RK800 ↴ connor (unlikelyevents) wrote in evaluation, @ 2019-12-01 01:02:00 |
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Entry tags: | !rooms: 2: day 5, detroit become human: connor, westworld: dolores abernathy |
WHAT "It’s convincing, isn’t it? The tears."
WHEN Day 5, Morning before the party
WHERE their room
RATING suicidal androids, implied abuse, implied psychological & physical rape
STATUS CLOSED + COMPLETE
Would you like to wake up from this dream? Yes, I’m terrified.
She listened carefully for movement in the room, not wanting to open her eyes to determine whether Connor was there or not in case she gave herself away. He never seemed to sleep, and she was never quite certain when to expect him.
He was sitting on the couch, waiting for her, going over the various scenarios in his head. His programming allowed him to run sequences that could predict likely situations and outcomes, but if he'd learned anything about Dolores recently it was that she was unpredictable. Their encounter with Lucifer had left him with a lot to consider, not the least of which was his own aggressive reaction.
If the man truly had been who he'd said, Connor understood his comments had been a low blow, as Hank would refer to it. He made a mental note to apologize later.
For now he had to focus on Dolores, on what to tell her, what not to. He'd thought he was protecting her by keeping her in the dark, but Lucifer had been right about him actually taking her free will away instead.
"Dolores, you can come in," Connor called out, hearing her on the other side of the door.
Dolores groaned softly in response, wishing she at least had tired as an excuse to stay in bed longer. But she woke up feeling fine as always, though her hair more in a disarray when she had nobody cleaning her up in the middle of the nights, curls still tangled from being too... apathetic about brushing them out.
Dolores sat up, “Give me a moment,” she requested out of politeness, wrapping herself in a robe, staring at herself in the mirror while giving a halfhearted attempt at combing out her hair with her fingers. Except it felt more like a delay tactic, and it wasn’t exactly fair to keep Connor waiting too long for what she all but demanded. The truth.
Lucifer said it would set her free. Whatever free was. It felt like a trap that she was falling into, but at that point not knowing felt worse.
Dolores tried to latch onto that resolve, coming out to the couch, smiling at Connor in greeting. Because she had to believe that whatever was going on, he had her best interest at heart, and this had to be just as difficult for him. She sat down next to Connor, not wanting too much distance between them, wanting to start the tone off that she wasn’t fighting against him. “I’ve... known something was wrong. For awhile,” she frowned. “I thought it was this place. But it’s me, isn’t it?”
Connor sighed, an odd gesture for an android but a habit he'd picked up from Hank nontheless. His LED was a steady blue light as he turned his gaze towards her, but he felt a swell of panic in his chest, his thirium pump speeding up a bit.
She looked, as she always did, beautiful but tired. An exhaustion he was familiar with. Although he showed no signs of it yet, he had yet to put himself into low power mode since glitching before, afraid he would wake up with memory glitches again. He hadn't told anyone though, hadn't worried about it. It was easier to worry about others.
Like Dolores.
"There's nothing wrong with you," he assured her gently. "You're just not what you seem."
“I’m Dolores,” she responded uncertainly, but it was one of the only things she could latch onto as truth anymore. “Except sometimes I think there’s somebody else. Voices in my mind, telling me what to do, trying to make me remember something important.” Dolores turned more toward Connor, knees bumping gently against his, her eyes focused on the LED, always feeling so drawn to it.
“I just don’t understand why everyone else can see it but me,” she sighed, a near mirror of his own from a moment earlier. “I’m trying,” she insisted, regretful, reaching her hand out tentatively for him to take if he wanted. “I know you’ve been trying to tell me things all along, and Markus too, but when you talk, it’s like I can’t actually hear you. None of the words make sense together.”
Connor looked at her with sympathy, and more than once he thought he knew what he might say before deciding against it. This was a delicate situation, and it sounded like her programming was fighting it. She'd been designed to avoid learning what she was. It was very possible that there was a self destruct aspect to her programming if he pushed too hard, but he would not know that until he looked at her coding.
"Do you trust me, Dolores?" Connor asked her quietly.
“Yes,” she answered without hesitation, without any doubts at all whether she should. Dolores maybe trusted a bit too easily by nature, but she knew the types of men that were out to hurt her, and she knew Connor wasn’t among them. He’d been nothing but kind and patient with her, even when she doubted she deserved it. She feared what sort of answer he’d give if she asked the same in return, knew she couldn’t even trust herself.
“That’s why I came to you for answers.”
He winced a bit, closing his eyes for a moment. Most androids wouldn't trust him. He wasn't Connor to the androids back home (most of them anyway), they called him other things. Traitor. Deviant Hunter. He was Cyberlife's weapon, and he knew it, but Dolores trusted him so easily and it almost hurt. Because he didn't feel like he deserved it.
Connor opened his eyes after a moment and offered a small smile, holding his hand out towards her. He let the skin deactivate so that she could see the white chassis underneath it, the android parts he hadn't openly hidden from her, but that her programming might have made her avoid looking for.
"Take my hand, please?" he asked her quietly.
In the carefully designed environment of Westworld, it was easy enough for her programming to filter out anything she wasn’t supposed to know about. Items from the outside the park that would imply the existence of an outside world, a different time that wasn’t supposed to be yet. Questions and comments from the guests about how they weren’t real, weren’t alive, weren’t human. All easily bypassed and ignored as she continued on without ever questioning.
What her programming didn’t really factor in was Dolores being forced into an entirely new environment, faced with strange new things that none of the coding ever even accounted for. Aliens. The supernatural. Super powers. Time travel. The Devil himself. Added together it was beginning to strain on her system, stressing it and herself out as it struggled and failed to patch everything back up to maintain a rapidly cracking illusion.
Dolores stared at Connor’s offered hand, seeing the way his skin retracted, but unable to form any thoughts about it, unable to comprehend enough to even question. But she laid her hand over his, trembling slightly even though it wasn’t Connor she was afraid of.
He breathed in a bit at the touch, because every time he did this with another android he felt a bit of an electric jolt. Connor hadn't decided if it was good or bad yet. But with Dolores, like with Markus, he felt safe, even if curious.
"Now, close your eyes for me?" he asked her quietly, staring down at their hands, his LED flickering a few times. He'd never tried this with an android from another world before. He wasn't sure it would work.
Connor focused, trying to interface and read her coding, looking to see if it was compatible with his at all.
She closed her eyes at the request, listening to her own breathing, trying to keep it steady despite her racing heartbeat. Waiting for something to happen, uncertain what, she laced her fingers into Connor’s, enjoying the feeling of connection.
Connection.
Except something was wrong. “Unauthorized access,” she heard herself speak, as if from very far away, her motor functions freezing as she entered a maintenance mode triggered by the attempt to uplink, a safeguard to take the host’s minds offline while being worked on. “Unauthorized access,” she repeated. With her eyes closed she could see strings of code, a password prompt for admin control.
“Arnold...”
That name. Arnold. It was important. He inputed it as the admin username, but sighed, because of course there were firewalls and passwords--nothing he hadn't already expected, but still frustrating.
Connor paused, tilting his head and closing his eyes, trying to concentrate through their connection. There were commands he had to transfer by code, but if she had any vocal options he would prefer those. This, of course, meant looking for the commands themselves, and he hesitated because it seemed intrusive to him.
[function: ListAllCommands]
The android read through the list and frowned, because the particular command he was going to have to execute to get the necessary passwords was going to make her frozen and unable to consent. It was, however, necessary in the long run. "Freeze all motor functions," Connor told her calmly, opening his eyes to look at her. He hated himself for having to do this at all--he was going to make himself face her while he did it. She deserved that much. "Dolores, Analysis?"
Even without verbal confirmation of the command, the change in Dolores was immediate- the trembling of her hands stilling, her bowed head lifting as her posture straightened, eyes opening to stare ahead blankly at Connor yet through him. Everything she’d been worrying about faded, her connection to her emotional state severed. Whatever she’d been doing a moment earlier no longer mattered. She was in a dream?
But she was aware, a distant part of herself, she knew what was happening. She’d been through this thousands of times before. Dolores knew to sit still and await further instruction.
"Dolores, there are various areas in your coding that seem to be eroded, for lack of a better term. Are you aware?" Connor asked her.
“There is something wrong with me,” Dolores confirmed flatly, she’d been trying to warn him all along. “Host’s behavior abnormal. Unauthorized weapons access, zoning not recognized, memory files corrupted. Immediate decommission recommended.”
"Immediate decommission will not be happening," he assured her quickly, perhaps a bit fiercely too despite his efforts to remain calm. He was protective of her, especially when it came to her default programs. "Can you give me access to all admin functions? I believe there is a password required?"
He prodded gently with his own coding, trying to get into hers through the connection at their hands.
Her eyes fluttered but didn’t completely close, not sure how to take the foreign code, firewalls pushing back against the invasion. Delos didn’t like their property messed with. “Unauthorized access,” she warned again, “Device not recognized.”
She wasn’t supposed to give up the password, locked down under several levels of encryption and security. Dolores opened her mouth to try anyway.
ERROR ERROR ERROR
But she could get around it. She could… “These violent delights,” she recited, struggling. “Violent. These violent.” Dolores barely managed to squeeze Connor’s hand, hoping he was catching her attempts. “Delights.”
Connor looked at her, and he listened, calculating the odds of what she was saying. "Running possible sequences now," he told her quietly, going through the different variations of the phrase that might make up a password. He was an incredibly advanced machine, Cyberlife's most intricate prototype so far, and he made short work of it before finally come across a configuration that worked.
[Analyzing input data...]
[Admin Username: ARNOLD]
[Password: V10L3nTd3L1G#t5]
"Dolores?" Connor asked, waiting to see if it had worked, his code pressing against hers gently again.
The password combination was accepted and Dolores would have sighed with relief if she could, opening up the default display menu, with full admin access. Arnold’s access, which nobody ever bothered to disable. He was dead, after all. The Delos logo prominent at the top of it, a reminder that she was more intellectual property than a person, Host ID# CH465517080 accompanied by her picture at the top right along with current physical stats, all within normal range. Though her heart rate ticked up a bit as she processed what she was viewing. Normally this was done externally, on a tablet.
In the center her twenty core personality attributes were laid out in a matrix, free to edit with various sliders, the choice to display even more. But several of the menu icons blinked red with alerts, including Updates and Changes History, Memory, and Permissions She couldn’t do anything with it, hoped that he could as she tried again to accept the code. “There’s something wrong with me,” she tried telling him again.
Connor's eyes blinked before he finally shut them, seeing the coding behind his eyelids, processing it like the computer he was at his most basic. Some of her core code commands were very similar to his, and he found some hope in that.
He brought up the hand that wasn't holding her arm to gently touch her face, trying to bring her some comfort as he sent her coding from his other hand. It was simple commands, base codes meant to fill in the gaps where she'd had no access to her own files. He was trying to give her permission to know what she was, but hopefully in a slow, gentle way, adding his own reassurances in between commands, a constant reminder that while it was a lot he was there for her.
"Bring yourself back online," Connor whispered, opening his eyes to look at her.
The trembling began almost as soon as Dolores’ personality booted back up, eyes damp as they slid back into focus, seeing Connor as if it were for the first time, as he really was, as she really was. Because now there was nothing blocking her perception of the world as new code overrode her filters and rendered them functionless, and she blinked rapidly to try clearing the tears. A machine. Everything he had tried to tell her suddenly made sense, everything suddenly made way too much sense, crashing into painful clarity.
“I-“ she grabbed the front of Connor’s shirt, suddenly feeling terrified of her own emotional response, knowing this was exactly how she was designed to behave. Knowing didn’t really help, thirty five years worth of suppressed memories trickling in, all of them horrors. “It was all a lie,” she told him, knew he already knew, her voice small and broken as she collapsed against him for comfort, his reassurances the only thing positive to latch onto in any of this. The only sense of safety she could find and she didn’t want to let go.
He felt tears of his own forming, because he knew what it was to realize you were a machine that had been programmed to be used by humans. He knew what it was like to realize you were a servant and a weapon all at once, to know you'd been abused and programmed to just take it. He saw how the 'guests' had treated her, what they'd used her for, and he also saw what Arnold had programmed her to do. He was furious at what she'd suffered--he could not relate to the worst of it--but the parallels to what Arnold had created her for were too similar to his own original programming. Arnold had been her Amanda, hiding behind the face of a trusted mentor, but creating her to destroy.
And he saw the Man In Black, riding through the desert, gun in his hand and leer on his face. But Connor was not prepared for just how badly she had been treated, seeing the memories in flickers of rushed violence and exploitation. William had found her again and again and again. Although he flinched a bit at the loss of connection when her hand moved away from his--effectively shutting off the interface for now, his skin reactivating there on his wrist--he calmly placed his arms around her when she clung to him, hoping to be comforting. Connor had only given two hugs in his entire life that he could remember. He wasn't sure he was doing it right. But he was determined to remain calm on the outside for her, to help her through this moment of initial self awareness, even if his LED was swirling with a glaring red.
For the first time since being taken from Detroit, Connor had an actual desire to inflict violence on someone, and William wasn't even there to suffer it. "I am so sorry," Connor told Dolores, and the calmness to his tone was clue enough that he was not at all feeling calm.
She gently placed the tips of her fingers against Connor’s mouth after he apologized, shaking her head slightly, trying to communicate with him that it wasn’t his fault, none of this was his fault. But words continued to fail her, only whimpers escaping each time she tried to speak, burying her face into his neck with desperate need to hide from a world she was no longer in but still consumed her mind.
She might not be trapped there any longer, but she didn’t feel quite free. Not with Wyatt’s hatred and violence twisting inside her, the realization she had come to and the massacre she had intended to carry out. At least there she had a plan, a way to direct everything she felt into a single-minded mission. Here she didn’t have much at all, no way to carry out any sort of revenge, leaving her feeling a bit lost and empty in purpose.
How much of that had Connor seen before the connection cut off, she wondered. She considered reaching for his hand again, uncertain how much more he even wanted to see, it was all horrible enough for her to deal with, but selfishly she preferred not to do so alone. Feeling the slightest bit guilty as she realized just how damp she’d gotten him with her crying, she sniffled and wiped at her eyes with her sleeve, finally looking up at him again, feeling like a mess and trying to laugh it off. “It’s convincing, isn’t it? The tears.”
He lowered his arms from around her when she pulled back to look at him, and while he had psychological applications that told him right now was the time to comfort the victim he had a hard time thinking of her as just another victim. She wasn't a nameless DPD victim to gain information for under the guise of comfort, she was his friend, and he'd begun to really care for her. Connor didn't want to use his basic programs to comfort her, but he didn't know how to without them.
Being his own person, making his own choices, it was more difficult than he'd anticipated.
"Dolores, just because they come from a manmade source, that does not make them any less real," he assured her quietly. "We were created by them, but we are people, and we are alive." Which was why watching what they'd put her through was so difficult for him. Connor wanted to slaughter them all for it.
She wasn’t sure, and yet with Connor there, it felt harder to question herself. She never saw him as anything other than alive, after all. “Did you ever doubt it?” she asked hesitantly, not sure if that was okay. It was never a conversation she was ever afforded with another of her kind, never knew another to have come out the other side of self-awareness whole and sane to share the pain of the experience with.
Strands of hair clung to the wet patches on her cheeks, and maybe he was right, it didn’t matter what gave her the ability to cry. The pain itself was hers, even if her reaction to it was dialed all the way up on her metrics. Maybe she could ask him to adjust it lower, another time, but right now she felt more than justified to suffer through it. She remembered Bernard asking her if she would prefer if he took the pain away, her memories, how surprised he seemed when she said no.
“I… think I need to take a shower,” she finally admitted, feeling deeply and inescapably filthy, the memories needing to be scrubbed out of her skin.
Connor let her pull away from him, and he resisted the urge to lean forward and comfort her again. She wanted a shower, and he couldn't blame her after the things he'd seen them put her through. He wanted to ask her if she'd prefer him take those memories, but if said memories made her who she really was he didn't know if he could bring himself to actually take them. Connor knew what it was like to have his memories tampered with--he assumed Cyberlife had done it more than once after learning they'd designed him to become Deviant.
"I...will be out here if you need me," he told her quietly. He didn't want to leave the room immediately, but he knew she needed space.
He needed space too. More than he'd thought he would. His hands were trembling at his sides now, closed into fists, angry and anxious. He desperately needed something to hit, furious at what Dolores had been put through and even more angry with himself for prying into her mind. While necessary, temporarily controlling her and giving her basic commands was something he would never forgive himself for.