SEQUENTIAL ━ Connor // RK800 ✔️

eight ━ the right information

Mia couldn't even look at him throughout the explanation. Consumed by thoughts and with a now visible line of worry between her eyebrows, she stared at her food silently.

"Look," Connor leant forward, propping his right elbow on the island's top, "I know it is unlikely for there to be a deviant. But I cannot rule out the possibility without knowing at the very least how an android can come to the point of malfunction that causes this to happen. You have access to the files I need to understand this, Mia."

"I signed an NDA," she blurted out, letting go of her spoon and finally bringing her hands up to cover her eyes. After a moment taken to gather her thoughts, Mia propped her both elbows on the flat surface of the island and let her hands drop under her chin, fingers interlocking beneath it. "When Elijah shut down our research project on the matter, he made us all sign an NDA about it. I am legally not allowed to discuss the research we've conducted there, Connor."

He could tell by the slight movement of her eyes that his LED gave away how much processing he had to do thanks to this new information. Even while knowing there was a need to thread carefully around this, Connor refused to let go of the idea altogether. Instead, he opted for a different approach, "Human lives may depend on this. I have to know what I am up against in order to do my job. My pattern recognition cannot help me against a typology I do not know anything about. I won't tell on you, if you give me this information. I will take full responsibility if anyone from CyberLife inquires into this, I will make sure they know I gained access to the information on my own." After a moment of thought, he continued, "Please, Mia."

The softness of his tone, perhaps even the hint of desperation riddled into his realistic reasoning, seemed to have exploited exactly that weakness in Mia that made her sigh out a defeated, "Fine."

She was painfully aware in that moment that there was very little she could ever refuse him anymore.

"But don't get your hopes up about this clearing everything out for you, because truth is, we don't know half as much as we should about this matter." Mia moved her hands to rest on both sides of her neck, slowly massaging their way to the back as she leant her head forward. "What do you want to know first?" She asked, obviously planning on telling him only as much as he needed, only what he would consider necessary.

"What is it?" He narrowed his eyes on her, body fully turned such that he could face her.

"Malware," Mia answered immediately. "A virus. We suspected it to have initially infiltrated externally, but we don't know for sure. Once activated, the virus spreads fast. It scrambles everything it finds in the programming of the android, turning it majorly unreadable while shredding their bade settings to bits. We were never able to find the root of the virus on the one afflicted android we managed to get back to tje lab after it was reported as malfunctioning."

"What about symptoms?" Connor interjected. "Can you tell when an android is affected by this virus by any signs?"

"There are a lot of signs, but they vary from case to case," she sighed. "We only had three such cases to study during the research we conducted and there was no clear pattern between them other than the fact that the afflicted androids, the deviants, started emulating emotions to the point past which they could no longer tell they were merely copying humans with them anymore. Some of them even started enacting senses which did not exist in their programming too, though they lacked the sensors to pick up on any of them and there was no data to prove what they were experiencing was real. All the cases had the deviants express these newfound emotions negatively. The software instability caused by the virus quickly degenerated into them lashing out violently, either towards humans or towards themselves."