dualislogs | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

WHO: Hank Anderson | Connor
WHAT: Hank discovers he has a new roommate
WHERE: The Noobie Chicken Coop
WHEN: Connor's arrival
WARNINGS: 🎜🎝 General warnings for Hank's possible suicidal ideation. Will come back and add anything else.

Hank's shift goes on per usual. Today's grind isn't any different from the usual. He's occupied at the intersection next to a school during a science fair type of event, constantly directing the flow of traffic and both entitled parents and sweet old ladies bearing baked goods for the kids braving the sidewalk. By the end of it he's gained three muffins, a large chocolate chip cookie, two cupcakes, and lost four points of sanity.

He fuels himself up with two cups of coffee for a round of ticketing in downtown. He's relatively sure that, at some point, he sees someone that looks just like him buying fruit from a stand. Besides the bizarreness of Hank Anderson buying fresh fruit very well it being a doppelganger, a double-take proves it a false alarm. Though he's so busy staring and trying to fathom what he wasn't actually seeing (he thinks?) that the man who's car he was about to ticket is able to run out of the store and jump into his vehicle and rush away before Hank can scan in his plate number.

Figures.

As he's back at the station clocking out he passes by detectives discussing their cases and is surprised by how much he misses it, considering his willingness to throw it away back home. He really wanted to help people, but he also didn't want to play the games associated with the job.

When he gets home he nearly falls over when he comes through the door. The entire room's changed. Two beds. More drawers. More closets. Still a shower, though, that's good.

He reaches up and pulls the tie out of his hair that keeps about half of it up at work, letting it fall loose and into its usual aesthetic of crimped sheepdog shaggy. He's just standing there, in his uniform, staring in a state of confusion at changes he just fuckin' doesn't understand. That whole "matrix bullshit" theory is gaining ground in his head again.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Connor frowns, his suspicions - nonsense though they seemed to be - confirmed.

"Hank, you were gone a day," he tells him seriously, going down on one knee in front of him to look him full in the face. "I came out of standby this morning and you were gone. I spent the day looking for you, then I was just putting in the missing person's report when I ended up here."

Even making the call, he hadn't had high hopes of anything being done - not under the circumstances, or given that Hank wasn't someone at high risk during the evacuation or the revolution. But he'd been making it. And he never even got through.

"I wonder if time moves more slowly here than where we're from..." he wonders aloud, although neither of them can answer that question.

"A day."

But instead of being shocked or doubtful, the words are grim. Like he isn't surprised and he's not disappointed, just fucking tired of it. Hank puts his hand on his forehead, runs it over his hair, and ruffles the back of it in all of his irritation.

"There are people here from 2008. There are people here from 2017. There are people here that do magical summonings and are named after weather phenomena. Well, they say they can, except the Head thing doesn't let anyone be anything above a standard dead average unless you buy it here."

Wait.

"Do you have everything or was some of it disabled? Do a diagnostic now. See if some of it's been limited."

He's sure there are a ton of other questions related to what he just said that need to happen. He'll get to this first. He doesn't even want to fucking graze Gotham or X-Men yet.

Hank doesn't sound anywhere near as surprised about this as Connor might have expected at first, but it becomes clear soon enough - it's not uncommon. He's frowning, gaze fixed at a distant point as he takes all of this in and files it with what he knows, when...

"I did one," he says immediately. "I honestly thought I might be hallucinating, so I ran a full diagnostic on the way here - no issues."

But then yes, the questions have to start. Or rather, not questions but flat statements of the 'I'm sorry, did I hear that properly' sort.

"Magical summonings."

Like that.

"Connor, you gotta start jobs at shit level positions. I am a traffic cop. I've had motherfuckers try to turn their cars invisible with actual bullshit sparkly magic to get out of a parking ticket. Because that's real? I'm still not sure any of this is real."

In fact he's got pretty good reason to wonder about it, in his opinion. But everything is such a hammer of information, he's going to have to get through one nail at a time or it's all gonna fall loose.

"Multiple people mentioned Gotham as a real place. As in the city where Batman lives. People have come back from the fucking dead. There are honest to god superpowered comic book mutants. Except they've all been docked a little.

"So try a few things, and see if there's anything you can't do. I'll even not bitch at you for licking anything just... please not off the floor."

Connor's face actually twitches at the words 'traffic cop'. But that's not important.

"If we're both hallucinating or in a VR we're not aware of, at least we're together in this." Even if it is real, he'd rather they work together to figure it out than Hank being stuck here alone and Connor in Detroit with no idea what's happened to one another.

He's actually not sure what he would have done if he'd been in Detroit with Hank gone for two months.

"I'll check, and then you have to tell me about people coming back from the dead," he says just before quickly activating his mind palace, speeding up his processors to maximum - at which point time virtually freezes before him, allowing him to visualise the room from memory and examine it that way.

"I just scanned the room, got your heart rate and pre-constructed the best way to fall if I wanted to jump out of the window," he says patiently after a grand total of one second. If he was going to find any problems, he'd have found them during the diagnostic, but it doesn't hurt to try everything out. He takes out the phone he's just been given and interfaces with it, showing Hank the screen: he's scrolling down an intranet forum of some kind without touching anything but the back of the device. "If you've got anything liquid in the room, I can test a sample."

Edited 2019-08-12 19:34 (UTC)

"Okay, well. That's good to know if you fall out the window," he mutters idly, making a bit of a face. He stands up, undoing his work holster (which has a radio pocket and a currently empty scanner pocket on each side), unsnapping it from around his thighs and waist before heading over to the closet. Rather than pulling out some whiskey, he pulls out a bottle of something orange with a tin cap on it.

He gives that to Connor. "Try this."

In the meantime, he finds a the shitty tacky paperback he's been carrying with him everywhere. People must think it's his favorite book in the world if they don't know better (a few do) because it's with him in some capacity much of the time. During work he leaves it hidden in his room.

He holds that in his hand as he waits for Connor to take his sample.

"Yeah, apparently people don't have to stay dead. A guy came in fully repaired after his fuckin' throat was slit. You know. Save for a bloody shirt." And that was its own massive mess.

"I've gone through a couple of windows in just the last week, I can't rule it out."

The immediate one that comes to mind is Hank's, but there was the urban farm as well. Technically that might have been a roof - all the same thing with greenhouses, really.

He stands as well, idly eyeing the holster as Hank takes it off, then staring at the radioactive-looking orange, carbonated drink Hank presents him with.

"OK." And he lifts it to his mouth, taking in just enough for it to coat his tongue and...

He twists his face in a sudden grimace. He's done this several times since being activated and it was never quite like... It's like a chemical bomb just exploded in his face.

"It's..." A ridiculous, sweetened chemical bomb. "...mostly sugar. And sweeteners. Citric acid. At least thirty different artificial flavourings. Several... I think you get the point."

He twists his face again, scrubbing his tongue of all remnants of it.

"Yeah, I fuckin' noticed. Connor." Hank says, referring to that window of his. But he hadn't been conscious at the time. So he only noticed afterward.

"So you react that way to that but not the old blood." Hank observes, taking his bottle with a skeptical look, then drinking from it because he can't just let it go flat like that.

He settles down again, rolls up his sleeves, undoes his shirt a couple of buttons, and watches Connor. As much as he still has to explain, he looks at him with a long suffering, exhausted sort of expression. Like Connor is his last friend in the world (he probably is).

"It really is good to see you. I missed you. I really did."

"I thought you were genuinely ill," he points out. "If I realised you were just drunk I..."

He pauses and considers the matter. "I would have done the same thing."

So much for that.

"It was different this time," he says, eyeing the bottle with a sceptical look of his own as Hank drinks from it. "Like I was processing it in a different way than usual. Same chemical information, but there was... I guess I was tasting it."

That doesn't seem like limiting his systems, unless they mean to do it by making sure he never wants to use his forensics suite ever again. But still, now that he thinks about, it's...

"Can I have some more of it?" He holds out a hand for the bottle.

Hank sits back down, leaving Connor to momentarily stand awkwardly in the middle of the room - before he too sits, on the bed opposite Hank's. He doesn't look anymore like he's so stiff he'll shatter if touched, but his posture's still good - comes with being an android and never having to slump. He fiddles with the bedsheet between the fingers of both hands, automatically needing to do something to keep them occupied. He has to admit, it's a little odd seeing Hank like this - weary, but... What, a functional human being? Still stashing whiskey in his room, but apparently going to work before midday and managing. Is it good to see, or is it a sign of something more at work? He wants to believe it's good: that getting Hank out of Detroit and apparently out of everything familiar to him has somehow helped. But that also means that Connor is something familiar suddenly back in his life, and with that this whole thought process becomes too weirdly tangled to go on with, and Hank's looking at him.

"I can't keep from thinking it's only been a day," he says. "I'm not sure what would have happened if you'd been gone for two whole months."

Hank's been away from Detroit now for longer than he ever knew Connor, and in fact two-thirds of Connor's existence. He's not sure how that matters, but it's another thought that's jumped into his mind unbidden, and he's not sure how deviants (other deviants) deal with it.

Hank gets up off his bed and lumbers over to sit by Connor, handing him the drink that he's decided his foul-tasting. "I'm glad we don't have that to worry about. I'm a little pissed they decided to wrestle in a way to make me say for another couple of months." Because he wouldn't want to leave Connor behind. Not willingly.

Hank opens up the shitty little novel he has with him. To the first page of post-it notes.

"There was a terrorist incident my first fuckin' week here." His voice drops to something quiet, like he's worried they might be being watched. "A stage was blown up during a parade. Some people were injured. I've been looking for clues on my own. But the part that's bothering most is the message they've been putting out there. 'Wake-up.'"

Familiar sounding, huh?

"I know it's just a coincidence. But even if people hadn't been hurt I'd be looking just because of that. But the government in charge, they're trying real damn hard to cover up it's even happening. Not just letting the media stir up a shitstorm and scare everyone. They have these big unfriendly enforcer bots that come and uh... recommend people keep their mouth's shut."

Between the pages of a Noirish story about a detective falling in love with an alien woman and the persistent ex that wants her back are brightly colored clues, little notes in flashy paper only visible if you flip through the book. (Also, ultimately, the woman chooses her ex when he's exonerated of a suspicious crime and the detective is left humble and alone in the end. It's not a very happy story.)

"I wonder if this means I have to stay two months later than you," he wonders idly. That's ten months away, who knows what'll happen in that time? But now, in this moment, he doesn't think he likes the thought of it.

Taking the bottle from Hank, he takes another swig out of it as Hank sits down next to him - again, barely drinking any of it, just enough to taste it. Actually taste it. Mostly, it's just sweet. Artificial, cloying sweetness. (His forensics suite suddenly and very unhelpfully informs him that judging from Hank's saliva, he is perfectly sober in that moment, and Connor will very definitely not bring any part of this up.)

"Yeah, I definitely don't like it," he says, giving it back without any particular fanfare. Maybe he'll try something else later. Just to see.

He leans forwards keenly, watching Hank as his partner quietly explains the current situation. Another glance around the room tells him it doesn't look like they're being monitored, but something's making Hank be careful all the same.

What that is becomes clear after only a few moments. And it's very, depressingly familiar. The American government wasn't able to keep the deviant problem quiet, and in the end went a lot further in quietening all dissidence - but it looks like they've already had their TV Tower moment. Right now, the government may not know who to blame - maybe it's because they don't know that they're focusing their efforts on a cover-up instead.

"What kind of "bots"?" he asks. He'd like to think - and so he'll assume - that Hank wouldn't say bots if he meant androids like Connor.

"Yeah, and it makes me wonder if I tried to stay with you, if there would be some sort of fuckin' fine print to bind us here longer." But there is time to figure that out.

He resumes drinking the soda that Connor's decided that he hated with a light shrug. Well, it's fine by him. But so are his shirts, so Connor might have a point and Hank is, as per usual, brazenly ignoring it as harshly as Connor can ignore him when he doesn't want to do what Hank demands.

Except Hank has, as of yet, no reason to dump Connor in the shower. He absolutely would, though.

"Robots. Fuckin'... You'll know 'em when you see 'em. And I fuckin' don't think these things are gonna deviate. It's more like a uh... hive mind sorta deal? Nothing independent about it. They just do what the 'Head' wants. The officers at the actual station aren't so bad. I haven't ran into one fuckin' Gavin Reed there. More like a bunch of guys like Ben or Chris. But they got these big robots to be the bad guys.

"Remember the guy I mentioned getting his throat slit? He was still bloody when he showed up at that parade. They didnt' give him much warning when he left the intake office in one piece. They just threw a pamphlet and a coupon at him. Not even a clean fuckin' shirt. He was still fucked up in the head and the fuckin' robots tranqued him and dragged him in for questioning. Barely had a brain in his head at the time."

Hank ruffles his hair at one side, an agitated little motion, full of frustration he's been storing up because he's a dimwit about how to share it. He really wants to get a drink. But he's almost too worried that if he turns his back on Connor he'll turn out to be some sort of hallucination.

Edited 2019-08-13 15:55 (UTC)

"And they're the closest thing to androids anybody here's ever seen?" he says, trying not to sound like he's already resigning himself to anything, but. He just deviated and got to see Detroit start to change its stance on androids - and now this.

His LED's flashing yellow now, trying to sort all of this information into something he can make some sense out of. Just him suddenly processing information differently and being a deviant would have been enough to keep him occupied for a good long while by itself, but add that to the entire unbelievable situation with Dualis that he's not convinced he'll ever work out, and then this possible terrorist attack... It's a lot.

"This is... It's a lot to take in," he says quietly, brow furrowed. He's still fidgeting with the bedspread between his fingers, gaze distant.

"So we're in a place where time and space have no meaning, death is fixable, there's...some kind of martial law in place enforced by robots? And we're stuck here for a year." He looks Hank straight in the eye. "Do I have that right?"

Establish that first. Then the attack. He has the entire rest of his existence to work out his deviancy - even if that's what he wanted to prioritise.

Edited (wtf happened there) 2019-08-13 17:52 (UTC)

"No no I mean... there are a fuckload of cyborgs nearly to the point of being androids. There are actual androids. These are just what's made locally. Not anyone brought in from somewhere else," Hank reassures him.

He notices that Connor's still plucking at the bedsheet. And, awkardly, so awkwardly, put's his hand over Connor's to still it. Just leaves it for a heartbeat or two, then turns it to face palm up. His keys are pulled out from his pocket then (including those from Detroit on the ring), and he disentangles a very old, weathered, round dogtag that says 'Rocky' on it, with a long irrelevant phone number.

"All the currency is digital here. No coins. This'll have to do."

He puts that in Connor's hand.

"That work for ya?"

It's annoying as fuck but just from the words coming out of Connor's face, he knows the entire situation is overwhelming. From the worrying color of that red light, it's gotta be a bit much.

Some of the tension almost visibly leaves him at that. He hasn't seen any-- "Cyborgs?"--so it's good information to have. People here will know what he is. He's not taking a step backwards.

He glances down sharply at the touch to his hand, stilling his fingers against the bed. He blinks down at their hands - at first he assumes he's annoying Hank with the fidgeting and his other hand stops as well accordingly. But no, what Hank presses into his hand is...

"Rocky?" he asks, lifting the tag to examine it more closely. Then, tentatively, wondering if Hank realises what he just enabled, he flicks the tag up, spins it from fingertip to fingertip and catches it by the edges between two fingers.

"Rocky was a dog I had a long time ago. I put his tag on my keys after I had to put him down. He was a good dog. Just got old. Dogs do that." He worries about Sumo. He's actually pretty old for a dog.

He doesn't complain about the coin this time. Hank fidgets in his own ways, drumming his hands or pacing. He's got no place to judge Connor. He lets it happen because Connor needs it.

"Yeah, you can actually have mods added? Stuff you can pay for to make you better. The people that don't have their magic have been getting these magical tattoo things. Sort of a 'self-improvement enabled' thing. Pretty sure if I put enough money into it I could do some of the stuff you do."

And there was the stupid idea. The one he'd shamefully considered but also felt like such a waste. He puts it to the back of his mind again. No, don't think about that.

"But also I've had sorta this worry it's gonna be a pomegranate seed. You do somethin' like get a mod and you're stuck, some Persephone bullshit. I don't wanna take the risk."

Edited 2019-08-13 21:58 (UTC)

He downloaded a lot of information about dogs trying to look after Sumo while Hank was gone - and one thing he does know is that big dogs just don't live very long. In that moment, he finds himself thinking about Sumo as well. He fidgets with the tag for just a couple more seconds: he already knows it annoys Hank when he does it, so the gesture of Hank giving him a coin replacement doesn't pass him by. He settles for just rubbing it with his thumb, reading the letters and numbers on the face by touch alone.

"Stuff I do? Like making reports with my eyes closed?" he asks, teasing a little, but also genuinely curious about what Hank would get if he had the power to get...magical tattoo things.

A second later, he frowns.

"I think I found a limitation..." He pauses for a second, LED going yellow, then goes on, "I tried to look up Persephone and pomegranate seeds, but all I'm getting is pictures of cats with writing on them."

But is that his ability to search being limited, or is it just that he's just been put on a network where the only information is cat pictures?

"No, um... I just..." He trails off with an awkward gesture in the air, and then rubs his mouth. He thinks again of Connor's hand wrapping around an arm, of something happening there. And fuck, it would be so much easier to talk sometimes without having to fucking actually talk. To just do what those other androids do and hold their hands together- "Nothin'."

He trails off, going to a different subject.

"Cat pictures? Like fuckin' 2005 memes? Shit. I thought this was the future. I guess everything runs in cycles."

It's not the future. He doesn't know what it is, but he's going to poke fun at it.

"There was a king of the underworld in Greek myth. It's not really hell. It's where everyone goes when they're dead. And he got very smitten with the daughter of a goddess, the woman who controlled seasons. Demeter. So he kidnaps the daughter- more like a bride-stealing, which was this thing where people 'stole' their wives so they didn't have to negotiate to marry 'em. Dowrys and shit were a thing. Apparently if you eat something in the underworld, you gotta stay forever. And he talked Persephone into eating a seed.

"Sorta goes hit or miss on whether she knew what she was doing or not. Anyway, Demeter gets pissed, like mama with a shotgun pissed. Dips the world into an ice age. In order to get her to shut the fuck up Hades has to get off his high horse and actually let her share time with her daughter. He gets Persephone a fourth of the year. During winter.

"Point being, if we do something to ourselves here? I wonder if it'll bind us."

Edited 2019-08-14 08:58 (UTC)

He stares at Hank. It's clearly not nothing. But he'll have to file it away for later - maybe Hank just really wants to know the chemical content of everything he puts in his mouth. Weirder things have happened. Hank has done weirder, as far as Connor's concerned about it.

Cat memes are a part of history also not part of Connor's memory, but sure. He silently loads one onto his phone screen and shows it to Hank, eyebrow raised. "This is what I get if I look up Persephone."

His search function just presents that to him like it's exactly what he's looking for and not a result of it picking up something totally random that has nothing to do with what he was trying to look up. He tries again with a couple of search terms and gets much the same thing...then realises with a slight sinking feeling that he's just been hobbled - he has a decent knowledge base - general and specialised to his programming - but a lot of it's supplemented by being able to automatically search unknown terms and concepts.

"Right." For now, he has Hank to explain his own references. "Is there anybody here who's done it already that you can ask?"

Hank actually smiles, showing that small gap in his teeth as he chuckles. Not that the meme is funny, but he's just never seen someone so thoroughly thwarted by one. He can acknowledge, though, this will very much be a pain in the ass later when they actually need to investigate things. But right now it's kind of funny.

Well. That gives them an answere there.

"The internet here's strictly monitored so I wouldn't count it having anything helpful about... I don't know... 75% of the time. Lots of censoring. One guy tried to bitch about his job and the name of the store was blocked out."

He thinks the algorithms are some sort of shit, though. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. But yeah, it looks like Connor has had his own limitations implimented. He's going to have to learn some things himself.

"Nope. Honestly as far as I fuckin' know, for the ones who go they could just brain 'em and throw 'em in a pit and nobody'd know any better." He shrugs. Great, huh? A lot of fucking mysteries he didn't want but he has, at least, been chipping away at them.

He's just confused, he doesn't find any part of the picture or the situation funny - but Hank does, and Connor's gaze flickers automatically to him as he laughs, then away again just as quickly.

"Not having a useful internet limits me in a lot of ways," he points out. "I can't use facial recognition or take proper scans now either. If I pick up an unknown substance, I can't identify it."

He then thinks of something else and pauses.

"And if I'm destroyed here, my memories won't be uploaded... Not that there's another body here to put them into anyway."

His LED is yellow again. This should have occurred to him before - after all, CyberLife almost certainly weren't going to replace his body if it was destroyed, not after what happened.

And that's something he needs to process, right now.

"Yeah, you only got one life. Just like one of us. I mean, I could get you a thumb drive but I uh... I like havin' you around. Think I'll just have to make sure nothing happens to you."

It might not be that reassuring, but he would gladly keep Connor behind him in a firefight. Hank can heal from bullet wounds. Connor can't. That's the logic he'll use. But it's not as if traffic cops get into a lot of firefights.

(Traffic cops that do independent investigations into totalitarian organizations might but you know, you do what you've gotta do.)

That LED has his attention, though. It's a lot to go through. He decides to sit there for the moment, to let him work it all out with his improvised coin. He's happy to just sit here at his side, taking up some of his newly bestowed personal space until Connor's had a little more time to think about that.

He's in the midst of throwing Hank a long-suffering sort of look at the words 'thumb drive', but then the rest brings it to a halt.

"I don't know if you remember," he says slowly, "But when we went to the apartment where Rupert was staying, we didn't know what we would find. You told me to get behind you."

In the moment, Connor had been completely unfazed by this. Machine-like. But later, as his software destabilised further, that moment - and then another like it in the Eden Club - came back to him and stuck in his mind.

"It was the first time anybody treated me like an equal, not an expendable tool," he goes on, every word carefully chosen because this isn't something he's used to talking about. Or something he expected to really talk about.

"Actually, you're still the only human who's ever really treated me that way." Maybe a couple of the other cops - the one who thanked him for saving his life comes to mind - but he was still just a piece of equipment to them, forever having to prove he was worth the basic dignity of even looking in the eye.

"I want you to know how much I appreciate it. I couldn't say it before, but I can now."

He couldn't feel it before, but he can now.

Thumb drive. He mouths, holding up his thumb and making a motion like that's where you'd plug it in. That long-suffering look isn't wrong.

Hank doesn't know how to respond to that. Not really. But Connor can probably see how the feeling swells in his chest, how it shows up in his eyes.

"You'll be amazed by how much nicer people will be to you than I've been." He promises. "But I swear that I'll always treat you like you're a little bit of a shit. Not because you're an android. But because you're a little bit of a shit.

"You're my partner. I only knew you a little while. Two months later it's been eatin' me up that I couldn't reach you."

Edited 2019-08-14 22:14 (UTC)

"If you can find one that holds several exabytes of information, let me know," he says, shaking his head.

Hank gives him a look then, one that Connor doesn't want to disrupt - wants it to stay there as long as it can because he's never seen it on Hank's face before. It suits him, he thinks - better than the anger and resignation. Better than the look of a man giving up.

"I'd argue with you," he says, still watching that look, "but you're the expert on what a little bit of a shit looks like."

But then he grins.

"I'm sorry you had to wait that long."

Especially since, for Connor, it was barely a day. A stressful day, sure, but not a stressful two months.