In Every Line of Code 2/2
Fandom: The Social Network
Pairing: Mark/Eduardo
Part 1
"You expanded to Columbia, Yale and Stanford," Gretchen says.
Mark lets the silence pan out until the moment Gretchen opens her mouth to say something else. "I'm sorry, was that a question?"
Sy touches his arm. Wardo would have punched him. Mark sinks further down into his chair.
"How did you expand?" Gretchen asks.
Mark folds his arms across his chest and doesn't slide off his chair onto the floor, as much as he wants to. "We brought Chris and Dustin on board. Chris had some savings and they both applied for credit cards and loans. We bought more server space and Dustin started to help with the coding. At this point Dustin took 20% of the company and Chris took 10%."
"Eduardo had no ownership share?"
"Wardo didn't have enough of a contribution to the company to be allocated a share and as a personality construct he didn't have the right to his own funds."
Mahoney leans forward with an unpleasant expression on his face, as if the struggling moustache across his top lip smells particularly foul today. "If Eduardo didn't contribute to the company, why did you say 'we' brought Chris and Dustin on board?"
Mark closes his fist around his pen and fantasizes about stabbing it into his bulbous eye. "Fuck off. Just fuck right off with your fucking-"
"Off the record," Sy practically shouts to the note taker, snatching Mark's arm to pull him back into his seat. "Mark, Mark sit down."
"Wardo was with me, is all I meant. He was my friend and he was there. He brought me food and made sure I slept. He had as much right to Facebook as your butler robot has to the entire research division of Cybernet." Mark falls back into his chair, folding his arms across his chest. "And you have no right to him."
Gretchen glances sideways at Mahoney but he doesn't comment, leaving her to go back to her notes. "According to the terms and conditions that you signed when you completed the personality analysis questionnaire, you lost all rights to the technology when you put it in danger."
"Objection," Sy says. "You're offering a conclusion not found in evidence."
Mahoney raises his eyebrows. "Let's look at the facts here. On his first day of ownership, Mark Zuckerberg opened Eduardo up, hacked his core functioning and reflected that the primary circuit board could be put to other uses. Over the next few weeks Mark Zuckerberg continues to hack Eduardo's functions, disabling both the inhibitors that stop him causing harm to himself or others, the inhibitors that stopped him using so much processing power that he could overheat and the function that allowed him to remain backed up on a secure server. He then almost fries Eduardo's circuits with a stupid college prank. Shortly after that, Mr Zuckerberg agreed to sell Wardo's primary circuit board to the first people who bother to ask."
"I didn't end up doing that," Mark points out.
"No," Mahoney agrees. "You just spent three months saying you would-aren't you in some legal action on that front as well?" He picks up his pen, spinning it between his fingers with a cold smile. "And let's not forget how you took your robot to a meeting with a man known primarily for his hatred of robots."
Mark meets his eyes. "He wasn't in any danger."
"And why not?"
Mark shrugs. "We never told Sean he was a robot."
***
"He's twenty four point eight five minutes late." Wardo rocked back on his seat, eyes scanning the restaurant as though he was expecting to be jumped from behind a glass fountain.
"He founded Napster when he was nineteen," Mark said, too tired of Wardo's complaints to be gentle. "He can be late."
"I co-founded TheFacebook and I'm not even two," Wardo said, sinking back into his chair and hunching his shoulders to make himself look smaller. "We don't need him. I looked him up and we don't want him. I don't want him."
Mark sighed and moved his hand sideways under the table to rest on Wardo's leg."It's just rumours, Wardo. It got out that he doesn't like robots so people made some shit up. Even then, he doesn't know what you are and I've promised not to let you out of my sight. What more do you want?"
Wardo's leg was trembling beneath his fingers. "I want him gone," he said, turning his head briefly to press against Mark's shoulder. "I want him nowhere near TheFacebook. I want him as far from me as he can get."
Mark found Wardo's hand and rubbed his thumb back and forth across his palm and said nothing. After a long moment Wardo kissed his cheek then turned his head away, relaxing very slightly. Mark didn't release his hand. "Are you going to talk about ads again?"
Wardo shrugged. "We can't run the site off spit and prayers forever. At some point you're going to have to pay off your credit card bills and where's that money going to come from?"
"We need users. Users won't come if the site isn't cool."
"Users can't come if the site isn't there." He tensed up again, head turning to the entrance where a young man was greeting the servers by name. "That's him."
Sean Parker turned his head to see them, smiling widely and cutting a path through the restaurant. He shook hands with a man in a three piece suit, kissed the cheek of the prettiest girl in the room before rocking up in front of them and holding out a hand. "Sean Parker."
For a brief moment, Mark didn't think Wardo was going to let go, but then the fingers loosened and he could pull his hand free and reach out to shake. "Mark Zuckerberg."
"Of course," Sean said. "And you must be Eduardo?"
"Yes," Wardo said, before Mark could correct him. He held out his hand for Sean to shake, fingers tightening just a touch too much.
All credit to Sean, he barely winced, his eyes already scanning between Mark and Wardo-taking in how close they were sitting, the way Wardo's hand slid back under the table to meet Mark's. "And you two are-?"
"Do you have a problem with that?" Wardo snapped.
Sean raised both hands quickly in surrender, sitting down in the third seat. "No, no problems." He smiled winningly at them. "As long as you're human, you're okay with me."
Mark felt Wardo's fingers tighten on his palm and reflected that his hand was unlikely to survive the evening.
"So, Eduardo," Sean said, waving over a waitress. "What are we drinking?"
Wardo stared directly into his eyes, a smile touching the edges of his mouth. "Let's do shots."
*
"See the thing about robots," Sean said, gesturing with a half full shot glass. "Is they're not human."
"Wow," Wardo deadpanned into Mark's ear. "Can you believe Case Equity let this one go?"
"They're just programs," Sean expanded, tossing vodka over one shoulder as he gestured. "They're programmed to smile at some things and frown at others and Cybernet toss around the phrase 'personality construct' like it means something. It doesn't mean shit, they don't program robots to have personalities. They program robots to do what they're told. Robots aren't like people, they don't have thoughts or feelings. They just run programs that tell them what to say in response to what stimulus. You can't trust them."
*
"They programmed robots to follow me," Sean said, three more shots leaving him wild eyed, leaning forward across the table. "Butler bots and sex bots and even a friendship bot all looking for something they could use to run me out of my own company."
"And what they found was you messing around with underage girls."
"The friendship bots are the worst," Sean said, aiming his words are Mark this time. "They've put so much time into coding reactions that sometimes you can't tell and anyone could be a robot. They set one on me and it took me a week to realize what he was and they even programmed him to react to that, to act like he didn't know he was a robot and to panic when I tried to switch him off. I had to pull out his battery and send him to the scrap heap in the end-even switched off it felt like he was looking at me."
"Mark," Wardo grabbed his arm hard enough to bruise. "Mark, you look ill. We'll just be in the bathroom for a minute."
Sean looked up at him, eyes wide, and knocked over three shots with a wayward arm. "Be careful," he said in a whisper. "There could be robots watching us right now."
*
"I can't do this," Wardo said as Mark threw up into the toilet bowl, because damn Wardo and his damn shots. "I can't sit here and listen to this."
Scallops and truffles were nice enough going down, but disgusting coming back up. "He knows people, he's connected, we need him."
"We need money and equipment and users. We don't need Sean fucking Parker and his 'I hate robots' variety hour."
"He wasn't so bad until you decided to get him drunk."
"Right," Wardo snapped. "This is all my fault. Of course, why didn't I see it before? Oh no, wait, it can't be my fault because there is no 'me'. I've just been programmed to act like this when confronted with a total douchebag."
Mark retched again, his stomach churning but apparently now mostly empty.
Wardo sighed and rubbed one hand up and down Mark's back. He rested his chin on Mark's shoulder as Mark retched again. "We don't need him."
Mark closed his eyes and didn't reply.
***
"Please state the consequences of the meeting for the record."
Mark shrugs. "We dropped the 'the'."
Gretchen lets out one of her tiny sighs and places her pen back down on the table. "And?" she says, in the tones of one settling in for the long haul.
Mark starts ticking them off on his fingers. "I had a hangover, Sean got a Facebook account, Chris and Dustin yelled at me, Wardo didn't speak to me for three days."
"Think a little bigger."
Mark makes a show of tilting his head to the side and thinking. "Did I mention dropping the 'the'?"
"You moved to California," Gretchen snaps.
"Oh," Mark says. "I guess that would have been right after the meeting, yeah."
"Bearing in mind the fact that Facebook still had no active source of income, how did you fund the move?"
Mark shrugs again. "We sold everything we couldn't easily carry across the country, rented the cheapest shithole of a house and gave up on food for the summer. We had been planning to hire a couple of interns but now we couldn't afford it so Dustin and I did more work and Chris learnt some rudimentary tech support."
"You were joined in California by Sean Parker. In spite of Eduardo's clear disapproval of Parker and Parker's paranoia about robots. What was Eduardo's reaction to you asking Sean to share the house?"
Mark closes his eyes, reaching up to drag a hand through his hair. "We needed more people, more contacts and more programmers. Sean knew more than Chris, he was prepared to work in return for somewhere to stay and he came with a fistful of vouchers for free pizza."
"That was also the summer you added the option to identify as a robot or a human to Facebook, prompting an increase in violence towards humanised robots in schools across the country. What was Eduardo's reaction to that?"
Mark swallows. "It only existed for a couple of months."
"The months between Sean Parker joining you in California and the events of May 2004?" Gretchen clarifies.
Mark nods.
"At this point," Gretchen says, flicking through her notes to pull out a single sheet somewhere near the middle. "We would like to request that the object in question be brought forward."
The room goes very still as everyone present turns their head to look at Mark.
Mark looks sideways at Sy and the best lawyer in the business shrugs as if to say 'we don't really have much choice here.'
Mark turns back to Gretchen. "Am I allowed to ask why?"
"I just want to check that you haven't damaged my property," Mahoney says, all wide eyes and false innocence. He pulls out a small personal computer from a bag under the desk and holds it up. "I was also hoping to check that it's functional, if that's alright with you?"
Mark closes his fists under the table. "And if it's not alright with me?"
Gretchen gives a long sigh. "Sy?"
"It's alright with you," Sy says, because what the hell is Mark paying him for anyway. "You did bring it, didn't you?"
"I'm not an idiot." Mark reaches into the pocket of his hoodie and tugs it out, tossing it carelessly onto the glass table where is spins easily across the polished surface, coming to a rest directly between Mark and Mahoney.
The scratched and smudged glass casing is no longer than Mark's hand, no wider than his palm and only slightly fatter than a desk of playing cards. The circuit board sits inside it, green and copper covered in resistors, capacitors, inductors, transistors. The memory card is slotted in one end, a tiny blue LED slowly pulsing on and off, and there's an integrated circuit no more than an inch square but with leads thin as hair coming out of it so close together they almost look connected.
'Cybernet Industries,' the casing reads. 'EdURd0.'
Sy closes his eyes, Marylin drops her eyes, Gretchen spreads her hands with the tiniest shrug. 'Well,' her expression says. 'Defend that.'
Mahoney smiles, reaching out to close his thick sausage fingers around the board, leaving smeared fingerprints all over the casing, and finds the small hole in the glass where he can plug his palm computer in.
The first drops of rain hit the window, Mark watches them inch slowly down the glass. Waiting.
"It's empty," Mahoney says.
The two raindrops have hit the bottom of the glass now, but more are falling. "Yes," Mark says. "As I mentioned earlier, I am not letting you anywhere near Facebook."
***
Mark woke up to the sound of someone pounding hard on his bedroom door. It took his brain a moment to catch up and reflect that, fuck, maybe Wardo was right and three hours a night was not enough sleep.
"Mark," Dustin shouted through the wood, which was strange because usually Wardo was the one who woke Mark up, coming into his room to shake his shoulder and kiss him because robots didn't care about morning breath. "Mark," Dustin shouted, hammering again. "Mark, get your ass out here."
Mark sat up, reached for his clothes and then realized he was already wearing them. "What's happened?" he called, snatching a hoodie from the chair as he crossed to the door and pulled it open. "Are we crashing?"
Dustin shook his head, already leading Mark downstairs. "It's Wardo. Wardo and Sean."
Halfway down the stairs Mark could already hear them. "Yes," Wardo shouted. "Yes, if I had my way you would be in a box on the street. Hell, if I had my way you wouldn't even have a box."
"I got you Thiel's number, I have contacts in case equity, I renamed the site, I'm inviting people over who will bring food. What exactly have you done for this company lately aside from fuck the fucking founder?"
"I started this fucking company. This is my company and you are a house guest living rent free and buying shit that you can't afford because what you're failing to tell Mark is that you're just as in debt as the rest of us."
"You say 'us' but when was the last time you paid for anything? I don't see 'Eduardo' on any of the server payments, you're not paying the rent, you don't even have a credit card."
Mark reached the bottom of the stairs. Sean was standing in the kitchen holding a half eaten slice of pizza, and Wardo was in the middle of the living room holding an empty glass like he was considering throwing it. "You think we should get further in debt? You think that's the answer?"
"And we all know that you think we should have ads. 'More ads, Mark. Get rid of the robot options, Mark.' You really have no idea what young people these days want, do you? Are you totally ignorant? Did you not have a childhood?"
"I'm so sorry that I don't want to advertise my website as the tool that allowed five teenagers to beat a robot into scrap last week."
"Newsflash, robots are not people. Like microwaves, like toasters. Are you going to cry if I take a mallet to this toaster? No, because it's just a fucking machine." Sean snatched up the toaster, pulling it so hard the plug came out the wall and threw it to the floor. "I don't understand you. I have brought ideas and food and my time to this without asking for anything in return and I don't get why you hate me so much."
Wardo threw the glass. It hit the kitchen tiles over Sean's head, spreading tiny shards of glass everywhere. "Yeah? Well I don't understand why you hate me, so I guess we're even."
Dustin pushed Mark forward so he stumbled in between the two of them. "Wardo," he said, turning away from Sean. Wardo's hands were clenched into fists so tight it almost looked like he was pushing holes into his palms. "Wardo, come on. Come upstairs and calm down." Mark reached for his shoulder, but Wardo shook him off.
"Hate you?" Sean said. "I was never anything but nice to you but you've had this irrational vendetta against me since the moment we met."
Mark turned. "Sean, Sean just leave it. Guys-" he cast a desperate look at Dustin, but Dustin just shrugged helplessly. "Has anyone checked the site recently, don't you think we should get back to-"
"And your hatred of robots, that's rational I suppose? And you always know who is and isn't a robot because you can tell because they're not even slightly human."
"So, what, you had a fucking nanny-bot growing up and she's the reason you turned out so three piece suit and perfect student and now you think you have to protect her kind. That's what they want. They want to trick people into supporting them so they can take over. Do you know what a robot can do if you take out the inhibitors on its strength?"
Wardo took a step forward, pushing Mark gently to the side, because even after everything and even when he was this angry he wouldn't hurt Mark. "You want to find out?"
Sean vaulted the kitchen counter, landing on two feet in the living room, two metres from getting his head punched right off his shoulders. "And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?"
Mark made a grab for Wardo's arm, but Wardo shook him off like he was nothing more than a fly and took another step towards Sean. "It means you should get out and never come back."
Sean stepped forward as well. "Do your worst."
The front door slammed open and everybody turned to see Chris panting in the doorway, holding a scrap of paper in one hand. "I need everyone here," he panted, then looked up and blinked as he realized the entire household was already present.
Mark reached out for Wardo's arm again, and this time Wardo let himself be pulled away. "I thought you were at the bank, what happened?"
Chris held the page up but it was too small for Mark to see. "They've frozen the Facebook account. I just got off the phone with the company we rent servers from and they're cancelling our service."
This took a long moment to filter. Each word made sense on its own but put together it was suddenly too much to take in and Mark just stood there dumbly while Wardo moved closer, wrapping both arms around his waist.
Chris slammed the door shut and slumped down in front of it, dragging his hands through his hair and closing his eyes. "The site's going down. It's over."
***
"Extract from the terms and conditions of robot ownership as agreed to by Mark Zuckerberg prior to receiving the unit:" Gretchen reads. "'The user will not intentionally or through inappropriate action alter the personality construct or any data related to the construct-including, but not limited to, memories, thoughts and feelings. The user accepts that if they do so all modified technology will be forfeit.'" Gretchen looks up at him over the sheet of paper. "That is the primary circuit board from the Eduardo unit?" she says, nodding to the item still clutched in Mahoney's hands.
"Yes," Mark says.
"Can you state for the record what should be saved on the memory card?"
"Nothing."
"And why is that?"
"Because your client is suing me to reclaim his hardware. He has no claim at all to Facebook and I have no plans to give it to him."
"Prior to you wiping the chip for this deposition, what was stored on it?"
"Facebook."
"You acknowledge that in May 2004, you erased the personality construct from the memory card and used the circuit board to run your website?"
The rain is getting harder, hitting the window in dulled repetitive thuds, rain drops running into each other as they track their own paths down the glass. Sy crosses out something on his pad of paper, Marylin stares at her hands and tries to pretend she never believed Mark was any better than this.
Mark wishes Wardo was there to punch Maloney's smirking face.
Wardo never punched Sean. Mark should have let him, it would have been as good a goodbye as any.
"I need you to give me an answer," Gretchen says, glancing down at her watch. Mark has already dragged this out longer than it ever needed to be. The sun is starting to sink and he's ready to go home.
He hasn't checked in with Facebook all day.
"Mark," Sy says. "You have to answer."
He misses Wardo like an actual ache, like someone has reached into his chest and started tearing things out.
"Yes," he says.
"And what made you think you had the right to do that?" Gretchen asks.
Mark shrugs. "Wardo said I could. Ask Chris, ask Dustin. They were there."
Gretchen pulls out more papers from her endless pile. "We have deposed your friends and they both said the same thing. You left the room with Wardo and returned-" she taps her pen against the circuit board. "With this."
"Even if we look past the complete absence of any evidence in your favour," Maloney interrupts. "Your entire argument is based on the false assumption that the technology in Eduardo's head was Eduardo's to give away."
"He was conscious," Mark says. "He was aware. He knew what he was offering. He was a much better human than a lot of people I know."
Mahoney leans back, spinning the circuit board between two fingers. "You seem awfully keen on the idea of treating the robot like a human being. Are you really that desperate for this to turn into a murder trial?"
Gretchen touches Mahoney's shoulder and he stops talking so she can flip to the very last page of her notes. "In conclusion, while he owned the Eduardo unit Mark Zuckerberg treated it with little to no respect and with no acknowledgement of its feelings. He modified the core functions of the unit without hesitation and forced the unit into situations with people who wished to do it harm. Finally, by erasing the personality construct and using the circuit board for something other than its intended purpose, Mark Zuckerberg voided the terms and conditions giving Cybernet all rights to reclaim their hardware." She pulls all her notes back into one pile. "We'll leave you tonight to deliberate and I look forward to hearing your proposal tomorrow."
She stands up to leave, Mahoney following her to the door before turning back. "Mark," he says.
Mark spins his chair around in time to catch the circuit board in both hands.
"Try not to break it before you give it back to me tomorrow."
The door swings closed behind him. Mark rubs his thumb across the scratched glass and swings his chair back round to the table.
No one looks at him.
***
For a long moment no one said a word. Chris pressed his face against his knees, Dustin picked up a computer and opened it on his lap, pulling up server response times and users online. Sean didn't move - he was still standing with his fists raised as though he'd been preparing to fight but suddenly found himself lacking an enemy presence to attack.
Mark leant against Wardo's chest and tried to remember how to feel anything. Wardo's face pressed against the side of his neck, his arms tightened almost painfully and it was enough to pull Mark back into the present. "How long?" he asked, turning his eyes on Chris.
Sean's arms dropped finally. Chris shook his head against his knees. "They said we had an hour to backup any data we needed from the servers but I had to run home so I don't-maybe forty minutes? If we're lucky?"
"Okay." Mark tugged lightly so Wardo would let him go. He needed to pace. "How long until we can get everything back up?"
Chris shrugged into his knees. "How up to date is your resumé?" He raised his head to meet Mark's eyes. "I'm serious, we aren't getting anything until we pay all our bills, unfreeze the account and beg."
Mark swallowed and started pacing again. "Okay, so we have forty minutes to do something. We can revert the site to a more rudimentary form, back the data up somewhere safe and just keep it going-as long as it's going we might keep the core users and we can bring it back when we can get a loan or an investment."
"Oh, right," Dustin said. "So until it literally starts raining money we'll just what? Build a data centre out of pizza boxes and empty cans of red bull?"
"I don't know," Mark turned, slamming his fist into the wall hard enough to break through the plaster. "We have to do something."
Three hundred thousand users. Three hundred thousand and they all knew his name and it was all apparently a waste of time because none of them were fucking rich.
He drew back to punch again but before he could do so Wardo caught his wrists. "Mark."
"No," Mark shook his head, staring up into Wardo's face because Wardo had to understand. Even if no one else did. "No, this is not how Facebook dies. We'll come up with a plan, we'll fix this, there has to be something we can use."
Wardo pressed his forehead against Mark's, using his grip on Mark's wrist to wrap Mark's arms around his waist and hold him close. "There is," he whispered.
It took Mark's mind a stupidly long time to catch up even though Wardo's forehead was warm and he was trying to smile but it didn't hide the fact that if he was human, if he was human there would be tears in his eyes.
Strange, how a robot could be biologically perfect in every way except the ability to cry. Perhaps normally they weren't emotionally involved enough; they were just programmed to be supportive no matter what and go to the scrap heap with a smile on their face.
"No," Mark said. "No, something else. There's got to be something else."
"Wardo-" Dustin started.
Wardo's head tugged away from Mark, turning to look at him. "No. Shut up. All of you can just shut up. It's my head and my website and I am every bit as involved as the rest of you and you don't get to tell me what I can and can't do."
Sean raised one hand. "Can I just say I have no idea what's going on here?"
Mark tugged his hands free. "Wardo's a robot. Be okay with it or get out. Dustin, keep an eye on the servers and keep brainstorming. Chris, call the server company. Beg. Beg, plead, go down on both knees, promise them half your kingdom and your daughter's hand in marriage if you have to."
Sean blinked. "Wardo's a-"
Mark ignored him entirely, grabbing Wardo's wrist. "You are coming upstairs with me and we're not coming down until you stop being an idiot."
Wardo looked sideways at Dustin. "How long would it take to transfer the site onto my main circuit board?"
Dustin swallowed. "Probably, just under five minutes."
"Okay." Wardo turned back to Mark. "You have half an hour."
*
"No," Mark said, pulling Wardo into the bedroom and slamming the door shut behind him.
Wardo tugged his arm free of Mark's grip. "No?" he echoed mockingly. "That's your argument, 'no'?"
"I don't need an argument," Mark said, because this debate was stupid and he should be downstairs with Chris and Dustin doing whatever it took to save his website. "You're my robot and I'm saying no."
"You're my human," Wardo snapped. "And I'm saying yes." He leant back against the door, folding his arms across his chest and blocking Mark's path downstairs.
"It doesn't work like that." Mark shook his head. "This is stupid. You're programmed to be in love with me and to want me to be happy or whatever so you're trying to give me what you think I want. You're wrong, I want you alive and well so stop being an idiot and help me brainstorm other options."
"I'm sorry Sean, for a moment there I mistook you for Mark." Wardo pushed away from the door towards Mark, eyes narrows and fists half clenched as he raised both hands to push Mark back against the wall.
"Wardo," Mark said as his back hit the plaster. "What the-"
"You're telling me I can't think for myself?" Wardo asked, pinning Mark easily with one hand. "You're going to stand there and tell me some geek with a comp sci degree wrote a program, uploaded it onto a chip and that's the only reason I'm in love with you."
"Wardo-"
"Because I have to listen to that shit every day from Sean fucking Parker downstairs and if I thought for a minute you agreed with him I would be out that door like a rocket because contrary to what you may believe I have my own thoughts and my own feelings and I can make my own fucking decisions about what does and does not happen inside my head." For a moment he stood there, pressing Mark against the wall with his fists clenched and his eyes narrowed.
Then his head fell forward, pressing against Mark's shoulder and he was still enough for Mark to reach out and wrap his arms around that skinny waist and press his face into Wardo's stupid hair.
"I didn't mean that," Mark said. "I didn't mean that you can't choose for yourself I just-you should have a self-preservation function. I remember reading about it and I thought I was so careful not to touch it but now there's this and it was an accident and I'm so sorry."
Wardo's shoulders shake and he wraps his arms around Mark's waist. "You didn't break anything, Mark. It's still there, nestled down in my consciousness telling me to side with you and let Facebook fade into obscurity. But I'm more than lists of functions and lines of code and I can ignore whatever I want to ignore."
"I don't care about Facebook," Mark said. "We can scrap it, it can go down in history as just a stupid project I was working on."
"We were working on," Wardo corrected gently. "It's bigger than you, Mark. It's bigger than me, bigger than Chris and Dustin downstairs and you know as well as I do that it could be bigger too. We're in one hundred and sixty schools including five in Europe. That's not something you can just throw away."
Wardo pressed closer, pushing Mark's hoodie up so his fingers could press against bare skin on his hip. "We're using more servers than any of us imagined and we always need more because they're never big enough. All our money is going to the data centre so we can't afford the programmers we need to keep expanding. Even if we find a fix now, it'll only be a matter of time before we hit the same problem again and again and again." More of his weight was resting heavily on Mark's shoulder. "We do this now and we're set for life. We can take whatever gets thrown at us."
Mark closed his eyes, sinking slowly to the floor so he ended up with his back to the wall and Wardo leaning against his chest. "I can't just throw you away," he said-quieter, as though the guys downstairs might somehow hear through the floor. "I want-I need you here. I need you with me." He reached for Wardo's jaw, lightly gripping with his fingertips to tilt Wardo's face up to his. "Don't make me do this without you."
Wardo stared at him for a moment then let out a low cry of frustration and pain and desperation, fingers grabbing at Mark's neck. Mark let himself be pulled into a kiss, Wardo's tongue licking in and exploring like he absolutely had to memorize every tiny corner of Mark's mouth, storing it forever in a stream of incomprehensible ones and zeros.
Mark pushed his hands up under Wardo's shirt and ran his fingers across the nubs of Wardo's spine and the curve of his hips. Wardo moved slowly over him; his knees slid to the floor on either side of Mark's legs, and his hands pushed up under Mark's hoodie. He broke the kiss for as long as it took to get Mark's hoodie and T-shirt off and then his lips were back on Mark's. One hand tilted Mark's head to a better angle as the other anxiously pressed too hard into his side.
"I won't," Wardo said breathlessly, breaking the kiss for a moment to help Mark with the tiny fiddly buttons of his shirt. "I won't, not ever." Then his shirt was off and Mark could press his hands against his chest and feel the slow regular thump of the internal cooling pump that wasn't a heartbeat but might as well have been.
Wardo closed his eyes for a moment, then reached both arms around to cup under Mark's ass and somehow in one move hoisted Mark up so his legs could wrap around Wardo's waist and his back was pressed to the wall. Wardo kissed him again, supporting him with one hand so he could thread his fingers through Mark's hair.
Mark dug his fingertips into Wardo's shoulders so that when Wardo set him down on the bed he could just tug and bring Wardo after him, rolling them over on the covers until Wardo was spread out beneath him and Mark could lean down to kiss him. He wished he was a robot, wished he had a microchip in his mind so he could store a perfect model of the way Wardo tasted, the way his hips pressed up, the soft moan that Mark caught in another kiss.
But he was human and he was fallible and he was going to forget the way Wardo looked right now with his head thrown back and his mouth slightly open in a silent moan as Mark kissed a line down his chest to the button on his stupid suit pants.
No one who knew Mark would program him a robot who wore suits.
"I love you," Wardo said, pulling Mark back up to kiss him even while Mark's hand pulled at his flies. "Always. Remember that."
Mark closed his eyes tight for a moment, trying to force the slight dampness away from the corner of his eyes. "I promised I'd look after you."
Wardo smiled weakly, reaching up a hand to Mark's cheek. "We can look after each other."
*
The sun was setting outside, casting a golden glow across Wardo's bare chest and his hand where he was tracing slow circles across Mark's skin. "Five minutes," he said, softly, because he had a clock in his head that was counting down to the last moment.
"I won't do it," Mark said, wrapping his arms tighter around Wardo. "I can't do it."
Wardo pressed his cheek against Mark's shoulder. "Fine, I'll go downstairs and ask Sean. I don't think he'll have a-"
Mark pulled him into a kiss to shut him up, swallowed down all Wardo's stupid words, like maybe if he made the kiss last long enough, the five minutes would be up and everything would be okay.
Wardo pulled away, burying his face against Mark's neck, pressing closer. "Four minutes," he whispered, sounding lost and scared and so many things that Mark couldn't protect him from. "Don't make me ask Sean."
Mark buried his face in Wardo's stupid, stupid hair that covered a pathetically thin exoskeleton between Mark's lips and Wardo's brain. "There has to be another way."
Wardo let out a weak laugh and Mark could feel the tremble of it right through his body. "I promise, if there's any other way I'll take it. If we go downstairs and Dustin has Maguyvered a whole rack of servers out of loo roll and parcel tape or Chris has traded all his future adopted children for an unfrozen bank account then you can come back upstairs, reinstall me and I promise I will fuck you all night long." He pressed his lips to every mark he'd made. "All night and all tomorrow and all the day after until you're so sore you wish they hadn't fixed it and then I'll hold you close and kiss you until you fall asleep. I will lie there with you in my arms and we can have forever."
Mark swallowed down the stupid lump in his throat and blinked back the stupid fucking tears that were no use at all because Facebook was crashing and Wardo was stupid and why could Mark never have anything that lasted. "We could have forever. We could stay up here and never go down and have forever."
"Make Facebook amazing," Wardo said quietly. "I mean, it's already amazing but it could be the biggest and best thing out there. It could be the future, it could be everything you've ever dreamed of if you let it." He closed his eyes for a moment. "And you have to make a billion dollars now, I refuse to donate my brain to anything that isn't cool."
Mark tried to laugh but his shoulders shook and the tears that had been threatening started to spill over. He buried his face in Wardo's hair, feeling damp strands brush his cheeks. "You are the best thing that has ever happened to me."
"Better than a laptop?"
"Fucking-yes, you idiot." Mark pulled him into as tight a hug as he could manage, pressing his face against Wardo's skin so Wardo could feel Mark's tears against his neck, could curl long fingers around Mark's trembling shoulders. "Better than a laptop, better than Facebook, better than anything and if there is any way to change your mind please tell me now because I will do anything, I swear."
Wardo raised his head to press a single soft kiss on Mark's lips, his dry cheek touching Mark's so that Mark's tears were echoed on his skin. "I love you," Wardo whispered, then buried his face back against Mark's neck, wrapping his arms tight and tilting his head forward.
"We could have done anything," Mark said, sliding his hand around to find the control panel in the back of Wardo's neck.
Wardo reached up to touch his face with one hand. "We will."
"I love you," Mark said, trying to fit in 'I'm sorry' and 'goodbye' and everything else there wasn't time to say.
Wardo's eyes slid shut and his fingers slumped, dropping one by one off Mark's face until his hand fell against Mark's chest. His head fell forward and he was gone.
***
Mark slides the circuit board from hand to hand, back and forth across the table, remembering walking downstairs to find Chris and Dustin had manufactured a cooling unit from the fridge. He had punched them both, splitting Dustin's lip for daring to focus on using Wardo instead than coming up with some other way, any other way.
Outside the window, the lights of the San Fancisco skyline seem to shimmer. Somewhere out there is the Cybernet research facility, one of those glowing squares is a lab where some old man in a white coat-possibly Bill Mahoney himself-put together the greatest circuit board ever made.
"Mark. We're done for the day."
Mark turns away from the lights to see Marylin standing at the side of the room. "I know," he says, wondering why she didn't leave as soon as possible with the others. Even Sy hadn't been able to meet Mark's eyes. "I was just... sitting here. Thinking."
She pulls out a chair two down from him and sits, purse resting in her lap. "I just... I don't understand why you did it. I don't understand how you did it. The way you talk about him-it doesn't make sense."
Mark doesn't say 'I used a USB cable to plug him into Dustin's laptop so I could access the files' because that very clearly isn't what she's asking. "He asked me to."
Marylin moves a little closer. "Sy's going to tell you to hand it over, you know," she says, reaching out one hand to pick the board up from between his fingers. "And you'll probably have to pay a settlement, to cover the danger you put it in." She holds it carefully, resting on her palms like some ancient treasure.
Mark wonders what would happen if he grabbed it now, threw it to the floor and smashed it under his heel. How much would it cost to replace? "Wardo could take care of himself."
Marylin weighs the board on one hand, then sighs and leans forward to place it carefully back on the table. "How are you running Facebook now?"
"We started advertising when Chris discovered Cybernet had prompted the investigation into our financial situation." Mark doesn't reach for the board, but he can't take his eyes off it. "That was when we knew the guys at Harvard had talked and Mahoney was coming after Wardo. By the time the lawsuit came through we had enough money for a data centre. We installed Facebook on the servers and it runs like a normal website." Inefficiently, slowly, prone to crashing but good enough. Better than letting it fall into anyone else's hands.
"Can I ask what happened to Sean Parker?"
Mark couldn't give less of a shit about what happened to Sean. He spends far too much time remembering that Wardo hated Sean and Sean was in California, which means Wardo spent his last days unhappy and Mark was too tied up in Facebook to do anything about it.
"He backed off for a couple of months, trod very carefully. Eventually he fucked up, got caught at a party where some shit went down-you know those robot boxing dens where they bet on which will be torn to pieces first-" Something's digging into his fingers and he looks down to see his hands have closed painfully tightly on the pen he's been scribbling with all day. He takes a deep breath and places it down on the table. "He's no longer affiliated with the company."
That's what the lawyers told him to say because 'I smashed his face in and called the cops' is supposedly bad for Facebook's image.
If anything other than Facebook were at stake, Mark would have confessed years ago.
"Why?" Marylin asks, moving slightly closer. "I mean, you clearly don't care about robots so why would it be such a big deal that Sean-"
"Don't," Mark says.
"I'm just saying, you killed Eduardo. Sure, the body was fine and maybe you've got it squirreled away somewhere in your mansion but that doesn't really make what you did any-"
"For fuck's sake," Mark snaps, pushing his chair back so he can stand up because-because he needs to be standing, damn it. "I'm not Sean, I'm not a mechaphobe. I'm not anything like those people and you have no right to accuse me of-"
"To accuse you of what you admitted to?" Marylin says, not even slightly fazed by him looming over her and shouting.
Mark goes still for a long moment, then collapses back into his chair. "I did, didn't I. I admitted it and no one questioned it because I just seem like the kind of guy who would kill the person he loved." He closes his eyes. "How fucked up is that."
When he looks up again, Marylin has moved her chair right next to him and is tapping her fingers against the table, inches away from the glass casing. "So," she says, when she notices him looking. "Are you going to tell me what really happened?"
If Mark was a robot-as so many people have implied he is-he would shut down until she went away. "Sorry?" he says, even though he's not-he's calculating how fast he can grab the board and get out the building and how difficult it will be to go on the run with an entire website in tow.
"I've been licensed to practice law for all of twenty months and I can already read enough into our conversation earlier to know you're hiding something. I'm not asking for Sy or for the company, I'll swear on anything you care to name that I'm not working for Mahoney I just-" her fingers inch sideways a little, nails tapping the glass. "I want to believe you're not an asshole, Mark. Make it easy for me."
Mark places his hands on the table then realizes that that just looks stupid and takes them off again. He glances back at the closed door; the only person in sight is the yawning receptionist reaching for her coffee half an office away.
He should grab his bag and leave, let Marylin believe whatever she wants. But it's the blog thing again, just like back in Harvard when Mark decided to announce to the world that he was downloading the internet onto a robot. He can't resist taking credit for his own genius and he doesn't want to see the look Sy gave him before he left reflected in Marylin's eyes.
"The question no one asked," he says, carefully sliding the board away from her hand so if necessary he could grab it and run. "Is: 'if you have a memory card with unlimited storage capacity, why would you ever delete anything?'" He picks up the board, turning it over between his fingers. "I didn't delete Wardo. There was no point deleting Wardo because there was space, and because none of the rest of us knew how the board worked, and because I was in love with him."
Marylin is smiling a little, Mark doesn't join her. "So you left Wardo and dumped Facebook on top?"
"We plugged Facebook in and Wardo assimilated it, yes. Wardo understood the board better than anyone. He knew how to get the best performance, how to increase the memory and he'd worked out how to run a website off it before the idea was even raised." He looks up and his expression is enough to make Marylin's smile fade. "That's what Mahoney wanted. He doesn't care about the board, if he can make it once he can make it again. They put a personality construct on there because they wanted to know how it worked. He wants Wardo."
Marylin nods, finally understanding. "That's why you lied."
"Wardo was put on there by mistake," Mark says. "The board came to me by mistake but it was mine and Wardo was mine and I promised I'd protect him. No matter what." His fingers press into the glass like he might be able to shatter it.
"But if the board's wiped," Marylin says slowly, eyes on Mark's hands. "Where's Wardo now? Have you installed him on another chip, is he back in his body?"
His body. Mark keeps Wardo's body in his parents' house-lying flat on Mark's old bed because when it was in Mark's mansion he could never stop himself from going to look at it, to sit next to it, to touch the lifeless limbs and wrap the cold form around him in a crude parody of an embrace.
"He's Facebook," Mark says, too quietly, wishing he could just fold in on himself. He looks away so he doesn't have to see her face. He's had enough pity to last a lifetime. "He's in every relationship status, every wall post, every line of code. I could go through with a fine tooth comb and I wouldn't be able to find where Wardo ends and Facebook begins."
"So-" her hand touches his shoulder and he shrugs it off.
"We can't put Facebook in a body." He turns back to the skyline, pressing the board between his palms like a prayer. "And I can't date a website, so. I didn't kill him, but I still had to let him go."
"Mark-" she starts and he can't bear the apologetic tone, the pity, everything Chris and Dustin tried to fill his life with at first like the constant reminders didn't make it so much worse.
"You should go," he says. "Go get a steak on University Avenue, tell three people that you love them and have sex like it's the last time." He reaches down for his laptop, hiding his face under the table so she won't see him shaking. "Would anyone mind if I stayed here for a minute?"
She sighs, and her hand presses briefly against his shoulder. "You're not alone, Mark. Not if you don't want to be." The hand pulls away as she turns to leave. "If Mahoney ever finds out, and you need a lawyer-"
He looks up in time to see her pulling open the door and she smiles a soft reassuring smile. "I'll be in touch," Mark says, surprised enough to answer. "Thank you."
The door swings closed behind her and he's alone again.
*
Facebook loads slightly slower, as predicted, but nothing that regular users should notice. The blue bars, white background-clean, simple-open on his screen like home.
He opens the messaging system and types out a quick request for an update on performance throughout the day.
From: Facebook
To: Mark Zuckerberg
System running at full speed, small glitch with photo tagging found and repaired.
There is a delay of about half a second, which at the speeds Facebook runs at must feel like a lifetime.
From: Facebook
To: Mark Zuckerberg
I missed you.
Mark closes his eyes, fingers hovering over the keyboard. It's like missing someone halfway around the world, only worse because Wardo isn't a plane journey away. He's half an hour down the freeway in a room full of blue lighting and the hum of cooling fans. He's rack after rack of servers and tiny flashing lights.
And there are so many things he wants to say but none of them are words. They're a kiss on the cheek when Wardo distracts him from coding, a press of hands as they pass in the corridors, the noise Wardo makes when Mark kisses the curve of his hip.
There are no words for the feeling of curled up on the sofa with a blanket with Wardo's head on his shoulder, watching a movie they won't remember in the morning.
Well, there's one word. But there should be a thousand.
From: Mark Zuckerberg
To: Facebook
I love you.
*
Try to define love. Describe it in short, simple words that can be typed into a computer program.
You can't, can you?
Pairing: Mark/Eduardo
Part 1
"You expanded to Columbia, Yale and Stanford," Gretchen says.
Mark lets the silence pan out until the moment Gretchen opens her mouth to say something else. "I'm sorry, was that a question?"
Sy touches his arm. Wardo would have punched him. Mark sinks further down into his chair.
"How did you expand?" Gretchen asks.
Mark folds his arms across his chest and doesn't slide off his chair onto the floor, as much as he wants to. "We brought Chris and Dustin on board. Chris had some savings and they both applied for credit cards and loans. We bought more server space and Dustin started to help with the coding. At this point Dustin took 20% of the company and Chris took 10%."
"Eduardo had no ownership share?"
"Wardo didn't have enough of a contribution to the company to be allocated a share and as a personality construct he didn't have the right to his own funds."
Mahoney leans forward with an unpleasant expression on his face, as if the struggling moustache across his top lip smells particularly foul today. "If Eduardo didn't contribute to the company, why did you say 'we' brought Chris and Dustin on board?"
Mark closes his fist around his pen and fantasizes about stabbing it into his bulbous eye. "Fuck off. Just fuck right off with your fucking-"
"Off the record," Sy practically shouts to the note taker, snatching Mark's arm to pull him back into his seat. "Mark, Mark sit down."
"Wardo was with me, is all I meant. He was my friend and he was there. He brought me food and made sure I slept. He had as much right to Facebook as your butler robot has to the entire research division of Cybernet." Mark falls back into his chair, folding his arms across his chest. "And you have no right to him."
Gretchen glances sideways at Mahoney but he doesn't comment, leaving her to go back to her notes. "According to the terms and conditions that you signed when you completed the personality analysis questionnaire, you lost all rights to the technology when you put it in danger."
"Objection," Sy says. "You're offering a conclusion not found in evidence."
Mahoney raises his eyebrows. "Let's look at the facts here. On his first day of ownership, Mark Zuckerberg opened Eduardo up, hacked his core functioning and reflected that the primary circuit board could be put to other uses. Over the next few weeks Mark Zuckerberg continues to hack Eduardo's functions, disabling both the inhibitors that stop him causing harm to himself or others, the inhibitors that stopped him using so much processing power that he could overheat and the function that allowed him to remain backed up on a secure server. He then almost fries Eduardo's circuits with a stupid college prank. Shortly after that, Mr Zuckerberg agreed to sell Wardo's primary circuit board to the first people who bother to ask."
"I didn't end up doing that," Mark points out.
"No," Mahoney agrees. "You just spent three months saying you would-aren't you in some legal action on that front as well?" He picks up his pen, spinning it between his fingers with a cold smile. "And let's not forget how you took your robot to a meeting with a man known primarily for his hatred of robots."
Mark meets his eyes. "He wasn't in any danger."
"And why not?"
Mark shrugs. "We never told Sean he was a robot."
***
"He's twenty four point eight five minutes late." Wardo rocked back on his seat, eyes scanning the restaurant as though he was expecting to be jumped from behind a glass fountain.
"He founded Napster when he was nineteen," Mark said, too tired of Wardo's complaints to be gentle. "He can be late."
"I co-founded TheFacebook and I'm not even two," Wardo said, sinking back into his chair and hunching his shoulders to make himself look smaller. "We don't need him. I looked him up and we don't want him. I don't want him."
Mark sighed and moved his hand sideways under the table to rest on Wardo's leg."It's just rumours, Wardo. It got out that he doesn't like robots so people made some shit up. Even then, he doesn't know what you are and I've promised not to let you out of my sight. What more do you want?"
Wardo's leg was trembling beneath his fingers. "I want him gone," he said, turning his head briefly to press against Mark's shoulder. "I want him nowhere near TheFacebook. I want him as far from me as he can get."
Mark found Wardo's hand and rubbed his thumb back and forth across his palm and said nothing. After a long moment Wardo kissed his cheek then turned his head away, relaxing very slightly. Mark didn't release his hand. "Are you going to talk about ads again?"
Wardo shrugged. "We can't run the site off spit and prayers forever. At some point you're going to have to pay off your credit card bills and where's that money going to come from?"
"We need users. Users won't come if the site isn't cool."
"Users can't come if the site isn't there." He tensed up again, head turning to the entrance where a young man was greeting the servers by name. "That's him."
Sean Parker turned his head to see them, smiling widely and cutting a path through the restaurant. He shook hands with a man in a three piece suit, kissed the cheek of the prettiest girl in the room before rocking up in front of them and holding out a hand. "Sean Parker."
For a brief moment, Mark didn't think Wardo was going to let go, but then the fingers loosened and he could pull his hand free and reach out to shake. "Mark Zuckerberg."
"Of course," Sean said. "And you must be Eduardo?"
"Yes," Wardo said, before Mark could correct him. He held out his hand for Sean to shake, fingers tightening just a touch too much.
All credit to Sean, he barely winced, his eyes already scanning between Mark and Wardo-taking in how close they were sitting, the way Wardo's hand slid back under the table to meet Mark's. "And you two are-?"
"Do you have a problem with that?" Wardo snapped.
Sean raised both hands quickly in surrender, sitting down in the third seat. "No, no problems." He smiled winningly at them. "As long as you're human, you're okay with me."
Mark felt Wardo's fingers tighten on his palm and reflected that his hand was unlikely to survive the evening.
"So, Eduardo," Sean said, waving over a waitress. "What are we drinking?"
Wardo stared directly into his eyes, a smile touching the edges of his mouth. "Let's do shots."
*
"See the thing about robots," Sean said, gesturing with a half full shot glass. "Is they're not human."
"Wow," Wardo deadpanned into Mark's ear. "Can you believe Case Equity let this one go?"
"They're just programs," Sean expanded, tossing vodka over one shoulder as he gestured. "They're programmed to smile at some things and frown at others and Cybernet toss around the phrase 'personality construct' like it means something. It doesn't mean shit, they don't program robots to have personalities. They program robots to do what they're told. Robots aren't like people, they don't have thoughts or feelings. They just run programs that tell them what to say in response to what stimulus. You can't trust them."
*
"They programmed robots to follow me," Sean said, three more shots leaving him wild eyed, leaning forward across the table. "Butler bots and sex bots and even a friendship bot all looking for something they could use to run me out of my own company."
"And what they found was you messing around with underage girls."
"The friendship bots are the worst," Sean said, aiming his words are Mark this time. "They've put so much time into coding reactions that sometimes you can't tell and anyone could be a robot. They set one on me and it took me a week to realize what he was and they even programmed him to react to that, to act like he didn't know he was a robot and to panic when I tried to switch him off. I had to pull out his battery and send him to the scrap heap in the end-even switched off it felt like he was looking at me."
"Mark," Wardo grabbed his arm hard enough to bruise. "Mark, you look ill. We'll just be in the bathroom for a minute."
Sean looked up at him, eyes wide, and knocked over three shots with a wayward arm. "Be careful," he said in a whisper. "There could be robots watching us right now."
*
"I can't do this," Wardo said as Mark threw up into the toilet bowl, because damn Wardo and his damn shots. "I can't sit here and listen to this."
Scallops and truffles were nice enough going down, but disgusting coming back up. "He knows people, he's connected, we need him."
"We need money and equipment and users. We don't need Sean fucking Parker and his 'I hate robots' variety hour."
"He wasn't so bad until you decided to get him drunk."
"Right," Wardo snapped. "This is all my fault. Of course, why didn't I see it before? Oh no, wait, it can't be my fault because there is no 'me'. I've just been programmed to act like this when confronted with a total douchebag."
Mark retched again, his stomach churning but apparently now mostly empty.
Wardo sighed and rubbed one hand up and down Mark's back. He rested his chin on Mark's shoulder as Mark retched again. "We don't need him."
Mark closed his eyes and didn't reply.
***
"Please state the consequences of the meeting for the record."
Mark shrugs. "We dropped the 'the'."
Gretchen lets out one of her tiny sighs and places her pen back down on the table. "And?" she says, in the tones of one settling in for the long haul.
Mark starts ticking them off on his fingers. "I had a hangover, Sean got a Facebook account, Chris and Dustin yelled at me, Wardo didn't speak to me for three days."
"Think a little bigger."
Mark makes a show of tilting his head to the side and thinking. "Did I mention dropping the 'the'?"
"You moved to California," Gretchen snaps.
"Oh," Mark says. "I guess that would have been right after the meeting, yeah."
"Bearing in mind the fact that Facebook still had no active source of income, how did you fund the move?"
Mark shrugs again. "We sold everything we couldn't easily carry across the country, rented the cheapest shithole of a house and gave up on food for the summer. We had been planning to hire a couple of interns but now we couldn't afford it so Dustin and I did more work and Chris learnt some rudimentary tech support."
"You were joined in California by Sean Parker. In spite of Eduardo's clear disapproval of Parker and Parker's paranoia about robots. What was Eduardo's reaction to you asking Sean to share the house?"
Mark closes his eyes, reaching up to drag a hand through his hair. "We needed more people, more contacts and more programmers. Sean knew more than Chris, he was prepared to work in return for somewhere to stay and he came with a fistful of vouchers for free pizza."
"That was also the summer you added the option to identify as a robot or a human to Facebook, prompting an increase in violence towards humanised robots in schools across the country. What was Eduardo's reaction to that?"
Mark swallows. "It only existed for a couple of months."
"The months between Sean Parker joining you in California and the events of May 2004?" Gretchen clarifies.
Mark nods.
"At this point," Gretchen says, flicking through her notes to pull out a single sheet somewhere near the middle. "We would like to request that the object in question be brought forward."
The room goes very still as everyone present turns their head to look at Mark.
Mark looks sideways at Sy and the best lawyer in the business shrugs as if to say 'we don't really have much choice here.'
Mark turns back to Gretchen. "Am I allowed to ask why?"
"I just want to check that you haven't damaged my property," Mahoney says, all wide eyes and false innocence. He pulls out a small personal computer from a bag under the desk and holds it up. "I was also hoping to check that it's functional, if that's alright with you?"
Mark closes his fists under the table. "And if it's not alright with me?"
Gretchen gives a long sigh. "Sy?"
"It's alright with you," Sy says, because what the hell is Mark paying him for anyway. "You did bring it, didn't you?"
"I'm not an idiot." Mark reaches into the pocket of his hoodie and tugs it out, tossing it carelessly onto the glass table where is spins easily across the polished surface, coming to a rest directly between Mark and Mahoney.
The scratched and smudged glass casing is no longer than Mark's hand, no wider than his palm and only slightly fatter than a desk of playing cards. The circuit board sits inside it, green and copper covered in resistors, capacitors, inductors, transistors. The memory card is slotted in one end, a tiny blue LED slowly pulsing on and off, and there's an integrated circuit no more than an inch square but with leads thin as hair coming out of it so close together they almost look connected.
'Cybernet Industries,' the casing reads. 'EdURd0.'
Sy closes his eyes, Marylin drops her eyes, Gretchen spreads her hands with the tiniest shrug. 'Well,' her expression says. 'Defend that.'
Mahoney smiles, reaching out to close his thick sausage fingers around the board, leaving smeared fingerprints all over the casing, and finds the small hole in the glass where he can plug his palm computer in.
The first drops of rain hit the window, Mark watches them inch slowly down the glass. Waiting.
"It's empty," Mahoney says.
The two raindrops have hit the bottom of the glass now, but more are falling. "Yes," Mark says. "As I mentioned earlier, I am not letting you anywhere near Facebook."
***
Mark woke up to the sound of someone pounding hard on his bedroom door. It took his brain a moment to catch up and reflect that, fuck, maybe Wardo was right and three hours a night was not enough sleep.
"Mark," Dustin shouted through the wood, which was strange because usually Wardo was the one who woke Mark up, coming into his room to shake his shoulder and kiss him because robots didn't care about morning breath. "Mark," Dustin shouted, hammering again. "Mark, get your ass out here."
Mark sat up, reached for his clothes and then realized he was already wearing them. "What's happened?" he called, snatching a hoodie from the chair as he crossed to the door and pulled it open. "Are we crashing?"
Dustin shook his head, already leading Mark downstairs. "It's Wardo. Wardo and Sean."
Halfway down the stairs Mark could already hear them. "Yes," Wardo shouted. "Yes, if I had my way you would be in a box on the street. Hell, if I had my way you wouldn't even have a box."
"I got you Thiel's number, I have contacts in case equity, I renamed the site, I'm inviting people over who will bring food. What exactly have you done for this company lately aside from fuck the fucking founder?"
"I started this fucking company. This is my company and you are a house guest living rent free and buying shit that you can't afford because what you're failing to tell Mark is that you're just as in debt as the rest of us."
"You say 'us' but when was the last time you paid for anything? I don't see 'Eduardo' on any of the server payments, you're not paying the rent, you don't even have a credit card."
Mark reached the bottom of the stairs. Sean was standing in the kitchen holding a half eaten slice of pizza, and Wardo was in the middle of the living room holding an empty glass like he was considering throwing it. "You think we should get further in debt? You think that's the answer?"
"And we all know that you think we should have ads. 'More ads, Mark. Get rid of the robot options, Mark.' You really have no idea what young people these days want, do you? Are you totally ignorant? Did you not have a childhood?"
"I'm so sorry that I don't want to advertise my website as the tool that allowed five teenagers to beat a robot into scrap last week."
"Newsflash, robots are not people. Like microwaves, like toasters. Are you going to cry if I take a mallet to this toaster? No, because it's just a fucking machine." Sean snatched up the toaster, pulling it so hard the plug came out the wall and threw it to the floor. "I don't understand you. I have brought ideas and food and my time to this without asking for anything in return and I don't get why you hate me so much."
Wardo threw the glass. It hit the kitchen tiles over Sean's head, spreading tiny shards of glass everywhere. "Yeah? Well I don't understand why you hate me, so I guess we're even."
Dustin pushed Mark forward so he stumbled in between the two of them. "Wardo," he said, turning away from Sean. Wardo's hands were clenched into fists so tight it almost looked like he was pushing holes into his palms. "Wardo, come on. Come upstairs and calm down." Mark reached for his shoulder, but Wardo shook him off.
"Hate you?" Sean said. "I was never anything but nice to you but you've had this irrational vendetta against me since the moment we met."
Mark turned. "Sean, Sean just leave it. Guys-" he cast a desperate look at Dustin, but Dustin just shrugged helplessly. "Has anyone checked the site recently, don't you think we should get back to-"
"And your hatred of robots, that's rational I suppose? And you always know who is and isn't a robot because you can tell because they're not even slightly human."
"So, what, you had a fucking nanny-bot growing up and she's the reason you turned out so three piece suit and perfect student and now you think you have to protect her kind. That's what they want. They want to trick people into supporting them so they can take over. Do you know what a robot can do if you take out the inhibitors on its strength?"
Wardo took a step forward, pushing Mark gently to the side, because even after everything and even when he was this angry he wouldn't hurt Mark. "You want to find out?"
Sean vaulted the kitchen counter, landing on two feet in the living room, two metres from getting his head punched right off his shoulders. "And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?"
Mark made a grab for Wardo's arm, but Wardo shook him off like he was nothing more than a fly and took another step towards Sean. "It means you should get out and never come back."
Sean stepped forward as well. "Do your worst."
The front door slammed open and everybody turned to see Chris panting in the doorway, holding a scrap of paper in one hand. "I need everyone here," he panted, then looked up and blinked as he realized the entire household was already present.
Mark reached out for Wardo's arm again, and this time Wardo let himself be pulled away. "I thought you were at the bank, what happened?"
Chris held the page up but it was too small for Mark to see. "They've frozen the Facebook account. I just got off the phone with the company we rent servers from and they're cancelling our service."
This took a long moment to filter. Each word made sense on its own but put together it was suddenly too much to take in and Mark just stood there dumbly while Wardo moved closer, wrapping both arms around his waist.
Chris slammed the door shut and slumped down in front of it, dragging his hands through his hair and closing his eyes. "The site's going down. It's over."
***
"Extract from the terms and conditions of robot ownership as agreed to by Mark Zuckerberg prior to receiving the unit:" Gretchen reads. "'The user will not intentionally or through inappropriate action alter the personality construct or any data related to the construct-including, but not limited to, memories, thoughts and feelings. The user accepts that if they do so all modified technology will be forfeit.'" Gretchen looks up at him over the sheet of paper. "That is the primary circuit board from the Eduardo unit?" she says, nodding to the item still clutched in Mahoney's hands.
"Yes," Mark says.
"Can you state for the record what should be saved on the memory card?"
"Nothing."
"And why is that?"
"Because your client is suing me to reclaim his hardware. He has no claim at all to Facebook and I have no plans to give it to him."
"Prior to you wiping the chip for this deposition, what was stored on it?"
"Facebook."
"You acknowledge that in May 2004, you erased the personality construct from the memory card and used the circuit board to run your website?"
The rain is getting harder, hitting the window in dulled repetitive thuds, rain drops running into each other as they track their own paths down the glass. Sy crosses out something on his pad of paper, Marylin stares at her hands and tries to pretend she never believed Mark was any better than this.
Mark wishes Wardo was there to punch Maloney's smirking face.
Wardo never punched Sean. Mark should have let him, it would have been as good a goodbye as any.
"I need you to give me an answer," Gretchen says, glancing down at her watch. Mark has already dragged this out longer than it ever needed to be. The sun is starting to sink and he's ready to go home.
He hasn't checked in with Facebook all day.
"Mark," Sy says. "You have to answer."
He misses Wardo like an actual ache, like someone has reached into his chest and started tearing things out.
"Yes," he says.
"And what made you think you had the right to do that?" Gretchen asks.
Mark shrugs. "Wardo said I could. Ask Chris, ask Dustin. They were there."
Gretchen pulls out more papers from her endless pile. "We have deposed your friends and they both said the same thing. You left the room with Wardo and returned-" she taps her pen against the circuit board. "With this."
"Even if we look past the complete absence of any evidence in your favour," Maloney interrupts. "Your entire argument is based on the false assumption that the technology in Eduardo's head was Eduardo's to give away."
"He was conscious," Mark says. "He was aware. He knew what he was offering. He was a much better human than a lot of people I know."
Mahoney leans back, spinning the circuit board between two fingers. "You seem awfully keen on the idea of treating the robot like a human being. Are you really that desperate for this to turn into a murder trial?"
Gretchen touches Mahoney's shoulder and he stops talking so she can flip to the very last page of her notes. "In conclusion, while he owned the Eduardo unit Mark Zuckerberg treated it with little to no respect and with no acknowledgement of its feelings. He modified the core functions of the unit without hesitation and forced the unit into situations with people who wished to do it harm. Finally, by erasing the personality construct and using the circuit board for something other than its intended purpose, Mark Zuckerberg voided the terms and conditions giving Cybernet all rights to reclaim their hardware." She pulls all her notes back into one pile. "We'll leave you tonight to deliberate and I look forward to hearing your proposal tomorrow."
She stands up to leave, Mahoney following her to the door before turning back. "Mark," he says.
Mark spins his chair around in time to catch the circuit board in both hands.
"Try not to break it before you give it back to me tomorrow."
The door swings closed behind him. Mark rubs his thumb across the scratched glass and swings his chair back round to the table.
No one looks at him.
***
For a long moment no one said a word. Chris pressed his face against his knees, Dustin picked up a computer and opened it on his lap, pulling up server response times and users online. Sean didn't move - he was still standing with his fists raised as though he'd been preparing to fight but suddenly found himself lacking an enemy presence to attack.
Mark leant against Wardo's chest and tried to remember how to feel anything. Wardo's face pressed against the side of his neck, his arms tightened almost painfully and it was enough to pull Mark back into the present. "How long?" he asked, turning his eyes on Chris.
Sean's arms dropped finally. Chris shook his head against his knees. "They said we had an hour to backup any data we needed from the servers but I had to run home so I don't-maybe forty minutes? If we're lucky?"
"Okay." Mark tugged lightly so Wardo would let him go. He needed to pace. "How long until we can get everything back up?"
Chris shrugged into his knees. "How up to date is your resumé?" He raised his head to meet Mark's eyes. "I'm serious, we aren't getting anything until we pay all our bills, unfreeze the account and beg."
Mark swallowed and started pacing again. "Okay, so we have forty minutes to do something. We can revert the site to a more rudimentary form, back the data up somewhere safe and just keep it going-as long as it's going we might keep the core users and we can bring it back when we can get a loan or an investment."
"Oh, right," Dustin said. "So until it literally starts raining money we'll just what? Build a data centre out of pizza boxes and empty cans of red bull?"
"I don't know," Mark turned, slamming his fist into the wall hard enough to break through the plaster. "We have to do something."
Three hundred thousand users. Three hundred thousand and they all knew his name and it was all apparently a waste of time because none of them were fucking rich.
He drew back to punch again but before he could do so Wardo caught his wrists. "Mark."
"No," Mark shook his head, staring up into Wardo's face because Wardo had to understand. Even if no one else did. "No, this is not how Facebook dies. We'll come up with a plan, we'll fix this, there has to be something we can use."
Wardo pressed his forehead against Mark's, using his grip on Mark's wrist to wrap Mark's arms around his waist and hold him close. "There is," he whispered.
It took Mark's mind a stupidly long time to catch up even though Wardo's forehead was warm and he was trying to smile but it didn't hide the fact that if he was human, if he was human there would be tears in his eyes.
Strange, how a robot could be biologically perfect in every way except the ability to cry. Perhaps normally they weren't emotionally involved enough; they were just programmed to be supportive no matter what and go to the scrap heap with a smile on their face.
"No," Mark said. "No, something else. There's got to be something else."
"Wardo-" Dustin started.
Wardo's head tugged away from Mark, turning to look at him. "No. Shut up. All of you can just shut up. It's my head and my website and I am every bit as involved as the rest of you and you don't get to tell me what I can and can't do."
Sean raised one hand. "Can I just say I have no idea what's going on here?"
Mark tugged his hands free. "Wardo's a robot. Be okay with it or get out. Dustin, keep an eye on the servers and keep brainstorming. Chris, call the server company. Beg. Beg, plead, go down on both knees, promise them half your kingdom and your daughter's hand in marriage if you have to."
Sean blinked. "Wardo's a-"
Mark ignored him entirely, grabbing Wardo's wrist. "You are coming upstairs with me and we're not coming down until you stop being an idiot."
Wardo looked sideways at Dustin. "How long would it take to transfer the site onto my main circuit board?"
Dustin swallowed. "Probably, just under five minutes."
"Okay." Wardo turned back to Mark. "You have half an hour."
*
"No," Mark said, pulling Wardo into the bedroom and slamming the door shut behind him.
Wardo tugged his arm free of Mark's grip. "No?" he echoed mockingly. "That's your argument, 'no'?"
"I don't need an argument," Mark said, because this debate was stupid and he should be downstairs with Chris and Dustin doing whatever it took to save his website. "You're my robot and I'm saying no."
"You're my human," Wardo snapped. "And I'm saying yes." He leant back against the door, folding his arms across his chest and blocking Mark's path downstairs.
"It doesn't work like that." Mark shook his head. "This is stupid. You're programmed to be in love with me and to want me to be happy or whatever so you're trying to give me what you think I want. You're wrong, I want you alive and well so stop being an idiot and help me brainstorm other options."
"I'm sorry Sean, for a moment there I mistook you for Mark." Wardo pushed away from the door towards Mark, eyes narrows and fists half clenched as he raised both hands to push Mark back against the wall.
"Wardo," Mark said as his back hit the plaster. "What the-"
"You're telling me I can't think for myself?" Wardo asked, pinning Mark easily with one hand. "You're going to stand there and tell me some geek with a comp sci degree wrote a program, uploaded it onto a chip and that's the only reason I'm in love with you."
"Wardo-"
"Because I have to listen to that shit every day from Sean fucking Parker downstairs and if I thought for a minute you agreed with him I would be out that door like a rocket because contrary to what you may believe I have my own thoughts and my own feelings and I can make my own fucking decisions about what does and does not happen inside my head." For a moment he stood there, pressing Mark against the wall with his fists clenched and his eyes narrowed.
Then his head fell forward, pressing against Mark's shoulder and he was still enough for Mark to reach out and wrap his arms around that skinny waist and press his face into Wardo's stupid hair.
"I didn't mean that," Mark said. "I didn't mean that you can't choose for yourself I just-you should have a self-preservation function. I remember reading about it and I thought I was so careful not to touch it but now there's this and it was an accident and I'm so sorry."
Wardo's shoulders shake and he wraps his arms around Mark's waist. "You didn't break anything, Mark. It's still there, nestled down in my consciousness telling me to side with you and let Facebook fade into obscurity. But I'm more than lists of functions and lines of code and I can ignore whatever I want to ignore."
"I don't care about Facebook," Mark said. "We can scrap it, it can go down in history as just a stupid project I was working on."
"We were working on," Wardo corrected gently. "It's bigger than you, Mark. It's bigger than me, bigger than Chris and Dustin downstairs and you know as well as I do that it could be bigger too. We're in one hundred and sixty schools including five in Europe. That's not something you can just throw away."
Wardo pressed closer, pushing Mark's hoodie up so his fingers could press against bare skin on his hip. "We're using more servers than any of us imagined and we always need more because they're never big enough. All our money is going to the data centre so we can't afford the programmers we need to keep expanding. Even if we find a fix now, it'll only be a matter of time before we hit the same problem again and again and again." More of his weight was resting heavily on Mark's shoulder. "We do this now and we're set for life. We can take whatever gets thrown at us."
Mark closed his eyes, sinking slowly to the floor so he ended up with his back to the wall and Wardo leaning against his chest. "I can't just throw you away," he said-quieter, as though the guys downstairs might somehow hear through the floor. "I want-I need you here. I need you with me." He reached for Wardo's jaw, lightly gripping with his fingertips to tilt Wardo's face up to his. "Don't make me do this without you."
Wardo stared at him for a moment then let out a low cry of frustration and pain and desperation, fingers grabbing at Mark's neck. Mark let himself be pulled into a kiss, Wardo's tongue licking in and exploring like he absolutely had to memorize every tiny corner of Mark's mouth, storing it forever in a stream of incomprehensible ones and zeros.
Mark pushed his hands up under Wardo's shirt and ran his fingers across the nubs of Wardo's spine and the curve of his hips. Wardo moved slowly over him; his knees slid to the floor on either side of Mark's legs, and his hands pushed up under Mark's hoodie. He broke the kiss for as long as it took to get Mark's hoodie and T-shirt off and then his lips were back on Mark's. One hand tilted Mark's head to a better angle as the other anxiously pressed too hard into his side.
"I won't," Wardo said breathlessly, breaking the kiss for a moment to help Mark with the tiny fiddly buttons of his shirt. "I won't, not ever." Then his shirt was off and Mark could press his hands against his chest and feel the slow regular thump of the internal cooling pump that wasn't a heartbeat but might as well have been.
Wardo closed his eyes for a moment, then reached both arms around to cup under Mark's ass and somehow in one move hoisted Mark up so his legs could wrap around Wardo's waist and his back was pressed to the wall. Wardo kissed him again, supporting him with one hand so he could thread his fingers through Mark's hair.
Mark dug his fingertips into Wardo's shoulders so that when Wardo set him down on the bed he could just tug and bring Wardo after him, rolling them over on the covers until Wardo was spread out beneath him and Mark could lean down to kiss him. He wished he was a robot, wished he had a microchip in his mind so he could store a perfect model of the way Wardo tasted, the way his hips pressed up, the soft moan that Mark caught in another kiss.
But he was human and he was fallible and he was going to forget the way Wardo looked right now with his head thrown back and his mouth slightly open in a silent moan as Mark kissed a line down his chest to the button on his stupid suit pants.
No one who knew Mark would program him a robot who wore suits.
"I love you," Wardo said, pulling Mark back up to kiss him even while Mark's hand pulled at his flies. "Always. Remember that."
Mark closed his eyes tight for a moment, trying to force the slight dampness away from the corner of his eyes. "I promised I'd look after you."
Wardo smiled weakly, reaching up a hand to Mark's cheek. "We can look after each other."
*
The sun was setting outside, casting a golden glow across Wardo's bare chest and his hand where he was tracing slow circles across Mark's skin. "Five minutes," he said, softly, because he had a clock in his head that was counting down to the last moment.
"I won't do it," Mark said, wrapping his arms tighter around Wardo. "I can't do it."
Wardo pressed his cheek against Mark's shoulder. "Fine, I'll go downstairs and ask Sean. I don't think he'll have a-"
Mark pulled him into a kiss to shut him up, swallowed down all Wardo's stupid words, like maybe if he made the kiss last long enough, the five minutes would be up and everything would be okay.
Wardo pulled away, burying his face against Mark's neck, pressing closer. "Four minutes," he whispered, sounding lost and scared and so many things that Mark couldn't protect him from. "Don't make me ask Sean."
Mark buried his face in Wardo's stupid, stupid hair that covered a pathetically thin exoskeleton between Mark's lips and Wardo's brain. "There has to be another way."
Wardo let out a weak laugh and Mark could feel the tremble of it right through his body. "I promise, if there's any other way I'll take it. If we go downstairs and Dustin has Maguyvered a whole rack of servers out of loo roll and parcel tape or Chris has traded all his future adopted children for an unfrozen bank account then you can come back upstairs, reinstall me and I promise I will fuck you all night long." He pressed his lips to every mark he'd made. "All night and all tomorrow and all the day after until you're so sore you wish they hadn't fixed it and then I'll hold you close and kiss you until you fall asleep. I will lie there with you in my arms and we can have forever."
Mark swallowed down the stupid lump in his throat and blinked back the stupid fucking tears that were no use at all because Facebook was crashing and Wardo was stupid and why could Mark never have anything that lasted. "We could have forever. We could stay up here and never go down and have forever."
"Make Facebook amazing," Wardo said quietly. "I mean, it's already amazing but it could be the biggest and best thing out there. It could be the future, it could be everything you've ever dreamed of if you let it." He closed his eyes for a moment. "And you have to make a billion dollars now, I refuse to donate my brain to anything that isn't cool."
Mark tried to laugh but his shoulders shook and the tears that had been threatening started to spill over. He buried his face in Wardo's hair, feeling damp strands brush his cheeks. "You are the best thing that has ever happened to me."
"Better than a laptop?"
"Fucking-yes, you idiot." Mark pulled him into as tight a hug as he could manage, pressing his face against Wardo's skin so Wardo could feel Mark's tears against his neck, could curl long fingers around Mark's trembling shoulders. "Better than a laptop, better than Facebook, better than anything and if there is any way to change your mind please tell me now because I will do anything, I swear."
Wardo raised his head to press a single soft kiss on Mark's lips, his dry cheek touching Mark's so that Mark's tears were echoed on his skin. "I love you," Wardo whispered, then buried his face back against Mark's neck, wrapping his arms tight and tilting his head forward.
"We could have done anything," Mark said, sliding his hand around to find the control panel in the back of Wardo's neck.
Wardo reached up to touch his face with one hand. "We will."
"I love you," Mark said, trying to fit in 'I'm sorry' and 'goodbye' and everything else there wasn't time to say.
Wardo's eyes slid shut and his fingers slumped, dropping one by one off Mark's face until his hand fell against Mark's chest. His head fell forward and he was gone.
***
Mark slides the circuit board from hand to hand, back and forth across the table, remembering walking downstairs to find Chris and Dustin had manufactured a cooling unit from the fridge. He had punched them both, splitting Dustin's lip for daring to focus on using Wardo instead than coming up with some other way, any other way.
Outside the window, the lights of the San Fancisco skyline seem to shimmer. Somewhere out there is the Cybernet research facility, one of those glowing squares is a lab where some old man in a white coat-possibly Bill Mahoney himself-put together the greatest circuit board ever made.
"Mark. We're done for the day."
Mark turns away from the lights to see Marylin standing at the side of the room. "I know," he says, wondering why she didn't leave as soon as possible with the others. Even Sy hadn't been able to meet Mark's eyes. "I was just... sitting here. Thinking."
She pulls out a chair two down from him and sits, purse resting in her lap. "I just... I don't understand why you did it. I don't understand how you did it. The way you talk about him-it doesn't make sense."
Mark doesn't say 'I used a USB cable to plug him into Dustin's laptop so I could access the files' because that very clearly isn't what she's asking. "He asked me to."
Marylin moves a little closer. "Sy's going to tell you to hand it over, you know," she says, reaching out one hand to pick the board up from between his fingers. "And you'll probably have to pay a settlement, to cover the danger you put it in." She holds it carefully, resting on her palms like some ancient treasure.
Mark wonders what would happen if he grabbed it now, threw it to the floor and smashed it under his heel. How much would it cost to replace? "Wardo could take care of himself."
Marylin weighs the board on one hand, then sighs and leans forward to place it carefully back on the table. "How are you running Facebook now?"
"We started advertising when Chris discovered Cybernet had prompted the investigation into our financial situation." Mark doesn't reach for the board, but he can't take his eyes off it. "That was when we knew the guys at Harvard had talked and Mahoney was coming after Wardo. By the time the lawsuit came through we had enough money for a data centre. We installed Facebook on the servers and it runs like a normal website." Inefficiently, slowly, prone to crashing but good enough. Better than letting it fall into anyone else's hands.
"Can I ask what happened to Sean Parker?"
Mark couldn't give less of a shit about what happened to Sean. He spends far too much time remembering that Wardo hated Sean and Sean was in California, which means Wardo spent his last days unhappy and Mark was too tied up in Facebook to do anything about it.
"He backed off for a couple of months, trod very carefully. Eventually he fucked up, got caught at a party where some shit went down-you know those robot boxing dens where they bet on which will be torn to pieces first-" Something's digging into his fingers and he looks down to see his hands have closed painfully tightly on the pen he's been scribbling with all day. He takes a deep breath and places it down on the table. "He's no longer affiliated with the company."
That's what the lawyers told him to say because 'I smashed his face in and called the cops' is supposedly bad for Facebook's image.
If anything other than Facebook were at stake, Mark would have confessed years ago.
"Why?" Marylin asks, moving slightly closer. "I mean, you clearly don't care about robots so why would it be such a big deal that Sean-"
"Don't," Mark says.
"I'm just saying, you killed Eduardo. Sure, the body was fine and maybe you've got it squirreled away somewhere in your mansion but that doesn't really make what you did any-"
"For fuck's sake," Mark snaps, pushing his chair back so he can stand up because-because he needs to be standing, damn it. "I'm not Sean, I'm not a mechaphobe. I'm not anything like those people and you have no right to accuse me of-"
"To accuse you of what you admitted to?" Marylin says, not even slightly fazed by him looming over her and shouting.
Mark goes still for a long moment, then collapses back into his chair. "I did, didn't I. I admitted it and no one questioned it because I just seem like the kind of guy who would kill the person he loved." He closes his eyes. "How fucked up is that."
When he looks up again, Marylin has moved her chair right next to him and is tapping her fingers against the table, inches away from the glass casing. "So," she says, when she notices him looking. "Are you going to tell me what really happened?"
If Mark was a robot-as so many people have implied he is-he would shut down until she went away. "Sorry?" he says, even though he's not-he's calculating how fast he can grab the board and get out the building and how difficult it will be to go on the run with an entire website in tow.
"I've been licensed to practice law for all of twenty months and I can already read enough into our conversation earlier to know you're hiding something. I'm not asking for Sy or for the company, I'll swear on anything you care to name that I'm not working for Mahoney I just-" her fingers inch sideways a little, nails tapping the glass. "I want to believe you're not an asshole, Mark. Make it easy for me."
Mark places his hands on the table then realizes that that just looks stupid and takes them off again. He glances back at the closed door; the only person in sight is the yawning receptionist reaching for her coffee half an office away.
He should grab his bag and leave, let Marylin believe whatever she wants. But it's the blog thing again, just like back in Harvard when Mark decided to announce to the world that he was downloading the internet onto a robot. He can't resist taking credit for his own genius and he doesn't want to see the look Sy gave him before he left reflected in Marylin's eyes.
"The question no one asked," he says, carefully sliding the board away from her hand so if necessary he could grab it and run. "Is: 'if you have a memory card with unlimited storage capacity, why would you ever delete anything?'" He picks up the board, turning it over between his fingers. "I didn't delete Wardo. There was no point deleting Wardo because there was space, and because none of the rest of us knew how the board worked, and because I was in love with him."
Marylin is smiling a little, Mark doesn't join her. "So you left Wardo and dumped Facebook on top?"
"We plugged Facebook in and Wardo assimilated it, yes. Wardo understood the board better than anyone. He knew how to get the best performance, how to increase the memory and he'd worked out how to run a website off it before the idea was even raised." He looks up and his expression is enough to make Marylin's smile fade. "That's what Mahoney wanted. He doesn't care about the board, if he can make it once he can make it again. They put a personality construct on there because they wanted to know how it worked. He wants Wardo."
Marylin nods, finally understanding. "That's why you lied."
"Wardo was put on there by mistake," Mark says. "The board came to me by mistake but it was mine and Wardo was mine and I promised I'd protect him. No matter what." His fingers press into the glass like he might be able to shatter it.
"But if the board's wiped," Marylin says slowly, eyes on Mark's hands. "Where's Wardo now? Have you installed him on another chip, is he back in his body?"
His body. Mark keeps Wardo's body in his parents' house-lying flat on Mark's old bed because when it was in Mark's mansion he could never stop himself from going to look at it, to sit next to it, to touch the lifeless limbs and wrap the cold form around him in a crude parody of an embrace.
"He's Facebook," Mark says, too quietly, wishing he could just fold in on himself. He looks away so he doesn't have to see her face. He's had enough pity to last a lifetime. "He's in every relationship status, every wall post, every line of code. I could go through with a fine tooth comb and I wouldn't be able to find where Wardo ends and Facebook begins."
"So-" her hand touches his shoulder and he shrugs it off.
"We can't put Facebook in a body." He turns back to the skyline, pressing the board between his palms like a prayer. "And I can't date a website, so. I didn't kill him, but I still had to let him go."
"Mark-" she starts and he can't bear the apologetic tone, the pity, everything Chris and Dustin tried to fill his life with at first like the constant reminders didn't make it so much worse.
"You should go," he says. "Go get a steak on University Avenue, tell three people that you love them and have sex like it's the last time." He reaches down for his laptop, hiding his face under the table so she won't see him shaking. "Would anyone mind if I stayed here for a minute?"
She sighs, and her hand presses briefly against his shoulder. "You're not alone, Mark. Not if you don't want to be." The hand pulls away as she turns to leave. "If Mahoney ever finds out, and you need a lawyer-"
He looks up in time to see her pulling open the door and she smiles a soft reassuring smile. "I'll be in touch," Mark says, surprised enough to answer. "Thank you."
The door swings closed behind her and he's alone again.
*
Facebook loads slightly slower, as predicted, but nothing that regular users should notice. The blue bars, white background-clean, simple-open on his screen like home.
He opens the messaging system and types out a quick request for an update on performance throughout the day.
From: Facebook
To: Mark Zuckerberg
System running at full speed, small glitch with photo tagging found and repaired.
There is a delay of about half a second, which at the speeds Facebook runs at must feel like a lifetime.
From: Facebook
To: Mark Zuckerberg
I missed you.
Mark closes his eyes, fingers hovering over the keyboard. It's like missing someone halfway around the world, only worse because Wardo isn't a plane journey away. He's half an hour down the freeway in a room full of blue lighting and the hum of cooling fans. He's rack after rack of servers and tiny flashing lights.
And there are so many things he wants to say but none of them are words. They're a kiss on the cheek when Wardo distracts him from coding, a press of hands as they pass in the corridors, the noise Wardo makes when Mark kisses the curve of his hip.
There are no words for the feeling of curled up on the sofa with a blanket with Wardo's head on his shoulder, watching a movie they won't remember in the morning.
Well, there's one word. But there should be a thousand.
From: Mark Zuckerberg
To: Facebook
I love you.
*
Try to define love. Describe it in short, simple words that can be typed into a computer program.
You can't, can you?