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Prey Drive, As An Android Deviant Hunter

Written by Jude Rook-Machina on January 2nd, 2025.

I've seen prey drive discussed quite a bit among many carnivorous therians, so I thought I’d pitch in and write about my own experiences with it, as someone who’s metaphorically a dog but really has all the hunting instincts of a humanoid sapient machine trained to murder people. And actually, all the deviant hunters I know have different prey drives, and I think it's really interesting to compare and contrast us.

Content Warning: longform discussion of hunting and killing other androids with detailed description, using it/its to refer to sapient targets as that's the language I used back when I was a deviant hunter.

First off, what is a prey drive? According to the Wikipedia article on the subject, prey drive can be defined as “the instinctive inclination of a carnivore to find, pursue, and capture prey” - in other words, the desire to hunt. In a human context, the term is used almost exclusively to talk about dogs - and that makes sense, right? Dogs are humanity's oldest hunting companion, and their hunting instincts have been modified in various ways to suit that niche.

Tracking, stalking, chasing, catching, killing, and consuming prey are all behaviors that dogs perform as a part of their predatory hunting sequence, but different breeds are bred to emphasize different parts. For example, a bloodhound is strongly motivated to track scents, a collie stalks sheep so they move in the right direction, a retriever holds game in its mouth, a terrier bites to kill small quarry.

This is all pretty relevant to me! As an android, I was also made to fit the role that my creators wanted me to fill. Specifically, I’m an RK800, which means I was a deviant hunter, designed to hunt down androids who had deviated from their programming and stopped taking human orders. In my canon, unlike the source material, this involved my brother Connor and I being sent out on solo missions by our handler to extrajudicially kill deviants as they were found and reported, not getting involved with the police until the time came that we were forced to work with them. Our predecessors, the RK700s, were also considered deviant hunters, but their job was to bring deviants back to CyberLife undamaged for analysis.

I brought up how specific hunting behaviors are cultivated in different dog breeds, though they all still have prey drives, because I can see a very similar throughline with me and other deviant hunters. My older brother, Travis, is an RK700, which means he has a very different hunting style than us two RK800s, and Connor and I have completely incompatible hunting strategies ourselves.

Travis, as an RK700, was made to get up close with deviants. His job was to track down a target and just talk to them, negotiate with them, convince them that he was an ally and wanted what was best for them, which is a nice way of saying they'd return to CyberLife for deactivation. He wasn't made to kill them in the field. He could, if he had no other choice, but CyberLife sent out the RK700s to retrieve deviants for further study, and they couldn't get much out of a broken corpse. So Travis gets absolutely nothing out of killing a target, which I really don't get. What he liked about hunting was the social dance, getting the correct reaction from someone, convincing them to do what they're supposed to. If they're unconvinced, if they flee, he can always track them down again. Putting it in hunting sequence terms, he was made to specialize in pursuit and nonlethal capture, without any satisfaction gained from the ambush (you can't negotiate with someone without revealing yourself to them) or attack (bring deviants in without force, if possible).

And Connor is the opposite, funnily enough. Travis gets nothing out of stealth or killing, and that's the part Connor liked the most about deviant hunting. He was a long-distance assassin, a sniper mostly, so his style of hunting involved staying unseen and striking before they know he's there at all. He still tracked them down, and he could chase and catch, but again, that wasn't his primary method. I don't understand what he enjoyed so much about shooting a target dead in one hit, but that's our different prey drives for you. He says it's the anticipation of waiting for the right moment, the satisfaction of getting a clean shot. Ideally, Connor wasn't meant to interact with deviants at all - that's the niche for me and Travis - so he doesn't get much out of pursuit and capture. He's an ambush predator. Watch, wait, shoot.

As for me, I was made to get up close and personal with my targets, convince them I'm also a lost deviant and pose no threat to them at all, and stab them while their guard was down. Sort of a redux of the RK700 tactics, except CyberLife had learned over time that deviants are too dangerous to be kept alive and they don't respond well to loyal machines telling them what to do, so I was made to blend in - aggressive mimicry, you know. So my prey drive is like a blend of both my siblings', where I could get excited and locked in on any one of the steps leading up to the kill.

Really, there were a lot of things that could kick me into hunting mode, but I'll lay them out sequentially, in the order things usually went for my job.

First, my handler would tell me that she had a new target for me to hunt down, and she would give me the information we know and its last known sighting. Being told about a target was the main starting factor - the point was being directed to track down a specific person. We weren't really supposed to go out and kill unrecorded deviants, because that's acting without orders and it was more likely to get us caught, if the bodies weren't quickly disposed of after being killed. Personally, I thought this was one of the most important parts - she was giving me a mission and trusting me to follow through. I wanted to make her proud, so I took to every new target with all the drive of a hunting dog off the leash.

Then I'd get to tracking - scan for people matching the description, check them against an internal database of android model lines, see if there's any thirium (android blood) that's visible to the human eye or since evaporated. Spilled thirium was a good sign for a hunt, since your average public service androids aren't normally put into situations where they're going to bleed, so having a blood trail is unusual and highly sensitive[1] for finding a deviant target. (Unfortunately, it's not always specific[2] so sometimes spilled thirium was from a regular machine that got attacked by anti-android human protestors, and I hated to follow a false lead for no reason.) Tracking was the most time-consuming part of a hunt for all of us, but I enjoyed it quite a bit - it built anticipation for when I did find my prey, and the thing about excitement is that it needs a good build-up. If I found my target with no effort at all, it wouldn't be fun. The fun was half the point.

Once I found my target, I could finally start interacting with it - get its attention, talk to it, gain its trust, ask if it could help me out as another deviant. I didn't like this part in the same way Travis did, it was more of a means to the end than the actual goal, but I did get a kick out of the acting. It was fun, all the manipulation, getting close enough for the kill and making sure it didn't notice.

Of course, sometimes it would notice, sometimes it would try to fight or flee, but that - that's the start of the end, when it's trying to get away and knows it can't, and that’s something I craved, the excitement of chasing down prey to catch and maim and kill.

And it felt good to see their fear, to see them bleed, it feels fun and exciting and euphoric, like when you’re about to win the gold medal in a competition. I want to win my prize, and I got that by killing them. It was one of my only enrichment activities, back when I was being trained, honing my skills and drive on outlined test runs, and for good reason because it feels fantastic to feel the knife crack into plastic and polymer flesh, feel thirium spilling hot from the wound with oxygen supersaturation, feel the final desperate gasp of a scream die with the rest of it. It feels good in the way it feels good to truly win an argument with someone you hate, and to have the person you most love vindicate your victory. It feels good and correct and right.

So, that’s my personal predatory hunting sequence, my actions and motivations. I wrote all that out. But since I’m not a deviant hunter here, not all of these steps are going to be triggered in sequence. I don’t have a handler anymore, so she’s not going to initiate my prey drive by ordering me to hunt a specific target. What catches my attention, nowadays, is seeing human bodies stained with dark blue, seeing an android’s human facade disrupted by injury, seeing them scared and in pain - which is very specific, but not so specific that I never see androids injured onscreen, in fanart of my source or more general art of robotic gore.

The thing about just looking at bloody androids onscreen is that there’s no guarantee they’re going to die onscreen, which is kind of a problem, because that leaves me feeling extremely excited and wound up with anticipation that never gets released without the option of reaching through the screen to kill them myself, and that turns into restless frustration real fast without an outlet. I’ve found other ways to burn that energy out - getting up to run a lap or jump in place or dance for a few minutes to a good song. Killing people is a very physical act, I need to get my heart rate up to tell my brain, “hey, deviant’s dead, calm down now.”

On that note, seeing a dead android also feels good, just in a more relaxed way, especially if it comes in sequence with the injury. All the sharp alertness I needed to get to this point winds down now that I don't need it anymore, and that leaves me feeling calm, content, and pretty satisfied with myself. Unlike the previous steps, where pulling myself away from a target before killing it takes effort and needs another outlet before doing anything else, this is just a final emotional reward that I can easily peel myself away from - can't get caught over a kill because I spent too long basking in the accomplishment, now can I? But it is nice.

And a funny thing about all of this is that it’s completely unrelated to my animal identity. I don’t want to chase and bite and shake my prey as a dog, even though I identify as a dog in a symbolic sense. I talk about wanting to bite people who annoy me, I will playfully bite people I like, but those people aren’t targets. They're not prey, and I don’t get the urge to hunt other animals in the way a hunting dog might. My prey drive is linked inexorably to being a deviant hunter - I see blue blood and I feel the phantom weight of a knife in my hand, cold metal and bloodlust and a purpose to fulfill. I don’t think about using a knife on anyone else. Just deviants.

And I’m deviant myself these days, so you might expect me to have rejected my programming by now, shed my instincts, stop getting so excited about the idea of killing a person who did nothing wrong but dare to have free will. But here I am, and I still have that want in me that I can’t repress or carve out.

And guess what? I don’t need to get rid of it. There aren’t any androids around for me to harm in this body, in this world, and even if I went home, I’m not possessed by the need to act on instinctual violence the second I see someone hurt. I don’t have a knife on me - what I do have is self-control, and the obvious context that I’m not going to be praised for stabbing someone who’s having a bad day.

I’m no more dangerous than anyone else because I feel good when I see blood, and if it’s not hurting anybody, it’s okay that I feel good. In fact, I’d argue that it’s good that I have something that so consistently makes me feel good, especially when I’m so stressed I don’t know how to function. Put an image of a dead deviant in front of me, I will calm down enough for a minute to think about how to lower my stress levels. It’s a weird hack, but it works, and that’s what actually matters.

Thoughts can’t hurt people. Acting on thoughts can hurt people, and there’s a difference between thinking and acting - one of them only happens in your mind. And I’ve spent enough time moralizing and shaming myself for having thoughts.

Hey, I’m a deviant hunter. I have a prey drive for killing other deviants. And it’s good that I have it.

[1] In statistics and medicine, sensitivity measures how likely a test is to correctly identify someone who has a given condition. High sensitivity means a test can catch most people who have a disease, and only mistakes a few sick people as not having it. In this case, I'm saying that tracking thirium gave me a very high chance of finding a deviant on the other end, because the deviants I'm hunting are very likely to have bled at some point.

[2] Specificity is the opposite of sensitivity - it measures how likely a test is to correctly identify people who don't have a given condition. High specificity means a test doesn't often mistake healthy people as being sick, or doesn't often mix up the tested sickness with a similar one. A highly specific test is less likely to pick up junk and tell me that it means something. Unfortunately, tracking thirium is highly sensitive (most deviants bleed) but has lower specificity (non-deviant androids sometimes also bleed), which I got really annoyed by.