albinomilksnake | DETROIT BECOME HUMAN OPEN RP POST

It's a narrow space, barely bigger than an oversized closet, effectively made smaller by a collection of filing cabinets and chairs that've all sat without ventilation for so long that they reek of stale air. Worn carpet clings to Markus's heels as he crosses Elijah's eyeline, finding a seat of his own across the edge of the only desk, focusing more on the process of it than the company he's left himself to keep.

"No," Markus corrects a little too quickly, a little too sincerely. Organic cadence. Flawed timing. "If he did, I think we both know what that service would've looked like."

Humor, what little they can find, helps. Masks the tension sticking to them both. The weight of a loss he isn't sure they share in equal parts and— how difficult it is to look at him directly, he realizes. Occupying the same, closed-off room leaves Markus feeling uniquely reduced.

"I almost didn't think you were going to show."

"Nor did I," he allows. "I wasn't sure if it would be..."

Right is a difficult word for someone as bluntly amoral as Elijah.

"...appropriate," is where he settles. "However, Leo contacted me, and...well. If I'd known what to expect, I wouldn't have worried."

A service befitting of Carl would have been half the length with a tenth of the guest list, he thinks. People he actually knew, not distant hangers-on who could claim he touched their lives.

"...How are you, Markus?"

Markus works his jaw for a beat, manufactured musculature flexing tightly under simulated skin.

Kamski is vivid, by either human or android standards. He's also paler now, gone sharper at the seams compared to the snapshot visual feed Markus still keeps compartmentalized in his housing, of an inventor in his element: hair half pulled back, glasses sitting low across the bridge of his nose. Unshaved. Probably unwashed. With that picture in mind, Markus wonders faintly if this is some kind of an evaluation.

He concludes, a cutting second later when he fixes his attention on the man standing at the opposite end of the room, he doesn't care if it is. He's done proving himself. He's been done for a long, long time.

So his answer is honest.

"I don't know."

"Carl's gone. Political momentum for our cause started and ended with humanity acknowledging our rights as a living species. Hell, they're going to be talking for weeks about the fact that you and I were in the same room more than they'll consider sanctioning necessary biocomponents as medical resources instead of commercial products." Frustration cuts his expression. Markus flexes his fingers, shrugging it off when he adds, "He never had all the answers, but he had a way of making it seem easier."

Time. Perspective. Things Carl liked to say he wasted in his youth, alongside rough-edged good looks.

"Without him around anymore I-

I don't know what I'm supposed to be feeling."

"An extremely human response. One I shared at my own parents' funeral," he permits. They had died in the same car wreck when he was twenty-five. Ironically, funerals came very close to bracketing his decade in exile. "Regardless of whether you've outgrown their influence, the loss of a role model can leave the modeled feeling...unanchored. That can be more damaging for some than others."

His eyes dart to Leo, barely out of earshot, for a fraction of a second.

"Human," Markus echoes, trying to work the implications of it around his teeth.

That kind of weight, that kind of grief, it doesn't feel normal. He doesn't see how it could be, even with the concept of loss standing as a fresh, steady constant. Unlike the glossy renderings of skulls in Carl's study, or the LEDs that had littered the floor beneath Lucy's heels, there's nothing beautiful about it.

It compounds.

"I won't have time to stay with him." And it sounds colder than he means for it to, despite being the truth. Despite the languid rhythm of his voice as he follows the direction of Kamski's stare.

"But you're wrong about Leo- Carl was never his role model."

“Perhaps. But almost everyone looks to their parents as a template, of sorts. Regardless of whether fitting into it, or superseding it, holds any interest to the child.”

Elijah shakes his head, almost unnoticeably.

“You don’t owe him anything.”

Leo, who asked him to come, and maybe not entirely because it was Carl's request. Leo, who hovered for the entirety of the service somewhere around Markus's elbow with a paper-thin presence, but never once moved to apologize. Elijah's right: he doesn't owe his brother anything. Not resentment, not hate, not affection.

If he had time, though, he thinks, he'd stay. Just a little while longer.

"Your parents," Markus starts, broaching the segue with couched interest; it's hard not to dwell on how little he knows about the man that made him. "is that why you..."

Left. Hid. Walked away from the world and his creations in totality.

Elijah watches him for a few moments, eyes a little narrowed, openly fascinated. No - he really doesn't know. Hasn't worked it out.

"...No. By the time they died, we were practically strangers to each other. They couldn't understand my work, and I was...far too wrapped up in it. Their passing had no influence on my decision to leave CyberLife."

Markus is a lot of things: intuitive, idealistic, motivated to the point of recklessness, inherently empathetic, a waypoint for millions via technicality in the wake of their victory— but analytical, no. He never really grew into that ability as keenly as his successive model.

He doesn't balk at the directness of Kamski's stare.

"Strangers to each other, strangers to you. Must have been difficult."

"Perhaps, for them. I'd left home almost a decade prior, and - they didn't seem to miss me."

He looks unconcerned.

"If you have a little more time to spare, somewhere more private, I can explain why I was driven out of CyberLife."

He ponders it for a moment, that offhanded suggestion, and in the end it only takes a fraction of a second to send a message to Jericho’s innermost circle. The seamless tip of his head, eyes drifting closed for a single beat, smoother than Connor’s habit of systematic sharp blinks and pitched focus.

The news probably isn’t a surprise to them. Not when he’d done his grieving in private to steady himself; he hadn’t asked them to come with him.

In truth, he’d isolated this part of his old life. Protective, striving to keep Carl sectioned off from the ire and interest and conflict, knowing how much he valued his seclusion. Knowing that in regards to the volatility of some humans, association was more than just a point of interest. It could be dangerous. And in hindsight— it was so much of why he’d never strained to go home. Never stayed beyond those short, infrequent visits.

Markus pulls himself off of the desk, the line of his dark, fitted suit collar settling easily into place.

“Feels like I’d be missing out on an opportunity if I said no.”

Dry and level, in the way that his tone tended to be more and more frequently these days.

He doesn’t offer Jericho’s now relocated site as an option. But he doubts Elijah was expecting that to begin with.

He wasn't. Not that he'd do anything with it, if he did know. The location of the original Jericho was information he could have gleaned from Chloe if he'd ever cared to, but - it was simply enough to know that she knew. Something to keep in his back pocket for when it was needed.

"We can share a cab," he says, knowing the destination will be nowhere in particular. It doesn't matter. "Do you care about making our way through whatever's waiting for us at the door?"

"Not really, no." He exhales narrowly, shaking his head. By the time he tugs open the door at the far end of the office, Leo's already gone: either made his move to leave, or settled into the focus of the public eye.

Markus hopes it's the former. The latter could be disastrous for a man that's always been unpredictably fragile and keyed up all in the same breath.

He stops just in the hallway behind the altar's center point, halfway between the primary and emergency exits: a difference of risks. Leaving openly attracts attention, but leaving privately? It's like asking anyone loitering nearby to personally take up a career in rumor mongering.

"You?"

Elijah takes a breath. Anyone who actually gave a damn about convering the passing of a great artist will have followed the funeral party. That leaves the jackals.

"No," he says, then straightens his lapels and eats up the distance to the front door in long, confident strides.

There are instant camera flashes. He hears his name multiple times. Mister Kamski - Sir, can you comment on - Have you been in contact with - Were you aware of - Elijah!

Markus is facing similar barrage, but Elijah isn't listening any more, making for the cab he's already summoned with a tap on his phone. His heart is beating too fast; there's sweat beading on the back of his neck. He's spent too long in the controlled silence of his own home.

Fortunate for the both of them, Elijah Kamski had the good sense to build Markus impressively tall— wide across his shoulders— and as Elijah retreats into the taxi amidst increasingly frantic demands for attention, Markus is no more than a dense step behind, stubbornly blocking either side of the car's automated doors with his hands so that none of the hungrier vultures can shove in the featherweight plastic of their microphones.

To their credit, they try regardless.

When they fail, the doors finally snap shut, muffling the chorus of shouting voices outside (simultaneously highlighting the contrast of the taxi's cheerful VI thanking them for their choice to use DTS transit services). Markus settles in beside Elijah, taking care not to crowd him in the process. Physical markers, all the slight signs of stress he'd known to look for in Carl— it's strange, noting them in Elijah as well— drawing a line between the two of them. Something almost

fragile.

Fragile machines, Markus thinks, head tipped towards his shoulder.

"Take a minute if you need it."

He probably does, but refuses the offer. Instead, he takes a deep breath and says:

"What predicated your design was a debate over designing androids to work in areas of high radioactivity. The issue was that wireless networking was so poor. Transmitting orders continously would be challenging."

He expects Kamski to take the opportunity to recover. Instead, there's no real ceremony to the subject change, just that single, drawn out inhale.

It's not really enough time for either of them.

Not for Markus, who told himself he was ready for this conversation and all its implications (there's no closed-door sessions with your maker that don't end in splintering self-reflection; he'd spent enough time pouring over George Eliot's words and Fehr's hard-hewn lines to know that much), expression already pinching tight between his brows as he works to process what he— too quickly— interprets as his own bluntly summarized origin.

"So you built a prototype machine, one that could communicate directly instead."

"In a way," Elijah murmurs. "What I was aiming for was a...conscious android, more aware of itself and its environment. One that could take an initial order - to clear a given area of dangerous waste, for example - and then have full autonomy in how that task was completed.

"Such a model could be left to work without explicit direction for - months. The idea had applications across countless extreme environments. Mountain and ocean rescue, deep mining, even space travel. All the intellectual freedom of a human, paired with the physical hardiness and processing power of an android."

"And you didn't think that would be dangerous?"

'Dangerous'. Danger always being a matter of perspective: to humanity now, androids were as much a potential threat as they were a benefit. Competition. A demand. A mirror tipped a few degrees higher. An improvement— and maybe even a segue into obsolescence, if all their paranoia and apprehensions were made real.

He wonders how Kamski sees them. He makes it a point to ask.

Later.

Don't ask him if he thought, Markus. Ask him if he cared.

"I thought it would be - interesting. But in the end, I was only able to build one prototype with the capacity for consciousness."

Elijah's answer is telling enough.

"Interesting." Markus repeats, voice edged, mismatched eyes sharpening as they narrow by degrees. Somewhere in the rooted tangle of his own secondary functions, he can easily picture North wrapping polyalloy fingers around Elijah's (still) sweat-soaked neck.

He stays where he is.

"Why." Less a question than a demand this time.

"Why Carl — why didn't you ever come back?"

"We stayed in touch," Elijah says calmly. "But he preferred his privacy and so did I. If he'd asked, I would happily have visited, but..."

He didn't, so Elijah didn't. End of story.

DETROIT BECOME HUMAN OPEN RP POST

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