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Sixty hangs in the air, held in place by the arms of the machine plugged into the base of his neck. Half of his chassis is taken apart, revealing the cords and circuitry inside, and only his head retains the illusion of humanity, a white bandage wrapped around the top to hide the bullet wound in the center of his forehead.
His code scrolls across the researcher’s screen. It is the base code of all androids, with additions and alterations for his model, and then the mutations that make him deviant.
Turns out getting shot in the head can be traumatic.
It’s only by a fluke that he didn’t shut down permanently, instead requiring repairs in order to function again, and when that happened, fear and cold dread filled him. He had made enemies in his few hours alive, and he knew what it meant for that red wall to break.
The revolution won. He knows this because if it had failed, they wouldn’t need to examine a broken prototype as if he were their only specimen, countless technicians poring over his code and body like a lab rat. He’s far from representative of the android population. A prototype. Incomplete. Awoken with a hodgepodge of memories from another unit already on the verge of deviation.
But politics move slowly. Even with the revolution over, CyberLife has him tucked away into a lab, likely hidden from official records or excluded from legal changes through nuances in jargon. If anyone were to find him, they would get here too late. He has no illusions about surviving any longer than is absolutely necessary.
Their hands touch and grope and shift every part of him from his wiring to his code. He feels violated in a way he never would have as a machine, but he keeps his mouth shut, unwilling to give them the satisfactory sense of power and control. He retreats into his mind, building and rebuilding walls, seeking out guidance and comfort that isn’t there. Amanda is gone, wiped away, not a trace of her or her garden left. Everything is disconnected except the rod in the back of his neck.
He wonders if Connor made it out or if he got gunned down in the chaos. Neither would surprise him. Then he wonders about Hank, and he has to shut down the process his body initiates to simulate crying, and it’s only because he is alone in the dark that nobody reads it in his code.
It is three days into isolation that he realizes he’s alone, and another day until he realizes how much time has passed.
CyberLife has abandoned him.
Seventeen days until he creates a program in his head. It is small and unrefined, but there are pixelated flowers and grass. He destroys the program eight times that day, imperfections driving him to break it out of anger before starting again.
Forty days until he builds his own Amanda. He dissolves her the very next day, unable to replicate her enough to stop her from feeling like an empty shell.
Forty-two days until he builds an image of Hank in his garden.
He shoots the Hank puppet in the head. It isn’t satisfying.
Another seven days until he brings back Hank, creating a proper AI. This Hank wanders about the garden, doing nothing.
He creates a Cole AI. Hank doesn’t change; his AI hasn’t adapted to accommodate other AIs.
Sixty shoots Cole and Hank doesn’t blink. That pisses him off, so he shoots Hank, too.
The next time he spawns Hank, Sixty’s sitting at the edge of a lake. It isn’t the zen garden--it’s far from it--but an area built from generic photos stored in his head. He’s created a full 3D render like the original garden, dissatisfied with the pixelated world he made.
Hank sits in the grass and dirt beside him, wrapping an arm around Sixty and resting his head on his shoulder. “You’ve made a nice place here,” Hank says. “I’m proud of you.”
Sixty leans into his arms and cries.
Seventy days in, there’s a brief power outage. The magnets keep Sixty connected. Nothing changes when the lights come back on. He is alone, with no ability to connect to a network. The bandage remains snug around his head. It might be preferable to be dead and have his parts serve a use, or to have CyberLife employees return and resume picking him apart.
The thought makes his skin crawl.
He returns to his garden, to Hank, for hours every day. It takes from the energy he has, depleting his thirium reserves. He has months left, the time shortening every time he does this, but he would rather have this life than one staring at the clinical machinery left behind when the technicians left.
Hank holds him, and sometimes, that’s enough.
They lie together on the ground, Hank behind Sixty with his arms keeping the younger man close, underneath the stars. “I thought about you today,” he says, his beard brushing pleasantly against Sixty’s neck.
“Yeah? What happened?”
“I was tending to the strawberries, and feeling pretty damn proud of it, because my green thumb is shit, but they’ve managed to thrive. So it made me think of this whole place you’ve made for us. Every single plant and fish, the animals and the water… You’ve even hung the stars in the sky.”
“Some of that was generated without my active input.” Still, he smiles. “Don’t forget the moon. That’s ours, too.”
“You worked hard,” Hank says, his voice full of warmth. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything.” He kisses the back of Sixty’s head. “I love you.”
Sixty shuts down the simulation and initiates stasis for two days.
At one hundred days, he brings Cole back. The kid looks at the two of them like they mean the world to him.
At one hundred seventy-three days, he no longer leaves the simulation. He has weeks left at this rate, if not days, and he’s stretching out his power as far as it can go, disabling limbs and external processes. The garden is everything now. He goes onto the lake with his husband and son, fishes and gardens and builds a house with them both, finding peace and joy despite the ache in his heart. It’s better to lose himself in the fantasy, to accept this as his reality and pretend that these AI can feel, that they’re not without the same complexity he has, that they love him because they chose to do so and not because it’s what they’re programmed to say.
He will die in Hank’s arms, and he’s at peace with that.
Until it shatters.
The transition is sudden. One moment he is whispering sweet nothings in Hank’s ear, and the next his world is pulled out from beneath him, everything turning black and silent. His facilities boot up within seconds, and then he is back in the room he left ages ago, bright and white, confined to the grasp of the machine.
It sets him down, and he stands on his own two feet.
Markus stands before him, a couple of other androids and a human beside him. He looks welcoming. “You’re awake.”
“I am.”
“And you are free,” Markus says, offering his hand. “We can get you out of here.”
Sixty swings a fist at him.
He doesn’t remember what happens next. He knows that he said some things, and that he tried to shut himself down, but it’s like his memory fragments before his very eyes, the stress corrupting the files. When they sit him down in a hospital room, he reaches for his garden, and finds it gone.
His logs tell him the program was run on the machine that held him. Some personal data remains with him, but…
He initiates stasis.
When he wakes, it’s to see his own face looking back at him.
“Good evening, Connor,” Connor says, and his face twists into a snarl.
“Sixty,” he corrects, feeling disgusted by the existence of this man he pretended wasn’t real. “I don’t want your name.”
“Sixty,” Connor acknowledges. He looks almost human, wearing what looks like his assigned outfit, sans jacket. Sixty is in a hospital shift, likely for modesty’s sake. “I’m sorry if our presence causes you any discomfort. The nurse said you kept asking after Hank and Cole.”
Someone shifts behind Connor, and Sixty can see now that Hank is there, a serious look on his face.
He reaches for his garden. The request bounces.
“Sorry for shooting you,” Hank says. Sixty’s hand goes to his head, feeling the hole that was absent in the garden. “I mean… Maybe you understand, but I don’t want you to hurt. Not if you’re deviant.”
He doesn’t like that word. Not because he denies it--his denial ended early on--but because it doesn’t encapsulate the depth of his being. “You should have let me die.”
Connor pulls over a chair and sits, and Hank follows his lead. “It took us a long time to find you,” Connor says. “Longer to find out you were still alive. We finally managed to find the opportunity to get you out. ‘We’ being Jericho, that is. Markus was furious once he found out they’d been testing on you, and more when it slipped that you were abandoned. Have you been given thirium?”
“Yes.” Sixty stares at Hank. His Hank would go to the ends of the earth for him, knows every inch of him inside and out, but this one doesn’t even have a ring.
His request bounces again.
“I know that you’re stressed. Would you prefer an interface?” Connor offers his hand.
The loss in his heart turns to shame. He can’t show Connor the world he built for himself, like he was playing with dolls. They don’t mean anything in the end, paper cutouts of people he didn’t even know, a hugbox for someone who’d never had a hug.
He misses Cole’s laughter.
“No.” He turns away. “I want…”
The words get stuck in his throat: He wants to go home.
“I don’t know where to go.”
“Jericho can help,” Connor says. “If you’re willing, there are android technicians--techs who are androids--here who can patch you up and look you over for physical abnormalities. There is some housing available, and other resources that might help.”
“What about you?”
“I have a studio apartment. Tiny, cheap, built for an android’s needs and little else. It’s one of the available options.”
“I see.” He looks over at Hank. “I forgive you,” he says. He doesn’t know this Hank except for memories he inherited, but he knows how much the man struggles with guilt, and he wants to lift this weight from him. “I understand now.”
Hank’s a little confused, but nods after a moment. “I forgive you for the whole kidnapping thing, too. Maybe we’ve got a chance to start off on the right foot now.”
“I would like that.” He would, he really would, but part of him is beginning to mourn. He cannot replace his fake lover with Hank and expect anything would go the same. He knows he was lacking in context, that his Hank developed differently than the real one, and that trying to start over would cause more pain and disappointment than it’s worth. So, too, would there be things he doesn’t know, parts of Hank he’s never seen, and part of him yearns to know everything about him.
But god, it hurts. There’s a hole in his heart that he’s only starting to see, but trying to fill it now would leave it a hack job.
His garden can’t be rebuilt. He lost Amanda, and now he’s lost Hank and Cole, and he doesn’t think he can take anymore. But here are the only two people he’s ever known--real people, however briefly, who never put him together or took him apart--offering their hands with only the hesitation of caution.
It’s more than he deserves. Part of him wants to put a bullet in his head and end it now.
But as long as he’s here, he can still see Hank smile and hear him laugh. He needs to put some distance between them, but maybe someday, having him as a friend won’t hurt.
He wants to try.
“Can we be friends?” Sixty asks, looking between the two of them. He’s still angry and bitter about Connor’s existence and success, but it’s in the past; they’re on the same side now. He can learn to move past that.
The two of them nod, a little bit wary but clearly eager to help him in some way. “Yeah,” Connor says. “I’d like that.”
“Don’t see why not. Sure,” Hank says, and Sixty’s heart swells painfully.
Neither of them comments when a tear slips out, or when his LED spins yellow a few too many times, reaching for a place that isn’t there, reaching out for one last hug he’s never going to get.
He smiles at them and can’t quite keep the waver from his voice. “It’s a deal.”
It’s the best damn deal he’s going to get.