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scribeofred · 4 months ago

Note

hey. hi. give me some commentary on a section of your writing you’ve always wanted to pick apart 👀

hey hi I see that new pfp. don't think I don't.

but yes! of course! <3 I have, at your behest, selected nines go fast, also known as mechanic!nines. there is, unfortunately, no mechanicing happens in the included excerpt, but that's okay, you know where this is going anyway <3

you said section. I said 😏. ergo, this is long, like 8.5K words long, so go into it armed with snacks and beverages. I'll supply fresh cardamom-cinnamon doughnuts and moroccan mint tea <3

−3.

An anonymous source releases formerly classified documents to the public—documents that detail US Army–overseen android soldier trial runs being conducted in the arctic. The immediate release of these soldiers is demanded by a seething android population, and CyberLife, already one wrong step away from total collapse, has no choice but to comply.

tiny little mostly passive-voice introduction here. I’ve used a lot of passive voice in my writing for a number of years now. still not quite sure why, maybe I’ll figure it out as I analyze this piece. I really do not love that first sentence, it feels like a noun word salad, but it’s something I’ve never tweaked during my various editing-when-I-should-be-drafting passes. always had something else on my mind.

RK900_313248317_87 spends almost six and a half days (561,443 seconds exactly) in the arctic circle before it is granted the status of personhood. It becomes he, and he wouldn’t know what to do with himself, except for two things:

it became clear to me almost immediately that this story was going to take on an Interesting Format: lots of parentheses, lots of lists, something more outline-ish than a strictly prose story in places. I like breaking conventions, so I remain tickled by this styling. Also, “It becomes he, and he wouldn’t know what to do with himself” has such a nice progression, I really love the sound of it, the look of it. one of my high priorities while writing is creating lyrical, smooth-flowing sentences, and I love repetition, which will likely become apparent throughout this piece, or any piece I write tbh.

There is another active android who shares his serial (but not model) number. This is immediately important.

300,291 seconds into his abruptly truncated tour of duty, he interfaced with an M77 and encountered a strange snaggletoothed bit of code that was supposed to balance the tank’s backup electronic targeting system but instead had a fifty percent chance of failing completely when the correct conditions were met. He (then it) corrected the code, submitted an error report and a copy of his applied fix to maintenance, and resumed his preset tasks for the day. This will become relevant later.

“snaggletoothed” is a word I (re)encountered while drafting this scene, and I (re)fell in love with it. fun words ftw. also, “He (then it)” is an immediate repetition payoff, and also reinforces the delineation between machine!nines and deviant!nines. this is also a good paragraph to drill down into the way I prefer to construct my sentences. typically I don’t rely much on opening dependent clauses, although that does vary per narrator voice, and for a character like nines especially I am Highly Conscious of the way he presents information to the reader. there’s a lot of facts, a lot of numbers and statistics, and a lot of general straightforwardness. I’m also conscious of each word’s function within the sentence (though I admittedly haven’t stripped this story to its bare bones either). the last two sentences in the second point in the list read, to my eyes and my ear, with this sort of stabbing effect. this is typical of my writing style in general, but in a story like this, with a narrator nines, the effect is heightened, blacks blacker and whites whiter. telling the reader information is a dangerous game sometimes, and my approach here is just. tell the reader exactly what needs to be said and nothing more.

He is offered and summarily declines a new position with the US Army (salary pending), he complies with the appropriate demilitarization procedures (they take a boning knife to his existence and they carve), he steps foot off Fort Hamilton (for the first and the last time), and he sets himself new directives that are entirely his own:

there’s two layers of subtext happening here. the first layer is the contrast between the information given in the main body of the sentence and the information given in the parentheses, which becomes particularly obvious by the end of the second parenthetical statement. the second layer is the paragraph taken as a whole, especially that first “(salary pending)”, which is a benign two words long and Will read different in the context of the entire paragraph. I love love love how much can be inferred via the simple salary pending, inferences about the state of the world, inferences about the US Army (and thus the USA as a whole), inferences about Nines’s priorities and character. the ping-pong match between the statements resolves in the last set of parentheses and the clause following it: Nines is going to do his own thing, thank you VERY much

Travel to Detroit, Michigan

Find RK800_313248317_53 “Connor”

Discover and execute his purpose

Completing the first objective is easy enough, even though he has to make his way from New York to Detroit primarily on foot. It’s fine. He was constructed to successfully navigate terrain more inhospitable than what he finds in the well-developed northeastern United States even in the middle of winter. It’s actually kind of nice to not be traveling in circles. He discovers he likes linear progression more than he likes circuitous. Probably this knowledge will come in useful, eventually.

“He discovers he likes linear progression more than he likes circuitous” is an example of both repetition and elision. choosing to not repeat something can be just as effective as repetition. even though this story is in present tense, occasionally I do flirt with imparting future knowledge that technically nines shouldn’t know. it’s fine it’s a stylistic choice, it’s not actually an issue; it does, however, contrast against that last sentence, where the two -ly adverbs intentionally create what should be ambiguity but actually isn’t because of the repetition. it’s almost like repetition legitimiz—

Completing the second objective is even easier. It only takes some moderate digital surfing to determine his predecessor’s whereabouts: time evenly split between the Detroit Police Department’s Central Station, one Lieutenant Hank Anderson’s house, and with the Jericho Movement’s core leadership (location randomized). He considers his options and determines the least threatening time to approach them to be just before Connor and the lieutenant finish work. Visiting them at their place of employment is less invasive than at their personal residence and less unpredictable than approaching them on the street.

I rebel against following trends, sometimes, so I’ve eschewed the popular term New Jericho and instead called it my own thing, because I’m Pretentious Like That. I don’t necessarily love the name the Jericho Movement? but it’s good enough for drafting purposes.

He catalogues but does not mind the stares he receives as he is escorted past the security checkpoint and through the bullpen to a pair of desks, one disorganized, one pristine, belonging to one disorganized human and one pristine android.

repetition legitimiz—

<<Ping.

>>Echo reply.

trying to figure out how to format messages between androids (or texts or what have you) can be an iterative process. if this went up on ao3, I’m sure I would have figured out a fancy lil bit of css or html to make it look Cool.

Their LEDs flash yellow in sync, and by the time he’s walked the seventeen steps to the desks, he and Connor have worked out all of the pertinent details they can by themselves. It’s purely for the wide-eyed lieutenant’s sake that he says, “Hello. I am RK900 serial number 313 248 317 - 87, Connor’s successor. You may call me Nines.”

wise writing advice says not to use numbers if you can help it, which. yeah. wise indeed. that said, because android systems are hilariously more powerful than even our modern supercomputers, I’ve taken pains to show how advanced the androids are via contextual clues. connor and nines probably had plenty of time to get to know each other and make jokes and so on tbh, but there’s only so much information I can include without cluttering up each paragraph, so. director’s commentary bonus info! also, I didn’t give nines an actual name here, but I intended to change it by the time I was finished drafting. couldn’t settle on the Right Name, though, so nines he remains.

“Pretty sure I’d rather take the other one,” the lieutenant breathes, looking spooked and unhappy. “Even if he did point a gun at me.”

“There’s no reason to be rude, Hank,” Connor says mildly as he stands. “And certainly not to one of our country’s newest veterans.”

“The hell are you talkin’ about? And where do you think you’re going?”

“To speak to Captain Fowler about bringing Nines on as a second consultant. Don’t worry, we’ll explain everything on the way home.”

“On the— Connor, no, absolutely not, one android in my house is more than enough, don’t you walk away from me—”

Captain Fowler, currently overseeing a woefully understaffed station, begrudgingly agrees to a trial run; Nines and Connor (but mostly Connor) sweet-talk Hank into letting Nines accompany them back to his house; and this is how Nines ends up with what humans call a family. He isn’t quite certain the term applies, especially when he consults the more traditional definitions, but when he and Connor sit cross-legged on the living room floor that night with Sumo’s almost-impossibly fluffy body draped over their knees, their hands pressed together as they interface, data flowing thick and rich between them, he thinks maybe family is something they can grow into if they give it enough time.

He wonders if he likes the idea. Connor certainly does, a brightness to his thoughts entirely unlike the harsh glare of raw sunlight off fresh snow.

>>I see myself in you, and yet I don’t.

<<Disparate objectives means we iterated differently. I was you, once, but now I am not.

Connor makes a meaningless-meaningful sound. He’s copying Hank, who uses wordless interjections liberally. Nines likes this practice.

(not so) secretly this is one of my favorite paragraphs. nines developing his own preferences in addition to the subtext that subtextual communication is both meaningful (but meaningless but still meaningful) and valuable to androids in addition to humans. I’m tickled.

>>Your system, Nines. It’s…

<<They had to remove everything classified.

>>Does it… hurt?

Nines doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how to tell. He shares this with Connor and Connor in turn shares his memories: two-thirds of the way to terminal velocity and then pavement, a bullet between the eyes, a bullet up through the jaw, impaled and heartless, don’t make me shoot, don’t make me shoot, don’t make me shoot—

repetition legiti— somewhere along the way I made the decision to remain vague re: nines’s system issues. this was half because I wasn’t sure exactly what issues I wanted him to have and half because it’s often more fun if I let the reader conjure the trauma themselves.

Fear static pain.

Whiteout.

They soft reboot nearly in sync, Sumo whining into their legs. In a single mirrored movement, Nines and Connor smooth their free hands through Sumo’s shaggy coat, trying to ease the dog’s distress even as their own systems struggle to rebalance.

>>Sorry, I’m so—

<<You didn’t mean—

>>That shouldn’t have—

<<Probably it’s because—

>>Let me—

Diagnostics and tests and error reports and debugging tools and they mutilated you and it doesn’t hurt because it doesn’t hurt like dying and not-doing-the-dying hurts and I can’t fix this, not immediately and that’s okay, you don’t have to and I want to, please, let me help, Nines, please and okay, Connor and thank you, Connor and your stress levels are alarmingly high, Connor, hug Sumo now, Connor.

Painful memories and mild panic attacks aside, it’s a good night. He has a warm place to stay, he has a new brother and a dog, he has objectives to complete starting tomorrow. He isn’t certain if it equals having a purpose, but it’s a start.

“hug Sumo now, Connor” is another favorite line <3 honestly, I love writing panic attacks, and figuring out how to write something equivalent being experienced by two linked digital systems was a fun challenge. their communication is happening so unbelievably fast here, millions—billions—of times faster than a human could possibly read it, and chopping half of their messages in half helps hint, if not fully convey, that rapidity. one of the big challenges with writing these scenes between connor and nines is the fact that, realistically, the two of them wouldn’t be communicating via a single throughline of conversation like the one written above. I’ve knowingly taken extreme liberties in order to craft a readable narrative because I just don’t have the ability to genuinely portray just how broadly AND simultaneously their systems are interacting. it’s fine, this is narrative-driven fiction, I just. one of the most frequent reasons I rolled my eyes while reading dbh fic was when I’d encounter descriptions of android systems that make them less powerful than even our current computers, to say nothing of the computing power that MUST exist in the dbh world in order for androids to function. as a result, I’ve always been highly cognizant of how I’m describing android/computer systems because this is one universe where writing them as potentially overpowered is more realistic than underpowered.

−2.

I decided to format this story in numbered sections. these sections do not function as chapters and instead function as a countdown to zero and then count up to whatever number I deemed suitable to round out the story. yes I used the actual minus symbol and not a hyphen.

Nines spends three days with the DPD and, in order, encounters

An impressively hefty backlog of paperwork and digital files that even Connor hasn’t been able to keep up with due to him and Hank being so busy with android-related crimes,

Detective Gavin Reed (antagonistic, aggressive, unpleasant),

Officer Chris Miller (direct, apologetic, tired),

two dead bodies (one human, one android; murder-suicide),

Chicken Feed (a Connor-determined reward for Hank’s ongoing attempt at sobriety),

a stray dog one-fourteenth of Sumo’s weight and size (Havanese, malnourished, unchipped but friendly),

Connor’s strategic employment of puppy_dog_eyes4.exp (16.22% more effective on Hank than Nines predicted),

Officer Tina Chen cooing over the rescued Havanese before taking on the responsibility of securing its future (Connor says he hopes it’ll be as loved as Sumo is; Nines agrees),

one dead body (android; murdered),

three trespassers and looters (two men, one woman; apprehended in 9.04 seconds),

Detective Ben Collins (personable, talkative, in need of a partner who can handle the more physical aspects of the job; Nines volunteers and is approved),

two dead bodies (androids; self-destructed),

a motor vehicle accident (high-speed rollover, manual-driving mode engaged; human driver pronounced dead at the scene, red ice use detected and likely to blame, autopsy pending),

four dead bodies (two humans, two androids; shot execution style; gang involvement?),

one alleyway brawl between ten people (seven humans, three androids; no casualties),

Detective Collins expressing concern over his wellbeing (minor damage sustained to biocomponent 7344c; self-repair already underway; such concern is unnecessary [but appreciated]),

a high-speed foot pursuit that lasts 8.7 seconds and ends with the suspect in custody (human, red ice found on person, suspected drug dealer),

roughly equal amounts of praise and teasing from his coworkers for his first solo arrest (he was just doing his job; he backs up their kind words and revisits them every 2.334 hours),

three dead bodies (one human, two androids; washed up on the banks of the Detroit River; shot, execution style; gang involvement?),

a high-speed vehicle pursuit that lasts 51.16 seconds and ends in an eighteen-vehicle pileup (five humans deceased, three humans and two android in critical condition, seven humans and four androids with moderate injuries).

the number of times I revised this list as I continued to write the story going forward cannot be calculated using modern instruments. so. many. times. it seems like a simple list of information, but nothing is ever simple when it comes to the inclusion of Actual Numbers. writing cute android boys can be tedious, y’all.

It’s the worst multivehicle accident within Detroit city limits in the last fifteen years.

(This, Nines thinks as he reviews footage of the carnage that’s still happening before his eyes, is wrong.)

(No. It’s not right, and he’s experienced just enough of the world to know that’s not the same thing.)

−1.

It’s happenstance, a convergence of the correct conditions in the correct order that produces a specific result. He and Detective Collins are returning to Central after inspecting a trio of bodies; Connor and Hank are following a couple of car lengths back. A sixth-mile ahead of them, patrol car 972 flips on its lights and begins pursuing a pair of motorcycles that have chosen an incredibly unwise moment to illegally and dangerously pass a transport truck.

The chase begins.

A half-second flurry of messages between him, dispatch, and Connor, and they have permission to act as backup.

“Been a long time since I did one of these,” Detective Collins says, voice grim but hands easy on the wheel as he threads through traffic. “Must not be equipped with those law enforcement override features.”

“Correct,” Nines says, listening to 972’s updates while analyzing the movements of the vehicles ahead of them. His hand hovers over the dashboard. “Should I drive?”

“Nah, I got this. Keep on keeping us in the loop.”

Twenty-nine point eight seconds later Nines watches but can do nothing as a catastrophe takes place before his eyes. With reflexes laughably faster than Detective Collins’s, he overrides their car’s systems and guides them to a safe stop on the inner shoulder of the highway before leaping out and rushing toward the disaster. Connor’s fifteen steps behind him; their human partners are even slower.

Screaming metal, screaming people, bleeding androids and bleeding humans, deep-tissue scans and beats per minute and crush injuries and ruptured blood vessels and shredded thirium lines and sobbing and stuttering and damage and malfunction and screaming and screaming and screaming. Nines and Connor work in fluid tandem, synced—Nines brute forces his way through the wreckage to expose life signs and Connor extracts said life signs with gentle words and gentler hands.

By the time they’ve relocate all victims (living first, deceased second) to a distance suitably removed in order to protect everyone in the event of an explosion, EMS have arrived and are hard at work fighting to save those in critical condition. Connor, Hank, and Detective Collins are lending their hands wherever necessary, and Nines should do the same, wants to the same, but he’s been in parallel reviewing all recorded footage of the accident, and so he makes one last visit to the twisted, heat-and-friction-fused heap of steel and aluminum, copper and glass, silicone and rubber. One car, interior soaked red and blue, is so tightly folded around itself that he has to peel back the dashboard so he can access the physical hardware beneath when it refuses all interface attempts. He pockets one of the redundant backup caches and downloads the same data from every other vehicle involved in the accident before rejoining the meticulously controlled chaos of emergency services and distressed victims and just enough bystanders to add some random variables into the whole mess. Nines scans and swiftly locates Detective Collins’s biorhythms, elevated but not to the point of distress. He pings Connor and gets a please hold back, which is both new and concerning but nothing he can assist with right now, so he reports to the on-site chain of command and allows them to put him to work.

it’s no secret that I do not cleave to the shitty first draft methodology. it works perfectly for some writers! it does not work for me. I am typically fairly set on what details I’m including in any given paragraph by the time I’m finished writing said paragraph, although I will usually lightly tweak things between two and infinite times whenever I reread. I rarely rewrite entire sentences, even more rarely delete sentences outright, because I don’t include throwaway information. there is, right from the get-go, intention behind each clause, each phrase, each word, each punctuation mark. this meticulous methodology has its pitfalls, of course, but one of the biggest upsides is paragraphs like the two above change very little between draft one and draft posted. typically the largest changes I make involve removing or replacing information rendered outdated as I continue to draft. occasionally I do have to smooth out awkward phrasing because done is better than perfect, but if I’m being confused by or tripping over my own phrasing, the reader is going to struggle even more, and that won’t do. revising can be tricky, though, because a pitfall of methodical drafting is the way I link each clause and each sentence together. they’re like a chain, and it’s a labor-intensive, difficult process to add new links. worth it! but definitely not easy.

>>I’m fine, Hank’s fine, we’re just on our way home now.

<<Already?

>>Cole.

<<Ah. Of course. Stay with him, I’ll be there when I can.

“You okay, kid?” Detective Collins asks while walking by, then points to his own temple when Nines merely tilts his head, hands busy holding a thousand-lumen light and a tiny but powerful portable heater so a human paramedic can stabilize another human’s compound fracture. “Your mood ring’s still red. Has been a while now.”

I just revised “while walking by” from the original “as he walked by” because of its ambiguity. it’s established later in the sentence that nines is stationary, but why create a potential moment of confusion for the reader if it can be avoided? especially when the solution is such a simple bit of rewording.

“I’m okay.” He is. Processors busy parsing and organizing a huge influx of new data, when they’re not consumed with saving lives.

“It’s fine if you’re not,” Detective Collins says later, once they’re back in the car, heater cranked to the max. The warmth is nice, although Nines isn’t sure he likes the air blowing across his face and body, but he doesn’t say anything; he isn’t the one who’s shivering. “Okay, that is. Scenes like that can be… well, they can be rough, even if you’ve been doing this job a while. The way you and Connor rushed in there…”

there is So Much information that’s covered in this entire crash sequence, and while I absolutely could have spent more time here, lingering, watching nines and co. do their things, I decided to play around with little time skips. it isn’t obvious right here, but there’s a line later in this numbered section that will give the above passage new context. this is also a good excuse to indulge my fondness for medic!rk units, combined with the many years I spent enmeshed in the thunderbirds fandom, which—there’s an extremely niche crossover that lives in my brain that I’ll probably never talk about again, but. now you know that’s a Thing. point is, reading and writing disaster/emergency scenarios is nothing new, and I’ve settled on a combination of specific, concrete details and relatively unemotional zoomed-out narrative.

“I’m okay,” Nines repeats, because he is. He suffered no significant damage, while there are five confirmed dead and sixteen injured. Seventeen if Hank’s emotional state can be counted as an injury. And it all could have been avoided.

“Mm. Well,” Detective Collins says, openly skeptical as he turns onto Michigan Drive, “you make sure you stay that way. Talk to someone if you need to, yeah?”

Concern, Nines decides, directed toward him, not because of him but rather on his behalf. It’s—nice, to have someone care enough to sincerely express such emotion toward him. He makes sure to tell Detective Collins this before they part ways, and he carefully indexes the memory of Detective Collins’s hand clasping his shoulder. “No thanks needed, kid, if you and your brother can keep Hank even halfway sober after that disaster. He’s been doing so much better, I’d hate to see him relapse. Call me if you need anything.”

this is not a story about hank’s recovery, not really, although there are certainly mentions of it present. ~connor magically makes hank better~ is an exhausting trope at best, but I’ve intentionally not dug into how, exactly, hank’s doing or how his recovery is being accomplished because that’s not the focus of this story. it is, in part, the focus of one of my other wips, and I don’t like covering the same ground twice, thus the ambiguity.

He does not need anything, at least not that Detective Collins can supply, and so he doesn’t call, but the option’s there, and somehow that lightens his system load in a way he can’t quite quantify.

the more time I spent in the dbh fandom, the more dbh fanfic I read, the more resistant I became to mirroring human and android systems when it comes to emotional reactions and manifestations. still, the reader is human, so parallels have to be drawn somewhere, somehow. and, also, even our modern computers run with such complexity that we don’t always understand everything about them, so I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable for an android to not know everything going on in their system all the time, depending on how their consciousness works. but we don’t have time to get into all that.

>>Bathroom.

The priority message arrives while Nines is still on the chilly side of the front door, so it’s no trouble to alter his path to take him down the hall instead of into the kitchen. He is… glad, he thinks, that he did, when he sees his reflection. Human blood, thirium, oil, dirt, coolant, half-melted snow, synthetic skin and even white chassis visible through the rips in his clothing. He looks like one of the causalities. He barely recognizes himself. He feels like he barely recognizes himself.

Because a convergence happened today, and it left people dead and broken, and it triggered upsetting memories for Hank, and it triggered upsetting memories for Nines. Nines, who applied a fix to a single unlikely, conditional problem and then made that fix available to the entire United States Army. Nines, who unwittingly, unthinkingly smoothed the road to a more assured death of whoever ends up on the other side of those targeting systems. Nines, whose hands are coated in the blood of nineteen people and the prospective blood of an incalculable number of people, blood in potentia that cannot be washed away with warm water and soap and a moderate application of friction.

sometimes just straight-up describing an action is fine! sometimes it’s better than just fine and is in fact the best option in scenarios where the focus should be elsewhere. but sometimes saying “he washed his hands” isn’t nearly as effective as that final clause. “a moderate application of friction” is what I would consider a Quintessential Red-Style Phrase™. between all the concrete details, I tend to lean on subtextual descriptions whenever I can get away with them because I like making the reader do at least fifty percent of work of parsing the story.

Nines, who has all the on-board data of every vehicle involved in today’s fatal crash and potentially the time and the resources to eventually compute the flaw in the code and the necessary fix.

and thus we find out what happens when an android is given a guilt complex. whoops. my bad. hilariously, hilariously, all of the story up to this point and beyond is laying the groundwork for something so much simpler and gentler. but the backstory became important enough to write out whole cloth. 8K+ words later…

He carefully places the physical memory cache on the glass shelf beside the mirror. Showers. Dresses in the clean clothing Connor left for him on the painted cabinet by the door. Repockets the cache. Joins Connor and Hank and Sumo in the living room.

<<How is he?

Connor sends a burst of high-density packets, most of which contain data Nines is capable of obtaining himself, but mixed in are Connor’s uniquely calibrated observations of a man he’s had time to study. Hank is more sad than anxious, more tired than angry, more sober than drunk, and that last one is a definitive surprise. Four of the victims were children. All injured, all alive, so far.

Nines sits on the floor beside Connor and Sumo. Filters out the squeak of the basketball shoes coming from the TV and dials up the sensors that most clearly register the life signs of android and human and dog around him. Everything else runs in the background, for a little while.

there’s a post floating around tumblr that talks about the prospective humor of connor filtering out gavin’s voice, without gavin realizing it. delightfully amusing but also totally implausible because gavin’s vocal frequencies overlap at least somewhat with those of basically every other man in the station, and connor would have to be running some truly bonkers frequency-isolation software to mute gavin specifically without losing anyone else’s voice in the process. maybe he could write a program to do that by himself! maybe not. either way, isolating a certain band of frequencies is simple enough even with our current technology, so nines absolutely can mute the obnoxious squeak of shoes on floor. I dislike the sound, thus nines does too.

The game is well into the third quarter and Hank’s glass is still almost half full when he nudges a toe against Nines’s arm and says, “You found yourself a quarter too, huh?”

“No.” Nines holds out the cache he’s been rotating between his fingertips, allows Hank to see the device is more than double the diameter and thickness of an American quarter. He explains its purpose using grade 7 vocabulary.

Hank isn’t stupid. it’s just that nomenclature is a difficult thing to parse if you aren’t In The Know. connor knows this, thus nines knows this, thus I get to write fun sentences like “he explains its purpose using grade 7 vocabulary.” sometimes writing truly is a joy and a delight <3

“Huh.” Most of the brightness in Hank’s eyes comes from the reflection of the TV. He sips from his glass, an absent gesture. “And you have it because…?”

“I intend to correct the error that incited the accident.”

Hank looks—surprised, baffled, angry, heartbroken, intrigued, angry, proud, heartbroken. He drains the glass in one sharp movement and stands. “Yeah. You do that.”

The words taken literally grant permission; the sarcasm and disbelief with which they’re said inverts their meaning into a negative. Nines counts himself fortunate he doesn’t need Hank’s blessing to continue what he’s already started.

Connor buries his fingers in Sumo’s ruff when Hank chooses the bedroom instead of the bottle. >>Grief is complex. And I’m finding it more complex by the day instead of less.

<<You’ll be able to establish a pattern for him eventually.

>>I think, in this case, I’d rather the data set be left incomplete.

Thermal vision allows Nines to see Hank folded in half on the edge of his bed, a soft-hard knot of loss and regret. <<I have to agree.

“a soft-hard knot”—I love using contradictory terms in tandem to create complexity and texture.

Once it’s clear Hank is down for the night, they sync, Nines’s software making use of Connor’s hardware to increase his efficiency as he scans billions of billions of lines of code. Not all the syntax is immediately readable, which leads them briefly down a detour of researching various programming languages, and he catches Connor making a note to further that study another time. Nines agrees, he wants to learn as well, but—later.

While he and Connor are CyberLife’s most and second most advanced models, respectively, they weren’t purpose built to do this kind of work. Their predictive programs aren’t even compatible with the vehicles’ data until they’ve written brand-new translation software to handle code that wasn’t designed to run on androids, and the entire process is slowed by the way their AI engines take up significant resources even with most of the optional subroutines suspended. Skinless, cosmetic breathing terminated, actuators locked in place, scanners dimmed to minimum, they sit and they work until the sun rises and they still have hours and days and weeks of work to go.

I could shorten my sentences. I could. I do, sometimes. a lot of the time I don’t. in this case, even though these sentences are dense, redolent with adjectives and nouns, I kept them long because long sentences can effectively convey the passage of time, in part due to word selection and in part due to the irl time they take to read. admittedly writing dbh fic is a chance to flex a bit of computing knowledge. I deliberately crafted these paragraphs to showcase that while nines and connor are exceptionally powerful, complex computing systems, they have their limits, in terms of both preprogrammed knowledge and processing power. the thing that most dbh fic writers seem to forget is that in the dbh world, androids would not be considered supercomputers. not even close. depending on what kind of back-end architecture cyberlife androids are linked to, they potentially have access to staggering computing power if they need it. if this is the case, I cannot see cyberlife allowing deviants to continue accessing their systems, especially after a public revolution, so I’ve structured this story’s universe around androids operating autonomously, with decidedly finite limits. this is important now, and it will be even more important later.

>>I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I want a computer that isn’t myself.

<<It is… not optimal.

>>Understatement. We’ve found more than a dozen potential points of failure, but even when we finish our analyses, we won’t be able to create specific fixes for most of the problems.

<<It’s still a worthwhile pursuit.

>>I never said it wasn’t. I’m just saying this is a problem you won’t be able to solve by yourself.

Connor’s right. This isn’t isolating and then correcting a single string of buggy code—this is a complex web of software and firmware and hardware and mechanical components, one acting upon another upon another upon another, and that’s before factoring in the addition of unpredictable variables such as humans and animals and weather and sundry acts of God. Millions of man-hours backstop the billions of billions of lines of code Nines is now carrying around, and for all of his computing prowess, he cannot force results any faster just because he wants them. It’s—frustrating.

>>I’ll continue helping you, of course, if it’s what you want, but—

<<No. Thank you, Connor. I’ll find another solution.

Except the thought of getting in the car with Connor and Hank makes Nines feel—

Well. It makes him feel. That’s a start.

“Anxious,” Connor supplies aloud when Nines shares this while they’re preparing coffee and breakfast for Hank. The shower turns off, which means there’s a ninety-seven percent chance Hank will emerge from the bathroom within forty-three seconds. “Is it the accident?”

realistically, connor and nines would be having this conversation silently, digitally. even more realistically, this conversation would not be nicely linear the way I’ve written it here, but again, trying to convey that kind of overlapping simultaneous awareness is beyond the scope of this particular work. also, convenience for the reader (and also the writer) sometimes trumps realism.

Yes but no. Nines analyzes himself, tracking the new impulses through his system in real time. His stress levels spike consistently as he reads and rereads his memories of the last three days. He feels… hm. Flustered, self-conscious, embarrassed maybe when he says, “I don’t like dead bodies.” Factoring in last night’s casualties (six now; one of the children died after almost five hours on the operating table), he’s seen enough dead versus living bodies to create a functional data pool.

remember I said that there was a line appearing later that would give the descriptions of the crash and nines’s perception of the events new context? bam.

Connor hesitates the barest fraction of a second—not enough for a human to notice but obvious to Nines. Connor is surprised. He recovers just as rapidly. “Solving this—is it your purpose?”

“I don’t know,” Nines admits as he layers avocado and jalapeño Monterey Jack cheese and tomato and salt and pepper on rye toast. “Likely not in the long term, but it suffices for the short term. I want to do this.”

nines likes to do things In Order, which I appreciate about him, but it does mean I’ve actually had to cut back on a lot of extraneous information. it’s fun information for me! but I am cognizant of the way my writing style can be dense by default, filled with Lots of information. it’s a part of my style, so I don’t eliminate most of it, but sometimes it does feel like Too Much even for me, and thus I trim. the sentence containing hank’s breakfast ingredients is one such sentence that went through multiple iterations of trimming and restructuring.

Connor smiles with his eyes more than his mouth, skin crinkling and creasing in synthetic crow’s-feet. “I’m glad. Yesterday was—bad.” Worse for Hank than for them, or maybe just bad in different ways. “Make sure you talk to Markus and Detective Collins first.”

“Talk to Markus and Ben before what?” Hank asks as he rounds the corner, ruffling a small towel through his hair. He looks tired, but less haggard than Nines predicted based off the data Connor shared. Having them nearby last night helped him.

The prepared mug of coffee has been cooling on the counter and is an optimal 199 degrees Fahrenheit when Nines passes it to Hank. “I’m leaving the DPD.”

if I had unlimited reader/writer bandwidth, I would have included the temperature in parenthetical celsius and kelvin, but at some point I have to start drawing lines. on a related note, I personally use a mishmash of imperial and metric in daily life, but I’ve deliberately used imperial throughout all of my dbh writing due to the setting.

Hank hesitates orders of magnitude longer than Connor did, eyes wide behind the half-dried ends of his hair. He looks at Connor, who’s visibly focused on plating the eggs he’s been frying, and then his shoulders droop, exhaustion and pain cutting shadows across his expression. “Yeah. Well. Can’t say I blame ya. City’s already a mess without that shitshow last night. I, uh, assume you already know what you’re going to do next?”

“Correct. My flight to Austin departs at 1305 hours this afternoon.”

“Austin, huh. Where you’ll be doing…?”

“My part in assisting a team in overhauling the current autonomous driving systems,” Nines says, proud but also anxious. This anxiety is why he doesn’t add I wish to prevent further losses of life as a result of vehicular accidents.

“Right.” Hank flips the towel over his shoulder and snatches the mug from Nines’s hand before turning for his bedroom. “Well. Good luck to you.”

Nines glances at Connor.

>>He doesn’t want to know. Also, someone else leaving him after a fatal crash.

<<Ah. Of course.

“Hank…” Nines starts after him, then pauses when the bedroom door slams shut. He barely has to raise his voice to project through the flimsy barrier. “I’ll be back when I’m finished.”

“Yeah? That’s nice. Go have your fun in the sun or whatever.”

>>Best leave him alone before he stresses himself out of working effectively today.

“Thank you, Hank,” Nines replies, neutrally polite, then returns to Connor, who shrugs as he fills Sumo’s bowl.

>>He’ll settle down again soon enough.

No doubt, but not soon enough to say something genuinely nice to Nines before he leaves. This loss isn’t the same as the mutilations slashed through his code, but neither is it so different.

It might be winter in the northern hemisphere, but the first thing Nines notices about Austin is it’s warm—warmer than Detroit and certainly warmer than the arctic circle. Warmth, he decides as he stares up at the wide, sun-drenched sky, is something he likes.

His conversation with Markus is short, only long enough to contain the appropriate first-meeting pleasantries before Nines informs him of his intentions and asks his questions and Markus puts him in contact with the appropriate members of his swiftly expanding legal team. Because the thing is, as badly as Nines wants to make progress as rapidly as possible, he doesn’t want to undermine what Markus is trying to achieve, so he takes Markus’s goals into account when planning his own actions. Before the plane touches down at Austin–Bergstrom International Airport, he has a framework in place that will prevent him from undermining the Jericho Movement and, instead, will hopefully allow him to assist it. To build instead of destroy. The idea pleases him.

Unlike Hank, Detective Collins is amiable to discussing Nines’s abrupt vocational pivot, and his advice is valuable. (An exact monetary amount is difficult to calculate depending on what factors are appropriate to include, but Nines’s loosest estimate assigns a value in excess of one hundred seventy-three trillion dollars; $173,844,613,176,922.65 exactly in the initial moment of computation, but this figure is already out of date before he can make it mean something to anyone else. This is fine, it isn’t a long-term functional number anyway.)

Never Use Numbers If You Can Get Away With It, I Know I Know I Know, but in this case, I really do want to hammer home just how brain-meltingly expensive enterprise computing actually is. and in this case, the computational aspect is only one facet. keep reading.

“Don’t let 'em exploit you, kid,” Detective Collins tells him, stern but kind, between thank-yous and goodbyes. “What you’re looking to do is huge and probably normally only done by high-flying experts, so make sure they know exactly how much your time’s worth.”

After doing his due diligence researching all related fields, salaries included, Nines decides his time is worth a lot. He’s one of the most advanced androids ever made, and he could just as easily assist other companies with similar problems, and wouldn’t it be a shame if he were to become contractually unavailable starting tomorrow. Yes, he has a bottom line, and no, he has no desire to bankrupt them, that’s the opposite of his goals, he wants to fix the broken parts in the system, not completely sink it.

But he’s also worth hundreds of man-hours, and fair’s fair. He’s just not sure what he’s going to do with the rapidly accumulating money. That’s okay. He doesn’t have to figure it out immediately. New York City to Detroit taught him one foot after the other.

it becomes obvious much later in the text, but the agenda for the early section of this story really is “find a way for nines to make a Lot of money fairly quickly.” an eighteen-vehicle pileup seemed a logical way to achieve this goal. I typically prefer to write things that don’t already exist within a given fandom, at least to my knowledge, so. here we are.

He spends six and a half days in Austin: ninety hours hardwired into a sprawling digital system and sixty-five hours officially off the clock to comply with the recently negotiated local android labor laws. Supervising a system so large is a new kind of challenge, and maybe it’s the deviant in him, but he finds he’s glad for the downtime: to explore, and to negotiate new contracts for once he’s finished here, and to chat with Connor and Hank and Detective Collins and Markus as their respective schedules allow. Hank is less genial than the other three; Nines keeps him in the loop anyway, using simple terms to summarize what he’s been doing. Hank didn’t warn up to Connor overnight even while they worked together day in, day out for weeks; it would be folly to expect Nines to make faster progress in a shorter amount of time while a significant chunk of country separates them. Physical proximity, he’s learning, matters greatly to humans.

as usual, I write stories set in a world where the events of the game happen over weeks, not over a handful of days. the computers might be able to move that fast, but the humans cannot, and would not.

With access to a zettascale system already configured for the task at hand, Nines makes more progress in two minutes than he and Connor made in seven hours. Vehicle-based collision-avoidance systems don’t have AIs nearly as well-rounded as those created by CyberLife, but there are enough inherent similarities that Nines finds he can understand how the other systems operate. This doesn’t lessen the sheer amount of debugging that needs to be done, but it at least removes some of the so-called language barrier. Watching the projected failure percentages tick closer and closer to zero is immensely satisfying in a way disparate, unpredictable police work wasn’t.

not shown: nines standing in a sterile data center the size of walmart, a cable the width of his wrist plugged into the base of his neck, eyes flickering white as he parses data while running his system to the bleeding edge of its limits.

Still, there’s only so much that can be done through exclusively digital models; eventually they have to incorporate physical systems.

Thus: to Germany.

At first Nines finds the switch from pure software to the inclusion of hardware exactly as tedious as he predicted. Their progress slows to a crawl as they iterate different digital builds with different physical vehicles, trying to find ways of disproving what pure mathematics tells them is true, trying to find ways of breaking what they’ve built. Even though they rotate between several groups of vehicles to keep moving as quickly as possible, the inevitable, occasional lag between tests means Nines has time to converse with the people around him if he so chooses, which is why he finds himself invited to an Autobahn party the following Saturday.

After witnessing the damage caused by a cascading error that started in an autonomous driving system, Nines has firsthand data to support why Hank chooses to eschew such systems in favor of his own abilities. These abilities are, without question, more consistently erroneous, but they clearly allow Hank to feel like he has some measure of control over whatever happens. His self-fabricated peace of mind matters more to him than the time he loses each day (sometimes numbering in the hours) while engaging in the act of driving. Considering Hank is of a species that already has such a finite life span, Nines thinks the waste of time is nothing short of catastrophically, criminally hedonistic.

And then comes Saturday.

All CyberLife androids with software released after August 2025 can handle autonomous vehicles in an emergency, and all androids with software released after March 2029 have the ability to take indefinite full manual control over vehicles. Nines (then RK900_313248317_87) has technically briefly taken manual control of an M77 tank, but he’s not allowed to talk about that, so his functional answer to the question “Have you driven before? Y’know, properly?” is “No.”

This answer, he’s told in no uncertain terms, is unacceptable.

it’s probably no secret that I spend a lot of time thinking about word order within my sentences. “end your sentences with a click” is advice that has soaked straight into every fiber of gray matter I possess. the occasional weaker sentence ending is. fine. but I typically do my best to structure my sentences so that the last word impacts, hard. this goes double for the final word of the paragraph. obviously there’s a fine line between ending with a hard-hitting word and contorting the sentence structure to the point of awkward in the attempt to achieve this goal, but I’ve observed that the quality of sentence-ending words is a consistent litmus test to draw lines between good writers and the true uppermost echelon.

A group of ten split between four vehicles: two luxury SUVs, two high-performance sports cars. Nines is one of two androids, the other a nurse-turned-liabilities-expert MC500 named Bluebell that traveled with them from the States, and they sign the same declaration forms as the humans. Progress, Nines thinks as he forwards the information to Markus and Connor, who swiftly relay their mutual delight. Nines saves their responses in his long-term memory and shares the sentiment and a smile with Bluebell.

>>If you enjoy this, we should go HALO jumping after.

He looks the term up and doesn’t understand the appeal, but he replies anyway because he isn’t rude.

<<I’ll keep you informed.

Her smile brightens, warm like the desert is warm, and he wonders.

meet bluebell! she dropped herself right into this story, and I low-key fell in love with her <3 a sweetheart adrenaline junkie. she and north should Never Meet (but they do, to the grief of literally every person in a fifty mile radius).

After two weeks of intense, demanding work, their itinerary for the day is almost laughably simple. Four drivers, four navigators, and two responsibility-free passengers to allow for physical and mental breaks. Everyone swaps roles and sometimes vehicles every fifty kilometers on average to allow for roughly equal distribution of driving time because even though all four vehicles fall under the same performance class, each one promises a unique driving experience. Nines isn’t skeptical, the statistics speak for themselves, but he also doesn’t understand.

And then it’s his first turn in the driver’s seat and he thinks, Oh.

He thinks, I owe Hank an apology.

He thinks, I know what I’m going to buy.

And he does.

(Of course, it isn’t quite that simple, but for once, he postpones immediately attending to the details and instead focuses all of his not-inconsiderable processing power on his first fifty kilometers of speed limit–free road.)

(Bluebell doesn’t have to ask him to go HALO jumping; two miles down the road he offers to take her the next morning. She accepts.)

what we see of road systems and vehicles in dbh indicates there’s a lot of autonomous systems at work. I decided to throw that completely out the window for germany, for both story and personal reasons. the full working title of this story is “that nines-go-fast project a.k.a. give him an m”—m as in the bmw m series. I intentionally didn’t include any specific vehicle brands because trying to come up with names for future vehicles always feels awkward and silly, but the moment my nines became an adrenaline junkie is the moment he found himself behind the wheel of a luxury suv. an suv because he has three rk brothers and all of their silly friends and family to tote around, but in ~style~. you see my vision.

***

we’ve reached the end! not of what’s written, there’s more words drafted, but this commentary has long gotten out of hand, so if you’re reading this, thank you for sticking around to the end! hopefully you’ve gleaned something interesting! if you have any questions, hmu!

#from the askbox #newpartnerincrime #detroit become human #rk900 #connor #hank anderson #fanfiction #fanfic #my words

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