Work Text:
You know the dream I’ve been telling you about: a little flower peddler
in Persia gives his tulips names. My recognition system nearly goes haywire
with electromagnetic waves. The humans would call this a hunch.
- Jon Stone, “WHAT ROBOTS MURMUR THROUGH BROKEN SLEEP”
-
A robot must protect its own existence, so long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
-
John crouches, presses his back against the rock and tries to think through the unsteady rhythm of gunfire. He stabs his knife into the medic droid’s leg and rips downwards, cutting back the skin that surrounds the bullet hole. He doesn’t have his tri-wing screwdriver. He doesn't know why he doesn't have it, but it is not where it should be tucked safe in its pocket over his chest.
John and the droid are wedged between two big rocks, out of sight and the spray of loose dust. Safe, for the moment. But out there the rest of his team is still under fire, and if any of them is hit the medic droid is going to be useless. John presses his hand against its thigh and peers into the wire and artificial muscle inside the robot's body.
His hand comes away bloody. He looks in horror at the slick redness sliding down the palm of his hand.
When John looks down again, it's not an android bleeding into the dirt. It's Sergeant Peters whose leg is shivering under John's hands. John is trained in first aid, more extensively than the average soldier because of his role in maintaining the medic droids. It's his job to stay with the med droids in the field, string them back together if they break, and help keep injured soldiers calm while the droid does its job.
He is not trained for this. Peters will bleed out here in the between these rocks. John can fix any droid you send his way if he has the right tools, but he cannot fix a human.
He applies pressure. His hands are slippery and hot with Peters's blood. He braces himself on Peters's thigh and says, "I'm sorry." Because it's his fault. Because he stood in the London School of Robotics twenty years ago and decided to be a roboticist, when he could have been a doctor. And now he can't save Sergeant Peters.
The bullet that breaks John's shoulder open ricochets off the rock and lodges in bone. He doesn't feel it at first, but then he finds his hands slipping away from Peters's leg, the right hand landing in the dirt and the left limp and shaking. Even if Peters were an android, John couldn't save him now.
This is what John dreams about before he meets Sherlock Holmes.
-
John spends his first few weeks living and working with Sherlock suppressing an ecstatic, joyful delight. He harps about the dead cat in the freezer to disguise his gratitude, and makes a lot of cups of tea to conceal his wonder.
Sherlock is the kind of robot John and his uni friends used to dream about building. Not because he passes for human--though that was a goal in itself, for some people--but because he performs an incredibly useful service that humans cannot do. He solves crimes and he saves lives. If he’s turned his politeness subroutines off to do it, well, it’s up to somebody else to have an argument about prioritization.
Sherlock is the most amazing robot John has ever had the pleasure to work with. The fact that his existence violates all the regulations in the book is a drum of injustice that beats against the inside of John’s skull. His mind says, this is wrong, and not fair. Sherlock is what robotics should be doing. Working with Sherlock is essentially what John envisioned for his robotics career.
He is finally making up for ten years lost to the Safe Robotics Act.
-
3 March, 2081
Sherlock shuts the refrigerator door and turns to the kitchen table. He tidies it a bit, putting two stray petri dishes onto a tray, shifting an unwashed Erlenmeyer flask. What’s the point? The samples aren’t becoming cross-contaminated, and he knows where everything is. John likes it when things look “tidy.” A very imprecise term. Sherlock spent two weeks in February studying John’s use of it--what state the flat has to be in for John to consider it “untidy,” which forms of untidiness John dislikes, which he puts up with, which don’t bother him at all, what kind of tidying John would like Sherlock to do.
Result: John dislikes untidiness when it is composed of clothing or food-related dishes and when it occurs in the bathroom. The few days Sherlock spent eliminating possible variables to determine whether there is anything John doesn’t mind cluttering the bathroom correlated with an increased number of heavy sighs. John puts up with scientific equipment and anything else Sherlock can pass off as work-related. He doesn’t mind books.
Studying John’s habits and domestic vocabulary is not strictly-speaking a scientific inquiry--at least, not one with any larger implications for science--but it keeps Sherlock occupied between cases. He’s never had so much unrestricted access to a single human before.
10:14. The sound of the front door opening and closing again, and John’s feet on the stairs. Long-catalogued--the sound of John coming in is so familiar Sherlock recognises it almost instantly, distinct from anyone else’s footsteps.
Sherlock leaves the petri dishes and moves into the living room. He straightens the blanket over the back of John’s chair and sits at the desk, removing his com from his dressing gown pocket. The creases in the screen fade more slowly than they should when he unfolds the com; he may need to upgrade. Inconvenient, but he’s been eyeing the new Lantos model from OriCom. It may offer new integration possibilities with Sherlock’s system.
John comes in through the kitchen door, his arms full of shopping bags. He looks for a clear surface to set them on, and then gives up and puts them on the floor by the fridge. Sherlock watches out of the corner of his eye, pressing his fingerprint code into his com.
The com is a distraction, but not one which can eclipse the unexpectedly central place John now has in Sherlock’s world. John is fascinating. Everything about him is interesting--even the mundane, even the routine. Sherlock watches him flex his hands, working out the stress on the joints caused by carrying the shopping. He has yet to say hello; Sherlock runs a quick analysis of the probable point at which he will start talking to Sherlock.
Sherlock has never found humans so interesting before. It’s his function to study them, their crimes and mysteries. They are baffling enough to be worth the effort, but they have never interested him. He is now forced to consider the theoretical possibility that the only reason he has never seen the enormous amount of data to be gained from a single human is because he has never looked closely enough. He’s never had the opportunity. Most of the humans he knows avoid him when they can; the few exceptions show him only scattered parts of themselves, not enough to form what Sherlock now realises is a complete human.
Sherlock’s limited sample size ought to bother him more than it does, but when there’s so much to be learned from John he has no time to find anyone else who would let him get as close as John does.
Out of the corner of his eye, Sherlock sees John open the refrigerator.
The refrigerator closes again.
John takes several audible breaths and opens the door again. “It’s a head,” he mutters. He closes the door again. He turns around and stalks into the living room, rounding his own chair and standing on the far side of Sherlock’s. “There’s a head in the fridge.”
Sherlock looks up, putting a mild and innocent expression on. “It’s only fair I get to use my share of the space, and since I don’t eat...”
“It’s a bloody head!”
“Well, where else was I supposed to put it?”
John half turns, clenches and unclenches his fists. Sherlock smiles. He does have an experiment to run on the head, but part of the appeal of that particular experiment was the opportunity to see how John might react to the head. “I’m measuring the coagulation of saliva after death,” he offers.
John heaves another loud sigh and puts his face in his hand. Then he turns and goes back into the kitchen. Sherlock watches him open the refrigerator and, carefully not looking at the head, put all his shopping in the shelves on the door of the refrigerator. He slams the door again when he’s done.
“You should get a minifridge and put it in your bedroom,” John says, as he wads up his canvas shopping bags and shoves them in one of the cupboards under the sink. “It’s not as if you use it for sleeping.”
“Hm.” Sherlock considers this suggestion. John often makes surprisingly good suggestions--Sherlock is prone (well, not prone--programmed) to choose the most straightforward answer to problems, but John sometimes goes a step out of the way and reaches a more widely-amenable conclusion. It’s an interesting phenomenon. Sherlock is quite able to think creatively at this point, but he is less able to usefully overcomplicate things the way John does.
Sherlock’s prediction that John’s next move will be to make tea is borne out by John’s path toward the cupboard where he keeps the tea bags. Instead of finding John tediously predictable, Sherlock finds him pleasingly consistent. And Sherlock’s own reaction to John is one of the many ways that living with a human is nothing like Sherlock expected--that at least was unpredictable.
The muscles in John’s forearm become visible when he carries the 65% full kettle from the sink to its base next to the cooker. Even John’s body is fascinating--messy, fragile, and marred as it is. There is nothing about John that Sherlock finds uninteresting, though he’s keeping up a front for John’s peace of mind (John doesn’t like the feeling of being studied).
Sherlock devotes his auditory sensors to John and turns his eyes back to his com, reading through his messages. It has been four days since they had a case. John begins exhibiting more signs of restlessness the longer they go without a case, and Sherlock welcomes the variety cases bring. Additionally, he has suspicions that spending all of his time cataloguing the minutiae of John is dangerous. He risks taking John as representative of all people, or cluttering up his files with data that is not useful.
None of Sherlock’s messages offer proper cases; most aren’t worth even a response. Only one catches Sherlock’s eye, and only because his humour analysis suggests that John will like it.
“What do you know about parakeets?” Sherlock calls.
John looks up from his box of tea. The rustling of packaging and tea bags stops. “Parakeets?” John repeats, uselessly. “Birds, colourful, kids keep them as pets. That’s about the lot of it.”
“A woman called Cynthia Malarkey wants us to find her missing parakeets.” Sherlock navigates back to the text of the message and reads to John, “‘Dear Mr Holmes, I heard about you from my sister, who reads your friend John’s blog. I have looked the blog up and seen the photos of you both, and I think you are very attractive young men. Perhaps that will help you find my parakeets as they are fond of attractive men and don’t get to see enough of them living in my flat.’” Sherlock rattles this off without pause, and then turns to look at John, who is holding a tea bag pinched in one hand. His mouth twitches slightly and then expands into a delighted grin.
“What do the birds like best, your soulful eyes or my dreamy smile?” John asks. He turns back to the worktop and dumps the tea bag in his mug. He laughs--more a snicker, but these categories are inconveniently ill-defined. “Are you going to find her birds?”
“Of course not. It’s obvious her nephew borrowed them for the independent film he’s making.”
“Of course he did.” John finishes making his tea and brings it into the living room, sitting in his armchair. He toes off his shoes and bends down to line them up on the side of the chair. Some of John’s habits are so routine it’s almost as if he, too, is a robot. Only in the most trivial ways, of course. He’s entirely human where it matters.
-
After six weeks of living with Sherlock John makes the surprising discovery that his old friend Mike Stamford is responsible for Sherlock’s presence in the London School of Robotics the day John and Sherlock met.
John discovers this absolutely by chance, after leaving Baker Street in a huff to go for a walk in Regent’s Park and get away from Sherlock making a totally unnecessary mess in their bathroom. He likes taking walks these days. He can feel all the muscles in his leg working like they should, and he likes that he has something to walk away from and a reason to go back again after an hour’s wandering.
“John! John Watson!”
John turns, surprised to hear his name. He wouldn’t have put it past Sherlock to come after him, but he knows Sherlock’s voice when he hears it. And anyway, Sherlock would be more likely to suddenly appear beside him than to call his name.
“Mike Stamford--we were at the LSR together.” And John is having his hand shaken by a man he dimly recognises as a version of the Mike Stamford he used to know. It’s been fifteen years.
"Yes, Mike, hello. What are you doing here?"
"I live up the north side of the park now. Wife and two kids. You?"
John wonders briefly what to tell him. "I'm living down on Baker Street with a flatmate, Sherlock," he says, going for basic and innocuous information. He’s been calling Sherlock his flatmate, because it is by far the least untrue thing he can say about their association. He’s tried colleague, on cases, because it makes him feel less like he’s just tagging along. It’s sort of an accurate term. Sherlock introduced John as his friend, two weeks ago. It was so strange to hear a robot say that that John automatically corrected him.
"Not Sherlock Holmes?" Mike exclaims.
Maybe not so innocuous, then.
They get takeaway coffees and sit on a bench. It's a bit stilted. They were never such good friends that they can pick up again as if the intervening fifteen years haven't happened. John doesn't know anyone he can do that with, actually.
"I heard you were abroad somewhere getting shot at," Mike says finally. "What happened?"
"I got shot," John says, trying to make it sound like a punch line. There's nothing visibly wrong with him anymore, people assume he's okay. Mike even laughs a bit.
"And Sherlock Holmes? Have to say, mate, I'm a bit blown away you're living with him." Mike pauses, giving him a long and surprisingly sharp look. John wonders if Mike knows more than his genial, unassuming appearance would suggest. But John always wonders what people think about Sherlock. He’s not quite paranoid, just wary. "On second thoughts,” Mike adds, “you were always a bit unusual. Stood out. Maybe it's not so surprising. How did you meet him?"
"Wandered into the lobby of the LSR a couple of months ago, there he was. He practically recruited me." John says this like it's simple, but actually it strikes him as a bizarre twist of fate that, against all probability, struck him. Something wonderful and dangerous.
Mike sits back against the arm of the bench, looking oddly delighted. "It's me that lets him in there," Mike says. "Teaching now, discovering just how much our professors hated us. And we must've been worse, they let us get away with all kinds of nonsense back then that you can't do now. When was this, January?"
"End of, yeah." In fact John remembers the date.
"He came in to talk to me, told me he was looking for a good maintenance tech who'd put up with a lot. I might even have suggested you if I'd known you were back in town. And then he walked out and found you in the lobby?"
"Must have done," John says. "I thought he was crazy at first. But thanks for that, it's been good living with Sherlock."
"Imagine that," Mike says. "Listen, we should go for a drink some time."
-
John is kneeling on the floor, Sherlock’s left leg propped up on a kitchen chair in front of him. His hands are knuckle-deep in Sherlock’s calf. He nudges aside a bundle of wires (Sherlock’s toes twitch) and yanks on the broken part of the central steel bone.
“Move your head,” Sherlock says. “You’re blocking the television.”
"Look, do you want to be able to walk or not?” John asks. He picks up his tri-wing screwdriver and presses his thumb to the lock. It clicks open, and he selects one of the smaller tips.
Even after three months, doing Sherlock's maintenance is still exciting. It’s still nothing like John has done before, nothing like he ever dared to hope he'd be able to do after the regulations tightened his last year at university. Nothing like the little army reconnaissance robots or even the more complex medic droids. It wasn't the robots that kept John interested in the army.
The repairs he has to make to Sherlock are comparatively mundane--usually they wait until after the shooting has stopped--but they're exciting in a way army robots are not. John is excited about robotics for the first time in years.
But there is Sherlock the android, and then there's Sherlock his flatmate, the Sherlock who is currently watching Connie Prince on telly. The Sherlock who this afternoon fell off a second-storey fire escape onto the edge of a skip and put an enormous dent in his calf.
John glances at the telly, where Connie Prince is talking to a woman with colour-changing eye implants about how to dress for her eyes. It’s impossible to watch anything with a plot with Sherlock. He spoils endings, he rips apart the logic of the story, he questions the characters’ motives and, worse, consults John on whether or not they seem realistic. John got him into watching crap telly by accident, after Sherlock realised that reality television showed “a fascinating slice of humanity not otherwise available for study.”
It's a bit of cognitive dissonance, doing maintenance on Sherlock while he watches ridiculous telly.
John applies the driver to one of the screws holding the bone in place. He ducks his head down, more so he can see the inside of Sherlock’s leg than to get out of Sherlock’s line of vision. The flap of skin John cut away to access the bones hangs down, brushing against the side of the chair.
“You should really be more careful,” John mutters to the inside of Sherlock’s leg. “You get hurt more than any robot I’ve ever met and I was a roboticist in a war zone.”
“What do you think I have you here for?” Sherlock asks, turning up the volume on Connie Prince. “I told you it’s inefficient to be careful.”
It's not that Sherlock has no sense of self preservation, because after all he's still a robot, complete with the Third Law--a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws--but he's less trapped in that law than most robots. He is capable of deciding when it is worth it to risk himself, at least in theory. In practice he has had a huge array of injuries since John met him, and John's not convinced that particular bit of risk assessment doesn't need recalibrating.
But John doesn't make changes to Sherlock that Sherlock doesn't ask for. Sherlock has never asked for adjustments to his programming. So far all the maintenance John has done has been mechanical. From what John knows about Sherlock's function, programming maintenance should be relatively unnecessary anyway. He's built to learn, to evolve as needed.
John removes his hands from Sherlock’s leg and sits back on his heels. “What happens if you injure yourself somewhere public and you end up with wires hanging out of you in front of all of Scotland Yard?”
Sherlock finally looks away from the telly and meets John’s eyes. “There are contingency plans in place,” he says.
John shakes his head and goes back to Sherlock’s leg. This is so illegal. Sometimes this hits John. He’ll be doing the shopping, or chasing Sherlock chasing a criminal down an alley, or here in 221B with his illegal tri-wing screwdriver in his hand and his hand in Sherlock’s wiring, and he’ll remember that Sherlock is a robot with fingerprints and a name and John is a roboticist working without a license.
But he's doing the kind of job he wanted to do the first time he stepped into the London School of Robotics. He's working with a robot that can do things humans can't to make the world better, not just a robot that can do the same job as a human but with a more durable body. It feels like redemption, like the last ten years of John's life in a world that no longer trusts intelligent robots or the people who build them aren't such a waste after all.
John shakes himself out of his overwhelming and uncomfortably grateful thoughts and smooths Sherlock's skin into place. He pinches the corners of the flap and pushes on the edges, waiting for the skin to knit back together. It never fails to make John uncomfortable, cutting into Sherlock with a scalpel, but he has to admit the technology that enables it is amazing.
Sherlock tears his attention away from Connie Prince and leans forward to look at his calf. The seam has almost disappeared, fading in among his sparse dark leg hair.
"Well done, John," Sherlock says, in a tone that somehow slips past “condescending” and edges in on “warm.” Not fully comprehending the words, John gets to his feet, knees cracking. They should really have some kind of work bench for maintenance. A morgue table, maybe? It wouldn’t look that suspicious, given Sherlock’s usual activities.
John catches sight of Sherlock’s face looking up at him, and thoughts about making maintenance more convenient fly out the window. Without any real action, Sherlock crosses the boundary between being the robot for which John is responsible and being John’s flatmate. He is intent on John’s face, looking searchingly up at him but without the sharp focus of deduction. The voice of the guest on Connie Prince’s show rises and falls incomprehensibly in the background, an ordinary and familiar sound of their lives in 221B.
“All right?” John asks. He steps back. He’s still holding his screwdriver; he tightens his grip on it, reminding himself what he’s doing here.
“Yes. Fine.” Sherlock bends forward, taking his foot off the chair and rolling down the leg of his trousers. He stands. John watches his feet flex against the rug. “You were going to make a cup of tea,” he says, and John remembers that yes, he did intend to make tea after he finished repairing Sherlock’s leg. But there’s something too comfortable about making tea now. Sherlock won’t drink tea, of course, but drinking tea while Sherlock watches telly is too companionable.
Sherlock carries the chair back into the kitchen, turns on the kettle in passing, and then walks back past John and sits in his armchair. And just like that, the boundary is invisible again. He’s Sherlock, John’s flatmate and partner in crime-solving.
John’s grip on his screwdriver loosens. He steps to the desk and puts the driver in the bottom drawer. Then he goes to make a cup of tea.
-
29 March, 2081
The doorbell rings. A precise three seconds pressing the button, that means it’s Mycroft. Sherlock scowls (what for, no one here to see it) and sets down the pipette in his hand. John is out--Mycroft seems to avoid him.
Sherlock moves into the living room, putting his hands into the pockets of his dressing gown (contents: two memory chips, a rubber band, and a precisely folded tissue). He takes a book off the shelf and sits down, affecting a look of absorption in the book. Mycroft won’t believe it, but it annoys him when Sherlock pretends not to be aware of his presence.
Mrs Hudson answers the door. She’s polite to everyone, but she’s intelligent enough not to trust Mycroft, even after only four meetings (Mycroft knows better than to be too frequent a visitor). Unfortunately, she still lets him up the stairs.
Mycroft is carrying his umbrella, as always. It's sunny out. The uselessness of it grates on Sherlock.
"Good morning," Mycroft says, picking his way through the flat towards John's chair. He's making the face Sherlock has associated with rubbish and messy crime scenes in his catalogues.
Sherlock turns a page. This is John's book, one of the textbooks Sherlock made him take out of his army trunk and put on the shelf. John likes paper books. They’re inconvenient, but they do furnish the room. Sherlock’s furnishings--the skull on the wall, the chairs more comfortable than functional--annoy Mycroft. He expected a robot who would live in an empty white room and sit on basic chrome chairs, if it sat at all. "Get out," Sherlock says without looking at Mycroft.
"Oh, Sherlock. Are your politeness subroutines malfunctioning?" Mycroft sits in John's chair. Out of the corner of his eye Sherlock sees the tilt of irritation about Mycroft’s stiff knees.
"Not relevant. Get out of my flat."
“Technically it’s John Watson’s flat. You know robots can’t legally own property.” Mycroft’s all-too-evident enjoyment in taking digs at Sherlock’s legal status as an android is a recurring annoyance with Mycroft’s visits. It’s Mycroft’s fault that Sherlock exists in the first place, and Sherlock wouldn’t put it past him to have had some kind of hand in the legal structures of robotics that make both Sherlock himself illegal and bar him from any kind of independent rights.
Sherlock turns another page in his book. He's already scanned this particular book for any useful information. It's just a prop. Like Mycroft's umbrella, only far less stupid.
"Well," Mycroft says, flicking the tip of his umbrella. "I have a case I would like you to solve."
"Obviously. You only bother getting out of your office chair when you really want something. The answer is no."
"You haven't heard what it is yet."
Sherlock looks at him. Forty-two, occupies a minor position in the British government as a front for less publicly acceptable government work. Responsible for Sherlock’s existence and still believes himself entitled to Sherlock’s aid. Inaccurately, of course. He long ago failed to make the best use of Sherlock’s functions; Sherlock can more efficiently and more productively work without him. The fact that he still considers himself relevant to Sherlock is a continuous source of irritation and tedium. And he’s a liability.
“Sherlock!” John’s voice. Preceded by the sound of the street door slamming, followed by John’s footsteps. He’s taking the stairs two at a time. Good, that means he’s cheerful. Or worried, but his tone of voice precludes that possibility.
John comes through the open living room door, breathing slightly heavier than usual. Not as heavily as he would have when he first moved in to Baker Street; he’s in better physical shape than he was before he started solving cases with Sherlock.
“I got your pancreas,” John says, extracting a temperature-control bag from his pocket and waving it at Sherlock. “But you’re kidding yourself if you think I’m going to pick up body parts for you again. People kept bumping into me on the Tube and I could feel it squishing in my pocket.” He begins to cross the room to hand the bag to Sherlock, when he stops short, seeing Mycroft. “Oh. What’s he doing here, Sherlock?”
“John,” Mycroft says, nodding. “How nice to see you.”
Sherlock snorts.
“Yeah,” John says. “In person, you mean, since I’m sure you see me all the time when you’re following Sherlock around with the CC-TV.” John smiles, false politeness. Despite the fact that John’s only recent contact with Mycroft has been through Mycroft’s interference with Sherlock, he seems to be able to read Mycroft’s insincerity very well. Sherlock is pleased with his perception.
"Yes, well." Mycroft purses his lips. John hands the pancreas to Sherlock.
"I'm not doing it," Sherlock says. "You can leave now."
"Perhaps you can persuade him, John. He seems to take your advice very seriously."
John clenches his left hand and unclenches it again, visibly making himself relax. "If Sherlock thinks you should leave, you might as well leave. I'm not making him do anything he doesn't want to."
John has previously expressed frustration with Mycroft's interference in Sherlock's life--and by extension, in John's. Some of Mycroft's more tedious and childish habits of getting in Sherlock's way inconvenience John as well. John sets his chin; he's already standing at parade rest, his face has something in it Sherlock's emotional recognition systems analyse as determination. He's been waiting for the opportunity to face Mycroft, Sherlock realises.
"I'm not making him do anything." Mycroft reaches into his waistcoat pocket and pulls out a memory card, small and rectangular and silver. "I was merely suggesting it would be in his interest to solve this case."
"You don't care about any case if it's not in your interest to solve it--or rather, to have it solved," Sherlock says. He sets the pancreas on the arm of his chair, fingers tapping against the plastic bag.
"I won't deny it also benefits me," Mycroft says. He holds up the memory card. "I have the file here. Andrew West. Found dead on the tracks at Battersea Station with his head smashed in."
"Jumped in front of a train?" John suggests, clearly interested in spite of himself. He crosses his arms, still standing. With Sherlock and Mycroft both sitting, John has a height advantage he is obviously enjoying.
“Of course not,” Sherlock interrupts. “Even he doesn’t bother me with cases that simple.”
“The government is working on an experimental new robotics development project--the Bruce-Partington Programme. The designs were on a memory card, rather like this one.” He holds the memory card between the first two fingers, looking at it.
“That was stupid,” John says. There’s a belligerent tone to his voice.
“It’s not the only copy. But it is secret. The designs are for true-humanoid autonomous androids, quite beyond the legal restrictions on robots. If built, they would pass far more than three of the Robot Limitations Tests.”
“The public’d go nuts if they found out about that,” John says. He’s tense, Sherlock can see it in his neck. “Christ, the government building illegal droids.” He shakes his head. Anything to do with public attitudes to robotics makes John uncomfortable; Sherlock has observed this on multiple occasions. It is undoubtedly the result of years of the stigma and fear surrounding robotics, but it seems to affect John more than most roboticists of whom Sherlock has had the opportunity to make an assessment. “Bad enough they’ve got government employees building illegal droids,” John adds, raising his eyebrows at Mycroft. “And I’d take Sherlock over a government-controlled droid any day.”
“Yes,” Mycroft says, making a face of distaste. “You’ll see, Sherlock, why solving this case would be in your interest. The plans on that memory card bear more than superficial similarities to your own design.”
Unsurprising. There are only so many ways to build a robot that can pass for human, and the way Sherlock is built must at this point be the most proven. This is hardly the first time the government has done secret research into advanced robotics. The initial design for Sherlock had to come from somewhere; Mycroft is a genius, but not a roboticist.
John looks between Mycroft and Sherlock, frowning. “You think it’ll endanger Sherlock if those plans get published?” he asks.
“Of course. We believe West had that memory card. It is now missing.”
“No,” Sherlock says. He stands up and takes the bagged pancreas into the kitchen, opening the refrigerator and putting it on the shelf John has labeled “Sherlock’s experiments ONLY.” When he turns back towards the living room Mycroft is also standing, staring at Sherlock. “What?” Sherlock snaps. “I’m not solving it.”
“Surely you’re capable of computing the risk to you, should those designs become public.”
“Yes. And it’s your man who lost those designs, so you can deal with it.”
Mycroft still has the memory card pinched between two fingers. He looks at Sherlock for a long moment, still holding it, and then sets it down on the table next to John’s chair. “If you change your mind,” he says. There’s an odd sound to his voice, an absence. He lacks the air of controlled performance he usually has. Sherlock can’t determine the source of it. Mycroft is used to Sherlock refusing to do things for him--Sherlock never agrees unless he has no choice. There’s nothing new there, nothing that should surprise Mycroft. It’s a minor puzzle, but Sherlock has no intention of spending any resources on Mycroft. “Good day, John,” Mycroft says.
John doesn’t answer.
As soon as Mycroft is gone, Sherlock moves back into the living room. He examines John, still standing with his arms crossed, neck stiff. John is looking at the memory card on the table. “I wish you could get rid of him for good,” John says, visibly forcing himself to look away from the memory card.
“Yes. He poses a risk to you, as well.”
“That’s not--” John takes a deep breath and shakes his head, loosening his tension. “Not the point.”
The point? There are twenty-six reasons why Mycroft is both an inconvenience and a threat to Sherlock and John. All of them are relevant; there is no “point.” Mycroft is one of only two people who know Sherlock is an illegal robot, and that information is dangerous in his hands as it is not in John’s. Mycroft knows John is a roboticist working without a license, in possession of an unregistered tri-wing screwdriver. The fact that he had Sherlock designed and built to pass for human, flouting the most strict and unquestioned robotics regulations, is immaterial. Sherlock and John have more to lose than Mycroft does.
Sherlock leaves the memory card on the table and goes to prepare his experiment with the pancreas.
-
30 March, 2081
"Six years ago, a young robotics student--LSR, well-respected by his teachers and fellow students, would have had a good career provided he didn't get disillusioned like the rest of you--got drunk, fell off the platform in front of an oncoming Underground train. Apparently."
"I don't remember that," John says, frowning. Oh, feeling guilty, thinks he ought to know about the welfare of the next generation of roboticists.
"Why should you? It was an accident, just another drunk student. And you were in Afghanistan at the time."
"But you remember. I mean, of course you do." John glances at Molly, leaning on the other side of the work bench. John is careful how he talks to and about Sherlock in the presence of others, and Molly pays enough attention to Sherlock that John is especially careful around her.
Molly angles herself toward Sherlock. She's trying to appear more eager to hear him talk. More eager than John--since John's arrival in Sherlock's life Molly has demonstrated a marked upswing in her bids to gain Sherlock's attention. Jealousy--Molly used to be a convenient source of social information. Being socially awkward herself, she was never surprised by Sherlock's lack of knowledge about social matters. Sherlock still values her input, but it's so much more convenient to ask John.
"I was there at the time," Sherlock says. "On the platform. Coincidence. But now, I suspect, not coincidence."
John snorts, disbelief. "You never take the Tube." Oh, he's getting distracted.
"John, you have known me for exactly two months; you don't have the evidence to know what I 'never' do."
Molly glances between them and then opens her mouth tentatively. "So there was something fishy about it?"
"He was barefoot. Nobody else thought that was odd. He was drunk. His friends couldn't remember him taking his shoes off, but then they were drunk too."
"So these are his shoes," John says, with a sudden shift of his arms that tells Sherlock he's suddenly grasped the depth of the situation.
"These are his shoes," Sherlock confirms. "So why did someone want to murder a second-year robotics student, and why am I being given the evidence necessary to prove he was murdered?"
-
Found. The Bruce-Partington plans. Please collect.
Holborn, platform 4. 00:30
-
John wakes up in an alley. He is lying on his back, and he can tell it’s an alley because he can see a narrow strip of sky framed by the bulk of two buildings. He’s warm. He blinks hazily up at the darkness, too calm. Why is he so warm?
A face looms into John’s vision, impossible to see clearly in the dark. “Oh good, you’ve joined us!” it says, and the distant familiarity of the voice makes the face resolve into something more visible.
“Jim?” John asks. His mouth is dry.
“You remember me! I’m so flattered. Sherlock would, of course, but I didn’t know if I could count on you.” He leans back. “Do stand up.”
John gets heavily to his feet. He looks down at himself, and discovers that he’s so warm because he’s wearing a parka with a furry collar and--oh, God.
“Noticed that, have you? You’re quite fashionable--the latest in robo-chic. Or, well, explosive-chic.”
John wakes up properly then, takes stock of his surroundings. An alley, partially blocked from the street by rubbish bins, dimly lit by a street lamp. Jim, wearing a posh suit and a leering grin. A large bloke who looks like a minion, helping the bins block the exit route. Behind John, the alley dead-ends with a big brick wall too high for John to climb.
“Who are you?” John asks, knowing he can’t do anything until he has more information. He feels like Sherlock for knowing that, for thinking incomplete data.
“Jim Moriarty. Hi!”
“Mor--” John sucks in a breath, suddenly understanding. “Jim. That sex bot, the one Jefferson Hope was using to kill people, it was named after you.”
“Good! Very good. I wasn’t expecting you to remember that, with your tiny little drugged human mind.”
“And the--Carl Powers, the Hickman's security robots, that was all you too." John squints at him, trying to match him up with the Jim they met at Bart's, or the Moriarty John is only familiar with as a sinister name and a series of crimes.
"You have been paying attention, haven't you?" Moriarty grins and puts his hands in his trouser pockets.
Something clicks suddenly in John's head, and Moriarty becomes recognisable, not as a criminal mastermind or Jim from IT, but--Jim from IT. John recognises what he is, not the way Sherlock does, left thumb or tie, but from hundreds of unidentifiable clues familiar from twenty years spent socialising almost exclusively with roboticists.
"You built them," John says. "The robots. You stripped the First Law of Robotics out of that sex bot. You killed Carl Powers because he--what? He knew what kind of robots you were building?"
"That's me! Jim Moriarty, consulting roboticist, at your service." Moriarty sweeps a flamboyant bow and straightens up.
"And you're going to blow me up," John says flatly, gesturing at his chest where explosive hangs heavy and waiting. John can feel all his muscles tense at once at the reminder, and he tries to relax but only manages to flex his hand around a weapon he doesn't have. "Kind of tame, isn't it? Not going to make a robot kill me?"
"Picky, are we? I'll have to see what I can do about that one. Now!" he claps his hands and rubs them together like a caricature of gleeful evil. "Chop chop. We have to make our appointment."
The man blocking the alleyway steps toward John, and John takes the opportunity to get a better look at him. Laser gun on his hip, concealed by the hem of his jacket. Considerably larger than John, and muscular.
Not that John can take his chances, with a bomb strapped to his chest and a busy street just beyond the mouth of the alley.
Moriarty's minion steps around John and grabs the scruff of his neck.
"Now, don't be naughty, or I'll have to do something even naughtier with that bomb. We're going on a little trip."
John is pushed towards the street, and as they get closer and his eyes adjust, he realises with a surge of horror where they are. It's the Marylebone Road. The entrance to the Baker Street Tube station yawns bright across the street.
-
“I don’t have a heart,” Sherlock says. Moriarty knows what Sherlock is--of course he does, he’s been making digs about it since John woke up in that alley. But for Sherlock to admit it like that makes John’s hands clench, empty and helpless. John closes his eyes--
“But we both know that’s not quite true anymore,” Moriarty says
--and John opens his eyes to a world which has both subtly and massively changed.
-
"Are you all right?" Sherlock gasps around the words. His long fingers are on John, a frantic scramble to undo the explosive vest. It slides across the tile floor, loud and heavy, and John stumbles, his knees giving way.
"Oh, Christ." John sinks down onto a bench against the wall of the platform. He watches a Sherlock he's never seen before, a Sherlock who is not in control of where his feet are moving or what he's doing with his hands. Sherlock has the remote robot disabling device John modified in the dark months between Afghanistan and Sherlock. He's so distracted that he's scratching the back of his head with it. And the RRDD isn't that modified--it can still disable a robot, as well as a human. It shouldn't even be possible for Sherlock to point it at himself. "Sherlock. Sherlock. Are you okay?"
"Me? Yeah, I’m fine, I’m fine. Fine."
John stares at him, at his fingers on the smooth metal of the RRDD and the RRDD sliding against the back of his neck. This is a Sherlock that isn't supposed to exist, one born the moment he stepped onto the empty Holborn Underground platform and saw John, and stark betrayal transformed his face. This is a Sherlock who looks so human it makes John's ribs hurt. And the terrible thing is that John can tell the difference between Sherlock's flawless acting and this.
He’s babbling.
"That... thing that you, er, that you did; that, um ... you offered to do. That was, um... good."
John wants to laugh. It wasn’t “good.” He just tried to sacrifice himself to save a robot. He’s human. The Three Laws of Robotics require Sherlock to save him.
But it doesn’t actually bother him, what he did. Because Sherlock is babbling at him, trying to thank him, fumbling with the RRDD and the explosive vest. Because the look on his face when he first saw John is a ghost in John's eyes, and now when he looks at Sherlock he sees it again and wonders what else might be there. Somewhere in Sherlock there is something inexplicable that seems to make anything possible.
John once killed a man to save a robot. Now he has shown that he’s willing to die so a robot can live. But that’s not it, not exactly. John doesn’t kill humans to save a robot--he kills humans to save Sherlock. And even now that John has had a good look at the most robotic parts of Sherlock--at his wiring, at his metal bones and programming--he’s still just Sherlock.
Which is why John understands for the first time in his painful and stifled career why it is illegal to build a robot that can be mistaken for a human.