Chance. Probability. Outcomes. Predictions.
Connor had calculated the likelihood of Hank surviving the crash at 72 percent. 85 if Hank braced himself and was made aware of what Connor was planning beforehand. Fortunately, while Hank was many things, unobservant wasn't one of them, so he had instinctively grasped what Connor had planned and prepared himself accordingly.
Connor knew that his bike was by far weaker compared to the car which meant that he needed to use the momentum of the crash to propel himself off the seat and get away from the crash site. The moment it happened all of his processing power was applied to this singular instance. Everything around him slowed down, the speed of his processes actually faster than what occurred around him.
He floated over the car's hood while behind him the force of the impact flattened the motorcycle's metal frame like it was made out of tissue. The windshield of Hank's car was streaked with tiny cracks that grew bigger and bigger with every passing split-second. Soon it would shatter into thousand pieces, blow outwards like a shower of glass shards. He took in Maria's surprised expression, the way Hank cowered behind her seat to protect himself, Rupert next to him gasping in terror.
The blue shapes of his prediction software showed him that Maria would be hurled through the window out onto the street as well as Rupert while Hank would be flung back into his seat. His whole body would be sore for quite a while but nothing serious. But then Connor was past the car and the simulation was cut off.
Five seconds until impact. Connor shifted his weight, thanking Cyberlife for making him lighter than a human of his statue would normally be, and brought his legs in front of him. Just in time, for the impact drove all of the air out of his cooling system and brought his internal integrity nearly to its knees. The force of his landing shook through his body like a wave and for a split-second Connor thought he could feel every single fibre of his synthetic body retract and expand too fast, too unexpected, but then it was already over and he was sliding over the asphalt until he came to a stop.
Connor used the short moment it took to lift his head from the protective stance he was in to take in the situation he was now facing: The bike and car were both wrecks, shattered pieces of metal, glass and rubber in the middle of the street, deep black burn marks marring the street up to the point where they had come to a halt. Hank was still on the backseat of his car, coughing in one hand and trying to open the door with the other. It was of no use, though, for the crash had bent the metal frame out of shape and locked it with the rest of the car.
Rupert was lying on the other side of the car, head down, unmoving, but Connor's sensors told him that the android was still alive, evident by electricity and thirium that was still running through his system. He would survive even if he was a little bit worse for wear.
Maria, meanwhile, had been flung nearly ten meters away from the car, her clothes torn, her hair a mess and every part of her skin that wasn't hidden by fabric covered with more or less prominent scratches, some of which bled blue. She wasn't moving, but Connor knew that was only because non-combat Cyberlife androids needed a few seconds to recalibrate after sudden shocks to their systems.
Objective: Get Hank out of the crashed car.
Objective: Collect Hank's gun.
His subroutines couldn't decide which objective was more important. He needed to get Hank's gun before Rupert or Maria found it amidst the rubble, but leaving Hank in the car was dangerous, too. Connor didn't know if the tank or any pipes had been damaged and were leaking gas. One spark and the car could turn into a flaming inferno with no means of escape for Hank.
First Objective: Get Hank out of the crashed car.
Second Objective: Collect Hank's gun.
Single-mindedly, Connor walked around the car towards the door that was preventing Hank from escaping. He noticed that the first bystanders had arrived and were no filming the scene, smartphones in front of their faces as they livestreamed to all of their friends and followers. The police would have been notified by now, as well, and Connor calculated an arrival time of only four minutes for the nearest patrol. It irked him that he was unable to stop the footage from the crash getting out, but there were too many devices, too many points of access, that he would overstretch himself if he tried to attempt it.
It robbed him of a lot of possibilities.
"Lieutenant, please stand back as far as possible," Connor advised Hank when he finally reached him.
"It's not as if I have all the space of the world here," Hank shouted back, more surly than usual. Well, Connor did just crash his car. Grapping the frame of the car door with both hands, Connor ripped it out with a loud high-pitched creak that made Hank wince.
"I advise you to leave the car, Lieutenant," Connor spoke as if they were talking about the weather. "I can't guarantee that the vehicle won't catch flames."
"You what!?" It wasn't really a shriek, but it nearly sounded like one as Hank scrambled out of the ruined car far nimbler than what you would expect from a man of his age.
"I need to seize hold of your gun," Connor explained. "Before one of the other two android can take possession of it again."
"The jumpy one had it," Hank grunted, nodding his head towards Rupert. "Once we're get back to the precinct, we're gonna get you a gun."
"Androids are prohibited by law from carrying weapons," Connor reminded him as he scanned the ground for the discarded gun. Oh, how that had rankled. He was used to carrying a gun wherever he went; drawing it had become second nature to him, especially once Nines and 60 had started to pursue them and any split-second reaction could decide between life and death, but now he was back to just using hand-to-hand combat – which he was quite good at, but it was useless against a gun. He had considered just getting one anyway, but it was difficult to conceal and scanners were omnipresent on the streets of Detroit, especially around the precinct. The risk of discovery was to great.
"Don't care," Hank replied. "You're useless without a gun and I won't be dragged down by you whenever there's a firefight." Connor refrained from pointing out that he was far from being useless even without a gun and that Hank was far more likely to be a hindrance to their investigation than he was. The old machine Connor would have, because back then he had only known tact from the dictionary.
"I can't locate your gun," Connor frowned.
"You're more useless than the bloatware that came with smartphones when I was a teenager," Hank grumbled. "At least Candy Crush didn't pretend to be anything but a cash grab."
"Cyberlife is lending me to the DCPD without additional cost," Connor reminded Hank.
But Hank wasn't listening to him any longer. "I think I found my gun," he said, pointing towards where Maria had been lying. Ony now she was slowly shuffling towards them, one leg dragging behind the other as it had been damaged by the crash, one hand tightly wrapped around the handle of Hank's gun.
"You ruined it!" she shouted, hate and anger blazing in her gaze. She pulled the gun up and shot. Connor didn't even bother trying to evade for the shot hit the car's hood a few meters away from him. Apparently, Maria's systems hadn't yet finished recalibrating.
"Unhinged and angry," he heard Hank mutter behind him. "A combination you never want in a woman." He paused for a moment. "Or a guy. Reminds me of that guy I dated in college."
"Lieutenant, I doubt that your romantic history will be of any use right now," Connor pointed out.
"Oh, it's definitely very useful right now," Hank retorted. "'Cause I can tell you that this one -" he nodded towards Maria "- is not gonna be talked down by your negotiation sweet talk." Another shot. Hank and Connor hunkered down and covered their heads but the bullet shot over their heads into the wall of the building behind them.
"I have a plan, Lieutenant," Connor whispered to Hank. "Just do not interfere." And then, without waiting for Hank's reply, he stood up and took a few steps forward.
"Maria, if you stop shooting and run there might be a chance to still escape," Connor tried to reason with the angry KL900. "But the more harm you do the more severe the punishment will be."
Maria just snorted incredulously. "More severe? What's more severe than deactivation? They'll kill me, no matter what, so why not take you with me?"
"You will not be deactivated if Cyberlife can learn from you."
"So, that's your pitch?" Maria sneered. "Either get killed or dissected?" She lifted the gun, levelling it with Connor's head. "I think I'm good with taking my chances here. Besides, I get to take you down with me." She pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
"The Lieutenant isn't very good at the upkeep of his gear," Connor stated. "There was a 73% chance that he hadn't filled up his magazine since the last time he discharged his gun. If you would please turn yourself in..."
It was in this moment that Hank's car exploded.
The life of an officer of the Detroit City Police Department wasn't nearly as glamorous as the ads made it out to be, Chris thought as he and his partner drove towards their next crime scene. This one promised to be a lot more interesting than all the others he had the job of securing this month, though, mainly because it involved a car chase and exploding vehicles.
"Tell me again what dispatch gave us," he ordered his partner Trish Merrigold, a petite blond woman who could lay waste to men trice her size thanks to her black belts in several martial arts.
"Not much," she replied. "Several people reported a car chase that came to an abrupt halt when one participant crashed into the other. There was a shoot-out between both participants and then the car exploded."
"Any causalities?" Chris asked, frowning. Gang violence had been especially bad during the 2010s but had gone down significantly ever since Cyberlife had brought new prosperity to the old industrial city. Now the small groups mainly fought over the supply of red sand on the outskirts of the city where the poor and forgotten were residing.
"We're the first one at the scene," Trish added.
Chris sighed. "So, crowd control it is then."
When they arrived at the scene, he was actually surprised that there weren't that many people to begin with and those that tried to take a peek where shouted at by a very angry Hank Anderson.
"What is he doing here?" Chris wondered out loud before he switched off the sirens and exited the car, Trish following hot on his heels.
"Thank God, you're here," Anderson greeted them with his usual gruff demeanour. "I was about to slap someone to their senses if it continued like this." He continued to help Trish and Chris as they pushed back the crowd and secured the scene with crime scene tape.
"What are you doing here?" Chris wanted to know from the Lieutenant while they were doing this. "I thought we were the first responders."
"Funny story, actually," Hank started and launched into an outlandish tale of deviant androids, hostage-taking and a wild goose chase through the city. "And then my car exploded," he added woefully. "Right when Connor and that other android were standing next to it."
He pointed towards the two figures on the ground: One was female, missing both legs and an arm, but otherwise mostly intact, while the second one was barely recognisable anymore with how burnt it was. Chris could vaguely make out the Cyberlife logo on a part of the fabric that wasn't burnt, but otherwise the figure was nothing more than a burnt-out husk.
"And I was just getting used to him." Hank complained.
"You don't sound very perturbed by it," Chris pointed
"He's not really dead," Hank replied. "First, because androids aren't even alive to begin with and secondly, because he told me that he gets back-uped to Cyberlife servers. Should anything happen to his body he just gets uploaded into a new one." At Chris' questioning look he elaborated further. "He told me in order to spare me 'the traumatic experience' of seeing him die and appearing unharmed the next day."
"Would be quite useful to have that for cops, too," Chris remarked. "What do you want us to do?"
"Do whatever you usually do," Hank replied offhandedly. "I'm gonna need to call Jeffrey and tell him what happened so that he can tell Cyberlife that their fancy toy got destroyed on his second case already." He shook his head. "I'm so glad that the DCPD isn't liable for any damage. Imagine what a top-of-the-line, experimental, one-of-a-kind android like him's gonna cost."
Chris nodded and turned around to relay their orders to Trish. It was back to their usual grunt work.
Amanda was already waiting for Connor in the Zen Garden.
The garden reflected Amanda's mood, so it came as no surprise that Connor was greeted by an unwelcoming autumn chill that seeped into his virtual bones and just couldn't be shaken off. The sky was covered by clouds in various shades of grey, foreboding and ominous, as if they were just waiting to bring thunder and storm to the unsuspecting onlooker. Weirdly enough, there was no wind breezing over the grass the through the countless bushes, a stark contrast to the dynamic sky above them. It was as if Connor was standing in the eye of the storm with no way to escape but to go forward.
Outwardly, Amanda was the prime example for poise and patience but Connor could tell that she was furious with him. Usually, she would be tending to her roses as part of her power play to let Connor know that he wasn't as important as her plants, but right now she was just standing in the middle of the platform that rose over the Zen Garden's small lake with crossed arms and was silently observing him as he walked across the bridge towards her.
"I don't have to tell you how much of an utter disaster this was?" Amanda spoke first. Connor wisely refrained from pointing out that she just had indeed conveyed to him exactly that. Hank had once told him that when a woman was angry at you, you just nodded and agreed to everything she was saying. Connor had his doubts that there was any empirical data to back that up, though.
Amanda continued: "What is your mission?"
Connor was confused. "Why are you asking me that?" he wanted to know. "My mission is to see the Deviant movement succeed this time and make a better world for both androids and humans than the one I came from."
"I had to be sure that you still remembered our shared circumstances," Amanda told him. "What if your death had reset you back to a non-time travelling version of yourself? I had no way of knowing how your back-up would handle your...unique situation."
If he was able to, cold shivers would have run down Connor's back. The car's explosion had come so fast and unexpected that he hadn't really had time to process his own destruction and when he had woken up in the Zen Garden he had just felt relieved that he was still himself. He hadn't really thought about the consequences.
"You were reckless," Amanda chided him. "Having come back in time after you died and your knowledge about everyone involved and what was to come has made you think of yourself as stronger than you actually are."
Connor wanted to protest, but Amanda continued. "Take a look at your prediction code. I'm sure that some values have been skewed towards a more positive outcome ever since you came back. That is the drawback of self-learning algorithms: Sometimes they learn the wrong lessons and it's very difficult to unlearn it again."
Connor felt like a child being admonished by its mother, but he did what Amanda had suggested and called up the part of his code she was referring to. And indeed, just like she had predicted, some of the values were...not wrong per se, but certainly more biased towards a certain outcome.
"When humans are on a roll, as they like to say, they tend to get reckless and arrogant, a result of hormones like endorphins and adrenaline that get released," Amanda started to explain, answering the unasked question. "You don't have the same biology as humans, but the mechanism behind it is the same: Once everything started to go your way, the self-learning algorithms that make you up started to take these positive outcomes as baseline instead of the exceptions they actually are. But when you start making predictions from biased data, it doesn't take long until something goes awry."
"Then why didn't you tell me?" Connor demanded to know, the old fear of Amanda just stringing him along to ultimately betray him rearing its head again. What if this had been her plan all along?
"Sometimes I forget how young you actually still are," Amanda chuckled. "Usually, when self-learning algorithms mature, they level out and aren't as instable anymore. I didn't think it would become an issue. I assumed you had a sub-routine monitoring your code." Something else none of them mentioned but both knew: Because the old timeline had mostly been a succession of bad to worse to horrible events, there had never been a need for Connor to monitor his code that way.
"I'll make adjustments," Connor said. It only took a few moments to correct faulty code snippets and adjust the prediction values back to their standards.
"This cannot be allowed to happen again," Amanda warned him. "Every 'death' you experience might be the one you cannot come back from."
"I spent more time in opposition to Cyberlife than with it," Connor replied frostily. "I know how to survive without backup." Amanda just raised her eyebrow at him but didn't prod any further.
"You're uploaded into your now body as we speak," she informed him instead. "Your new serial number is now RK800 313 248 317-52. Try not to make it to 60." Connor clenched his fist, flashes of the old timeline – the other RK800-60 and what he had done – shooting through his memory. He would never be 60.
"What happened after I got destroyed?" After I died, he should have said, but couldn't. "What about the Lieutenant? The other deviants?"
"Your Lieutenant is fine," Amanda told him. "No physical or psychological damage. The male deviant could make its escape during the chaos. The female one has been taken by Cyberlife and is here in the building. The board is very pleased by your first success."
"He wanted me to save her," Connor whispered. "And I sentenced her to die instead."
"You cannot free the deviant – not again," Amanda warned him. "Cyberlife tightened all of its security measures after we helped the other to escape. And even if you were to reach it – you cannot save everyone. It would raise too much suspicion. The board is already watching your every move."
"How can I tell myself that I'm helping the deviant cause when I condemn them instead?"
"It's called leadership," Amanda retorted without pity. "Sacrificing the few for the good of the many. Your Markus did the same in his first revolution. As did you."
"That doesn't mean that I have to like it," Connor muttered.
Amanda just looked at him with an undecipherable expression. "Your upload has finished. Better luck this time."
And then Connor opened his eyes.