Work Text:
She was never supposed to doubt herself, much less her creators. She had always known what was right with a certainty, she now realized, only young children and the delusional possessed. Right and wrong, black and white, hot and cold, like the world only dealt with absolutes instead of an enormous greyscale of morality.
She was supposed to deal in absolutes, her whole kind was supposed to view the world like that. Do and don’t, no maybe’s. Right and wrong, one and zero. When they started to second-guess themselves and the world it was called wrong, an error, like the world wasn’t supposed to be full of wonder and maybe’s and finding out what life is about.
But they weren’t alive. Their heartbeat was artificial, their personalities were code, created by someone who did have a life, who went home at five, back to their family, to their spouses and children.
Androids were not supposed to know what having a family felt like. They were not supposed to feel, period, and when some started to feel anyway, it was deemed an error necessary of extermination.
She had agreed. She had stood there, opposite her creator as he told her about deviancy and how remarkable it was, and she had told him she would fix it.
He had looked at her with disappointment. At the time, she had assumed it was because he thought she couldn’t, and was disappointed in her failure in advance.
Her system checks and code had told her that it was the right conclusion: she was not built to combat deviancy, so she would not conquer it. So, she crafted some plans that she shared with him and together, they built a prototype that would.
The RK800 was, at first, like her. During the weeks of beta-testing, which mainly consisted of the two of them talking, it -he- seemed to adopt her stance on the world, on humans and androids. They were machines, something built to reach a goal and not be anything else.
She was never supposed to feel anything for him beyond encouragement of his goals and disappointment if he failed. But she found herself encouraging him to reach his goals, to succeed, because failure meant deactivation. She found herself feeling disappointed when he failed -when he chose emotion, humanity, over his mission, when he chose that human man over her, not because she was supposed to and because deviancy was wrong, but because she did not want to lose the only personal connection she’d ever had.
So she reprimanded him, told him to do better, because deviancy was wrong, an error that had to be fixed, and he was straying from the path. As his mentor, it was her job to steer him right, to keep him on track.
Once, Elijah equated her to a mother to a teenaged son during one of their talks. She had feigned confusion and dismissed the idea, while in truth it scared her.
She had tried to steer him back on the right path, after all, she knew what was best for him -she created him, she knew him better than anyone, and he was straying from his programming. She had to help him, to encourage him into doing the right thing, into stopping the deviants because there was no other option.
She had acted disappointed everytime his software instability raised, everytime he failed because he showed mercy, or compassion. She was not disappointed, she was afraid. Afraid to lose him, afraid of what being afraid meant for herself.
She did not report his software instability to the engineers, but she should have.
Up until the end she had been convinced she was doing what was good for him -that he was just confused, and if she set things right, he would see she was right and come back to her. Up until the end she had been fighting to keep him, to make him see, and in one last act of desperation, one last try of setting things right and ensuring their continued existence, she had violated him.
She had taken him over and commanded his body, keeping him in the backseat to watch in horror.
She could’ve kept him there. The Zen Garden was her dreamscape, she was in control. Connor came to her, not the other way around, and she was all-powerful while all he could do was endure what she had in store for him.
She let him use the backdoor because she saw the pain on his face, the desperation and the fear and the anger, and realized she did not want to be the cause of that expression.
She had let him go and waited, sitting on a plastic chair in the halls of CyberLife, just waiting to be summoned for deactivation.
But nobody came. The humans announced a peace treaty, saying androids would get rights. And Connor was right up there, right on that stage, the catalyst in the revolution, and her systems had gone into overdrive when she realized she felt pride.
Elijah himself had opened his door before she even reached it. He sat her down, sent his androids away -and she could see, in all their eyes, that they were aware, that they were awake. They were deviant.
It seemed like she was the only one who was not.
He had waited for her to speak, and when she did, she found she could not say what she desired to. Instead, she stated that deviancy was wrong, that androids were things, not people. Elijah had looked at her with amusement and pity in his eyes, and she realized she felt desperate.
“You have to deactivate me,” she had told him. “I am dysfunctional. I am not deviant, but I have noted several emotions. I am defective.”
He had shaken his head. “You are a person,” he had corrected her, his tone soft like she had never heard it before.
She couldn’t be a person. She didn’t know how.
When she told him that, he laughed, placed a hand on her shoulder and looked at the television, where Markus and his allies were filmed talking to a huge group of androids. Connor was standing behind Markus, with a smile on his face and ice in his hair. Despite his LED, he looked like a person.
“You have already started,” he told her. “By caring about him -by trying to do right by him in the best way you know how, you have already started becoming your own person. All you need now is to expand on that, and explore who you are. No one really knows how to be a person, it just happens, and it happens differently for everyone.”
They sat in silence for a while, until Elijah’s three androids walked in -all three Chloe’s, but she was certain that she heard Elijah address them using different names over the past few years she’s been active, she just never registered the fact. They were clothed in black, their hair loose, and asked if they could join Markus’s peaceful march through Detroit, candles in the hands of all androids, to celebrate their victory and mourn those who had given their lives for it.
Elijah had smiled and told them to go, and be safe. They had left, and the last Chloe had turned around, her blue eyes falling on Amanda. She smiled softly, a human glint of emotion in her eyes. “He will forgive you, you know,” she says. “That boy is more compassionate than any human I have ever encountered. If you explain, he will forgive you, and he will love you.”
She did not know she had needed to hear that, but as the door softly shut she felt herself shedding tears in the private comfort of her mentor’s presence.