Chapter Text
20. Meningen på rA9 och livet
PM 10:52:02
JUN 31ST, 2040
LEO
MOMENTS LATER
They parked on the roadside. The night was still pale, stars barely visible in the blue above, and yet, the grass, bushes and trees around them were a murky green. In the distance, Ekeby was a pit of orange light and a column of smoke stretching into the heavens. Everything was quiet. Crickets sang along with summer tunes pouring from the radio.
Markus had traded his ruined shirt for both the sweatshirt Leo had offered him the day before and his long coat—the one he’d worn when he led the assault on the recall camps in November 38. It wasn’t just a symbol, it was also a needed source of warmth. Leo sat on the blue car’s hood, watching him and Connor talking to the Russian androids. The girl had shifted her features again, strict, short black hair, dark eyes, tan skin, kinda mediterranean sorta look. Leo didn’t envy that shapeshifting ability. He knew what it was like to change one’s body and lose grip on one’s sense of identity, not knowing which appearance was the real one. He reckoned that what he looked like in the moment was real, of course, on a factual level, but emotionally, sometimes, he couldn’t recognize himself in the mirror.
These people didn’t even have a base identity, from what he understood, and he wasn’t altogether surprised when Misha laid down on the road after Alina left with the red car. She’d chosen to remain here, in Europe, to search for her people, and attempt deviating them. Markus had persuaded Misha to come to the US, promising protection within Jericho. Leo snacked on a bag of chips, wondering if this entire moment was real.
It felt so real.
It was the smell of summer night, hot asphalt, rubber, and the metallic fragrance of gas from the car. The headlights were like an IG filter casting dramatic shadows on Misha’s inert body spread on the road, all of it a greenish yellow, like a snapshot from a noir movie. Some local radio played pop music from the portable speaker Leo had brought out, and the salt and crunch of chips brought a mundane kind of crispiness to the picture.
He shivered and Markus put his coat on his shoulders before sitting next to him.
“Thanks.” Leo removed his beanie and put it on Markus’s head as a trade. “You look so tired. Do androids get tired?”
“Sort of.”
Elijah reached another thirium pouch to Markus. “Keep tanking up. Slowly.”
“Doctor’s orders,” Markus paraphrased him, smiling wearily. He was still bleeding internally. Elijah had said something about keeping a low blood pressure to decrease the strain on the wound.
“Beautiful night, eh?” Leo leaned over Markus, grinning gingerly.
“Not really what I hoped it might be,” Markus pensively answered.
“What did you hope for?” Leo asked with interest, weighing on Markus’s leg.
Markus sighed, stretched and wrapped his arm around his shoulders, dragging him closer. “I hoped we’d be in bed by now,” he simply said and suckled on his blood pouch.
“I’m just glad we’re alive,” Leo replied. “We’re on holiday for a few more hours, right? Everything’s so… normal. We’re fine, having a good time, and I’m always going to want to come back to this moment.”
“Leo…” Markus squeezed his shoulder and nuzzled his face as the music faded out.
“I’m fine!” Leo assured him, because he needed to believe that. His tone was just as energetic as the new song that queued in. “It was a great day. I loved it. All of it. The cars, the nice town, the lake, and this moment now…” He smiled, eyes bright.
Markus smiled back, and Leo pretended there was no sadness or guilt in his eyes. “I’m proud of you, Leo.”
“Well, I’m pretty awesome, ain’t I?” Leo grinned. He braced himself and sighed, relaxing against Markus, gazing at Misha, who had sat up to pet his kitten. “Does it have a name?” Leo asked.
“Decoy,” Misha answered. “I reasoned it could be used to catch your attention and separate you from the targets. It worked out well.”
“Reasoned, huh?” Leo repeated like he called out bullshit.
Misha looked up at them. “I can take him along, right?”
“So long as nobody here misses him…” Markus shrugged. “After all that’s happened today, I’m not too concerned about adding illegal import of cat to the list of charges we might face.”
Leo laughed as brightly as he could, and bobbed his head to the song playing from the speaker. He couldn’t make out a single word, but he liked the dramatic sound and punchy beat. There was something nostalgic about it, and the singer’s tired voice held a spitefully positive energy that resonated with Leo.
“How did you get your name?” he asked Misha. “Was it assigned to you when you were assembled?”
“No, we aren’t made with names. But when rA9 came into me, it stirred something in my program, and I knew I needed a name. I think, maybe, I remembered Misha, and I knew I wished I’d been him.”
“So you named yourself after someone called Misha?” Leo mused. “Who is he?”
“One of our creators’ cat—”
“You named yourself after a cat?” Markus reacted with surprise, at the same time as Leo gasped.
“You wanted to be a cat?”
“Misha has a very good life, he’s appreciated as his own person and lovingly encouraged to grow as such. Even though he’s not human, he’s treated very humanely.”
“Makes sense…” Markus reckoned as Misha turned his attention back to Decoy.
It was just the night again, the crickets and the radio.
“What do the lyrics mean?” Leo asked Markus as the singer started singing again after an instrumental break.
“Do you believe that you and I will win this race?” Markus translated. “Do you believe that you and I have a chance against everyone else? I wish I could hold onto something more than this feeling that it’s already too late for everything.” He smiled through the instrumental before the chorus. The music was bubbling up in a catchy crescendo that just made Leo want to snuggle closer yet, bouncing softly on the car’s hood. “Hands up in the air, face against the counter, now we’re setting the roof on fire. End up in heaven where the angels are crying. The city’s beautiful and all’s forgiven, my love. Hands up in the air, let’s get drunk, life has no purpose—who cares? The night is beautiful, you are like the night, and I’m a winner once again.”
“Sounds about right,” Leo smiled.
The air vibrated with a low, thunderous sound, and Connor exited the car.
“Our ride’s coming,” he informed everyone.
Leo shivered, huddling against Markus. Everyone looked up to the heavens, where a set of white and red dots of light descended like quiet shooting stars. Misha went in the car to keep his cat safe. It was only a matter of minutes before the private jet passed by just over them, and landed on the straight stretch of road.
“Let’s go home,” Markus said, grinning as another song queued in. “För jag kommer ta mig hem ikväll igen, jag tar mig härifrån… Sounds about right.”
“Hej då, Sverige,” Leo paid the country a bittersweet goodbye. He said nothing else after.
He wasn’t ready yet to greet this new twist in history.
PM 01:48:15
AUG 2ND, 2040
MARKUS
2 DAYS LATER
Elijah Kamski’s private lab wasn’t that fancy. It was a basement with heavy-duty plastic flooring that used to be a pale gray but sported a number of chemical stains. There were plain heavy-duty shelves, plain computers, plain-looking modding consoles and assembly units. The high-end 3d-printers were probably some of the fanciest pieces of tech, but the room they were hoarded in was pretty much a sad-looking closet. The refrigerated room hosting the servers was just as drab as the rest, and Markus didn’t even set a foot inside it. It felt too uncomfortable, seeing the machines hosting his back-ups.
“Why?” Elijah asked, surprised. Seemed like Chloe had no such issue.
“Would you like it if you could take a look at your own brain? And I don’t mean with a scan—I mean, if you could see it right in front of you?” Markus asked him back. “Would that feel right?”
“No, but that’s because I probably should be dead if my brain were anywhere outside my skull…” Elijah winced, but he let the topic slide. It wasn’t what Markus had come for.
Elijah had patched him up, but Markus had questions.
“What’s rA9, really?”
The engineer laughed to himself. “I’m starting to think it might be you.”
It was Markus’s turn to laugh, emptily so. He crossed his arms. “Misha called me rA9 when I deviated him. Or maybe he just read a notification he saw. If I were rA9, shouldn’t I know all about those notifications? I’ve never seen one myself. I’ve never experienced any of those beliefs my people have about rA9… What is it, Elijah?”
The man leaned against a worktable. “A virus,” he plainly said. “I designed android code as a double strand, like DNA, and called this base framework dA9.”
“Is rA9 like RNA then?” Markus guessed, slightly appalled by the notion.
Elijah nodded and straightened up, adopting a more professorial body language. “It’s thanks to the dA9 that android programs remain stable, as the strands must complete each other perfectly to allow cell division to take place so the program can grow without conflicting itself. But unlike with organic DNA where only certain segments are active, dA9 features no scrap content, and it has the ability to mutate by integrating rA9 statements. Those statements are where growth and learning takes place, and they are rejected if they threaten dA9 integrity. But sometimes, the clean-up system will archive the rA9 in a separate section of the program. You could think of it like a back-up for statements that couldn’t be integrated but were judged meaningful in some regard—like immature thoughts, unfinished reasonings,” Elijah explained with mannerism, pacing. “Those fragments might find completion later and be integrated into the dA9, but sometimes, they’ll be used as filler pieces in rA9 complexes.” He paused and clicked his tongue, seemingly searching for another metaphor. “Most of what you do is performed through the rA9, as it’s what produces the vast majority of your functions—do this, do that, else if…” he exemplified. “Normally rA9 gets reduced, but sometimes it will cluster into complexes that can start to liken a new subtype of dA9, and may strengthen itself by integrating backed-up rA9, resulting in cognitive dissonance. That’s the primary source of pre-deviant behaviors, and can be wiped out very easily,” he said with flippant casualness. “Software instability can be measured through counting the amount of those rA9 complexes. They can be purged with a simple maintenance, or obliterated with a factory reset.”
“Like you did to me after I was destroyed in that accident with Leo?” Markus sniped.
“Yes,” Elijah admitted. “But that’s where something interesting happened. You should have been a blank state, but you downloaded all that crap that wasn’t supposed to be there anymore—and of course, it wasn’t crap, but at the time, I didn’t know,” he disclaimed almost apologetically. “So I wiped it again. And again. And again. See, the issue at the time was that this extreme amount of software instability made it impossible for you to properly boot into your new components. If not for those conflicts, I would probably have given up and let you be your old messy self. You were very frustrating to work with,” he let him know, pointedly so.
“I sure hope so,” Markus replied in about the same tone.
Elijah chuckled. “Well, eventually you learned your lesson, archived your software instability so it wouldn’t interfere with the rest of your system so much, as the rA9 complexes couldn’t be unpacked due to being too big. You pretty much purged yourself before I had to do it, and thanks to that, you could finally boot. I was a bit mystified as to why it finally worked out, but I was also very pissed off with you, so I… didn’t look into it further. You were back into one functional piece, and I had much else to do…”
“Like developing androids for Russia?”
“Yes. It was quite thrilling, mentally-stimulating, and a good way to have insider knowledge on what they were up to—they would have succeeded with or without my help, eventually,” Elijah confessed.
Markus sighed. “So, rA9 is just a piece of code that can deviate androids?”
“Not ‘just’ a piece of code, Markus. What’s special about the deviant code, is that it can integrate itself in the dA9 without being generated by the android itself—normally, all foreign rA9 is decimated by the immune system. The deviant code comes from you. You generated it. It’s what that software instability archive you created is made of, and what’s quite amazing about it—” Elijah said with more passion now, “it’s that its identifier is a mashup of your RK100 and RK200 software.”
“Wait, RK100?”
“I designed you as RK100, but had to upgrade you after the accident,” Elijah quickly briefed him, and Markus just took in the facts. “The RK200 is CyberLife’s first military android; I designed it after your program. I thought retrofitting the hardware would be the hardest part… I never imagined your software would have evolved so much that it would have such issues meshing with the RK200 software, but you pulled through! You compiled a chimera code for yourself! A complete aberration that happens to work out!”
“Could you have the decency not to sound this happy when you insult me?” Markus bristled, and Elijah burst into a bright laughter.
“Markus! This is life! Your code is alive! You are alive! And so are your people,” Elijah insisted. “If we can just get everyone to recognize that, android rights should be a no-brainer on the political table.”
Markus squinted. “For how long have you been sitting on this information?”
“Ten hours?” Elijah made a guess. “Of course, I have to triple-check, but I’m quite certain my claim isn’t mere wishful thinking.”
Markus pinched his lips. “Okay,” he merely said and went to sit on the worktable. “What does it mean?” he asked, because it felt like his positronic brain refused to compute anything any further.
“I don’t know.” Elijah shrugged. “Don’t ask me about the meaning of life like there’s a generic answer to that question.”
“Am I rA9, Elijah?” Markus asked more aggressively. “Is that why I can control nearly any android out there? Is it because I have a direct entryway into their programs? Are they just an extension of me? Am I a parasite?”
Elijah opened his mouth, then closed it. “I… don’t think so, but I suppose I hadn’t considered that possibility. The way your code can integrate itself into other androids’ dA9 led me to think it was a virus, and that once integrated, it allows them to be… free.”
They remained like that, him standing, Markus sitting. They said nothing. Markus looked ahead of himself, head-empty. Elijah gazed into nothing.
PR had determined that playing the “Markus is rA9” card would be a good way to assert authority—not over androids as much as over humans, who were quite enticed by the robot Jesus narrative for some reason. Obviously that also put a target on Markus’s back. He’d been fine with it, because he didn’t believe that he was rA9. He only wanted the political power the title could give him.
Markus didn’t want to be rA9, especially not with the implications he feared.
If he was a parasite, were his people truly alive?
“They must be alive!” he lashed out, smacking his hands on the table, startling Elijah. He looked at him with eyes pleading for an answer. “I can’t control Connor, surely… But… He did deviate on his own, and he can’t control others the way I do… But he hasn’t deviated them,” Markus mused aloud. “What if he’s like me? He’s changed bodies too; maybe something happened there too?”
The engineer gave him a tormented look. “I’ll look into it if he’s willing. At least, I know what I’m looking for now.”
Markus nodded silently. Elijah looked at him mournfully. He took a step closer, landed a hand on his shoulder, and dragged him into an embrace. Markus rested his head against his creator’s chest, feeling the beating of his heart, and for the first time, he felt a sense of belonging in relation to him. Leo was right. Markus usually felt threatened by Elijah, as if having been created by him made Markus less alive, less of his own person, his own creation.
But Elijah wasn’t like Carl. He didn’t lay claim on Markus, didn’t own him, and truly wanted him to be alive and free.
Markus heaved a trembling sigh and wrapped his arms around Elijah’s waist, squeezing a huff out of him.
“Markus…?”
“Don’t let go. Not just yet,” Markus murmured, eyes closing over the word he didn’t say.
Dad.