• • •

The silence lingering between them was nothing short of undesirable to Connor, even as it fit in with the house itself, a minimalist design succumbed into the dark stillness of the night, a museum of shadows judging them for moving about at such a late hour, when no travelling figures were expected to be out of bed. He has remembered to put back his shoes before joining Mia on this strange night investigation, but the sound of his steps was only as big of a problem as the sound her bare feet against the cold floors.

Once they made it downstairs and came face to face with the long dark hallway awaiting their movement to trigger the bright lights above and reveal slowly just how deep it ran below the house, the silence was no longer acceptable. Connor was still troubled about the conversation Mia was hoping they would leave behind, but he knew better than to pressure her into continuing it right away - he had to ease her back into it, even if to do so meant that he'd have to take a deliberate interest in her current distraction and channel all his patience as preparation for however long it will take him to get her there.

Connor resorted to looking down at the keycard she was holding, giving it a brief scan before looking back ahead. "What are you hoping we find?" He inquired, thus taking the initiative in not letting the silence linger for too long.

"I am hoping we find nothing," Mia admitted, the walk pace she dictated certainly backing up her previous claim that this was indeed just a pursuit chosen in the detriment of laying around in bed, waiting for sleep to get to her. "I suppose I am hoping Chloe had some malfunction on her wiring from all the steam in the bathroom, but knowing my recent luck, she's probably caught the deviancy virus and we are walking into some sort of trap."

"If it is a trap," Connor replied with casual seriousness, "it would be wise for you to let me enter the lab first."

Instantly, her elbow nudged his arm. "Connor," Mia whined. "You're not supposed to believe my crazy theories. You're supposed to present me with a more believable alternative."

"I'm sorry, Mia," Connor did not hesitate to play along with her return to casual conversation. At least she'll be talking, he reasoned with himself and his curiosity before focusing on the fact that she clearly required some reassurance just then. "Perhaps the Chloe did experience some malfunction and misunderstood Mr. Kamski's work intentions. Isn't your birthday coming soon?" He glanced her way. "Maybe all we'll do is ruin his surprise for your birthday."

She smiled, because though she recognized he was being uncharacteristically positive only for her sake, she couldn't help but appreciate his attempt to lighten up the mood after she so clumsily ruined everything with one single word she still couldn't believe her own stupidity for saying. "My birthday's still a month away," Mia sighed.

"Twenty-fifth of October, I am aware," Connor allowed himself a small smile as the information was brought before his eyes accompanied by the memory of the first birthday she celebrated at the lab with him. It was a Saturday, and by no means would anyone have been upset if she took that day off to celebrate her birthday in a much more lively and entertaining place than the plain lab. But there was little that could stop Mia from working, he'd come to learn when she arrived all the same, right on time and holding a box with twelve cupcakes.

'We just fine tuned your oral cavity analysis sensors,' he recalled her saying while she presented him with the assortment of sweets. 'I thought we could test them out with twelve different flavours which you should be able to identify.' He couldn't appreciate taste the way a human would, but she let him sample from the cupcakes anyhow, let him take his time to analyze everything and even allow him to choose an objective favorite from the bunch. Knowing what he did now, he looked back and realized that perhaps that's exactly how she wanted to spend her ideal birthday, and it wasn't just a compromise she had to do for the sake of work and duty.

Perhaps we will do that again this year, Connor couldn't help the passing of that hopeful thought right as Mia stopped them before a door to their left. The number on its security panel matched the one on the keycard.

"Moment of truth," Mia sighed and without any resistance, let Connor take it from there, handing over the keycard and stepping out of his way, just in case his recent postive outlook was as improbable as it sounded.

He raised the keycard, but stopped before it touched the scanner. Pleasant as it was to now have the confirmation that her nervousness after their bedroom conversation would not affect the way she talked with him, Connor felt it was a betrayal to the significance that conversation she was avoiding held to just let it go completely and dedicate himself to this pseudo-investigation of hers.

"Mia," he lowered his hand and turned to her then. "What you said back in the room..."

"We can forget about that," Mia dismissed the topic, something Connor expected to hear. Right away, he shook his head, but just as he was opening his mouth to make an argument as to why that would be unwise of them, she explained herself instead, "You were right. I am tired and tired brains don't exactly work well."

"Then we can talk about it when you're no longer tired, yes?" Connor raised his eyebrows and to his surprise, Mia's tensioned shoulders dropped, her guard completely broken by something she must have seen in his eyes.

She saw too much hope in Connor's eyes to follow her instinct of dismissal again. "Yes," she barely mouthed along her agreement. "We'll... talk about it tomorrow," Mia forced the words out of her, her gaze dropping.

There was no mistaking the relief Connor felt hearing those words. Weak as they were when spoken, they alleviated a good chunk of the pressure that has been piling onto his processing unit since she alluded to the aspect of 'love' affecting them. "Promise?" He took a chance to probing a little further, in the hopes of gaining himself the last bit of reassurance needed to let the topic go and put his trust in her fully. Mia is not cruel, he reasoned with himself. She would not forget about me.

You owe it to him, Mia heard that thought dance around her mind while she had the slightest of hesitation to allow her courage to build up the momentum for her to raise her gaze back to his. You owe him a better explanation, damn it, the scolding of her consciousness lashed out on her the second she distinguished a sense of desperation in the way his eyes studied her reactions.

"I promise," she sighed out those words like they were a heavy stone, lifted off of her chest.

If he had even one percent less restraint, Connor knew he would have offered Mia not a simple smile but an embrace as a sign of his gratitude for what he believed to be a true mercy from her.

Good, he thought to himself, finally able to distinguish his tasks after the absolute havoc she had wrecked of his systems in the guest room. First we handle this investigation and hopefully get Mia tired enough that she would fall asleep a little easier, he begun running through his plan as he turned to the door and pressed the keycard to the door's scanner. Then I make sure she sleeps through the night and when she wakes up, we'll talk over breakfast about whether she actually has fallen in love with me or I merely understood her wrong.

The very idea of her, a human, being enamored with him, a machine who was by no means equipped with the means to show the kindness and care required for such affectionate emotions to take root, was downright insane for him to grasp. Just thinking about it did things to his biocomponents that Connor was not ready to assess in full and thankfully, he didn't have to. Not just then.

The door before them slid open and, as planned, Connor stepped through first, entering the lab and flicking on the lights himself to get a good look around.

Immediately, he was able to disprove Mia's fatalistic theory that they'd be walking into a trap because there was no one waiting for them in there, living or android. The entire space, radically different from the minimalistic design applied in the rest of the house and definitely in the lab they have been taken to upon arrival, was a stilles chaos, a conglomerate of works put on display. It vaguely reminded him of the mess in the garage of Mia's father, only instead of junk piled up to the low ceiling, there were books overflowing their shelves and stacking up in mazes on the floor, biocomponents drconstructed and forgotten on top of uneven surfaces and walls covered in handwritten code that got from 'hard to decipher' to 'lost language' kind of unreadable.

The lab was exponentially smaller than the other one, but not even the unlimited space could have saved it from this mess, Connor found himself thinking as he stepped aside and let Mia through.

Unlike him, she seemer far less perplexed by the sight before them. With the door sliding closed behind her, she sighed with a faint smile upon her lips, "This looks more like the Elijah I know."

"Messy?"

"Thinking too fast for his projects to keep up with him," Mia nodded along and, much to Connor's surprise, did not hesitate in letting her curiosity take the lead. She walked straight for the wall covered in what Connor's scanners counted as two thousand five hundred eighty-three pages filled to the brim with handwritten code.

Of course that's the first place in here she'd go to, Connor tilted his head ever so slightly to the side, but did not let his endearment of Mia's passions distract him from the task at hand. If there was something in there which could have alarmed a Chloe android, the detective he was programmed to be should be able to find it with ease.

There were a lot of items and places in the room that had caught Connor's attention at first glance, but after a quick yet careful consideration, he decided he had the most chances of finding something relevant on the single workdesk that had some room left on it and a chair behind it. Thus, he walked to the side of the room opposite from where Mia had remained, utterly enraptured by the code pieces written on those papers. He reckoned, with a small attempt at a smile forming on his lips that he had less than two minutes to find something before she'd turn around, eyes bright and wide, marveling over some code lines she recognized in there.

Better not waste any time, Connor told himself, not denying however his own excitement to sharing in her passion.

Once behind the desk, he pulled the chair aside and let his attention descend on the single drawer left open on the left hand side of the arrangement he faced. Pulling on it ever so slightly, he peeked inside and already gained a first addition to his profiling on Elijah for the night - no one proud of his attachments would hide framed photos in a drawer, of all places. Remembering Alan Wilkins' shoebox filled with pictures of Mia's mother, as well as the woman's absence from the shelf in the living room, seemed only to further drive his point home.

The first picture in the drawer was of Elijah Kamski and someone his scanners identified as Amanda Stern - AI specialised professor from the University of Colbridge, where Kamski had studied, his processor brought up the information in his field of vision.

Moving that picture aside, he was not entirely surprised to see there was a framed picture of Mia in there as well, one she had taken with Mr. Kamski on her own graduation day from the University of Michigan. She looks happy, Connor noted before carefully setting that picture aside as well and revealing something he had found almost disturbing enough to be intriguing.

"Do you know a certain Amanda Stern?" Connor threw the question towards Mia while he straightened up holding a stack of printed scans of that woman's body.

"Yeah," Mia answered without abandoning her own investigation into the pieces of paper stuck to the wall. "She was Elijah's professor," she explained, but did not manage to give Connor any information he didn't already know by then.

"Right," he started looking through the scans to find some answers for himself. Just as his silence had built up sufficiently to prompt Mia to look back over her shoulder and ask why he'd be interested in Amanda all of a sudden, Connor's eyes scanned a page which he recognized to be a blueprint for an android he was certain had not been built and definitely did not hit the market at any point in the past. Despite that, the project margin bore a series number and the accredited CyberLife project denomination. "Was Amanda human?" He looked up only to find Mia's confusion had led her to narrowing her gaze at the pages he was holding.

"Oh," her shoulders dropped. "The AS100," Mia returned to her papers on the wall, "you don't have to worry about that. It's pretty old news, doubt that's what got Chloe so worried." After a short break in which she waited for any sign that Connor's curiosity had been quenched, she shrugged, "I can tell you about it though."

"If you don't mind," he hurriedly accepted her offer. "Please."

"It's not really that long of a story," Mia said, clearly not as interested in the subject as him. He silently wondered if it was a boring matter to her, or rather a memory of times she didn't want to recall. Without seeing her expression, he couldn't be entirely sure until he'd get a good read of her tonality. "Mrs. Stern was terminally ill, you see," she sighed next. "During his studies in her department, I'm pretty sure she became a bit of a mother figure to Elijah. He always talked so fondly of her, and some people love their teachers, but it was visible in his eyes that Mrs. Stern had managed to give him that nurturing maternal approval and endorsement he lacked growing up."

Connor neatly returned the scans back to the drawer, reconstructing their arrangements under the framed pictures so it was all exactly how he had found them. However, just because he kept his hands busy did not mean he wasn't paying attention. His cycling yellow LED was proof enough that he was analyzing not only what Mia was saying, thus furthering his profiling on Elijah Kamski, but also confirming through her sadness leaning tone that she may not necessarily like having to remember this story.

"By the time he found about her illness, it was already too late to do anything about it in terms of treatment. He had the money, just not the time. It's often like that with humans."

Though Connor believed the limited amount of time humans were given in order to be alive was hardly an inconvenience, and more so a disguised blessing, he refrained from interrupting Mia only to thread too closely to philosophical talks he shouldn't even be considering engaging in.

"Once her illness got her stuck in bed by doctor's orders, AS100 was his way of coping with the imminent loss," Mia finally got around to explaining the very papers that had caught his attention. "Elijah was planning on making an android in her image. Reconstructing her personality, her memories, and putting all that in a body without the fragility of humanity. In theory, she'd live on as an android, at least as far as he was concerned, so Mrs. Stern agreed to the scans, to the meticulous profiling."

"Didn't you say she was terminally ill?" Connor inquired, finding it efficient that while Mia continued the story, he proceeded with his investigation of the desk, namely the terminal on top of it.

"I never said it was a successful profiling," she confirmed his suspicions. "The body was easy to reconstruct with high fidelity, but the illness advanced much faster than the doctors could have anticipated and Elijah simply didn't have the time to profile a fully functional mind. He coded what he could, but what he got was not the Amanda he knew. He was..." Mia hesitated then, remembering a little too vividly for her liking the bad side of people that grief brings out, "He was devastated. Angry. At everything and everyone. And I don't think he's ever been the same after that."

Not willing to slip too deep into the memory of trying to stop Elijah from hurting himself while pulling apart the built AS100, Mia shook her head and dragged her story along. "He shut down the project, of course. I thought he deleted it entirely until he came to me during my research days in that deviancy division. Apparently, he had a change of heart due to our research findings and wanted to repurpose the code of Amanda into an antivirus AI that would combat the virus' takeover of code from within. I told him then what I told him when he put me on the RK series project and saw that he wanted you to be the first model sporting that AI in your interface." She looked over her shoulder and smile as she realized Connor was waiting for her to look at him already, "That's how you make the Terminator."

"Terminator?" Connor's eyebrows furrowed down.

"You know," Mia finally abandoned her wall sufficiently to turn halfway towards him, "the movie." Sharing in the soft chuckle the android indulged into didn't stop her from rolling her eyes, "You may be laughing, but I wasn't. It's just such a bad idea to have intelligent androids' most significant interactions be with an AI. Machine teaching machine is how we get androids to see the irrelevance of human existence."

"That's just ridiculous," Connor shook his head, still unashamed of showing his amusement of her apparent fear that androids would ever see their creators as irrelevant. "And I have proof right here," he nodded down at the terminal screen in front of him. "It's password locked and if I hack my way past it, it will detect my program and set off an alarm." He straightened up and stepped aside, leaving room for Mia to come join him at the desk. "Lucky me I have a human partner who can hack past a password without being detected."

"Charming," Mia shook her head but did not refuse his clever way of asking for help. Walking over, she took a single glance at the screen and stiffened a short chuckle, "We won't need any unethical hacking for this. I already know the password to Elijah's company account."

"You do?" Connor watched, his endeared gaze switching to a confused one in real time as Mia typed in the password and successfully logged them into the terminal. "How do you know his password?"

"It was part of a bed back when I first joined the company," Mia shrugged it off, stepping back to allow Connor to resume his own investigation into Elijah. She should have felt a lot worse about snooping around her friend's personal things, but perhaps because he know him well, she couldn't yet grasp that he'd hide anything in there that she didn't already know. So far, nothing they've seen was even remotely alarming and much as she disliked to admit it, her eyes were starting to find it hard to stay open.

"A bet?" Connor raised the inquiry to her, in hopes of keeping her by his side while he inched forward and, placing his hand bare of any trace of synthetic screen to the terminal ports, started scanning through the documents saved in the local network.

"He claimed he's the better hacker between the two of us and I told him to eat shit, so we sat down after work and hacked into each other's company accounts to settle who's the best," Mia recalled that far too late night spent in his office not even half as vividly as she did the destruction of the AS100. "It was a draw. But if you ask me, I was definitely a millisecond faster than him."

"So he knows your password too then?" Connor blinked out of his scan and adjusted his posture so he could look up at Mia without too much stress brought onto his neck. There was a faint sense of disappointed once he found her still staring, even from across the room, at those pieces of papers littered with code. Her growing interest in that whole wall was starting to make him curious about it too, so before she had the chance to confirm for him the security risk both her and Elijah had deliberately left in the company system for the sake of a bet, of all things, he spoke again, "You seem to have found something of value on that wall. Care to share?"

Startled out of her stare, Mia shook her head firmly before looking down at Connor. "rA9, actually," she replied.

Connor took his hand off the terminal and turned to face her fully, thus silently giving her the sign to continue.

"I would explain more, but honestly, I am still not sure what I'm looking at there," she turned to give another long gaze at the code. "All pieces of paper are out of order, and sure, I can recognize bits and fragments of algorithms, but I can't see why he would have ever spent so much time testing with that particular variable. Half of the processes I did recognize in there don't even get used in your systems in the first place. Elijah's never been one for wasting time though," Mia sighed. "I'll figure it out. I just need a bit of time"

"I'll come take a look with you once I am done here," Connor vowed, connecting himself to the terminal once again to scan the few remaining files on the server. He was expecting to be there for another whole minute at the very least, but he disconnected from the terminal before Mia even had the chance to take a single step away from him and the desk.

Noticing his jerked movement away from the terminal at the corner of her sight, Mia glanced at the screen out of curiosity, in all honesty expecting to be weirded out by some digital proof of Elijah's more erotic vices she wished she knew far less about than she really did. What she saw displayed on the screen was not disgusting though, yet simply confusing.

"Rory?" Mia turned to the screen and lean forward, leaning slightly into Connor's shoulder to squint at the document. "Why's he got a test file on Rory?"

"The real question is, why is this test file so recent?" Connor moved the cursor to the top of the document, where its default name had the date saved. "This sets the document's creation date only day before the deviant killed its master."

"Well," Mia let that information sink in only too briefly while her head tilted ever so slightly to the side, confused by the contents she was reading, "that's a weird coincidence..." Her eyes stopped on a single line of the document and read one word off of it out loud in a barely audible mumble, "Injection..." The idea took its time to get through her tired brain, but once it took root, she snapped her gaze back towards the wall ahead instantly.

"And it's not all," Connor went back in the file system and showed her the folder he found the document into, too caught up in his discovery to notice Mia was straightening up, distracted. "The first documents in here coincide with the deviants you described you've met during your research. This doesn't feel like just a coincidence to me. It feel more like Elijah has elected to continue the research on deviancy alone... Mia?" He had to trail off and call her name when he finally noticed she wasn't by his side anymore, even at the cost of interrupting his own thought process. Perplexed, he watched as she made her way to the wall opposite of them and, after a brief gaze over it's whole entirety, ripped off three pages from three distincr spots.

"Show me the Rory test file again and open the raw data attachment," Mia requested as soon as she turned around and walked back towards him. "Yes, that's it," she confirmed in a hurry the second she saw Connor had put on screen the information she required to see.

"What are you doing?" He questioned her slam of one of the papers face down on the table's surface, as well as her fret to grasp the nearest pencil.

"Praying I'm wrong."

That's not worrying at all, Connor held himself back from responding, instead resorting to watching over her shoulder what she was noting down after glancing up at the screen. The raw data attached to the document was a screening supposedly similar to the output test she had conducted on him in that abandoned gas station bathroom, only unlike Connor's, this data looked heavily encrypted. He tried every hashing method available to make sense of it, but nothing untangled the puzzle before his eyes which, at times, seemed to even draw out patterns of mazes rather than start making actual sense.

His personal inability to solutionate the chaotic conglomerate of characters and symbols that deviancy had turned Rory's output data into was why Connor was so shocked to see that what Mia was writing down by looking at the same screen as him were ordered lines of code.

"How are you decrypting this?" He could not bite back on his bewilderment, especially as it was bound to grow once Mia simply gritted her teeth and turned the paper to face upwards again. She slid the paper aside, towards him and he picked it uo while she took the next page she stole off the wall and turned to write on its back. After swiftly identifying an insertion algorithm having bern scribbled down by Elijah initially on the paper he was holding, Connor recalled Rory's documentation on the test mentioned something about an insertion method being tested.

However, before he could flick the screen back on that document to check, his attention was captured fully through that one glance he took down at Mia that had him realizing she was writing a piece of deviancy scrambled code without actually looking at the screen for reference. A quick scan revealed onto him the exact piece of encrypted data she was writing down was in fact not part of Rory's whole recorded test.

"Are you writing that from memory?" Connor had once again fallen victim to his own surprise regarding Mia's capabilities, letting it slip through into his tone, even reflect on his features. It was easy for an android to channel a perfect memory and recall things with precision, but for a human to write something so complicated out of memory, while running on so little hours of sleep snd almost nothing nutritious in their system... She's impressive, he noted down in his profiling of her, as if he hadn't reached that exact conclusion before.

"I lost entire nights wrecking my brains over this exact section that kept repeating in the data we were collecting from that deviant we managed to get back to the lab to study," Mia finally spoke, pushing the page with the ecrypted code forward and pulling the last one in front of her, taking to its blank back to write. "Entire nights trying to make sense of it, to decrypt it and find the root of the virus."

He watched as, line after line, she wrote down the decrypted version of the scrambled data she had just finished jotting doen. Four lines in, Mia slammed the pen down on the paper, her hand flat above it.

"Fuck," Mia shut her eyes tightly and straightened up. "I can't believe this son of a bitch..."

The moment her hand lifted from the table, Connor picked up the page and tried his best to understand what in there had caused her so much anger, so abruptly. "How did you decrypt this now?" He decided to slowly inquire once his scanners failed to detect a proper reason.

"rA9," Mia breathed out, her hands coming on top of her hips as she stared out at the wall covered in paper and shook her head. "The virus root is rA9 and the variable injection algorithm Elijah created is how Rory turned deviant."

Immediately, Connor looked back at the pieces of paper, then at the screen, running the decryption with 'rA9' as the key. After a few blinks, his eyebrows shut upwards. "Hold on," Connor threw his gaze back at Mia, abandoning the papers on the desk. "Didn't you say the variable was first introduced with me?"

"Hence the injection algorithm," Mia sighed. "Forcing the variable into a software that cannot accommodate it results in the scrambling of the data and the deviation of the android."

"So what?" Connor furrowed his eyebrows down, realizing what she was beginning to insinuate. "You think Elijah Kamski figured out the root of the virus and decided to compromise Rory out of all the android out there with it in order to test his theory?"

"No," she shook her head and turned around. "I think he ran his tests during our research on deviancy and the second he found a way to stabilize the variable, he shut us down and implemented his little revolutionary piece of code into you."

"That's a lot of assumptions there," Connor noted, too nervous to even consider yet the implications of that variable being present in his code as they spoke.

"Is that so?" Mia did not backtrack her statement in the slightest. "There are years worth of a gap between the documents in that folder from our deviancy research and the test he ran independently on Rory. And of course, there's them, and then there's you. You've had all the telltale signs of deviancy apart from the single most significant one from the perspective of a machine. You told me you were experiencing emotions outside the bounds of your programming, a deviant trait. Your tracker had been switched off subconsciously too, yet another deviancy proof. But your code stayed intact despite those signs."

Connor felt words trapped in his throat desperately trying to stop him from wording out a weak question, "What does that mean?"

"It means he finally fucking did it," Mia was too tired to dial back on the occasional curse word anymore, too tired to deny her boiling blood that little outlet to alleviate the building tension through. "He's been fantasizing for so long about taking the next step in evolution with androids, and he finally did it."

Uneasy with the way her eyes looked him up and down while wording out such downright scandalous ideas, Connor couldn't help but admit defeat. "You're not making any sense, Mia."

"What is the thing deviant pretend to be?" She fired back at him with a rapid question.

"Human," he responded, albeit the sense of a question lingered behind his tone.

"Alive," she corrected him. "And why can't androids be classified as alive?" When his answer hesitated into a second of dilence, she immediately rushed to add, "Come on, it's a basic Turing Test question here."

"Androids don't have souls," Connor answered then, not exactly seeing the relevance of what he was saying, but doing so only because she had asked.

"Alright. So androids, and therefore AI in general too, they cannot be alive because they lack a soul," she recaped for him. "What is a soul then?"

"Mia," Connor's tone tried to warn her these philosophical questions were not something he was actually capable of delving into.

"How about a synonym for 'soul' then?" she understood, but did not drop the subject.

"What is this about?"

"Just humor me," she almost raised her voice, clueing him in on the fact that she was slowly losing her patience of building up to getting to her point.

"Well," he chewed on his tongue, giving the prompt some thought, "assuming we are not talking about religion, but instead a more exact science, some older textbooks do use the word 'soul' in order to refer to the 'psyche'."

"Yes, so an android does not possess a pscyhe. What is the psyche?"

He knew better than to object to her trail of thought anymore, so he accepted how nonsensical it all seemed to him and answered anyhow, "It's another word for the human mind."

Much to hid surprise, after his answer, Mia had walked to the wall oppsite of the entrance to the lab, only to briefly trail her finger across the spines of some books until she grasped the one she was apparently looking for. "Can you define what a 'mind' is for me, Connor?" She walked back to him and handed him the book.

Mark Solms, Connor found the author of the book catching his attention and while his LED flickered unsteadily in blue, he prepared himself to answer, leaving the book aside. "The four defining properties of the mind according to Mark Solms are subjectivity, consciousness, intentionality and agency. An android does have the capability of being subjective and intentional, but it has no agency or fully functional consciousness, therefore it cannot have a mind."

"And it cannot be alive," Mia completed his conclusion, thus not leaving any room for him to question where this definition exercise was leading and what it had to do with 'rA9' and the Rory test, which still troubled him.

Thankfully for Connor, Mia continued her idea, "Deviancy, as a virus, imitates life in the sense that the androids corrupted by it show signs of 'consciousness' by being hyper-aware of the full spectrum of emotions, and 'agency' by choosing parameters and actions outside of the restrictions of their code. It's an attempt at completing the missing pieces that would confer them a mind and thus the recognition of being alive. However, what makes deviants clearly distinguishable from a life form is the fact that their code, the matrix of their very existence, is left unrecognizable as soon as agency and consciousness start being noticeable."

After a small break in her speech, only there for her to catch her break, Mia chose to approach Connor until they stood together behind that desk, facing each other. "Nothing in nature that is alive has a randomized or chaotic arrangement," she looked up at him. "Everything works in systems. Every life form has an order of some sort and it abides by it from the moment of birth to the day it dies. One cannot be alive while actively destroying that which has conferred its status of livelihood in the first place. That it what scientifically makes deviants incompatible with qualifying as new life forms. But your code never changed."

"I...," Connor's eyes narrowed, his LED flickering to yellow at last, "I don't think I follow you on that one, Mia."

"You experienced emotions, yes?" Mia circled back to her previously made point, no panic in her tone, and much to his surprise Connor, with some of her anger also gone. "Emotions that you cannot describe, because they have never been programmed into you. But you experienced them anyhow. That's full consciousness, Connor. Of course, there's still agency to account for, but that one's obvious now, isn't it? I was so busy trying not to think about what I would be forced to do if you turned out to be deviant that I didn't even question it properly. You and I both know you shouldn't have been able to shoot that cop when you did. The fact that you did it anyhow, that is agency."

She stepped closer to him - any closer and her breath would fan onto his synthetic skin - and tilted her head to the side to capture his numbed expression at a certain angle. Connor feared she must have seen something in his eyes because unbearably slowly, a smile built up on her lips. "I think..." In a moment of hesitation, Mia stopped her hand from reaching up to his face and instead hid its motion by moving it behind her back. "I believe you are alive, Connor."

"You're not making any sense," Connor argued, but his voice betrayed him by being much quieter than true conviction should sound. His LED was not doing any better in hiding his distress of processing all the information she was giving him - a bright red had replaced the yellow already and he had no chance in fixing that just yet.

Alive? He entertained the thought for the single second he had before rebuking it.

Mia watched his eyes, with his LED's color only an issue for her peripheral vision to keep in mind, but decided not to explain her belief any further. Instead, with her own gaze slowly narrowing, she turned once more towards the computer facing them. "I just don't get it," she sighed then. "Elijah tests on those androids back then a way to make his creation into a new life form rather than just a fancy AI that can no longer impress him. He figures it out after several failures which ended up in our first cases of deviancy. He successfully implements the 'rA9' variable with a brand new prototype and the variable stabilizes. But instead of doing what he's always wanted to do and announcing his discovery to the world, he goes back to the failed attempts and turns Rory deviant? That doesn't make sense."

There were a whole lot more things not making any sense to Connor by that point and top of the list was her outlandish conclusion that he was somehow 'alive'. Him? A precursor to a new life form created by Elijah Kamski? Connor has never in his whole operating time entertained a wilder idea. Even with some small percentage of his processing unit arguing that the contradictions between his software instability and the negative deviancy test could be explained through this game of assumptions Mia was presenting, his more rational side reminded him of the facts: he was only a machine.

"Do you think Elijah did it on purpose?" Mia had asked after a prolonged moment of silencr gave her too much time to think. "Turning Rory deviant."

"The implications of that would be that he wished harm on you," Connor managed to shake his head and thus bring down his LED's glow to yellow again. "He's eccentric, yes, and I may even agree with you that he's perhaps developed an advanced form of God complex when it comes to the relationship with androids he's created, but Mr. Kamski has no reason to want to hurt you. You're his friend, and according to his violent reaction to the death of Amanda Stern alone, it's unlikely he'd want to lose someone close to him." Only when he noticed the way Mia's lips pursed did Connor's until then calm approach drop into doubt. "Right?"

"My code interpretation isn't wrong," Mia argued softly. "rA9 is the virus root and all the papers on his wall are rather telling of what he was looking to achieve through it, what he did through your project. I am just trying to make sense of everything else."

"So am I," Connor chose to empathize despite his loud doubts on the matter. "But jumping to conclusions tampers with the evidence at hand." And it scares me to think that you're right, he continued his thought without giving voice to it.

It was that exact fear which pushed him to seek something else inside that crowded, mess of a room to either shed some light on theie current predicament or at the very least prove they were looking in the wrong place for the cause of Chloe's worries.

"There's a pocket of air behind that wall," he said, nodding towards the wall with shelves from where Mia had brought him the Mark Solms book.

She seemed confused and even slightly displeased with his change of subject, but if she could be granted some understanding over being afraid of the mention of the word 'love' in one of their conversations, he too should be granted the same mercy over his fear of the radical idea of being alive.

If I'm alive, he unfortunately started considering the impossible now that the thought had been planted in his processing unit, then what I have been feeling lately has names which I cannot ignore forever.

With that alarming thought blasting through his processor, it was much easier for Connor to fully commit to ignoring Mia's theories and walk right past her, towards the false wall he had identified. He concentrated on scanning its surface and finding the access point on the busy shelf to the right. There was room enough for him to push the books there aside, so he did, revealing a secondary scanner. Desperation alone made him have very little hesitation in removing his synthetic skin from his hand and placing it directly over the security installation. Connecting to the server, he forced entry past its lock and triggered the mechanism that slid the wall inside and to the left, opening up whatever part of his tiny lab Elijah did not want exposed to any possible curious visitors.

"What the... fuck?"

Having seen the contents hidden behind the false wall before him, Connor took Mia's slow and inquisitive shock as bad news which, paradoxically, thrilled him with thinking that perhaps this was the actual reason why Chloe had alerted her of this private lab's existence in the first place. Stepping back to look inside as well quickly made Connor regret being displeased with his only problem having been the possibility of his condition as a living being.

"This is wrong," Connor breathed out, ending up agreeing with Chloe so naturally that he unfortunately knew right away this was what the android had wanted Mia to discover. This caricature of morals standing before him made him feel a lot of things, none of which even close to being described as good.

Anger, Connor dared identify the sensation trickling his hands into a strange desire to close them into fists.

The android Elijah has been building right there, in his personal office was off the books, despite sporting parts easily identifiable as belonging to several licensed androids, including some that clearly originated from Chloe's. But it wasn't the secret nature of the project that quickly made it disturbing enough for Mia to feel nauseous and for Connor to experience a distinct rash of anger. The pictures and sketches of this illegal android's final face model were the clues that drew abhorrent silence over the room.

Seeing herself in pictures she hadn't a clue when had been taken was all too much for Mia's sleep deprived mind. Those were her features being documented into blueprints, her private life plastered into a swarm of data collection. Elijah was building a high fidelity copy of her, and to realize that took away her breath, stirring her into stepping back until she had the support of the desk to lean against while her hand grasp over her chest.

This alarming discovery was unfortunately all Connor needed to make sense of everything they've found in there, even everything that has happened to them. The truth was right before his eyes and he was disgusted by it.

The failure of the Amanda project, the 'rA9' testing, the RK-series and even Rory turning deviant. All nodes linked in his mind and painted a dangerous picture.

Mia lost balance and caught herself on the edge of the desk just about at the right time not to fall over from her sudden case of dizziness. After staring down at the scattered documents she knocked over, she raised her gaze to look at the thing she was now starting to believe she was better off never discovering in the first place, only to instead meet the kind and worried brown of Connor's eyes. His hands, which only then she started feeling past the numbness that had taken over her, were firmly grasping her upper arms, holding her upright and steady.

And she wanted to talk, to say something, anything at all, but she knew that if she opened her mouth then, she was more likely to start sobbing than articulate a single word.

"We're not safe here anymore," Connor spoke for the both of them. Though he could tell Mia did not want to talk about what Elijah was building, he needed one last detail cleared out before he could identify their best next step. Her reaction alone was telling enough for him to understand that she had not been aware of this project being conducted by her boss and supposed friend. The pictures used in the blueprints were another telltale sign that her privacy had been violated severely for a while now. Then of course, there was the matter that he had just remembered too, one he found key to starting with. "He's been using my profiling on you to avoid making the same mistakes he did with the Amanda project."

Mia's lips trembled and the way she avoided looking him in the eyes unfortunately told Connor that there was indeed one last piece of information he should probe for and request. "You're not sick though," he pointed out, choosing a calm approach, even making sure his thumbs rubbed into her arms. "And you didn't give your consent for any this. Why is he doing this then?"

Connor wanted to give room for his disappointment to grow when he noticed she was holding back as she did when Rory had hurt her. Do you not trust me yet? The question raised itself only to be pushed back down by his more reasonable patience with her and her currently fatigue riddled state. "It's illegal activity through and through, Mia. Creating a fully functional android without registering it through the company, spying on an employee, using your personality and background as a base for an AI code without your written permission. I can file in an anonymous report with proof of what he did here and the DPD will be forced to prosecute him, but in order to protect you, I need to know his motive. He planned this too meticulously to be a psychotic behaviour trait. I know he has a motive and I know you know it."

He had hoped his reassurances and his overall controlled calm would help Mia past her shock, but his warmth had apparently only managed to brake down her strongest attempts at holding back tears. Even as she blinked her sight clear of them, there was nothing she could do against the silent downpour. "He said we...," she barely whispered, trying to move even further back, only to be met with the resistence of the desk behind her. Connor's hands helped her remain steady on her feet, and though he itched to be more of a help against her tears, he needed to be patient only a little while longer.

"He said we would stay friends," she finally worded out, feeling the nauseating sensation return.

"So you broke up with him-?"

"No," she interrupted before he even finished his question, firmly shaking his head. "We never..."

"Mia, I am not mad, I am just trying to understand," Connor let his right hand rub her arm, needing her to remain calm with him.

"He did make advances when I started my internship at the company," Mia admitted, eyes wide, yet seeing very little past the blur of tears. "But I was a minor and... and I told him that, he understood, and we stayed friends."

She refused him, so he decided to make a version of her that could never do so, Connor filed in his conclusion under motive. "Don't move," he gave Mia one last pat on her right arm and stepped back, returning to the android stuck in stasis inside the wall. It had never been activated before and he would make sure it never will.

After all, Elijah used him to profile Mia. That code belonged to him as much as it belonged to Mr. Kamski.

Wrapping his hand around the still faceless android's wrist, Connor accessed the databanks and wiped everything clean. He knew it was a rather irrational thing to do, yet once the android was a clean state, he moved back to the terminal and searched for the project files in the serves as well, deleting every trace of the program created to replicate Mia.

His memory alone would have to serve as proof in the case of what they were reporting, Connor decided once he finally retracted his hand and looked back at Mia. His memory, and Rory's.

She seemed to have reached the same conclusion as him in their moment of silence regarding Rory's implications in this reframing of the situation - it did never quite make sense to Connor how a deviant could have found Mia's location so fast when their field trial was a secret well kept even within the company. The only one who knee their exact location for the field test, enough so to send her flowers, was Elijah Kamski.

Mia's eyes were filled with panic as she stared at the floor, but after hearing the first step Connor made her way, she flinched her gaze upwards to meet his. "The S.W.A.T. team," she barely breathed out and he knew then for certain she was reaching the same conclusions as him. "CyberLife has government contracts. Elijah can kill me and get away with it, can't he? Cover up his sick project?"

"He can't do that," Connor did not waste a single breath before disagreeing firmly. "As long as I am here, he will not harm you. And he is definitely not going to get away with any of this."

"We're in his house," Mia's body seemed to have remembered she could move, because while she whispered her desperation out of her bones, she finally distanced herself from the desk and came forward. For a moment, Connor thought she might be wanting to initiate a hug with him, but though standing now close enough for her personal space to blend into his own, her arms wrapped around herself and she looked around.

He didn't have to read her thoughts to know she was beating herself up for bringing them there. If he could, however, he would have taken away her ability to blame herself for things so out of her control - it baffled him that she would even consider the sentiment of guilt over a scenario in which she was the victim of a clearly obsessive individual, but then again, this was the same Mia who had trusted the word of a deviant while knowing of their predilection to violence.

Rory, Connor remembered then, LED cycling to a single short flash of yellow while he compiled their best plan moving forward. "Then we are leaving," he concluded out loud for her. "Right now."

"And go where?" Mia whined at the idea of being back on the road.

"Rory didn't kill you when it had the chance," Connor responded indirectly to her question by stating that fact. "You were right before, Elijah had no reason to turn Rory deviant, unless he was looking to tie up loose ends. With you dead, there would be no case against him about the android he was building because he can resort to the falsification of your agreement if need be. But Rory didn't kill you when it had the chance, so obviously the deviancy virus did not act in accordance to his expectations. Which is why he got desperate and forged those documents, framing you for everything. If we can get to Rory and get the memory proof that Elijah wanted you dead, the case file I am putting together against him will take priority faster and you will be given witness protection until the matter is resolved in court."

"Rory's probably half way across the ocean by now," Mia held on a little tighter to herself.

"It didn't get to take with it even half of all the supplies you brought for it," Connor kept his hope. "It might still be trying to get everything it needs."

"We don't know how he's planning on leaving?"

"I bet we can pick up a trail in Ann Arbor, where it killed its master."

"I don't know if I can do this anymore, Connor...," Mia's voice cracked over her admission. Much as she would have liked to avoid casting a gloomy shadoe over his determination, her chest felt too heavy for her to hold back on the truth - she was tired.

"Of course you can," he reassured her at first with nothing but words. Seeing the way her fingers clung to her own sleeves was what ultimately forced his hand to sacrifice his software stability and be the one to initiate physically contact - she finds physical contact comforting, he justified the motion of his right hand reaching out to cup her cheek, but he could not find any explanation other than a deep rooted care he harbored for her when his thumb brushed over the dampness of her cheek and wiped away her most recently fallen tear. "We can do this," he said then with a smile that taunted him into remembering that if he accepts his theory, he has to, by extension, accept Mia's as well.

He pushed the thought about being alive aside without a hint of hesitation though. Distractions were the last thing he needed then, when already too many sensation were obstructing the normal functioning of several of his biocomponents. He hoped making a quick stop in the guestroom to get Mia dressed in some proper clothes that wouldn't have her shivering herself into a cold the second they go outside would help him get a hang of himself, but all he managed to do waiting outside the room's door was catalog what he was feeling. Impatience, paranoia, anger, guilt, worry, and the list went on, much to his despair.

Connor's only true relief was that once him and Mia started making their way quietly to the exit of the house, his protocol presents have switched successfully back into the escort mode. He gripped her hand a little tighter when his optical vision received the message about the change and all the emotions that have plagued him drained out of his body - he assumed that's how adrenaline must have felt for humans.

The house had been almost too quiet before they stepped foot in the parlor, making the noise they heard all that much more concerning. Watching Mia's vitals as a continous mandatory task while employing the escort preset, Connor had the certainty that she was far too scared. Some fear was good in humans - knowing she had shot a deviant before in order to defend herself gave Connor the sufficient material to conclude that in a case of life and death, Mia had it in herself to do what had to be done. But too much fear, that was a dangerous territory he didn't want to get her into and thus find out just how much her heart can really take.

The noise reassembling a thud part of a supposed fight may have stopped them both in their tracks, but after a second of waiting, Connor leant forward and took a good look around the parlor, identifying the open door to the side, going into some sort of pool area.

"No, no, no," Elijah's voice sounded, all too recognizable. "Don't tell me you told her, you stupid bitch." Soon after his harsh words, another thud became distinguishable as it was joined by a hurdle of static noise, that of a tortured voice synthesiser. Elijah was talking with one of his Chloe's and his hand was wrapped around her neck.

Confirming that Elijah had his back turned on the open door of the inside pool area he was currently into, Connor pulled Mia along with him and kept the exit into the focus of his field of vision.

They were so close.

"You fucking did," Elijah sighed and dropped Chloe back to the ground, only for her to collapse to her knees from the loss of balance.

Not even a second later, a gunshot rang through the silent, dark house, its echo bouncing off the almost bare interior.

A single bullet had been fired through the defective Chloe's head, spraying Thirium onto the clean floors around the pool, but most importantly, the abrupt sound made Mia muffle a scream behind her hand clasped over her mouth a little too late.

"Shit," Connor cursed when he looked behind and confirmed the sound had made Elijah aware of their attempted discreet exit.

"Where are you going?" He sounded surprised when he asked, but Connor wasn't about to waste any time confirming in his profiling yet another sign of mental instability with the man.

Connor brought Mia to the front door and with an instinct solely fine tuned by his sensors, he raised his hand onto her head and pushed her down with him to dodge the first bullet fired their way by Elijah.

"You're not going anywhere," Mr. Kamski tried to speak calmly to them, even amused, but arguing with someone not in their right minds was a wasted time gamble Connor was unwilling to take while he had Mia with him to protect.

He pushed the door open and had Mia out of the house first, even at the cost of taking the second bullet fired through his left shoulder while he covered the exit for her.

"Connor!"

"Get to the car," he fired back an order to get her going. He was right behind her after all, even while dismissing the alert message about imminent Thirium loss and unexpected biocomponent damage registered. That was a problem for later.

Thankfully, being able to straighten up and grab her hand again in a matter of a fine second reassured Mia enough to comply to his request. She climbed through the driver's seat onto the passenger one with the dexterity brought onto her solely by the adrenaline which finally started kicking in now that she had spotted the dreadful return of that blue stain which confirmed for her that Connor had been injured.

"Get the gun," Connor ordered as soon as he sat into the driver's seat. He was expecting Elijah to be going outside after them and perhaps, under the threat of a gun, he would give up shooting after them - a vehicle covered in bullet holes was hardly the sort that would blend in on the streets. While he heard Mia rummaging for the gun in the compartment before her knees, Connor twisted the key in contact and the car came alive beneath them. He had a 10% chance of getting them out of there before Elijah Kamski stepped outside his home.

Mia straightened up to hand him the gun, "Here-"

Thirium was blasted onto her face making her see blue for just about the second it took her to realize what had just happened.

The gun slipped her fingers and frankly, Mia couldn't remember if she screamed or not, just that she was suddenly gasping for air, lungs left defenseless against her onslaught of tears that have all but run out just when she needed them most to blur out this gruesome sight.

A single bullet blasted through the window and the back of Connor's head, stopping in the plush side of the very seat she was into.

She could see his processing unit sparking from the damage that had torn right through its side, the blue blood flowing out, soaking into his seat.

All Connor saw off of the emergency alerts he shut off instantly in order to press his foot on the acceleration and drive off was that he was nearing an imminent shutdown.

"Connor," Mia breathed out and, much to his horror, he could hear her voice from a distorted distance, though she was sitting right next to him. His hands clung onto the steering wheel a little tighter once he sensed a cold chill travelling down his back from his shoulders.

"I'm fine," he forced his voice synthesiser to cooperate.

Under 3 minutes until shutdown.

"Connor, you gotta pull over," Mia tried her best to look away from the horror which was the back of his head completely blown open, but deep down she knew it was too late to erase that image from her mind in the first place.

"No, I need to get you far away from him and the city first."

"If you shutdown before I save your memory, you're gone forever," Mia shouted back at him and even without looking, he knew she was crying. He wanted to get that one last look at her, in case he was never going to see her again, but he knew he should not take away more of his already depleting energy from the mission of getting her to a relative safety.

"It's alright," he hoped to reassure her instead through words. "Kamski changed my emergency protocol to automatic."

"And you trust anything he does after what just happened?" She righteously kept her tone raised.

Mia was right. For all he knew, Kamski could have lied about the automatic memory upload. For all he knew, he will wake up at the CyberLife tower as a clean slate himself, forgetting everything about Mia. Maybe Kamski had meant to shot him in the first place.

But in that moment, he had to believe that he will not be gone forever. That he will wake up into a new body and remember everything, that he will remember her. "You won't lose me," he promised what was frankly out of his control the more Thirium he lost. "I'll come find you."

"From the CyberLife tower?" She puffed a defeated puff and self-ironic laugh through her sobs. "They will never let you out of that place again." After just a moment of hesitation, Mia shook her head, "This is maddness. You have to pull over. Now, Connor. It's an order."

"Your order contradicts with my mission," he said, but couldn't ignore just how harsh those words felt on his lips.

Connor's jaw locked once the silence prevailed. If he manually turned off enough internal processes he didn't immediately need in order to drive, he could extend the time he had left in his countdown and push the car a little further past the speed limit, get Mia away from danger and put her on a road from which she could safely take over the wheel.

As soon as he could, he took a turn and put them on a rural road, going in between agricultural fields where the only light at 3AM were their own headlights.

His plan involved driving until shutdown, but as he was entering the final minute of the countdown, he made the selfish mistake of glancing at her and thus was face with what his choice to prioritize the mission really entailed. Mia had her head bowed forward, eyes looking down, most likely at the gun fallen to the floor. I don't know if I can do this anymore, he recalled the echo of her voice and that was enough for him to stop the car there, in the middle of the dark fields and reactivate his voice synthesiser.

"Can you help me out?" He pushed the door open, but the smallest movement of his head momentarily took away both his balance and his sight. The next thing he knew, he had fallen out of the open door and planted the side of his head onto the cold dirt.

"I'm here," Mia breathed out, pulling him out of the car completely and onto her lap as she had knelt besides him on the ground. She cared very little about the dirt and even less about dirtying her hands once she had brought them behind his head to try and hold together the pieces that were threatening to fall loose. Though she had fallen silent in the car when he did, now that she was looking down on him again, her eyes were aching again, burning and stinging to force out more tears than she had in the first place.

"You've got to stay alive," Connor hurried to make use of the voice synthesiser he had sacrificed entire seconds in order to bring back online. "I will find you, but you've got to promise me you'll stay alive. No matter what."

"I promise," she nodded along with a single moment of hesitation. "God, Connor. You can't do this to me." There went her resolve, spent away and grinded into dust by the sight of his rapid blinks, the redness of his LED and all the blue slipping through her fingers, soaking into her jeans and into the dirt. She never had a chance to save herself the tears, because who did she have left? It's always ever been herself, hidden away in the company of humming technology. Until him.

"Please don't leave me," Mia begged, though she knew her prayers were useless. The wound will not close itself, the processing unit couldn't mend on its own either. She could trash and scream and nothing that had happened could be undone. "I love you," even that justification to her pleading was too little, too late. "You gotta come back to me... I love you."

With only twenty seconds to go, he begun the memory upload sequence, feeling as his biocomponents begun shutting down one by one, making him number and heavier in Mia's arms.

He tried to smile, but he wasn't sure his expression followed suit. "I want to remember you saying that," he admitted.

Mia leant down and pressed a chaste kiss to his trembling lips whispering faint words slowly less cohesive and closer to just a buzzing static noise.

"Come back to me," she looked right into his eyes and he saw the last seconds of his timer flash behind the upload line being filled.

The sensation of her lips had momentarily awakened his awareness to just how cold everything else apart from their narrow point of connection was. With his gaze distancing itself, he swore he saw a single snowflake fall from the sky too and it was a blessing for him to remember then being back in her childhood home, with her by his side, admiring pictures.

It's snowing, Mia, he said, into the void of data getting transmitted away from his lifeless shell left behind in her arms. This is the earliest snow on record.

• • •

AUTHOR'S NOTE |
Holy moly, did I underestimate how long this chapter was going to get when I made the plan for this act's structure 😭😭😭
11k words y'all !!! This chapter honestly tried to act like it was the finale of the book when in fact it is not.

I poured sooo much emotion into every single scene that happened in this chapter, but goodness, I forgot how the longer the chapter, the more insecure I feel about everything that I write.

Sooo, would this be a good time for me to ask for some reviews, maybe? I could really use some feedback at this point, before we are heading into Act 3, the true final act of this book.