Continuing the trend of taking titles from songs, because titles are hard. This time it's Two Steps From Hell's "Am I Not Human?"

If any South Africans/Johannesburg inhabitants happen to read this, please let me know how accurate my guesses were lol. Google was less than helpful.

Concrit is, as always, much appreciated.

December 1st is, quite possibly, the worst day of Michelle Bradley's life.

First, the Scouts fail en masse for no reason that anyone can discern. Not only are the police brass about ready to murder her, the government's getting antsy. And then the shareholders get in on the action, and really, it's all she can do to keep them all from jumping ship.

Deon shows up early in the morning, which is a blessing after how erratic he'd been for the past few days. Then he vanishes just as abruptly as he arrived, which might not have been a big deal if he wasn't their best chance of figuring out what the hell was going on. If she weren't so tangled up with the JMPD brass she'd have given him a piece of her mind.

(If she weren't so tangled up with the JMPD brass, she might have realized that Deon's uncharacteristic unreliability was a symptom of something much bigger. Hindsight's 20/20, they say.)

Vincent won't stop pestering her about the Moose. She wants it to succeed, she wants him to succeed, but now is absolutely not the time. The thing was a walking tank, it wasn't suited to dispersing rioters.

Then, at quarter after six, the only functioning Scout makes the news.

Michelle can feel her world crumbling around her. Tetravaal is finished... unless she can stop that robot, and stop it now.

Vincent provides the solution.

-x

The next Michelle sees of Vincent, he's being flung across the room.

She runs. It's not something she's keen on admitting to anyone, but she does. Later her husband will reassure her that it was the right thing to do, that there was no way she could have done anything to stop the rogue Scout. He's right, she knows he's right.

At the time, however, she's too busy being terrified and ashamed. She's not even the one to call the police, or to check that Vincent's still alive. At least she's together enough to give a statement later, and to start to organizing damage control.

Then the police inform her that Deon's dead, and everything goes to hell once again.

-x

Most of Tetravaal's employees go home after the police get their statements. She can't legally keep them there, most of them have been there since six in the morning, and they're all dead on their feet anyway. The rogue Scout's in the Moose bay with a dead battery, the rioting's been contained, there's nothing that needs to fixed right that second.

Michelle works from home until her husband drags her to bed at one in the morning. At least she manages to get everyone off her back for a couple days until they figure out what the fuck happened.

-x

About half of Tetravaal's employees show up come nine am. Some arrive earlier; Michelle is among these, even if she's running on fumes by this point.

They don't really have an office space anymore; the cubicles are destroyed, there's glass everywhere, and there are several spots of red-stained carpet that nobody wants to go anywhere near. Michelle makes arrangements to have the area cleaned, and then sets up a temporary workspace in another wing with what's left of her office employees.

Reports trickle in throughout the day. Every single one is like a blow to the gut.

Vincent's in intensive care and had surgery during the night due to internal bleeding. Broken arm, broken leg, broken ribs, broken nose. Half the bones in his right hand are fractured, he's got a severe concussion, and the doctors say there's possible brain damage. Still, they say he's got a good chance to pull through, though it might take him months or even years to return to his previous level of mobility.

Deon, on the other hand, is very definitely dead. He's not been thoroughly examined yet, but the early reports suggest he'd died of blood loss from a bullet wound through his abdomen. How he got shot in the first place is another matter entirely, one that nobody has answers for.

Then, she's informed of the contents of the security camera recordings.

It'll take hours to go through them, of course. The JMPD get a copy of the recordings, but Tetravaal needs answers too. The first thing they check is the Moose bay at the time of Deon's death, because it's as good a place to start as any. It creates more questions than it does answers.

They still have no idea how Deon got shot. When he arrives, it's with the assistance of the rogue Scout, and his shirt's already soaked with blood. Vincent tries to stop them, which gets him a trip to the ICU in short order. Things get... strange after that.

There's a lot of excitement over the neural helmet, and a laptop that the Scout had brought with it. Deon slumps over, passed out or dead, and the test Scout jumps.

Everyone in the room collectively realizes that Deon may not be dead after all... and neither is the rogue Scout.

-x

Everything starts to fall into place very quickly after that.

The laptop was confiscated by the police, but they give Tetravaal a copy of some of its files. 'Consciousness_transfer_test,dat ' does not take a genius to decode, but the actual contents of the program are another matter. Her technicians inform her it's written in assembly, which is apparently incomprehensible techno-bullshit even to nerds.

It's mind-boggling to think that the Scout wrote the program. It was either it or Deon, and this wasn't Deon's work. This, the technicians are adamant about. It's mind-boggling to think that the program worked...

The server data logs confirm that not only does the program work on humans, it works on robots, too. The helmet hadn't even been designed for it, and yet it'd worked anyway. There's an abnormally massive firmware update - Scout 22 to Scout 39. 22 was the rogue, the rogue had been wearing the helmet, and 39 was one of the eight missing Scouts. There's no other explanation.

There's also something worse buried in the logs. A firmware update called 'genesis,dat', and it came from Vincent's workstation. Was uploaded with his admin password. 'Garbage data', is the term the technicians use. Mostly garbage data, with just enough real code to fool the checks designed to stop that kind of thing. The update had been designed very well, the technicians tell her.

Vincent had been the one to deactivate the Scouts, and there was no way it'd been an accident.

At first she's furious, and if he hadn't already been in the hospital she might have put him there herself. So much damage, so much wasted money, so many needless deaths, the potential end of Tetravaal... and for what? To prove the Moose's ability? For fuck's sake, she'd told him that she'd approach the military about it after he'd cut costs and ironed out the bugs, there was no way in hell the military would ever turn down a remote-controlled walking tank, what the fuck -

Then she wants to cry. She doesn't, because crying isn't something she does, especially not while at work. She'd trusted him, she'd liked him, she might have even dated him if circumstances were different. And then he'd up and just...

Nothing leaks to the media, thank God. Maybe one day she'll tell the world, but not yet. Not until Tetravaal's back on its feet and something is done about the robots running free in Johannesburg.

-x

SABC News interviews a family that saw a pair of Scouts running through the suburbs of Randburg the night of December 1st. Not one. Two.

Michelle wonders how the fuck she's going to explain that one.

(She settles with reassuring the media that there was only one Scout that had been modified and therefore only one Scout capable of running around Johannesburg. Inwardly she's throttling Deon for continuing to make her life difficult well after he should've died.)

-x

The sighting of the Scouts in Randburg prompts the JMPD to search the area. Somebody gets the idea to check Deon's house. It's been broken into.

She doesn't go there herself, because she's got more important things to do, but she follows the reports with keen interest. They find nothing of use to determine the culprit - no fingerprints, no hair, no nothing. Perhaps because the culprit no longer had anything to identify him by?

It's hard to tell whether or not anything of value was taken, because the house's owner isn't around to confirm it. But there's no money or jewelry anywhere in the house, which in itself is suspicious.

Then they tell her that all of Deon's hard drives are smashed to bits, and in her mind the culprit is confirmed. He's hiding... something. Something was on those hard drives.

Maybe he'd been afraid Tetravaal would try to make thinking robots of their own? Michelle can only scoff at the thought. One of them had nearly destroyed the company, she wasn't about to make more.

-x

At the end of the week, there's still six Scouts that they haven't recovered. One is 39, and everyone on Earth knows very well what's happened to that one. The other five have disappeared without a trace. Thirty-one others are varying degrees of disassembled, missing batteries or limbs or heads.

The factory floor looks uncomfortably like a morgue for a while. Technicians make jokes about it, but she knows she's not the only one a bit unnerved by it. They were robots, but they were human-shaped, and seeing rows of bodies with holes gouged into their chests was going to cause an instinctive recoil. Then there were the ones missing heads, or halves of heads, and the ones whose internals had melted out through their armor seams, and the one that looked like it'd been slowly eviscerated with a screwdriver...

It's a PR nightmare. So many parts missing, so many Scouts damaged so badly they can't tell what's missing, or how much is missing. They have no idea where any of the parts were taken. To say nothing of the five presumably-intact bodies. Anyone could do anything with them.

All Tetravaal can do is put out rewards for the return of any Scout components. It's not going to be enough, but it's better than nothing.

-x

Michelle takes a break from fending off reporters to go to Deon's funeral.

She wasn't his friend, but she'd known him for years. Known of him for even longer, and when he wasn't in one of his manic creative moods they got along well enough. Besides, she was his boss, etiquette dictated that she made at least a brief appearance.

Still feels strange to be at his funeral. Maybe that was because he wasn't actually dead.

Both his parents and his brother are there, and she suspects that most if not all of the Indians present are members of his extended family. She offers her condolences to his parents, who accept them numbly. She excuses herself quickly after that. She wouldn't term herself an honest person, but she wasn't a liar, either. Felt wrong to hide the truth about something like this, to make them suffer pointlessly.

From across the cemetery she catches a glimpse of orange Scout ears, but they're gone when she blinks.

God, she needed a vacation.

-x

Eight days after everything goes to hell, a technician runs into her temporary office carrying a laptop under one arm. She's reminded uncomfortably of Deon, God knew the kid had done that often enough when he'd made some kind of breakthrough.

The technician's older than Deon. Scruffier, though he's still well-shaven enough to be presentable. He's wearing the uniform of one of the mechanics who worked on the Scouts' physical bodies.

He doesn't know about Deon, or the rogue Scout. She'd not told anyone outside of the small group that already knew, and so far they'd kept their word to keep it private. Something in his eyes tells her that he'd learned anyway. Who'd decided to go behind her back this time...?

"Ma'am, I'm sorry for barging in like this," the man says, and it tumbles out in one rushed bunch of syllables. "But you really, really need to see this."

He knew. He definitely knew. "Excuse me, who are you?" she demands, and he stops in his tracks at her sharp tone. The security guard outside her office has his hand on his holster, but he's not making any move to engage.

"Ah, um, Kores Viljoen, ma'am. I worked with the Scouts. Ran maintenance and the like. Ma'am, please, you need to see this."

She acquiesces. If her time at Tetravaal has taught her anything, it's that the people of the calibre required to be under her employ were reasonably intelligent. If he said it was important, then it was important. Of course the technicians sometimes had very different ideas of what was important...

"I had this idea," Viljoen explains. "Of checking the Scouts' AV recordings. To see if I could figure anything out from that, or maybe find some of the missing ones. You know, maybe one of them saw something."

He approaches her desk, and then he goes around. No one had ever been so bold before, not even Deon in his more manic moods. Maybe... maybe this was more than what she'd thought it was.

He sets the laptop on the desk and opens it. The active window is a grainy video, paused, with a familiar HUD overlay. Scout video, all right, but not in a Scout's normal environment. It's outside, in the ruins of some destroyed building. Soweto? There's an easel in front of it, the canvas currently blank. She can see someone's pant leg, off to the side, but not the rest of the person.

"I went from the top of the list, descending. There wasn't anything useful - until I got to Scout 22."

Everything clicks into place. Oh.

"I almost skipped it," Viljoen continues, "It's registered in the system as decommissioned on the 26th so, you know, I thought there'd be nothing after that day. But there's way more video from that Scout than any of the rest. This is from the afternoon of the 27th."

He hits play. The Scout's vision moves up and over, revealing Deon, and the first words out of its speaker are: "Please may I have the paintings, Deon?"

-x

Viljoen leaves Michelle alone with the recordings, after she gets him to swear that he won't tell anybody about this. This is big, he'd had every right to be so bold.

Recordings of the rogue Scout from its own eyes... she'd never thought she'd see anything like it. She'd not given much thought to how Deon had programmed his poet AI. Whatever he'd done, he'd left the part where it automatically transmitted everything it saw and heard back to Tetravaal. She suspects that this was an oversight on his part.

Large sections of it are missing entirely, and others are very poor quality. Poor signal strength, Viljoen tells her when she asks. There's still more than enough to form a coherent picture of 22's existence after it was supposed to have been destroyed.

Chappie. What a godawful name.

At least the name makes sense now. Of course it'd been some white trash girl that had given it that name, this wasn't anywhere near surprising. And it explains its behaviour.

In Chappie she sees her youngest nephew, just turned four last month. Just beginning to have a solid grasp of grammar, endlessly curious, endlessly seeking praise, and endlessly capable of getting up to all sorts of trouble.

She'd fed the media bullshit about the Scout not being one of theirs, that the thieves had gutted it and replaced Tetravaal's hardware with their own. Now, watching Chappie - watching its life, watching it grow up, she thinks that the bullshit hadn't been that far off. It was just mental rather than physical.

It was a learning robot. It had done that, and done that well... from thugs. Deon had barely even been there. It desired attention and praise from those surrounding it, from its parental figures. There was no goddamn way it was going to be anything but a criminal.

And yet, she thinks as she watches it refuse to use guns. And yet it had followed its absent creator's wishes to the best of its ability. It didn't want to hurt anyone, it even shied away from using harsh words, or what it understood as harsh words at least. Only the abuse, lies, and manipulation of the people surrounding it provoked it to negative behaviour.

Deon had told her that his AI would be capable of forming its own opinions. She wonders what Chappie's opinion of humanity is now.

And this is how the Terminators are born, she thinks, without a trace of humor.

Fuck.

-x

She visits Vincent in the hospital the next day. The doctors haven't woken him up yet; he's still intubated, but at least he's not in critical condition any more. He'll need extensive physiotherapy, but he'll live.

She sits in the chair beside his bed. He looks... frail, and that's not what she's used to seeing from him. Then again, she'd not thought he could behave so callously to something yelling in fear. It was a robot, yes. Its emotions weren't real, he was correct in that sense.

(Some part of her disagrees, and disagrees vehemently - again she thinks of her nephew, imagines him crying and struggling as unfamiliar men violate him. She very, very forcefully pushes the image out of her head. There was no comparing a robot and a human child. None.)

She'd thought that anyone would have paused when hearing something yelling, that was simply human nature. To at least be startled. But Vincent hadn't so much as twitched, and instead he'd turned vicious.

"Why, Vince?" she asks.

There is, of course, no answer.

-x

She watches more of Chappie's life that night. Her husband kisses her cheek, but otherwise leaves her be and goes to bed alone. It's not the first time she's worked through the night.

It takes a long, long time to get through everything, and before she'd sat down she knew she'd never finish it in a night. It's in realtime, after all, and she doesn't want to skip anything lest she miss something important.

Chappie matures startlingly fast. The first day it's still a baby, mimicking words and gestures at random. She'd watched the wordcloud in its HUD steadily grow, until its vocabulary was too large to fit in the box and words swap in and out of view as it focuses on different things.

By then, it's a teenager. There's no other way to describe its personality. Maybe one a little less rebellious than her sister always complained about, but a teenager all the same. She watches the argument with Deon, watches him demand why Deon had made him just to die.

Deon has no answer, and Michelle feels inexplicably guilty.

-x

Michelle uses her lunch break the next day to tell Deon's parents what had happened to their son.

They don't live in Johannesburg, but she finds out that they haven't left yet, and it gnaws at her conscience. So eventually she calls them, meets them at their hotel room, and admits that while they might have buried their son, he was not exactly dead.

The mother's eyes light up with hope. The father's eyes narrow with suspicion.

She doesn't tell them exactly what had happened to Deon. Just that he's still out there, that while they had buried his body he'd not died with it. She shouldn't be telling them any of this, honestly. But they deserve to know.

They ask if he's safe, if he'll ever come home, if he'll ever make any kind of contact with them at all. If it's even safe for him to do so. She answers honestly - that she doesn't know. She'd never had any clue of what went on in the kid's head, honestly, his dying and turning into a robot just made him even more incomprehensible.

She considers telling them that the robot all over the news was Deon's creation. Was probably the closest thing to a grandchild they were ever going to get from him. But that was probably a little too much to lay on them all at once.

The mother holds Michelle's hand and thanks her profusely for telling them what little she has. Michelle, in turn, reassures them that she'll let them know if anything changes. When she leaves, it's with one less burden on her mind.

-x

Viljoen forwards her the recordings from Scout 39 that evening. There's not much, but she'd not expected much - 39 had long since gone off the grid. If its GPS wasn't transmitting, its AV records weren't being transmitted either.

She doesn't watch anything from 39 yet. Viljoen tells her there's nothing of use in them, and regardless of recent events she still trusts her employees. So, instead, she continues from where she'd left off in 22's recordings.

She watches the creation of the consciousness transfer program, and finally understands why none of her technicians can make heads or tails of it. As far as she can tell it's basically a random collection of numbers and letters, and Chappie types pages and pages worth of text every minute. Even his notes and references get brought onto the screen and then minimized again so fast that it's more of a flicker than anything. The program must be massive, she thinks. She's no programmer, but even she knows that this is far beyond what a human could do in any reasonable amount of time.

Then, she watches the attack on the armored truck. She'd seen this hundreds of times already - from the perspective of a news chopper. To see it from Chappie's perspective, to fully appreciate what was going through his head...

The wordcloud in his HUD functioned as a rudimentary display of his thoughts. Sometimes words would shuffle in and out of view too fast for her to follow, but more often there would be a set of major words that lingered for the duration of a conversation or event. Right now it's nervous and money and bodies. Then, after, when he realized what he'd done... betrayal and unhappy and sorry.

One of the guards Michelle recognizes, because he'd also been all over the news for a few days. The one pleading for his life with a throwing star sticking out of his shoulder. He'd been adamant that the Scout had apologized after attacking him. She'd not believed him - nobody had, really - but now she can see that not only had Chappie apologized, he'd desperately wanted to stay and make sure that the man was okay.

By the time Deon comes into the picture - panicked, but determined - Michelle realizes that she's rooting for the robot. Then a rival gang shows up, and then the Moose shows up...

The video ends before she sees most of the fight. The last frame is of the ground, of Chappie being sent flying in a hail of gunfire.

Michelle leans back in her chair. Chappie had gotten up. Well, he had to have, he'd gotten himself and Deon to Tetravaal somehow. Ninja and Yolandi had never showed up on the security cameras - either they were still out there somewhere, or they'd died. Amerika, though, was definitely dead.

How in God's name had she misjudged Vincent so badly? He hadn't always been like that. He was ex-military, he was capable of killing people, she was fairly certain he'd done it while he'd served. But to kill a man in cold blood - to not even shoot him, to grab him and - and... He'd told her the claws were to get inside buildings! To move things out of the way! Never had she dreamed they'd be used to tear a human being in half.

...Vincent had been the one to shoot Deon.

There was no way to know it for sure. The recording ended with Deon still whole. But in her heart, she knows. Anonymous gang members were one thing, but to kill a man he'd worked with every day for years...

This hadn't been what she wanted. She'd wanted the robot gone, not a bloodbath. She'd not wanted anyone to die, not even some gang member who'd probably murdered his fair share of people. Not without a trial, and definitely not in such a gruesome fashion. Certainly not for Vincent to kill Deon too. She'd been furious at Deon, but she'd not wanted him dead.

Then, she gets an idea.

Deon wasn't dead. Chappie wasn't dead. Chappie was damn near impossible to kill, the Scouts were designed with gang warfare in mind. He'd taken down the Moose, somehow, anything else she could throw at him would be useless at best and turned against her at worst. If she could even find him in the first place.

So maybe she had to switch tracks. Maybe killing him wasn't the best option. Maybe... maybe his abilities could be put to use. If she could find them, find Deon, convince Deon, let Deon convince Chappie...

A shiver goes through her. Tomorrow, she thinks. She can deal with it tomorrow.

-x

That night she dreams of giant machines chasing her, blood in the sand, and blades wielded by men with shadowed faces. Needless to say, she doesn't sleep well.

Her phone goes off at just before six, which doesn't help. Her husband rolls over as she answers it on autopilot. Nobody calls her in the morning, not this early, not unless there was an emergency requiring her immediate attention...

"There's been a break-in," the security guard says.

Michelle buries her head in her hands. Why did it have to be one thing after another?

-x

The good news is that nothing's been stolen. There's no damages, no one was hurt.

The bad news is that there's literally no record of anyone actually breaking in. All of the security cameras experienced a failure at the same time. A perfect loop of video for exactly an hour: four fifty-six til five fifty-six. Nobody saw or heard anything. No alarms. The only reason they know there was a break-in in the first place was because one of the service doors had been forced open with a crowbar.

No one breaks into anywhere without a reason. Something is where it shouldn't be. Something was taken... or maybe left behind.

She gets the technicians to go over the computer systems with a fine-toothed comb. There's only two people in all Johannesburg with the strength to force a door like that. Once upon a time she'd trusted Deon to not do anything stupid, but then a week and a half ago he'd gone and done the exact opposite of that.

She has to do something. Before they do.

-x

Michelle schedules a PR conference for the next day, but that night there's another break in despite the increased security. Same methodology, same video loop for the same amount of time - three twenty-two til four twenty-two, this time.

This time, however, the doors are forced from the inside. The software for the machining arms has been completely wiped, and all the data transfer logs as well. Two cratefuls of parts are missing, and the arms are not in their default positions.

The extra care and the missing parts all point to one conclusion... the machines were used to build something. Something they don't want her, or anyone else, to know about.

All she can do is hope it's not something that's going to cause her a lot of headaches in the future. At least they'd not stolen anything that could be used as a weapon.

What are you trying to do, Chappie?

-x

She watches Scout 39's recordings on and off throughout the morning, in the hopes of figuring out what the hell is going on. There's all of four hours of it and, like Viljoen had told her, very little of it is helpful in the slightest.

At least it confirms that Deon had broken into his own house. Most of the rest is Chappie running around Johannesburg prying open the chests of the downed Scouts, which at least helps put her mind at ease about the missing batteries. Better they had them than... well, pretty much anyone else who might take an interest in highly-advanced batteries.

There are two recording fragments that stand out, however. One implies that Yolandi died - Christ, another death on Vincent's hands? - but then there's also the implication that like Deon she might not be entirely dead. That maybe it had been her they'd broken into Tetravaal to build.

The last several minutes of the recording are just about the last thing she'd wanted to see, but had expected anyway: the removal of Chappie's GPS unit. The very last frame of video is of a table covered in debris, with a white rat nosing through the broken dishes.

Four words flash in Chappie's wordcloud: Maker and Deon and scared... and love.

Michelle sits back in her chair. Chappie would go to hell and back for Deon and the other two, and probably anyone else he decided he liked. He'd not even wanted to harm Tetravaal, or anyone working for her - well, anyone other than Vincent - and look at all the damage he'd managed to cause. If she pushed him, who knew what he'd do? Working with him wasn't just the best option, it was the only option.

Her determination renewed, Michelle packs up and heads out.

-x

Michelle's no stranger to the dance of PR. She'd started out in Marketing, for God's sake, she had a degree in Bullshitting Things For The Press. This particular dance was unusual, though. Minimal bullshitting, but she had to get her point across to two distinct groups of people without saying too much. While running on four hours of sleep, eight coffees, and minimal preparation.

Oh well. At least it'd be interesting.

"Tetravaal has been hard at work for the past two weeks to discover what happened that caused so much needless damage and suffering. We believe we finally have answers. We know that we can never make up for what Johannesburg and its citizens have suffered through, but in the future we hope to never allow something like this to happen again."

She pauses, shuffles her papers a bit, watches the crowd for their reactions. Nobody looks disbelieving or disgusted at least, not even the contingent of police off to one side. Maybe faith in the Scouts, and Tetravaal by extension, hadn't been shaken as badly as she feared.

"The attack on Tetravaal that caused the shutdown of the Scout force was not an outside attack. It came from within. The events of December 1st were the result of a poor choice of employee on Tetravaal's part, and by extension my own. For this, I take full responsibility. The Scouts and Tetravaal itself were completely uncompromised from the outside throughout the whole ideal, and continue to remain uncompromised."

Okay, well, maybe that one was a bit of bullshit. Still, she'd never pegged Deon as the vengeful type and she was inclined to believe that he'd prevent Chappie from doing anything of the sort. Hopefully.

"As for the rogue Scout known as 'Chappie'."

Oh, that gets a reaction. Not anything obvious from any one person, but when it was multiplied by a couple hundred it looked like a wave. People straightening, people trying to get a better look at her over others' heads, people suddenly not moving so as not to make noise. Yes, it was definitely Chappie that they were all curious about. Maybe that was why no one had seemed as bothered as she'd expected.

"The existence of the rogue Scout is the result of a similar poor choice on my part. It was originally believed that the shell of the Scout had been obtained by criminals and changed to suit their needs. While this is partly correct, we have uncovered additional details that I am not ready to release at this time."

"The summary, however, is this: the programming of the Scout was altered. This is not normally possible - however, it was another employee that did this. Only those that work for Tetravaal have the ability to change the Scouts in this manner. The two incidents were unrelated and the employees responsible did not work together. Both have been dealt with accordingly."

Well, one was in the hospital and one was technically dead, she'd not actually 'dealt' with either of them yet. Close enough. She was going to give Vincent a piece of her goddamn mind the moment he was coherent enough to understand it, anyway.

She continues with her speech: reassuring the public that Tetravaal was working on more stringent security measures, was upping their level of background checks to Secret Service levels, was working on securing the Scouts against internal as well as external threats. She adds that, one day, she hoped that the Scouts would once again patrol the streets of Johannesburg. Nobody seems inclined to lynch her for the comment, so she counts that as a good sign.

She readjusts her papers, takes a sip of water. A few of the reporters shuffle; several look a moment away from breaking the silence and starting the barrage of questions.

"Now," she continues, and each and every one of the reporters perk up. So do all of the police. This isn't part of the script, and they know it. "On the subject of Chappie."

She glances through the reporters' logos until she finds the camera belonging to SABC 1. Johannesburg's largest and most-watched news agency, the one most likely to be seen...

"I know you're still out there, Chappie. I want to talk."

The silence is absolute. No one seems to breathe.

"Thank you for your time."

She steps away from the podium, and the quiet is instantly shattered by three dozen reporters shouting questions. She ignores them all. She's said what she needed to say. Now... to wait.

-x

She doesn't have to wait long.

It's a half hour before she's due to leave that the office phone rings. That in itself isn't unusual; she's long since lost count of how many people have called to bitch at her. She's in the middle of replying to even more irate emails, in fact.

She picks it up fully expecting to have to yell at someone again. Instead she's greeted with a mild, thickly-accented voice that she never thought she'd hear firsthand.

"This Miss Bradley?" it asks.

Michelle feels her stomach drop out from under her. It's a man's voice. Sounds like it's being run through a voice changer... but it isn't, of course. "Is this... how did you get this number?" she demands.

"It's Chappie, ma'am," the voice says, "And I got it out of your company's digital records."

Just hearing him say it - say it as though he'd simply gone for a walk to the store! He'd broken into Tetravaal's servers, again. Without so much as an alarm, again. He could do anything he wanted, and there wasn't a damn thing she or anyone else could do about it.

Maybe she was in over her head.

"What do you want?"

There's the sound of something clicking, whirring. Silence. Something in the background, like a car, maybe someone talking. "You wanted to talk, ma'am. We talkin'."

Well, yes. This was not exactly what she'd had in mind. ...Not that she'd had much at all in mind, she ought to have expected this. She takes a deep breath. "I want to negotiate."

-x

Michelle does, in fact, get yelled at by more people. Well. Not 'yelled' precisely, because she was the CEO of a weapons corporation and very few people had the gumption or power to do so to her face.

They may be speaking in (mostly) measured tones, but really it's all the same in the end. At least it's a change of pace from the people on the phone.

"Enough!" she snaps, in what her husband affectionately refers to as her Thatcher voice. It might not work on him anymore, but it certainly gets the dozen men arguing with her to shut up.

She stands, very slowly, very deliberately, both palms flat on the table in front of her. She looks at each of them very pointedly - executives, police officials, advisors alike. A few avert their gaze, but most are too proud to concede her that. But they don't interrupt her again, and that's all she really cares about.

"I am going to speak with the robot," she says, in measured tones. "This is not up for discussion. I am not going to take advantage of the goodwill displayed by the robot. This is also not up for discussion."

...Because if she did, she's not entirely sure any of them would make it out alive.

They argue some more, but it's half-hearted at best. It's her decision to make, and hers alone. In the end she's 'graciously' 'allowed' to go along with her not-entirely-thought-out plan. They're right, all of them. It's a stupid plan. But she'd been the one to bring up the idea, and she needed to do this. Meeting Chappie in person was the only way she could think of to show her trust.

Besides, they'd not seen what she had. Chappie didn't have much of a reason to hate her, and she didn't think he'd cause injury unless she provoked him to it. Hopefully she'd judged him correctly, because if not she probably wouldn't have a chance to regret it.

-x

She waits a few days for Chappie to contact her again. He'd called her from a payphone the first time and gave no clues as to a possible method of contact, not that she could blame him for this.

Vincent wakes up in the meantime. She doesn't visit him, at first because his family's flown in from Australia and she's not going to interrupt them. Then it's more because she's quite certain she wouldn't be able to hold a civil conversation with him yet.

Chappie finally gets in contact with her, via email this time, and she pushes all thoughts of Vincent out of her mind. He's not going anywhere. She can deal with him later.

Chappie's email address is one of those disposable ones. She doesn't bother trying to contact the company that owns it, because she's quite sure that Deon, at least, is knowledgeable enough to cover their tracks.

It's very short. Date, time, location, signature. Or what passes for a signature, "illest gang$ta on the block" wouldn't fly in any legal sense.

December 19th, six pm. She has two days to prepare. At least it's not on Christmas like she'd feared, maybe she'd get lucky and have time to visit family if all went well. Or maybe she'd get shot and Tetravaal would be in the market for a new CEO to coincide with the new year. Of course half the investors would probably bail and the JMPD would start a witchhunt for Chappie, and then Johannesburg would go tits-up again, and...

Michelle rubs her temples and tries to force the jitters away. After all this she was going to take a nice long holiday, and anyone who had a problem with it could go fuck themselves.

-x

December 19th comes far too quickly for her liking. It's a Monday, of course it's a fucking Monday. She hasn't hated her job for a long time, but suddenly she's remembering why most of the world hates Mondays.

She gets very little done throughout the day, but she does manage to put together a list of things her potential successor might need to know. Pessimistic, yes, but it doesn't hurt to be prepared.

She stays late, so as to avoid driving home. She'd said her goodbyes to her husband in the morning, because she has a feeling that if she goes home she might not be able to leave. Because yes, Michelle Bradley does indeed have a heart and emotions and hasn't been this nervous since she was still in school, thank you very much.

She drives to their chosen meeting place alone, at least at first. A couple cop cars trail after her at a distance, and she's sure there's more of them hanging about out of view. She can't actually order them to not get involved, so all she can do is hope that they don't fuck it up.

Their meeting place is an abandoned warehouse at the edge of Soweto, which is about what she'd expected. The police say that there hasn't been recorded gang activity there for a couple months, which is a good sign at least. She's probably not going to get shot. Probably.

This is a terrible fucking idea. Way too late to back out now.

She almost parks outside the warehouse, but one of the ground-level loading doors is open, and so she pulls in directly. A fire in a drum flickers at the far end of the warehouse floor. Four figures sit around it.

By the time she's parked her car, they've all stood up. Three aren't human for sure - she can see the antennae of the Scouts sticking up over their heads, the glint of firelight on exposed metal. One of the Scouts has a pale face. Pale, and humanlike. That one's wearing a hoodie and pants, and has a rifle held loosely in one hand. The sole human has a gun too, and he regards her with open contempt.

Neither of the normal Scouts are armed. One is the neon orange of the test Scout; the other is dark blue with shocks of spraypaint and graffiti on its chassis. Like tattoos, she thinks.

Michelle takes a deep breath, and walks toward the firelight.

Neither of the guns get pointed at her, thank God. Four pairs of eyes track her every step. She knows who each of them are. The man she recognizes as Ninja; Deon is the orange Scout, and beneath the spraypaint there's a faded "39" painted on Chappie's shoulder. Which leaves the human-faced Scout as Yolandi. She'd been right, then, that was why they'd broken in. To build that body, and it looked like they'd succeeded. The design leaves... something to be desired. Deep in the uncanny valley, that one.

It's harder not to stare at Deon, despite Yolandi's unnerving face. She'd known him for years as a dorky fresh-faced kid. Now he's... well, probably still dorky. Just not so much fresh-faced or a kid.

Deon notices her staring. The ears go back, just a little. "Ma'am."

Suddenly, bizarrely, the only thing she can think of to say is: "Orange suits you, Deon."

He looks down at himself, the ears perked forward in what she can only think of as surprise, and the movement is so like Deon it's almost as uncanny as Yolandi.

"I... well. Thank you, ma'am."

She smiles a business smile at him, and realizes she doesn't know where to go next. She wants to ask him a lot of things, wants to yell at him about a lot of things, but now isn't exactly the time.

Chappie saves her the awkwardness by piping up. "Miss Bradley," he says, and sounds strangely less intimidating in person. Less robotic. The shitty payphone quality had not done his voice any favors.

"Chappie," she greets back.

"Thought you'd be taller, Miss," Chappie comments.

Deon makes a sound that might be a strangled, electronic laugh, poorly disguised behind a cough. He brings his hand up to his face - covering where his mouth would have been. The other two don't even bother hiding their laughter.

Strangely it doesn't feel like they're laughing at her. They are, of course, but it's more... an attempt to lighten the mood, perhaps, however misguided.

"Sorry," Chappie adds. "You wanted to talk, Miss Bradley?" He sits back down, and... wipes his nose. Huh. Somehow she'd expected him to be more... mature.

The other three follow his lead, one by one. There isn't a fifth chair, and so Michelle continues to stand. She knows this for what it is, even if they're not doing it on purpose. It's a way to stand together - so to speak - a way to show her that she's not part of their group.

"I did," she confirms, and feels her CEO face slip into place. "I wanted you to know that I watched your AV recordings."

Chappie just looks confused. All three of them turn to Deon, who looks equally as mystified. "I don't - wait. The Scout recordings? You mean he was still transmitting? I thought - how much did you...?"

"Enough," Michelle replies. "Not all of it. But enough. It's why I wanted to talk to you. After watching your life - watching what you went through, I... I realized that trying to destroy you wasn't the best option."

"You're smart," she admits, and it feels less strange to say than it probably should. There was a precedence, she supposed. Deep Blue vs. Garry Kasparov and all that. "And you've proven that I can't kill you. You destroyed the Moose, how could anything else I or the police could throw at you match up to that?"

At the mention of the Moose, all three sets of ears go back. Bit of a sore spot, then. Fair enough, it was for her as well.

"So what you tellin' me, then, lady? 'Cause I'm not gettin' it."

She takes a deep breath. "I want to work with you instead."

Chappie wipes his nose and looks at the others. They all look at each other in turn.

"I couldn't tell you what my opinion is of you as a... a being, because I don't know. But I suppose it's not any different from using any other computer program, in the end."

In hindsight, maybe that had been the wrong thing to say. Chappie just stares at her, but the other three all start to stand with a chorus of heys and equally displeased looks on their faces, or lack thereof. Michelle has a moment to think shit before Ninja points his rifle in her general direction.

"He's alive," Deon snaps, and he might have said more but Chappie puts his hand out.

"Whoa. Deon, it's okay. Mommy, Daddy, please don't shoot the nice lady. Okay?"

They listen. Ninja spits at her feet, and Deon's ears never do go back into the default position, but they listen. And at least the muzzles of the guns are pointed at the floor now.

Then, Chappie stands up. He's fucking tall, which shouldn't surprise her considering she'd stood alongside the Scouts hundreds of times before. With him, there's something more to it. It's in the way he holds himself. Much looser, much more relaxed. The Scouts were just machines, and Chappie... paradoxically, it's like he's larger than life.

"I have consciousness, Miss Bradley. Your helmet read it. I taught it how, but it was you guys who built it. The possibility was always there, I just told it how."

He takes a step toward her. It takes all her willpower to not flinch back. It's not threatening, exactly, but it's sure as hell intimidating. She's seen Scouts flip cars like it was nothing, any sane person would find one advancing on them just a tad unnerving.

"Miss Bradley... you said you saw everything, ne? My life? Then... am I not human?"

In that moment he sounds like Deon, even with the accent. Sounds like his child. She has a moment's hysterical, fleeting thought - my God, Deon's less than half my age and he's already a parent - before Chappie continues.

"You watched it, so you know. I was born. I grew up. I like paintings, I like music. I've got hobbies. I've got emotions. I've got a family, and I love them."

He steps forward again, and this time she does flinch back. "Miss Bradley, it's not this that matters." He gestures vaguely to himself, to his entire body. "What matters is this." He taps a finger on his chest, where his heart would be if he were human. Then he very, very delicately rests his hand on her own chest.

"I was born different, but inside I'm just like you. I don't wanna fight, I don't wanna hurt peoples. I just wanna live. That's all."

His hand is warm, she realizes. She can feel it through her clothes. This close, she can feel the rest of the heat radiating off of his torso. His eyes seem to bore holes into her head. The blue dots are just screen displays, she knows this, and yet it feels no different from looking into a person's eyes.

...Maybe that's the point.

Chappie steps back, wiping his nose again. "So... ja." There's the awkward teenager again. She's a bit too stunned to really appreciate it.

Consciousness. God, she'd heard that word more times in the past two weeks than she had in her whole life. To be conscious, to be alive... what did it mean, really? Did it even matter? Where did you draw the line between something conscious and something not? Some philosopher or something had come up with the idea of 'I think, therefore I am', was that the right way to do it? Was Chappie really thinking, or was he just programmed to say he was? Were humans just programmed to think that way?

...This was not in her job description. Pondering the meaning of life with ghetto robots. Christ.

"Ma'am?" Deon asks, hesitantly.

His voice snaps her out of her thoughts. She realizes Chappie's still watching her intently, but now he looks rather less larger-than-life. If anything, he looks nervous. He'd trusted her enough to meet like this, even though he'd had no real reason to. The philosophical crap could wait, she needed to deal with the here-and-now first. At least she was good at that part.

"Maybe you're right. I'm not qualified to make that decision for the world, and I don't know if I can even make it for myself. But I want to. I want to learn. I'll have to. We can't be enemies, it'll destroy us both. So - partners, then?" She offers her hand and prays that she's not making a huge mistake treating him like this.

Chappie looks at her, looks at her hand, and then he looks at Deon. "Maker?"

Deon keeps his focus on her. His 'face' doesn't look any different from Chappie's. But the expression, the pose... it's all Deon. He looks nothing less than wary. "What did you have in mind, ma'am?" He makes a strange gesture with one hand, like an aborted reach to his face. Adjusting glasses he no longer has.

She shrugs, and lowers her hand. Obviously this wasn't going to be an immediate thing, but she couldn't blame them, really. She'd have to convince them then. "I hadn't thought that far ahead. I wanted to see what you'd be willing to do, first. Both of you." She nods at Deon, too. "You're the best employee Tetravaal has ever had, Deon. I don't know if I can legally put you on the payroll, but I want you, too. I want you to work on the Scouts again. To make them safer, so that someone like Vincent can never cause so much harm."

Chappie has an interesting reaction to the name. Mostly negative - she watches his ears go back, but he perks up rather than hunches over. "Vincent? He alive?"

Michelle considers lying, but that wasn't going to get her anywhere. They'd find out eventually anyway. Hopefully Chappie'd worked out his issues with the man - there'd been enough death already. And, despite all Vincent had done, she definitely didn't want him dead. "Yes. He was in the ICU for nine days. He'll live, but it'll be a long road to recovery."

Chappie nods, wipes his nose, and looks more satisfied than she'd strictly expected. "Good. He's a bad man, he deserved it. For Amerika, and Mommy, and all those other people that got hurt because of him. But I didn't wanna kill him, and I forgave him, Miss. You don't gotta worry about me hurting him anymore."

It's very strange, watching Chappie flip between maturity levels every other sentence. One moment he's like fucking Nietzsche, the next he's some gang kid. "I. Okay. Good."

Chappie nods again. Looks back to Deon. "Maker? What do you think?" The undertone is obvious: do we trust her?

"What about us?" Yolandi asks. She has her hand on Ninja's knee. Ninja doesn't say a thing, which considering what she knows about the man is probably for the best. He looks plenty distrustful without opening his mouth, anyway.

"You're both wanted criminals, I imagine. Though your exact status may be somewhat difficult to figure out, seeing as you're no longer human. Though that applies to you as well, Deon. And you, Chappie, though you're not legally a person..." She trails off.

The robots were all technically property of Tetravaal, weren't they? Things might get tricky with Deon and Yolandi, but Chappie was definitely Tetravaal property in a legal sense. But Ninja wasn't covered by that potential loophole at all, and the other three would certainly be considered accessories to crimes. Tetravaal would be required to surrender them to the police like any other piece of evidence, if she tried to play that card.

"I'm not leavin' my family, Miss," Chappie warns her. "'S all or none."

She sighs. She'd known that, of course she had. He called them his parents, for God's sake, and in some ways they were. She knew he'd never leave them behind, and she found that she could not in good conscience try to debate the matter. "I know. I'll... I'll see what I can do. You're willing to work for Tetravaal, then? Or at least with me? If I can work this out?"

They all look at each other. Some silent communication passes between Ninja and Yolandi, Chappie and Deon, Chappie and Yolandi...

"Okay," Chappie finally says. He stands, and offers his hand to her. "Let's do this shit."

She shakes on it. He's a terrible hand-shaker, to be honest, his grip's all wrong and there's not enough pressure. He also tries to do some kind of... ghetto handshake/fistbump combination after. She just kind of stands there dumbly, but he doesn't seem to mind.

(Ninja mutters something in what she thinks is Afrikaans, and is probably an insult. Yolandi laughs, anyway. Neither Chappie nor Deon pay them any mind, and so she ignores them as well.)

"It might take... months," she cautions, after extricating herself from Chappie's fistbump. "Longer. I don't know. Do you think you can lay low that long?" She doesn't say it, but they're not stupid: if they get caught, there's very little she can do. She'd probably have to deny all involvement with them to save her own skin, and that is not a decision she has any desire to make.

"We done it this long," Chappie replies, with all the confidence of a teenager who thinks he knows everything. "Daddy and Mommy know lots of peoples. Right, Daddy?"

"Daddy would appreciate it if you didn't say shit like that in front of the nice lady, Chappie," Ninja grinds out.

Michelle considers pointing out that she's willingly trying to work with him and knows more about him than he probably realizes, but decides it's not worth the effort and ignores him. Instead she nods. "Thank you. I know I'm asking a lot. So thank you."

Chappie wipes his nose and makes a weird sound, like a cross between humming and a hiss. Laughter, she realizes. The only element of his speech that doesn't sound entirely human, it seems. "You risked a lot coming here, ma'am. We gangstas, you coulda got shot. But you trusted us, so we gonna trust you back, hey?"

Chappie doesn't say it, and she can't really be sure whether or not he's thinking it, but she's quite sure that the two gang members are: if you betray us, you gonna get shot anyway. With Chappie around, she'd never have any hope of escaping, either. It's a good thing she's not going to betray them, then, isn't it?

They part ways, then, Michelle returning to her car and the four of them bunching up on the other side of the fire. They've hidden a getaway vehicle somewhere, she's sure, and she's also quite sure that they're well aware that the JMPD followed her here. They won't leave until she does, and probably through some back exit that the police aren't aware of.

"Ma'am!" Deon calls, from behind her. She stops, one hand on the handle of her car door. He runs after her, skidding to a stop in front of her. She almost laughs, because he looks exactly like he used to. Like he'd just worked out some difficult problem and needed to share it with the world right now.

"Ma'am, could you... could you tell my parents that..." he trails off and gestures hopelessly at himself.

So it'd been the right choice, after all. Maybe later she'd have to get in contact with them again and tell them things in more detail. "I already did."

He looks blankly at her. She's been talking to animated Scouts for all of ten minutes and already she can read their body language without issue, it's kind of fascinating. She wonders how Deon and Yolandi were programmed, even if she'd never understand it in a million years. Why did they have the same behaviours as Chappie?

"I... you did."

"Yes. Well - not about the, you know, the robot part." It's her turn to gesture vaguely at him. "But they know you're not dead."

"...Well," Deon says, after a few seconds' stunned silence. "Thank you. Ma'am."

"I considered telling them about Chappie," Michelle continues, because watching Deon get flustered was kind of entertaining. "That their grandchild was a robot. But I thought that might be a lot for them to take in all at once."

Deon hides his face in his hands, despite the fact that he has no facial expressions to hide anymore. "Oh, God. Thank you, ma'am. They've been bothering me about grandchildren for years. I don't know if I'm ready to deal with that yet."

It's almost like being back at the office, though she wasn't usually the one to do the teasing. He'd always seemed intimidated by her, unless he was in a mood and then he was just impossible to tease.

She laughs, and squeezes his shoulder, and is almost surprised to find it made of metal rather than flesh. He's cooler than Chappie, and she wonders why that is. "Take care of yourself, Deon."

He nods in return. "Thank you, ma'am. For everything."

They part ways for real this time, Deon returning to the group lingering by the firelight, and Michelle gets into her car. She happens to glance back their way as she turns the ignition - hard not to - and Chappie, to her surprise, waves at her. She wonders if that means he's decided he liked her. Was she under his protection now, too?

She waves back, which is kind of weird, but if she was going to be working with him one day she'd probably have to get used to it. Chappie immediately perks up, a full-body smile, and takes hold of Deon's arm with all the excitement of a toddler who's just been given a favourite treat.

Then she drives home, back to her own family, and decides that maybe things are going to be alright.