SEQUENTIAL ━ Connor // RK800 ✔️

eight ━ the right information

"What?" Brady turned around once inside and noticing Connor was not besides him anymore. "What's wrong?"

"Joel Reed has sixty-three working androids currently registered to his business," Connor explained out loud, seeing no reason to step inside the barn anymore. "There's only fifty-eight androids in there."

"Well, this is all we found on the premises, so your numbers must be wrong," Officer Brady was ready to dismiss him.

"No," he raised his eyebrows, returning his LED to a stable blue. "It means five of them are missing."

Mia was in the kitchen. There was nothing quite as effective as cooking her favorite dish to put her back on track after a long day at the office. That day had reminded her a lot of one spent at the lab — all the data coming in from Connor, all the reports to fill in and the analysis to run on his software operations. It was all alligned to how things used to be, save for the fact that he wasn't there, not physically at least.

It quickly became a rather safe bet to fool herself into thinking they were back to normal by bringing a scent of home to this house, a scent of her favorite mushroom stew, one her landlord complained countless of times she had managed to embed into the wallpaper of her apartment.

But then again, her cooking therapy wouldn't have been complete without her headphones being propped over her ears and blasting in unhealthily loud the same playlist that got her through high school and college, top of her class each time. Of course, that's exactly what she ended up doing later in the evening, once the reports stopped filing themselves in from Connor and she was certain he was on his way back: she allowed herself to lose herself into a small delusion, to feel at home and take a break.

That's how Connor found her. He opened the front door and stepped inside still drenched from head to toe from the rain, then he heard it. Before even properly taking in the environment bathed in a warm yellow light, he heard the faint bass of songs he knew too well. The only lights on, he noticed, were those in the kitchen, so he leant forward and glanced curiously towards that area, his eyebrows raising when he spotted Mia with her back turned on him, completely unaware he was there. He was certain of that last fact because she was humming along to the song, unaware of how off beat she was, and dancing to it, all the while carelessly stirring into a pot bubbling over the electric stove.

The contrast was stark between the scene he had just left behind and the one he was greeted with once stepping inside the house. It was almost like these were two parallel worlds — the one with Mia, where warmth was a given, and the one out there, where he learnt of horrors and of cruelty; a matter of humanity versus the lack of it presented itself to him.

At the same time, he was also faced with a lighter curiosity: is this how she spent her time when she wasn't working?

Not wanting to alert her while she handled hot foods, nor wishing to diturb a marvelous display of a rare occasion in which he could observe how Mia had fun when she wasn't in the lab, Connor walked into the kitchen and stood on the very edge of it quietly. He switched on some of his heating systems underneath the synthetic skin to dry himself off — even though Officer Brady ended up dropping him off there, the short walk from the street to the house had already managed to undo all the hard work to dry himself while in the man's car — and merely observed.

While watching Mia dance, positively and strangely endeared by how confidently she did so against the tempo of the song, he couldn't help but also scan her headphones and therefore identify that she was listening to music a good amount of decibels over the advisable amount. In the long run, such habits, no matter how adorable to witness, were guranteed to damage her hearing, therefore, with concerningly little hesitation, Connor took the liberty of remotely hacking into her headphones and lowering the volume to the recommended and healthy level.