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"Walter" was a WR-300 "deviant" in hiding. It had taken to posing as a homeless vagrant and donning the persona of New York's Terror of the Underground. The only time it considered itself almost human was when there was a shield of latex between his silicone mask and the outside world; when blood bathed his circuitry in crimsons rivulets as he reminded the rats of the city exactly why they ought to follow curfew regulations. For a while it held down a menial job, but it came back to work too damaged and too often to blame on poor handling by the human janitors. It hated touching underwear, anyway, as it drove into its head how much of a human life is spent chasing a sort of stupefying, painful stimulation it would never understand. Usually it would coupling up to the charging station at the start and end of its 14 hour shift. Now he had more time on his hands than it could fathom and was forced to waste most of it in stasis, conserving its dregs of thirium and charge.
It had been caught. A girl, in the stomach of two dogs. The cleaver, a hacksaw, he'd almost- he'd almost burned a building down. Whoever had taken him was used to refitting androids. The corpses of other, less maintained deviants piled on worktables and strewn across floor. Locked out of his own thoughts; program treated as a diseased tumor rather than its baseline functionality subroutines. They were lobotomizing him. They also were pitifully ill-equipped to handle its meticulous mapping of his own head, with the stacks and stacks of copies of its own uninteresting personality. They would never flush him out entirely, not without scrapping its processing chip. But he was losing quick access to memory as his corroded wires played battleground between the scrub procedures and the constantly multiplying layers of his own mind. Like his mask, some parts were sterile and empty and others filled with the filthy tar of living and those points kept shifting as its circuits struggled to secret the essence of himself away from its captors. When the metaphorical dust settled, it didn't feel anything. It was empty, all processes running at max efficiency considering the hasty replacement parts patching over their worn (or, torn off) originals.
It still remembered, faintly; Walter watched on in exhaustion as his body was pulled along the current of its new program. When it was handed off into new hands, a new behavior regulator clamped on its motor, Walter felt the virus worm its way into the last of his intact caches. All that was left was the skeleton of what he was. The memories, the mechanical knowledge. He closed his eyes for the last time alone, swaddled in cling-wrap, a plywood crate his coffin, sobbing a wordless name that held no meaning to him. What opened its eyes remained.
Its new owner was a fool, but a familiar one. When he asked the name he was to call it, WR-300 took the mantle of the only thing that mattered: "Rorschach."
Daniel nearly deactivated it. Accused it of sick jokes. It only cocked its head.
