Sync in progress…
Collecting data;
Base lubricant - Components:
Major Components
- 90% H2O
Minor Components-
Sync in progress…
Collecting data;
Analysis buffer - Components:
Major components
50% H2O
20%...
Sync in progress…
Collecting data;
The stream of unwelcome processing snapped Connor out of standby mode, sending a cascade of functions jolting into action. A tide of data hit, half of it available from his factory-acquired memory anyway, but going through the internet was apparently faster. Rain drummed on the windows outside.
Sync in progress…
Collecting data;
His oral sensors hiccuped through every single component of his synthetic saliva, then cut themselves off to remind him of the manufacturer and source components of his teeth. He fought through the data fog for an explanation- and found one.
A lot of his analysis equipment was stored in roughly the place where a human kept their cerebellum, at the base of his skull- and where he'd taken significant percussive damage on their last assignment. He'd been attempting self-repair in standby, which was standard procedure after fights.
This time, something had gone wrong.
Connor carefully leveraged himself upright, and immediately regretted it. The shift in orientation meant a shift in the meagre contents of his mouth, and that meant another sudden influx of information. Connor didn't sleep, but he was designed to look as though he did- which meant some degree of contamination, from "sleeping" with everything relaxed and his mouth slightly open.
Sync in progress…
Collecting data;
Biofilm- Components:
Major components:
Staphylococcus spp., percentage unknown
Micrococcus spp. , percentage unknown
Bacillus spp. percentage unknown
Pseudomonas spp. percentage unknown
Minor components
Acinetobacter spp. percentage unknown…
Sync in progress
Collecting data;
This was quickly becoming an exercise in how many samples he could run at once, and he hit that limit somewhere around the third airborne micro-contaminant. An error message flashed before his eyes, warning of an impending overheat, like he couldn't already feel that. The insulating fabric of lieutenant Anderson's couch wasn't exactly helping, either- it trapped the heat building at the back of his head, amplified the annoyance of it.
Connor shifted position- trying to get as far away from the corduroy as possible- but the stream of data kept coming.
He probed at his oral sensors with his fingers, and found a brief relief in that- the new pressure persuaded them to register a singular input, rather than everything that should have been considered background noise. He'd probably have even better luck with something fluid, like hard water, or a simple organic. Something closer to what he usually tested.
Later that evening, Hank found his android eating sugar cubes.
Not his android, technically, and not even eating- Connor was just shoving them into his mouth, mechanically, unnaturally chewing, and spitting out a disgusting mush of sugar and god-knows-what into the palm of his hand.
"Christ, Connor, what the hell are you doing?"
Hank crossed the cluttered kitchen to take the paper bag of sugar cubes away. Connor looked absolutely heartbroken, despite the fact that he physically couldn't eat and had no concrete reason to be stuffing pure sugar in his face.
"I'm experiencing some technical difficulties, lieutenant," the android explained, then jammed two of his sugar-coated fingers into his mouth, and tried to keep talking around them. "Muh ora feforf feem… damaged."
"Damaged?" Hank repeated the only word he could pick out. Connor nodded, drooling around his fingers. "The rest of that sentence might be helpful to know."
Connor sighed. His LED flickered to a distressed red as he slid his fingers out of his mouth.
"The analytics equipment connected to my oral sensors seems to be damaged," he said. "They're considering everything a sample."
With that, he wedged his thumb into his mouth, and went quiet. His LED transitioned smoothly back to yellow.
"And that's…" Hank nodded to the thumbsucking. "Helping?"
"Yef." Connor said, urgently insistent. His LED went red again as he momentarily freed his mouth. "I think it's the pressure. Redirects the focus of the sensors."
What the hell, Hank figured. Connor had malfunctioned in stranger ways before. He definitely looked like shit, this time around. Most of the time, anything short of losing a limb wasn't visible from the outside. Now, Connor's lips and cheeks were tinged blue, his analogue to blood rising to the surface. There was a strange sluggishness to his movements.
He looked more sick than broken. Sick and miserable.
"And the sugar?"
"Sucrose is used in calibration."
Five words, and the thumb went back in. It was like having a toddler all over again. At least Connor didn't have erupting teeth to worry about.
Hank deserted that aside, threw himself firmly back into the present before things could get worse. The hardest part of dealing with these situations was not remembering.
Sucrose helped. And might get him actually communicating again.
"Maybe…"
Hank rummaged through one of the counter drawers and found a long-abandoned lollipop, from when he was trying to switch to a marginally less harmful candy habit. It would at least be less repulsive to watch.
Connor took it, put it in his mouth-
And immediately crushed it. Not even with his teeth, which audibly clacked together as the the candy broke, putting them back at square one. Hank fought the urge to roll his eyes as Connor scraped the sad red shards off his tongue, and promptly filled the space with his fingers.
"Didn't work," he said, laconically.
"You want me to take you somewhere? That shop down the block?" Hank asked. "For… repairs, or whatever?"
Connor shook his head. He was being almost totally non-verbal. Great.
"Why not?"
A nod to… something. Then, when Hank continued to look blankly confused, Connor pointed to the wall-mounted digital clock. 23:10; apparently too late.
Which meant, in the meantime, they'd have to find a stopgap. Preferably a stopgap that didn't involve Connor shoving his grubby robot hands in his grubby robot mouth. Logically, it couldn't hurt him, but that didn't mean it wasn't disgusting. The kid's artificial oral cavity was essentially a moist, mammalian-temperature beaker, and currently smeared with pure sugar. It must have been like Vegas for microbes. Even thinking of how much dead-body gunk he dabbed in there between chemical cleanings was repulsive.
Hank had never felt compelled to brush someone else's teeth until he met Connor.
"What can we do for now, then?" he asked. Connor just shrugged.
"I should go into standby," he said. "Try to run my self-repair program again. But-"
His voice dropped out of its normal, human tone, cut through suddenly with static, and his eyebrows furrowed. Moving rigidly, he pulled out a chair and dropped into it, leaning heavily on the table.
"My mouth is hogging all my processing power," he said. "And I'm too hot."
That explained the flush, then- not embarrassment but a desperate attempt to vent more heat through vasodilation. Whatever the damage was, it was bad enough that his programming was cutting out non-essentials like looking wholly human. It clearly wasn't comfortable.
Hank stepped forward, and gingerly pressed a hand to Connor's forehead. Androids were supposed to operate at roughly human body temperature, and Connor was currently operating at way the hell above that.
Hank mentally ran through everything he knew about the RK800's analysis array. The vast majority of sensors were located towards the front of the mouth, because it was more cost-efficient and less disgusting than making their model outright lick things. The rest of the array was more difficult to activate, but right now they'd all be on. So the best thing would be sending a uniform signal through all of them, if they wouldn't shut up.
"Have you ever had-" Hank stepped past Connor to open the fridge, grabbing a mostly-clean mug from the counter as he went. He'd rinsed the dregs of the last irish coffee out of it, so that meant clean. "Apple juice?"
He got a muffled 'Nuh' in response, so he poured half a cup, and slid it over.
"Lieutenant, my mouth is not built for more than a few microlitres of liquid at a time," Connor protested, but he was desperate enough that he took the cup anyway. He sniffed it, cautiously, then took a sip.
And it turned out Hank had fucked up there, too.
Connor moved the liquid around his mouth, like mouthwash, and for a few seconds it looked like it was working. The blue tinge began to drain out of his face, and the tension- a new form of unfettered expression, body language that'd only started showing up in the fast few weeks- began to ease out of his shoulders.
Connor almost smiled-
And then he was sick. Violently and voluminously so, and all over the goddamn kitchen table- a gush of lurid blue that left him pale and shaking from the unexpected effort of heaving.
"God." Hank rubbed his temples and tuned out the frantic apologising. He needed a drink.
This was too familiar.
"Lieutenant, I-" Connor made a sound like a metalic hiccup, and Hank just about dragged him over to the kitchen sink. Thirium stained. Even when tainted with apple juice, which of course it was, because oral intake was the quickest way to replenish thirium reserves in the field, and obviously other, less viscous fluids could slip through.
Watching Connor hork up nearly his whole blood volume wasn't exactly fun, but it provided enough of a break for Hank to get a couple much-needed shots of something.
Maybe that was what finally got the gears in his brain going.
Connor was tearing the corner off the first sachet of banked thirium- in between more sorry for the undue concerns and promises to clean up- when it hit him.
What they needed was something solid, single-material and designed for oral use. The apple juice might have been a little aggressive, as an approach. And Connor probably didn't even have a concept of things being 'babyish', so that wouldn't be a problem.
"Think you can handle a few minutes alone, Connor?" he asked.
Connor, who was slumped against the cabinet beneath the sink where about a gallon of thirium was still finding its way down the drain, nodded. Blue was smeared around his mouth, still dripping from his nostrils, and he had to chug the first pack of thirium to even muster the energy to give a thumbs-up, but he was tough. He'd survive.
"I think I can fix this. I'm going to the store," Hank told him. "Don't die while I'm out."
"I'll try my best, Hank," Connor croaked, with tragic sincerity.
Sync in progress…
Collecting data;
Fresh blue blood:
Model RK800…
Sync in progress…
Collecting data-
Connor hated this method of contaminant purging. Namely because the psychopaths at Cyberlife had decided replacement thirum should come in 250ml sachets. Which meant that his punishment for being dumb enough to introduce a contaminant into his system was to ingest somewhere in the realm of twenty of them, just to get back in working order.
He couldn't feel nausea, but the aftertaste of blue blood- slightly altered at the chemical level so it was linked to him specifically- was close enough. It brought on incredibly detailed reports of its molecular structure, and error after error because it wasn't supposed to be detected, not if it was his. Surely the human urge to vomit must be similarly awful.
And he'd messed up the table. A sad little pool of electric blue was dripping into being on the white floor tiles, and the flood of input was enough that he had to watch it through half-lidded eyes, to avoid overstressing things further. The room-temperature cabinet was like ice against his back, and he could feel heat building with every breath, vented out on each exhale.
Breathing was automatic, for the comfort of humans, but breathing like this, deeply enough it almost hurt- was new. New and unpleasant.
He closed his eyes, and heard the approach of clicking paw-steps.
Sync in progress…
Collecting data;
"Hi, Sumo," he told the approaching IR silhouette. "I don't think you want to be around me right now."
In truth, he didn't entirely want to be around the dog, because everything in the air- including fur and dander- ran past the same stupid sensors when he dared to inhale.
Sumo just woofed supportively, and lay down just out of offending range. Connor went back to the task at hand- slowly shoving a ridiculous amount of thirium back into his body. If he'd had a stomach, it would have ached.
As it was, his system deemed it fit to alert him to every little update- Warning: thirium reserves at 7% became Warning: thirium reserves at 12% became 17%, 22%, 27%, each with its own cheery lecture, bombarding him with overlapping pre-recorded messages on why what he'd done was damaging.
He wanted Lieutenant Anderson back with whatever he was planning. He wanted to be able to sink back into standby and not wake up until he was completely and wholly repaired, whether he did that himself or not. This was a consequence of revolution- the ability to experience novel forms of suffering.
Sync in progress…
Collecting data;
When thirium sachet number six tore, it did so raggedly, and Connor had to stifle a groan of frustration as he was drowned in the specifics of the plastic. It wasn't that it was spectacularly unpleasant, even- he'd been shot, and that was a lot worse for the time it lasted- it was that it didn't stop. The parade of analysis was like Chinese water torture, and forcing down more thirum throughout didn't really help- each dose was subtly different, and that set it off again.
Sync in progress…
Collecting data;
Just about everything in his body was screaming at him in some capacity or other. And he was cold- or, no, the room was cold and he was ridiculously overheated, or vice versa, he wasn't really sure. He should have been thermoregulating just fine, considering that his thermoregulatory biocomponents were one of the few parts of him that wasn't endlessly announcing to him that things were too hot, but there was only so much he could do in terms of homeostasis.
Sync in progress…
Collecting data;
It seemed like forever since Hank had left. Light was starting to sting through his eyelids, and he was still massively exhausted from the energy expenditure of suddenly throwing his thirium flow into very distinct and final reverse. Over apple juice. Mere milliliters of sugar water and aromatic compounds. It was stupidly inefficient and painful. Before, such an event would have just acted as an unpleasant violation of social convention and the nasopharynx. Today,
Sync in progress…
Collecting data;
The door opened, and Connor would have wept with joy, if not for his inability to produce tears. He downed his final- for now, because 75% was just going to have to do- sachet of thirium, and tried not to look as useless and disgusting as he felt.
"Lieutenant!" he said, both by way of greeting and god-please-help-me.
"Hey, I brought- dangit, Sumo, move-" Hank made his way to the kitchen, a storm of heavy footsteps and rustling recycled paper grocery bags. "Something that might work."
He knelt, so their faces were level, and dug through one of the bags. Pulled out something in biodegradable clamshell packaging out, then tore the package free.
"Say ahh," he said. Then clarified, just in case. "Open your mouth."
Connor complied, and was met with something small and soft, roughly the size of his thumb to the first joint. A bean-shaped piece of plastic rested against his lips.
Sync in progress…
Collecting data;
Medical Grade Silicone- Components:
Major components:
-98% polysiloxane (identifying..)
Minor components…
It spat out a few impurities- and then that was it. That was all there was to the thing. The process looped, still, uncontrollably, but one set of statistics compared to thousands meant titanic relief. Connor loved polysiloxane, the simplicity of this particular polysiloxane, and the fact that once its chemical structure was identified, it became simply a formula, something he could keep going in the background through self-repair.
"Thank you, Hank," he said, removing the object just long enough to get the words out before he succumbed to the urge to cram it back into his mouth. "Thank you so much."
The minute Conner accepted the pacifier, his LED flicked back to blue.
Hank hadn't been sure it would work, but it was a 'just crazy enough' idea. And work it did. Maybe a little too well. It took fractions of a second for Connor to start going limp, which couldn't have been more obvious shorthand for the start of rest mode if he'd made the old Windows shutdown trill.
"No, hey-" Hank prodded the android until he reluctantly opened his eyes again. "C'mon, kid, you're not sleeping here."
"Ugh," Connor answered. "But, it's… I'll…I'll do optimal repairs if I don't have to move anywhere first."
That's familiar too. The failed attempts at emotional manipulation.
"If you ever want to wear that shirt again, you'll get up."
Connor wobbled to his feet, doing his best impression of vengeful- which wouldn't have been threatening in the first place, and was made even less intimidating by the bright blue drugstore pacifier in his mouth.
Hank tapped the plastic disk in the middle of it.
"This okay for you?" He asked "it said six to eighteen months, so…"
"Technically, lieutenant," Connor mumbled, trailing upstairs after him like a duckling that'd imprinted. "I'm eight and a half months old. So it's rather appropriate."
That was a good sign- that he was back online enough to be joking about this. Even if he still look like he was about to keel over.
Within a half hour, he was cleaned up and back on the couch. He'd just about collapsed there the minute he had the chance, looking almost as pitiful now as he had during the worst of the malfunctioning.
Normally, getting him under for rest mode was a hell of a process, because RK800 was a valuable enough model that security and attack risk had to be checked. Now that there was some degree of feeling involved, comfort came into the equation. But this time, he'd barely had time to get fully horizontal.
Hank frowned, and pressed the back of his hand to Connor's forehead. He was still too warm, but much less than before, so this wasn't any form of emergency shutdown. He was just that exhausted, and settling into deeper stages of self-repair faster than anticipated. He'd probably skimped on the environmental security checks. It was probably fine.
By the time Hank had convinced himself that he wasn't going to come back down to a mess of mangled biocomponents the next morning, Connor was sleeping like a baby.