CYBERLIFE

Chapter 4

Hours he spent hunched over Connor, working endlessly on the mess that his body system was. He was going through too much Thirium to keep him working, but he needed to untangle Connor's chest to actually figure out how to even get more lines run through and another Thirium Pump working. And there was that too, Connor's Thirium Pump looked weird. Not like any of the other models that he's had before, even Markus'. At least with Markus if his Thirium Pump broke, he could find one that would work. It wouldn't work perfectly, and it would pump slower, but it would work efficiently enough.

Connor's doesn't look like it would actually do that. Which meant he was going to have to reconstruct a Thirium Pump like the one he had and make it work. He could unhook the Thirium Pump from him, but to do that he needed to have the machine connected to the Thirium Lines and not the Pump. Which also meant untangling this mess.

He was running in circles.

"It's been eleven hours, ten minutes and fifty seconds. We've rewired a good portion of him, about one-fourth of the system."

"I know, but it's still not enough. We can start running some of the Thirium lines though, get him connected to the most important biocomponents and slowly get him worked off from the Thirium Pump itself. We need to start focusing on preserving some of the Thirium." Elijah reached for the new lines and handed them over toward Nathan. "Connect them to the system, I'll work on digging through the mess."

Together they slowly got Connor transferred over to the artificial pump that would now regulate the Thirium through him without the use of the pump itself. The system took over and the computer registered the change, adjusting the settings as needed to get Connor to a more stable place. Elijah then turned his attention to the more pressing matter now, the torn lines that the bullet cut through and fried.

"Was there an exit wound?" Together they carefully sat Connor up and checked his back, running their fingers along the skin and finding nothing. "The bullet is still in him then, can you see it, Nathan?"

The bullet had torn through several of the mess of wires on the right side of Connor's chest near his Thirium Pump. With some work and a bit of direction from Nathan, they managed to carefully extract it without damaging more of Connor's body. The bullet, their evidence, was dropped into a petri dish and sat off to the side for later. As he started to return to working on Connor's wires and trying to repair and untangle what he could, Nathan suddenly stepped away from the table and glanced toward the door. Elijah raised his gaze up toward him and saw the brief turn of his LED to yellow before it settled back on blue.

"Detective Reed messaged me, he said that everyone is getting anxious for an update."

Elijah nodded his head and turned back down toward Connor's chest. "Go tell them what you can, but don't tell them too much." He tapped the mess of wires. "Remember, they don't need to know everything nor will they understand everything." Give detail but don't make it worse by upsetting them, was what he meant.

"I understand. I will return shortly."

Once he was alone Elijah stepped back and lowered himself down into the chair, taking in Connor and everything they have done so far. He turned in the chair and scooted himself up to the computer, clicking on a few things and having the system run another diagnostics. He already knew a good portion of the errors would be from what he hadn't managed to fix with the wires, but he needed to know what else he was looking at now. He's slowly been working his way through all the errors as much as he can, crossing them off like a list as he goes along.

As it did that he loaded up a different program to check the updates that Connor has been through and what programs were running in him. Androids, even deviated, still had programs in them that allowed them to do the things they could. Androids that operated machines had a program in them to know how to do that. Connor's ability to analyze things in real time was another program that was built into him.