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

Right this moment, Connor can't imagine another life either - but not because of a lifetime of work and sacrifice. He was programmed for it, and activated for what turned out to be a specific task, and that task is largely done.

It seems obvious what he should do next: "I'll go to the station tomorrow. Hopefully they've got another opening. Everything that isn't detective work's going to be pretty new to me, but I'll pick it up."

Belatedly, he realises something else - a very human problem.

"You're sure you won't get tired of seeing me all day at work and at home at night?"

He's...half serious. He doesn't like very much that his first thought is that humans have replaced androids after much less. And what is it they say? Familiarity breeds contempt?

"Well I was gonna be with you all the time anyway, at least until we got to safety and settled. So it doesn't really fuckin' matter. I'll fuckin' deal with it. Besides, I want you around after you read my fuckin' calories to me, after you broke my window, and after you slapped me. And I assume you want to even be around me after I pulled a gun on you."

And the worst I ever got with my ex-wife was an argument over her inlaws."

It's an extremely low bar they've set for themselves. He's sure they can be better to each other.

"Hopefully it won't remind you too much of being an android. Starting out, it's mostly helping people and getting yelled at for being in the way or not being good enough. So, that's the crappy part. The good part is helping people. I don't care high up the chain you get, every time you help a lost kid find its family, you're a little better off."

Right. In Canada. He'd been thinking about that, vaguely in the back of his mind, some of his processing energy dedicated constantly to worrying about what it would be like in a country that didn't prohibit androids from doing anything that could make someone mistake them for human. It had scared him...but oddly excited him at the same time, and the reason he could feel that way was knowing Hank would be there to help him discover that freedom.

"It won't," he says with an easy certainty. Androids fit into human lives perfectly, they were made to. So the difference, the one thing that could remind him of being an android... "Because no matter what happens, I can defend myself now."

He won't take abuse from anybody. He's not equipment. He can get fired, sure. But disposed of? Never again.

"Yeah, you can. And I am going to guess they programmed you with a bunch of non-lethal ways of detaining or discouraging humans- Always, always try to do something that won't even break skin first. I know you're good at talking people down. Hang onto that."

He advises his wise old sagely bullshit advice, as a wise old bullshitter must. But it comes from very real concerns he learned back in the teens, when kids in Detroit were dying for being in the wrong neighborhood, or the mentally ill were dying because most cops didn't know a damn thing about it.

All that criticism aside, he wants to see Connor be the best kind of person out there.

"I got a question. How hard were you bullshitting me when you said you'd like to listen to music?"

"Don't worry," he says. "I won't use any more force than I have to."

Humans are pretty fragile. Especially when you know how to take guns off them. Before, Connor had no problem with killing humans who were trying to destroy him; unlike most androids, he didn't have a duty of care programmed into him because his mission was more important than human life. Now, as someone who can make that decision himself? He wants to be someone who values life more than he was created to.

He blinks, not expecting the question.

"A little," he admits. But he goes on, "I was still interested in the whole concept of it."

He hesitates, because Hank didn't ask...but he offers it anyway, a little tentatively at first. Because in a way, it wasn't bullshit at all. "You have to understand, if I needed to know something, I downloaded it. I know everything there is to know about basketball because I noticed you were interested in it. If you'd mentioned a movie or a book you liked I could just look up every line, every word."

He's gesturing a little as he gets more engaged with what he's saying, that coin between his fingers.

"I couldn't do that with music. I could download the music and examine the wavelengths in the sound file, but that's not what listening is. I would have to take it in the same way that you do. Just like a human."

And that was something he found intriguing even as a machine. Something he couldn't learn just by connecting to a network and putting the information directly into his brain.

"So I was mostly telling the truth. Actually," he says as he thinks of something else, "The real bullshit was when I told you I liked dogs. I'd never even seen one before. But actually, it turns out I do."

As Connor explains, he can probably see the thought processes that dance over Hank's expression. When he starts talking about downloading and analyzing, there's a sort of vacant confusion. Then he mentions having learned everything necessary about basketball scores and Hank looks somewhere between annoyed at the overly obvious effort to manipulate him (he'd known at the time too) and entertaining the passing thought that he should get Connor to help him bet on stuff.

But the rest makes sense. Even the part with the dog. There'd been something bizarrely innocent in the words, though, that he'd been unable to find fault with. This artificial person proclaiming interest in Hank's very real dog.

"I was asking because I found some." Hank grunts the grunt of a man that hates getting up once he's down, and stands to his full height to find the CD player he'd scrounged up in his research.

"The media here is pretty sterile. You're not gonna find a lot questioning authority. But that's half of good metal and jazz right there." Says a cop, which seems inappropriate. But to Hank, the people that feel this way are exactly the type of people he wanted to give words to. "It cuts out a lot of the casual stuff, too."

Then almost like it's a joke, he waves a CD at Connor. "You're gettin' pretty desperate when you're usin' these again." He puts on the song and sits back down. Part of it's so Connor can listen. Part of it's because he's been paranoid about people, or the AI itself, eavesdropping still.

He can watch the expressions flitting over Hank's face with every word he says - and the irritation is an immediate rebuke. It wasn't him - or rather... It was him, but removed from concepts like compassion and decency, anything that would keep him from completing his mission. And in that moment he had thought Hank tolerating him would make his mission more easy.

But he doesn't say anything about it. And maybe Connor will delete those NBA stats.

He's never seen a CD player before - and didn't know they existed at all, for that matter: what people did before data was fully digitised has never had any reason to enter his mind. But now he stands easily and stoops a little to look at the player, then at the CD as Hank puts it in.

The music that plays is grainier than he expects. But that's not what he's supposed to be taking in about it. It's the percussion, the way it creates movement with the other instruments, threads of sound that the woman's full voice weaves into something bigger.

"Is this jazz?" He'd recognise metal thanks to Hank, and this isn't it. Besides, that's not the important question - he shakes his head, waving a hand: never mind that. "Tell me about the media."

It's a good way to start looking into how censorship works here - and therefore how authoritarian the regime is. What exactly they're working with. And Hank is clearly worried about eavesdropping.

"Well, this one guy started to complain about his job? They editted the name of the company out of his posts. Also after the bombing the only thing that was said is that the mayor was stable. You know. For a fuckin' bomb being under her feet and everyone close to the stage being peppered with shrapnel."

Which still sounds fishy, but he's not found evidence to the contrary. "They had their robots walking around threatening anyone that was askin' too many questions. I think that might be why your search results are gettin' fuckin' cluttered up with jokes. It was kinda strange to me. With most 'terrorist' or 'local violence' threats the media we're used to goes hog wild in making people scared. But in this case they don't want people to feel anything but safe. Or displeased in the corporate status quo, which makes me think that most really successful businesses might be collaborators in something. But I've not had much of a chance to dig into that."

He had been hunting the Heart for a while, trying to find the very particular people behind the bombing. He wasn't happy they were actually endangering or near killing people, especially in a setting where children would be in attendance. He's still not. He'd still bring the person responsible in.

Hank just can't figure out what this 'wake up' means? And he still swears to god if this is some matrix bullshit he's gonna be so pissed off.

Then, at the end, he adds a- "Yeah, she does some soul, some blues, some jazz. All of it along the same lines."

Edited 2019-08-26 03:30 (UTC)

Connor gives the obvious expression of deep scepticism when Hank mentions the mayor is 'stable'. An android probably wouldn't survive being at ground zero of a dirty bomb. And his expression only deepens into an outright grimace the more Hank talks.

"So we're all androids here." Kept in ignorance. Their opinions stifled. "'Wake up' sounds pretty fitting."

It's exactly what he said to that army of androids in the CyberLife basement. What Markus said to the androids he turned deviant. And Hank mentioned it's the exact message the perps have been spreading.

He can't name most of the instruments playing, or the singer, but, "I like it."

Not that he knows the words to describe why, but his fingers are tapping his leg along with the rhythm anyway.

"Yeah, if you do a search on here you might find a couple of articles on her 'strength against adversity'. Some fluff piece bullshit. But yeah, that's about the way it is."

And Hank's had the same thought. Many times as he's looked at 'wake up' messages, he can remember the touches that brought that entire room of people to reality. Them saying the words 'wake up' to each other.

Something warms his chest when Connor says that, though. He's glad for their differences and the insight it gives him. They're both alike enough in inherent nature, capable of thinking along the same lines of investigation, that their partnership worked out for the best. But to have a true commonality is kind of nice.

He notices Connor's able to keep a beat with tapping his leg.

"Remind me to teach you to dance sometime."

Since he doesn't trust his internal network connection to check, he uses his phone instead to search the mayor. And he does find what Hank's talking about that way: articles about how she's in a stable condition, the mayor's own writing, all of it using a lot of words to say very little that means anything... When he sets the phone down, he looks troubled. This is nothing like what he was expecting - all he has for reference is the android crisis, and this isn't how the media operated. Not how the president or anyone else from top down reacted.

"To dance?" he asks, face suddenly blank, before he looks down at his own legs...then back up to Hank like he's not sure he's being made fun of. "You're joking, right."

Androids. A detective model android, no less. Dancing. It's one of those times where an idea gets introduced to him so suddenly he's not sure how to respond, and defaults back to old thinking.

Hank can recognize it as being *wrong*, and as someone who grew up in the shadow of the cold war and survived the harrowing late teens, early twenties he can remember how things seemed to be veering. But this sort of atmosphere is new.

It's growing up in that age, though, that causes his resolve to buckle. The You're joking, right? provoking a mental recoil, causing his neck to prickle up with embarrassment as if he'd just somehow compromised his manhood in front of this android that really has very little concept of gender as a useful mechanism of any sort.

"No I was-"

He just trails off and makes a dismissive gesture. "Whatever." Whatever is such a useful word to hide behind when one doesn't know what to do with their thoughts.

Connor physically recoils a little at Hank's reaction, LED going yellow for a moment as he stares, utterly wrong-footed.

"Wait, I thought--" he leans forward, hands out in a placating sort of gesture. "I thought you were making fun of me."

But apparently now Hank thinks Connor's making fun of him, and all his programming on integrating with humans didn't cover anything like this.

"If you weren't joking, I'm sorry - it just surprised me, that's all." Trying desperately to defuse the situation. "Androids don't...do things like that. That's the first thing I thought."

(If Markus had ever shared memories with him, he'd know that even without deviating, androids are capable of all sorts of things humans wouldn't expect of them.)

"Come on, androids do whatever they're fuckin' programmed with and you can make your own fuckin' programming. You learn. You're an AI. You were just tapping your fingers with the music. You know there's a beat."

But, he's still a little embarrassed.

"I won't bother you about it until you're settled in. It was just a thought." He might not even bring it up again. He doesn't want to admit how embarrassed he just was. But to add some humor, he says-

"If I were making fun of you I'd say you looked goofy again."

"Yeah, I should know that…" He knows he should. He spent days slowly destabilising, chose to deviate, chose to help a revolution for the right to do whatever he wants.

But as soon as he stops thinking about it, his default is still to go back to thinking about himself as he was before: a machine. Machines don't do anything they're not programmed for. Androids decide their own programming.

"I'm not used to it yet," he says, almost to himself. "To not being a machine, I mean," he adds for Hank's benefit.

"You'll get there." He promises, and pats Connor's knee before getting up. It seems like lip service, but he thinks of all the people that have to get over harrowing experiences. Connor's is just being an android, no specific form of abuse other than inherently programmed indoctrination.

It's not a lot. But it's meant as a lot.

Hank goes to the bathroom then, just because he needs a moment to pass over the euphoria of knowing his partner is alive, unharmed, and potentially someone who can help him get out of here, to the actual concerns of him being here. What could an AI do with an android like him?

As he's considering that, the song changes.

As soon as Hank's left, Connor zones out into thought. There's so much to unpack here he's not sure where to begin to go about it. So start with the most immediate things: Hank was missing, but now Connor's missing as well, so it doesn't much matter anymore. Whatever this place might be, they can leave it in a year. He's a deviant - and that by itself is something he hasn't even had time to put together yet. Back in Detroit it barely looked certain what his life as a deviant was going to look like after the revolution, but he'd wanted to know.

Here, his life could be just like anybody else's.

He looks down at himself. Maybe to everybody here, he's just a normal person. A normal person, sitting in his room listening to music.

A new song starts - and if the last one was despair, this one feels like a sad resignation, and it surprises him to realise he can feel anything, or recognise feelings, just listening to music. This is all one surprise after another, from the world-shattering to the painfully mundane.

When Hank emerges, Connor hasn't moved from his seat, but he's sitting with his eyes closed, a finger tracing the edges of the dog tag, just...listening.

It'll be confusing. If Connor came from a day later, he's hoping that he's right; he can go back and show up right after. That Sumo won't be there on his own too long, or have to wait for animal control to show up for him. He's always sort of trusted, though, that someone would notice. The neighbors love Sumo too much to just not notice him not going out.

His concerns for Sumo and Connor somewhat alleviated in his mind for the moment, he comes back to the room to find Connor with his eyes closed, holding that old dog tag like he's getting lost in the texture.

Hank assumes that he's off in one of his mental places, compiling or doing important things, so he lets him do that. He doesn't disturb him. Instead he starts picking up a few more things, making it a little neater, eventually humming along with the music to himself as he does.

He doesn't open his eyes again until Hank's been in the room a few moments, picking up more of his stuff. It's when he starts humming that Connor looks at him.

"If you want to go to sleep, let me know," he says, voice softer, someone who's lulled themselves into a reverie and just coming out of it. "I was thinking I'd go look around the city."

And not keep Hank up hanging around their room when he doesn't need to be in standby.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only