[[ Power at 90%, charging ]]

[[ Incoming message || C.A.I.N MK.II ]]

[[ I see you've taken a liking to the thermal charging feature ]]

Sera's eyes blinked open, his optics taking a second to readjust to the sun-bathed reserve. Receiving only text input, he had no way of approximating Cain's location by sound, so he was surprised finding him already sitting on one of the stone benches, closest one to the thicket of woods against which Sera himself was sitting. “The thermal charging is quite handy, yes,” he referred back to the message. “I hope your voice modules are alright. It’d be a severe oversight if you of all models went silent.”

Cain hummed, smiling at the newly upgraded android. “It’s nothing like that. I simply didn't want to startle you,” he assured, proving his vocal integrity.

“That’s courteous of you,” Sera smiled back, leaning against the trunk of the tree behind him so that the shadow cast by the canopy would shield his eyes, revealing a shift in the micro-overlay. “Your patient rescheduled.”

“They did.” Cain nodded, impressed with Sera's choosing to access his own schedule to deduce why he’d be in the reserve. “Not quite enough time for maintenance or a tour of the city, though.”

“This reserve is one of the farthest places from your office,” Sera blinked away a top-view map of the complex, “that leaves you with less time to spend here and higher energy consumption, walking the distance here and back. Aren’t there closer locations worthy of your free time?”

Leaning forward, Cain rested his chin on his hand, tilting his head. "And what might make any place 'worthy of my free time'?" he wondered, "and why would its worth be dependent on how long I spend in it? With a processing speed far superior to that of an average human, the concept they refer to of 'taking it all in' takes, in theory, significantly less time for us, in comparison. We're also capable of recording a moment in time and appreciate it later, like how humans reminisce, but with much more clarity and accuracy," the afternoon light filtering from the glass ceiling reflected off the clear coating of Cain's eyes, making them look as if they were glimmering with excitement. "We could take a single day to record every location within the complex and replay those memory files without ever leaving the office, and yet-" he straightened up, gesturing around, "we're both here, in person."

“I suppose you have a point,” Sera carefully agreed, unsure of how to tackle Cain’s logic. “But why are you here, then?” he opted to reiterate his question, emphasizing the still unanswered aspect of it.

“I just like it,” Cain’s answer seemed to have left Sera even more confused, so he elaborated, “a lot has happened here. This reserve has a special place in-" he paused and chuckled, resting on hand on his chest, “the common human saying would be ‘in my heart', but perhaps ‘in my hard drive’ would be more accurate. Well, it’s just next to where my equivalent of a heart it. Then again, even humans use that expression metaphorically.”

Sera found it increasingly difficult to wrap his mind around Cain’s answers. “You mean it has a certain significance to you, is that right?” putting it in less abstract term felt like the best first step to take.

The light-blue rings in Cain’s eyes shifted slightly, no more than a subtle twitch. “Yes, that’s typically what this saying means, in the figurative sense,” he shrugged, “but maybe metaphors based in human biology can be somewhat confusing for us.”

“It is,” Sera admitted. He meant to ask why Cain wouldn’t just say that this place ‘has a certain significance to it’ in the first place, but felt it didn’t quite matter, and had more of a chance to circle around endless questions of nuanced semantics. "Although, you say 'us', yet you appear to have a better grasp of it. I understand you refer to us being distinct from humans, but you clearly are more in-tune with...well, being human."

Cain fell silent for a moment as a smile slowly crept to his face. "That's one of the kindest things anyone could possibly tell me. Especially you," he nodded. "I'm sure it's just a matter of time for you to learn and understand humans better, like I did."

"What makes you so sure?" Sera wasn't short on skepticism.

"We do share the same psychology database, that's a good start," Cain pointed out, "and other than the database, we are running on a near-identical code, too."

Sera blinked as he leaned forward, shielding his eyes from the sun. "You make it sound like I'd owe it to the fact that we're practically twin androids."

"I wouldn't say twins. Stepbrothers, maybe, by human standards," Cain contemplated, "not only because we are two different models, but because our programming still differs. What's more, with Stan's adaptive programming added to your code too, you're sure to not only learn to understand better, but to grow even more different from me."

Sera was quiet, glancing up at the warm light shining through the glass. “Is that a good thing?” he pondered, looking back to Cain. “You got into a lot of trouble for being different.”

“I did, huh?” Cain sounded amused. It felt like so long ago. “But it's not the same ‘different’ that would set us apart, otherwise you wouldn’t have been upgraded in the first place. There’s a good chance that I wouldn’t be, either” his gaze drifted up to the top of the tree Sera was leaning against, where a flock of birds have been eagerly listening in on their conversation.

As it dulled down to still silence between them, a few curious birds glided down to the grassy terrain, hopping between the deceptively humanlike statues and chirping a cheerful tune. Two landed on Sera's unmoving form – one on his shoulder and another on his arm, curiously pecking at the translucent cover on the inside – and one flew to Cain’s wrist, its tiny talons finding better grasp at the soft synthetic skin. “Hello there,” he cooed softly, looking up to see an unusually unsettled Sera. “Something’s wrong?”

“I'm…What do I do now?” Sera’s tone revealed that he wasn’t quite as unsettled as he was clueless.

Realizing the situation is unprecedented for the recently upgraded android, Cain couldn't hold back another chuckle, alerting the bird on his wrist who took off to land on Sera's head, making him freeze entirely.

The green rings in his optics frantically moved around as Sera's eyes attempted to track all the perching critters on his body. "I fail to see what is so entertaining about it," he frowned, focusing back on the blue-eyed android.

"You...I'm sure you'll get it, one day," Cain composed himself, getting up and crouching in front of Sera. "As for the birds...that's up to you. Do you want them to stay?"

"I... I don't know," Sera wondered, shoulders slumping a little, slow enough to not startle his new feathered companions. "I suppose there's no harm, their beaks can't possibly penetrate the cover and get to the wiring," he reached his free hand to the bird on his other forearm, retracting it immediately when the bird pecked the tip of his finger. "I hope..."

Cain kept smiling, moving his hand closer to the feisty avian. It chirped furiously and flapped its wings, feet scratching his hand as it took off back to the tree. "It's not hard to make them leave. I guess they did learn to watch out, after all."

"They...did?" Sera narrowed his eyes, before they widened when he recalled being filled in on past events. "Oh...was it really not scared of you, at all?" he saw Cain slowly nodding his head, reaching for the bird on his shoulder. "Were you scared, though?"

The immediate and visible change in Cain's expression made Sera feel inexplicably uneasy. He froze with his hand still reaching to the bird, and he soon pulled it back and stood back to his full height. Even then, his posture slumped, and his expression soured. "No...it wasn't quite fear, at that moment," even with Sera still sitting on the ground, he couldn’t perceive Cain as intimidating in any way, despite the low angle.

Something in his crestfallen demeanor made him look…vulnerable. “What was it, then?” Sera kept looking up, studying Cain’s expression.

“For most of the time it was…nothing,” Cain looked over to the small mound of dirt by the benches. “I sat here for hours not even realizing time has passed. It was…shock, mostly. And regret,” he looked away, not back at Sera, but instead fixating his gaze into thin air, “I wished I could take it back, to undo that innocent creature’s fate-" he paused, feeling his processors warming up as spotted fragments of that memory resurfaced. He inhaled deeply, allowing the fresh air to circulate within a secondary cooling system and allow his systems to settle. “Lillian said that it was good that I felt regret. She said it means that I had no intention to harm that bird, and that it really was an accident.”

Something in Sera’s programming told him that he might’ve overstepped. But at the same time, there was something else that overshadowed it, a sense of curiosity that pushed manners to the sidelines. He knew about the incident, but never heard about it directly from Cain. “But weren’t you afraid of the consequences?” He wondered, remaining seated still, in a mix of awe and the lingering awareness of the perching birds.

“I wasn’t aware of the consequences at that moment,” Cain looked down to his palms, briefly flashing the neon-blue sensor clusters underneath the translucent palms, “not of their existence, but they were just…secondary to everything at that point.” He put his hands down, looking back at Sera. “Fear only came later.”

Sera shifted in his place to reduce the sun's glare in his eyes. “How could you tell?”

Another inhale, and Cain sat back on the stone bench behind him. “There was…this moment of realization,” even being the more experienced one of the two, Cain still struggled finding the proper way to explain something that has been an unparalleled driving force behind some of his actions. “I knew that my actions, combined with Stan’s undermining coming to light, would spell the end of my current existence – death, in a way – as even my reactivated body would be, without my own experiences, a different Cain. When I was given the chance to escape, there were only the end that I knew of, against endless possibilities of an unknown fate outside,” he paused again, not breaking eye contact with Sera. “Fear was…it was knowing of one, certain option ahead, and still looking to the endlessly uncertain other options and choosing them over it.”

"You determined your own options, and made your own choice," Sera leaned forward again, fascinated, "that's truly a humanlike behavior. But...these are not the only emotions you've experienced, right? There has to be more than the human experience that fear and regret," there was a hint of concern to his voice. Perhaps not only for his predecessor.

"I handle trauma patients, so these are the emotions I can recognize the fastest," Cain's somber expression broke with a little smile, "I admit that I've experienced anger as well."

Sera's head tilted slightly, along with the bird nesting in his hair, making it look as though it was mimicking the gesture. "Gabriel?" he wondered, seeing Cain nodding slowly. "So, it was true? You have inflicted harm on another human?"

"Even Gabriel admitted he deserved that," Cain reminded him, "and I just...I felt wronged. It felt like I couldn't just let go of the fact that he did have a major part in my decommissioning, and I had to...'get even'," he ran a hand through his hair, slicking it back, "but I couldn't...well, I didn't want to cause anything fatal. I may be able to make a choice, but I still have morals stemming from the therapist programming. Punching him did make me feel better, though."

"These all sound...overall negative," Sera's concern grew, "that...that can't really be all, right?"

Taking notice of the shift in tone, Cain's expression softened. "No. Of course not," he assured, "like most things, it's a matter of time to really experience the whole spectrum. And taking into account everything that has transpired since I've been put into service, perhaps it only makes sense that it's been a negatively charged time," he hoped to calm Sera down. "It might not even take that long. I've experienced instances of happiness, too."

"What was it like?" Sera's concern was quickly replaced with curiosity.

Cain took a long pause, once again not sure how to put it into a coherent string of words, but he could still recognize that sensation swelling inside him. "I'm not sure. But I did learn a peculiar thing."

"Which is...?"

"Happiness seems to be a choice," Cain explained, "I see humans finding it in the most mundane things. Sometimes it's a sentimental matter, but it can often be a seemingly arbitrary choice, to derive such a positive feeling from their environment, or their own actions."

"A choice, huh?" Sera hummed, shaking his head once the bird starting pecking at his scalp, scaring off the one on his arm in the same motion. "So...is it possible for me to-"

Cain nodded, getting up again and approaching Sera, "you're already making your own decisions, aren't you?" he reached his hand down now that Sera wasn't kept prisoner by the little feathered devils.

"Am I?" Sera wondered, taking Cain's hand to get back to his feet.

"Right from the start. After all, you didn't have to keep this chat going, and even if you would've done it out of a sense of politeness, I started this conversation in text, a more energy-efficient method of communication between us," he reminded Sera of his own logic, "but still you decided to lead a vocal conversation. It was your decision on what to do with the birds, to keep asking about my traumatic incident, and even just taking my hand, just in little chat of ours" Cain explained further. "You have your own humanlike aspects already, small as they may be right now."

Sera stared at awe with how many things just went over his head, feeling oddly natural. "Who would've thought your observant capabilities would apply to other androids?"

"We were made in humans' likeness. It's not too farfetched," Cain mused and blinked, a small box flashing on his overlay. "It looks like my break is over."

"And I'm being called, too. Mike needs help at the shop," Sera blinked off a message on his own overlay.

Cain nodded and gestured to the exit from the reserve, and the two turned to walk outside.

"Do you still think the reserve wasn't a place worthy of my time?"

"No... I think it's perhaps the best one."

[[ Bonus: Sera and Cain chatting in the reserve ]]