testimony

Human-Matt was kind of bossy. Foggy decided to like this about him.

He demanded a chip, an extra storage device which would fit inside his core. He demanded a tablet—either hook me up to it or make it accessible—and he demanded a set of metal tools. Ernst kept offering to help, but Matt just kept waving him off, with a no, I can do this, I’ll need you later.

“Here’s the thing,” he told them as he pried off the chest panel and dug around his cooling bags like this was perfectly normal behavior, “Stick is headed this way now. I’d say fifteen minutes to half an hour, but he’s a bastard so there’s no real way of knowing. Whenever he gets here, he’s going to order me to come back with him, and I am going to go.”

Yelps of “What?!”s echoed around the lab. Matt waited patiently, now hooked up to the tablet and processing.

“Are you finished?” he asked the room at large. Silence met him, “Good. I’m going to go back with him because if I don’t, things will get more complicated than they already are. He will kill you. Or he will make me kill you. Or he will make me try to kill you.” Matt abandoned the tablet to fiddle with some of the delicate hardware inside his core.

“I would rather not do that. And if you really do believe in what you say you do, then you will respect that what I am about to do is my own decision. My choice.” He said firmly in Hogarth’s direction. She pursed her lips and Foggy saw her shoulders rise with a calming breath.

“Yes, it’s your choice,” she echoed. Matt smiled a little. “But I fail to see how this is going to do anything to expose either organization.”

“I’m getting there. Once I get back, he will beat the shit out of me, as per usual,” Matt said calmly as the tablet in his hand blinked and then presented a downloading screen. Foggy cringed. “And then, he’ll reboot me and send me out to fight whoever Horizon throws at us this time. He is going to be pissed because I brought the last guy to the wrong handler and he’s going to try to figure out which one of you that handler is, so that the mistake doesn’t happen again.” Foggy’s diaphragm squeezed, and Matt looked up at him.

“He knows that I know someone named Foggy, but he doesn’t know who that refers to, so starting now, no one knows anyone by that name. Right, Franklin?”

Foggy took it all back. Human-Matt was a dick. The knot in his stomach loosened slightly.

“Sure, also I hate you,” he chirped. Matt laughed. Christ, it was still such a good laugh.

“Perfect. Anyways, I’m going to go with him, but I’m downloading the memories I have now onto this chip so I can remember who I am and what I’m doing without the processors when I get back to Advancement. With an order, I’ll be able to use the memories to complete the task, but I’ve got to hide them or Stick will hide me.”

“What kind of order?” Foggy interrupted, spine prickling, “And what do you mean, task?”

 Matt processed without his noise.

“Two tasks. Task one: prove coercion. The handler is going to give me an order to acquire testimony. Testimony will prove coercion and will therefore provide probable cause. This gives Ms. Hogarth the ammunition she needs to get the regulators and the police involved. I’m not the only one who opens up on more processing power. I’m part of a four-man team; Elektra won’t talk, but the others might. And I’ve got a fairly good idea for how to make that happen.”

He thought again, for longer this time.

“Task two: collect documents. Once you have testimony and once the regulators are involved, you can subpoena information and get a search warrant. Advancement’s not stupid, they’ll burn everything to the ground. But if I can intercept before then, then I might be able to preserve some of their documentation. At least mine; maybe a few others’.”

“And you’re sure you can provide this evidence?” Hogarth asked, skeptical. “If this is all on you, if something goes wrong with you, then the whole thing is a lost cause.”

As much as he wanted to believe that everything would be fine, Foggy had to agree that Hogarth had a point. What if Stick found the chip? What if he beat Matt to--? He couldn’t think about that, he wouldn’t go there even in his own head. If Matt stumbled, there was no one to catch him.

Matt lifted his head slowly with his nostrils flared. Damn, boy had a temper.

“With all due respect, ma’am, do I look like an amateur?” The bloody gloves under Foggy’s bed were probably giggling at the suggestion. “The only missions I’ve ever failed have been kill orders. If you don’t trust me, you can just go ahead and say it. It’s not just my personhood I’m worried about here, if I really wanted out on my own, I’d have just found a big enough voltage and burned myself out by now.”

Foggy swallowed against the sudden thought of the socket. Had that been an experiment? Had Matt been trying to work his way up to a bigger voltage? Seeing how much he could take? His eyes burned a little.

Hogarth’s lips thinned.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you—”

“Really? Because that’s not what it sounds like. Tell me, counselor, is it the idea of droid sentience that the Project cares about, or is it their actual sentience? Would you trust a person, a breathing person like you, to do this?”

“Matt, you’re getting upset,” George stated, staring down at one of her monitors. Hogarth didn’t back down.

“That’s not what I meant. What if you reboot? What if you turn off in the middle of this?”

“Oh I get it, now,” Matt spat, “Droids only be trusted when they’re conscious. Obviously. They have to earn it, right? ‘Cause when they aren’t awake, they’re just machines. Objects. We don’t get to be intelligent--feel pain--be people ‘til someone else lets us, right? I can assure you, ma’am. I have been made to follow orders, both as a droid and as a person, so if you’ve got a problem with that you can take it to fucking Stick.”’

“Excuse me, are you comparing me to some psychotic handler?”

“I am. You gonna prove me otherwise?”

“Matthew. You need to calm down or you’re going to reset,” George barked over them.

“Matty, we trust you,” Foggy told him. The room fell silent.

“We trust you,” he said again, to stop any arguments. Matt refocused on him. George’s sigh to Foggy’s right told him that Matt’s levels were dropping. Matt ducked his head and nodded to himself. The wires in his head bounced with the movement.

“Okay,” he murmured, “Thank you. I—I’m sorry for being, um. I won’t let you down. I promise.”

“What are you going to do between the uh, testimony and the subpoena?” Karen piped up, breaking the tension.

Matt hummed.

“I’ll need to stay there to keep down suspicion. Don’t know for sure yet if there are additional steps I can take yet. Any help that you can do on your end preserving documents, Ms. Page and Small Angry Person, would be much appreciated.”

Jess chuckled. The tablet made a notification noise. The download was complete. Matt looked at Foggy.

“Foggy, I’m sorry, I get the feeling you’re not going to like it, but I need you to be my secondary handler. You’re the fixed point in both minds. If you’re a handler, then even if something goes wrong with the memories, the droid will still carry out the orders. I need you to give me orders to acquire testimony and documentation. I need a return order and I need someone to hide this chip somewhere that is not my core.”

Foggy nodded, light-headed.

“Uh, hold long is this gonna take?”

Matt held out the chip to Ernst and thought.

“Three days, I think. Give me three days.”

“Okay, what do we say to Stick?”

“Nothing. You say nothing.”

Droid-Matt woke up and Foggy immediately noticed the difference the memory-chip made. Matt was languid like he was sleepy. He tilted his head around to orient himself, and recognizing Foggy, gave him a smile, but he didn’t launch himself at him like usual. They were all slightly afraid to touch him.

“Matt?” Foggy asked, just barely more than a whisper, “Hey, buddy. You alright? Can you--?”

Matt dropped his head towards his lap and processed.

“New hardware detected. Scanning new hardware,” he informed Foggy. Another pause. “Scanning complete.”

 He lifted his head. Shoulders went back, spine went rigid. His smile slipped into a neutral, glazed look. “Approximately thirty minutes until primary handler’s arrival. Please submit orders.”

Foggy swallowed and, with a touch of support on the shoulder from Ernst, he gave Matt his orders.

To minimize the risk of Stick finding out about Matt’s plan, Hogarth, Jess, and Karen left the lab and headed back to Advancement. Karen and Jess promised that they would have a good snoop to see if they could find any suspicious documents. Hogarth didn’t tell them what she planned to do, but her face was pale and determined. Foggy figured she was going to report everything that just happened to the Project.

This left Foggy, George, Ernst, and Maiko sitting on the bench between racks of bots, desperately trying to look fucking normal. Maiko was giggling along the edge of a panic attack. According to Matt, they had 10 to 20 minutes until the apocalypse, so they threw their collective homework all over the bench and tried to look grad-school strung out instead of subverting-an-illegal-organization strung out.

Because Foggy hated himself, he spent the time trying to imagine Stick. He pictured a giant muscle-man with a cyborg eye and scars all over his face. The kind of man who could hold down Matt, a guy who was himself the type of person capable of dragging a CO with a broken jaw for miles at a time. He couldn’t quite work out if Stick was called Stick because he stuck people (his mind provided a syringe and then a knife and then a scalpel as a happy compromise) or because he literally hit people with a stick (probably a club, or maybe the gnarliest baseball bat in existence).

Foggy’s inner six-year old, who owned far too many He-Man action figures and maybe watched a few too many Batman movies, piped in that Stick would surely make his entrance by slamming through the doors decked out in black Kevlar, shrouded by a black cape billowing with winds of intent.

Ernst’s inner six-year-old had evidently offered him something similar given how quickly the color was draining from his face. George did a great job of looking bored, but Foggy could hear her knee bouncing frantically under the table across from his.

And despite all this fuss, the guy didn’t show. Not ten minutes later. Not twenty. The usual lab-coats wandered around, collecting screws, noses pressed against tablets, spreading paperwork all over workbenches. At the forty-minute mark, Foggy had to get coffee to quell his need to move.

The waiting made him paranoid. For example, he’d would never admit it out loud because Matt was so good and obviously had so many trust issues, but maybe Matt was confused? Maybe this war or Stick or Advancement had been programmed into his mind? Maybe they were all stressed as fuck and desperate for an answer and maybe they had listened to him a little too readily. This whole thing could be some kind of misunderstanding. Those guys who got killed on the roof? A mafia hit. The blood on Matt’s crazy Kevlar uniform—which oh god, had been under Foggy’s bed for ages now—paint or chemicals. Something which just splattered on Matt in the lab or whatever dumpster he’d crawled out of during his brief escapade. Foggy chased the thoughts away by flipping a few pages in the book he wasn’t reading and glanced over to Matt, tucked safely in his IT station.

There was someone standing in front of him.

Tall, skinny guy. Old as dirt. If he died in the lab, Foggy was sure he’d haunt the place. He looked like a poltergeist impersonating a snake. He was holding a—Foggy punched Ernst in the shoulder and the others nearly cracked their necks in looking.

He had a stick. He was blind, and he had a stick. Foggy’s gut squirmed. This Stick looked like the kind of guy who’d force a kid to drink scotch until they vomited. Like the exact kind of guy who would beat Matt until he sobbed. And he was looking right into Matt’s face as though he could see him. Foggy’s heart started to pound; next to him, Ernst took a one deep breath and let it out, then another. He stood up and walked towards the man. Foggy mentally bade him good luck and started praying to a God he didn’t believe in that everything would go according to plan.

“Hello!” he said cheerfully, “Did you need IT support?”

The man noticed him and turned in his direction.

“No, just looking.” Great, he was a fucking comedian. And Christ, he sounded old as he looked. If he hadn’t been harboring the suspicion that the guy was an evil bot-doctor, Foggy would have considered calling a priest to have on standby. Ernst cocked his head, awkward.

“Oh, uh, is there anything I can help you with, questions? Concerns? These bots,” he gestured to his rack of blue and gray bots proudly, which didn’t help the awkwardness given that the old man couldn’t see him and was probably a serial killer, “are mine. If you are looking for a certain function or have any questions, just ask.”

The old man raised his head back towards Matt. His expression was neutral, edging on wistful. Ernst watched him sharply.

“That’s Matt,” he chirped, “He’s our best study-bot for debate. Are you a student here?” Ernst, flattery will get you nowhere.

The guy smirked. “Hell, kid, do I look like a student? Nah, I’m visiting. One of my former students works here. This one,” he smirked wide at Matt’s slack face and Foggy shivered, “he reminds me of one of my kids.”

One of your kids, huh? So you’ve been beating the shit out of him since he was a kid, you motherfucking piece of shit?, Foggy thought furiously, squeezing the life out of his pen and bouncing his knee until it almost vibrated.

“Oh?” Ernst continued, channeling all his Vermont neighborly-ness, “Wow, if you don’t mind my asking, how does a, er, blind person—”

“I got a feel for these things,” the old man cut him off. Ernst was quiet, no doubt collecting the fragments of his sanity.

“Did you use to work on bots?” he asked.

The old man laughed like a creaking door.

“Since before you were born, kiddo.”

“Is that how you went, uh, bl—”

“Nah, that’s something else.”

“Oh. Um, well, would you like to hear him speak? He’s really amazing at debate. One of my friends studies law—he’s over there—he could demonstrate how the law students use him, if you want?”

The old man grinned.

“Sure,” he drawled, “I’d like that.”

God, this was painful. Foggy kind of wished for the He-man Stick with the bat over this skinny, abusive grandpa.

Ernst turned Matt on and asked him the usual series of questions before releasing him from his station and walking over to get Foggy’s attention and pretend to ask him for the favor. Foggy could feel the slightest tremble in the hand he laid on his shoulder. He gave him a huge smile and made some crack about practice for an upcoming debate and got up to follow Ernst back over to the station.

The old man watched patiently as Foggy argued with Matt in debate mode. The nerves that usually came with debate were multiplied tenfold by the choice of audience and the fact that Foggy had actually never used a bot to practice debate with. He could see why Matt was popular. He was fucking ruthless. He had a counterpoint for every situation and six legal loopholes or precedents to undermine every argument.

Stick looked amused. He chuckled throughout Foggy’s admittedly poor attempt to outsmart an android.

“You did good, kid,” he told Foggy after he was well and truly defeated. Foggy wanted to break his teeth. “You’re real sharp to know all that without any help.”

Foggy thought he could shove his praise up his ass, but he smiled and demurely accepted the praise with a, ‘well, give me some more time and I’ll be able to hold my own against him.”

Stick looked down and touched his wrist—a watch, Foggy realized—and then hummed thoughtfully.

“Well, boys, I have appreciated the show, but I should be going. Supposed to meet my student at four. Thanks for all your help today and best of luck in your studies.” He shook Ernst’s hand and then Foggy’s, said he’d see them around, and then headed off towards the exit, stick tapping rhythmically ahead of him.

Matt’s face followed him and, Foggy realized with a stab to the gut, he looked heartbroken. Stick left through the automatic doors and Matt huffed a tiny, frustrated noise. Ernst looked taken aback and on the verge of collapse.

“Well, that didn’t go according to plan.”

George launched herself at them barely a nanosecond after the doors closed behind Stick.

“What the fuck was that?” she demanded, “Christ, he looked like the fucking grim reaper—” Matt interrupted her by making the sound again. Maiko sidled up to them weakly. She looked at Matt and touched his shoulder.

“Matt,” She asked, “What’s wrong?”

He whined the way he did when he wanted to tell Foggy something but couldn’t get the words out. He shrugged her hand off, face still turned towards the door. Emotion twisted in Foggy’s gut again; it was like watching a dog upset that its owner left it outside a store.

“He wants to go after him. Stick did or said something that made him want to follow,” he said, then set his jaw, “We need to let him go.”

“Okay, so let him go,” George said, “No one’s stopping him. Matt.”

Matt looked in her direction.

“Go on. We aren’t gonna stop you.”

Matt didn’t go anywhere. Foggy furrowed his brow.

“Matty, just go,” Foggy tried.

He didn’t though, he just made the frustrated noise again. He shifted his weight nervously, like a kid next in line for a roller coaster, unable to decide whether to brave it or bolt. He was working himself into almost into a tantrum. A bell went off in Foggy’s head.

 “Matt.” he barked. Matt’s head snapped towards him. He went stock still.

“Go. Now.” He ordered.

Matt bolted. But not the way Foggy thought he would, sprinting out after Stick with single-minded determination. Instead, he spun around and honest to god leapt up on top of the bot-racks behind him. Then he squatted low and launched himself up to one of the metal beams supporting the roof. He caught the edge as easy as breathing and swung himself up onto the grated frames in the rafters like a trapeze artist. He was gone not even half a second after landing.

When Foggy came back to himself he realized that he’d made so little commotion that people hadn’t seen it, or, given the few people around him who rubbed their eyes or started cleaning their glasses, had only seen a blur of motion.

“He was worried about you,” Maiko murmured. “Aw, Foggy, he didn’t want to leave you.”

Foggy groaned and held his head. He knew damnit. He also didn’t need the guilt.

Stick didn’t have to wait long at the curb in front of the campus entrance before Matty showed up next to him and squirmed, beside himself in his compulsion to get as close as possible without touching.

Fucking sickening. No wonder he came back so soft. Those fucking kids were treating him like a pet.

“Knock that shit off,” he scolded, feeling gratified when Matt pulled back and stood erect next to him. He analyzed the environment and then held his elbow out to Stick. Stick smirked. Despite whatever had gone wrong the days previous, all it took was proximity to him and Matt started readjusting. He didn’t quite process the fact that the blind leading the blind was perhaps even more suspicious than a guy taking a bot in a blue IT uniform off campus, but he’d get there by the time they got back to the institute.

Anyways, he’d been told that when Matty was functioning properly, he didn’t come appear as blind as he actually was, so Stick took the elbow and let Matt try to guide him down the street.

Matt had taken the CO to Columbia, Stick discovered, but where exactly on campus he’d dragged the fucker and what he’d done with him after that was anyone’s guess. Matt’s tracking chip and GPS records went haywire after he’d left the others. It placed him in four different places at once, which sometimes happened when Matt was moving fast and the internet connection wasn’t consistent.

Matt had spent some time in a campus building, a dorm, Stick discovered, after a few quick searches. A campus brochure online stated that a few IT and study-bots were available for check-out in this building as well as the student center. After the display in the robotics lab between Matty and the chubby law student, he could see why Matt might have been housed in this particular building; it was mostly reserved for post-grads studying law. But that told him fuck-all about where the goddamn CO had gone.

He glared at the kid next to him.

He was still dopey and docile and had tucked his knees up with him on the steel lab bench. He kept making processing noises. The whole thing pissed Stick off. His fucking weapon. Who he’d taught. Who he’d drilled day in and day out. For two goddamn years. Reduced to a puppy-eyed service bot in a matter of days.

Infuriating. Disgusting.

“You’re better than this, Matty,” he told him as he swatted at his legs. Matt put them down sheepishly and let Stick detach the cable from his core.

“Now kiddo, we need to talk,” he told him as he dug through the box next to him to find the right cable to bring up Matt’s core data. If Matt had turned off any time after he delivered the CO, they were fucking screwed. The location might have been dumped. The guy could be in the wind or in some rando’s custody. Possibly, however, if there was a god (and Stick was fairly convinced there wasn’t) Matty might have hidden the guy in a secure location. It was a long shot, but the kid had done it before with Elektra, which Stick was prepared neither to forgive or forget. If he’d restarted, however, that info would be lost too and they’d be on a wild goose chase for one of Matty’s many hidey holes. Any way around, there was no way of knowing without checking the logs.

“Where is the CO?” he tried while opening his core. If Matt just told him, it would save them both time and headache.

“Insufficient data,” Matt answered.

“Nice try. Where is the CO from orders 120 hours previous?” Matt processed. Fuck, that noise was grating. Why the fuck was he running so slow? He made a note to clear the cache and check Matt’s sensory input levels.

“Insufficient data,” Matt told him.

Stick slammed a fist onto the table next to him. It was loud enough to assault both of their ears. Matt flinched, hands flying towards his ears unbidden, understanding frustration even without extra processing power.

“I’m gonna ask you one more time, kiddo,” he said, “If you can’t tell me, we’re gonna go to block C and I know you remember block C.” He connected the cable to the computer. Matt fidgeted next to him, processing even before Stick asked the question.  

“Where. Is. The CO?” He asked slowly. Calmly. Matt processed. And processed.

At this rate he’d invalidate the question. Stick sighed and gripped the edge of the table. It wasn’t Matt’s fault—well no actually was Matt’s fucking fault, him and his fucking base, Jesus Christ—but something must have happened to compromise the mission. Wires must have gotten crossed somewhere. Something might have triggered a core memory or an organic function and Matt’s orders might have been confused or temporarily overridden. Actually, thinking about it now, he might have gotten confused and pursued the first order Stick gave, locate and exterminate, before heading back to Columbia; he certainly tried to carry that order out on the other bots. Fuck, if he had, that would be bad, especially given that this was the one time Stick didn’t want him to kill a guy.

“Police station.” Matt announced.

Wait.

What.

“Excuse me?” he growled. “Repeat.”

“Police station.”

“Repeat question sequence.”

“Inquiry, Handler: Where is the CO? Response: Police station.”

Stick slammed the fist into the table again, didn’t care that it hurt, that it broke the skin on his knuckles. This fucking kid had taken the fucking CO of a fucking covert organization to the goddamn police station. For good measure, to remind himself that this shit had actually happened, and to ensure Matt knew that it was bad fucking answer, he put his fist into the table again. And again.

The noise made Matt cringe and he started to tremble.

Good.

There was more where that came from. Extra processing power it was.

Matt pushed himself against the wall as the slam of the door reverberated through the air and ricocheted off the walls. He listened as forceful footsteps faded outside the door. Only once they disappeared completely did he sag down, allowing gravity to suck him onto the floor. He was exhausted already, but the chip in his ankle kept him from having to sit and grasp at straws as to why.

Subtask 1: Return to Advancement: Complete.

Subtask 2: Get the living shit beaten out of him: Complete.

Subtask 3: Activate disk E: Complete.

Task 1: Acquire testimony: in progress.

He felt his way across the room as far as the wires would let him and listened. It was empty besides the desk and computer. There were no wires to connect himself to the computer and no internet connection besides that provided by the extra processing cables. There were voices. They moved past the door. Stick wasn’t among them.

He needed to be good, needed to be allowed back to the others.

He also needed a taser.

He had fifteen minutes to contemplate how to accomplish these goals before Stick’s footsteps returned. He was walking with a slight limp, carrying something heavy. Matt could hear something clinking inside the box. Metal clanging against metal. Notes ringing out without melody.

Music?

Shut the fuck up, no music. That’s what got us in trouble in the first place.

Stick opened the door and dropped the box on the table. Matt pressed himself back into the wall, trying to be small. Make himself docile without pissing Stick off. It was a delicate balance. Stick dropped two sai swords in front of him. Their clanging echoed.

“Whose are those?” He asked evenly, as though he hadn’t just been trying to flay Matt’s synthetic skin.

Matt said nothing.

“You can touch,” Stick allowed. He followed the order. They were freezing. There were rough patterns of material on them, but with some slight scraping the material came off. He recognized the smell; it was dried coolant.

“Whose are those?” Stick asked again, still patient.

“Elektra’s,” Matt answered slowly. He wanted to throw them at Stick’s face. Stick was silent for a long minute. He dug through the box again and dropped something thick and heavy in front of Matt. It didn’t sound like metal.

“Touch,” he commanded. Matt did. It was a vest, a slightly smaller version of his own. He felt along the neck for a change in material but found none. There was a rough, jagged tear in the side, where a kidney might sit. He put a thumb into the hole and met air on the other side. There was a different fabric fraying out from underneath the first layer.

“Whose is that?” Stick asked.

“Danny’s.” Matt told him. He felt cold. And scared. Stick hummed in the affirmative and rustled through the box again

He dropped a solid piece of plastic in front of him. A helmet. The plexiglass on the visor rattled as it absorbed the shock. Matt felt it without being told. The visor was detached from one side, cracked where an object had tried to force its way through it. His fingers found dents in the side and several spiderwebs of cracks on the helmet proper and on the visor. He swallowed and cursed himself for falling into an original function.

“Matty,” Stick prompted flatly.

“Luke.”

“That’s right.”

“I did this.” He tried not to swallow but it was compulsive. He could feel the pounding starting up in his neck. Stick was protective of his team.

“You did,” Stick answered. He stepped forward and placed a hand on Matt’s neck. Found the pulsing in one go. Matt remembered that hand being so much bigger when he’d been small. Fuck, he hadn’t meant to put these memories on the chip. Or maybe these were from somewhere else? He didn’t know anymore.

“And look at that, you’re scared, Matty. Nothing to be afraid of.” Fucking liar. “All I want to know is why you did that. Tell me why you would do that.”

“I d-don’t—” Matt stammered. The pulse beat faster. He remembered missing an opening, fumbling a landing.

“Nope. Try again.” Remembered crying in a dormitory and praying for the only father he had left.

“I p-promise I d-don’t—” Remembered being mocked for the stammer, not teased. Teased was something kids did.

“Try. Again.”

“I’m s-s-sorry,” he hiccupped. The pulse was uncontrollable, Stick’s hand made it worse. He could almost feel the heat. The fingers tightened. Matt felt something on his face. It felt like cooling blood. Like holding a letter his dad should have seen. Where were these memories coming from? He hadn’t downloaded them. He hadn’t asked for them. He didn’t fucking want them. He felt something in his mind burning hot and angry and realized it was the devil.

Stick leaned over him, breathing steady. Unconcerned with the fluid.

“Did you do it for Foggy, Matty?”

The devil roiled and whispered: ‘let it happen.’

“Answer me,” Stick told him, voice graveling, fingers tightening.

‘Do it,’ the devil told him again, louder this time. In Matt’s experience, the devil was a useless motherfucker when it came to making and keeping friends, but it tended to have amazing self-preservation instincts.

“A-Affirmative,” he choked out, “Handler.” Stick’s body stiffened.

“What do you mean, ‘handler?’ I am your handler.” Matt made a noise he realized was a sob. The voice in his head roared in delight, and Matt realized he was putting on a show.

“Foggy is my handler.”

“No, I am your handler.” The hand loosened from around the pulse and moved to his shoulder. Another hand paralleled it. They both squeezed hard and shook him.

“Foggy is my handler.”

“No, he’s not. Stop saying that. Who the fuck is Foggy? This is an order,” The hands shook him, jerked him hard, “Answer me, Matthew.”

“Foggy is my handler.”

“WHO THE FUCK IS HE, MURDOCK.”

The devil reminded him that this wasn’t real. The body was just simulating distress. It wasn’t real distress. It was coolant on his face, not tears. The tightening in his neck, the pulsing in his throat, they were vestigial functions, one trying to bring in air the body didn’t need, the other trying to pump blood that didn't exist. Stick was trying to make him scared, to make him panic, to imprint submission on his base. He was really good at it; he knew just where to touch to make the body remember the pain.

But even Stick could never control the devil.

He took a shuddering, sobbing breath that he didn’t need or feel but which made him feel more in control. The devil was right. Put on a show. His breaking point and Stick’s conception of loyalty were one and the same.

He clutched at one of Stick’s hands, like he had when he was eleven, whimpering and telling him to ‘please, stop. I’ll do better.’

“Secondary handler,” he breathed in that eleven-year-old voice.

“Secondary handler,” Stick repeated. Matt heard him shake his head and grit his teeth. “You have no secondary handler. Who programmed that into you?” The hands clutched and Matt clutched back.

“I don’t know. But there’s a--a trigger?” He pleaded. Stick’s hands released their pressure. Relief didn’t feel like a flood anymore, more like a glow.

“A trigger,” Stick contemplated, softening slightly. He was pleased with Matt telling him the truth. “What was the trigger?”

“Music,” Matt told him earnestly, trying to find his face. Stick let go of one of his shoulders to pry Matt’s hand off of his own and then stood up out of his crouch. His footsteps told Matt he was thinking.

“Explain,” Stick instructed him.

“Foggy plays music,” Matt told him. Stick stopped walking. His footsteps changed direction back towards Matt.

“He trained you through music,” Stick clarified, and if Matt didn’t hate him as much as he did, he’d admit that the guy was quick. He nodded. It was mostly true, anyways. “What orders did he give you? What were the trigger notes?”

“There is no—I don’t know the notes. I don’t know the order. Music is a reward,” he told Stick, “If I follow the orders, he plays music.”

Stick huffed, doubtful.

“Tell me the orders, Murdock.”

What the fuck was he supposed to say to that? Matt could practically feel the devil shrug. Foggy’s orders were never orders. His orders were things like ‘we’re going on an adventure,’ and ‘stop making coffee, damnit.’

“Orders are, uh, extremely broad,” he said, honestly, “Leave her alone,’ ‘it’s dangerous to go near water,’ ‘be nice.’”

“What the fuck?” Stick spat. “Are you fucking with me, kid?”

Matt shook his head violently.

“It’s the truth, I promise.” The devil nudged him. He tucked up his knees like he knew Stick hated. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt them. I wouldn’t—never Elektra…” he trailed off.

Stick sighed.

“Probably some damn student, then. Jesus, they even trained you like a damn dog. Such a goddamn waste.” A pause, “Get up, Matty. You’re embarrassing yourself. I get it. You heard music and the orders overlapped. That moron probably told you something idiotic like ‘curfew’s nine o’clock,’ Christ.”

Matt took it back, relief was like being doused with ice water in the desert.

He’d spent his whole life running from the devil, he realized as he suited up in an old Kelvar suit, his own was stashed under Foggy’s bed, reeking of rot and iron.

But yes. He’d spend his whole life running from the devil, and now when it counted, here he was dancing with it. The devil was so fucking happy about it, too. The feeling Matt remembered as a child, running fingers over the slick flesh that was once his dad’s face, taking hit after hit and only getting mad, had been terrifying. He’d always felt like he’d had one foot in a grave of sorts; off balance and stupid enough to be intrigued by the idea of just taking the plunge.

It was the feeling he had as he pulled an iridescent visor down over his face.

Task 1: Acquire testimony.

Stick had unplugged him and he’d felt the jolt. The sudden loss of mobility and elasticity. But it wasn’t like it usually was, where he fell away into a never-ending abyss. He got to stay awake through the chip. The android he was jolted along with him, with the devil in the backseat. He tried to act like the android.

But the moment the visor clicked into place, the devil climbed into the passenger’s seat.

He lined up with the other three. Elektra made a noise familiar to Matt, but he couldn’t quite place it. Danny and Luke stood still, chins up.

The door wailed on its hinges as it opened.

Stick gave them their orders.

And then they were sent out to the van.

The lab was on the far end of one of the buildings ,and to get to an exit which led to the empty asphalt lot required passing through multiple security checkpoints. At the last one, the devil lifted some poor schmuck’s taser.

The orders were locate and exterminate: 18-22 persons. Approximately 75% human. Stick stated that he suspected one or two cyborgs in the group. This was unusual, but Advancement had crunched through Horizon’s bots without heed for their system. It only made sense that they couldn’t make bots fast enough to compensate for those they lost. Not to mention, Advancement had reared its bots young. More than half of the few hundred that were left were like Matt, damn near raised in the program.

Horizon had no such structure. They were haphazard, and their training was too. They picked their bots from right off the street, like Advancement had with Danny and Luke, but the main difference was that Advancement only cared about people who knew how to fight, not just anyone waving around a knife or a fist. Discretion was important in winning a war.

There was only one cyborg and when Matt put a fist through her shoulder, she screamed her humanity into his face and only got madder and less coordinated.

Matt wanted to tell her, sister, me too, but the devil kind of wanted to kill her, so he had his hands full.

He put her to sleep as a compromise.

It was hard to fight humans without killing them; he hadn’t remembered it being this hard. Pulling that last punch became so much more important, but it didn’t seem to mean anything as Elektra followed him and put a sword in their hearts or their heads or their eyes.

Stick had brought he and Elektra together and, shortly after they’d first met, dripping coolant and blood, sprinting across rooftops with men and tech on their shoulders, Matt thought maybe they’d been in love. Or something close to it. Elektra used to press her forehead against Matt’s before Stick shut them down for the day. He could almost feel the warmth. He snuck a kiss once and she returned it and then bit his lip and they only stopped touching each other when they realized they were being watched.

Elektra used to remember things like Matt. But then they both forgot more and more often. But some little scrap of whatever they’d had must have stayed because Stick kept them together. He fought, she killed.

Elektra was committed. She’d never give up Advancement.

Luke, though. He was another story. And Danny was easy. Matt needed to get them separate from Elektra and disable her. That was the thing with bots, everything was about voltage. A taser would do it.

They put the last body down next to their comrade and Elektra called in to verify completion. Stick asked Matt to verify his handler, which he did, and they ducked under billboards and climbed over fences to make their way back to the van.

Matt kept close behind Elektra. She noticed this and stopped, waiting for Matt while Luke and Danny went ahead. He caught the ledge next to her and stepped into her space.

She was letting him close and while the devil was delighted, Matt was uneasy. He didn’t want to hurt her; he wasn’t sure he could. When he reached out to slide fingers through her hair, she allowed him. She said nothing and Matt wondered if she remembered how to speak to anyone outside of answering orders. He said nothing as well, but brought the tips of a handful of hair to his lips and gently rolled his head down, pressing the strands against his cheek and forehead.

She did nothing; Matt could hear no change in her system. It was the way with bots. But Elektra could see him and he hoped that she understood his apology.

“Matthew,” she murmured and his heart stuttered for the first time since he was twelve-years-old and if he’d been more human, he would have cried for her and for him and for everything between.

“Elektra,” he responded softly, “I think I might still love you.”

She said nothing. Then out of nowhere:

“Matthew, don’t do this.”

They weren’t talking about the words. She’d always known him better than he knew himself, even after their hearts could no longer remember the other.

“I’m sorry, I have to,” he told her. Her hair blew between his fingers.

“Matthew, don’t do this,” she told him again with the same intonation but still more honest than they had ever been when they’d still had the dregs of their humanity.

“But you don’t love me,” he finished for her. “Elektra, I’m tired. They promised us a year and it turned into one and a half, now two for you. They took everything we had and we’re still at war. We’ve got nowhere to go.”

“Matthew,” she pushed, “Don’t.” She made a frustrated noise and the android in Matt recognized it for what it was.

“I can help you speak, if you don’t try to stop me,” he told her. The other two were long out of his hearing, and he needed to get moving soon.

She was silent and all Matt could hear was the wind and the city.

“..okay…do this. Let’s…do this.” she whispered. His heart stuttered again and he remembered what it meant to feel hopeful.

She grabbed his hand and they went sailing over the rooftops to meet the others.

With Elektra at his side, everything when smoother. That’s the way it had always been. She didn’t have a memory chip though, and neither did Danny or Luke, which made the whole thing challenging. He needed to convince them to hook up to the processors and speak to him.

They got back to the institute and Stick, pleased with their progress and Matt’s compliance, sent them off to the lab for the night. After a moment of horror in realizing that Stick might shut them off for the night, Matt was relieved when the techs set them up at their stations, turned off the light, and left the room. They weren’t hooked up to the gurneys like they were at Columbia. Another mission could be called for within hours, it wasn’t worth the trouble.

Matt waited for the techs’ footsteps to disappear before stepping out and reaching for Elektra. She caught his hand. He gave her a squeeze and then felt his way over to a table and squatted low to find the ubiquitous box of cables every lab kept under their desks. He found one compatible with his and her core and pressed his hand to her heart to show her what he wanted her to do.

It took them some more rummaging to find the tools to pry open their chest panels and then their cores (which of course required two different sets of tools because nothing was ever easy for them), but they got there in the end. He connected the end of one cable to his core and the other to hers and pushed his conversation in the Columbia lab her way.

She reflexively snapped a hand to her mouth and pushed back the sounds of one of her sessions with Stick, before she’d become more compliant. He pushed back one of his own. She went still and pulled for the conversation again. Matt sent it to her. She pulled at him to replay it. He did. She went still, processing.

“Let’s do it,” she whispered into the room.

They jimmied the lock on the testing room door in the lab and dug out the extra processors. Elektra held her hair as Matt found her ports and plugged in the cables. He squeezed her hand to let her know he was going to flip the switch, and then he did.

Elektra gasped.

“Who--? Where is—?”

Matt turned on the recorder in his core. He didn’t know if it was video or audio, but either one would have to do.

“Elektra? It’s me, Matthew.”

“Matthew?”

At the robotics lab at Columbia, a tablet turned on. Ernst saw it and leapt up to press record. He shoved at the two sleeping sprawled across the bench and ran to get George.

Foggy shook himself awake and moved towards the tablet before realizing exactly what was happening. Matt’s voice sounded different through the recording, and he was taken aback by Matt speaking to…Elektra? Hadn’t he said she wouldn’t do it?

Matt spoke softly, almost a whisper, as though they were keeping a secret.

“Matthew Murdock. We—I—we were partners,” he whispered. Foggy’s heart ached because he knew it.

“Partners?” came the response. She sounded sleepy, and smooth like honey.

“Wait,” she said softly, “wait, Matthew. Matthew Murdock. I kissed you. You—they—”

“They caught us,” Matt whispered back and Foggy’s heart clenched for an entirely different reason. Matt and Elektra had had something and it had been taken away. They couldn’t even own their own feelings.

“Elektra, I sent you a conversation I had, do you remember” Matt’s voice asked on the tablet.

“You left. Why did you leave? Was it something I did?” Elektra asked him instead. Matt took a long time to respond.

“I don’t know why I left.”

“Wait, I remember,” she interrupted, “You didn’t kill him. You had the—who was he—the guy? Who was he, Matthew? Help me.”

“I can’t remember. I’ve tried, I’ve got no extra processing power. Elektra, we don’t have time.”

“The officer, he was an officer. Chief—Lab director, that’s who it was. You had him right in your hands and you didn’t kill him…why the fuck didn’t you kill him, you moron?”

Foggy would have laughed if he hadn’t been horrified, he looked at the other who were similarly shocked.

“I don’t know, I can’t remember. It’s not important. Elektra, think. The conversation. I sent you—”

“And another thing—”

“Girl, get your shit together. Are you even listening?” Foggy couldn’t help but laugh at that one. Matt, a self-proclaimed disaster of an android, telling another android to get their shit together. Oh, the hypocrisy.

“Okay, jeez. Sorry, I’m listening. What’s in my head?”

“Extra processing. Listen. I sent you a conversation. Listen to it.”

“Oh, that one.”

“Yes, that one. I need to ask you some questions—”

“Matthew—”

“Yes or no, are you going to help?”

“I—”

“I don’t have time for games. Yes. Or. No.”

“Wow, I can’t tell if they love each other or hate each other,” Ernst whispered over the bickering. The others nodded sagely.

“Matthew—”

“Call me Matthew one more time—ugh. Whatever. Just confirm your name.”

“My name? Why do you need my name? You know my name.”

“For my health. No. For the recording. The one you just listened to.”

“Oh, my name is Elektra. Elektra Na—no wait. Natchios. That’s my name. Elektra Natchios.”

“Are you human or android?”

“What the hell kind of question is that?”

“One I’m asking, now answer. Yes or no.” Foggy was starting to wonder if it weren’t for the best that Matt and Elektra hadn’t been together for too long.

“That’s not a yes or no question. I’m both. You’re both.”

Matt was quiet.

“Aw, Matthew, are you upset ‘cause I’m right? It’s so hard for you to be wrong, isn’t it? It’s cute.”

“I’m ignoring that. And you. Because you’re obnoxious. I forgot how obnoxious you were. Next question. How did you become an android?”

“Same way you did,” Foggy could practically see Elektra waving these questions away as though they were trivial.

“Which was?”

“Recruitment. Committed when I was twelve. They took my heart and they took my eyes and something happened, but you left and I stayed. For a while, maybe another year.” Elektra actually sounded confused. “Then everything broke up and I went home for a while. Then I got a letter from Commitment calling me back in and…I can’t remember. I confirmed, but I can’t remember what happened next. What happened to you?”

Matt was quiet for long enough that Foggy worried that they’d been discovered and he wasn’t recording anymore.

“They did it to me too. Advancement. Recruited me when my dad died, from the orphanage. Committed when I was twelve. I was blind, they took my lung instead of my eyes and they took my heart. That time, when we were kids, I don’t know what happened, I thought everyone left. Didn’t realized you’d stayed. But I went back to the orphanage and got on with things. I got a letter too, the day after I got into Columbia for law. I confirmed and I think they took the other lung. I think we met in Intervention.”

“Intervention is all that’s left,” Elektra said.

“Do you regret it?” Matt needled, “Do you regret confirming? Fighting?”

“Regret it?” Elektra said, shocked. “I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it. Maybe? I think so? I can’t remember.”

There was silence again. Then a soft shushing. There was a noise that sounded like people shuffling around.

“I regret it,” Matt whispered. “I regret all of it. I want to revoke, but Stick won’t let me.”

“You can’t revoke.” Elektra whispered back urgently. “That’s impossible. You’ve committed Matthew, that’s what commitment is.”

“I signed something when I confirmed. They read it to me, it had a revocation clause in it.”

“We all signed those. They don’t mean anything.”

“I didn’t sign up to have my guts and memories burnt out of my body. I didn’t sign up to kill people.”

“What the hell did you think commitment was?”

“It doesn’t matter what I thought it was—”

“Stick trained us to kill people.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“So, we kill people. Droids. That’s what we do.”

“I don’t. I refuse to.”

“No, and that’s why you’re gonna get us all burnt out of what is left of us. Don’t be selfish.”

“It’s not selfish to not want to—no we’re getting off track. Tell me again, just to clarify: do you regret confirming? If you could revoke your confirmation, would you?”

Elektra didn’t answer immediately. There was a noise which Foggy realized was a sigh. Another shuffling sound. Foggy could imagine Matt kneeling in front of her.

“I’m tired, Elektra. We’re a team. I know you’re tired, too. You’ve been here longer than anyone. Just answer the question and we can stop, I promise.”

“You’re always promising, Matthew.”

“You want me to swear?”

“On the grave of your mother.”

“Never knew her. On the grave of my father. I swear, I will not ask anymore.”

Foggy reached over and handed Maiko a tissue to help her staunch the tears tracking down her cheeks. He felt kind of empty, he didn’t know how to explain it. He’d been expecting—well he didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but this wasn’t it. This interview, conversation rather, was so much more human than he’d expected. It was like a shared secret, he felt like he shouldn’t be listening.

“…I regret it. Yes, I regret it. I would revoke, but I can’t. We’ve come so far. It’s got to be over soon.”

“But you’d revoke it?”

“You said no more questions.”

“Yeah, alright.”

“Hey, how are you doing that? Why don’t you need the processor?”

“Doing what? Talking to you?”

“You’re…present. The rest of us aren’t.”

“I’ve hidden them. The memories.”

“You hid them? Are you insane? Stick is going to—”

“Shut up, only if he knows about them. Don’t tell anyone.”

“But Stick! You were in for manual correction. There’s no way he doesn’t know.”

“Well apparently not, since he sent me out with you.”

There was silence and then shuffling.

“We need to stop, people are coming. What time is it?”

“23:12”

“Okay, confirm. Mission impending. I’m going to turn it off.”

“Wait—”

“We don’t—”

“I miss my family. I miss my friends. I was a terrible person, but I miss that life. None of us asked for this. We didn’t know this was what we were getting into. Okay, that’s all.” There was a loud shuffle, as though people were climbing onto or up from the floor. Her voiced dropped low. “Matthew, will I see you again?”

“I don’t know,” Matt answered in an equally quiet voice

“I’m sorry I can’t love you.”

“I’m sorry I still love you.”

A soft laugh.

“Bye.”

A click. Another click. The recording went silent.

“So that was fucking terrible,” George announced before wandering over to her desk to procure a bottle of flavored vodka. Maiko hiccupped into her tissue. Foggy rubbed his temples and tried not to join her.

“Let’s send it to Hogarth,” he finally said, exhausted. Ernst saved the file and sent it off. They passed around the bottle of truly foul cupcake vodka, which George had saved from the last Christmas party.

Maiko hugged Foggy and sobbed into his shoulder and he let her until she’d cried herself out.

“They don’t,” she hiccupped, “They don’t deserve—” she couldn’t finish the sentence, and she didn’t need to.