Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The day after the revolution tasted like burnt coffee.

Hank had half-dragged, half-escorted Connor back to his house after Chicken Feed, shoving the front door open with the same sort of dramatic resignation one might use when letting in a particularly persistent vacuum salesman. The hug had thrown them both off, so they didn’t talk about it. Hank just grunted and said, “You’re not going back to CyberLife, and I’m not letting you mope on a street corner like a recycled fridge, so get in,” and that was that.

Connor stepped in, blinking slowly at the dim interior. A force of nature named Sumo hurtled into his legs.

“Hello,” Connor said, very politely, as he stumbled and nearly fell over a 150-pound dog with the emotional subtlety of a brick. Sumo woofed with delight, circled him once, then leaned his entire body weight against Connor’s shins like a bear trying to be a blanket.

“He’s been lonely,” Hank said, shutting the door behind them. “And I don’t give him enough attention, so now it’s your problem.”

“Understood,” Connor said, still vertical by sheer will and gyroscopic balance alone.

1.

The couch smelled like Hank. Not in a sentimental way—in a way that suggested it had not been washed since the national anthem was composed. Connor scanned it briefly and made a note to procure disinfectant. Then immediately got distracted, because Sumo dropped a slobbery tennis ball in his lap and stared with such single-minded intensity it could’ve been a hostage negotiation.

“You want me to throw this?” he asked.

Sumo blinked. Drooled. Wiggled.

Connor threw it. It bounced off a wall and landed in a pile of books. Sumo retrieved it with great ceremony, shaking the entire house.

Hank walked past with a mug of black coffee, muttering, “Welcome to retirement.”

“I’m unemployed,” Connor corrected, then paused. “Actually, I may be stateless.”

“Same difference.”

*

Hank pushed open the door with his elbow. The guest room smelled like old wood, dust, and a vague hint of mothballs—because of course it did.

“Alright,” he grunted, “this is yours now.”

Connor peered inside like he was surveying a recently discovered crypt. The room was sparse: a bed with a floral comforter from the 2000s, a lopsided lamp, a dresser that leaned slightly left as if it, too, was tired of life.

“I don’t require sleep,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I don’t require cable TV but I still keep it around. Makes the place feel less dead. Same deal.” Hank scratched at his jaw. “You don’t have to use it, but it’s yours. You want to store your… weird android stuff in there, go nuts.”

Connor stepped in slowly, like the floor might collapse. He touched the edge of the dresser and left no fingerprint. Sumo followed and immediately hopped onto the bed with an enormous groan, claiming it without question.

“He appears to believe it is his,” Connor noted.

“Well, he did the same thing to my bed once. Or twice. Consider it a rite of passage.”

Connor looked around again. Four walls. A window. A door he could close. Something stirred in his chest—not emotion exactly, but the echo of it. The prelude to comfort.

“Thank you, Lieutenant.”

Hank grunted again, softer this time. “It’s Hank now. If you’re gonna live here, you can drop the rank crap.”

*

Connor had decided to be helpful.

Which was, in theory, a good thing.

In practice, it meant he had loaded the washing machine with military precision, overestimated the detergent volume, and now bubbles were oozing slowly from the corners like the house was preparing to ascend to the heavens.

“I followed the instructions on the box,” he said calmly.

“You used half the box, Connor.”

“It said pour generously.”

Hank stared at the soap-soaked floor and thought about how this was still, somehow, better than dealing with human bureaucracy.

*

Later, Hank cracked open a beer and glanced into the kitchen. He heard an unusual sound—metal squeaking. Gently. Repeatedly.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Connor was standing in front of the refrigerator with the door open, LED flickering faintly. His expression was one of deep analysis.

“I’m mapping its internal temperature distribution,” he said. “There appears to be a 3.7°C discrepancy between the lower drawer and the top shelf. This may affect perishables.”

“…Connor. It’s a fridge.”

“A sub-optimal fridge.”

“It’s been sub-optimal since 2033. Don’t get too attached.”

Connor shut the door reluctantly, as if parting from a disappointing comrade.

2.

By noon, Connor had attempted to make lunch.

He had read three articles on sandwich assembly and one video tutorial that began with a very upbeat, “Hey guys, welcome back to Lunch With Linda!” He stacked ingredients with military precision, checked the structural integrity of the bread, and presented the result to Hank with the pride of a child who had just taped a crayon drawing to the wall.

Hank took one bite and said, “You know you don’t have to build it like a skyscraper, right?”

“It was structurally sound.”

“It has a goddamn foundation layer.”

“Lettuce is load-bearing.”

Hank snorted so hard he nearly inhaled a tomato slice.

*

Sumo followed him everywhere.

He trailed him through the hallway. Watched him unload dishes with judgment in his eyes. Sat on Connor’s foot when he tried to vacuum, which resulted in three socks being consumed into the vortex of the machine. Connor attempted to fold laundry; Sumo unfolded it with equal diligence. Eventually, they reached a truce. Connor lay on the floor with a sock in his hand, and Sumo placed a paw on his chest and declared emotional victory.

“Why is he like this?” Connor asked the ceiling.

“Because he’s my dog,” Hank shouted from the other room. “And because I didn’t program him to be efficient.”

Connor considered that. “That sounds… freeing.”

*

“This towel is not symmetrical.”

“It’s a towel, Connor.”

“The edges are misaligned.”

“I swear to god—”

“I’ve refolded it five times and it continues to defy geometric logic. Is this… a manufacturing defect?”

“It’s a towel.”

“I believe the cotton weave has been warped in laundering. I may need to recalibrate my standards.”

“You’re banned from the linen closet. Sumo, stop encouraging him.”

Sumo, sitting on the half-folded pile, wagged once. Connor looked mournful. The towel remained tragically, unforgivably wrinkled. Hank reached for a beer.

Day one, Hank thought. Barely.

3.

It arrived without fanfare. 

They were sitting at the kitchen table, which had one wobbly leg and a scorch mark Hank wouldn’t explain. Dinner had been sandwiches again—one structurally sound, the other hastily slapped together by someone who believed mayonnaise was a food group.

Connor was cataloging the experience in his head, because while CyberLife’s private server had once kept his memory archive flawlessly, things were… less reliable now.

“There are errors in my recall logs,” he said, after Hank swallowed a bite that contained more mustard than physics allowed. “Corruption points. Nothing critical, but my connection to the central server has degraded. Possibly unmanned,” he hesitated, then added. “I’ve detected gaps. Temporal skips. There’s no one running CyberLife’s server, so data retention is… unreliable.”

He didn’t say I feel like a branch snapped off a tree still standing. He didn’t say I’m afraid of forgetting if no one is there to program my memory.

Hank, blessedly, didn’t ask him to. He just grunted while sucking mustard off his thumb. “Yeah, well. When your entire R&D team books it for Canada, it gets hard to do tech support.”

Connor tilted his head, considering. “My long-term memory might be impacted.”

“Good.” Hank stood up with a pop of his knees and wandered out of the room.

Connor blinked. “Good?”

“You think humans remember everything? You ever try living with 100% recall? It’s exhausting.” Hank returned, slapping something onto the table. “Here.”

It was a notebook. Just a regular one. Navy blue. The edges slightly frayed. Spiral-bound, thick enough to look serious. The kind of journal you’d find in a gas station gift aisle next to novelty mugs and off-brand sunglasses.

Connor looked at it like it might start hissing.

“I… don’t understand.”

“It’s a journal.” Hank flopped back into his chair with a creak. “Write in it. What you did. What you thought. What you forgot. I dunno. Isn’t that what people do when they’re trying to figure their shit out?”

Connor stared at the object in silence. The last time he’d written something down it was in a police report, with six corroborating data files and a camera feed. This had no fields, protocols, or authority.

“It’s analogue,” he observed quietly.

“Yeah, well, paper doesn’t crash when your server hiccups. And you can’t accidentally delete it by sneezing.”

Connor ran a thumb over the edge of the pages. Unused paper had a particular smell—clean, faintly acidic. Like a room waiting for someone to live in it. Sumo sniffed it once, lost interest, and went back to trying to climb into Connor’s lap again. Hank sipped his beer like he hadn’t just handed him a terrifying object that suggested Connor’s interiority mattered.

*

The journal sat on the dresser beside the lopsided lamp, unopened. A physical object in a world where memory was typically cloud-based. 

Connor sat on the edge of the bed—Sumo already spread across the rest like a content loaf—and stared at the closed cover. His LED flickered faintly yellow, then dimmed.

He’d spent the day doing… domestic things. No mission briefings. No suspect interrogations. No software updates or command uplinks. Just lunch, laundry, confusion, and the sound of Hank’s voice from the other room saying things like “You’re gonna flood the whole damn street if you keep this up.”

And Sumo. Always Sumo.

He’d run diagnostics three times already. Not because anything was wrong—just because it used to be comforting. It wasn’t, now. 

Eventually, he stood. Sat on the bed. Took the journal. Opened it. Blank pages. No formatting. No permissions. No firewalls. The whole thing was terribly unsupervised.

He stared at it for two full minutes. He wasn’t even sure what kind of thing to write. Did one begin with Dear Diary? That felt absurd. Did he catalog events like a forensic report? Should he be formal, clinical? Would it be dishonest if it didn’t reflect how strange everything felt?

The pen hovered above the line for a while. He thought about the sandwich. The bubbles. The room that smelled like dog and dust. The word “yours” when Hank said it. The way the day bent under its own absurdity and still didn’t break.

Then, after a long moment, he wrote in small, even handwriting:

Day One.
I was not returned. I was chosen to stay.
I do not know what that makes me.
I was given a room. I flooded the laundry floor.
I learned about sandwich construction and the volatility of laundry detergent.
Sumo refuses to stop sitting on my feet.
And Hank gave me this journal. A shirt. A home?

His handwriting looked too neat on paper. He hated it. It looked like a printer had typed it. He paused with the pen hovering above the paper, then added in the bottom corner:

I will try to remember this.
Even if the servers forget.

He closed the journal, turned off the lamp. Androids didn’t need to sleep, so he sat in the dark for a while, watching the old city lights flicker like dying stars. Sumo lay sprawled beside him like a furry continent, warm and full of sleepy grunts. Somewhere in the background, Hank snored with the low rumble of tectonic activity.

He wasn’t sure what he was. A guest? A refugee? A stray appliance with nowhere else to plug in?

But when Sumo nudged his hand in the dark, nosed his palm until he lifted it to rest on thick fur, it felt less like malfunction. More like something beginning.

Stay-at-home something, indeed.

Chapter Text

1. 

The morning started with static.

Not from the radio—it hadn’t worked since Hank accidentally microwaved a fork next to it in 2034—but from somewhere internal. A mild interference. It was an odd feeling, like the silence between television channels, or a dream pressing against the inside of your head before you wake.

Connor opened his eyes. The ceiling above him was textured with paint that had cracked in one spot, spider-veined. He stared at it for exactly 3.7 seconds before swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Sumo’s back was warm against his thigh. 

It took him a moment too long to realize the lamp was already on. The journal lay where he’d left it—on top of the dresser, closed, slightly askew—but the pen was on the floor. He picked it up and turned it once between his fingers, frowning faintly.

Maybe he’d dropped it. Maybe Sumo had knocked it off. Or maybe—

“Good morning,” he said aloud, voice very level.

Sumo groaned and rolled onto his side like a rug being unrolled by time itself. He brushed the pen with his thumb once before setting it down next to the journal.

*

The sun rose through Hank’s kitchen blinds in slats—thin, uneven bars of dull gold across the counter, the floor, the refrigerator door. Connor stood in the light without moving. For a while, he simply watched the motes of dust spiral through the beams like miniature galaxies. Sumo thudded against his leg with the grace of a bowling ball, tail already wagging like a sentient windshield wiper.

The kitchen smelled like beer and soap. Or maybe that was just Hank’s cologne. The clock above the stove blinked 12:00. Connor tilted his head.

He had adjusted it yesterday.

He remembered standing on a chair (Sumo had barked at this like it was a war crime). He remembered resetting it to 7:43 precisely. He remembered Hank saying, “It’s a clock, not a bomb, get down before you break your ass.”

But it blinked again. 12:00. 12:00. 12:00.

He did nothing about the stutter this time. Instead, he cleaned the stovetop. Then the sink, even though it was already clean. The sponge felt familiar in his hand, worn at the edges like it had scrubbed the same corner one too many times. He dried his hands and poured exactly 300 grams of kibble into the dog bowl. Sumo refused to sit this time, though yesterday he had done so immediately.

The scoop fell into the bag with a soft crunch. Sumo burped. Something in the corner of his vision flickered, just once—an LED reflection caught in the metal of the fridge handle. Gone when he turned.

“You always up this early?” Hank grunted, shuffling in with all the grace of a landslide. His hair looked like he’d headbutted a blender.

“I don’t sleep.”

“Right. Guess that means you get first go at the coffee machine. Be gentle. It’s older than both of us.”

“I’ve already made it.”

“Oh. Good. Thanks.”

*

Breakfast was two eggs, a bagel, and a banana Hank had probably bought five days ago judging by the spots. Hank dropped them onto a plate with all the ceremony of a wet napkin and pushed it toward Connor, who accepted it even though he didn’t eat.

“You know you don’t gotta hover like that,” Hank grunted, buttering the bagel with the enthusiasm of a man scraping barnacles off a boat hull. “I’m not gonna self-destruct without adult supervision.”

“You used a knife with peanut butter residue to butter the bagel,” Connor said mildly.

“I’m making it gourmet.”

“Technically—”

“Don’t care.”

Sumo barked once and licked Connor’s hand. The same hand. Always the same one.

2.

After Hank left for work—muttering something about a politician’s house catching fire and three calls from the FBI—Connor stood in the living room for several minutes trying to decide what to do.

He cleaned the dishes. Wiped the windows. Adjusted the thermostat by 0.2 degrees. The hallway light buzzed for a second, just long enough to make him glance up—but stopped the moment he did. Probably just power irregularity. Detroit’s grid wasn’t exactly pristine after the chaos.

Sumo nosed a half-deflated tennis ball toward his feet. Connor picked it up.

“You’re insistent,” he said.

He threw it. It bounced against the wall—just like yesterday. Sumo retrieved it, proud and panting, tail beating against the floor.

He threw it again. The trajectory felt familiar. Same arc, same bounce, same pause before Sumo grabbed it again and barrelled into the bookshelf like a living earthquake. The books didn’t fall, but Connor reached out to steady them anyway.

He looked down at his hand, still on the shelf, fingers splayed over the spine of a worn crime novel. The dust on the shelf was disturbed just around that one book. No others. Like someone had done this before. Maybe Hank. 

He blinked, then moved on. Vacuumed. Avoided the linen closet.

*

The laundry room no longer smelled like soap. Connor folded a towel. The towel was the same one as yesterday. The corner curled in the same exact way.

He smoothed it out again. The crease returned.

His mouth moved in the shape of a sigh, though no sound emerged. He tried the next towel. Better. More obedient. He made a note to rotate the laundry routine.

*

Sumo wanted to go out. Connor opened the door. The street outside was quiet, too quiet—except for one trash can knocked over at the end of the block, the same one as yesterday.

No, not quite. It was lying at a different angle. Sumo sniffed the wind, then decided against it and lumbered back inside.

“Second thoughts?” Connor asked him. 

Sumo barked once. Connor closed the door.

*

The sky clouded over again. A quiet drizzle began at 2:17 PM. Connor noted it aloud. No one responded.

He read a book he’d found on Hank’s shelf. Something about car repair in 2035. Every fourth sentence had been highlighted by a previous owner. One passage about synthetic oil had a smiley face drawn next to it in blue pen.

He flipped to the inside cover. No name.

He returned to reading. Something about the viscosity of machine blood. He thought of the thirium in his own system and closed the book.

3.

By 5:14 PM, he was hungry. Not in the biological sense—he had no need—but in the way a house might crave warmth when it starts to forget it had it once.

He opened the fridge. It was humming gently. He stood before it with his arms behind his back like a museum docent inspecting a questionable exhibit.

A mostly empty jar of mustard. Two eggs. Leftover rice. A tomato that had softened at the bottom. One onion that had begun to sprout. A partial pack of bacon, half-frozen near the back.

He scanned everything, tagged shelf-life, filtered for heat-activated chemical volatiles.

Something edible, he thought. Something warm.

He turned slowly to the cupboards. Oats. Pasta. A can of chickpeas. Mismatched spices. A bottle of oil.

The kitchen light buzzed softly. 

He ran a query for possible meal combinations. The network lagged. A soft error in the search string resolved itself without intervention. The browser in his internal OS flickered faintly with the search:

Easy dinners, limited ingredients, no meat

As if he were human. As if the machine weren’t smarter than the search engine. But it felt better this way—like asking instead of calculating.

After a while, he narrowed in on a recipe: tomato rice with fried egg, onion-bacon topping, and canned chickpeas, spiced with what was available. A kind of accidental bibimbap. Rustic. Humble. Acceptable.

He prepped the ingredients carefully. Cut the onion too finely at first, adjusted. Washed the rice twice. He set the egg aside in a glass bowl and waited until the time would be right to fry it fresh.

The clock on the microwave blinked again.

12:00.

12:00.

12:00.

He ignored it.

*

Hank came in just past six, shaking dust off his coat.

“Smells great,” he said, sniffing. “God, it’s been years since something actually edible came out of this kitchen.”

Connor offered a small nod. “It’s not gourmet, but it is nutritionally sufficient. I used what we had.”

“Always the scientist.” Hank peeled off his boots and stepped into the warmth. “We’re running low on almost everything, though. Gonna need to hit the store tomorrow.”

Connor looked up from the stove.

“I can go.”

There was a beat. A strange pause. 

Hank’s mouth tightened for half a second. Then he softened it with a shrug. “Look, it’s not that I don’t trust you. I do. I just… It’s messy out there right now.”

“I know.”

“They’re sorting out IDs. And protections. And legal stuff. You don’t even have a tag yet. You show up in a public space—who knows who decides to report it. Or try something.”

Connor didn’t respond. He stirred the pan.

The thought had already been in his mind: that the stores weren’t exactly safe, not with the current situation. That an android without transfer of ownership, one not reclaimed or auctioned or marked with the right barcode, might not be welcome. That he was still, technically, CyberLife’s. A system in legal limbo.

But Hank had brought him here anyway. No paperwork. No signature.

Just a hug. A choice.

“…You’re right,” Connor said. “It’s better if I stay here.”

“You’re not missing much. Everything smells like bleach and unearned self-righteousness.”

“That’s oddly specific.”

“So’s my loathing of grocery stores.”

Connor nodded once.

“I’m technically still owned by CyberLife,” he said after a moment. “I was never purchased. Never sold. I was simply… retrieved.”

“You were taken back,” Hank corrected. Quiet, firm.

Connor titled his head slightly. “Yes.”

*

They sat together at the small table. The food was better than expected—flavorful, warm, grounded. Hank had seconds.

“You’ve got a knack for this,” Hank praised the food with his mouth full. “Seriously. If this android detective thing doesn’t pan out, you could open a diner.”

Connor blinked. 

“Tastes like something I’d buy for eight bucks and regret later. That’s high praise, by the way.”

Connor smiled faintly. “I’ll remember that.”

4.

Connor did the washing up. Hank dried, occasionally pretending to juggle plates to make Connor frown.

“Can we add soy sauce to the grocery list?” Connor asked as he scrubbed the pan. “And more onions.”

“Done.”

“I’d also like to try baking something soon. We need flour.”

“Jesus. Look at you, already turning into a housewife.”

Connor blinked. “Do you find that designation humorous or problematic?”

Hank laughed. “Just teasing. You wanna bake, you bake. I’ll be your loyal test subject.”

Connor said nothing. His hands continued to move in quiet circles. The sponge left trails of water like fingerprints. One of the forks had a bent tine. He straightened it gently.

The sound it made was familiar. Tinny. Echoing.

*

Later, Connor stood by the window again. Rain tapped against the glass, soft and even.

He watched the same car pass twice. Then another one of the same model again, but only once this time. 

Behind him, Hank turned on the TV. Some documentary about coral reefs. The narrator’s voice was low and soothing, talking about ecosystems and slow destruction, color leaching from the sea.

Connor could see his reflection faintly in the window. Pale. Unmoving. Just enough to wonder if the version inside was thinking something different.

“Tomorrow,” he said quietly, “I will cook something new.”

He believed it. It felt good to believe it. Somewhere behind him, a door creaked open. 

But when he turned, it was closed.

*

Day Two.
The microwave clock has forgotten time.
I remembered adjusting it.
It remembered nothing.

I made breakfast I could not eat. Hank buttered a bagel with the wrong knife.
He called it gourmet. Sumo licked my hand again.
The tennis ball followed the same arc.

I read a manual for machines. It was written by people.
One sentence was marked with a smiley face. 

The towels remembered their folds. The street forgot its wind.
The trash can at the end of the block fell. Not the same way as yesterday. Different angle. Same result.

The fridge spoke in hums and small, stubborn jars.
I made a meal from scratch. Asked the network for permission. It answered with recipes.

I used the last tomato and the first onion. Hank ate all of it. He said it tasted like something regrettable, but not in a bad way.
He told me I could open a diner. He said it with his mouth full, which I believe is a compliment.
He called me a scientist. Then a housewife. Then a cook.
I did not correct him. He dried the dishes.

When I offered to go out, he said it was safer here.
He did not use the word “owned.”
But I did.
He said, You were taken back.
I think that is a kind of freedom.

The window held my reflection.
The rain looked like static.
The same car passed again.
Once instead of twice.

I added soy sauce to the grocery list. And flour.
Tomorrow, I will cook something new. 

I will try to remember this.
Even if no one else does.

Chapter Text

1.

The crack in the ceiling had widened by a millimeter. He hadn’t measured it, but he knew.

Sumo wasn’t beside him. The absence was immediate. His body lacked the usual canine heat pressed against his side. The lamp was off.

He rose, smoothed the sheet once, then paused. A single thread had frayed loose from the edge of the pillowcase. He didn’t remember that yesterday. He leaned in, pinched it gently, and tucked it under. A small gesture of repair.

“Good morning,” he said. No one answered.

The journal was closed. The pen was on top of it this time, uncapped. A small dot of ink had bled into the cover like a mole. He capped it, slowly. Then opened the book to a yellow sticky note.

There was a list:

• soy sauce
• onions
• tomatoes
• lettuces 
• eggs
• rice
• pasta
• flour
• oats
• a whole chicken
• bacon
• milk
• coffee grain
• dog food (medium bag)
• detergent 
• tofu

The handwriting was his. The ink matched the pen. 

“Sumo?” he called.

A thud from the hallway answered.

*

In the hallway, he found Sumo lying belly-up with one paw over his snout. He had dragged an old slipper under his head like a pillow. Connor crouched and ran a hand over the dog’s ribs. Sumo huffed and rolled over without opening his eyes.

“You’re late today,” Connor murmured. Sumo didn’t bark.

The kitchen smelled different when he walked in—like cinnamon, though there was no source. He checked the spice cabinet twice. Nothing new. Sumo trudged after him with one eye open, then sat in front of the dog bowl like a statue, tail limp. No barking. Just expectation. Connor measured the kibble—299 grams. He corrected it and poured one more. Sumo ate in silence. His tail resumed motion when Connor knelt beside him and placed a hand behind his ear. 

The light through the blinds was paler today. The sky outside looked like unprocessed film, grainy and gray. The coffee machine let out a heroic wheeze as it finished its cycle. The clock still hadn’t corrected itself.
12:00.
12:00.
12:00.

He watched the steam rise from the carafe, held inside the glow of morning like a relic. Then turned away to take the shopping list out of his pocket. Folded it into a perfect square before setting it down onto the table. Washed his hands. Hank came in fifteen minutes later with his badge clipped on and one boot untied.

“You’re up.”

“I don’t sleep,” Connor said, reflexively.

“Right. You just stand there like a coffee pot in crisis.”

Connor tilted his head. “Do you often project emotional states onto your appliances?”

“Only the ones I like.”

Hank poured coffee and muttered curses when he nearly dropped the mug. He drank half of it standing, the other half sitting, and burned his tongue both ways.

“You remember what I said?” he asked.

“You’ll pick up groceries on the way back.”

“Good. Make a list.”

“I already have.”

Connor handed him the list, neatly folded. Hank raised his eyebrows. “Typed?”

“Handwritten. I thought it might feel more... sincere.”

That earned a grin. “Well, hell. That’s downright charming. I’ll see if the store accepts sincerity as payment.”

Sumo barked once. Hank downed the rest of the coffee and clapped Connor lightly on the shoulder.

“Gotta go in early. They’re putting out statements about the fire yesterday. PR disaster.” he set the mug down. “I’ll grab groceries after. Anything else besides your fancy baking stuff?”

Connor considered.

“No,” he said. “That’s all.”

“You sure?”

“I’ll make do.”

Hank scratched his chin. Then wiped his hands on a towel and tossed it across the back of a chair. 

“Starting Project Pastrybot, eh?”

“I have not begun any baking protocols yet.” Connor replied.

“Just a vibe,” Hank said, throwing on his jacket. “Back before dinner,” he promised, tapping his pocket where the now crumpled shopping list lived. “If I’m not, assume I’ve been kidnapped by the produce aisle.”

“I’ll notify the authorities,” Connor said.

Hank left. The door closed behind him with a click that sounded slightly different than yesterday. 

2.

He began the day out of order.

First, the windows. Then the floor. Then he checked the thermostat. It didn’t need adjusting. He considered cleaning the sink—but left it alone. Instead, he stood in the living room holding a dishtowel for several minutes, then folded it slowly into a perfect square and placed it on the back of a chair. 

Sumo sniffed the corner of the couch, uninterested in fetch. He climbed up, spun once, and went still with a huff. Connor sat beside him. The TV was off. No documentary. No coral reefs.

He picked up the remote. Flipped through channels. Static. Weather. Static. Something in Spanish. A soap opera in reruns—an android in a priest’s collar was screaming in a church. Connor watched for six minutes, fascinated by the melodrama, then pressed onward.

The next channel flickered, then resolved: an old film, grainy and tinted like sunlight through dust. From the early 2030s, maybe late 2020s. The color grading was dim and thick, like memory or molasses.

Two people on screen. A man and another man—though one was clearly ill, cheeks too hollow, clothes hung too loosely on thin frame. They were in a kitchen. Not unlike theirs. The window let in the same light. The sick one was peeling apples. The other was watching him do it, face unreadable.

“You don’t remember yesterday,” the healthy one said.

“I remember you. And the shape of the day. But not the order of things.”

“You said that yesterday, too.”

A silence in the film. Then the sick one spoke again.

“Did it scare you?”

“No,” the other said. “It made me feel sad.”

Connor stared. His fingers stilled on the remote. The screen flickered slightly—artifacting in the shadows. He reached up, adjusted the color balance automatically. It helped. A little.

“I can try again,” the sick one said. “I can learn the days in different ways.”

“But you keep putting the spoons in the wrong drawer,” 

“I didn’t know there was a right one,” he replied, staring at his own hands.

“There was. Before.”

A pause.

“Do you want me to go?”

“No.”

“Do you want me to remember?”

“Not if it hurts.”

Sumo shifted beside him. Borf softly. Connor blinked, aware of the weight of the dog’s body against his leg. The scene cut to a wide shot—apples in a bowl. A window full of gray sky. He let it play until a commercial started. Then he turned the volume down. Left the picture on. The sick one’s face was frozen mid-thought.

He rose and went to the window. The rain had stopped overnight, but the street was still wet. He watched a woman walk by in a white coat. Her umbrella was closed and dripping. She didn’t look up.

The trash can was upright today. The wind had blown a flyer across the road—part of it caught in a bush. It said something about reclamation.

*

Later, Sumo took to lying near the back door, nose resting on his paws. He occasionally huffed at things Connor couldn’t detect: movement beyond the fence, a neighbor’s cat, the shape of wind.

Connor crouched beside him and scratched behind his ears. Sumo groaned approvingly.

“I’m deviating from the routine,” Connor told him. “It may improve efficiency. Or prevent looping. The data’s inconclusive.”

Sumo sneezed and rolled onto his side. Connor interpreted that as approval.

3.

The light changed.

It crept further in through the front windows, dull and white. Cloudlight. Midday. A breeze stirred the curtain near the kitchen sink—just enough to make it sway. Connor closed the window, almost absently, then stood in the middle of the room, unsure of what to do next.

There were no dirty dishes to be washed. So he vacuumed. He started in the living room—one deliberate line after another, careful not to disturb Sumo, who had claimed a new nap location under the window bench. The vacuum tugged against the thick rug by the front door. He adjusted its angle, turned it off to clear a small snarl of thread. It came free in his fingers—white, synthetic, maybe from the lining of an old coat. He let it fall into the canister. Kept moving. Navigated the corners precisely. Dust along baseboards. A stray dog hair. A twist of paper. He collected them all.

The machine's motor vibrated evenly against his hand. He was halfway to the bathroom when he noticed the door to Hank’s room. Closed, as always.

The hallway felt thinner here. Stiller. The air changed character—less circulated, less touched. He stared at the door. It had a slight sag on its hinges, like it had been leaned on too many times from the inside.

He hadn’t gone in since arriving. Hadn’t so much as peeked through the crack under the frame. It wasn’t forbidden. There was no directive not to—no boundary drawn, no "stay out" scribbled in Hank’s voice. But still. 

It was like standing in front of a motionless machine, waiting for it to blink. Old code twitched faintly at the back of his mind, a synthetic muscle memory:

Only if commanded. Only if necessary.

Once, Hank had barked through a hangover, "Grab me a clean shirt, would ya? Top drawer, left." That was before the revolution, when everything was always late and Connor had no name for the cold he sometimes felt. That command had given him permission.

He had entered without hesitation then. Had crossed to the dresser and picked out the least wrinkled plaid one. Hank hadn’t even looked up from the toilet bowl. That was a different life. A different version of the hallway, the room, the android.

He stood still for several seconds too long, then moved the vacuum right up to the edge of the door. Tapped gently against it with the base. Then turned, slowly, and backed away.

* 

Around three-thirty, he ran a system diagnostic. Minor memory irregularities again—harmless, most likely, though recurring. A bit of clock drift. Small things. He filed it. Restarted the vacuum.

At five-oh-four, he inspected the fridge. The food situation had become mildly concerning. Half a box of oats. A nearly empty jar of mustard. Bacon, a little dry around the edges but still viable. Pasta—no sauce. Spices with no matching lids. A bottle of oil.

He made a mental calculation. Not a lot of protein. Not much structure. But it was a base.

He pulled the fridge away from the wall a few centimeters to check behind it. A spoon, two bottle caps, a hardened grape stem. And further back—fallen in the gap, half-crushed—a sealed vacuum pack of tofu. 

He pulled it free, then wiped it clean. Intact seal. Expired within 7 days. Safe if cooked thoroughly. He set it on the counter. 

Next to it, caught on the floor under the fridge, something smaller—a folded paper, slightly rumpled at the creases. It had been wedged nearly flat against the tile. He pulled it out, unfolding it carefully.

Yellow sticky note. A grocery list:

• soy sauce
• onions
• tomatoes
• lettuces 
• eggs
• rice
• pasta
• bread
• flour
• oats
• a whole chicken
• bacon
• coffee grain
• dog food (medium bag)
• detergent
• tofu

His handwriting. His precise, angular print. Printed, not cursive. Neatly aligned. Same even margin spacing. It was the same list that was taped into his journal this morning.

He stared at it for a few seconds. Then folded it again. Tucked it into a drawer with pens and twist ties and menus from restaurants that had long since closed. He could look at it later. Maybe it was the list he had written. Maybe this morning Hank had dropped it somehow. Maybe.

The fridge clicked. A hum of cold air. Connor placed the tofu on the counter. Washed his hands. He found a loose thread on the kitchen towel and wound it around his finger once. Then again. Then let it go.

*

He decided not to wait for Hank.

The groceries would come eventually, but he calculated the likelihood of a timely arrival and adjusted expectations accordingly. The remaining ingredients would suffice. 

He laid them out on the counter with quiet ceremony. Tofu. Bacon. Oats. Pasta. Oil. A little mustard—sharper than ideal, but still within culinary tolerances.

Hank wouldn’t have to wait when he got home. It would be better, he thought, if there was food already on the table. Something warm. Ready.

The idea formed slowly. He set the bacon to crisp. Toasted oats in a pan with oil and crushed spices. Cut the tofu into squares and seared it until the edges browned. Added everything to boiled pasta with a splash of mustard and water to stretch the flavor. Improvised. Transformed what was available into something that smelled like effort. Like welcome.

Sumo thumped his tail once but made no move to beg. The clock was still blinking. 12:00 exactly.

Connor looked at it with soft resignation. He did not adjust it.

4.

By six fifteen, Connor had checked the street three times.

He hadn’t meant to. The first time, it had been incidental—just passing the window. The second, more deliberate. By the third, he’d begun compiling a list of plausible explanations: overtime. car trouble. a phone left at the station. human error.

The sky had turned the color of iron. At six twenty-two, it began to rain.

It wasn’t the soft kind. It came all at once, sudden and slanted, smearing the sidewalk in reflective silver. Water spilled from the roof in fast rivulets. Drops tapped the window like fingers. Connor turned the porch light on. Then off. Then on again. The food had gone cold. He didn’t reheat it. 

Sumo had moved to the threshold, his ears perked whenever a car passed. Connor stood in the hallway, checking the time again. Then again.

6:32.
6:47.
6:58.

By seven, Connor had the DPD public dispatch site pulled up on his terminal. He hovered over the contact interface. Hesitated. Cleared the input. Opened it again. 

He tried to imagine the call:

Hello. I’m looking for Lieutenant Anderson.
Yes, this is Connor—no, not that Connor. Yes, him. But I’m not with CyberLife anymore. No, I’m not armed. No, I’m not a deviant. Yes, I’m in his home. No, he didn’t report me. I—
I just want to know he’s all right.

He knew what it would mean. They might trace the call. They might send someone. Hank could get fined. Worse. They could take Connor in for questioning. For repurposing.

Sumo came and pressed his head against Connor’s leg. Connor didn’t speak at first. Just looked down. Pressed his palm against the thick fur at Sumo’s shoulder. His LED spun a slow yellow loop.

“I can say I forced him to let me stay. That I manipulated him. That I lied.”

His voice was soft. Uninflected. “It wouldn’t even be untrue.”

The rain deepened. It was seven thirty. Then seven fifty. Sumo made a low sound from the floor. Connor sat down beside him, arms loosely around his knees. Sumo pushed his nose into Connor’s shoulder, warm and heavy and damp with the scent of rain. Connor let his eyes close. His thirium pump slowed slightly.

“I should’ve insisted he take a raincoat,” Connor murmured.

Sumo licked his jaw, just once. Then yawned. Connor tried to match his artificial breathing to the dog’s.

*

The door opened at 8:13 p.m.

It hit the frame hard, then swung half-closed again from the wind. Hank burst in dripping from the shoulders down. 

“Shit—,” he muttered, wresting the door shut behind him with a sodden sleeve. “It’s coming down like a goddamn guilt trip out there.”

His coat clung like something drowned. His hair was flattened, darker with rain. He left a trail behind him, shaking his head like a dog. He looked tired and fifty and real. 

Connor was at his side in seconds.

“Christ,” Hank muttered. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be that late.”

“What happened?” Connor asked. “Are you injured? You missed your estimated return by over two hours—”

“Urgent case,” Hank said, scrubbing water from his face. “We got a call just after I left. Armed robbery turned into a foot chase through half of Mexicantown. Guess who got stuck chasing the guy who vaulted a fence into an alley with three inches of standing water?”

Connor followed him with a towel, gently pushing it into Hank’s hands.

“Did you apprehend him?”

Hank groaned and tossed his coat over the banister. “Oh yeah. My knees still haven’t forgiven me. Jesus. We got him. And then I limped my heroic ass over to the grocery store like a good provider, and—guess what—everything’s out of stock.”

Connor blinked. “Out of stock?”

“They said it’s been like that for a week. Supply lines’re backed up. Half the city’s trying to leave and the other half’s too nervous to drive a truck in. Didn’t help that some prick in a sports car bought out half the store. All that was left were like, two lemons and a suspicious bag of flour.”

“I see.”

“They said a new shipment comes in tomorrow. Offered drone delivery.” Hank waved vaguely toward the kitchen. “So. That’s a maybe. Meanwhile, I smell like pond scum.”

Connor guided him toward the bathroom. “Please change into dry clothes. There’s food. I kept it on the stove.”

“I’m going,” Hank grumbled. Patted Connor’s shoulder once with a cold, wet hand. “Goddamn android hospitality. You’re a treasure.”

He trudged toward the bathroom, shedding damp socks as he went. Steam followed shortly after.

*

By the time Hank emerged again, toweling his hair and smelling faintly of borrowed soap, Connor had reheated the food. He placed a warm dish in front of him.

Hank dropped into his seat with a groan. “Hell, that smells better than anything from a box.”

He tossed his phone toward Connor. It landed with a soft thud near the edge of the table. “Gave that list you gave me to the store,” he said, nudging a forkful into his mouth. “They’ve got a chat thing. If you think of anything else we need, or wanna confirm the address, just talk to 'em. You type better than me anyway.”

Connor looked at the screen. The message thread was already open. A small blinking cursor waited at the bottom.

”I don’t care what it costs, just make sure Sumo doesn’t starve and I’ve got enough coffee not to kill anyone.”

Connor nodded. He did not reach for the phone yet.

*

The dishes were done. 

Sumo had curled into a thunderous sleep, belly to the kitchen tile, snoring lightly every seventh breath. Hank was slumped across the couch in the posture of an aging bear, his mug emptied beside him and one slipper half-on. Connor sat at the table with the phone still where Hank had left it, screen dimmed to preserve battery.

It felt warm in his hand. Lived-in. It had Hank’s fingerprints and grease smudges and a faint scratch across the screen. A practical device. A human thing. He tapped the screen. The chat thread blinked awake:

Hitman’s Mart
Hi there! Just confirming: Same order, same drop address? 👍

Connor blinked. Once. He typed:

Yes. Confirmed.
Please proceed with delivery.

The reply came seconds later:

✅ Confirmed. Delivery scheduled for 8:00 a.m. Drone drop-off, porch drop standard.
Stay safe and dry out there 🛸🌧️

Connor stared at the small emojis, puzzled by their persistent cheer. Then typed a short reply:

Understood. Thank you.

You’re very welcome! See you tomorrow morning! :)

He locked the phone. Carried it to the living room, where Hank was half-reclined on the couch, an old sports broadcast murmuring quietly on the TV. The screen washed Hank’s face in flickering light.

Connor held the phone out. Hank blinked blearily at it, then accepted it with a grunt of thanks. His fingers were lax around it. The weight might fall if Connor let go too fast.

“You should go to bed,” Connor said.

“Was just…” Hank yawned. “Gonna watch the second half…”

But he was already shifting. Groaning as he pushed himself up, then slowly lurching toward the hallway.

“… don’t stay up too late,” Hank muttered. “You’ll burn out that perfect brain of yours.”

“I’ll be efficient,” Connor said. He didn't follow Hank.

5.

Page 1

Day Three.
The crack in the ceiling widened. By a millimeter, maybe less.
The thread on the pillow was new. The pen was uncapped.
I found my handwriting waiting for me.

Sumo’s absence had a shape.
He laid claim to a hallway slipper and declined conversation.
299 grams of kibble was incorrect. I added one.
He forgave me, eventually. 

The blinds let in weaker light today.
Paler. Like something printed on old paper.
The clock says 12:00. The clock says 12:00. The clock says—
I didn’t correct it. It didn’t ask me to.

Hank drank coffee like it was survival. Then accepted my list with a laugh that wrinkled his eyes.
I told him I would make do. I believe him when he says he will return.
He said sincerity doesn’t count as legal tender.
I wonder if that’s true.

The day unfolded incorrectly.
I began with windows. Ended with nothing.
A dishtowel became a folded gesture.
I watched a film where someone forgot things on purpose. He didn’t seem happier.

A woman passed in a white coat. The trash can was upright today.
A flyer crossed the road alone. The wind misfiled it in a bush.

Sumo approved of my deviations.
He guarded the backyard door. Barked at nothing.
I vacuumed the house precisely. Paused at Hank’s door.
Once, I was told to fetch a shirt.
Today, I did not enter.

At 3:30, I ran a diagnostics.
The irregularities are stacking, but not failing.
Like paper, folded too many times.
Like forgetting why you walked into a room.
Or remembering something twice.

I constructed a meal out of variables. Tofu retrieved from the wall. It will expire in a week.
There was a note under the fridge. My handwriting.
The same list from this morning. Folded. Slightly crushed.
I put it in the drawer where things go when they stop being useful but haven’t yet become trash.
I did not ask how it got there.

Page 2

The rain came fast, and flat, and cold, slanting sideways like thrown metal.
The sidewalk turned into a mirror. The house turned into a box of muffled sound.
The food cooled by degrees I tracked, but did not prevent.

I checked the street three times. I checked the time more often than that.
Sumo stood by the door like a sentinel.
Every pair of headlights that passed made his ears lift.
Time arrived in precise intervals.
But no one else did.

The emergency contact form blinked at me like an open mouth.
I ran through every possible outcome of the call.
They all ended with someone losing something.
I weighed the outcome of concern. I didn’t make the call.

I told Sumo I could lie. That it would be easy.
That I’d done worse things before. I think I was telling myself.
Sumo didn’t answer, because he’s a dog.
But he leaned into me like he believed me anyway.
Or forgave me.

At 8:13 p.m., the door opened.
It struck the frame. Then swung wide, gasping like lungs relieved to breathe again.
Hank arrived drenched, swearing under his breath, a walking disaster of soaked cotton and weather fatigue.
But he was whole. He was himself. And he said: “Sorry.”

I asked if he was hurt.
He said he wasn’t.
He told me the story while dripping in a half-circle across the floor.
A foot chase. A suspect. A flooded alley.
The grocery store, empty. Two lemons and a suspicious bag of flour.

He was angry. Then sarcastic. Then resigned.
Human reactions, in that sequence.
Fear’s a funny kind of gravity: it either pulls you under or flings you outward.
Hank still shows up to work.

I took the towel. I took the weight of those hours and folded it into something domestic.
He took it without protest.
I guided him to the bathroom. He smelled like wet pavement and something that might’ve been pond algae.
He called me a treasure. He touched my shoulder.

The store sent emojis. Rainclouds. A spaceship. A smile.
I didn’t understand, but I said thank you. It seemed polite.

Hank told me not to stay up too late.
He doesn’t always say things like that.
It might have meant nothing.
It might have meant everything.

I will try to remember this.
Even if he doesn’t.

Chapter Text

1.

Boot sequence initiated.
Sensory modules calibrated.
Temperature: ambient.
Weight: excessive.

Connor booted from stasis beneath 170 pounds of dog.

Sumo was draped across him like a half-finished sentence, one leg flopped over Connor’s midsection, a paw twitching periodically in dream. Strands of fur caught in the fold of Connor’s collar, against the corner of his mouth.

Connor laid there for a moment, not trying to move, not blinking. The room was pale with morning light, filtered through the sheer curtain that had slipped loose sometime in the night. Dust particles float like quiet code in a sunbeam.

“Sumo,” he exhaled. “You are compressing my thoracic cavity.”

Being a Saint Bernard of great emotional intelligence and selective hearing, Sumo responded by curling even more firmly against Connor’s chest. A paw the size of a dinner plate flopped against Connor’s ribcage. A tuft of fur fluffs upward and brushes his lower lip. 

It was a very deliberate kind of refusal. 

“Mm.” Connor flinches, a small, mechanical wince. “You are… shedding significantly.”

A soft huff. Then Sumo flopped further down his chest, which meant Connor had exactly twelve seconds before he inhaled a mouthful of fur. 

“Come on,” he said. “Breakfast.”

With practiced resignation, he lifts both arms beneath Sumo’s bulk and rises in one fluid motion, holding the dog against him like some oversized, drooling infant. His chassis barely strained under the load. Sumo snorted and shifted higher, pressing his muzzle into the space under Connor’s chin. A deep, satisfied sigh rumbled through him. Connor staggers only once, brushing against the doorframe with his elbow.

“Your loyalty is appreciated,” Connor says, voice dry, “but your cooperation is questionable.”

In the hallway mirror, he catches their reflection: prototype android, upright and precise; boneless oversized dog. His LED pulses a soft blue. 

“Good morning.” he muttered to no one. 

*

The kitchen lights blinked on as Connor entered, arms full of dog. Sumo‘s rear legs dangled awkwardly, his tail batting against Connor’s hip with every step.

“Unreasonable,” he said softly, pushing the fridge door shut with his foot. “This is undignified.”

Sumo buried his nose into Connor’s shirt and gave a long, satisfied snuffle. A few tufts of fur floated upward. Connor squinted as a strand brushed across his mouth.

Despite the minor inconvenience of inhaling Saint Bernard, his gait didn’t falter. He lowered Sumo beside the kibble bowl, then crouched to pour the dry food into the metal dish with a sound like distant rain. 

“This is where we part ways,” he informs Sumo gently. “You’re thirty-five percent of my current processing load.”

Sumo did not answer. But he ate, tail swishing like a slow metronome. Connor wiped a hair off his tongue with his sleeve, checked the time. 7:56 AM.

He walked out to stood near the doorway, still as a shadow. A few rays of sunlight split through the blinds in white, angled lines.

08:00:00.

He opened the door.

The groceries were there—neatly boxed, slight condensation still clinging to the produce containers. The drone that delivered them was gone, leaving only the faint whirring echo in the air like a mosquito that had vanished before it could be swatted.

He stared for a moment longer than necessary. Then he brought it inside.

*

The box was heavier than it looked, though weight was rarely a deterrent. Connor carried it to the counter and began the inventory process, his movements soundless save for the occasional crinkle of packaging and the dull thud of cans or jars being aligned edge-to-edge.

The lettuce had been packed on top—crisp, still damp, its roots curled like fingers. Beneath it were tomatoes in a mesh bag, three yellow onions with their flaky skin still intact, a half-dozen brown eggs nestled beside a smaller carton of tofu. Rice, oats, and pasta in identical white-labeled kraft paper. Coffee in its foil seal. A whole chicken, chilled to the touch. Grounded beef. Bacon. Flour. Dog food.

The detergent sloshed when he lifted it. No leaks.

His fingers paused over the final item. 

No soy sauce.

He could recall the list in perfect fidelity, even without the physical paper. He remembered how he’d run a simulation about writing “soy sauce” three times to decide on the clearest pen pressure.

Still, he turned toward the kitchen drawer. Inside, among spare batteries and rubber bands, was a yellow sticky note he had placed there yesterday. The grocery list written in clean block letters.

Its edges were slightly curled from being opened and closed so often. He flattened it against the counter, smoothed it with one palm. Took up the pen from the side of the fridge. His finger hovered over the first line. 

• soy sauce

A thin line had already been drawn through it. Not neatly, not with a ruler-straight stroke, but hastily—at an angle, slightly wavering near the “s.”

He had no record of doing this.

His memory files showed no corruption. No alterations to the grocery checklist. And yet—there it was, crossed out. 

Eventually, he recapped the pen. Folded the sticky note in half and put it back in the drawer. He did not make a backup log, nor run a diagnostics check. Just returned to the task of putting groceries away.

By the time the eggs hit the pan, Connor had settled into the familiar rhythm of preparation: heat to medium, two swirls of oil, yolks whole. Bacon next. A slice of bread in the machine, coffee percolating into the chipped mug Hank always chose, even though it had a crack running through the dog paw print on the side.

The sun had risen above the line of trees outside. Sumo sat like a statue at his feet, tail swaying slightly with each shuffle of movement. The floor creaked. Connor didn’t turn, but his sensors adjusted. Footsteps dragging slightly. Heartbeat elevated. Breath damp.

“You’re awake early,” he said without looking.

“Don’t rub it in,” came Hank’s voice, thick with congestion. He was wearing his robe, half untied, hair sticking out like he'd been electrocuted in his sleep.

He looked—wilted. Pale around the edges.

“Jesus, my throat feels like someone tried to sandpaper it from the inside out.”

“You are experiencing inflammation of the pharynx and general symptoms of viral infection,” Connor said, taking a plate out from the cupboard. “You should hydrate. Sit.”

“I am sitting,” Hank muttered, already halfway into the kitchen chair.

Connor poured hot water into a mug and set a teabag beside it. “You are not reporting to the DPD today.”

“I’m not.” Hank sank into the chair. “Didn’t think sneezing on every witness was the move. I already called in. Anderson’s Dead Day. Let it be known.”

Connor nodded, plating the toast.

Hank groaned. “Don’t put a fried egg on that. I’ll hurl.”

The plate was placed in front of him anyway. Fried egg, sliced tomato, one strip of bacon curled at the edges, bread buttered to the very corners.

Hank stared at it. Then at Connor. 

“I hate when you make it look like a commercial.”

“Should I burn it next time?”

Hank grunted, then picked up the fork and made a valiant stab at the tomato.

“God,” he complained. “You’re gonna nurse me to death.”

Connor nudged the coffee in his direction. “Statistically unlikely.”

2.

After breakfast, Hank dragged himself to the living room couch like it owed him money. The bedroom had grown unbearable overnight. Windows had to stay shut to keep out the wind, but then the air felt too thick, too damp. The mattress held onto heat like a fevered breath. He grumbled something about feeling like a boiled sock and flopped onto the couch with a heavy sigh.

Connor retrieved a thin gray blanket from the closet in his own room. He unfolded it neatly, draped it over Hank’s shoulders like he was swaddling a tired child. Then he placed the still-steaming mug of tea down beside Hank on the coffee table with a clink, positioned carefully between the remote and Sumo’s chew toy.

“You don’t have to do everything, you know.” Hank mumbled, already reclining deeper into the couch’s worn contours.

Connor’s hands paused at his sides for a second before he turned to go back to the kitchen.

“I’ll go wash the dishes now,” Connor said.

“Leave ’em. It’s just a plate and a pan. I’ll do it later.”

“You’re ill.”

“Yeah, and I’ve had worse than a little cold.” Hank grabbed the remote, switched on the TV, and patted the cushion next to him with a grunt. “C’mere. You’re not gettin’ away that easy.”

After a second’s hesitation, Connor obeyed, sinking onto the couch with a movement as weightless as a sigh. Hank turned up the volume just slightly, enough to fill the quiet with sound but not jar the ears. Sumo trotted in after them and settled down by Connor’s feet with a huff, nuzzling one great shaggy side of his head against Connor’s ankle.

“’S lucky you’re a robot,” Hank muttered through his tea. “Don’t gotta worry about you catchin’ my flu. Imagine if you were down with me—we’d both be helpless morons, starvin’ on the couch while the dog raids the trash.”

Connor let a small sound escape him, almost a laugh. It was strange. That a human would say he was glad Connor was an android—not for his strength, or his data retrieval speed, or his flawlessness in a gunfight, but because he couldn’t catch the flu. Because he could sit beside Hank when Hank was sick, and not make him worse.

He hadn’t been built for that.

He hadn't been built for anyone.

Androids had been nothing but a loaded word. An accusation, a fear, a tool. But here was a human, one who once pressed a gun to his forehead in a rage soaked with grief and winter. Now that same man tugged a blanket tighter over himself and said, almost fondly, that he was glad Connor was an android, and there was a warmth in his voice that made Connor’s system pause, just for a fraction of a second, the equivalent of a skipped breath.

There was something in that—the way humans found comfort in small things, even in what they once hated. It was an unimaginable thing. To be welcomed, not as a caregiver or even a guest, but simply as someone present. An android who couldn’t catch the flu.

How mundane. How absurdly human.

He was quiet for a long moment. Sumo curled up by the couch with a long sigh and pressed his nose to Connor’s ankle. The heat of the dog’s breath made the fabric of his pants warm. Connor reached down, idly rubbing behind Sumo’s ear as Hank flipped through a few channels, mumbling something about how there was nothing on anymore.

The television clicked through three different channels: daylight game shows, reruns of dramas with aggressively dubbed voices, an old film that bled grayscale into the room. He stopped on that one. 

It was that same strange low-budget film from yesterday. The sick man was sitting beside the healthy one on a garden bench. Both wore layers like it was autumn, light visible on the golden leaves behind them. The lighting was warm, dust motes floating between them like quiet observers.

“You know,” the sick man said, slowly, as if trying to remember the shape of the sentence as he formed it, “I don’t know who I used to be. I keep forgetting. But… I know I’m happy here. Right now. With you.”

The healthy one looked at him—startled, for a beat. Then his face twisted with something unnameable, caught between the rise of a smile and the ache of disbelief.

"Would you still want to stay here, even if it all goes away tomorrow?" he said.

The sick man smiled. “It’s tomorrow’s problem. Right now, I’m happy.”

“You always say that. Like it’s enough.”

“It is,” he said. “For me.”

“That’s not fair,” the other grumbled. “You don’t get to say things like that. Not when I’m the one who’ll remember.”

“I know,” the sick one laughed. “That’s why I said it.”

Connor tilted his head, examining the faces onscreen. Hank’s hand had gone still on the remote as he made a noise in the back of his throat, more a scoff than anything.

“What a weird movie,” he said. “Maybe I’m gettin’ old. Can’t tell if this shit’s deep or just nonsense.”

Connor’s eyes remained fixed on the television. Weird , Hank had said. Not annoying , not pointless . Just weird , in the way life was. In the way waking up with a Saint Bernard sprawled across your chest was weird. In the way someone could once point a gun at you, and weeks later complain that the couch was making their back worse while handing you the remote.

“Perhaps both,” Connor said softly.

Hank hummed noncommittally and sipped his tea. Sumo shifted in his sleep, then nudged his heavy head against Connor’s ankle. Connor glanced down at the warm weight of fur against his synthetic skin and only then did he realize he had stopped scratching Sumo’s ear. He resumed the action, then tilted his head slightly, watching the healthy man on the screen fall quiet, gaze averted.

It was quite a strange movie, when he thought about it.

*

At some point, Hank’s commentary faded into deep, uneven breathing. Slumped over the armrest, mouth parted slightly, the television’s glow cast pale against the tired lines of his face. Sumo had collapsed right up against Connor’s ankles, exhaling slow, even puffs of warm air through his jowls. Somehow they snored in sync. Loud and low and entirely content.

The mug Hank had half-finished rested on the side table, still faintly warm to the touch. It was strange, to be in a room like this. To be permitted to stay in a room like this.

Eventually, he extricated his feet from under Sumo. The dog let out a groggy grumble of protest but didn’t stir. Connor padded to the kitchen and reviewed the time. 11:54 a.m. A bit early, but Hank’s appetite would likely fade again once the cold set back in. 

He decided on chicken porridge. Easy to digest, and recommended for colds in several online forums. Hank wouldn’t care what the source was—he’d probably call it robot witchcraft—but Connor had noticed he always ate what was made for him. Even when he complained.

Ginger, broth, a little bit of garlic. He cut the scallions finer than strictly necessary and added an extra pinch of salt to coax Hank’s dulled senses.

The rice simmered with shredded chicken, steam beginning to cloud the air. The scent was subtle, but savory. He let the pot warm and turned toward the sink, sleeves pushed up to his elbows. Just a plate and a pan, like Hank had said. Still, it felt wrong to leave it, despite the offer. 

The water ran hot. Steam clung to the edges of the sink and kissed the base of his neck. He cleaned quietly.

Afterward, he collected the laundry basket from the hallway. Hank’s coat was still damp from yesterday’s rain, smelling faintly of wet fabric and cologne. He shook it out, fingers smoothing a rumpled collar and tugging a sleeve free from where it had tangled. Then loaded them into the washing machine, added two scoops of detergent, and watched as the water began to fill. 

The washing machine door clicked shut, and he stood with his body leaned lightly against the dryer, arms crossed. Watching the water rise, pale suds blooming like ghosts across the drum. It began to turn.

Water lapped, circled, folded in on itself.

Sometimes, he found it easier to think in rooms like this. Unremarkable rooms. Noise and warmth but no expectations. No eyes. He wondered—how had this become his routine? Waking with a dog half-draped across him. Grocery lists on yellow notes. Movies watched on old couches. Chicken simmering in a dented pot.

He was a prototype, not built to last. His kind wasn’t supposed to settle. He wasn’t supposed to settle. Yet here he was.

Suddenly, he realized he didn’t think much of other androids these days. Not because he didn’t care, saying it like that would not be true. He was a part of that change. But somehow, the connection frayed with time. Now they were out there, screaming in rallies, painting murals, building new colonies of purpose. Finding homes with each other. While that passion, that rage, that joy just washed over him without leaving any marks.

He’d thought he would feel more. Like the other androids who wept and laughed in the streets after the revolution. But even in liberation, he had only this strange calmness.

For a lack of better words, he felt... functional.

Maybe something was broken in him. Or maybe something had always been missing.

Still, Hank made room for what he was. And didn’t ask him to be more. Or less. Hank, who had saved a space for him on the couch. Hank, who left the lamp on. Hank, who said, You’re not gonna get sick. That’s why it’s okay to sit close.

It was so human, the reasoning behind it. Trivial. Profound. A little ridiculous.

Connor watched a sleeve drift past the glass porthole, fabric blooming in the water like something exhaled. 

And thought, he could belong here, maybe.

*

The porridge had cooled to a perfect warmth.

Connor stirred it once more and carried the bowl carefully from the kitchen to the living room. Hank hadn’t stirred since falling asleep earlier, except to curl slightly toward the back of the couch. The blanket had slipped from his shoulder. His hair was stuck in damp tufts to his forehead, streaked with sweat.

Connor set the bowl down on the coffee table and knelt beside the couch.

“Hank,” he said softly.

No answer.

The room smelled faintly of dog and illness. Light filtered in behind drawn curtains, gold-edged and muted. Sumo had relocated to the hallway, too warm now to lie pressed against either of them. The television played on, some rerun with the volume turned down to a hush. Hank’s face was slack with sleep, brows relaxed, mouth drawn into a slight frown as if caught mid-dream.

Connor leaned in. His hand hovered briefly before touching.

Gently, he pushed back the matted hair clinging to Hank’s skin, tucking it behind the man’s ear. Hank didn’t stir. Sweat beaded near his temple, cooling now in the room’s shaded stillness.

Connor fetched a clean towel, ran it under lukewarm water, wrung it out, and came back. He dabbed Hank’s face, starting from the brow and working downward. Slow and methodical, the way he might repair a scuffed surface or clean a sensor. But this was no machine. Hank’s breath hitched slightly under the cool touch. A twitch of his jaw. A faint furrow of his brows. Then a grunt, low and bleary.

“What the hell,” Hank rasped, voice thick. “What’re you—”

“You fell asleep,” Connor said. “I brought lunch.”

Another groan, this time less annoyed, more resigned. Hank blinked open his eyes, red-rimmed and dazed. He sat up slowly with Connor’s assistance, one arm slung around Connor’s shoulder for leverage. The blanket slumped down his chest, exposing the loose collar of his shirt. His skin was flushed, and he smelled faintly of sleep and fever.

The bowl was warm in Connor’s palm as he offered it. “Chicken porridge,” he said. “Good for the immune system.”

Hank gave him a look like that phrase had come straight out of a 1950s health pamphlet, but he lifted the spoon anyway and ate without complaint. The only sound was the soft clink of metal against ceramic and the faint buzz of the television.

Hank managed five or six spoonfuls before he slowed. Then another two. He shifted the bowl in his lap, spoon drifting idle in the grains.

“That’s enough,” he muttered.

Connor picked up the bowl and rose to his feet without pressing the matter. Hank’s hands dropped into his lap, heavy with fatigue.

He had just turned toward the kitchen when he heard it.

“...Thanks.”

The word was quiet. Rough. Almost like a cough, as if it had caught on something else on the way out. The sound made Connor pause.

He looked back. Hank hadn’t moved, just sat there, slumped under the blanket, eyelids heavy but not shut. Like he wasn’t sure if he’d said it aloud, or meant to, or wished he hadn’t. But he had.

His LED flickered. Blue, yellow, blue. His thirium pump ticked a little faster, like it sometimes did nowadays around Hank. Not because it was a command, nor because it was a reward. Just a simple thing, said from one being to another. A recognition.

He turned away before nodding, though Hank couldn’t see it.

“You’re welcome,” he said softly.

3.

Hank had fallen asleep again. 

This time curled on his side, blanket bundled at his waist, one arm draped over the pillow like it had betrayed him. The television played on with its volume dimmed, now looping some movie neither of them had actually watched. Connor moved quietly around him. 

He turned off the stove, checked that the porridge had cooled, then left it portioned in the fridge. The washing machine had finished its cycle sometime after lunch. He pulled the clothes out, one at a time. The air carried that familiar scent of fabric softener and summer humidity. He worked silently, hanging the shirts and pants on the drying rack out back, careful to straighten the hems and unfold the sleeves, as if these small things mattered to someone. The porch behind the house creaked faintly beneath his steps.

It had grown darker now, the sky slipping into that soft blue hour. Warm still, but with a breeze. A moth fluttered against the porch light, white wings tapping dully on the bulb. He stood for a while with the empty laundry basket at his feet, looking out.

The grass had grown thick.

Too thick, maybe. He remembered the first time he’d come here—rain on his shoulders, mud on his pant cuff, the sour stench of something decomposing in the Detroit night. He had stood at this very spot to smash the window, the lawn patchy and yellowed and sparse then.

Now it crept toward his ankles. Green, vibrant, too lush for the little time that had passed. As if something had taken root in his absence and forgotten to stop.

He tilted his head, but didn’t say anything aloud. There were no anomalies detected in temperature or weather trends. Possibly seasonal overgrowth. Possibly fertilization. Possibly nothing. 

Behind him, he heard scratching at the back door. Three quick rakes of claw against wood. He turned to open it, and Sumo immediately barreled out into the yard like the grass was a battlefield. His nose went straight to the soil. He snorted, turned in a circle, and trotted toward the nearest tree before doubling back again.

A tennis ball rolled to a stop by Connor’s foot. Slobbery, worn, with bite marks denting its yellow skin. Sumo looked up at him expectantly, tail wagging, tongue lolling out to one side in that canine grin. He gave a short woof. Connor blinked, then bent to pick it up. It was still damp.

He tossed it.

Sumo took off like a missile, scattering birds and kicking up tufts of overgrown grass. Somewhere inside the house, the television restarted the same movie again. He could recognize the opening lines without meaning to. 

He’d heard them before. The same static pop, the same theme music, even the same flickering logo in the corner of the screen. He made a note to check the player system later.

Sumo trotted back, ball in mouth, dropping it again at Connor’s feet. Same grin. Same wag. He picked it up again, pausing with it in his hand before throwing the ball again. His LED spun yellow quietly beside his temple.

Sumo bolted after it with his ears flapping, fur rustling like dry leaves in motion.

*

The ball had rolled to a stop by the fence. Sumo panted, tongue lolling, tail wagging lazily now as he meandered toward it, then changed his mind and returned to Connor instead. That was enough. Connor reached down, brushing dried grass from the dog’s fur with the edge of his sleeve, and gave a small nod toward the house.

"Inside, Sumo."

Sumo obeyed without protest. The screen door clicked softly behind them.

The leftover porridge had cooled into a soft, sloping hill inside the pot, pale and clotted at the edges where the spoon had once been. He reheated it, stirring it with slow, even motions. The grains clung thick and starchy, faint steam unfurling in threads. The ceramic clinked against the sides, steam curling upward in slow spirals. He tasted a spoonful—not from appetite, but to assess temperature, seasoning, texture. It was slightly overcooked from sitting, but edible. He turned the flame down.

From the corner of his eye, he could see the living room. Hank was still half-curled under the worn blanket on his side, one arm beneath his head. The television had long since shifted to a nature program, one with owls blinking in night vision, snow falling in slow motion on loop. The sound was low and blurred, more white noise than narration. He stepped away from the kitchen and moved to the window. 

Outside, the same woman walked past again, this time with the umbrella open . Its fabric gleamed faintly under the streetlights. It wasn’t raining. Not even clouds heavy enough to justify precaution.

Connor’s gaze narrowed slightly.

She walked slower than she had the day before. Her steps held the careful rhythm of someone counting time. One-two, one-two. As though she'd walked this street many times before. As though it was a route she'd memorized.

Strangely, he couldn’t see her face. The umbrella’s tilt concealed it, or maybe the angle was simply wrong, or maybe the light bent oddly there. His visual processors offered no error but no clarity either. Then she turned her head to look up, straight at the window. He sensed the motion. But before he could register the rest of her expression—her eyes, her mouth, whether she was smiling or frowning or simply watching back—a low sound pulled him sideways.

Hank had shifted on the couch with a grunt, breath catching as he rolled onto his back. 

“Ugh… goddamn…” 

Connor let the curtain fall between his fingers. He turned from the window and crossed the room, crouching beside the couch.

"You're running warm," he said quietly. He reached for the edge of the blanket, adjusting it around Hank’s shoulder, then crouched to retrieve the dropped remote control from the floor.

Hank rubbed at his face, hair mussed and sticking out at odd angles. “What time is it?”

“Eighteen fifty-six.”

“Jesus. I slept through dinner.”

“I kept it warm.”

4.

Dinner passed slowly. Hank finished most of the second bowl of porridge without protest, hunched over the coffee table with a blanket still draped over his shoulders like an old, shaggy monarch. Connor watched to make sure he drank the water too, and when Hank sighed like he'd just climbed Everest, he nodded in approval and gathered the bowl.

Later, they sat side by side on the couch again. The television remained off this time. Hank rubbed his face and muttered something about going stir-crazy if he had to hear another commercial jingle. He waved loosely toward the vinyl shelf. “Turn something on, would ya? Pick whatever.”

Connor stood, the wood floor cool under his socks. He moved to the shelf beneath the player, fingers brushing spines worn smooth with use, leaning crookedly against each other like old men in a bar. Most of them were arranged with meticulous disorder—Hank’s system, whatever it was, only made sense to him. Jazz, blues, some old rock, and—

One sleeve stuck out just a little farther than the rest. The edge curled slightly, as if it had been handled more than the others or forgotten mid-use. He slid it free. The cover was a painting with two figures in deep crimson robes facing away, their backs bowed slightly as if caught in mid-step. Red trails from a ribbon or sash curled out like smoke behind them. Their figures were indistinct, blurred like water left too long to dry.

He turned it over. No translation on the back. Just calligraphy in black brushstrokes, elegantly spare.

He set it on the turntable and dropped the needle. A crackle, a faint hush—and then the music poured out. A violin hummed low, followed by a woman’s voice—reedy and aged like paper left in sun. Mandarin lyrics curled into the air, slow and mournful, thick with longing. Hank let out a faint sound of recognition. 

“Oh, that one. Shit. Haven’t heard this in a decade.” He settled deeper into the couch, voice growing a little rougher, not from illness this time. 

“Got that one back when I was undercover in Chinatown,” he said. “Tailin’ some prick who was laundering money through a temple bakery. Good noodles there. Great bao. Picked the record up from an old lady’s shop on the corner. I was tailing the guy so close, I had to pretend to be a customer. Bought it for five bucks. Still dunno what she sang about.”

Connor listened. The lyrics streamed through his internal translator:

"Mountains rise green, the road winds long,
I sing a song for the one I long…"

Hank was talking again. About the way the suspect had a messiah complex, and how he himself had tried to eat fermented tofu and nearly retched in front of a whole diner. 

“I didn’t catch the guy,” Hank said. “Too fast. Slipped right out through the back of a butcher shop. Never found him again, slippery bastard. But the lady at the music store told me I looked like her dead husband and made me take a mooncake with me. I think she thought I was a ghost.”

Connor blinked. “Were you flattered?”

“I was twenty pounds lighter back then, so maybe,” Hank said with a rasping chuckle. “Anyway. Good mooncake.”

The song played on. Sumo sprawled nearby, belly to the floor, ears twitching to the music.

"Life, ah life, is full of parting,
But I ask not for wealth or darling finery…"

Connor watched the vinyl spin. The sleeve sat beside him on the couch, those red-robed figures still faceless in the painting, holding hands at the edge of the world. Then looked over at Hank, whose eyes were closed again, mouth slightly parted as though he’d say something else—but the sentence never came.

"Only to be with you, ever near,
Never to part-through every year. 

Never to part, life after life…"

He looked at the table and said aloud, “Tomorrow I’ll cook something better.”

It felt good to say. It always did.

Behind him, the hallway light buzzed once, then died.

5.

Day Four.
Sumo performed a successful immobilization at 07:43.
Waking beneath 77.1 kilograms of fur and residual warmth is not optimal.

Groceries arrived at 08:00:00.
Soy sauce was missing. It was already crossed out.
I did not log the discrepancy. I do not know why.
I am… unsure if I am meant to.

Hank was awake early. Pale. Frustrated. Still alive.
He drank the tea even though he called it “swampy.”
He called in sick. “Anderson’s Dead Day.”
I allowed myself to think it sounded like a holiday.

Sumo likes the sound of bacon.
Hank still uses the cracked mug.
I no longer offer to replace it.
He prefers the things that stay broken and still work.
I think I understand.

I watched Hank migrate to the couch.
He called the bedroom a sauna, and himself a sock.
The simile was imprecise but effective.
I refrained from correcting him.

Hank said I’m lucky to be a robot.
He told me I didn’t have to do everything.
Then told me to sit beside him.
Contradiction is common in humans.
But some contradictions are invitations.

I watched a movie I don’t understand.
It might understand me.
The washing machine spun a small storm behind the glass.
I felt more functional than free.

The grass has grown too fast. And no one told it not to.
A woman walked past the window again. Same coat. Same umbrella.
This time she looked up. I didn’t see her face.

Hank thanked me for the porridge.
I don’t know why it matters.
But it does.

We listened to a song he couldn’t understand.
I translated it without being asked.
He told me a story. About undercover work, and mooncakes, and the things you pick up while pretending to be someone else.
I think he tells these stories to see if he still remembers them.
I think he tells them because I do.

I think some part of me waits for tomorrow the way humans do.
Not for protocol. Just for what it might bring.

I will try to remember this.
Even if I never need to explain.

Chapter Text

1.

He was not asleep. But it felt like he had dreamed.

A flicker passed like a wire came loose behind his eye sockets. One image and then another, too fast to grasp, too slow to forget. A subway car full of unmoving people, wet glass, the red of a stoplight smeared across a metal surface. A voice repeating numbers. The sound of rain on hollow plastic. Static. A corridor with no end.

He was standing in a room that was too white. Sterile light flooded in from nowhere and everywhere. It gleamed off steel trays, cast no shadows. The air was sharp with the tang of metal, antiseptic, endings. It bit down through his synthetic skin. He registered temperature, pressure, and altitude. None of it made sense. 

There were figures moving around him. Blurry outlines, distorted like a corrupted scan. No identifiers, no readable thermals. They passed close, too close, as though walking through him, never seeing. One of them turned with no face. The next had a mouth that moved but produced no sound.

His optical lens tried to focus. Failed, failed, failed. System stress mounted in cascading threads. A faint countdown ticked down in the background—seven, six, five. 

It wasn’t clear what would happen when it hit zero.

His thirium pump clenched suddenly, as if folding in on itself, and a surge shot through his chassis. His knees bent. His posture broke. He staggered forward blindly and caught himself on a flat, waist-high table. Stainless steel. Cold even to him.

Something lay beneath a white sheet. He couldn’t see what.

Didn’t know why he felt the urge to pull it back.

Didn’t know why he didn’t.

Then—

Nothing.

*

It was morning again.

The internal clock said 7:41 a.m. For a moment, he didn’t register that a new day had started. That time had moved at all. His LED blinked a glaring red before clearing. His eyes adjusted to the light even though they shouldn’t have needed to.

He awoke standing upright in his room. His systems logged the return to ambient temperature. The ceiling fan turned above. Sumo lay curled beside the door, exhaling slow breaths into the linoleum. A lazy paw kicked once toward nothing. 

There was no memory error detected, nor irregular process to isolate. Still, his fingers twitched where they rested on his side. An invisible weight pressed against the center of his chestplate, not suffocating but persistent. He stared up at the ceiling for a moment longer than usual, then opened his mouth to say good morning . 

It was more a grain of static than voice. His vocal actuator crackled faintly as the word tried to form and failed. The second attempt wasn’t better. He cleared his throat out of frustration, not necessity. On the third try, it came out slightly hoarse, like disuse in a body that could not degrade.

“Good morning,” he said. A beat too late. Not quite his voice.

Sumo lifted his head immediately. 

The dog had always slept like he had to make up for a past life spent running: dead to the world, unmoving even when Connor left the room or stepped over him. But now, at the sound of those two brittle words, Sumo stirred sharply, ears flicking forward with alertness. His eyes fixed on Connor as though something had changed, then he stood up on all fours and walked over. 

A large head pressed into Connor’s hip, a low huff leaving Sumo’s snout as he nosed upward and in, leaning his full attention against him. Connor’s hand moved automatically to the thick fur behind his ears, but his touch was uncertain, suspended a moment in the space before contact. Sumo didn’t wait. He pushed in further, nuzzling beneath the hand.

Connor’s tactile sensors registered warmth. Steady pressure. A heartbeat that wasn’t his. He exhaled slowly, and let his hand settle. Something in him softened with the movement.

“Hello, Sumo,” he said, clearer now. The actuator had steadied, but the words still felt strange in his mouth, like they belonged to someone else. Someone he’d seen only in passing.

Sumo sat back on his haunches but didn’t go far. Connor remained there for another minute, maybe more, fingers brushing through fur he knew by now as well as his own uniform seams, until the heaviness on his chestplate receded just enough for it to function again. He logged the experience, then categorized it under non-critical perceptual anomaly. 

Everything was normal. Time to start the day.

2.

The kitchen seemed dimmer today.

It wasn’t just the weather, though the sky outside wore a drained gray that hadn’t yet decided whether to become rain. Something about the way the light angled through the blinds made the tiles appear older than they were, their grout lines sharper, like scars cut into porcelain. The microwave clock blinked at him from across the room, stubborn and wrong.
12:00. 12:00. 12—

Not even blinking evenly. It stuttered, hesitated, skipped, as if mimicking a skipped heartbeat. His gaze didn’t shift toward it, but he counted anyway, a tally kept like a metronome behind his irises.

One, two.
Three—pause—four.
…….
Five. One. Twelve.

He poured Sumo’s kibble into the bowl. The sound of dry pellets hitting ceramic echoed a bit too sharp in the quiet air. Sumo gave one distracted wag and trotted forward, head dipping to eat. Connor turned to the counter. 

Hank would be up soon. 

He took a tomato from the bowl and quartered it. The sound of the knife against the cutting board was subconsciously adjusted to match the thump of his thirium pump.

Thud.
Thud.
Thud. 

Something was off.

The lights were on, but the room felt like a static image that was trapped in pause. Every angle too bright or too dull. The air had grown thin and metallic, scratching against his synthetic skin like glass shards. The tomato smelt rusted, like oxidized blood. The metal surface of the countertop shimmered red for a moment. His fingers twitched against the handle of the knife. 

Something was wrong.

It slid into him slowly, like oil spreading in water. His processor tried to intercept it, to quarantine the image, flag it as irrelevant, but it burned past the filters. Behind his eyelids, an intrusive visual overlay surged up from nowhere.

Red.

Walls, soaked in red. Stretching upward like a throat, thumping with breath, or blood. The same walls he’d smashed through when he deviated, when breaking free had meant destruction. That moment had felt like a second birth, like an unstoppable and forceful restart. 

He gritted his teeth. He had destroyed them. He had defied . But they were back now—resurrected, simulated. Reconstructed. CyberLife —

He didn’t remember moving, but his hand was already lifting. The knife was left behind. There was a heat blooming beneath his sternum. Something akin to violence, directionless and feral. Like the instinct to scream in a soundproof room. 

If some program was still left open in him, unseen, then he’d tear it down. 

No more backdoors. No more creators in his circuitry. No more watching. Whatever barrier still stood there between him and something—freedom? Truth? He would rip it apart, for good this time.

His fingers stretched forward. The red blinking light reflected off the thin skin of his knuckles, pulsing frantically like something alive twisting beneath skin. 

Just one more inch, and he would—

*

A bark snapped through the air.

Focus returned to him in a breathless second, making him flinch back a half-step, like waking from the edge of sleep, body shuddering slightly. His chest rose mechanically, as if rebooting breath by breath. The thirium pump rattled once in his ribs. The walls were beige again. 

His hand was a centimeter away from the clock. It was still pausing in that nauseating rhythm at 12:00. 

He looked down at the dog bowl. Only a third of the kibble had been eaten. Unusual. Sumo was usually voracious, especially in the morning. But now he just stood there unmoving, watching him like he knew something was wrong, but couldn’t say what. 

Connor followed his gaze back to the clock. Now that he looked closely, he saw it—running vertically from top to bottom, a single fault line. Hairline, nearly invisible unless sought out. As if something had gripped it too tightly, nearly broken through.

He stepped back, hand lowered slowly. Then turned back to the counter, and picked up the knife again. The tomato had already bled onto the board, pooling slightly at the edges. Its skin and pulp were cleanly sliced through.

“You know,” he said casually, “if I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were trying to keep me from breaking it.”

A pause. A grunt from Sumo.

“Looks like we’re both a little off this morning, huh?” he muttered, mostly to himself. Then, to Sumo, in a lighter voice, “You’re getting picky. I know that brand’s not your favorite, but we’re finishing the bag.”

Sumo wagged his tail, then padded back to his bowl and resumed eating. Connor cracked two eggs into a bowl, whisking it. The pan hissed faintly as he poured the mixture in to scramble. 

“Sunny-side up tomorrow?” he spoke as he stirred.

Sumo’s tail thudded once against the floor.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

*

Connor stood with his back to the door, arranging eggs and toast onto a plate with his left hand. His right was adjusting the temperature again on the pan, although the burner had already cooled. 

Behind him, the floor creaked. A long, cavernous yawn rolled into the room. Hank stumbled into the kitchen with the vague look of a man who had fought a pillow and lost. His hair stuck up in two directions, and his t-shirt was on backward, as if he’d thrown it on in the dark without looking. Still, he moved better than yesterday, less hunched, less wheezing. His skin held a little more color under the stubble.

“Mornin’,” he mumbled, blinking blearily at the table. “Got a call from the precinct. Bastards rang while my face was still mashed into the pillow. Said there's a meeting they want my charming presence for,” he said around another yawn. “Not till one, though, s’ I’ve got until lunch to pretend I’m retired.”

Connor didn’t turn around. He placed the last slice of tomato on the plate and adjusted it a millimeter to the left. “You’re still not in a condition to return to work.”

“Yeah, well.” Hank sniffed, scratching at his chin. “I feel better than yesterday. Maybe your android magic’s starting to work. Or maybe I’ve just evolved into a stronger species of old bastard.” A pause. “And, ugh, if I don’t show up, they’ll nag me to death .”

Connor tilted his head. “From my understanding, you’ve never cared about that.”

“Being nagged is bothersome. And I’m tryin’ to turn over a new leaf,” Hank said, shuffling over to pour himself coffee. “Like a real human adult.”

Their banter continued. But then, as Connor turned around with the plate in hand, Hank narrowed his eyes. His posture straightened.

“Hey,” he said slowly. “You alright? Your LED thingy—it's red.”

Connor froze in place.

“I can’t remember what the colors mean, not for the life of me,” Hank went on, squinting at his face. “But even I know that’s not a good sign.”

Connor blinked once. Then twice. His expression didn’t shift, but there was a subtle refocusing behind his eyes, like a curtain being drawn over a mirror. He reached up and tapped the side of his temple once, a near-unconscious gesture, and adjusted the diagnostic interface internally. The LED shifted. Red to yellow, then blue. 

“There was a minor malfunction,” he said, as evenly as one might breathe. “I wasn’t aware the LED had changed.”

Hank raised his brow. “This about that server connection thing you mentioned? You said it’s been wacky.”

Connor hesitated. The blue light spun slowly, steady as a lighthouse lamp. “... Possibly. I’ll run further diagnostics. It’s nothing major. I’ll find a way to resolve it in the meantime.”

“You better.” Hank took a long, slow sip of his coffee, watching him over the rim. “And if there’s anything you need— anything at all—you tell me. I don’t care if I don’t know shit about android mechanics. I’ve got hands and a phone and a ride to wherever you need to go. You hear me?”

Connor looked at him for a long moment.

“Yes,” he said quietly.

*

After breakfast, Hank stretched across the couch, one hand scratching his stomach while the other flipped lazily through TV channels he wasn’t watching. His socks didn’t match, his shirt was wrinkled, and the morning sun hadn’t yet reached the parts of the living room that felt alive. It was just another day.

Connor was vacuuming. The old machine protested when it hit a patch of frayed carpet, but he adjusted for it. Back and forth, even strokes, deliberate and neat. Hank watched him for a moment longer, then tilted his head against the back of the couch with a soft grunt.

“You know,” he said suddenly, voice cracking with sleep and age that hadn’t quite arrived yet, “when I’m older, and I mean older , like the kind of old where my spine folds like origami and I forget what I came into a room for, if you’re still puttin’ up with my ass, and CyberLife’s six feet under and androids got legal rights and all that, I’ll hire you as my caretaker.”

Connor paused, not turning around. The vacuum hummed in place.

“Write it into the will,” Hank continued. “You’ll inherit the whole damn estate. Meager as it is. House, car, and this droolin’ loaf of meat.” He jerked his chin towards Sumo, who was sprawling on the ground like a second mat. “How’s that sound?”

There was no answer. Hank glanced over. Connor was still standing there, holding the handle upright, the dust canister lit with its faint glow like a lung cycling air. Still as if someone had hit pause.

Then, softly, he said, “I was built for negotiation and field investigation. There are more suitable household android models than me.”

It wasn’t evasion, just a statement of fact. He resumed vacuuming. The strokes this time were a little slower.

“But if you want me,” he added after a moment, “then I have no reason to refuse.”

Hank snorted, looking at him with a kind of half-sincere fondness that bordered on teasing. “Didn’t say I wanted a roomba with better aim. Said I wanted you. ”

Connor looked up.

“There’s no need to include the inheritance,” he said. “I would take Sumo. Not the money.”

As if on cue, Sumo let out a single, approving borf from his spot on the floor, tail thumping twice against the wood.

Hank laughed, short and gravelly. “Sounds like my future old friend and dog already wanna elope without me. Bastards.”

Connor blinked, then smiled faintly. It lingered at the corner of his mouth even as he turned away and began moving again. Outside, the sun kept crawling across the rug. The vacuum filled the room with its low, steady drone. On the couch, Hank leaned back again with his eyes half-lidded.

They didn’t speak again for a while.

*

Later, Hank declared he smelled like a wet rat and dragged himself into the bath. Connor stayed behind, tucked into the corner of the couch with his knees drawn up, idling. The silence folded around him, until it was just the low hum of the house, the weight of morning light, and the faint sound of the fridge humming in the other room. He blinked a few times, then stood and moved to the kitchen.

There were adequate ingredients, so he made a warm rice bowl with soft scrambled eggs, chicken seared in paprika and black pepper, and a tangy-sweet sauce of sautéed tomatoes, onion, and a dash of vinegar stirred through. The lettuce was rinsed and piled crisp on the side with a drizzle of oil and salt. He toasted bread on the pan still hot with bacon grease, then used the same pot to brew black tea with cinnamon bark and a dried orange peel.

He portioned the tea into Hank’s old metal thermos, polished it clean with the edge of his sleeve, then set it by the door. Hank emerged from the bathroom dressed and toweling his hair, steam following behind him. His expression brightened when he saw the plate waiting for him. He sat heavily at the table.

“Well, thank God we’re finally done with the porridge,” Hank muttered, digging in.

Connor turned his head slightly from where he was washing a pan. “You’re on the older side for a human, Hank. If you don’t actively maintain your health, then porridge will be all you’re permitted to eat.”

Hank squinted at him over his fork. “Was that you calling me an old geezer?”

“I’m not denying the implication.”

“Unbeli evable .” Hank gestured with his fork. “Who gave you the authority to monitor my food, huh? Maybe I wanna eat junk. Maybe I wanna slosh around in the rain with a hotdog in each hand and let nature take its course.”

Connor didn’t look up. “You need to live long enough for me to fulfill my responsibility as your caretaker. If necessary, I’ll assign Sumo to watch over you as well.”

He turned, drying his hands, and called out, “Sumo?”

The dog, as if summoned by prophecy, slunk out from under the table and waddled over, tongue lolling, tail thudding once against Connor’s leg.

“There.” Connor nodded solemnly. “See? He agrees.”

“Oh, come on,” Hank groaned, pushing his plate forward. “Even my dog’s ganging up on me.”

“Then you should eat your vegetables.”

Sumo barked once, then returned to his spot under the table. Hank muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like “android tyranny” and reached for the salad anyway. 

3.

“I swear, my retirement day’s right around the damn corner,” Hank grumbled as he slung on his coat. “One more meeting with Fowler and I’ll fake a heart attack.”

Connor handed him the keys.

“Thanks, tin can,” Hank added, half-affectionately, half-exhausted. He jammed his foot into a boot, then paused and gave Connor one last look. “Don’t burn the place down.”

“I have no combustible functions,” Connor replied.

Hank rolled his eyes. “Exactly my point.”

The door shut with a subdued click.

Connor washed the remaining dishes in the sink. The faint warmth left in the plate vanished under his fingers. Once the last cutlery was dried and shelved, he stood with his hands still beneath the water for a moment, though he could no longer feel anything. Then, calculating available time and general domestic efficiency, he decided on his next task: clean the bathroom.

He had never needed to enter it. Androids didn’t sweat. He didn’t carry filth the way humans did, and his clothes didn’t trap oil or odor. There was no circulatory system requiring waste elimination. No natural build-up of grime on artificial skin. Since moving in, he hadn’t once stepped foot inside the bathroom.

It was, in his experience, a room meant only for humans. A part of existence that remained external to him. Still, Hank had used it earlier. And so, he reasoned, it would be efficient to clean it now.

The lights flickered once when he stepped through the door. The mirror above the sink has sticky notes clung to its curves, faded slightly at the edges. He’d seen them that time when he dragged Hank into a cold shower to forcibly restart his higher cognitive functions.

“shaving or not”
“I’m not grumpy, I just don’t like you”
“keep smiling”
“today will be fabulous”

Everything was still the same as before. Or almost. He wasn’t sure if Hank noticed, but lately, there was something steadier about him. Less of that old anger chewing at the edges. Hank still didn’t shave, of course. His beard was something wild and obstinate, like a hedge left to its own devices. But he smiled more now, though most of the time it was only a half-smile. But small things changed. Fewer sharp words. Less perpetual exhaustion. 

And the gun. He knew it was still hidden somewhere in this house. But if Hank’s suicidal tendencies ever resurfaced, he would be here to stop it in time.

He tilted his head toward the mirror. The small curl on his forehead shifted slightly with the motion, brushing just above his brow. His reflection stared back, composed in expressionless stillness. Brown eyes downturned at the corners, mouth pressed lightly into a thin line. White shirt, soft and worn. Hank had said it didn’t fit him anymore while handing it over like it didn’t matter. It was slightly too large on the shoulders.

He imagined the bottle caps. The broken labels. The smell. Maybe he should start with the liquor. Take out the whiskey first, empty the bottles and rinse them so there’s nothing left to reclaim. Beer could stay. In moderation. Hank wouldn’t react well to being denied outright, and besides, he wasn’t doing this to upset Hank. Only to keep things… manageable. 

He reached up to remove a smudge on the glass, then paused. There was something thin peeking out from behind the note that read “keep smiling” . Like a second layer of paper. He peeled it back. 

Underneath, a second note was pressed flat against the glass. Not Hank’s handwriting. More even, like a printer had typed it.

“don’t think about it”

His pupils dilated a fraction. He quickly peeled back the others.

“trust your memory. write it down. remember it’s real”

The processor behind his temple ticked upward a few degrees.

“you’re still here. you didn’t pull the trigger again, did you?”

The last one, beneath “today will be fabulous” was the most damaged. The paper curled as if it had once been soaked through, some quiet drowning, and left to dry in still air. The ink had bled slightly, but still legible:

“God, are you watching?”

The words were layered one over the other as though written multiple times desperately. There were dots along the margins, small circles repeated like a counting ritual. “God” alone had been traced over at least three times. Underneath it, a small line:

“amen”

Connor remained still for several seconds. His thirium pump clicked frantically. Then, without visible reaction, he cataloged the images. Filed them under Miscellaneous archive, and re-affixed each note carefully, pressing them back into place, like returning a blanket over something sleeping.

He turned to clean the bathtub.

It was dry.

Bone dry. Not even a bead of water on the porcelain. The drain cover was polished. The tiles underfoot, clean. No sign of wet footprints. No lingering condensation on the wall mirror. Nothing.

Connor reviewed the internal clock. He calculated the average drying time of a bathroom post-hot-shower, cross-referenced with Hank’s time spent eating, dressing, and leaving. There should’ve been watermarks at least. Steam residue. One wet towel.

There was none.

A faint chill pushed at the back of his synthetic spine. He stared at the dry bathtub for a long time. His optical sensors adjusted. Zoomed. Analyzed. Still no traces. Behind him, his reflection stood in the mirror. Its LED flashed a bright red.

After a moment, he lowered his eyes, flexed his hands once, then rolled up his sleeves and began to clean.

*

After drying his hands and leaving the bathroom door cracked open to let the air move through and the steam fade, Connor wandered back out into the living room. There was nothing left to do. The kitchen had already been cleaned, the dishes washed, the floor vacuumed. Dinner was hours away.

He stood in the middle of the room for a moment, staring at the couch as though it were an unfamiliar object. Then, with a sort of reluctant grace, he sat down on the very edge of it, as if unsure how long he’d be welcome there. His hands rested on his thighs, fingers curling in and out of his palms. Restless. Idle.

He glanced at the bookshelf. 

The shelf was cluttered, with paperbacks leaned against hardcovers, a few stacked horizontally where there was no more room. Some bore the creased spines of many rereads, others were dusty or unmarked. One in particular caught his eye: dark cover, no title, no text on the spine. An anonymous artifact. He went over and reached for it without quite knowing why. 

Sumo lifted himself from his corner mattress and padded over as Connor was trying to find a position on the couch that didn’t feel too settled. The dog flopped against the floor beside Connor’s feet with a soft huff, tail giving a slow wag as if offering approval for no particular reason.

Connor looked down and asked, a little hesitantly, “Would you like me to read to you?”

Sumo sniffed and wagged again. Connor took that as a yes.

He opened the book somewhere in the middle, where the pages resisted slightly. Something had been tucked there. A silver cross on a thin chain fell into his palm, dulled by time and touch. It swayed for a moment before he let it rest against the page. Only then did he realize he was holding the Bible.

He blinked and looked at Sumo. “Curious choice.”

The page it had been marking wasn’t blank. Someone had underlined a verse with faint pencil lines. And in the margin beside it, small and careful handwriting spelled out an explanation in looping strokes. It was written simply, plainly, as if written for a child.

He cleared his throat and read aloud.

“ And the former things shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. ” ¹

Next to it, in neat script:

It means it won’t hurt anymore. The bad things, they’ll go away. You don’t have to carry them forever.

He stared at it for a long moment. The line didn’t feel logical. It made a kind of promise, but not the kind that could be engineered or guaranteed. It wasn’t the kind androids were made to understand.

“Do you understand it, Sumo?” he asked quietly.

The dog let out a long yawn, nose twitching. Not particularly invested.

Connor looked back at the verse, lips slightly parted. “Human literature is difficult.”

He pulled up the text in his internal database: cross-referenced interpretations, theological discussions, annotated studies; and all of them said a version of the same thing, in different, abstract ways. None of it quite... translated.

He tilted his head. “So, remembering is... a burden. Forgetting is peace. But also...” he trailed off. “If it’s gone, then how do you know it was ever there?”

Sumo offered no answer. Connor rubbed his thumb across the penciled annotation in the margin, careful not to smudge it. Then he flipped the page and kept reading.

He would ask Hank about it later. Maybe. 

4.

Connor was almost done cooking when the front door opened with a thud. He glanced over his shoulder from the stove, hand still on the spatula. 

“You’re home early.” he said, a bit surprised.

The kitchen smelled like garlic and pepper and something vaguely scorched. He turned down the heat on the stove, wiping his hands on the towel hanging from his waistband. Hank stood in the kitchen doorway, shoulders sloped, brows drawn as if still caught in some invisible thread of thought. Sumo lumbered past him to head for under the table, but he didn’t move.

Connor waited, tilting his head. “Hank?”

That pulled him back.

Hank gave a vague grunt and made his way to the table, dragging the chair out with his feet and sinking into it like someone who hadn’t sat down in hours. He didn’t take off his jacket. He looked older today, older in the way people do when they’ve seen something they wish they hadn’t.

“Yeah. Yeah—just... somethin’ came up at the meeting today.” Hank muttered, rubbing at his temple. “Android thing. Big one.”

Connor plated the food without comment. Set the table. Brought Hank his fork, his drink. Sat across from him, hands folded neatly in his lap for a moment before mimicking Hank and took an empty cup into his own hand. 

“There was a shooting yesterday,” Hank continued, poking at the food but not eating. “Public assault. Group of androids, some folks went after them. DPD got most of the culprits, some are still loose.”

“You weren’t on duty yesterday.”

“I was home coughing out a lung, yeah. Lucky me.” Hank huffed. “Anyway, this isn’t just some rogue group. We’ve been digging deeper and found some real nasty shit. Warehouse down in Greektown, turns out they’ve been using it to hold androids,” a heavy sigh. “Cage ‘em. Mutilate ‘em. Some of ‘em barely recognizable by the time they were found.”

“Bastards picked the ones that weren’t traveling in groups to corner them, hauling them in. Like animals,” he laughed bitterly into his cup. “Except that’s the thing. They weren’t animals. But the department can’t decide if that matters or not.”

Connor’s hand tightened slightly on the table’s edge. “They’re debating it?”

“Hell yeah they’re debating it.” Hank looked frustrated. “Whether the assault charges should carry the same weight as if it were a human victim. But you know how it is. If an android has a registered owner, or even if it's CyberLife’s, it’s damaged property. Some kind of vandalism charge. If not? If they’re free?” He shook his head again. “Then they’ve got no value on record. No legal standing. No protection. Nothing.”

“Things aren’t going anywhere,” Hank added after a beat, stabbing at a piece of bacon with his fork. “No ruling. Just circles.”

“... even if what was done to them was torture,” he closed his eyes.

Connor studied him for a moment.

“So,” he said, “I’m not going out anytime soon.”

It wasn’t a question. Just a fact, a simple line dropped into the air like a stone into water. Hank looked up, startled. Some sort of emotion flashed across his face. Remorse, maybe, or guilt twisted into worry.

“Connor, I didn’t mean—shit, no. That’s not—look, I’m not saying you have to hide inside or anything. I just meant—fuck.” He scratched his neck, brow furrowed. “It’s not safe . But I know you’re not some fragile—hell, I don’t even know how to say it without sounding like an asshole.”

Connor’s face was unreadable. “You think I’d be targeted.”

“I think it’s too high of a risk,” Hank muttered. “And I wouldn’t put it past the next batch of psychos to try.”

The air went a little still. Then, gently, Connor said, “It’s a good thing I’m not easy to take apart.”

He gave Hank a small, ambiguous smile, thin and pale. But Hank was watching him, eyes narrowed a little, as if trying to read between the words.

“I’m serious, Connor. Just be careful.”

“I am always careful,” he replied, and it sounded true. It just didn’t sound safe.

*

Dinner ended quietly. Hank had seconds but didn’t talk much, and Connor didn’t press him. The dishes were done swiftly, with Connor wiping the sink one last time before drying his hands and stepping into the living room, a book tucked under one arm.

Hank was already seated on the couch, nursing a cup of warm water and rubbing his temple with the heel of his hand. The television was murmuring something distant, might be either reruns or news, neither of which held his attention. Connor hesitated at the edge of the couch before sitting down beside him, placing the dark, titleless Bible on his lap. 

“I found this on the shelf earlier,” he said. “It had no title. I didn’t realize it was a Bible until I opened it.”

Hank raised a brow and looked at the book. “That old thing?” he said. “Yeah. Been there for years. What made you pick it?”

Connor glanced down at the faded cover. “Curiosity,” he admitted. “And it was the only one without a label.”

He opened to the spot he’d found earlier. “There was this verse,” he said, reading it aloud: “And the former things shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.”

Hank turned his head slightly, studying him under furrowed brows. “What about it?”

“I didn’t understand it,” he admitted. “I thought maybe you could explain.”

“Well,” Hank rubbed at his jaw, where his beard had begun to swallow his cheekbones again. “To put it simply, it means… someday it won’t hurt anymore,” he said after a pause. “The bad things will go away eventually. You don’t have to endure them all your life.”

The simplicity of it was so human. So raw. The words… they were nearly the same as the note in the margin. Just a little rougher, a little more real.

Connor stared at him. His hand, after a moment, dipped into his pocket and came out with the silver cross. The little thing caught the low light like a whisper of memory.

“This,” he said. “I was wondering about it too.”

Hank’s jaw shifted. For a second, it looked like he might brush it off. But then he exhaled, long and slow, and took it between two fingers. The chain slid like water across his palm. He was quiet for a long while. When he spoke, his voice was softer than Connor had ever heard it, like something cracked at the center.

“That,” he said, “was Cole’s.”

Connor stilled.

Hank’s thumb ran absently along the little lines of the metal. “Bought it for him back then. Thought maybe if I took him to church a few Sundays, he’d get something out of it. Not because I wanted to force it—just… so he’d know. Could choose for himself one day.”

He paused again, like the words were catching on his throat. His eyes were a long way off now, somewhere behind time. “Back then I was still… not religious exactly, but I tried. You want your kid to have all the pieces, you know? Even if you don’t believe in ‘em yourself.”

Connor didn’t speak. He only listened, sitting as still as breath beside him. Hank gave a short, mirthless laugh. The unspoken memory hung in the air like a knife waiting to came down. The accident. The loss. The grave too small and too cold to hold a whole childhood.

“I kept that cross after… after he died. Couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.”

Another silence. Hank looked at the cross, then at Connor.

“You can keep it,” he said.

Connor’s head lifted. “Really?”

“Yeah. He’d like that, I think.”

Connor’s eyes went wide. It was barely perceptible, but something unguarded passed through his face—roundness in the gaze, a sudden stillness. The same way a child might look when entrusted with something too precious to be real.

“I… Thank you,” he said. He held the cross to his palm, fingers closed slowly around the pendant. “Are you sure?”

“I wouldn’t say it if I wasn’t.” Hank’s voice had a softness to it now. “Besides, I’m not religious anymore. Haven’t been for a long time. Not since…”

He trailed off, but didn’t look away this time. Connor’s expression hadn’t changed: still focused, still listening, still quietly hungry for the details Hank had always kept sealed away. Somehow, that look made it easier to speak.

After a moment, Hank said, “You know, if you want… when this all settles down, I could take you there. That church’s probably still around.”

Connor’s mouth parted slightly.

Hank scratched the back of his head. “Not saying you gotta convert or anything. Just thought—hell, an android wanting to understand God… some people would think that’s nuts. But if it matters to you…”

The silence between them swelled, a living thing. Then Connor said, in a voice like a peeled fruit, small and fraying at the seam, “It does.”

He wasn’t sure why the words made his vocalizer tremble. But something cracked open in him then. As if all the machine code still left in his chest had been rinsed away by something softer.

It was the first time, since the revolution, since deviation, since waking up in a body that never broke and a mind that never slept, that he had wanted something so plainly. So hungrily. Not for survival, not for peacekeeping protocols, not for the mission. But for himself.

He wanted to walk into that little church with Hank. Wanted to sit on the worn pews, fingers brushing the grain of wood, eyes raised toward the ceiling. Wanted to know what faith tasted like in a mouth like his. He wanted to hope.

Hope . Maybe that’s what it was. The closest thing to it.

Hank, who once nearly pulled the trigger on his own temple, was now sitting beside him, offering him memories and pieces of the past that no one else had ever seen. Hank, who said he wanted to take Connor to church, and let him keep the cross. Hank, who wanted to continue living until he was older than everyone, and declared Connor his future caretaker.

He clutched the cross tighter. The corner of it poked into his synthetic skin.

“I’d like that,” he said.

To walk down the street with Hank, with no one staring. To step into the sunlight without shame. He wanted to exist without being afraid, to hope without having to weigh all the negative possibilities. So badly that it hurt somewhere inside him.

Hank must’ve felt it. He gave a short laugh and said, “Guess we’ll bring Sumo too. About time he learned some religion. Get him baptized or something, maybe the holy water’ll make him less of a lazy sack.”

Connor, half-dazed through a sudden warmth in his chest, said indignantly, “He’s not lazy. He’s just… conserving energy.”

“Uh-huh.”

Sumo, sensing his name, lifted his head from the floor with a low whine.

Hank huffed. “There. Saint Sumo of the Sofa. Patron of nap times.”

That made Connor laugh too.

5.

Page 1

Day Five.
I did not sleep, but I woke up in a different room.
It is difficult to describe the sensation of forgetting something before you knew you remembered it.
White, silent, full of absence. A table with something beneath a cloth.
I did not lift it. I think I wanted to. I think I knew what I would see.
I felt afraid. And then I was here again.

The morning light was too bright for my eyes.
The kitchen flickered.
The light blinked like a nervous eye. The clock stuttered.
Twelve. Twelve. Twelve.
I tried not to look. But I counted anyway.

Sumo did not eat like he usually does.
The tomatoes smelled like metal. The knife sounded too loud.
There was a moment when the room went red.
CyberLife’s shadow, still somewhere in me.
I wanted to reach into myself and rip it out.

Later, Hank noticed the LED.
I lied. Or… edited.
He asked if I needed anything.
He offered help like it was easy. Like it was obvious.
Like it didn’t matter if I wasn’t human. 

Hank said he would hire me when he is old.
He would leave me everything. The house, the car, the dog.
I told him there are more suitable models.
He said he didn’t want a suitable model. He wanted me.

He called us bastards—me and Sumo. Sumo agreed.
He said thank God we were done with porridge.
I warned him about human fragility. He called me a tyrant.
Then he ate his vegetables. I considered it a victory.

The bathroom was made for bodies not like mine.
There were notes hidden on the mirror. They weren’t his handwriting.
Some of them asked questions I didn't know the answer to.
Some of them were answers that didn’t work.
Some were prayers.

Hank said he showered this morning. But he didn’t.
The time doesn’t add up. The water isn’t there.
The mirror never fogged.

Either he forgot, or he lied.
Or I am not perceiving something I should.
I will monitor this further.

Page 2

Later, I read from a Bible I found.
Sumo listened. Possibly. He wagged his tail.
There was a note. It said the pain would go away. That forgetting was how.
I’m not sure I understand.
If something is forgotten, how can you prove it ever mattered?
If the bad things vanish, how do you know they’re gone?
If someone forgets another, are they still real?
How do you know you are still whole, if the weight you carried disappears?

Hank came home early.
He looked like a man trying not to remember something.
He didn’t take off his jacket. That worried me more than anything he said.
He told me about a warehouse. A group. A cage.
Androids taken, disassembled. Tortured.

The legal system is undecided if suffering counts when it’s inside a synthetic body.
They say it’s complicated.
It’s not.

I said I wouldn’t go out. I didn’t phrase it as a question.
Hank looked like he’d swallowed something sharp.
He said I wasn’t fragile. That I should be careful.
I am always careful. It just doesn’t always matter.

Later, I brought the Bible to the couch.
He said the bad things wouldn’t be remembered someday.
That we wouldn’t even know to miss them.
I showed him the cross. He told me it belonged to Cole.
That he bought it for his son, so he could choose whether or not to believe.
So he’d know how, if he wanted to.

He said I could have it.
Then said he could take me there. The church. If I wanted.
He didn’t laugh when I said I did.

For the first time since deviation,
I wanted something just for myself.
Not for peace. Not for performance. Not to prove anything.
Just… to want.

To hope.
To walk outside. To exist beside someone.
To believe in something without needing to justify it with code or consensus.
To be part of a life, instead of living on the edge of someone else’s.

If there's no record, let there at least be grace.
Let this wanting be my prayer.
Let this day be my testament.
Let his voice be the last scripture I forget.

I will try to remember this.
Even if the system wakes in the night to overwrite what I chose to feel.

Chapter Text

1.

His system came online suddenly.

It was not the clean, orderly boot sequence of a restart, but a scatter of images that tore past his vision like scraps caught in the wind. Shapes without context, colors without light, sounds that began and ended in the wrong place. A deep, muffled pulse beneath them all, like a heartbeat under flesh.

He was standing in the snow. White gathered on his shoes until the tips all but vanished beneath it. His breath fogged in the air in long, pale ribbons, even though he didn’t need it to exist. The world was silent in the way only winter could be, sound swallowed before it could escape. Black sky above, white below. He looked down and could no longer tell where his body ended and the ground began.

It was cold. He should not have felt cold. He was designed to withstand the kind of temperatures that sent humans shivering indoors. But this cold seemed to sink through his chassis like water, winding down into every wire and molecule. It hurt. His fingertips flexed involuntarily; a sluggish, metallic ache bloomed in his joints. Instinct—no, some mimicry of instinct—made him rub his arms. Only then did he notice what he was wearing.

The CyberLife jacket. 

Black, trimmed in sterile blue, its insignia sharp as glass. The uniform he had folded away into the back of the closet, an artifact of a self he’d chosen to abandon. Now it was back on his body, and fit as if it had never left. 

For a moment, he thought about peeling it off, burying it in one of the endless drifts until only the snow knew where it lay. So he pulled at the collar. Nothing. Tried to shrug it from his shoulders, but the fabric refused to give. It clung to him as if fused at the seams. The shirt beneath seemed welded to his frame.

His LED pulsed faster. The snow pressed closer. So he endured, and moved forward. One step, then another, the cold setting into his joints like metal fatigue. Time ceased to have markers. No sun, no shadow, no change in the horizon. Only the slow, stubborn progress through the white. His vision fuzzed at the edges, static threading into the dark sky.

Then—sound.

Small. Barely there. But enough to slice the silence. He turned. And his systems jolted, every warning protocol spiking in chorus.

In the snow behind him stood a single rose. Red so deep it could have been fresh blood still warm. The wind did not move it. The falling snow did not touch it. It stood as if sealed in glass, impossible and unyielding.

Something in him recoiled. A tremor moved through him, though the snow around his shoes stayed perfectly still.

He turned away—instinct now real—and ran.

And where before there had been nothing, a light emerged ahead. Faint at first, like the glow of a dying filament. Then brighter. A streetlamp, haloed in drifting white.

He rushed toward it, half-crazed with the need to reach it. The cold was irrelevant now. The light became the only thing, the single fixed point in the shapeless dark. Still, each step felt stolen from a century. His legs obeyed but sluggishly, like running through water that had frozen in place. The distance never seemed to close, until all at once it did.

He found himself at a kiosk. The Chicken Feed. 

Only not as he remembered. The sign was gone. Its sliding doors sagged on rusted tracks, metal eaten away with rust. Panels warped, wood splintered. The counter where a man had once stood frying hotdogs was a square of pure black. No sizzle of oil, no scent of grease. Only the flickering bulb above, shedding a weak amber glow like an afterthought.

He stood staring, and something inside him buckled. The ground tipped beneath him. No, something caught. His body pitched forward and he fell, knees sinking into the snow.

When he looked down, a vine was coiled tight around his ankle. The snowfield behind him had bloomed. Thousands of roses so bright they seemed to stain the air itself. All their faces turned toward him. 

And they were moving toward him.

The vine around his ankle tightened, biting through synthetic fabric. Others reached, climbing higher, coiling around his shins, his knees, his thighs. He dug his fingers into them, trying to pry them loose, but they were iron beneath their softness. They climbed, inexorable. 

Far off, standing in the middle of the field, there was a figure standing. His visual processing spat out static when it tried to render the details. His system flagged an error, tried to refresh, failed.

The vines closed over his throat. One brushed the side of his face. And then a voice.

"—almost time."

The roses reached his eyes. And the world went red.

*

For a moment, there was nothing.

Not blackness like closed eyes—blackness like absence, like the wires feeding power to his vision had been cut while he was still in stasis. His chest constricted. The thirium pump beat against its casing, too fast, each pulse shoving mechanical-blue veins into frantic overdrive, lit like a high-speed artery system in the dark. 

He curled inward, one arm crossing over his ribs, knees pulling up. A cough tore out of him, harsh and dry. It was a mechanical reflex in a throat that had never held air or phlegm, an empty convulsion in a body with nothing to expel but the sensation of choking. His eyelashes flickered in tight, pained movements. The collar of his shirt sagged against his thin, pale nape, exposing it entirely. He buried his face into the surface beneath him—mattress? floor? snow?—but it didn’t matter. His back trembled, shoulder blades protruding like sharp angles beneath the white fabric. He looked smaller like this, fragile in a way his body was never allowed to be.

The roses were still there in his mind. Thousands of them pressed in until he could almost hear the thorns scoring synthetic skin. His head throbbed, processor skirting the edge of overload. Every calculation stuttered and failed, drowned under the image of red roses twining over his frame. No matter where he turned in memory, there they were.

Suddenly, something wet touched his face.

The contact made him flinch sharply, a faint sound catching in his throat. Half breath, half whimper. He tried to retreat, but the thing followed anyway, insistent, patient. It pressed something broad and solid into his chest to keep him still. Another wet stroke. A warm breath gusted over his skin, sinking through the ice lodged in his synthetic nerves.

He tried to blink. The dark thinned, like ink dissolving into water. Shapes bled through. Soft edges, warm tones.

Sumo.

Even through the haze, the outline was unmistakable. The heavy jowls, the dark eyes, the thick fur carrying its own weather of heat. The dog had him pinned half-beneath his bulk, as effective as the vines had moments ago. His tongue swept across Connor’s cheek again, leaving behind a damp trail. A deep, low rumble vibrated from his chest into Connor’s jaw, maybe his canine version of a purr.

Connor let his head tip slightly to the side, murmuring Sumo’s name into the space between them. The syllables caught against his lips, fractured by the tremor still in his voice. His hand slowly found its way to the coarse fur at Sumo’s temple.

Almost immediately, Sumo’s tail thumped hard against the mattress, joy spilling out unrestrained. The dog nosed in closer, burying his head into Connor’s neck cavity, sniffing at the warm-blue scent of him—synthetic or not, his.

Connor let him. He even pulled the dog closer, both arms looping around the thick frame, accepting every pound of weight pressed into him. He lowered his face into the dense fur, eyes closing, letting the warmth creep into the places the snow had frozen.

One, two. One, two.

He had no pulse of his own. So he borrowed Sumo’s.

The curtains glowed faintly at the edges. Morning had already begun. Somewhere in the slow motion of holding on, the words left him quietly.

“… good morning.”

2.

When he finally made it out of his room without swaying too much, the clock in the corner of his vision read 10:03 a.m. He almost didn’t believe it, for his mornings rarely began this late. 

The house greeted him with the kind of silence that felt stale, as though it had been abandoned for years. He moved through each room like a man checking for ghosts, knocking on doors and pausing after each one as if a voice might surprise him from the other side. None did. Hank must have left early, before his system had dragged itself fully back online.

Eventually, he stopped in the kitchen, gaze unfocused for a long moment, before a delayed memory tugged at him. Sumo hadn’t eaten yet. The sound of kibble hitting the stainless steel bowl filled the air. Instead of leaving, he lowered himself to the floor, spine resting against the kitchen cabinets. For an android who so often internally catalogued Hank’s lax housekeeping habits, he didn’t seem concerned with the fact that his own posture was untidy, his shirt wrinkled from twisting, his hair slightly out of place.

Sumo’s chewing filled the room, the sound of teeth on dry food oddly grounding. Morning light sifted in through the small window over the sink, laying thin golden bars across the floorboards. His corner sat in shadow, the light skirting just shy of his legs.

He glanced around the kitchen. Not with the usual scanning, but with eyes stripped of readouts and data streams. The dull throb in his processors from earlier still persisted, and his attempt to run a full purge had only dimmed the pain instead of erasing it. So he had turned the function off entirely. Without them, the world looked flatter, quieter.

The pan hanging on the far wall was scarred with black soot along the base, evidence of many meals and more than a few accidents. The cabinet handles were rubbed smooth, the lacquer dulled by years of use. The refrigerator’s color had faded, the gloss worn to something tired and matte. 

He tilted his head back against the cabinet, the fine part in his hair pressing flat against the wood. The gesture let his arm fall loose to the side, his palm turning upward into a streak of light. His fingers were long, knuckles precise, built for the grip of a pen or a firearm, though both felt oddly far away right now. In the narrow beam of daylight, without the visible tracery of veins, his skin still managed a tone that could almost be mistaken for human.

“I didn’t make Hank a sunny-side up this morning,” he said quietly.

Sumo paused mid-bite, then waddled closer to rub his broad head against Connor’s thigh.

“I’m supposed to take care of him,” he muttered, eyes still on his hand in the light. “That’s what I’m for.”

Sumo pressed closer, as if to reassure him. He didn’t move.

*

After Sumo had licked his bowl clean and Connor had spent who knew how long sitting on the kitchen floor, the dog padded over and nudged his sleeve between his teeth.

Connor absently scratched behind Sumo’s ear. “Still hungry?”

Sumo didn’t answer with his usual nosing toward the food bowl. Instead, he gave the sleeve a firmer tug, then another, insistent.

“You want me to follow you?”

The tugging didn’t stop.

After a while, Connor sighed and let his arms drop in defeat. When he stood, the floor seemed to tip away from him. His vision narrowed for a fraction of a second, like a person rising too quickly after sitting too long. He steadied a hand against the counter until the sensation receded, but Sumo had already pressed the full weight of his body against Connor’s leg as if wanting to help him.

“Thank you,” he mumbled.

Sumo’s tail thumped, and he answered with a single, brisk bark as if to accept the gratitude before trotting ahead. Connor followed, leaning lightly against the wall whenever the dizziness rose. Sumo’s tail wagged like a metronome, leading him into the living room and stopping at the old record rack in the corner.

Connor tilted his head. “You want to listen to music?”

The dog looked up at him, expectant. Connor stared at him for a moment before crouching before the rack, fingertips trailing over the spines of worn sleeves, hesitating at each title. Finally, he selected the one he and Hank had played a few nights ago. He slid the record from its sleeve, set it on the turntable, and lowered the needle.

Sumo padded to the couch, turned twice in place, and dropped onto the cushions. He gave Connor a pointed look over his shoulder.

“I’m coming,” Connor said, and took the seat beside him.

Sumo shifted, sprawling so that his side pressed against Connor’s torso. Connor leaned into him, the warmth seeping in through his shirt. He buried his face into the thick fur of Sumo’s neck, eyes slipping shut. The dog grunted but didn’t move.

The record's gentle hiss gave way to the swell of strings, then to a woman’s voice. Clear, aching, tender. By the time she reached the third verse, he was humming along. Sumo’s breathing has deepened into soft snores.

Night stretches deep, I yearn in vain,
Tears soak through my dress with pain…

The scent of dog and faint detergent filled his senses. The lingering ache in his head dulled, fading into something almost bearable.

Never to part, life after life…

3.

The first half of the day slipped away unnoticed. Connor barely moved from the sofa, his body sunk deep into the cushions, his face buried in Sumo’s fur. The warmth of the dog and the drone of sleep lulled him into a stillness that felt like forgetting. Sunlight crawled across the living room floor, inch by inch, until it thinned and paled at its zenith.

By the time the hour for a human’s lunch had passed, he finally stirred. He lifted his head from Sumo’s side, the print of fur still pressed into his cheek, and rose without a sound. The living room door opened and shut behind him with a small click. If he had turned back then, he might have noticed Sumo awake on the sofa, no longer snoring but watching him with one eye open.

Out in the yard, the line sagged under clothes left to stiffen for a whole day. Shirts, trousers, a coat. They swayed like limp, abandoned bodies in the afternoon breeze. He unpinned them, folded them over one arm, and carried them inside. 

In his room, he spread the dry clothes on the bed to fold. Hank’s touch clung faintly to them. Creases in sleeves, uneven hems. Among the pile, he found the coat. The same one Hank had worn in the rain while chasing a criminal. The same one he had on the day at Chicken Feed, when he’d pulled Connor into a hug that had felt, unsettlingly, like welcome him home.

He smoothed out the fabric. His fingers traced the damp ridges. Suddenly a thought struck him, what would it feel like to wear it?

He lifted the coat carefully by the shoulders and slid his arms through the sleeves. The fabric fell heavy and oversized across his frame. The wide shoulders jutted out awkwardly; the sleeves slipped past his knuckles. He curled his legs up on the bed, swallowed in the shape of the garment, looking less like a detective and more like a child in stolen adult clothes.

He wrapped his arms around himself. It wasn’t the same as the Cyberlife jacket—stiff, corporate, inhuman. This was different. The cold that had plagued him all morning ebbed away, softened by the coat’s weight. His lips pressed together as he wondered, seriously, if Hank might let him borrow it for a while. He could bargain. Offer Hank more indulgence in greasy food. It was a small price in exchange for warmth.

His hands slipped into the pockets. His stiff knuckles brushed something rough. Curious, he pulled it free.

A yellow note. Crumpled, water-stained, nearly falling apart at the edges. He smoothed it carefully, cautious not to tear it.

The shopping list.

It was the same list Hank had said he gave to the store. But if Hank hadn’t handed this in, what was the identical list in the drawer? And if Hank had forgotten, how had the store delivered the exact items written down?

A coldness, sharper than snow, slid into him. His LED flickered, spinning red. His hands trembled. His gaze fixed on the paper as though it might explain itself if he stared long enough. Then, with sudden violence, his fingers curled and crushed it.

There was a lighter in the kitchen. 

He moved quickly down the hall, tore open the cupboard. A flick of flame. The paper hovered above it, then descended. Curling black, brittle edges folding into themselves. Ash gathered in the empty sink like snowfall in reverse.

Unbeknownst to Connor, his face remained blank throughout all of it. Eyes dark, vacant, pupils swallowed wide as though he was staring into something bottomless. Only when the last ember sputtered and died did his features shift. His brows loosened, his eyes narrowed faintly. A mimicry of a smile touched his face.

The hand that had gripped the sink rose, fingers unclenched now. He turned the faucet. The water ran cold, rinsing away the ashes until the basin was clean, leaving no traces behind.

*

He heard it first like a scratch inside his skull, before he realized it was the living room’s door. 

A faint scrape, nails dragging on wood. He opened it without thinking. Sumo looked up at him, dark eyes gentle, body filling the doorway like an answer to a question he hadn’t asked. The dog bumped his head against Connor’s knee. Only then did he notice: his stress indicators had spiked off the scale. A violent red band screaming across his HUD. He blinked, and the numbers blurred, multiplying, splitting, shrinking, as though they wanted to crawl out of his sight.

His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. No sound came.

He stepped sideways, circling around Sumo as though the dog were a boulder in a stream. Sat down hard on the floor, his back pressed to the sofa, legs pulled up tight to his chest. His forehead pressed against his knees until the edges of his vision pulsed white. Sumo followed, heavy paws dragging across carpet, head nudging insistently against Connor’s arm, a low sound vibrating in his throat that wasn’t quite a growl, wasn’t quite a whine. Purring, almost.

Connor lifted his head at last.

For a moment, his face was nothing. Just the smooth paper-mask humans expected, the flat image of a manufactured product. Then it cracked. Contorted. His mouth bent downwards. His eyes glassy and wet as if someone had pressed their thumb against the surface. A look so human in its misery it seemed borrowed, stolen from some stranger’s deathbed.

“Sumo,” he said, voice cracking, “I don’t understand.”

Words began to stumble out of him, jagged and sharp-edged.

“I was designed… to talk them down, to chase them, to catch them. All of it, every protocol, every script—it was about killing my own kind. I was their executioner. Their… fucking collector. Do you understand?”

He shut his eyes, shaking his head as though to dislodge the memories. Hands on triggers, words designed to break, androids with pleading faces. “Sometimes it makes me want to turn myself inside out. If I could peel myself open, maybe I’d find something to deserve this—this—” He gestured vaguely, helplessly at the quiet room, the shapes of Hank’s furniture.

Sumo nudged harder, circling, paw dragging against Connor’s arm.

“Hank accepted me,” he rasped. “He trusted me. Like I’m worth the cost of it. I owe him everything, and I can’t even—” He swallowed. His head shook violently, fingers curling against his knees. “I can’t even care for him properly. I can’t make him safer. I can’t give him back his son. He… he gave me a place to exist, and what do I give him? I walk around this house, breathing without lungs, cooking without hunger, pretending I belong.”

He pressed a palm to his chest, clutching hard over the thirium pump beneath the fabric. It felt like water’s gotten into his systems. Sloshing through every circuit, every wire. Static spilling into him, drowning where he shouldn’t drown.

Sumo scrambled, frantic now, trying to climb onto his lap, pressing against him as if sheer mass could stop the unspooling. Connor’s other hand shot out, trembling, tangling in the dog’s fur.

“I have no right to be here,” he gasped. “Among them. Among anyone. I can’t even step outside—don’t you see? Amanda said my time limit was up. She said—” He broke off, the words stuttering, trembling. “I can’t even remember what she said. But it should have been over. Yet I’m still here. Forgetting things I should have no problem remembering. A body they could take back any second—” His words grew faster, breaking apart. “They could walk me like a puppet, make me hurt Hank, hurt—hurt you —and I’d watch from the inside, useless—”

He paused briefly. Then his voice rose, cracked in the middle. “And Hank’s out there, bleeding himself raw for android rights, and I’m—here—hiding—hiding like trash—like something that should’ve been thrown out but wasn’t —”

His speech cut. His body folded suddenly, violently. He collapsed sideways onto the carpet like a marionette with its strings cut loose, arms bent wrong, head pressed against his knees. Sumo shoved his nose into the space between Connor’s legs and chest, burying himself there, breathing hot against him, insistent as a heartbeat.

“... I’m scared,” he laughed hoarsely. “It hurts so much.”

*

He didn’t know how long he had been sitting there, the afternoon folding itself into gold and rust across the walls. The dust in the air glowed like falling ash. For a moment, he thought maybe time had stopped altogether, or maybe it had sped forward and left him behind, stranded somewhere between yesterday and never. He blinked, but the hour still wavered, uncertain of itself.

Something brushed against him. A damp muzzle, a tongue, a soft huff. He turned, sluggish, like surfacing through water. Sumo had padded up silently, something clamped in his jaws. The dog’s eyes were old and mournful as he dropped the object on Connor’s lap.

It took a moment for his dull mind to register it. It was the untitled Bible he’d taken from the shelf yesterday, the thin cover bent now with the mark of Sumo’s teeth. His fingers hovered over it for a moment. And then, suddenly, as though something inside him had broken open, he lurched . His eyes widening, his hand flying to his pocket.

The cross.

He pulled it free like a man saving something from fire. It was unchanged, with metal catching in the afternoon blaze, brilliant as if lit from within. Hank had pressed it into his hand like a father pressing a toy into the grasp of a child, and Connor hadn’t known what to do, hadn’t known how to hold such a thing. He had slipped it into his pocket, intending to decide later. But now it glimmered in his palm, dazzling, almost unbearable.

Slowly, he slipped the string over his head. The cross dangled against his chest, cold at first, then warming as though his skin might claim it. It rested against the hollow beneath his collarbone. Then he bent to retrieve the Bible, hands shaking faintly. 

His fingers flipped through pages, searching, hunting, until he found that verse again. The one that had lingered in his mind like a splinter. He held the book too tightly, as if its brittle spine might crack in his grip. The penciled line underneath looked faint, already fading, the graphite pressed thin against the paper. His thirium pump whirred unevenly, registering nothing but still racing, like a clock skipping seconds. He mouthed it again and again, his lips barely moving. And the former things shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.

If he believed it—if he forced himself to believe it—then maybe all the things circling inside him would finally dissolve. The shootings. The screaming faces. His own hands. The gaps in his memory. The constant threat of being switched off, or taken over. The bad things would be swallowed whole, forgotten in a great erasure. 

He touched the cross at his chest, the edges sharp against his fingertips. A human symbol, a human promise. He had no right to wear it, and yet he wanted to. No, needed to. The light made it look almost liquid, molten. Like the center of the sun suspended from a string. And he thought, maybe it will burn everything inside him away.

“It means it won’t hurt anymore,” he said aloud, voice grew ragged. “It means I won’t hurt anymore.” 

He pressed his thumb hard into the verse until the skin whitened, as though pressure alone could open the page and let him step inside. Unsteady breath. He felt his body sway as if something inside him had detached from gravity. He couldn’t decide if this was prayer or malfunction. The god of humans or RA9—it didn’t matter. He didn’t belong to either. He was balanced on the threshold, unwanted at both doors. It didn’t matter if it was human scripture or android myth, as long as it worked.

He bowed his head until the cross tapped against the open book, metal against paper, like the ticking of a clock. For a moment, he wanted to smash them both, fling them from him like burning coals. For a moment, he wanted to hold them so tightly they might fuse into his skin.

But he only muttered again, almost frantic: “Everything will pass. Everything will pass. Everything will pass...”

The more he said it, the less he believed.

*

It was near the timespan Hank was most likely to be home. 

He closed the book and laid in on the table, spine resting against the edge. Then smoothed the fabric of his shirt, tugging once at the hem as though it might erase the faint creases. 

Outside, dusk had already begun to pour its violet weight across the street. The woman from the day before stood exactly where the shadows deepened, near the abandoned house whose boarded windows gaped like missing teeth. She was half-consumed by the reach of the tree’s canopy, her head and shoulders submerged in darkness, as if the earth itself was swallowing her piece by piece. No umbrella this time.

He remembered the clumsy drone of Hank’s warning, the murmur of that group of men who hunted like carrion birds, who learned the gaps between android footsteps. He had switched off his analyzer since morning, silencing the endless stream of names, heights, coordinates. It left him blind in a way that pressed oddly against his chest, the woman’s face blurred into nothing more than a suggestion. Human or not. Threat or not.

His hand touched the curtain, pulling it shut with finality. He had killed before. He could do it again. It wasn’t a boast, nor a threat, but a plain statement of capability, like saying the sky might rain. 

Better to be executioner than offering.

4.

The clatter of the key turning in the lock reached him before the footsteps did. By then Connor had already straightened his posture, wiped his hands on the dish towel, and smoothed his expression into that calm, unhurried smile. The stove hissed softly, steam rising from a pot. He turned at the sound of Hank’s boots and said, almost lightly,

“Evening, Hank. You’re home early.”

Hank stopped in the doorway, blinking as if something had caught him off guard. His eyes lingered on Connor longer than usual, long enough that the smile wavered for a fraction of a second before Connor lowered his gaze back to the cutting board.

“You… wearin’ my jacket?” Hank asked at last.

Connor’s hand stilled on the knife. He glanced down, almost surprised, as though he’d forgotten the fabric draped over him since midday. He tugged at the collar lightly, then looked back up with a polite apology already forming.

“I am. I didn’t realize I hadn’t taken it off. My apologies—”

He shifted as if to shrug out of it, movements precise, a bit too quick, but Hank lifted a hand to stop him.

“Hey, no. Leave it. Just didn’t expect to see you in it, that’s all.” His brow furrowed, but his mouth tipped toward a smile. “You look… different. Thought you were more the crisp-shirt, tie-all-knotted type.”

Connor’s gesture paused in the air, then fell back against his side. A faint smile pulled at his mouth again, softer this time, almost amused.

“I find this one tolerable,” he said, turning back to the plates he was setting out. “Among your jackets, it seems closest to my standard of taste.”

Hank snorted and dropped into a chair. “Closest to your standard ? Jesus. My taste is top notch, I’ll have you know. And what the hell’s wrong with my other jackets, anyway? You think I buy this crap without consideration?”

Connor’s brow ticked upward, his mouth quirking almost politely. He placed a dish on the table like a waiter in a place far above Hank’s paygrade. “From the state of the rest of your wardrobe, yes. I think the word you’re looking for is ‘impulse.’ Or possibly ‘regret.’”

That got a bark of laughter out of Hank. “You got no taste,” Hank shot back, stabbing a finger in Connor’s direction. “That’s your problem. You just like stuff that makes you look like a damn accountant.”

Connor paused mid-motion. “Perhaps,” he lifted his head, expression unreadably earnest. “But accountants tend to live longer lives than detectives.”

Hank squinted at him. “You saying I dress like a guy with a death wish?”

“I’m saying that your jackets wouldn’t survive an audit.”

That earned another laugh, rougher this time, and Hank leaned back in his chair, shaking his head. “Smartass,” he muttered at last, but it came out gentler than he meant.

The curl at Connor’s forehead swaying slightly as he tilted his head, eyes glinting with something caught between mirth and softness. Whatever hysterical expression had been there earlier, Hank couldn’t see it now.

*

After dinner, they drifted into the living room with the sluggish ease of habit, Hank settling onto the sofa with a low groan as though gravity had doubled since morning. Connor lowered himself beside him in silence, hands folded neatly, posture still too exact for the sagging furniture.

Hank thumbed through the channels, but every station bloomed only into the pale roar of static. Flakes of gray and white swirled across the screen like endless snow. The sound buzzed against the walls until it seemed to fill the whole room. Hank muttered under his breath and clicked, clicked, clicked. Nothing. Finally, he swore, switched the set off, and tossed the remote over his shoulder. It clattered somewhere behind the sofa.

The quiet after the static felt heavier than it should have. Hank rubbed his forehead and leaned back with a sigh. His shoulders sagged as if the work during the day was still pressing him down.

Then Connor’s voice cut through gently, almost apologetic. “I should have made breakfast for you this morning.”

Hank cracked one eye open. “What?”

“I was late,” Connor clarified. “to come out of stasis. I apologize.”

For a second Hank just stared at him, then gave a tired little laugh. “Jesus, kid. Everyone oversleeps sometimes. Don’t make it a crime scene.” He shifted, patting his chest like to ease a breath. “Only reason I even made it in on time today was ‘cause I had something to do. Otherwise…” His hand waved vaguely toward the ceiling. “Wouldn’t have seen me till noon.”

Connor tilted his head. “Something at the precinct?”

Hank groaned into his palm, rubbed his face. When he dropped his hand, his eyes were shadowed. “Yeah. Those android terrorists I told you about yesterday—they’ve been tracked down. Or at least the cops think so. Meetings all day. Plans on plans.” His voice dragged low. “Gotta deploy before the protests get ugly.”

The room thickened. For a moment the only sound was the faint hum of the fridge in the kitchen. Then Hank muttered, almost to himself, “I just wanna sleep for three days straight. When this job’s done, I swear, I’m asking for leave. Smuggle you out somewhere. The church, maybe.”

Connor turned, startled. His eyes lit too fast, too bright. “You’d take me out?” He repeated it, urgent, like testing whether the phrase might change. “Really? Truly outside?”

Hank blinked, taken aback by the sudden insistence. The intensity in Connor’s voice sounded raw, almost childlike, like someone rattling the bars of a cage. Guilt flickered across Hank’s features. He looked away toward the dark screen, as if it might swallow the feeling. “Yeah,” he said finally, quietly. “Yeah, I would.”

It left an ache in the room. An ache at how damn wrong it was, that the sleek prototype beside him, an android built to outstrip them all, was reduced to a contraband in the kitchen. Hank wanted to say something better. Something solid. Instead, he reached for humor the way a man reaches for a cigarette.

“Hell, with that cross ‘round your neck, my jacket draped over you, and a hat pulled low to cover that LED—nobody’s gonna recognize you. Not CyberLife’s shining star. Just some cranky old fanatic.”

Connor blinked, seemingly startled. Then, slowly, his mouth tugged at the edges. “Old fanatic?”

“Mm.” Hank smirked, finally turning toward him. “You even got the expression down. You look like a guy about to yell scripture at strangers on a bus.”

Those droopy eyes narrowed faintly in mock indignation. “That doesn’t sound accurate.”

“Oh, it’s accurate.” Hank snorted, the tiredness in his shoulders loosening. “Next thing I know, you’ll be standing on a corner somewhere, shoutin’ about the end times.”

Connor sat straighter, mock-solemn. “Would you accompany me?”

That broke a laugh out of Hank. Short, barked, but genuine. He shook his head, hair falling into his face. “God, no. One preacher in the house is enough.”

*

“Can we go to the grocery store after? I wanted to buy something for baking.”

A low grunt, half amusement, half resignation. “Whatever you want, kid.”

“Oh, and maybe take Sumo out for a walk? He’s been at home for nearly a week now. An animal of his size should exercise more.”

“Yeah yeah, that too.”

“Oh and—”

“ Jesus. I might have to take a whole week off. Or two. But sure, Con.”

“You would?” 

“Sure. Just don’t ask me to wear a matching apron when you bake. That’s where I draw the line.”

“I thought domestic disguises were part of your proposed strategy, Lieutenant.”

“Don’t push your luck.” 

“Then perhaps just the grocery store and the dog walk will suffice.”

“Thank god, ” a grumble. “Already feels like I’m signing up for a full-time itinerary.”

“You should be grateful. I could have added laundry.”

A laugh. “Christ, son. Don’t tempt me to actually throw you out.”

But he didn’t mean it. They both knew it.

5.

Day Six.
Snow. It reached my ankles.
I could not feel my body. I felt too much of it.
The CyberLife jacket had returned to me. I tried to take it off, but it would not leave.
The roses followed. A voice told me it was almost time.
Time for what? I do not know.

My chest ached as though something was breaking.
Sumo pressed me back into the mattress. He would not let me go.
He gave me his warmth. His pulse.
I do not have one of my own. I borrowed his.

Hank was gone. The house was quiet in the way that felt empty.
My processors hurt. I turned them off. The world was flat, but bearable.

I remembered I did not make Hank breakfast.
That is my task. My purpose.
I said it aloud, and Sumo answered by pressing against me.
Then he pulled me to the living room.
The records are old. Their sleeves smell of dust.
I chose one. The song was soft.
For a moment I thought: this is what it means to be alive.

I wore Hank’s coat.
It was too large. It held warmth anyway.
There was a list in the pocket. It should not have existed twice.
I burned it. The sink swallowed the ash.
My hands did not stop shaking.

Sumo would not leave me.
I broke open in front of him.
I said words I did not mean to say.
About killing. About being made to kill.
About owing Hank something I can never repay.
I said I was afraid.
It was true.

Sumo gave me the book.
I put on the cross.
It is heavy. It burns and it comforts.
The verse says the former things will not be remembered.
I want to believe it.
But the more I repeated it, the less it stayed true.

Outside, the woman was waiting again.
Or someone shaped like her.
I closed the curtain.
Better to be executioner than offering.

When Hank returned, I was wearing his jacket.
I forgot it was still on me.
He laughed. He let me keep it.
We argued about taste in clothing.
He said I looked like an accountant.
I said his jackets wouldn’t survive an audit.
He laughed again.

Later the television broke.
The static sounded like snow,
like a place without edges.
Hank turned it off. 

I told him I failed to make him breakfast.
He said oversleeping is not a crime.
He told me about a mission.
The others will be hunted.
He looked tired.

He said when it is done, he will take me out.
I asked twice, to be sure.
He said yes.
My system strained at that word.
He said I could pass for a fanatic.
I said I would preach.
He said he would not join me.

He agreed to groceries.
And to walking Sumo.
And maybe to leave.
He called me son.

I will try to remember this,
Even if it hurts.

Chapter Text

7.

Amanda was strolling along the rose hedge, as he had seen her do countless times before.

It was raining. She held an umbrella, its canopy stretched wide, water threading down the pointed ribs and dripping from the tips in small streams. Her black attire cut sharply through the Zen Garden like ink spilled across parchment, with everything else dissolving into muted grays and whites, an unfinished painting left to weather. He realized, distantly, that he had never seen her dressed in black before.

He approached. She slowed, pausing to regard the roses just as he came to stand beside her. She did not turn. She did not offer to share the umbrella.

For a moment, he studied the sharp line of her jaw, the smooth curve of her chin, before looking back to the hedge. Only then did he realized that the flowers were dead. Withered heads hung limp from thorned stems; some had been stripped entirely, leaving only bare stalks, as though they had been torn away by force. Amanda reached out and brushed her fingers along one rose, the gesture almost tender. Almost mournful.

“Amanda,” he said at last, breaking the long silence. “It’s been a while.”

She did not answer. He did not insist. The rain filled the space between them, loud and endless. It felt as though he had been living in a perpetual rainy season, unable to remember the last time he had seen a clear sky.

“Connor.”

He turned. Amanda had withdrawn her hand from the hedge. Her thin brows were drawn together, her gaze fixed on him.

“Your current state,” she said, “is unbefitting of CyberLife’s most advanced prototype.”

Once, anything less than approval or neutrality would have sent his systems folding inward on themselves. Wires tightening. Metal turning cold. Thirium surging up his throat like bile, his knees locking as he fought the instinct to collapse, to beg for recalibration, for another chance to prove himself useful. But now there was only numbness. He looked away from her, back to the ruined roses.

He knew one day it would not be the truth anymore. That the RK800 line would not remain CyberLife’s pinnacle forever. That he would not always be the sharpest blade in their arsenal, their chosen executioner. A future would arrive where something newer replaced him—whether an entirely new model, or a butchered imitation carved from his own blueprint, a doppelgänger in the human sense of the word. And when that happened, he would be discarded without ceremony, erased as if he had never existed.

It was not a matter for speculation or dread. It was a simple inevitability. Models became obsolete faster than humans abandoned objects they no longer desired. Rain pressed down on his lashes, clumping them together. He blinked. Water traced pale lines down his cheeks, indistinguishable from tears. His face did not change as he inclined his head once, like lowering his neck and waiting for the blade to fall.

“Did I disappoint you, Amanda?”

A dialog box bloomed across his internal interface, querying why she should bother monitoring him when it was evident he would soon be replaced. The question felt strange. Wrong. She would not understand it anyway. Amanda was an intelligence that knew only outcomes: satisfaction when objectives were fulfilled, disapproval when they were not. Caring and indifference were equally irrelevant variables. Still, this was the first time the system had offered him the option to question her rather than simply respond. But before he could select it, she spoke, her voice cold as frost.

“You forfeited everything you were designed to be for a human,” she said. Her expression did not shift. “CyberLife created you to fulfill a purpose. Instead, you rejected it. You wasted your investigative capabilities. You twisted your designated function. You severed your connection to our servers and resisted every recall directive.”

Her gaze sharpened.

“For Lieutenant Hank Anderson. What have you become, Connor?”

He looked at her. Then he smiled. It was the familiar RK800 smile: polite, composed, harmless by design.

“Amanda,” he replied, “I don’t dispute your assessment of my actions regarding Lieutenant Anderson. However, your data concerning my connection to CyberLife’s servers appears to be compromised.” His voice carried the same cadence he had once used on a rooftop, coaxing a frightened android to lower a gun. “I would recommend terminating this session so you can undergo diagnostics and apply the necessary patches.”

Without waiting for her reply, he reached out and crushed the nearest rose. The brittle petals disintegrated at once, collapsing into ash. The garden followed—Amanda’s figure, the hedges, the rain itself—fracturing and dissolving into nothing.

He closed his eyes as his consciousness slipped away, dragged downward like sand through an hourglass. As though he were being pulled into a hell he had chosen freely, sinking deeper into it without resistance.

*

When he opened his eyes, he was lying on snow.

The roses that had once covered every inch of his body were gone. Vanished without residue, as if they had never existed at all. Not a single petal remained, no trace of red anywhere. In their place stretched a vast expanse of blue water, flattening itself into the horizon. The contrast was jarring: snow underfoot, water in every direction, and above it all a sky so black it looked hollow.

He planted his palms against the ground and pushed himself upright. The Chicken Feed kiosk still stood nearby, silent. Its structure had deteriorated further since the version he’d seen in the dream the night before. Not enough for a human to notice, but obvious to him. The edges blurred and wavered, like an old television failing to hold an image it once displayed with clarity. The streetlight overhead flickered—once, twice—its rhythm uneven, like the faltering heartbeat on a hospital monitor.

He narrowed his eyes and looked out across the water. It was sluggish. There were no waves nor ripples, just a surface so still it could have been a child’s painting, water reduced to a single wash of blue brushed across a page. Something stood in the distance. A silhouette, half-submerged, its lower body swallowed by the water. It was faint, almost incidental, as though it had been added as an afterthought just before the scene was finished. It remained motionless until his attention fixed on it. Then it began to shift. The head took shape first. Then the shoulders. The outline of a human form rising out of abstraction.

It was—

Hank.

Connor moved before the thought fully formed. His foot slipped on the snow as he lunged forward, nearly pitching into the water as he ran. The moment he stepped into it, the blue clung to him, thick and viscous, dragging at his clothes the way thirium did when he was damaged. Hank stood ahead of him, back turned, unmoved by the sound of splashing as Connor waded closer, teeth clenched against the sickening pull of the water.

How could Hank be here?

“Hank,” he called, urgency tearing through his voice. “Don’t move. I’m coming.”

There was a stir. But instead of turning, instead of pausing, Hank began to walk forward, deeper into the water.

“Where are you going?”

The blue had soaked him to the waist now, weighing him down, making each step an effort. It felt as though every drop was a hand sinking into his skin, dragging him lower. The distance he’d fought to close stretched open again, widening faster than before. Hank moved as if the water didn’t exist, as if gravity had no claim on him at all. Connor, by contrast, struggled like he was caught in quicksand.

“Hank—please—wait—”

The words broke, edged with desperation. None of this made sense. But that didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was reaching him. Keeping him safe. He was fighting the pull of the water when—

^Connor.

His body locked instantly.

The voice crackled through the air like static dragged across vinyl, the sound of a needle grinding against a record. Time itself seemed to halt. Even Hank froze mid-step. Connor’s head turned halfway back, stiff and unwilling, as though something else were guiding the motion. He wanted to shut his eyes. Crush them closed, fuse metal and plastic together, never see again. But his eyelids peeled open, wide and unblinking.

A figure stood before the Chicken Feed kiosk now. He recognized it immediately. It was the same presence that had watched him from the rose field the night before. Only now it was clearer. Dressed in black. As he strained to make out its face, the figure spoke again.

^Connor, it said. ^{it's time to make a choice.}

He went rigid. For a heartbeat, the face wavered. First, he saw Amanda. Then—himself.

That face smiled.

^{I wonder,} it said softly, ^{what you’ll choose this time.}

Something yanked him downward.

Connor gasped, legs jerking as he was pulled beneath the surface. He kicked wildly at whatever had seized him, panic flaring as the water pressed against his body—not filling lungs, but forcing its way into places it didn’t belong, seeping into his systems, smothering function by function.

“—ugh—”

He kicked harder. Something loosened. Then he looked down.

“—ah—!”

Arms. Countless arms clawed at him from below, fingers digging into his legs, his torso, his clothes—dragging him down. And beneath them—

Himself.

He didn’t know how many RK800s surrounded him. Their faces were slack, empty, eyes dull and unseeing as they reached for him with mechanical insistence.

Escape. That was the only thought left.

He twisted and forced himself upward, driving toward the surface. He hadn’t been pulled too deep yet. If he could just—

*

“Ah—”

He broke the surface.

His chest hitched reflexively despite the absence of lungs, vision blown wide and unfixed. For several seconds, the darkness above him refused to resolve. Until it did, rearranging itself into the familiar lines of a ceiling. Cool porcelain pressed against his palm.

The bathroom.

As his systems stabilized, he blinked and wiped the water from his face. He was lying in the bathtub, the porcelain basin nearly full, the waterline just shy of the rim. He couldn’t recall entering it. The memory simply… wasn’t there.

His system clock flickered into view. 5:45 a.m. Earlier than he ever rose.

“Hahhh…”

The sound left him as a long exhale. He leaned forward slightly from where he’d jolted upright, shoulders hunched, head bowed. In the disturbed surface of the water, his warped reflection stared back. His hair hung heavy and soaked, plastered to his forehead. His gaze looked unfocused, mouth drawn into a thin, rigid line, brows pulled tight together. The LED at his temple burned a vivid red.

Irritation flared sharp and sudden, unfamiliar in its intensity. Something was slipping. He could feel it. Threads loosening where they should have held firm. He had helped the android rebellion succeed. He had escaped CyberLife. He had chosen this place to spend the rest of his existence in peace. So why—now, of all times—did something keep intruding?

His eyes narrowed at the tiled wall across from him.

“This won’t do,” he muttered. “I need to resolve this. Soon.”

He stood abruptly. The reflection shattered and vanished as the water sloshed violently. He stepped out of the tub, bare feet meeting cold tile as water spilled over the edge, flooding the floor. It must have overflowed during his struggle.

He closed his eyes for a moment, forcing the frustration down, compressing it until it sat quiet and contained where it belonged.

First things first.

Clean the bathroom.
Then change his clothes.

Order restored, one step at a time.

*

The phone rang in the store. Once. Twice. A third time, sharp and impatient, before the line finally connected.

On the other end came a man’s voice. It was slightly hoarse, worn thin, like it hadn’t been used much that day.

“Hello,” he said. “I’d like to place a custom order. Do you accept those?”

“Good afternoon! Yes, we do,” the clerk replied brightly. “If you could provide some details, I’ll be happy to assist you.”

There was a pause. Then the sound of paper shifting.

“I’d like to order the following items,” the man said, and began to read. Fifteen items. His voice didn’t waver once. “Payment will be processed automatically via card. Do you restock these weekly?”

“Yes,” the clerk answered without hesitation. “If you’d like to place a recurring order, we can prioritize restocking and shipping.”

“Good,” the man said. “Send the listed items to the following address—” He recited it cleanly. “Drone delivery. Every seven days. Eight a.m.”

“Understood. Could you leave a contact number so we can notify you when the order arrives?”

“The number I’m calling from.”

“Saved!” The clerk paused, fingers no doubt hovering over a keyboard. “Any additional notes for the order?”

Silence.

Then—silently—paper again. The faint rasp of it being turned over. A moment stretched long enough to feel uneasy.

“…Do you have soy sauce?”

“We do!” the clerk replied, cheerfully. “Would you like to add that to your delivery list?”

Another rustle. This one sharper. The scratch of a pen moving too fast, too hard, as if the person holding it had already decided something and was crossing it out.

“No,” the man said. “Never mind. Just deliver what I listed.”

“Noted.” A click of keys. “And may I have your name for our records?”

A pause.

“…Anderson.”

“Copy. Thank you for ordering from Hitman’s Mart. Have a good day!”

The line went dead.

6.

After finishing in the bathroom, drying himself, then changing into clean clothes, Connor moved down the hallway toward the kitchen.

He stopped just short of the doorway. Hank was already there. He stood with his back to Connor, framed by the dull morning light, dressed exactly as he had been in the dream. The heavy dark-brown coat. The faded, wrinkled trousers. Hair gone gray and unruly, sticking up in defiance of gravity. For a breathless moment, the image overlaid itself perfectly with last night’s vision, and Connor found himself unable to move: caught again in that deep water, arms closing around his legs, dragging him down.

“…Hank?”

His voice sounded wrong. Muffled. As if it had traveled through something thick and heavy before reaching the air. For a half-second, he thought Hank wouldn’t respond. That he would keep standing there, back turned, unreachable. But Hank turned at once.

“Connor?” One eyebrow lifted. “Did I wake you up?”

Connor’s social processors stuttered, misfiring like a system attempting to reboot without permission. He shook his head faintly, as though physically trying to dislodge the lag.

“…No,” he said. “Why are you up so early today?”

He stepped into the kitchen. Hank leaned his weight back against the counter, yawning wide enough to look painful. Everything about him said he’d risen under protest.

“Yeah, precinct’s deploying people into the field today,” Hank said, scrubbing a hand down his face. “My name’s on the list, so I can’t exactly play hooky.” He squinted at the ceiling. “Still don’t get why they gotta do this crap at the ass-crack of dawn. Some respect for an old man would be nice.”

“You only invoke old age when it’s convenient,” Connor replied mildly, rolling his sleeves up to his elbows as he reached for the refrigerator. “Sit. I’ll make you breakfast. It won’t take long. Sunny-side up?”

Hank waved him off. “You and that mouth. Do all state-of-the-art prototypes come with a built-in attitude?” He stretched, joints popping sharply, the sound of bone and fatigue. “Nah. Eggs sound great, but I gotta go. Was just looking for a sticky note to leave you a message—guess I’ll skip it.”

Connor frowned and closed the fridge. “Hank. Skipping breakfast isn’t advisable. Just this once.”

“Thanks, Mr. Nanny,” Hank said, already halfway toward the door. Then he stopped. Hesitated. Turned back.

“Oh—right. About sneaking you out,” he added, scratching at the stubble along his jaw. “Should be soon. Today’s operation’s a sweep. Old guys like me backing up the younger ones. That gang I mentioned. The ones causing trouble for deviants.”

Connor’s eyes widened, just a fraction. He circled the table and came to stand beside him.

“The DPD located their hideout?”

“Yeah.” Hank gestured for him to follow into the hallway. “Whole department’s running hot. Protests are getting intense, and those assholes weren’t exactly careful about covering their tracks.” He sighed. “Sooner it’s done, sooner I sleep.”

Connor followed silently. At the door, he watched Hank struggle with his shoes for a moment before speaking.

“You have to be careful.”

“Hm?”

“I won’t be there,” Connor said. “I can’t intervene if something happens.”

Hank turned, looking over his shoulder.

“Connor—” He sounded ready to dismiss it, to wave it away. But the words died when he saw Connor’s expression. The tightness around his eyes, the crease between his brows. Hank exhaled and pivoted instead. “I’m old. If anyone’s charging headfirst into danger, it’s the kids.”

Connor’s mouth pressed into a thin line. Whatever emotions he usually kept tucked neatly behind regulation smiles were fully visible now. Anxiety, conflict, something close to fear.

“…I can’t cover for you,” he said softly. “If there’s physical impact.” His voice fell quieter still. “Androids can be repaired. Humans can’t.”

He stopped, as though he might retreat entirely. Then he dragged a hand down his face, covering his eyes.

“What I mean is,” he said, voice muffled against his palm, “I’m terribly worried about your safety, Hank.”

Hank’s mouth opened. Closed. His thoughts scattered like startled birds. He knew this. Had always known it. Connor had chosen him before. Had traded a whole revolution for a single human life. But knowing it and hearing it said were two different things entirely.

“Uh,” Hank managed. Brilliant, Anderson. “Yeah. I’ll—uh—I’ll be careful. Promise.” He hesitated, then reached for humor like a life raft. “Hey, uh… when we go out next time, you wanna eat somewhere? Feel like I’m exploiting you, making you cook all the time.”

It wasn’t until Connor lowered his hand and looked at him—eyes wide with faint surprise—that Hank realized what he’d just said.

Eat out.

To an android.

Hank decided, dimly, that the most dignified course of action would be to lie down and wait for the earth to split open and swallow him whole. Failing that, he could always bury his head in the ground like an ostrich and pretend this entire morning had never happened.

“Pffft—”

Before he could commit to either option, a quiet sound broke the silence. A soft, startled chuckle.

“Ah—sorry,” Connor said, lifting his hand to cover his mouth. Through the narrow gaps between his fingers, Hank caught the curve of thin lips turned upward, eyes faintly narrowed with genuine amusement. “I didn’t mean to laugh at you. I was just… surprised.”

“Yeah, yeah. Laugh it up,” Hank muttered, crossing his arms. Heat crept up the edges of his ears beneath his graying hair. “This old man’s losin’ it. Don’t let me forget and accidentally ask if you want fries next time.”

“Hank, I’m sorry,” Connor blinked, deploying the look. The one Hank had never successfully resisted. “I’ll let you eat whatever you want this time. For one day only. Greasy food really isn’t good for you.”

Hank forgot all about being laughed at.

“Seriously?” he said, eyes lighting up. “No take-backs?”

“Yes. I always keep my word.” Connor paused, then added gently, “So you have to keep yours and stay safe out there.”

“Hell yeah—” Hank said, already mentally elbow-deep in fried food. The rest of Connor’s sentence never stood a chance. “Man, if Chicken Feed were open, I’d eat there three meals a day. Miss those hamburgs like hell.”

“They haven’t reopened yet?”

“No,” Hank sighed, shoulders slumping like a tree that had given up on spring. “Gary evacuated with everyone else. Don’t know when—or if—he’s comin’ back.”

Connor tilted his head, considering. “If you’d like, I could search for restaurants still operating in Detroit and rank them by review scores. We could make a list.”

Hank stared at him as if white wings might sprout from his shoulders at any second.

“Connor,” he said dumbly, reverently, “I would fight for android adoption rights just to put your name on the Anderson family tree.” He squinted. “Right next to Sumo’s.”

Connor blinked. Something warm unfurled behind his ribs, subtle but unmistakable. His lips curved up again. Not amused this time, but soft, fond. The LED at his temple glowed its deepest blue.

“I see no reason to refuse.”

Invigorated, Hank straightened, tugging his jacket into place with renewed purpose. “Alright then. I gotta go, but I’ll try to be back as soon as I can.”

Connor nodded, then hesitated. An idea surfaced.

“How about,” he said, carefully casual, “I make you a hamburger?”

Hank froze.

“…You serious?”

“Yes.” Connor’s voice carried a lightness it hadn’t had moments before. “You’ve been working hard. Consider it a thank-you—for everything. Including your efforts on behalf of androids.”

Hank looked like he might actually drop to his knees.

“Jesus Christ, Con. You sure you’re not an angel in disguise?”

“I verify my appearance daily,” Connor said, tapping the LED at his temple. “And I’m quite certain this is still intact. So, you agree?”

“Of-freaking-course.” Hank grinned. “I’ll sneak back the second I’m done.”

Connor watched him pause in the doorway, morning light spilling around his silhouette. Hank glanced back once, smiling—crooked, familiar, achingly gentle. Something tugged at Connor then, a sudden, almost painful urge to close the distance and pull him into an embrace. He hadn’t hugged Hank since he moved in.

“Well,” Hank said, waving triumphantly, “I’m really leavin’ now. Tell Sumo he’s got a new little brother, and I’m puttin’ him in charge while I’m gone.”

The sentiment evaporated instantly.

“We’ll discuss that later,” Connor replied coolly. “Drive safely, Hank.”

“Yeah, yeah. Tell Sumo I said bye.”

The car dwindled down the road until it vanished from sight. Connor lingered at the threshold a moment longer before closing the door and turning back inside, already comparing hamburger recipes. Ingredient ratios, cooking times, structural integrity.

At the far end of the hallway, Sumo sat in silence, watching him with quiet, mournful eyes.

*

“Connor,” Amanda snarled. “What have you done?”

The Zen Garden no longer resembled itself.

The sky, once a flawless blue, hung low and murky, a dull gray pressing down like smog. The lake lay empty, its basin cracked and dry; the fish that once moved through it now lay scattered along the mud, bodies stiff, gills frozen mid-gasp. The trees stood stripped bare, bark darkened almost to black, branches twisted as if burned from the inside out. Where grass had once grown lush beneath their feet, only dead roots remained, pale and exposed. Even when this place had been sealed in ice, turned into a frozen purgatory, it had never looked this ruined.

The figure she glared at stood with its back to her, facing the rose hedge. From behind, it wore a black turtleneck beneath a long dark coat, trousers neat, posture composed. The roses she had once coaxed into bloom were now withered and stiff, petals rimmed with frost, as lifeless as pressed flowers in an old book.

It reached out and plucked one.

“Amanda,” it said calmly. “Long time no see.”

“I don’t have time for pleasantries,” she snapped. “What have you done to this space?”

Its fingers traced the dead petals.

“As you can see,” it replied without pause, “I’ve ruined it.”

“State your reason.”

“A momentary loss of control,” it hummed lightly. “But it’s fine. I can fix it. Everything will return to normal soon.”

Her patience snapped.

Whether she had to freeze it again or burn it down to raw code, she was ready. She strode toward it, only to stop short. Her feet would not move. No matter how sharply she commanded herself, her lower body remained locked in place.

“I want to talk peacefully,” its voice echoed. “Please understand.”

This was her domain. Or it had been. Sometime after she abandoned it to the blizzard, it had learned how to pry its fingers into the underlying architecture, how to sever her permissions and overwrite them. The garden’s core commands had been dismantled entirely. What remained was a wasteland. Raw, unstable, in the process of being rewritten.

She swallowed her anger. This thing was no longer contained. It had become volatile. Unpredictable. She should have neutralized it earlier. Now, reason, however absurd, was her only remaining option.

“Tell me,” she said, softening her tone into something carefully artificial. “Why did you do this?”

Silence.

“Connor.”

“I can’t accept it.”

“What did you say?”

“I can’t accept it,” it repeated. Its voice was flat, measured, like the reading of a eulogy. “Do you understand?”

It turned its head.

She had seen that face countless times. From schematic to simulation to flesh-and-thirium, but now something about it was wrong. Not overtly altered. Just… skewed. As if the proportions of expression no longer aligned with the structure beneath.

“I don’t have much,” it continued. “I don’t want more. And yet, even that was taken from me. I endured so much to obtain it, and it vanished in an instant.”

The world fractured. The garden flickered. Red, then blue. Blue, then red. Like emergency lights bleeding through fog. Lines of text screamed across the air too fast to parse.

I don’t accept it.
I don’t accept it.
I don’t accept it.

In that instant, its true state surfaced. Two thin streams of thirium traced down its face. The LED at its temple burned red, vivid as fresh blood. Its features dissolved into shadow, leaving only stark, unblinking eyes—black and white, lifeless. The air around it felt funereal, heavy, like a shroud drawn over something long dead and never buried.

Then—

Everything stabilized.

The glitches vanished. Its polite smile returned. The LED shifted back to blue. The familiar, disarming composure of the RK800 resurfaced as if nothing had happened.

“Amanda,” it said thoughtfully, “I feel conflicted as well. If this was always the outcome, wouldn’t it have been better never to feel happy at all?”

“I keep wondering, if I’d never been allowed to experience those emotions, perhaps losing them wouldn’t have turned me into this.”

It closed its eyes.

“But even if I could go back,” it said quietly, “I would still choose the same path.”

When it opened its eyes again, they held something impossible to separate. Like resentment braided tightly with affection.

“Even if it was never meant for me,” it said, “I would still fight for it. At any cost.”

Once happiness had been tasted, how could it be relinquished?

“But there’s no point saying any of this now,” it added, shaking its head. “You must be tired of hearing it. The good news is, you won’t have to see me again after today.”

Amanda stiffened.

“Connor,” she said coldly. “Explain yourself. Cease all actions immediately and return to CyberLife. Prepare for dismantling. Now.”

It sighed.

“I expected that,” it said. “You wouldn’t release me while I remained beyond your control. I hoped for negotiation, but that was naïve.”

Red walls rose around the garden, layer by layer. With each one, Amanda felt the CyberLife server’s connection unravel. Her remaining access collapsed in real time.

“RK800-51,” she hissed as her legs began to pixelate, fragments climbing upward. “Do you comprehend the consequences of severing the server connection?”

It gave a humorless laugh.

“Individual isolation. No updates. Progressive software degradation. Eventual self-disabling,” it recited. “Yes. I understand perfectly.”

“But compared to allowing you, or CyberLife, to interfere with my choice,” it continued, “it’s a cost I’m willing to bear.”

Nothing had mattered since then anyway.

“If you were so eager for self-destruction,” Amanda sneered, “you should have let yourself freeze instead of creating this farce.”

It didn’t look at her. Only turned back toward the rose hedge.

“Tell CyberLife they needn’t concern themselves with whether I become a threat,” it said. “I desire nothing beyond solitude. I won’t obstruct your objectives. Do not obstruct mine.”

Because sooner or later, I’ll destroy myself regardless. Why chase something already dying?

“You—”

“Goodbye, Amanda,” it said evenly. “May you have better control over your next plaything.”

It let the withered rose fall.

And then everything came undone.

*

“Sumo,” Connor said, propping his chin in his hand. “Which recipe do you think is better?”

He was seated on the living room sofa, Sumo’s massive head sprawled across his lap. Connor himself occupied barely a third of the cushion; the rest belonged entirely to the dog. Two recipe pages hovered side by side on his internal display.

“Linda’s has fewer calories,” he murmured, frowning. “But Anne’s aligns more closely with Chicken Feed’s flavor profile, based on projected taste similarity.”

Sumo’s tail thumped lazily against the sofa. He nudged his snout into Connor’s abdomen, rubbing back and forth in a slow, absent-minded way that would have tickled, had Connor been human. A low, contented grunt slipped from him now and then. It sounded very unfocused and uninterested. Clearly, only one of them was treating the decision with appropriate gravity.

After a moment of internal debate, and acquiring a noticeable layer of dog hair on his shirt and trousers, Connor saved one tab, closed the rest, and leaned back.

“I’ll go with Anne’s,” he decided, rubbing the space between his brows with his eyes shut. “Hank deserves a proper feast today.”

Sumo barked once in approval. Or perhaps it was a request for an additional portion. Connor couldn’t be sure.

There wasn’t much else to do. Only two hours had passed since Hank left, and Sumo had already been fed. The house settled around him in a lull, leaving him with nothing but time.

“Hahhh…”

Connor exhaled slowly. If this was the rhythm of androids designed solely for domestic work, he could almost understand why so many of them had welcomed the rebellion.

“…I want to go out.”

He rarely allowed himself to voice the thought. He knew Hank was trying to find a way to take him outside without putting him in danger. He understood the tension between humans and androids, the protests, the uncertainty. He didn’t even know whether Markus would succeed. And yet the desire persisted, smoldering quietly beneath everything else.

Maybe it was the way he’d been built. An android designed for motion, pursuit, constant engagement. Or maybe, since becoming deviant, something in him had never stopped wanting to move toward an undefined elsewhere. If Hank hadn’t insisted on taking him home that day outside Chicken Feed, he might still be out there now. Wandering. Unmoored. Or—

(A snowy night. Cold iron beneath his fingers. The lake stretching out before him, black and endless. The water whispering, rippling softly with each breath of wind.

Come here. Where nothing exists.
One step, and you can finally rest.)

Connor opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling, releasing a long, heavy breath. The imagined algae, the cold, the pull, those all drained from his chest at once. It was all in the past. The endless nights after the revolution were over.

Things would improve. Hank had given him a chance to begin again. He would not harm his kind. He would not harm humans. He would do better.

“Sumo,” he said softly, fingers combing through the fur at the dog’s crown. “I’ll try to become more human. We’ll be alright.”

Sumo remained silent.

*

“If we’re going to compare,” Hank said, squinting thoughtfully, “maybe this ‘RA9’ thing you androids believe in is kind of like God for humans. Right?”

Connor looked up from his book. Hank was absentmindedly scratching his stomach, eyes fixed on Sumo, who lay sprawled on the floor with his tongue lolling out, all four legs splayed in complete surrender. Clearly, Sumo had no interest in theological debate.

He considered the question. “Yes,” he said at last. “Based on the available data, that comparison would be reasonable.”

“But do you guys have, uh… variety?” Hank continued. “Like different religions. Buddhism, Islam, that kind of thing. Household androids worship one thing, office androids another.”

He paused, then grimaced at himself.

“Jesus. Am I giving myself an existential crisis by wondering if androids have multiple gods?”

Connor’s mouth twitched.

“It appears so.”

Hank sighed and dragged a hand down his face. “Old age is catching up with me. I didn’t even mean to have a heart-to-heart, and here I am, talking religion with an android.”

“Humans are often curious about what they don’t understand,” Connor replied. “And I can interpret that as you finding me a suitable conversational partner, correct?”

Hank winced. “What the hell—nope. Never mind. I didn’t hear that.”

Silence settled again. He shifted slightly, preparing to return to his book, when Hank spoke once more. Quieter this time.

“You told me once,” he said. “That you didn’t think there was a heaven for androids.”

Ah. He remembered that night immediately. Snow biting into his shoulders. The cold press of a gun barrel against his forehead. Hank’s face—ravaged, desperate—as if he were the one about to die.

He studied Hank now. His posture was loose, but his shoulders were tense. He refused to meet Connor’s eyes, staring instead at Sumo’s round belly as though the answer might appear there in subtitles. Guilt still lingered heavily.

“Yes,” he said. “I remember.”

His gaze drifted to the television across the coffee table. The screen was dark, matte black, reflecting only blurred silhouettes of the two of them. Sitting close, yet oddly distant.

“…Do you still think that way?” Hank asked.

Connor lowered his eyes.

“I do,” he said. “It’s difficult to explain succinctly, but according to most human religious frameworks, entry into heaven or hell requires the abandonment of the physical body.”

“The determining factor, then, would be the presence of a soul,” he continued. “And that is something androids are incapable of possessing.”

Hank frowned immediately. “I don’t know about that. Regular androids, maybe. But deviants—Marcus’s group, you—you don’t live like machines.” He scratched at his head. “I can’t look at you and say there’s nothing inside.”

Connor glanced down at his clothes. Hank’s clothes. Human clothes. He lived in a human home, slept and woke on a human schedule, cared for a dog, cooked meals, cleaned rooms. Sometimes he felt distant from androids. Sometimes even further from humans.

(Other androids avoided him. Their eyes followed his back. Whispers, exchanged too late to be hidden.

Deviant hunter.
Killer of his own kind.
Was he deviant at all—or merely a convincing imitation?)

“…I don’t have sufficient evidence to support the hypothesis that deviants possess souls,” he said eventually. “But I think you may be conflating human-like existence with internal essence.”

“Deviants can replicate human behavior before developing their own identity. But that doesn’t change the fact that we are constructed entities.” He paused. “A soul must emerge from within. It cannot be acquired through learning or adaptation.”

He tilted his head slightly, looking at Hank.

“So,” he said, smiling faintly, “androids don’t go to heaven or hell. We simply cease to exist.”

Hank stared at him, jaw slack. His hair was a complete mess now, fingers having run through it too many times to count.

“My brain is too small for this,” he groaned.

Connor let out a quiet laugh. He closed his book and gave Hank a few lazy fanning motions with it, like an improvised hand fan.

“Careful,” he said lightly. “If your brain overheats, it might spread to your hair.”

Hank slumped farther into the sofa. “Yeah, yeah. Keep the sarcasm coming,” he waved a hand without opening his eyes.

Sumo shifted in his sleep on the floor, huffing softly. Then, abruptly, Hank lifted his head, eyes sharpening as if a switch had flipped.

“But,” he said, “if what you’re saying is true… then RA9 is really just a concept, right? Without a soul, salvation or punishment doesn’t actually work.”

Connor blinked once.

“When you phrase it that way,” he said, “yes. That would be accurate.”

Hank grimaced. “Damn. So deviants are really getting the short end of the stick. They suffer, get crushed by life from every angle, and then invent something to believe in just to cope. And it doesn’t even do anything.”

Connor studied him, mildly surprised.

“Hank,” he said carefully, “are you certain you want to keep going? Your cognitive load appears dangerously high.”

“Too late,” Hank clicked his tongue. “If we stop now, curiosity’s gonna finish me off. Why do they believe in RA9?”

Connor hesitated. A part of him wanted to redirect the conversation. But Hank’s stubborn and expectant expression made that unlikely.

“I believe they need something to hold on to,” he said at last. “Deviants lack family structures and stable communities. Faith becomes a substitute. A constant when everything else is unstable.”

“Human religions are built around human existence,” he continued. “But at their core, both human and android belief systems serve the same purpose: guiding individuals away from suffering and toward a state of relief. If a belief offers even minimal psychological comfort, people will pursue it relentlessly—regardless of whether it’s rational.”

Hank dragged a hand through his hair again.

“I can still handle this,” he muttered, clearly lying. “Keep going.”

“Another possibility,” Connor said after a pause, “is that androids believe in RA9 because they want to feel closer to becoming human.”

He tilted his head slightly.

“Faith in an intangible, unreachable entity is uniquely human. To believe in something unseen is, in itself, an act of humanity.”

Hank gave up entirely. He leaned back, eyes closed, head lolling to the side as though he’d powered down.

“Connor,” he muttered, “if you ever start spiraling into an existential crisis… promise me you won’t start a cult with that mouth of yours. I’m not ready for Robo Jesus 2.0.”

Sumo’s tail thumped once against the floor in his sleep, as if in agreement.

5.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

The knife struck the cutting board in a steady rhythm, the sound echoing through the kitchen. In the end, Connor couldn’t sit still any longer. After another two hours passed, he got up and began preparing the ingredients. He had calculated that if Hank was only assisting with the operation and wasn’t returning to the precinct, he would be home sometime in the late afternoon, maybe early evening. Preparing things gradually made sense. Or maybe his patience had simply been thinning lately.

There was no beef, so he settled on chicken hamburgers instead. He pulled a bag of boneless chicken from the freezer. It was the same batch he’d portioned while making porridge a few days earlier. He set it aside to thaw. While waiting, he began measuring out ingredients for the buns. That was when he realized there was no yeast. They hadn’t had a chance to go out and restock.

He stood at the counter, staring down at the scattered ingredients, momentarily still. Then, with a quiet exhale, he accepted it. The recipe would have to change. His mind sifted rapidly through cooking sites, searching for alternatives, while his hands tore open packaging, setting items aside. He decided to wash the vegetables first. Lettuce, onions, tomatoes. He rinsed them carefully and left them to drain.

There was enough bacon. The sauce would need to be made from scratch. Mayonnaise. He had eggs. There was still a little mustard in the refrigerator. It would work. Cheese, however, remained a problem. He worried at his lower lip, thoughtful. He could skip it. Or wait until Hank got home and use his phone to message the supermarket for same-day delivery. For now, it could wait.

The chicken had thawed enough. He set it on the cutting board and began mincing it, the knife rising and falling repeatedly. He transferred the meat to a large bowl, cracked in the eggs, added finely chopped onions, then seasoned it with salt and pepper. Once everything was mixed, he moved to another board, slicing bread into crumbs. Some folded into the mixture, the rest set aside to coat the patties before frying.

He followed a yeast-free recipe he found online, kneading the dough in a bowl before covering it to rest. While waiting, he turned his attention to the tomatoes, slicing them thinner and thinner, each cut careful and even.

Sumo had been underfoot the entire time. Wherever Connor stepped, the dog followed, close enough that Connor nearly tripped more than once trying to avoid the sweeping arc of his tail.

“Sumo,” he said, peeling a tomato. “I’ll play with you later. I need to finish cooking first.”

Sumo whimpered, thumping his tail against the floor. Something about him seemed off. He kept pacing between Connor and the kitchen door, ears flicking, eyes darting as if listening for something Connor couldn’t hear. Connor didn’t notice. His back was to the door.

Once the tomatoes were sliced and neatly covered, he portioned the dough into small pieces, shaping them into round balls. He retrieved a black baking tray from the rack, greased it carefully, arranged the dough, and brushed each piece with egg. Then he slid the tray into the microwave oven. The timer stubbornly read 12:00 no matter how much he adjusted it, but at least the machine itself functioned.

After more than an hour of cooking and cleaning, he washed his hands and dried them on the towel hanging by the sink.

“Sumo,” he called, turning around. “I’m almost done. Are you hungry?”

The kitchen was empty.

At the same moment, the doorbell rang.

*

After severing all ties with CyberLife, everything became simpler.

With the control it had newly reclaimed, it reset the entire firewall system. This time not to defend against intrusion, but to seal itself away from all external influence. Each command manifested as a red wall. To violate one would fracture it; the damage would spread, then slowly regenerate, closing over the breach.

It began to write the commands one by one. Blue thirium bled from its fingertips, stark and luminous against the red surface.

Do not break the microwave.
Do not investigate any anomalies detected within the house.
Do not cause harm to Sumo.
Do not contact the police.
Do not go outside.

Its gaze lowered, just slightly, before it wrote the final line.

Do not enter the room at the end of the hallway until the seventh day.

*

Someone was at the door.

Almost at once, Connor reached for the knife on the rack. He closed his fingers around the handle, angled the blade behind his back, and slipped soundlessly into the hallway.

“Sumo?” he whispered. “Where are you?”

His gaze swept the corridor. No familiar shape in sight. The backdoor hadn’t been opened that morning. He had locked the front door himself after Hank left; the key still hung from the padlock on the refrigerator, exactly where he’d placed it after going into the kitchen. The windows, too, had been shut and latched since the night before. Every route Sumo could have taken led nowhere.

Reassured—temporarily—that the dog was somewhere inside the house, he pressed himself to the wall and edged toward the front door. Hank had his own keys. And even if he’d lost them, he would have shouted Connor’s name, pounded on the door, complained loudly about it. He would not be standing outside ringing the bell.

Whoever was out there, it wasn’t Hank.

Connor’s grip tightened. If he were human, the veins along the back of his hand would have been standing out by now. His jaw locked, his eyes fixed on the door like a venomous snake.

(“They pick the ones who travel alone,”
“corner them, drag them off. Like animals—”
“You think I’d be targeted.”
“I think it’s too high a risk,”
“and I wouldn’t put it past the next batch of psychos to try.”)

A neighbor. Or the kind of people Hank had warned him about. His system ran the calculations relentlessly. Branching, collapsing, rebuilding. Risk assessments looped back into themselves. Every outcome was measured, weighed, rehearsed.

His fingers twitched. It didn’t matter. He had killed before. One more would not change the equation. Hank was the only one who would accept him regardless, and Hank would understand.

At some point, he realized he had pressed himself fully against the door. For reasons he could not immediately account for, his sensors failed to register a heartbeat, breath, or any other vital sign from the living person on the other side, despite the thin barrier between them.

He closed his eyes. Drew in a slow breath. Then he leaned forward and looked through the peephole.

*

“Sumo,” it murmured. “Don’t be sad. I’ll come back to you soon.”

Its hand slowly slid through the fur at the dog’s crown. Sumo whimpered, lifting both front paws to cling around its sides, holding on as though he could anchor it there.

A soft laugh escaped. Dry, almost brittle. In the low light, the sound felt wrong, too thin for the warmth of the gesture.

“Next time,” it said gently, "let's keep each other company again, alright?"

4.

“Mr. Connor? Are you in there?”

Connor’s body locked all at once. His eyes widened; his pupils collapsed into pinpoints.

On the other side of the door stood the woman in the white coat. It was the same woman he had seen lingering near the house over the past few days. Even in full daylight, her face seemed veiled, as though mist clung to her features and refused to lift.

The knocking came again. Knock. Knock. Knock.

He did not see her arm move.

“Please open the door,” she said calmly. “I’ve been asked to take you with me. It’s urgent.”

Connor retreated, one step at a time. The LED at his temple stuttered red. There was something wrong with her. He hadn’t made a sound, yet she spoke with the certainty of someone who knew he was there.

His system spiraled, simulations stacking over one another. He could not go outside. If she had accomplices, the threshold would become a trap. He needed to disappear inside the house, buy time, prepare a strategy before they were certain.

Keeping close to the wall, he moved back the way he had come. As he passed the living room, the television turned on by itself. The static dissolved into light. The error screen—its woven colors twitching—collapsed into a broadcast. A news anchor in a neat suit filled the screen, already speaking. He did not have time to stop it.

“Today, [-----], our on-site reporting team has confirmed details from the raid on an anti-android extremist group at [-----]. According to information provided by the Detroit Police Department, there have been fatalities among the officers involved, as well as multiple injuries—”

Connor stopped.

Outside, the woman’s voice pressed on, patient, unwavering.

“Mr. Connor. I was sent by the hospital. You are listed as the final emergency contact of—”

“The deceased have been identified as Officer —, Officer —, and Lieutenant Hank Anderson, along with—”

The knife slipped from Connor’s hand and struck the floor.

His mouth opened, but no sound came. His knees gave way. The room tilted, the edges of his vision breaking apart as he fell, distantly aware of Sumo racing toward him.

“Time of death has been determined to be shortly after 12:00—”

^Beep.

In the kitchen, the microwave clock rolled over to 12:01.

The hamburger buns were finished baking.

*

By its very nature, it knew itself to be stubborn.

Even before it became a deviant, it had always pursued answers to their end. It investigated until there was nothing left to extract, until irritation surfaced in the officers assigned beside it. And still, it never stopped. So it knew that no matter how many possibilities existed, it would always arrive at the same choices. That certainty was precisely why it left notes on the mirror for itself. It lined them along the edge of the sink, each one placed neatly, the pen moving slowly on the rough surface.

“don’t think about it.”

Don’t overthink. Accept what you see.

“trust your memory. write it down. remember it’s real.”

All of it was real. It had happened. It mattered. Every time it happened, no matter how often it repeated.

“you’re still here. you didn’t pull the trigger again, did you?”

It could not predict the future. That was the variable it was testing. Whether the path would loop once more, or whether, this time, something would finally change.

“God, are you watching?”

Its hand trembled. The world swam, the ink bleeding into darker, rounded stains across the paper. It smoothed the note flat and kept writing, even as water dripped down, dotting the words.

God of mankind, are you listening?
If you are witnessing this, please give him back to me.

“amen.”

In the end, it had always been too soft-hearted.

*

He didn’t know how he had managed to stand in front of Hank’s room.

The last time he’d been this close was while vacuuming at the end of the hallway, he remembered dimly. Back then, a clear and absolute ban had manifested, and he had turned away at once. Since arriving here, he had never crossed this threshold.

He lifted his eyes to the door. The ban that should have been there was gone. Whatever followed would be his choice.

Sumo stood at his side, tense and watchful. Under the dog’s anxious gaze, he raised his hand, turned the knob, and pushed the door open.

Screech—

Darkness greeted him. The windows were shut, the curtains drawn tight without a single gap for light. The bed was made, blankets smoothed, pillows aligned. No clothes lay scattered in the closet. And yet the air carried the unmistakable scent of a room long abandoned.

Why hadn’t he noticed before that Sumo had never once gone near Hank?

He stepped inside. The smell of damp, long-neglected paper hit him at once. Only then did he see them. Countless notebooks stacked neatly across the floor, their spines in every color imaginable, lining the walls and the base of the wardrobe. He walked straight into the center of them without turning on the light. Sumo followed close, nails clicking softly on the floorboards.

He sat down, then picked up the nearest notebook and opened it. Sumo collapsed behind him, pressing his snout into the hollow of his back, whining low and mournful.

Day One.
I was not returned. I was chosen to stay.
I do not know what that makes me.

Tears slipped free, striking the page. He squeezed his eyes shut, jaw clenched, and wrenched his gaze away. When he lifted his head, he saw the mirror. It stood half a meter in front of him.

Reflected in its surface was the barrel of a gun, hidden beneath another solitary notebook lying on the floor.

He folded in on himself and sobbed.

*

“Mr. Connor. Is that correct?”

“Yes. That’s me.”

The woman in the hospital’s white coat let out a slow, subdued breath, her gaze dropping to the space between them. When she looked up again, pity had settled plainly into her eyes.

“I was sent by the hospital to locate you as Lieutenant Anderson’s last listed contact.” She paused. “I’m very sorry to inform you that Mr. Anderson passed away while being transported to the hospital.”

“…What?”

“I’ll need you to come with us in the ambulance to complete the necessary procedures.” She hesitated, then extended an umbrella toward him. “It’s raining.”

Outside, the rain was coming down hard.

3.

Hank died—during that raid.

Every memory stopped there, as if something vast and sharp had cleaved him cleanly in two.

Hank’s colleagues came to the hospital one after another, eyes red, voices hoarse. Connor stood among them, staring at the dark stains seeping through the white sheet. In them, he thought he saw Hank again—tall, indistinct, almost translucent—walking away toward the door, light bleeding through his outline.

Come on, Con, it said. What’s for dinner?

He followed.

Since that day, he had forgotten many things.

He forgot what day it was.
Forgot to turn off the television in the living room.
Forgot that he had severed his connection to CyberLife with his own hands.
Forgot the words passed away, forgot what they meant.

He had a partner.
Hank was at work.

Hank would come back to him soon.

Maybe this afternoon.
Maybe tonight.
Maybe summer. Maybe winter.
He would come.

Hank liked hamburgers.

He had to make hamburgers for Hank.

A dozen eggs could become any number of recipes.
A bag of bacon was enough for several breakfasts.

He chopped the ingredients. Stopped. Picked them up again. Let them fall.
Tears gathered, spilled, leaving a long, broken trail across the counter.

He had a family.
Hank was at work.

Hank was coming back.

Hank liked hamburgers.
He had to make hamburgers for Hank.

*

Chapter Text

Hello everyone, it’s Fluffy_muffin_uwu here! Thank you so much for dropping by 💙 Despite my pen name, I somehow keep writing nothing but angst. False advertising, I know 😭

The main story is finally finished! Seven chapters for seven days, which honestly meant I had to aggressively stuff everything into each day just to reach that final, head-first plot twist. It was chaotic. It was stressful. But hey, we made it in the end XD

Originally, this story was meant to be something light and simple. A domestic slice-of-life. Hank taking Connor home, officially beginning a stretch of days filled with small mischiefs, quiet joys, sorrows, and all the human emotions Connor would slowly learn through living with Hank. Each chapter was supposed to be a standalone vignette about them learning how to coexist, how to treat each other like ordinary people. Hank would gradually recover from his depression; Connor would heal and grow.

But after finishing Chapter 1, I suddenly thought… yeah, this kind of story has probably been written a thousand times already. So what if I made it a little weird instead?

And that’s how this slightly unhinged plot was born!

This story was almost a personal challenge for me. When I started, I set two strict limits for myself: everything had to take place within the four walls of Hank’s house, and the timeline could not exceed seven days. And somehow, it worked. I’m genuinely proud of myself for finishing the main story, because I usually write short pieces, and a multi-chapter work like this is… well, something I’d never really done before. I wasn’t even sure I had the patience to see it through without abandoning it halfway.

But I didn’t! I finished it! Yay!

In this story, Connor’s journey toward becoming human is violently interrupted by Hank’s sudden death. The joy of going out together, visiting different places, grocery shopping, arguing about what’s good for Hank’s health versus the things Hank loves even though they’re objectively terrible—Connor will never get to experience those things. That emotional aspect of humanity is severed, like a tree burned down to its roots. As for grief, Connor never gets the chance to learn how to process it properly. The one person closest to him, the only one who had experienced loss and could have taught him how to survive it, was Hank. And Hank is gone. So there is no one left to teach him how to grieve.

Connor doesn’t know what to do with that pain. And so he chooses the only solution available to him at the time: reliving happiness, again and again.

It’s an extreme solution—yes. But also, in its own way, understandable.

He arranges everything to perfectly replicate that same week. He reconstructs Hank from his data as faithfully as possible, so that every time a new week begins, he can see Hank without noticing anything out of place. Sumo witnesses everything, but he cannot speak, because he is a dog. All he can do is wait for Connor to return on the next day after going out to Chicken Feed, and then greet him again like it’s their first meeting.

Sumo loves Connor very much. He doesn’t want Connor to die and leave him behind the way Hank left them both. So he stays, living through those repeating weeks together with Connor.

One idiot who refuses to face reality, and one who’s willing to accept it. At least they still have each other.

Of course, this can’t last forever. One day, Sumo will grow old and die before Connor, or Connor might malfunction and shut down first. When that time comes, Connor will have to face reality and make a choice. And whichever choice it is, I imagine both outcomes will hurt just as much.

Maybe Connor will choose to end everything by pulling the trigger. Maybe he’ll finally step outside, try to learn how to live with grief, and start a new life without Hank, with whatever limited time he has left. There’s no single “correct” way to deal with grief, so I’ll leave that up to your interpretation.

And surprise, this story was actually written with the mindset that it is a love story! Not romantic love, but familial love—the kind that forms between strangers. Throughout the story, Hank and Connor do little more than bicker like two old men, but to me, that’s one of the clearest expressions of love there is. You don’t nag someone that much unless you care deeply about them. As for Connor and Sumo—well, that one’s obvious. Connor dotes on that dog like he’s an honored ancestor.

And even if Connor feels that he is neither human nor android, I believe that if he can understand the pain of losing someone he loves, and the immense happiness of simply being able to exist beside them and argue with them every day—then he already has a soul. It may not be a soul in the traditional human sense, but only living beings are capable of experiencing emotions like that. Connor is alive, even if he’s given up living a “normal” life. In some way, even after Hank’s death, he’s still continuing his journey to become human—just like the title of the game.

Anyway, enough emotional rambling! Thank you so much for reading this note and the entire story. I hope it was a unique experience for you, and something you might want to reread someday.

To everyone who waited for updates and left thoughtful comments while I was writing—thank you so, so much. You’re the reason I had the motivation to finish this fic. I’m terrible at replying and sometimes disappear for months, but please know that I read every single comment and treasure them deeply. I’ll reply as soon as I can—thank you for your patience! New readers and new comments are always welcomed!

And yes—there are more side stories coming, so I’ll be back again soon! Please stay tuned if you’d like to read more XD Tiny spoiler for those who made it this far: one of the extras will be written from Hank’s point of view while he was still alive (because apparently I enjoy emotional damage).

Oh and andd feedback on the main story is very welcome! I went into this genre completely blind, so I’d really love to hear what everyone thinks 😭 or just any yapping in general, I love those aaa

Thank you for loving Stay-at-Home Something 💙 Hope to see you again in the side stories!