SEQUENTIAL ━ Connor // RK800 ✔️

nineteen ━ what money can't buy

• • •

As soon as Mia had left the lab, Connor unfortunately became the sole focus of Mr. Kamski's attention, forcing him between two conflicting realities. No matter how strange the cold gaze of the man made him feel after years of getting used to Mia's gentler, more personal work ethics, he couldn't begin to even wish that she had stayed there with them any longer. In fact, much as he liked working with her, if it was up to him to decide, he would have preferred she prioritized herself from the start, even at the cost of having to allow Elijah Kamski to probe around his code instead.

It's been years since the creator of androids had paid any mind to Connor at all. That was not to say that back when he was in charge of the RK series project, Connor had seen much of him anyway. Elijah had always been more of a 'man behind the scenes', the faceless presence of abstract existence, pulling the strings to machines that assembled and disassembled Connor until the arrangement was to his liking, or uploading code while he stared up at a bare ceiling, speaking into an empty room with the voice of a master he could not see.

In that sense alonr, Elijah was the opposite of Mia — he nurtured perfection by distancing himself and his humanity as much as he could from the processes involved in the building of an android from the ground up.

He wondered at what point in his career Mr. Kamski had adopted this new approach.

Connor was rather confident to affirm that the RT600 had benefited from a much more personal process of construction than the majority of androids built by CyberLife these days, but since he kept his curiosities to himself, Kamski had all the reason to ignore the way his stare was causing a rising tension, and merely move his attention ever so carelessly down to the terminal.

Mia left it open, Connor realized then, as he watched Elijah click some keys in. Registering no new command prompts into his system, Connor didn't bother actually inquiring into his creator's activities. He contained and subdued his own nervousness behind a blunt thought — just because he had developed a preference for Mia's code, it doesn't mean his bias was prompted to exist. Elijah Kamski was a genius in his own right, the brightest mind of the century. He knows what he's doing.

The prolonged silence Connor has allowed to lengthen its reign over the lab, had abruptly ended with Elijah's abandon of the terminal. "It's been a while since we last spoke, hasn't it, Connor?" He walked around the desk, eyes glued on the android once more. Given his several steps taken to approach him and the mechanism not yet done working on synthesising his wounds sealed, Connor doubted he would be let out of his sight any time soon. "For the sake of old times, would you mind giving me a brief report?"

Connor has never been more relieved to hear a familiar prompt being spoken to him almost word for word from the most basic array of protocols installed into him.

"Self-diagnosis returns fully operational systems," Connor begun, his confidence audible in his tone. "Software is up to date. Thirium levels are...," despite a strong start to his brief report similar to the sort he had bren required to record for Mr. Kamski back in the early days of Mia's takeover of the project, he had to trail off once he heard Elijah's chuckle.

"I'm sorry," he shook his head in hopes of stiffening his amusement. "It's good to know your physical state is in working order, within parameters, but what I meant is that I would like your explanation of this."

The ghost-like caress of the tips of Elijah's fingers was not what Connor expected to feel snaking up his arm, the very same arm that he couldn't move thanks to the still working mechanism reconstructing the plastic fiber lost to the bullet. Elijah's touch trailed up to that wound, thumb pressing over the edges of the newly synthesised plastic.