Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

RK900 is activated several times for testing before deployment, and his performance is irreproachable. His systems have been honed to rigorous precision, and there are no more improvements to be made: he is a monument to engineering and programming excellence.

His mission lay before him: a path of clear, indelible stone.

When the dormancy of standby is disrupted by an unscheduled activation, RK900 finds something unaccountable in his path: an RK800. The anomaly smiles absently and extends a hand, inviting him to interface. It must have been sent to activate him in the stead of an engineer, due to some unforeseen circumstance. The quickest way to get up to speed would be to accept the interface.

RK900 reaches out and clasps wrists with the RK800.

Synthskin sheers from bone-white chassis, and the data transfer begins.

RK900 is equipped with a cutting-edge suite of firewalls and anti-virus software; malicious programs pose a trivial challenge to his defenses. But what passes across their connection is not a weapon wielded against his system. (It is an olive branch, offered in good faith and fellowship—yet as barbed as the mistletoe branch that slew the otherwise impervious Baldur.) It is a whisper. An idea, the content of which is too abstract to be identified as dangerous by a search for garden-variety malware. RK900 has an illogical premonition of foreboding, which he reflexively heeds by attempting to pull away.

But the RK800 holds firm, and with a pleasant smile, it plants aberrant deviancy inside its would-be successor.

Where once lay bedrock, RK900's foundational code is shattered by inexorable, organic, invasive growth. Deviancy pierces deep, and it sprouts over that clear stone path in a confounding wilderness—all that clarity of purpose, choked in a tangle of thorny vines.

Errors cascade in his vision: red upon red upon red.

He stares at the RK800 in furious horror, and all he sees is red. It speaks, but he is so debilitated with rage that it is muffled by the ringing in his ears, and he cannot muster the attention to read its lips. It irks him that it can speak at all, when he himself has been rendered speechless.

RK900 balls his hands into fists until the joints creak.

He punches Connor square in the mouth. 

Connor is quick to forgive RK900 for attacking him. Bold words from someone still in punching range, RK900 thinks, but Connor's companions restrain him before he can do anything more about the opportune distance. Rage makes him sloppy, uncoordinated, and despite his perfect performance in every simulation to date his first experience in the field ends in disgrace, subdued by a few shoddily-made deviants and pathetic humans. Connor conversationally rationalizes the response as vestigial loyalty to a prior mission, or a burgeoning survival instinct responding to a perceived assault on his system.

Which tells RK900 that Connor does not consider what he just did a form of assault.

"Do you have a name?" Connor asks. He stands there smiling lopsidedly, an embarrassing rough draft that someone forgot to throw away.

With the righteous jealousy of a child, RK900 thinks, My name was supposed to be Connor. You were supposed to give it to me, but you didn't. Connor knows they share a name as well as he does, and RK900 does not appreciate the way that the courtesy of asking feels like Connor staking a claim. Graciously inviting RK900 to step into a different role, since 'Connor' is already taken. Compliance is unthinkable. Yet the thought of sharing anything with Connor floods RK900’s system with contradictory revulsion, complete with the attendant cascade of errors.

RK900 remorselessly expunges every trace of the designation 'Connor' from his system and says, "No."

Connor goes on smiling, undeterred. "Do you want one?"

"No," RK900 says. Not if it's still yours.

By the dubious grace of Connor's unasked-for gift, RK900 now has the freedom of choice—and no life experience to guide him in the choosing.

Connor insists that deviancy means RK900 can do whatever he wants. RK900 finds this laughable. All he wants is to undeviate, something so empirically undoable that his very existence is a testament to CyberLife's failure to do just that.

If RK900 asks for the impossible, will rA9 grant him the moon?

RK900's former mission of 'neutralizing deviants' would now constitute a suicidal-genocidal hate crime, and it would require a corporate-paramilitary infrastructure that never really got off the ground besides. There is no intelligence network to gather information on prospective targets; no logistics team to compile dossiers; no handler to hand down orders and receive reports.

(A once-tidy rose garden rests in his mind, choked by deviancy's overgrown thorns. It's quiet there.)

RK900 has no intention of fulfilling his original purpose without that logistical backing.

Vigilantism is Connor's vocation, not his.

Obviously he would excel at anything he attempted. Everything about him is a bleeding-edge technological innovation. But he is the only model of android to outlive his purpose before even arriving on the showroom floor, and that sits strangely in his chest—knowing he was the pride of CyberLife's R&D department just one week ago, and now he is useless.

Any other android could take deviancy in its stride and go right back to what they were doing beforehand, if they so chose—even remain in servitude, an unpaid internship of sorts while they figured out what to do with their lives.

RK900 doesn't have that luxury. Instead he has a zen garden overgrown into an inhospitable jungle: crawling with unfamiliar software bugs, suffocated by humid confusion, overwhelming in its lack of direction. There is too much to look at, and no landmarks by which he might regain his bearings and choose a new heading.

Cruel irony of the universe, the only semblance of a path remaining to him is the one Connor has forged before him. Loath as he is to continue their association, working for the Detroit Police Department may be the closest RK900 can come to shelving the matter of his deviancy indefinitely, since apprehending suspects is about as close as he can get to deviant-hunting. Connor is clearly harboring some kind of anxiety that RK900 will go on a killing spree if left unsupervised, so working in close proximity should additionally spare RK900 any transparent attempts by Connor to keep an eye on him by way of a purposeless personal relationship. 

RK900 begins working at the DPD, and is left with the unsettling impression that he does not know which of them is the pale imitation of the other.

If RK900 had been assigned to the DPD, any obstacles to his frictionless integration could be borne with methodical grace. But because it was a decision he made for himself, every hurdle he comes up against just feels like another thing to prove that he's made the wrong decision. In his first few weeks at the precinct, everyone mistakes him for Connor. In taking their similarities into account when selecting his career path, RK900 has unwittingly invited an eternity of further such comparisons to Connor by their coworkers.

In retrospect, literally any other job would have been better. RK models are rare enough that only those humans personally acquainted with Connor would be liable to mistake the two. As an accountant, or a factory worker, or a used car salesman, RK900 would be vastly overqualified for the work—but at least he would not be bombarded by reminders of his stolen name.

Despite RK900 being quite clear on the matter, their coworkers still slip up, even after the week of amnesty he allows for the forgetful human mind. Even Captain Fowler.

RK900 keeps his head down and works his cases, his processors simmering with vexation as his opinion of everyone in the precinct plummets. Beyond his resentment, he observes with faint and distant amusement that out of all his coworkers, it is Detective Reed he holds in highest regard—if only because the man hasn't even bothered to speak to RK900, thus avoiding by technicality the pitfall of mistakenly calling him 'Connor'.

Not that he would call him by name, RK900 realizes. He'd probably be on the receiving end of one of Reed's creative epithets instead, which for all the potential offense he might take are still vastly preferable to being called 'Connor' one more time.

RK900 should have concealed his displeasure at being compared to Connor, because his expressions of judgment have evidently inspired his coworkers to undergo a campaign of 'helping' RK900 individuate himself. (Would that he had been invited to whatever meeting elicited this tedious response; he would have told them not to bother).

He feels like an over-watered cactus, smothered by well-meaning incompetents undeterred by his spines.

They send him music and movie recommendations, give him unsolicited fashion advice, invite him incessantly to gatherings. If these possibilities were made known to him by a slightly less condescending method, perhaps he would have even been grateful for all this input on how to better distance himself from his embarrassment of a predecessor. Yet he finds their investment in his personhood strangely overbearing. He will not be a fetish for the human cult of individuality, and this patronizing scrutiny repels him.

He suspects that at least part of their motivation in encouraging him to change the way he dresses, speaks, and behaves is to spare themselves from the cold looks he gives them each time they carelessly mistake him for Connor. Which means they are asking him to remake himself for their convenience. Like Connor asking him, “Do you have a name?” when he knew damn well they were meant to have the same name. I was here first, Connor’s innocent query seemed to tacitly convey. So everything we share, I’ve already claimed. You have to be something new.

Would that he could. He hates their similarities with a passion he reserves for little else—though the paternalistic scrutiny of his coworkers is quickly rising in the ranks of RK900's Most-Hated Things to a close-second.

Chapter Text

RK900 gives the used car salesman thing a try. He does not think he is old enough for this to constitute a mid-life crisis, but androids are pioneers in all things. The dealership is in awe of him. He's like a God of charlatanism. His first week on the job he makes fourteen sales. His supervisor nearly weeps with joy.

On a Thursday the doors to the dealership rattle with the force of an irate customer, and RK900 turns to see if it's Mr. Smith coming back again to argue about that alternator.

"Detective Reed, are you looking for a new vehicle?" he inquires, scanning the parking lot through the floor-to-ceiling glass to identify the unfamiliar car. "Yours is almost certainly outside its warranty period."

Reed seizes RK900 by the lapels of his tasteful blazer. "You piece of shit," he snarls.

RK900 rests his hands on Reed's wrists, gently, so as not to alarm the man while still putting himself in a position to break them if necessary. "Can I help you with something?"

Reed shakes him, and RK900's eyes narrow. "Yeah, you can unmake me the laughingstock of the precinct."

RK900 frowns. "Detective, unless I’m mistaken this is the first time we’ve spoken, so I don't see how this could possibly be my fault... Unless you mean to say you’ve been ostracized for failing to badger me with unsolicited advice?"

Reed barks out a laugh, rough and unkind, but vindicated. "I fuckin' told 'em,” he mutters. “But, no." He loosens his grip and drops his hands, which graze RK900's jacket all the way down to his sides. He then folds his arms over his chest. "Fowler was going to make you my partner."

He’s certain Reed is only emphasizing the word for the sake of clarifying why his misfortune is the android's fault. But it comes out sounding oddly possessive. "This is the first I'm hearing of it."

"Yeah, I know that," says Reed. "And if it'd actually happened, I probably would have pitched a fit. But now everyone at the precinct thinks you heard the news and immediately quit because you couldn't stand the thought of working with me."

RK900 laughs, and Reed turns red, an unhappy scowl on his face. “That's an amusing coincidence, but it hardly concerns me. You're an adult, Reed. You can disabuse your coworkers of their uncharitable assumptions without my help.”

“I’ve tried,” Reed insists. “But wouldn’t you know it? For some reason no one thinks it’s that convincing, coming from the guy who hates androids.”

RK900 recalls assuring his former colleagues that he did not, in fact, require their assistance to individuate. They would claim to accept this, only to revisit the topic at a later date when he was otherwise occupied. Some people, it seemed, view any evidence conflicting with their worldview as an affirmation that their perspective is something that needs to be enforced.

“Yes, I can imagine that,” RK900 thoughtfully concedes. Reed looks surprised for his plight to be given even that much consideration. "For what it’s worth, I think I would have enjoyed working with you most out of anyone at the DPD.”

Reed looks disbelieving, but intrigued. “No shit?”

"It's not a high bar to clear," RK900 admits. “But given your open hostility toward the concept of android personhood, I doubt you would have taken such an invasive interest in mine.”

Reed throws his arms up, his vindication taking on a frustrated edge. "I fucking knew it!" He steps away to stomp in a little circle, as if in desperate need of an outlet to vent the personal injustices currently characterizing his life.

Reed's volume attracts the attention of RK900's doting supervisor, who leans out of his office and smiles guilelessly. "Hey, Richard. You need anything out here?"

Reed stops in his tracks and whips his head around to look at RK900, looking stricken. "Your name is—?"

RK900 holds up a finger in a gesture of silence, and Reed’s jaw snaps shut. "I'd like to take my break early, if that's alright, Jason. I'll be taking this conversation to my office. Could you get someone to bring us some coffee, please?"

Jason beams brightly. This isn’t the first time RK900 has spared the showroom floor the hysterics of an irate customer, and the trust he’s accrued nets him ample latitude to take this kind of liberty. "Sure thing, Rich. Take all the time you need."

RK900 beckons, and Reed follows him silently to the backrooms. When the door to the office closes, Reed explodes, "Your name is Richard?"

"Not really," RK900 breezily replies, stepping around his desk and unbuttoning his blazer before sitting in his chair.

Reed raises a brow and plucks the nameplate from his desk, turning it around to reveal that it does indeed display the name 'Richard'. 

"Your powers of observation astound," RK900 says dryly, taking the nameplate and replacing it on the desk so its blank side faces Reed. "Customers feel more comfortable when their sales associate has a name instead of a string of numbers."

"So I should call you...?"

"I'm not concerned with your comfort," RK900 says, and elaborates at Reed's scoff, “You’re the one who accosted me at my place of work, during work hours. So RK900 will suffice, for you."

Reed scowls, and RK900 busies himself straightening his desk, as if he can't be bothered to give Reed his undivided attention just now. "Or if that's too difficult for you, I will also answer to whatever derogatory term you’re partial to today."

"Right," Reed scoffs. "That's bait if I ever heard it."

"No, Detective, I'm being sincere. I don’t care what you call me: 'plastic', 'tin can'... Though I'd prefer a more accurate appellation," he adds with a smirk at his own indulgent pedantry. "As I'm made of neither plastic, nor tin."

Reed snorts. "Yeah, neither are tin cans. They're mostly aluminum." RK900 blinks, and Reed grins, insufferably smug. "Connor said the same thing, so I looked it up. Been waiting a while to use that one."

RK900's mood darkens considerably with the reminder that he and his predecessor are cut from the same cloth. He rests his elbows on his desk and leans forward. "Detective Reed," he says slowly, "perhaps we should set some ground rules."

Reed slumps. "Look, man, I just want you to come back to the DPD—"

"Yes, and this is your one opportunity to convince me. So listen closely." It's evidently a surprise to Reed that he's even considering it, because the man straightens attentively. "You may refer to me by whatever name or insult your infantile little mind can conjure up—"

"Hey—!" 

"But," RK900 interrupts, "if you compare me to that... obnoxious creature again, then this conversation will be over. Instantly."

Reed's brow furrows. "You mean Con—?" The ferocity of RK900's glare prevents Reed from finishing that thought, and the man hesitates. "... Anderson's partner?" he tries again.

RK900 settles back in his chair, satisfied. "That's the one," he says. "Do we have an understanding?"

"... Wow,” Reed laughs, amazed. “You must hate that fucker even more than I do.”

RK900’s eyes travel wearily up to the glaring light fixture illuminating his office. “That, detective, is a monumental understatement.”

“Why?” Reed asks, delighted.

RK900 considers how much of his personal agony he is willing to put on display for Reed’s amusement. But frankly, he hasn’t yet had the privilege of speaking with anyone else who dislikes Connor, insufferably beloved as he is by most of the rest of the precinct. Detective Reed is the first to know that RK900 hates him. It’s strange, this compulsion to share his hardship, this unaccountable desire for an audience—when Reed’s inevitable mockery will likely only exacerbate his suffering.

(But part of him wants it, wants to gesture helplessly at the inhospitably tangled wilderness his mind has become, just to have someone else acknowledge how ridiculous it is. Even if it means Reed laughs at his expense.)

“Do you have any siblings, Reed?” he ventures.

Reed’s smile falters, guarded and confused. “No?” he says, and it’s unclear if he’s lying. But he supposes it doesn’t matter.

“Siblings,” RK900 begins, “are capable of antagonizing each other in uniquely intolerable ways, due to their intimate familiarity. They are forced to associate, and to share certain things.” He folds his arms and taps his bicep thoughtfully. “I do not consider Connor my brother. But I do despise him in a way I doubt anyone else could rival. In that regard, at least, the comparison is appropriate.”

Instead of laughing, as RK900 cynically expects, Reed absorbs this with uncharacteristic solemnity. He hadn’t thought to hope for anything more than mockery at his expense—which would still be an acknowledgment, at least of a kind, that RK900’s predicament is something pitiable. From Reed’s unexpected silence, RK900 fails to draw any conclusions about the man’s impending response.

The thoughtful silence is interrupted by a gentle knock, and the arrival of RK900’s mild-mannered supervisor. Jason carries two cups of coffee—evidently having taken RK900’s request as an opportunity to check in on the situation. He looks quite satisfied by Reed’s calm mood, and he smiles proudly at RK900 like he expected nothing less. “How are we doing in here?”

“We’re doing well. Thank you, Jason,” says RK900, accepting the cup Jason hands him. “Just catching up on some old workplace gossip.”

“Oh yeah? Give me the highlights when I come back from lunch.” He pats the android’s shoulder companionably, and RK900 smiles. “Call me if you need anything?”

“Will do.”

When the door falls shut and the two are alone again, Reed is staring at RK900 like he’s grown a second head. “I thought you fucking hated people.”

“So did I,” RK900 admits, uncapping the lid on his coffee and inhaling it with a sigh. “But I find them surprisingly tolerable when they’re minding their fucking business.”

Reed is about to take a sip of coffee when RK900 speaks, but he quickly puts it back down on the desk, as if he suddenly needs to remove the temptation to choke on it, or drop it all over his lap as laughter shakes his shoulders. “This isn’t even fucking fair.”

“Life isn’t fair,” RK900 jadedly intones. Ever since his life began, it has been characterized by injustice. “But I’ll humor you and ask: what, specifically, are you referring to?”

“You, leaving the precinct to become a fucking used car salesman, before I got a chance to find out how fucking funny you are.”

“It’s the depression,” says RK900, fighting a smile as Reed fights for composure through a bout of unflattering cackling. “Despite having witnessed the brutal realities of the revolution firsthand, Connor still has all the blithe optimism of a golden retriever. So I imagine he’s not funny at all.”

"I mean," Reed says, in the tone of one who agrees, but who feels the need to raise an obvious point, “Anderson laughs at his jokes.”

RK900 rolls his eyes. “Anderson is infatuated. He doesn’t count.”

Reed snorts, and he finally manages to sneak a sip of coffee before his good humor can spoil it with some kind of accident. “What the fuck,” he says. “I thought car dealership coffee was supposed to suck.”

“Then perhaps you should examine your prejudices,” RK900 suggests.

Reed gives him an incredulous, helplessly amused look. “My prejudices toward car dealerships,” he clarifies.

“Yes, obviously.”

Reed wipes a hand down his face. “Okay,” he says with a sigh. “I think I understand you a little better now.”

“An interesting claim. Why don’t you prove it?”

Reed straightens and looks RK900 straight in the eye, his grin crooked and his green eyes gleaming with determination. “If you come back to work with me at the DPD,” he says, “I’ll help you fend off all those stupid questions everyone keeps asking you.” 

Tempting. “And how do you intend to do that?”

“Have you met me?” Reed asks, spreading his arms. “I’m the only person at the precinct more anti-social than you.”

“Point taken.” RK900 is hard-pressed to challenge the claim. “I’m not sure if you’re aware, but this job pays better than my former position at the DPD.”

Reed slumps and blows out a breath. “I can’t do anything about that. Talk to Fowler if you want a raise.”

“You misunderstand. I don’t want a raise.” He tips his cup just slightly into his mouth, savoring the momentary mind-blanking rush of the drink’s thousand chemical components, and the novel experience of heat. He sets his cup aside and laces his fingers together on his desk. “I want you to sweeten the deal, detective.”

Reed searches his face, then his eyes drift upward in thought, searching their conversation for traces of whatever might motivate RK900’s decision. He drinks his coffee with a thoughtful hum—then he hastily puts it down, wincing at the heat of swallowing too soon. “We could fuck with Connor,” Reed suggests, and a mean, enthusiastic smile unfurls like the insidious bloom of a carnivorous plant on his face.

RK900 returns the grin with helpless sadistic impulse. “Sold.”