• • •

It's been years since she had seen the home she grew up in and if she were to describe it just then, when the creak of the tyres on that old car marked the moment Connor parked in front of the front porch, Mia would say it was a place immune to time: it hadn't changed, not even a bit.

The same door, the same dusty windows where only the sign of "Service Around Back" was cleaned spotless and shinning in the midday sun. It was her family name on that rusty postbox, and her window overlooking the street from the terrace floor of the house. From inside the car, she could still make out the outline of all the dolls and little figures she lined up on that inner window sill, remnants of a past untouched since she had abandoned it by her own free will.

"His car is not here," Mia muttered, bringing her eyes back to the front yard. "We may yet be in luck," she met Connor's gaze before exiting their vehicle and finally greeting for herself the daunting sensation of stepping on the cobblestone leading to the front door of her home. The last she's done that, she was younger and more determined, a student aspiring to a greatness one could never achieve in a small town high school. There was an angry father behind her back then, screaming as if that could have stopped her from leaving for Detroit once her acceptance letter was in her hand and her dreams burnt a little brighter.

Given her hesitation in front of the door once they've reached it, Connor took the initiative to ring the bell himself.

"If he's not home," he reasoned while waiting for any sound to answer from inside the house, "would that mean you want us to break in?" He let his gaze turn to Mia while he pressed on the button to ring the bell a little longer the second time around. Perplexed enough to tilt his head to the side, he watched her walk towards the roundest pot to the side, where it stood amongst a bunch to form a decaying picture of neglected plants barely scrapping about to thrive in their little corner of the world.

From under that exact pot on the second row, Mia took the key to the house and returned by his side, "It's not exactly a break-in when you have a key and you've been paying the mortgage for the past couple of years."

Connor stepped aside to allow her the bare minimum of necessary space to access the lock on the door. "It may still count as one if..."

"Well," Mia twisted the key in the lock, interrupting him, "we'll be out and on our way before he's back. This isn't a break-in if we don't get caught." She pushed the door open and was hit, head on, by the scent of home. All her bravery had suddenly drained through the soles of her feet - How could the place still smell the same? How could she still remember it so clearly as to recognize it?

It wasn't hard for Connor to piece together why Mia would hesitate before the open door, but given her voiced wish to be in and out of that place without coming face to face with her father once he inevitably returned, he placed his right hand on her shoulder and made his way past her to get inside the house first. "Where do we find what you need?" He gave the interior a quick scan, one however fortunately interrupted by Mia pointing him forward.

"The garage. My dad's workshop is in there," she explained, settling to following Connor through her own house. This quiet arrangement of theirs was what she would define then as perhaps the only way in which she'd be able to traverse the living room and the kitchen without feeling like a stranger walking through a past she's worked hard to outgrow. She could almost see the ghosts of her childhood, the wires and motherboards on every surface, dining with her a breakfast rushed as she listened to the latest news from the city of innovation so close, yet so far away from her grasp. That little girl would have met who she was now and cried excited tears of joy to meet the embodiment of her dreams, the woman she has always wanted to be - save for the recent mishaps with the law.

Connor opened the door to the garage and stepped inside the dark, but crowded place, a cemetery of half dead appliances waiting their turn to be repaired on the three benches long workdesk of Mia's father. Behind him, Mia stopped again in the doorframe, this time to reach to the side and flick the lightswitch on. Her short and subdued laugh followed, "This place hasn't changed much either." She dragged her steps inside until Connor could feel her shoulder and elbow brush against his arm. "His hoarding habit finally becomes useful. My boxes are still here too. Right where I left them." He followed the direction in which she was looking, spotting the whole corner filled to the ceiling with boxes. Mia uncrossed her arms from her chest and placed her hands instead atop her hips, "It's going to take some sorting, but I should have stuff in there that I can use to set up a system to keep you stable while I operate."

"I'll check the perimeter," Connor offered, "make sure we are alone in the house. Keep a lookout for your father. Do let me know if you need help with the boxes though."

"Got it," Mia nodded, but waved at him without turning around from her task. He watched her retrieve the first box from the pile and appreciated she could handle not toppling the whole structure over on her own.

Before actually leaving the mess of the garage entirelt to her though, Connor spotted near the door a hung frame that had compelled him to pause. "Your father has an engineering degree," he declared out loud, his eyebrows furrowing upwards. He knew Mia's father worked as a local mechanic, but he never could have imagined he was a graduate of MIT settling for such a job.

"Yeah," Mia murmured along, seemingly disappointed with that detail being reminded to her. "His thesis was spectacular too. I think I referenced it once or twice in my own work. He could have been so much more, but he just... He always said he didn't like where the industry was heading. He just preferred the company of old pieces waiting to be turned into junk."

Finally, Connor understood why the rift between Mia and her father happened in the first place - she was a mind of the future, while he was a mind stuck in the past. Really, their distinction was written across that whole garage when comparing it with the systematic approach Mia had to setting up her own lab. All those appliances well past their range of operation laying around, had they been under her care instead, they would have met their most merciful ending of retirement instead of being reanimated to working corpses doomed to be constantly out of their league.

Innovation was knocking on her father's door for years now, but he kept it locked and it costed him his daughter.

Connor didn't bring voice to his new analysis data, instead storing it away amongst the other details gathered for his profiling on Mia. Attending to his self-assigned security tasks took priority as soon as he moved his eyes away from the framed degree.

He'd be a spineless liar if he didn't admit, at least to himself, that he was experiencing a form of excitement when faced with the reality that he was standing in the house in which Mia grew up. It wasn't just the personal nature of the fact, but rather also the opportunity that has teased itself into his mind during the short time in which they had lived in the same house — there was so much more about humans, and consequently about her, that he could learn.

Before giving his curious mind the freedom to take in every single detail that he could find, Connor forced himself to focus on completing his part of the job, giving the house a thorough search from top to bottom. It turned out, just as suspected, thay they were alone there and by the looks of the still quiet street outside, though it would be hard to tell with precision when her father would return, he was certain they'd at least hear his car approach before being faced with the inevitable.

By the time he finished his own personal tour of Mia's childhood home, Connor already knew all the spots he wished to have a look at downstairs before returning to the garage and checking in on Mia's progress to scraping together something that would be of use to them both.

While walking in front of the stacked shelves in the living room of the house, Connor had the background noise of Mia's loud sorting process of whatever she found worth salvaging through her boxes. Perhaps he should have been more worried about the tracker remover operation, given the age of all the junk in that garage, but the percentages on probability of success remained the same, so his stress levels were minimal. If anyone could figure something out form trash, it would certainly be Mia.

Finally, Connor arrived at that first spot of the house which had already caught his attention. The shelves in the living room had all been overfilled with books spanning in genre from philosophy to manuals and classic literature, but amongst them, a single shelf was dedicated solely to framed pictures. After a quick scan, he counted there were twelve of them, none of which containing Mia's mother however. If this was a shelf for family memories, Connor assumed her mother hadn't been around enough to make it on it.

He didn't linger on that observation for long though, not when the picture closest to him was so curious - Mia, six years old at the time of the picture, presenting to the camera a bowl-shaped fish tank with a single oranged colored fish in it. She was smiling from ear to ear, which allowed Connor to spot that she worn some thin braces when that picture was taken.

He wondered how she got the fish. Did the night that picture was taken had a story? It looked like she cared for that little being. She certainly seemed happy, Connor appreciated.

Moving his eyes to the next picture momentarily stunned Connor. With his eyebrows raised, he reached out, carefully minding the gentleness of his right hand as it picked up the said picture. His scanners were trying to tell him it was still Mia, but all he was seeing was a baby sitting in the snow and looking up with big eyes at the grey sky. He couldn't help a smile once he accepted the scanner data as a fact - Mia has once been a one year old child mesmerised by something as mundane as falling snow.

"What are you smiling about over there?" Mia asked, a smile of her own, albeit spiced with a nuance of smugness, gracing her lips. She had exited the garage to let Connor know that she got all she needed ready for him, but seeing him before the book shelves holding a picture and smiling forced her to reconsider her priorities. Without letting him do more than look back at her startled, Mia had walked to his side and nudged him to make room for her to see what picture he was holding.

Connor tilted the picture towards her, but now his attention had been reserved solely to watching her face for a reaction. "This is you," he informed her out loud, as if some part of him was still incredulous on the fact and wished to double-check.

Mia reached her right hand around and touched the corner of the picture's frame, "Sure is." Her temple was close to leaning on his arm while looking at the picture and for some reason, Connor had turned hyper-aware of the exact distance before that would happen or the one that her fingers would have to travel if they were to accidently slip down and touch his hand. "Back when I was younger, smaller and definitely much balder under that winter hat," she laughed in a soft chuckle, which Connor, try as he might, mirrored.

The vibration of his quiet and short laughter prompted Mia to straighten up and look at him, a single eyebrow raised at first. "I don't think I've ever seen you smile this much, Connor."

Was it inappropriate to smile over the picture? Asking himself that question following her statement made Connor take control of his expression and start returning it to a more netural state.

"No," Mia let go of the corner of the picture and let her hand fall instead onto his forearm, her body turning to face him properly. "I didn't mean you should stop. Your smile is pretty. I like it."

He didn't know how to answer or even if he should attempt to at all. The corners of his lips seemed more responsive than his processing unit in finding the appropriate reply to be a simple and gentle smile.

She seemed to like that because, letting go of his forearm, she dropped her gaze once more to the picture itself, "What do you like about this one in particular?"

"I think," Connor started, raising the picture back to its original place on the shelf, "it has something to do with the fact that you were so young in it. I have never thought much of the fact that you were once a child." His hand lingered near the pictures on the shelf, his eyes moving to the next one down the line.

Seeing his attention shifting, Mia reached out ahead of him and took the next picture herself. "I remember this day," she admitted, looking down at it. Leaning closer without however letting his chest touch her shoulder, Connor corrected his gaze downwards as well. "Science fair," she ran a finger over the silhouette of herself back when she was twelve years old. There was a small, box shaped robot on the table next to her and behind it, written out in colored markers a tagline she read out loud for Connor, "Come say 'hi' to your new best friend, A.C.E.." After a short break, she looked up at Connor, "Advanced Conversation Engine. It wasn't really that advanced. Just a little sequential programming to make it seem smarter than it really was. But it did win me the competition. Actually..." She turned around to look at the stairs leading upstairs, where there was really only one room, Connor had noticed.

She handed the picture back to Connor as soon as she returned her attention to him, but most importantly, there was now a distinct look in her eyes, one he recognized all too well — she had an idea.

"I might still have it," Mia announced, a thoughtful hint to her voice. "Dad doesn't seem to have touched the dolls I kept on my window sill, so I doubt he moved anything else from inside my room. Would you like to see it?" She knew she would like to revisit that little thing and given how fast Connor placed the picture back in its place on the shelf, she assumed he was willing to meet it as well.

"It should still work," Mia continued, leading the way upstairs. "I made it with voice activation, but I believe I've been gone too long for that to still work. Little thing is definitely not in stand-by anymore, so I'll probably have to reboot it to get it working again. It really shouldn't take too long." In the pause of a fast paced speech broke through by ragged breaths from the abrupt stairs they climbed on, she stopped before the door to her childhood bedroom. Mia looked back over her shoulder and could not deny, her heart swelled at the way Connor looked up at her, eyebrows raised, eyes trying to show eagerness.

Looking at Connor made opening the door much easier than it would have been, had she been standing before it alone. It was only once she was inside that her composure was momentarily gone. Even with a blanket of dust coating everthing, the room which greeted her was still the room she had left behind. Nothing changed, apart from the person walking inside.

She took it all in, everything ahead of her that the passage of time had touched, everything which remained resilient against it all. It felt as if the room had waited for her to come back and it's been waiting since the day she left hoping the next one to walk up those creaky stairs, to touch that cold doorknob would be her.

She turned around to apologize for the dust to Connor, but instead found him marvelling at the fish tank next to the door that she hadn't even noticed when coming in. Perhaps some subconscious part of her did not want to see the dirty water container, nor the corpse of a fish floating around, hence her shock to find that none of those grotesque images awaited her there. The water was clean, the glass was pristine and her fish was still swimming around, now interested in the android watching its loops. Mia wasn't dumb enough not to know what a clean and taken care of aquarium meant, but she pushed away those thoughts of her father to instead walk beside Connor and also observe an old friend.

"I can't believe he's still alive," she admitted.

"There was a picture with it downstairs," Connor brought it up, hoping to earn himself some explanation to his previous wondering question left unasked. "The container was much smaller and much rounder."

"They gave it to be in a bowl from the carnival," she explained. "From the moment I saw it swim around in that small thing under the flashing lights of the vendor, as if its in a constant race with itself, I knew I wanted it. It was a bit of a love at first sight, if you think about it," she nudged Connor, not with her elbow, but by instead fully leaning against his arm for a brief moment. "Played every single game in that carnival to get this fish," a soft laugh motioned her lips into a lingering smile. "The most expensive fish in the world, that's what dad called it, but it didn't matter much to me. Though I suppose I should have kept the bowl. Maybe that way I could have taken it with me when I left." Looking away from the fish and its tank, Mia found Connor already staring at her, having that look in his eyes that almost always meant he was scanning, a look that had almost started fooling her recently as more than just a programmed expression that would help his computing blend in and go by unnoticed by humans.

What could be there to scan when it came to her talking about a fish, she didn't know, but it seemed enough to prompt her to turn around and resume what she was in that room for in the first place. There was no point in losing unnecessary time. "Let me find A.C.E.. He's somewhere around here, I know it."

Connor took this chance to take in the room too — from the posters on her walls of robotics events framing lines of awards from middle school science activities and competitions, to the two desks her room sported, he took it all in and was bound to relish in a certain sensation of satisfaction. "Your room fits your personality," he pointed out while Mia knelt besides her bed and leant down to look under it.

"Does it?" She asked, voice a little muffled now that she started reaching for something under the bed.

Connor missed his cue to answer, finding himself distracted by the opposing tables in the room. While the one to his left seemed to have been dedicated to schoolwork, the one to his right looked more like her first personal lab, so naturally, he was drawn to the latter, with all its circuits left unfinished.

There was a warmth out of his control happening to his gaze as he trailed it over what he assumed had been the last project of hers before she left. Careful not to disturb the peace and stillness of the room, he reached his hand out to an intricate design of a robotic arm put on display right in the middle of the desk. It was nothing like the CyberLife design of such a component, but more so a fidelity copy to a human skeleton, had the bones been made of metal and the blood vessels made of conducting wire, twisted around. That design idea of hers could explain the ripped pages of an anatomy book plasted over the wall in front of the desk. He could still see the places on the arm where she had had to weld the metal together herself, forming trembled lines of connection up and down the rudimentary, but absolutely mesmerising design.

Just as he spotted the external wire connecting to a button on the side of her desk, Mia dropped something with a loud thud on her bed, prompting Connor to abandon his quest of curiosity proving to him at every turn that he had been correct to assume she's always been a brilliant example of human genius. He turned around to her and met not only the box shaped robot on her bed, but also the excitement with which she beckoned him over. She was knelt before the bed, showing no signs of wanting to get up any time soon, but Connor preferred to remain standing, watching from above how she touched with gentleness the sides of the box, feeling around for the lid behind which she hid the control buttons.

Only once she found it and pressed long on the reboot button did she finally stand up. "Alright, let's hope it works," she muttered before quickly clearing her throat with a cough. "Hi, A.C.E.."

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.