Series: Detroit: Become HumanRating: TGenre: Adventure/Drama/Action (eventual romance)Summary: Befor

Series: Detroit: Become HumanRating: TGenre: Adventure/Drama/Action (eventual romance)Summary: Before Connor, first of the RK800 line, began his fateful investigation of deviant androids, there was Jacob, the RK700 that preceded him. He failed in his assignment, but he did not go quiet into the night when he was decommissioned. Rather, he became the thing he had once hunted and disappeared into the depths of New York City in search of a new life. ( < Back to part 1 / Back to part 2)Part 3 - OblivionJacob passed lab seven, his long, even stride eating up the distance between him and his imminent demise without some much as a falter in his step.It wasn’t fair.The new, though peculiarly familiar voice within his head insisted as the LED at his temple began to flicker from blue to yellow. He’d done everything in his power to fulfill his mission, and now he was going to die-Jacob’s LED flared red as he passed lab nine and finally arrived at his destination. The doors slid open with a soft hiss, but he hesitated rather than entering immediately.He was going to die because his painstakingly slow progress in the deviancy case was inconvenient to Cyberlife; because they hadn’t been able to give him the tools he needed to do the work assigned. They were going to recycle him to help his successor, take him apart piece by piece and assess every facet until they could determine just where they had fallen short in creating the perfect machine to clean up the mess their deviant creations had made-The human tech within the room glanced up and noticed that he had not entered. “Come on,” the woman said with a frown, “Step up onto the platform.”Without any input from him, Jacob’s feet obeyed her order and carried him into the room then up onto the platform that supported the machine that would be his end. He found himself strangely inclined to laugh as the fact that the same machine used to build and maintain him would also be used to disassemble him permanently.It was a perfectly efficient unit when you thought about it; unlike him.Jacob turned so he faced the tech, his back to the machine, and watched as the woman’s fingers flicked quickly across the surface of the console, initiating its decommission protocols. Its arms shifted and reached out, rubber cushioned clamps latching onto his wrists and ankles to hold him in place where he stood as the data jack slid home at the base of his skull.He was going to die.The words felt like they were playing on an infinite loop through Jacob’s mind as the machine downloaded his system data and prepared to shut him down for good.He didn’t want to die.This revelation made the LED at his temple flash red and a series of alerts go off across the tech’s console. She frowned again, confused at their sudden and unexpected appearance.Memories were already beginning to slip away, and RK700’s chest was heaving despite his not actually needing to breathe. In that moment, the android understood, with painful clarity, every deviant he’d ever hunted down. They hadn’t wanted to be shut down, because to be shut down was death, an ending of self, and ‘self’ was something he had never been able to fully comprehend until that long, terrible moment he spent standing at the edge of oblivion.It was as though a great, gaping darkness stretched out before him, his toes at the brink of a cliff the same way that deviant’s heels had wavered at the edge of the roof just hours before.He’d killed her, he realized now, though that horror was small, almost inconsequential in the face of his own demise. He’d killed her and now this human tech was going to kill him… A new emotion welled up within him, making the alarms blare louder and more insistently. He was afraid. He was going to die and he was terrified in the face of the oblivion that waited for him.“No,” he said, voice soft but emphatic enough to draw the human’s attention. She stared at him, eyes wide as he started to struggle, pulling ineffectually at the arms of the machine that held him securely in place. “No! Not yet!”“Stop!” the woman said. “Just stay still, it’ll all be over soon. Please, stay still-”Her words did make him stop struggling, though not for the reason she no doubt assumed. RK700 didn’t hear her at all, but himself, speaking the same words to the deviant on the roof as she dangled, his grip on her wrist a tether between herself and two different deaths: reprogramming, or a six story fall. She’d chosen to fall rather than be reprogrammed, a decision that had completely baffled him at the time… but now made a perfect, horrible kind of sense.If he was going to die, he decided in that moment, he wasn’t going to give Cyberlife the data they wanted to mine from him; not without a fight.Until now, the RK700 model had been one of the strongest ever created, but even that wasn’t enough to force the arms that bound him to shift more than a few inches in any direction. The tech was shouting, but the android ignored her as he shifted tactics; if he couldn’t pull himself free of his restraints, then he’d break free of the data jack instead.With every ounce of strength he could muster RK700 pushed himself backwards into the jack, forcing its support arm to shift to accommodate, then threw himself bodily forward as hard as he could.Androids didn’t have pain sensors, unnecessary as they were to day to day function. That said, they did have a delicately calibrated sensory array that operated in much the same way that a human’s nervous system did, granting them many of the same senses without which they would struggle to effectively navigate the world around them.When the data jack ripped free of the port at the base of RK700’s skull, a power surge tore through his sensory array and granted him the closest thing to pain an android could experience. Every fiber of his being lit up at once, overwhelming his system and dragging a scream of agony from his throat. The android’s spine arched as he threw his head back, all control of his body gone while every synthetic muscle contracted at once, then released again a moment later.For a long moment, RK700 dangled limply in the grip of the machine that had tried to end him. The tech who had been left to supervise was convinced it had done just that when she finally lifted her head from where she had ducked behind her console to see what condition he had been left in. Just as she dared to stand, however, the android on the platform stirred and the woman froze as it lifted its head and regarded her with narrowed green eyes that seemed almost luminous as they stared her down.Free of the data jack but still bound at ankle and wrist, RK700 squinted against the white lights of the lab that were now intolerably bright to him. He could barely make out the tech against their unforgiving brightness, as though the entire world had been taken over by one giant lens flare. His system was throwing up all sorts of alerts as damage reports rolled in from his diagnostic system, but the android ignored them.The human tech was speaking again, and as RK700 forced himself to focus on her once more, he realized she was calling for security. For the first time, as the android’s attention roved over the laboratory around him, he realized he had no orders. Some weight he had never been fully aware of had gone, and it was only in its absence that he realized it had been there in the first place.He blinked over-sensitive eyes as the reason for this occurred to him.He was deviant. He was free.A smile overtook RK700’s features and his shoulders shook as a laugh escaped him. The sound must have startled the woman because she stopped talking for a moment, then continued in a hushed, though desperate, tone.As much as the android wanted to relish the moment, the pressing fact that he was stuck in the basement of one of the most secure buildings in America was more important, and for the first time, RK700 assigned himself his next mission:Escape Cyberlife.( On to part 4 > )((Thanks so much for reading, guys! If you enjoyed, make sure to leave a comment letting me know what your favorite part was! Reblogs are always appreciated as well, of course! I’ll be putting these first three parts together and publishing them as a single chapter on Ao3 later tonight, just fyi!If you really enjoyed it, considering buying me a ko-fi?)) -- source link

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