SEQUENTIAL ━ Connor // RK800 ✔️

five ━ not alive, not dead

The only good thing that came out of Kamski's interruption it seemed was that now, with her eyes no longer forced to remain on Connor by a sense of duty and guilt, she could sit up, stretch her sore muscles and drag her feet to the open kitchen.

The cold half a coffee left from before her evening had turned to an absolute nightmare was unsatisfying and hardly helpful, but it was something other than pain for her to feel. Bitterness tasted better than the saltiness of tears. Those tears... Mia's hands grasped the edge of the counter remembering them. She knew what they meant but she didn't know if she was ready for that meaning to be acknowledged.

Looking back at Connor over her shoulder, she bit her tongue. She had grown awfully attached to him, hadn't she?

Perhaps it was easy to excuse her excitement to get to work every day, the carelessness with which she worked overtime even without getting paid for those extra hours at the lab. She had been given no raise to move her lab with him for this field trial, she had volunteered for it, though she could have made it work by offering support remotely too. But any dedicated individual with a gram of her passion would do that and more for a job they love. What a professional wouldn't do though was what she did that night, after that phone call telling her where Connor was.

Running all the way there, crying over his corpse, holding him as she had... Even thinking of his destroyed body as a corpse was unacceptable. Those weren't normal things a professional would be caught doing, not when there were clean slates of the very same model ready to take Connor's memories and his place should anything happen to his body that would deem it unrepairable. They prepared for the dangers of the job, and yet she lost her composure. She was compromised.

The truth was easy to spot, but hard to accept: she cared about him more than one should ever care about a supposed "project". She cared about him as one would their partner, their friend, their closest acquaintance and that was dangerous territory that she's been threading towards all along, like some blind fool walking head first into death.

A knock on the door almost made Mia jump out of her skin.

Even with light now outside, she gulped, remembering how wrong things went last time someone knocked on her door, events which happened not all that much time ago. The bruises around her wrists started hurting as a distant background noise the moment she checked the door scanner's sensors and realized, once again, there was an android outside. Barely breathing, she took a knife from the kitchen and approached the door. She reached forward, grasping the edge of the curtain of the window nearest to the door. Tugging ever so gently onto it, she glimpsed outside.

Her hand was shaking on a knife she doubted she would have had the strength to use, but she soon dropped her defensive stance because the androids outside her door were ones recognizable enough, those sent by CyberLife in regards to her issued request. Or so the delivery truck from the company behind them would tell her.

She tucked the knife in her jeans' back pocket and worked up the courage to open the door, though she knew now that it would have looked a lot better on her part had she cleaned up when she had wanted to the first time. They would scan her and they would send the report with only the objective facts back to the company - she knew how they were programmed and that it won't be a good look for her to look this dishevelled before them.

But whatever words of explanations she wished to give knotted in her throat when she saw the container two of the three androids at her door brought in. There was the replacement model in there. The new Connor, merely asleep, spotless like nothing had ever happened. Nothing happened to him.