SEQUENTIAL ━ Connor // RK800 ✔️

eighteen ━ the creator

• • •

With the makeshift bandage tightly wrapped around his arm, all Mia had to say in order to persuade Connor out of his driver's seat was that it was still too fragile of a fix for him to subject it to any form of unnecessary strain. Seeing him bleed clearly caused her distress, despite his inability to feel pain and definitely regardless of how little Thirium he was actually losing due to this injury in the first place. It wasn't much of a choice for him when it came to choosing compliance over an overall full efficiency — stress would only worsen the state of deprivation that she was entering with most of her human needs, and he had come to admit he didn't like how close to a mission failure seeing Mia even slightly upset or uncomfortable had started feeling lately.

That was how he ended up in the passenger seat to her right, several hours into their drive, with nothing much left to do. According to his maps, they were approaching Detroit's ring road, a point from where Mia should be able to drive without his occasional input on directions. Though occasional delivery drones flying above busier roads leading into the more developed towns of the surrounding area have managed to keep him busy by becoming target practice for the range of his camera capture attributes, Connor was slowly leaning into a new activity to pass the time, one other than even the coin tricks which had gradually lost their satisfactory charm of keeping his systems engaged: keeping track of Mia's vitals.

It was the better option, he believed. The more responsibile of his available choices.

After all, while going in stand-by had short term benefits to his systems such as giving them time to recalibrate their sensors and do routine maintenance checks, he didn't require it to the point that it would take priority over his duties or his mission, mission which currently sat wide awake to his left, trying to pretend like she wasn't actually yawning every ten minutes, like clockwork.

At the very least Mia didn't mind his new passing time activity. Far too concentrated on the road, he supposed she hadn't even noticed his occasional glances turned into blatant staring, and if she did, then surely she would have told him by then to stop if he was being too intrusive.

Maintaining his coin tricks to a simple nudge of the round metal piece into rolling across his knuckles and between his fingers, Connor refocused his computational power on optical scans instead, gathering as much data as he could on anything and everything. He was not even opposed to the redundant data flows that came in, as re-confirming things he already knew like who the blood on Mia's shirt belonged to or how long it's been since her now faded bruises have been inflicted upon her skin.

Sooner rather than later, his scanners had picked up more than just these surface details he couldn't even use and eventually, he even came to pick up on her increased heart rate. A live screening of that scan result showed up in the periphery of his optical field and he chose to pin the information there while he followed through with an assessment — she's forcing herself through exhaustion.

His own Thirium pump had been designed in the image of the human heart, but Connor was rather certain that had he overwritten the commands of the Thirium pump regulator and forced his pump into operating past its limited parameters or at an unexpectedly increased rate, he would gain nothing but a system failure and a forced system reboot. The human heart was impressively resilient compared to his imitation of it. Androids may have been built to last longer, to be more resistant to damage in general, but none of his biocomponents had the loyalty and dedication of the organic systems abiding a human's brain.