Chapter Text
November 17, 2039. Detroit, MI.
One year.
It had been one whole year since the prototype RK900 model, now known as Nines Anderson, had been activated.
And instead of celebrating the fact that he’d been alive and free for that entire year (his brother, Connor, having activated him with the deviancy virus already installed), Nines Anderson was having a panic attack on the bathroom floor in the police station.
Back pressed against the cold tiles of the wall and knees pulled to his chest, inside the stall furthest from the door, he hyperventilated as he sat there, red error messages flashing across his vision.
^76% LEVEL OF STRESS
He wasn’t crying yet, but he could tell that he would be soon.
A leaky urinal dripped quietly in the background, but the sound was somehow amplified by his processors, every drop of water onto the tile like a short-circuit to Nines. It almost hurt , every one of his senses flooding him with useless information as his stress levels rose.
^88% LEVEL OF STRESS
It had been a whole fucking year of Nines being deviant, and he still could barely find any personality to speak of inside himself. Cyberlife hadn’t bothered to give him the social protocols they outfitted his brother with, had they? His premade personality matrix wasn’t a personality so much as it was just traits that came along with some of his skills―he was an expert at reading social cues and vitals to tell when someone was lying (never mind that he wasn’t equipped to follow those social cues himself), he was insanely agile and fast both physically and mentally, and of course there was the fact that he quite literally had a supercomputer for a brain.
He had thought, at the beginning, that this would mean he would shape a personality quickly, without the trouble of trying to tell preprogrammed traits from acquired ones, but now it just seemed as if Cyberlife had been determined to make sure he was never able to assimilate into human society.
Nines squinted his eyes shut and opened them again, and shivered as a cold stream of thirium trickled down his cheek, and then another, and then he was sobbing and he couldn’t stop. Thirium splattered the white fabric of his Cyberlife-issued jacket―why had he never bothered to replace that thing?―and soaked into the black of his Cyberlife-issued slacks.
He was a failure, wasn’t he?
Nines’ thirium tears hit the off-white tiles, slowly creeping towards the drain a few feet away.
^91% LEVEL OF STRESS
Designed to never deviate, designed to never assimilate if he somehow did deviate, and then thrown headfirst into a world where he had never known anything but deviancy.
At least he was the prototype, and there had never been another RK900 made after him. No other android would ever have to suffer like he did; that was a relief.
He deserved this.
^94% LEVEL OF STRESS
Why hadn’t he just asked Connor to shut him down after the first week? It would have saved everyone the trouble. He’d gotten the worst parts of deviancy, the crying and the pain, but none of the good things.
^96% LEVEL OF STRESS
Most people treated Nines like a human these days, even those who had previously had anti-android prejudices before the revolution, but was he really anything more than a machine?
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WARNING: STRESS LEVELS CRITICAL
Nines snapped out of his trance at the sound of footsteps entering the bathroom. A familiar pair of well-worn steel toe boots appeared outside the stall: Detective Gavin Reed, work partner and friend, Nines’ scanners helpfully supplied, as if he didn’t already know that. His rapidly overheating processors spun, trying to preconstruct a way out of this situation that didn’t end with Gavin discovering him having a panic attack, but it was too late. He would shut down from the stress if he did anything but continue to sit here.
The owner of the boots knocked rapidly on the stall door. What would Gavin think of him after this? Surely he would laugh at Nines, call him weak and pathetic.
“Hey, what the fuck is going on in here? Nines? Are you okay?”
Nines continued to sob violently, unable to force himself to speak. More thirium splattered on the floor, and some part of him realized that Gavin must think he was injured, but he just sat there shaking.
“Nines!” Gavin sounded almost as panicked as Nines felt as he rapped his knuckles on the stall door again. “Let me in!”
Nines wanted to speak, wanted to tell Gavin to go away, or that the thirium was from tears and not a wound, but his processors were whirring too fast, everything far too loud and too bright even in the dim of the bathroom, and red error messages obscured his entire field of vision now.
Gavin swore under his breath and stepped back, and then the door shuddered and flew open with a bang as the lock popped off. Gavin grabbed it with unprecedented speed, stopping it from slamming into the side of the stall or into Nines, and slowly closed it behind him before crouching at the android’s side.
“Hey,” he said, voice softer as he saw that Nines was panicking and not dying (although it certainly felt to the android as if he was dying), “what’s going on?”
Nines forced himself to move, looking up at the detective. His arms were still wrapped around his knees, making himself as small as possible. He finally forced himself to speak: “Panic...attack,” he croaked.
V 97% LEVEL OF STRESS
Gavin’s expression shifted from that of concern to something uncharacteristically empathetic and gentle. “Oh, that sucks. I get those all the time, so I, uh, I know what you’re feeling right now,” he said quietly. “Can I sit down?”
Nines nodded. “Just don’t touch me, please. Processors...too much.”
Gavin slowly moved into a sitting position beside Nines, careful to give the android a little space. “That’d be the sensory overload. Happens sometimes with anxiety.”
Nines didn’t have the processor capability to run a search on what sensory overload was right now, but the name seemed to speak for itself.
V 94% LEVEL OF STRESS
“Try to take a deep breath,” Gavin said. “In through your nose, out through your mouth. Slow. Hold it for a few moments. I dunno if that shit works on androids, but if you can hyperventilate it’ll probably do something.”
Nines watched as Gavin inhaled (four seconds), held his breath (seven seconds), and exhaled (eight seconds). The second time around, he breathed in sync with the detective, taking a deep breath and holding it despite his involuntary shuddering and his intense compulsion to keep breathing as fast as he could.
V 87% LEVEL OF STRESS
For a while, it was just the two of them sitting there, breathing in sync. Nines eventually reached up and wiped as much thirium as he could off his face, the sleeves of his jacket irreversibly stained blue now. He had stopped crying at some point, and not long after that returned to something resembling a normal breathing pattern.
V 73% LEVEL OF STRESS
Nines’ body was still shaking a little bit, the android equivalent of adrenaline running through his veins, but the sensory overload seemed to have retreated and now he was just left with a pounding headache and the last remains of his fear.
V 60% LEVEL OF STRESS
STRESS LEVELS STABILIZING
The error messages started to disappear, Nines’ vision returning to normal, and he took another shuddering deep breath before peeling his hands away from his knees and stretching his legs out on the cold, wet tile.
“Thank you, Gavin,” he whispered.
V 42% LEVEL OF STRESS
“Yeah,” Gavin breathed noncommittally, turning a little to face Nines. “If you don’t mind me asking, what was it that made you panic?”
^49% LEVEL OF STRESS
Gavin reached out a hand, almost touching Nines’ shoulder. “Hey. It’s fine. Just...talk to me about it. Only if you feel comfortable, but I can tell you from experience that talking about it can help you work things out.”
Nines was silent for a moment, thinking, wondering if he should confide in Gavin. Would the detective understand? If his current behavior was anything to work off of, he probably wouldn’t judge Nines too harshly, but Nines doubted Gavin would be able to relate.
Still, they’d been partners for the majority of Nines’ year since activation, and Gavin had shown himself in the past to be a very understanding person given enough time and a good incentive.
“Do you know what today is, Detective Reed?” Nines queried.
“Thursday?” Gavin replied, sounding slightly unsure of himself.
“November seventeenth, 2039. The one year anniversary of my activation.”
“Nines! It’s your birthday! Why is that relevant to you having a panic attack?” Gavin said, tilting his head in confusion.
“I’ve been a deviant this whole year, but I just...I don’t have a personality. I barely have any identity. I’ve never known anything but deviancy, yet I can’t help but feel that I’m nothing more than a machine.” Nines leaned his head back against the wall, closing his eyes.
V 36% LEVEL OF STRESS
“You’re not.” Gavin paused, swallowed. “You’re not just a machine, Nines. For fuck’s sake, you’re crying. Only deviants can cry, as far as I know.”
“That is correct, but Cyberlife designed me so that even after deviation, I’m hardly human. They gave me the smallest personality matrix they possibly could, and I’ve been trying to build a personality and an identity but I just can’t . It’s too overwhelming. How do you humans do it?”
Gavin threw his head back and laughed, a hearty sound. Nines wondered if his processors were working correctly, because he found himself inadvertently making a copy of this moment and saving it to his ever-expanding mental file on Detective Gavin Reed.
V 14% LEVEL OF STRESS
STRESS LEVELS STABLE
“Oh boy, you sound like you just hit puberty for the first time.”
“‘The first time’?” Nines repeated. “I thought humans only hit puberty once.”
Gavin’s face paled for a moment, and then he laughed again. “Not this human, buddy. I hit puberty, realized it was the wrong one, and then I had to get it done synthetically the second time around. I’m trans, you know.”
Nines vaguely remembered Gavin mentioning that in the past, but since the detective had never made a big deal out of it, he’d never really thought much about it. He ran a quick search on trans and puberty , and no sooner than the information had run through his processors, too fast for him to consciously comprehend, he nodded in understanding.
“But anyways, what I meant was that when you hit puberty, for a lot of people that’s when you start to form your identity for real. Not just gender, and some people figure that out earlier or a lot later or whatever, but everyone gets confused about who they are when they hit puberty. I don’t know shit about how that works for androids, but it’s a normal thing for humans. I know a lot of people like to compare deviancy to a coming-of-age. And, you know, you’re not alone. I know it can be overwhelming trying to figure that out in such a short period of time, but you can get help with that.”
Nines looked at Gavin. “Can you help me?”
Gavin smirked, the scar tissue on the bridge of his nose crinkling as he gave Nines an open-mouthed smile, flashing his sharp teeth. It was the same smile he gave to perps right before they got handcuffed, or when he’d worked a confession out of them, and especially when he pulled a gun on them, but there was something more mischievous than malevolent in his eyes this time.
Nines found himself cataloguing that smile.
“You dumbass,” Gavin said, but the tone of his voice indicated affection that was contradictory to his words, “I thought you’d never ask.”