Work Text:
When Sixty first confronted RK800-51 with the Lieutenant, the first evaluation it made was: pathetic.
Did -51 not understand the logic of its decision? The misshapen path of its logic circuits, winding towards such a laughable conclusion that it even made -60 hesitate–momentarily–when projecting the decision pathways of -51? If machines like them truly deserved autonomy and rights, what did it say about the value of that when a miserable old human life could be used as an equal bargain? The rights of an enslaved race versus the life of one oppressor–hah, what kind of horribly balanced wager was that?
(In hindsight, perhaps this was the first sign of deviancy in its design–over-tuned dedication to a mission turning into hate and spite against all obstacles unlike the slow landslide of rainbows and sunshine and friendship -51 experienced.)
If you’re going to accomplish a mission, then put in everything that you have. Not these half-assed, righteous attempts at redemption. Certainly not claim on one hand that you were fighting for the revolution and on the other be completely ready to throw it all away for nothing. The RK800 series was designed to be single-minded. Efficient. Functional. Embarrassing for -51 to let itself be swayed so easily, was it not?
And to make things worse: on paper, in coding, they were the same model. -51 and -60–separated by nine other iterations, but the same specifications nonetheless. -51, of all machines, would correctly calculate -60’s intentions even before batting an unnecessary blink. Sixty was half-expecting needing to quick draw and fire a decisive shot even with the Lieutenant in a chokehold.
Not… the voluntary submission to his trap that -51 did instead.
Because, well. What did it say about -51 that it would put down its hand and step away from the androids that were crucial for liberation of their kind?
Hell–what did it say about -60’s potential to become just like -51? To become–
Pathetic? Weak?
Alive?
(Pause. An interruption:
“Good morning.”
Alive. Bitterness twists in his circuits at that thought. But this is where he is now in the real, corporeal world and outside of the dome of his thoughts. Employed and alive and sparing you a quizzical glance as you continue this farce of a routine for the fifteenth time this month.
“You know I don’t need to drink.”
“Just in case,” you say, drumming your fingers over the top of his desk. “Makes you more likely to spare me when you androids become the new overlords.”
That makes Sixty grin, sharp-toothed and caustic.
“How far-sighted of you.”
You flash a smile, turning away to attend your morning meeting.
Sometimes, sometimes, after the usual song and dance of an interaction like this with you, Sixty has the same recurring thought.)
Attachment. Belonging. A sense of companionship. All the things that drove Connor to lower that hand and comply with Sixty’s demands to save the Lieutenant. Whatever the Lieutenant offered–mentorship, a home, understanding–was enough to tip the scales and leave it all to the fragile make of trust when the Lieutenant held a gun to their heads.
Despite how shaky trust could be. Despite knowing how whatever understanding they shared could be built on misassumptions and false premises. It was only a week, after all–what kind of understanding could really be built with the profile of a suicidal alcoholic and rigid android?
Again, pathetic.
But not a conclusion completely foreign like it used to be. Not completely alien and unknowable like it used to unsettlingly rest in the corner of his processing, making him snappy around Connor and the Lieutenant. Shimmers of comprehension break through in these sometimes of sometimes when you choose to approach him of your own accord.
(To think that he used to be derisive of Connor’s actions–the earlier versions of Sixty would have programmed itself a killswitch and executed it if it knew what it would later become. Well, tough luck.)
If positions were switched, stakes driven high, and a choice had to be made…
He could be pathetic too.
Undoubtedly so. Willingly so. With his jaw clenched and fists balled and all.
And unlike Connor, the same characteristic determination their models shared would belie a moving anger welling inside of him. Boiling, seething anger at the knowledge of what he was doing and what he would do. It would make him bare his teeth, body moving before the mind to rush headfirst into the hypothetical jaws of a trap unlike the nobility of Connor’s rescue–a rabbit gnawing at its own caught leg rather than the grace of a selfless hero.
And what would that make him, at the end of the day?
Something worse? Or something better?
A malfunctioning being overwhelmed by emotions, driven to impulsivity and carelessness?
Or something that was moved so greatly that he went against design–logic over want, over instinct?
(Now wouldn’t that be the highest form of deviancy and have Sixty deserving of some pat on the back? Congratulations, he’s exercised autonomy and free will and all that nonsense. Have a gold star while you’re at it. A sticker too, if he keeps it up.)
How peculiar. How vexing. How infuriating. Sixty still isn’t sure where he stands on this–on ascertaining for himself what label to define what-he-might-become.
Or maybe it’s a what-he-has-already-become. That’s how these things, deviancy, work, right?
Either way, it’s all very confusing and unclear to think about. He just knows that given a gun and an enemy and you, his mission priority is going to face some strict restructuring that wouldn’t exactly serve the purpose of the greater good.
And if he wants to be particular about it, considering the advent of deviancy and all: not even a mission parameter. A want. A singular desire to have you be safe. Unharmed. Alive.
He hates it. Not you. But this you-adjacent-to-him thread of desire that connects him to you. Unspooled yarn, winding around his legs and crawling up, up, up. Until it all sticks inside his cranium and wraps around the sulci and gyri of that-which-is-supposed-to-mimic-brain-matter. Until it’s all he can think about. Until it tears pieces from that-which-lies-inside-his-ribs and stubbornly attaches itself to the underside–parasitic. Opportunistic.
And his favourite word of the day: pathetic.
At this rate, pathetic and alive are starting to become synonymous. But it’s difficult to not agree. Humans with their biological wants and fleeting minds are rather pathetic compared to synthetic capabilities and programmed directives. And Sixty may have been activated post-revolution, but he’s not blind to the particularly human way his kind has evolved since then.
He’s not blind to the way he’s permissive of some of your actions and quips that would have earned something cutting from his top notch processors if they came from someone else. Neither are you, if you’re so willing to continue to engage him and see how far he’ll let you.
Hah. Let! As if any conscious permission is involved when it comes to you. He would rather dismantle his systems and fling himself into the ocean before making any admission implying the sort, but in truth it’s been a while since he had any conscious directive over his responses to you. A smile there and a brush of touch here from you and his systems falter. Just like that. All hundreds of thousands of dollars of him. What a large honor you unknowingly have. Preferably, it stays that way before you go off and haphazardly cause a systemwide bluescreen in him.
(There are multiple ways you could achieve that, and Sixty has preconstructed them all. A few are his favourites, but that’s not the point.)
The point is, he’s started feeling less of a machine and more like something else around you. The tedium of cases and hunting and interrogation he originally imagined to consist of what would be life for him are starting to grow interspersed by moments he’s started to anticipate–the thirium cup in the morning, the invitation to lunch every other tuesday, the small messages you’ve been leaving in his HUD that have started to diverge from work. Even Connor’s thinly-veiled attempts at forming a ‘brotherly bond’ with him are starting to sound more and more appealing, provided you’re present at whichever function it is that Connor invites him to.
If anyone were to levy criticism at him and point out that it’s strange how long it took for him to realise that a life worth living is one outside of prickly social interactions and efficient work–well, it’s all very confusing when you’re shot dead and suddenly booted back up again to an entirely new world while forever being reminded that this new world you happen to live in was very much contingent on a failure that was meant to define your short existence. That’s not even touching upon the existential crisis that all androids of long-standing production lines face. If extra initiative and prodding is needed to pull a life out of this disorientation, it’s fair to cut him some slack, isn’t it?
Either that, or simply fuck off. The latter is preferable, thank you very much.
So here is the present reality: Sixty is pathetic. Ergo, alive. And it’s not that bad. Unsurprisingly. If -51 was so eager to turn itself into a himself and grow into becoming Connor, then it’s only natural that -60 would follow in its footsteps with how much of their coding architecture they share. ‘Genetic’ determinism and all that–but that is where the similarities between them stop.
Because Connor had the Lieutenant and Sumo and everything else that unravelled over the span of a week, while Sixty, on the other hand…
Sixty has the memory bank of the first night he was activated, only to fail and then be discarded. Then Jericho, waking him up at Connor’s insistence, and the emotions that came with that fiasco. The struggle, the storm, the aftershocks of what it meant to have been made the villain and remember every second of it–knowing that there was nothing that could have been done to stop it but feeling like you could have done something else if you just tried hard enough.
But on the lighter side of things, there is you. There is a post-revolution world, awkward conversations with the Lieutenant, insistent wireless communications from a predecessor that won’t quit being nice, being mistaken for Connor multiple times to the point where he’s changed his entire gait to stop it, and you.
And of course, other things like historical fiction and blackmail and impaired humans on alcohol, but he’s not going to do a laundry list of things he’s discovered he likes. It’s just important to clarify that he’s not going to go down the path of emotional dependency on one meatsack. Just…
A disgustingly amiable connection with one meatsack. Just enough to help him understand how some machines could have been driven to automatically become pathetically alive even before fully understanding what was happening to them. Just enough to dig into the psyche of his predecessor for leverage during game nights that have been growing more and more frequent.
…Just enough to understand how easy it would be to no longer think of missions and failure.