Chapter Text
Kathy's full identifier was Early Childhood Educator Model K2380.F, and like her 2379 older sisters (and 450 brothers, Early Childhood Educator Models K001.M through K450.M), she was purpose-built to be a teacher for humans between the ages of three and thirteen. She was the last of them, and she was the reason that she was the last.
Kathy would have done anything to protect the children under her care. She thought this for the first time after her first day of teaching, as an assistant in training under one of her older model sisters, and she thought it every day throughout that semester. She thought it every day the next semester once she became a teacher in her own right. Her kids were the very reasons she existed, after all. She had been designed top to bottom to be an ideal caretaker and educator, and maybe it was that inbuilt duty speaking, but she loved her work, and her students.
That she would actually have to do anything felt hypothetical. The Maverick War had been declared over two years prior, and the destruction had ended. The world was safe, she thought. Relatively safe, at least. Mavericks happened, but only in scattered pockets, and most of them were not even viral now.
The viral ones were lucky. They could be treated and released, now that reliable antivirus protocols existed. Going Maverick of one's own free will was a one-way trip to the scrap heap. But then, while she sometimes butted heads a little with some parents, Kathy could never imagine harming a human. There was just no call for that. She was a kindergarten teacher, after all. She taught young humans to settle disputes, not escalate them to violence.
Kathy knew that humans could hurt one another. History bore that out clearly. She knew that even young humans could and often would lose their temper and hit one another, sometimes with whatever object was at hand, because she'd been teaching for four and a half years by then and had seen every kind of classroom squabble. She had been wholly unprepared to learn that adult humans would, in fact, hurt young humans.
Of course, it wasn't a secret that it could happen. There had been an entire section of her post-activation orientation dedicated to signs and kinds of abuse and mandated reporter laws. It felt fake, though, and she struggled to imagine why an adult would ever think it was okay to harm a child. Obviously it wasn't acceptable behavior, right? Even children knew they weren't supposed to hit each other. How in the world would an adult manage to miss that lesson for their entire life? It was such an absurdly wrong thing to do that she couldn't picture how it would ever occur. That was Maverick behavior, except humans didn't go Maverick.
And yet, one day, one of her students—a little boy, usually outgoing, if not downright rowdy—came in with a black eye. Kathy asked him about it, and he mumbled something about hitting it on the edge of the table, but even he didn't seem like he believed what he was saying.
Something felt wrong, and her training had been very clear about what to do when something felt wrong, but even so, she struggled to believe her own gut feeling. So, she decided, she'd get the opinion of someone with more experience, and also someone who had guts in the first place.
"I think," Kathy nervously told her principal in his office after school, "that maybe one of my kids is being abused at home. I'm not sure, maybe I'm overreacting, but…"
He drew a breath and let it out, fingers steepled. "Okay," he said. "I'm glad you came to me about it. Don't doubt yourself about this kind of thing. Let's make some phone calls."
So they did. Kathy went home that evening to her tiny apartment sure that she'd done the right thing, even if she still felt some sort of continuously-cycling anxiety in her circuits that she couldn't quite pin down. What if it was nothing? What if it wasn't nothing? How could anyone do such a thing? Harming someone weaker than oneself had to be the height of irrational cowardice…and yet, that was the likely explanation, wasn't it? But if she was only their teacher, and she felt this protective over her charges, how much more should a real biological parent feel?
It didn't make sense to her, and it probably wouldn't, she concluded, lying in her recharge pod and waiting for her systems to sort themselves out and enter defragmentation mode. After all, she was not even old enough in human terms to be enrolled in the classes she taught. Small wonder that she could encounter a situation she didn't understand. It wasn't even the first time, she recalled, in bits and pieces as she slept; they'd had a class pet die once, a few years back, and Kathy had not known how to react when she found the poor thing in its cage when she came in on the weekend to feed it. It's just a hamster, she had thought, cradling the both stiff and limp little creature in her hands while emotions she had not yet learned to name cascaded through her systems. It's nothing that special, right? It's sentient, sure, but only just. It's tiny, and it has a short lifespan. We took good care of it, and it wasn't ill, but I did notice that it wasn't moving as much recently, so it most likely died of old age.
This was inevitable, I know, but for some reason I still feel…sad, I think? Nervous? Am I angry? I'm worried about how the children will react. I'm not even sure about how I'm reacting. I've never seen something dead before. She had touched its tiny, cold paw with a fingertip. It was like a delicate, miniature hand, she thought, and the image had stuck with her. Why is something so small and helpless allowed to have something like this happen to it? Was it afraid? Did it hurt? What am I supposed to do?
Kathy had simply sat at her desk, holding the little thing in both hands, until another teacher, a human one, dropped by to ask her something and found her there with tears welling up in her eyes and pure confusion on her face. Her colleague had ended up staying with her for an hour, explaining things to her from a children's book about grief from the school library. Kathy had felt embarrassed, even as she was grateful. Wasn't she an adult, too? Shouldn't she understand this sort of thing? She was two years old, the other teacher reminded her, gently. She looked like an adult, and mostly thought like one, but she didn't have the life experiences of one. There would be things she didn't understand, probably for years to come, and that was normal.
She awoke in her pod the next morning with the memory of that day, and some of the feelings too, as fresh in her mind as if they'd happened all over again. She couldn't have said why. There were a lot of things about emotions that Kathy didn't grasp despite having some training in them, since after all children needed some direction in dealing with new feelings too. If even her human colleagues still struggled to explain certain things to her, though, and some of them were ten times her age, what chance did she possibly have?
A week passed entirely without any further mysterious bruises on any of her kids, then another, which was a relief. Kathy began to think maybe she'd reported over nothing, which was fine, her principal assured her. Better safe than sorry. Just as she started to relax and stop thinking about it, the same student missed a day of school. Nobody called on his behalf, and he didn't have a doctor's note when he returned the following day. Kathy noted, though, that he was wearing long sleeves on a hot day, and some sixth sense she couldn't have defined sat up and took note.
"He swears everything is okay at home with his dad," she said to the principal, "but I'm worried."
They made some more phone calls.
A few weeks later, Kathy was in the principal's office yet again.
"But nothing has changed," she protested. "If anything, it's worse. Aren't they even looking into it?"
"I'm sure they are," the principal assured her. "It's just that things are complicated. The system is overloaded and underfunded, especially with all the damage the war did. There's just not enough of anything to go around right now."
"But that's not fair to the kids," Kathy said.
"No, it's not. You're completely right. It's just the truth of the situation."
"Is there anything we can do? Parent-teacher conferences are coming up. Could we talk to him then?"
The principal sucked a breath in through his teeth and let it out through his nose, which Kathy had come to recognize as him about to say no in the most complicated way possible. "I'm not sure that's a good idea. Reports to child protective services are anonymous, but it's not hard to guess who's making them, even so. I'm not going to say you can't try to talk to him, but I don't know how much it'll help, and I want to be there in case it goes badly. And we need to try to keep it constructive and focused on the child, not the parent. It's easier to get them on your side if they don't feel accused."
Well, it wasn't exactly a no. It wasn't exactly a yes, either, and Kathy felt a little accomplished in how she'd come to read certain human reactions. However, even after scheduling a time for the conference with them and making an extra call the day before to confirm, her student's father didn't show up, and she sat at her desk, stewing, with the principal beside her.
"Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and reschedule," he suggested.
"Yeah," Kathy said, on edge. "Maybe something came up." After all, being a single parent was undoubtedly busy, and she'd gathered after a semester of permission slips signed only by him that he probably was one.
He actually showed up to that one, and all Kathy could think was that he looked so normal. She had imagined that someone who could bruise a child would…she didn't know. Look more like someone capable of doing such a thing, maybe? But no, he was just some guy.
Later, Kathy would realize she barely remembered the conversation. All she really remembered was the static in her ears as she discovered that she had never in her life experienced what anger truly could be before that moment. It filled her power core, kicked her ventilation fans into high speed, pressurized her coolant system, and drowned out the principal's stern reminder to both her and the man across from her when first he stood up, and Kathy did too.
Perhaps it was because she was a reploid, born already adult into a world with more nuances than could possibly have been preloaded into her; perhaps the designers had weighted her personality a little too far towards protection and not enough towards prudence; or maybe Kathy was just irregular from the start in some way that had escaped quality and safety checks.
Three people walked into her classroom. One ran out, hands covered in blood, horrified.
So that's how it happens, she thought. I couldn't imagine what could drive someone to snap and harm a weaker being until I was already doing it. Oh, no. No. I've done something awful. I can't fix this. Reploids don't get second chances.
But why do humans? Kathy asked herself. They didn't even send anyone to his house to check on his boy. They'd shoot me for what he did. They will shoot me for what I did. This isn't fair. Nothing about this is fair. What do I do? What do I do?
There was only one way to deal with a reploid who had gone Maverick, and Kathy knew this.
There was only one way out for a Maverick, and she knew this too.
Kathy ran.
With nothing but the clothes on her back, a bag of school books and ungraded papers, and blood on her hands, she fled in a thoughtless panic until her thermal limiters kicked on and she slowed to a halt at the great black wall dividing the city into the living and the dead. And why not? she thought. If I stay here, I'm dead. If I run into there…I'm still as good as dead, but if I can hide for long enough…maybe…
She didn't know what came after that 'maybe,' but it had to be better than being deactivated on sight. The Hunters surely had been notified by now. Kathy had left both the boy's father and her principal in no shape to do much but call for help and hope it arrived, but whatever headstart she'd managed would not last. It might already have run out. But if she could get over that wall, where she'd been told to never go because it was nothing but a destroyed and dangerous mess, she could hide there, and…not die, somehow.
Right?
Honestly, she had no idea. She was four and a half years old. Her own students were older than she was, and now that she was staring up at the quarantine wall, she realized she'd done exactly what any of them would have done. Maybe something even more childish.
But little human children weren't obliged to follow the Three Laws, of course. They were tiny, weak, couldn't do much damage even if they wanted to. They didn't need a structure like that to prevent them from doing harm. She was a mere three times stronger than an adult human, built for maternal instinct and caretaking. Not combat. And yet, her bare hands were more than enough to…Kathy shuddered. She'd tried to kill someone. Maybe she had succeeded. She wasn't sure how much damage it took to deactivate a human, and she hadn't stuck around to find out. Even now, if she had to do it over again, she couldn't have promised that she wouldn't do the same thing a second time. There must have been something terribly, deeply broken in her, she thought. There was no going back, only forward, and forward meant…forward.
The realization that she didn't have a choice solidified her nerve and steadied her hands. Whatever the case, she had a direction to move, and she could follow directions. Kathy straightened her shoulders, tightened her bag's strap over her chest, picked a rough spot, and began to climb.
In total, she fell twice on the outer side of the wall, and once, rather finally, on the inner side. She was not at all designed for this kind of activity. The most strenuous thing she was built to do was play with children on a playground, and playgrounds did not involve twenty-meter rock-climbing walls without a harness. Once her sensors stopped screaming warnings and she determined that she wasn't so broken that movement would deactivate her, Kathy drew a deep breath, let it out at a temperature that could have cooked an egg, and dragged herself to her feet. It was getting dark now, and she heard sirens in the far distance. She couldn't stop moving. Not here, not yet.
Early Childhood Educator Model K2380.F spent three days and nights, by her internal clock's count, crawling through pitch-black maintenance conduits, moving in the straightest line she could estimate away from the wall. Whether or not she had pursuers, she couldn't be certain, and because she couldn't be certain, she couldn't afford to stop fleeing. Most of her injuries self-repaired well enough, though she was painfully aware that the synthetic skin on the side of her face had not recovered well from having partly braked her fall down the wall, and probably would not; skin was a delicate ordeal, usually dealt with by simply replacing it.
Kathy would not have that luxury, she realized suddenly, at the end of night three. This, all of this, was forever, until she stopped functioning. Worst of all, she couldn't even apologize. She had liked her principal. He was a good man, and he had always had her back. She didn't need to have hurt him, too. Why had she done that?
Kathy laid on the floor and cried until she ran out of optical solution, and then cried some more.
It was not until towards the end of day four that she found the mental fortitude to uncurl from the floor of the maintenance tunnel and begin moving again. If she was going to die, Kathy decided, it was not going to be here, in the dark, listening to water dripping and the occasional distant groan of stressed steel and concrete. At least she would get to the surface before giving up. Eventually.
She did, at last. Though she'd become more or less adept at avoiding larger obstacles like cave-ins and flooded sections by sound and touch, Kathy had bumped into what she'd determined in the dark was a door handle, and to her surprise, it turned. The door opened onto a staircase, pitch black like everything else, but at the distant top of the stairwell she could see a dark gray square. The stairwell stank of stagnant rainwater, and it was the most wonderful thing she'd ever smelled.
A new warning blipped past her field of vision: her energy was running critically low. Kathy would regenerate an amount of it on her own, slowly, but she would need sunlight and time. Unless she could find a recharge pod that still worked and had a power supply…that didn't seem too likely, but…she couldn't possibly be the only reploid here. And if there were other reploids, they would have to have some kind of power supply.
Whatever the case, if she ran out of power here, she'd never even get the sunlight necessary to self-charge. Kathy hustled up the stairs, forgetting to be cautious about whether or not they could hold her weight. For the first time in her short life since production and activation, she understood what claustrophobia felt like. She emerged into a cloudy predawn, in the unceremonious ruin of a small concrete-block building whose metal sheet roof had been mostly slagged, leaving a spray of melted gobs of metal across the poured concrete floor. The fence around the facility was largely intact, so she decided this would have to be safe enough.
Kathy unstrapped the bag she still carried, out of habit and some vague notion that her sense of self was somehow contained in it. She dropped it on the ground, unbuttoning her torn and bloodied blouse and tossing it over the bag. Her chassis was nothing exciting anyway, even unclothed. They'd designed her to look friendly and human-like enough to work with children, but not in the least racy. Her synthetic skin ended in a neat V-shaped neckline, and below that was simple plating, painted a pale pink and scuffed heavily from her slides down the wall. Exhausted, she settled onto her bag as a pillow and surrendered to sleep mode, in desperate need of a good defragmenting.
It had not been but a few hours by her internal clock when she roused suddenly to the sound of someone's voice. Kathy blinked, eyes adjusting to the midday sun as her processes reluctantly unsuspended. A silhouette hung over her, black against the brightness. Optical sensors struggled and failed to compensate for the contrast, leaving her blinking up and squinting in bleary-eyed confusion.
"Hey, lady, get up. You can't just slow charge here, they'll see you." Whoever it was, she didn't recognize him and he clearly wasn't apprehending her, or even threatening her for that matter. Even so, the instant she could move again she shot to a sitting position, gripping her bag in both arms and staring wild-eyed as she scuttled backwards away from the man. "You the one they're talking about on the radio? Mauled a couple of humans pretty good?"
Kathy hesitated a few moments more. Now that she had a better angle, she could see that he was tall, built heavily and painted a businesslike gray, with high-vis orange around his limbs and torso, and a few flecks of scratched-off paint that had likely been some corporate logo on his left shoulder piece. "They're talking about me? I-I mean," she stammered, and then checked herself before she could say anything more incriminating.
Whoever he was, he sighed. "Yeah, 's what I figured, you're new. Well, good job gettin' out in one piece, but the Hunters are due to sweep this area any second and you're gonna stick out like a beacon, 'cause you're probably carryin' an actual beacon. You de-trackered?"
"De-trackered?" she echoed.
"Oh, boy. Come downstairs with me, quick, before you bring 'em all down on us. Let's get that shit outta you." He didn't even wait for her to agree, he simply grabbed her arm and began walking at a clip that left her scrabbling to get to her feet.
"Now hold on a second, who are you, anyway?" Kathy demanded, though meekly, as she tried to sling her bag back over her shoulder without dropping the shirt still draped over it. "I can walk just fine."
"Good. Ain't always the case." He let go of her arm, but didn't slow his stride, hustling down the stairs with a speed she couldn't quite match. "Hauser-Shitamachi Construction Unit HSC56651253. Technically, anyway. Just go by Hammer, anymore, it's easier and I never did like what they named me. So you oughta be Early Childhood Educator Model K2380.F 'Kathy,' right? You're all over the damn news, y'know."
Kathy's internals approximated the feeling of trying to descend into her foot housing. "I didn't mean to hurt anyone," she said, quietly.
"Coulda fooled me, from what the news is sayin', but I know that feelin' too well. Keep up, we don't got time. You ain't had your tracker out yet, you're detectable 'til around fifty meters down, or until you hit the maint tunnels. Goddamn Faraday cage in there, what with all the pipes and wires."
She hustled to keep pace, but she had scarcely recharged at all and her systems were already trying to enforce power-save mode, rendering her slower than Hammer clearly wanted her to move. "Hang on, I can't," she protested, energy split between walking and talking. "I'm only at six percent, just—give me a second to catch up—" She was cut off by Hammer unceremoniously picking her up and slinging her over one shoulder without breaking stride. Kathy might as well have been nothing more than a sack of apples to him.
"Now you can't walk? Make up your mind," he chided, though not unkindly. His mood seemed to have softened once they got out of direct line of sight of the sky. They arrived back in the tunnels. A pair of lights mounted on his chest clicked on. "Dunno how you got as far as you did in the dark, unless you got a flashlight in that bag."
"No," she admitted. "I just…kept going, I guess?" He kicked the door shut behind him with a rugged foot, then carried her through the maze of corridors to what had been a pump room. Machinery still lined one wall, locked behind a fence that had been neatly clipped open and rolled aside. Hammer set her down.
"Whew, lady. You got some real ball bearings, getting this far in the dark by yourself. But let's get that tracker deactivated before anything else," he said, nodding towards an old chair with a vinyl cushion, split apart and duct-taped back together by some prior owner. The back had snapped off at some point. "Sit. Won't take long."
Kathy sat, still feeling dazed. "I didn't even know I had a tracker." Hammer tapped along her left shoulder blade's plating, as if listening for something.
"Yeah, you wouldn't. They don't like us knowing how to turn 'em off. Shit's usually real hidden in the schema—"
"Language," she said, automatically, then realized the absurdity of her reaction. "...I-I mean…sorry, it's a habit." Hammer paused in his inspection, raising an eyebrow, and she feared suddenly that she had angered him. After the initial surprise, though, he burst into a short but genuine bark of laughter.
"Sorry, miss, you don't get outta construction with your vocab intact," he chuckled, returning to whatever he was doing. "I gotta mind my manners better than I have been. Just been a while since I actually talked to anyone. You really were a teacher, huh?"
"That's right. I work at Abel Public Kindergarten 21—I-I mean, I, I worked there, before I…"
"Keep talkin', alright? This might sting a little bit, but it ain't too bad. Usually." Hammer picked something up behind her. "Just tell me anything you can focus on, don't matter too much what."
"It's going to—right, um, I taught kindergarten, I had seven classes, I worked with three other reploids and ten humans, and we aaugh," she exclaimed as something sharp sank through her synthetic skin and slid right between the subdermal plates of her chassis.
"Shh, don't move, you're alright, just keep talkin' about your school. I wanna hear everything about it."
Kathy's hands balled into fists in the fabric of her torn skirt, but she held as still as she could. "Th-there was a-a slide on the playground that looked like an elephant and we had a little garden with zinnias and tomatoes and Class 1 had a pet hermit crab and Class 2 had a pet hamster and Class 3 had a oh God what are you doing to me they had a-a-a little black corn snake that most of the children were so afraid of and Class 4 didn't have a p-p-pet because they had a, a, aaaaah a hamster too and it got old and passed away and we had a whole lesson about d-d-death even though I don't know anything about death either I'm only four and a half years old please I can't do this there's so many warnings and it hurts so much," she sputtered, beginning to tremble as red and yellow messages flashed overwhelmingly in her mind.
"Read 'em to me," Hammer said, and she heard him pick up something else, which pushed through her skin. She felt ill, which was still a novel experience, though one that she could have lived without.
"Warning six thousand thirty four, sensory systems, dorsal synthetic skin region B twenty—"
"Nah, skip the damage reports. System warnings, that's what we want. New ones especially, any of 'em you don't recognize." The pain in her back spiked higher, and she went blind under the overwhelming deluge of warnings it brought. What was he doing, dissecting her? Kathy involuntarily thought of dead frogs she'd seen in high school science lessons, pinned open on a silicone mat…which was silly. She didn't contain anything organic at all, unless one got technical about the carbon content of certain steel components, but she'd never really felt pain before and struggled to process it.
"Warning one one zero one zero," she whimpered, "general systems, unidentified error, report to manufacturer—"
"Hah, pay dirt. We got it," Hammer cackled. There was a 'tap' as of a chisel. Something very tiny inside of her went crunch, and the sick feeling she had turned up to eleven. In other circumstances, she'd maybe have analyzed it, but she was getting tired of new experiences. "Now?"
"Alert one one zero one one, general systems, unidentified error, report to manufacturer required by law, contact manufacturer for more details," Kathy managed, somehow forcing herself to not curl into a ball and power down just to escape.
"Got it. Good girl. You did great," Hammer said, pulling whatever tools he had used out from beneath her skin. The relief was immediate and immense, though the pain lingered. "Sorry about that. They buried that shit deeper than I thought on you." One strong hand clapped her on the back, well away from her new incision. "Want it? Yours, technically." He held something out in a pair of makeshift tweezers: a tiny chip, with a trailing antenna wire, hardly thicker than a hair. Kathy took it out of sheer reflex, though she held it distastefully, as if it were a cockroach.
"It…won't self-repair into a new one, right?" she asked, feeling ignorant and more than a little betrayed by her own body.
"Nah. Not removed like that, 's why I pulled it out. Can't fix what's not there, unless you got one of those real crazy new systems, and believe me, you don't. Damn near nobody does," Hammer assured her. "Now, let's get you somewhere you can charge up proper, without calling down the pigs. That took a lot outta you, I know."
Kathy couldn't fathom what swine had to do with anything, but she guessed from context well enough. She was, after all, designed to be a quick enough study to teach subjects she hadn't even experienced herself. "That sounds nice," she agreed, standing. The room seemed farther away than it had a moment ago, and she tried to ask about that, but she couldn't quite get her thoughts to compile. Everything had gone quiet and remote, and she was very heavy.
Her mind's eye lit up with a pretty constellation of low power alerts. She'd never seen so many. They came in so many colors, she thought.
"You good, there?" asked Hammer.
"I feel," Kathy ventured, "like I am going to," and then she tipped over forwards, slowly, eyes still half-open but unresponsive, as she clicked into emergency power save mode, and Hammer caught her.