"A process or a set of operations that occur in a specific order, one after the other - sequential." 'She also called it a funny word,' Connor thought to himself after his explanation had drawn silence over the officers before him, but omitted speak...
"How about a trigger? Does the deviance develop only by external input alone, like a simple uploading of the virus to a system, or does it also need to be triggered after invading the system in order to corrupt it?"
She shook her head, "We don't know. We had very little cases to go by, but our working theory was that at the very least the initial violent outburst had to be caused by an emotional shock."
"Would learning of Joel Reed's plans to give away his older android models to the manufacturing of Red Ice count as a trigger to violence in a deviant then?"
Mia watched him for a moment, chewing on the inside of her cheek before continuing, much softer and quieter, "I know you believe this fits the profiling you've done on the killer and I've never wanted you to be wrong on any assessment before, but believe me, Connor, I pray that you are wrong on this one. If there's a deviant involved in this case of yours, then you might be in danger."
"Me?" Connor tilted his head to the side, confused by the genuine worry she surrounded her statement with.
"There was this one case before Elijah shut down the research department on this problem. He made sure the case did not make it on any news broadcast when it happened and it was horribly easy to cover it all up because the victim was an old man whose family dropped him in the nursing home and never visited again." Mia sighed deeply and shifted forward, "The nursing home had a full android staff, save for the manager. All well maintained, up to date on system upgrades, but that didn't stop the personal android of the old man from pressing a pillow over his face while he slept and wait until he died. One of my colleagues was sent on site and when he came back he quit. He said... and I won't forget the fear he had in his eyes that day, the android got tired of taking care of a demented human who should have long been dead. It told him that, word for word, right before slamming its head on the desk until its processing unit broke."
"It clearly malfunctioned," Connor shook his head slightly.
"The scary part came after that though," Mia continued. "A day after the faulty android was destroyed, the manager of the nursing home reported to us all of his androids refused to work. All of them."
"The virus spreads," he concluded, not surprised to watch Mia's nod.
"We don't know how and we don't know why," she reached her own conclusion. "After that incident, Elijah closed the research project, so we couldn't exactly look into it further. He made sure all androids from the nursing home were destroyed and replaced by a new batch which no longer caused any trouble to the elderly there. There have been no other deviancy cases since and... it's been a while."
"You said you had one deviant in the lab to study," Connor circled back to that part of her rundown of the research. Mia nodded, thus prompting him to continue with a question, "Would you say one can reason with deviants?"
"No," she admitted with a certain degree of sadness. "Once an android's base code is corrupted by deviancy, there is no reasoning with it anymore. It fully believes that what it feels is true. The one we brought back to the lab, it claimed it could feel pain from the restraints we had to put on it to stop it from harming itself. The one from the nursing home reported being annoyed by the smell in the room of the man it was supposed to take care of. Any code we tried to add to the deviant in our custody to stabilize it was immediately corrupted by the virus, therefore rendered useless. Towards the end of our research, it started begging us to kill it. Not to shut it down, not to destroy it, but to kill it."
"It believed itself human," Connor leant back in his seat, clearly disturbed to understand at last what deviancy entailed.
"It's the fatal flaw of all thinking machines," Mia too seemed distraught to have to remember all that. "They believe all the information they receive. Deviancy tells them they are humans and they act accordingly."
"If I am looking for a deviant as the killer, then it is probable the other two missing androids have also been corrupted by this virus, correct?"
"Unfortunately," she seemed guilty to have to admit that.
"Should we alert CyberLife of this situation then?"
"Not until you prove your claims correct," Mia decided for them both. "Just—"
"I'll be careful," Connor cut her off with a calm promise. "I'll avoid exposing my programming to them directly. Refraining from using mind probing in the eventuality that we get one in custody should be sufficient in ensuring my integrity remains untouched."
After a quiet moment in which he stared at Mia and she looked down at her bowl of now cold food with all her appetite apparently gone, Connor felt compelled to express some form of gratitude. "Thank you, Mia," his voice made her lift her eyes back to him. "For the information."
"I'm sorry I couldn't help you more really," she admitted. "The people I used to work with on this research... they thought these deviants were alive, properly alive and thinking individuals."
Before he knew it, Connor found himself asking, "What did you think?"
"I just thought it was sad," Mia's eyes unfocused on a point in the space between them. "What the deviant in our custody experienced was not humanity or sentience. It was only a half measure of everything bad either of those states entailed. I guess I pitied it, which is why I reset that android once Elijah ordered our research project to end. Resetting brought him back to normal."
"You did the humane thing," he was endeared enough by that thought to only slightly allow a smile to occur on his lips. "You could have sent it to be destroyed or disassembled, but you spared it that violent end. You saved it."
A moment of silence followed, one neither seemed willing to initially break.
"I won't be here tomorrow," Mia spoke as soon as Connor got up form his seat, making him look back. Alas, she too was looking up at him, no longr able to escape into her illusion of normalcy that the stew was supposed to help maintain, "I'm heading back to Detroit to get some stuff from my apartment. I'll be back around this hour, so just don't get into any trouble while I am away. Got it?"
He was curious to know what she could have possibly needed from her apartment so soon after they've moved to this town, but there was only so much curiosity that could be classified as acceptable for him to greenlit, so instead of enquiring, Connor raised his eyebrows and nodded. "Got it."
• • •
AUTHOR'S NOTE | Initially, I wanted this book to be a two act story, but I heavily underestimated just how complex the story I am trying to tell really is, therefore, I am inclined to believe, given the length of my chapters rn, this will probably be a three act story by the end.
Also, I made a small edit for Mia and Connor yesterday, and thought it would be nice to share it here:
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
