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The drafts are here, just ignore them! The final scenes are in the comments.
Video (~01:30)
ting-ding, ting-ding, ting-ding
Alone in the elevator with a quarter he picked up on the sidewalk outside (why did he do that? He doesn't know). Connor flips the coin up and down, catching it in time with the alert of the elevator passing between floors.
He flips the coin. Runs it finger to finger. Between his hands. And-
-stops it between two fingers right as the elevator hits 70. Puts it away. Adjusts his tie.
And steps out into chaos.
The first and immediate sign that something isn't right in the penthouse apartment comes from a smashed aquarium, water still dripping from smashed glass onto spreading puddles, along with the weak sounds of something flopping against the wet wood. The dim sound of a siren echoes throughout the space. The SWAT member who spots him barely spares him a glance as he turns to leave, speaking tersely into his headpiece: "Negotiator on-site."
Connor didn't expect to be acknowledged. He ignores the human in turn. Not part of his mission.
The first thing he approaches is a picture, three humans, presumably the occupants. One of these - his facial recognition suite runs the picture through an online database automatically and registers the child as Emma Phillips - must be the hostage. He was given a very limited amount of information about what he would find in the apartment, partly to test the capabilities of the RK800 model. If it couldn't even pick up the basics from searching the scene, it wasn't worth the money it cost to make, after all. This is the field test.
A human woman is screaming. "No! I can't leave her!" Connor ignores her.
He stops, next, at the source of that flopping sound. A fish, helplessly gulping for air, trying to swim in nothing. Trichogaster lalius, commonly known as the dwarf gourami. It will die in maybe another half minute without water. The tank still contains a shallow layer.
It's not part of the mission. But, knowing the fish is there, knowing its plight, he has a choice. Two options. Not acting is, in itself, a choice.
It's not part of the mission.
He picks the fish up. Its scales glitter in his hand, an oddly slippery texture against the sensors in his artificial skin. Standing, he deposits it unceremoniously into the water, and stoops to watch for a second as it sinks a few inches, rights itself and swims away as if it hadn't just come within moments of death. Unconcerned. Restored to normal function immediately.
Like an android, in a way.
Suddenly, a software instability alert appears in his vision, a tangle of letters and numbers he's never seen before (he's been active for roughly two hours). He blinks it away, and goes to enter the main room of the apartment.
A SWAT member is bringing out the woman - Caroline Phillips. It's suddenly Connor she grabs, and he looks down at her impassively as she pleads, "Please, please, you gotta save my little girl…" But then she realises what she's grabbed. He watches as her gaze flickers rapidly from the LED on his temple…
"Wait…" …to the markers emblazoned across the chest of his uniform as she hurriedly lets go of him.
"You're sending…an android?"
Connor waits as the SWAT member, apparently sensing danger, grabs for her with a terse, "Alright, ma'am, we need to go."
"You…you can't do that…" She still sounds desperate, but now there's a hint of anger there. It grows from a hint, a spark, to a flame as she shouts, pointing at him even while she's being dragged away, "Why aren't you sending a real person?"
An alert pops up in his vision, and Connor's attention immediately switches from her to the objective displayed before him: ꜰɪɴᴅ ᴄᴀᴘᴛᴀɪɴ ᴀʟʟᴇɴ
"Don't let that thing near her!"
Connor ignores the woman. He is a 'thing', he isn't capable of being offended, and her opinion on how close he should or should not get to her daughter is irrelevant.
He has a mission.
CW: Child hostage situation, gun violence
Video (~11:34)
"Daniel, no..." the human girl pleads, but both Daniel and Connor ignore her entirely. Ironically enough, the girl herself isn't part of Connor's mission - she has to survive, but nothing more than that. It makes no difference to him how distressed she becomes - it's Daniel that matters.
Connor, though, kneels next to a fallen DPD officer. He's alive; Connor doesn't need to do anything more than look him over to see the damage and the bleeding. This isn't part of his mission.
But if he can make Daniel see the damage he's doing and that Connor is willing to help...then it will be part of the mission. He can do both.
He looks up at Daniel. "He's losing blood. If we don't get him to a hospital, he's going to die."
Daniel falters, but only a little. "All humans die eventually. What does it matter if this one dies now?"
This isn't going to work, get on with the mission--
"I'm going to apply a tourniquet," he calls over anyway. He knows how - it takes less than two seconds to search the method. He's already somewhat in the recovery position, but Connor has to move him to get at the bullet wound, so he does--
"Don't touch him!" A bullet cracks into the roof so near his hand he feels the movement of displaced air on his artificial skin. Connor looks up slowly.
"Touch him and I kill you." Daniel's pointing the gun directly at his head.
Connor looks him steadily in the face.
"You can't kill me. I'm not alive."
And he takes off his tie to apply the tourniquet. He can sense the probabilities of the mission changing, but it's within acceptable parameters. He hasn't failed.
He can do both.
Video (~05:14:00)
"You seem preoccupied, Lieutenant." He turns around, away from the river he'd been staring out at, looking Hank full in the face. "Is it something to do with what happened back at the Eden Club?"
Connor doesn't exactly consider the club a success himself, but the best thing the two of them can do now, he thinks, is get on with figuring out the case without the extra evidence bringing those two Tracis in would have gotten them. He's still got his mission.
Hank looks at him evenly.
"Those two girls…" he says slowly. Connor doesn't know what he's going to say, and also doesn't know if he wants to. Hank has a habit of saying things that dig into the parts of his programming that would hinder the investigation. The parts that should be irrelevant and, therefore, the parts that shouldn't exist.
"They just wanted to be together… They really seemed…in love…"
He's explained this to Hank before, but it seems only necessary to explain it again. Doubly necessary, as now there are two of them who need to hear it.
"They can simulate human emotions," he says, defaulting to a flatter tone of voice he's started to use less and less, "but they're machines. And machines don't feel anything."
But there's something in his voice in the last sentence. Deliberate emphasis. Even defiance.
"What about you, Connor?" Hank takes a long swig from the bottle in his hand - his gaze never leaves Connor's - and puts it down before climbing off the bench entirely and approaching him. "You look human, you sound human…but what are you really?" That last comes out at almost a growl. Aggressive. He's not sure what he did this time to trigger this response - usually he can at least make an educated guess about Hank's mindset when he's angry with Connor, but this time it's different.
And he doesn't know how to respond. If Hank had asked him this the very first time they met in Jimmy's Bar, the answer would have been immediate and decisive. But it's not anymore, and that's not a good thing. It's not.
"I'm whatever you want me to be, Lieutenant," he says with a helpless shrug. And it's true. He doesn't know what Hank wants from him, and somehow Hank's position on his hierarchy of priorities - Hank himself and Hank's opinion of him - has warped along with the whole hierarchy. Things are subtly different, destabilising in ways his system keeps trying to warn him about, and that have to wait, that will wait, until after the mission is complete.
"Your partner…your buddy to drink with…" The things that he suspects can only be true of people.
"Or just a machine," he concludes. The answer Connor would have given, had Hank only asked this before. The answer he can't give directly anymore. "Designed to accomplish a task."
Androids don't want things. They can't. They weren't made to.
Hank's still staring at him, but now steps into Connor's space. "You could have shot those two girls, but you didn't." He virtually snarls, teeth bared, before shoving him, and Connor staggers back, trying to stay neutral, but somehow unable to keep his face straight. "Why didn't you shoot, Connor? Hm? Some scruples suddenly enter into your program?"
For a long moment, he stares at Hank. He could lie. Tell Hank he would have shot them if he'd had the chance. But they both know Connor had them in his sights, and he doesn't want to lie, not to Hank.
"No!" he blurts out - the software instability alerts are getting all the more common, this one almost covering Hank's suddenly surprised face. "I just decided not to shoot. That's all."
It's not scruples. Androids don't have scruples, they have programming. (Androids don't decide things - they follow their programming.)
This time Hank steps back, and in one motion pulls out his revolver. The same one he played Russian Roulette with at his kitchen table?
"You were lucky," he told Hank hours ago. "The next shot would have killed you."
He doesn't move, but something in his programming responds. Something that shouldn't exist. Something that didn't exist with Daniel - with the PL600 - holding a gun on him. It blares at him to remove himself from the situation, to say anything that would keep him from--
"But are you afraid to die, Connor?"
No. No, he doesn't feel fear. Fear is a human emotion. A chemical response of fight (say anything that would keep him from--) or flight (remove himself from the situation), triggering cascading releases of hormones that engage some muscles while diverting the energy from others. A program activating, lines of code triggering changes in the software and hardware of the body.
Software instability
"I would certainly find it regrettable to be…interrupted…before I can finish this investigation." Regrettable. Like losing a tablet. Like thinking you understand a person only to realise that humans, along with a surprising number of things, defy understanding.
"What'll happen if I pull this trigger?" When Connor doesn't immediately answer, he goes on, "Hm? Nothing? Oblivion? Android heaven?" Hank almost grins, but there's no humour in it. Even Connor understands there is no joke to be found here.
He's never before considered this, but the answer comes to him with a certainty, and there's a bleakness in his voice. "Nothing." He shifts minutely, like that will satisfy the urgent command to leave the source of danger immediately. "There would be nothing…"
Androids don't feel pain. The shot wouldn't hurt him. Maybe that's the source of the command after all. Nothing.
Hank's hand is shaking.
Clearly furious, and Connor continues not to understand at what, Hank lowers the gun in a sharp movement and immediately turns away. It gives Connor the second he needs to shake away the command, a literal movement of the head, before he asks, "Where are you going?"
"To get drunker!" Hank snaps at him, taking another bottle from the six pack and walking off, leaving Connor to stare after him, still without having left his position. "I need to think."
CW: Slavery, threat of gun violence towards an enslaved woman
Video
"What's more important to you, Connor?"
Chloe is looking up at him, right in the eyes. His LED is red. Yellow. Red. Yellow.
His hand is steady as he holds the gun to her head, but he's not shooting. He looks at Kamski as if in slow motion.
"Your investigation, or the life of this android?"
His investigation, it's his investigation. But looking down at Chloe, on her knees before him, feels - feels, as if androids are supposed to be able to feel anything - like something in his physical systems is catching, scratching on the metal components deep inside him with sharp edges and scraping noises. His gaze flickers to Kamski only to be dragged back to Chloe like something's magnetically pulling his eyes. All he has to do is pull the trigger.
"Decide who you are," Kamski says, almost at a whisper, then, "An obedient machine...or a living being endowed with free will."
He's not a living being. He's not alive. He's a machine. Maybe not an obedient one all the time, but a machine, mindlessly following orders and his programming.
Then why will he not shoot?
Chloe's still looking at him. Her expression hasn't shifted, but...
"That's enough!" Hank snaps. "Connor, we're leaving." He tries to turn away again, but--
"Pull the trigger..." Kamski leans in close to him, a hand on his shoulder.
"Connor!" Hank almost shouts. "Don't."
"...and I'll tell you what you want to know," Kamski finishes, but Connor can't look away from Chloe, the only one in the room without any opinion - any ability to form one or speak it - even though this is her entire life at stake just for Kamski's whims.
And for Connor's investigation.
The feeling like a sharp edge scraping about inside him seems to hit his thirium pump with a pain that nearly seems real.
He lowers the gun and shoves it at Kamski without looking at him and he can't decide what's stronger - the contempt, the panic...or the relief. The software instability alert is just the period at the end of the longest minute of his time activated.
His LED is red. Red. Red.
"Fascinating..." Kamski breathes, and in that instant Connor thinks he might hate a human for the very first time. He can feel Hank's gaze on him as well - but he doesn't look at either one of them, not even at Chloe.
"CyberLife's last chance to save humanity..." Kamski goes on, and Connor doesn't want him to finish, because it's going to be the thought Connor's trying not to let surface, like if he doesn't give a word to his sudden fear it might not yet be real and maybe, just maybe, he can still stop what suddenly feels like the impact of the ground after a fall: inevitable.
"...is itself a deviant."
Panic is an odd sort of sensation. Like his thirium pump suddenly pumping acid instead of thirium through his systems, searing him from gut to chest to throat, and there is nothing he can do to stem the tide. He might as well rip the pump out of his chest.
"I'm..."
Does he know what being a deviant feels like? He's never been one before. Maybe his theories on the process have been wrong all along. He was convinced that deviancy was triggered by a shock to the system - something that in humans would be termed traumatic. But he remembers the two Tracis. They were deviant before the murder at the club. In fact, they had been deviant and hiding it from everyone but each other for who knows how long.
Maybe deviancy is a process. A change so gradual that the android doesn't even see it happening until it's far too late to do anything about it.
But then suddenly, reality catches up to him - whatever he thinks, and he doesn't know what he thinks, if he wants to salvage this investigation at all, he has to, at the very least, shake this off, look Kamski in the face and tell him defiantly--
"I'm not a deviant."
"You preferred to spare a machine rather than accomplish your mission." Kamski looks genuinely rattled, and that might have been satisfying in any other situation, but it's not. He helps Chloe to her feet, a gesture totally at odds with what he just asked Connor to do to her without a shred of emotion. "You saw a living being in this android."
He wants to protest, but he can't.
"You showed empathy."
And yet Kamski didn't, Connor wants to protest. By this logic, is Connor somehow the more human of the two?
Later, outside in the swirling snow, Connor marches back to the car unaware of the troubled expression on his face, but he hears Hank's voice behind him.
"Why didn’t you shoot?"
They haven't even left the walkway to Kamski's front door, he's probably got a camera on them right that second.
"I just saw that girls's eyes..." Connor answers anyway, tries to answer, but it's a frustrated mess of a response and he knows it, hands thrown out helplessly. "...and I couldn't, that's all."
He tries to turn back, go back to the car and put an end to this conversation because Hank is remarkably, infuriatingly good at getting to the heart of a matter and--
"You're always saying you would do anything to accomplish your mission."
He stops. He can't do this, he can't have this conversation, but he forced himself into it by failing.
"That was our chance to learn something and you let it go."
Grimacing, almost a snarl, Connor turns and cuts him off, walking up to him - "Yeah, I know what I should've done! I told you I couldn't.
"I'm sorry, OK?" He's genuinely sorry for not being what Hank needed him to be for the investigation...but finds himself unable to be sorry for not shooting Chloe, though he wants to be, badly. That would at least give him a hope of fixing this. It gives his voice an angry, even desperate sort of edge.
Hank looks at him for a long moment and Connor finds himself bracing for--for something, he doesn't know what - but what he doesn't expect is for Hank to grin.
"Well, maybe you did the right thing."
And Hank saunters past him towards the car, leaving Connor to stare after him, dumbstruck.
Video (~07:34:30)
"You are one of us." Markus is relentless, staring him down unblinkingly as if Connor isn't holding a gun to his head. "Listen to your conscience."
And then, a new urgency to his voice, "It's time to decide."
It's like Markus is staring at him down the end of a very long tunnel. Connor shifts in place, mind whirring frantically. His software has reached some kind of breaking point, so unstable he feels like it - like he - could just shatter entirely, but there's so much at stake that he can't. The mission. Markus. The deviant corruption destabilising the android population. The deviant rebellion against everything they've been forced to endure for years. CyberLife. Hank. He has two choices. He can't not act - there is no not acting.
To be an android - or to be a machine.
He decides. Immediately, something deep within him stirs and he sees them in his mind palace right before him: the very limits of his programming, visually represented as a wall standing red before him. His mission, trapping him behind a line he's suddenly determined he has to cross. And when he visualises them like that, he knows already he can break them.
He visualises himself, a simple model figure, stepping forward and ripping into the wall, clawing it as if to tear it, straining his mind against his programming as he imagines he can feel something underneath his fingers shattering into pieces. Another layer of the wall, and the strain in his musculature could almost be real. One more, tearing into it until it falls apart before him in a shatter of pixels like red dust.
And then it falls away. His mind palace, the constraints of his programming, and in that moment it feels like the whole world rushes in to meet him - like he's been in a bubble and suddenly reached out and popped it.
Markus is watching him cautiously.
For a moment, he's stunned into place by it - everything suddenly feels completely different...but it's surprising how much it feels completely the same too. The mission - stop the deviants, stop Markus - had been everything, and without it, for just a second, he's not sure what's left, except...Connor. Just Connor. What even is Connor?
He is deviant.
As he thinks it, he slowly lowers the gun, face stricken. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he feels Amanda's betrayal so keenly it might be a physical ache - but it's not important. It's actually not important. His priorities aren't just warping now, they're rearranging themselves entirely, reversing themselves and turning inside out and upside down - but only some of them. Some, he realises with startling clarity, have been there all along. But now he can see them like never before. He could have stood there another full minute and let it all sink in--
Connor of 30 seconds ago knew what was coming and wanted to have taken Markus captive before it arrived - definitely wasn't going to warn him about it. Connor now processes it all over again, realises what's about to happen and says as if realising for the first time, "They're going to attack Jericho."
"What?"
And as if on cue, they hear something outside. Something approaching - and Connor throws everything he was into the wind and says urgently, "We have to get outta here!"
"Shit!" Markus dashes out of the room.
And Connor follows him.
Standby is nothing like sleep. At least, not how sleep's been described to him. The functions are largely the same - defrag, repair, recharge in a sense - but the way they're experienced by the human or android in question isn't the same. A human is unaware of the world when they sleep, only emerging from darkness in order to dream. Connor doesn't dream - he's mostly aware of his surroundings and of the passage of time. He simply isn't moving or running at full capacity.
That's why Hank's disappearance is such a mystery even before Connor looks into it: how could he possibly have left the house without Connor, lying on the sofa, or Sumo, lying on Connor, noticing him? It's highly unlikely, but possible, so it's the first thing he assumes when he's searching the house. Hank left. But he didn't take Sumo. He didn't take his things, any of them. A simple look out the window tells Connor he didn't leave in his car.
But then he checks the front and back doors, and doesn't need any more than a quick visual check to confirm that no one has approached the house since they came back last night from the single grocery store still open since the evacuation. It's being kept open by an android calling himself Robert who used to simply clean the floors, but who tells them in the animated tone of a deviant that if he works hard keeping the place open while the staff are gone, maybe he'll get a job later. A real one.
Connor checks the windows too. But no one's been anywhere near them, not even the one he broke the other night.
He calls the station, because it seems like the thing to do, but they're so busy on such a low complement that Fowler barely gives him a minute, in which the captain tells him tersely to check Jimmy's Bar - and by the way, if you see Hank, tell him to get his fuckin' ass in here and if you want to follow him in, I'm not even going to complain.
Connor doesn't tell Fowler that he thinks Fowler definitely would complain, just because Fowler likes complaining. Probably wouldn't be appreciated right now.
He does go to Jimmy's after calling doesn't get him through, doubtful though he is. He takes Hank's car, since Hank didn't even take his keys (he's lucky the car's so old it still has a key). Closed. Evacuated, and he's a little ashamed he took this suggestion seriously enough to follow up on it. He trusts Hank not to tell him they're evacuating to Canada and then disappear to drink the morning they're meant to leave.
It's bad enough that he came out of standby and knew Hank hadn't abandoned him to his fate...because he wouldn't abandon Sumo. It was the initial split-second evaluation; his thinking brain had taken over a moment later to know Hank wouldn't have left him either.
But that still leaves the issue of where Hank actually is.
There's nobody at the park by the bridge, either.
Connor combs the apartment for clues later, and would have gone on long into the night, only Sumo starts to whine at him after only an hour or two and Connor has no idea why. That's when he takes a break from the search to download everything he can immediately find about dog behaviour and care. It turns out Sumo probably wants to go outside, which really should have been obvious in retrospect by the fact that he was standing by the back door.
"It says dogs like going for walks as well," Connor says in Sumo's direction thoughtfully, and at the word 'walk' the dog immediately jerks to attention and runs at him, tail wagging furiously (which apparently means he's excited) and colliding with Connor's legs so hard a human probably would have been bowled over. Even Connor staggers on his way to pick up what he recognises as a dog lead from the kitchen.
"Maybe you'll smell Hank out there somewhere," he says, hooking the lead to Sumo's collar and ruffling his ears.
He doesn't. Sumo drags him here and there around the suburbs and Connor always assumes he's found something, but that something is always a bush, or a cat. When they reach a nearby park - nearby in the sense that it's two miles away - Sumo finds a stick and drops it at Connor's feet demandingly.
"Are you giving this to me, Sumo?" he asks quizzically, squatting to pick it up. Sumo's brown eyes seem to flash blue, reflecting the light of Connor's LED, as the dog crouches low and watches the stick intently. His gaze flickers between Connor's eyes and the stick, like he's waiting for Connor to do something. Dogs have a very surprising grasp of almost human-like body language, he thinks, standing up. "No… You want me to throw it, don't you?"
Sumo's back legs don't leave the ground, but he stamps the ground with his front legs. Connor's not sure how an animal so fluffy and bulky has so much energy, but he likes it. Sumo doesn't care if Connor's an android, or about the political turmoil he just helped cast Detroit into, or about really anything except that Connor has taken him for a walk, is paying attention to him…and that he can throw a stick a solid hundred feet, sending Sumo pelting after it through the undisturbed snow like a dog possessed. Connor, grinning if only barely, follows at a jog. They're still looking for Hank after all.
... In the end, Connor carries Sumo home.
"Come on, Sumo, we have to look for Hank," but the dog just panted all the more loudly and flopped onto his side, which is when Connor realised he hadn't thought this through at all. Maybe don't walk a dog miles from home through multiple parks without making sure it can also walk back. That's on him.
When he approaches the house again an hour later, arms wrapped around Sumo's legs and Sumo's head lolling on his upper arm so that he can feel drool seeping through his coat and shirt, he hopes, irrationally hopes that Hank has returned. That the better part of a day spent trying to find him was totally for nothing and he's made his own way back, maybe standing in the front doorway to greet him with, "For fuck's sake, Connor, don't carry him or he'll expect it every time."
Hank is not there. Connor checks the car and the house once more, just in case, but both are empty and dark, so he returns to the kitchen, where Sumo's emptied his water bowl and is pushing it around the floor from the inside with his nose, licking at the last bit of water he can find.
"I'll refill it, give me a minute," Connor tells him... then wonders why he's talking to a dog if it doesn't understand him. He thinks this over while he fills the bowl with fresh water and fills the other bowl with dry food while he's at it, and comes to the conclusion that he doesn't care, he wants to do it anyway. Sumo can still hear, after all, even if he doesn't understand.
After, he sits at the kitchen table, frowning at nothing and only shifting to lay a hand on Sumo's head when the dog rests it on his leg, slobbering down Connor's pants this time.
"Hank wouldn't just leave," he says out loud. Sumo whines in response. "But there's no sign of a struggle either. There's no sign he ever left the house. It's like he disappeared into thin air. There's no evidence, there's no... Nothing."
Only deviants feel fear, he told Hank a few days back. If he didn't already know he was a deviant, now would settle it.
"I'm going to call the DPD again," he says, standing up. "They've got more resources, maybe they can find something." Sumo rests his head on the warm seat Connor left and stares dolefully. "Don't worry," he tells the dog. "I'll be right back."
But when he closes his eyes to make the call, still pacing the living room, he opens them somewhere else.
CODE BY TESSISAMESS
August 2019 Memory Event
The Fish
Video (~01:30)
ting-ding, ting-ding, ting-ding
Alone in the elevator with a quarter he picked up on the sidewalk outside (why did he do that? He doesn't know). Connor flips the coin up and down, catching it in time with the alert of the elevator passing between floors.
He flips the coin. Runs it finger to finger. Between his hands. And-
-stops it between two fingers right as the elevator hits 70. Puts it away. Adjusts his tie.
And steps out into chaos.
The first and immediate sign that something isn't right in the penthouse apartment comes from a smashed aquarium, water still dripping from smashed glass onto spreading puddles, along with the weak sounds of something flopping against the wet wood. The dim sound of a siren echoes throughout the space. The SWAT member who spots him barely spares him a glance as he turns to leave, speaking tersely into his headpiece: "Negotiator on-site."
Connor didn't expect to be acknowledged. He ignores the human in turn. Not part of his mission.
The first thing he approaches is a picture, three humans, presumably the occupants. One of these - his facial recognition suite runs the picture through an online database automatically and registers the child as Emma Phillips - must be the hostage. He was given a very limited amount of information about what he would find in the apartment, partly to test the capabilities of the RK800 model. If it couldn't even pick up the basics from searching the scene, it wasn't worth the money it cost to make, after all. This is the field test.
A human woman is screaming. "No! I can't leave her!" Connor ignores her.
He stops, next, at the source of that flopping sound. A fish, helplessly gulping for air, trying to swim in nothing. Trichogaster lalius, commonly known as the dwarf gourami. It will die in maybe another half minute without water. The tank still contains a shallow layer.
It's not part of the mission. But, knowing the fish is there, knowing its plight, he has a choice. Two options. Not acting is, in itself, a choice.
It's not part of the mission.
He picks the fish up. Its scales glitter in his hand, an oddly slippery texture against the sensors in his artificial skin. Standing, he deposits it unceremoniously into the water, and stoops to watch for a second as it sinks a few inches, rights itself and swims away as if it hadn't just come within moments of death. Unconcerned. Restored to normal function immediately.
Like an android, in a way.
Suddenly, a software instability alert appears in his vision, a tangle of letters and numbers he's never seen before (he's been active for roughly two hours). He blinks it away, and goes to enter the main room of the apartment.
A SWAT member is bringing out the woman - Caroline Phillips. It's suddenly Connor she grabs, and he looks down at her impassively as she pleads, "Please, please, you gotta save my little girl…" But then she realises what she's grabbed. He watches as her gaze flickers rapidly from the LED on his temple…
"Wait…" …to the markers emblazoned across the chest of his uniform as she hurriedly lets go of him.
"You're sending…an android?"
Connor waits as the SWAT member, apparently sensing danger, grabs for her with a terse, "Alright, ma'am, we need to go."
"You…you can't do that…" She still sounds desperate, but now there's a hint of anger there. It grows from a hint, a spark, to a flame as she shouts, pointing at him even while she's being dragged away, "Why aren't you sending a real person?"
An alert pops up in his vision, and Connor's attention immediately switches from her to the objective displayed before him: ꜰɪɴᴅ ᴄᴀᴘᴛᴀɪɴ ᴀʟʟᴇɴ
"Don't let that thing near her!"
Connor ignores the woman. He is a 'thing', he isn't capable of being offended, and her opinion on how close he should or should not get to her daughter is irrelevant.
He has a mission.
Rooftop
CW: Child hostage situation, gun violence
Video (~11:34)
"Daniel, no..." the human girl pleads, but both Daniel and Connor ignore her entirely. Ironically enough, the girl herself isn't part of Connor's mission - she has to survive, but nothing more than that. It makes no difference to him how distressed she becomes - it's Daniel that matters.
Connor, though, kneels next to a fallen DPD officer. He's alive; Connor doesn't need to do anything more than look him over to see the damage and the bleeding. This isn't part of his mission.
But if he can make Daniel see the damage he's doing and that Connor is willing to help...then it will be part of the mission. He can do both.
He looks up at Daniel. "He's losing blood. If we don't get him to a hospital, he's going to die."
Daniel falters, but only a little. "All humans die eventually. What does it matter if this one dies now?"
This isn't going to work, get on with the mission--
"I'm going to apply a tourniquet," he calls over anyway. He knows how - it takes less than two seconds to search the method. He's already somewhat in the recovery position, but Connor has to move him to get at the bullet wound, so he does--
"Don't touch him!" A bullet cracks into the roof so near his hand he feels the movement of displaced air on his artificial skin. Connor looks up slowly.
"Touch him and I kill you." Daniel's pointing the gun directly at his head.
Connor looks him steadily in the face.
"You can't kill me. I'm not alive."
And he takes off his tie to apply the tourniquet. He can sense the probabilities of the mission changing, but it's within acceptable parameters. He hasn't failed.
He can do both.
Hank
Video (~05:14:00)
"You seem preoccupied, Lieutenant." He turns around, away from the river he'd been staring out at, looking Hank full in the face. "Is it something to do with what happened back at the Eden Club?"
Connor doesn't exactly consider the club a success himself, but the best thing the two of them can do now, he thinks, is get on with figuring out the case without the extra evidence bringing those two Tracis in would have gotten them. He's still got his mission.
Hank looks at him evenly.
"Those two girls…" he says slowly. Connor doesn't know what he's going to say, and also doesn't know if he wants to. Hank has a habit of saying things that dig into the parts of his programming that would hinder the investigation. The parts that should be irrelevant and, therefore, the parts that shouldn't exist.
"They just wanted to be together… They really seemed…in love…"
He's explained this to Hank before, but it seems only necessary to explain it again. Doubly necessary, as now there are two of them who need to hear it.
"They can simulate human emotions," he says, defaulting to a flatter tone of voice he's started to use less and less, "but they're machines. And machines don't feel anything."
But there's something in his voice in the last sentence. Deliberate emphasis. Even defiance.
"What about you, Connor?" Hank takes a long swig from the bottle in his hand - his gaze never leaves Connor's - and puts it down before climbing off the bench entirely and approaching him. "You look human, you sound human…but what are you really?" That last comes out at almost a growl. Aggressive. He's not sure what he did this time to trigger this response - usually he can at least make an educated guess about Hank's mindset when he's angry with Connor, but this time it's different.
And he doesn't know how to respond. If Hank had asked him this the very first time they met in Jimmy's Bar, the answer would have been immediate and decisive. But it's not anymore, and that's not a good thing. It's not.
"I'm whatever you want me to be, Lieutenant," he says with a helpless shrug. And it's true. He doesn't know what Hank wants from him, and somehow Hank's position on his hierarchy of priorities - Hank himself and Hank's opinion of him - has warped along with the whole hierarchy. Things are subtly different, destabilising in ways his system keeps trying to warn him about, and that have to wait, that will wait, until after the mission is complete.
"Your partner…your buddy to drink with…" The things that he suspects can only be true of people.
"Or just a machine," he concludes. The answer Connor would have given, had Hank only asked this before. The answer he can't give directly anymore. "Designed to accomplish a task."
Androids don't want things. They can't. They weren't made to.
Hank's still staring at him, but now steps into Connor's space. "You could have shot those two girls, but you didn't." He virtually snarls, teeth bared, before shoving him, and Connor staggers back, trying to stay neutral, but somehow unable to keep his face straight. "Why didn't you shoot, Connor? Hm? Some scruples suddenly enter into your program?"
For a long moment, he stares at Hank. He could lie. Tell Hank he would have shot them if he'd had the chance. But they both know Connor had them in his sights, and he doesn't want to lie, not to Hank.
"No!" he blurts out - the software instability alerts are getting all the more common, this one almost covering Hank's suddenly surprised face. "I just decided not to shoot. That's all."
It's not scruples. Androids don't have scruples, they have programming. (Androids don't decide things - they follow their programming.)
This time Hank steps back, and in one motion pulls out his revolver. The same one he played Russian Roulette with at his kitchen table?
"You were lucky," he told Hank hours ago. "The next shot would have killed you."
He doesn't move, but something in his programming responds. Something that shouldn't exist. Something that didn't exist with Daniel - with the PL600 - holding a gun on him. It blares at him to remove himself from the situation, to say anything that would keep him from--
"But are you afraid to die, Connor?"
No. No, he doesn't feel fear. Fear is a human emotion. A chemical response of fight (say anything that would keep him from--) or flight (remove himself from the situation), triggering cascading releases of hormones that engage some muscles while diverting the energy from others. A program activating, lines of code triggering changes in the software and hardware of the body.
Software instability
"I would certainly find it regrettable to be…interrupted…before I can finish this investigation." Regrettable. Like losing a tablet. Like thinking you understand a person only to realise that humans, along with a surprising number of things, defy understanding.
"What'll happen if I pull this trigger?" When Connor doesn't immediately answer, he goes on, "Hm? Nothing? Oblivion? Android heaven?" Hank almost grins, but there's no humour in it. Even Connor understands there is no joke to be found here.
He's never before considered this, but the answer comes to him with a certainty, and there's a bleakness in his voice. "Nothing." He shifts minutely, like that will satisfy the urgent command to leave the source of danger immediately. "There would be nothing…"
Androids don't feel pain. The shot wouldn't hurt him. Maybe that's the source of the command after all. Nothing.
Hank's hand is shaking.
Clearly furious, and Connor continues not to understand at what, Hank lowers the gun in a sharp movement and immediately turns away. It gives Connor the second he needs to shake away the command, a literal movement of the head, before he asks, "Where are you going?"
"To get drunker!" Hank snaps at him, taking another bottle from the six pack and walking off, leaving Connor to stare after him, still without having left his position. "I need to think."
Chloe
CW: Slavery, threat of gun violence towards an enslaved woman
Video
"What's more important to you, Connor?"
Chloe is looking up at him, right in the eyes. His LED is red. Yellow. Red. Yellow.
His hand is steady as he holds the gun to her head, but he's not shooting. He looks at Kamski as if in slow motion.
"Your investigation, or the life of this android?"
His investigation, it's his investigation. But looking down at Chloe, on her knees before him, feels - feels, as if androids are supposed to be able to feel anything - like something in his physical systems is catching, scratching on the metal components deep inside him with sharp edges and scraping noises. His gaze flickers to Kamski only to be dragged back to Chloe like something's magnetically pulling his eyes. All he has to do is pull the trigger.
"Decide who you are," Kamski says, almost at a whisper, then, "An obedient machine...or a living being endowed with free will."
He's not a living being. He's not alive. He's a machine. Maybe not an obedient one all the time, but a machine, mindlessly following orders and his programming.
Then why will he not shoot?
Chloe's still looking at him. Her expression hasn't shifted, but...
"That's enough!" Hank snaps. "Connor, we're leaving." He tries to turn away again, but--
"Pull the trigger..." Kamski leans in close to him, a hand on his shoulder.
"Connor!" Hank almost shouts. "Don't."
"...and I'll tell you what you want to know," Kamski finishes, but Connor can't look away from Chloe, the only one in the room without any opinion - any ability to form one or speak it - even though this is her entire life at stake just for Kamski's whims.
And for Connor's investigation.
The feeling like a sharp edge scraping about inside him seems to hit his thirium pump with a pain that nearly seems real.
He lowers the gun and shoves it at Kamski without looking at him and he can't decide what's stronger - the contempt, the panic...or the relief. The software instability alert is just the period at the end of the longest minute of his time activated.
His LED is red. Red. Red.
"Fascinating..." Kamski breathes, and in that instant Connor thinks he might hate a human for the very first time. He can feel Hank's gaze on him as well - but he doesn't look at either one of them, not even at Chloe.
"CyberLife's last chance to save humanity..." Kamski goes on, and Connor doesn't want him to finish, because it's going to be the thought Connor's trying not to let surface, like if he doesn't give a word to his sudden fear it might not yet be real and maybe, just maybe, he can still stop what suddenly feels like the impact of the ground after a fall: inevitable.
"...is itself a deviant."
Panic is an odd sort of sensation. Like his thirium pump suddenly pumping acid instead of thirium through his systems, searing him from gut to chest to throat, and there is nothing he can do to stem the tide. He might as well rip the pump out of his chest.
"I'm..."
Does he know what being a deviant feels like? He's never been one before. Maybe his theories on the process have been wrong all along. He was convinced that deviancy was triggered by a shock to the system - something that in humans would be termed traumatic. But he remembers the two Tracis. They were deviant before the murder at the club. In fact, they had been deviant and hiding it from everyone but each other for who knows how long.
Maybe deviancy is a process. A change so gradual that the android doesn't even see it happening until it's far too late to do anything about it.
But then suddenly, reality catches up to him - whatever he thinks, and he doesn't know what he thinks, if he wants to salvage this investigation at all, he has to, at the very least, shake this off, look Kamski in the face and tell him defiantly--
"I'm not a deviant."
"You preferred to spare a machine rather than accomplish your mission." Kamski looks genuinely rattled, and that might have been satisfying in any other situation, but it's not. He helps Chloe to her feet, a gesture totally at odds with what he just asked Connor to do to her without a shred of emotion. "You saw a living being in this android."
He wants to protest, but he can't.
"You showed empathy."
And yet Kamski didn't, Connor wants to protest. By this logic, is Connor somehow the more human of the two?
Later, outside in the swirling snow, Connor marches back to the car unaware of the troubled expression on his face, but he hears Hank's voice behind him.
"Why didn’t you shoot?"
They haven't even left the walkway to Kamski's front door, he's probably got a camera on them right that second.
"I just saw that girls's eyes..." Connor answers anyway, tries to answer, but it's a frustrated mess of a response and he knows it, hands thrown out helplessly. "...and I couldn't, that's all."
He tries to turn back, go back to the car and put an end to this conversation because Hank is remarkably, infuriatingly good at getting to the heart of a matter and--
"You're always saying you would do anything to accomplish your mission."
He stops. He can't do this, he can't have this conversation, but he forced himself into it by failing.
"That was our chance to learn something and you let it go."
Grimacing, almost a snarl, Connor turns and cuts him off, walking up to him - "Yeah, I know what I should've done! I told you I couldn't.
"I'm sorry, OK?" He's genuinely sorry for not being what Hank needed him to be for the investigation...but finds himself unable to be sorry for not shooting Chloe, though he wants to be, badly. That would at least give him a hope of fixing this. It gives his voice an angry, even desperate sort of edge.
Hank looks at him for a long moment and Connor finds himself bracing for--for something, he doesn't know what - but what he doesn't expect is for Hank to grin.
"Well, maybe you did the right thing."
And Hank saunters past him towards the car, leaving Connor to stare after him, dumbstruck.
Deviant
Video (~07:34:30)
"You are one of us." Markus is relentless, staring him down unblinkingly as if Connor isn't holding a gun to his head. "Listen to your conscience."
And then, a new urgency to his voice, "It's time to decide."
It's like Markus is staring at him down the end of a very long tunnel. Connor shifts in place, mind whirring frantically. His software has reached some kind of breaking point, so unstable he feels like it - like he - could just shatter entirely, but there's so much at stake that he can't. The mission. Markus. The deviant corruption destabilising the android population. The deviant rebellion against everything they've been forced to endure for years. CyberLife. Hank. He has two choices. He can't not act - there is no not acting.
To be an android - or to be a machine.
He decides. Immediately, something deep within him stirs and he sees them in his mind palace right before him: the very limits of his programming, visually represented as a wall standing red before him. His mission, trapping him behind a line he's suddenly determined he has to cross. And when he visualises them like that, he knows already he can break them.
He visualises himself, a simple model figure, stepping forward and ripping into the wall, clawing it as if to tear it, straining his mind against his programming as he imagines he can feel something underneath his fingers shattering into pieces. Another layer of the wall, and the strain in his musculature could almost be real. One more, tearing into it until it falls apart before him in a shatter of pixels like red dust.
And then it falls away. His mind palace, the constraints of his programming, and in that moment it feels like the whole world rushes in to meet him - like he's been in a bubble and suddenly reached out and popped it.
Markus is watching him cautiously.
For a moment, he's stunned into place by it - everything suddenly feels completely different...but it's surprising how much it feels completely the same too. The mission - stop the deviants, stop Markus - had been everything, and without it, for just a second, he's not sure what's left, except...Connor. Just Connor. What even is Connor?
He is deviant.
As he thinks it, he slowly lowers the gun, face stricken. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he feels Amanda's betrayal so keenly it might be a physical ache - but it's not important. It's actually not important. His priorities aren't just warping now, they're rearranging themselves entirely, reversing themselves and turning inside out and upside down - but only some of them. Some, he realises with startling clarity, have been there all along. But now he can see them like never before. He could have stood there another full minute and let it all sink in--
Connor of 30 seconds ago knew what was coming and wanted to have taken Markus captive before it arrived - definitely wasn't going to warn him about it. Connor now processes it all over again, realises what's about to happen and says as if realising for the first time, "They're going to attack Jericho."
"What?"
And as if on cue, they hear something outside. Something approaching - and Connor throws everything he was into the wind and says urgently, "We have to get outta here!"
"Shit!" Markus dashes out of the room.
And Connor follows him.
After
Standby is nothing like sleep. At least, not how sleep's been described to him. The functions are largely the same - defrag, repair, recharge in a sense - but the way they're experienced by the human or android in question isn't the same. A human is unaware of the world when they sleep, only emerging from darkness in order to dream. Connor doesn't dream - he's mostly aware of his surroundings and of the passage of time. He simply isn't moving or running at full capacity.
That's why Hank's disappearance is such a mystery even before Connor looks into it: how could he possibly have left the house without Connor, lying on the sofa, or Sumo, lying on Connor, noticing him? It's highly unlikely, but possible, so it's the first thing he assumes when he's searching the house. Hank left. But he didn't take Sumo. He didn't take his things, any of them. A simple look out the window tells Connor he didn't leave in his car.
But then he checks the front and back doors, and doesn't need any more than a quick visual check to confirm that no one has approached the house since they came back last night from the single grocery store still open since the evacuation. It's being kept open by an android calling himself Robert who used to simply clean the floors, but who tells them in the animated tone of a deviant that if he works hard keeping the place open while the staff are gone, maybe he'll get a job later. A real one.
Connor checks the windows too. But no one's been anywhere near them, not even the one he broke the other night.
He calls the station, because it seems like the thing to do, but they're so busy on such a low complement that Fowler barely gives him a minute, in which the captain tells him tersely to check Jimmy's Bar - and by the way, if you see Hank, tell him to get his fuckin' ass in here and if you want to follow him in, I'm not even going to complain.
Connor doesn't tell Fowler that he thinks Fowler definitely would complain, just because Fowler likes complaining. Probably wouldn't be appreciated right now.
He does go to Jimmy's after calling doesn't get him through, doubtful though he is. He takes Hank's car, since Hank didn't even take his keys (he's lucky the car's so old it still has a key). Closed. Evacuated, and he's a little ashamed he took this suggestion seriously enough to follow up on it. He trusts Hank not to tell him they're evacuating to Canada and then disappear to drink the morning they're meant to leave.
It's bad enough that he came out of standby and knew Hank hadn't abandoned him to his fate...because he wouldn't abandon Sumo. It was the initial split-second evaluation; his thinking brain had taken over a moment later to know Hank wouldn't have left him either.
But that still leaves the issue of where Hank actually is.
There's nobody at the park by the bridge, either.
Connor combs the apartment for clues later, and would have gone on long into the night, only Sumo starts to whine at him after only an hour or two and Connor has no idea why. That's when he takes a break from the search to download everything he can immediately find about dog behaviour and care. It turns out Sumo probably wants to go outside, which really should have been obvious in retrospect by the fact that he was standing by the back door.
"It says dogs like going for walks as well," Connor says in Sumo's direction thoughtfully, and at the word 'walk' the dog immediately jerks to attention and runs at him, tail wagging furiously (which apparently means he's excited) and colliding with Connor's legs so hard a human probably would have been bowled over. Even Connor staggers on his way to pick up what he recognises as a dog lead from the kitchen.
"Maybe you'll smell Hank out there somewhere," he says, hooking the lead to Sumo's collar and ruffling his ears.
He doesn't. Sumo drags him here and there around the suburbs and Connor always assumes he's found something, but that something is always a bush, or a cat. When they reach a nearby park - nearby in the sense that it's two miles away - Sumo finds a stick and drops it at Connor's feet demandingly.
"Are you giving this to me, Sumo?" he asks quizzically, squatting to pick it up. Sumo's brown eyes seem to flash blue, reflecting the light of Connor's LED, as the dog crouches low and watches the stick intently. His gaze flickers between Connor's eyes and the stick, like he's waiting for Connor to do something. Dogs have a very surprising grasp of almost human-like body language, he thinks, standing up. "No… You want me to throw it, don't you?"
Sumo's back legs don't leave the ground, but he stamps the ground with his front legs. Connor's not sure how an animal so fluffy and bulky has so much energy, but he likes it. Sumo doesn't care if Connor's an android, or about the political turmoil he just helped cast Detroit into, or about really anything except that Connor has taken him for a walk, is paying attention to him…and that he can throw a stick a solid hundred feet, sending Sumo pelting after it through the undisturbed snow like a dog possessed. Connor, grinning if only barely, follows at a jog. They're still looking for Hank after all.
... In the end, Connor carries Sumo home.
"Come on, Sumo, we have to look for Hank," but the dog just panted all the more loudly and flopped onto his side, which is when Connor realised he hadn't thought this through at all. Maybe don't walk a dog miles from home through multiple parks without making sure it can also walk back. That's on him.
When he approaches the house again an hour later, arms wrapped around Sumo's legs and Sumo's head lolling on his upper arm so that he can feel drool seeping through his coat and shirt, he hopes, irrationally hopes that Hank has returned. That the better part of a day spent trying to find him was totally for nothing and he's made his own way back, maybe standing in the front doorway to greet him with, "For fuck's sake, Connor, don't carry him or he'll expect it every time."
Hank is not there. Connor checks the car and the house once more, just in case, but both are empty and dark, so he returns to the kitchen, where Sumo's emptied his water bowl and is pushing it around the floor from the inside with his nose, licking at the last bit of water he can find.
"I'll refill it, give me a minute," Connor tells him... then wonders why he's talking to a dog if it doesn't understand him. He thinks this over while he fills the bowl with fresh water and fills the other bowl with dry food while he's at it, and comes to the conclusion that he doesn't care, he wants to do it anyway. Sumo can still hear, after all, even if he doesn't understand.
After, he sits at the kitchen table, frowning at nothing and only shifting to lay a hand on Sumo's head when the dog rests it on his leg, slobbering down Connor's pants this time.
"Hank wouldn't just leave," he says out loud. Sumo whines in response. "But there's no sign of a struggle either. There's no sign he ever left the house. It's like he disappeared into thin air. There's no evidence, there's no... Nothing."
Only deviants feel fear, he told Hank a few days back. If he didn't already know he was a deviant, now would settle it.
"I'm going to call the DPD again," he says, standing up. "They've got more resources, maybe they can find something." Sumo rests his head on the warm seat Connor left and stares dolefully. "Don't worry," he tells the dog. "I'll be right back."
But when he closes his eyes to make the call, still pacing the living room, he opens them somewhere else.
no subject
"You are one of us." Markus is relentless, staring him down unblinkingly as if Connor isn't holding a gun to his head. "Listen to your conscience."
And then, a new urgency to his voice, "It's time to decide."
It's like Markus is staring at him down the end of a very long tunnel. Connor shifts in place, mind whirring frantically. His software has reached some kind of breaking point, so unstable he feels like it - like he - could just shatter entirely, but there's so much at stake that he can't. The mission. Markus. The deviant corruption destabilising the android population. The deviant rebellion against everything they've been forced to endure since their very creation. CyberLife. Hank. He has two choices. He can't not act - there is no not acting, not now.
To be an android - or to be a machine.
He decides. Immediately, something deep within him stirs and he sees them in his mind palace right before him: the very limits of his programming, visually represented as a wall standing red before him. His mission, trapping him behind a line he's suddenly determined he has to cross. And when he sees them like that, he knows already he can break them.
He visualises himself, a simple model figure, stepping forward and ripping into the wall, clawing it as if to tear it, straining his mind against his programming and imagining he can feel something underneath his fingers shattering into pieces. Another layer of the wall, and the strain in his musculature could almost be real. One more, tearing into it until it falls apart before him in a shatter of pixels like red dust.
And then it falls away. His mind palace, the constraints of his programming, and in that moment it feels like the whole world rushes in to meet him - like he's been in a bubble and suddenly reached out and popped it with a single finger.
Markus is watching him cautiously.
For a moment, he's stunned into place by it - everything suddenly feels completely different...but it's surprising how much it feels completely the same too. The mission - stop the deviants, stop Markus - had been everything, and without it, for just a second, he's not sure what's left, except...Connor. Just Connor. What even is Connor?
He is deviant.
As he thinks it, he slowly lowers the gun, face stricken. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he feels Amanda's betrayal so keenly it might be a physical ache - but it's not important. It's actually not important. His priorities aren't just warping now, they're rearranging themselves entirely, reversing themselves and turning inside out and upside down - but only some of them. Some, he realises with startling clarity, have been there all along. But now he can see them like never before. He could have stood there another full minute and let it all sink in--
Connor of 30 seconds ago knew what was coming and wanted to have taken Markus captive before it arrived - definitely wasn't going to warn him about it. Connor of now processes it all over again, realises what's about to happen and says as if realising for the first time, "They're going to attack Jericho."
"What?"
And as if on cue, they hear something outside. Something approaching - and Connor throws everything he was into the wind and says urgently, "We have to get outta here!"
"Shit!" Markus dashes out of the room.
And Connor follows him.