Partners [Path Unlocked 🔓]

Chapter 2 - Miscalculations

With the knowledge that Connor was now actually on his way instead of laying in bed with no real intent of moving from there anytime soon, HK800 was easily able to calculate the distance between the DPD and where his databases informed him Detective Anderson resided and approximate how much time he was allotted before the human's expected arrival. According to his calculations, which were never wrong, the android had 27 minutes to wait before he could finally get on with the actual investigation.

While, hitherto, the only objective in HK800's program had been Eliminate Deviancy the android had since given himself the secondary quest of Form Partnership With Connor and under that, of course, the smaller task Learn More About Connor. With these new occupiers to busy himself with, HK800 decided to use all of his remaining time, now 26.43 minutes, to the utmost in an attempt to meet these new requirements. Which is why the android felt it would be beneficial to scan over the ungodly mess that was Connor's desk, even if looking at the haphazard array of useless junk and scattered papers thrown hither and thither as if the detective had mistaken them for confetti rather than important documents made the machine cringe.

Masses of crudely stuffed files dominated the scene, the pale yellow folders thrown carelessly over every available inch of surface space and all overflowing with far too many papers shoved messily into their insufficient confines so that court documents and case reports stuck out at every corner like an unbeatable game of whack-a-mole. The folder that currently played king of the hill over the rest of the paper junkyard, however, was surprisingly slim in comparison, only holding what could be no more than three or four sheets of paper within its bowels rather than the apparent novels the rest of the folders were suffocating under the weight of.

HK800 glanced a quick eye about the room to ensure than nobody was glancing his way, waiting a brief moment until a small, green check of approval pinged into the left hand corner of his vision and his rapid scan delivered a negative result before flicking the folder open.

The first paper in the folder was, as one might expect, a description of a suspect; in this instance, a deviant PL600 owned by the Phillips family. The suspect was registered under the name of Daniel; but what caught HK800's attention was not necessarily the actual information about a case he held no connection to, but rather the fact that the word "Damn" had been scribbled over the android's given name in a messy Sharpie scrawl and - far worse than that - the sentence "Back at it again with the white kids" had been doodled underneath the name as well.

Jesus Christ, was this really the shit HK800 was going to have to deal with? At least the same sloppy handwriting then went on to jot a few actually pertinent notes about the suspect and its relation to a girl apparently taken hostage, an Emma Phillips, who HK800's automatic information scan confidently informed the android was still alive and well before the machine even flipped through the rest of the folder. The sloppy Sharpie scrawl shorthanded the date as Aug, 15. 2038. Followed by a scribbly 7:52 in which the tail of the last number jerked sideways in a long streak as if the writer had already been up and moving by the time they finished the notes.

Taking this all in, the android leafed through the remaining few sheets of paper a lot quicker, finding little hand scrawled text on the next few pages he rifled over and only being provided with a bare bones description of the actual negotiation and preceding investigation, the pages filled with uninformative facts such as Detective Anderson arrives: 8:29 and Detective Anderson discovers PL600 was going to be replaced: 8:38. (Though this fact at least had the words EMOTIONAL SHOCK written alongside it in bold but sloppy sharpie marks) Though, even the short, objective notes obviously typed by someone uninvolved with the whole situation, probably from much higher up than the detective himself or anyone else actually sent onto the field, clearly detailed Connor Anderson's preferred methods in crystal clarity and HK800 eagerly filed the potentially useful bit of knowledge away for later use.