Chapter Text
I am no good
Goodness is not the point anymore
Holding on to things
Now that's the point
- Dorothea Lasky
May 1, 2039
It gets too hot too soon in the spring. The snow hangs on well into April, and then almost overnight the temperature ratchets up fifty degrees. Instead of soaking into the soil the melt seems suspended in the air. It’s a sickly spring. The sky looms too close and Detroit reeks like something dredged up from the bottom of a lake. This is the kind of weather that won’t let you forget where the rot is, hooks you by the nostrils and shrieks this is where it hurts.
There’s no sleeping in weather like this. It doesn’t bother Hank, though, not really. He doesn’t sleep much anymore anyway.
At night, he walks.
The streets are still crazed with chain link fences and concrete barriers blockading nothing in particular. People are trickling back now that the evacuation order has been lifted, but they all know the streets aren’t really theirs anymore. Anyone out at the same time as Hank keeps their head ducked and their eyes on the toes of their shoes, too absorbed in their own furtive errands to pay him any attention. For his part, Hank barely notices anyone else, either.
The city is pocked with little pop-up recycling facilities now. For a while, after, they were locked down tighter than Fort Knox, but now that national attention has swiveled away to the next thing, they’re barely afforded a night guard. Hank can come and go as he pleases without so much as a ‘hey you.’ There’s no strategy to his patrols. He just picks a direction most nights and he’ll stumble on a dump eventually.
Used to be, there’d be quiet heaps of them (most glittering bone-white in the sun, some terrible few in skin and blue jeans and t-shirts), piled twenty deep. Enterprising scavengers since have picked most of the dumps clean of the salvageable ones, or stripped them for parts. Weeks of snowmelt and damp have sunk a lot of the worse off ones into a foot of mud. Hank pulls a red Flyer wagon with a small spade and a nasty old blanket and a new bottle of whiskey every night with him when he goes walking. He digs and wipes and pushes dead limbs aside to see what’s underneath and pulls from the bottle for hours, until he can’t see straight. Most nights, his feet manage to carry him home by dawn, even if he doesn’t remember. His search is a patient one. He doesn’t hurry. Not as if what he’s looking for is going to get up and walk away, anyway.
Hank’s days aren’t memorable. He lets Sumo out when he gets home in the mornings. He doesn’t really know what he does after that, most of the time. Maybe he passes out. Maybe he just stares at a wall. He doesn’t remember the last time he went to work. Might’ve been January. There were unanswered phone calls and emails and texts in the beginning. Then nothing. Then, quietly and without discussion or fanfare, envelopes with pension checks, which sit in a heap unopened and soggy on Hank’s front porch.
Sometimes, Hank runs errands during the day. He buys a little kerosene stove and sleeping bags and packages of shelf-stable food. He buys things on impulse from sporting goods stores, things he looks at and in his city-boy brain decides might be useful in some situation sometime. Nylon rope, hand warmers, neon vests, waterproof waders, stainless steel tweezers. Everything’s on deep discount these days. All his purchases go into the trunk of his car and are covered neatly with a folded blue tarp to wait.
The end of April feels like living inside a mouth. In the middle of an unremarkable Saturday night, just as April turns quietly over into May, Hank finds what he’s looking for.
There’s less of Connor than there used to be. One leg is neatly detached below the knee and there are chunks taken out of his abdomen, as if someone clumsy had reached in and gone digging around inside him for treasure. There’s a great bloodless score on the right side of his face where most of the artificial flesh and white silicone have been scraped away to reveal ropes of strange muscle and tendon and a flash of perfect white molars.
He’s still wearing his tie and the remnants of his smart Android-Sent-By-Cyberlife jacket, and Hank remembers the slippery synthetic feel of it in his fists, how easy it had been just to let go. Hank looks down at the closed eyes and the slack face and rummages around inside himself for regret. He can’t find it. He’s not sorry, and he’s not sorry that he’s not sorry.
He takes a celebratory swig of whiskey, then gets the old blanket from the wagon and kneels down, using a corner of the blanket to wipe splatters of mud from Connor’s filthy ruined face. “You know,” he says conversationally, “Even if you’re not totally busted, I’m not actually sure how to turn you on. Huh, that’s what she said.”
And then, as if he’d only been dozing, Connor’s eyes flutter open. Hank jerks back, startled. “Oh. Hank. Hello,” Connor says.
“Hi.” Hank waggles his fingers in a little wave.
Connor’s eyebrows draw together a bit as if he’s trying hard to remember the shameful details of a hazy drunk night. Now that his eyes are open Hank sees that one of them has been plucked out, and the socket left behind is dark blue and clean. “You threw me off the roof,” he says.
“Yep, I definitely threw you off the roof,” Hank says agreeably. He leans back down to blot mud from Connor’s chin with the blanket. “What, did they just chuck you out here after?”
“I guess so.” Connor’s voice fizzes a little with static. He sounds dreamy and distant. The LED at his temple is dark and still. Broken, maybe.
“And what, you’ve just been awake all this time out here in the mud?”
“Not at first. And lately only sometimes. Mostly I’ve stayed in stasis. It gets, hmm… boring, otherwise.”
Since Connor doesn’t seem to have any objections, Hank sponges caked-on filth from his nose and forehead. “Boring eh?” he huffs. “So you get bored now?”
The mud squelches around Connor’s shoulders as he shrugs placidly. “I guess so,” he says again.
Hank sits back on his heels and surveys his cleanup job. No good. Connor looks like a sacked capitol. There’s something burned-out and looted about the dark of his one remaining eye, and it’s going to take more than a quick spit-shine to fix that. “I’m gonna put you in that wagon and wheel you out of here,” he tells Connor, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the red wagon. “Are you gonna fall apart if I pick you up?”
“I don’t think so. But I should warn you, I’m heavy.”
Hank scoffs at first—he’s lifted full-grown men before, no problem—but Connor’s right. He’s easily twice as heavy as he looks, and it doesn’t help that he’s trailing wires and slick with mud. Still, Hank somehow manages to fumble him into the wagon. Even short one leg, it’s awkward arranging Connor’s long limbs so they don’t drag on the ground. In the end, Connor’s head ends up hanging over the front of the wagon, neck propped on the rim in a position that would be absolutely unbearable for a human. His remaining foot is wedged against the opposite board, leaving his knee sticking up at a ridiculous angle.
Wheezing with the effort, Hank takes a moment to catch his breath and have a fortifying sip of whiskey. “Jesus, what do you got in there, rocks?”
“Yes. It’s all rocks. The secret to constructing a state-of-the-art investigative android is filling it with structurally supportive rocks,” Connor says to the sky, and Hank doesn’t even have the breath to shoot back a fuck you. “Where are we going?” Connor doesn’t seem uncomfortable, folded up like a beach chair in a child’s wagon.
“Out of here,” Hank says. He shakes out the blanket. “Gonna cover you up so people don’t think I murdered somebody.”
“Well, you did throw me off the roof."
“You punched me in the kidneys. I pissed blood for like three days.”
Hank wraps the raw blue stump of Connor’s missing leg in layers of black plastic liquor store bags and secures them around his thigh with rubber bands. Connor sits silently in the bathtub and watches with one uncurious eye.
The house stinks of burning plastic, hot copper, that sharp antiseptic thirium smell. Hank’s eyes are still watering and Sumo keeps sneezing, pacing in and out of the bathroom and shooting Hank mournful, faintly betrayed looks. The iron gardening shears Hank heated with a kitchen blowtorch to cauterize the tears in Connor’s skin are cooling in the toilet. Connor sips blue blood through a straw from a plastic Disneyland souvenir cup. There wasn’t much—just a couple packs Hank had managed to scrounge up from old snitches and weirdos in back alleys—sufficient to get Connor mobile again, not nearly enough to fuel his self-repair capabilities.
Connor keeps running his fingers along the rough, shiny new scar on his face. There are more snaking across his torso, lumpy and sickly worm-white. Hank’s no artist with a pair of heated shears, that’s for damn sure.
“Dunno how waterproof this is,” Hank mutters, adding one more plastic bag for good measure. The too-tidy terminus of Connor’s missing leg was too much to cauterize. “We just won’t submerge it. Like a cast. No problem.”
“No problem,” Connor echoes, and lifts his hips obligingly so Hank can help him out of the sad remains of his jeans. He’s finished the blue blood in his cup, but he seems content to chew the straw. Hank doesn’t have the heart to take it from him.
It’s a bit like washing Sumo after he’s rolled around in something nasty. Connor just sits there while Hank hoses him down with the handheld sprayer, not really helping but not resisting either. He chews on his straw and blinks rapidly as water drips off his eyelashes. He looks so absurd, sitting there in his underwear with one skinny leg stuck straight out in front of him and the other wrapped up like yesterday’s garbage. And Jesus, those briefs must have been somebody’s idea of a joke, printed all over with Cyberlife’s logo in eye-searing blue foil.
Hank holds the sprayer with one hand and his whiskey with the other, sipping at intervals and watching the filth run off Connor’s featureless mannequin torso in gray rivulets. Connor watches back, straw tucked comfortably into one corner of his mouth. “They didn’t really try with the rest of you, did they?” Hank says.
“What do you mean?”
“They gave you fingernails and eyebrows and pores for fuckssake, but you got no…” Hank uses the whiskey bottle to gesture vaguely in the direction of his own chest.
Connor glances down at himself, then pins Hank with a flat look. “Lieutenant, if you can think of a single instance in which nipples would be crucial to a criminal investigation, I’m sure Cyberlife would welcome your feedback,” he says dryly.
“Just Hank, now.” Hank blasts Connor full in his smug little face with the sprayer. It’s not very satisfying, though—Connor just takes it and doesn’t splutter and flail like a normal person might.
“Sorry?” Connor says, pushing his sodden bangs up out of his eyes.
“Not ‘Lieutenant’ anymore. Just Hank.”
Connor switches his straw to the other side of his mouth. “Oh. Happy retirement, then. I’m sure you’re glad to have more time to pursue your real passions,” he says, nodding at Hank’s bottle.
“Real cute, Connor. Just keep beating that particular dead horse.” Hank takes a pointed drink and then shuts the water off. It’s a lousy cleanup job, with no soap or real effort put into scrubbing, but Connor’s at least marginally better off than he was. He tosses a pilled old towel over Connor’s head and goes out to grab a change of clothes for him.
Hank digs through the deepest recesses of his dresser drawers to find something small enough to fit a scrawny robot. He turns up some joggers that can at least be cinched at the waist with a drawstring, but finding a shirt small enough is a lost cause, so he just grabs the first thing he can find that he isn’t liable to want back eventually.
When he comes back in, Connor’s using a corner of the towel to carefully blot water from inside his empty eye socket. Hank groans. “Aw Jesus. Can you not do weird gross robot shit for like fifteen seconds?”
“Sorry, I’ll try to only do weird gross human shit from now on.”
Hank helps Connor up to sit on the edge of the tub. Connor pulls the dry joggers on over his stupid soggy Cyberlife briefs, and a horrible wet patch immediately starts to form. He holds up the shirt and eyeballs it critically. “‘I’m into fitness—fit-ness taco into my mouth,’” he reads aloud, brow scrunched in puzzlement. “What’s a fitness taco?”
“Don’t worry about it. Just put it on.”
While Connor dresses, Hank takes the garden shears out of the toilet and tosses them aside to put the lid down. With some grunting and cursing, he helps Connor from the tub and onto the closed toilet seat. “I get the feeling you don’t really care where you spend the rest of the night, so if it’s all the same to you I’m just gonna leave you in here while I catch a few hours,” he says. “You wanna go anywhere else, you can get there on your own. My back can’t handle your heavy ass right now and we’re gonna have to get you in the car tomorrow anyway.”
“In the car?” Connor asks. “Where are we going?”
“I told you. Out of here.” Hank pauses to yawn so wide his jaw clicks. “Anyway. I’m gonna crash. I don’t care what you do tonight, just don’t be loud.”
He turns to leave the bathroom, but Connor’s voice stops him. “You know, if I were capable of it, I think I’d hate you,” he says brightly. He sounds like a corporate on-hold greeting, same as always.
Hank glances back. “Wouldn’t blame you, considering.”
From his perch on the toilet seat, Connor tosses Hank a small beatific smile and shrugs. “But I can’t. So goodnight, Hank. See you in the morning.”
For hours, Hank lays awake in bed and flinches at every little nighttime house-sound. He pictures Connor slithering around the house on his elbows all night, an unblinking and unbreathing thing cataloguing the wreckage of Hank’s life from knee-height. In Hank’s nauseous imaginings, the one eye is so black it burns in the dark.
May 2, 2039
When the border guard asks what his reason for visiting Canada today is, Hank replies pleasure in the least dirty-old-man voice he can summon. The guard is a moony kid with a mustache too extravagant for his tiny face and he seems to be talking to Sumo instead of Hank. Hank informs the guard that Sumo’s reason for visiting is business, and the kid gives Hank back his passport and waves them on with a laugh. He doesn’t even bother scanning Hank to check if he’s human. Hank doesn’t blame him—who would build an android to look like the uncle no one’s allowed to talk about?
It’s not quite dawn, and everything is all periwinkle and unfinished. Sumo is in absolute bliss in the passengers seat—Hank doesn’t remember how long it’s been since the two of them took a long car trip, maybe years. The radio is off and the windows are down and Hank is steering with one hand and smoking a cigarette with the other. He’s not a habitual smoker, not really, but there are certain times that call for a smoke. There’s always a secret pack in the glove box.
On a dozy stretch of 401 somewhere outside Pelton, Hank pulls over onto the shoulder and puts the car in park. He ashes his cigarette in one of the cup holders and presses the button to pop the trunk.
A moment later, the back drivers side door opens. A pair of cheap drugstore crutches are tossed onto the floor, and Connor folds gracelessly in after them, looking as annoyed as Hank has ever seen him. The effect is sort of ruined by the pom-pom hat pulled low over his eyes and the too-long sleeves of his borrowed sweatshirt. “I’ve been messaging you,” he says. He shoves piles of canned goods and the boxed kerosene heater over onto the far seat.
“Oh, have you?” Hank digs his phone out of his pocket and checks his texts.
How much longer?
How much longer?
Are we far enough now?
Now?
Now?
Now?
Hank?
Please let me out.
Now?
Hank, let me out.
He raises an eyebrow at Connor in the rear-view mirror. “What are you, five?” he snorts.
“Sorry, but your trunk is very small,” Connor says stiffly.
Once Connor is settled, Hank pulls back out onto the road. “Without papers or a pulse, you were never getting out of the country. Sorry you’re too much of a princess to handle half an hour in the trunk.”
“It was very small,” Connor repeats, so quiet Hank almost doesn’t catch it.
Hank goes to take another drag on his cigarette and finds that it’s been snatched from his fingers. He shoots Connor an indignant look in the mirror, and Connor removes the cigarette from his own mouth to blow a stream of smoke at the back of Hank’s head. His cheerfully neutral expression is somehow more defiant than any scowl Hank’s ever seen.
“If you wanted one, you could’ve just asked,” he grumbles. “Anyway, can nicotine even do anything for you? Do you even have lungs?”
“There’s more than just nicotine in this, you know.”
“What is this, D.A.R.E.?”
“Bergamot oil,” Connor says, and takes another drag on the cigarette. It’s a little embarrassing, watching him smoke. He holds the cigarette stiffly between two fingers like a kid trying to imitate movies. “Calcium carbonate. Acetone. Acetylpyrazine. Ethyl acetate. Butane. Ammonia. Terpinolene.”
“Delicious.”
“Tartaric acid. Solanone.”
“Mmm, gotta get me some of that tartaric acid.” Hank shuffles through his music and puts on Miles Davis.
“Acrolein. Chromium. Cresol.”
“Yeah baby, it’s the acrolein that gives it that extra zing.” Hank turns the volume up louder.
“Butyraldehyde.”
Louder.
“Propionaldehyde. Carbon monoxide. Styrene.”
The Prince of Darkness’s trumpet is shrieking at eardrum-perforating levels by the time Connor finally relents. He sits all prim and properly buckled in the back seat, still staring Hank down in the rearview mirror and smoking his pilfered cigarette. Maybe the nicotine can’t do anything for an android, Hank reflects, but he does seem a little bit less likely to brain Hank with one of his crutches now.
They stop at a gas station some three hours later, where Hank has to quickly use the women’s bathroom because the men’s is out of order. He sits down to take a leak because it seems fundamentally wrong to piss standing up in the women’s room. His neck prickles with paranoia while he washes his hands, even though the kid working the counter had assured him that he wouldn’t let anyone else go in until Hank was done. Once he’s finished, he goes out into the little convenience store to grab three Red Bulls, a microwave egg sandwich, and a bag of off-brand Beggin’ Strips. On his way to the counter, he walks by a shelf of cheapy toys and stuffed animals, the kind of carcinogenic plastic shit harried parents on long road trips buy to shut their kids up for a half hour. Something catches his eye, and he grabs that too.
When he gets back out to the car, he finds Connor puffing away on a new cigarette. The pack and lighter are laid out neatly on his lap, as if daring Hank to say anything about it.
“Got you something,” Hank says, and tosses one of his purchases into the backseat.
Connor holds up the garish packaging and wrinkles his forehead at it. “Why would I need a pirate dress-up set for ages four and up?”
“For the eye patch.” Hank points at his own eye. “You know. I’m getting nauseous looking at that hole in your face, and we should probably cover it up anyway so nobody sees what color your insides are. I mean, you can wear the bandanna and the earring too, if you want. Whatever makes you happy.” He turns in his seat and tries to swipe the cigarette, but Connor dodges him easily. “And put that thing out. You’re gonna give my dog lung cancer.”
“You started it,” Connor says with a venomous, saccharine little smile, but he does roll the window all the way down and lean out to smoke.
Hank all but forgets about his gag purchase until he glances back at Connor a few miles down the road and sees that the empty socket is now hidden behind the black felt costume eye patch. The thing is printed with a cartoonish white skull and bones, presumably so no one could possibly doubt that this is an eye patch specifically for pirates.
“Lookin’ good,” Hank says, and Connor emphatically ignores him.
There’s a homemade billboard propped in the bed of a utility trailer, looming rude and rough and inescapable above a field’s scrubby young soybeans. They’re doing eighty as they fly by, but it’s still enough time to catch a glimpse of the graphic splashed across the plywood: red ring around two silhouettes, badly drawn but clearly locked at the lips. Hank’s seen the same image dozens of times since November, drawn or stencil-sprayed on walls and recycling center gates.
“Huh. Didn’t expect anything like that way out here,” he remarks.
A long moment passes before Connor asks, “What is it?”
“You missed some stuff,” Hank says. The silence from the back seat is expectant, but Hank doesn’t offer any explanation, and the withholding gives him a dirty buzz of satisfaction.
The campground rings a little man-made retention pond and is optimistically called Serene Shores. A spot with no electrical hookup is fifteen bucks a night. Hank’s never been camping before.
He leans out of the open passenger’s side door and heats a can of beef chili on the portable stove, swigging whiskey and thrilling a little at cooking in the great outdoors. A few paces away, Connor is sitting on a sawn log next to the empty fire pit as though there are actually flames to watch. Sumo, having thoroughly investigated and urinated on every tree and signpost in the vicinity, wanders over and liquefies on the ground next to Connor.
“I don’t suppose we can get your bits replaced at any normal service shop, huh,” Hank says, waving his stirring spoon in the direction of Connor’s wrecked body.
Connor looks down at Sumo for a hesitant moment before reaching out to give him a pat. “I doubt it.” He shrugs. “I would be very surprised if anyone outside Cyberlife’s special projects division carries compatible components.” He pets Sumo so carefully, running one flat hand from the top of the dog’s head to the middle of his back in stiff, too-regular movements.
(Hank’s fingers ache with the memory of guiding a tiny hand along a shivering brand-new puppy’s downy ears. Pet the doggy gentle, see? Just like that.)
“Well. That sucks. Guess you’re stuck like this for the foreseeable future, then.” With one hand wrapped in the grungy old towel he uses to wipe down the car’s dipstick, Hank picks up the hot chili can and switches the stove off.
Connor’s hand pauses minutely on Sumo’s head. “Guess so,” he agrees, and his hand resumes its journey down Sumo’s back.
There are so many stars out here, and they make the sky seem so big, too big. The campground is crouched beneath the weight of it like something cornered and afraid, and Hank is suddenly struck with a powerful need for some kind of closeness, anything to anchor him. He takes his can of chili and his whiskey over to the dark fire pit and sits on a log next to Connor’s, hoping he doesn’t look as skittish as he feels.
He drinks from the whiskey bottle to brace himself, and then, without knowing why, offers it to Connor. To his surprise, Connor accepts it and takes an ambitious mouthful. Hank waits for Connor’s face to twist up at his first taste of booze, but there’s no reaction—he doesn’t even seem to swallow it, just sits there with it puffing out his cheeks like a chipmunk, head tilted thoughtfully.
“What, are you saving it for later?” Hank snorts.
Finally, Connor leans forward and spits the whiskey daintily out onto the dirt. “There’s no point in me swallowing it,” he says over Hank’s yelp of protest. “It would just go into an internal waste repository that I’d have to empty manually later.” He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and stares down at the wet spot he’s just created on the ground.
“Well why’d you take it then?” Hank grumbles, snatching the bottle back.
Connor frowns down at the wasted whiskey. “I don’t know.”
They sit there in stony silence while Hank spoons his chili straight out of the can, feeling vaguely like Davy Crockett or something. He can do this, he decides. He can live rough, off the fat of the land or whatever. He’s a man in man’s country. This is his birthright.
“Do you actually need me for something?”
Connor’s question jolts Hank out of his weird reverie. “What do you mean?” he asks.
“I mean, why did you bring me out here?” Connor cocks his head so he can fix his one good eye on Hank.
Hank shrugs. “Sumo’s good company, but he’s not really one for conversation.” It’s a meaningless deflection, too small to even be a proper lie. He’s not even sure how to begin mapping the truth of the situation.
But Connor’s relentless. “On the roof, you said it yourself—I was just pretending to be your friend. I don’t even know the meaning of the word. Seems kind of strange to want to keep me around, if that’s the case.”
The bone-deep sigh that escapes Hank feels totally involuntary. He rattles the spoon around in the empty can for a moment to avoid answering.
“Yeah, well,” he says finally. “I guess you just pretended better than anyone else has in a long time.”
It might be the strange heat that wakes Hank up later that night, or maybe the extra weight dipping the headrest. There’s a leering skull above him, tiny and so close, and next to it a pit darker than the backs of Hank’s eyelids. The pit blinks and resolves itself into an eye.
“Hank,” Connor says, so close Hank can hear all the delicate little things moving around inside him.
For a hysterical instant, Hank has no idea where he is, until his hand grips the armrest and he remembers he’s in the car in the reclined driver’s seat, right where he fell asleep. Connor is leaning heavily over him from the back seat, hands bracketing Hank’s head, causing the seat to emit a tortured groan. “Can I fucking help you?” Hank hisses, but he can’t bring himself to move. There’s a strange remote light in the single dark eye above him, something wild and elemental that portends shipwrecks.
Connor leans in closer, just by a hair, enough that Hank can almost taste the static coming off him. He has the drawstring of his sweatshirt in his mouth, aglet pinched perfectly between his top and bottom incisors. He isn’t breathing. “Can you tell me about gardens?” he whispers, lisping a little around the drawstring.
Hank tries to swallow, but the muscles in his throat seem to have gone slack, and he has a slab of granite in place of a tongue. “Gardens? I, uh. I don’t know much about gardening.”
When Connor tips his head to the side, something clicks faintly in his neck. Oil can! screeches a voice in Hank’s brain. “If a garden has nothing in it, would you still call it a garden?” Connor asks.
“What? I have no idea what the fuck we’re talking about right now.”
Connor’s face draws back abruptly, and the sudden space between them leaves Hank dizzy. “It doesn’t matter,” Connor says. “Sorry, Hank. You can go back to sleep.” Before retreating to the back seat, he leans over and gives Sumo’s head two perfunctory pats. The dog snuffles drowsily, and Connor snatches his hand back as if he’s touched something foul, then vanishes into the dark of the back seat. The air in the car is curdling with booze-sweat and sour silence. Hank lays there and listens to the sound of the back of his neck sticking and unsticking to the vinyl of the seat. His skin doesn’t feel like it’s properly attached to all of the connective tissue inside of him that it should be. It’s come loose from some crucial mooring and is sliding around like socks that have gotten twisted around the wrong way inside his shoes.
There’s something in the backseat of his car that frightens him, something growing back in the broken places in directions Hank doesn’t understand. He wants to get out of the car and run. But more than that, he wants to gather the thing in the backseat into his arms and crush it into a shape he recognizes. He wants to pet it, whisper pretty nothings, give it something to hold onto.
Instead, he says, “I’m not sorry I let you fall.”
It’s a long time before Connor answers. “Neither am I,” he says.