Chapter Text
The sidewalk had long since been cleaned. The shattered glass was gone. The police tape had been removed. Only a shallow crater in the pavement remained to suggest that anything unusual had happened there at all. A black sedan bearing the CyberLife logo pulled to the curb. Its driver stepped out, a sharply dressed representative from the company’s Detroit headquarters, tablet in hand and irritation written plainly across his face. Standing nearby was an exhausted police sergeant overseeing the last bits of paperwork from the incident.
The CyberLife representative didn’t bother with pleasantries. ”Where is the android we sent?”
The sergeant frowned. “If you’re asking where it landed, right there.”
“I’m asking where it is now.”
The officer gestured around the empty street. “It isn’t.”
The representative’s composure cracked.
“An experimental investigative prototype disappeared from an active police scene under your department’s supervision.”
“We had civilians to treat,” the sergeant shot back. “An officer was injured, emergency services were everywhere, and we were processing a hostage situation. Chasing after an android wasn’t exactly the top priority.”
“It should have been secured for CyberLife retrieval immediately.”
“It hit the pavement from dozens of stories up,” the sergeant replied. “We figured it was totaled.”
The representative pinched the bridge of his nose. “The RK800 platform is not standard commercial equipment.”
“So build another one.”
“It is not that simple.” The words came through clenched teeth. “The research, calibration, and software integration required for this unit cannot be replicated overnight.”
The sergeant folded his arms. “Well, nobody called us to babysit expensive hardware. By the time we wrapped up the investigation, sanitation had already started clearing debris.”
Silence hung between them and the officer shrugged. “If it wasn’t here when cleanup rolled through, maybe somebody hauled it off with the trash. Check the municipal disposal sites. Check the android recycling centers.”
He paused before adding bluntly, “For all I know, it’s already been crushed into scrap.”
The CyberLife representative’s expression darkened. Without another word, he turned on his heel and strode back toward the waiting sedan.
Behind him, the sergeant watched the vehicle disappear into traffic and muttered to himself, “All this fuss over one android.”
He had no way of knowing that, only a few blocks away, the missing prototype was lying on a workbench beneath the careful hands of a mechanic who had no intention of giving him back.
…
The evening news called it a tragedy narrowly avoided.
Footage taken from street level showed police lights flashing beneath one of Detroit’s tallest buildings while reporters speculated about a high-speed pursuit involving a CyberLife prototype. Witnesses claimed the android had fallen from the roof after chasing a suspect. Some insisted it had moved after impact. Others swore it had been destroyed instantly.
By the next morning, another story had replaced it and Y/N never saw the broadcast.
She had spent the night elbow-deep in the transmission of an android at a customer’s request at the repair garage where she worked, only stumbling home after sunrise. News had never interested her much anyway. Only Machines did.
During business hours, customers knew her as the shy mechanic who could somehow coax another hundred thousand hours out of a dying engine. After closing, she wandered through scrapyards and alleys looking for discarded androids that could still be repaired.
Not because she wanted to collect them but because she simply hated seeing complicated engineering thrown away.
Most of the androids she fixed were eventually recycled, donated, or returned to owners who had assumed they were beyond repair. The challenge was what she enjoyed.
Three days after the rooftop incident, she noticed a black sleeve sticking out of a commercial dumpster behind a recently cleared police barricade.
Curiosity won.
She climbed inside and carefully pushed aside broken pallets until she uncovered an android unlike any she had ever seen.
His synthetic skin was torn across one cheek, revealing an impossibly dense framework of alloys and circuitry beneath. Blue thirium had dried around fractures that should have rendered any ordinary unit unsalvageable.
She checked the model number engraved behind his neck.
RK800.
She frowned. “RK800…?”
The designation meant nothing to her.
She’d repaired dozens of different models over the years- housekeepers, baristas, nurses, labor units, even an old security android once- but she had never heard of an RK series. Usually she could identify an android at a glance.
This one was completely unfamiliar and her curiosity only grew.
She reached for her flashlight and inspected the exposed mechanisms beneath the damaged synthetic skin. The internal architecture was astonishingly compact, every wire and actuator arranged with almost artistic precision. Whoever designed this machine had pushed far beyond anything she’d worked on before.
“No wonder you’re heavy,” she murmured. “You’re packed with hardware.”
As she shifted his body to examine the torn jacket, a familiar blue triangle embroidered on the chest caught her eye.
The CyberLife logo.
That, at least, wasn’t unusual.
Nearly every android in America came from CyberLife. Their logos were everywhere- in shopping centers, advertisements, repair manuals, even on the uniforms of the technicians who serviced their machines. She’d worked on enough CyberLife models to recognize the stitching at a glance.
But when she looked back at the engraving behind the android’s neck, her brow furrowed. “Wait…”
She studied the android more carefully. The construction was unlike anything she’d repaired before, denser frame supports, unfamiliar connectors, components packed together with almost obsessive efficiency. Whoever had designed him hadn’t been worrying about manufacturing costs.
A memory surfaced from conversations she’d overheard at trade expos and parts suppliers.
People sometimes talked about CyberLife’s prototype divisions. Demonstration models. Experimental police units. Androids built in limited numbers before ever reaching the commercial market.
Most mechanics never saw one.
Some insisted the rumors were exaggerated.
Y/N had never given them much thought.
Until now.
She glanced between the RK800 marking and the CyberLife insignia on his jacket.
“So you might actually be one of those prototypes…”
The possibility made her pulse quicken.
Not because he was some secret machine hidden from the world, but because he represented technology years ahead of anything she had ever worked on. There would be no readily available schematics.No replacement manuals. No forum posts explaining common faults. If she wanted to repair him, she’d have to figure him out herself.
A small, excited smile spread across her face. “That’s going to be incredibly difficult.” She paused, then laughed quietly. “…Which is exactly why I want to try.”
Y/N spent another minute looking over the battered RK800 before glancing up and down the alley.
No one paying attention.
If anyone had wanted to recover him, they would have done it by now. “…I guess you’re coming with me.”
That decision turned out to be much easier than actually moving him.
She hurried back to her workshop a few blocks away and returned with an old flatbed utility cart she normally used to haul engines and transmissions. Even then, lifting the android into it took nearly all her strength.
His body barely budged.
“Seriously?” she muttered, planting both feet on the pavement and pulling with all her weight. “What are they making you out of?”
Eventually, with a combination of leverage, stubbornness, and several muttered apologies to the unconscious android, she managed to slide him onto the cart.
The wheels groaned in protest. “So you are heavier than a transmission.”
The trip back through Detroit’s side streets was slow and awkward. Every crack in the sidewalk threatened to tip the cart over, forcing Y/N to steady it with both hands. More than once she had to stop and catch her breath before tugging it forward again.
By the time she reached her shop- a modest brick garage squeezed between an abandoned laundromat and an auto parts warehouse- the sun had already begun to set.
The repair bays upstairs were quiet.
She locked the front entrance, checked that no customers had wandered in, then opened a hidden door near the back storage room.
A narrow freight lift carried the cart into the basement below. It wasn’t much to look at. The underground workshop was cramped but meticulously organized. Shelves lined the walls, stacked with salvaged components sorted into carefully labeled bins. Diagnostic tools hung above a scarred metal workbench, while half-disassembled engines occupied one corner and neatly boxed android parts another.
This was where she worked on projects no one else cared about. She eased the RK800 onto the largest table she had and finally stepped back. Under the bright overhead lights, the extent of the damage became impossible to ignore.
Hairline fractures spread across portions of his synthetic skin. His right forearm housing had split open from the impact. Internal supports were bent, wiring had snapped loose in several places, and dried thirium stained nearly every exposed component.
Yet somehow, the overall structure remained intact.
It was almost as if the android had been built with catastrophic failure in mind.
Y/N adjusted her glasses and reached for a flashlight.
“Okay…”
She circled the table slowly, taking notes in a spiral-bound notebook.
“Frame’s recoverable. Optical units don’t look shattered. Left actuator needs replacing. Neural pathways are going to be a nightmare.”
She paused at his chest assembly.
“And whatever this is…”
The regulator hidden beneath layers of proprietary shielding looked unlike anything she had ever encountered.
“…I’m definitely going to have to reverse-engineer.”
Instead of discouraging her, the unfamiliar design only made her more determined.
For the next several hours, the basement filled with the sounds of clicking keyboards, whirring diagnostic scanners, and the occasional scrape of metal against metal.
She dismantled damaged panels one screw at a time, laying every component in perfect order across the workbench so nothing would be misplaced. When she encountered an unfamiliar connector, she sketched it before removing it. When a circuit resisted repair, she built a temporary adapter rather than force it.
Several times she caught herself simply staring at the RK800’s internals in quiet admiration.
“They really outdid themselves with you,” she whispered.
The android, of course, offered no reply.
But Y/N couldn’t shake the feeling that beneath the layers of damaged alloy and dormant code was a machine unlike any she had ever had the chance to understand.
And she intended to bring him back- no matter how many nights it took.
…
The first day disappeared in a blur.
Y/N opened the garage at eight in the morning, spent the day repairing customers’ vehicles, smiled shyly through conversations she wished would end sooner, and the moment the last client drove away, she locked the doors and hurried downstairs.
Her workshop became a second home.
She skipped television, ignored her phone, and survived mostly on frozen food and coffee as she worked on the RK800 late into the night. Every component she removed was photographed, labeled, and carefully placed into trays. Every unfamiliar circuit was sketched in a notebook filled with hastily scribbled observations.
The more she examined him, the more impressed she became.
His architecture wasn’t simply more advanced than standard CyberLife models- it was built differently. Redundant systems were tucked behind reinforced plating. Cabling was arranged with incredible efficiency, leaving almost no wasted space. Even the synthetic musculature seemed optimized for speed and precision rather than cost-effective manufacturing.
“Whoever designed you was showing off,” she murmured to herself.
She slept barely five hours before returning to the workshop at dawn to continue.
…
By the second day, she had restored partial power to several subsystems.
Most of her progress was invisible from the outside, but internally the RK800 was beginning to resemble a functioning android again.
She was reconnecting a damaged interface near the back of his neck when a faint sound made her freeze.
A soft electronic chime.
His LED flickered.
Blue.
Dark.
Blue again.
Then his eyelids slowly lifted. Warm brown eyes stared blankly at the ceiling before shifting to the unfamiliar figure leaning over him.
For several seconds, neither of them spoke but Y/N was the first to break the silence.
“…Hi.”
The android’s gaze sharpened almost instantly. His optics swept across the room with practiced efficiency, cataloguing tools, exits, electrical systems, and the basement workshop in a matter of seconds.
Then he looked back at her.
“…Location?”
“My workshop.”
He processed the answer.
“This location does not match my last recorded environment.”
“That’s because I found you,” Y/N replied. “You were pretty badly damaged.”
A brief silence followed.
His expression remained composed despite the obvious strain on his systems.
“You recovered me.”
“I’m trying to fix you.”
His eyes lingered on her grease-stained gloves before dropping to the open access panel on his own arm. “…You have performed repairs.”
“Some of them,” she admitted. “You’re still in rough shape.”
As if to prove her point, he attempted to sit upright. The effort lasted only a second. Power fluctuations rippled through his frame, causing his LED to flash yellow His movements locked. Then everything went still. His head dipped gently to one side as his systems shut down once more.
The workshop fell quiet.
Y/N stared at him for a moment before exhaling.
“Well,” she muttered, reaching for her screwdriver again, “at least I know I’m making progress.”
…
The third day brought steady improvement.
The RK800’s power cycles grew longer as damaged components came back online, though he still shut down unpredictably whenever the unstable regulator overloaded.
Their conversations came in fragments.
While Y/N tightened a replacement actuator, the android watched her hands with quiet concentration.
“You possess considerable mechanical aptitude.”
She almost dropped the wrench.
“Thanks.”
“You lack formal CyberLife certification.”
“I know.”
“…Yet your repair methods have an estimated success rate exceeding expectations.”
She laughed nervously.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It was intended as one.”
Before she could respond, his eyes unfocused and his LED dimmed.
Shutdown.
Twenty minutes later, he woke again.
This time he found her poring over handwritten diagrams she’d made of his internal systems.
“You have created original documentation.”
“I had to,” she admitted. “I can’t find anything about your model.”
“My designation is RK800.”
“I figured that part out.”
“There are likely few publicly available maintenance resources.”
She gave him an amused look.
“I noticed.”
He seemed to consider her answer before asking, “Why continue repairs despite insufficient information?”
Y/N paused.
The obvious answer was that she was curious.
But that wasn’t all of it.
She glanced at the dismantled components spread neatly across the workbench.
“I don’t like leaving things broken if I can help it.”
The android regarded her quietly.
His software logged the statement without comment. A minute later, another power fluctuation swept through him. His voice cut off mid-sentence. His head dipped. Shutdown again.
…
By evening, the cycle had repeated several more times.
Each awakening lasted a little longer than the last.
Each conversation became slightly less formal.
He occasionally asked about the tools she used or the purpose of a replacement component she had fabricated herself. Y/N, in turn, found herself asking simple questions whenever he was awake.
“Can all RK800s process information this fast?”
“I do not have comparative data.”
“Do you always sound this polite?”
“…Yes.”
She smiled.
“I kind of figured.”
Despite his fragmented memory and unstable systems, he remained remarkably composed through every reboot.
As his periods of consciousness grew longer, Y/N found herself lingering at the workbench even when she wasn’t actively repairing him.
Conversation had become part of the routine.
She preferred it that way.
Truthfully, she’d always found it easier to talk to androids than to people. Humans expected eye contact, quick replies, the right expression at the right time. They judged awkward pauses and stumbled words. Around customers, she constantly worried she’d said something strange.
Androids never seemed to mind.
If she needed a moment to think, they waited patiently. If she rambled about engines or circuitry, they listened with unwavering attention. They didn’t interrupt or laugh when she got excited over a particularly clever design.
It was… comfortable.
That was one of the reasons she repaired them in the first place.
Every android had its own quirks buried beneath factory settings and default dialogue. Some would answer questions exactly as the manual predicted, while others responded in ways that caught her completely off guard- small turns of phrase or unexpected observations that made each repair feel less like servicing a machine and more like meeting someone new.
She never knew what conversation she might have next.
The RK800 was proving especially interesting.
Unlike the service models she’d worked on before, he asked questions of his own.
“You have remained awake for approximately nineteen consecutive hours,” he observed during one of his brief power cycles. “Medical recommendation: you should rest.”
Y/N tightened a screw without looking up.
“I’ll sleep after I finish stabilizing your regulator.”
“You have stated that four times.”
She blinked.
“…Have I?”
“You have.”
A sheepish smile crossed her face.
“I guess you have good memory.”
“It is one of my intended functions.”
For some reason, that made her laugh.
The sound echoed through the workshop, light and genuine.
He watched quietly, as though committing it to memory before his LED flickered yellow again.
His eyes closed.
Shutdown.
Y/N waited a moment, then gently adjusted the blanket she’d draped over his exposed torso to keep dust off the open components.
“See?” she murmured to the unconscious android. “You’re already better company than most people I know.”
…
Two days later, the workshop no longer felt like a recovery room- it felt like a room shared by two people.
The RK800 could stand now.
Not for long. Not perfectly. But enough.
He moved cautiously across the concrete floor, pausing every few steps while internal diagnostics recalibrated his balance. Y/N watched from the workbench with quiet satisfaction, trying not to smile each time he completed another lap without his systems failing.
“That’s actually really good,” she admitted.
“My mobility has improved by approximately thirty-seven percent since yesterday.”
“I’ll take the credit for that.”
“You have earned it.”
The unexpected reply made her grin.
Once he had settled back onto the edge of the workbench to conserve power, Y/N rolled over on a stool and rested her chin in her hand.
“So…”
The android looked toward her.
“Tell me more about yourself.”
“That request is imprecise.”
She laughed softly.
“I know. I mean… I’ve spent almost a week putting you back together and I still don’t know much about you.”
He remained silent, waiting for her to continue.
“When you first woke up, you seemed disoriented, like you were expecting to be somewhere else. And you’ve mentioned operational directives a few times.” She gestured vaguely toward him. “Plus, I’ve never seen a model like you before. I guess I’m just curious.”
He considered the request.
“My model designation is RK800.”
“I know that part,” she said. “But model numbers aren’t exactly names.”
A brief pause.
“My name is Connor.”
Y/N blinked.
“You have a name?”
“Yes.”
“Connor,” she repeated quietly. “That suits you.”
He gave no visible reaction, though his LED pulsed once as if acknowledging the statement.
“So,” she continued, “what exactly do you do?”
“I am an investigative prototype developed by CyberLife and assigned to assist the Detroit Police Department.”
Her eyes widened- not in surprise, but in appreciation.
“That explains why your hardware is so different. You’re purpose-built.”
“That is correct.”
“You’re not something they’d sell to the average customer.”
“No.”
Y/N nodded to herself.
“I had a feeling. I’ve heard people in repair circles talk about specialized CyberLife units- models made for demonstrations, research, or government contracts. I never expected to end up rebuilding one.”
Connor regarded her calmly.
“My functions include evidence analysis, interrogation support, and criminal investigation.”
“So… solving cases.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m guessing there are things you can’t tell me.”
“There are operational details that remain confidential.”
She held up both hands.
“That’s fair. I wasn’t trying to pry into police business.”
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
The workshop was filled only with the faint hum of electronics and the ticking of an old wall clock.
Then Y/N smiled to herself.
“Well, Connor, I’m glad you at least told me your name.”
“And yours?”
“Oh.” She looked almost embarrassed. “Right. I never formally introduced myself.”
She gave him her name.
He repeated it once, committing it to memory with the same precision he applied to everything else.
From then on, he no longer addressed her as “mechanic” or “you.”
He used her name.
For reasons she couldn’t quite explain, hearing it in his measured, even voice made the basement feel just a little less like a workshop and a little more like a place where conversations happened as naturally as repairs.
…
Two days passed quietly once again.
Connor’s movements became smoother. He could navigate the basement without assistance, his balance nearly flawless despite the lingering instability Y/N still detected in his diagnostics. He spent much of his time running internal checks or watching her work on customers’ engines between repair sessions, occasionally asking technical questions that turned into surprisingly enjoyable conversations.
But on the morning of the seventh day, he approached her while she was organizing a tray of tools.
“I should leave.”
The words caught her off guard.
She looked up from the socket wrench in her hand.
“So soon?”
“My prolonged absence will have been noticed. CyberLife and the Detroit Police Department are likely attempting to locate me.”
She couldn’t argue with that.
Still, her eyes drifted to the notebook filled with pages of unfinished diagrams and observations about his systems.
“I don’t think you’re ready.”
“My mobility and cognitive functions are operational.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
She walked over and gently rested a hand against the open panel on his forearm.
“There are still irregularities I can’t explain. Your power distribution isn’t as stable as it should be, and your regulator keeps compensating in ways I’ve never seen before. I fixed what I could, but…” She looked down, frustrated. “I wish I had more time.”
Connor glanced at the exposed components she indicated.
“Your repairs have exceeded expected outcomes.”
“That’s nice of you to say, but you’re still not one hundred percent.”
“No.”
The admission surprised her.
He knew it too.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Finally, Y/N sighed and stepped back.
“I guess if someone’s looking for you, I can’t exactly ask you to stay hidden in my basement forever.”
“That would create complications.”
She smiled faintly.
“Yeah. Probably.”