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Time easily lost its meaning when working. It's always been that way. As if the handshake between her and that blinking cursor incrementing characters into a perfect symphony of code was a pact with forces beyond the human perception. Only that could possibly explain how the passage of time lost its meaning and she could get lost, hours on end, working her eyes past the point of exhaustion and hurt, until the task was completed, the project was over and she'd sit up, dizzy and perplexed by just how quickly her whole life turned into a binary sequence, how instantaneous was the transition of reality to code and probability.

Of course, that daze would pass after a much needed sleep, which just then, at what her very far stretched guess hoped to be around seven in the evening, was just a faraway thought. Mia Wilkins would be the last to leave the simulation room if the project wasn't completed that night. In fact, she'd go as far as to acknowledge she'll most likely be the last to leave the whole building if her and her team come that close to missing a deadline entirely.

The upgrade package on the MC500 had to be introduced tomorrow in the afternoon, hospitals counted on it.

"Again?" Donald inquired from somewhere behind, making Mia flinch and turn around with a look that tried to claim on her behalf that she believed this existence outside of her thoughts to be nothing but a sudden nuisance. Remembering where she was certainly counted for at very least a medium degree of annoyance added to her pending deaf headache.

Right, she looked back ahead, re-acknowledging her surroundings without tje tunnel vision focus on the numbers right in front of her, written in blocks between the lines of a holographic simulation of the interface seen by an MC500 android. Given the red tint of everything in that small circular area in which the pixels pulsed, their twenty-seventh simulation of the scenario in which an MC500 would be tasked to give first aid to a human failed and the android proved once again to be taken off guard by the changing variables in the algorithm brought by the crisis.

They — and by 'they', Mia finally acknowledged all the people on her team, sat down on their chairs behind, staring at screens showing different parts of the program access in real time by the android — have watched this play out time and time again, each result getting close, but never close enough to the 'fast and efficient response' promised in the advertisement for the android.

"Maybe our database needs a revisit?" She heard Felicia offer reluctantly a direction of research everyone knew all too well could involve even more overtime for all of them. Thus, as expected, a few groans of frustration filled the room.

Mia sighed. The solution was in there, somewhere between the lines of code. Something in there was stopping the otherwise flawless program from accessing efficiently the comprehensive and complete database of every single affliction and procedure that a proper doctor could ever know in current times. She rolled her shoulders back and straightened her posture, stealing a glimpse down at her tablet before finally deciding, "Let's run the simulation back from the top. Re-initialize the human variables and..." Her words held themselves on a rope of hesitation. She sunk her teeth briefly into the flesh of her own tongue and turned around to squint her eyes in the vague direction of Donald, in charge of the simulation runs. "Do me a favour and compile into the program the code I sent in yesterday."

"It hasn't been approved yet," Donald responded instantly, a tired sense of empathy reverberating through his hoarse voice.

"I authorise it," a much warmer voice quipped in from further back where the faded memory of an exit to that simulation room reappeared in Mia's mind. The lights were turned down low in order to facilitate the holographic show, but after a bit of squinting, she made out the silhouette of Elijah and mustered a smile she hope would look closer to showing gratitude than just how bothered she was by the human weakness of sleepiness beginning to take root in her. For Donald, it was sufficient to hear Mr. Kamski's approval in order to compile Mia's code into the program.

She turned around just as the simulation was about to start again, trying with no avail not to think too much about the consequences it would have not only on the company's sales, but on the people who already bought MC500's if the issue of efficiency is not solved that night. Elijah could claim all he liked that a single model series' failure was inconsequential to the public's already exponentially growing dependency on this innovation CyberLife has brought, Mia could not shake off her mind the image of the emergency rooms of the truly busy hospitals in metropolitan areas counting on a faulty MC500 to help them. There was a death count on her mind, one far more important than her need for sleep, for natural light or for food.

Only the live feed of data pouring itself before her eyes managed to string her out of her growing panic. Androids were spectacular machines, brilliant in every aspect, but every model was only as good as the code behind it, and for a medical android, being good was quintessential.

From side to side, her eyes scanned every line of data that appeared, every string of choice the machine's simulated mind chose, hoping to find the one moment where the code restricts it too much and thus ends up jeopardising the patient.

"Stop!" Mia shouted before she could even read fully that single line which stood out to her. As soon as her mind fully caught up with the instinct of her eyes though, her hands begun shaking on the tablet she was holding. She typed away, gritting her teeth as the screen was not responding as fast as her thoughts were firing, that the keyboard was not cooperating to read her mind on the modification she needed to bring to the code there and then.

"You're adding a new function?"

"The android's not efficient because it doesn't have the option to put his actions on stand-by status to save space. He's getting overwhelmed," Mia explained away mindlessly. "Alright, rewind ten lines and compile again," she looked expectant back at the simulation, her grip on the tablet turning slippery as her nervous hands took the fall for her emotions and started sweating.

It felt both like a blink of an eye and a century of torture before the holographic spectacle before her turned still and green. A burst of cheers and applause erupted behind her, but all Mia could muster was a sigh of relief.

"What's the time spent in the analysis by the android program?" She asked out loud, putting an early break to the celebrations of her team who had grown righteously restless.

"Thirty five seconds on the dot," Felicia responded.

"Efficiency?"

"A hundred percent."

Finally, a smile relaxed itself upon Mia's lips as they shivered out an utter meant only for her ears to hear, "Perfect." Just as it was supposed to be.

Unfrozen from her spot by the success, Mia turned around and abandoned her tablet on the nearest surface in order to clap her hands before herself, "Well done everyone! All the hard work this week paid off and our MC500 will be out saving lives again. Let's run this patch in tomorrow's update, but for now, treat yourselves with a good, long rest."

"Congrats," Elijah waited for her besides the door and clicked it open as soon as she was close enough to follow him out.

The pure white light on the hallways blinded Mia to an instant halt. She must have been trapped into that simulation room for hours on end because finally, her headache had had enough of her carelessness with her wellbeing and it reasoned that to be the perfect moment to make itself felt. By the time Mia came to her senses, Elijah was much further down the hallway. While catching up to him, she made out the fact that he was still going on about some praise regarding her code addition to the MC500.

"Did you really come thirty floors below your paygrade to fan over a little sequential programming?"

"Of course not," he immediately confirmed her suspicion. "That would be silly. I am here to offer you a promotion, Mia."

"Elijah," a note of exasperation riddled itself into her groan. "I am way too tired to be in the mood for another one of your jokes."

He laughed, finally matching her slow pace of walking, "Good thing I am not joking then. You know, I am not forcing you to work overtime, you could have left hours before and been in bed by now."

"Could have, should have, would have," Mia rolled her eyes, noticing they were walking towards the elevator. With a final sigh, she looked up at Elijah, the CEO of CyberLife she unexpectedly went with from stranger to friend, somewhere between the meetings and conferences where they seemed to gravitate around the same fascination. Obsession and passion brings people together without fail. "You really want me to believe you're willing to stick me behind a desk to pay me more when I am clearly more needed on the current department."

"Yes," he nodded, leading them into the elevator. "But I am not sticking you in a cubicle, if that's your biggest worry." Before she could question him any further, Elijah opened his jacket and retrieved from the inside pocket a slightly wrinkled file reeking of his absolutely choatic work ethic. It was a file, alright, a report in all its glory, written at his old typewriter, in an absolute frenzy, and stuck inside an old folder with a yellow smiling sticker placed over the year, giving her a hint that at least this coil was nothing but a recycled relic from one of his school projects, there just to appease the professionalism she applied to work ethics.

He's desperate, she noted to herself, opening the file nonetheless.

"I would have waited until tomorrow, but this is a bit time sensitive, you see."

"Everything is time sensitive," Mia dismissed his worry. "RK800," she read out loud, eyebrows slowly furrowing down. "Is this—?"

"Yes," Elijah cut her off. "All these court appeals and public speeches took away all the time I thought I would have to finish what I started. But no matter, if there is anyone I could trust with this, that someone is you." The ding of the elevator doors opening allowed him to redirect his tone away from resentment rooted in his current issues with the law and tone it down, anchor it all into the present moment instead. He led them down another long hallway, just as bright as the last, albeit far emptier, with little to no doors. "It's already been built. The prototype you'd work on. The results are promising so far, but not quite up to par with the expectations I have of it."

A single look to his side cut Elijah off because Mia was not where he had expected to find her, but instead several steps back, looking down at his file, showing no signs of amazement, but rather a concerning amount of fury instead.

"Amanda?" She looked up and marched the distance between them to shove the file in his face, pointing at the paragraph of deliverables expected from her. "You want me to code an Amanda safe-fail in his program?"

"It," Elijah corrected her, bemused. "And yes, I do," he lifted his hands aiming to guide hers to come down from being so close to his face, but Mia retracted them herself long before he could touch her. "How else are we supposed to regulate its thought process?"

"Forget it," Mia shook her head and closed the file. "You know I never liked your pitch of Amanda. It's a program within a program and it threads dangerously close to a security risk. You are hoping to build an android capable of human-like genius and yet you restrict it through a crude—"

He grasped her shoulders with a heavy grip that staggered her words to remain trapped in her throat, "Then do it your way. I don't care how you do it as long as you take over the project, Mia!"

Her appreciation of his desperation about this kept echoing in her mind as some sort of red alert like the many she had seen that day in the simulation centre. "I don't know, Elijah...," she looked away, her uncertainty softer now that his hands were tantalisingly close to bruising. An added pain to her pulsing headache was the last thing she needed.

"Don't dimiss this opportunity before you meet it, alright?" He let go of her to point towards the door to their left. "See for yourself what I am on the verge of achieving here and then tell me what you want to decide." Elijah watched closesly how careful Mia was in studying the door, "Come on, Wilkins. You read the file. Forget about the Amanda initiative, we scrap that, but perfect intelligence? Isn't that something you dreamed about too?"

And after all, it won't hurt to admit she was a little curious to fact check his data reports.

Mia sighed out a defeated, half amused question, already moving towards the door, "How much am I getting paid for overtime again?"

"You're about to get paid a whole lot more," his voice stayed as an echo with her while she went form a well lit hallway to a well lit lab room of the layout she was all too familiar with. It was a showroom in which androids had to be called in and tested. She routinely arranged two chairs from the line near the door in the center of the room, facing each other, then returned to door and keyed in the serial number written in the file for the android, to activate him from the storage behind the showroom and call him in.

She didn't have time to sit down on her chair before the door to the storage opened and the android stepped inside the room. It was long since she has grown used with the idea that she will never get used to the chill caused by just how human-like CyberLife managed to make their androids look. Clean, dressed neatly with a serious tie, Mia was met with the pair of gentle brown eyes of a man. She even dared think of him as looking kind. They probably designed that on purpose, she reasoned.

"Hello," the android greeted her. "My name is Connor. I am a prototype android created by CyberLife. "

"Hello, Connor," she returned the greeting with a smile. "My name is Mia. Please," she gestured to the chair on the right, "sit down." She took a seat in the chair in front of him, undeniably feeling a bit revigorated by her newfound curiosity regarding the android in room with her, enough so apparely to open the file again in her lap.

"Mia...?" Connor spoke up, inquisitive, and once she looked up, shocked by his choice of intonation, she realized he even leant forward, tilted his head to the side, waiting to have her attention. "Humans usually have two names," his expression followed the feeling of confusion he was attempting to emulate before her eyes.

"We do," Mia straightened up and leant back in her chair after being slightly taken off guard by the high fidelity reassembly to a human that Elijah had managed to implement with this model series. It wasn't just Connor's appearance either, but the fact that he took initiative in the conversation with such ease. She shouldn't have been all that surprised, given his file mentioned his needed high adaptability to be compatible with any personality. "The file says your goal is to one day aid within police stations during investigations, so I will assume you have retinal scanners installed already, correct?"

"Yes."

"Good, then let's test those, shall we? I am registered in the CyberLife database. How about you tell me my full name instead, Connor?"

It couldn't have been more than a blink of an eye for him before he too corrected his posture in his chair, "Mia Elizabeth Wilkins."

She couldn't contain the absolute astonishment in her smile even if she tried. Silence drew out because for the first time in a long couple of years spent working for CyberLife, they finally managed to surprise her again. It was unintentional the way Mia had forgotten about her tiredness, about her headache, about the fact that she was running on a steady and unhealthy full four hours overtime already; she was merely too mesmerised by the masterful programming that must have went behind scenes to create the paradigm of efficiency before her eyes.

"You...," Connor hesitated, assessing in real time the information on her, "you designed the interface of my scanner."

"I did. How do you like it?"

"It is efficient."

Mia attempted to stiffen her laugh, "That's exactly what I wanted to hear, you know. It's what it's supposed to be. I must say, your diction and intonation is the best I have ever heard with an android."

"Thank you."

He sounded genuine. Her dormant tiredness even helped her hallucinate a faint twitch of a smile on Connor's facial expression just then, but sure as Hell, Mia was feeling her own cheeks hurt from her own childish joy about this prototype sitting before her so blissfully unaware of his own brilliance and uniqueness.

"What else can you see, Connor?"

He gave her a rather brief once over before responding, "You have a high deficiency of Vitamin D, most likely from staying inside for too long and missing daylight hours for the vast majority of days within a week. I can also tell you may need to take an ibuprofen."

"How so?" Mia narrowed her gaze on him.

"Your eyes are bloodshot and teary, your eyelids seem heavy and your neck muscles are showing signs of significant tension. You have been experiencing a headache for a prolonged time."

"Fascinating," Mia mumbled out before being able to control herself. How could she? In the chair before her was sitting an intelligent being, the next step of evolution with androids, able to compute data of all types at humanly unachievable speed. It should scare her, it should probably really scare her, but she would much rather be impressed than scared by the extraordinary. "I mean," she shook her head in order to stop herself from staring too long, "you are correct," she added with a laugh following close behind. "I should probably take that ibuprofen first thing."

Connor nodded, but after his brief break, he continued, shifting in his seat, "There is one thing I do not understand about you though, Miss Wilkins."

"Just Mia is fine." She noted curiously he had taken a full second to compute her request of being addressed by her first name. Given it made him blink two times, she assumed the android had built in professionalism etiquette as a default.

Eventually though, Connor continued with his inquiry, "What are you doing here? You are appointment as lead to the programming department on floor thirty-two."

"Oh, that," Mia smiled, a bit of irony stinging the back of her throat. She never had a chance of refusing Elijah. He knew her too well and assumed correctly that after meeting Connor, she'd be too intrigued by his intelligence to pass on the opportunity. "Yes," she sighed, because all that was left to do now was accept the cards she was dealt. "The database hasn't been updated on that matter yet it seems, as it has all been a bit spontaneous, but I have just been appointed to your project, Connor. From now on, we'll be working together to iron out everything into perfection and get you ready to help save lives alongside police force. How does that sound?"

She watched with interest how his eyebrows raised, how his eyes captured in a human-like fashion the bright light above them, how his hands gripped down on his knees relaxed, and how, ultimately, he worded out a calm answer. "You have my full cooperation, Mia."

"Then let's get started."