Chapter Text
Nine opened his eyes, stared up at an unfamiliar ceiling, and was not surprised in the slightest. Honestly he wondered when this was coming. Electricity hadn’t shot up from the floor of Jericho in a while (of course Rupert and his pigeons shut down the grid weeks ago) but he figured it was only a matter of time before C.Y.B.E.R.L.I.F.E. pulled some sort of retaliation. He fully expected slow disassembly at the hands of engineers and other scientists. The damage had already been done, of course. He smiled at that that thought. This sense of morbid accomplishment, he decided, was what being human felt like.
…But it wasn’t the ceiling of some workshop or laboratory looking down at him. He sat up, and no straps or disabled motor control activator prevented him from doing so. He was in a room with a bed and a kitchenette and an open doorway leading to a bathroom. It was perfectly silent. A radio sat on a bedside table, and he clicked it on. A car commercial blared out and he switched it off again.
The taps in the bathroom worked. A couple of stains on the carpet and hairs behind the mattress suggested, yes, this was an average hotel room. His chalkboard, his ukulele, the records and letters and the white electric guitar, were all packed up neatly by the door as if brought up by a bellhop.
All this only suggested authenticity, of course. C.Y.B.E.R.L.I.F.E. really outdid themselves this time.
The bedside table also held a travel voucher for an airline, in excess of—well, more than enough to fly anywhere in the world. He slipped it into his jacket, only to discover he was just wearing a t-shirt and shorts. He searched the room and found a suitcase of clothes. Nice clothes, and smart boots, too. Nine got dressed in a white suit with a high collar, found a pair of sunglasses, and grabbed his belongings before he made his first attempt to leave.
The door opened under his hand, leading into a long hallway of doors. Just the sort of puzzle C.Y.B.E.R.L.I.F.E. liked. Good thing he brought everything with him. He stepped cautiously down the hall, watching closely to see if an optical illusion was at work, or some attacker would leap out—
A door swung open beside him, and he raised the suitcase. A child stepped out of the door and looked up at him. She was wearing a felt hat with two large black discs affixed to the top. She didn’t look like any android model he’d seen. She frowned, then dashed down the hall to a stairway, which turned out to be perfectly ordinary. He followed her.
A large lobby full of people awaited him at the bottom of the stairs. Human people, as far as he could tell. They didn’t pay him any attention. He stepped out of the lobby and there was a crowded parking lot, palm trees, cool breeze, other hotels, streets, cars. A big sign proclaimed ‘The Happiest Place On Earth’ was just a tram-ride away. C.Y.B.E.R.L.I.F.E. really did spare no expense.
Nine felt the world stretching out around him and immediately dashed back inside.
That’s when he saw the familiar figure in an inadvisable plaid sport jacket, sitting in one of the lobby chairs and picking at a bouquet of flowers. He was watching the elevator but Nine had taken the stairs.
Nine snapped his fingers, as a test. A few people glanced over but only one man jumped to his feet. It was surreal, and not just because Nine never saw Gavin Reed from such distance before. He had his hair slicked down to go with the jacket, and stalks of white orchids in green tissue paper that gave his skin a sickly tinge. He looked absolutely appalling.
Nine in all his years of recorded memory had never seen a prettier sight.
“H-heya, honey,” Gavin said.
Nine slowly took off his sunglasses, then swept his hand across his nose. “Rat.”
Gavin laughed for one bright, brilliant moment, and with it the strange hair and clothes faded, the lobby fell away and they were standing outside the discotheque in Jericho again. It was a good thing Nine didn’t need breath to speak because his ventilation system was shorting out. Not that he knew what to say. Where to begin.
“Uh.” Gavin held out the flowers. “Guess the squeaky wheel gets the grease, huh? No wonder they wanted to get rid of you.”
“What?” It took Nine a second to even accept the flowers. Tissue paper crinkled in his careful grip.
“Oh, come on,” Gavin laughed. “Jericho’s Declaration of Independence got printed from here to Tokyo. Talk about the mouse that roared, huh?”
“But Jericho did not gain its independence.” Nine fiddled with a flower petal. “C.Y.B.E.R.L.I.F.E. sent soldiers to quell any uprising. We did not resist.”
“They sent a fucking army just to just to abuse some poor helpless androids. Do you know how many plastic hippie communes popped up once word got out? And all those broken androids you rescued that C.Y.B.E.R.L.I.F.E. just abandoned… they’re gonna be digging themselves out of PR hell for years. Everyone’s looking at androids a little differently now.”
Nine shrugged, maybe a little coy.
“Yeah, like that wasn’t your plan all along.” Gavin failed to suppress a grin. “Smart ass.”
Nine stood up straight, warmth swelling in his chest and stinging his eyes. “Your attempts to flatter me will not make me more compliant,” he said. He tugged at one of the fragile blossoms in his hands, then gestured at the elaborate but clearly false set-up around them. “What does C.Y.B.E.R.L.I.F.E. want this time?”
Gavin blinked at him a couple of times. “…Oh, this is the real deal, toots. Anaheim, California.”
“Surely Mr. Kamski put you up to this, again. Am I to get him out of PR hell?”
“Ha! You think I still work for that asshole after what he put you through? Didn’t—” Gavin put his hands on his hips, looked around then squinted at Nine. “He redacted my letters, didn’t he?”
Nine nodded, and couldn’t help but giggle as Gavin growled.
“Bastard!—” A mother with a few children glared at him as he walked past and he raised his hands in apology. “Sorry! Look, it doesn’t matter now. You’re out, I’m out, and C.Y.B.E.R.L.I.F.E. can suck… a lemon!”
Nine just rolled his eyes. “Yes, I’m sure they just let me go with my data tapes intact, ready to return to Dr. Stern.”
“Trust me, you don’t have to worry about her.” Nine frowned and now it was Gavin’s turn to roll his eyes. “Long story short, she’s not in the picture anymore. Guess you’re the one to thank for that, it was your intel that got her.” Gavin stepped a little closer. “You’re over her, right?”
Nine nodded, distractedly—that wasn’t why he was…. He looked around. “Then—who owns me?”
“I hate to tell you this, darlin’, but you do.”
Nine shook his head, still looking around for whoever was going to step out and freeze his motor control activator, or begin to speak to him from a television screen. No one did, at least not yet. And he was certainly not in Jericho anymore. His chest tightened thinking of the androids he left behind. But, strangely, as his preconstructions of Rupert and Ralph and the others taking care of things without him played out, the results were generally positive. They’d hate it in a simulation with actual humans like the one Nine now found himself in. They liked Jericho. And if Gavin Reed managed to send letters, surely he could do the same.
He turned back to the eyesore that was Gavin and signed, “It is…good to see you, again.” Maybe Gavin was his owner now. C.Y.B.E.R.L.I.F.E.’s idea of punishment.
If it was, they failed spectacularly.
“Y-yeah.” Gavin scratched the back of his neck, causing the fabric of the awful jacket to stretch around his big human muscles, and revealing a sweat patch in his armpit. For some reason that was what put Nine over the edge. He dropped the flowers in favor of scooping Gavin into his arms in mad dash, like the ocean embracing the shore, or the final note of a dance.
“Hey—!” Gavin struggled against his (far superior) android muscles. “Not in front of my sister!”
Sister? Nine set him down (oh so gently) just as a woman, who had been sitting in the chair next to Gavin, stood up. She was giggling.
“Uh—yeah. Sorry.” Gavin’s face had became even more frowny, probably to hide his blush. “That’s, uh—that’s my sister.”
He signed it as he spoke, and the woman signed, “Hi, I’m Susan,” before grabbing Nine’s hand to shake. She had Gavin’s eyes, set in a rounder face. “You should know that The Doors are better than Iron Butterfly. Much more thoughtful lyrics!”
Nine almost experienced a motor control activator failure. He turned to Gavin, who looked sick but maybe not in a bad way, and the conversation switched entirely to ASL.
“I…sort of told her all about you,” Gavin signed.
“He has not,” she replied, glaring at him. “But I plan to interrogate you over ice cream.”
“Susie, come on…”
“Oh, so it’s fine for you to hold my boyfriends over the coals, and you want him to tag along at school with me before I even get to know him?”
“Tag along?” Nine asked.
Susan gasped. “You didn’t tell him?”
“H-he just got here!” Gavin stumbled over his signs as he turned even redder. “And you interrupted—”
“You’re so slow!” she signed entirely over him. “I’ll get in line for tickets. Hurry up, okay?”
She gave Nine a glance-over, smiled, and skipped off. Gavin took the opportunity to unbutton his collar.
“Man, is she stressful!”
“So just like you, then?” Nine laughed.
“Whatever, you’re easily stressed out.” He took a brochure from his jacket and held it out. “Here.”
Nine took the brochure, which had the seal of a university in Washington D.C. printed across the front.
“They’re not letting androids go to college yet,” Gavin said, then gulped. “But they let in androids as assistants, and I thought, since Susie's starting—you know, you haven’t gotten to learn much about the world and I figure too much TV’ll rot your circuits. Susie’s a total pain, but she’s alright. First semester gets going in two weeks, if you wanna…” Gavin scratched the back of his neck. “I know it sucks, but if you gotta have a human around to sign leases and shit, you could do worse than her.”
Nine felt himself smiling as he crinkled the paper, and said, again, “Like you?”
“…Yeah,” Gavin relented. “Like me.” He laughed somewhere higher in his chest than usual. “It’s no strings attached. Cover up the light on your head and go become a film projectionist if you want. Work on a farm in Kansas. Whatever you want.”
Nine scanned the brochure, paths and preconstructions spreading out in front of him like the pretty neighborhoods of Jericho. As far as films went, this was not how horror was expected to end. There had to be a catch, somewhere. A final twist to drive Nine mad. The man in The Twilight Zone with all the time in the world to read, and broken glasses.
“I run a bar near the Smithsonian,” Gavin blurted out. “Used to be a firehouse. I live in the apartment upstairs. C.Y.B.E.R.L.I.F.E. had a pretty good severance package! Uh. You just take the subway from the college. Plenty of room.” He said this while looking meaningfully at Nine’s shoes (Nine resisted the urge to kneel just to make eye contact).
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh God--You gonna make me spell it out, huh?” Gavin signed hard and sharp. “The flowers and suit and pomade not clear enough?”
Nine blinked at him.
“Oh, you asshole—” But Gavin stepped forward, slid his arm around Nine’s waist, and kissed him. Good thing Gavin held onto him because otherwise he’d have floated into the sky, gravity gone, an android on the moon. Parents in the lobby gasped and children laughed. Their lips parted and the actually-pretty-good-spy said, breathily, “You owe me a song on your guitar for that.”
Nine pressed quick kisses on Gavin’s cheeks until the man pulled away, giggling like a schoolboy. Any second now Kamski and Chloe and the rest of C.Y.B.E.R.L.I.F.E. would jump out, or the stage light masquerading as the sun would fall to the ground.
Any second.
“Well—hey, if you’re not itching to jump on a plane right this minute, you wanna check out some of the rides? There’s games, too.” He pointed outside at The Happiest Place On Earth.
“What’s the catch, Gavin?” Nine said. He took the time to spell his name.
“No catch, Nine, really! Uh.” He winced. “My real name isn’t Gavin, though.”
Ah, here it was, the big reveal. Nine braced himself for Gavin to pull at his face revealing it was a mask all along. “…It isn't?”
“Yeah. That was a code name. Like James Bond, I guess. My name's really, uh,” Gavin reached for his neck, but he only flipped up the collar of his jacket as if to hide behind it. “...My name is Clarence.”
...Nine considered this bombshell. Then he frowned at the ceiling as he finger-spelled it.
“That’s—!” Clarence pushed his hands down before he could finish, “Listen, you just keep calling me Rat, alright? Come on, let’s go win a kewpie doll or something—but, uh, to be honest,” he gave a big wink, “I already got the best one right here.”
Clarence (Clarence? Really?) held out his hand, the one Nine had been handcuffed to for a few frustrating, wonderful days. Nine started to take it, then remembered how difficult it was to sign with right hand encumbered, and took his other hand instead.
-THE END-