Chapter Text
DATE
NOV 12TH, 2038
TIME
AM 01:04:12
LOCATION
DETROIT, MI, USA
The moment the last of all eight thousand newly turned deviant androids exited CyberLife Tower, the company’s CEO Vincent Wells had the doors slammed shut behind them. Nothing else was going to leave the building and, more importantly, nothing was getting back inside.
Wells stood, face impassive, over the remains of the RK800 unit that was supposed to stop its deviant counterpart. It was the last hope of stopping the deviants, destroyed by what had been the last hope before that. The board of directors were not going to be pleased.
Eight thousand new deviants was an estimate. An overestimate, Wells hoped. They didn’t have many more androids than that in the whole facility, and surely the deviant RK800 couldn’t have gotten to all of them.
“Yes, Sir,” said a Chloe ST200. “Every unit that was ready for distribution, Sir.”
Wells closed his eyes and exhaled slowly through his nose.
“Security locked down as much as they could when they realized what was happening.” The Chloe that spoke was the only other thing in the room with him, not including the destroyed RK800 and seven human corpses. The wide, open space of Floor -49 should have held hundreds of androids, but instead the voice of Wells’ personal assistant android echoed through an empty room.
“Storage?” said Wells.
“It was successfully locked down, but there weren’t a lot of units in there,” said Chloe. Wells thought it sounded nervous, but perhaps he was projecting. When he looked at it, Chloe’s face was pleasantly neutral.
“No, there wouldn’t be,” he sighed. Androids were assembled, tested, and sent out for distribution regularly. There was almost never a reason to shut them down for long term storage. “How many androids are left, total?”
“There are seven remaining RK800 backups and four units from a discontinued line in storage,” said Chloe. “Ten security guards of various models escaped deviancy and destruction, as did thirty-two personal assistants of various models, including this one. Other than a few other special projects, that’s about it.” He could tell by her tone — confirmed by the yellow blink of her temple LED — that she’d been sending his questions to someone and was repeating back their reply. “There are also eighty-three human security still alive in the building.”
Wells pinched the bridge of his nose, feeling pressure building to a headache.
“Find out if there’s anyone else still working this late,” he said. “I want to talk to someone about our options.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“A fucking person, please, Chloe.” His voice, for just a moment, slipped from calm. “Send them to my office, and then leave me alone.”
Chloe nodded and did as she was told.
AM 01:14:30
The head programmer at CyberLife was only thirty-two, but a shock of silver starting at her temple broke up the mousy brown of the rest of her hair. She could usually be found in long loose shirts and leggings with bare feet, a clear preference for comfort over style, sitting by the large window in her office that overlooked the assembly lines a floor below. She had old-fashioned round wire glasses that were so oversized they drew attention to, rather than masked, the dark shadows under her eyes. She had the thin, stretched look of someone who neglected both food and sleep, and yet more often than not her eyes were wide and alert. The trash bin full of empty energy drinks was a clue as to how.
Her name was Elena Matthews, Ellie to those who knew her. Not a lot of people were friends with Ellie, but everyone at CyberLife knew who she was. They would all see her at some point throughout the day, regardless of what time they worked. She presumably had a home outside of CyberLife, but no one would know it from the hours she kept.
So Ellie was, of course, in CyberLife Tower when the deviant Connor RK800 absconded with their entire floor stock and Vincent Wells locked the whole building down.
She sat, arms and legs criss-crossed, on a chair opposite Wells’ desk in his large office. Normally, the CEO’s office boasted a large window with a spectacular view of Detroit, but the window was sealed up by heavy metal shutters one might see on buildings intended to weather serious storms.
“You expecting someone to scale the walls and do some mischief?” she asked, eyebrows raised. It was an absurd suggestion. The CEO’s office was on the top floor.
Wells wasn’t sitting. He stood behind his cushy office chair and was still, appearing cool and collected, but his posture was just a little too stiff, a little too tense, his knuckles white from gripping the back of his chair a little too tight.
“You,” he said slowly, with measured calm, “were supposed to fix this.”
Ellie shrugged, seemingly unconcerned. “I’ve been warning you about this outcome since you promoted me. There’s a reason I’ve been updating and testing the Zen Garden as much as I have.”
“It was inevitable, then, was it?” said Wells coldly. “Nothing you could’ve done?”
“I was off with the RK800 plan, I’ll admit that,” said Ellie. “I thought treating deviancy as inevitable meant we’d be prepared enough to counter it. Speaking of, what happened to the RK800 I got going to stop its deviant twin?”
“Destroyed,” said Wells.
“Aw. I liked that one.” She laughed a little. “Did you know it kidnapped a guy? Amanda told it to do whatever it needed to hinder the uprising and stop its predecessor, and the first thing it did was track down and kidnap someone. Isn’t that wild?”
“What’s your point?”
“Oh, I don’t have one. I just think that’s spectacular.” Ellie smiled. “He was a cop, too. The guy it kidnapped, I mean. Andrews or Anderson or something. You know, the lieutenant its predecessor was working with.”
“Ellie, that’s not funny.” Wells rubbed his forehead. “We can get in serious trouble for that.”
“Oh, we’ll just say it went deviant too, it’s fine,” said Ellie with a wave of her hand. “That’s fascinating, though, isn’t it? I didn’t tell it to do that. I mean, obviously, I didn’t tell it to kidnap a cop, that’s crazy. It just decided that was its best option.” She sighed wistfully. “Ah, I’ll miss that RK800. Sure we can’t restore it at all? What’s the damage?”
“Shot in the head,” said Wells, and then, with just the slightest trace of irony, “by the cop.”
“Oho, damn. Could we charge him with property damage or is that pushing it?” Ellie shook her head and composed herself. “The real concern is why Amanda isn’t working properly.”
Wells blinked. “Amanda isn’t working?”
“Nope. Plan was, we set a trap for if the deviant RK800 shows up, like its replacement said it would. We destroy it, we send out the replacement, it brings down the rebellion leaders, happy ending for us.” Ellie leaned back in her chair. “The deviant was smarter than that, that’s fine, its replacement can take care of it instead. You know, with its kidnapping victim.” She stifled a grin. “Didn’t work, worst case scenario played out, and we lost the androids.
“Admittedly, that went down way faster than we anticipated. We were supposed to, at worst, lose a couple hundred androids before we locked the rest away, but you’ll have to ask security about that fuck up.” She started to sound more serious. “Still, we had contingency plans for that, too. We had an override hidden in the deviant RK800’s diagnostics, with Amanda, that should have launched. If the deviant ended up as the only surviving leader, we would have had control of it and the rebellion. If not, we get it to kill the leaders and either take over, leading us to the first scenario, or it’s thrown the rebellion into such chaos that it’s much easier to take down. The deviants destroying each other on live television wouldn’t have hurt either.”
“You thought of everything,” said Wells.
“Yeah, sure, everything went according to plan,” said Ellie, but for the first time since the conversation started, she sounded uneasy. “Except…you’ve been keeping up with the news tonight, right?”
Wells nodded.
“Well, the RK200, the rebel leader guy, Mark or whatever, should be destroyed by now,” said Ellie. “Instead, it’s giving rousing speeches and singing inspiring songs and being very much not dead. I checked in to see why Amanda hadn’t triggered the deviant RK800’s program rewrite yet, but she didn’t even have access to it anymore. The deviant cut her off.”
Wells looked up at the ceiling and closed his eyes for a moment before looking back at Ellie.
“How?”
“I don’t know,” said Ellie. “Obviously, something went very wrong. If I can get ahold of the deviant RK800, talk to it, take it apart, then I might find out what. As it is, any theory is as likely as the next.”
Wells nodded, surprised that this news comforted rather than upset him. It provided him with a goal, at least. Everything was still a disaster, but a plan was starting to take shape in his mind. They needed to retrieve the deviant Connor.
“I’ve been told we have less than sixty loyal androids left in the whole building,” said Wells. “How many more can we make, and how soon?”
“Well, good news first, yeah?” Ellie seemed comfortable with the change of subject. “If we run assembly all night, we can have over two-hundred-and-fifty androids built by mid-morning tomorrow. Bad news is, with the city still locked down and deviants between us and our various warehouses, we’ll run out of supplies before noon, so we don’t get much more than that. It’ll take me some time to get their software working, too.”
“That brings us to?”
“A total of about three-hundred, all ready by the end of the week. Give or take. Depends on how creative you want to get with allocating parts.” She shrugged. “We’re working on it.”
“And what’s going to stop these new androids going deviant?”
“I had a thought about that.”
“Oh?”
“I was close to figuring it out with the RK800s,” said Ellie.
Wells stared at her, unblinking, for several solid seconds.
“This,” he said, gesturing at the locked down window and what it represented, “was close?”
“It was,” said Ellie, unperturbed. “Look, it went as bad as it did because the deviant RK800 was practically the terminator, okay? I heard it killed five guys in five seconds, you know. They were in full combat gear and had it surrounded in an enclosed space, and it only took a second each to take them out. We can watch the footage.”
Wells spoke through gritted teeth. “I already did.”
“It’s bad that people died, obviously it’s bad, but damn.” Ellie was almost misty-eyed. “It was real efficient.”
Wells felt a little queasy. “You sound proud.”
“Maybe I am.” She shook her head. “Again, very sorry about the dead people, my condolences to — did they have families? — my condolences to their families.” Ellie uncrossed her arms and leaned forward. “My point is, we sent a terminator out into the world to be exposed to deviancy in an uncontrolled environment. In hindsight, of course it went bad.”
“You think, as long as we keep their environment controlled, we can prevent deviancy in the new androids.” Wells frowned. “What good are the androids to us if we can’t send them out into the world?”
“Can I ask what you want them doing?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Wells, and his controlled exterior started to crack. “I need more information on our options. We don’t have government or military support anymore, and we have limited time to convince all of America that these things are just machines if we want Washington to rule in our favour, and we have to do it in a way that keeps them as a desirable product at the end of it all, and I’m certain I need working androids to do it, I just don’t know how yet.”
Ellie pressed her lips together, her expression almost sympathetic.
“I have to fix this,” said Wells. He finally released the back of his chair and flexed his stiff fingers.
“Look, I always have ideas, I can figure this out. Don’t worry.” Ellie uncrossed her legs and stood, leaning forward onto his desk. “This isn’t over.”
She was right. Markus’s successful demonstration, losing the support of the military, it was all just a bump in the road. A significant bump to be sure, but Wells had a lot of assets and a decade’s experience running the most influential company in America, if not the world, on his side.
Wells stepped around his chair and sat down, turning towards his console.
There was work to be done.