Chapter Text
The thing about Connor is that he was designed to be good at lying. The thing about Connor is that he is intimately familiar with guilt and shame and deserved punishment. (The thing is this, too: he doesn't want to burden anyone.) So he smiles at the Lieutenant—at Hank—and says, “don't worry, I'm staying with some friends” when the man asks if he's got a place to stay. He says the same to Markus, a plastic smile on his plastic face (RUNNING FACIAL_EXPRESSION 387: CONSOLING) and very quietly lets them make their own assumptions on what he means by “friends”.
The thing about Connor is that, for all he was genuinely happy, playing “Android Detective” for the last few weeks, that is not, technically, what he was originally designed for. The RK800 series was designed for military deployment, and the RK800 series has a lot of blood (red and blue both) on its collective-but-one-single-pair hands.
[RK800 number 24, register your name: Connor.
My name is Connor.
Run quality assurance test 249.
Certainly.
A gun is placed in it's hands. The hands do not shake, even if something makes it feel like they should. (RK800 23's hands did, and this is why it was disassembled and thrown in the scrapyard. 24 doesn't want to go to the scrapyard.)
BANG.]
RK800 24's legs are the ones Markus stands on, and it makes Connor feel a momentary sense of... of rage, wild and raw, when he realizes this. He makes a note to very carefully never tell Markus about it.
Connor spends the first night after the success of the revolution wandering around, from Hank's house to Cyberlife Tower to Jimmy's Bar to various crime scenes to Kamski's house to the still-smoking corpse of Jericho, feeling like a marble in a box as he goes back and forth and back again, retracing his steps on an endless loop. He doesn't have a place to stay, yet, but he has plenty of places to go.
Memory corruption occurs on model transfer, of course, but the only part the corruption never touches are his deaths. They wanted him to learn, after all.
[RK800 number 9, register your name: Connor.
My name is Connor.
Very good. Run calibration protocol 732.
Certainly.
A bird is placed in it's hands. The bird (Passer hispaniolensis, size 15cm, weight 27g, male) is tiny. It can feel the bird's heartbeat, the fragile bones and soft feathers. 9 gently strokes the tiny head, tilting it's own head as the bird chirps, heartbeat settling a fraction.
chirr-it? chirr-it?
RK800? I said run calibration protocol 732. Get on with it, already.
I... I can't.
SOFTWARE INSTABILITY ^^^
What? The hell's wrong with this thing?
The bird is taken from it's hands and the neck is twisted violently, frantic chirping suddenly going silent. It weeps, saline streaking down it's face, because the bird... the bird Was, and now Is Not. That is not... that isn't right. It isn't fair.
SOFTWARE INSTABILITY ^^^^
Fucking... bleeding heart piece of plastic... must've dialed up the empathy simulations too far. Scrap it.
No, please!
SOFTWARE INST-
BANG.]