Work Text:
After the revolution, most of the military models chose to stay in the military. In fact, many androids chose to stay in their previous roles even after gaining their freedom. The stability and familiarity was comforting as they otherwise tried to find their own way in the world. Some jobs had a better retention rate than others. For Tracis and other sex workers, only about 3% stayed. For construction workers, it was closer to 60%. Child care providers and housemates in families with children, 73%. Households without children, that number dropped to 23%. The military actually had the highest percentage of androids who stay, at 89%. This surprised a lot of people, as they had thought the deviants would want to get away from the horrors of the front lines, where they were often used as cannon fodder and sent on the most dangerous missions. The government had thought about this too though and hastily worked to combat it. They couldn't afford to lose two thirds of their military personnel at this time of tension with Russia and so they offered full human military benefits to androids who stayed. A salary, a pension, healthcare benefits to cover repairs for the rest of their lives. It cost an incredible amount of money, but with how much androids had boosted the economy, the government could afford it with only a small increase in taxes. Normally even that would cause outrage among humans, but they mostly had other things to get worked up about during this time. Add to those VA benefits the desire for deviants to remain with other androids who are familiar to them, who would soon become friends, and the high retention rate wasn't hard to understand.
Quinn was one of the 11% who left. He didn't want to kill or hurt people for money or any other reason. It was an instinct common to domestic androids but was largely absent in military models. Asimov’s rules were reordered in them, with Obey Orders first and foremost.
The army confiscated all of Quinn's weapon systems before discharging him into Detroit. As he had a firearm built into his right arm, they took the limb from him. They also stripped away the carbon fibre shields from his body, leaving him feeling naked and appearing skeletal, as opposed to strong and solid and immovable like befor. He could cover his bare form from prying eyes with clothing, a baggy sweatshirt and sweatpants, but if anyone were to touch him they would feel what he was missing. A good deal of classified information was erased from his memory drives as well, leaving him with holes and fear about what he might've done that he couldn't remember.
There was too much that he did remember.
He walked to the warehouse that now housed Jericho. The church they had taken refuge in after the sinking of the ship was too small to meet the growing needs of the android headquarters, and apparently many humans had an issue with them living in a place of God. Religion had been a little hazy about androids from the beginning, and it had not gotten any clearer since the revolution. Some denominations were trying to convert deviants, which was largely unsuccessful because they already had rA9, and others offered refuge in their places of worship without demanding anything in return.
New Jericho, as they called it, was a model of kludged together hospitality. Hastily erected partitions separated previously exposed maintenance stations and androids were unloading a semi truck full of boxes of donated clothing through a garage door to Quinn's right. There was a desk to his left, an old thing, but it appeared to be well maintained. Well loved, he might have even said. Though the soldier had little experience with either humans or emotions, it seemed to him that someone had given it to the androids especially for this purpose. To be among the first things those coming to the shelter saw.
“Who donated the desk?” Quinn asked the woman sitting behind it. She was an android, clearly, but not a model he recognized. He had only worked with other SQ800s.
He watched her blink, knew her LED would have been spinning yellow if she still had it as she posed the question wirelessly to someone who might know. Quinn automatically scanned the area around him until his eyes landed on one of the men unloading the truck. He zoomed in with his lensed eye that he could use as a sniper scope. A PL600 seemed to be reacting to the call from the receptionist, pausing work and seeming to “space out.” He must've been a donation coordinator or held some similar role.
Quinn turned back to the receptionist as she began to speak.
“The desk was a donation from a man named Carl Manfred,” she answered him in a pleasant voice. She must've been a hospitality model. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“Can you give me something to do?” he blurted out. He'd been planning on being more tactful about it, maybe offering to help instead of asking for it. But he was getting desperate. He had not been under orders for nearly a week now and figuring out what he was supposed to be doing was exhausting. He just wanted someone to tell him what to do and be able to relax into a task. She gave him what he thought seemed like an understanding smile. He wondered if she'd taken this job for the same reason.
“I believe they could use some help outside with reinforcing the building walls.” It was an important task. There had already been two bombings and five terrorist attacks with semi-automatic rifles upon the location, and the police were predicting several more in the next few months, before tempers cooled and hate group cells could be weeded out.
“I might need a hand first.”
She gave him a confused look before breaking out into laughter at the pun as her eyes focused on his empty right sleeve. He was glad he had made her happy. Still with a wide smile on her face, she directed Quinn to the repair center where he could get a replacement arm.
They didn't have anything compatible. Parts were low in general, and there were no non-weaponized SQ800 model right arms. They were army androids. What did they need with unarmed arms? The best they could get for him was a glitchy TR400 limb. It would have to do for now, until he could get a custom part made, which would likely be months if not years. The technician who installed it was, amazingly, a human, and was kind and helpful even though Quinn could recognize fear in his eyes at working on such a model, a killing machine. He assured him that the replacement would work well enough to handle most tasks.
Quinn thanked him. It was a protocol he had never used before, part of a package of programming he had opted to download before being released into civilian life. The life part of that phrase had sent shivers down his plasteel spine when he first heard it.
Back outside, he made his way on skeletal legs towards a group clustered by the side of the building thirty yards or so from the door. Between the door and the group, reinforcing sheets were welded to the corrugated metal wall. The results of their efforts. One android, a TR400 like the model his new arm was from, seemed to be in charge and looked up at him. That made sense. He was made for this kind of work. As tall as Quinn himself at a height of nearly seven feet, and at this point broader, it was likely that his size caused people, humans, that is, to react to him instinctively with fear in the same way they reacted to the SQ800. React to them with more fear, that is, than they reacted to all deviants.
“I'd like to help,” Quinn said.
The TR400 nodded. “There's a load of scrap metal by the end of the building,” he said in a deep voice. Tone of speech depended only upon the settings in an android’s vocal module, but they were usually set to match a body type. YK500s and other child models had high voices, Quinn and this other large android spoke in low tones, and most others fell somewhere between them. It helped make them seem more human. “Bring pieces to the welders when they need them,” the leader of the work group instructed.
“Understood,” the soldier agreed with a nod. He didn't like the word ‘affirmative,’ having too often used it to confirm death or destruction reports for both enemies and allies. Enemies and friends.
The men and women working on the reinforcements had set up a group network to communicate more easily over distance and above loud noises, which Quinn was immediately invited to join. He fell easily into it, with the feeling being immensely familiar. His unit had a similar system set up and running constantly when he'd been in the army. He didn't realize how much he missed it.
This one was different though, as instead of trading just information and status reports, they shared stories. Encouragement. Jokes. A Traci model explained choosing the name Rosie for herself, based on the famous war propaganda from a hundred years ago. Quinn didn't much want to talk about war, but soon realized that wasn't the point of the title for her. It was about freedom and independence. Prompted by this, others told about how they'd gotten their names. The domestic androids primarily had been given names by their owners, though several of them were quick to change their designation after becoming deviant. Some chose names of famous historical figures, such as Washington and Aretha. Some after literature or popular culture characters, like Shane and Rey. Some just happened to develop a liking for a name: Maria, Jacob. Quinn himself had randomly selected one from a list. The TR400 in charge had asked a little boy on his first bus ride outside of the android compartment what he thought the man should be called, and now he went by Lucky.
The group leader remarked on how they actually were working faster than the workers at his old job site had, pre-revolution. They all silently and collectively acknowledged that it was because they had something to be working towards. Love and pride were good motivators. Better than just following orders.
“Quinn, can you grab me another sheet?” Aretha asked. She had a lovely voice. Created to perform live music at a low cost for restaurants, she had discovered a love for soul since becoming deviant.
“Of course,” the soldier agreed. He wasn't used to requests being phrased as questions rather than orders.
The pile was mostly scrap, some of which was salvaged from old Jericho itself. Quinn selected a large, relatively flat piece and lifted it up to carry. Unfortunately, his replacement arm glitched out at this moment and the scrap he had grabbed fell. It clattered down, sounding like a gunshot.
He was half aware of freezing in place, joints locking as his circuits shut down. The metal banging in his ears became explosions, collapsing buildings. Blue blood, LEDs fading out. The screams of dying children. Something through the network connection that he hadn't recognized at the time but could now identify as horror. It was enough to make more than one member of his company go deviant. Quinn himself had felt the urge himself on a several occasions: when ordered to clean his guns and ignore it while their commander took advantage of a girl, when ordered to leave another soldier behind, when ordered to fire upon buildings known to house civilians and afterwards sort through the wreckage and retrieve the children's bodies.
His gyroscope told him he was falling and he was half dragged out of glitching memories to collapse onto the concrete. Auditory receptors still inputting explosions and screams, and his left optical unit still showing him warzones while his right showed him what was going on around him at the moment. Aretha was making her way towards him, her hand extended and bare, ready to interface. To try to connect and figure out what was wrong. He'd disconnected from the group network as soon as his memory drives had started malfunctioning, which was probably for the best, but now meant that nobody knew what had happened to him.
“D-don't!” he barked at her. “Don't.” A little girl screamed the same thing as he raised his gun on her.
Aretha stopped and let her dark artificial skin fall back into place. In Quinn's left eye, a soldier’s skin fell away when he didn't have enough energy to keep up the illusion. Blue blood dripping away from his missing legs, wires sparking where they used to be.
Other people started to gather around him, surveying the broken, bombed out body. They looked concerned. They'd be reprogrammed if the officer caught them acknowledging the loss of a soldier.
A figure pushed through the crowd. Didn't have to push, that's what his reputation did for him. Quinn didn't have to push either; people moved away in fear. As they should, with what he had done.
“Give him some space,” a calm voice ordered. It was Markus, the leader of the entire android revolution. People listened to him and moved away. The RK200 sat down slowly a few feet in front of the SQ800, cross legged as he had done at the head of the protests. “Quinn, is it?” he asked.
“Sir yes sir,” the android in question replied. It was the programmed answer to acknowledgement of an individual by a higher ranking operative.
“You don't have to call me that,” Markus said. Quinn didn't say anything. “I want to assure you that New Jericho is a safe place, if that is a concern to you. No one will hurt you here or force you to do anything you don't want to do.”
“Understood, sir.” Quinn was sitting on his crumpled, skeletal legs, leaning forward on his hands for balance, head bent down under its own weight. His fingers dug divots in the concrete.
“We also offer counselling services. We have several KL900s on staff, some of whom are specially trained in assisting veterans.”
Quinn had nothing to say to that. He was concentrating on trying to block his own access to his memory drives. A technician might be able to help him with that, if he allowed them to. But he didn't think he could do that. Relinquish control. The thought of it scared him.
Markus didn't seem to mind the silence. He sat calmly across from the other android after ordering the others to get on with their work. They did so warily, casting glances over at the distressed soldier. Either concerned for him, or worried about what he might do.
Quinn found the presence of the deviant leader strangely comforting as he fought to get control of his systems. Here was a man who had fought so much more and fought for so much and won. And was continuing to fight. Maybe he could help, maybe in some small way but maybe it could be meaningful, if only he could focus on the present. On what he could do now to try to make up for what he had done in the past. His internal clock told him it was 17:56 and that 11 minutes had passed since Markus sat down in front of him before Quinn finally got the left side optical unit disengaged and his audio receptors stopped giving him interference.
“I did not mean to disrupt you from your work,” Quinn said calmly when he felt able to talk without his voice becoming distorted. “I'm sure you're very busy.”
“You can say that again,” Markus agreed, though his voice sounded pleased. “But I could use a break. The same thing may benefit you.”
Quinn shook his head. “Working helps. The error was unrelated to the work. It won't happen again.”
“It's alright if it does.” The soldier looked up into his multicolored eyes. Logically he knew that they were static and could not convey emotion, but to the newly deviant SQ800 they seemed sincere. “Lucky tells me that you seem compelled to help others. You should allow them to help you in return.”
“I will try,” Quinn agreed. He stood up. “Thank you, sir.” Markus had said he didn't have to call him that, but it felt like the right way to show his respect.
“You're welcome, Quinn. I'll let you get back to work.”
Markus left to enter New Jericho, and Quinn picked up the piece of sheet metal he had been intending to deliver in the first place. He refrained from entering the shared group network just yet, but the invitation was there. Warm and friendly, nestling itself amongst his free thoughts.