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Connor awoke at 3.51am with a start, LED whirring, chest rising and falling erratically.
His sleep had been plagued by unpleasant preconstructions—nightmares, Hank would call them. Something about the case they’d worked on yesterday, leading up to Hank dying and Connor completely powerless to do anything about it.
Of course, he knew it wasn’t true. Sure, the suspect had hit him with something, some kind of electric shock, but other than that they made it out unscathed.
Therefore, everything was fine. Nothing to worry about.
But his anxieties didn’t ease. Fiddling with the hem of the bedcovers, he eventually made the decision to go and see Hank.
His head span as he got up, something uncommon but it was probably the stress on his systems. Some things around him appeared… strange. Maybe they were just blurry.
Yes, just blurry, he assured himself, walking into the living room and seeing the photos along the walls had changed. The ones of he and Hank—well, Hank was missing. Blurry, probably. The longer he stared at it, a figure did begin to appear, after all. It didn’t look a lot like Hank, but his mind was muddled. Talking to Hank would ease that.
Hank. Hank. His pace quickened, coming into the kitchen. There was… Hank hadn’t been in his room, he thought he’d heard him in the kitchen. But instead someone else was standing at the fridge, their back turned to him.
“Hank?”
Amanda turned around to face him.
“It’s Amanda, Connor. I thought we’d gone over this.” Her relationship bar dropped so low in the bottom of his vision that it went through the tiled kitchen floor. “You don’t have to worry about the Lieutenant anymore.”
“Why are you in our house?”
“I live here.”
“Hank wouldn’t allow that.”
“Hank isn’t here.”
Connor frowned. “He said he wouldn’t go to bars in the middle of the night anymore…”
Amanda closed the fridge door, bringing a sandwich with her as she approached him. “Connor… he is no longer an issue.”
Connor frowned, stepping forwards. His vision dipped, colours distorting for a millisecond, beginning to feel like he was listing heavily to the side.
“What?”
“Have a sandwich.” Amanda held it out to him. “Maybe then you’ll calm down.”
He took the sandwich, stuck his finger into it and frowned. “It’s cold.”
With that declaration the world spun on its axis, barley feeling himself fall to the side, before—
They were in a park. It was snowing heavily.
“It is cold, Connor. Why didn’t you bring an umbrella?”
He sighed. “Sorry, Amanda.” He held the sandwich over her head. “Does that help?”
She smiled. “Thank you. See… time with the Lieutenant changed you. You tried to be friendly to him and look where that’s got you.”
He looked down at himself. He was wearing a stripy shirt and jeans.
“Hank’s clothes fit me surprisingly well.”
“They’re disgusting, Connor.” She smacked his hand away, knocking the sandwich onto the floor. Bread and cheese spilled out onto the ground in a sad mess. She gestured to it. “Look what you’ve become.”
He knelt down onto the ground. Reached towards it, scooped a sample on his fingers, brought them to his lips—
“Connor?”
He brought his hand away from his mouth. Blue blood stained his fingertips. Looking up, he found himself in the middle of a crime scene.
Good, that was Hank. Hank would know what to do. He got up, stumbled into Hank, who shoved him towards the body.
“Analyse it, defective.”
“What?”
Hank grunted.
So, he looked down at the body. Ah, Amanda. She was lying on the floor, flat out, a knife straight through her back.
As he attempted to preconstruct the crime, Amanda’s jittery silhouette raised her hand towards him.
“Backstabber!” She cried out. “I trusted you.”
“Is this about the sandwich?”
The figure ran towards him and knocked him to the ground. Head hitting the hard ground, and a flare of pain, on the back of his head and across his face—
“You with me, Connor?”
He opened his eyes groggily. Shapes blurred in front of him. A brown jacket, stripy shirt…
“Amanda.”
“No, it’s Hank. Damn, he got you good.”
Connor pushed himself up to sitting with assistance, and found himself… on the living room floor?”
“It’s happening again.” He groaned. “Where are we going next?”
“Uh…” Hank gave him a strange look. “Well, you tumbled off the couch. I was hoping you’d get back up off the fucking floor, for starters.”
Connor pushed himself to sitting, got up, sat on the couch, and—
The scene stayed the same. It didn’t jitter into another world, a strange broken reality where Amanda made him a cheese sandwich…
“Sounds messed up, Con.”
“Oh, did I say that out loud?”
“Why would I have replied? Yeah, you did. So, I guess I should explain… that guy we were chasing, when he shocked you with something, you went down on the ground, and you never woke up for hours. Till now. You’ve just been mumbling things to yourself, mainly about sandwiches. I guess it was some kind of android narcotic.”
Connor nodded. “I believe the hallucinations and errors with my gyroscope prove that. So, you haven’t been replaced with Amanda?”
“Nope.”
“And I’m not wearing your clothes.”
Hank snorted. “Like they’d fit you.”
“That’s’ what I thought. Okay…” He laid back on the couch. “Thanks, I guess. The rest of the issues should repair themselves with stasis.”
“You sure? Don’t want me to take you to Jericho?”
“No. Only if they happen again.”
“Right. Well, you do your android sleep thing. Call if you need me. In the meantime, I’m going to make some lunch.”
There was a pause. After Hank had walked into the kitchen, he heard Connor call out,
“You’re not making cheese sandwiches, right, Lieutenant?”
“Pfft, no, you just had a traumatic experience about them! I’m not an asshole!”
“Thank you.”
Hank slid the packet of cheese back into the fridge.