SEQUENTIAL ━ Connor // RK800 ✔️

twenty-four ━ to understand

Her hand wrapped around the gun, but Mia didn't stop her struggle there. She dragged herself to sitting, back leaning against the doorframe and once the freshest wave of pain allowed her to open her eyes again, she moved her head to the side and checked on her hallucinations.

One of the two RK800's was holding a gun and, forced by the other into pointing it to the ceiling much further above the level of the scaffolding installation still. Two shots were fired and a rain of glass shards fell on top of the pair while the gun had finally been knocked out of his grip.

The ear ringing those two gunshots caused her had spread into a head splitting headache within the second, turning redundant her attempt to arm herself, because the gun had already slipped her grip.

In an attempt to see where the gun had landed while the height of the headache still reverbed inside her skull, Mia threw by mistake a single glimpse that would turn into a panicked stare down at her white shirt turned bloody and the absolute carnage of her left shoulder. Was that white her collarbone? Obviously, that was no question to ask herself when her consciousness was hanging by a thin thread, because while the sight of her wounds immediately nullified her brain's efforts in dosaging how much pain she'd feel, the mere thought of seeing her own bone through a bullet hole twisted her stomach in a knot tight enough that she felt lightheaded and prone to throwing up.

Instead, her brain decided that would be the perfect time to turn off the lights for a while and abandon this scene turned into a nightmare of obscure darkness barely interrupted anymore by the nightclub neons below or the broken lamp still shining on the room's ground, illuminating the path she had crawled over the Red Ice crystal covered floor.

Connor could not bring himself pinning the trackint of Mia's vitals on the corner of his interface, not even as her passing out distracted him enough to allow the Forty-eight model to land a good hit on the side of his face, one sufficiently strong to temporarily throw off his synthetic skin into deactivating from the spot and exposing the white plastic beneath. He recovered too quickly back to the fight for him to even consider turnint off such an important background runnint command, one that ultimately help give him wn edge of motivation over his clone.

With his own handgun now out of the equation too, and with no statistical chance of winning a close combat encounter against an android of the same model that held the same programming and protocols as him, Connor knew he had to pivot to some sort of advantage that his clone could neither expect, nor employ in return: he made his second mistake on purpose.

The hit as punishment for him dropping his guard was immediate, knocking harsh knuckles over an equally harsh surface that was his cheek, and pushing his head all the way to the side while he was backed into the railing by this power imbalance he allowed to come between them.

When a second hit followed, taking full advantage of his hesitation and stagger, Connor knew his plan had worked and Forty-eight fell for what chess would have seen as a brilliant sacrifice — with chess having been his and Mia's favorite method of training his computing power in the early days, Connor had learnt  the weaknesses of a computer laid in its inability to choose a small loss in order to earn a bigger win. Hundreds of chess games played against Mia and the only two she had won were those where her blunders set up moves he that he could not predict thanks to first classifying her strategy as a mistake and thus dismissing it.

There was nothing quite like intentional errors that would throw off an android's processing unit, and Connor knew that for sure, because even his own LED flashed red when he chose and executed this plan without heeding to a single warning given to him through his interface.