Static Crush {M/M} ✔

Chapter #28

Outside, the rain stops. It is just one more flaw in a trying day as they emerge from the cafe and go their separate ways. For his part, Hale feels he's no closer to learning how to hack. If anything, Damo only managed to give him more problems.

The hodgepodge method of building androids, he'd said, means no two are identical. Two H.A.L.E.s could bear the same hardware and construction, the same title, but totally fresh installs of their programming no longer exist. It would roll them too far back in their ability to learn, understand, and socially integrate. When an android gets recycled, programmers take what remains of their code—what they learned—and make changes to account for problems or customer complaints. The results were androids with code like sunken cities upon which new foundations were laid. But those foundations were hardly smooth, still defined by the shape of what came before, and unravelling one bit could pull loose threads of his identity he may not have meant to.

The long and the short of it is Rayner can't just rewrite Hale's anti-hacking protocols without risk of unintended side effects. Hale will have to find work-arounds that are as unique to him as his haphazard code.

Damo claimed he could help. He could give insights on the various ways he'd bypassed his own protocols, but there's no guarantee what works for him will work for Hale. Hale doubts Damo actually wants to help. The entire visit had been an excuse for him to lord it over Hale. Look what I can do, and you can't.

>>Ye of so little faith.

Hale isn't in the mood to answer. He feels sick for reasons beyond his disappointment. He looks at his hand with mistrust, because who's hand is it? Are these even his own thoughts? How much of him is really him, and how much is trace data from another android who never got the second chance he did? He remembers the first time he looked in a mirror with a lurch of his stomach. Perhaps even his appearance is just the echo of another life a part of him lived.

Normally so hungry for knowledge, he wishes he could un-know this.

What's more, he didn't realize just how much faith he put in his programming. No matter how challenging things seemed, it was a comfort to think that his behaviour was intentional. A deliberate result of careful coding. To know that so much of it was an accident or a—

Mistake.

He cuts the thought short. Rayner had said not to use that word. Miracle, he'd said. Though this doesn't feel like one.

For once, Damo doesn't answer his circular thoughts with a haughty quip. He's uncharacteristically silent.

Rayner walks close, but even his warmth and proximity fail to penetrate the cold of the late-autumn night. It gets dark early now, and there's only a thin beam of dusky light left. They walk in relative silence until they get to the shop.

Inside, Theo says, "Hale, I just want to say...I don't know. That was a lot. If you need something, we're here. But I think you deserve a bubble bath. And a hug."

She gives Rayner a pointed look on this last point. Hale appreciates the thought, though her acknowledgment of his feelings somehow makes them harder to bear. His eyes sting as though he's staring into bright lights.

"Thank you," he says. "I'm...fully functional."

She says, "You don't have to be. If you wanna talk, I'll be in the workshop."

Once she's left, silence falls. Then it's filled by the screeching of machinery. Apparently, Theo's version of a bubble bath involves mitre saws.

At a loss for what to do, Hale runs a search for chores that haven't been done in the past week and starts upstairs, intent on cleaning out the refrigerator. He hears Rayner follow after a moment's hesitation. As he opens the fridge and starts pulling out items from the back, logging their expiration dates and sniffing the contents in order to detect mould, he can feel Rayner's eyes on him.