SEQUENTIAL ━ Connor // RK800 ✔️

twenty-two ━ electric sheep

"Your what now?" Mia tried to hide behind a bemused chuckle her growing confusion soon to turn into worry. "I think I would have known if I married a Christmas tree, Connor. You don't have LEDs—"

"We're not married," he interrupted her with a correction that stunned him far more than it had shocked her.

"Alright," she rolled her eyes, slightly annoyed. "This isn't funny, you know? You can cut the bullshit now, I'm not laughing."

Given some time to look around now that she turned his back on him and resumed her morning routine, Connor shivered at the unfamiliarity of their surroundings. "Where are we?"

"In our house, Connor," Mia answered with a certain nuance of boredom to her tone. "Again, you can drop this act at any point now."

"I'm not acting, Mia," his agitation grew exponentially by the second and with it, the cold that overtook his body and threatened to make his jaw tremble out his next words. "Something's not right. I don't remember how we got here. Or where here even is. The last thing I remember is that we were driving. And I stopped us on... a field. My memory is so...," he stopped himself for a second to think through the right word. "Corrupted," Connor decided. "This is wrong. This is all—!"

The second wave of glitches crashed in over him more abruptly than the last, taking him off guard. Even as he forced his eyes shut at the onslaught of images corrupting his vision, the footage played back for him nonetheless. "This is wrong," he heard himself say while staring between a faceless mannequin — an android, he corrected his apprehension of the scene — and Mia, scared by the sight enough to have backed herself against a desk. They were in some sort of lab — Elijah's personal study, the information gap filled itself — and he remembered so vividly the rawness of the anger he felt in that moment, the disgust, but most importantly, he remembered a sense of duty.

A mission.

The glitch of memory disappeared and though his eyes stayed closed his vision was lit by a system message:

Mission Updated:
<< Return to Mia >>

Connor gasped his way into opening his eyes again, but there was no warm lit bathroom to greet him this time, no house between whose walls he could seek shelter and there was certainly no sight of Mia in the great expanse of snow he found himself laying down into.

<< Danger Temperature: 30.9°F>>

A first alert message covered his vision while he tried to get up without sinking further into the snow, but as soon as he dismissed the prompt in order to prioritize his task at hand, Connor realized it had minimized itself to a countdown at the edge of his sight. Less than two minutes until he completely freezes over.

"Mia?" Connor called out, immediately gritting his teeth to stop his jaw from trembling against the cold seeping through his body. He felt heavier than ever and he blamed that on his synthetic skin and plastic having been the first to catch a coating of frost and ice over them.

After a final grunt marking the end of his crawling from underneath any snow, Connor pushed himself up to his feet and called her name again, looking around for any sign of an answer. The winds were howling, hoisting snow up in the air to join the still falling one to the ground, but most importantly taking away from him any hope of finding the horizon or spotting anything not within five feet away from him. There was no visibility he could count on and if the biocomponent failure warnings he kept dismissing were anything to go by, he feared he won't have a sight to guide himself by soon anyway.