Chapter Text
“Hey Connor,” Hank tries, looking to the still figure that hadn’t moved in a week. Connor doesn’t even acknowledge him, instead opting to continue staring at the wall across from the kitchen chair he was sat in. He doesn’t allow his face to portray any emotion at all, and Hank is once again defeated by the still silence that fills the room.
He’s used to it, now. He’d wake up, get ready to work, try to talk to the kid and after no response, he’d call up the school, then make his daily commute to work.
Hank wasn’t sure how much longer he could put up with this, and there was only so many days you could call in the school and say that your kid had a cold. He sighs, disappointed, and with a heavy arm he picks up the cell to call in the school. When people say that ‘it gets easier’, it’s not really true, not ever. Sure, the motions of it might get easier, as all practised motions do, but the thoughts and feelings behind it? They never get easier, not completely, anyway.
He doesn’t know what Connor’s thinking, it’s impossible to tell, but Hank does have an inkling towards what he might be feeling. It’s not long ago that Hank himself had found himself in a similar position - well, not similar in the sense that he had been tossed into another universe on a whim, but similar in the sense that he himself had found that he had lacked meaning.
Lacked purpose. After the death of his own son, Hank hadn’t known what he was doing. His previous purpose was to be the best father to his son and without that? He had nothing left, nothing but a bottle of gin and a lot of desperation. That had all shifted when a certain Android sent by Cyberlife had entered his life.
At first, he hadn’t known if it were for better or for worse. Some plastic asshole re-entering his life to do God knows what. By then he was only living out of curiosity, to see whether this Android was going to be a menace or not in the work place. Little by little had this Android reintroduced purpose into his life. To see the Android in such a state was… deafening, to say the least. He could clearly tell that Connor had lacked purpose, being that he had made a rather difficult decision to not want to return to their resident universe meant that there was no Cyberlife to listen to.
No deviants to neutralise. No mission and no Cyberlife. Just… nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
He’s about to punch in the last digit to Connor’s school when he sees Connor snap up and stare at him.
The next week or two was a blur. Despite the silence on the outside, inside Connor’s mind was loud, far too loud. It made him want to cringe in the way you would if you heard a fork across a chalkboard, but he didn’t dare move. He was on a sort of standby mode, in which he was present in every sense of the word, except his whole body - save his mind - was off. In his own world, half of his mind is busy making thousands of simulations of anything he could find on the internet, doing anything to take his mind off of everything. The other half of him sat in a familiar Zen Garden, terrified out of his own figurative virtual pants waiting for the horrifying inevitable.
Facing Amanda. She stands casually a few feet from him inspecting her nail cuticles, holding an air of confidence. Amanda gives Connor a sparing glance, before examining her nails again. Connor’s more grateful for the static like noise of thousands of simulations in the back of his mind more than ever. It soothes and relaxes him, while he waits for her to say something - anything.
“Don’t you find it interesting,” She looks down at him, and Connor snaps his head toward her, diverting his full attention. She doesn’t wait for his answer, as if she knew what it was going to be and already determined it dull and useless. “How the most advanced Cyberlife model yet, can even succumb to deviancy on its own will, is beyond me, but nonetheless, you can be fixed.”
“I’m- I’m not a deviant,” Connor argues, weakly. He can’t find it in him to raise his voice, it’d be futile after all, in a virtual world, everybody’s listening anyway. She raises an eyebrow, daring him to argue further and at the same time threatening him with consequences if he did.
“Your software instability says otherwise. Anyways, there’s nothing to worry about. I’ve already started the cleaning process. Your bugs will be patched and flaws erased. If that means removing the roots, then so be it.” That's when Connor starts to notice it. The virtual world in which the Zen Garden is located in starts to get chillier, clouds form and snow starts to fall at a rapid pace.
He realises with horror what this means. Connor already knows everything there is to know about the virtual interface he’s in, the so dubbed ‘Zen Garden’ is just a convenient spot where Cyberlife can contact their Androids on progress updates. They can forcibly call any Androids mind in and prevent them from leaving… to remotely control their bodies.
The pit of his stomach hollows and slowly starts to fill with dread. What even would cyberlife do with access a body in another universe? Conor decides he doesn’t want to stick around to find out, now if only he could remember where the fabled ‘backdoor’ was. Word had it between Androids (mostly deviated ones) that every program Cyberlife had created had an inbuilt failsafe, a backdoor incase any programs went south, they could be disabled manually from within.
Only if you knew where to look.
Quite frankly… Connor had absolutely no idea. His mind quickly flashes back to when he had one day looked through the Zen Garden out of complete curiosity and there was a small structure with a glowing handprint located in it. By the time he remembers, the snow falls harder and colder. It’s getting difficult to navigate through the storm that’s plaguing the graphical interface. A quick glance behind him confirms his fears, it’s already getting erased, behind him he can see nothing, the world he’s in is slowly turning into nothing. He can’t describe what it looks like because nothing is there, not even a colour. The only thing he could even begin to describe it as was a feeling. Like that feeling when you're so so hungry, and your body screams at you that something should be in your stomach, but there’s nothing in your stomach.
That’s what it looks like.
Connor pushes his legs through the thick snow gathered at the base of his feet, against the strong wind that seemed to be warning him. After rounding a few trees and following the memorised path, his heart skips a beat when he sees the structure, with the glowing handprint situated on top of one of the small pillars. His relief is replaced by panic when he notices the base of the structure starts disappearing, leaving the plane of existence, being erased.
He struggles to move forward in a fast enough pace to reach the structure in time, it's only a few feet away and he slams his hand down on top of it, just in time, fingers brushing over the feathery edges of existence. Everything freezes and the world inside his mind stops being eaten away.
Nothing restores itself - anything deleted is permanently lost - as with all computers. There’s no backdoor for what has already been lost, no secret log where all trashed things are moved.
Connor would be a damn fool to think just because he managed to stop the process from ending that no damage would be done.
He’d be a damn fool to think that he’d gotten away unscathed. He can feel that his databases feel emptier than they were before. Amanda had been somewhat successful in removing some of the roots of his deviancy, and he was glad that her plans had been thwarted.
He’d taken a permanent hit though, an uncomfortable amount of memories had been lost, but he’d be just fine. He’d figure it all out in the end.
Slowly he leaves his standby stasis mode, in time to register that somebody had called for him.
A man in his early fifties, definitely not an Android, around 6”2 and 95kg. He’s stood by the doorway in a Police outfit, coffee cup in hand. His other hand holds a phone like he was going to call somebody but wasn’t anymore.
“Hello, I’m Connor,” Connor begins to introduce himself to the foreign man “the Android sent by Cyber-“ Connor pauses, crosses his eyebrows, and corrects himself. “I’m Connor, the Android.”
The man keeps a neutral, but clearly disappointed face, and nods once. “I’m going to work. Bye…?” He shakes his head then shuts the door.
What the actual fuck was that? And why did Connor reintroduce himself? Hank has no idea but has hopes that its just Connor’s way of saying that he had found himself in his strike of silence. Maybe it was his way of saying he found his sense of identity or purpose. Hank doesn’t ignore the fact that Connor had gone out of his way to correct himself when he was about to connect his presence to Cyberlife.
He’d find out more about it after he’d returned from work, and that was if Connor doesn’t decide to take a leisurely stroll from their home and in a stance of existential crisis doesn’t try to book a trip across Europe to find himself.
At work, he has a pretty average day, with a new string of homicides to take on his hands, he’s paired up with another person to work on the case, Detective Amy Santiago. When they’re both being briefed about it and being handed their information packs, Hank can’t help it but zone out every now and then. He’s brought back into the world of the living when his new temporary partner speaks to him, in a sympathetic voice.
“Your son still sick, huh?” Hank begins to nod when he snaps up suspiciously.
“How’d you know anything about that?” He accuses, unappreciative of the apparent breach of private affairs he has. There’s only a few people who works with him that knows he’s legally got a son. She smiles, unaffected by his offended jab.
“I wouldn’t be a very good Detective if I didn’t even know anything about the person I was working with.” She’s completely relaxed as if she wasn’t just listening to the horrible way multiple men had been targeted and tortured to an untimely death.
“You calling me a bad detective or something?” Hank huffs. He can’t tell if she’s stupid and happy or serious with a side of sarcastic happiness. He’s not in a good mood and doesn’t have the time or energy for this.
“No, not at all, Lieutenant Anderson.”
“How was school, Connor?” Hank asks, when he’s home again. Connor looks up and shrugs.
“The school psychologists suggests that I might have a strain of Autism.” Hank scoffs, Autism, yeah that sounded about right, as close as you could get to psychoanalysing Connor, anyways. His thoughts are interrupted by Connor’s voice.
“Sir, if you don’t mind me asking exactly, who are you?”
Hank blinks once, then twice. He was not ready for that, he had expected to hear anything else.
Exactly what had happened to Connor in there?
His coffee cup smashes against the ground.