#Markus will flounder but his heart is in the right place - he will make note for next time

[rekindlevn]

MC is sick! Who's a good nurse and who is making everything 100x worse??

Jules - This man has nursing as a secondary degree. With 4 younger siblings that he helped with, he is a pro at making sure you are taking your meds, keeping comfortable, eating what when you should, and keeping your fluids up. He will make it seem like you never really got sick in the first place.

Niko - He would be anxious over you but would do everything to make you comfortable. Cook all your favorite sick-time meals, hold you, be near you. Anything to help you get through it.

Markus - This poor man; he is struggling. He has only had to look after himself in the past, and seeing you be sick is terrifying, because he doesn't know what is going to help and what won't. So he will do it all. He is really trying his best here.

[jui-imouto-chan]

Sneak Peek into my Reverse AU (RK1K)

Markus smiles down at Carl, wheeling him beside the table before seating himself. Carl smiles at him, placidly watching him take a few bites before he turns on the TV. Markus’ glabella scrunches as he takes in the news, more coverage on the situation in the Arctic with Russia.

He sighs, sitting back in his chair with a petulant chomp of his bacon. “TV off.”

Carl tilts his head at him, blue eyes curious. “Markus?”

“I’m alright. Thank you for worrying, Carl.” Markus pauses and takes a sip of his coffee, “How about you find something to occupy yourself until I finish?”

He earns a nod and then Carl is wheeling himself across the room to the door beside the giraffe, moving into the studio and grabbing at a canvas before it can even slide shut. Markus smiles softly at the sight, even if the sight of Carl being unable to walk to his favorite activity makes him feel a pang of distant sadness.

“The damage was excessive, you might just have to get a replacement. I’ll give it to you free of charge, good friend, but even if we transfer his memory, he won’t be the same Carl that you know.”

“It’s fine,” Markus assured her.

“Then we’ll prepare--”

“No, I mean that that’s not necessary. We’ll be going now.”

Carl stared up with a certain twinkle in his eyes, and when they arrived home, all he managed was a, “Thank you,” to which Markus smiled, ever enigmatic, and told him that he was only sorry that he couldn’t be fixed.

Markus grabs for the remote on the table, turning the TV on and lowering the volume immediately. He changes the channel and rests his chin on his fist, melting into the table with a large, silly grin on his face.

“Lieutenant Connor Stern has just solved yet another case! Revealing a man who’d advertise himself as a loving father to be an abusive alcoholic, the victims of the abuse come forward to thank Stern personally.”

The scene cuts to a brunet little girl sat beside a woman with short blonde hair, both of whom brighten up upon a distracted-looking, mildly disheveled brunet male entering the room. He smiles at them gently, but his features contort in surprise and then sheepishness as the two females envelop him into hugs, smiling gratefully into his coat.

The newscasters voice-over the scene, cooing and gushing over the bashful grin the Lieutenant has. He notices the cameramen filming them and flushes beautifully, and Markus barely represses the urge to slam his fist into the table as an expression of his overwhelmingly swollen heart. 

“Fanboying again?” Carl asks, suddenly right beside Markus, to which the dark man can’t completely quiet his shout of surprise, nearly toppling out of his chair.

Markus sputters before managing to shout indignantly, “N-No! I was just watching the news and he so happened to show up! That’s it!”

Carl smiles, amused. Markus blows him a petulant raspberry, crossing his arms while looking away. The TV draws his attention once more, as now it shows the Lieutenant, on his own, rubbing his neck and looking to the side.

“I just wanted to help them, the fame be damned. If I couldn’t find a steadfast legal method for saving them, I’d find a loophole or do it someway else,” he says, even as someone in the background attempts to reprimand him.

Markus unwittingly releases a dreamy sigh, upon which Carl belts out chuckles that stain Markus’ cheeks dark red.

“I didn’t take you to be someone who appreciates art,” he says, hinting at an inquiry.

Connor sputters, pink dusting his cheekbones. “I’m not—I mean, I just—it’s—I do! I like...! I like art...” he finishes lamely, deflating. Hank casts him an amused look, his LED cycling yellow as he likely documents that information.

“Quite a reaction to such a simple question. What aren’t you telling me, Lieutenant?”

“I didn’t climb my way up the chain just for my title to be used so mockingly,” Connor mumbles, but Hank doesn’t take the bait.

“You can’t change the subject so easily with me, kid. What has you so intrigued by this piece? Its uniqueness in comparison to the other images in this gallery is relatively low, so it should not garner such attention.” Hank continues his analysis of Connor, heedless of the redness crawling up to his ears, “You paused at a similar work on your terminal at the department, made by the same--“ A smile creeps up Hank’s face as he comes to a realization, his LED shifting to blue, to Connor’s dawning horror, “Do you, perhaps, have an interest in this particular artist?”

Connor’s face burns. “N-No, it’s just a coincidence, that’s all! Je— This artist’s art just happened to come up that day, and the name just... seemed... familiar.”

“Lieutenant, they don’t have the names displayed right now.”

Connor’s expression is that of defeat, his shoulders slumping and smile dead. “...Ah. So it seems.” 

The HK800 refrains from laughing, his social programming dictating that he act as human as possible to maintain a friendly relationship with Connor, though Fowler’s disapproval from within the Zen Garden is inexplicably calling for him not to. His sly grin is still enough to garner a sigh.

“Damn android,” Connor mutters, burrowing into the collar of his coat with a petulant pout.

“This thing is not our dad, okay? Mark, look at it! You’re wheeling it around when it’s supposed to serve you! What good is it to you, huh? Did you replace your brain with your fancy paints? Or maybe plastic, like this fucker-- “

“That’s enough, Leo,” Markus breathes, trying to keep himself from lashing out. He steps in front of Carl, who stares up with forlorn azure orbs and an LED of faint yellow. “That’s enough.”

Leo seems to look for something, in his eyes, in the room, in the sad-eyed android in the wheelchair behind him, the one who’d been introduced as a servant and became akin to their—more Markus’ than Leo’s—father-figure.

Markus’ heterochromatic gaze yields nothing to him, and he flounders for a moment, stumbling over his words and over himself as he makes to storm off, “You--I-It can’t replace dad. Your little toy there, it can’t play house with you forever. It can’t love you the way dad did, and you’re just going to ignore your only family left for it because you think you care about it. But you never cared, Markus, not about it, not about him, and not about me.”

Markus feels a lump in his throat. Carl places a hand on his shoulder consolingly, and the two of them watch in subdued silence as Leo repeats himself quietly and leaves the studio.

“Wakey, wakey, Lieutenant.”

Smack!

“Ah, shit, what the hell, Hank?” Connor whines, rubbing his cheek with bleary eyes, hissing as the stinging mark isn’t cooled by his palm.

Hank appears neutral, but Connor knows that behind the blank expression, he’s cackling at Connor’s expense. Or, rather, he has a feeling that that’s the case. He can’t see any other reason ‘the android sent by Cyberlife‘ would be such a pain in the ass.

“I need you for a case, so I had to wake you.” Hank’s eyes shift to the bottle of pills Connor tries to conceal behind his back, “In regards to your sleep, Lieutenant, why’d you consume a few too many doses of melatonin and then proceed to sleep on the kitchen floor?”

Connor laughs weakly, “I have trouble sleeping.”

Hank sends him a pointed look, glancing at the bottle for barely a moment and then, for just a fraction of a second, flicks his eyes over to the picture frame face-down on Connor’s counter, beside the cabinet where he keeps his medicine. “These are rather strong pills, Connor.”

“And my body has a strong resistance to medication of any sort.”

The two stare at one another, waiting for the other’s will to break, and it seems Connor is more stubborn than Hank had anticipated. Noted.

“I’m still tired, so how about you take care of this case yourself? You’re more than capable, as you’ve proven, so please just replace me early.”

Hank wordlessly stands up, which has Connor laying back on the kitchen tiles, curling up with his hand cushioning his head.

Not a moment later, Connor’s shooting up with a shriek as Hank dumps a pitcher of ice-water over him, enraged beyond measure.

“WHAT THE FUCK-- “

Hank doesn’t hold back his smile as he tells Connor that he’d better freshen up. Connor tries to punish him by having him pick out his clothes, but he ends up regretting it as Hank picks up a gag shirt someone’d gotten him at the department Christmas party, one with the design of a pug, holding a shield and a sword, majestically riding a horse. The words once printed overtop have long since worn off.

Bidding goodbye to his favorite cacti and a picture of his childhood dog, he follows Hank out to an autocab, unwilling to drive or let Hank into his car.

“I’m amazed that you managed to lead a revolution in this state,” Connor says, genuine awe written in the shines of his eyes.

Carl laughs, “It was a matter of planning. I was a strategist, but it was my--“ he almost seems to choke up at the next word, which still has Connor reeling, because how could anyone have ever thought these beings aren’t alive? “--my son who really did the hard stuff, like supply raids and marches. I ran speeches and the like, but it was all thanks to him and his support.”

“Your son? Is he--“

“He’s a human; his name is Markus Manfred. He was my owner, but he always felt more like family, and maybe we can now make that official.” His entire face softens when he says it.

The brunet smiles, and Carl can certainly see why his son is so taken with him. Little dimples frame his grin, and his earthy eyes have this gleam of knowledge that contradicts the naivete he seems to radiate with his boyish features, and his curls seem to bounce with life as he says, “I’m happy for you.” It’s so clear that he really, truly means it. 

Hank seems to take an interest in the ‘making it official’ part, because he gazes upon Connor with a thoughtful look on his face, as though considering it. Carl sends him a secret smirk, and Hank gains a faux-sourness, to his amusement. 

“I’ll introduce you two if you’d like. I think he’d be pleased to meet you.” Carl’s eyes have this slyness he’s no good at concealing, but Connor pays it no mind.

“I’d love that.”

((I’ll paste the link later after im finished ;D))

[0100100100101101]

At the beginning of Detroit: Become Human, a video game about American androids fighting for equal rights, a character looks out from the television screen and says, directly to the player, “Remember: This is not just a story. This is our future.”

It’s a bold claim. As Detroit’s story unfolds, the game switches between three different androids: household servant turned revolutionary leader Markus; Kara, a robot fleeing from government persecution with the abused child she rescued from her former boss; and Connor, an agent of the delightfully named megacorp CyberLife who hunts down “deviant androids” disobeying their programming. Through their perspectives, we’re meant to observe a technological future the game wants us to believe is, in fact, soon to come. Connor’s character may sound familiar. That’s because he’s essentially a recast of Rick Deckard, the titular Blade Runner from Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic. In each case, Deckard and Connor are hunting aberrant robots, capturing and/or killing those who have broken free of their programming and attempting to live outside their intended roles as servants to humanity.

In both Detroit and Blade Runner the point of these robot hunters is to introduce the question of what separates humanity from a synthetic being so emotionally and intellectually advanced that it is indistinguishable from any member of our species. By the time we’ve watched the monologue from Blade Runner’s bleach blond “replicant” robot Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) about his memories vanishing “like tears in rain,” any hint of inhumanity feels irrelevant. He, like the soulful androids who populate Detroit, remembers his past in the same way we do. He loves. He can be sad. He thinks about his own mortality. The movie ends with the audience having been convinced that a robot with incredibly advanced artificial intelligence deserves to be treated better than a defective home appliance. Blade Runner, it bears repeating, was released in 1982. Detroit: Become Human came out May of this year.

Again and again, Detroit attempts to pull its sci-fi storyline into the real world to convey the same message Blade Runner accomplished so many years ago. It evokes the American civil rights movement (its future Michigan features segregated shops and public transit where androids are kept to the back of city buses; one chapter is even called “Freedom March”), American slavery (the horrific abuses visited on the androids by their masters are regular enough to become numbing), and the Holocaust (extermination camps are set up to house revolutionary androids near the game’s finale) in order to do so. Others have done a great job running down the myriad ways in which Detroit fails in its evocation of the civil rights movement and class-based civil unrest. The poor taste inherent in its decision to make tone-deaf comparisons between its (multi-ethnic, apparently secular) robots and some of human history’s most reprehensible moments of violent prejudice is grotesque enough on its own. But it’s worth noting that on a dramatic level, Detroit also falls completely flat.

Its central point, presented with the satisfied air of a toddler smugly revealing that the family dog feels pain when you yank its tail, is that an android with a sophisticated sense of the world and itself deserves the same rights as any human. This seems like a philosophical problem that ought to have been put to bed around the time Blade Runner made the “dilemma” of android humanity part of mainstream pop culture. For decades now, audiences have watched, read, and played through stories that very persuasively argue there’s no good moral case for treating sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence—especially when housed in an independently thinking and feeling robot body—like dirt. To watch Roy Batty die in Blade Runner and feel nothing isn’t a failure of social and cultural empathy, but the viewer for just kind of being a monster. To release a video game in 2018 where players are honestly expected to experience conflicting emotions or a sense of emotional revelation when a completely humanistic robot is tortured or killed in cold blood ignores decades of genre-advancing history.

Even outside popular art, the past few decades have seen seismic shifts in our relationship with technology that should be impossible to ignore. In the ’80s, a home computer was revolutionary. Now, we live in an era where it’s completely mundane to ask talking boxes for trivia answers and maintain digital extensions of our personae on websites accessed through portable phones. We are not as suspicious of technology as we once were. It’s a part of us now—something we live with.

This shift is pretty clear in other areas of pop culture. Westworld—one of the highest profile sci-fi works in recent years—spent much of its first season retreading some of the same familiar ground as Detroit, but has found a more interesting path as it’s continued onward. While early episodes floundered with dramatically inert questions of whether sexually assaulting, torturing, and murdering lifelike thinking and feeling robots was an okay premise for an amusement park, it’s since moved on from hammering home the simplistic, insultingly moralizing lesson that “treating humanoid androids badly is the wrong thing to do.” At its best, characters like the show’s standout, Bernard Lowe—a tortured robot who is very well aware he is a robot—bring a welcome complexity.

Bernard, in actor Jeffrey Wright’s strongest performance to date, alternates naturally between a machine’s cold, vacant-eyed calculations and the trembling pathos of an android traumatized not only by the loss of his family and the violence of the world in which he lives, but also the knowledge that his memories are artificially coded and that his programming has led him to contribute to the horror of his surroundings. With this focus, viewers are given scenes far more philosophically troubling than the show’s earlier attempts to question whether it’s all right to kill humanlike robots for fun. In season two’s “Les Écorchés,” for example, Bernard is sat in a diagnostic interrogation and tormented by park co-creator Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), who, apparently, has entered his system in the form of a viral digital consciousness. Ford flits about his mind like a demonic possession. Bernard remembers killing others while under the intruder’s control. He cries and shakes like any human wracked with so much psychological pain would. “It’s like he’s trying to debug himself,” a technician notes. A digital read-out of Bernard’s synthetic brain shows his consciousness is “heavily fragmented,” as if under attack from a computer virus.

Rather than focus on simple ideas, the show acknowledges, in instances like these, that its audience is willing to accept an android character like Bernard as “human” enough to deserve empathy while remembering, too, that his mechanical nature introduces more compelling dramatic possibilities. Thankfully, Westworld’s second season has leaned further into this direction, moving (albeit at a glacial pace) toward stories about what it means for robots to embrace their freedom while being both deeply human and, due to their computerized nature, still fundamentally alien. By the end of the season, its earlier concern with flat moral questions has largely been swept away. Its finale, while still prone to narrative cliché elsewhere, shows a greater willingness to delve into explorations of how concepts like free will, mortality, and the nature of reality function for the computerized minds of its characters.

This is the sort of thing that elevates modern sci-fi, that reaffirms its potential for valuable speculation rather than just being a place to indulge familiar tropes and revisit nostalgic aesthetics. We see it in games like Nier: Automata, whose anime-tinged action is set in a far-future world where humanity has gone extinct, leaving behind only androids who must grapple with their minds persisting over centuries of samsara-like cycles of endless war against simpler machines trying to come to grips with their own intellectual awakening. We see it in Soma, which explores similar territory and turns it into soul-shaking horror by telling a story where people’s minds have been transplanted into synthetic consciousnesses, stored immortally on computers that reside in facilities dotting the inky depths of the ocean floor while the Earth dies out far above them. Like Bernard—and like many of the other characters now freeing themselves from both their shackles as Westworld’s park “hosts” and the narrative constraints of the show’s earlier episodes—these games transcend the outdated concerns of a story like Detroit. They give us something new to chew on, concerns that are not only intellectually fuller but also more reflective of where we are now as a technology-dependent species.

There’s no better summary of this change than the extremely belated Blade Runner sequel, Blade Runner 2049. Its predecessor was devoted entirely to convincing audiences that its assumedly inhuman replicants are worthy of empathy. It ended by asking if we’d even be able to tell the difference between a flesh-and-blood person and a synthetic one. Compare that to 2049, where protagonist K—Ryan Gosling playing a character with a suitably product-line-style name—is shown to be an android almost from the start. The plot of the film centers (like Detroit and Westworld) on a fast-approaching revolution where self-sufficient androids will overthrow their human creators, but the heart of its story is about the psychology of artificially intelligent beings. K is depicted as deeply troubled, grasping for affection from the mass-market hologram AI he’s in love with, grappling with the fact that he might be the first replicant to be born from another android, hoping to connect with his possible father, and being tormented by his inability to distinguish between what’s been programmed into his synthetic mind and what’s a “real” memory.

Blade Runner 2049 considers it a given that modern audiences can empathize with this android character without prerequisite arguments—that we’re not instinctively terrified of what he represents but willing to think about what such a creation means when set against age-old concepts of love and selfhood. As a sequel to the movie that did so much to settle questions about whether a robotic being was equal to humanity, it moves its concerns forward in tandem with society itself.

There’s a scene in 2049 where K, having learned of the existence of the first replicant child to be born of two replicant parents, is asked by his boss, Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright), to homicidally erase this revolutionary evidence in order to maintain the world’s status quo. K says he’s never killed something “born” before. When asked why that makes him uncomfortable, he replies that being born means having a soul—that that may be a crucial difference. “You’ve been getting on fine without one,” Joshi says. “What’s that, madam?” K replies. “A soul.”

It’s an exchange that takes moments, but it’s enough to communicate more about the nature of an AI consciousness than Detroit manages over its dozen hours. In these few words, 2049 puts an old debate to rest while raising new questions about what it means for a machine to worry about its place in the world. K doesn’t “have a soul” in the traditional sense, but he is tortured by the knowledge that he, with his need to love and be loved, may possess something quite like it. Modern science fiction is capable of asking us to explore what it means to view technology this way. It’s able to make us consider how our sense of reality may or may not intersect with the ever-more complex computers we create. It is, basically, able to do a lot more than revisit tired questions about whether the kind of highly advanced robots that populate Detroit: Become Human are worth taking seriously enough to care about in the first place.