One Man's Month is Another's Lifetime
Title: One Man's Month is Another's Lifetime
Author: Afiawri
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Garrett Fowler, Neal Caffrey, Peter Burke
Word Count: 2440
Remix of: katikat’s Worth Every Cent
Model two, "Jayme Brun," never even saw Burke coming. The cuffs were on it before it even looked up from its dinner.
Garret Fowler didn't like Burke- the man's heart was soft in all the wrong places- but there was no doubt he had captured his models faster than Brookheim could program him new ones. Record time dictated that Garret stick out his hand for a congratulatory shake and offer Burke the chance to get clearance to know about the dolls and test out a prototype. Burke had accepted.
Now, Garret stood with the remote in hand in his D.C. office where he was booting up the latest doll. Its dead eyes opened and sparked to the first second of its three year "life"- the amount of time Burke had to catch it before Brookheim wanted it back to make sure it didn't break down in the field. Garret admired how human it looked as it jerked to life, sprung to its feet, and growled, "Fowler."
"Neal Caffrey"- a name that started with a C because it was the third incarnation made for Burke- was programmed, like all the others, to hate him, to hate capture, and to get away as fast as possible. And that's just what it did. It snatched its back of supplies out of Garret's hands and backed out the door. Once outside, it took to its heels.
Garret smirked at the remote in his hand. It always felt powerful watching them run, knowing he could see through their "eyes" and hear through their "ears" and pull up their location any time he wanted. The doll might not quite be his plaything, but it had no secrets from him.
Garret came home a week later to find something, he wasn't sure what, amiss. He crept into his house, searching every corner with his eyes for even the tiniest knickknack moved half an inch, but saw nothing different. All he had was a vague sense that someone had been here who shouldn't have been, and he had good instincts. He unholstered his gun as he crept around the first floor and up the stairs.
He nearly dropped his gun when he saw the open, empty safe. His instincts screamed for him to check the video feed on the doll. He jerked the remote from his belt and fiddled with it, his hands clumsy with anger. Sure enough, when he got the thing rewound, it showed him his house through an ever so slightly shorter vantage point as the doll crept through it. Nimble hands drilled open his safe and scooped up its contents.
Seconds from shutting down the remote or throwing it against the wall- he wasn't sure which- he saw the doll turn back to go further into the room. What else had that doll taken? It stood in front of the mirror, grinned, and winked. Garret sent the remote crashing against the mirror. The mirror cracked, but didn't shatter. The remote bounced off it unharmed.
They'd have to rethink programming increasingly intelligent and dexterous criminals with a tendency to hate the person with the remote. The thing couldn't be watched every second of the day. Thank God they'd given it a distaste for violence.
Giving the Caffrey model its distaste for guns turned out to be doubly fortunate. He got a laugh back at Burke, after the humiliating process of being questioned by the man about the theft at this house, when one of Caffrey's marks pulled a gun on it.
Burke showed up at the house fast enough to see Caffrey, hands raised in surrender and absolutely terrified of the gun. He had, they later saw on surveillance tapes and footage on the remote, at least three opportunities to disarm the mark and turn the gun on him. But he didn't, and the mark held a gun on Caffrey until Burke arrived. When the mark saw an FBI agent, he lowered his gun.
Caffrey, his back to the mark and unable to see the gun lowering, took off, at risk to his life and limb. The mark fired off a shot and missed. According to the mark, Burke had the shot, could've easily clipped Caffrey. Shooting the robot might have been cheating a little since you couldn't do that with a human suspect, but Garret took his laughs where he could get them. And he yukked it up.
As the agent heading the operation, Garret had access to Burke's notes. And he used "notes" in the loosest sense of the word. Next to typical things on the profile were things like: "Doesn't like guns. And knives. And bats. Doesn't like violence." Which had things under it like: "Fears guns, but not as much as he fears capture, makes him desperate. Makes him dangerous."
And then, as the months wore on, details emerged like: "Likes designer suits. Loves to crack wise and knows when to give up, but not averse to taking risks. Loves antiques. Loves history more. Has friends, doesn't trust them."
And, while some of that might be useful, it wasn't something you usually wrote down. Garret got the sense Burke was trying to figure something out more than get stuff down on paper. And he was pretty sure he was proven right when he Burke wrote this:
"Loves people, but doesn't mind being alone to just stare out the window. He doesn't just shut down, he moves a little. Does a robot need time to process thoughts? What does he think about? Or does he? Introspection- brooding?"
The "he" wasn't new. Whenever Burke spoke he referred to Caffrey as a him; plenty of the pursuing agents did. But robots didn't think; they were just programmed to act as human as possible. And human beings brooded.
Burke was becoming attached to the doll. The best agent looking for a prototype was tripping up over fake humanity. Fantastic. Garret was going to be on this assignment until the robot shut down at the end of three year trial run.
Two and a half years of watching Burke fumble around, and finally, Burke was looking straight into the cameras that made up Caffrey's eyes. This wasn't a shot of the top of his head or his back, but his eyes. Burke had found him.
The screen moved up and down like Caffrey was panting from a long run. And Burke's eyes were soft, sympathetic. Garret hesitated on the shut down command; if the doll looked to the right, at the edge of its peripheral vision, it would see an open window, an escape route. Pushing the button now would negate the results.
"Peter, long time, no see."
"Don't mock me," Burke said, pulling out his handcuffs.
Caffrey's eyes stopped flitting around the room to zero in on the cuffs. Then his eyes went back to Burke's. "Please," he whispered.
"Please what, Neal? I'm taking you in. It's about time."
"Please don't. Please." The screen blurred at the bottom with tears. Damn, the robot was going to pull out every stop on Burke. Burke looked merely curious for a moment, then cautious, wondering if he was being manipulated, wondering if this was one final test. It wasn't an intentional one. But either way, Garret was going to either get an end to this idiocy or get to laugh at Burke for falling for crocodile tears.
The Caffrey model was good. It stopped pretending to be just another human being and said, "If you take me back now, it will be a month of tedious questions to explain everything I've done while they've tracked me and you've tried to catch me. It'll mean betraying all my friends." And the last bit slipped back into the humanity farce. Interesting, though, that the model was aware of what they'd do to it once Burke caught it.
Burke kept approaching, slowly, like he was intent on catching a cornered animal. "They'll force me, Peter. And that will be the end of my life. They'll cut it short as soon as they've forced me to tell them everything I know and I'll die alone in a lab, knowing I just put everyone I care about in prison. Please." It even dropped its gaze to Burke's shoes as it spoke. When it realized Burke wasn't moving, its eyes darted around Burke's face and it rushed out the words, "Just this once, let me go. I already have so little time. Let the statue of limitations runs out on a few things my friends have done before they have access to the stored video footage past the few days the remote has, before they watch it all for themselves and make me to explain everything.
A noise like a gulp came through the remote as the robot's eyes dropped back to the floor. The screen trembled a little. The robot was doing its best to appear frightened and alone, and it was getting to Burke. From the last footage Garret had seen of his face, he knew: Burke couldn't do it. He dropped his hands to his side and made to turn around, but stopped. "They'll know I did this, won't they? That I let you go. From the video."
Caffrey held out his wrists in front of him without another word, even as it took a step back. It had seen the window. Before Burke could snap the cuff on, Caffrey turned and climbed out the window and started booking it down the street. Burke's pursuit, when Caffrey flung a glance over its shoulder, was half-hearted at best.
In the intervening months, Burke's notes both normalized and got weirder. They grew more typical of a human profile, even included the "birthday". But they included likes and dislikes not typical of any profile: "likes shrimp, hates salmon" and had a "death day." Not a shut down date, not a deadline, a death day- exactly three years after the birthday, when "Neal Caffrey" would shut down.
A month short of the deadline, the video cut out. The audio got a little fuzzy, muffled, but Garret could still make out what the doll said. It reassured its long time associates, a woman named Kate and a small man called Mozzie, that no one could spy on them any longer. Garret growled and marched right over to talk to the doll's maker.
"I can't do anything while the doll is out in the field, Agent Fowler. You'll either have to retrieve it or do without." Garret made the call to let the test go on; if the doll didn't think it could be heard, that was almost more of an advantage than before.
Shortly after that, when Burke cornered it, two weeks short of the "death day," he snapped the cuffs on before Caffrey had a chance to talk its way out of it. It went quietly to the car. How strange.
Garret was trying to figure out the play it made by letting itself be put in the car or if, perhaps, the audio had finally died, but just as Burke told it to watch its head as he placed it in the car, it spoke.
"Peter, I disrupted the visual and audio on myself. No one knows anything but my location. Please let me go."
"For two more weeks?" came Burke's voice, sounding displeased and saddened. Poor fool. "I can't fail this. I've postponed this for you as long as I could. I let you slip by last year, but now-"
"I overrode so many commands, and I acted at the very fringes of my programming. No one will think any less of you-"
"They expected me to already have you," Burke lied. "Get in." But there was a softness to his voice, and then he justified it, a sign of a slippery slope: "It's just two weeks."
"Don't you think the first thing I did was negate the shut down command?"
Damn. Garret jabbed his finger in the shut down command. Nothing happened. He'd have to take it to the doctor, see if he could remedy that from his end.
"At the rate of deterioration my body undergoes, that's another six months- a sixth again of my life. That's like fifteen years for you, Peter. That's- please. It's so little to you, but it's forever to me."
"Please, Peter."
And then Garret heard nothing more from Burke, only the sound of a man running and breathing heavily. Burke had nearly apprehended Caffrey again. Unfortunately, there was no way of proving whatever excuse Burke would come up with to be false with just the audio. Hell, there was even an outside chance that Caffrey legitimately managed to escape.
Garret chucked the remote at the wall. Again, it survived.
While he was fixing the shut down command, Brookheim also figured out, to the old fool's great delight, how to restore the audio and visual to their previous states.
"Could've done that before, then" Garret growled, jerking the remote from the doctor's hands and knowing he would now get a long, complex lecture on why, no, it wasn't possible before.
After the remote was restored, Garret's new orders came in: stay on top of the Caffrey model. The higher uppers had agreed with Garret's objections about Burke and thought he should be watched. They required Garret and his team of agents to at least be in the same city as the doll at all times.
And that's how he came to be at the hotel when Caffrey admitted, "You caught me." He pressed the shut down button. 10… 9…
"And it took me only three years."
4… 3…
"Peter I-" am a machine that is now shut down. Finally. After all these years. All the other teams had their models shut down automatically at precisely the three year mark and gone in for updates and then re-released the next day. The teams had been rotated out. Garret, on the other hand, had been sitting on this Agent and this model for three years, a month and thirteen days.
He congratulated Burke with true joviality; this thing was finally over. He took a perverse pleasure in making sure Burke knew that "Neal Caffrey" would be used for spare parts. Once it had been reviewed and questioned, of course.
Before Garret had enough to put any of the criminals that had associated with the doll away, the request came in. Burke had bought the thing. Garret growled at any equally frustrated Brookheim, "Just mess it up before you give it to him. Program it weird or something, I don't care. I'm sick of him thinking it's a human being."
Author: Afiawri
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Garrett Fowler, Neal Caffrey, Peter Burke
Word Count: 2440
Remix of: katikat’s Worth Every Cent
Model two, "Jayme Brun," never even saw Burke coming. The cuffs were on it before it even looked up from its dinner.
Garret Fowler didn't like Burke- the man's heart was soft in all the wrong places- but there was no doubt he had captured his models faster than Brookheim could program him new ones. Record time dictated that Garret stick out his hand for a congratulatory shake and offer Burke the chance to get clearance to know about the dolls and test out a prototype. Burke had accepted.
Now, Garret stood with the remote in hand in his D.C. office where he was booting up the latest doll. Its dead eyes opened and sparked to the first second of its three year "life"- the amount of time Burke had to catch it before Brookheim wanted it back to make sure it didn't break down in the field. Garret admired how human it looked as it jerked to life, sprung to its feet, and growled, "Fowler."
"Neal Caffrey"- a name that started with a C because it was the third incarnation made for Burke- was programmed, like all the others, to hate him, to hate capture, and to get away as fast as possible. And that's just what it did. It snatched its back of supplies out of Garret's hands and backed out the door. Once outside, it took to its heels.
Garret smirked at the remote in his hand. It always felt powerful watching them run, knowing he could see through their "eyes" and hear through their "ears" and pull up their location any time he wanted. The doll might not quite be his plaything, but it had no secrets from him.
Garret came home a week later to find something, he wasn't sure what, amiss. He crept into his house, searching every corner with his eyes for even the tiniest knickknack moved half an inch, but saw nothing different. All he had was a vague sense that someone had been here who shouldn't have been, and he had good instincts. He unholstered his gun as he crept around the first floor and up the stairs.
He nearly dropped his gun when he saw the open, empty safe. His instincts screamed for him to check the video feed on the doll. He jerked the remote from his belt and fiddled with it, his hands clumsy with anger. Sure enough, when he got the thing rewound, it showed him his house through an ever so slightly shorter vantage point as the doll crept through it. Nimble hands drilled open his safe and scooped up its contents.
Seconds from shutting down the remote or throwing it against the wall- he wasn't sure which- he saw the doll turn back to go further into the room. What else had that doll taken? It stood in front of the mirror, grinned, and winked. Garret sent the remote crashing against the mirror. The mirror cracked, but didn't shatter. The remote bounced off it unharmed.
They'd have to rethink programming increasingly intelligent and dexterous criminals with a tendency to hate the person with the remote. The thing couldn't be watched every second of the day. Thank God they'd given it a distaste for violence.
Giving the Caffrey model its distaste for guns turned out to be doubly fortunate. He got a laugh back at Burke, after the humiliating process of being questioned by the man about the theft at this house, when one of Caffrey's marks pulled a gun on it.
Burke showed up at the house fast enough to see Caffrey, hands raised in surrender and absolutely terrified of the gun. He had, they later saw on surveillance tapes and footage on the remote, at least three opportunities to disarm the mark and turn the gun on him. But he didn't, and the mark held a gun on Caffrey until Burke arrived. When the mark saw an FBI agent, he lowered his gun.
Caffrey, his back to the mark and unable to see the gun lowering, took off, at risk to his life and limb. The mark fired off a shot and missed. According to the mark, Burke had the shot, could've easily clipped Caffrey. Shooting the robot might have been cheating a little since you couldn't do that with a human suspect, but Garret took his laughs where he could get them. And he yukked it up.
As the agent heading the operation, Garret had access to Burke's notes. And he used "notes" in the loosest sense of the word. Next to typical things on the profile were things like: "Doesn't like guns. And knives. And bats. Doesn't like violence." Which had things under it like: "Fears guns, but not as much as he fears capture, makes him desperate. Makes him dangerous."
And then, as the months wore on, details emerged like: "Likes designer suits. Loves to crack wise and knows when to give up, but not averse to taking risks. Loves antiques. Loves history more. Has friends, doesn't trust them."
And, while some of that might be useful, it wasn't something you usually wrote down. Garret got the sense Burke was trying to figure something out more than get stuff down on paper. And he was pretty sure he was proven right when he Burke wrote this:
"Loves people, but doesn't mind being alone to just stare out the window. He doesn't just shut down, he moves a little. Does a robot need time to process thoughts? What does he think about? Or does he? Introspection- brooding?"
The "he" wasn't new. Whenever Burke spoke he referred to Caffrey as a him; plenty of the pursuing agents did. But robots didn't think; they were just programmed to act as human as possible. And human beings brooded.
Burke was becoming attached to the doll. The best agent looking for a prototype was tripping up over fake humanity. Fantastic. Garret was going to be on this assignment until the robot shut down at the end of three year trial run.
Two and a half years of watching Burke fumble around, and finally, Burke was looking straight into the cameras that made up Caffrey's eyes. This wasn't a shot of the top of his head or his back, but his eyes. Burke had found him.
The screen moved up and down like Caffrey was panting from a long run. And Burke's eyes were soft, sympathetic. Garret hesitated on the shut down command; if the doll looked to the right, at the edge of its peripheral vision, it would see an open window, an escape route. Pushing the button now would negate the results.
"Peter, long time, no see."
"Don't mock me," Burke said, pulling out his handcuffs.
Caffrey's eyes stopped flitting around the room to zero in on the cuffs. Then his eyes went back to Burke's. "Please," he whispered.
"Please what, Neal? I'm taking you in. It's about time."
"Please don't. Please." The screen blurred at the bottom with tears. Damn, the robot was going to pull out every stop on Burke. Burke looked merely curious for a moment, then cautious, wondering if he was being manipulated, wondering if this was one final test. It wasn't an intentional one. But either way, Garret was going to either get an end to this idiocy or get to laugh at Burke for falling for crocodile tears.
The Caffrey model was good. It stopped pretending to be just another human being and said, "If you take me back now, it will be a month of tedious questions to explain everything I've done while they've tracked me and you've tried to catch me. It'll mean betraying all my friends." And the last bit slipped back into the humanity farce. Interesting, though, that the model was aware of what they'd do to it once Burke caught it.
Burke kept approaching, slowly, like he was intent on catching a cornered animal. "They'll force me, Peter. And that will be the end of my life. They'll cut it short as soon as they've forced me to tell them everything I know and I'll die alone in a lab, knowing I just put everyone I care about in prison. Please." It even dropped its gaze to Burke's shoes as it spoke. When it realized Burke wasn't moving, its eyes darted around Burke's face and it rushed out the words, "Just this once, let me go. I already have so little time. Let the statue of limitations runs out on a few things my friends have done before they have access to the stored video footage past the few days the remote has, before they watch it all for themselves and make me to explain everything.
A noise like a gulp came through the remote as the robot's eyes dropped back to the floor. The screen trembled a little. The robot was doing its best to appear frightened and alone, and it was getting to Burke. From the last footage Garret had seen of his face, he knew: Burke couldn't do it. He dropped his hands to his side and made to turn around, but stopped. "They'll know I did this, won't they? That I let you go. From the video."
Caffrey held out his wrists in front of him without another word, even as it took a step back. It had seen the window. Before Burke could snap the cuff on, Caffrey turned and climbed out the window and started booking it down the street. Burke's pursuit, when Caffrey flung a glance over its shoulder, was half-hearted at best.
In the intervening months, Burke's notes both normalized and got weirder. They grew more typical of a human profile, even included the "birthday". But they included likes and dislikes not typical of any profile: "likes shrimp, hates salmon" and had a "death day." Not a shut down date, not a deadline, a death day- exactly three years after the birthday, when "Neal Caffrey" would shut down.
A month short of the deadline, the video cut out. The audio got a little fuzzy, muffled, but Garret could still make out what the doll said. It reassured its long time associates, a woman named Kate and a small man called Mozzie, that no one could spy on them any longer. Garret growled and marched right over to talk to the doll's maker.
"I can't do anything while the doll is out in the field, Agent Fowler. You'll either have to retrieve it or do without." Garret made the call to let the test go on; if the doll didn't think it could be heard, that was almost more of an advantage than before.
Shortly after that, when Burke cornered it, two weeks short of the "death day," he snapped the cuffs on before Caffrey had a chance to talk its way out of it. It went quietly to the car. How strange.
Garret was trying to figure out the play it made by letting itself be put in the car or if, perhaps, the audio had finally died, but just as Burke told it to watch its head as he placed it in the car, it spoke.
"Peter, I disrupted the visual and audio on myself. No one knows anything but my location. Please let me go."
"For two more weeks?" came Burke's voice, sounding displeased and saddened. Poor fool. "I can't fail this. I've postponed this for you as long as I could. I let you slip by last year, but now-"
"I overrode so many commands, and I acted at the very fringes of my programming. No one will think any less of you-"
"They expected me to already have you," Burke lied. "Get in." But there was a softness to his voice, and then he justified it, a sign of a slippery slope: "It's just two weeks."
"Don't you think the first thing I did was negate the shut down command?"
Damn. Garret jabbed his finger in the shut down command. Nothing happened. He'd have to take it to the doctor, see if he could remedy that from his end.
"At the rate of deterioration my body undergoes, that's another six months- a sixth again of my life. That's like fifteen years for you, Peter. That's- please. It's so little to you, but it's forever to me."
"Please, Peter."
And then Garret heard nothing more from Burke, only the sound of a man running and breathing heavily. Burke had nearly apprehended Caffrey again. Unfortunately, there was no way of proving whatever excuse Burke would come up with to be false with just the audio. Hell, there was even an outside chance that Caffrey legitimately managed to escape.
Garret chucked the remote at the wall. Again, it survived.
While he was fixing the shut down command, Brookheim also figured out, to the old fool's great delight, how to restore the audio and visual to their previous states.
"Could've done that before, then" Garret growled, jerking the remote from the doctor's hands and knowing he would now get a long, complex lecture on why, no, it wasn't possible before.
After the remote was restored, Garret's new orders came in: stay on top of the Caffrey model. The higher uppers had agreed with Garret's objections about Burke and thought he should be watched. They required Garret and his team of agents to at least be in the same city as the doll at all times.
And that's how he came to be at the hotel when Caffrey admitted, "You caught me." He pressed the shut down button. 10… 9…
"And it took me only three years."
4… 3…
"Peter I-" am a machine that is now shut down. Finally. After all these years. All the other teams had their models shut down automatically at precisely the three year mark and gone in for updates and then re-released the next day. The teams had been rotated out. Garret, on the other hand, had been sitting on this Agent and this model for three years, a month and thirteen days.
He congratulated Burke with true joviality; this thing was finally over. He took a perverse pleasure in making sure Burke knew that "Neal Caffrey" would be used for spare parts. Once it had been reviewed and questioned, of course.
Before Garret had enough to put any of the criminals that had associated with the doll away, the request came in. Burke had bought the thing. Garret growled at any equally frustrated Brookheim, "Just mess it up before you give it to him. Program it weird or something, I don't care. I'm sick of him thinking it's a human being."