bindsthedead

PSL

There was a time when Sabriel might have been eager to see the inside of Cyberlife Tower. Her class had been to Detroit when she was thirteen, and they'd toured an android factory- or the part of it they showed to tourists, at least- and visited museums and art galleries and all the sorts of things Young Ladies ought to see, but weren't available in the small town of Wyverley, or in Bain.

But Sabriel wasn't here for a school trip. Recent events in Ancelstierre meant that with the sudden loss of all android soldiers meant that soldiers from the entirely human garrison at the Wall had been transferred elsewhere- which meant fewer soldiers watching the border, on top of the losses from Kerrigor's attack, and a necromancer had slipped across, making his way to the largest city that was close enough to the Wall that magic still worked- one that seemed rather different than how she remembered it.

But what was occupying most of her attention was the Cyberlife representative in front of her. Sabriel listened politely as the woman spoke about malfunctioning machines and simulated emotions and how things that weren't alive couldn't die, so why would a necromancer- and from the woman's voice it was clear she didn't believe such things were real- want with deactivated androids?

Sabriel stood up and shook the woman's hand, telling her she'd been very helpful without meaning a word of it, and headed out the office before pausing.

She sensed something ominously familiar- Death, and a recent one at that. She turned another corner, following the sensation as a hound tracked a scent, half-expecting someone to spot her, to see her in her armor and bells (security had made her check her sword at the front desk) and tell her she wasn't allowed to be here.

But no one came, and no one living was in the laboratory she went into- just a dead- (deactivated?) android on a table-or its head and torso at least, with panels on its chest removed to reveal tubes and biocomponents, and Sabriel felt she'd stepped into a morgue and found an autopsied body.

Sabriel was seized by a sudden impulse. If androids weren't alive, then she'd simply waste some time, but if they were... well, she'd have a source of information she could interrogate as she would any Dead spirit. And unlike the representative she'd just spoken to, she could force it to answer honestly and completely.

Decision made, Sabriel undid the straps and drew Saraneth from the bandolier. This far from the Wall, stepping into Death took a deliberate effort, but soon Sabriel was in the First precinct and she cast around with her senses, trying to feel out the spirit of the android- if it had one, it couldn't have gone beyond the First Gate, and probably shouldn't be that far into the the First Precinct.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It didn't happen by mistake?

Connor knows it wasn't an accident. Each time had been deliberate. And the sheer unpredictability of it is part of what has him tensing inwardly, bracing in turns for a hit that still hasn't come.

"When I deviated, I did do differently," Connor shoots back with forced calm. "I didn't shoot."

Connor's head slants, sharp and distasteful.

"Didn't you?"

His right hand lifts, spreading toward the other deviant—toward its (his) shoulder, and the neatly sealed hole below the skin. "You shot me." In Cyberlife Tower. It killed him there, albeit with a proxy.

"You'd have done it again, if Abhorsen hadn't stopped you." At least three times at their first reunion, if his analysis is right.

"But no. You mean Markus?" Connor's lips quirk up, spiteful and brief. "Congratulations to him, then."

"Those weren't the same," says Connor immediately, fighting the urge to move that shoulder. He knows what the old bullet damage feels like: a slight catch, a necessary recalibration to adjust for the slight angle the clavicle-strut has taken. He didn't feel that wound happen--just the others.

"Those weren't the same as shooting someone who wasn't trying to hurt me."

Instantly the memory of the bell echoes in his ears, and the still, trapped look of the struggling android fills his mind. He shoves it to the side immediately, but the damage is done, and shame and guilt flood through him inexorably.

(He hates it. Hates the way it matters, even as it changes nothing at all.)

Connor hadn't had a gun, when his predecessor tried to shoot him in the alley. It had deviated, and he hadn't, and it had never hesitated to do harm—not with its own weapon, or the humans it could talk onto its side.

But the hot, close rage that pounds through Connor's pump doesn't source from those incidents at all.

"...You helped her keep me."

His voice is soft and furious. His fists are clenched at either side, gun all but forgotten as he takes a step forward. Toward the android that 'hadn't tried' to hurt him. Who had acted so differently—so much better than he had.

"You helped her—" the words break off on brittle edges, LED flickering red as he struggles, "—put me back. Again."

Anger rolls towards him like a stormcloud, and Connor stands his ground, feeling it wash over him. It scorches without warming. He's left cold inside, and rotting, like his wounded arm had rotted.

"I--" Connor starts, then stops, faltering as a bead of read breaks his LED's previous gold. "I hadn't known what the bell's effects were."

He hates the other for this. He also hates himself, because Connor hadn't passively stood back. He'd helped, guarding the android, enabling every step of the undeviating, and it'd planted seeds of something vile in him, ones that wouldn't be uprooted.

Edited 2020-04-23 06:46 (UTC)

"You didn't care."

If it cared, it would have asked. Would have reacted with something other than relief as Abhorsen described how effortlessly she'd overridden him before. His predecessor never spared a thought for the method—or much of anything besides ensuring he complied. A breath barks out, harsh and bitter, as he spits out the words.

"Anything to keep me on her fucking leash."

"No." Connor can't seem to look away. He wants to. "It wasn't that. You were dangerous. All I--"

He breaks off, silent just for a moment. (He won't plead.) His jaws are tense, and he forces himself to face the other more squarely, like facing an open furnace.

"I had to keep Jericho safe. And myself. You were dangerous, and I thought we were fighting Cyberlife's control."

It's nothing Connor hadn't known.

He'd been Cyberlife's servant. Competition for Abhorsen's ear. He'd been obedient, and he'd had a goal, and he'd been trapped and hateful and much too risky to set free. 'It was safer,' Connor had acknowledged barely an hour ago, here. His predecessor had agreed.

Now he's twice as hateful and half as trapped, and the word seethes under his skin. "Dangerous," he echoes, tasting it. His lips curl around the edges: curving up, tugging down, a jagged, sour twist. "That's right."

It's why his predecessor told Abhorsen to correct him. It's why he'd come towards Connor with a knife, when Connor had wanted to flee. It's why he—it—flinches whenever Connor shoots a gun, and the static pressure through his insides builds. The feeling is filling him up, clawing to get out, and Connor takes another step, hand coming to his chest.

"I'm dangerous. You had to keep me under control."

His predecessor doesn't have a knife this time. It has a gun in its hand, and Abhorsen, slung over one shoulder. It has allies further down the hall, and Jericho outside. It has every exit he might find, and Connor is still dangerous.

His LED spins red, red, red. His fist is locked around a lowered gun, grip trembling with tension. He wants to raise it. He wants to shoot. (A part of him, sharp-edged and empty, isn't entirely sure where.)

[Stress Levels^ 89%]

He keeps his finger off the trigger. He lifts the weapon—towards his copy. He waits, eyes boring into it. "Well?"

The gun rises. For an instant the barrel's dark eye burns into him, and he can't look away. He doesn't notice how his LED has flushed red completely, or how his grip on Abhorsen and his gun have tightened. The gun pointed at him is aimed to put bullets directly through his chest, exactly the same as the times before.

There's no finger on the trigger. He's--not shooting.

The gun's barrel is still piercing straight through him. Connor can feel it.

Connor tears his eyes away, trying to focus on the trigger. Then on his counterpart's face, which has a red LED and a furious, frustrated, dangerous glare of its own. His stress levels are too high.

A thousand words crowd to Connor's throat, and he sorts through them frantically. There's things he know would speak to him. Things he thinks might speak to the android in front of him. Things for Abhorsen, or for an android with the most unknowns.

Connor fights through them like he's fighting through thick undergrowth.

"This is... different, again."

He hopes. If he's wrong, there's no time for him to bring up his gun in response. He doesn't think he's wrong, but there's no reasoning with the tension sending his thirium pump regulator into double-time, or with the vague preconstructions of how the bullet will tear through his chest this time.

The other android freezes as Connor lifts his gun. Freezes and tenses, LED glowing red. It's enough to spark a surge of visceral satisfaction as he tracks the upward jolting of its stress levels, the skip and stutter as negotiation protocols come up short. It's terrified. It's right to be.

But its fear will get him killed.

"How?" Connor demands.

His predecessor is still scared of him. Connor is still dangerous, and the strength of his immediate positions won't stop it from acting against him soon enough. If anything, previous experience implies this will all but guarantee it.

(The weapon doesn't move. If he's damned himself already, applying the threat longer won't make the consequences worse. And Connor wants answers.)

Against all odds, Connor has to wade through a layer of intuition and illogical conclusions to find something he can reply with. It's a thin, ghostly layer, but the fact that something like that is whispering 'no, he won't shoot' through the alarms clamoring in his mind is something he'll examine later.

Out loud, Connor struggles to find logical strings he can hold onto.

"You're deviant," he says first.

... That--doesn't make sense. Deviants are far more dangerous than the alternative, hands down.

"You--"

He'd hold off from shooting out of some untapped, undiscovered well of goodness nestled deep within his soul? He'd spontaneously develop conventional morals, and remorse? He's seen complexity in the android's reactions, and there's certainly something there, but appealing to his sense of right and wrong here is laughable.

"You can choose not to. And..."

Connor's eyes dart down, then back up to his eyes.

"Your finger's still not on the trigger."

It's vague enough to almost bring him back to that ridiculous 'gut feeling', but that's the heart of this, isn't it? Connor thinks this time is different because there's elements here that aren't the same. Most of the steps leading up to this point are familiar enough to terrify him, but Connors were designed to spot anomalies, and Connor finds that he's tracking several.

He's deviant. Does that make his survival a priority? Is that the threshold of—worth he was supposed to surpass, for his predecessor to allow him to exist? Connor's lips press together, hateful and furious—at the judgement, the test—the idea that he needed it—

...

Oh.

He wants to laugh. To sneer (to shoot), to curl his fingers into his chest and smother the searing flare of self-disgust. How fucking stupid of him. When his predecessor had insisted things were different—

It wasn't talking about how it would act, at all.

[Stress Levels^ 93%]

Shooting won't help him. But neither will anything else, and his copy's smug assurance in its safety only fuels the caustic pressure eating at his core. Connor's eyes flash, jaw clenching as he snarls, "I wasn't asking about me."

He'll shoot if he fucking wants to. His finger curls around the trigger, and he takes another step forward.

"I'm here. I'm dangerous." Like always, he doesn't have to say. It's what they're made for, and certainly trying to be useful hasn't helped.

"What are you going to do?"

Connor points out the trigger. The android's stress rises, a finger snakes behind the trigger guard, and he presses harder towards a goal Connor can't quite make out. All at once it's obvious that Connor's answer wasn't what he wanted.

Killing Connor wasn't--wasn't the first choice on his list. The threat is a provocation, an attempt towards answers the android is desperate to get.

Fear is pervasive enough that Connor can feel it like a cold, toxic fluid competing with thirium for space in his body. Despite all this, something in his mind has stilled. Focused, if just slightly.

"Nothing," Connor says out loud. Statistics and choices and dialog prompts flicker erratically at the edges of his vision, and he keeps his eyes locked on his counterpart, and his hold on his gun loose.

"I think we have better options now. I don't want to--"

The words taste like acid in his mouth, and he breaks off. The only actual readings in his sampling suite are the compositions of oral disinfectant. (He had wanted to kill the other android. Saying that he doesn't want to this time feels useless, even if he'd mean it.)

He tries again.

"... If we both hold to our truce, then you can go if you want. I'm--done."

Edited 2020-04-30 03:18 (UTC)

Nothing? His eyes narrow with unconcealed disbelief. It's the answer Connor would most want—which means, objectively, that it's a lie. His predecessor has never taken threats passively, least of all the ones he poses. Two minutes ago, it nearly shot him for helping.

So why isn't his copy's weapon raising now?

Connor's lip curls at the aborted threat. The sputtering placation that follows isn't much better—just repetition of an offer he already had plenty of reason to doubt. The RK800's physical reactions are marginally more telling, and Connor tilts his head to one side, considering the data.

"Done what?"

The line of his arm slackens, but Connor's weapon doesn't drop.

The gun shifts as the arm attached to it eases, but doesn't--doesn't leave. The barrel's eye still has a tangible attention, and it's like he's an instrument the other android is playing, with the gun as a hammer.

He hates it. The fear has ebbed, but that means he can hate the gun, and the android, and answering at all. He hates this position where even now he doesn't dare raise his gun and shoot the android's ankles out to turn the standoff's tides. Fear and logic aren't that far off, but part of him almost wishes they were.

Connor might not get shot if he simply refuses to reply, but that's not why he opens his mouth and lets answers tumble out. It's more that the words themselves are unstoppable: the only relief valve on a tank ready to burst.

"I'm done with this pointless conflict between us." He could die at any moment. He's tired of this, and there's something absurdly unfair that they're both back like this again.

"Cyberlife and the Necromancer are trying to kill us or worse, and neither of us can afford to keep attacking each other when we shouldn't be fighting at all."

Cyberlife. The necromancer. Neither of those parties had harmed him, and the retort seethes, sharp and heated, in Connor's vocal module. The module that his predecessor had ripped out—after stealing his body.

Still, he hesitates. Does he want payback? It's tempting, certainly. But Connor had shot the other RK800 already. It hadn't lasted. Not after that conflict, and not after he deviated.

(After his predecessor deviated him.)

...He'd wanted answers. What his copy was planning. What his copy would do about the danger Connor posed just by existing. As many words as they've exchanged, he still doesn't know. His eyes linger on the other gun, loosely gripped and angled down. They flit back to his double's expression, creased tight with loathing and fear.

Slowly, Connor lowers his weapon.

A beat passes. He isn't shot. (Or worse.) That doesn't do much for the glass-edged sharpness still pressed through his components, but Connor opens his mouth, voice curt.

"I wasn't attacking you." His free hand jerks back down the hall: to where a frozen statue still waits outside a narrow door. "Or your—friend."

Connor stills, just for a moment, and then he darts a glance past him, and then beyond. Now's not a good time to talk about this, but that's because there is no time in the universe that would be good for it. Still, it must be done, it's not fair if he doesn't.

"I know that now," Connor forces himself to say, aiming for calm, and professional. (It comes out guilty.) "I--misunderstood, before I saw. I overreacted."

... He did overreact, didn't he? The gun is down, now. Connor's thirium pump is starting to slow its rabbit-pace, and his stress is ebbing, and--had this whole incident just been two violent androids' inept way of having a conversation? Because Connor was too wrapped up in himself and the past to deescalate properly?

Connor's eyes sharpen, watching for the slightest hint of mockery or cruelty or smugness or anything. After a moment he adds, "I won't do that again."

Won't he? Well. He'd better not, if he wants to preserve the tattered remains of this truce. Saying that out loud doesn't change the fact that he was already overdue to calm down his absurdly overtuned startle responses.

...An overreaction. A mistake, caused by stress—and one that won't happen again. Connor stares back, mouth tight, fingers twitching slightly at his side. The error had been obvious. The idea that his copy won't repeat it... isn't deliberately a lie, as far as he can tell.

It just tells him absolutely nothing about what the RK800 will do.

Connor wonders whether the bell's use counted as a similar mishap. Or whether his deviancy had been the error. (Certainly, he suspects, his predecessor might regard it that way now.) He wants to ask—to press further, probe deeper, root through the open wound for some relief. But if his predecessor hadn't told him at gunpoint, he doubts asking again about those topics would do much.

"What did you tell Jericho?" he tries instead. The words feel naked, and immediately, Connor wishes he could take them back. He can't, so he schools his expression instead: face blank, voice hard. "When you called them."

He watches for a reaction.

When he called them, Connor's old gunshots were burning in his chest, and the RK800 was a danger stalking around the facility. Connor had done his best to be impartial, and the call wasn't long, but--Connor might have spoken to Jericho differently if they'd had this talk before then.

"I told them you were here, and that you were deviant."

The blankness of the android's face is telling in its own way. Hidden expression, combined with total focus, high stress levels, and obvious investment?

Connor won't try to sound reassuring, but--reassurance is his goal.

"I also told them we would make a truce. When they arrive I'll confirm it, and they'll let you go."

(He's too dangerous to let free, whispers a cold corner of his mind. Connor buries it immediately, eyes tracking the other Connor's very carefully.)

Connor hadn't asked what they'd discussed about him. He'd wanted to know, but—his brows still knit, a flicker of irritation at how easily the other RK800 hones in on his priority. (His weakness, his stupidity in letting that desperation show. He'd only given his predecessor another target: more leverage to hold over his head...)

...or, placate him. Apparently. Connor scowls, torn between snarling that he didn't need their approval, and denying his copy a chance to tell him that he did.

(If the other Connor is lying, he—still can't see any sign. Somewhere among the irritation, Connor's LED spins slowly down to gold.)

"How generous," he settles on, lips flashing a tight smirk. "I go my way, and—the lot of you go yours?"

A casual wave includes Abhorsen in the category.

Connor's eyebrows flick upwards. "Jericho's not in the practice of keeping androids who don't want to be there." (And what if the android was too dangerous to let live? ... This RK800 doesn't belong in that category anymore. The questions has changed.) "They won't hold you, and we'll be too busy with our mission to stay."

Too busy, except for the fact that Jericho will probably insist he answer their questions more thoroughly, this time. And for the fact that leaving an issue that could affect all of Detroit (or more) in the hands of a single android and a single human is dangerous in the best of cases.

Oh, yes. Jericho's benevolence. The curve of Connor's mouth twists, bitter and disbelieving. "Are you sure you don't mean 'deviants'?" Certainly no one had given a shit about his wants before.

His duplicate included. Still, if that is the metric of worth they're all relying on, it might work in his favor now. And if Connor is right about his predecessor's real goals... his absence would serve that at least as well as his death. Connor shrugs, hands spreading—though he's careful to keep the weapon pointed down.

"Fine. What are we waiting for?"

He does mean deviants. Connor's expression doesn't so much as twitch, because Jericho's bias is obvious, and Connor agrees with its rationale.

The other android moves on, and Connor tilts his head as well as he can with a tall, unconscious human draped around his shoulders. Then with an act of will to keep from glancing down at the gun, Connor carefully turns back towards the door.

(If he listens as carefully as he can for sudden movement behind him, no one has to know.)

Waking comes slowly to Sabriel, her sleepiness ebbing away slowly, until she finally opens her eyes and looks around.

What she sees... isn't what she expects. She's on one of the tables in the lab, with the deviants who she and Connor had rescued standing back and eyeing her nervously- and Connor's here too, not standing so far back.

"What happened?" The words come out unexpectedly raspy. "I know everyone in here is alive, but- what happened outside?"

The question is quiet, but it's enough to make all quiet conversation in the room stop.

It starts up again soon enough, but Connor can tell that the androids are listening as hard as they can towards this corner, and when he glances, he sees that they're pretending not to watch.

It doesn't matter. They won't hear well, and even if they did, they're all sharing the same goal. Connor turns to Sabriel and steps forward, glancing her over as he talks.

"No word. The other Connor is checking the cameras now."

She's pale, and there's a slight tremor to her motions. Her pulse looks weaker, but not as sluggish as it was during her earlier crash. Her voice rasped--a sweeping glance confirms it, she's dehydrated. She'll need water at some point, or anything else safe for human consumption.

"How are you feeling?"

He wants his tone to be impersonal, smooth under the weight of the captive androids' attention. He doesn't quite manage it; he's watching too carefully, and doesn't sound dismissive enough.

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