the other hand, is a subunit of the synthetic soul, that mysterious personality module that gives the DRNs their individual natures. It's not a printable component, so therefore Rudy may have had to scrounge up another one on the open market somewhere. Plausible that could have taken over a day.
“Did I act inappropriately?” Dorian asks.
“Oh, it was great,” John says. “Swearing and dancing naked on table tops, Like a giant power failure, and I totally got blackmail video.”
Then why did Rudy erase it from my mind? Dorian thinks. But out loud he says, “Was this just at home? Does the Captain know?” They weren't due to be on duty today.
Rudy could have shrugged here, but instead twitches. Something's definitely up. “I, uh, just put a note in your repair log. I doubt she will notice.”
“You DRNs're glitchy, everyone knows that,” John says, trying and failing to be soothing. “No big deal, Dorian. Can we go home now? I'm old and need my beauty sleep.”
Dorian nods as Rudy releases the last connection to his head and slides the skullcase port shut. He doesn't have much in the way of tactile receptors up there, but he's notified when the link to Rudy's terminal is severed. Free in his own body at last.
* * * * *
Dorian demands to know what really happened the minute John and him hit the squad car, but John, weirdly, demurs. “Like I told you before, Dorian,” he says, with a fraction of a nod towards the car's dashcam. “No big deal.” He doesn't want to say anything that could be legally recorded for the department.
It's kind of cute, the way John differentiates Dorian himself from all the official spying devices they are surrounded with. He knows John thinks of Dorian as a person, not as a sophisticated camera owned by the police department just as surely as the squad car. Rudy tends to do the same thing, having blabbed his secrets right and left back when Dorian lived in the lab, despite the fact that the technician was more intimately aware than anyone of how every last thing Dorian experiences could be replayed back for a court of law. Dorian secretly thinks this is one of the less obvious reasons Command approved of android partners in the first place. Humans are so very likely to implicitly trust something that looks and talks like them. Their brains may be meat, but they are programmed all the same.
Nevertheless, Dorian never reminds his friends of these facts. He accepts their irrational behavior as an indication that he's been accepted into the human tribe, at least by the people that know him. He's happy to take these small comforts where he can.
When they get home, it's after midnight and pitch black, with only a few faint gleaming reflections on the riverfront behind John's house. John doesn't keep many external lights, despite the fact that it's bad security. Only a dim porch lamp flickers on as they pull up. Like most people with a detached residence in the city, John inherited the place from a previous generation lucky enough to buy in, from his mother's mother. It's very twenties chic with retro postmodern touches, not what Dorian thinks of as his personality at all. But John melts into it when he's home, and the house's old-fashioned lack of connectivity does suit him well.
John switches to autodrive and lets the car pull itself into the garage. Only when they're out of the vehicle, into the house, does he let himself relax. He turns and faces Dorian with a sigh.
“What happened?” Dorian asks, as softly as he can.
He doesn't dare reach out and touch him, not without some sign of permission. He doesn't know what on Earth he did. But then John does the touching, suddenly grasping Dorian's neck and pulling him forward for a kiss, more desperate and panicked than Dorian ever would have guessed. Dorian leans into his partner, letting him take the lead, but also wrapping his arms around John and pressing their bodies together. It kicked in then, all his love and fierce devotion pouring out, and sensing it reflected in John's urgent kiss.
“C'mon, man, this is ridiculous,” Dorian says when John pauses for air. They're still clinging together, and just standing right in front of the garage entrance barely two feet into the house. “I didn't hurt you or something, did I?”
“What? Of course not,” John says, and pulls back in surprise. He strokes Dorian's flashing cheek like he's wiping a child's face. “You didn't do anything, Dorian, and that's what was terrifying. You were talking with me, like normal, and then...stopped. Deactivated right in front of me, black eyes of death and all.”
“Oh.” Then, slowly, “So Rudy didn't erase anything?”
“I think he snipped off a bit of the last few minutes before you blinkered, but that's all. Is that what you thought? That we deactivated you for bad behavior and restarted you like a buggy mainframe?”
“The thought may have crossed my mind,” Dorian says. Relief floods his system, and he clutches John's back even further into a bear hug and leans his head into John's neck.
“Back to normal I see,” John says into the top of his head. “You're such a hormonal teenager, Dorian. I thought Rudy topped off your power levels while you were laying there, but maybe not.”
“He did. It's fine. I'm all fine,” Dorian says with relief.
Until next time, he thinks, but pushes that thought away. Dorian's trying to live for the moment, with John, and holds onto that as the only possession he really owns.
Dorian wants to continue with the snuggling right on into comforting sex. To continue with this charade that he's a human citizen with rights and autonomy, instead of a machine that can be transformed on command and blinked off like a light. But tonight he is moody, and finally can't tae it any longer. He gently pushes away from John's unconsciously soft touch.
“Tell me,” he says, “what happened to all the DRNs again?”
John groans and flops onto his couch. “Dude. We've been over this before. Let it go.”
“Just tell me what you remember. The memories are gone, John, and I...”He chokes off the response. Not due to malfunction, but because he's afraid John won't give him the answer if he says what really on his mind.
“You're afraid it will happen to you too? That you'll go crazy or break and they'll toss you into the back dumpster? You know I won't let that happen, Dorian.”
Why is it up to you, Dorian thinks, but he doesn't admit that flaw in the plan out loud. He doesn't want to implant the notion in John's mind that he might not have the power to keep Dorian alive, if it came to that. John's rash enough to press forward in low-probability situations, and Dorian clings to that irrationality as a thread of hope.
“Yes. I am afraid,” is all he says. “Please tell me anyway. I just want to know what the possibilities are.”
John sighs. “I didn't have a bot partner then. Hated the very idea. So what I remember of what went wrong, it's kind of … tainted, you know? Like when a piece of equipment you hate busts and you get to say good riddance? Like that.”
“Well at least you'll come out and admit it now,” Dorian says dryly.
“Look, R2-D2, I've never hidden my negativity on the whole idea. There's a hundred thousand unemployed adults in the city, why do we have to replace more good jobs with machines? Not like human life's at a premium out there.”
“But I'm different.” Dorian’s getting more sarcastic by the minute. Maybe this conversation wasn't such a smart plan after all.
“Yeah, Dorian you're different,” John says, putting too much emphasis on his words too. “I mean, you are. Maybe if I'd actually boned up and gotten a DRN back in the day, I'd have realized that the lot of you were not annoying backtalking bodyarmor after all.”
He nudges Dorian with a lazy foot from the couch, trying to get him to sit down with him. The artificial limb pings its proximity on autopilot, chatting as devices do all day around Dorian, unbeknownst to John's unwired brain. It reminds Dorian that John is surrounded with machines of varying sentience and responsiveness, some even embedded in his very body. That the humans around him were constantly forced to make distinctions between human and not, between human-like or not human enough, between things to pour their hearts into, or ignore as background noise. Everything a judgment call. It must be exhausting.
Dorian sits down right next to John's head, sinking his heavy metal bones into the cushions. John wriggles his cramped frame and props his head into Dorian's lap.
“What do you really want to know Dorian? What will happen to you? I don't know. Nobody knows their fate. One minute you're enjoying life and the next some asshole mows you down. I mean, look at me, I should be dead. I'm on my second life, and so are you. Maybe just chill out and enjoy it as a bonus.”
“Such a comfort you are, John. 'Seize the day, for tomorrow you'll die'.” But he begins to stroke John's face, despite the cynicism. Forgiving him for his bluntness. Wanting contact, for however long it lasts.
“Hey, it's true. I'm a very zen person when you get to know me.”
Dorian laughs. “Do you think if you'd had a DRN partner back then, you would have gotten intimately involved with him too?”
“Um, yeah? Your fuckableness was legendary. Why do you think they made the MXs into totally neutered pansies? In fact, that's the secret history of the DRN deactivation. You were a goddamned distraction to the entire police force. Couldn't get any work done.”
“You are a terrible liar, man.”
John's leg pings him that it needs to recharge; Dorian had long ago asked it for standard updates, to keep an eye on John's tendency to self-neglect. The police department mainframe pings him with the next day's duty schedule. John's phonemail pings to remind Dorian that John still has 52 unread messages, four marked urgent. One of the urgent messages is from the bed, John's lone updated modern appliance, complaining about its onerous self-cleaning cycle.
John himself doesn't ping him about anything. He's just there for Dorian, day and night, there to catch him with every glitch. And Dorian is there for John.
His executive controller pings his overwrought synthetic soul to chill, because that has to be good enough.