SEQUENTIAL ━ Connor // RK800 ✔️

six ━ comforting approach

• • •

"Connor?"

His systems were just starting to turn back on again, but behind the rebooting messages, as his sight was amongst the first to re-activate, Connor could already see Mia. She was standing above him, head tilted, watching for his blinks, for the micro-changes on his expression. He knew she was aware of the order in which his systems would initialise - she must have meant to be the first thing he saw.

"There you are," she smiled with the same warmth to her tone that she had always had towards him. After the previous night, he could appreciate that warmth better, as a nice change of pace. "Hi," her hand, which Connor could now finally distinguish as having been gently resting on the right side of his face, fell down to the side of his neck instead, then lifted off completely. She looked down, "Can you move?"

Connor kept looking at her while he focused on lifting his right hand, then his left, clenching them both into fists, only to release them a moment later. Mia moved aside and gave him the room to sit up, which he did without an issue. "All systems are working well," Connor continued minuscule movements like that of his head and his shoulder, finding no resistance in any joint, thus identifying no difference at all between this current body and the last. Even his clothes were the same - spotless and clean, as they have always been and should have always remained.

Upon looking at Mia though, he realized that she was staring down at where he too recalled all too well he had been impaled by a piece of wood not that long ago.

They've never had to use this emergency protocol before, transferring his memory to another model.

To his knowledge, CyberLife had built several identical models of his series, all empty vessels, stored in the storage at the tower for the eventual inevitability of such events that compromise the integrity of an in-use model. Working in the police force was a dangerous job and sometimes, repairing a damaged body would take more resources than building and using a new one. Maintaining performance level was paramount after all, and as long as his memory could be salvaged and moved, it was but another feature to hone in order to differentiate himself from the human counterparts in his field: he needn't be cautious, he needn't care for damage taken, as long as the job got done.

The usefulness of the protocol did not change the reality that this was the first time Connor had the chance to get critically damaged on a job and thus test the whole ordeal of moving memory data. To his understanding, if Mia's dark circles of sleeplessness around her eyes and the distinct expression of uncertainty she carried were anything to go by, she wasn't taking it too well.

"You brought me here—"

"How about memory?" She ignored his attempt to dissipate the silence and he realized, rather perplexed while watching her eyes lift to meet his, that she seemed to be holding back tears. This information confused him enough that, before she even asked the question, his LED briefly turned halfway yellow. "What's the last thing you remember? Talk me through it."

Prompted by her, Connor had, for the first time since coming back, reminiscenced last night in full.

"I remember the farmhouse. Abandoned. I've uncovered a Red Ice lab there. There were users of the drug still in the building, all of which were underage, between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. The missing person I was tasked to find was also there." He stood up from the table and walked with Mia over to her computer, watching as she checked the live results of his computing, comparing the data with what she had sampled from him previously. Her hands are slightly sweaty, he noticed. She's nervous to determine the result of the memory transfer. He looked up from her hands to her wrists and his computed data made his eyes narrow. A bruise.