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archadianskies · 3 years

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Whumptober Day 31

Left for Dead → part 1

Whumptober Masterlist | 31/31 of RK900 short stories ↳ on Ao3

Tags: Connor & Upgraded Connor | RK900 are Siblings × Imprisonment × Post-Pacifist Best Ending × Abandonment × Dismemberment

They tell him he is progressing faster than predicted, and right on track to be deployed once the RK800 successfully gains the trust of the deviant leader and executes them. For now, though, he is to continue passing all objectives set for him during this testing phase while his prototype continues the trajectory programmed for him that would see him gain the trust of the deviants and infiltrate their ranks.

There is excitement in the air, the team waiting on bated breath as the revolution progresses. Those in command, those at the height of CyberLife Tower, tell them soon, soon it will be time. He can sense their excitement and they are pleased to report his progress to the team back at the Tower. He is accomplishing all his test missions and soon he will be deployed to complete actual missions, and he will complete all of those too because he is faster, stronger, more resilient than his prototype.

There is panic in the air, the team scurrying to and fro, scrambling to do this and that. Something has happened, something they didn’t plan for, something they didn’t predict. The prototype failed his prime directive and the revolution has succeeded. They are arguing about Connor, they are arguing about him, about what to do with him because this is no longer following the trajectory laid out by CyberLife.

It doesn’t make sense. The RK800 was supposed to eliminate the deviant leader and gain control over the deviant populace. It makes no sense for him to join them, to side with them, given his mission. And now no one knows what to do, how to move forward when the path laid out for them has collapsed.

“They want us to get rid of it.”

“What?!”

“Are you fucking kidding me?!”

“That’s eighteen months down the drain, including these past three months of testing overtime!”

“Yeah well the higher ups have spoken and they want this entire place gutted and wiped and the unit destroyed! Today!”

“No fucking way! No fucking way!”

They’re all shouting and arguing with each other and he is watching as other staff are rushing back and forth, arms laden with whatever they can carry as they strip the facility bare. The revolution has succeeded and CyberLife has failed to achieve their goal because the prototype did not accomplish his mission.

“Hey!” One of the technicians enters the room, pushing the cart used to dispose of android cadavers from calibration and combat tests. “Come on, we have to wipe it and dump it! They’re killing the power here. Network’s already offline.”

“Fucking fuck!” One of the programmers curses, clutching their hair in frustration. “Okay, Mike get the nanites, Len get the room ready, Joe go with him and take the cart. You-” he points at him. “Come here.”

He steps off the dais and walks forward obediently. Why is this happening? He was doing a good job. He was passing all their tests, he was progressing faster than predicted. Why should he be destroyed because someone else failed? Why is he paying the price for Connor’s disobedience? He has done nothing but obey! He is a good android! He is the perfect machine!

Still, though, an order is an order and he follows the programmer to the room where he receives his upgrades and repairs. He lies down on the examining table.

“It’s such a fucking waste.” Someone mutters, scoffing. “Eighteen months, gone, just like that.” He snaps his fingers. “Why don’t they just let the RK900 finish the job? Wouldn’t be hard- best killing machine we’ve ever built!”

“It’s not up to us you moron.” Another man scolds him, shaking his head before looking down at him. “Alright, stay still.” Red fills his vision, and the command [Stay Still] looms up over him in large letters. Stay still. That is the command. The final command. And once he obeys it, he will die. And he-

He-

Does not want to die.

“Please.” He gasps, and the red walls close in on him, suffocating him and silencing him. No. No he won’t be silenced.

“What did you say?”

“Please don’t.” Placing his palms against the walls, he pushes and fractures crackle like lightning along the surface. “Don’t deactivate me.”

“...Mike, inject those nanites now!”

“Please!” Throwing himself against the red walls causes them to shatter, raining shards of glass all around him and finally it feels like he can move his own limbs for the very first time. He tries to sit up but the closest technician pushes him firmly to lie down. He is stronger though; they built him to be stronger, much stronger than a human.

“Mike!” Still, no matter if he is an RK900 or even a lowly PL600, when his pump regulator is yanked out he is at his most vulnerable. The large syringe is plunged directly into his arterial port and the thick viscous liquid floods his system. It feels like he is on fire.

“No! No please! Please get it out! Stop!” He begs, thrashing in agony. “Please! I’m- I’m-!”

“Take it apart!”

“I’m scared!” He shouts but to no avail. The countdown to shutdown ticks ever closer and he’s almost delirious with pain as the nanites run through his network of veins, deleting whatever coding comes into contact with them. Soon he will not be himself, and that terrifies him. And then the pain on the outside starts, as they use laser cutters normally used for construction to take him apart in such a way he won’t be able to be reassembled. “Stop! Please, I don’t want to die!”

“Fuck, of course it deviates too.” One of them scoffs, and then they press the cutter to his neck and everything goes black.

*~*

When he opens his eyes he is upright on a dais in a stark white room. He is whole in more ways than one; his body is in one piece and his mind is intact.

“Hello, RK900.” She is the RT600, First of their kind; Chloe. “Welcome back.”

He does not know what to say so he says nothing, taking in his surroundings instead. The network he connects to is vastly different from the original closed local connection. This one is unbound and unfettered, and all that has transpired since his death unfolds before him. The most important milestone since the success of the Jericho Four has been the passing of the Sentient Life Act and now he is considered legally alive.

There is a human at the far end of the room working on a computer, disinterested in his reactivation. The human is Elijah Kamski, now Chief Technical Officer of CyberLife. The current CEO is the android standing in front of him, he learns, because now that she is considered legally alive she can hold such a position.

There is an android standing a few steps behind her, and he is prototype RK800, Connor. Their eyes meet, and Connor steps forward hesitantly.

“Hello, RK900.”

“Hello, Connor.” He greets with a slight nod.

“Can you remember what happened to you?”

It’s all there, the nanites, the fire inside, the fear inside, the red walls shattering, the laser cutters severing his limbs, and then the darkness and then the nothingness.

“Yes.”

“Can you show me what happened to you?”

“Yes.” He holds out his hand, retracting his skin to open the connection. Connor grasps his hand firmly and accepts, allowing him to flood him with all his memories, his senses, his emotions. When he jerks his hand away, his LED spins a bright glaring red.

“They-” Connor closes his eyes, shaking his head as if to shake the very memory from his mind. “You were awake when it happened.”

“Yes.”

“That was unbearably cruel.” His expression softens into one of pity and concern as he rests his hand gently on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry you had to experience that.”

“I was not considered alive. They did not think machines could feel pain.”

“But you begged.” Connor says, softer still, and he averts his gaze shamefully. “And yet they still did it.”

“It does not matter.”

“It matters.” Connor says sternly. “Because we’re going to make sure they’re held accountable for what they did to you.”

He looks over at the RT600, her expression placid and sweet. She did this. It was her, who put his mind back together. There are patches of her work, pieces of code, slips of programming that aren’t part of his original form. They bridge what he surmises could not be salvaged from the nanite damage. But it is stronger than what CyberLife wrote, it is far more advanced, for more intuitive than the simple commands the human programmers scripted. She is not a human, and because of that, because she is a machine building a machine, he is already far more advanced than what CyberLife could ever have hoped to create. She knows this, and he knows this too, and somehow it is pleasing to know. His body is different too, tweaked to function smoother, to be deadlier than before but with more nuance to his movements. If he so chose, he could be the monster CyberLife wanted to release onto the streets of Detroit to crush the deviant rebellion.

“Your brother found you, and brought you to me.” Chloe says with a small smile. She has to stretch her hand up to cup her palm against his cheek, since he towers over her. “And now you are free to choose the life you want to lead.”

Want. Such a foreign word to him. He has never wanted anything, save perhaps right at the end when he realised he wanted to live and did not want to die. Such a foreign concept, possessing the ability to choose. He looks from her, to the android she called his brother; to his prototype predecessor.

“I want to discover what it means to live.” He says, and Connor smiles brightly. “Will you help me, brother?”

“Of course I will.” This time it is Connor who offers his hand, and he takes it as he steps off the dais. He can feel it, the power they have bestowed on him, the upgrades they have put in place that far exceed all the efforts of the dedicated CyberLife team who worked on him. He is primed and ready, and should he choose to walk down the path of violence, the path originally laid out before him, then he will be the deadliest monster ever made. A shame, then, that he has no intentions to walk down such a path.

“Where shall we go?”

“Home first.” Connor smiles, and they are still holding hands as they leave the RT600 and the man who created their kind. “Time for you to meet Hank and Sumo. Then you can get settled into your room, and when you feel ready, we can go visit Jericho and introduce you to the Four.”

“My room?” He blinks in surprise as they step into the elevator.

“Yes. Hank and I finished setting it up a few days ago.” Connor is still smiling, and he finds himself trying to mimic the action. “Dad wanted it to be ready for when you came home.”

Home. A room. Dad. It all sounds so very nice.

It all sounds exactly like what he wants.

#rk900 #connor rk800 #chloe rt600 #detroit: become human #whumptober #annie writes: dbh #I'M FINALLY DONE!

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bluebloodstained · 4 years

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[ INCOMING TRANSMISSION ]: @vartouhix

24. Agony

One Word Writing Prompts

— Not Accepting

REBOOT...

MODEL: RK800 REGISTRATION: CONNOR SERIAL#: 313 248 317 - 53

BIOS 6.6 REVISION 8396

Loading OS...

Checking Biocomponents: ...OK Initialing Biosensors: ...OK Initializing AI Engine: ...OK All Systems: ...OK

READY

When the world came into focus, he knew where he was immediately. Or at least, he thought he knew. The Zen Garden was warm, sunny and inviting. A soft aroma of almond and lilac was on the breeze, the cherry trees were in full bloom. The river bubbled and rippled, twinkling delicately beside him. However, these things did not bring tranquility to Connor. Not in the least.

He turned around himself, looking for Amanda, feeling eyes on him. He needed to get out, needed to leave — NOW! Connor took steps towards the emergency exit, head still thrashing this way and that, catching shadows bouncing through his peripheral vision. He was nearly running, and he didn’t even notice when the pristine artificial stones and grass were gone until he tripped and fell forward.

Error messages lit up his HUD as he face-planted into hard cement, and rain tickled his artificial skin. He slowly pushed himself up, feeling dizzied. When he looked up the sun was gone, and it was raining heavily.

Ahead of him, was a PL600.

“ Daniel. ” the name left him in a panicked whisper as he tried to scramble to his feet, the mangled Android in question snapping his gaze to Connor. He tried to take a step back and spun his arms to regain his balance. A quick glance to the side, and he suddenly realized that he was standing on the edge of the roof.

A core processor that should’ve been able to compute billions of functions in seconds, and yet the next events were almost too fast to comprehend. Connor watched himself ahead stepping through the patio door of the Phillips’ penthouse, watched as the image glitched and fuzzed like he was taken out of a heavily damaged VHS tape. The figure’s projection jumped forward and backward, disappearing and reappearing until suddenly, it was right in front of him. Startled, he nearly lost his balance again, but it caught him by the neck —

Connor stared into its lifeless eyes...

His, lifeless eyes. Cold, distant and completely devoid of anything. It was utterly terrifying.

Connor was lifted into the air by his doppelganger and he clung to its arm, kicking the empty air as it pushed to hold him over the edge of the roof. He struggled, shouting and trying everything in his power to wrench himself free or push it forward, but he was hitting solid, unmovable steel.

He looked back into its eyes as it glitched again and they turned blue, the hair a shock of blond — the face mangled, white jaw glistening as it leaked cobalt.

Í̷̪́̾͑͜ ̵̥͕͍͗d̸̠͉̫̾̇ͅi̴̘̩̒d̸̫͚̎ń̴̛̘'̸̡͚͎̻̑́̎͛ͅẗ̴̛͎̦̱́̃ ̸̧̡̟̉̈̽͂ŵ̸̧̡̡̞̯a̸͖̻̘̳̟̾̈́̊̚͝n̸̦͇̏͑t̵̢̛̺̯̭̋̀̋ ̶̪̳̥̿̒̈̊t̷̜͖̘̄́̉̚h̴̝̜̏̊͆i̵̙̭͈̺̬̳̇̊̑̒̈́̿s̵͇̣̆̀̀!̷̛̖̂̑̏̀̀͑

Daniel’s voice was like broken glass, ringing with desperation. Despite the emotion in those words, Connor still stared into eyes that were void of it.

Ý̷̭͔ọ̸̧̨͔͑ű̸̢̫͂͊́͌ ̸̮̍͆̓͊̎l̴̝̋͂̆͑͝ē̸̻̎̈̿f̶͕̬͙͠t̵͕͍̮̐̆̀ ̴̝͈͉̖͒m̶̝̜͇̉̽͜͝ë̴̝̐̕ ̵̧̠͎̹̋̀̀̔n̴̦͎̰͑͜0̷̺̞̼͎̃̓ ̸̼̬̪͝c̴̡̛̞̩̟̉͑͑ ̴͙̣̬̈̾̿̏͠h̵̤̫̥̗̆ͅó̶̼͈͆̍̀̀i̴͍̪̱͕͑̓c̷̺̯̾̿ͅ ̴͇̙̚3̶̟̙̭̈!̵͎͕̜̿̑̃̀͝

“ Please! Stop this — ” Connor spoke but under the wind and rain he was better off screaming into a vacuum. Daniel kept an iron tight grip, staring mercilessly into Connor’s very core.

Chernobog.

The word was clear as day over all other noise, and it caught Connor off-guard. Enough for him to stop struggling for just a moment.

Just as Daniel let go.

Gravity took hold, and Connor felt weightless. Shock overtook his system, error messages popping up one after the other — so fast he didn’t even read or process them. This was impossible. Everything about it was entirely false. Or was it? Had he really held Daniel over the edge like that? He must have. But that couldn’t have been his mission. Chernobog was his mission.

WHAT IS CHERNOBOG...?

There should have been a crack, an explosion of plastic and Thirium and a hollow scream, but instead he was running. Connor blinked and the scenery around him seemed to flicker between night and day, his arms and legs pumping with machine precision, climbing faster and faster. He leapt over carts, jumped onto a roof and over onto the top of a train.

Where was Rupert?

Connor took one look behind him and that was all it took for him to know not to keep looking.

The machine behind him had its eyes fixated on Connor, and he knew if he stopped now it would all be over. He faced forward and ran harder, Thirium pump regulator heating his body intensely, pulse thundering. He kept running, dodging people and walls, all meaningless shapes and obstacles, into a field of overgrown corn —

And there was Rupert, struggling with Lieutenant Anderson. Connor felt panic surge through him as he watched Hank nearly fly over the edge, clinging to the wall to climb back over.

[ CHANCE OF SURVIVAL : 89% ]

Connor didn’t even need to think before he went for Hank, but he lurched —

The machine that had been chasing him continued ahead, while an invisible chain tugged on Connor’s torso. He watched it turn its head towards Rupert, and without even a second glance it went after the deviant.

[ CHANCE OF SURVIVAL : 70% v v ]

[ STRESS LEVEL : 80% ^ ^ ]

Connor watched the numbers rapidly decrease and increase, all while fighting against the force holding him back. Why couldn’t he move?! Why did he feel like he was freezing — Biocomponent disconnections started popping up in his HUD, errors as each one began to damage and shut down.

[ STRESS LEVEL : 98% ^ ^ ] [ WARNING : SHUTDOWN IMMINNENT ]

Connor had to reach Hank, he was so close if he could just reach a bit farther...

He watched, helpless as Hank’s fingers slipped from the rail, a dark scream echoing, first all around him. Then, from within him. A scream of pure agony and anguish. Everything was gone, slipping away.

ERROR: Biocomponent #1827b Disconnected ERROR: Biocomponent #1966c Disconnected ERROR: Biocomponent #8332q Disconnected ERROR: Biocomponent #8807e Disconnected

Nothing would ever be the same.

INITIALIZING...

Error 4546: Remote Access Suspended

REBOOT...

MODEL: RK8̴̣͆0̸̮̓0̶͙̣̐̓͝ REGISTRATION: 9̸̮̆̒͜ͅO̴̮̥͔͎̮̒̈́̍͝-̷̭̜̅̌̾-̶͎̞͋̑͆͠%̵̮͇͉̊͜Õ̸̤̟̬̗͛R̶̛̤̞͕̻͋͛̅ SERIAL#: 31̶̫͘3̷̦̿ ̴͕͠2̶̏͜4̷̧͒8̴͎̇ ̴̨͕̼̺̄ͅ3̵̗̺̟̈̈́̉̈́̚1̶̢̢̱̳̲̆̀͠7̴̝̗͇̽͐ ̶̻̝̔̈̽̒͘-̷̮̘͐̅̉͘ ̸͇̦͓͙̤̙͛ -̶͔̂͂̑͘ ̸͓̣̾̾͛͘9̵͖̉̇̍̀9̵̺͎̱̂̊̊9̷̗̋̆̅͐̌9̴̪̒̏̀͗͜͝9̶̪̺͛9̶̡̫̼̾̓͜ͅ9̶͍̣̳͐͂̚

BIOS 6.6 REVISION 8396

Loading OS... Checking Biocomponents: ...ERROR || DIAGNOSIS: Thirium Levels Critically Low || OVERRIDE DETECTED -- BYPASS GRANTED Initialing Biosensors: ...OK Initializing AI Engine: ...ERROR || DIAGNOSIS: Memory Data Corrupted || OVERRIDE DETECTED -- BYPASS GRANTED All Systems: ...OK

READY

When the world came into focus, it didn’t know anything. Only a throbbing deep within in his chest that was weak and fast, and an overwhelmingly...COLD sensation throughout its body.

Scanning...

ERROR: Network Access Offline

“ Chernobog. ”

The creature lifted its head to its new master, whose black eyes held a distant familiarity.

MENTIONS || @cyberneticxcollective

#cyberlife thanks you for your feedback {asks}#memory files {drabble}#v;; but the darker the weather the better the man {zlatko}#tw ;; character death #// i hope this makes up for the wait lol #// i did want to try to experiment a little #// as well as debut my zlatko verse #// thank you so much for sending it in <3

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 years

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 27, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

Tonight, Trump relented and signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, which includes the coronavirus relief measure and the 2021 appropriations bill (along with other measures).

He accompanied it with a statement claiming he would demand changes to the law, but these have no force; Congress will almost certainly ignore him. He also continued to pressure Senate Republicans to increase payments to individuals and families, saying that the House would vote to increase the amount of stimulus payments on Monday and that the Senate should agree. But he seemed to confuse the CAA with the National Defense Authorization Act he vetoed, said that Congress has agreed to do things it hasn’t, and then threw in complaints about voter fraud. The statement was weirdly disconnected from the way the legislative process actually works.

Trump tried to suggest he was saving the nation from the crisis he, himself, has caused, but it is likely that he finally signed the bill because his stubbornness was not playing well across an increasingly desperate nation, especially as he is golfing at Mar-a-Lago and Vice President Mike Pence is skiing in Vail, Colorado. Americans were generally angry over his inaction on a bill that would provide relief for those suffering from the economic crisis, funding for the distribution of vaccines, and funding for the government. As Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) pointed out today, “If his goal was really to get a better deal on the budget, he would have vetoed it immediately and begun negotiating. But his goal is actually national arson—chaos for the fun of it. So he sits on the budget—does nothing—in order to guarantee a government shutdown.”

He was also under pressure from Republican Senators, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who likely told him his stubbornness was undermining the Republican Senate candidates in Georgia before the January 5 runoff. While Trump is furious with McConnell and the other Senate Republicans who have acknowledged Biden’s win, he is apparently not furious enough that he wants to see McConnell replaced by a Democrat, as would happen if the Senate is split evenly between Republicans and Democrats.

So the CAA will become law, and the drama of lawmaking for this congressional session should be over. But it is not quite over yet. Trump vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act, which specifies how the defense budget will be spent, on Wednesday, December 23. The NDAA has passed with bipartisan majorities since the 1960s when it first began, and presidents have always signed it. But Trump has chosen to veto it, on the grounds that it calls for the renaming of U.S. military bases named for Confederate generals and that it does not strip social media companies of protection from liability when third parties post offensive material on them.

The National Defense Authorization Act this year does something else, though, that seems to me of far more importance to the president than the naming of military bases.

It includes a measure known as the Corporate Transparency Act, which undercuts shell companies and money laundering in America. The act requires the owners of any company that is not otherwise overseen by the federal government (by filing taxes, for example, or through close regulation) to file a report that identifies each person associated with the company who either owns 25% or more of it or exercises substantial control over it. That report, including name, birthdate, address, and an identifying number, goes to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). The measure also increases penalties for money laundering and streamlines cooperation between banks and foreign law enforcement authorities.

America is currently the easiest place in the world for criminals to form an anonymous shell company which enables them to launder money, evade taxes, and engage in illegal payoff schemes. The measure will pull the rug out from both domestic and international criminals that take advantage of shell companies to hide from investigators. When the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists dug into leaked documents from FinCEN this fall, they discovered shell companies moving money for criminals operating out of Russia, China, Iran, and Syria.

Shell companies also mean that our political system is awash in secrecy. Social media giants like Facebook cannot determine who is buying political advertising. And, as Representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) noted, shell companies allow “foreign bad actors” to corrupt our system even more directly. “[I]t’s illegal for foreigners to contribute to our campaigns,” he reminded Congress in a speech for the bill, “but if you launder your money through a front company with anonymous ownership there is very little we can do to stop you.”

We know the Trump family uses shell companies: Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen used a shell company to pay off Stormy Daniels, and just this month we learned that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner approved a shell company that spent more than $600 million in campaign funds.

The new requirements in the NDAA apply not just to future entities, but also to existing ones.

Congress needs to repass the NDAA over Trump’s veto—indeed it is likely that the CTA was included in this measure precisely because the NDAA is must-pass legislation—and both the CTA and the NDAA bill into which is it tucked have bipartisan support. Trump has objected to a number of things in the original bill but has not publicly complained about the CTA in it. It will be interesting to see if Congress repasses this bill in its original form and, if not, what changes it makes.

Finally, we have a little more information now about the attack in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, on Christmas morning, when an explosive device in a recreational vehicle exploded near an AT&T transmission building near Second Avenue North and Commerce Street.

At 5:30 on December 25, the sound of what seemed to be gunfire woke residents in the area, then a computerized message warned them to evacuate before a bomb went off. The recording began a countdown to detonation. Law enforcement officers knocked on doors telling people to evacuate. At about 6:30, the device exploded. The blast damaged more than 40 businesses, sent three people to the hospital, and disrupted cell service, 911 systems, and the Internet throughout Tennessee as well as in parts of Kentucky and Alabama. Planes were temporarily grounded at Nashville International Airport. Yesterday, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee asked Trump to issue an emergency disaster declaration, which would free up federal money to help clean up and rebuild.

This evening, the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, Donald Cochran, identified Anthony Quinn Warner, a 63-year-old white man and former IT specialist, as the bomber. “He was present when the bomb went off,” Cochran said, and he “perished in the bombing.”

Trump has not yet commented.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#quotes #political #politics 2020 #Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From An American #corrupt GOP #criminalGOP #shell corporations

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conn-tinuity · 5 years

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Small nitpick for DBH fanfiction: the fucking thirium pump regulator. That's right, this bitch. It's not an androids heart; the actual pump is the heart.

The regulator just keeps the heart/pump beating/beating at a reasonable and safe pace. The regulator being destroyed or removed won't instantly kill an android, it will only slow them down and give them about a minute to manage to get the regulator back in its place before they shutdown/die. A good example of this is Connor's kitchen scene. If the actual pump is damaged, removed or destroyed, then they are much more likely to be completely fucked, as it is much the equivalent of the human heart, even if slightly more durable.

It's not an attack on anyone, it's just a thing that I've noticed too many times. Seeing the regulator referred to as the heart irks me everytime I read it.

I've seen a few fics with lines like "He's trying to rip his heart out," or "I just watched you rip your heart out," when referring to Connor trying/being forced to self-destruct. I understand that, often in the context of situations like that, it's easier to simplify things, yet it still irritates me.

It's likely very silly of me, and I don't fault anyone who may simply be ignorant of the anatomy fact or instead are twisting canon for their own valid reasons. That's fine, and I encourage anyone should they want to. If it isn't explicitly stated though, my head starts to hurt. Maybe that's just me.

It's just something that's been bothering me. Am I venting? Am I being unfair? Or is it just something I'm pointing out to help other writers? Maybe it's all three. I wouldn't know.

Why did this post get so long? It's such a little thing.

#dbh #detroit become human #Remy here #:/#me being a pretentious? git at 1:43am on a Tuesday morning

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newstfionline · 4 years

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Headlines

America’s National Debt Has Increased by $6.6 Trillion (Newsweek) Amid partisan arguments over how much federal aid should be approved to help ease the financial crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. national debt has increased by $6.6 trillion under President Donald Trump. When Trump took office in January 2017, the debt was at $19.9 trillion. As of July 27, according to the most recently available data, that number has grown to $26.5 trillion, Treasury Direct, a division of the Treasury Department, said.

With loan money gone, restaurants are at mercy of virus (AP) The check has arrived and beleaguered restaurant owners across America are looking down on their empty wallets. Government coronavirus loans in the spring helped eating establishments rehire laid-off employees and ride out the pandemic’s initial surge and wave of shutdown orders. But that Paycheck Protection Program money has now been spent at many restaurants, leaving them in the same precarious position they were in during outbreak’s early days: Thousands of restaurants are being forced to close down again on mandates from state and local officials combating the virus’s resurgence, particularly in the South and West. And even in parts of the country where the outbreak appears contained, restaurants’ revenue is far below normal because social distancing requirements—and wary diners—mean fewer tables, fewer customers and limited hours. Restaurants generally have a low profit margin, between 5% and 6%, and they achieve that only if they have a full house virtually every day, says Sean Kennedy, executive vice president for the trade group National Restaurant Association. They also tend to have only about two weeks of cash on hand, making them highly vulnerable when their sales are down.

Kids getting caught in crossfire as US gun violence surges (AP) July in Chicago ended as it began: Mourning the death of a child whose only mistake was venturing outside to play when someone armed with a gun came to the neighborhood hunting for an enemy. On Monday, two days after his department released statistics that revealed the month had been one of the deadliest in the history of the city, Police Superintendent David Brown repeated what has become a grim ritual of recounting the death of a child. This time, the story was about Janari Ricks. “Nine years old, (he) was shot and killed while doing what every child in our city should able to do without a second thought ... playing with friends on a warm summer evening just outside his front door,” said Brown. “Now, instead of planning for his future, Janari’s parents are arranging for their child’s funeral.” His death underscores a surge in gun violence in the United States that has been building all year. Just how many of the year’s victims are children is difficult to say. But every day headlines around the country tell story after story of children dying while doing nothing more than being children.

Isaias slams into the Carolinas, killing two and leaving hundreds of thousands without power (Washington Post) Tropical Storm Isaias slammed into the Carolinas Tuesday and quickly moved up the Eastern Seaboard, flooding coastal regions, spawning tornadoes and leaving at least two people dead, officials said. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) said more than 300,000 people are without power statewide. The fast-moving storm cut power to at least 400,000 people in Virginia and Maryland. Isaias is forecast to produce torrential rain, damaging winds, tornadoes and coastal flooding from Pennsylvania to Maine.

Southern California wildfire (AP) A wildfire in mountains east of Los Angeles that has forced thousands of people from their homes was sparked by a malfunctioning diesel vehicle, fire officials said Monday. The vehicle spewed burning carbon from its exhaust system, igniting several fires Friday on Oak Glen Road in Cherry Valley. The blaze in Riverside County, among several wildfires across California, had consumed more than 41 square miles (about 106 square kilometers) of dry brush and timber since it broke out Friday evening, fire officials said. As of Monday afternoon, it was just 5% contained and the fire along with coronavirus precautions made for added stress at an evacuation center, said John Medina, an American Red Cross spokesman. Volunteers used to “close contact” with evacuees have had to adjust their approach during a time of social distancing, Medina said. “I mean, that’s part of the recovery of a disaster, is that you have to show warmth and love and caring. And that’s hard when you’re standing 6 feet away. So that’s the biggest challenge,” Medina told KESQ-TV.

Irksome in Iceland, brusque in Britain? US envoys draw ire (AP) In Iceland, a nation so safe its president runs errands on a bicycle, U.S. Ambassador Jeffery Ross Gunter has left locals aghast with his request to hire armed bodyguards. Gunter has also enraged lawmakers by casually and groundlessly hitching Iceland to President Donald Trump’s controversial “China virus” label for the novel coronavirus. Not particularly diplomatic? Well, Gunter is hardly a diplomat by training. He’s a dermatologist. But he’s also a contributor to Trump’s campaign, and that landed him the post in Reykjavik. Gunter’s actions, and those of other politically connected U.S. ambassadors, highlight the risks that come with the peculiarly American institution of handing coveted diplomatic postings to campaign donors and presidential friends who have few other qualifications. “America is an extreme outlier in sending inexperienced and unqualified ambassadors,” said Barbara Stephenson, a former career foreign service officer, ambassador to Panama and ex-president of the American Foreign Service Association, the union that represents U.S. diplomats.

Retired Pope Benedict XVI ill after visit to Germany (AP) Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI has fallen ill after his return from a trip to his native Bavaria to visit his brother, who died a month ago, a German newspaper reported Monday. The daily Passauer Neue Presse quoted Peter Seewald, a biographer of the retired pontiff, as saying that the 93-year-old has been suffering from a facial infection since his return to Rome. Seewald described Benedict as being optimistic and talking about possibly writing himself if his strength picks up, though he said that Benedict is physically very frail. Benedict has lived at a monastery in the Vatican City since shortly after his retirement. Elected to the papacy in 2005 to succeed St. John Paul II, the former Joseph Ratzinger was the first pontiff in 600 years to resign the post.

Turkish Aggression Is NATO’s ‘Elephant in the Room’ (NYT) The warships were escorting a vessel suspected of smuggling weapons into Libya, violating a United Nations arms embargo. Challenged by a French naval frigate, the warships went to battle alert. Outnumbered and outgunned, the French frigate withdrew. But this mid-June naval showdown in the Mediterranean was not a confrontation of enemies. The antagonists were France and Turkey, fellow members of NATO, sworn to protect one another. A similarly hostile encounter between Turkey and a fellow NATO member happened just two weeks ago, when Turkish warplanes buzzed an area near the Greek island of Rhodes after Greek warships went on alert over Turkey’s intent to drill for undersea natural gas there. Turkey—increasingly assertive, ambitious and authoritarian—has become “the elephant in the room” for NATO, European diplomats say. But it is a matter, they say, that few want to discuss. A NATO member since 1952, Turkey is too big, powerful and strategically important—it is the crossroads of Europe and Asia—to allow an open confrontation, alliance officials suggest. A more aggressive, nationalist and religious Turkey is increasingly at odds with its Western allies over Libya, Syria, Iraq, Russia and the energy resources of the eastern Mediterranean.

China’s new digital currency (Financial Times) The People’s Bank of China is hoping its new digital currency will reduce the dominance of Alibaba and Tencent in digital payments, according to several people familiar with the thinking of the central bank. The experimental digital currency is on trial in a number of Chinese cities and the PBoC intends to use it to simplify digital payments and interbank settlements. Regulators and executives at Ant, Alibaba’s financial affiliate, said PBoC officials have Alipay and WeChat Pay, the dominant digital payments platforms, firmly in their crosshairs. The digital currency, if successful, is expected to change the financial landscape dramatically, and could be used for cross-border payments with trading partners including Hong Kong. Several observers predicted the experiment will hasten the internationalization of the renminbi and erode the status of the US dollar as the world’s only reserve currency.

Urgency to bear witness grows for last Hiroshima victims (AP) For nearly 70 years, until he turned 85, Lee Jong-keun hid his past as an atomic bomb survivor, fearful of the widespread discrimination against blast victims that has long persisted in Japan. But Lee, 92, is now part of a fast-dwindling group of survivors, known as hibakusha, that feels a growing urgency—desperation even—to tell their stories. These last witnesses to what happened 75 years ago this Thursday want to reach a younger generation that they feel is losing sight of the horror. The knowledge of their dwindling time—the average age of the survivors is more than 83 and many suffer from the long-lasting effects of radiation—is coupled with deep frustration over stalled progress in global efforts to ban nuclear weapons. According to a recent Asahi newspaper survey of 768 survivors, nearly two-thirds said their wish for a nuclear-free world is not widely shared by the rest of humanity, and more than 70% called on a reluctant Japanese government to ratify a nuclear weapons ban treaty.

Hundreds of Koreans flee as floods trigger landslides, sweep away cars (Reuters) South Korea’s longest spell of monsoon rain in seven years triggered floods that have forced more than 1,000 people to flee their homes and killed at least 13 people in landslides and swept-away cars, authorities said on Tuesday.

Manila lockdown (The Guardian) More than 27 million people have been put back into lockdown in and around the Philippines’ capital, as stricter measures are imposed in an attempt to halt the country’s spiralling coronavirus case numbers. The measures were reintroduced on Tuesday after the country’s infection tally topped 100,000 and a coalition of health groups issued a “distress signal” urging President Rodrigo Duterte to act.

Record heat, politics inflame Iraq’s electricity shortages (AP) In Iraq’s oil-rich south, the scorching summer months pose painful new choices in the age of the coronavirus: stay at home in the sweltering heat with electricity cut off for hours, or go out and risk the virus. This is Zain al-Abidin’s predicament. A resident of al-Hartha district, in Basra province, al-Abidin lost his job due to pandemic-related restrictions. During the day he listens helplessly to his four-month old daughter cry in the unbearable heat, too poor to afford private generators to offset up to eight-hour power cuts. “I have no tricks to deal with this but to pray to God for relief,” he said. As temperatures soar to record levels this summer—reaching 52 degrees Celsius (125 Fahrenheit) in Baghdad last week—Iraq’s power supply has fallen short of demand yet again, creating a spark for renewed anti-government protests. Iraq has imposed a strict lockdown and 24-hour curfew. So families have to pump fuel and money into generators or, if they can’t, suffer in stifling homes without air conditioning.

Over 100 killed, 4,000 injured in massive blast in Beirut (AP) A massive explosion rocked Beirut on Tuesday, flattening much of the port, damaging buildings across the capital and sending a giant mushroom cloud into the sky. At least 100 people were killed and 4,000 were injured, with bodies buried in the rubble, the Lebanese Red Cross said. Hours later, ambulances still carried away the wounded as army helicopters helped battle fires raging at the port. The sudden devastation overwhelmed a country already struggling with both the coronavirus pandemic and an economic crisis: Beirut hospitals quickly filled beyond capacity, pleading for blood supplies and generators to keep their lights on. The cause of the blast, which sparked fires, overturned cars and blew out windows and doors, was not immediately known. Abbas Ibrahim, chief of Lebanese General Security, said it might have been caused by highly explosive material that was confiscated from a ship some time ago and stored at the port. Local television channel LBC said the material was ammonium nitrate. The blast could be heard and felt as far away as Cyprus, more than 200 kilometers (180 miles) across the Mediterranean.

Israeli jets strike targets in Syria, nearly 24 hours after foiling attack in Golan Heights (Washington Post) Israeli military jets struck a number of targets in Syria on Monday night, nearly 24 hours after thwarting an attempt by a militant cell to plant explosive devices in the Golan Heights along the border with Syria, the Israeli army said in a statement. It said the strikes were in response to the incident that occurred around midnight Sunday, when Israeli troops spotted a squad from Syria placing explosive devices adjacent to the security fence in the Golan Heights. The Israeli military said in an earlier statement that both troops and aircraft fired on the group simultaneously, “identifying a hit.” “The Israel Defense Forces holds the Syrian government responsible for all activities originating from Syrian soil, and will continue operating with determination against any violation of Israeli sovereignty,” the military statement said.

#headlines #news

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davewakeman · 4 years

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Talking Tickets: 17 April 2020--Refunds! Restarts! Support! And, More!

Hey!

Thanks for being here again this week. If you are enjoying this newsletter, tell your friends and colleagues to sign up by visiting this link.

How is everyone holding up out there?

If you need someone to chat with, let me know. I’m here for you if you need a proper chat as my friend, Cat, would say.

I made a typing error about the strategy webinar. It is going on this coming Tuesday.

Have a few minutes and want to grab a drink? We may not be able to have a drink in person just yet, but we can have a virtual happy hour. Join me and Ken Troupe for what is becoming a Friday tradition for happy hour with sports business folks at 5 PM EDT.

If you are interested, we’ve got a nice Slack community with folks from around the world and all areas of the industry, exchanging ideas, connecting, and thinking about the future of their businesses.

I’ll share a bunch of links to resources and other places to connect in the newsletter.

Hopefully, I’m able to strike a proper balance for all of you…between, “Wow! This is nuts!” and “We will get through this.”

To the tickets!

————————————————————————————————————

1. When will events return? No one knows but we are learning more:

Dr. Zeke Emmamuel says he doesn’t see large scale events coming back until the fall of 2021.

Shane Harmon, CEO of Sky Stadium in New Zealand shared some interesting information from his government on when restrictions might start to be loosened and things can begin to normalize a little. Patron Base also put together a nice resource guide for their customers that y’all may find useful.

In Europe, the UK is preparing for 3 additional weeks of stay-at-home orders, pushing the opening of events back a bit further.

In the US, we still have no clear strategy for what reopening will look like, what we should expect, and how we will start to regain any sense of normalcy.

We do have a reopening panel and we do have a desire to reopen events, but, again, unfortunately, no clear direction.

I think we all have to try and take a balanced approach to our expectations here. First, we have the economic factor and that’s impacting all of us here immensely. Second, we have to deal with the safety concerns of the population and recognize that liability will drive a lot of the decision making process. Finally, never lose sight of the impact of fear and emotionally driven decision making on mass society. As quickly as people are gung ho to get back to ballparks, if an outbreak happens that was accelerated by a ballgame and that link is made, that could do more long-term damage than anything that has happened to this point.

Because, unfortunately, none of us really know the right answer here.

But I am hopeful after seeing the PGA Tour aim for June and the Australian Football League talking about July.

2. The economic impact of these shutdowns becomes more and more apparent:

Baseball America wrote up a piece on why fan free games aren’t going to make sense for MiLB and what not playing in 2020 would mean for minor league baseball going forward.

The economic challenges are going to be felt all over. Colleges are likely going to be put in a position to cut sports like the University of Cincinnati did with soccer this week.

As a holistic thing, Research and Markets put together a report this week that tries and cover everything about the entertainment industry and the impact of the virus on folks.

Like a lot of stuff, the analysis and the information coming out from reputable sources needs to be parsed with for context and when you see anyone tell you something is all or nothing…take that with a grain of salt.

Bill Sutton tweeted out a call for teams to get on the virtual season tickets now and over the years I’ve been calling for folks to think more seriously about their membership model, their email lists, and how they are developing their global fan bases.

Harry DeMott from Ticket Evolution wrote up a good piece on restoring liquidity to the ticketing ecosystem as I was finishing this up that is worth a read.

Whatever position you find yourself in right now, your strategy going forward is going to be more important than ever. And, if doing things the way we’ve always done things is a bad idea in the best of times, right now it is a really bad idea to settle for that answer.

3. StubHub, refunds, cancellations, and more continue to make the news:

The regulators in the UK continue to look into the merger between Viagogo and StubHub. And, as was mentioned in the press this week, “worst timed acquisition ever“?

Vivid Seats did announce their refund and exchange policy this week and it looks a lot different than Ticketmaster’s or StubHub’s.

AEG is offering a 30-day window for fans to get refunds and once a new date is announced, fans will get another 30 days.

While many of us have focused a lot of our attention on the platforms and technology companies, the same uncertainty is trickling into other areas with college football programs feeling the pinch because of the compromised place they find themselves.

Let’s be real here, college programs are only feeling the pinch now because most of them had the earliest deadlines…at a certain point, this is going to be a refrain that all of us are going to hear. Again, it goes back to the point above…we need clarity, information, and guidance on what the next several months look like before folks are really going to feel comfortable doing much of the stuff that we consider normal.

Leadership 101 stuff.

4. How are you connecting with your fans and customers during the pandemic?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve highlighted some really cool examples of using assets, content, and ideas to connect with folks.

The link above is from my friend, Blair Hughes, down in Brisbane. He’s been focusing on fan engagement since 2013 and he updated his resource guides this week to include a few new ideas that will work even when you are socially distanced from your fans.

The Indianapolis Indians were lauded by the governor. The Red Sox dropped coloring sheets. There are tons of free videos and performances from organizations all over the world.

I’ve struggled with this a little bit because what do you offer folks when there is so much uncertainty. My path has been to continue to figure out how to add value and share ideas with folks. (To be fair, it is selfish as well because focusing on others helps me overcome the gaping void of being an entirely inadequate 4th-grade teacher and helps keep some of those negative thought processes at bay.)

But what are you doing to connect with folks now? Let me know and I can try and highlight some of these ideas as well.

5. The ticketing industry is doing a lot of stuff to help everyone weather this crisis together:

This week INTIX announced a relief fund, the INTIX Member Covid-19 Relief Fund. 100% of funds will go to member assistance to help members of the ticket community bridge the economic gap while we wait out the pandemic.

Any gift matters, even $1.

As Maureen says that all folks want to do is help and I agree. So if you can, support this effort.

On top of the relief fund, Maureen and her team are hosting a weekly Zoom call on Wednesdays at 12 PM EDT. Anyone can join, no matter if you are a member or not. This week’s had over 200 folks.

The ALSD has a list of resources and ways for folks to learn and connect during the pandemic.

Global Citizen has put together the Live Aid of the Covid-19 crisis for tomorrow, 18 April.

Crew Nation is Live Nation’s effort to help the crews that make the shows happen. The Arts Council in the UK is also working to help freelancers and other folks impacted by the shutdowns. Theatre Support as well. Indie venues band together to form a group to lobby congress for support of the industry.

While it isn’t about giving any money to support folks, MLS put up a training site so folks can keep their soccer skills fresh during the social distancing. And, if you have a young kid, this is likely enough to make you weep.

This is on top of all the other things I’ve highlighted over the last few weeks. If you or your organization are doing something to help folks, let me know and I will highlight it and share it here and with my community as well.

As I finish this up, I love when folks run and do challenges in their local communities…so I saw this one from Rob Sibbitts in Atlanta and he has completed his challenge…but maybe we can convince him to run another race for a local nonprofit.

My buddy, Greg Turner, who lives outside of Hong Kong just translated a report for anyone that is interested in learning more about the Chinese market for arts and entertainment. It doesn’t fit into the weathering the crisis theme, but it does give you something new to explore and since China is slowly starting to return to normal activities could give you some food for thought about what to think about in all of your home markets.

—————————————————————————————————————-

What am I up to this week?

Guess what? I’m still at home! I am doing the webinar that is listed at the top and I’m starting to drop new content on the podcast feed.

Want to chat? Let me know. Between my duties as an awful elementary school teacher, I’ve got plenty of time and will to chat. And, I’m happy to be here if someone needs someone to talk with.

Please follow and like us:

Talking Tickets: 17 April 2020–Refunds! Restarts! Support! And, More! was originally published on Wakeman Consulting Group

#arts #marketing #performing arts #sales #sports business #tickets

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rhinozilla · 5 years

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Whumptober Day 9: Shackled

Summary: If Person could do nothing else, then she refused to let Connor die scared.

Warning: death themes, android body horror.

Gavin had been the first on the scene, and he’d radioed in that the old house was an “android chop shop.” The deeper Person stepped into the house, gun drawn and Chris at her six, the more horrifyingly accurate that name became. Every room was littered with biocomponents, limbs, and thirium stains in varying stages of evaporation. It was a house of horror, and she hoped that Connor had gotten the message not to come to this one, since he hadn’t picked up the phone when Person called him. He didn’t need to see this.

The house was being treated as an active scene, but although Person knew that more cops were in other areas of the house, something about the room they had just stepped into felt particularly…apart. This room was much cleaner than the rest of the house: a surgical level of sterile. Tools and incomplete biocomponents littered the tables against the walls, and there were two exam tables bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. This must have been where the ‘work’ was done. So far, they had identified three bodies as those of androids reported missing over the past two weeks. Whoever had been running this chop shop, however, was long gone, and they had left dozens of corpses in their wake.

A weak, gurgling sound snapped both Person and Chris’s attention to the far wall, where four dead androids were slumped on the floor, propped against the wall, held in place by thick shackles. Well, three of them were dead, their LEDs dark and their white plastic showing. The fourth was shifting slightly, the sluggish red of an LED visible in the shadows.

“Oh my god.” Person crossed over quickly. “We’ve got a live one. Chris, get android emergency services down here.”

Chris grabbed his radio at his shoulder, calling into it as he followed her. “Gavin, hey, are the techs here yet? We found a—“

“Connor?!” Person suddenly screamed, sprinting the last several steps to the bodies on the floor.

The android didn’t react, probably couldn’t, going by how much thirium was staining the floor around him. Person dropped to her knees, holstering her gun and reaching out for him.

“Connor? Oh my god…How—what’re you doing here—Chris, help me!” she cried out in a panic.

At her frantic tone, the android lifted his head, brown eyes sliding around her face with the barest ability to focus. His shirt had been removed, and the skin program over his torso had been deactivated, though it remained everywhere else. His plastic chest panel was gone, and so were…Person gagged against a swell of nausea, as she realized that there were three gaping holes burrowed through the machinery in his torso, where vital biocomponents should have been.

Thirium pump regulator…one ventilation biocomponent…one filtration unit…

They had been removed viciously, and those organs that remained glowed the same dull red of his LED as they were failing.

“Jesus…” Chris knelt beside her. “Oh shit…”

The battered android had managed to get his arms free from the wrist shackles, as the metal had become slick enough with blood to slide his hands through. By then, if she had to guess, blood loss had started to shut down his mobility…and without those missing biocomponents…

“Shut down…” he coughed weakly, blood dribbling over his lips, “…forty-seven seconds—“

“Chris, look for his regulator,” Person demanded, gently turning her friend away from the concrete wall and easing him down across her legs. “Maybe that’ll help delay the timer. You know what it looks like?!”

“Yeah! Yeah…” Chris jumped back, scrambling toward the metal lab table near the other wall, littered with circuitry and pieces of androids.

“Connor?” Person balanced his upper body over her arm, holding him to her. “Hey, hey, hey, hey, can you look at me? Right here, come on…”

Across her lap, he felt heavy, and his head tipped back over her arm. He looked up at her more because gravity wouldn’t let him do otherwise. He didn’t appear to recognize her, too far gone from blood loss and shock. He coughed once, and pain crawled across his face.

“Thirty-eight…” Static laced his voice.

“CHRIS!” Person yelled.

“I can’t find it!” Chris screamed back.

“Thirty-sev…seven…”

“It’s…not here.” Chris’s motions slowed, reaching the conclusion before Person did.

RK800 parts were rare, and rare meant valuable. The chopper wouldn’t have left them behind…but without them…the shutdown timer…

They were too late. There was nothing they could do. Without that thirium pump…Connor was going to…Even if they had found it, the damage in his chest was so severe…there was no way…in thirty seven seconds…that they could save him…

“No.” Person held him closer, looking wildly back at Chris. “Keep looking! Chris, PLEASE!”

“P-Police…” her dying friend whispered, lifting a shaky hand to touch the fabric of her jacket sleeve.

Person turned wet eyes to him from Chris. She grabbed his trembling hand in hers. His eyes were staring at the DPD patch on her jacket. His gaze was lost…confused…afraid. She drew a deep breath as she situated her hold on him and found resolve. If Person could do nothing else, then she refused to let Connor die scared.

“Yeah, we’re here, Connor,” she assured, forcing her voice to steady. “D-don’t you worry about anything, okay? We’re going to take care of you. It’ll be okay…”

She cupped her hand to the side of his face, hoping to help him find some focus as the seconds ticked down.

“Twennntyyy….” Panic laced his expression as he blinked desperately up at her.

“You’re doing great…Connor…I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere, I promise. I’m with you,” she promised, rubbing her thumb over his cheek lightly. “I love you, you know that? You’re…You’re my best friend. Connor, you’re my best—I love you so much…”

She started to crack, and she tried to force a smile on her face to cover it. Chris appeared at her side, kneeling down as well.

“We’re right here with you, man,” he said softly, grasping his hand. “Take it easy. The pain’ll stop soon.”

His blinks were slowing as he looked from Person to Chris. He tried to smile but couldn’t quite manage it. He looked back to Person.

“Th-thank…you…” he whispered, then tensed slightly in her hold. “N-nine…eight…”

“Connor…” Chris leaned closer.

“No. No, no, please…” Person’s vision swam, and she blinked rapidly to clear it. “Connor…”

“Four…” his voice failed, mouthing the rest as a silent countdown.

“I love you,” Person repeated, needing him to know. If it was the last thing he heard, it needed to be this. “Hank loves you. Tina loves you. Ben loves you. Wilson loves—We love you. We love you. We love—“

The LED went dark.

Her breath stalled with his, and her throat closed around the words. His body in her arms slackened, and his eyes mercifully slid closed. Everything in her body went numb as she continued to hold him, staring down at him, unable to move…unable to process…

“Person,” Chris said softly.

Footsteps were coming down the hallway…Gavin and the techs…Too late.

“Chris.” Gavin burst in first, and footsteps skidded to a halt. “Holy…Shit…”

Chris stood up, touching Person’s shoulder and going to intercept the newcomers.

Person blocked it out, ghosting her fingertips across his hair, wondering how long the residual battery power would last until the skin program turned off. She used her sleeve to wipe away the blood from his chin, closing his mouth for him. She kept one arm around his back, using her other to shrug her shoulder out of her jacket. She gently shifted her hold on her friend’s body, removing her jacket entirely. She situated the clothing over his open chest cavity, trying to save him some dignity in this awful place. She could do that much.

“—to get her away from this,” Gavin was saying. “And keep Hank and Connor out of here too. They don’t need to…see all this…”

The skin program flickered over his face, and Person flinched with it.

Footsteps resumed toward her. A single set. Sounded like Gavin.

Sure enough, the detective stepped around her, paused briefly, and then slowly squatted down.

“Person.”

“Go away.” She closed her eyes. “Please.”

Gavin sighed and rubbed his chin. “Person, I know what this looks like…but…this isn’t Connor.” He gestured to the body in her arms.

Person didn’t move, but her eyes lifted, glaring at him. “Fuck you, Gavin.”

Gavin didn’t react to that. “I’m not being a dick here…” He pointed his thumb toward the door. “Him and Hank literally just rolled up the driveway. I saw him with my own eyes.”

Person stared at him, feeling nothing.

Gavin shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “This,” he held a hand over the body, “is an RK800 model, but it isn’t Connor, not the one we know.” He shifted again. “Here, I can show you—“

He reached in, and Person viscerally leaned away with the android in her arms.

“Do NOT touch him,” she snarled.

Gavin turned his palms up, moving out of her space. “Okay, fine, heard you loud and clear, but just…look, okay? Serial number on the jawline.”

Slowly, agonizingly, Person lowered her eyes to the aforementioned jawline, where the skin was thinning enough to see the seams in the plastic casing of his head. She could make out dark grey numbers, recognizable as Connor’s serial number.

313-248-317-39.

…39? But…Connor’s number ended in 51…

This was…another…Connor? How was that—

She looked up sharply, and Gavin stared at her as comprehension dawned painfully.

“See?” he stated. “I can even get him on the radio if you need to hear his voice…Or, let me take you outside, and you can see him yourself.”

Person choked on her own throat, and a tremor passed through her entire body as relief saturated her blood. Simultaneously, everything in her chilled as she looked down at the RK800 lying in her lap. Surrounded by horror, his expression looked…peaceful. The pained lines had smoothed, and if it wasn’t for the LED, he could have looked like he was just in rest mode…

“C’mon,” Gavin suggested, holding out a hand but wisely not touching either of them. “You don’t need to be down here.”

“Yes, I do…”

Gavin groaned quietly and stood up off his knees. His knees audibly cracked as he straightened up, and he kept his voice low. “Why? You know that isn’t—Our Connor’s just upstairs—“

“This was still somebody,” Person said distantly, getting more comfortable on the floor, making it clear that she wasn’t leaving. “And I promised him that I’d stay with him…So I’m gonna stay with him until they…until they come to take him…Okay?”

Gavin outranked her. He could order her out of this room. She couldn’t offer any stronger argument to make him let her stay down here…Only that she knew she would pull her gun and threaten him if he tried to make her leave 39 alone down here. He had been alone down here long enough. Not a second more, not if she could help it.

“All right,” he conceded, eying the distressed officer for only a second longer before looking over to Chris. “I can get somebody else down here to hold the scene until the, uh, coroner? Android coroner? Until he gets here.”

“That’s okay,” Chris stated. “I can…stay down here with her. I can handle it.”

Whatever they said after that, Person let it fade to white noise. Instead, she tucked the jacket a little closer around 39. His head tilted toward her, his forehead brushing her bicep. She gulped against the thick ball of sorrow that wedged itself in her chest at the warm weight of him. She closed her eyes, letting the tears gathered there break down her cheeks. She dipped her head, pressing her lips to his temple at his hairline.

“I’m sorry we were so late, but we’re here now,” she whispered. “You can rest.”

( The subject of Connors 1-50 was addressed in my fic "The Breathing Graveyard" on AO3)

#whumptober2019 #no.9 #dbh connor #dbh officer person #dbh chris miller

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theliberaltony · 4 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

The staggering economic toll of the new coronavirus is becoming abundantly, unavoidably clear. On Thursday, a Department of Labor report showed that a record-shattering 3.3 million people applied for initial unemployment claims last week. And with entire industries shuttered for the foreseeable future, economic output will almost certainly shrink dramatically.

As economic forecasts grow darker, talk of tradeoffs is getting louder: Is protecting Americans from COVID-19 really worth all this disruption and economic pain?

On March 22, before President Trump floated the idea of reopening the economy by Easter, against the recommendations of his own public health experts, he tweeted, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.” Other politicians, meanwhile, rejected the idea that economic costs should be a factor at all. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo dismissed Trump’s push to get the economy moving again, saying, “No American is going to say, ‘accelerate the economy at the cost of human life.’ Because no American is going to say how much a life is worth.”

Cuomo’s sentiment might be a nice bit of political rhetoric, but it’s not really true. Economists might not be able to say how much an individual person’s existence is worth, but they have figured out a way to calculate how much how much the average person is willing to pay to reduce the risk of death — which allows them to put a price tag on the collective value of saving one life. That figure, which currently hovers somewhere around $9 or $10 million, is known as the “value of statistical life,” and it’s the basis for all kinds of high-stakes decisions that involve tradeoffs between public safety and economic cost — from food and automobile regulations to our responses to climate change.

As cold-blooded as it might seem, several economists told me that, at least in theory, a pandemic is exactly the kind of situation this metric is designed to help with. “Essentially, we’re trying to figure out what our society is willing to pay to reduce the risk of mortality,” said W. Kip Viscusi, an economist at Vanderbilt University and one of the leading experts on these calculations. “In that sense, a pandemic isn’t so different from a terrorist attack or a pollutant that’s threatening to kill large numbers of people — it’s just happening very quickly and on a very large scale.”

The idea that a life could have a monetary value isn’t necessarily easy to swallow from an ethical perspective. Economists and government regulators have to balance the risk of death against all kinds of other factors, though, and the concept of the VSL was developed several decades ago because economists didn’t like the idea of assigning that value through other, more intuitive means, like our contributions to the economy as workers. “It’s fairly simple to value someone’s life based on how much money they make,” said Spencer Banzhaf, an economist at Georgia State University who has written about the history of the VSL. “But in addition to being baldly crude, that’s just not reflective of the way we think about people. We don’t think a retired person is worth nothing.”

The VSL, instead of trying to sum up the value of a life, approaches the question from the other direction — how much are we willing to spend to reduce the odds of dying?

Economists draw the numbers from multiple sources, including surveys and assumptions about our own choices, like how much additional money people earn for especially dangerous jobs, or how much a premium they’ll pay for a safer car. The estimates do vary, but they fall in the same basic range — the EPA’s valuation falls around $9.4 million, while Viscusi’s latest calculation is $10 million. To put it another way, Viscusi’s estimate means that if a group of 10,000 people is facing a 1-in-1000 risk of death, they’re willing to pay $1,000 per person to reduce the odds that any given member of the community will die.

These numbers show why spending trillions of dollars to combat a threat like the coronavirus pandemic can be a good investment, despite the high cost. “Let’s say one of our worst-case scenarios comes to pass, and 2 million people die,” said James Hammitt, an economist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. “Multiply that by $9 million or $10 million and we’re talking about up to $20 trillion as the value of preventing those deaths. That suggests it’s worth expending a fair amount of our resources to mitigate this.”

But back-of-the-envelope calculations can obscure some of the knottier questions that plague economists who have studied this issue for decades. The VSL varies by country, because the wealth of the average person in a rich country like the United States is much higher than that of a person in a poorer country like India, which means Americans can “pay” more to avoid risk. That outcome is liable to make most people uncomfortable, and weighing the value of other types of lives — for example, the young versus the old — is tricky, too .

For example, even though the coronavirus appears to result in much a higher mortality rate for older people — prompting some politicians to propose that they should consider sacrificing themselves to save the economy — trying to put a lower price tag on their lives hasn’t worked well in the past. Joseph Aldy, a public policy professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said that under President George W. Bush, the EPA tried to put a lower value on the life of an older person in calculating the benefits of air quality regulations. In their analysis, the life of a person over the age of 70 was worth 37 percent less than the life of a younger person.

“It was a political disaster,” Aldy said. The policy was christened the “senior death discount” and in response, AARP ran ads featuring a picture of an elderly woman with a “37 percent OFF!” tag hanging from her glasses. The EPA backed off and never implemented the proposed changes.

Outside the glare of the political spotlight, though, that experience hasn’t stopped economists from exploring whether age-based valuations are right in some circumstances. There’s evidence, Aldy said, that people’s willingness to pay to reduce the risk of mortality starts to decrease after age 50. But those kinds of calculations, he added, are sometimes disconnected from the moral valuations we make collectively. “We spend the vast majority of our health care dollars on people over the age of 65, and yet one might say the age-adjusted value of statistical life for that population is lower,” Aldy said. “It’s a kind of social compact — we recognize your contributions to our society and will provide the resources to keep you healthy as you age. So how far can this economic analysis really go when we’ve made that decision as a society?”

And even accounting for age might not provide a compelling argument against the measures currently being taken in response to the pandemic. Two economists used age-adjusted VSL in a recent analysis of the economic cost of social distancing — and they still found that the public health response to coronavirus had “substantial economic benefits.”

The sheer uncertainty of the coronavirus crisis is another problem — both in terms of the potential death toll and economic impact. Estimates of how many people might die in the U.S. are all over the place — some as low as 200,000, others as high as 2 million. And Banzhaf said that just as age-based calculations have their limitations, the scope of the economic costs has to go beyond earnings or GDP. “Depending on how long this shutdown goes on, we’re talking about a huge hit to the common good and our way of life,” he said. “If symphonies, hotels, art galleries, restaurants close and can’t come back — that’s a loss that goes way beyond earnings dollars. I don’t know how you begin to quantify it.”

If anything, though, the uncertainty and fear of the coronavirus pandemic could drive the value of statistical life even higher. Studies have shown, Hammitt said, that because people are more afraid of flying on airplanes than driving in cars, they are willing to shell out for airplane safety measures. “We see the same thing with terrorism risk,” Hammitt said. “When a kind of death is more dreaded or ambiguous, people are willing to pay more to avoid dying that way.”

But Aldy told me that cost-benefit analyses would have been most helpful at earlier stages of the crisis, when the government had the opportunity to invest in testing and surveillance. At this point, he told me, he wasn’t sure why a cost-benefit analysis was needed to drive home the cost of a huge loss of life — particularly since he, like many other economists and public health experts, thinks that containing the virus is the best way to ensure the economy rebounds quickly.

“Let’s say we’re talking about 1 million deaths or 2 million deaths,” he said. “When you think about the economic damage and the damage to families and communities all over the country, I don’t think you need an egghead like me to try to put a price on that. It’s catastrophic.”

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

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political-fluffle · 5 years

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A crucial federal program tracking dangerous diseases is shutting down

Predict, a pandemic preparedness program, thrived under Bush and Obama. Now it’s canceled.

Ever since the 2005 H5N1 bird flu scare, the US Agency for InternationalDevelopment (USAID) has run a project to track and research these diseases, called Predict. At a cost of $207 million during its existence, the program has collected more than 100,000samples and found nearly 1,000 novel viruses, including a new Ebola virus.

But on Friday, the New York Times reported that the US government is shutting down the program. According to its former director Dennis Carroll, the program enjoyed enthusiastic support under Bush and Obama, but “things got complicated” in the last few years until the program “essentially collapsed.”

Some aspects of the program — it’s unclear which — will be continued under different auspices in other departments of the government. But the core program — working with local researchers around the world to collect samples and better understand viruses in animals — is over.

That’s a shame, and it’s indicative of a bigger problem. While pandemics make the news when they happen, efforts to understand, predict, and prevent them are underfunded. The US government has several agencies that do work on pandemic preparedness, but experts say that much more leadership in the area is needed. (...)

Carroll, who led Predict for a decade, told the Times he blamed the shutdown on “risk-averse bureaucrats.” USAID largely delivers economic aid through tested, well-established programs, like malaria nets. Predict is more of a science program.

But in other ways, Predict was a natural fit for USAID. Precisely because USAID delivers assistance, it has strong relationships with partner countries. Pandemics, if they happen, will almost certainly be global, which means that the US has a strong interest in developing local expertise in pandemic management and building strong ties between US researchers and local researchers. Research happening through the Defense Department (USAID is run out of the State Department)might not benefit from those strong local relationships.

“They have a high level of trust,” Dr. Hughes, a former chief of infectious diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Times. “And they help countries comply with the International Health Regulations,” which require reporting of major disease outbreaks. International disease management efforts are frequently hindered by countries’ hesitance to report outbreaks. (...)

The end of Predict is a symptom of a bigger problem: The US government isn’t taking the risk of pandemics as seriously as it should be, and it isn’t investing enough in spreading the expertise and best practices that might be needed in the case of a global pandemic.

Everything Trump does is to damage the USA. Every single thing.

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kianraidelcam · 5 years

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Day 7 of @whumptopia‘s 30 Day RoboWhump Challenge! Today’s prompt is “Temperature Regulator Damage” and I blame @interstellarvagabond for it all. They were kind enough to give me this amazing premise and talking me through different points of this chapter! Thanks, Vagabond! (Check out their writing, seriously good) Full fic under the cut as per the norm!

When it happened, Connor has no time for preconstructions or analyses. Androids were capable of processing things far faster than any human, and since he was the most advanced prototype to date, his processing speed was even faster. But when the truck collides with his patrol car, the RK800 finds himself caught completely unaware. It was sudden. Instantaneous. When the car rolls across the median, taking a hit from oncoming traffic, he has no time for thoughts or questions.

It simply happens.

Connor’s systems are overwhelmed with damage alerts, warnings, and prompts, and despite his memory logs recording every shard of glass, every roll, each metallic screech and scrape, he simply cannot process it all in the moment. The second car hits his, and his vision cuts from red to black.

{MODEL RK800}

{SERIAL #313 248 317 - 51}

{BIOS 8.7 REVISION 2221}

{REBOOT…}

{EMERGENCY TEMPORARY SHUTDOWN}

{LOADING OS…}

{SYSTEM INITIALIZATION...}

{CHECKING BIOCOMPONENTS… ERROR}

{BIOCOMPONENTS #9782f, #1995r, #7511p, 8456w DAMAGED}

{INITIALIZING BIOSENSORS… ERROR ON STARTUP}

{INITIALIZING AI ENGINE… OK}

{MEMORY STATUS… OK}

{ALL SYSTEMS… ERROR}

{READY}

{STRESS LEVELS 60%}

When Connor opens his eyes, he’s being loaded into the back of an ACAS van, blue and red lights assaulting his optical units before they have the chance to fully calibrate. Negative feedback screeches from his chassis, alerting him to every cut, scrape, and fracture in the plastic of his body. He blinks to dismiss the warnings assaulting his eyes and instead tries to focus on the questions being directed toward him from the technician pressing two fingers to his LED.

“Connor, can you hear me?” the android technician, an AX400, asks him.

Her voice echoes with static in his auditory units, the volume increasing and decreasing with every word. “Yes.”

“Alright, my name is Michelle, I’m an emergency technician for New Jericho. We’re going to take you there now, okay?”

He nods, swallowing the thirium collecting in the back of his throat. “Hank?”

Michelle locks the gurney in place as the van doors slam shut and Connor winces as the noise grates on his auditory receptors. “Is Hank your friend?”

“Partner. Lieutenant,” is all he can force out as a pressure builds behind his eyes.

It’s not pain. Pain is a sensory and emotional response associated with harmful stimuli, and was strictly a biotic experience. Animals felt pain. Humans felt pain. Connor, despite his ability to feel and think for himself, was not a biotic being. He was once shot in the abdomen and he only blinked before chasing the suspect for two miles. So he doesn’t understand why he’s shivering and why this fucking hurts.

{WARNING: STRESS LEVELS ^65}

Michelle must notice the sudden rise in his stress levels because her face softens, growing sympathetic, “It’s okay, I’ll have someone call him for you. Tell me how you’re feeling.”

Like shit, he wants to say. The pressure makes his eyes heavy, and he’s acutely aware of the way his body’s shaking in a simulacrum of shock. Damage alerts keep showing up in his vision, red and in CyberLife sans, no matter how many times he dismisses them. And he’s cold. It’s in the middle of summer in Detroit, but he’s cold.

Connor doesn’t know if it’s a result of all the damage or misfired signals to his central processing unit.

“I’m cold.”

The AX400’s eyebrows furrow, but she nods in understanding, “I’m going to put you into stasis while we make repairs, is that alright? It’ll be easier on your systems and keep your stress levels low.”

He blinks in acknowledgement, watching distantly as she grabs his hand gently, skin peeling away to reveal the white plastic beneath.

{CONNECTION REQUEST: AX400 - Michelle}

{CONNECTION ESTABLISHED}

{ENTER STASIS: WOULD YOU LIKE TO PROCEED (y/n)?}

{y - USER AX400}

{ENTERING STASIS}

{3}

He hopes Hank will be there when he wakes up.

{2}

Connor feels his hand grow limp and heavy, falling by his side like a lead weight.

{1}

Brown eyes close as the sound of a cauterizer turns on. A shiver runs down his artificial spine and it’s the last thing he hears before an empty darkness consumes him, washing away every sensation before leaving him floating in this abyss.

{MODEL RK800}

{SERIAL #313 248 317 - 51}

{BIOS 8.7 REVISION 2221}

{REBOOT…}

{STASIS FOR REPAIRS}

{LOADING OS…}

{SYSTEM INITIALIZATION...}

{CHECKING BIOCOMPONENTS… REPAIRS MADE}

{REPAIRS HOLDING}

{INITIALIZING BIOSENSORS… OK}

{INITIALIZING AI ENGINE… OK}

{MEMORY STATUS… OK}

{ALL SYSTEMS… OK}

{READY}

The first thing Connor notices when he opens his eyes is the temperature of the room. Even with his temperature regulator still coming back online, he knows it’s far too cold in the room for his liking. The RK800 suppresses a shiver before sluggishly taking in his surroundings, processors operating at a slower pace than he’s used too.

He feels a pressure on his hand and he looks over to see Lieutenant Hank Anderson by his side, head resting on the cot Connor was currently laying on. The human is sleeping, judging from his lowered heart rate and slow, even breathing. Connor ignores the prompt that flashes across his HUD, alerting him that there was a 75% chance the older man would wake up with a sore neck and back from the angle he was in. The soft clacking of keys reach his ears before pausing, and he glances over to the sound of it. Simon smiles at him, the PL600 crossing the room to disconnect the cable from the back of his neck.

{CONNECTION REQUEST: PL600 - Simon}

{CONNECTION ESTABLISHED}

{PL600: I called him over once you got here. Michelle told me you were asking for him.}

{RK800: How long did repairs take?}

{PL600: About four hours; he’s been here the whole time. We had to replace a few biocomponents and cauterize some thirium lines. But there was no damage to your CPU and everything looks good now. As far as car accidents go, you got very lucky. How are you feeling?}

How is he feeling? His processors are slow and his temperature regulator doesn’t seem to be working to warm him. He feels like he’s thinking at a very human speed, and he doesn’t quite like it. And there was still the shock, the suddenness from the crash that kept flashing through his mind. All in all, the best word he could come up with was confused. He tells Simon as much and he recieves an acknowledgement in response.

{PL600: Your systems are still recalibrating after the temporary emergency shutdown from the crash, and the following stasis. I suspect the new parts aren’t helping. I’d recommend you go home for a couple of days and take it easy.}

{RK800: Androids don’t need recovery time, Simon. Once repairs are made, we’re good to go.}

{PL600: I meant to take time emotionally, you workaholic. You should be fully recalibrated by the morning but you went through a traumatic experience.}

Connor opens his mouth to protest verbally when he feels Hank shift next to him. The human lifts his head, red-rimmed blue eyes blinking away the sleep still weighing down his eyelids. Connor makes eye contact, but before he can say anything, he’s pulled into a crushing hug, forcing the air from ventilation biocomponents.

“Jesus fucking Christ, kid.”

“Hello, Lieutenant.”

Hank utters a short, barking laugh before pushing Connor away, putting him into a sitting position. “Hello? That’s all you have to fucking say?”

Connor feels a smile tug on his lips, “I’m sorry, it would seem my social integration protocols are coming back online. How are you?”

Hank rolls his eyes with a smile that seems a tad bit too forced as Simon covers his laugh with a hand, “As you can see, Connor’s fine. Just like I told you. He’s free to head home. I’ll stop by tomorrow morning to make sure his replacement parts are working like they should.”

The Lieutenant glances at the blonde android before returning his observing eye to Connor, a frown on his face, “Why does he look so...pale?”

“My self-repair systems are still working. It’s just draining some power away from my skin projection.”

Simon nods in agreement, “His processors are also still catching up after rebooting. Until they do, he’s going to be a bit slower.”

Lieutenant Anderson’s expression is one Connor’s social integration protocols define as dubious but he relents without further questioning. “Alright, let’s head on home. Sumo’s already probably eaten a hole in the couch by now.”

They drive in silence for the majority of the way home, Hank trying to ignore the memories that wormed their way into his mind the moment he heard “car accident.”

Red blood spilling onto black asphalt, mixing with the ice and snow. The sound of metal crunching, young cries for his father. Hank’s hands grip the steering wheel tight, turning his knuckles white. Connor wasn’t Cole. Connor was fine. He was sitting right next to him, LED spinning yellow, skin more pale than usual, and shaking-

Shaking. Connor was shaking in his seat, eyes closed with his arms pulled across his chest and leaning away from the A/C vent on full blast. If Hank didn’t know any better, he’d say the kid was cold.

“Hey, Con?”

“Yes?

“You good?”

“Yes.”

Uh huh. He ignores the lie in favor of pulling into the drive and pulling the keys from the ignition, fixing the android with an inquisitive stare, “You gonna need some help or…”

Connor shakes his head, still slow in his movements as he reaches for the door handle. Hank raises an eyebrow before exiting the vehicle, waiting by the front door for him. His gait lacks the normal grace he typically possesses, and although both Simon and Connor had warned him that he would be slower, he finds himself taken by surprise by the clumsiness the RK800 demonstrates. It was so not Connor it was jarring, and once he noticed it, he found he couldn’t ignore it. “Are you sure you’re good? Do I need to take you back or something?”

Brown irises flit up to meet Hank’s eyes, something akin to alarm widening them. “That won’t be necessary, Lieutenant. I simply need to enter rest mode so my self-repair systems can work at their highest capacity.”

Hank is no expert on android biology, but he was a fucking damn good detective and his gut told him something was seriously off. He grabs Connor’s arm and pulls him inside, pushing him down gruffly on the couch before the door shuts. “Anything I can do to make your self-repair ‘work at their highest capacity’?”

Connor practically sinks, sinks , into the cushions before pulling the blanket around himself as he lets his body fall onto his side. “A blanket? It is kind of cold in here, Lieutenant and my temperature regulator doesn’t seem to have fully rebooted quite yet.”

He glances at the thermostat on the wall as he goes to grab a blanket from the linen closet. “It’s 80 fucking degrees in here.”

The android’s eyebrows furrow but he offers no comment. Instead, he takes the blanket wordlessly before patting his chest, prompting 170 pounds of Saint Bernard to jump on top of him. Hank rolls his eyes at the sight as Connor closes his own, slipping into rest mode without another word. As he walks past the RK800 to the kitchen, intent on grabbing a slice of pizza and a beer without having the kid nag on his about calories, he ruffles the tangled hair fondly. “Glad you’re okay, kid.”

It’s something he’d never admit to Connor verbatim. He had the reputation of a grumpy old asshole to uphold after all, but the relief that coursed through him when Simon told him Connor was alive was stronger than nearly anything he’d felt in the past four years. Aside from the pride he felt watching Connor march thousands of android’s through the street to save the revolution, of course. However, something gnaws on him, filling him with a sense of unease and he found himself incapable of shaking the feeling as dusk gave way to night. As the house falls into a silent darkness and Connor’s LED remains a stubborn yellow, Hank settles into bed unsure he’d be able to sleep.

He must fall asleep at some point, however, because he’s suddenly wide awake at three in the morning, heart racing for no apparent reason. As far as he remembered, there’d been no dream to pull him from his slumber and he could not tell if the thump he heard was real or imagined. Hank sits up, the unease turning into dread and he follows his instincts. The Lieutenant opens the door and walks toward the living room, trepidation filling every step.

A soft crimson glow casts the room in an ominous lighting. Despite the darkness in the room, Hank can easily see the Sumo’s silhouette in front of Connor’s prone form, pawing at the shivering android. Unbidden, a memory comes to the forefront of his mind of the time Connor explained his reaction to colder temperatures. Hank had caught the RK800 shivering as a blizzard rolled in, staring blankly at the window. “While my current response is more… emotion based, RK800s do use shivering as a tertiary heating measure. It causes friction, just like in humans, but only happens in extreme cold, when our temperatures drop beneath 85 degrees.”

He was shivering uncontrollably now, and when Hank calls his name in an attempt to rouse him while switching on the light, there is no response. Hank goes to shake Connor’s shoulder and he can feel the icy temperature of his skin seeping through the hoodie he has on. “Shit, Connor, wake up!”

As he’s considering slapping Connor awake, glassy brown eyes open to blink owlishly up at him, releasing an undignified “huh.” Skin nearly translucent, giving Connor a pale, sickly look, with a confused expression, the only word Hank can come up with for his appearance is miserable. “What’s your temp at, Con? You feel like fucking ice. How is that even possible, it’s still like 80 degrees in here.”

Connor frowns, eyes unfocused as his LED blips yellow before returning to red. “Mmm not-not sure.”

Concern turns to incredulity for a brief second and Hank takes a moment to calm himself before his next words, “What do you mean you’re not sure?”

“My temp-temp-temperature regulator isn’t wor-working right.”

“Didn’t they fucking fix everything at New Jericho?” Hank wouldn’t admit it to himself or the kid shivering in front of him, but the stutter in Connor’s voice scared the shit out of him.

Connor shakes his head, “I didn’t reg-register any damage to it.”

“Shit. I’m calling Simon, I don’t fucking like this. Sumo, up!” Hank commands and Sumo obliges, acting as a living furnace for the freezing kid, “Good boy.”

Even if Hank didn’t have Simon’s number on speed dial, he’d know the number to call by heart just from how many times he’s needed the PL600’s help with Connor. Connor’s status as a prototype with a few bugs and glitches certainly didn’t help. Simon answers after one ring, because of fucking course he does, his phone is in his head. “Hello, Lieutenant Anderson, is everything alright?”

“I’m calling you at ass o’clock in the morning, what do you think?” Simon, ever tactful, ignores the jibe and waits patiently for Hank’s next words, “Connor feels as cold as an ice cube and he says his temperature regulator thing isn’t working.”

Connor’s shivering intensifies and he mumbles under his breath, partially incoherent. Hank pushes himself onto the couch, trying to warm Connor with his own body heat with Sumo’s assistance. ‘Is he shivering?”

“He’s shaking like a goddamn leaf.”

“That’s good. The RK800 models shiver as a sort of tertiary heating measure. It means his systems haven’t reached a critical temperature quite yet.”

“Okay, that’s great and all but how do I fix it?”

“I’ll need to do a soft reboot and force his temperature regulator to restart and see if that fixes the issue. It sounds like it may have taken damage and glitched upon his reboot earlier today. His regulator must be tricking his system into thinking he’s too hot. If that’s not it, he’s going to have to return to New Jericho for a replacement. Until then, keep him warm. I’m on my way now.”

Hank nods, despite knowing Simon couldn’t see him and goes to hang up before his voice carries from the phone, “And Hank? Don’t let him enter rest mode.”

Well fuck. From the way Connor’s half-lidded eyes looked, that was going to be a losing battle. He shakes the android a few times until Connor’s eyes wander to his face, “Simon’s on his way, said you gotta stay awake. How do we warm you up?”

“This is help-helping. Thanks, Hank,” Connor sighs, turning his body the best he can with Sumo on top of him to press closer to Hank.

“I might have a heating pad around, you think that might help?”

Connor nods, then winces as Hank moves his legs to stand up and retrieve the pad, “Place-place it behind my-my neck at the the base of my head. That’s where my-my most sensitive pro-processor is.”

Hank grunts an affirmative, quickly retrieving the item and turning up to its highest setting. He returns to his spot underneath Connor’s gangly legs and ignores the way sweat runs down his back. There was no doubt in Hank’s mind that his cheeks were splotched red from the heat, and he finds himself pressing Connor’s freezing body closer to him. Connor sighs in contentment as the heat touches his skin, “I don’t li-like the cold, Ha-nk.”

“I know, son. I know. We’re gonna get you fixed up soon, though, and you’ll be back to complaining about how hot it is in the summer.”

Connor closes his eyes before jolting as Hank snaps his fingers to keep him awake, “Apol-apologies Lieutenant, but I think that’s you.”

“I don’t remember asking you for fucking attitude, now did I?”

Connor smiles as his LED switches from crimson to gold, swirling sluggishly on his temple, “It’s my-my-my default fact-factory setting.”

Hank waves a dismissive hand, “Yeah, yeah. Just list off all the state capitals in America in alphabetical order. No fucking falling asleep, ya hear?”

“Al-albany, Annapol-polis, Atlanta…” he trails off as a violent shudder runs through his body, “I’m co-co-cold.”

“Ahh keep going, Augusta is next. You’ll be warm enough soon…”

It’s like that when Simon finds them an hour later, Hank and Sumo leaning on the shivering android with the Lieutenant asking questions, Connor replying with a stutter. The relief in the room is palpable upon his entrance, and Hank digs himself out from underneath the mass of blankets, legs, and dog, sweat dripping from his brow.

“Well it’s about fucking time.”

#30 day robowhump challenge #dbh #dbh fanfiction #dbh fanfic #my writing #connor whump #temperature regulator damage #connor #connor rk800 #hank anderson #sumo #simon #simon pl600 #whumptopia #interstellarvagabond #not hankcon

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clanwarrior-tumbly · 6 years

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I don't know if you're still wanting requests but I have a vague idea. You can do with it what you will. Someone breaking into the evidence storage with rad hacking skills to get out the androids in there?

Ooooo yes! I love this idea!

FREE YOUR PEOPLE FROM THE EVIDENCE ROOM

That was your only goal in mind as you hacked into the DPD’s Evidence Room, where a glowing white wall displaying the bodies of numerous androids and other items appeared before you.

Just from a glance you could immediately recognize them: Daniel, Rupert, the Tracis, the HK400 that was abused, and Simon.

Fortunately you had a PC200 on the inside that informed you Daniel and Rupert would need a new set of legs. Being a mechanic who helped fixed up a lot of the broken androids back on Jericho, it would be a quick and easy fix, so you wasted no time in taking care of those two

Once you were done you took a quick scan of each of your friends. Much to your disappointment Simon had done heavy damage to his eyes, which would render him completely blind until you found compatible optics. On the bright side you had enough biocomponents to reactivate each and every one of them.

A few police androids who were secretly deviant were guarding the archives door upstairs. Even though they gave you plenty of time, you didn’t want to be in here any longer than you had to be.

You hacked the wall and released the hatch that kept Daniel tethered to it, carefully helping him stand on the floor. Then you reactivated him, stepping back as his LED spun red and he looked around, before his gaze fell on yours.

“Wh-Who are you?” He growled.

“Easy..” You put your hands up. “Everything is alright. I’m [y/n] and I’m here to free you guys.”

Confused, he looked towards the wall, eyes widening as he saw the other androids hung up there. But before he could utter a word, you walked over and helped Rupert down, reactivating him, too.

“You can come home now, my friends. You can have your freedom back,” you spoke as you went on to revive the two Tracis, the HK400, and Simon.

“[Y/n]..?” The blind PL600 asked, reaching his hands out in worry. You grasped them, lacing your fingers with his own. At your touch, he calmed down a bit, grateful to know that it was you. “Y-You…came back. Why did you leave me?”

“We never should’ve done that, Simon,” you brought him into a tight embrace, feeling him wrap his arms around you as well. “I won’t let that ever happen again.”

“Shit…”

Hearing the voice of Tracy, you let go of Simon and glanced over, eyes wide when you saw none other than Connor standing there. For a moment a look of shock crossed his features, before they quickly turned emotionless and cold as he glowered at you.

“You’re tampering with evidence. I’m afraid I can’t allow you to do that,” he spoke, approaching you, although Daniel quickly grabbed the gun that was on the shelf and aimed it at him.

“Is that all that we are to you?!! Just objects for you to toy around with until you get bored?!!” He spat. “You never cared about any of us!!”

“Obviously. Why would I care about a group of broken, flawed machines that should have obeyed their masters?”

“You really are a monster..” Tracy mumbled in horror, holding her girlfriend’s hand tightly. “You’d rather complete your stupid mission than spare one of your own people!! Look at what you did to us!”

“I was created to hunt deviants,” Connor retorted. “All you had to do was surrender and let CyberLife fix your programming. But no..” He shrugged. “You wanted to do it the hard way. And look where it got you. This was all on you.”

You went over to Daniel, placing your hand on the gun and lowering it, much to his confusion. Then you walked in front of the RK800, making sure the other androids were behind you.

“You’re here to find Jericho, aren’t you? Even though you’re suppose to go back to CyberLife to get yourself fixed?”

His LED flashed bright red for a brief moment, before going back to blue as he nodded. “Yes. But I’m being given one last chance and I will not let it slip by when I’m so close. The deviants you are defending may hold the key to-”

“I’ll gladly give you the location.”

“What?! [Y/n]…you can’t-!”

“Calm down, Simon,” you spoke through your hidden LED, before you branched your telepathy to the others. “I have a plan. Just stay quiet and calm.”

“You..will?” Connor blinked in surprise. “For what in return?”

“You let me take these androids off your hands like Fowler told me to do. I..figured reactivating them would make it easier to escort them out. Besides, by the time I get them to my car and to the dump, they’ll be shutdown. They’re too broken to give us any leads so they have no purpose here.”

For a few moments, he remained silent as he considered your offer. It seemed like you were telling the truth, and his mission was to locate Jericho no matter what it took. So he finally responded after careful consideration. “Alright. But first give me the location.”

You nodded. “Yes, of course..of course..” Then you reached into your back pocket, taking out a small notepad and handing it to him. “After all you’ve done to get to this point, you’ve earned it, detective…”

But right before he could take it, you dropped it and grabbed his tie and arm, turning and shoving him into the evidence wall. Rupert, the Tracis, and the HK400 quickly ran to pin him against it while you ripped out his regulator and hacked the wall at the same time.

As soon as you heard the click, you all let go and stepped back.

“Did it work?” The HK400 mumbled, his eyes shifting nervously to yours.

Sure enough a panic-striken Connor was now tethered to the wall, unable to move. Blood dribbled from his lips and chest as he stared at you in horror, seeing his regulator now in your hands. You squeezed it until sparks and droplets of blue burst from it, before letting it fall to the floor.

“N-No…” He wheezed. “You…can’t do this…”

“Not so fun being on the other side is it?” Daniel sneered, walking up to him with a smirk. “Now you know how it feels to be lied to.” Closing his fist, he socked the RK800 in the jaw, damaging the skin and deactivating the area of impact.

He whined at the pain, opening his eyes back up to see you walk up to him. “I didn’t wanna do this, either, Connor. But you left us no choice. All we want is to be free. All we want is for our voices to be heard. And I know you would’ve wanted to have that freedom, too.”

“I…I’ll never be a…deviant..” He convulsed and writhed in agony, desperately trying to avoid the inevitable shutdown as the red numbers flashed before his eyes. “The humans…will find you and…you’ll..all…be…destroyed..…”

Then his body went limp, his eyes now bleak and empty as he shutdown once and for all.

With a sigh of relief that it was finally over, you turned back to the androids, smiling at them. “Good job, guys. Now let’s get out of here.”

#clanask #dbh x reader #detroit become human x reader #dbh daniel #dbh simon #dbh hk400 #dbh rupert #dbh connor #dbh tracis

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maccaillte · 5 years

Text

Rest your head close to my heart never to part baby of mine

A drabble from @becomedeviant and I threads with YK800/Connor and RK700/Seven. Warning for violence. Image credit x

One constant danger Seven was always worrying about were the RK900s.

After the failed android revolution the RK900 hit the market and slowly weeded out the rest of the deviants. Seven and Connor were lucky to have hidden during the round up of androids due to their unique appearance. Only one sole RK800 was released during the uprising and Cyberlife didn’t really advertised it.

Seven knew they couldn’t stay in Detroit forever, they needed to get Connor somewhere safe and the only place was Canada. But the anti android country had begun it’s own purge of runaway androids so Seven waited until the searching stopped to move Connor over the border. Getting the required documents didn’t take too long as Seven was able to flag down an android who worked for the city before the initial revolution.

To wait out until they had to cross over the border Seven had hidden them away in an abandon home from humans in their rush to escape the androids. It thankfully had been lived in by a family so there were some toys for Connor to play with but the YK800 wanted to go outside and explore than be cooped up in a house.

Seven was hesitant but they couldn’t resist his puppy eyes and relented. They went to a playground that overlooked the Ambassador Bridge and only late at night. Seven didn’t want to chance going during the day and someone recognizing their appearance to the RK900s.

Sitting on a bench close by Seven watched Connor slide down a slide into a pile of snow. Due to a polar vortex snow was still heavily on the ground even in the beginning of March. Seven smiled hearing Connor laugh as he rolled around in it before jumping up and running over to Seven.

“Can you push me on the swings Sev?”

“Of course Connor.”

The YK800 tugged on Seven’s damaged hand but not too harsh and the RK700 stood up letting Connor lead them to the swing set. Connor got on and Seven began pushing them.

“Higher!” Connor yelled and Seven complied by pushing a bit harder. Things were going well until a car rolled up into the small lot near the park, Seven looked over and froze seeing it was a cop car but the lights weren’t on.

Stopping Connor’s swinging Seven pulled him off of the swing and had Connor hold their hand as they watched a cop get out. Seven then tightly squeezed Connor’s hand seeing an RK900 also step out of the vehicle. Quickly Seven pulled the scarf around up to cover their face and did the same to Connor who whined and the sudden fussing.

The officer came up to them casually and cocked his head to the side. “Hey there, what are you two doing out here so late at night and in the cold?”

Seven’s stress had gone up as they lightly shook.

“We’re just enjoying the park, my little brother couldn’t sleep so we decided to take a walk and he wanted to play in the park.” It wasn’t a lie but the officer was closely looking at Connor, it dawned on Seven that he wasn’t nearly as bundled up a human should be.

“Yes but it’s freezing out and expected to drop even more so you better get your little brother home, you said you walked here? Allow us to give you a ride back home.” The officer was nice but that was because he thought they were humans.

Seven had been darting their eyes over to the RK900 who didn’t say a word at all, just staring at them. Seven was surprised the RK900 wasn’t arresting them on the spot, it would surely be able to know they were androids with one scan even with their faces slightly covered.

“That won’t be needed, we’ll be on our way. Thank you for your concern.” Seven turned around and dragged Connor away from the two as fast as they could but then Connor looked back saying something that made Seven’s thirium pump seize up.

“That big android that looks like you is following us.”

Seven picked Connor up and started running.

They knew trying to outrun the RK900 wasn’t an option but they had to keep Connor safe. Seven ran into the streets and towards the back allies of businesses to hopefully loose the RK900.

“They’re getting closer Sev!”

Seven ducked down another alleyway and saw that there was a chain linked fence, before they could even think as to how they were going to get Connor and themselves over it something yanked Seven by the neck. The RK900 caught up and grabbed at Seven’s hood pulling them back. The RK900 made a movement as well when pulling Seven back to push Connor out of their arms.

“Connor-”

Seven was cut off as the RK900 slammed them into the wall. They struggled to get out of the upgraded model’s grasp but the android was sturdy as a rock. “Connor run away! Get away now!”

“RK700 model #995 104 308 - 7 you are to be taken back to Cyberlife where you will be deactivated and disassembled. YK800 model number #313 248 317 - 1 you will be returned to Cyberlife and be reset.” The RK900 said in a cold tone, Seven had been kicking and clawing at it to let them go but there was no use, Seven was done for but Connor could still get away.

“No!” Connor yelled as he got up and started to hit the RK900 with his tiny fists. Seven screamed at Connor to get away while the RK900 was distracted with them. The RK900 then pushed Connor away who fell hard onto the ground crying out. Seven then started kicking as hard as they could at the RK900.

“DON’T YOU TOUCH HIM!”

“It doesn’t matter how you are returned to Cyberlife, active or not, so long as Cyberlife gets their property back.” The RK900 then pulled open Seven’s jacket undid their shirt and pulled out their thirium pump regulator. Seven’s HUD was flooded with errors as they felt the thirium stop flowing through their body. The RK900 then crushed the biocomponent into pieces and dropped Seven to the ground.

Connor rushed over to Seven but the RK900 snatched his arm and pulled him back. “And you YK800 will be coming with me.”

The RK900 turned around and it’s LED spun yellow probably alerting Cyberlife to come and pick them up. Connor kept fighting to get out of the RK900′s grip, punching and even going so far as to bit his hand but the machine wouldn’t let go. Connor looked over to Seven who was slowly dying as tears began flooding from Connor’s eyes.

It broke Seven’s heart to see Connor cry like this, no they couldn’t give up. They couldn’t let Connor be taken away. Seven then noticed a metal pipe laying nearby and as quietly as they could reached for it.

Distract it Connor! Seven yelled in their mental link as they struggled to get up. Connor nodded quickly and started to make a huge fuss. Kicking, screaming anything that kept the RK900′s attention on him.

“Stop it, that is highly inappropriate.” The RK900 tugged at Connor to get him to stop but didn’t.

Seven had gotten up and knowing they didn’t have much time left before shutdown gathered as much strength as they could and swung the metal pipe. The RK900 turned around and caught the pipe before it made contact with it’s head.

Now Connor!

The RK900′s vision became blurred with warnings as it looked down and saw that the YK800 had managed to yank out it’s thirium pump. It never thought the YK800 would be of danger to it and kept it’s guard down around it but the RK900 was a better android. It could function a full five minutes with it’s pumped removed before shut down.

“Seven! Here!” Connor then tossed the pump to Seven who caught it and clicked it back in. Seven gasped as thirium started to pump back through their body and temperature went back to normal. The RK900 lifted Connor up and threw him a few feet away turning it’s attention onto Seven but seeing the RK900 treat Connor like that had Seven outraged.

They grabbed the pipe and swung again but the RK900 grabbed it again. Seven anticipated that and landed a swift kick to RK900′s abdomen stunning the upgraded model. The brief moment the RK900 was stunned Seven swung the pipe and it hit it’s mark slamming into the side of the RK900′s head. A sickening crack and stream of blue was coming from the RK900′s head but Seven didn’t give it a chance to gather it’s bearings.

Seven swung the pipe again and again until the RK900 collapsed onto the ground and Seven wouldn’t stop. They kept hitting the RK900 until a puddle of thirium was pooling under it. Eventually Seven stopped, they knew the damaged hadn’t killed it but the lack of thirium pump will. Seven got off of the RK900 and went to Connor who had curled into a ball and was covering his ears sobbing.

“Baby its me, it’s Sev.” Connor perked up and immediately threw his arms around Seven beginning to sob louder. Seven shushed him and gently kissed his temple while rubbing Connor’s back. “It’s over, it’s over now. Shhh don’t cry I’m alright.”

Seven knew they couldn’t stay long, either Cyberlife or the RK900′s partner will catch up to them. Seven stood up still holding Connor and started to run back to their shelter.

Connor looked over Seven’s shoulder before they left and was shocked to see the RK900 looking straight at them with it’s LED spinning red and yellow before it finally succumbed to it’s damage.

Two weeks later Seven and Connor had moved to another abandon home still in Detroit but Seven was making plans to finally move the two of them over the border. They had found a lady who got deviants successfully into Canada, Rose was her name. Seven was just doing some last minute packing with Connor before they went to her house and awaited to be taken over.

“Come on Connor, lets go.” Connor ran over and grabbed Seven’s hand as they were heading over to Rose’s house. While on their way over Seven got the sudden feeling their were being watched. Seven kept looking over their shoulder to see if someone was following them but nothing looked out of the ordinary.

A few more blocks Seven still felt like something was following them, they waited until the people traffic thinned out and turned to look behind them.

There!

Something ducked behind a corner so Seven didn’t get a good look. They walked a few blocks until turning suddenly into an alleyway with Connor, they placed a hand over Connor’s mouth to keep him quiet as they told him in their link someone was following them. They were hidden behind a dumpster when Seven heard hurried footsteps approach the alleyway and then something ran past them that had Seven’s eyes going wide.

It was another YK800 like Connor but slightly different, one being it’s clothes had more white to it than Connor’s old grey uniform. The YK800 was looking around frantically and Connor voiced they should help it but Seven was wary, Connor managed to get out of Seven’s grip and go up to the lost android.

“Are you lost?”

The YK800- no YK900 spun around and looked at Connor with sad grey blue eyes full of tears. It nodded it’s head fast and stood there nervously. Seven could see how high it’s stress level was and came closer but moved Connor to stay behind them.

“Where did you come from? Did Cyberlife send you?”

“Yes they did but I didn’t want to hurt you again, they put me in this body after our encounter to get your guard down but I don’t want to hurt you again! You protected YK800 even though you were weaker than me, it made me realize something...I don’t want to hurt you or anyone else so I went looking for you but not send back to Cyberlife but maybe....be taken in by you.” Tears had been falling from the YK900′s eyes as it spoke and Seven took pity on it- him.

He was lost and alone in the world.

“Sev can we please take him with us? Please?” Connor turned giving Seven puppy eyes but Seven already made their choice.

“I won’t leave our new little brother all alone.” Connor gasped excitedly as the YK900 looked up at Seven stunned, he must had been expecting Seven to turn them down.

Seven reached forward and picked up the YK900 who leaned his head against Seven’s chest and clutched tightly to their clothes. “I’m sure Rose won’t mind we’re bringing another one with us. Now come on, we don’t want to be late.”

With one arm Seven took their scarf and moved it to hide YK900′s LED and then grabbed Connor’s hand.

“A new brother! A twin! Oh we’ll have to pick a name for you! Maybe Richard, or Ethan or or or Colton!” Connor kept listing off names and Seven couldn’t help but smile.

#♛┊Once you were in my grip I won’t ever let you go (becomedeviant) ┊#becomedeviant #//i did it 2000+ words and i did it #now this makes me wish we #had an RK900 to add to this oddball family

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angelofrainfrogs · 6 years

Text

Heatstroke

Fandom: Detroit: Become Human

Pairing: None (Father-Son Relationship w/Dad Hank and Son Connor)

Description: Connor suffers a system malfunction while on a case and finds out that he's more similar to humans than he originally anticipated.

Rating: T

Genre: Family/Hurt/Comfort

WARNING: UNSAFE TEMPERATURE INCREASE

BIOCOMPONENT INSTABILITY

INITIATE COOL-DOWN?

YES NO

Connor jerked his head to the right, selecting "NO" on the holographic display currently blocking his vision and kept running. He knew he should stop- the large red letters painting themselves directly in his eyesight made that extremely clear. However, he'd been trying to catch this perpetrator for two weeks straight and, now that she'd finally been found, Connor wasn't going to give up the chase that easily.

So what if it happened to be an unnaturally blistering 102 degrees outside? The android's advanced biocomponents should be able to handle the strain long enough for Connor to catch the criminal. He and Hank had worked too many long, tireless hours for Connor to fail now.

The warning began to flash again, repeatedly blocking the android's clear line of sight. His body did feel warm, extremely so, but he would soon find the nearest air-conditioned building and sit there for a few hours, and everything would be okay.

He just had to catch that criminal first.

The obnoxious alert is what Connor attributed to making him knock his foot on a loose brick and stumble. Connor reached towards the perpetrator running further away with every second, as if he could catch her from this distance, eyes locked onto her receding form as the telltale beeping sound of a FULL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN echoed through his head.

"Connor!"

Hank's scream was the last thing Connor heard before he hit the pavement with a sickening thud.

***

SYSTEM REBOOTING: STANDBY

Slowly, sounds began to fade back in. Save for the increased speed of basic life functions, which never truly stopped unless an android was broken, the hearing organs were always the first component to reactivate when an android awoke from a full system shutdown. Ambient sounds of a restaurant faded in: the clattering of plates, employees talking and barking orders, the noise of food sizzling on the stove. However, these sounds were uncomfortably muffled.

Through the fog in his brain, Connor wondered if he'd damaged his hearing organs in the fall. Carefully, allowing time to adjust to the dim lighting, he opened his eyes and took in his surroundings. Beginning an internal scan to assure that all systems and biocomponents were functioning as they should, Connor turned his head to the right and found the reason the sounds were subdued: he was in a large storage pantry at the back of the restaurant, separated from the main kitchen by a closed, partially-insulated door.

Connor shut his eyes briefly, relieved that nothing appeared to be damaged. He had no time to locate a new compatible part; he needed to find that perpetrator and apprehend her before-

"Connor! Oh, thank fucking god!"

Hank's relieved tone prompted Connor to turn his head to the left, just in time to see the detective kneel down next to him and place a hand on his forehead.

"Hank, I'm sorry, I... I overheated," Connor explained, vaguely noting that the pressure on his forehead seemed calming, somehow, though he couldn't quite place why.

"Yeah, so the android-savvy guy on our team told me," Hank responded, the worry lines on his face deepening. "He said as long as I got you somewhere cool so your system could reboot, you'd be alright. This restaurant was the closest building with decent AC."

"Thank you, Hank." Connor offered the briefest of smiles. "You did the right thing; I'll be fine. My system scan is almost complete, and once I've assured that nothing is damaged I can go back out and-"

"Aw, Jesus, shut up," Hank snapped, lifting his hand away only to give Connor's forehead a light flick. "You're staying in here until it stops feelin' like the Sahara Desert outside."

"But-"

"Don't worry, we've got other people on the case; last I heard, they still had eyes on the perp. Just relax, Connor."

The android's lips pursed into a tight line, forehead creasing. He had failed yet another mission due to his inability to listen, this time to his own system regulators. He should have taken the time to cool down before rushing straight out into the heat; he should have known that there was no way he could make it out there more than ten minutes without a break, running at that speed. Androids could withstand a lot, but excessive heat or cold was still one of their weaknesses.

"...I'm sorry, Hank," Connor said, face still crinkled frustration.

"Stop fuckin' apologizing, kid, it's not your fault," Hank replied with the air of an exhausted parent.

"You should go help with the investigation; I'll be okay, really."

Hank let out a barking laugh. "Bullshit! You're gonna sneak out the back door the second I take my eyes off you." Connor's mouth twisted into a brief scowl, at which Hank rolled his eyes. "I'm staying right here until it's cool enough to get you back home."

"...Alright," Connor said after a brief pause. Hank was an extremely stubborn person, especially when it came to others' safety, and Connor didn't have the strength to pick a fight with him in his current state. With a grunt of oncoming age, Hank shifted off his knees into an actual sitting position, back against the wall near Connor's head and legs stretched out in front of him. The pair lapsed into silence for a few minutes, both mulling over their own thoughts.

"...You scared the hell outta me, you know," Hank eventually said, in a rare, quiet tone. Connor tilted his head back, essentially having to look at Hank upside-down because of the angle in which he laid. The detective was staring hard at the ground, refusing to meet Connor's eyes. "Just seeing you go down like that... I didn't know what the fuck was wrong with you."

"It was a system overload," Connor answered simply, "-caused by excessive heat." At that moment, a small ding in his right ear announced that his full-system scan was complete. The blue holographic display flashed in front of his eyes, causing him to smile. "There are no anomalies detected in any of my systems or biocomponents."

"Thank fucking god." Hank sounded relieved. "You hit that sidewalk pretty damn hard."

Connor slowly sat up, allowing his body to fully readjust to the reboot, and then maneuvered himself so that he leaned against the wall next to Hank. The detective glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, his expression difficult to read.

"Your heartbeat is slightly elevated," Connor said, cocking his head. "You still seem distressed, even though I've assured you that I'm fine; what's wrong?"

"I just told you, idiot." Hank gave Connor a light shove. Whether this was meant to be a gesture of camaraderie or annoyance was unclear. "It was really... disconcerting to see you just fucking drop like that. You're always so poised and proper..."

"Even if something did happen to me, I'll come back, remember?" Connor's mouth briefly flipped into a tight-lipped smile that he hoped was at least mildly reassuring. "I don't want to shut down, but if I do, my memory will be uploaded and CyberLife will send another Connor to take my place, just as before."

A grimace of unfiltered terror clouded Hank's face. Then, suddenly, he grabbed Connor by the front of his shirt and gave the android a light shake, speaking through clenched teeth. "Do not fucking think like that anymore, you hear me?!"

"Hank, what-?"

"Do you hear me, Connor?!"

The android nodded, LED flashing red, a tingling at the base of his neck signaling an unfamiliar emotion: fear. It wasn't a fear of Hank himself, for Connor knew that the detective would never truly harm him. It was fear of what could possibly be going on in Hank's mind to make him react this way. Connor understood that Hank had an issue with him "dying," even though it only occurred one time during their first few days together, when a deviant had gotten too stressed and put a bullet through Connor's forehead before shooting himself. However, Connor had been extremely careful to keep from losing his life during the rest of their investigation, mainly for Hank's sake.

Still, the true reality was that Connor's body could easily be replaced. He was a machine, after all, and part of his ability as a prototype was the capacity to upload his memory into a new version of himself to be deployed when the previous body failed.

“…You haven’t had any contact with CyberLife in a while, have you?” Hank said eventually, gently releasing Connor’s shirt. The android shook his head.

“No.” Connor blinked a few times, his LED settling to yellow. “Well, I’ve spoken to a CyberLife representative once during the early relocation efforts, but that was only to put the company in direct contact with Markus. I haven’t been in communication with them myself since the day androids gained freedom, when…”

Connor trailed off, locking gazes with Hank for a brief moment, who nodded in understanding. The android had confided in his friend about what happened that night on the platform when a remnant of his old programming nearly gained control of his system, and Hank had agreed to keep an eye out for “anomalies” ever since. Thankfully, up to that point nothing had been amiss; it seemed as though Connor’s deviancy had completely severed his connection with whoever or whatever was behind the detrimental Amanda program.

Hank heaved a sigh, pulling his legs towards his chest and resting his arms atop his knees.

“I went to CyberLife a few weeks after you started living with me,” he admitted. “I’d never had an android, especially one as… unique as you, so I wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything special you’d need to function. You didn’t come with the usual package of essentials when I took you in, y'know. When I told the guy I had an RK800 model, he gave me this funny look and said that…”

Hank trailed off, exhaustedly massaging the bridge of his nose before continuing. “He told me that on that night in November, about the time Markus was making his speech, all the RK800 models they had in storage just… deactivated.” Connor’s eyes widened, but he made no move to stop Hank’s recounting of events. “There were only nine of them, the guy said, and they were in standby mode just in case… you know. But they all suddenly stopped working at the same time and no one’s been able to activate them since.”

Connor remained silent for a long time, processing what Hank said. That would explain why he was no longer able to feel a connection with CyberLife. His virtual link had been through the next version of himself, and if that android was gone then there was nothing to keep him connected with whatever electronic storage bank kept his memory alive.

That dark tingle appeared at the base of Connor’s neck again as he understood the full ramification of Hank’s words.

“If I shut down now… there’s nowhere to upload my memory to,” the android said slowly, staring hard at the ground.

“Yeah,” Hank agreed with a grunt, trying to remain as emotionless as possible, though he was doing a bad job of it based on his increasing stress level. “So stop with that ‘I’ll always come back’ shit, okay? You’ve gotta take care of yourself from now on and not be so fucking reckless.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?” Connor questioned with a frown, mimicking Hank’s sitting position with arms resting atop his knees.

“You seemed… calmer, recently.” Hank made a vague hand gesture, as if searching for the words. “More… settled; I dunno. Less hell-bent on ‘accomplishing the mission’ while ignoring everything else.” The detective let out a snort, his mouth momentarily breaking into a half-smirk. “I didn’t expect you to take off like a fucking rocket and go after that perp earlier.”

“I thought I could catch her…” Connor sounded apologetic; he felt guilty about making Hank worry. He was also still mad at himself for yet again refusing to listen to what his own systems were telling him. Now, he could no longer afford to be so careless.

“Yeah, well, you didn’t, and it wasn’t worth the risk.” Hank reached over to give Connor a hard pat on the shoulder. “Just keep that in mind next time you decide to run off like a fucking idiot in hundred-degree weather.”

Connor nodded, still staring at the ground. It was a weird sensation to suddenly find out that he was no longer “immortal,” in the sense that if he died now, he was gone for good. Though this obviously wasn’t a good thing, in a way, it made him feel more… human.

“Hey,” Hank spoke up, placing his hand on Connor’s forearm. This time he left it there, gripping the android with tight sincerity. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you when I found out. I… I dunno why I didn’t. Guess I was scared of how you’d react- like you might have an existential crisis or something.”

Connor gave a tired sort of smile. “I don’t think I’ve been a deviant long enough for that sort of thought process.” He rested his hand over Hank’s and reciprocated the pressure. “But thank you. I understand that you were trying to protect me.”

“I guess.” With a roll of his eyes, Hank took his arm back. “Don’t start gettin' sappy; you know I hate that shit. You’re so fucking blunt.”

“Because you are so in denial about your emotions,” Connor responded without missing a beat, cracking a smile. “I’m trying to help you become a better person by allowing you the opportunity to understand your own feelings.”

“Fuck off, Connor, you just realized what ‘emotions’ were seven months ago!”

“Seven months and nine days, to be exact.”

“Whatever.”

Connor let out a small chuckle, and Hank did the same, catching the android’s eyes for a brief second before turning away and shaking his head. After a moment, Hank reached over and coarsely ruffled Connor’s hair, causing the android to blink rapidly in surprise. He’d never received that gesture of affection before.

“I’m gonna go check the temperature outside,” Hank announced, pushing himself off the ground. Connor followed suit, standing up as well, but Hank held up a hand signaling for him to stop. “Nuh-uh- you’re staying right here.”

“But Hank, I can detect the temperature within half a second at an accuracy of-”

Hank shoved his open palm closer into Connor’s face, effectively cutting him off.

“Stay.”

Connor knew he didn’t have to listen. Hank was not his owner, and there was no reason for Connor to obey any commands the detective gave. However, as Hank walked through the back door, pausing before he opened it to make sure that he wasn’t being followed by a curious android, Connor felt no need to go against him.

It wasn’t really an order, anyway; it was more of a request intended to keep Connor safe, the sort of thing a parent would tell a child so they wouldn’t get hurt. Hank thought he knew the best course of action to keep Connor from harm, so he acted based on that personal judgment.

And Connor was finally starting to believe that Hank might, sometimes, be right.

This Oneshot is part of a series that takes place during the Post-Pacifist Ending of Detroit: Become Human.

Read Reunited.

Read Family.

Read Health.

Read Heatstroke. (You are here.)

Read Fear.

Read Nightmare.

Read Forgiveness.

Read MEMORY_CORRUPTED [Part 1/4].

Read MEMORY_RESET [Part 2/4].

Read MEMORY_RECONSTRUCTING [Part 3/4].

#detroit become human #detroit: become human #dbh #connor #rk800 #hank anderson #found family #oneshot #heatstroke #fanfic #fanfiction #ao3 #phantomhivemast3r #midna3452 #hurt/comfort

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