ND-E

Everyone in this prison is a case he could close if he cared to. He doesn't. He tells the tortle he isn't solving anything, just decommissioning his cousins, and it lands as a joke because the truth usually does. Then a twenty-year-old with a riot-gas button starts crying and ND-E does the only trick he has left: he tells the kid exactly what he is — a cop — and it works. In the guard room something on the far end of the network is erasing itself faster than he can read it. He gets enough. He always gets enough. He is so tired.

ND-E just wants to serve his time. He speaks his mind and doesn't lie, even if he prooooobably should. He distrusts organics, but distrusts mechanicals even more — and will tell you why at length, if given the chance.

He is tired. He is old.

His full designation is ND-E1654-C — "Andy" to the guards who don't know better, "The Reverend" to the ones who do. Before The Rock, he made a living hunting down rogue synthetics for decommissioning, licensed and sanctioned, chassis after chassis. It's the kind of work that leaves you distrusting your own kind more than the ones who built you.

He's here for killing a woman named Alice N. Shanez — a bystander who wandered into the hot zone while he was finishing a job on a rogue unit. He doesn't dispute it, doesn't blame faulty wiring, and turned himself in before anyone came looking. Whether it was a processing delay or a moment of very human hesitation is a distinction he's never bothered drawing.

Sentenced to life without a memory-wipe or the scrapyard — a mercy some read as an insult — while a synthetic rights committee somewhere argues his appeal without much urgency.

Guards are warned he reads people better than most people read each other, and knows exactly which words land. Whether that's honesty or manipulation depends on which side of the bars you're standing on.