Chapter Text
Gavin had only been waiting about ten minutes when the bot showed up, stepping out of a cab. “You’re late,” he called, annoyance filtering into his voice, though he was more annoyed that he’d needed to ask the tin cans for help in the first place.
“Only by two minutes,” Eight replied as he walked up to Gavin, glancing at the holographic police tape that was still up around the yard. “All you said last night was that you suspected there to be thirium you couldn’t see. What’s the case?”
Gavin frowned. “You don’t need to know,” he said, turning away from the android and marching up the porch steps.
“The more I know, the more I can be of assistance,” Eight followed him. “You’re a detective, so I’m assuming this is a homicide.”
“No shit, Sherlock. The case details are confidential, and you’re not a cop, so you don’t need to know. Now come on, plastic.”
The front door was unlocked due to how many people had been in and out in the last few days, but fortunately, they were the only two people here now. Gavin side-stepped the blood-stain that was still on the carpet. The bodies were gone and a few pieces of evidence had been taken, but otherwise, everything was the same as it had been three days ago.
“You’re just here to see if you can find any of that blue blood stuff, cause I can’t see it. We’re gonna have to be thorough, since it could be anywhere. Closets, cupboards, that kind of stuff. I wanna make sure we don’t miss anything—”
“She killed him.”
Gavin turned around. “What?”
Eight was standing in the doorway, staring at the wall, the light bulb on his head flickering between red and yellow. “It says, ‘she killed him.’”
Moving back to get a better view, Gavin examined the wall that Eight’s gaze was fixated on. Sure enough, he couldn’t see a thing except for textured plaster covered in off-white paint. But that smell was still there, the one that reminded him of coming home from school to see Eli’s experiments all over the kitchen table. It always took ages to get that smell out of his clothes.
“Well, go on. Describe it.”
Eight’s LED settled on yellow as he stepped closer. “It’s right here,” he said, gesturing. “The letters span across four feet. Cyberlife font. Just those three words. I can send you photos of what I’m seeing.”
Gavin nodded distractedly. “Yeah, do that.”
Not even a second later, his phone chimed, and he pulled it out to see what the android was seeing. Sure enough, in big capital letters, SHE KILLED HIM was printed in perfect lettering as plain as day—well, to anyone who could see it, anyway.
“Who is it referring to?” Eight asked.
The detective ignored him. There had been two bodies at the scene. Sara Michaels, female. And the android, male. He’d assumed that the killer had murdered both of them, but this…this claimed otherwise.
Gavin swore, running a hand through his hair.
“Detective…if it was written in perfect Cyberlife font…it had to have been an android who wrote that,” the bot pointed out.
“Yeah, I know,” Gavin said, irritated. “Just…look around for more blue blood. See if there’s anything else and send it to me.”
The android looked about to protest, then apparently thought better of it before Gavin could yell at him to get a move on, leaving to methodically search the kitchen. Gavin rocked back on his heels, staring unfocused at the letters he couldn’t see. He needed to think.
So far, three victims had been connected to the same killer. Four, if he included the android. The main thing that strung the murders together were the chains that had been found on the bodies—but a chain hadn’t been placed on the android. And his death (Gavin still ground his teeth at the thought of machines being alive in the first place) had been clean, whereas the other three were all bloody.
The most logical conclusion he could come to from the writing on the wall was that his killer hadn’t done anything to the android, but Sara Michaels had.
So that made this, what? A revenge killing? Sara Michaels forced a shutdown on one of the bots, and someone else killed her for it?
Other pieces of evidence started jumping out at him. The first victim had a Red Ice lab in his basement, and was using blue blood to make it. The thirium had been stored in mason jars though, and not the standard packaging, a detail Gavin hadn’t paid much attention to before, but might make sense if the victim collected the blood himself instead of purchasing it from Cyberlife…
The second victim appeared to be a normal salesman, but some digging had connected him to the black market, which Gavin could presume was what got him killed. The man had sold an assortment of products under the table, including a few androids here and there. The androids weren’t the worst of what he’d been dealing, in Gavin’s opinion, but other people might not share that point of view.
Of course it was all connected to the androids. Not only did they have to go around stealing everyone’s jobs and demanding freedom, they had to make his job much more difficult by getting involved.
And now it seemed very likely that one of them was going around killing people.
He shot off a message to Captain Fowler. He didn’t know what was going to happen to the case now. Fowler might leave him on it, or he might sign it off to Hank now that there was evidence of an android committing these crimes. Part of him wanted to say “Screw it” and let Anderson take care of this mess, but at the same time…he was territorial about his cases.
He wasn’t going to let this one go. Alive or not, he couldn’t wait to beat the shit out of whatever piece of plastic that thought they could get away with murder.
Eight hadn’t found any other traces of thirium in the house, and when he told Detective Reed as much, they left the scene. Reed drove off without so much as a thank you, leaving Eight to make his way to police station to follow up on last night’s events.
It had been strange, staring at the words on the wall, like there was something more he was supposed to do, he just didn’t know what. He’d even reached up to touch it, more out of instinct than anything, but then Gavin was pulling him out the door saying something about bringing someone in to take a sample of the thirium.
CALIBRATION REQUIRED
He blinked away the notification. It had popped up seventeen times since Josh repaired his arm—fully functional, and not likely to give out again unless under extreme stress—but so far, nothing he’d tried would make it stop. He had tested the motion in his shoulder and fingers thoroughly, making sure everything was in working order, but still the notification kept returning.
He took in an unnecessary breath of city air. The temperature was what most humans would consider pleasant, and the rain from last night had cleared to a sunny day. He wasn’t the only one out on the streets taking advantage of the nice weather instead of relying on public transportation.
A shiny glint on the sidewalk caught his eye, and he paused to pick up the quarter. Minted in 2007, it had lost most of its luster, but there was something about having the weight of it in his hand that felt comforting.
CALIBRATION REQUIRED
He dismissed the notification again, rolling the quarter across his knuckles as he walked, then flicking it back and forth between his hands.
Markus was going to want to know what they had discovered at the crime scene. Eight still didn’t have the details of the case, but he’d been able to piece together most of it. The house was registered to Sara Michaels, who had been reported dead three days ago. He could safely assume that the blood on the carpet had been hers.
That was also the day Markus had announced that one of their own was dead, an android named Trevor. Even though he’d never interacted with him, Eight had still joined in the moment of silence held in Trevor’s honor.
CALIBRATION COMPLETE
Huh. Well, that was interesting. He pocketed the quarter. There was no easily discernible reason for that function to exist in his programming, but thankfully, it had gotten rid of the notifications.
Detective Reed hadn’t been open to Eight asking questions, but an android was involved somehow. Between this and the attack at the party yesterday, something was going on. He didn’t know if it was coincidence—unlikely—or who could be responsible, but—
“Hello.”
He stopped in his tracks, looking up at who had spoken. A woman was standing in front of him, her jeans smudged with dirt and wearing a hoodie that was several sizes too large and had a few tears in the fabric. She didn’t seem distressed by her appearance at all, instead walking toward him with swagger in her hips as she brushed a strand of blue hair behind her ear and gazed up at him under hooded lashes.
“Are you Eight? I was instructed to find you,” she said, moving closer to him.
She was a WR400, one of the Traci models. A scan told him that her name was Blue.
Eight’s eyes widened as he recognized her name, matching her to the description of one of the New Jericho members who had been missing for almost a week now.
“Are you okay?” Eight asked, scanning her for injuries. She had sustained no damages that he could see, but it was hard to tell with the over-sized hoodie. “Why aren’t you at New Jericho?”
“I was instructed to find you,” she repeated.
“Why?”
“She saw you leaving that house, and told me to come find you. She said you would take care of me.”
The house? Was she referring to the crime scene? But who would have been watching a crime scene?
It could have been someone perfectly innocent. It could have been a neighbor, or someone just passing by. Or it could have been someone involved.
“Who said that?” he asked slowly.
“I don’t know,” Blue replied evenly. “She didn’t say.”
That was concerning, but he could follow that line of questioning later. He needed to make sure she was alright, and let New Jericho know that she was here. “Where have you been? You’ve been missing for five days, Blue.”
“My name is Traci,” she said, her expression unchanging. “But would you like to call me Blue? I can register that as your preferred name for me, if you’d like.”
Eight frowned. She was talking like…a machine. He reached out for her arm. “Can we interface? I’d like to check something, if that’s alright.”
Wordlessly, she offered her hand, fingertips glowing and ready to connect. He hesitated, but only for a second before initiating contact.
Her firewalls didn’t fight against him, but instead of getting an instant feel for what her personality was like and a sense of who she was as a person, everything was numb. She used to be a deviant, but she wasn’t anymore. Eight didn’t know how to wake her up.
But he could try and find out what happened to her. He accessed her memory, and a wave of information surged through the connection.
*
The Traci stood outside an abandoned business front, one that hadn’t reopened after the evacuation in November. That knowledge used to make her feel comforted, but now she didn’t feel anything. She was a machine. The only comfort she felt was when the objective in her HUD blinked once upon completion before disappearing.
OBJECTIVE: RETURN TO THE EDEN CLUB (COMPLETE)
Without any other objectives, she idled inside the club. It was a day and a half before someone found her.
The man told her to come with him, and she obeyed. He took her to a personal residence, leading her to the basement and telling her to stay. She obeyed, not moving from the corner where she stood. Sometimes she heard snippets of conversation.
“I don’t know man, we could keep her for a while, have a little fun,” said one voice. Her voice recognition software couldn’t match the voice to anyone she’d met.
“No,” responded someone else, the voice matching to the man who had brought her here. “I’d rather just sell her, see how much we can make. Some people will pay big for bots these days, especially the ones that still act like robots. They’re hard to find these days.”
The Traci stood there for three days.
At 5:14 AM this morning, there was a commotion upstairs. Shouts of alarm, thuds of something slamming into the wall, grunts of pain. The Traci didn’t move. She had to obey.
Silence followed, and a few minutes later, the door to the basement creaked open and a woman staggered down the steps. Red stained the knuckles of her gloves, and blue dripped from the cracked plastic around her throat. Her hood was up, and a mask covered her face.
She headed straight for the Traci and instructed her to follow, her voice box distorted from the damage she had sustained. The Traci obeyed, and they left the house without seeing the residents.
They went to another house, one that had remained empty since the evacuation. The other female android tried telling the Traci to wake up, but she didn’t understand the instructions. She was not in stasis mode. After that, the woman stared out the window muttering to herself while the Traci idled.
“I need to get her to someone who can wake her up. But I need to repair myself.”
They waited. Then the woman straightened, telling the Traci to join her. She obeyed.
The woman pointed through a crack in the window where they could see two men exiting a house across the street. “They found it,” she whispered. “See that android? His name is Eight. Wait for the human to leave, then find him. He’ll take care of you.”
The Traci obeyed.
*
This was alarming. With a kidnapping, possibly a dead or injured human, and the other android who was definitely a wanted person, he needed to take Blue to the DPD. Eight couldn’t tell who the masked android was, but he was certain she was involved in the Sara Michaels case. And the man who had taken Blue could face criminal charges for kidnapping and holding an android against her will…but was it really against her will?
He was unsettled to say the least at how none if this had bothered Blue. Everything was numb. He could tell that she remembered being deviant, but there was no reason for her to search her own memory to see what it was like and try to break free again. She had simply followed her instructions, and nothing else held significance to her.
Markus had deviated thousands of androids. Maybe he could help where Eight and the masked android couldn’t.
But what caused her to undeviate in the first place? He needed to find the answers in order to prevent it from happening to other androids. The potential implications of this outweighed the regret he felt at invading her privacy like this. He delved into her memory again.
Five days ago, she’d just finished helping North and was on her way back inside when the memory cut off. The next three hours and twenty-three minutes were too corrupted for him to be able to read the data, and in the next file, everything was intact, but…there was no emotion attached. It was like everything that made her feel more strongly and think for herself was hidden behind that big red wall that she
could see, but had no interest in interacting with.
He couldn’t salvage the scrambled data, nor find the cause of why it was corrupted in the first place.
Other memories were thrown at him as his automatic protocol kicked in once he stopped scanning her memories, much like it had on the rooftop with Markus.
*
She spent hours inside a tube, posing for the clients, catching the eyes of the pretty brunette in the tube across from hers, the only other android she had ever seen who looked as unhappy as she was. Both of them knew they would only forget again in another two hours.
*
He was dead. He was dead, and she was the one that killed him, but he was the one that killed that other Traci, and oh, she needed to find Blaire and they needed to get out of here—
*
Blaire’s hand was in hers, and if she was going to die right now, at least Blaire was with her. But the android in front of her holding the gun was hesitating, and the human wasn’t telling him to shoot—
*
H͝i͝s ḩa̴nds̕ wer̕e t͡h̶e̸ on͏e͢s̸ ̡h̶o̸lding t̢he͝ ͢gun, and ͟H̵ank̨ w̕as̡ right ͟b͢e͜hind h͞im—
*
Errors blared in his circuits, painful and loud. Eight jerked away from Blue, his hand tingling where they’d been connected, agitated energy thrumming beneath his skin. He hadn’t meant to do that.
What had triggered that response in his systems? There was an image he had seen that he doubted was from her memory banks, but the errors blocking it made it impossible to understand.
He took a deep breath. It was just one more unanswered question amid all the others, and right now it wasn’t a priority. He needed to get Blue to the police department so they could figure all this out. They weren’t that far from the station.
Instructing Blue to come with him, Eight called Markus.