9S tried to go to sleep that night but struggled to do so, noticing that when immmersed within his own body instead of mind, he compulsively associated the very feeling of being in a state of wakefulness with being conscious or alive. This clues him into the fact that he often forgets the once apparent fact of his own existence existing, and what remains is a series of compulsions that are only able to mimic that former self - that he didn't even realise until now, that he had lost.
He is complacent.
Confused by this specific situation, and with reflection on the experience he had only moments before, he asks himself what question he should be asking right now. As a Scanner android, his strength is analysis, and for the first time after all his experience with striving for the truth of all sorts of situations, he now feels a need to question the truth about himself, and analyse all that subtlties that make him in any-given-moment possible.
'What would that even look like?', he would wonder on repeat throughout the night.
This chatting mind, almost like a hallucination, comes from his subconscious desire to stimulate the feeling of a life changing epiphany, to have a sense of purpose or mission.
Now with no commander, making the decision to start something isn't so clear, and he wonders if there is a better way to begin things rather than slowly duty.
Consistency is the easy part, emotions were prohibited, but that never came easy to him as he often grew sick of the repetition.
What kept him going was not duty, not glory for mankind, but his own love for 2B.
The day she died, he was left without a purpose, and her sudden return while his mind remained stuck in the past with carried over resent for A2 only made him disgusted with himself for not appreciating his dream coming true.
So, he decides to bring back his desire, to become the type of person who does not get sick of things no matter how technically repetitive things get, and to be able to love 2B as intensely as he did before.
In a lot of ways, he envies 2B and A2 in this moment, their infection from the flower clearly made them more sensitive to the things that happen to them, unlike him who is still capable of being distraction from his own chatting mind in silent moments like this.
Unfortunately, that is the curse/NieR of a scanner, for despite analysis being his strength, he is fatigued.
After all the years of repetition his soul had to endure, the behaviour to seek/scan in itself has become compulsively associated with the intent to doubt, even doubting itself is doubted.
So, he has faced this subconscious desire to find his own chosen one moment, a purpose, a mission, outside of the directive the commander gave just in order to be productive.
Complacency through productivity, to ignore the reality that he is still lost. That is the dilemma he is faced with.
And so, he begins to decide upon his standards.
'It's night time right now, I am supposed to be asleep. The feeling of that being a fact or rule, comes down to expectations. This is what I know I should believe, and yet… I feel nothing at all, so how can I truly expect anything?'
Emotions aren't prohibited anymore, but now he has no emotions tonight. Why is it that he has it when he is around others but it disappears the moment he finds himself alone?
That's a question for another day.
…
He begins to drift off to sleep.
While waiting with the darkness he sees from behind his eyelids, he sees something else.
It starts out as a fuzzy shape, and then colour is added, and a full hallucination slips into his experience.
He wakes up fully rested, but no more than an hour had passed.
His first dream.
Since that tiny visual hallucination, he felt as though everything that came before had been left behind, all his resentment, all his intentions, all his memories.
Everything is new again, even though nothing has changed.
However, something catches his eye, or more like something doesn't.
This is something they should have been aware of from the moment it began, but they were too caught up in the experiences that came from the flower, including his sudden ability to dream like a human, that now when he is vividly awake he knows right away that this is something that is not the same.
He leaves his bed and goes to open the door to the outside.
"Its... night.".