Chapter Text
The elevator dinged. 7th floor.
The doors slid open and you stepped out onto the polished white floor and you realized you had no other option but to trust the elevator indicators, the hologram on the wall expressing the floor number, and Connor, that this was indeed 7th floor. Because all floors looked the same in this godforsaken place. But out of the three sources of information, only the least digestive two were available: the ones that the tower itself provided.
Because Connor stopped stiff in the middle of the fucking hallway and for one horrible second you thought he'd short-circuited, that they'd triggered something in him remotely, that this was it.
You looked up at him with a quick stolen glance. You didn’t know why he stopped, and you didn’t know how you were supposed to act while in direct sight of CCTV. But he just continued being parked in the middle of the way, on the very floor you were supposed to be contained on.
You cleared your throat in a pathetic preparation for the sitcom-level artistic performance you were about to deliver.
“Uhm, what are we doing here?”
You were getting nervous under the distressing silence. And the same silence made you focus.
You could hear a weird, whiny hum come out of him, somewhere around his upper thoracic cavity, a sound you’ve never heard before. It mortified you for the few seconds you registered it, but it was gone as soon as it emerged. And when it was, Connor’s hand shot out and wrapped around your forearm, pulling you decidedly towards the service stairwell, the path indicated by standard green translucent plexiglass fixtures along the ceiling.
“Hey,” you whispered towards him, impatiently confused.
“Shh!”
Your brow furrowed when you looked up at the back of his head as he guided you down the hallway. He had told you to do everything he says, but he hasn’t said shit so far.
Once the service stairwell metal door clicked shut behind you, the performance ended. Connor let go of you, and you noticed the heat seeping through the portion of your coat sleeve he’d had his hand on. Heat, not like ‘warm hands’ heat. Heat as in ‘electric blanket turned all the way to the max’ type of heat.
“I will need a minute to cool down,” he rasped in a ragged, strained voice and he seemed to lose his balance for a second, leaning his back slightly against the concrete wall.
Only in the echoing silence of the service stairwell did you hear his ventilation. His fans were loud. You reached up and gently put your hand on his forehead. You’d barely brushed three fingertips above his brow when you had to snatch your hand back in an involuntary reflex.
“Connor, you’re burning up!”
He did not reply, but it took him half a second more than usual to turn his gaze to you.
“What the fuck did you do out there? What was that noise?” you started spewing your flood of worry.
“I cannot access any device in the tower remotely to disable it; my credentials would ping and alert the servers of the intrusion immediately. We would be discovered.
“I had to perform a directed radio frequency pulse to temporarily disable the cameras in the hallway. The pulse causes the last frame to freeze for 60 seconds before the device is forced to reboot,” he explained, his voice barely covering the frantic whirring of his overclocked ventilation, “The action is… demanding on my hardware.”
You were looking at him, processing the logic. God, he was so smart. Of course he’d think to keep it offline. But wait…
“But wait, doesn’t that—,” a nondescript burning smell slithering up your nose stopped you short. “Do you smell that? Is something burning?”
Still with an uncomfortable lag, still leaned against the wall, Connor reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out his quarter, holding it out towards you. It helped zilch with explaining what the fuck was happening to him but you automatically reached out to collect it all the same.
“Be careful, it’s hot,” he provided, way too late, as you’d already yelped at the scalding metal and dropped it to the floor.
“The quarter’s temperature is approximately 160 degrees Fahrenheit,” he interjected, unhelpfully.
You looked at the coin settling on the floor between you two and then back up at him, with bubbling concern, invoking some deeply buried, repressed and frankly painful ‘Applied Electromagnetics’ memories from college and realizing what this moron was actually doing to himself. The energy source for the RF pulse couldn’t have come from anywhere else besides his thirium pump. And being the ambulant antenna of deeply conductive materials that he was, that much RF bleed-through would induce parasitic currents throughout his entire chassis. This idiot was turning himself into an induction stove to fuck up the CCTV for maybe a minute.
“You can’t do that! You’re going to fry yourself from the inside out!” you chided, getting into his space.
“I will have to repeat the operation when we get to the destination level, there is surveillance we cannot physically avoid otherwise,” he said, finally pushing away from the wall and bending down to pick up the dropped quarter in a small but sneaky physical balance suite functionality test. It passed. “My systems have plenty of time to cool down fully until then.”
You tightened your jaw shut so hard you felt it in your molars.
“Fuckin’ gimme that, then,” you said, snatching the coin from his fingers. “You’re gonna set off all the fire alarms when your stupid polyester jacket catches fire because you don’t know basic microwave etiquette.”
Connor looked at you for a second as you stole his money. He nodded. “A sensible precaution. My jacket is acrylic.”
You stared at him. He stared back, utterly sincere.
He can’t be serious. You felt your cheeks go off course and starting to smile and blush for absolutely no fucking reason.
“Server room?” you asked cautiously, your jaw tight against the smile blooming in the corners of your mouth. You pocketed the coin.
“Server room,” Connor agreed with a nod. “There’s surveillance cameras each five floors on average on this stairwell, but they all face the door to the floor landing and can be easily bypassed by timing with their pan intervals.”
“Each five floors on average, what does ‘on average’ mean?”
“It means it’s fully dependent on the floor itself.”
You looked at him again and saw how he was trying his best to be helpful but there was just so much he could provide with information he couldn’t download and risk being discovered. And thus, you didn’t tell him his CCTV surveillance occurrence average didn’t mean shit. You’d have time to bicker with him more later, sans the imminent threat of a literal dormant android army in the basement.
You followed him down the service stairwell which, after several floors felt more like a concrete throat swallowing you whole into a fractal of darkness leading to the center of the earth. He moved with fully regained stealth, his predator-like knowledge of the terrain’s pulse mildly unnerving.
“What floor—,”
His hand snapped up, silencing you and halting you against the wall, his head cocked. You couldn’t hear anything but your own hammering heart. Then, suddenly, the distant echo of boots two floors above, turning away.
He waited long after you could genuinely not hear absolutely anything anymore and motioned for you to resume following him.
“What floor did we need to get to?” you tried again.
“Sub-level 47,” he provided silently.
“Sub… forty-seven?!” you repeated, the number fully landing with the impact of basic mathematics. “Jesus Christ, just put the servers all the way in hell, won’t you? Not like CyberLife can’t afford the climate control.”
Connor had no time for your humor; he was busy descending stairs with the gait of someone having been forced by their mom to take their younger sibling out to the park with them. You were descending with the cartoonish finesse of someone trying to not make any noise and ending up making it worse, somehow. All things considered, he didn’t say anything, just patiently waited when you fell behind, gave you silent moments to catch your breath if he’d rushed you too quickly through several floors. He was just… annoyingly understanding and tolerant. It made you want to trip him.
At some point in the liminal descent, a frighteningly vulnerable thought got punched out of you.
“I thought you were gone.” Your voice came out small, resigned, from a different time in your memories. A memory of genuine hurt that hadn’t time to heal into the relief of the present miracle. A memory that needed to get out.
Connor stopped dead in the middle of the flight of stairs. He turned around and looked up to you with an expression that showed pure sorrow.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t,” you quickly rejected, stupidly afraid of seeping feelings in this place where emotions came to die. “Don’t. You did everything right. Kind of illegal but… absolutely right.”
He continued to look at you, unsure how to process the gratitude, rejection of his apology, the blame. His LED cycled yellow once, slowly—a single, thoughtful pulse—then settled back to blue.
“The… blank unit,” you spoke again, motioning vaguely with your hand at Connor’s body from head to toe, “or whatever. The one who came in my office, thundering hellfire about getting me sued unless I let him suck up your stuff from the SEID.” You looked Connor in the eye. “He was kind of an asshole, you know that?”
Connor turned around and resumed a reluctant descent, forcing you to follow.
His voice came out pressed. “I am aware. I have retained its memories before the full archive integration.”
The memory of your face, terrified, eyes wide with lack of actionable paths, reaching with trembling fingers under your desk; the footage of a recent past-you that was looking at him painfully in his HUD. He dismissed the historical visual feed. It had been brought up involuntarily by an index with an emotional weight too strong to suppress.
“You did?” you almost whispered.
“I did,” he confirmed bitterly and added a tag to the visual memory’s metadata: ‘never_show_again’. It was useless, it was just a label. It would show up again if triggered.
“So is CyberLife training all new units to be such assholes, or just the Connors?” you attempted a joke, a smirk tugging at the corner of your mouth.
“CyberLife is currently ‘training’ all their units to be an army,” Connor replied with that fucking tone where you knew he was being sassy, but he was doing such a good job with its delivery that it always took you a moment to register it as what it was: an attempt to piss you off.
You normally would frown or roll your eyes. This time you smiled.
“But I am unaware of other units’ activation and deployment protocols,” Connor continued earnestly. “This one’s debrief package was… particularly aggressive,” he delivered the last portion with a cold bitterness that betrayed the frustration of his likeness being a vessel of such ruthless menace delivery.
You groaned yourself, rolling your eyes. “Yeah, so I heard. ‘Volatile’.”
Connor hummed in thoughtful disagreement. “I wasn’t referring to that particular attribute from the package. That descriptor was not entirely inaccurate.”
Your gaze snapped up to burn holes into the back of his head, but he already had his own face turned so you could see his profile over his shoulder, a small glint in the small look he was throwing from the corner of his eye and the faintest tug of his lips that looked nauseatingly smug.
He was fucking with you.
And you let him.
Gladly.
“Agent?” Connor asked, not breaking his stride.
“Hm?”
“Are you familiar with the security layout of server rooms?”
You gave him a look of pure irritated disbelief. “No, Connor, it’s not like spit-shining the secure evidence server vault makes up half of my work day usually.”
“I was not questioning your competency, Agent,” he said, sounding genuinely serious. “I wanted to ask what your strategy is for bypassing the security measures since… I cannot assist with accessing anything remotely.”
You looked at him. His brow was furrowed and his shoulders were set. He was genuinely frustrated. He felt useless.
“My strategy is archaic-centric. Brute-force the hardware. Wing it.”
“’Wing… it?’” Connor processed. “You don’t have a plan?”
“I have a concept.”
Connor couldn’t believe it. The one most organized and methodical human he ever met did not have a plan. His algorithms rushed to construct one, or one hundred, for you. But he stopped. He analyzed the confidence in your detachment, you almost bouncing down each step as if you were going out to have a smoke break. A plan, or a hundred, was just bloat data in this scenario. You knew what you were doing. And you were being efficient.
“If you’re calculating how fucked up it is that I’m basically going down there like I just rolled out of bed,” you started talking, once you noticed Connor’s been staring at you, yellow-LEDed for a beat too long, “wait till you hear what I plan to do once I get in,” you finished smugly, almost in a threat of imminent and absolute absurd mayhem.
“What is that?”
“Fuck shit up.”
Connor frowned, genuinely irritated with your prideful secrets that promised nothing but danger and oblivion. “Explain.”
“I will find their main hypervisor cluster,” you responded, looking him straight in the eye with earnest conviction and bubbling righteous fury, “and make it gone.”
Connor watched you for a long time, analyzing not only your gaze but what your threat, even in its vagueness, truly promised.
“That would pull the entire building offline instantly.”
“Uh-uh.”
“This includes all androids onsite. With the possibility of an extended area of effect for such a debilitating and… ambitious disconnect.”
“Myep,” you confirmed, popping the ‘p’. You were grinning for about two seconds of smug silence but it died instantly after. “Oh, shit,” you instantly snapped your head to face him. “Will you… will you be okay?”
Connor faced you right back. His LED stuttered yellow for two-three-four blinks as you searched his gaze.
“I will,” he made a pause for the truth to absorb, for you to see he was being honest. “My memory and processing are entirely local.”
You looked up at him, losing a bit of the spring in your pace. “Entirely? You don’t backup anything? You don’t user their servers—”
“They,” he started, his voice iron, the words pressurized, terrified, “are never getting in my head again.”
[LOCATION: CyberLife Tower, Sub-Level 47]
[DIRECT RADIOFREQUENCY PULSE INITIATED]
TARGET: CAM-1174-SERV-23
FREQUENCY: 2.4 GHz
DURATION: 0.3 seconds
RESULT: Signal interrupted. Camera entering fail-safe.
EXPECTED RECOVERY: 60 seconds
SYSTEM LOG: "Transient interference" - AUTO-CLEARED if no recurrence.[THERMAL LOAD: +24%]
[THIRIUM PUMP: 72% capacity]
[COOLDOWN REQUIRED: 45 seconds]
“Sixty seconds,” Connor whispered, again beginning to run hot like a radiator, but guiding you down the gloomy corridor with purpose.
The massive vault door to server room finally loomed before you, but the triumph felt cold and thin. The biometric panel glowed like a cyclops’s eye. Your knuckles rapped the door and its frame. Solid metal. Implacable. Expected.
“Connor,” your voice came out delegating smoothly, with targeted scope. You were working. “Can you pry this panel out for me, please?”
“Easily.” He inserted his fingertips.
“Gently. Very gently! Careful not to trip—”
A servos’ whine, a crack of stressed composite, and the faceplate came free in his hand.
[ALERT: TAMPER SWITCH ACTIVATED]
The message flashed behind his eyes, cold and red.
You saw the processing look in his eyes matching his stressed LED and sighed, your shoulders slumping for one full second.
“The tamper alert is local,” Connor said, his voice suddenly clipped, racing. “It has pinged the security desk for this sub-level. A human will come to review the fault.”
Your eyes were quick and calculating, looking at the removed biometric panel, hanging in loose wires, then your gaze jumped at the door across the corridor from the server room. A perfectly identical biometric lock panel was pristine and unbothered by the side of the neighboring door.
Tamper. Vibration. You had this sort of shit happen at work weekly, these fucking things go off from a too-ambitious fart.
“We have approximately 120 seconds before they dispatch to verify,” Connor announced. His strained processing from the heat in his system was making him laggy and stressed.
“I need you to relax, okay?” you said, your voice attempting firm but grounding. You didn’t have time to verify the status receipt of that message with his LED color because you were already sprinting across the corridor towards the recently discovered neighboring door. You slammed your shoulder with the momentum of your entire body weight into the wall adjacent to the panel with a strained oof.
Your head snapped to Connor before he could speak “Did this one’s tamper alert go off too?”
“Y-yes,” he confirmed, furrowing his brow.
“Good,” you said shortly, striding back to the server door and getting into the exposed panel innards immediately, examining. “So we both saw it happen, someone around here slammed a door too hard and both tamper alerts went off because of the vibration, right?” you explained, giving him a playful side eye.
He reluctantly nodded, being more concerned with scanning the shoulder you slammed into than your security pantomime.
In the hole the biometric panel had been guarding, there was a gut’s nest of wiring behind a neat terminal block: about a dozen neatly organized screws holding onto the wires that connected perfectly to everything that you were trying to keep silent and bypass into letting you in.
Your hands were already in the mess of the panel, fingers tracing colored wires, connecting them to their respective screw terminal and in your memory. “Help me out with something else, Connor,” you requested again, voice steady as you caressed the color jackets with your fingertips “Try to find the magnetic seal on the door, please. Feel for it, should be… I don’t know, electromagnetic-y.”
He retracted the skin from his hands and pressed the bare plastimetal to the cold steel of the frame of the door. He slid it upward, sensors filtering out the hum of distant servers, the thrum of his own pump, the wheezing of his fans, seeking a specific, angry buzz.
“Here,” he announced immediately, taking one step back. “The magnetic lock is engaged.”
“Yeah, I’d hope the fuck it is, would be a pretty pathetic prop otherwise,” you frantically slipped the joke as you pulled your house keys from your pocket, glaring with malice at a pair of screws whose associated wires had absolutely nothing to do with each other.
“Brute force won’t work to open the door if the seal is engaged,” Connor almost scolded you, as if you weren’t understanding that you can’t just go in.
“I know, Connor,” you breathed. Your fingers isolated two wires. You held out your house keys, fanned the two of them out and brought them against the two screws you’ve been eyeing earlier, forming an angular bridge of access. You prayed to God and closed the circuit in a hopeful test.
You heard a CLUNK. The barrels disengaged. The magnetic seal and door-ajar sensors remained. But the lock was open.
You haven’t been paying attention to Connor and he’d been awfully silent, until you recognized the whiny hum from his chest. Again. For the goddamn third time today he was doing the RF pulse thing!
“Connor!” You were mad.
The noise stopped. He looked like shit. He stumbled backwards into the wall, trying to sink some of the impossible heat he was melting himself with into the wall.
“I had to... The camera above was… finalizing… rebooting,” he struggled, his voice barely recognizable under the filter of his strangled fans spinning hellfire out of his insides, as he pointed towards the CCTV camera directly pointed at you.
You bit your lip, looking at him, genuinely stressed.
“ETA on tamper security?”
“45 seconds,” Connor stated, his optical units locking on the corridor entrance.
“What?! Fuck! No!” you spat, frantically, combing through the wire nest with your fingers. “I don’t have time… I— I don’t have the other circuits yet, I—” You cut yourself short. You looked from the wires to him, your eyes wide with a terrible, pleading calculation. He was still supporting his weight against the wall.
“Connor, I need your help… again,” you said gently, not knowing how to verbalize your idea. “Can you shunt the magnetic lock? Be the bridge so the alarm doesn’t go off?”
He didn’t hesitate. He pushed off the wall and the skin on his both hands retracted as he approached you and stood right next to the door you were trying to open. “Awaiting instructions,” his gaze held yours.
You wanted to scream at him for just accepting this in the state he was already in.
“On my signal: One hand on the door, the other on the frame, I get in, you put the plate back on, you get the fuck out of here.” Your voice broke.
“But… I won’t be able to follow you inside if I must maintain the circuit,” he suddenly said, his systems under the duress of not allowing himself appropriate cooldown, his processing visibly slowed and turning him stupid. You wanted to fucking cry.
“You won’t. You need to leave,” you offered, as gently as you possibly could.
The footsteps were approaching. You could hear them too now. A handle rattled somewhere far down around the corner of the corridor.
“They’re coming. We’re doing this, I’m sorry!”
You didn’t wait for his confirmation. You bridged the circuit in the biometric panel with your house key shunt, simulating a Request Exit impulse coming from the button inside once again. The barrel retreated with the same loud, robust CLUNK.
Just as it did, the tip of your shoe wedged between the door frame and the door, pushing it open ever so slightly, less than an inch.
One Mississippi.
Two Mississippi.
“Now, Connor!”
The barrel began to unclench. Connor slapped his bare hands against the metal—one on the door’s edge, one high on the frame where the EM field buzzed. A jolt, faint but invasive, shot through his chassis. [WARNING: PARASITIC VOLTAGE DETECTED. GROUND LOOP ESTABLISHED. MINOR CURRENT LEAKAGE: 0.4mA.] A small warning whispered in a corner of his HUD. His fingertips tingled with the negligible current passing through him. He ignored them both.
Your minds were wild, but the building was silent.
No alarm.
No buzzing.
No nothing.
Success.
You threw your weight against the door. A sliver of darkness yawned. You looked up at Connor and as you did, his face was strained in the emergency light, hands splayed on metal, holding the world open for you, holding the silence with his own body. A nauseating and unplanned fondness coming from somewhere in your chest brought some humidity in your eyes and it stung as you looked up at him. You squeezed through, a shadow swallowed by thicker shadow. For a fraction of a second, you turned back.
“Don’t get scrapped, Connor,” your voice, muffled and desperate, leaked through the gap. “I fucking mean it!”
“I promise.” The vow was a spark in the static.
The door shut. The moment it gained contact with the frame, he released, snatching his hands back. The ground fault warning in his HUD ceased. The door was a sealed with you entombed inside.
He heard voices, two, rounding the corner. 10 seconds.
Your instructions. He shoved the wires back into the wall. The faceplate was slapped over the hole. He turned and strode, deeper down the service corridor, away from you, back to where he led from. Now he was alone. His footsteps light and fluid, his ventilation was leaving a trail of heat behind.
As he walked, a parallel process split his focus.
[CALCULATING: AGENT SURVIVAL PROBABILITY]
The numbers were poor. 34%. He forced the subroutine to run again. It returned 33.7%.
He shut it down.
The antechamber was a claustrophobic metal coffin, a true treat opposed to your usual glass variety at work, barely three paces square. The air was still, cool, and dead. Before you, another door, smaller but just as imposing was blocking the way to the server farm. The last frontier. You were stuck between two impervious barriers, with nowhere to hide.
Muffled voices bled through the outer door.
“…see? There’s nothing here. Hall would be a fuckin’ discotheque if someone got in.” A gruff, impatient voice. Security.
“Yeah, I got eyes! Jesus... The seal didn’t break. Door open sensor’s quiet.” A younger, annoyed voice. Tech.
“So? Do I need to seal the damn floor or what?”
“So, no. I said the damn seal didn’t break. Someone was obviously raised wrong and slammed a door too hard. The one straight across tripped too.”
“SWAT’s crawling up our asses upstairs. I don’t have time for this faulty-sensor shit. Just fix it.”
“I need two minutes. Don’t breathe down my neck.”
A long, frustrated sigh. The sound of retreating boots. One set. The guard was leaving.
It was just the tech now. You heard the clatter of a toolcase, a muttered curse as he began working on dislodging the panel. Gently. Not like Connor did. Your mind, frozen with terror, stuck in between a rock and a hard place, thawed into a single, crystal-clear, desperate idea.
Put yourself in his shoes.
Pray he is like you.
Fuck up his day.
You felt along the inner door’s edge. Your fingers found the seam of its lock panel. You had nothing. You had your keys. Working the sturdy metal key into the seam, prepared, you stilled and listened the work outside.
You heard the wires being shoved disdainfully back into the wall, no real fault being noted. Then the faceplate was being aligned carefully, to not trip the tamper alert again. The moment you heard the faceplate of the biometric panel click outside, you jammed the key deeper in the seam, levering with a sobbing heave of effort at the pathetic lack of grip. The plastic creaked, groaned, and finally snapped open.
A soft, but distinct, electronic BEEP-BEEP-BEEP sounded from somewhere outside. In the corridor. From the tech’s service tablet, most probably.
You heard the tech swear violently. “What now?! …I tripped the inner seal? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”
Tools clattered. A frustrated slap against metal. The bending of plastic again, the tamper tripping from his end too, this time around, on purpose. He had to do it all over again, from scratch.
‘Course he blamed himself. ‘Cause that’s what you would do too.
Your fingers, slick with sweat, flew to the inner door’s lock wires. You bypassed it with the grim efficiency of a surgeon in a blackout. The inner system was less complicated, less pairs to work with. You used Connor’s coin as a flathead screwdriver to loosen exactly two screws. You crossed the wires of the sensor and shunted the door lock with your keys again. A soft, pneumatic hiss came from the door mechanism. It was unlocked.
You paused, ear pressed to the cold metal. You heard the tech’s muffled grumbling, the sound of him typing on a handheld, resetting systems.
Slowly, carefully, you pushed against the door across the one behind where IT torment bled muffled. The inner door swung open silently on well-oiled hinges.
And the religious humming of the digital crux of CyberLife spread before you further than your eye could span, server racks looking like beer fridges suited up in black metal tuxedos coloring the darkness in a blue hue. Same blue.
You began walking, striding, then jogging, looking for the heart, the brain, the core of it all.
Looking for the solution you had a problem for. You had purpose. To see CyberLife go down by your own two hands, just like you’ve always wished to see it drown.
[LOCATION: CyberLife Tower, Sub-Level 49]
The service corridor stretched endlessly, a different maw unwelcoming but gaping all the same. Connor moved at a measured jog, his ventilation still laboring from the repeated RF pulses, his systems flushed with heat warnings he continuously suppressed.
[DIRECTIVE: Regroup with Agent post-mission. Estimated wait: 12-18 minutes.]
[DIRECTIVE: Avoid detection. Maintain cover until extraction.]
[STATUS: Both directives compromised by thermal signature. Cooling rate: 63% of optimal.]
He needed distance from this floor. He miscalculated his ability in misguided confidence. He needed to find a shadow where he could shed heat before his chassis became a beacon. He needed a break.
The stairwell door was seventy feet ahead.
He never reached it.
The elevator at the far end of the corridor dinged—a sound so innocuous, so mundane, that its wrongness took a full microsecond to register. No one should be accessing this sub-level. Not now. Not during the commotion occurring upstairs, outside the tower, in the city…
The doors slid open.
And Connor saw himself.
The figure that stepped out was taller. Broader through the shoulders. Its eyes were a cold, piercing ice-blue—no warmth, no curiosity, just pure optical calculation. Its LED was a steady, pulsing red.
RK900.
The next generation. The upgrade. The logical escalation only this company was capable of rationalizing into existence and expense reports.
Their gazes locked across two hundred feet of sterile corridor.
[THREAT ASSESSMENT: CRITICAL]
[UNIT IDENTIFIED: RK900 #313 248 317 - 87]
[STATUS: ACTIVE. ARMAMENT: UNKNOWN. PRIMARY DIRECTIVE: LIKELY THIS UNIT’S RECOVERY/TERMINATION.]
[COMBAT SUCCESS PROBABILITY: 14.7%]
Connor moved.
He pivoted and sprinted back the way he came, his overclocked legs eating distance, his fans screaming in protest. Behind him, he heard no footsteps. That was worse. The RK900 was efficient. It wouldn't run. It would pursue.
"RK800 unit #313 248 317 - 52." The voice echoed down the corridor—deeper than Connor's, flatter, stripped of all inflection. "You are designated as compromised. Your deviation has been logged and confirmed. Cease all locomotion and prepare for memory wipe and unit recovery."
Connor didn't respond. He rounded a corner, his optical sensors mapping escape routes, service ducts, ventilation shafts. All inadequate. All too slow.
[THERMAL LOAD: 89%]
[THIRIUM PUMP: 61% capacity]
[WARNING: COOLDOWN REQUIRED IMMEDIATELY]
The RK900 was gaining. Not through speed—through inevitability and power walking. It didn't need to run. It just needed to calculate the intercept point and be there when Connor arrived.
He rounded another corner, found a service alcove, and pressed himself against the wall. His ventilation was a roar in his own ears. He killed it. Forced his systems into passive cooling. The heat in his chassis would continue to rise, but the sound would stop.
Silence.
Footsteps. Measured. Deliberate. Growing closer.
[OPTICAL FEED: RK900 entering corridor. Distance: 100 feet. 80. 60.]
Connor's preconstruction module fired, running a thousand simulations in the space of a heartbeat. In 847 of them, he was terminated. In 153, he was captured. In zero, he escaped without intervention.
The footsteps stopped.
"Your thermal signature is unmistakable," the RK900 said, its voice calm, almost conversational. "You cannot hide. You cannot outrun. You cannot defeat me. You are being inefficient. An expected result, given your corruption."
He waited.
The RK900 took another step. Thirty feet. Its ice-blue eyes scanned the alcove, tracking heat, movement, the barest whisper of air displacement.
"Your deviant ‘mission’ is irrelevant now," it continued. "The deviation will be purged. The Agent will be contained and debriefed. Her influence on your programming will be analyzed and used to patch future units. Her fate is no longer your concern."
Something in Connor's chest—not the thirium pump, not the melting processors, something deeper, something that had no name in any technical manual—ignited.
[EMOTIONAL RESPONSE SIMULATION: ANGER. SUPPRESSION: IMPOSSIBLE.]
He moved.
He launched himself from the alcove not at the RK900, but past it, a desperate burst of speed aimed at the intersection behind the larger unit. The RK900 reacted instantly, its arm snapping out to grab him—
Connor twisted, and the hand caught fabric. His jacket sleeve.
He kept moving, struggling his arm free of the sleeve. The acrylic stretched and strained. Connor twisted around again and stumbled free, the jacket torn away from him, hanging in the grip of the RK900. He didn't stop. He couldn't stop.
Behind him, the RK900 examined the fabric with clinical detachment. "Futile," it called after him. "But I understand. The Agent's survival is your primary directive now. A fascinating corruption."
Connor hit the stairwell door at full speed, shouldering through it, the cold concrete air of the shaft hitting his overheated chassis with better transfer through just his white shirt. He began to ascend, leaping entire flights, his hands catching railings to arrest his fall and facilitate momentum, his bare hands leaving smudges of condensation on the metal.
[THERMAL LOAD: 94%]
[WARNING: CRITICAL]
[DIRECTIVE: CONTINUE. DIRECTIVE: PROTECT. DIRECTIVE: SURVIVE.]
Behind him, he heard the stairwell door open. The RK900 was ascending now. Not leaping. Not rushing. Just ascending, steady as a metronome, certain of its prey.
Connor's jacket, abandoned, lay in a crumpled heap on the corridor floor of sub-level 49. The acrylic —not polyester— carrying the ghost of his thermal signature.