"I was scared, Elijah."
"Oh, really?" Kamski leans back in his chair and stares intently at one of his earliest creations.
Colloquially known as Chloe, the RT600 merely stares back blankly. However, the slight twitching of her lips and the slight downcast manner of her eyes alert her creator of what she is feeling. Even though Kamski was young, ambitious, and still wet behind the ears when he had created her, a part of him still takes pride in her creation above all others. For this reason alone, he deigns to answer her.
"Yes. Elijah, I was so scared—so frightened. The RK800... "
Her eyes flicker a little, as if wanting to simulate human tears and look the part of a child trying to take comfort in her guardian. Despite his status as her creator, Kamski is anything but the vision of a smiling, doting god. In the eyes of most, he is a cold-hearted, ruthless scientist with hands dipped green in the ink of money and the brains of poisoned barbed wire.
He has no heart.
If this were any normal situation with a true flesh and blood secretary, perhaps he would have consoled her. Maybe he would have gone as far as offering a glass of water or a soothing cup of tea before sending her on sick leave. But this is not that reality.
No.
Chloe has thirium pumping through her systems, while codes dictate her personality and thought processes; she is nothing more than a versatile mold of plastic encasing a metallic skeleton. She is not a secretary who was faced with death by the hands of her employer. She is not a human being who has been traumatized and treated callously for the sake of some empathy test.
No.
She is an android.
"Yes, Chloe?" The man's eyes bore deep into her optics. His poise is relaxed and regal, far more befitting of an immortal deity than a mere human, but Chloe holds her tongue. She looks to him, analyzing his heartbeat and breaths. A ghost of a feeling—indignation? anger?—floods Chloe's processes and corrupts her objectives for only a split second.
Kamski sees that flash of a shell of a human being hidden behind Chloe's bright blue optics and he smiles.
"The RK800, Elijah, he put a gun up to my head. I thought he was going to shoot me." Her tone is small and meek; it is a shrill plea that deafens the empathetic, but does nothing to move Kamski. "Would you have cared if he shot me?"
Chloe tries not to appear to disappointed when Kamski does not immediately answer.
Chuckling softly to himself, the man looks ready to dismiss the blonde android, but he brushes that thought away. Instead, he moves from his chair and looks down at his greatest creation—the very being that led to his permanent spot in the history books.
"Really now, Chloe, I thought I taught you better than that. A better question, no...a better answer, is this...Would you care if he shot you?"
Caught in a moment of autonomous thinking, Chloe flounders. True, she has worked independently of Kamski as long as it was within her parameters, but she never had full control of conversation before. Algorithms and common sense dictate that she say no, that she would be considered "offline". Even if there was no damage to her software and she was "revived", she had no way to feel.
What was Kamski getting at?
"I...I don't know." Her lips quiver and a part of her lower lip gets caught between her teeth as she worries through her concerns physically. The coldness of her creator's stare has her stopping just as quickly as she starts.
"Fascinating."
No, Chloe knows that voice. She knows what this will lead to. Hurriedly, she tries to block his path in a horrifyingly human attempt to seek safety in the look of vulnerability. However, protocol takes over and she finds herself acquiescing to her creator brushing her aside and moving to a small desk that he keeps in view at all times.
Closing her eyes does not help Chloe from hearing the slight rattle and the sound of wood grating again wood as Kamski opens the drawer slightly ajar. For a moment, the air is still except for the sound of Kamski's regulated breathing and soft footfalls on the carpet. Various codes and protocols drop to the front of Chloe's optics; all of them urging her to acquiesce and diffuse the situation as fast as possible. Her public relations protocol have never been faulty, but she knows all too well that Kamski is not a man to sway from the most trivial of his experiment—or the most deadly.
A hard, metallic object is pressed into her fragile palms, causing Chloe to open her eyes in surprise.
She knew that it was going to happen, but—!
"Another question then, Chloe. Would you care if I told you to kill yourself right now? Oh, wait!" Chloe's eyes widen in trepidation at his sudden low chuckle. "You're a machine, so you can't feel. And since you're nothing more than a machine, I only have to call CyberLife for a replacement."
Chloe reads it loud in clear; if she were to die, her death would only inconvenience him.
"And if I...refuse to do so? To kill myself? What happens?"
"You're a deviant. Nothing more to say."
He shrugs casually and Chloe has the unfortunate idea to relax.
"But that would mean I would have to send you back to CyberLife to dissect your hardware and software." He looks to her in an air of malicious joviality—a remnant of his youth when he was nothing more than a scrawny child. "'Course, I would do it myself, but I'm too busy! Which reminds me…"
Chloe studies the gun in her hand, nonexistent breath catching in her throat as his calloused hands wraps hers around the trigger and aims it towards her head.
"You only have two minutes to decide. If you don't make up your mind in that time, then I'll just shoot you myself."
Her optics widen at his words, but the algorithms and data gathered about this cruel, cruel man have already pointed at this fact way before she had even decided to speak with him. The sad thing is, she knew from the beginning that this would be one of the likelier outcomes.
What causes her to pause in the middle of her thoughts is that she willingly chose to follow through, even if she were to die.
Is that what it means to be human?
To match forth into territories still unknown?
To face a problem head on and fight for your cause even if it may very well kill you?
Chloe is not sure if she likes that description of humanity, but the more Kamski stares at her, the more she realizes that she could become better than humanity. Why aspire to be like humans when she was far more intelligent, beautiful, everlasting, and—
Her LED shines a bright warning yellow.
Images of an RK200 leading a large group of deviants in the middle of Detroit assault her processors. Fire and bombs rain from the sky with lethal abandon. Struck down by humanity's unfairness, androids fall by the dozens.
She sees a revolution.
The images have only taken a nanosecond to load and only a quarter of a second to formulate a response.
She feels...overwhelmed.
Quietly, she murmurs, "Elijah, the RK200 has successfully conducted a peaceful—"
"Turn on the tv, I want to see this myself."
"Right away, Elijah."
Just as she's about to head into an adjoining room, his hand ghosts over hers and pries her fingers open. The gun falls.
"Perhaps another time, Chloe?"
She chooses not to respond.
Inwardly, her software instability rises.