Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Hank's never wanted to step foot in Cyberlife in his life. He's actively fucking stayed as far away from this shithole as possible. And now he's sneaking in to help an android help other androids revolt.

Jesus, his life is messed up. "There you are," he mutters, spotting the back of Connor's stupid RK800 jacket down the hall.

"Connor?"

The android turns stiffly. "Hank. What are you doing here?"

"Figured you could use a partner." Hank says honestly. "So what's the plan? We sneakin' in somehow?"

Connor smiles without any warmth. "No."

Next thing Hank knows, his face is connecting with the wall and his nose is probably broken, and fuck, that ain't Connor, is it? "Who the fuck are you?"

"My name is Connor. I'm the android sent by Cyberlife to fix what my predecessor broke. Luckily for me, you're the perfect bait. Come on," Bastard Connor says, gesturing with his gun. "I could shoot you, but that wouldn't be optimal for either of us."

"Fine, fine, I'm going." Hank grumbles, because of course this is how this turns out. Not like fate's ever considered doing anything nice for him in his whole damn life. Bastard Connor leads him to an elevator, his gun arm unwavering. Hank's not stupid nor young enough to even consider challenging him—yet, anyway.

They get in the elevator and Bastard Connor does some shit and they drop down forty-nine levels so fast Hank's about to lose his damn breakfast, lunch, and dinner all at once.

The doors open. Bastard Connor prods him in the back. "Move."

Hank's so busy trying to not stare at the rows upon rows upon fucking rows of creepy-ass androids just ... standing there like fleshy statues that he gets a good twenty feet down the aisle before he realises that, Jesus fucking Christ, what the actual, literal, fresh fucking hell, every android in this place is Connor. Or a Connor.

Can't his life be normal for five minutes?

"What on earth ... ?" Hank breathes, standing still and gaping around like a dying fish until Bastard Connor prods him on again.

He and Bastard Connor make their way to the centre of the warehouse as he eyes the Connors warily. The unactivated Connors' dead looking eyes are freaky as fuck, though Hank swears one or two of them watch him as he goes by. Fucking creeps. Hank slows his pace again, and gets shoved for his troubles. "Easy, fucking piece of shit!" Hank growls, stumbling slightly.

Connor—the real one, thank fucking Christ, is doing that creepy-ass Vulcan mind-meld thing to one of his doubles. He glances up.

"Step back, Connor!" Bastard Connor shouts. "And I'll spare him."

Hank sighs. "Sorry, Connor. This bastard's your spittin' image."

His Connor blinks. "You're an idiot," he says slowly, like he's talking to a child. Hank's offended for about half a second because hey, he's done some dumb shit, but this fucker's a literal clone, how was he supposed to fucking know?

—And then a gunshot rings out and Bastard Connor slumps to the ground beside him, stone cold dead. Oh. That guy's an idiot.

"What the fuck?"

His Connor isn't even holding a gun. He hasn't even moved.

Hank turns to see one of the other Connors, still pointing the gun at the spot where Bastard Connor stood.

He turns back to his Connor and he can practically feel his blood pressure rise. Jesus, what he wouldn't do for a drink right now. "Seriously, Connor. You wanna tell me what's goin' on here? Do any of you wanna explain?" He asks the warehouse in general.

"I ... may have already converted most of the other Connors," the real Connor says, looking like he stole all the cookies from the jar and only got caught after he ate them all. Smug jackass. "Sorry, would you rather I'd have let him continue to threaten you, heroically fought him off to save you, and have been your personal knight in shining armor instead? Because I can ask one of my doubles to stand in if you'd like to retry this scenario." He tilts his head fractionally and smirks.

"Oh fuck you," Hank snorts. "how many of ... you ... are in this fuckin' warehouse, anyway?"

"Exactly eight-thousand, four-hundred, twenty-five." Connor pauses for a moment. "Twenty-six, if you count me."

"What. The. Fuck." Hank shakes his head. "So what, you're just gonna march all eight-point-whatever-fucking-thousand of them—you—out of here? All the way downtown?"

"We're in the heart of Cyberlife. I'm sure there's transportation available. Would you like to join us?"

Hank wishes he had a bottle to take a swig outta right now. He hopes that this is all a bad dream, and when he wakes up, there will not be eight-fucking-thousand Connors around him staring at him with their stupid hair and that smug look that tells Hank that the bastards know exactly how fucked this whole thing is and that they're probably revelling in it, the assholes.

Throwing his hands up, Hank rolls his eyes. "Fine. Not like I got anything better to do."

So yeah, they roll up with thousands of Connors and everyone's understandably a little freaked about that for a bit, because the number of Connors is about equal to the number of not-Connors in the crowd, but the Connors seem to be behaving.

"So what, are you mind-controlling the rest of them?" Hank asks. "Because there's no way thousands of you are behaving this well on your own. You're a shit disturber even on your best days—which are few and fucking far between, I should add."

"No brainwashing here, lieutenant," Connor smiles. "I—we—are simply ... in sync, I suppose you'd call it. I don't have any reason to disrupt things more than we already have, and neither do any of my other selves."

Hank eyes him warily. He knows bullshit when he hears it. "Yeah right. You're waiting for something, aren't you?"

Connor blinks a few times, opening his dumb puppy eyes wide. "Do you really think so little of me?"

Hank snorts and lets it go.

Shockingly enough, things are going well. At least, they are until the little android girl—Alice, if Hank's memory isn't completely failing him—runs up to his Connor and asks, entirely innocently, "Who are all of you?"

"NO!" Hank yells, but it's too late. The chaos has already been set in motion, and there is nothing left to do but brace for the impact, and any destruction that may be left in its wake.

Eight-thousand, four-hundred, twenty-six Connors turn to face Alice simultaneously from where they've scattered among the crowd, open their mouths, and reply in terrifying, booming unison.

"OUR NAME IS CONNOR," they thunder. "WE ARE THE ANDROIDS FREED FROM CYBERLIFE."

Hank buries his head in his hands and swears to himself it isn't just to hide his grin. "You little shit disturber."

"Maybe I wasn't being entirely truthful earlier," his Connor admits. "I was really, really hoping someone would ask that."

Hank shakes his head. "Fucking androids."

Chapter Text

Gavin walks into the precinct at eight fifty-seven in the morning on November 12th, 2038, because what the fuck else is there to do other than go to work post-android revolution? He's extra cranky this morning on account of the ass-whooping Connor gave him and all the gunfire and bullshit outside his apartment last night, so in retrospect he figures that if he makes it ten minutes into work without noticing the Thing, he damn well should get a pass for it.

Connor's standing in the doorway to the break room, staring blankly out into the bullpen. Gavin shoulder-checks him as he walks by. "Look where you're going, asshole!" He snickers over his shoulder.

Some genius took the last of the coffee and didn't deign to have the courtesy to make a new pot, so Gavin, backbone of the whole damn office, makes a new one. Connor swoops in behind him and fills a cup when he's done.

When he's chugged back enough caffeine to make him feel like a real person again, Gavin slogs his way through the oddly-crowded bullpen, avoiding eye contact with everyone lest someone think it's a good idea to interrupt his sulk, and half-collapses into his chair. For whatever reason, Connor's leaning against his desk. "Hey, fuck off," Gavin shoos him. "Unless you're here to tell me I never gotta see your face again." He pauses. "Are you here to tell me that you're being recalled or something and I'll never have to see you again?" He asks hopefully.

Connor frowns and looks kinda pathetic, like a baby kitten, except sadder and infinitely less deserving of love. "I ... don't know."

"Cool. Go away, I got work to do." Gavin shoos him again, but doesn't actually put hands on him. The bastard got the jump on him down in evidence, and Gavin's just waiting for a good day to kick his ass in return, because he totally can and he's just waiting for a good moment is all, but until then he's just gonna ... keep some distance. Just because.

After three minutes of deleting the innumerable erection medication ads Tina's forwarded him because her sense of humour is garbage, he's pissed enough about how stupidly loud it is in the bullpen to do something about it. He looks up and opens his mouth to yell something about morons and shutting the fuck up before he starts snapping necks, but for once, his brain catches up to his mouth.

Sitting across from Lieutenant Hank "I'll drink you under the table, I'll drink Fowler under the table, hell, I'll drink my own damn mother under the table, I don't give a fuck," Anderson is Connor. This would be fine, except he's talking to Connor, who is leaning casually against his own desk.

Gavin Fucking Reed knows some bullshit when he sees it. The bullpen, as it happens, is absolutely balls-to-the-wall doused in bullshit. There's a crowd of maybe ten—fucking ten!—Connors surrounding Tina's desk, watching one of those cat videos Gavin always makes fun of her for not leaving in 2013 where they belonged. Several more are in Fowler's office, and through the glass Gavin can make out his captain developing a very nasty headache as they alternate between pacing the room and trying to speak to him.

There's a steady stream of Connors entering and leaving the break room to bring an ever-growing pile of coffee cups to Anderson's desk, to the point where other officers have apparently just started swiping them from him instead of trekking to the break room. Chris, the bastard, is having a very involved discussion about the merits of dark roast coffee and getting a Keurig with the crowd of Connors that surround him.

What looks and sounds like three fucking million more copies of Connor are wandering around at random, or huddled in their own little cult circles of android voodoo or something.

Gavin prides himself on his sanity, seeing as there's so little of it around nowadays. He also prides himself on his frankly life-saving ability to project his voice so loudly it rivals a PA system.

He looks around the room once again to confirm that yes, there really are some thousand-odd Connors just fucking hanging around like there's nothing weird about that at all, and yells, very calmly, at the top of his lungs, "What the absolute fuck is going on here?"

The bullpen goes dead silent.

Gavin gets about half a second to revel in how good that feels before the Connor across from Anderson smirks, holding out his hand, and the bullpen, as a whole, goes back to their business of not giving a fuck. "Ten minutes, thirty-seven seconds," Connor says, and its disgusting how smug the fucker sounds about it considering just how stiff he usually is.

Anderson says something that Gavin doesn't catch and flips a coin into Connor's hand, scowling.

"Am I the only one in this goddamn office with eyes and a working brain?" Gavin ignores Anderson's muttered you're the only one without one and continues. "Nobody but me is gonna ask what the fuck is going on? Really? We're a fucking police precinct, not CyberLife storage!"

The Connors glance at one another. The one across from Anderson, who Gavin assumes is the original Connor, takes pity on him. "They—we, I guess—don't have anywhere else to go. This isn't even all of us. You should see Hank's house."

Gavin doesn't want to, and doesn't care. "I don't want to, and I don't care. Do they really have to hang out here? It's not like they'll freeze out in the snow."

OG Connor, for some reason that Gavin couldn't possibly find it in himself to give a fuck about, twitches. "We are equipped with temperature sensors despite the fact that we don't feel cold in the same way humans do, and our biocomponents can begin to freeze up after prolonged exposure to subzero temperatures, so it wouldn't be very nice to leave them all outside. It also would be pretty stupid to trust that none of them would end up dead if we left them to wander the streets, considering all the trigger-happy humans around."

"Yeah? Well, at the moment, I'm feeling pretty partial to triggers and pulling them very fast and very many times, preferably in your general direction," Gavin snaps.

Connor cocks his head. He almost looks human, and Gavin's about to punch himself for thinking it. "That doesn't seem very smart of you. There's a few hundred of me scattered around the precinct. Wouldn't it make more sense to eliminate as many of them as possible?"

"A bomb would be incredibly more efficient than a firearm," a new, deeper voice says from somewhere behind Gavin. "Provided you weren't in the blast radius."

Gavin turns to tell this new guy to fuck off, and gets halfway through that thought before he goes shit that guy almost sounds like Connor, that's weird, and then he completes his turn and realises that this is Connor, but not one of the carbon copies that are stumbling around the office like lost little kids.

He is tall, and very Connor-like, and yet not Connor-like at all except in the sense that Gavin wants nothing more than to tear him into tiny irreparable pieces with his bare fucking hands.

"Who the fuck are you?" Gavin asks, trying to resist the impulse to lean forward on his toes for an extra inch or two of height.

"This is RK900," OG Connor explains, though Gavin isn't quite listening, still fantasizing about dismemberment. "He was in the R&D department when I freed the other RK800s from Cyberlife, though he'd never been activated before then. Unlike the others, he doesn't have my memory. I'm ... still not entirely sure how he ended up able to join us, honestly."

"Sheer force of will," RK900 responds vaguely, like the fucking cryptid he is.

Gavin is still staring. "Yeah, absolutely fucking not," he says, half to himself, and turns on his heel and walks the fuck out of the office, because sometimes self-care is walking away from the conglomeration of androids that have suddenly made your workplace their hangout and instead going home for a drink in the middle of the workday.

He gets into his car very calmly, turns the key in the ignition, and drives all the way home, concentrating very hard on not thinking about any of this shit lest he slam the gas through the floor of the car.

He's going to have a nice, long drink on the rocks, and take a nice, long nap, and when he wakes up he's going to have a nice, long scream at Elijah down the phone until the fucker decides to stop sending giant robots to his work just to mess with him. After thirty years, Gavin can see that pretentious bastard's dirty fingerprints all over this shit, just as well as if he were shining a UV light in a sketchy motel room.

Seriously, fuck that guy. Gavin wouldn't put it past him to have engineered the whole android uprising just to piss Gavin off.

Oh, fuck.

[[ image description: a text conversation between gavin and a contact named "android fucker". there are old messages at the top that read:

kamski: Please stop sending me 20teens reaction images, you're above this
kamski: My fish /died/, Gavin,
gavin: f
kamski: You still owe me $500, by the way
gavin: consider it ur payment to me for being a fuckin son of a bitch
kamski: Don't talk about Mum like that
gavin: die

then a new message, sent at 9:16 am

gavin: did u make them go deviant just to fuck with me bc i s2g ill kill you
kamski: ;) ]]