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For the DVD commentary ask game:

Yes, it's more than 500 words, but I was about to chose the last passage of chapter 6 from "a question of time" when Sixty and Connor meet.

I love that interaction so much!💙

So, I would like to hear some of your thoughts, if you have the time and energy!

As Connor shifted his method of attack, Sixty’s body reactive instinctively. Instead of activating a firewall to prevent unwanted data transfer, it opened to mutual data sharing; a blue glow under the plastic lit their skin, bleaching it of what little colour it had, turning them ghostly.

In a rush, Sixty felt Connor's experience every bit as much as he did his own, heart racing, tense limbs, fear and anger backed by—

Absolutely nothing.

Red lines flashed across his vision for milliseconds at a time, forming a giant matrix that encompassed the room, swallowing him entirely, but he saw nothing beyond Connor’s face.

Sixty grabbed Connor again, harder, as the blue faded from their skin and Connor started blinking as he returned to himself.

“There was nothing.” Sixty’s voice was a coarse snarl. “I saw nothing in you. How is that possible?”

LED yellow and spinning, Connor seemed to recover more slowly than Sixty. His mouth parted and he breathed slowly, releasing warm air in the narrow space between them, eyes moving back and forth over Sixty’s face, something dark and active coiled in the space behind them.

“How have you—” Connor blinked again and let go of Sixty’s hand. “What did you do to Hank?”

Sixty had been so afraid that Connor would deviate him, to pass on his flaw with a light touch and a flash of static, that he’d ignored all other potential outcomes.

Connor’s face changed, hardening as he processed the fragments of memory he’d glimpsed. His initial wariness was back and dominating his features—he no longer seemed uncertain, nor did he seem content to wait and analyse. He leaned forward of his own accord, searching Sixty’s face for evidence of guilt, for confirmation of what he already knew.

A wrenching twist in Sixty’s chest followed the change. Where he should have felt gratified to see Connor so strongly affected, he felt trepidation, sensed imminent danger.

He shoved Connor away from him, throwing as much of his weight into the movement as possible. Anticipating the move, Connor stumbled backwards but caught himself before he fell, arms outstretched to maintain his balance.

Sixty’s hand ghosted along his waistband, reaching obviously for his gun, his priority haste over stealth, careless that Connor would notice so long as he armed himself first.

Instead of grazing smooth gunmetal, Sixty’s hand brushed something else, equally cold but smaller, its shape indistinct through fabric and brief contact. It stalled him, pulled him back to another place, a heavy tension—cold fingers and colder air, the last vestiges of frustration and pain, overtaken with small but soothing defiance…

Three gunshots shattered Sixty’s thoughts at the same time as his chest panelling.

Three bullets to the pump regulator and surrounding systems, close grouping, damaging the biocomponent far beyond repair and causing critical thirium loss in fewer than seven seconds.

Sixty allowed himself to fall backwards, feeling the warm spread of blood across his skin, the tightening in his chest. His collision with the floor knocked the breath from him and he closed his eyes; at the same moment his hand reached into his pocket to remove the cause of his distraction and found chilled metal—glacial, as if it carried winter with it.

Connor paused, gun raised, stance steady, watching him fall. He took a step forward, cautious and slow, weapon still trained on Sixty, who didn’t notice him at all; he’d let his head fall back on the floor and watched the lights blur and swim as the thirium flowing through his processors ran thin. His thoughts stalled and faded, one at a time, until he was left with only the feel of cold metal as he pulled his hand from his pocket and pulled it up to eye level.

Above him, Connor murmured something soft, but it was lost to him—his audio processors had already shut down and he focused his remaining energy on lifting his arm to see what had cost him his victory.

He tipped his head sideways as his fingers, clumsy and numb, dropped the object he’d pulled from his pocket. Blinking repeatedly to clear his vision, his eyes caught something small and dark and gleaming in the cold blue light, rolling in a wide arc away from his face. Sixty’s brow creased and his arm, losing strength, fell back to his side as he watched it rock gently to rest on the grey floor.

The black king.

my DARLING (this ask meme)

for starters kisses your face I love you dearly

I have a lot of thoughts about these scenes with Sixty, and not all of my thoughts make it into chapters, so I'll try and expand around those. Also: warning for not-quite spoilers in case anyone wants to avoid upcoming stuff in chapter 7 - nothing I haven't foreshadowed, but maybe something you haven't pieced together (and certainly stuff Sixty hasn't processed).

this chapter was a MESS of a thing to write. I knew from day one I wanted an achronological chapter, a haphazard mix of thought and feeling that made about as much sense to the audience as the experience does to Sixty, but I had literally no clue if it would work in-text. It was going to start out more complicated but I simplified it for word count and clarity. I wanted to achieve several things:

first, Sixty hits a low

second, Sixty starts to lose what little discipline he has left and starts listening to his wants more than his mission, which alienates him from Amanda and leads us to:

third. because of the above, Sixty experiences consequences inside his closed loop, but they don't arrive in the way he expects.

four. for fun. Sixty realises (or starts to realise) that he’s been so preoccupied with the obvious (connor, the mission) that he’s missed something critical

sooooo in every instance, here and in previous chapters, I wanted sixty to forcibly cut himself off from Connor. he sees an uncrossable void between them but his perception is VERY skewed – he holds a contradictory view of Connor: Connor is deviant, so Connor is a failure. despite all of Connor’s failures, Sixty is still trying to match him, still trying to overtake him in Amanda’s eyes – and it’s complicated somewhat by him imitating Connor in the beginning. Here it manifests as Sixty expecting violence from Connor when Connor is reaching out to understand. This backfires horribly for two reasons:

Sixty misreads Connor, because his perception of Connor is so flawed he cannot make accurate predictions of his actions; his two-dimensional perception of Connor is just a reflection of how he’s afraid to be seen himself, an archetype of failure. Amanda uses Connor’s failure as a very effective motivator, in the same way we see Amanda use praise and disapproval to motivate machine!Connor in-game. Dumbass Sixty can’t see past who he thinks Connor is, and so Connor surprises him

Connor can SEE him now. Properly. He offered to take Sixty with him before and of course Sixty didn’t believe him, but it was genuine. Connor looked at Sixty and saw himself: a machine designed to accomplish a task, held hostage by his own mission. Sixty desperately does not want to be compared to Connor, even though he does it to himself compulsively…and this time Connor knows how different they are. Interface means he not only knows what Sixty has done but that he feels no remorse for it. Any chance of cooperation is lost completely.

Connor attacks, of course. Sixty takes this as more evidence that he and Connor are fundamental opposites, rather than the truth: he has set himself to be diametrically opposed to Connor and all of the problems come from his resulting actions, not some grand design from Amanda or CyberLife. He doesn’t hesitate in trying to fire back.

Naturally that doesn’t end well either. This time (compared to the other loops) Sixty isn’t too slow, or too angry – he hasn’t made a fundamental error that leads him to getting shot, he’s distracted by something else.

Okay so I have always been SUPER aware that in choosing to write a time loop some stuff is going to be crazy boring to read because it’s repetitive by nature. I’ve tried to weave interesting things into the narrative on purpose to negate that, and focus on different aspects in loops that are similar… and that also let me lay groundwork for the subtle shifts loop to loop. They aren’t quite the same. They do vary. For example, from chapter 3:

It wasn’t right. He remembered last time: there’d been two night-shift guards, bored and ill-mannered, who’d verified his identity and then waved them on without pause. He checked the time and found there was fewer than two minutes’ difference between arrival times—they were later this time, but not late enough to explain the guards' absence. Instead of following Hank, Sixty looked over the partition to the desk below, searching for signs of recent activity: thermal residue from the presence of a warm human, a recently used coffee cup, an idling computer, anything. He found nothing at all. It didn’t look like anyone had used the space in hours. Stepping backwards slowly, mind consumed with unanswered questions, Sixty followed Hank’s voice when he called out, though he didn’t hear the words. He remembered. He’d scanned his palm… Hank had reluctantly flashed his badge-- “Connor. What are you waiting for?”

Sixty fixates on change because change is threatening. It adds an element of unpredictability to his loops, and unpredictability has an unfortunate habit of leading him to die and restarting the loop.

This time he’s carrying something he shouldn’t have. He picked up a chess piece in the garden – a general fuck you to the universe for messing with him, a way to strike back and mess up the game he feels forced to play. I love that reactive, selfish, childish part of Sixty and wanted him to show it whenever possible – more so as the fic progresses, as he gets angrier and less concerned about showing it. Taking the king was tantamount to taking control, pulling something back in an environment that is entirely out of his control, a game that he isn’t playing, he’s just caught up in it.

Fun behind the scenes fact: I’m gonna gif some fic stuff because I cannot RESIST this kind of self indulgence, but the chess stuff came from this scene in Last Chance, Connor where I noticed a chessboard in the frozen Zen Garden. It’s never referenced in-game, but I wondered… was Amanda supposed to be playing? Who with? I want to know. So I’m taking fic-flavoured liberties and writing my own version.

I like to think of Sixty’s emotionality as a strength, when it’s not wild an unchecked… an asset he could use if he chose to follow in Connor’s footsteps and embrace deviancy. He wouldn’t, of course, because following Connor would be tantamount to becoming him, and that’s unthinkable. He unknowingly cuts himself off from all growth because to grow and develop means following in Connor’s footsteps – and Sixty can’t see any further than that, even though beyond that he’d be able to become his own person. I love the tragedy of him constantly getting in his own way.

This’ll be a theme for the next chapter, and is one of my favourite ways to interpret Sixty in fan works: because he’s a copy, because of Amanda’s influence, he's searching for his own identity. He makes the critical beginner mistake of defining himself against Connor, which of course doesn’t distance them from each other at all. He won’t be able to become his own person until he learns to move past Connor, which of course is REALLY difficult when you’re… reliving the same night over and over again.

ANYWAY. The shift at the end of chapter 6 isn’t a failure on Sixty’s part this time, it’s a paradigm shift because the game has changed. Something is different. The price Sixty pays for noticing this is another death, another loop. He doesn’t even have time to speculate on the meaning before he dies, he’s already being pulled back into the storm…

The point of the black king is for Sixty to have brought something from the zen garden with him, in a way that shouldn’t be possible. I’ve discussed this before, most notably in chapter 5:

When he came to a stop, he flexed his hands experimentally, testing the tendons and joints. They were fine—just fine—almost no different from how they felt in the zen garden. There was little difference between physical reality and a simulated one: his synthetic brain processed all stimuli in the same way, regardless of its origin, so when his sensors told him he experienced the warmth of the summer sun, he did so. When they told him ice crystals were growing in his joints, seeded by microscopic imperfections in the metal and plastic, he felt the grind and burn every bit as much as if it were happening to a physical body, not just a projection of one For the same reason he shivered, the memory of the snow almost as strong as the sensation itself.

I wanted to discuss how android perceive reality. If you sense the world as so much data, how do you distinguish between different modes of being? Would reading data be the same as experiencing it? Would experiencing a virtual reality, like Amanda’s garden, feel the same as a real, physical world? Does “real” world even have a meaning in that kind of situation?

And, maybe most importantly for Sixty, how would you begin to tell the difference? Well, if you were smart and not distracted, maybe you’d steal something digital – a little object, something no-one would really miss, as a kind of test. If you woke up and it was still there… 😏

thank you SO so much for this kisses your face 💕 I love rambling about sixty and my convoluted plans for this fucked up time loop✨

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