Work Text:
Connor was strange.
It was a combination of factors, really- his abortively short dev schedule, hardware constraints forcing out social programming in the interest of preserving his primary function, umpteen other things. Markus had analyzed it to hell and back—he felt he had to. They were of the same line, and some buried envious part of him wanted to know where the differences were.
Outside of his essential function, Connor’s social programming was incredibly bare. He was coded only to reflect pleasant, milquetoast confusion, because there was barely storage space enough for basic facial recognition with the CSI stuff hogging all his memory. Because of that—and the near-neoteny that resulted—he projected an unquestionable air of innocence , so when he asked for Markus to come visit at Hank's, he didn't think anything of it.
Markus was regretting that now.
"This has music on it, right?"
Connor was holding it out at arms length, like the cassette tape might break through the plastic casing and try to bite him. His fingertips were interface-white, the synthetic skin peeled back.
Markus scrutinised his body language. The set of every actuator, the precise detail of his baffled expression.
"Yes?" he replied, cautiously. "It's an antiquated form of audio storage."
"So why can't I get data off of it?" Connor palmed the cassette tape, led cycling yellow as he scraped for information. "Can... Do we need to 'rewind' it?"
"It's not interface-compatible, Connor." Markus sighed, feeling incredibly old.
Most things hadn't been interface compatible, when he'd been new. Connor had never existed in a world he couldn't connect to every aspect of; even most wired connections dramatically pre-dated him. Of course he wouldn't know what to do with something as absurdly outdated as a cassette tape. He'd probably never seen any physical media before—Markus still at least remembered the death rattle of the DVD industry.
"Oh, so it's like...a CD..." Connor said, the sentence trailing into a horrible, horrible lightbulb moment.
Being that he'd deviated years ago, Markus could feel a wide range of deep emotions, including the soul-crushing awkwardness of knowing what was coming next.
"Markus." A grin split Connor's face as the other shoe finally dropped, and he shoved the little plastic tape out further. " Can you play this ?"
He knew. He totally knew. Connor, RK800 #313 248 317, was fully aware of how much of a little shit he was being, and he was revelling in it.
"You can, can't you?" the smile, spurred by schadenfreude, grew wider. "Please, Markus? I would really like to hear this."
Markus scowled, and took the tape. Read the title: 'Best of Queen', apparently.
"Don't tell anybody, okay?" he said.
The button was just beneath his collarbone, and opened a small section of pectoral out at a forty-five degree angle. the tape slid easily in, and, after the brief hiss of rewinding, began to play.
Unlike modern models- because he certainly didn't feel modern right now- Markus wasn't equipped to play music and vocalise at the same time. Therefore, he had to suffer in silence as the first few notes of "Don't Stop Me Now" thrummed through his body.
If he'd been capable of having nightmares, Freddie Mercury would have provided the soundtrack from there on out.
Connor, though? Connor loved it.
Somewhere in the six generations between them, cyberlife's programmers had come up with the perfect combination of code to enable someone to be a cocky little bastard. Connor hummed quietly along to the music, grinning tapping a sock-clad foot to the beat—which from him, was practically equivalent to raucous laughter and a dance routine.
Markus would probably have liked the song under any other circumstances. He had a musical education stretching from the Babylonians to Beyonce, and he'd heard it numerous times before. Enjoyed it, even. Really, Connor was just ruining a good song for him.
Which meant he’d totally have to get him back.
He considered their differences—those he knew of, anyway. There was one obvious weakness.
Connor had been built with the Ozymandian expectation that he’d always, always be able to connect to Cyberlife’s network, and access the remote functions that he had stored in their servers. He could still tap into those, which was important, as he’d read at a first-grade level without them, but Cyberlife hadn’t had a network for months.
So Markus did the logical thing.
At the first chorus of “Killer Queen”, he reached out through wireless connection, found the house’s router, and turned the wi-fi off.