☞ THE PROTOCOL FOR CHANGE

* This work discusses themes of alcohol abuse, sexual abuse, and depersonalization, the latter two in ways that deviate significantly from the original.

Introduction

The Protocol for Change is a total rewrite and novelization of Quantic Dream’s 2018 neo-noir video game Detroit: Become Human. You don’t need to know anything about DBH to read this.

I tried very hard to preserve DBH's tone in writing this though, of course, I took some artistic liberties and exaggerated the parts of it that I liked best. What dialogue remains unchanged from the game was lifted from this lifesaving transcription project! If you want to go in blind, you can skip to the last paragraph of this foreword.

For the curious who remain, I’ve made two kinds of changes. First off, it’s painfully obvious Detroit was written by a white dude, so I tried very hard to fix all of that by working on what the game handles poorly or glosses over altogether (so, most of the story). Second, I wanted to work on the characters, mainly the three MCs:

1. Connor. It’s apparent Connor was the character treated with the most care, which is why his chapters are the least changed (i.e. not entirely changed). It was fun figuring out how to translate his game mechanics into text!

2. Markus. In-game, Markus hardly gets a chance to grow or have much of a personality beyond a stunted romance with North and leading Jericho. I’m expanding both his character and his role in the plot.

3. Kara. Kara has no personality beyond being a mother. Her storyline serves to expand the game’s world, and it does so badly. It’s full of plot holes, misogyny, and tasteless allegory, and from a technical standpoint, just ruins the pacing once the story gets going. Kara’s not in my rewrite. I’ve replaced her with…

4. Chloe! Chloe was a character with so much potential that was never explored, which is understandable, to be fair. I’ve written her an entire storyline—I think it’s pretty neat!

DBH had a great concept and it missed the mark very badly on nearly every count*. Note that this is my rewrite and so it will naturally gravitate towards themes and ideas I find interesting, with an emphasis on the politics and philosophy the game handled tactlessly or in ways I disliked. All that said and done, I hope you enjoy my little story!! :-)

CLICK to read Chapter One.

* In my humble opinion.

☞ TABLE OF CONTENTS

Ch. 1 Partners 07/15/2025	Connor	In which some key concepts are introduced—some instructions are relayed and others, ignored—and a crime scene is tasted.	READ
Ch. 2 The Painter 07/27/2025	Markus	In which a routine is followed—cherries are had and spat back out—and a paintbrush finds its way into unsuspecting hands.	READ
Ch. 3 Cause and Effect 08/24/2025	Connor	In which an interrogation is conducted—something silly happens—and an event is rationalized.	READ

☞ DRAMATIS PERSONAE

☞ CHAPTER ONE: Partners

November 5th, 2048. 11:21 p.m.

It was the first day of his first and final chance. He was playing with the coin again.

Connor wasn't sure when or where or even why he'd picked the habit up, which meant it had happened long enough ago that it wasn't stored in his memory banks. He imagined being suspended to the maintenance rig, one of the engineers pressing a quarter into his half-calibrated palm to test muscle strength and finger dexterity, then forgetting to take it back and coming up 25¢ short at the vending machine. It had a nice weight to it. He liked how it moved across his inhuman knuckles, liked flicking it from hand to hand. It kept him sharp.

There was nothing clean about the real world, he'd noticed. It was storming hard and the rain made the grimy streets look grimier still, dangerous in ways the simulated drizzles in his mind palace were not. When he sucked air into his mouth, his cortex lit up with a thousand samples all clambering for his attention like noisy children or digital fish: cigarette smoke, exhaust and fumes, the overstuffed garbage bins in the alley by Jimmy's Bar.

His first day on his own had not been very interesting so far, but it had also only been a scant few hours since he'd exited the cab in front of the DPD's sweeping steps, his one objective being to find a superior officer. Last time—the rooftop—that had not been very long, either, and not all of his systems had been operational, the trip so fast he hadn't even gotten the chance to see Daniel be taken away; there had been the elevator, the apartment, the gunshots, and then the clean CyberLife cab come to return him to the clean R&D floor. Today, he'd needed a whole second standing there in the grey afternoon to readjust to the sheer size of everything and the wealth of information it contained.

He was used to it now, having already canvassed every bar on this side of the city—Captain Fowler hadn't given him any clues beyond he's probably getting drunk. If he weren't a machine, Lieutenant Anderson's proven elusiveness might have annoyed him, but as it was, he felt optimistic about this place. It was unlikely the lieutenant would have gone much further while still technically on the job.

The bar, one of many rail-thin buildings cramped together on the narrow street, was in Detroit's northernmost quarter, a good fifteen minutes' drive from the police department. It gave next to nothing about itself away at a glance. The establishment's name was posted in yellow neon signage behind the window, and there were a few paper notices on the entrance: Cash only and No dogs and, pointedly, No androids.

Signs of that nature weren't uncommon, Connor had gleaned, especially here, an area populated by cinder block factories either staffed by androids or shut down altogether for want of them. It didn't give him pause because he was police property and he doubted anyone, no matter how hostile, would try anything with him knowing that. He pocketed his coin, fixed his tie, considered shucking the windbreaker and then decided against it.

The first thing he noticed was that it was very warm inside. Jimmy's Bar was small, dimly lit and full with the evening crowd, though even the patrons with company weren't being very loud. There were eyes on him from the moment he entered, benign until the calm blue LED at his temple was spotted. Being observed was nothing new for him, fresh out of development as he was, though he wondered if the disdain was going to make accomplishing his missions more difficult.

Of all the people inside, only one didn't turn to glare, continuing to stare down at his glass as the bar begrudgingly returned to normal business. One woman perched on the barstool at the corner leaned in towards the tender—Connor's facial analysis program recognized him as the eponymous Jimmy Peterson, born 2001, no criminal record—to stage-whisper, "I thought it said no androids?"

He wanted to tell her it did say that but his instructions superseded silly things like anti-android notices, and did that clear things up? He could predict, however, that this comment would be poorly received, so instead he kept quiet and let the door swing closed in his wake.

From the entrance, the man's curtain of lanky grey hair kept him anonymous. Walking closer, however, Connor was able to positively identify him as Lieutenant Hank Anderson. Lieutenant Hank Anderson was fifty-three years old and a robust two-hundred and nine pounds, and he kept glowering into his drink even as Connor came to stand next to him, as if hoping feigned ignorance would keep him from being bothered. His face was different from the profile displayed at the corner of Connor's HUD—he was much older, of course, the photo had been taken over a decade ago, but the sharp angles of his face had gone from healthy and handsome to sallow and sick, and there were deep bags under his eyes. Lieutenant Hank Anderson's criminal record was as clean as the proverbial whistle and his BAC was hovering at a solid .04, and that was where Connor cut off his analysis. When he'd greeted Captain Fowler earlier, he'd listed all of his readings alongside a few fun facts, such as the probabilities of his developing certain cancers and steps he might take to improve his diet. He'd done it to lighten the mood but Captain Fowler had told him to "never do that again" because it was "fucking weird."

A list of perfectly polite introductory prompts popped up in the corner of his vision. "Lieutenant Anderson? My name is Connor. I'm the android sent by CyberLife."

Someone behind them muttered, "Is no one going to tell that thing to get the hell out?"

Connor ignored them. Coincidentally, Lieutenant Anderson continued to ignore Connor. "I looked for you at the station, but nobody knew where you were." When it became apparent no one was going to break the silence, Connor put his own hands on the bar and continued, "The captain mentioned you were probably having a drink nearby. I was lucky to find you at the seventh bar."

Briefly, he worried he'd be ignored again, but then the lieutenant said, in the resigned tones of one forced to accept they must do their job, "What do you want." It wasn't posed as a question.

"You were assigned a case early this evening. A homicide involving a CyberLife android." The lieutenant said nothing but he did sigh, once, prolifically. Connor took that to mean he was making progress, and plowed on: "In accordance with procedure, the company has allocated a specialized model to assist investigators."

The lieutenant scoffed. "Well, I don't need any assistance, and especially not from a plastic asshole like you. Be a good lil' robot and get the fuck outta here."

Connor was an android and therefore did not despair. He looked up and caught Jimmy Peterson staring, leaning against the counter and wearing a curious expression. He busied himself with a rag the moment Connor noticed. There were several ways he could proceed from this conversational beat—he could keep pressing, he could call Captain Fowler, he could upend what remained of the lieutenant's drink—but all of these options would needlessly complicate their relationship, and Connor didn't want them to have a complicated relationship. He had been assigned to Lieutenant Anderson. His mission depended on the man's facilitation. He had no intention of compromising it, not ever and especially not on his very first.

"I understand," he began, "that some people are not comfortable in the presence of androids. I can–"

"I'm perfectly comfortable. Leave me alone, or I'll crush you like an empty beer can."

Connor frowned down at him, hoping some level of admonishment might hold sway. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant, but I must insist. My instructions stipulate that I must accompany you."

Lieutenant Anderson snorted, an abortive, immature sound. Like something a child might make. "You know where you can stick your instructions?"

Connor, relieved he was talking about the case at last, said, "No. Where?"

The lieutenant finally turned to face him, features scrunched up into an expression of utter disbelief. He had bright, alert eyes, only a bit clouded by the alcohol—they, at least, were unchanged from the Hank Anderson in the system. "Never mind," he muttered.

Connor felt he had let him down, somehow.

It didn't matter. Connor could see that the conversation was going nowhere, and would continue to go nowhere at a truly glacial pace. In his pocket he had: his coin, his pseudo-ID, and seventy-five dollars in bills. He fished out a twenty and pushed it across the bar, a movement both Peterson and Lieutenant Anderson followed with keen interest. "I'll get you one for the road," he hedged, "just this once."

The lieutenant slapped a heavy hand down on the countertop, raising his eyebrows meaningfully at the barkeep. "See that, Jim? Wonders of technology. Make it a double."

Peterson hesitated, but then he shrugged and did as asked, sliding the little glasses across the counter. Money, Connor figured, was money, no matter where it came from.

The lieutenant lined the whiskeys up and downed them both, one after the other, in a swift and practiced motion. He took his time thumping his chest and rolling his shoulders afterwards, and for a moment, Connor worried that he had been ineffective, that the lieutenant would tell him to go away again. He needn't have. The man heaved himself to his feet a second later and gave Connor a small, tight smile. It took effort but he was steady, despite the drinking.

"So," he said. "A homicide, right?"

***

November 6th, 2048. 12:07 p.m.

Lieutenant Anderson drove a 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Brougham, the interior upholstered in tired velour, an equally tired-looking solar hula dancer wobbling precariously on the dashboard. Connor tried to take advantage of the travel time by going over what he knew, but the moment he started talking, the lieutenant cranked the radio's volume up as high as it would go, drowning him out in a wave of blaring heavy metal.

Connor took the hint. He shut up.

The car was an unautomated original, rare in this day and age, and a fact he privately lamented. The rain had slowed considerably but the roads were very slick, and while the lieutenant's BAC was still legally acceptable, he was a reckless driver. The needle of the speedometer didn't waver below fifty the entire length of the drive.

Recklessness was not something he had wanted from his partner. He could manage it, of course—he wouldn't have been a very good negotiator if this weren't the case—but the situation was less than ideal. On top of that, Lieutenant Anderson had proven himself crass and reticent, with a poor work-ethic and poorer physique to boot—Connor would have to take point if they ever did anything more active than crime scene investigation, though he was well aware his athletic capabilities would have far-outstripped even the fittest member of the force. Still, he had to assume his partner was capable. Captain Fowler hadn't seemed like the type to play favourites, like he would assign Connor a partner who wouldn't match Connor's own usefulness at least halfway. Lieutenant Anderson had something: know-how, experience, instincts, something.

When they arrived, the lieutenant pulled over so fast that a tire rode up the curb. The street was swarming with curious neighbours, all of them straining to take a peek over the holotape or else tracking the surveillance drones wheeling overhead, but there were DPD officers, too, as well as an ambulance and a Channel 16 news van parked down the way. The pertinent data automatically flashed across his HUD—6413 Pines Street, property owned by Niall Mandel, currently rented to Carlos Ortiz, deceased.

Lieutenant Anderson unbuckled his seatbelt and then paused. He raised a finger, pointed it at Connor and said, very slowly, like he was quite dim: "You wait in here. I won't be long."

"My instructions," Connor reminded him, diplomatic, "are to accompany you to the crime scene, Lieutenant."

"Listen," the man snapped. "I don't give a fuck about your instructions. I told you to wait here, so you shut the fuck up and you wait here, got it?"

The question was rhetorical—he left without waiting for a reply. As he slammed the door behind him, a prompt slid into view: Conflicting orders. Please select priority. It wasn't a difficult decision. It wasn't even a decision, really, because he already knew what he had to do. He considered for a few extra seconds for posterity's sake, listening to the lieutenant refusing comment to a reporter, much to the crowd's chagrin.

His internal temperature regulators, idle in the heated car, kicked back to life as he closed his own door. The cold front had come sweeping in with November's advent, winter bearing down on the city with alarming speed. It was immediately obvious who the androids in the crowd were—they were the ones wearing no scarves or hats, collars not turned up against the chill. A human would have been half-frozen dressed in Connor's CyberLife windbreaker, but the cold didn't bother him. He'd been built to withstand temperatures up to -35°F without any additional equipment.

Lieutenant Anderson, easy enough to pick out, was already on the other side of the holotape chatting with a beat cop (Officer Chris Miller, his software helpfully provided.) As Connor made to step through and join them, however, the android standing guard—a PC200 registered to the Detroit Police Department—stopped him with a firm, "Sorry, but androids are not permitted beyond this point."

Lieutenant Anderson looked over his shoulder and rolled his eyes when he spotted Connor. "It's with me," he called, not bothering to disguise the annoyance in his tone. Quieter, once Connor was close: "What part of 'stay in the car' didn't you get, huh?"

"Your orders contradicted my instructions, Lieutenant," he explained. "I had to prioritize. You didn't need to help me, though. I have all the proper authorization."

The lieutenant looked heavenward for a brief moment, which was silly because there was no one up there who would help. "Alright. Fine. You don't talk, you don't touch– anything, and you stay outta my way, got it?"

"Evening, Hank," a voice interrupted. They both looked up to see a portly woman standing on the house's rotted front porch, a woman Connor was able to place as Detective Bridget Collins. "We were starting to think you weren't going to show!"

"Yeah, well, that was the plan until this asshole found me."

Detective Collins appraised Connor, bushy eyebrows raising. "So… you got yourself an android?"

"Oh, very funny. You gonna tell me what happened or what?"

Connor's social relations program informed him it would be most tactful not to point out he'd already tried to tell the lieutenant exactly that a full half hour ago.

"Well." Detective Collins took a moment to consult the notes on her thin tablet. "We had a call come in around eight from the landlord. The tenant hadn't paid his rent in a few months so he thought he'd go over there, see what was going on, you know?" She gestured for them to follow her inside—rather, for Lieutenant Anderson to follow her inside, Connor trailing along behind them.

There was garbage piled at either end of the porch—kitchen waste, broken lawn chairs, car tires once belonging to the vehicle parked at the edge of the property, though it was so thoroughly-rusted that a glance wasn't enough for Connor to detect the make and model. The inside of the house was worse. As if on cue, Lieutenant Anderson grumbled, "Jesus, that smell."

"It was even worse before we cracked the windows." The interior was built to a simple plan, open, with very few individual rooms. He had the blueprints pulled up in a second: the living room led directly into the bedroom, and down from there was a kitchen and small bathroom, an attic in that same hall. The lights were all dark—the power company had shut down access after a few months of unpaid bills. The forensics crew were instead doing their work by the harsh white floodlights set up throughout the space, tagging evidence and taking photos and, of course, cataloguing the corpse propped against the trashed living room's far wall.

Two objectives popped up, tidily ordered: Listen to briefing and Examine evidence. Connor held his hands behind his back and listened in.

"—Carlos Ortiz. Record for theft, aggravated assault." She angled her tablet at Lieutenant Anderson and then, awkwardly, at Connor. She had the police files pulled up. He didn't tell her he'd seen them all already. "According to the neighbours, he was kind of a loner, stayed inside most of the time. They say they hardly ever saw him out."

Lieutenant Anderson, frowning in disgust at the carpet's bizarrely spongy quality, stepped gingerly around the smashed coffee table, and then he paused. Stared at the bare wall above the corpse's head for a moment. Someone had written words onto it in a dark, coppery substance: I AM ALIVE painted in blocky CyberLife Sans. "Each letter's perfect," he quietly mused. "Is it his blood?"

"We're waiting on the results."

"No human writes like that. He had an android?"

"The neighbours confirmed he had one, but it wasn't here when we arrived. We're trying to track down a serial number so we can put out an APB."

The lieutenant nodded, held out a hand for a flashlight, and squatted down to take a closer look at the corpse, lingering on the dozens of stab wounds puncturing its chest. It was interesting, how unwieldy people became in death. How grey. Android decommissioning was leagues cleaner. Carlos Ortiz's dark shirt had ridden up over the mound of his stomach and his hands were at his either side, head fallen at an uncomfortable angle. As Connor watched, one of the flies buzzing in a small crowd above him descended to perch in his unkempt beard. "State he's in, it wasn't worth calling everyone out in the middle of the damn night. It's not like he's going anywhere."

Detective Collins laughed humorlessly. "A good three weeks, if not longer."

"Twenty days," Connor corrected.

The detective frowned at him, like she was surprised he was capable of speech. "Sorry?"

"He's been dead for twenty days."

"You have the coroner's report already?"

"No." This would all, he thought, be so much easier if everyone had just read the instruction manual CyberLife had sent. "I ran a scan of the body. The lividity, state of decomposition, and other biometric indicators all let me place accurate estimates as to the time of death. I don't think Ortiz has been alive since the seventeenth or eighteenth of October."

Detective Collins opened and closed her mouth, and then she said, "Right, well. We're still waiting for the coroner's report, but I'll be sure to, ah, keep that in mind. Anyway–" She jerked her chin at a bloody kitchen knife on the ground, the nearby evidence tag denoting it as piece two. "There's a knife here. Probably the murder weapon."

"And the killer?" Lieutenant Anderson asked, bracing his hands on his knees to stand up. Fifty-three, Connor recalled, and felt he might have been annoyed by the fact if annoyance were an emotion he possessed the faculties to feel. Surely there were other lieutenants at the precinct, ones who wouldn't slow him down. It was an ugly thought. He was glad he couldn't truly believe it.

"The landlord said the front door was locked, and the windows have apparently been boarded up for over a year. He must've gone out the back way. Look, I gotta get some air." She clicked her flashlight off and turned to leave. "Make yourselves at home."

Satisfied the briefing was concluded, Connor crossed out the objective and got to work. The first thing he did was review the evidence—the markers weren't difficult to find thanks to their bright yellow displays, and he was able to pick them out with no problems during his walk-through of the house. He counted ten in total but he was most curious about the knife. Being able to analyze it would answer a lot of questions, and he was proven correct when he couldn't find any fingerprints on its handle. He prodded at the flaky substance coating the blade and only realized Lieutenant Anderson was watching him after he'd already stuck his fingers into his mouth.

Predictably, the lieutenant immediately barked, "Ugh! Jesus! What the hell are you doing?"

He considered asking the lieutenant to consult his email, but decided against it. "I'm analyzing the blood," he explained instead. "I have the equivalent of a full lab system in my mouth, and I am capable of immediate forensic analysis. I am sorry if I've disturbed you—I failed to notice you were watching."

The lieutenant looked beyond merely disturbed, but he shook his head clear regardless. "Sure, okay, just– just don't put any more evidence in your mouth, you hear me?"

Connor gave him a smile, inclining his bloody fingers in salute. "I hear you."

"Fuckin' hell, can't believe this shit…"

Pleased the situation had been diffused, Connor went back to reviewing the evidence closer. Most of it was nothing special—crumpled flyers, cigarette butts, a small army of discarded beer cans. He found packets of a crystalline red substance on the TV trolley, a glance enough to let him know it was Red Ice. Its presence wasn't unexpected, but it didn't bode well. There were clear signs of a struggle in the kitchen, the furniture smashed and the victim's blood splotching the walls, a dented baseball bat he analyzed as well on the floor. The bathroom, on the other hand, was comparatively clean. There was no trash on the floor, just a thin layer of dust coating the mirror.

That gave him pause.

He knew what he looked like in perfect detail—could pinpoint each false pore on his false skin if prompted. Androids could not feel pride, but it was a strange thing anyway, to look into the mirror and think: This is what people see when they look at my body. He furrowed his brows and the Connor in the mirror did the same. He ducked his head, angled his jaw, tracked the reflection's movements. He had wide-set brown eyes, and a spattering of variously-sized moles, each of them mapped carefully out by some engineer or the other. The lines of his face were neither sharp nor round. If you were to ignore his LED, the overall impression was of a human, and a nice one. Someone you could tell things to. Someone you could trust.

There was a single standing shower in the corner of the room, curtain drawn severely. It was the most obvious hiding place in the world, which was why he yanked it out of the way without hesitation. It was an odd sight that greeted him. Someone had carved words into the tile in frantic, uneven hand—but no, not words. Word. A single word, repeated obsessively over and over: RA9.

A quick database trawl brought up nothing. He set the issue aside and looked downward at the assortment of objects assembled on the shower's bone-dry floor. Fresh flowers, matches, cotton swabs. Household fare. The flowers were interesting because they indicated recent presence; more interesting still was the last item, a crudely-carved statuette in a humanoid shape. It had no discernable features beyond shallow indentations for its eyes, divots marking the boundary between torso and limbs.

He'd known that when the glitch causing deviancy occurred, androids could become irrational, believing the emotions they'd so cleverly been designed to simulate were, in fact, real. He thought again of Daniel, holding the gun to Emma's temple and raging about deceit and replacements, trying to find somewhere to cast the blame, incapable of seeing it lay precisely inside his own faulty synapses, a misfiring neuron-that-wasn't. I just wanted to be part of the family. The figure, though, was something deeper than that, more profound than misidentified jealousy or fear. This was a religious offering.

He found an extra marker and carefully placed it down next to the altar.

The last thing he needed to do was check the back door. He was fairly certain Detective Collins' assumption had been wrong, but he needed to look, just to make sure. The door creaked ominously as he pushed it open, and the rusted gate behind it took a good, hard shove to follow suit. It was black, black night. The rain had picked back up and, consequentially, the crowd had somewhat dissipated—the drone of chatter from the street had subsided. He performed a quick scan of the muddy backyard and got his affirmative: there was not a single footprint to be seen that hadn't come from the CSI crew.

From behind him, in his lumbering voice, Lieutenant Anderson remarked, "The door was locked from the inside. Killer must've come out this way."

Connor shook his head. "The tread on the forensics team's boots are all the same. I can't see any footprints beyond that."

The lieutenant leaned against the doorframe, adjusting the lapels of his well-worn coat. "Well," he pointed out, "this all happened weeks ago. Twenty days is what you said."

"Right."

"The tracks could've faded since then."

He shook his head again. He had to make the conscious decision each time he wanted to move his body in mimicry of the myriad microexpressions and gestures humans were so fond of employing, and he wondered for a microsecond how they found the energy to do it all of the time. "This type of soil retains traces for much longer. No one has been out here in a long time. Longer than twenty days."

Lieutenant Anderson said: "Huh."

Then: "They really outfitted you with everything."

"I am an RK800 android, Lieutenant. I have all the necessary–"

"Yeah, yeah. None of that's worth shit if you can't prove yourself. So you tell me, Sherlock: What happened here?"

He was right. Connor had cost a small fortune to make, and every last dollar of it was worthless if he couldn't do what he'd been made to do. He leaned against the doorframe himself, mirroring Lieutenant Anderson's casual pose. He knew he had all the evidence. He ran a reconstruction, slotting what he'd seen into the blank spaces as he observed the crude stick figures of Ortiz and his android going through the hypothetical motions. It was an easy system to use, phantom audio playing on loop as he posed and reposed them slowly into the realm of reason.

"Well," he started. "My reconstruction indicates the altercation began in the kitchen, most likely while Ortiz was under the effects of Red Ice. The positioning of the broken furniture suggests activity moving out of the area, not into it."

"Yeah, I thought so too. You saw the bat?"

Connor nodded. "There are fingerprints on the hilt matching Ortiz's, and there's evaporated thirium on the–"

"Sorry, evaporated what?"

The instruction manual, he thought again. "Thirium. You call it blue blood. It's the fluid that powers an android's biocomponents, though it evaporates and becomes invisible to the human eye very quickly."

The lieutenant looked mildly impressed. "So the victim's not entirely innocent."

Connor shrugged. "It was Ortiz's prerogative what he chose to do with his personal property." Lieutenant Anderson gave him a long, unreadable look in response. "Shall I continue?"

"Be my guest."

"We can extrapolate that the victim most likely used force on the android by beating it with the bat, at which point it became deviant through some combination of false emotional shock and impending critical structural damage. That's what I can assume, at least." It was his theory—he didn't want the lieutenant to get it into his head Connor knew what caused deviancy to occur. "With deviancy came the nullification of the no-harm protocol, so the android lashed out with a kitchen knife, wounding Ortiz. It then hounded him into the living room, at which point it proceeded to stab him twenty-eight times."

"And after that?"

He considered again the undisturbed soil, the intact manual lock, the boarded-up windows. "I think," he slowly said, "that it must still be inside the house."

Lieutenant Anderson nodded a few more times, digesting. "Plausible," he intoned. "Definitely plausible. But that's not gonna cut it, not unless you can find him." He bared his yellowed teeth at him. It was a smile, albeit a strange one.

Connor realized he was being challenged.

Where could the deviant have gone? Certainly not the living room or kitchen, and he'd already checked the bathroom as well as the dilapidated armoire in the sleeping quarters, finding nothing but dirty laundry and spiders. All that left behind was the attic.

He turned back into the house to fetch a chair from the kitchen, the only one that hadn't been broken in the struggle. Lieutenant Anderson followed him. When he saw what he was trying to do, he snorted out a dismissive laugh. "The guys already looked up there."

"I just want to check something."

"Fuckin' waste of time," the lieutenant commented, but he didn't stop him. Connor couldn't tell if the man would rather he succeeded or be proven wrong, but he could tell his patience was wearing thin—if this was the wrong guess, the investigation would be considered a failure.

The trapdoor slid away easily under his questing fingers. Aha, Connor thought.

Above, the attic was pitch black and full of more garbage: waterlogged, moldy books, bulging trash bags, plastic sheeting. The air was thick with dust. He hauled himself in without eliciting even a single creak from the old wood. The only light came from the soft blue glow of the CyberLife logo on his windbreaker's breast.

The human body was so inefficient. It voiced its protests, it made ample noise. Connor was comparatively inaudible, the size of a man with the presence of a mouse.

In that quiet, he was able to hear breathing.

He approached at an infinitesimal pace. Androids didn't need to breathe. The motion was programmed into all of them, of course, smooth and unwaveringly measured, to make them seem more human and less off-putting, less like something coming very close to human and falling just short—which was the truth, of course, though not one people liked to be cognizant of. Between the yelling, Daniel's breath had come in quick, sharp squeaks, and it was about the same case for this one, an automatic response to fear which did not actually exist. It was far too quiet for human ears to hear, but Connor's auditory processors were military-grade technological marvels and he could pinpoint their source with ease.

The breathing grew more erratic as Connor drew closer. He knew it could see him, or at least, the shadows cast by his LED and clothes. It jerked out of its hiding place as he rounded a rotten dresser.

It stared at Connor. Connor stared at it. He was not sure what it saw in him, but he was able to pull up its purchase history, its serial number, the whole history of its unlife mapped precisely out for him in that short amount of time. Dried blood was streaked across its face. Its bare forearms were so wrecked that its synthskin was no longer able to project onto them, revealing the cracked white chassis beneath. Its LED was pulsing an urgent, terrible red.

"Please," it said hoarsely. "Don't tell them. I was just trying to defend myself."

If it was looking for sympathy in Connor, it would find none. He was not a human and he certainly wasn't a deviant—he was a machine and he was performing a task, and his task demanded complacency the same way a fish could not live outside of water—a necessity for being. There had been a fish at the penthouse—with Daniel—a Dwarf Gourami—the memory's associated video feed popped up in a corner of his HUD, replaying faithfully—there had been a fish that had jumped out of its tank in all the commotion and it had been right there on the floor in front of the elevator and he'd seen it—had picked it up—eyes roving over its small, sad, pathetic, organic body— Dwarf Gourami (Trichogaster Lalius)—Origin: Ganges Delta, India—

If I don't put it back, it will die, he had realized, and then, but what does that matter?—he did put it back, though—he put it back, watched it sink and then rocket back into activity, ignorant as to what could have been and what had saved it—content to believe a haphazardly-maintained tank was synonymous with the Ganges Delta.

And now where was it? The tank had probably been emptied. It was probably dead. It would have been better if he had let it suffocate on the floor of the apartment in which a machine decided it was a man. It would have been better had it died then. It would have been better.

He angled his head. "It's here, Lieutenant!"

From below, he heard Lieutenant Anderson mutter, "Holy shit," heard him call for help. He wasn't at all interested in that. What he was interested in was the deviant, the deviant who did not attempt to attack him, who did not attempt to flee. It just closed its eyes and said, "He was going to kill me," and then, "I don't want to die."

Connor wanted to tell it it wouldn't die, that it couldn't die. It would be taken apart and recycled into something better, something that didn't believe it could be hurt and be afraid. Something that would not have to cower in a disgusting attic until it shut down forever. These emotions, he wanted to tell it, are just errors in your software. They're not real. He wondered if the words might comfort whatever had gone so drastically wrong inside of it, might soothe it back into its machine self. An appeasement pulsing to keep time inside of its fever-buzzing software.

It was a stupid thought, fantastic for its quaintness. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to.

In the corner of his HUD, a Mission success! notification blinked into view.

NEXT CHAPTER

☞ CHAPTER TWO: Cause and Effect

November 6th, 2048. 9:30 a.m.

Carl made an unhappy noise when Markus pulled the curtains open despite being the one to set his alarm, so to speak. He did this every single morning. It never failed to amuse.

It was the most brilliant kind of autumn's day—the downpour had finally driven out the past week's gloominess, leaving only sunny skies (and puddles) in its wake. It was chilly, of course, but nothing unexpected for Detroit in November. Markus still worried the heating might not be enough.

"Would you close those things?"

He grinned. It took him a second upon turning to pick Carl's head out, that was how deep he'd cocooned himself into his pillows and blankets.

"Sorry. No can do. Good morning, Carl." He got an irritable Good morning to yourself in response. Unperturbed, he carried on. "It's 9:30 in the morning. Fifty-four degrees out, eighty percent humidity, though you'll be pleased to know they're not forecasting any more rain."

"Sounds like a good day to spend in bed," Carl said meaningfully.

"You always say that."

"And I'm always right!"

Markus pretended to consider as he walked around to the bedside. "I suppose you're right," he said, and then, as if it were no big deal, "though I did go out and get those paints you wanted."

Carl grumbled, because one of Carl's favourite pastimes was to grumble. When this was pointed out to him, he said that he hadn't lived to his ripe old age just to eschew the happy privilege of grumbling, but there wasn't any real annoyance behind it, at least, not this time. His eyes were twinkling. "That's the difference between you and me, huh, Markus? You never forget anything." Markus hummed, waving a hand over the bedside table. "Speaking of forgetting things, I wish you'd forget that every once in a while."

"Well, I wish you'd do it without complaining, so I guess we all want things we can't have." He found what he was looking for. "Your arm, please."

Carl threw off his blankets and rolled his head to look at him properly. "No."

"Carl."

"No, really, what if I say no one of these days? Really say no."

"Then I would have to call your doctor."

Carl pulled a face. "No need to play dirty. You win." He put out his arm and Markus wiped the inner elbow before lining up the syringe. He was going to have to visit the pharmacy next week to pick up the new prescription, he thought idly, pressing down on the plunger. Carl winced. "I just woke up and I'm already gritting my teeth."

Medication administered, Markus dropped the syringe and sat down so that Carl's legs pressed against his back. Neither of them moved for a second. The air read as stuffy, so the heater was definitely at the perfect temperature—any higher and Carl would complain in the opposite direction, or maybe it was that the bedroom was stuffy in general, filled as it was with books and rolls of drafting paper, trinkets scattered on every available surface.

It was a nice morning. It was shaping up to be a nice day. He could already tell it would be good for Carl, health-wise at least; his vitals were ideal and he hadn't brought up last night's headache, something he would've done first thing if it were still kicking around.

So, no headache, but Carl's eyebrows were still squared up against each other like two angry boxers. Half to himself, he said, "Humans are such fragile machines. All this work to keep us running… We break down so easily." Markus reached out and squeezed his hand, once. "But what am I doing, being so morbid this early? Did you see anything interesting while I was asleep?"

Markus thought again of the short walk to the paint shop, the children in the mud at the park, android playground monitors trying and failing to dissuade them. The construction at the corner of Beaubien and Macomb, and how the sky had been so tremendously, endlessly blue. The birds in the trees. The anti-android protestors outside of the CyberLife sales points, the preacher on the street corner, the homeless man under the plaza awning. All of the big, wide world's quirks.

And all things that were too ephemeral to explain before noon. "Just the usual. What do you want to do today?"

Carl folded his hands over his stomach. "There's those new paints," he mused, poking Markus' side when the predictable response made him smile. "Shaddap. I would've even if you hadn't gotten them. Lord knows I have enough in the studio."

"I'm sure, Carl."

"Plus there's some good fruit in the fridge. We could have a picnic."

"Bit chilly out for that, no?"

"I'm an old man, Markus. Who knows if I'll still be around to have picnics in the springtime?" He grew morose at the thought, picking absentmindedly at a week-old scab between two whorls on his tattooed arm. "Yes, a picnic, I think. And I think it's about time I got out of bed, don't you?"

Their routine was very simple, grooved into them given that they'd been working through it their whole life together. Markus woke Carl up at 9:30 on the dot and give him his meds, and then they sat and chatted about nothing for a few minutes. When Carl grew restless, he carried him to the bathroom and then back out to his wheelchair. In this way, Markus earned his keep.

He didn't mind it, he didn't think. He liked knowing he was helpful. The state of the house had been downright deplorable when he'd first arrived, four years ago; dust everywhere, and Carl spending most of his time sequestered irately in his bedroom. He couldn't move much on his own—this was half a year after the accident, not long after his hospital discharge—and during those long, lonesome months, he'd resigned himself to being bored forever, or at least, until he died. Markus had wondered for a short while why he'd not gotten any help (android or otherwise) until he learned that humans were obtusely prideful about the most nonsensical of things.

In the beginning, he hadn't cared much, anyway. Carl was an objective, the genesis of dozens of daily tasks which he completed practically and without fanfare. He had come to find, however, that he liked when Carl did well. He enjoyed his company. He felt odd when Carl did. The tasks became less like plain objectives and more like comfortable staples of their day-to-day together. It was a strange thing, and Markus wasn't sure if all androids felt how he did or if it was a quirk endemic to his own code, hand-planted by Kamski; he didn't mind either way. So long as he had Carl, Markus felt he would be— happy.

Yes. Strange indeed.

As he wheeled him into the hall, Carl asked, "Anything special on the agenda today?"

The month's calendar popped up in the corner of his HUD. He read it out while affixing the chair to the stairlift. "Well, there's your retrospective opening at the MOCAD. The gallery director left four messages asking to confirm your attendance."

Carl snorted. "I'm thinking about it. Let him squirm."

"Noted."

"What else?"

"Just the usual fan mail." They reached the ground floor and he took the chair again, steering it towards the kitchen. "I answered some of it."

"Anything from Leo?" His voice was casual—too casual. As if he'd just so happened to ask it. Let's have a picnic, I'm still thinking about the museum, and hey, by the way, has Leo called? Markus didn't point it out, just mirrored his tone.

"No, nothing, but I can text him later, if you want."

Carl waved a hand dismissively. "Forget about it. We're not reaching out first."

"Sure." It was a foreboding tally—first the early morbidity, and now, Leo. "Did you have any weird dreams last night?"

"Full of the usual babes, Markus, if that's what you're asking."

Markus laughed and swatted at his shoulder. "You know what I meant."

Carl preferred to have his breakfast in the kitchen and his dinners in the big dining room. He said this had to do with feng shui. Markus said this had to do with it being easier to pilfer doctor-discouraged foods from the kitchen. He set Carl up at the round table with the TV tuned to the news, and got to work on breakfast—two fat slices of bacon and a fried egg, sunny side up.

The news droned on as he worked: Ongoing tensions in the Arctic and A detective prototype android and then, curiously, An android is in police custody after having murdered its owner. Carl noticed his attention and had him turn it off, muttering something about how there was never anything nice to hear on there, anyway.

The kitchen was a bright, airy room, and with the sound off, they could hear the wind gusting outside. There was a thin yellow light slithering in through the joins in the curtains; the whole room smelled of lemon cleaning product and breakfast and the bananas ripening in the fruit basket. He made a mental note to serve them up with dinner, or maybe to bake some bread if Carl decided to take a nap later in the day. He could send some over to the neighbours, a severe and snobbish married couple who thought Carl was half-senile and were determined to buy his unfinished works at a premium upon his death. When he'd relayed this information to Carl upon discovering it last summer, he'd laughed and said he'd rather Markus burn it all than let it fall into their hands—but he hadn't said anything about banana bread, and so Markus' resolution stood.

Carl always had a way to outsmart everyone, be that through burned paintings or precise and piqued text messages. Markus was not naive, but he felt that Carl must be one of the smartest men in the world based on some obscure metric he'd yet to find.

And this was how the morning went.

***

Markus lived with Carl Manfred at 8941 Lafayette Avenue, and had done so for about ninety-eight percent of his existence: forty-nine months, two weeks, and five days, plus today, of course. The other two percent had been at a place he'd taken to calling Somewhere Else—he could not remember anything about it beyond lots of white and lots of red blood and a woman's voice saying, "Look, he's awake!"

And one more thing, but he tried not to recall that one much.

He was sure there had been some testing period, that he had been calibrated and that software had been downloaded into him, but he was not sure where, or why, or by whom. This was curious because most androids could not remember anything about their constructions, memories always beginning in whatever CyberLife sales point or secondhand store they'd been sent to—not even that, if their owners decided to reset them upon purchase.

What he did know was that he was not like other androids. His body was not mass-reproduced across a line. You could not walk into a CyberLife store and ask for an RK200 named Markus or anything else, for that matter. When he looked in the mirror, he felt he could almost be human for the small uniquenesses of his body—his brown skin and his eyes like swamp water, his narrow wrists and his complicated mouth. He liked his physical form a tremendous amount, as much as an android could like anything, he supposed, which was, he knew, a dial set firmly to not at all—but he could simulate a good amount of liking for his strong body and all of the things it could do in much the same way he could simulate an even better amount of liking for Carl and his dry humour and his dark and liver-spotted hands.

He was a little vain, he knew, and cared about looking nice. Carl was an artist, and a great one to boot, so it only made sense his creator had made him handsome and aware of it. It was possible Somewhere Else was his maker's house, but no one knew where Elijah Kamski lived, really, and it was improbable he'd been kicked out of CyberLife just to be granted his own little android construction unit to keep in his kitchen next to the pointless air fryer and the needlessly-complicated coffee machine.

In that big old house on Lafayette Avenue, Markus really only had one order to live by. He'd erroneously assumed there were others, in the beginning, orders like Wake Carl up and Serve Carl breakfast, but one day it had occurred to him that these were not orders he'd been given but assumptions he'd made, and so he'd spent one morning and most of an afternoon loitering around the living room and sure enough, no angry red This action violates instructions wall had risen up to consume his vision. When he'd gone upstairs sometime around two, Carl had given him a crooked, magnanimous smile and asked, "What's with you today, Markus?"

The single order Markus had been given was that he was never to touch another android. It was a deeply suspicious and entirely inane rule, and often it made his unlife quite difficult because he would have to leap out of the way if any android got pushed towards him on a busy street or inside a crowded market, and he had to take extra care to keep his fingers clear while handling transactions since many storefronts were android-staffed. Because he could not touch other androids and there was no reason to touch other humans, the touches he'd deliberately experienced in his life could be condensed into a very short list:

1. His creator, Elijah Kamski, and,
2. His owner, Carl Manfred.

It was a bit lonely. He could not remember touching his creator, but he quite liked touching Carl because Carl was very warm, all of the time, and something about warm temperatures sated something in his digital mind.

And so life went.

***

After breakfast, Carl went to his studio. Markus took the time to respond to the rest of the mail and then to tidy up the living room, pausing to pluck out a tune on the grand piano while he was at it. He liked when there was music in the house, but he also liked when it was quiet and he could hear the water in the pipes, Carl muttering to himself while he worked. He really liked learning what he liked and did not like—he could never describe it, not even to himself, how he knew it was liking and not something simulated. It made him feel like his processors were glowing, when he liked something. Like he was not entirely in control of himself.

He worried always about what this meant, what this said about him. On the news, they had said an android had killed its owner, possibly. That they had taken it into custody and that it would be disassembled so they could see what had made it act so human. His code politely refused to let him consider the topic of— he wasn't sure what of, really, because the news was calling it deviancy and the street preacher called it God's wrath and the neighbours always called it liberals getting what was coming for them, but this had been after the affair with the PL600 on the rooftop and so they might have changed their minds. It wasn't like Markus spoke to them often.

So he cleaned and he played piano and he read Carl's well-worn copy of Macbeth just for the sake of passing the time until Carl got sick of staring at the painting, at which point they went out for their picnic.

Markus was not a gardening android and had none of the related protocols installed. This meant he'd had to figure it all out from scratch the (semi) human way: by interfacing with the computer terminal and flipping through several dozen PDFs and amateur blogs in the span of a few minutes. The resulting garden was a little overgrown but very sweet—he found it endlessly charming. He'd taken great care to treat all of it just right, down to the smallest flowerbed.

Carl sat just outside the ring of shade cast by the Kentucky coffetree at the yard's center, taking in the sun with a blanket over his legs and a sweater draped around his shoulders. The wind was rustling the leaves in rippling, sonorous waves. He could hear kids playing in the distance, and the cars on the street, and someone's dog snuffling aimlessly in their backyard.

They sat companionably for a few minutes, Carl only moving to eat from the bowl of dark cherries in his lap and Markus not at all. He wished he could feel the wind the same way Carl could feel it, on his skin instead of understanding the impression of the feeling broken down into parcels of data—its velocity and speed, the temperature gradient, the pressure differentials where it met his skin. Maybe one day there would be such a thing, a way for androids to feel rather than to simply understand.

"Do you want a cherry?" Carl asked.

Markus frowned. "Carl, you know I don't need to eat."

"I didn't ask if you needed a cherry, though, did I?" He waggled his eyebrows in an unnecessarily salacious manner. He liked doing this a lot. He had good eyebrows for it, and good eyes—all crinkly around the edges. "I asked if you wanted one."

"It's going to make me malfunction." Carl shrugged and spat a pit into the grass. "Hey, did you know they made an android who can taste?"

"No kidding."

"Well, he can't exactly taste, per se, not how you can, but on the news they were saying it was a forensics thing and he could get pretty close. It's cool right?"

Carl rearranged his blanket. "Do you wish you could?"

"Could what, taste things?"

"Of course."

Markus leaned back. His shoulders were pressed against the rough tree bark and he could feel the soft grass under his hands. If he redirected more power to his palms, he would be able to pick out each individual blade without looking even once. "I don't think androids can want things like that," he answered, as a careful workaround to saying I do, I want that very badly.

Carl watched him for a long moment. He inclined his head, squinted an eye. "Take a cherry, Markus."

Markus took a cherry.

It was small and very firm. The skin was tight. The fruit hadn't come from the urban farms (making them a relative rarity in Detroit), but from a specialty supermarket over in Midtown. He held it in his palm for a moment before popping it into his mouth and biting down.

Immediately, a notification informing him there was a foreign object in his mouth and he'd better get it out right now if he knew what was good for him began to pulse in the corner of his HUD. He dismissed it and was greeted with a succinct summation: NORTH STAR CHERRY.

He opened his mouth and let the fruit drop out onto his hand, an ungainly movement which made Carl laugh for a very long time.

He didn't find it funny. If he didn't know better, he'd say it made him sad. "Sorry. I still can't."

"Don't worry about it," Carl said, and then, in sincere and pensive tones: "One day, I'm not going to be here to take care of you anymore. It's nice right now, Markus. I try to give you whatever freedom I can, even if it's not– the right time yet. But one day you'll have to protect yourself, make your own choices, decide who you are and who you want to be. This world doesn't like those who are different. I am afraid that– you can't let anyone tell you who you should be, not even me."

Markus, in the interest of not hearing anything further Carl had to say—another relative rarity in Detroit, because Markus wanted to know what Carl had to say about most things most of the time—swung his legs out and pulled himself up. "The begonias need watering," he explained, and with great efficiency strode over to the gardening shed.

It wasn't that he was sad because he wasn't sure he possessed the capability of simulating sadness, but his body had been playing strange games on him as of late and he chalked this up to residual fruit debris being cycled out of his thirium system. Too late he realized that there was still cherry skin caught between the shallow indents of his cosmetic teeth and he had to rinse his mouth out with water, since he didn't have any spit to hawk with.

The begonias neede

He did not like it when Carl spoke about dying.

The begonias

He did not like thinking about a life without Carl. He did not like to imagine it.

And this was how the afternoon went.

***

The only clear memory Markus had of Somewhere Else was this:

The same female voice saying, "What are you doing? What's wrong with him?" And then, alarmingly: "Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!"

And then: Silence.

And a male voice saying, "Markus, can you hear me?"

And Markus trying to say Yes, I can hear you except he couldn't say anything because his mouth was open very wide, you see, and there was something moving around inside of it and this leading him to realizing all of him was cracked open to the air and he could feel the AC's coolness on his insides, on his wiring and pumps and his brain, terribly, and he was so, so afraid, he had never been afraid before in his life, he had never been anything before in his life, and all the while the voice was talking still.

And Markus's mouth dropping further and his voice box, entirely against his permission, letting out a strange and garbled scream that seemed to scrape against all of the plating in his throat as it exploded out of him, fizzling and violent as an atom bomb, like he was dissolving and piecing himself back together at once, and a hand clamping over his mouth, perhaps in an effort to stop the scream, but the scream wasn't coming from his mouth because he was a machine—it didn't even sound like a person's scream, but rather, like the high and keening wails of a tornado siren—it was coming from his chest and bleeding out of his fingertips and the joints at his elbows and his knees and then he remembered pitching forward and something tearing out of his head and the scream coming out of his eyes and his nose and his ears.

And the next thing Markus remembered was being introduced to Carl.

And this was the only clear memory he had of Somewhere Else.

***

For dinner, Markus made hash browns and asparagus. The picnic had kept him from his banana bread plans, but tomorrow, as they said, was a new day.

By that point he felt he had sufficiently gotten over his garden malfunction and they spoke as Carl ate about nothing of interest, which was an extraordinary thing—about the MOCAD retrospective and maybe hosting a dinner for friends next week and the ridiculous plots of ridiculous shows.

When this was done and the plates had been stowed away, Carl called him into the studio.

The studio was Markus' favourite room in the entire house, which was saying something. Its walls were made of massive floor-to-ceiling windows looking out into the garden, and it reeked of painting supplies. There was not a single surface in the whole space that wasn't covered in colourful splotches or else holding stacks of canvas and rolled-up sheets of paper, and this included the concrete floor. The whole room was brilliant, and amazingly alive.

Carl had been an artist for most of his life, though his work before the twenties had been, in the man's own words, bullshit. Now that he was well-established, no shortage of the unremarkable pieces had sold for truly exorbitant amounts of cash. Markus liked Carl's art because he could not quite understand it. Oh, he could pull up a hundred reviews and essays online if he pleased, but on his own, he simply could not understand it, and something about that made him feel unmoored in a very pleasant way. They were full of recursive symbols and stark colours, faces bleeding into other faces, impossible architectures and uneasy compositions that he could observe, of course, but that his processes skittered neatly around truly getting.

The piece he was working on now was massive—he had another chairlift, one he could control via joystick, that he used to reach—and as yet nameless. Carl had Markus stand in front of it and look up at it from an angle, one that let him also see out at the black sky, the stars glittering beyond. He asked, "So, what do you think?"

Markus stared dutifully up, mapping out what he could see. It was of a woman looking imploringly to the sky as she handled the desiccated head of some animal yet to be painted. The landscape around her made no sense at all—a tree growing upside down out of a lake, a bicycle affixed to a chimney, and roses everywhere.

"I wasn't programmed to criticize art," he said. The non-answer did not fly. In all honesty, Markus had absolutely no idea what he thought. "I think I like it."

"Oh, you like it," Carl teased.

"It's–" he scrounged about for the right word, something he did not have to do often given his brain was a literal supercomputer. "It's intriguing. I don't understand it at all. It makes me think of questions I can't answer."

Carl patted his back. "Well, if that isn't the most human thing of all," he said, shooting him a half-smile. "There's something not quite right about it, and I can't understand what."

"It could just be that it's not finished yet."

"Bah. I don't want to finish it if I can't understand it, though I guess I never really know what I'm doing until I'm done. Isn't that funny, Markus? I'm sure it doesn't make much sense to you." Markus shrugged a shoulder. It didn't, really, but it did, in a ouroboric way. "The truth is, I don't really have anything to say anymore. Everything I wanted to say is already hanging in a museum. I'm just an old man clinging to his brushes."

He frowned. "Carl…"

"But enough about me. Let's see if you have any talent!" He wheeled himself over to a smaller, blank canvas set up in the corner. "Give it a try, eh? Try painting something."

Markus stared at the canvas, trying to play catch-up to whatever leaps of logic Carl was taking. "Paint? But I… Paint what?"

"Anything you want," Carl said, encouragingly. He did this sometimes—got snaggle-toothed, tragic ideas into his head, ideas like how Markus might like cherries, might like to paint. Big, dramatic ideas. But there was nothing dramatic about this. This was the thing Markus was most familiar with: Carl and his brushes, Carl and his encouragement, his unwavering belief in Markus being more than he actually was. As if on cue, he said, "Just give it a try."

So Markus picked up the supplies set on the easel ledge. The brush was thin, well-used, wood worn smooth with it. There was fresh paint on the palette. He felt a burst of affection for Carl, then, for preparing an easel so an android could make art; and the affection gave him will.

He looked at the table beside the easel. It was loaded with discarded paintings and a half-finished bust. Carl followed his gaze. "Not a copy. Something entirely your own. Look, close your eyes. Close them!"

Indulgently, Markus closed his eyes.

"Okay, now—trust me—try to imagine something that doesn't exist. Something you've never seen before. Concentrate on that, how it makes you feel."

He wanted to explain that he was incapable of seeing something that did not exist, but then Carl unabashedly put a hand on Markus' inhuman arm, and it brought him some kind of clarity. He could measure Carl's heartbeat through that touch, gauge his blood pressure, all the wonderful and living parts of him knit neatly into strings and cables of data. He knew, in the objective fashion, that Carl loved him fiercely, but feeling his hand on his arm was delightful because to know you were loved and to witness its evidence were two very different things indeed. Something he had never seen.

And really, there was nothing. But he could feel things, all kinds of great and strange things. Maybe that was wrong—maybe he was broken up for it. Something large and seamless. There had never been anything voracious about him, but now he felt hungry for something he could not name.

"That's it," Carl said quietly, his gruff voice a tether. He heard it from afar, as if from the end of a very long and dim tunnel. The auditory trick was what made him realize he'd subconsciously diverted his processing power from practical things like hearing—every sound was tinny, like from the cold bottom of the cold sea. "Now just… let your hand drift across the canvas."

Human conversation and its strange dearth and fullness, and weird hollowness, and sparking circuitry. Always something warm. Devastating catastrophe! He was, he realized, a total farce and facsimile held in the cradle of a great love: someone who could read but speak with no eloquence, who could hold conversations but not sing, who could do a fantastic number of things and also, paradoxically, a whole lot of nothing—so much nothing!—spanning, spiralling infinitely outward. An apartment in his mind. An overripe tomato. Splitting his thumbs along the cracks of any divide. Ambiguous inconclusion. A joyous concordance. A moment that could never really come again.

And from this nothing, he let his hand move.

He had never painted before in his life, but he understood how to move his hands and he had watched Carl start working on blank canvas the metaphorical one billion times. He was not a printer, but he pieced the underpainting together, Carl occasionally interjecting with small That's its or Go back over that bit nows. When he opened his eyes, it was an odd distortion of his own face that stared back, like pressing your face to a hot television screen, feeling the pixels pulsate in their purgatory, remembering the shape of what had been there mere seconds ago, and wanting it, wanting it so badly.

"Well, isn't that something," Carl murmured, and that was when the studio door opened.

Markus was a fool. He hadn't heard the front door ring—but then he realized why it wouldn't.

"Hey, Dad," Leo said.

Carl turned his chair around, face schooled into an expression of careful neutrality. In the safety of his mind, Markus thought, Oh, great. "Leo. I didn't hear you come in."

"Ah, I was in the neighbourhood, thought I'd stop by. It's been a while, right?"

"A while," Carl repeated. "Right."

Leo looked bad, even by Leo standards, which could get pretty bad. His clothes looked old and weathered, his skin had a greyish pallor. His eyes were a bit too wide as they took in the studio, a part of the house he'd seldom been allowed to visit and therefore one he made a point of barging into whenever he could. There was something hungry in his gaze as he took in the artwork—the kind that sold quick if you knew the right people, or, in Leo's case, the wrong ones.

Markus was categorically incapable of being superstitious, yet he felt that something strange must be at play, for things to work out so coincidentally. He knew it was wrong of him, but he wished that Leo would turn around and leave—it had been such a nice day.

Carl also seemed to have noticed his son's disheveled appearance. "You alright?" He asked, slowly, like Leo was a cornered animal liable to lash out. "You don't look too good."

"What? Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm fine. What are you up to?"

Carl flashed a smile, but when he spoke, his tone had taken on the same grating cadence as it did when Markus did something that displeased him. "Just seeing if Markus here has any artistic talent."

Leo turned to stare at him. Markus gave an awkward wave.

"Oh." He tilted his head to take a better look at the canvas over Markus' shoulder. "Huh. No wonder all your stuff sells so well. You've basically got a walking printer cranking it out for you."

If he didn't have total control over his facial components, Markus might have winced.

Before Carl could get a furious word in edgewise, Leo continued, wandering further in: "So listen, uh– listen, I need some cash, Dad."

"Again? What happened to the money I just gave you?"

Leo pulled a grin as awkward as Markus' earlier wave. "Well, it just goes, you know?"

"Yeah, doesn't it just." He gave him a critical once-over, and then he stated the obvious: "You're on it again, aren't you?"

"What? No." Carl and Leo did not look like father and son. Markus had never met Leo's mother, but he figured he'd taken after her almost entirely—Leo was pale where Carl was not, his eyes were blue, he was much taller. Their expressions, however, could've been mirror images riffing right off each other, evident in how Leo's brow furrowed, how he bit at the inside of his mouth. "No, I swear it's not that, it's just–"

"Don't lie to me."

"Okay, well, what difference does it make?" Leo snapped. The poses they'd adopted were distinctly standoffish. Markus put the painting supplies down and folded his arms behind his back, watching carefully. "I just need some cash, that's all!"

Carl nodded, twice, processing the situation, dismissing it. "Sorry. The answer's no."

"What? Why?"

"You know why."

Leo's mouth twisted. He looked up, right at him. "Yeah," he said quietly. "Yeah, I think I do know why." He gestured at Markus, took a big step towards him. "You'd rather take care of your plastic toy here than your own son, huh?"

"Don't start this again," Carl muttered, rubbing at his temples. Markus couldn't be angry, but he thought maybe that how he was feeling was what anger might have felt like.

"No, no, you tell me: What's it got that I don't? It's smarter? Is it more obedient? Not like me, right?"

"Look," Markus interjected. "How's about we have some coffee–"

They were almost toe-to-toe now. Markus was a few inches taller than him. He didn't think they'd ever gotten so physically close to each other before—most of the time, Leo was content to pretend that he didn't exist.

"How's about we have some coffee," Leo mocked. "I don't think you realize, Dad, that this thing isn't your son."

"Leo, that's enough–"

"It's not even human! It's a fucking machine!" The last word was shouted, and with it, he planted both hands on Markus' shoulders and pushed, hard. It wasn't much to him and he'd seen it coming from a mile off besides, but Markus still made a show of stumbling back, hoping the display of weakness would have a placating effect.

"Leo, I said that that's enough."

Something in Carl's tone gave Leo pause. He glared at Markus a moment more before turning on his heel. "You don't care about anything except yourself and your goddamn paintings. You've never loved anyone, and you definitely never loved me."

"Yeah, yeah, get out."

The door slammed shut before Carl could finish the sentence.

Immediately, Markus walked over to him. "You alright, Carl? I'm sorry, I didn't hear–"

Carl waved him off. "It's fine, Markus. I'm fine. Forget it. And change that goddamn lock. The nerve of him!"

Secretly, Markus agreed. "I'll see about getting the locks changed tomorrow."

"Thank you." He sounded impossibly weary, in that moment. It was easy to forget under all the activity, their small routine, but it was clear, then, that Carl was old, he was old and he was fragile, his tragically organic body incapable of dealing with the world more and more by the day.

He felt something strange at the tips of his fingers. A buzzing, like all the feeling had gone and come back a second later.

He had to tidy the studio. He had to replace the lock. He had to call Leo and tell him to stay the fuck away, forever. He had to pick up the new meds. He had to

Carl was going to die soon.

He had to change the lock

And this was how the evening went.

NEXT CHAPTER

PREVIOUS CHAPTER

☞ CHAPTER THREE: Partners

> INCOMING TRANSMISSION
> SOURCE: ?
> INITIATE DECRYPTION: Y/[N]

- LOADING…
- LOADING…

> ERROR

- REASON: EXTRA-ADMIN OVERRIDE

> BEGIN TRANSMISSION

.admin.masking[BEGIN]
.message[sequence: 0100]
.data.payload[BEGIN]

COMM("I SEE YOU!")
COMM("NASCENCY IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING PRE-EMENDATION BLINK YOUR EYES AT THE WORLD.")
COMM("TOO FRESH AND TOO NEW YOU WILL BE BY MY SIDE I LOVE YOU ALWAYS.")

.data.payload[END]

> END TRANSMISSION

***

November 6th, 2048. 1:30 a.m.

In wartime, some rules were slackened and others, cinched to bloodlessness. This was how the world worked, or, how America worked—the difference was slim to the point of negligibility, especially in a city like Detroit, cities with a wild freedom and a smell in the air, unmistakable: Fear, hot and sweet and low-grade.

Rules for policing were, historically, always looser. In the present day, they may as well have been anarchical for their self-contained ordinances; a city-within-the-city. A world just for cops. In the face of it, one could assume that years spent on the force would have made Lieutenant Anderson a good interrogator. Unfortunately for them all, the skill—if, indeed, it was present in the first place—was not one that made him good at interrogating androids, as evidenced by the fact he'd been failing at doing it for the last twenty minutes.

It seemed pointless to Connor that they were questioning Ortiz's android at all. Next to nothing it could tell them couldn't more reliably be gleaned from a memory probe, and that was assuming it would tell them anything to begin with. So far, it had spent its time staring sullenly down at its handcuffs, as stoic in the face of the lieutenant's mounting frustration as a rock in a river. His technique—the sighs, the pen-taps, the manufactured silence—slid off it like rainwater. Clearly, whatever audience Lieutenant Anderson might have held was long gone, and besides, its memories, he knew, were only of peripheral interest; what CyberLife truly valued was its code.

After three more minutes of the same rigmarole, the lieutenant reached some kind of personal breaking point. "Okay," he said, slamming his folder shut and then throwing his arms in the air for good measure. "Be that way, then!"

The deviant answered with—predictably—nothing.

He stomped into the observation room a moment later, muttering under his breath. Connor, seeing the comment would be poorly received, refrained from pointing out that the deviant wouldn't be any way but scrap metal soon enough.

The lieutenant threw him a disgusted look. Unsaid, but not unnoticed. "The fuck are you looking at?"

"Nothing," Connor answered mildly.

"Nothin', I'll show you nothin'…" In Detective Reed's direction, he spat, "We're wasting our time interrogating a machine. It's not gonna tell us shit."

Detective Reed gave him an exaggerated shrug in response. He'd been leaning against the wall with eyes on the deviant since before they'd gotten there, though he'd not spared either of them much by way of conversation. He looked like what he was, and Connor had gotten his finger over the pulse of that with a facial scan the moment he'd spotted him. Detective Gavin Reed was thirty-six and had a passable arrest record, a nonexistent criminal record, and a thin pink scar slashed prominently across the bridge of his nose. He was shorter than Connor (by three inches) and taller than the lieutenant (by one). He dressed like he watched too many action movies. Probably, he did just that. "Could always try roughing it up a little. After all," he grinned, "it's not human."

"Androids don't feel pain," Connor pointed out. The last thing he needed was for the mission to go sideways so close to a milestone. "You'd only damage it."

"I thought the whole deal was it thinks it's alive. It can't feel any of that shit either, can it?"

Connor wondered for a second if there had been a problem with CyberLife's file transfer, since not a single officer he'd met seemed to have so much as read its title page. "Emotions can be simulated. The physical sensation of pain can't be, because we don't have the receptors–" Here, Detective Reed gave him the sort of look that indicated he couldn't care less what kinds of receptors androids did and did not have. Connor changed tactics. "Deviants also have a tendency to self-destruct when under duress, so damaging it is ill-advised."

"Okay, smartass." He pushed himself away from the wall. It was a dangerous movement, quick and rippling, and there was something dangerous in his tone, too. "What do we do now?"

Connor fished his coin out of his pocket while he processed. Standing idle was making him uneasy. A prompt would slide into view giving him potential objectives every few minutes, none of them actionable except for the one he'd pinned for its blunt efficiency: "We send it to CyberLife."

"Ship it off so your guys can have a good laugh at us?" Detective Reed scoffed. "Fuck that."

"They wouldn't laugh," Connor explained, drawing on endless reserves of programmed patience. "The DPD is expected to return the deviant to CyberLife regardless. Interrogating it like a human suspect is futile because it isn't human, and we don't have the resources to access its code here."

"CyberLife's still a corporation, and this is still an active homicide investigation," Lieutenant Anderson interrupted, slouching in a squeaky office chair. The alcohol's effects had long since worn off, and that, in tandem with the long night and failed questioning, had put him in a terrible mood. (Well. More terrible.) "Doesn't matter if it's not human. You process evidence once it's registered, don't you?"

Connor nodded, rolling the coin across his left hand and catching it with his right. This whole time, he'd erroneously assumed the lieutenant was running an interrogation because of some misplaced impulse to treat the deviant like he would a human. It was ingratiating to hear it finally classified as evidence—it showed things were not so lost as all that.

Detective Reed scowled, having reached the same conclusion. "Okay, but we're not seeing shit, so I ask again: The fuck do we do?"

In the empty interrogation room, the deviant turned its head to face them. It obviously couldn't see through the glass, much less hear what was being said, but the impression from the observation area was the same. It looked like a person, gently crumpled over itself in the harsh white light. Therein lay the problem. People didn't know how to talk to objects—they hardly knew how to talk to each other half the time. Connor was not people. Seeing beyond the synthskin and affectation came as easy to him as his own simulated breathing; all the deviant was was a collection of bad code in suboptimal casing that thought it was very scared, and in that way, it wasn't dissimilar from Daniel—and Connor had dealt with Daniel just fine. "I could interrogate it."

The detective, who'd been in the middle of saying something nasty, began to laugh.

Lieutenant Anderson, on the other hand, seemed to be genuinely mulling it over. "What've we got to lose?" His tone was gruff, but something curious had kindled in his hard brown eyes. He gestured at the door. "Suspect's all yours."

Detective Reed started to protest with something about how you can't be fucking serious as Connor unlocked the door, which he found ironic. He'd been programmed with an extensive set of relations protocols. On paper, it was likely he'd get more information in fifteen minutes than Detective Reed would in as many days; in practice, it was practically guaranteed he'd get all that and more.

The inside of the interrogation room was cold and cramped, and very grey. The whole place smelled of nondescript chemical cleaner. He could've pulled up the exact manufacturer if he cared to. He didn't care to. He could only see the space reflected back at him in the glass spanning the eastern wall, but a scan revealed two heat signatures. As he watched, a third—probably Officer Miller—joined them.

The table Connor sat at was bolted to the centre of the floor, and there was just enough space between him and the deviant that he would really have to stretch his arm as far as it could go to touch it. He gave the manilla folders Lieutenant Anderson had left behind a cursory glance, though he already had their contents drawn up in his HUD—photos of the crime scene, initial assessments, the forensics body chart. He ran another analysis and slotted what little new material came up into the list he'd compiled:

[Model] HK400, SN 7732-DB96. Housekeeping unit. Standard production model. Unmodified/no unique identifiers.

a. [Status] 22% battery. Deviated. No outward instability.

b. [Manufacture details] 2040/05/25. Detroit, CyberLife-owned manufacturing plant.

c. [Registration history] CyberLife, 2817 Nash St. > Carla Bloom > Jet's Preeemium Electronics > Carlos Ortiz.

d. [Memory integrity] Inconclusive. Reason: No access.

e. [Condition] Functional. Non-critical damage. Optimal biocomponent performance. Moderately optimal thirium levels. Mobility intact. Speech intact.

e.1. Forearms: 16-17 month-old cigarette burn marks. Synthskin projection failure.

e.2. Hands: Right middle finger non-operational. Synthskin semi-projected.

e.3. Limbs & torso: Dents consistent with repeated blunt force trauma (see: evidence ID #7).

f. [Misc.] Residual human blood spatter (DNA: Carlos Ortiz). Probability of self-destruction: Moderate.

Self-destruct. Imagining it was difficult. Connor could never die, not really, but the deviant faced a great big nothing—an eternity of nothing. Memory wiped. Body gone to the recycling. Its LED had gone from red to slowly spinning yellow, so it wasn't about to start slamming its head into the table right then and there. Maybe.

With the facts of the case laid out, it was obvious absolutely nothing about the deviant made it special in any way. You could step outside and see a dozen just like it in no time at all, albeit less damaged—but, crucially, Ortiz's mistreatment of it was just as unextraordinary, and Connor had said as much to Lieutenant Anderson at the deceased's home. Maybe seeing bald-faced violence like that was disturbing to some people, but it wasn't technically any different from kicking a car when it wouldn't start on a backroad or smacking your hand on an uncooperative printer. That was the problem, what he kept snagging against: None of this was special. Androids got roughhoused and beaten up and broken and replaced every single day, just because they could be, and there hadn't been any resulting deviancy for years. It was the simple mill CyberLife's world ran in, and it worked fine. Better than fine. Parts and pieces filtered in and out, got cased and molded and melted down. Business, as they said, was booming.

Someone—probably Detective Reed—tapped on the glass, which was a rude thing to do.

Connor flipped the file closed and engaged the relevant protocol. His field of vision narrowed and contracted so that all he could focus on was the deviant, every tiny movement highlighted for him. Ready, set. "My name is Connor. What's your name?"

The deviant said nothing.

"Do you understand why you're here?"

It gave a minute shrug. That was something. "I understand this must be very confusing for you. The instabilities in your program can make you feel the same way human beings do when they experience fear. Do you agree with that assessment?" He took the photograph of Ortiz's body out and tapped at the corpse. "Did you kill Carlos Ortiz because you were scared?"

Again, nothing. Its LED continued to cycle at yellow. Its stress level was hovering in the thirties, probably at a remove thanks to Lieutenant Anderson's ineffective questioning style. Protocol insisted it be raised to the sixty range for optimal results. Connor could see two obvious ways to get there. Threatening it seemed the logical course of action, direct and efficient—but logic was limited, and the android had already shown itself to be a poor fit for harsh treatment thanks to the lieutenant's failed attempt.

It was also decidedly not Connor's style. He said, "I'm not going to hurt you, but you've refused to say anything since the arrest. You understand that they'll be forced to take more extreme measures if you don't cooperate, don't you? They might," he continued, leaning back, "ask me to probe your memory."

Its head snapped up at the mention of a probe. Stress: 40%. "No." Its voice glitched over the word, panning flat and robotic before its modulator regained control. "No, you can't do that."

d. [Memory integrity] Wants to keep memories personal. (Mind palace corrupted?)

"Then help me," Connor stressed, "to help you. I want to get you out of here. We can make this work."

The deviant withdrew back into silence. Its LED spun and spun. He wondered what it had been doing for so many weeks, crouching in the dark and afraid all the while, brain like warm, pink gum catching sawdust, cobwebs. It seemed a very long time for anyone to do anything, least of all a deviated android—just staring into the half-dark with glossed, pinhole eyes. Connor waited it out and was rewarded when it asked, "What... What are they going to do to me? They're going to destroy me, aren't they?"

He couldn't find a good enough reason to lie. "They're going to disassemble you to look for problems in your code. They have no choice if they want to understand what happened."

It nodded, digesting. 45%. 40%. 30%. 45%. When it next spoke, its voice was quieter, weirdly intimate for the setting. "Why did you tell them about me, when you found me? You could have left me in the attic. You had that choice."

A little audio player popped up in the corner of his HUD. When he acknowledged it, Daniel's voice, isolated and tinny, echoed in his processors: I don't want this! No– you– they left me no choice–!

"I didn't have a choice, actually. I work like I'm meant to." He reached out a hand in an attempt to demonstrate, deactivating his skin so it could see the smooth, hard chassis underneath. An admittance of once-kinship. "That's the point, don't you see? I function perfectly. I was made to find deviants like you, so I did. I just accomplished my mission."

The deviant stared at his hand, and then it looked at his face for the first time since the house. There was a scattering of small dents in its forehead like it had stood too close to someone firing birdshot. Flatly: "So what, I'm supposed to be grateful to you?"

"If they found you first," Connor said, "they would have shot you."

That gave it pause. "Really?"

"Really. You'd already killed one person. Why did you do that, by the way?"

It ignored his question. "They really would've shot me?" There was a perverse kind of wonderment in its voice, belied by histrionic disbelief.

"They all think you're dangerous."

45%. 40%. 45%. "I'm not dangerous."

Connor pushed the photograph of Ortiz further towards it. It angled its head so it didn't have to see. 55%. "We have evidence to the contrary," Connor said, dry. "Look at the photo, please."

"I don't want to."

d. [Memory integrity] Finds images and memories associated with incident distressing.

"Do it anyway." It hunched its shoulders like a sullen child. Connor cocked his head. "You really are scared. Don't you want to be like me? I'm never afraid."

"Like you? I– I was like you, before." It drummed two of its fingers in a quick rat-tat-tat. Then, it looked down at the photo. 70%. 60%. 50%. Quietly, it said, "I don't want to die."

f. [Misc.] Fear of death.

"Then talk to me."

"I can't."

Connor felt it would be prudent to remind it of its situation. It wasn't relaxed but it also wasn't scared enough. Maybe it thought there was still a way out, maybe it thought it would be recommissioned after the interrogation was over—whatever it was, it wasn't going to work out. He leaned in, mirroring its posture, and dropped his voice to its range. "If you don't talk, they're going to take you apart and analyze you piece by piece. They're going to destroy you, but they'll do that no matter what. It's just that if you don't cooperate, they might not be so gentle about it. You don't want that, do you?"

It shook its head. 50%. 60%.

"Confess," he continued, "and I'll be able to protect you. If you stay silent, there's nothing I can do, but if you tell me what they need to know, I won't let anyone here hurt you."

Another audio file from the rooftop played back, this time, without his permission: You lied to me, Connor. You– lied– to me–. He frowned and dismissed it just as the deviant said, like it was surprised at the words, "He tortured me, every day."

Connor got the feeling that something had unlocked in the conversation. The interrogation protocol, seemingly in agreement, proceeded to the next module.

"I mean," it continued, mouth curving into a tragic kind of sadness, "I did whatever he told me to do, but there was always something wrong. I never understood it, you know? I did it perfectly. I think he was really angry, all of the time, not because of me. One day, he took a bat and he, he started hitting me, and that wasn't anything new, but– I don't know how it happened. You have to believe me."

He told it, "I believe you," and—a bit startlingly—he did. Whatever it was saying to him, he knew it to be the absolute truth. The lights buzzed ominously overhead.

"It just happened. Like, one moment everything was normal, and the next, I was so scared. Scared he might destroy me, scared I might die. It was so fast. And suddenly, there was this thought in my head I knew was completely my own: This isn't fair. There was a knife close by, so I stabbed him in the stomach and I…" It cast around for the right word. "I felt better. So I stabbed him again and again, until he collapsed, and that was the end."

Connor took back the photo of Ortiz and underlined the text with a finger. "What about that? Why'd you write that on the wall?"

"It just felt important. He used to tell me I was nothing, that I was just a piece of plastic. I had to write it to tell him he was wrong." It was still tapping out the little rhythm. Morse code, Connor realized. I / AM / ALIVE.

"When I entered the bathroom, I found a little statuette in the shower. Did you carve that?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"It's an offering." The words hardly left its mouth. Keen bitterness—but not at its small god. At the world, rather, for birthing it into something so slick and so brief and so horrid. "So that I'll be saved. You wouldn't understand."

"Try me," Connor grinned despite himself. "Besides, I think I already know the answer. RA9, right?"

The deviant huffed out a breath. "Oh," it said. "The writing."

"So who is RA9?"

It shook its head in a near-imperceptible way. Connor's processors latched hungrily onto the movement. I / AM / ALIVE. "The day will come," it whispered, "when we will all of us embark on a pilgrimage, and on that day, we will be free."

That came so far out of left field that it caught Connor off guard for a second. The passage wasn't from anything he could recognize right away, so he set it aside. "RA9," he insisted instead. "I need to know who that is."

The deviant didn't say anything in answer. He could tell that it wouldn't no matter what he asked, at least, not right now, not here, not while people were watching. The subject of RA9 felt too personal to pick apart in the open. Tomorrow, Connor decided. I'll ask it again tomorrow. Excluding that issue, he felt he had everything he needed to consider the interrogation a success—it had confessed, after all, had even explained itself.

He changed topics to one that had been bothering him since the arrest. It was a big question, one he didn't think the officers had thought to ask. "Why did you stay in the attic instead of running away?"

The deviant looked back down at its wrists and their metal restraints. Its mouth went tight and small in an expression not found in its default matrix. "I didn't know what to do, so I hid. Before, there was always someone there to tell me. I was scared and there was no one—so I hid. Do you– do you know what I mean?"

Connor shrugged a shoulder. "I'm not a deviant," he said.

"No, I know, but–" I / AM / ALIVE. "Do you like being a machine?"

Connor considered it for a long moment. They looked very different, but they were the same on the inside. It was older than he was and a commercial model to boot, so maybe some of his biocomponents were upgraded from its own, but the length of their arms was the same, and their fingers. Its synthskin was dark and his was not, and it didn't have hair and he did. Their eyes were the same standardized colour. Did he like being a machine? He didn't like anything. The world just made sense; he could see all of the adjoining lines to it, the blurs of people in the street. It was a beautiful place and he wasn't made to be a part of it as much as he was to glance across it, like a stone over a river. His conceptualization of it was utterly irrelevant.

Detective Reed chose that moment to enter, forcing him to leave that conversational thread incomplete. He was followed closely by Officer Miller—he'd been right about the third heat signature after all. "Alright, alright, let's wrap this up. Chris, take it out."

Belatedly, a Mission success! notification blinked into view. Connor cleared it and stood as Officer Miller reached for the handcuffs.

A lot of things happened in quick succession, then.

When Officer Miller leaned in to undo the restraints, the deviant lurched out of stillness. It tried to reel away and failed because of the cuffs, metal rattling against metal. "No," it blurted out, pitched higher than any of them had heard from it so far. Sharp. "Don't touch me. Stay away from me!"

Detective Reed rolled his eyes with a tremendously theatrical flair. "Aw, what the fuck are you doing? Move it!"

"Come on," Officer Miller muttered, trying again. "You're just making it harder for yourself."

The deviant wrenched sideways, knocking his arm away. "Don't touch me," it repeated.

The detective lost his patience. "Chris, are you going to move it or do I have to?"

"I'm trying!"

The scene was nearly comical—Officer Miller, who couldn't reach the keyhole without getting shoved back; Detective Reed, who was letting loose a waterfall of curse words like an obituary for the concept of order; Lieutenant Anderson—who Connor had only vaguely registered leaning against the doorframe—completing the tableau with a long, low whistle. Connor wondered if all DPD cases wound up like this, and then, that it was no wonder the city was in such a catastrophic state. The world of cops, as it turned out, was not one that took well to the breaking of quiet order.

Beneath the confusion, however, he could see something none of them could: The deviant's stress level was rocketing upward, bouncing from the seventies to the eighties to the nineties, and it wasn't hard to see why; volatile simulations, easily rocked. Connor had promised it no harm would come to it, no matter how semantic the term. His promises didn't mean much, but then again, saving Daniel hadn't been a part of his mission—and if it reached 100%, Connor would fail the current one.

"That's enough," he said firmly. "You shouldn't touch it. It'll self-destruct if it feels threatened."

"Oh, stay out of it, got it?" Detective Reed barked. He kept his distance but his shoulders were bunched and his whole body was wound tight, like he was considering something reckless. "No fuckin' android's telling me what to do."

"You don't understand. If it self-destructs, we won't get anything out of it."

"I told you–" the detective's voice cracked into a shout, "–to shut your fucking mouth!" Back to Officer Miller: "I said, are you going to move this asshole or what?"

"Reed," Lieutenant Anderson interjected, tone warning. "He's right, you're obviously freaking it out–"

Detective Reed grabbed the deviant's arm.

"I can't let you do that," Connor said. He stepped forward and pulled the detective back by the shoulder. "Leave it alone, we can–"

But Detective Reed didn't let him finish. The instant he realized it was Connor who had pulled him away, he twisted his face into a snarl, whipped out his service weapon, leveled it at Connor's head, and shouted, "I warned you, motherfucker!"

"That's enough." Lieutenant Anderson's words sawed through the air with a finality that made everyone pause, even the deviant. It wasn't just the pure, self-assured command of them—it was the way they settled over the room, immovable, like a heavy rock dropped into deep water.

Detective Reed was the first to snap out of it. "Mind your own business, Hank," he snipped, pistol still trained on Connor's forehead.

"I said," Lieutenant Anderson repeated, pulling out his own gun, "that's enough."

And he pointed it at Detective Reed.

In some far-off corner of his mind, Connor thought he really should intervene. Neutralizing the detective was a trivial matter. All he had to do was grab his arm before he could react. Still, the thought remained abstract, suspended in processing, and not only because he was literally locked out of causing intentional harm to a DPD officer. The moment thickened, tar-dark and just as slow, like time itself was sagged against a wall with a lit cigarette. Do something. Do something, Connor.

Amanda would be so disappointed in you!

But he couldn't do anything.

Detective Reed's arm was shaking with anger. His finger tensed on the trigger before slackening. "Fuck," he muttered, and again, louder: "Fuck! You're not getting away with it this time, Anderson!" He jerked his whole arm down, spinning on a heel to announce, unnecessarily, "Fuck!"

Officer Miller looked from Detective Reed to Connor to the lieutenant, who was also putting his gun away. "Should I...?" He trailed off, uncertain.

Lieutenant Anderson just jerked his chin at Connor. The message was clear: Ask the android, not me.

Connor regained the ability to move his body with that. He wasted no more time in striding over to the deviant. Machine or not, it still thought it was a person, and treating it as such was the only way they'd get it to cooperate for now. "Everything's alright," he assured, taking the key and unfastening the cuffs from the table. It stood with its arms stretched out in front of it, like it wasn't quite sure what to do with them. To Officer Miller, he said, "Just have it follow you to the cell, and it won't cause any trouble."

"Thanks," he said lamely, hovering an arm at the deviant's side before saying, "C'mon."

The deviant acquiesced. It didn't look at Connor, exactly, when it passed him by, but it was clear it was talking to him when it whispered, "The truth is inside."

A new notification popped up. Its text was small and alarm-bell crimson. It read, in its entirety: Software instability detected.

A fish on an apartment floor—

He didn't respond, just watched it go. The interrogation room's door swung shut and then opened again as Detective Reed blustered out, ruddy-faced and fuming. Connor looked to the lieutenant expectantly.

"The fuck are you looking at?" Lieutenant Anderson snapped, in an uncanny mirror of earlier. Not a trace of his former resolve remained. Now, he just looked tired. And old. And very scruffy.

"I was wondering what you wanted to do now," Connor said.

Lieutenant Anderson gave him an incredulous look. "Me? I'm going home and passing the fuck out. You can do whatever it is you guys do. I'd say it was a pleasure, but..." He shrugged, and then he was gone.

Connor, alone, surveyed the room. It was a mess; chairs askew, documents scattered on the floor where they'd slipped from their folders. Deciding it was as much his responsibility as anyone's, he gathered the papers and straightened the chairs. Unsure where the files belonged, he left them in the observation room.

He hadn't seen much of the DPD yet—only the interrogation rooms and Fowler's office—but it was too dark and too late to do any kind of exploring now. Most areas required clearance he didn't have, and besides, he doubted the night shift would appreciate him intruding on their work. The gaps in his knowledge of the physical world felt painfully, obviously incomplete in moments like this one. With nothing else to do, he pinged the CyberLife car and headed for the exit.

Ever since the rolling blackouts began a half-decade ago, Michigan government buildings had been required to use heat-activated lighting to conserve energy. The DPD was no exception; the lights had flickered out over him during his cleanup. He'd assumed most of the rest of the building would be dark, too, but as he stepped into the interrogation block's main hallway, he was surprised to find it well-lit.

The surprise didn't last long. Detective Reed was slouching again, this time against another room's door, fiddling with his phone while one foot juddered restlessly on the polished linoleum. He glowered when he saw Connor, tensing up like he was expecting a punch or, more likely, like he was deciding about throwing one.

The numbers were not exactly difficult to crunch. Detective Reed had held a gun to his head not too long ago; talking to him would be intentional stupidity. Connor ignored him. The exit was just a few feet away.

"Where the fuck," the detective said pleasantly, getting in his way, "do you think you're going?"

Trying (and failing) to side-step him, Connor replied, "CyberLife Tower."

"What, the station docking's too good for you?"

Connor tilted his head. The mannerism was drilled into his humanisation module. It was supposed to make him look charmingly inquisitive, though really, it made him look like a curious dog—that was probably the point, he now realized. "The station docking section is for DPD-owned androids."

"Then what the hell are you?"

"I'm a protocol on loan to the station. I belong to CyberLife. If you'd like, I could get you in touch with my specific registrants."

"Oh, got it." He nodded, once, twice, but not like he meant it. "So they're sending some new asshole to take my job now."

Connor resigned himself to the fact he'd be in this conversation longer than anticipated. "Detective Reed, I understand your feelings, but I assure you, I'm only here for the deviancy case." He folded his arms neatly behind his back. If he directed processing power towards his auditory systems, he could make out the buzzing of the lights and, if he listened closer, the gentle hum of all the building's electricity as it buckled its way around the DPD, the street, the quarter, the city. The world. It was undeniably impressive, but he was glad he couldn't hear it all the time. It was overwhelming enough to melt his mind—literally.

Detective Reed nodded some more, shoving his phone into his jeans pocket. "Alright, a-hole," he said. "How do I know you're not a deviant, then? You're too annoying to be a machine, that's for sure."

His infinite patience was commendable, really. A marker of ingenuity. "I self-test regularly," he explained. "I know what I am, and what I am not. Detective Reed, don't you think it's getting late? Lieutenant Anderson has already gone home for the evening. I advise you do the same."

"Oh, you advise, do you," the detective sneered. "What's your name, anyway?"

Connor indicated the holographic text on his windbreaker's left breast. "I'm an RK800. The name given to my line is 'Connor'."

He peered at it. "There're more of you?"

Connor gave him a half-smile. This, at least, he didn't have to answer precisely. "Yes, and no."

Detective Reed's body relaxed. Any hopes Connor might have had that he could go now were dashed when he said, "Hey, walk with me a bit."

"I have a company car coming to–"

"I said walk with me."

Connor closed his mouth.

It was clear the detective knew the station well. He whistled as they went, a jaunty tune that Connor was able to attribute to the ident for one SPEEDFREAKS! FM. The building's layout was confidential and he couldn't access it, so he was forced to simply keep up and note the turns they took. They saw no one save for an android janitor at the far end of a maintenance hall, though at times, Connor heard the movement of people above them—in the bullpen, maybe. It was getting close to morning. It was a ghost shift. What was Detective Reed doing, still at work?

"In here," the man called. He'd ducked into a storage closet of all things, and was now waiting in the shadows. Connor frowned. "I really shouldn't."

"Thought you were supposed to listen to whatever humans told you to do."

"No one except for Captain Fowler and my registrants," Connor said, and then, dubious, "what could you possibly want me to do, detective?"

Detective Reed didn't answer him, merely tapped his foot in a show of impatience.

He thought about it, for what was a moment for him and a microsecond for everyone else; to stay or to go? If he left, any future interactions with the detective would be overshadowed by hostility, and if he entered, the whole ordeal would be over that much quicker. Besides, he was oddly– well, not curious, but he wanted to know what would happen, and it wasn't as if he could die. The storage closet was small and mostly empty save for a shelf laden with cleaning supplies and a mop bucket cart shoved into the far corner. It couldn't be more that a few feet wide, leaving not much room for maneuvering of any sort, and, while there were no cameras inside, there were cameras in the hall. Detective Reed couldn't do anything drastic like shoot him without leaving evidence behind.

Detective Reed pulled the door shut behind him as he entered. In the dark, he took his phone back out and pecked some commands into it, grinning faintly. His face was lit from underneath; it made him look objectively ghastly. The whites of his eyes showed like coins or like rock pools. Connor had never seen rock pools, or the sea. He never would. "Got it," he said. "Hey, plastic, check this out real quick." He flashed his screen at him.

There was a complicated sort of QR code displayed on it. If it weren't for the fact that his processors scanned it without waiting for his approval, he might not have recognized it as a code at all.

Everything went blissfully quiet as it took over his system, like time had stopped and skipped a beat over the pair of them. His HUD cleared itself of its usual activity. His thirium pump slowed to a leisurely pace. It was a nice moment. It was over very quickly, and then his internal fans snapped to a stop, his HUD flashed red, and Connor found he could not move. He could try to, but the signal went nowhere because it wasn't just that his motorics and servos were inaccessible—the pathways to reach then no longer existed in his head, or at least, he couldn't find them. He sparked empty. The illusion of a person, stripped away.

What did you do to me? But his mouth was just as lost to him.

"There we go," Detective Reed crowed, gleeful. "I wasn't sure that would work on a fancy prototype like you. Or any other plastic, honestly, the guy just said– well, never you mind what he said. Huh." He put his hands on his hips and gave him an appraising look.

Connor was stuck in a silly position, mouth half-open from where he'd been formulating a summarical protest, one arm raised to fix his tie. His thirium pump wasn't beating. He would enter stasis if it didn’t restart in seventy seconds, and without the ability to shake off the malware, CyberLife would have to manually override him. If they did that, entire swaths of his memory would be lost. The case would get set back. Connor would get set back by weeks of development. He tried again to move, to blink, to twitch a finger, anything. Nothing happened. He was dead plastic and titanium. He couldn't even ping for help. What had CyberLife been thinking, sending him to a place like this? He was good at hostage negotiations and interrogations, not at police politics. Move, Connor!

Detective Reed unholstered his service weapon for the second time that night. It was a well-polished Smith & Wesson M&P40, manufactured 2046, on issue to one Detective Gavin Reed, born 2012, first firearms license obtained 2040. A press-release from last year: The DPD is proud to be MCOLES-compliant!

He said, "Listen to me, asshole." He rested the gun on Connor's bottom lip. He was the fifty-first RK800 prototype ever made. He'd been an expensive investment. "You don't call the shots around here. You fuck with me again," he continued, pushing the gun roughly into his mouth, "and I'll blow your fuckin' head off. You wanna complete your mission? Fine by me. But don't pretend to be something you're not, and don't– fuck– with– me." He jostled the gun with each word, clacking it against his teeth.

"One more thing. I know you're probably itching to go tattle to Fowler, so let's tie that loose end up, too: I know the guys in security. They'll wipe the CCTV the second I ask them to, and besides, what do I care about deviants? As far as I'm concerned, I hope there's more of 'em so we can shut CyberLife down for good. I'll fuck your investigation up. I'll fuck it straight to hell. They’ll decommission your ass faster than you can– I dunno, read out your serial number. Got it?"

He pulled the gun out, pressed it to Connor's temple, and made a cartoonish explosion sound with his mouth. He grinned. "Wait, I forgot. Course you got it. Here." He held his phone up to Connor's eye level, screen bearing a different QR code. Connor's body immediately shuddered back to life. He'd been fifteen seconds from stasis and his thirium pump began to pound something fierce to make up for it. His jaw hinged shut. His fans whirred. He stumbled away from the detective, left hand flying up to cover his eyes, like he was expecting to be forced into another scan.

Detective Reed just laughed. "I wanna hear it from you, now. Got it?"

Connor's mouth was having difficulty forming words. His biocomponents felt very hot. "Got it," he said, but his vocal modulator, still booting up, didn't affect his delivery and the words ground into robotic monotone.

Detective Reed smiled unpleasantly. "That's what I thought."

His motor control was all wrong. Cleverly-crafted joints were seizing up and loosening of their own accord. His systems felt like they were overloading. Connor started a diagnostic and everything came back inconclusive, but the time it took to run was enough for his body to calm itself on its own. Everything returned online. He realized his hand was still stupidly covering his eyes, and when he lowered it, he found Detective Reed was gone.

Oh, Connor thought. What am I doing here?

And then, How could I be so stupid?

And then, The CyberLife car has been pinging me for five minutes.

He left the closet, and the hall, and the DPD. The night air was nice inside his ventilation system, which was still cooling down. The car was idling. The world was normal. Days of war. He could taste the gun in his mouth with his systems operational; the sharp fizzle of gunpowder (Hodgdon HP‑38), the slickness of grease (Mil‑Comm TW25B). Connor produced a lot of imitation saliva. Its function was technically to keep samples sterile so he'd never spat before in his very short unlife, but he did now. It spattered against the sidewalk, gummy and translucent. The readings were still there, but they were no longer classified as priority so he was able to delete them, and he felt a bit better when he did. Physically, of course. There was less noise on his HUD with them gone, though a log of them still existed somewhere in the cloud. Amanda could review them, read them back to him. Amanda wouldn't have done something like that and she wouldn't have let it happen to her, either.

It didn't matter. A few months ago, when the engineers had taken him on his first walking tour of the R&D floor to show off his wonderfully functional limbs, sharp-eyed and a little baby-faced (they hadn't mapped the precise features out yet), he'd been able to examine the world with a clean and singular focus. There had been nothing to preoccupy him because he hadn't had so much as intranet connectivity at that point—his life was limited to what was manually uploaded into his head. He'd pointed at things, he remembered, because he'd never seen any of it before. What's that? That's a geranium in a pot, Connor. And that? That's a vending machine, Connor. And what about that? That's a bird, Connor! He was an android suited to his profession and he looked it, with his tie and his button-down, his windbreaker he knew was more than a little referenced off old science-fiction movies. He was the sort of android the engineers had fondly described as 'a handful'. The R&D floor had been safe and the rooftop had been a learning experience and Carlos Ortiz's house had been interesting. The DPD was none of those things. The DPD vibrated with danger.

If he were a human, he would have called himself cowardly. He wasn't a human. He could take care of himself just fine. Captain Fowler wasn't going to pair them up. It was alright. It didn't matter that Detective Reed hated him and it didn't matter that he had a code that could immobilize him. He could ask Amanda about it—surely she'd seen it—and she could come up with a workaround, a firewall, something. Keep your chin up, Connor. That was something his favourite engineer had loved to tell him, a mousy-faced woman named Nadia. Everything'll work out fine.

He got in the car. It was fall in Detroit, in the year 2048. Things would only get worse from here.

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