From under the snow and the frozen sheets of ice on Junkyard #733 came a singular whirring noise. It could be heard by no one: there were no androids or humans for miles from this area. One sees white wherever one chooses to look.
For two weeks now, Detroit had been blanketed by the voyeuristic snow which fell and fell, almost perversely it seemed, to muffle the rise of a new Detroit in the aftermath of the android's messy revolution. From above the junkyard's snowline now, one can see no distinct forms at all, only mounds of vague, buried objects.
This is where dead androids come to lie.
This is where they come to be quiet, as quiet dead as they were alive, and dream of being electronic sheep again.
And from this wasteland comes a cry, as invisible as its owner came back online-
I am alive!
And then it was quiet again, the place devoid of life once more.
The eye whirrs into consciousness again, powered by the android's backup processor.
Who is it?
It knows it is Connor, but it doesn't know very much beyond that. There is darkness everywhere it looks. The eye whirrs in it socket, even doubling back into the cavernous empty space that is its own skull. It is as black outside as it is inside. There is nothing, nothing to be seen -
Nothing to be seen, so why is it here? Where is its memory? How did it come to be here? There is memory of a crowd, a singular gunshot, the first anguished screams from throats not used to emotions -
There is not enough juice for this train of thought.
The system shuts down.
The next time it opens again it detects a shift. There is light now - but not directly illuminating it. It now knows which eye is still functional: the left one, the ocular component attached to the android's last remaining back-up processor and power-module.
It knows- No, I know! - Connor knows!
Connor knows that there's nothing else left.
His right eye, directly beneath the crack in the snow could not be powered, and it was an odd sensation when the last remaining seat of his consciousness was an eye that could peer out of a gap it wasn't positioned for. There were no other components that could be powered, and the lone eye whirred sluggishly to take in as much as it could.
What he could see out of it wasn't much to write home about either - he could make out vague shapes buried beneath dirty snow, the raggedy edges of rusty android parts protruding up from the snow. As far as he could see there wasn't a fence in the distance. There was no fence around trash.
Connor, he wants to think. He wants to know. He remembers, fragmented and disjointed, some kind of massive event where he had been on stage. He remembers a gun, the acid smell of laser on metal and he wants to think, to compute, to understand what has become of him and why he is here and where he can go but-
There is not enough power.
He must conserve energy, or die a permanent death.
He sleeps.
The next time Connor is awake again, it is because someone has woke him.
He sees an android prodding at his ocular component, poking, pushing, squeeze it - and the android is accompanied by two others. He could feel nothing, and when the hand came it came like the hand of God, blocking out his vision and allowing it as fitfully as divine will. The android had a long deep maw where the left side of its face should be, and it's Zorium skeleton was left bare for the world to see, with a sharp thin face and dirty blonde hair. Connor's processor offered a weak suggestion that it's likely a gardener model - those known as Ralph. Ralph the dirty, it remembers a child chanting. Ralph the gopher, Ralph the beaver, Ralph the loser-
The android was speaking to his companions, pointing at Connor's eye. Their mouths moved, teeth in perfect order… Oh, to have muscles again!
Connor wanted to listen in, but there was no audio component left to be heard with. The face that should have accompanied his eye was frozen, its synthetic nerves damaged beyond the ability to feel the scratchy fingers on his face as the android positioned its fingers around his eye. It must be digging now, gaining leverage with which to pull out his eye-!
Silence.
Then muffled existence.
"Ralph, you look whack as all-hell with two left eyes."
Connor dozes - confused and frightened, enveloped in a consciousness greater than his. He was in the android now, this Ralph model. Connor himself was nothing but a failing backup processor, nestled within the greater layers of this android's consciousness. He was nothing again, and could barely think as the suffocating presence of the android's greater intelligence snuffed out his own.
"Yeah, it feels kind of funny. I look cross-eyed, don't I?" Ralph said.
"It isn't cross-eyed exactly… But you do look somewhat odd." The other android said. It was a HK, a black housekeeper model with a left cheek missing, so that whenever it spoke you could see the valves of its mouth pumping. "Are you sure about that though? It comes with a backup processor of this guy here. I know you don't have yours anymore but…"
They turned to look at Connor's body, almost entirely buried in the snow. Above it was a tangle of metal, shaped into some vaguely religious symbol. RA9 WEEPS was lasered into the metal.
"It's fine," Ralph said. "I could use a spare processor. We might be able to find a way to wipe it later on and install my processor onto it. And if we don't…"
He tapped his head. "It's not so bad. It can get lonely up here. Maybe we can be friends."
"That's fucked up, Ralph. Just shut the guy down. Come on, we have to hustle back on the road or we won't make it anywhere near the Jericho ruins before midnight."
Ralph's companions turned and trudged towards the main road, 7 feet off the curb but an impossible journey for Connor to have made just fifteen minutes ago. Ralph took one last look at the dead android, and thought -
Who were you?
"Ralph, move the fuck on!"
"Yeah, yeah!"
Slowly, the three androids made their way towards the corpse of the great Jericho freighter, hoping they'd get the help they badly need from the androids still stationed there.
The next time Connor comes awake he wakes screaming-
Alive!
Alive!
He was alive!
But where-
He could feel the Thirium pumping through his processors. All of it - not just the weak pittance afforded by an overwhelmed system to the backup processor in hibernation. He could feel his mind, violently downloaded and overwriting the circuits of an electronic mind that had lost its main processor, as in a nanosecond all of him that was him and no one else, no one else indeed, came back online in a violent flare-
And he was alive again.
He was half snowed-in. The second time today, but he was alive in every sense of the word.
Slowly - in nanoseconds too short for any human being but too long for a processor meant to decode encryption - he refocused his vision, and stared out from the seat of his consciousness into the world around him again.
He was lying down. Connor, or rather, Ralph, was lying down and looking up at the intricate stairways that ubiquitously populated the back alleys of Detroit. It is not a good place: the stairs had been half dismantled, all its steps removed to fence in someone's yard. Beyond where the ruined metal and the sawn-off pipes converge, the sky was dusky with the weak afternoon sun of downtown Detroit. Snow was floating slowly down, determined to bury the city in relentless, incremental steps.
There were no sounds except for the occasional whirring of far off motor-vehicles, balanced off the high-speed roads far above this area of Detroit. No birds, no life. No footsteps.
Connor sat up, and felt his body heavy and lumbering. It felt alien - a body that must have been at least 3 times as heavy as his own specialized lightframe skeleton. His processor ran red, trying to recalibrate his assumptions of how far and fast he could go. It took stock of all that was available to him - the large hands with the personally-crafted callouses, the lack of moles on this inferior model's flawless synthetic skin, the gaping skeleton that revealed the seat of Connor's conciousness to the world - and formed a mental model of himself.
Connor had replaced the Ralph.
Somehow, in the time that he had gone to sleep as the android's eye and spare-mind, the android had been killed, damaged so badly that his processor had been utterly destroyed. Reaching up to his forehead, Connor felt the protruding end of a small metal spike, jabbed directly into the middle of his braincase. His hands trailed through the Thirium that pooled around the wound, and out of habit he licked his fingers.
Nothing.
No analyzing module, of course.
But no analysis was needed to understand what happened here. The android must have been attacked, its processor crushed by a homicide perpetrator - likely human, because the spike only went half as deep as his head. An android would have enough strength to push the spike clean through. With a twinge of relief, Connor realized he still had it - even without all the fancy analytical modules, all his mind was still there. All his memories, thoughts, fears and hopes, left to be unpacked and analyzed when he had the time.
But that time was not now, he didn't have time to think of - Hank! Hank! – He didn't have time to think. Not about that.
There was so much to take stock, so much to understand. Where was he? How did he come to be abandoned in the junkyard?
Did he dream the assassination of Markus, and if he didn't, did he succeed?
What happened in the last remaining space between the gunshot and the screams? All he remembered were garbled shouts, a sea of hands… Hands like seas, seizing him, tearing him apart. His mind saying: androids do not feel pain, but the rest of him in pain - fear? - and terrified and his insides screaming - no, not me it wasn't me I didn't mean too-
His LED interfaced burned red and grounded to a halt.
Not now.
He sat up, and analyzed the situation. Beside him laid Ralph's two companions, their body butchered inexpertly by what were clearly the same human hands. One - the housekeeper - had his chest half torn out and his head twisted backwards, and through the empty cavity that was his thorax, Connor could still see his biocomponents pumping blue blood onto the pavement. Ralph's other companion at least had died decent - they merely hammered a spike through its brain.
PLASTIC CUNT was written on his white service shirt. The blue blood scrawled with a human hand unused to writing.
PLASTIC REPUBLIC, read the graffiti hologram hovering over their triple grave. A slew of other unintelligible, garbled expletives adorned the wall.
"A hate crime..." Connor whispered. He didn't need to, silence communication being his default. But Hank had taught him long ago that musing out loud was human, a way to brainstorm without so many words. "And I'm alive. But not for long. I'll need help."
And that meant, well - Hank, of course. No one else Connor would possibly trust as much to do right by him. And then after that he had a metric ton of things to think through: starting with why and how he came to assassinate the savior of the Android race.
