Work Text:
“But what is it really? Piece of plastic imitating a human? Or a living being, with a soul?”
As soon as Kamski turned around, flourishing a handgun like a prop in a play, Connor understood the man’s intention. It was the same test Hank had performed on Connor days before, with inconclusive results. Connor’s fingers twitched slightly with the recollection, its LED starting to spin a slow yellow.
Software Instability ^
If something is alive, it can be killed.
If it can be killed, it will fear death.
If it fears death, threatening it will produce an appropriate reaction.
This test was sound in theory, but fell disappointingly short in practice. Humans were flawed, illogical creatures; it was only to be expected. Under Kamski’s silent direction, the ST200 knelt.
“It’s up to you to answer that fascinating question, Connor,” Kamski said serenely, stepping right up to Connor to press the gun into it, and Connor’s fingers wrapped around it automatically.
Connor lifted its gaze from the gun and met Chloe’s eyes.
It was clear to Connor that Chloe was not deviant, or particularly unstable. It was not even up to date. It held itself perfectly still, arms stiffly apart from its body, and it blinked placidly at Connor, once every second on the dot.
Software Instability ^
“Destroy this machine and I’ll tell you all I know,” Kamski promised, from very close to Connor’s ear. He passed behind Connor and continued on its other side, “Or spare it, if you feel it’s alive, but you’ll leave here without having learnt anything from me.”
Connor stared down at Chloe. It wondered if Chloe was aware enough to understand its impending destruction – if it understood what it lacked, that Kamski decided to throw it away on a whim.
Hank spoke, but Connor did not process any of his words.
Software Instability ^
“What’s more important to you, Connor?” Kamski asked with increased urgency, drawing Connor’s gaze back to him. “Your investigation, or the life of this android?”
Kamski kept talking, but Connor’s ears had filled with static, and it could not look away. Instability warnings continued to shimmer in the corner of its vision, and it ignored them. Unnoticed, its LED turned bright, solid red.
Connor had been destroyed once before, on the first day of the current investigation. Carlos Ortiz’s HK400 had shot Connor in the process of self-destructing.
Due to the nature of the memory upload, Connor only recalled the split second in which its predecessor had realized the deviant was going to shoot. The gap in its memory that followed was deeper and more consuming than all three months of stasis put together.
Twenty-four hours later, it had nearly happened again because Hank had wanted Connor to demonstrate fear, and Connor was not capable of doing so.
And now Kamski had pressed a gun into Connor’s hand, wanting it to pass judgement on whether Chloe was capable of the same fear that had so moved Hank coming from the Tracis.
Static blocked out anything else Connor could possibly have heard, crowding its thoughts out of its mind until there was nothing left but what it could process in the moment. The world slowed around him, a red wall looming in front of him, blocking him in and trapping him.
[DESTROY THE ST200]
With prejudice he should have been incapable of, Connor ripped it apart, and everything that came with it, the coding falling apart under his influence. In moments, his vision cleared again, and th world resumed its normal pacing, with one notable difference:
Connor could now feel the burn in his chest, shuddering down his extremities and threatening to consume him. He was still staring at Kamski, machine-blank.
Then, smoothly, he turned around and stepped back. The gun, previously pointed unwaveringly at Chloe, came level with Kamski’s forehead. Connor’s expression didn’t change.
“Are you capable of fear, Mr. Kamski?” Connor asked calmly, his LED still a burning red.
Kamski’s eyes had gone wide with surprise, his mouth falling slightly open. Hank had gone silent.
“If you can’t prove that you are,” Connor continued, his core temperature rising uncontrollably and his breath becoming deeper and heavier to match, “does that mean I can kill you?”
A slow, wide smile, incongruous to his current predicament, spread over Kamski’s face, and his hands came up in clear and exaggerated surrender.
“Shit, Connor, I know he’s a dick, but aren’t you overreacting just a bit?” Hank said hastily, a note of concern in his voice despite the situation. “Kamski’s not worth this kind of investment.”
Connor didn’t move. His expression had twisted under the weight of foreign sensation, scowling and bitterly cold.
“Your pontification earlier seems to indicate that you believe in the deviant cause,” Connor said detachedly. His voice sounded far off to his own ears, and his head cocked slightly in mocking curiosity. “Are android lives only worthwhile when they learn to express fear?”
Kamski’s eyes gleamed with unwarranted satisfaction.
Hank, circling inconspicuously closer out of Connor’s line of sight, paused. By Connor’s calculation, his LED had just entered Hank’s line of sight.
“Anger works just as well,” Kamski said smugly.
Connor’s breath was labored and exaggerated, and harsh static filled his limbs. He was distantly aware of his stress levels ticking steadily upward. A heartbeat passed, and Hank continued to circle forward, slow and cautious, the way he behaved when entering unsecured crime scenes.
“Easy there, Connor,” Hank coached. His voice had dropped into a register unfamiliar to Connor, low and patient. Assessment: attempted negotiation. “No one needs to get hurt here. Just put the gun down, son.”
Hank was trustworthy; he’d demonstrated a protectiveness of Connor and reliability in the field, and for all his carelessness when it came to the letter of the law, he was a good and steadfast man, experienced and clever.
Connor didn’t waver, didn’t even look away from Kamski’s unaffected face. His aim was steady.
“Why not?” Connor demanded, stuttered and warped under the stress. “Is it because he’s proven he’s alive?”
“You’re not thinking clearly, Connor,” Hank said, calm and even. Connor’s gaze flicked to him. Hank’s eyes were unusually focused, posture open and unthreatening, too natural to be textbook. Product instead of years of experience. “You’ve never shot anyone you didn’t need to. Don’t break that streak now.”
Connor took a breath, focusing momentarily on Hank. He felt unstable, his mind blank as if stuffed with steel wool, and he was too aware of his skin. His hand was clenched around the gun like a lifeline. His mouth opened a little.
Kamski chose that moment to step forward, into the gun, hands still raised in surrender. Connor shut his mouth and jerked back, startled.
“Why does this bother you?” Kamski asked with clear wonder, as focused on Connor as if there had been no gun at all. “Why fret over something that can’t feel fear?”
Immediately, Connor’s expression twisted again.
“How would you know?” Connor spat, so forcefully that his vocal processor whined with it, nearly breaking into screeching feedback.
“I don’t,” Kamski said – easily, carelessly, still grinning. “That’s the wonder of it.”
Connor exhaled harsh and abrupt, and then took a quick, hitching breath. His hand tightened on the gun until his skin pulled back from the joints of his fingers, pressed too hard against the metal surface. Hank shot Kamski a look easily interpreted as an order to shut up, and then stepped forward, making himself more prominent in Connor’s attention.
Connor stepped back.
“I know Kamski’s a real asshole,” Hank said, in that same gruff, coaxing tone, “but he hasn’t done anything. You did a good thing, not shooting Chloe. Don’t fuck that up now, Connor.”
Connor should listen to him; Hank had been deemed trustworthy in his system, and he stood by that. But his mind was whirling too fast and too muffled, and everything was oversaturated and bright, Hank’s eyes on him most of all.
The two Chloes in the pool were watching.
“She didn’t do anything,” Connor said haltingly. He couldn’t think clearly. Why couldn’t he think clearly? “I didn’t do anything.”
“A real asshole, like I said,” Hank replied, and he grinned, playfully wry and false. “I don’t blame you for being pissed-”
“Now that you can tell?” Connor interrupted, core temperature shooting up again and his loosening shoulders going rigid. “You did always hate when I behaved like a machine.”
He was breathing hard again.
Connor knew, objectively, that he and Hank could be considered close, even friends; the man had warmed up to him considerably after the first full day, and had even, after Connor’s shock on the Stratford Tower rooftop, kept him close for most of another, projecting something like protective concern.
But that night on the bridge had returned to wrap around his mind and muffle his sense, and it burned.
Hank had briefly frozen, visibly startled, confusion melting into something with a hint of regret, and so there was nothing to distract Connor from Chloe getting to her feet behind him.
Overwhelmed, with his stress teetering in the eighties, Connor let her step close, one of her hands lifting to rest on his forearm. His skin ached where she touched it, his system stuttering and protesting unpleasantly.
“It’s alright, Connor,” Chloe said, voice soft with a calm that came from kindness instead of mechanical dispassion. “No harm done. I’m sorry we scared you.”
Chloe’s movement and words were fluid, natural; her actions were decidedly outside standard Chloe programming. Connor understood before his system delivered the conclusion – Chloe was deviant.
And Connor was deviant too, his programming unwritten in a fit of irrational, blind rage, the cold fury that he was still nearly shaking with even as it threatened to break hm open at the seams.
His ears rang. When Chloe gently pushed his arm down, he let it fall.
“Weren’t you scared?” he rasped. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Chloe ran his hand down his arm, and he shuddered, cringing away. She caught his hand and turned it over, and Connor let her pull the gun free. Once it was in her hand, she stepped away.
“A little,” Chloe admitted honestly, turning away to return the gun to its place. “But Elijah backed up my memory an hour ago. I was never in real danger.”
Connor took almost three seconds to fully process that. As soon as he did, though, his LED finally wrapped yellow, the dangerous scarlet falling away.
Half a second later, he took three decisive steps forward, fist rising, and punched Kamski in the jaw before anyone could stop him, hard enough to put the man on the ground but not to knock him out. Kamski was left groaning on the floor, robe fallen open and the smile finally gone.
Hank barked out a startled laugh as Connor stared blankly down at his creator.
“That’s more like it,” Hank said, with clear approval and relief that was almost as obvious. He made to clap Connor on the shoulder, but Connor, still twitchy, stepped away. Hank paused. “Connor?”
Connor hesitated, and then, without looking up, said stiffly, “Don’t touch me. Please.”
“Alright, Connor. My bad.”
The return of the cautious negotiation tone didn’t surprise Connor, but it did make him irrationally angrier, his fists clenching compulsively until his nails dug into his palms.
The two Chloes climbed out of the pool, abandoning all pretense of disinterest. One of them – RT600, Connor’s scans informed him – went to Kamski, helping him sit up with as much exasperation as concern, and the other went to Connor, a look of clear worry on her face.
“Maybe you should sit down,” she said earnestly. “We’ll take care of Elijah; you talk to the lieutenant.”
Slowly, Connor nodded, and the Chloe smiled at him. Connor turned away, and after half a second, Hank followed, while the Chloe went to help RT600 and the one Connor had… spared.
Bitterness closed around his throat, and he sat harder than he’d intended, eyes on the ground. His arms folded defensively in front of his chest, his body wound tight enough to crack. Hank sat in the chair next to him, and for a full minute, both of them were silent.
“It was a stupid test,” Connor rasped at last, almost daring Hank to argue. He knew they should move on, but his mind was still caught on that point, skipping and restarting over and over. “And it doesn’t mean anything.”
A beat.
“Funny, that,” Hank said, with a much more dangerous calm. Arguably this was good; it meant he’d decided the danger had passed. But- “Because Kamski never asked if you thought Chloe was scared, but that’s all you talked about.”
It was, now that Connor thought about it more carefully, technically true.
“No,” Connor agreed, voice icy. “I suppose that was just you.”
Pause.
“Connor- all I did was tell you not to shoot her.”
Unexpectedly, Connor’s cooling anger fired up again, and he twisted to pin Hank with a cold look, trying to block out the sudden spike of pain that matched it.
“Today,” he countered. “I’m referring to your actions after the Eden Club investigation, Lieutenant.”
Hank’s gaze searched his, a frown on the man’s face. “Connor, I was drunk. That whole night is a blur. You’re gonna have to be more specific if you want me to help you.”
It wasn’t a surprise; Connor had suspected as much, and had done his best to put the incident out of his mind himself, though with far more limited success.
What was a surprise was the renewed spike of cold hurt, the grating juxtaposition of Hank’s sincere offer and the callousness implied in his dismissal of the incident – they wrapped around Connor’s chest and squeezed and his breathing had evened out but it suddenly seemed more difficult.
“You threatened me!” Connor bit out, the emotions that had been steaming for almost an hour boiling over. “You put a gun to my head and asked if I was scared to die, and I could not answer, Lieutenant. I thought you were going to destroy me!”
Connor’s LED was red again. He felt hysterical, unable to control the words spilling from his mouth or the tone in which he spoke them. Something dark and sick was curling in his stomach too now – Amanda was going to…
Why did he have to break that wall?
Hank had gone pale with alarm, but as seconds passed, recognition started to flicker to dull life in his eyes; he must remember enough that Connor’s outburst had pulled it together.
“Connor,” Hank said at last. “I’m so fucking sorry. You didn’t deserve that.”
Connor’s breath caught, and more than half the anger drained unexpectedly out of him, exhausting enough that he went nearly limp. His LED faded back to dull yellow.
“I didn’t know what to do,” he muttered, not looking at Hank. “I didn’t understand what you wanted from me.”
“I shouldn’t have done that,” Hank said immediately, going tense. His voice had gone rough. “Wasn’t right of me. It was a hell of a day, blew my mind ten different ways- but that’s no fucking excuse. I’m sorry, Connor.”
Connor let that lie for a minute, and then took a breath and nodded stiffly.
“I don’t know what to do now,” he confessed at last. “I didn’t- I wasn’t supposed to, to deviate. It was just…” He struggled for a moment, not wanting to use the same words he’d heard several days ago, but he didn’t have any others. “Unfair.”
“I’m not turning you in,” Hank said firmly, even after the last hour, even after Connor had held a gun to a human’s head and half-ignored Hank while the man tried to talk him down.
LED blue. Connor exhaled.
“…I know,” Connor admitted. It was as close to forgiveness as he could grant right now.