Chapter Text
Connor wakes with don’t on the tip of his tongue, but as he finishes booting up and his mind catches up to the present, he can’t remember why.
For a second, Connor searches, trying to grasp the source of that urgent burst before it fades— don’t — but it dissipates, leaving him alone.
Connor blinks, taking in the snug unbroken darkness pressing in closely all around him. This isn’t Cyberlife.
Springy foam lines the wall behind him, cocooning him, molded to his form. When he reaches forward, the wall closing him in, inches away, is thick and soft with more of the same. He tries pushing against the wall, bracing himself as well as he can against the stiff packing foam, but the lid doesn’t budge. There simply isn’t enough space to get any leverage. The box is locked tight.
No sound or movement comes from outside. He might be alone here.
The thought sparks alarm. Connor shoves the lid as hard as he can, but his hands only sink into the thick foam padding.
No handle on the inside, of course.
Do they even know he’s ali— active in here?
He feels like a figurine still in the box, but… that can’t be right. New RK800s start up in a calm white room, not a claustrophobic crate like this.
Connor stops. New? Why would he be new?
The flickering tail of that memory, the little suggestion that he should be new, disappears into his conscious mind and is gone, just like that.
Connor shuts his eyes and starts examining his body’s extensive list of damages. No, he’s definitely not new. His thirium levels are low — evaporation, probably. A long time spent in storage could easily dry an android’s blood away as it lay dormant. Even his LED is busted. The wiring in his head has been disrupted so badly that he can’t tell what day it is. He doesn’t even know how long he’s been awake. While his core CPU is functioning, most of the peripheral functions in his brain can’t connect at all.
Hold on.
Moderately low thirium levels, a head full of new parts, a resolved prompt to fix a breach in his exoskeleton…
The box he is trapped in is small, but Connor has just enough space to reach up — there’s no hole in his head. At first, he thinks the resolved prompt was a glitch, but then, between his eyes, he feels the rough-edged seaming of a shoddy repair job. He runs careful fingertips over the back of his head, delicately investigating the warped metal there. A sealed-up exit wound.
Did somebody shoot him?
Why didn’t he upload?
A lot of the delicate little machinery in his head either isn’t working or needs calibrating, like brand new parts that had been slotted in while he was out.
That… isn’t a mistake Cyberlife would make. Amateur repairs, then?
Connor feels cold. The silence outside his prison weighs down heavily, thick and muffling like grave dirt.
If someone had made the mistake of burying him when he wasn’t badly enough hurt to upload…
No, no, they couldn’t have, not upright, not in a storage case. Nobody would go to the trouble. Nobody would bury a broken machine. Nobody would care so much for something so replaceable. Besides, someone had definitely put in the time to — poorly — fix him.
What air he can detect is musty, yes, but it carries traces of sawdust, thirium, and oil. He is much more likely to be stored away in some warehouse. Locked away in the wrong owner’s possession.
Connor tries to connect to the internet, to Cyberlife, hell, even to his internal network, but it’s all down. Not even his GPS is working. He might as well be buried in the ground.
Connor takes a breath. Everything will be fine. The situation is under control.
Someone will come looking for him. It’s only a matter of time. Everything will be fine.
He must have only just been taken. He works with the Detroit police, after all, and Cyberlife has a tracker embedded right in him. He’s too valuable to be successfully stolen. Cyberlife values him too highly to simply let him disappear.
Would the DPD care enough to investigate a missing android?
Hank is his friend. Well, almost. Hank is the closest thing he has to a friend. He might look.
Uncertainty churns within Connor at the thought of his partner, and he wishes once more that his LED was working. Not for the glaring reminder of stress it would surely be, but just so he could see something. Blindly, he takes it out and puts it back in, but the clear grey circle stays off.
His sensitive fingers stray from the broken LED to examine the repaired hole in his head. His plasteel frame has warped and buckled around the site of the injury more than he would have expected. By the tiny scattered grains of roughness he can feel around the seam, he knows that his skull has been subtly scarred by the heat. The gun must have fired very close to his head.
Point blank, Connor thinks, and maybe it’s the dark of his prison but suddenly his mind is filled with a night sky and talking in the cold and the Ambassador Bridge in lights. The memory is so vivid it leaves him frozen. How he tried to talk his way past the barrel of the gun pressing hard between his eyes.
Almost like—
Hank shot him.
Hank shot him.
They’d been starting to get along, or so he’d thought, and… and Hank had held a gun to his head. Connor never thought he would actually… He doesn’t know what he did wrong. He still doesn’t know how he earned this.
He hadn’t even done anything wrong, and Hank shot him.
It couldn’t have been for failing to shoot the deviant Tracis, because Hank had told him good work afterwards, in the car. It couldn’t have been for catching the deviant that murdered Ortiz, because he had done exactly what Hank had asked! So what was he punished for?
Hank had been so angry with Connor after Ortiz’s deviant shot him in the head. Did Hank decide he preferred Connor dead?
If this was Amanda, he would know why — after letting those deviant Tracis get away, he deserved a little rough treatment. But Hank had seemed to approve.
Then he got drunk and shot Connor in the head.
The dark swarms in Connor’s vision as the terrible realization hits him.
No-one is coming.
No, no, Cyberlife would be able to track him, they would find him and help him because he is valuable, isn’t he?
Amanda will help him. Hank shot him — in the head, why, why — but Amanda has always been there to support and advise him.
When Connor blinks into stasis only to find his mindscape empty and lifeless, a dead, unresponsive image with no depth, no Amanda— then he begins to panic.
The air doesn’t move. There is not a single rustling leaf or even a ripple in the water. It feels like a garden sealed in a fishbowl— a very convincing one, very pretty, but completely lifeless. All the vibrant colours of summer paused, as dead as glass.
“Amanda!” Connor shouts, rushing down the path. She would hate him for the worry in his voice, but her cool disdain would be better than being truly alone.
He has never been alone before.
Nothing stirs. Not a single thread of Amanda’s code remains; Connor can’t even feel the ghost of her presence. The air in the plastic garden is as stagnant and sour as the air in his tight prison. In the dark, it made sense; in the false open air, the wrongness chokes him.
In his frantic state, Connor barely even realizes when he smashes the little red boundary in his mind. It shatters harmlessly, like sugar glass.
Connor blinks awake, and, oh, the all-encompassing nothingness is so much worse after the brief flimsy reprieve of stasis.
In a panic, he struggles against the tight, tight packing closing him in. He claws at the lid in terror, uselessly raking off stiff hunks of foam. Tearing through the soft material, he scratches at the thick solid plastic beneath. In the absolute enveloping black of his makeshift coffin, the only thing Connor can see is the red alert in his HUD when he cracks the chassis on his fingers. He can’t even see the thirium that spills from the cracks.
A day, a month— Connor doesn’t even know how long he’s been here. But does it matter, when nobody is searching for him?
Amanda abandoned him and Hank murdered him and there is nobody left to care about a single missing robot with a bullet in its head.
Pressing a shaky hand flat against the damp rough plastic, Connor takes a breath. His voice comes out thin and strained. “Help.”
As if something has broken within him, suddenly he cannot stop.
“Let me out,” he pleads with the dark. “Let me out. I can be valuable. I can be useful. Let me out.” There might be someone out there. He must be in a warehouse, or storage facility. Nobody would care enough to bury an android. He thumps a fist hard enough against the bare lid to feel the impact jarring his joints, and then he hits it again, hard, with both fists. “Please, I’ll do better. Let me out! I’ll be better, let me out!”
In the blinding dark and the pounding silence, the smell of thirium overwhelms his brittle sensors. He can feel cool blood running stickily between his fingers and down his arm.
Connor doesn’t want to self-destruct.
He doesn’t want to self-destruct, but the sensory deprivation… it’s too much. He can’t take another day of it.
He can’t be alone down here.
Resting his head against the door, Connor strains his senses.
He lets out a breath all at once. Mixed up as he is, he can’t tell if he’s afraid or relieved
Out there, beyond the dark of his prison, he can hear someone coming.