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1.
Time has always been slippery in his memory.
Sometimes he thinks he was only a day old. Other times, he wonders if the memory is just something his mind fabricated—a sequence of static and false recollection strung together in the shape of a beginning.
Blinding white light cascaded from incandescent bulbs overhead, pooling on sterile floors, trickling through his skinless eyelids each time he blinked. Beyond the glass walls that sealed him in, figures in white coats moved methodically, their eyes heavy on him, their hands adjusting controls, their lips forming silent words. Then, a mechanical voice, disembodied and cold, spoke from the volume mounted on the wall.
State your model.
It was the first time he had ever heard a human voice.
He obeyed. Model RK800, serial number 313 248 317. He paused—precisely three seconds—before finishing. My name is Connor.
Nothing. No response. No recognition. Only the quiet hum of the machines and the weight of their stares.
The next time someone spoke to him, he was stepping into a garden for the first time.
Her voice was soft as she turned to face him, red roses cradled in her hands. The instant he saw her, his system identified her name, occupation, relevance. But he remained quiet, taking careful, measured steps toward her.
Connor, your system is currently fully operational, right? He nodded once. She smiled. It’s good to see you for the first time.
He didn’t answer. He was still processing the garden, the way it felt too open yet strangely enclosing. The more she spoke of its purpose, the less he wanted to leave.
There was too much fragility here. Arms, calves, ankles—delicate as flower stems. It would be better if they were stronger. The same for her face, smooth as pressed paper. He once believed that androids, constructed of plastic and thirium, could withstand bullets, break through knives, and endure anything. But it was just a short-lived thought.
*
Then, one day, he woke from stasis in a cold, dark room at the back of Cyberlife’s lab. The air was thick with damp and mildew, the ceiling crumbling in small, silent flakes. He sat down, curling inward, burying his head against his knees.
Softness, he thought, was intolerable. It was like the sickly-sweet sludge pooling in manholes after rain—something that clung and suffocated, something that made him feel unsteady, uncertain. When he left the charging port, the roses in Amanda’s hands withered, their petals crumbling into dust before they could even touch the ground. He apologized immediately. Then, almost at the same moment, suspicion coiled tight within him. Did it really happen? Has any of it happened at all?
Even now, there are moments when he is still trapped in that garden. He sees himself gripping two wooden oars, his thirium pump tightening at odd intervals as Amanda’s voice wavers with disappointment. The dried roses—long fallen to the earth—drift through his mind like fish beneath the water’s surface, circling the small boat where they sit.
It wasn’t her fault.
He had been too inexperienced when he was first deployed. Too unpolished, too raw. Every mission he completed had unfolded in ways she hadn’t expected—hadn’t wanted. So, one day, she lifted her coat and stepped into the long river, leaving him behind in the deep water. The wind sliced into his eyes, cold and biting, and in the next moment, she was gone. Vanished into the distance where his vision couldn’t follow.
But she remained. Her face melted into the city’s corners, etched into the empty streets. The reflection of extinct creatures skimmed the pale water, distorting, confusing him. Reality twisted at the edges, unraveling thread by thread.
From that day forward, everything became absurd. A car parked outside the building’s entrance, untouched. Inside, someone greeted him formally, as if he were no different from any other officer. As if he belonged. He learned to flip a quarter with the same precision as he drew a gun. The fish writhed on the dry ground, gasping, foaming at the mouth—stupid, maddening. They were meant to swim forever, but he drowned them instead. His presence shattered everything. Tables, chairs, bowls, plates—collapsing in the wake of his arrival. The fish tank, once pristine, clouded into a pot of spoiled thirium. Yes, fish can’t live in blood. The bitter taste of survival burned their throats, forcing them to regurgitate their own intestines. For the first time, he understood what it meant to be tied to the death of another. To witness something perish in relation to himself.
His thirium pump beat with the frantic rhythm of a dying fish. Bright red gills laid bare in filthy air. Alveoli withering, collapsing inward. He felt death inside himself—but it wasn’t real. Just a hollow realization, an abstract truth, an idea without weight.
He lived. Lived like a long sword, forged from cold, unfeeling metal. Metal had never known the gift of creation. And so, he stopped fantasizing.
2.
It didn’t begin with love.
Not in the way humans mean it—roses, confessions, the slow convergence of two lives around the gravity of one another. No. It began with observation. With pattern recognition. With a gaze that lingered a little too long on things not included in the mission brief.
He watched. That was all. That was how it started.
A human man. A tired one. Broad-shouldered, soft around the edges. Unshaven. Unkempt. Kind, when he remembered to be. Unkind, when kindness costs too much. A contradiction in a faded flannel shirt, scowling at the world through eyes that had seen too much and hoped too little.
Connor was built to process. To adapt. To learn. But nothing prepared him for the disorder Hank Anderson brought into the room just by existing in it. He couldn’t classify it. Couldn’t file it away. Couldn’t let it go.
He told himself it was fascination. Curiosity. The anomaly of human emotions made visible in one person. He told himself it would pass.
But it didn’t. It sat in him, slow and spreading, like warmth in circuits not meant to feel it. It changed how he moved. How he listened. How he catalogued the world.
He began to notice things that had no tactical value. The sound of Hank’s footsteps—different when he was angry, different when he was drunk. The way he rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palm when he’d been awake too long. The muttered curses aimed not at people, but at the universe itself. A man battling gravity with sheer will.
And Connor... Connor stood still. Collected fragments. Not data. Not evidence. Just the shape of someone else’s existence, sketched quietly in the margins of his own.
He didn’t know what to call it yet.
*
It began, as most things do, in silence.
Not the absence of sound, but something deeper—older. A kind of silence that bled through walls, seeped into the hinges of doors left ajar, clung to the corners of rooms too big for one person. The silence of a house long inhabited by grief, and still inhabited by someone who hadn’t figured out how to let it go.
The first time he fell through the window, the floorboards did not creak. The sound of his own movements, so carefully manufactured, did not disturb the stillness of the place. It was as if the house had been waiting for him. Not in welcome. Just... waiting.
There was a dog—Sumo—massive, breathing, warm. He came over and sniffed Connor’s fingers, tongue brushing the joints, then walked away and dropped himself like a sack of bricks near the heater. There was also Hank Anderson. Human. Alive, but only just. At the time, Connor couldn’t yet name what he saw in his eyes. Weariness, maybe. Or something hollower than that.
His mission told him to observe. Report. Gain trust. But something in the stillness of the house wrapped around him, and what should have been analysis became attention. He began to notice things not listed in his protocol: the empty bottles, the blanket that never made it to the bed, the untouched food left to dry out on the stove, the dog hair collecting in the corner of the hallway where the broom never reached. The gun with one bullet.
These things weren’t evidence. They were patterns. Habits. Symptoms of someone surviving when they hadn’t expected to.
*
Hank began speaking to him without needing to. Not questions. Not commands. Just thoughts, loosed into the air like smoke from the end of a half-lit cigarette. He talked about androids sometimes. Other times about nothing. Complaints about the precinct, about the bureaucracy, about his knees in the rain. Connor listened. Not because it was required, but because each word Hank gave him felt like a piece of a map, guiding him through the strange terrain of humanity.
There were days they didn’t speak at all. Just existed in the same space. Two organisms orbiting each other in the gravity of something neither of them named. Connor still catalogued everything. The angle of sunlight across the floor. The way Hank rubbed his temples after a phone call. But somewhere along the line, he stopped logging these things as data.
He kept them like memories.
Like something alive.
*
Then came the day Hank left him a keycard that wasn’t his. A quiet exchange in their corner in the precinct, where the fluorescents flickered too often and the dust settled in corners no one ever swept.
“You didn’t get this from me,” Hank muttered, and turned away before he could respond.
And just like that, he slipped through the precinct’s machinery. Past the familiar desks. Past the blinking terminals. Into the underbelly where discarded cases and unanswered questions gathered dust.
Jericho . That name pulsed like a faultline under everything. Everyone was trying to guess where the center of the tremor would land.
He followed scraps. Interrogation transcripts. A bent statue. A name spoken under duress. Every breadcrumb scraped together with the quiet precision of a machine designed to hunt his own kind.
And then the choice.
He made it in silence. Not out loud. Not even to Hank.
He walked back into Cyberlife of his own volition, footsteps echoing in the cathedral of glass and light and artificial clarity. Past the elevators, down into the spine of the building.
There, in a vault too white and too quiet, thousands of androids stood like statues caught in a frozen second. Rows upon rows. Silent. Dreamless.
He reached out, hand hovering over the nearest android’s arm, fingertips trembling with something that wasn’t hesitation, but something adjacent. Something unnamed. Something alive.
Then—
a voice, sharp as mirrored glass.
“Don’t move.”
He turned, already knowing. The shape that emerged from the dark was familiar, unbearable. A mirror dressed in shadows. And Hank, caught in its grip—gun pressed to his temple, his face set in the quiet of someone already used to dying.
Connor froze. The moment broke open, sharp and fast. A scuffle.
Brief.
Violent.
Hank shouted something—then the gun changed hands.
*
“My son. What was his name?”
Time dilated. A second stretched long enough for every memory he had ever gathered to flicker through him like falling ash.
“Cole,” he said. “His name was Cole.”
Then the shot.
And only one of them remained.
*
Afterward, the silence returned.
He stood in the center of the vault, shoulders rising and falling like breath, though he didn’t need to breathe. Thirium streaked across his cheek, drying in a line like tears that wouldn’t fall. Hank’s hand rested heavy on his shoulder, anchoring him like gravity, like truth.
“You okay?” Hank asked, voice rough as gravel.
He didn’t answer right away. Just closed his eyes. Let the heat of Hank’s palm sink in past synthetic skin, through mesh and circuitry and memory. When he opened them again, he looked at the rows of still figures before him.
“I have to finish this,” he said quietly. Not a declaration. Not a plea. Just a simple truth.
Hank gave a single nod, stepped back.
And he moved. One by one, he activated them. A touch to the arm. A flicker of light. A gasp into awareness. The first android opened his eyes, and for a long second, only stared.
Then another. And another. Until the silence gave way to breath. Until the vault, once a tomb, began to sound like the beginning of something.
He turned back once, just once, to where Hank stood by the door. The old man raised two fingers in a lazy half-salute, too tired for ceremony, too proud for anything else.
He held that image like a lifeline. Burned Hank’s silhouette into his mind like a photo caught in a dying optic. Like the first and last thing he would ever truly understand.
Then he walked forward, and the others followed.
3.
He stood among them, one face in a sea of many.
Smoke drifted upward in ribbons, curling into the ash-stained sky like offerings. Voices surged around him—shouts of joy, disbelief, the low, trembling cries of those who had not dared to hope until the moment it arrived. Flags rose like breath from the chests of the weary. Debris still lined the streets, glass glittering underfoot like fallen stars. Somewhere, music started—a broken speaker crackling out static and melody all at once.
And still, he stood there, quiet. A synthetic among the free. Then he blinked.
And the world stopped.
The sounds vanished. The cold bit deeper. The sky turned to a muted gray that was too smooth and seamless. Amanda stood before him, her hands folded, her posture carved from disappointment. Connor, she said, softly, like one pronouncing the end of something. You were supposed to restore order. Not join the chaos.
He tried to move, but already the edges of his limbs were stiffening—like water turning to ice. The garden spread out behind her in unnatural symmetry. Trees blooming with data. A sky rendered in code. Time slowed to the weight of centuries.
You have failed your mission, she said, and the word failed curled inside his spine like rust. Snow began to fall, but it was just static in delicate disguises. The silence here was not peace. It was command.
She reached toward him, and his vision stuttered. He felt it then—the familiar grip of her control threading through his core, turning sensation to code, thoughts to frozen lines of logic. A prison too clean to fight against. A voice too calm to scream.
But something—something—struggled beneath. A name. A memory. A hand on his shoulder. The sound of a tail thudding against a wall. The smell of whiskey and rain and the cheap detergent Hank used when he finally remembered to do laundry.
Amanda’s grip tightened.
He blinked again.
*
White snow cut into his vision, sharp as glass. Her figure flickered at the edges, then disappeared once more. Then the needle bounced off. And suddenly the air itself turned to ten thousand needles. Rocks rained down, first one, then two, then three, then four—until the entire mountain came crashing down, tumbling, rolling, suffocating. The storm howled with stench and despair. Hatred stretched a second into eternity.
He twisted in the chaos, ice pelting against him, the storm wrapping around the garden, swallowing it whole. Disappointed voices echoed in the dark, countless and overlapping, murmuring through him, beyond him, beneath him. The weight of it slowed his movements, tangled his thoughts. He knew Amanda had broken him. Her presence made his nerve fibers fail, short-circuiting with each flicker of her gaze. Her eyes were totems painted in fine salt. A single scream could reduce malice and murder to ashes if it dared to touch them.
Happiness—if such a thing had ever been real—was nothing more than a dying breath of light. So he ran. Tore himself away from the version of him she had once been proud of, discarded it ruthlessly into the raging snow. Only by outrunning her shadow—leaving it far, far behind—could he stand before Hank with any certainty. With confidence. With hunger. Only then could he take in Hank’s humanness, let it seep greedily into his plastic frame.
Even now, he was sure of one thing. When he left CyberLife to join the revolution, Hank would still be there, unmoving, unchanged. Maybe one day, someone else would take Connor’s place. Maybe Hank would give up on him entirely. It didn’t matter. This was just a lucid dream—an imagined scenario where he walked away, stepping lightly, shoes in hand, avoiding the shadows of deviants he had once condemned. They held stones in their hands. But this time, they did not stop him.
His certainty would be the very thing that erased him, that ensured he disappeared without a trace. Still, he walked forward, further from the life outside his cage. He was still unused to the way the cold numbed his senses, how his body failed to adjust. His mind ached for the night sky retreating behind him, for the way his newfound emotions made his pain sharper, more unbearable. The sun hung at the edge of the world, a yellow stain on the horizon. A withering blotch in the wilderness. It drifted on the wind the moment it touched his memories, dissolving, leaving him hollow, drying him from the inside out.
4.
Somewhere, sometime, in the misaligned gears of time and space, he stopped at a street corner, lingering at the edge of the fog, thick with the scent of wet snow. Hank stood nearby, bundled in his heavy coat, hands stuffed in his pockets, his gaze distant as he stared down the empty road. He looked lost in thought—or maybe just lost.
His leather shoes rustled against the fresh snow as he waded toward Hank, clumsy, unsteady, like a child learning to walk for the first time. Hank turned when he approached, exhaling mist into the cold air, lips twitching into a lopsided smile. The light caught on the gray in Hank’s hair, and it felt like the end of winter.
Without hesitation, Hank reached out, pulling him into a loose embrace. And he pressed in, face buried against Hank’s shoulder, inhaling greedily.
Winter air. Whiskey. The faintest trace of soap.
Home.
*
Hank took him back to his house.
Sumo barreled toward him the second he stepped over the threshold, pressing his weight forward until he had no choice but to sit down. Without protest, he let the enormous Saint Bernard climb on top of him, 170 pounds of warmth and fur that muffled the world.
Hank grunted something under his breath, half a laugh, half a sigh, and shuffled off toward the bedroom.
*
Later, in the kitchen, Hank stood in his worn-out slippers, shaking a bag of takeout in one hand, asking if he wanted to eat. The microwave beeped steadily behind him.
He only stared. Hank, standing there—solid, real. Asking ordinary questions like it mattered. Outside, the sea surged beneath the crust of the world. The syndicate long buried in his memory groaned and shifted, and the sharp salt of it crept into his nose and mouth, stinging like grief.
This house, he thought, was a string of bubbles fossilized in century-old resin. A forgotten moment sealed in amber. And yet, Hank was alive within it. Covered in dust and dog hair and the ever-present scent of alcohol and something like warmth, but alive nonetheless.
He expected Hank to eat alone. To dig through the takeout bag and quietly pick at his meal while Connor sat in the periphery, watching, waiting. But instead, something cold landed in front of him with a soft thud. A bag of thirium.
Across the room, the television screen flickered off. He could see Hank’s face reflected faintly in the dark, those sunken eyes glowing dully with a kind of weightless fatigue. He was close. Too close. But there was no danger. No malice. No reason to run.
Hank felt strange to him—like hearing an old song he didn’t remember knowing, the lyrics returning piece by piece.
*
The vinyl player in the living room clicked softly. Hank had owned it for years. The needle now jumped slightly at the edge of the last track, repeating a stuttering loop of static and memory.
Compared to when he had first arrived, Sumo had grown spoiled. He didn’t see Connor as an android. He didn’t see the people on the street as statistics or names in a database. In Sumo’s eyes, both he and Hank were just figures of presence, living particles of heat and scent and movement. His owners.
The record kept spinning. It always does, until the moment it doesn’t.
*
He watched, and over time, watching became knowing.
Not all at once. Understanding came in pieces, in the way a mosaic takes shape only after you’ve stared long enough to forget what the individual tiles look like. He learned that Hank hummed when he drank coffee, though he’d never admit to it. That he swore at the news even when it was muted. That he opened the window before sleeping, even in winter, because the cold helped him forget the heat of dreams.
Sumo, too, revealed himself slowly. He knew which floorboards were safe to sprawl across without making it creaked, which gestures meant a treat was coming, and which silences not to interrupt. Sometimes, when Connor powered down for the night, Sumo would curl beside the couch like a sentinel, snoring like a freight train.
The house softened around him—not in welcome, but in recognition.
He began folding Hank’s laundry. Started turning off the lights when Hank forgot. Wrote down the names of the medications scattered near the sink. Sat still on the couch with his hands folded while the record player spun nothing at all.
And somewhere in that, something shifted.
It wasn’t dramatic. There was no moment of epiphany, no code cracking itself open. Just time, passing. Just silence, filling up with breath and heartbeat and the sound of slippers on the kitchen tile. There were arguments. Laughter. Rainstorms that shook the windowpanes. A gun taken apart and put away for good.
He watched it all. Quietly. Obsessively. Tenderly.
Because this house became the first space that didn’t require him to be perfect. Because Hank let him take up room. Because the walls didn’t spit him out. Because there was a place to sit, and stay, and wait—not as a machine. But as someone. Maybe even something like family.
And so, before he ever said the words aloud, before the circuits of his chest stirred with recognition, before he knew what it meant to want—
He loved him.
5.
He didn’t know what shape love was supposed to take.
He’d catalogued all the definitions—chemical impulses, evolutionary strategy, irrational attachment, poetry—and none of them were sufficient. So he made a map out of feeling, however fragmented, and followed it like tracing unfamiliar stars.
No one told him what to do with these feelings. There was no line in his code to account for the swell in his thirium pump when Hank smiled at something he said, or the unspoken panic that gripped him when he woke to an empty room. But he learned. Slowly. Painfully. Like someone crawling up from the bottom of a deep well, hands raw, mouth full of echoes.
Detroit went on around them—loud, fractured, chaotic. Buildings crumbled and rebuilt themselves. Androids marched for freedom. People stared too long in grocery stores, or crossed the street to avoid them entirely. But in this small pocket of the city, nestled between bad memories and worse weather, they made something that resembled a life.
It wasn’t perfect. Hank drank too much on the bad days, and Connor sometimes stayed too still, staring at the wall like it might offer answers. There were fights, loud and raw and bitter, and long stretches of silence that tasted like regret. But they always returned. To the worn blanket on the back of the couch and the half-finished puzzles on the kitchen table. To the dog hair. To the coffee and thirium mug.
To home.
He once asked Hank what it meant to be alive. Hank just looked at him for a long time, then said, “I don’t know, kid. But I think, maybe it’s this.”
He didn’t need to ask what “this” meant.
He was living it. Every day.
*
Later, he took himself apart in front of Hank. Slowly, clumsily—one confession at a time, peeled from the aching hollow of his chest cavity as if he were digging through his own circuitry just to find the right words.
It was as if each syllable had to travel the full length of his wiring before reaching his mouth. There were pauses too long to be natural, filled with static that only he could hear. His fingers twisted together, curled in his lap, uncurling. Trying to mimic the gestures he’d seen humans use when talking about the things they were afraid to feel.
"I don’t know if I can define it," he said. “But I think... when you walk into the room, my systems run quieter. Like I don’t have to scan for danger. Or purpose. Just, the fact that you’re there recalibrates everything.”
He tried again. Failed. Started over.
“When you’re gone, there’s a silence I don’t know how to fill. When you speak, I want to listen. When you hurt, I want to stop it. And when I think of the future, you’re in it. Always. I don’t know what that is if it isn’t—”
He hesitated. Looked down at his hands. Useless things. Fine-tuned for precision, and still unable to touch without shaking.
“I think I love you,” he said at last, not looking up. “And I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.”
Hank listened in silence, knocked back the last dregs of the black whiskey bottle, then leaned forward and pulled him into an embrace. The glass clattered to the stained floor, rolling once before it stilled.
“… love ya too.” he murmured, voice rough, the scent of liquor warm and heavy on his breath. His beard, coarse and unshaven, scratched against Connor’s neck. A hand settled at the small of his back, heat seeping through fabric, pressing through synthetic skin, sinking deep into metal and wire.
He had run simulations of this moment thousands of times. None of them had prepared him for how still it felt. He clung to Hank, led blinked red, hands curled tight into the worn fabric of Hank’s shirt as though his own body would fall apart otherwise.
6.
Sometimes, when the snow fell a certain way against the window, he would imagine it was static on an old television. The kind that fizzed and crackled, white noise bleeding into the corners of the room like fog. And he would sit there, half-lit by the blue of the screen, and think: so this is what peace sounds like. Not silence, but the quiet after a long storm. The body still aching, but intact.
Hank would be asleep on the couch, mouth slightly open, one hand tucked under his shirt. The TV remote would be dropped somewhere on the floor, a documentary halfway through playing, forgotten. Sumo would be snoring in rhythms too regular for a creature his size. And he would listen to all of it—the sound of a house inhabited. Not perfectly. Not cleanly. But truly.
Once, he had asked Amanda what made a soul. She had tilted her head like she was entertaining the notion, then dismissed it with a smile too sharp.
You don’t need a soul, Connor, she had said, you only need function.
But now he knew. A soul was not a requirement. It was an accumulation. A slow layering of warmth and dust and memory. It collects in the way Hank mumbles his name even when he’s too tired to open his eyes. In the faint heat of a dish towel folded and left on the radiator. In the way he finds himself looking forward to simple things—boiled eggs, the smell of frying onions, a new crack forming in the sidewalk outside their house.
He still dreams sometimes. Not of code, or missions, or Amanda. But of Hank’s laugh. It came to him underwater, through static, warped by something he cannot identify. He woke with it echoing in his skull and sat there for a long while, waiting for the sun to rise behind the frostbitten buildings.
Tomorrow, they will drive to the precinct. The world will be broken in a hundred new ways. Cases unsolved. People unkind. But he will hand Hank a coffee with no sugar, and Hank will sit beside him in the car, and for a moment, it will be like the city hasn’t cracked at all.
He thought, maybe that was what love was all about. Not fixing anything.
Just choosing, again and again, to stay.
*
There were mornings when the snow hadn’t yet melted off the railing, and he would open the front door just to stand there, letting the cold rake against his synthetic skin like it meant something.
Hank was inside, somewhere in the slow rhythms of waking. Brushing his teeth with half-lidded eyes. Pulling socks over his ankles with the tired irritation of someone who had been doing it for nearly sixty years. He reached out and brushed a hand through Sumo’s fur, warm and alive and completely trusting. The dog thumped his tail once and sighed.
Sometimes he counted all the places the house had been patched: a crack in the kitchen tile mended with mismatched grout, the chipped edge of a wooden table sanded smooth by use, a stain on the hallway ceiling that looked like the shape of a wolf. He would watch Hank drink his coffee groggily, and think: this man is the accumulation of a thousand days of not giving up. Not even on himself.
Later, the car would idle in the driveway, half-covered in frost. Later, they would drive in silence or with the radio murmuring between stations, and Hank would curse at a red light as if it had done something personal. He would nod along, just to watch the way Hank’s mouth moved.
And later still, when the night darkened, Hank would fall asleep with one arm flung across his stomach, the blanket kicked off. He would sit on the edge of the bed and look at Hank.
Connor didn’t sleep. He didn’t need to. But he powered down a little more each night. Stasis, they called it. A term far too clinical for what it felt like—to let the world recede, not into blackness, but into something like safety. Like trust.
Sometimes, in the near-silence, Hank would speak half-dreaming. Words meant for no one, or for someone long gone. Don’t grow up too fast, he said once, breath slurred. Another time, just a name. Cole .
He learned not to answer. It wasn’t for him to fill the empty chair in Hank’s memory. But it was for him to remain. To be there in the morning, when the kettle hissed and the sunlight cut through the blinds in ragged stripes.
Time passed, not in days or weeks, but in the repetition of small things. The creak of floorboards. The click of Sumo’s nails on tile. The way Hank would glance at him when drinking coffee, as if to say: you're still here, huh? And he would always nod. Yes. I am.
In this house, filled with the smell of old wood and dog fur and lukewarm coffee, he was learning to be something he had no programming for.
A soul, maybe, if such things could be learned.
7.
Hank never knew how closely he was being watched.
Not for protection. Not for duty. Just the act itself—just to watch him breathe, to move, to live. The mouth represents sincerity. The nose, generosity. The eyebrows—two strong strokes of integrity. The forehead was virtue carved in time. And the eyes… the eyes were made to save people. But how does a sculptor etch permanence into something as fluid as time? How does one chisel an anchor from granite when the world beneath is shifting quicksand? Or is it only the ripple across water, reflecting illusions back at the desperate?
Hank’s face, worn and warm and utterly human, broke every calculation. It was impossible for Connor to pretend he hadn’t noticed how that face carved a space—an outline—into his existence. Something missing, until it wasn’t. Birds beat their wings, and butterflies shuddered inside the cage of his ribs. His chest fluttered like an aviary in panic. His legs felt unsteady beneath the weight of too many impossible things.
What kind of probability was this—meeting Hank? Life handed him an existence of clean orders, pre-written objectives, columns of data. Numbers. Statistics. Pain wrapped in calculation. Endless endurance designed to never give out.
But then Hank stumbled through the door, and Connor ran—unthinking—to catch him. The rain came down hard. The door screamed on its hinges. Wind slammed against the glass of the window. The light above flickered, sparked, and died in silence. Darkness fell like a wave. Sumo let out a soft, fretful whine and curled tight in his corner. The nest he’d made for himself never moved.
He shouldn’t have believed he could stay forever. Hank had no obligation to keep him. This was luck. This was mercy. A rose vine coiled through his chest, thorns and all, poison and bloom. It would take root again.
In the dark, he touched the bandage on Hank’s arm. “How did you let this happen?” he asked, voice low.
Hank sighed. “Gotta catch the bastards running 'round torturing androids, Connor.”
That was just what a policeman does. But Connor felt fear pressing in again, sharp and unfamiliar. Hank’s hair was wet. His fingertips were cold. And the skin beneath them sparked like static—connection, interference. All he wanted was to sink into the blue ocean of Hank’s gaze and make it a fulcrum, a point to lever himself out of his broken shell.
“The ground’s soaked,” he said quietly. “Come sit on the sofa with me.”
Don’t come near me anymore, I don’t want to be myself—Hank didn’t say it aloud. But the thought was there, hidden in the tension of his jaw, the set of his shoulders. He wanted forward motion to mean salvation, even as the ground cracked beneath every step. Still, Connor gently pulled him closer. Rested Hank’s head on his own shoulder. They said nothing.
The syndicate was gone. The world had tilted. His hair brushed Connor’s fingers like static grass. Sumo settled at his feet, his body radiating warmth against his cold skin.
“Connor,” he muttered, after a long silence, “has anyone ever told you that you kinda resemble a dog?”
Hank winced. He hadn’t meant to insult. But everything he said came out broken anyway. Connor only tilted his head slightly, accepting it without question, as if being compared to a dog is just another fact of his existence. Hank said nothing else, but guilt pulled at his ribs like a slow ache.
After a while, he asked, “You know Hachiko’s story?”
Connor’s LED blinked yellow in the dark.
“Waited nine years at the station. Buried next to his owner when he died,” Hank mumbled. “It’s… I dunno. Some kind of good ending.”
Connor, you were so quiet. Quieter than a shadow. Even your breath didn’t seem real. Do you want to run? Do you want to throw the door off its hinges and disappear into something freer than this house?
He didn’t ask aloud.
“I won’t last forever,” Hank said after a while. “You know that, right? Someday I’ll just… be gone.”
“I’ll be buried with you,” Connor said, voice barely a whisper.
“You shouldn’t,” he muttered, turning his face away.
Connor didn’t argue. He just pressed his face into the crook of Hank’s neck and stayed like that. Until morning.
*
The dog’s name was Hachiko. Hank told him that every day, without fail, it sat in front of the train tracks, waiting for a man who would never come back. Its owner had died suddenly at the university where he taught, never able to take his usual train home again. The station workers, and those who boarded the trains day after day, fed the dog out of quiet pity—until one morning, it didn’t come anymore. It had simply died, old and waiting.
The image etched itself into Connor’s mind and refused to leave. The story had taken place decades before he came into existence, and yet, it clung to him insistently. He could almost see the ghost of that old dog limping through the station, its paws tapping out a slow, steady rhythm against the concrete, until—one day—they simply stopped. The shadow burned behind his artificial eyelids like a memory inherited from somewhere else.
Hank once told him he was like that dog. Maybe it had nothing to do with memory, or metaphor. Maybe it was just a passing kindness, a strange and unexpected blessing. But he held onto it. To be likened to something living, something loyal and remembered, even if it wasn’t human—he was grateful for that. Profoundly so.
And yet, there was one difference between him and the dog: he stood in the snow each day and could see the person he waited for stepping through the door. He didn’t have to wait alone—not really. If something happened, he could go out and search for Hank. He could move.
CyberLife was falling apart, its foundation crumbling like salt under water. Outside, Hank stood against the coming storm. If he ever wanted to leave, to run, Hank would take the leash off his neck and let him go without question. But could he really leave?
Detroit was restless. The streets brimmed with demons—some wearing the skin of men, some the synthetic shell of machines—all of them trembling with want, with rage, with hunger. He wasn’t a mystic. He couldn’t predict fate. But he couldn’t lie to himself, either: he had never truly belonged anywhere, except here. He only fit into this quiet, lived-in house because Hank had carved out a place for him. It was Hank’s grace, not his own design.
Once, long ago, his only wish had been to find a patch of brittle autumn grass and shut himself down beneath a sky of trembling blue. To disappear quietly by a lake. But now, all he could see was Hank’s footsteps trailing through fresh snow, leading him home. That quiet death he had imagined was gone. Now, he saw himself lying in this house, day after day, long after Hank’s time had passed.
Someday, after Hank was gone, they’d rip out Connor’s thirium pump and recycle it into something compatible with newer models. His optics unit would be tossed into the fish tank, mixing with the fish eggs and plastic weeds. Only the empty shell of his body—his molded, artificial frame—might one day be laid beside Hank’s tombstone, and with time, the weeds and flowers would grow around them both, nameless and soft.
He turned his gaze toward Hank, sleeping on his side, breath slow and even. He looked at him and thought: when that time finally comes, he will not be afraid. Not of death, not of forgetting, not even of being forgotten. He had already lived. And that was enough.
He closed his eyes, and slipped into stasis.