becoming human / a+e (d:bh au)

[tick 12a / calla]

E D E N

"Lieutenant."

The officer approaches Eden carefully where he's crouched over the rotting corpse of a man, a thick manilla of case-notes in his hands.

Carlos Ortiz. Male. 29. Unemployed, with a criminal record of theft and public disorder, stayed several stints in a psychiatric hospital between 2033 and 2036. Allegedly stabbed to death with a kitchen knife by his newly registered secondhand HK400 android.

There's a message on the wall behind his corpse, written in either ink or blood: I AM ALIVE. It was presumably written by the deviant android before it fled the scene of the crime, nearly a month ago.

It makes Eden's skin crawl.

The gore is the easier part to handle. The corpse has long started to go bad, turning on itself as the skin and the organs starts to all rot. There's a gathering of flies around the mess of its stomach. There are likely maggots already settled underneath it.

They've lost two officers to weak stomachs already, Eden dismissed them easily and called for replacements. They were only plain clothes anyways, not the deviant specialists he'd asked for. Sergeant Flowers escorted the two away from the scene, aware of how little patience Eden has for repeating himself. And for good reason.

He's the youngest lieutenant on the Detroit Police Force, and the youngest in Detroit history, pulled from the top ranks of the Police Academy and heading the newly formed deviant division. Cases like these are specialities - cracking down on criminal and dangerously malfunctioning androids. He stays under the radar in the force, out of the papers and the limelight, and lets the Captain take most of the credit.

It's an easy tradeoff, anything to keep the public from being reminded of the only other two old and buried articles his picture is in - the bust of an android/human fighting ring from ten years ago, the one with the single lone survivor. And the follow up piece, a boasting around the rich family that took the survivor in as a charity case and sent him to school out of the goodness of their hearts.

"Lieutenant Le Roux." The officer says again, "The Cyberlife truck's arrived."

"I heard you." He murmurs softly, eyes still on the message. It looks like there's water damage on the wall behind it. "When will Detective Nuan be here?"

The officer shuffles. Eden keeps examining the wall.

"Uh, Sir, she's... not coming. That's why Cyberlife's here. Said they could handle it."

There's a beat of tense silence.

"The forensic team then." They're still there, still very human, huddled in their white coats near where the knife was discarded, "Get them on that message. I want to know whose blood it is."

[gamemaker kelsier]

A V R I E L

There is no birth, only this: the cheerful little song a washing machine makes when it's done it's job.

⟣ ⟢

Avriel sits in the back of a CyberLife truck, waiting patiently for the case he's being dropped into to load into his system. His fingers, bone white where they touch the interface of the small computer in his lap, vibrate at such a high frequency that it would be unnoticeable to the human eye.

But the person sitting across from him is not human.

He opens his eyes and the sound of running water flows through him, tagged to a visual of a Japanese zen garden. Fingers of sunlight push through the canopy created by a maple tree. Avriel nods, the corner of his mouth flicking up briefly into a smile.

"Have you received the case file?" his handler, Gloria, asks him.

"Yes Ma'am. Looks similar to the case we dealt with three weeks ago," Avriel says and pulls his hand back from the console. Synthetic fluid runs back over his structure quickly, hiding the imperfection of his being in a matter of seconds. Avriel flexes his hand absentmindedly, as if the change was painful. It is only a reflex action programmed to give him a false humanity.

"It is important we solve this quickly," Gloria tells him, "I don't need to tell you why that is."

He only nods and the garden bleeds away, leaving him sitting in silence in the back of the truck once again. Avriel arrived exactly ten minutes and thirty nine point eight seconds ago but he has yet to be deployed. That's not much of an issue in a case like this one, where the violence enacted was already performed weeks ago.

Avriel is used to this wait period, it has happened more times than the android can count on one hand. The humans always hold on until the last possible moment and they're all out of ideas before they call him out of storage.

But a human ego is a strange thing, something Avriel is grateful not to have.

As he waits, his cognitive function begins to slip. His system, unique to him, balances it by having his hands begin their idle function- he drums his nails against the metal bench he sits upon. tap, tap, tap, in the same staccato rhythm of that washing machine's song.

"Hmm," Avriel says to no one as ten minutes becomes fifteen, "Bureaucracy."

Finally, at time mark seventeen minutes twenty-four point one three seconds, the door of the van opens and Avriel stands up. The circular light on his forehead flashes a steady green and his armband is visible as per standard. The officer at the door to the truck grins up at him, "You again, huh?"

At her appearance, information begins flowing onto Avriel's visual feed. Officer Adroxis, born September 12, 2016. Twenty-two years old, assigned to Deviant Unit, no criminal record, holds permit to carry hand gun.

The question is rhetorical, but a connection can be made here through the use of a human conversation construct known as 'banter'. "Me again," he says with a nod and ducks his head to exit the back of the truck.

That's to be expected as Avriel is the only RK800 currently in use. He doesn't tell her this, she probably knows.

He moves quickly towards the location of the crime, nodding politely at officers he has interacted with before along the way. This isn't because he is happy to see them again, Avriel has simply been programmed with a set of scripts created to help him seamlessly integrate into a team.

At the doorframe to the living room, he is stopped and told to wait. Avriel does as he is told and leans impassively against the wall for two minutes and fifteen point two seconds, until he is finally allowed to enter.

At first, he ignores the detective standing beside the body, focus immediately caught on the decomposition happening at his feet. A quick scan tells him the victim's name, despite the rotting flesh. It matches with the one provided in the case file he uploaded twenty minutes ago.

Carlos Ortiz, born October 27, 2008, died October 17, 2038 twenty-nine years old, confirmed criminal record. Ten days shy of thirty years old. It means nothing to Avriel, who has only been in use since August.

He then raises his eyes to look at the writing on the wall.

I AM ALIVE.

His scan tells him that the blood is human but anyone could have known that. The question is whether it's Carlos' or not. Avriel analyzes it quickly, sensors measuring the width of each stroke.

"The writing, It's mathematically perfect," he says.

Finally, he turns to face the detective.

[tick 12a / calla]

E D E N

The officer steps away to alert the forensics team and Eden tries to work out if a message like this is enough to warrant a report of suspected consciousness. He'll still write it in regardless. The team's got a specialist in Chicago that's researching the correlation between potential free will cases and the rise of deviant numbers within the past year, he'll want to see this.

"The writing, It's mathematically perfect."

“Yeah mate, no shi-“

He glances up. The technology’s gotten so seamless that the voice didn’t immediately give him away. They've gotten better at that. Still, Eden can’t see the professing disk at this angle, but he knows the uniform.

RK800. There's been an upgrade then. Eden had foolishly hoped that the Captain would stop pushing androids into his unit focused on decommissioning androids after the last RK600 on a case like this got too close to a deviant and switched sides faster than Eden's officers could take it out.

They both had to be tracked down in the end. Melted down completely. A waste of resources.

At least this one looks better. Cyberlife must've gotten tired of their ginger models.

Eden still tenses near immediately, rising from the crouch, “Don’t need a ‘Droid to tell me that.”

That's the leading bit of evidence that brought the Deviant Unit here in the first place. spotted by one of the plain clothes on the first sweep. Humans don't write in perfect font, not unless there's a serial killer walking around with a ruler, it's way too neat.

He ignores the android. Maybe it's just. Leave him alone.

The forensics team has started to disperse from the knife, one of them holding it up in a plastic bag while the other goes over it with a handheld scanner.

"Mali! Where's my blood analysis?"

One of them, not Mali, and not holding the scanner for the blood sample, scurries over.

"Twenty-seven stab wounds counted, sir." She reads from her clipboard, "We'll prepare to move the body now."

"Twenty-seven." Eden repeats incredulously, looking back at the body and whistling low, "Someone had it out for him."

The HK400 is still the prime suspect. There's so much of the public that's unwilling to recognize how dangerous these things can be. If they end up killing you, they think, then they'll do it in the most efficient way possible, the least painful way, the quickest. Robots are programmed for efficiency, after all.

But those people are stupid, and they're very, very wrong. Eden's seen enough androids chose brutality over efficiency to last a lifetime. It's all the more terrifying when something comes at you like that, with all of the gestures of passion and of anger and of desperation, but none of the actual feeling.

They don't stop if the kid is crying or screaming, or even begging. They're not programmed for empathy. They stay dead behind the eyes.

He nods and shakes it off, "Wrap it up, then. Nuan can get a better look at the lab."

[gamemaker kelsier]

A V R I E L

"Yeah mate, no shi-"

The detective's face is pulled downwards, as if a weight is anchoring the corners of his mouth and the furrow in his brow.

First things first, Avriel scans him. A red circle appears around the Detecive's face, writing appearing directly below that. Jason Song, known name is Eden Le Roux. Born in 2014, no recorded date. Expat from Sydney, Australia. Assigned to Deviant Unit. No criminal record. A link to a news article pops up, about a fourteen year old boy found as the lone human survivor of an android fight ring. A picture of him from ten years ago comes up beside the headline.

Avriel watches Jason take him in, his processors in his eyes catching the exact moment that Jason's expression turns from one of indifference to dislike. He skims the article quickly as the detective tells him that his help is not needed. The details are gruesome, it's no wonder he doesn't like androids.

"I have orders," Avriel tells him even as Jason tries to dismiss him.

He's used to prejudice from the cops, they've seen the full extent of what a deviant android can do though, it's logical.

Another man approaches, this one nervous looking, like he has something to hide. Avriel scans him quickly in case he does. It's much the same as the other members of this unit, nothing to see.

While he waits for the Detective to finish with the newcomer, Avriel looks around the room some more, scanning anything that looks useful. His eyes catch a small bit of plastic peeking out from under a well worn armchair. He bends down to retrieve it and as soon as he pulls it out, he knows what it is. He doesn't even have to scan it.

Red ice, a synthetic stimulant composed of trace amounts of thirium, acetone, lithium, toluene, and hydrochloric acid. Interesting, he passes it to the newcomer standing beside Jason, known as Eden.

"Twenty-eight," Avriel corrects.

[tick 12a / calla]

E D E N

Eden really does a commendable job of ignoring the android as it wanders around the scene. He still can't help by shift slightly as it moves, keeping it in his line of sight even as he directs his officers.

The place really is a pigsty. It's hard to tell what was damaged beforehand and what could be damage from an altercation. Half of what's been marked as evidence is probably just mess and clutter.

"Twenty-eight." The android says.

Eden and the forensics officer both look over at it, briefly surprised. Then the officer flips through her clipboard furiously, swiping the touchpad at the back and typing something in. She blinks at the screen a few times and then looks at the android, avoiding Eden and his slowly darkening gaze.

"Oh, yeah, it's right. Twenty-eight stabs wounds, not twenty-seven."

"I thought our scanners were supposed to be up to date."

"Well, they are. It's just that-" She makes a little nervous gesture to the android, "The new RK model is really, really up to date. It's supposed to have real time analysis too - hey, 'Droid d'you-"

"Dimova." Eden cuts her off, biting.

"Sir." Comes the voice of another one of the officers. He's holding a small plastic bag. "We've got Red Ice, we need to call in Drugs and Narcotics."

Shit.

The Red Ice Task Force was one of the Department's greatest achievements. The crack down on the drug had soothed the population two years ago, and that was supposed to be that. It's talking point at every function. It's the Captain's favourite work story.

It's a bad sign for Task Force's success. It also makes this case much more complicated.

"Where did you get that?" Eden demands, already feeling the beginnings of a stress headache forming.

The officer points to the RK800.

The headache flares.

"Don't touch anything else." He snaps at it.

Androids don't leave fingerprints, but that doesn't mean there isn't some other way it can mess up Eden's crime scene.

"Don't talk to anyone, don't touch anything, just stay out of the way. Got it?"

[gamemaker kelsier]

A V R I E L

"It was kicked under the armchair in the struggle, detective," Avriel says, pointing out the places the victim and his assailant moved through the room as he recreates it in real time through virtual reality. "Red ice can cau-"

"Don't touch anything else."

Avriel pauses, head falling to the side slightly at the human's tone, as if he's trying to hear better and the movement is simply a programmed quirk instead of a slightly annoyed idiosyncrasy in his system.

"Don't talk to anyone, don't touch anything, just stay out of the way. Got it?"

"Got it," he says with a nod, and then steps back closer to the wall so that the forensics team can move around him with ease.

Sometimes he forgets that humans do not like being corrected, not even by the technology they themselves created.

Avriel stands there, fingers tapping against his leg as the forensics team works around him. While he waits, he scans Dimova next. Sabine Dimova, born August 11, 2015. Twenty-three years old, assigned to Deviant Unit. No criminal record, holds permit to carry hand gun. His gaze flicks away again and it falls on a knife on the carpet. A simple scan shows it to be from a popular knife block found at most home stores. The knife itself is a chef's knife, six and a half inches long and covered in flaked, dried blood.

Avriel looks back up at the wall. I AM ALIVE it reads. The circular light to the right of his temple flashes yellow for a brief moment as his processor works to try and match the blood by appearance alone, but it is not possible. He glances at Jason, Dimiva and the others. They are occupied.

He was ordered not to move, but a higher order outweighs that- the order to solve the case. It allows him to walk over to the wall, technically that's staying out of the way, and then press his tongue against the hand-painted letters. It's not like that's touching either, that's tasting. It's different.

Avriel leans back away from the wall, chin resting on his knuckle and thumb as he processes. The blood sample finds its match in Carlos, the body, almost immediately thanks to his criminal record. It records the sample as roughly four weeks, give or take a few days old, which also matches Avriel's scans of the body.

He looks back up at the letters, eyes scanning, pulling them apart piece by piece. Just as expected, there are no prints stamped into the blood to mark a human assailant. That does however, confirm that the human was killed by an android.

Avriel turns to share this information with Detective Jason, but the man is busy barking orders at a team that walks on egg shells around him. It is a strange comfort to realize that he is not the only thing in the room that the detective is unkind to.

Since everyone seems preoccupied, Avriel exits into the kitchen next. He immediately notices the hole in the knife block where the kitchen knife is missing from. He is eyes then go to the kitchen table, where a flyer for Eden Nightclub sits. Everyone knows about that place, a legal brothel, powered entirely by androids.

All the pieces of this case are starting to come together for Avriel. The red ice, the exorbitant number of stab wounds, the testimony on the walls and Carlos' criminal past, combined with the kitchen knife is enough for him. He sweeps his gaze around the room once more and is about to turn back into the living room when he notices a baseball bat that has rolled under the table.

He reaches down and picks the bat up.

"Ah," he says, the light on his forehead turning yellow, briefly flashing red, then turning back to green. Avriel raises the bat, then drops it back into his open palm. There are traces of blue blood on the end, long evaporated but the processors in his eyes specifically can pick it up.

There's movement in the doorway back to the living room. Avriel looks up to see the Detective standing there, staring at him.

"I told you," he says with a shrug, "I already have orders." Then he tosses him the bat, "Get a load of this, there are traces of blue-blood on the end. It looks like our victim attacked the android with this bat, hitting him three times before the android took a knife from there." Avriel pauses and points at the knife block, "Who then stabbed the victim, who made an attempt to retreat into the living room."

He gestures at the rotting flesh just behind Jason.

"Obviously, the retreat was unsuccessful," he says, "But Im sure you already know all that, right, detective?"

[tick 12a / calla]

E D E N

The android backs off and Eden starts to breathe easier.

Dimova eyes him, something almost like pity in her eyes.

"Maybe you shouldn't be-" She starts, voice already creeping into that tone that she uses, but it makes Eden's stomach sink and his temper flare and he shoots her a warning glare. She punches something else into her clipboard and purses her lips, leaving the subject alone.

Twenty-eight stab wounds. Damned scanners - up to date, he was told. Not fucking likely.

A few officers haul a stretcher in, coming to the side of the corpse. Eden nods at them and they get to work, fully covered in thick plastic and masks, slowly rolling the body over to lift it. Dimova winces as she watches them.

"Nasty bit of work." She mutters, "Hope he wasn't anyone important."

"He's about to be."

The pool of cases marked android performed homicides is extremely small. Nearly non-existent. Dimova watches the body be hauled out, and Eden knows that they're thinking the same thing. It's not really Carlos that's important in this case. He could have been anyone. But now, with this out in the open, they'll finally have solid proof of how dangerous these things can be. They're not harmless, and they're certainly not complacent.

The Deviant Unit was a gamble that the Captain took, but really, it was Eden that he was taking the gamble on. If anyone was going to get the bastards taken down, it was him.

He's about to turn back to Dimova, to move on, when the RK800 moves and Eden glances it's way out of instinct. It's licking the wall. The blood.

"Jesus...."

Even Dimova makes a face.

"Is it-"

"I told you I didn't want it here."

"You don't see me making friends with it. Relax."

"Put the android on the case with the murderous deviant. Yeah, that'll work out so well, won't put any ideas in its head at all." He rubs at his temples, "Remind me why I took this job again."

Dimova just shrugs, "Because you believe in it?"

Eden huffs. He wishes it were that simple.

They can't do much else until the Narcotics team arrives, just in case there's something that Carlos Ortiz had in his home that's more dangerous than Red Ice. But they also can't bring the case in without proper motive. It would have been easier if the android had just stayed behind, listened to its programming.

Or, it would have been better if it had never been made at all. There'd be at least one more man still alive in the world.

The back of his neck tingles, his shoulders suddenly tense, Eden looks around for the RK800, but it's gone.

"Where-"

One of the forensic guys examining an upturned table points to the kitchen.

"Christ's sake."

Eden steps quickly across the mess of a floor to the kitchen doorway, he can already see the damned thing tampering with something, hiding evidence to help its fellow bot-

Eden catches what's thrown at him out of reflex. Then looks at it. Grimaces.

"Somebody get some gloves in here." He calls back through the doorway.

Now his fingerprints are on the thing. Great.

Eden narrows his eyes. Grinds his teeth while he listens to an android do his job for him. Mockingly, almost. But that would be impossible for such a new, up to date model. He watches the RK800, and doesn't even try to keep the suspicion out of his body language.

"The vic could have been defending himself. That doesn't change the fact that the 'Droid still killed him - programming shouldn't have allowed it to even punch him." Eden leans against the doorframe in show of false laxness. His spine stays straight. "And it still doesn't tell us where it went."

[gamemaker kelsier]

A V R I E L

"No," he answers in agreement.

Then Avriel steps forward and takes the bat back, running a thumb over Eden's fresh prints, burning them away. Another officer from the forensics team enters and Avriel smiles politely before scanning them. His brow furrows the littlest bit before he drops the bat into an evidence bag. "You should really pay that parking ticket, officer," he says before turning back to the detective glaring at him.

He takes a moment to consider his body language, displayed carefully to appear relaxed, but his posture gives him away. That, and the waves of venom running off of him like rainwater. Avriel didn't understand that phrase until he'd stood in the detroit rain to experience it himself.

The lady at the diner on third street called it a 'detroit baptism'.

"This isn't guesswork detective, but the amalgamation of every piece of evidence we've seen so far laid out for me in a virtual space, a reenactment," Avriel says. He looks around the room once again, scanning for blue blood. There are too many spots of it on the floor to create a clear path.

There's a doorway out into the hall, the entrance to the living room that Jason leans in, then a door leading to the outside. Avriel scans the knob for any evidence of human blood as well as blue. After writing on the wall with Carlos' blood, there'd have to be traces.

None.

His brow furrows to mimic a human's expression when in deep thought as he processes that information. He hadn't noticed any blood on the front door either, though he was certain the forensics team would have already looked for that.

"Hmm," he says, for the benefit of the humans in the room. Humans don't enjoy silence. Then Avriel pushes the back door open, letting the night in. The garden behind the house is well kept, but something tells Avriel that wasn't Carlos' doing. Still, it's near untouched.

"No trace of blue blood out there," Avriel says, turning back in. The doesn't make logical sense when nearly every surface in the kitchen holds traces of it. "From what I can see," he says, gesturing at an invisible mark, "The HK400 was heavily damaged, we'd know if it left."

Avriel looks around the room once more, then his head falls to the side as the floor plan he was loading in completes.

"Oh," he says, then looks upwards. There's a seam in the sealing and a worn bit of metal where a string used to be wound around it. Avriel nods up at it, then looks at Jason, "I think we should check the basement."

Hopefully the human is as smart as his files say he is. Spelling it out for him might give the android the opportunity to escape.

[tick 12a / calla]

E D E N

Eden watches the android's LED flash yellow as it processes. It goes to wander again and his head thunks backwards against the doorway. He lifts both hands to massage at his temples.

"We'd know if it left." The RK800 says once it's done scanning the back garden.

"It's been raining." Eden tries flatly, "The prints could've washed away."

But he already knows it's unlikely. He finds himself being cursory on purpose, trying to poke a hole in the android's story, trying to take apart its logic.

It doesn't work very well.

When it disappears around the corner, Eden sighs and pushes himself off the wall.

"Remind me later to put in a request for thyrium scanners." He says to Adroxis as he walks by.

Fucking androids and their fucking invisible blood.

The RK800's stopped at the end of the hall, looking up at the ceiling. A sudden stupid thought hits Eden then - that it looks like it's praying. For some reason, it unsettles him. He stares.

But it's not praying. Eden forces himself to look away from the android, and then he forces himself to look closer.

"The basement." He repeats at a normal volume, catching on.

It seems like an underhanded tactic for a machine to use. To lie.

So then he says louder, "You're not going alone."

It's more of a command than a reassurance. He doesn't trust the RK800 to go after the deviant on its own - that's what happened to the earlier version, the one that had malfunctioned and nearly attacked an officer and had to be decommissioned.

But as Eden looks at the seam in the ceiling, he realizes that the attic can't be that big. It's probably more of a crawlspace, judging by the trapdoor, and as soon as one of them clears the opening, the android will know someone's up there. There's no telling what it would do then, they would just get in each other's way. Only one of them can go.

The thing is they're both different levels of disposable. They've both been built for this. Eden can fight, but he doesn't know what he's going into. He doesn't know what the space is like, or if the android is even armed. Plus he's got a dog waiting at home for him, likely lying by the door and staring pitfully at her perfectly full food dish.

He'd gotten a rush from taking down androids in the beginning of all this. It had felt familiar, was something he could wrap himself up in and use as a balm. He took every case that had even the faintest trace of android involvement and worked them until he was bloody. His first year of being an officer had been efficient, brutal, but he's the one that made it that way.

His caseworkers thought that he'd spent too much time with the droids. That it had changed him fundamentally, that he'd lost something, maybe he was more like them now. It was just a matter of waiting until he finally self-destructed and they could all move on from the poor little boy and his poor little fucked up childhood. But the years worth of resentment had built up, and the Academy made no attempt to dissuade it.

That was a better fuel than any blue-blood could have been.

"So, what have you been up to?" His twice monthly state-mandated therapist Clarissa would ask him.

"Just the usual." Eden would say back, the bruises on his knuckles long healed and the cast on his ankle hidden. "Work, mostly."

"And you've been adjusting?"

"Of course."

Now Eden looks at the RK800, gaze sharpening. He doesn't care what happens to it, but he cares about what happens to his case.

He nods once, unholstering his gun. He'll stay down in the hall, incase the deviant really is up there and manages to sneak past the RK800. Incase the RK800 lets it.