SEQUENTIAL ━ Connor // RK800 ✔️

thirteen ━ memory lane

The LED screen acting as a display for the robot's eyes switched on, but the glitch happening on it matched the response otherwise unintelligible from the interference.

"Dust," Mia sighed, leaning over the box, lifting it up and blowing some air on the coolers behind it. A cloud of dust exited through the bottom and the little robot stabilized past the glitch, its voice blasting through.

"Hi, Mia. Did you miss your best friend?"

"There he is," she sighed relieved, placing it back down and resuming a standing position besides Connor. "Alright, watch. A.C.E., I want to introduce you to someone who wants to be your friend too. He's standing to my right."

The box robot moved its LED eyes towards the indicated direction, towards Connor, then jumped on the spot to turn itself to face him.

"Spacial awareness," Connor pointed out, impressed.

"The bare minimum of it," she shrugged off the underlying compliment, just as, after a delay of getting into position, the front of the box on the robot opened and a red silicone hand posted on the end of an extending rod greeted Connor.

"Hi. I'm A.C.E., your new best friend."

Connor knew protocol when he saw it, so though lightly amused by the aperture a younger Mia had improvised on what was perhaps her first bold robotics project, he bent over and took the silicone hand into his. He tried to keep to a certain seriousness about it all, "Hello, my name is Connor."

Checking in with Mia with a glance over his shoulder had Connor come to face the fact that while he clearly found enjoyment in learning more about her past, she too was in fact thrilled to share these things with him. Watching him shake hands with her first attempt at making a robot brought to her the sort of innocent smile one would sooner see on a child on the first day of Christmas than with an adult on the run. She may have claimed smiling looked good on him, but Connor had a database full of proof that it looked most natural on her.

"Nice to meet you, Connor," the robot answered with a delay in which, he imagined, it processed the new name. Connor let go of the silicone hand and it retracted back inside the box-shaped body of the robot with a creak.

Once he straightened back up besides Mia, she sighed, "And that's about all this little thing does. He has some more pre-installed voice prompts, since I had to woo my audience to win, but this right here was the piece of code I was most proud of back in the day."

"You've come a long way since box-shaped robots," Connor noted while she picked up A.C.E. from the bed to shut it off again and look for a better place to store it, one a little less dark.

"Please," Mia rolled her eyes. "You're lucky I wasn't on your project team from the start. You would have probably ended up being a box too. I've never been good with the outer design thing."

Though he did found the thought amusing, Connor didn't appreciate the self-critical nuance enough to green light it further. Instead, he pointed her towards her workdesk, "Your arm project seems rather intricate in design to me."

"That's...," Mia stopped, looking at the project splayed across the surface of that table, one she seemed to have even forgotten about in the years since she left. "That was just me fooling around, it doesn't count."

She walked A.C.E. over to her other desk, assuming there would be plenty of space over its dusty surface to give the robot a better resting ground. Just as she was about to wipe the dust off of the table, her hand stopped above something she did not remember being there when she left. In fact, as soon as her eyes focused down on it, she could identify that this board filled with pictures and printed news snippets was in fact new.

It wasn't until she recognized one of the pictures towards the bottom as being the one she took with Connor in the car, heading to their first field test day, that Mia's heart sunk with realization.

With shaking hands growing weaker by the second, she placed A.C.E. down on the empty edge of the table and picked up the board instead. The news articles caught her attention next as they have clearly been clipped off of websites, printed out on paper just so they could be stuck between the pictures she's been sending her father - 'Wilkins' innovative upgrade on the MC500 models hits statewide hospitals and helps save the lives of countless people already, giving the doctors someone they can trust', 'Kamski and Wilkins inauguration of the new CyberLife aid fund provides medical assistance androids to everyone in need', 'Mia Wilkins becomes the youngest graduate of the University of Michigan, making waves with her upgraded interface system for our home androids: the productivity levels to CyberLife's house assistant androids have just been raised'.

"These date back a while," Connor murmured, looking down over her shoulder at the board, giving it a quick scan only to momentarily have to stop on the long line of pictures with him that she had taken and sent. He couldn't help but notice that comparing the last picture taken by them, where he was so distracted by her own smile that he didn't notice himself beginning to mirror it, with the first, where he sat stiffly in a chair in the background of her picture, highlighted a progress — it was clear, just as it was hard for him to admit, that they've gotten closer, that he has allowed that closeness and attachment to happen.

"So what?" Mia mumbled, a failed attempt at hiding the cracks in her composure echoing in her voice. Anger. Pain. Connor read one too many such destructive sentiments in the way she spoke next. "He can keep track of what I do but never bother to answer his damn phone?"

"Mia—" Connor had no time to give his appreciation on the matter, because Mia had already dropped the board back onto the desk and turned around. She may have thought she was fast about it, but he noticed nonetheless the tears she wiped away before looking towards the door.

"Let's get that tracker out of you and be done with this place already. It's too dusty," she went ahead and exited the room without him.

Though he planned on following her right away, to make sure her emotional instability would not continue during the extraction process, Connor looked back at the board on her desk one last time instead. He didn't know her father nearly as well as he knew Mia, so all he could be fully certain about was that the topic of parents was a sensitive one for her, specifically because of this seemimgly unresolved business between them, stemming back to the day she left her home. His wants to know more were quickly brushed aside in order for Connor to prioritise the fact that it would serve neither of them for him to pressure on something clearly close to being an open wound on her consciousness.

Maybe later, he reasoned with himself. Once we get back to work and everything will be fine again.

His lingering forced him to look again at those pictures of Mia and himself. Before he could stop it, his hand reached out to that last one, tracing over her smile, then his. A dreadfully uncomfortable feeling returned in his chest and made Connor swear to himself that he should not forget his doubts, but merely delay them being voiced. If I have been compromised, Mia has the right to know.

"Connor," Mia called from downstairs. "You're coming or not?"

"I'm coming," he confirmed, promptly moving away from the board and the pictures.

Deviants were too dangerous and unpredictable for him to want to take a chance with it in the long run, definitely not while Mia's safety was at stake.

• • •

AUTHOR'S NOTE |
You learn a lot about someone by knowing their past and it is safe to say that Connor had just learnt and confirmed a lot of the things in his profiling of Mia through this "pit stop" at her childhood home.

And yes, yes.. The fish, because with this detail added into the story, Connor gaining "system instability" by saving that fish in the game's pilot chapter gains even more of a meaning.

Btw, I probably should not be admitting this right now, we aren't even halfway through the story after all, but that last picture they took would become relevant in the "bad ending" for this book. 😅 Do with this information what you will.