SEQUENTIAL ━ Connor // RK800 ✔️

three ━ new priorities

He felt Mia's tender touch on the back of his head while he plugged the thinner cables past his biocomponents flowing with clear blue Thirium.

Her thumbs brushed gently around the short cut of his synthetic hair. He's heard CyberLife perfected the feel of its texture and that the synthetic hair was now not all that different from normal hair to touch. He couldn't tell the difference based on touch alone though, but he wondered for a brief moment if Mia could, or if she agreed with the claimed advancements towards new levels of realism on the androids' imitation of humans.

She was always careful with touching his hair, for a reason he couldn't exactly understand, but never really asked about either. There were simply times when she acted as if he was made out of porcelain, and he grew to accept them, even if that was an objectively silly opinion to hold. He was far less fragile than a human, far less fragile than her.

Before Connor could get used to the tingle of her playing around with his hair, brushing through it superficially, Mia found the ridge to his connecting port and opened it. "I'm connecting you to the terminal," she let him know before plugging the wires in.

"The connection was established successfully," Connor reported in return, tilting his head to the side. He couldn't feel the external wires as additions to his body, which always seemed strangely intriguing to him.

Mia's right hand dropped to the back of his neck. "You may shut down systems, if you please."

"Of course, Mia," he responded with an intentional softness, closing his eyes. He appreciated now her warmth and respectful nature a little more given the cold and rude versions of humans he met at the station the other day. "Shutting down all systems."

Softness was mirrored right back, "Good night, Connor." Her hand remained planted, half on his synthetic skin and half on top of his white shirt's collar, until his LED started a sequence of slow pulses. Only when the terminal lit up did Mia remove her hand and returned to her seat in order to give her full attention to her keyboard and the screen.

The code was already prepared. It has been waiting on her crowded desktop for months already, along with a whole other bunch of files that she would never be able to bring herself to delete.

To copy and place the code in the right places wasn't nearly as difficult as convincing her shaking right hand that all those hours she spent debugging and testing the said code at home actually happened and that she was being irrational suddenly feeling as if she was making some catastrophic mistake simply because she wouldn't wait for some bureaucratic approval over a project she has been legally in charge of fully for a while already.

"Come on, Mia," she murmured to herself. "Connor's right. Get it together, it's what he..." She bit the inside of her cheek. "It's what the project needs."

With a final click, the update got uploaded into Connor's main code. Mia watched the thick and thin wires alike flow a blue glow from the computer towards the android seated next to her, until finally the computer screen showed the upload as complete.

So much stress over a process so short.

For Connor in particular, it was merely just a blink of an eye between the moment Mia wished him 'good night' and the one in which he fluttered his eyes opened again to hear her say 'good morning' with an all too familiar smile. Nothing seemed different to him while his systems were rebooting.

"Good morning, Mia," he greeted back, as usual.

"How are you feeling?" She tilted her head to the side, watching him carefully now that she was done studying the live feedback of data on her screen's new tab. Her question was part of their secret code — he knew what she meant to ask was that he should run a self-diagnosis and report on it.