SEQUENTIAL ━ Connor // RK800 ✔️

twenty-five ━ point of no return

• • •

9:57 PM, Eastern Docks, Detroit

Rain poured mercilessly over the rusted equipment the Detroit industrial center still used to load and unload cargo ships that made their stop there. Not even the sounds of entire curtains of rain falling on surfaces of concrete and metal alike hid the creaks of the machinery too old to be in function, a single bad rainy day away from snapping their rods and dropping the containers on one of the workers.

As he watched 'safety hazard' alerts come and go before his eyes while the perimeter below was scanned, he indulged one glance to the far left side where, in the distance of the coast, much brighter lights than some used up neons in need of a cleaning marked the zone of the docks that had been leased by CyberLife. There were no creaks there, no dirt to be splashed around by the rain and stain the bottom of containers. The pavement there had no cracks and the machines had years ahead of them that this dockside area couldn't even dream about.

However short his glance was did not prompt him to justify it. Standing atop the roof of the main building of the Eastern docks and bracing himself against the rain with nothing but holding his hands in the pockets of a rain coat plastered atop his shoulders more so to cover his Android identifiers and thus keep him hidden, and less to actually give him any sort of cover from the rain, he returned his gaze to the parking lot below. He could feel only the taps of the raindrops on his hooded head, on his covered shoulders, hear the downpour flood beneath his feet while he remained unmoving.

"I've got eyes on the target's vehicle," the newly commissioned RK800 finally reported directly into his system, LED flashing blue beneath the shadow of his hood.

313 248 317 - 50. His previous iteration had a short runtime thanks to the intervention of who he was told to have been the destroyed 47 model calling itself 'Connor', now returned thanks to a glitch in the system and running the 49 model. He didn't expect it to cause as much trouble as it did, given its defective status in the system, but Connor turned out to be an actual challenge, not exactly during their fight, where its methods of defense and attack reassembled a randomized generator's behaviour, but more so after it.

For the past two days, he's been trying to pick up his real target's trail again, but what had initially been only a human slightly above average at covering her tracks turned, with Connor's presence, into a statically impossible dive off the grid he was supposed to get to the bottom of. It seemed like a hopeless task until, earlier that evening, he intercepted a report brought up to the police station about an abandoned car fitting the description of the vehicle he knew for certain the target had used. As it was his first real lead in a while, CyberLife pulled the report out of DPD's jurisdiction and passed it through the FBI in order to get it appointed in total discretion to him.

Connor. He's been thinking a lot about his predecessor lately, about the differences between them and about the files that were still locked away from him regarding the research he knew his target had been involved in regarding the RK-series. A lot more than he would have liked, he thought about how he didn't have a name like his, he didn't have a name at all.

His system eventually responded to his report by changing his interface to the still in-testing antivirus he had installed into his programming, a feature he otherwise did not share with Connor.

"Well done," the antivirus' face, Amanda, greeted him in the space of a blank room formed within his processing unit. "Remember," she showed firmness in her words and in the way her gaze narrowed on his own projection inside his mind. "The human target is highly dangerous and in possession of a virus that can compromise any android's system, including your own."