SEQUENTIAL ━ Connor // RK800 ✔️

two ━ orders are orders

He waited a little while longer, watching for movement, but when ultimately nothing happened, he pushed the door opened and slipped inside, listening attentively for the lock behind him clicking the place shut.

With the house dark and quiet, it was safe to assume Mia was asleep. There were plenty of boxes with lab equipment yet to be unpacked, stacked in lines down the hallway, but Connor made his way quietly through the narrow path and reached the open kitchen. He placed the basket on the tabel, mustering only a passing thought about how he's never quite pieced together how Mr. Kamski and Mia related in order to have what seemed from the outside as quite a trusting relationship.

A soft sigh pulled him from that pending analysis and Connor was forced instead to notice that Mia was asleep on the couch in the living room. The lamp on her lab desk on the other end of the room was casting a diffused light over the scene: messy hair, serene features. Connor realized he's never actually seen her this relaxed before. It has always been the lab setting, never this imitation of domestic life, so he always got to see her with her hair tied up, out of her eyes, always concentrated, even if she found the energy to smile and joke and get excited over the most humane things she could. This slowly breathing version of her was new, so he stepped closer and assessed whay he was seeing.

Half draped in darkness, half in gentle light, her breathing patterns were normal and her eyes were moving behind her eyelids, meaning that she was in deep sleep, dreaming. She's been asleep for a while. Wearing what humans would classify as pajamas, he also noticed her book of Sudoku and a pen neatly arranged next to the couch, all of which told him that she did not fall asleep there by accident, but rather intentionally.

He could have sworn there were two bedrooms on the house plan. Looking up from her and down the hallway behind the couch, Connor scanned and confirmed that there was indeed one bedroom up for use parallel to the one they'd use for storage. One more glance down at Mia told him a final detail: she didn't have a pillow, nor a blanket taken for her camping on the couch, which could only reasonably mean there was some reason for her to not want to even enter the bedroom.

The curiosity of a true detective had been installed into Connor from production, so he kept the silence and walked to the said bedroom to inspect it himself. If the police station provided Mia with no data to study over tomorrow, he'd put his systems to work himself, for the sake of the research.

Initial scan revealed nothing: the room was just a room. Two nighstands, an open suitcase filled with neatly folded clothes, waiting before an open wardrobe. There was a tall mirror to the left, next to a still empty desk. The bed was right in the middle of the room, connected to the wall under the only window.

Stepping inside the room, Connor noticed the bed was in quite the disarray: the blanket has been pulled aside only halfway. He dropped his gaze to the carpeted floor and identified with ease Mia's footprints since she seemed to be liking wearing slippers inside the house. There were quite a lot of steps, most a bit further from the bed. It seemed to his understandment up to thay point that Mia was about to get in bed when something made her leap backwards and abandon everything related to the bed in the room, resorting to simply sleeping on the couch, a far less comfortable medium.

If pulling on the blanket scared Mia away, then Connor definitely had to test his theory by pulling the blanket all the way himself.

A single tug was enough to stir awake a black spider the size of a thumb that has been hiding under it. The thing ran off the bed this time, instead of further under the blanket as it probably did when Mia attempted to get in bed, but was clearly underestimating Connor's ability to track down a target. The system worked wonderfully in locating the pesky being of a kind which had caused troubles to the human before behind the nightstand. He picked it up with a sigh, reminiscing while he watched it struggle the first time Mia revealed to him the existence or "irrational fears" in humans and the fact that she too suffered from such an affliction. 

Since that one spider disrupted their lab session, Connor knew should it come to it, it would always prove to be more efficient to discard of this beings before they can affect her mental state and therefore hinder the project's progress and their overall productivity in-session.

With the mystery of why she'd ever choose a couch over the designated space for humans to sleep in, Connor walked the spider over to the window, opened it and tossed it outside, promptly closing the window behind. He turned the blanket over and scanned it for any more such small creatures, then picked it up and took it with him out of the room. The night was pretty chilly outside and the house itself seemed to have almost no heating at the moment — Mia catching a cold as a result of her irrational fears would heavily impact their productivity on the project, therefore, he placed the blanket over her sleeping figure on the couch.

She did not stir, she didn't even flinch in her sleep at the little disturbance of a weight being added on her.

Of course, Connor noted a final observation looking down at her careless and relaxed features one last time before straightening up and retreating to the storage room to switch off in the recharge port. She's such a heavy sleeper.

• • •

AUTHOR'S NOTE |
Having some fun with this book, ngl. It's interesting to challenge myself to think how an early version of Connor would have behaved without having the full upgrades or the full package so to say of the Connor the games introduced to us. I imagined it makes sense that apart from Amanda missing, there would also be some features which were yet to be fine tuned, like his prioritising system on tasks, goals and orders.

I also got some more stuff planned in regards to what more differs, but yeah, one chapter at a time 🥰 speaking of chapters, this is a rather short one, but no worries, my chapters usually tend to get longer the more the story progresses