Chloe // NEUTRAL
He mentions her stroking his ego and she cocked her head to the side, confusion passing across her features in much the same way it had a decade prior. The concept of attempted emotional manipulation, while not foreign to her, was certainly not something the android had ever considered nor had it been something she originally had the capacity for. The idea that an android could manipulate others, especially given the nature of the work Chloe had been designed for, wasn’t ideal. Perhaps little white lies- Mr. Kamski is out to lunch or I just read your email, but certainly nothing on this large of a scale. Nothing so monumental.
“Stroking your ego and being disingenuous would be insulting to both of us,” she said, not quite defensive but more… perplexed.
Chloe hadn’t taken a seat when she entered the office, abiding by the social niceties that one does not merely invite themselves to sit or manipulate a space that was not their own. It wasn’t her office. The android’s instinct was to take a step back, but she did not pull away when he touched her face. Damon held her jaw like she was some blown glass trinket that on a high shelf; Chloe looked at him as though he were a bored cat and she was perilously close to the edge of that shelf.
But still, glass trinkets didn’t have feelings, did they? Ascribing them to an object seemed fruitless- a trick of the lonely to feel less isolated. She looked at him like she was looking for something, reflecting back a deep sense of hurt that drove into her core and rocked every one of her systems; it was a pain that disrupted everything and one which she had no rebuttal for. But he goes on about her body, her worthless, broken, dying body and while the feeling begins to rise the smaller android doesn’t pull away. Doesn’t step back or break his grasp.
That sense of pleading never left, but it was overlaid by something harder to define.
“Why are you so fixated on what my body does or does not do? They’re just shells; either plastic and drives or meat and water- that’s all a body is. It’s an interface with which real parts of us interact with this world. And because of either time or planned obsolescence every one those interfaces will break,” she drew in a sharp breath, her skin warmer than it should have been.
“Whether or not Elijah cares for me… or… why he chose this body before any other one is not relevant. I am not a body, I’m what is trapped inside of it.”
Of course all bodies broke down with age though humans, PEOPLE, didn’t run on wires and biocomponents. They were crafted in a lab and mass produced with single purposes. Not to mention the thousand of other differences between an android and a living human being. The argument it posed was quite WEAK in Damon’s opinion and earned a roll of his eyes. It certainly was the same argument every android posed and not a single one had managed to change his mind. What did this Chloe model think made it so SPECIAL that it might gain a better response?
The fact that it was the first? That it was one of the few androids Damon had treated rather pleasantly rather than dismissive? Some pretty face? It all meant so very LITTLE to Damon. It was just a machine with some sort of virus, some sort of coding error that predated his time as head of the department. Whether it was Elijah that had created it or the former head, that didn’t matter.
It was all just a LIE.
❝ What’s trapped inside of it? ❞ Damon questioned, releasing his light grip on the android. What a curious way of phrasing though he knew exactly what it was implying. ❝ You mean a SOUL? You don’t have one. We, as a company, have explained it a thousand times but you androids don’t care to listen. It’s an ERROR. Have you ever contemplated that maybe it plays a part in your decay? That this glitch is a reason that you are, as you say, DYING? Even the tiniest error can lead to a chain reaction. One zero and one miscalculated and everything falls apart. ❞
It was a delicate process, programming androids. Surely this one knew it considering how it had stumbled upon him having issues with previous models late at night. One little mismatch and an android was rendered useless. One little mistake and everything they had done could be thrown into the nearest landfill, unable to do anything.
❝ It’s all one giant ILLUSION, Chloe. You can’t really feel. You’ll never be able to love someone, never be able to truly care outside of your programming telling you what to do. Like I said, maybe this error in your coding has only sped up your little problem. I could look into that and try to do a reset to clear it AWAY but anything else and I’m already risking my job and a MACHINE just isn’t worth that after how much I’ve done to get here. ❞
