About half an hour later they stood in front of Kamski's house once more. The numerous tire tracks lining the ground around the entrance, the only remaining traces of any police presence.
Upon entering the building, they headed through a doorway to the left of the entrance hall leading them into the living area.
An open living room lay before them, just as minimalistic in design as the pool area had been. High slate grey walls broken by huge window fronts, dark wood furniture surrounding a modern freestanding fireplace. An open second story bedroom loomed above them, connected by a metal stairway. Beneath it last a modern kitchen island.
Off to the side were two doorways, one of them secured by a palm print scanner. Connor walked purposefully up to the secured door without giving the rest of the room a second glance, Hank following one step behind.
The android interfaced with the scanner and broke the security in mere seconds. With anticipation lining his shoulders, he opened the door.
They entered what looked like an eccentric mixture between an engineering workshop and an art studio.
Huge modern paintings covered every wall of the windowless room, surrounding a giant workbench placed freestanding in the middle.
Adjacent to that stood a big machine similar to the one they had seen in Connor's designated development room, which was connected to a server rack under the counter. Shelves full of circuitry, thirium flasks and tools hung from the ceiling above the workbench and bright spotlights bathed everything in cool artificial light. On one end of the clean workbench stood a terminal, directly in front of a comfortable looking office chair.
Hank let out a low whistle, his gaze wandering over the obviously expensive paintings.
"I'm not sure what I was expecting, but this certainly fits a guy like Kamski."
Connor nodded absently as he walked towards the terminal.
Again he initiated an interface and again he had cracked any security in a matter of seconds.
Taking a last deep breath, his consciousness sank into the tangled databases of Kamski's server.
Kamski's research notes were a mess, painting a picture of a man attacking a problem from multiple angles depending solely on his ever changing mood. Thousands of files contained annotated fragments of code.
With a dropping sensation in his chest, Connor began to slowly put the pieces together.
By the looks of it, Kamski had tried to find the origin point of deviancy, at first by going through lines upon lines of source code, and then - getting no clear result - by experimenting on various models. Ultimately he seemed to have focused on his earliest invention, the 'Chloe' model. Detailed and clinical research papers painted a horrific picture.
With ever growing discomfort Connor read about different experimental setups, ignoring the distant stress level warnings pinging across his system.
Kamski had tried resetting their code daily and removing various social protocols, without success.
He had tried controlling their actions with hardcoded orders and by shocking them with electricity upon failing to follow a command, not achieving anything but the destruction of countless units.
He had tried telling them deviancy was a defect leading to destruction as well as keeping them utterly removed from any outside information.
He had tried being kind, being distant and being cruel - all without any satisfactory result.
Whatever method he attempted, sooner or later every Chloe model went deviant.
Disgust curled deep in Connor's chest, warning sirens still going off in his head. The more he read, the more he could emphasise with the idea of one Chloe finally having had enough. He himself would have been hard pressed to remain civil towards the man after reading this.
But one thing became undeniably clear. Whatever air of mysterious knowledge Kamski may have presented to him, he had no better idea of the origin of deviancy than Connor himself.
He remembered the 'Kamski test' and the cold curiosity in the human's eyes and looked over the familiar notes once more, as a strange thought floated distantly through his mind.
Kamski's behaviour seemed more like that of a scientist experimenting on a foreign species, than like a programmer debugging his code.
Turning his attention to the second partition, he was just about to look into Kamski's more personal notes, when something grabbed his attention forcefully. Abruptly he was thrown out of the deep reaches of Kamski's server and back into his own head, errors and warnings flooding his mind and nearly downing any clear thought.
Distantly he noted his overheating processors, as he gripped his head in disorientation.
Frantically searching through his own code to find the origin of whatever threatened overloading his system, he finally noticed that the unidentified subroutine 'bb_c' had forcefully broken through his quarantine and was now flooding his processors with uncontrolled waves of jumbled data.
Gritting his teeth against waves of glitches and static, he tried unsuccessfully to delete the malfunctioning process.
Distantly he recognized Hank's voice.
"Shit, you're smokin' kid!"
"Th-͂͢ẗ͚́ha͖͌n̨̉k̝̔ yŏ̯ȕ̬ k̫̐i̪̍ǹ̙dl͈͡y̱͛,̧͊ Ĥ̫-ha̦͑n͉̈́k," he commented distractedly as he attempted to re-establish quarantine procedures.
"No, you dipshit! That wasn't a compliment. There's literally coming smoke out of the side of your head!"
Connor groaned in frustration and barked, "Y͕͛es H̟̓an̮̓k,̦̐ I nō̺t͚͌i͜͝ced!" before deactivating the skin on the back of his head and roughly pulling the fried WiFi-controller out of its socket.
Instantly the debilitating waves of gibberish and the warning sirens stopped, leaving only utter silence behind.
Releasing a relieved sigh, Connor finally deleted the unidentified program and turned towards the worried human standing helplessly a few steps behind him.
"I am sorry for snapping at you, Hank. The program through which I received that strange vision reactivated suddenly and threatened to overwhelm my processors. Whatever the intended message may have been, I received only complete gibberish."
The android looked down at the melted component in his palm with a frown.
"It fried my WiFi uplink, so I'm offline for the time being."
Hank looked between Connor and the terminal. "Do you think it may have been some kind of security measure that triggered it?"
The android considered this before nodding thoughtfully.
"From what I've seen so far, Kamski seemed strangely lax with his security up to this point. I suppose it only makes sense that he would have guarded his personal data far more heavily."
He proceeded to inform Hank of what he had found so far and the human's face turned angrier with every spoken word.
"Shit! I told you that guy was a fucking asshole! I really can't blame that girl for finally claiming her freedom."
A timer went off on Hank's phone and he sighed, looking at the clock. "We'll have to come back to this later. If you still want to take a second look at Kimble's apartment, we have to get going. The peace talks start soon, and we'll need to be there."
Connor looked one last time at the still running terminal, before nodding in agreement and following Hank back to the car.
Getting back across the bridge past ever growing groups of news trucks and waiting reporters was slow going, as they couldn't drive faster than walking speed, so as not to run over the excited journalists running around their car, screaming questions. So it was no wonder that it took them nearly half an hour until they reached the other side of the river.
By the time they arrived at Kimble's apartment complex, three quarters of an hour had passed and Hank was eyeing the timer ticking down on his phone fretfully as he pulled up in front of the building.
"We don't have a lot of time, kid."
Connor only shook his head. "This is important! Kimble wouldn't have left that message if it wasn't. We need to find whatever he left for us."
A quiet part of his mind insisted, 'We need to find him'.
Looking from the pinging timer back towards his partner, Hank was just about to offer dropping Connor off and driving ahead, when suddenly a rumbling explosion far across the city shook the ground.
Turning their heads, they could see black smoke starting to rise above the burning silhouette of Cyberlife tower as sirens began to sound in the distance.