Connor can't sleep.
That, he knows, is common, and he can summon any number of statistics to prove it. Many people have difficulty sleeping, and any number of preexisting conditions can contribute to the inability. Stress. Depression. Insomnia. Over-caffeination. In their apartments, or houses, these stressed, depressed, insomniac, over-caffeinated people lay in bed, eyes glazed as they stare at the ceiling, memorizing every crack, stain, split, and general malformation of the surface above them.
Connor doesn't have a bed.
The strength of his internal energy source belies the need for traditional recharge, so he can avoid the indignity of public charging zones as easily as his programming sidesteps the need for the necessity and indulgence of sleep. While his colleagues bundle home to their apartments, or houses, Connor stays. And waits.
Sometimes he'll walk around the downtown area, following the perimeter established by beat patrols, allowing his sensors their fill of the glitter and grime of the city. Sometimes he'll utilize the twelve hours gifted to him for research, analyzing clues and criminal conduct, and he'll greet his coworkers in the morning with a smile and an answer to a seemingly impenetrable deviancy case. Sometimes they smile back. Most times, they don't. And most nights, Connor waits.
Waiting, for a human, can be unbearable. Connor's programming is far more pragmatic, and he's proud that his innate pragmatism can easily override any form of boredom. Waiting is a transitory stage. As he sits in a chair (he likes to assign each chair in the police station a number, run each number through his internal randomizer, find the chair corresponding to whichever number he sees flash in his visual input feed, and sit in it), he'll shut off several of his systems, ease himself into low-power mode, and wait.
Most nights.
Connor can't dream.
His algorithms can piece together collected and implicit input in random sequences, but what typically runs through his mind after ordering it to dream is a dizzying array of sight and sound, disorienting and unpleasant. Dreaming, in a human sense, connotes a sense of escape. Connor just experiences the day's events on fast-forward, something that irritates him. But he knows that to dream is to be human, and he is not, and will never be, human.
But he'll be damned if he can't try.
He stands up from tonight's chair (by the lieutenant's desk) and surveys his surroundings. There is nothing resembling a bed for him to lay on, and the only large, flat surface that presents itself, besides the desks of his coworkers, is the floor. Connor knows that most of the officers are largely indifferent to him, with a few notable exceptions, but he doesn't think any tenuous link he may have with them would survive them discovering him laying on their desk in the morning.
The floor is cold and polished beneath the fibers of his jacket, and the hollow, plastic sounds that echo flatly through the room as he lowers himself are decidedly inhuman. Supine, he lays his arms on the ground beside him, and he fixes his eyes with determination on the ceiling above him. He can smell the lemony tang of the polish-Mrs. Mahafferty's Seal and Shine- reapplied by the custodial androids every second Tuesday of every month. The janitors leave him alone, for the most part. He thinks they're unsettled by his presence, by the inevitable taint of human association he wears with his uniform. If he dials up the sensitivity of his auditory sensors, he can hear the gentle whirring of a vacuum several stories above.
What do humans dream about, he wonders, tuning out the sounds above. It must be idealistic. Idealism separates him from those with organic brain chemistry. He shuts his eyes.
Where would his perfect dream take place?
Though his eyelids are shut, a high-definition image of a walkway appears, pulled from the extensive reserves of his memory banks. The ambient darkness suggests that the event leading to the formation of the memory took place at night. Snow falls, faint and pale in the quiet dark, and the cold austerity of the stars is muted by the artificial blare of the lights of the bridge before him. Interestingly, the image, and, consequently, the memory, is one he can't place. It must belong to a previous model, he thinks. He selects it anyway.
Connor doesn't know many people. His efforts at friendship have been met with stolid frigidity from his associates, and their inherent bias had further damaged any hope of cordial interpersonal relationships with the humans he shares a mission with. He does know Lieutenant Hank Anderson, whose desk he lies by. Lieutenant Anderson, with his grizzled hair and gruff demeanor, his grim personal commitment to avoiding any form of hygiene, his desk divider plastered with anti-android slogans. An inebriate. A liability.
Connor selects him, too.
Lieutenant Anderson's bulky form appears on the walkway, snow settling on his dirty jacket as he sits down on a bench. His respiration causes little wisps of condensation to blossom in the air. If Lieutenant Anderson will be in his dream, Connor realizes, he must be happy. So he browses through his memory banks until he accesses a file on a large, shaggy Saint Bernard, as disheveled as his owner. He outfits the lieutenant with a leash in his hand, suitably ragged looking, and inserts Sumo into the scene.
And since this is his dream, after all, Connor inserts himself.
He allows his sensors to conjure the cold of a snowy night, and watches. He wants to talk, so he does. And Lieutenant Anderson speaks back. Connor doesn't bother to imagine what he would say- he just wants him to talk. To him.
And they do, with Connor standing in front of Lieutenant Anderson. Maybe he's allowed to pet Sumo, and he imagines the coarse knot of the dog's fur beneath his hand. Maybe Lieutenant Anderson will compliment him gruffly on the success of a recent case, and Connor allows his registers to indicate that Lieutenant Anderson is proud. Of him. Maybe he says that he couldn't have asked for a better partner to be assigned to him, and Connor believes him.
"You know," Lieutenant Anderson says in his aggressive, gravelly way, "Sometimes, I think you're human."
And Connor believes him.
For a moment, his sensors flood with positive feedback, and he's really there, on that bridge, petting Sumo and talking with Lieutenant Anderson, whose fatherly tousle of Connor's hair seems designed to both annoy and display affection. Sumo licks his hand. The snow falls quietly through the filter of the lights lining the walkway as they make their way back to Lieutenant Anderson's car, with its interior smelling of cigarette smoke, and its worn upholstered seats mottled with dog fur. Lieutenant Anderson drives, and Connor turns on the radio. Flips through channels until the lieutenant remarks to the closing bars of a mediocre pop ballad, "That song was popular when I was in high school. Good song." They drive on, Lieutenant Anderson giving a nod of approval whenever Connor finds a song he likes, and Connor trying his hardest to find those songs.
"Anywhere you'd like to be dropped off?"
Connor has no reply, so they say goodbye on Lieutenant Anderson's driveway. He's halfway down the cracked sidewalk, into the quiet blue dark, when a voice rises through the silence. "Hey, kid!"
Connor turns.
"I recorded this old movie a few weeks back by mistake. Boring. I hate it, but you might like it." Lieutenant Anderson pauses, watching the pale form, speckled with snow. "And I've got a couch. Pull-out bed. It's normally Sumo's, but…" he shrugs as Connor walks up the driveway. "You're alright, Connor. Come on in."
And in that moment, he is human.
Human as he holds the screen door for Lieutenant Anderson, who fiddles with the lock, swearing under his breath as he searches for the correct key.
Human as he sees that the house is messy. Dust on every surface, a small table set up by the television, the remains of a microwave dinner on top of it.
"Forgot to clean," Lieutenant Anderson grumbles. "Make yourself at home."
Human as he lays down, fully dressed, on the cover of the futon, head on the doggy-smelling pillow. He watches the light cast by his external feedback component shine steadily blue through the half-dark of Hank's home. Here, he closes his eyes.
And dreams.
Connor opens his eyes.
Of course not. It's impossible. Even now, his own actions are ludicrous- a pitiful imitation of human behavior. He's not a human, lying in a sofa bed at the house of a friend, sleeping, dreaming. He's a machine, lying on his back on the floor of his office, pretending to sleep.
Pretending to dream.
He sits up, his sensors recalibrating themselves to his surroundings, to the plain, immaculate row of desks before him, and rises to his feet.
Not today, he thinks, as he walks out of the front door of the station, into the dark of the city, with lights as tears in the fabric of the night. And he knows it will not be tomorrow.
But one day.
One beautiful day.