In Every Line of Code 1/2
Fandom: The Social Network
Pairing: Mark/Eduardo
Length: 18,900 words
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Mark's parents buy him Eduardo - a state-of-the-art, brand new, tailor made robotic best friend - for his birthday. The only problem is, Mark asked for a laptop.
Warnings: Language, make-outs, allusions to violence, completely unrealistic and unresearched technology/coding talk, Sean Parker as a villain, so much angst.
Notes: All of the love for altogetherisi who read it as it was being written, pressured me into finishing it so she wouldn't have to live in suspense and betaed the whole thing into something readable.
Also the chatfish for the cheerleading and the wordwars. <3 you.
Read at AO3
When Mark returned from lectures, there was a brand new, highly advanced, supercomputer powered robot standing in the middle of the room.
Damn it.
"Mark," said the robot, turning with a smile that seemed to brighten the whole room. It had big innocent eyes, limbs that looked a little too big for its body and it looked like a boy, so at least they'd got that right. "Hello."
Mark pushed past it to get to his desk, and it bounced along after him like a particularly hyperactive puppy.
"How was your lecture? What are you up to? When are Dustin and Chris coming home?"
So Mark's parents had done their research. Mark sighed and sat down in his chair, spinning it so he could meet the robot eye to eye. He held up one hand and the robot slammed its mouth shut obediently. Apparently it could still beam with its mouth closed. "Do you have a name?"
"Wardo," it said brightly, folding its ridiculous legs up so it could sit on the floor at Mark's feet.
"Okay," Mark said. "Wardo. You're a robot."
The robot-Wardo-tilted its head to the side, its bright smile very clearly saying 'I know this is a joke but I will humour you because we are best friends.'
"Seriously," Mark said. "A robot. You're a carefully engineered piece of hardware and software from Cybernet industries programmed to be the best friend money can buy. I filled out a whole personality profile and they built you to match up with me."
Wardo's smile faltered a little but he covered it with a nervous laugh.
"You're the new big thing," Mark continued. "What upper middle class parents get their children for their birthdays."
Wardo glanced down at his hands then back up at Mark. For a long moment they sat there staring at each other. Mark imagined he could see the tiny cameras in Wardo's eyes.
"I don't get it," Wardo said, brow furrowing a little. "What's the joke?"
Damn program. Mark pushed his chair back to sit on the floor opposite Wardo. "You think we've known each other forever, right? You think we're best friends? You don't think it's at all strange that I had to ask your name?"
"Um," Wardo said.
"There's a subroutine in your program that tells you to ignore everything that doesn't quite match up," Mark said. "I'll take that out later, I can't imagine it being anything other than an annoyance."
"Um." Wardo glanced down at his hands again. "So I'm... you asked for me?"
Mark sighed and stood up. "No, I asked for a new laptop. You can't have everything."
*
Dustin arrived twenty minutes later to see Mark coding on his laptop and Wardo staring intently at each side of a rubix cube in turn as though it might fix itself through force of will. "What are you doing?" he asked, stepping around Wardo to lean over and read over Mark's code.
"Jailbreaking my robot," Mark said.
"Cool," Dustin sat down beside him. "Can I help?"
*
Chris got in around dinner time when Dustin was looking through the cable drawer, Mark was tapping his fingers waiting for his code to compile and Wardo was turning each side of the cube in turn, apparently trying to solve it through process of elimination. "Do I want to know?"
Dustin looked up with an Ethernet cable in one hand and a red vine in the other. "Mark has a robot," he said "But it's programmed to never believe it's a robot, so we're hacking it." He gave each of the items careful consideration before tossing the cable and eating the red vine.
"Uh-huh," Chris said in his familiar 'I'm just going to pretend that made sense' voice before turning to Wardo. "And you are?"
Wardo's fingers trembled a little on the cube. "Hey Chris," he said. "I'm Wardo. I suppose you don't remember me either."
Chris frowned, looking between Mark and Dustin before settling on Mark. "He's the robot? Your parents bought you a robotic best friend?"
Mark shrugged. "I asked for a laptop."
"Victory!" Dustin interrupted, rolling over with a USB cable held high. "Now, where do I stick this?"
There was a moment of silence during which Mark blinked, Wardo drew his legs up against his chest and Chris looked seriously tempted to knock his head into something heavy.
"Okay," Dustin said, slower and more carefully. "Everyone can stop thinking dirty thoughts in three... two..."
Chris snatched the cable from his hands and turned to Wardo who was now rocking back and forth a little on the floor. "Didn't he come with a user guide?"
Mark glanced back at his code. "There might have been an email attachment with instructions."
"Where is it?"
"I deleted it and told them to send me a laptop."
Chris let out a low sound of despair and tossed the cable at Mark before crouching down in front of Wardo, touching one hand hesitantly to his shoulder. "Do you come with a manual?"
Wardo buried his face in his knees. "I don't know," he said, muffled by the denim. "I don't know and I'm not a robot and this isn't funny anymore." He turned his head to throw a desperate look at Mark. "I remember your fifth birthday. There were red balloons with fire trucks on and a bouncy castle. You had a cake in the shape of a hedgehog and you ate so much you threw up and I was there."
"It was a caterpillar," Mark said, pushing Wardo's head round and forward to bare the back of his neck. "And no, you weren't. You're not even five years old. Dustin, in a minute I'll need you to search something."
"I remember it."
Chris reached out to take one of Wardo's hands. "Memories constructed from data given by Mark's parents, most likely. You're programmed to believe them without question, it's barbaric and wrong and I'm starting a campaign but-"
"No one cares," Mark said, sliding his fingers carefully across the synthetic flesh on the back of Wardo's neck until he found the small indent. He dug his fingernails into the edge, ignoring Wardo's slight tremble, and pulled up the flap to reveal the control panel complete with USB port, a whole array of switches and a serial number. "Dustin, google a user's guide for a Cybernet AI unit, EdURD0."
Dustin rolled over to his desk and typed something, then paused. "Like Eduardo?"
"You always call me Wardo," Wardo muttered, hands clasping and unclasping on his knees. "Always."
"He's midrange," Dustin called, wheeling back into the room with his computer on his lap. "Pretty decent from the looks of things. Good at math, capable of learning, enough memory for at least ten more years of input data."
Mark picked up the cable and wired Wardo up to his laptop, pulling the computer down onto his lap so he could scroll through Wardo's memory drives. "You think we've known each other all our lives, hey?"
Wardo's head dropped against his knees, pulling the cable tight. "I'm dreaming. This is just some stupid, crazy dream or you're playing a trick or something and it's not funny anymore. I don't like it and I want to wake up." He reached behind him with one hand, feeling where the skin of his neck lifted away to reveal the control panel, his fingers closing around the point where the cable plugged in.
He tore his hand away. "It's a dream. It's just a-"
Mark dragged his new program across to the centre of Wardo's command structure and started it running, reaching out to close his fingers on Wardo's hand. He only meant to stop Wardo from pulling the cable out, but Wardo's fingers closed almost painfully tight on his the moment they were in range.
"He works as a speaker," Dustin said, wheeling in from the other room. "There's a button to open him up and there should be an iPod dock somewhere inside."
"We can look inside?" Mark asked, already scanning the few buttons on the control panel. It's not that he had any plans to open Wardo up and pull out the incredibly powerful circuitboard powering him. He was just curious enough to hit the button and take a quick peek.
Wardo's hand went loose, his head falling forward until it hit his knees.
"Mark," Chris snapped. "What did you-" he broke off as the back of Wardo's head split open, parting his hair to reveal the soft blue glow of the tech inside.
There was an ipod dock secreted neatly at the base of Wardo's skull, a few slots for additional graphics or memory cards but more importantly there was a circuitboard that Mark had never seen the like of outside of advanced computer theory. "Dustin?" he said slowly, pulling his hand free of Wardo's limp fingers. "What hardware should he have installed?"
Dustin rolled a little closer. "Latest intel processor, Cybertronix learning chip and a Flashback memory card all on the Cybernet basic unit?"
"Yeah," Mark said, ghosting his fingers around the curve of Eduardo's skull. "He doesn't have any of that. This is... I don't even know what this is. It shouldn't be possible."
Dustin leant forward to get a look and let out a long whistle. "Wow."
"Okay," Chris said. "All I see is chips and circuitboards. What am I looking at?"
"The most powerful theoretical tech ever," Dustin said. "It's supposed to be impossible to manufacture but the theory is that every time the computer learns something or commits something to memory, storage only increases. This isn't a slow programmed learning curve, this could download, like, all the information in the world ever and understand it." He leant forward a little further. "There's a whole load of inhibitors on it, but theoretically it could be used to run anything and I'm not talking a small company website I'm talking a small country. Or a large country. Or, like, the entirety of google could run off that one chip. No one in their right mind would put it in a basic robot companion."
Mark was still staring at the board, running through everything he could do with it from destroy the world to create world peace. "Chris, if you bought a pack of cornflakes but found a chocolate bar inside and didn't return it, the chocolate bar would still be yours, right?"
Chris frowned. "I think technically yes?"
Mark nodded. "So it's my technology. They made a mistake and I get to keep it." He tilted his head to get a better look at how the board was attached and what the best ways to get it out would be. "Dustin, I need a toolkit and a-"
Chris slammed the two halved of Wardo's head back together, hiding the world's most complex technology beneath the universe's most mysterious hair. "He's yours to have as a friend and look after. If that board is as good as you say it is he should be the most advanced AI out there which means what's in his head belongs to him and it's up to him to decide what he wants to do with it."
"Chris," Mark hissed as Wardo started to stir. "This is futuristic technology. You don't throw the future inside any old robot and then let it make its own mind up as to what happens next."
"I don't care," Chris threw back. "I am not sitting here and letting you tear him apart."
Wardo's head jerked upwards between them, his hand pulling away from his neck. "Did I-" he looked around for a moment. "You switched me off?"
Mark glanced at his laptop to see that-yes-his program had finished running. "What are you?"
"Wardo," Wardo said absently, running his face with one hand. "Eduardo. I'm a robot, I'm-" he turned slowly to look at Mark. "I'm your robot."
"And," Dustin added, waving his laptop. "You're programmed to fall in love with him in six to eight weeks. I know love should be a surprise but I thought I'd tell you because it's Mark and no one should be forced into that without warning."
Wardo looked up at Mark. He had big brown eyes that logically hid cameras but all Mark could see in them was slight confusion and complete trust. Somewhere behind this face was the most powerful circuitboard in the world and all it wanted was to be here with Mark Zuckerberg.
"Yeah," Mark said, reaching out to pull the USB cord out from Wardo's neck and slide the flap closed over the control panel. "You're my robot."
***
"You were called in front of the ad board."
Mark blinks, looking away from the window to the woman sitting opposite him at the long table. "That's not what happened."
Gretchen frowns-a neat little tilt of the brows-and consults her notes. "You weren't called in front of the administrative board?"
"No, back. Back when I met Wardo-I didn't-I wasn't going to break him up for parts. Where would you even get that?"
"The data is a transcript of the video recorded by the robotic unit's external cameras while in standby mode. The Eduardo unit was programmed to send back-ups of all its data to the Cybernet servers at regular intervals." She pulls up another page of notes. "You successfully disabled the function on your third day of ownership along with a whole list of other core functionalities of the unit." She slides the page across for Sy to pick up. Mark doesn't bother looking.
"There were inhibitors on the chip and the other hardware to make him seem more human. I disabled them and I cut the links to Cybernet industries as it was detailed in the terms and conditions that jailbreaking Wardo would result in him being cut off from updates so it didn't seem necessary to keep the link in place."
"Why did you want him less human?"
Mark swallows and tries to work out the best way to word this. "At the time I wasn't interested in the personality construct programmed to become my friend but I was interested in the hardware which the construct could help me understand. I left Wardo's personality intact but took out the inhibitors that stopped him using the hardware to its full potential."
Gretchen nods, taking a few notes. The man beside her looks sour. "So you were called in front of the ad board?"
Mark picks up his pen and presses it against his note pad. "It wasn't a big deal. We were messing around and we crashed the network."
"How did you crash the network?"
"It doesn't-"
"Mark," Sy says. "Answer the question."
Mark twists his pen on the pad, digging through the top layers of paper. "We wanted to test the capabilities of Wardo's tech so we hooked him up to the internet and he tried to download it. There was too much data and it overloaded the Harvard servers. I was given a month's academic suspension and instructions to take better care of my technology." He stabs his pen hard against the page. "It wasn't a big deal."
"It made the Crimson," Getchen remarks, pulling out a clipping.
Mark doesn't look at it. He knows what it says, all that shit about proper robot care and how a computer science major should know better. "It was a slow news day."
"So one week into ownership, you had already expressed an interest in dismantling the unit, removed some of the humanising functions of the unit and put the unit in a state where it could have been overloaded and destroyed. I think this shows-"
"No," Mark interrupts, ignoring Gretchen in favour of the man to her left. "No, you know as well as I do that Wardo wouldn't have overloaded. The servers would always have gone down before his memory chip filled up. I knew that, Dustin knew that and Wardo knew the risks when he said we could."
"Oh Wardo said you could," the man drawls, leaning forward in his chair a little. "How lucky we all are that you remember Eduardo giving you permission to do all of these things since we can no longer ask him. I mean, if it wasn't for you remembering we might have cause to doubt that he had ever said anything at all."
Mark clenches his fingers around the pen and wonders how effective it would be as a missile flying straight into the man's smug, self important mouth. "He was my robot. I would never have hurt him."
"You are truly delusional, Mr Zucker-"
"At least I'm not filing stupid lawsuits far too late to actually fix my mistakes."
"Because we all know how you've never made any mis-"
"I make it eleven thirty-five," Sy interrupts, grabbing Mark's arm to drag him away. "Let's call that lunch."
***
"A robot called me a dick today," Mark said, slamming the dorm room door shut behind him. "Some generic friendship bot who was in my lecture taking notes because its owner couldn't be bothered to get out of bed. I mean, surely even with its limited intelligence drive it would know that I was less of a dick than the asshole that bought it."
"You say that," Chris said from the sofa. "But we all watched Wardo doing your homework yesterday."
Mark waved this off with one hand. "He likes math. He's also good at it because he actually has intelligence installed." He grabbed a beer from the fridge. "I mean, anyone could see it was just a stupid prank and Wardo barely even started to overheat before the servers crashed and everyone knows he survived." Mark had barely landed on the sofa when Chris's bottle opener was in his hand. "If the fucking Winklevii can figure out that Wardo isn't a normal robot, surely another robot could work it out."
Dustin rolled into the room. "What's a Winklevii?"
"Tall, big shoulders, rows crew, two of them." Mark opens the bottle and takes a long swallow. "They found me after I walked out of my lecture."
Chris immediately pulled away. "You walked out of class? Mark-"
"Don't bother telling me off," Mark said. "Wardo has a lecture saved for times like these and I'd hate to disappoint him by learning my lesson before he has a chance to play it to me. Anyway, if I hadn't left I wouldn't have bumped into the Winklevii and-" He glanced towards his closed bedroom door. "Is Wardo still switched off?"
"We haven't been in there today," Dustin said, rolling over to them. "What did big, strong and seeing double want?"
"Chris, could you go check on him? If I left him off, bring him out." Chris gave him a long look. "Please," Mark said. "It's been a long day of being intimidated by rowers and hated by robots."
"I bet Wardo could out row the Winklevii," Dustin said thoughtfully. "In fact, we could just rig up an engine to plug into his USB port and power the boat that way. Unless that's cheating."
"I am going to get Wardo," Chris said. "So you can repeat that to him and he can do whatever he did after you tried to hook him up to a popcorn machine that made you creep around guiltily for days."
"It's not fair," Dustin said, rolling up next to Mark. "He has Bambi eyes." He leant his head on the back of the sofa and watched Chris disappear into Mark's room and shut the door. "Okay, so what is so terrible it can't be said in front of Chris?"
Mark looked down at his beer. "The Winklevii heard about us crashing the network. They think I somehow upgraded Wardo's circuit board on my own and they want it."
"They want you to upgrade all their circuit boards to holy-shit-Wardo circuit boards?"
Mark glanced at his bedroom door to check that Chris wasn't emerging with Wardo. "They're building a website," he said, quickly and quietly. "Like match.com for Harvard guys-they also asked me to code it for them-but they want to run it off something simple like, say, a single computer. They only need one board."
Dustin's disappointed face says all Mark really needs to know. "Are you asking me because you think I'm more likely than Chris to say yes or because I'm less likely to hurt you when I say no?"
Mark swallowed and repositioned his hands on the neck of his beer. "Their final offer was three hundred thousand dollars, Dustin. Three hundred thousand and we don't even have to-we could pick up a normal Cybernet circuit board for five hundred bucks and transfer most of Wardo onto that instead. Chris wouldn't even notice. Just think of all the things we could do with the money. I have this idea for a website-it would blow the Winklevii's idea out of the water but we'd need some start-up cash and we don't know anyone with that kind of money."
Mark's bedroom door swung open. "I can't find the on switch and he's heavier than he looks," Chris said, stepping back into the room. "Get in here and switch him on. Dustin, tell me what the Winklevii wanted."
Mark met Dustin's eyes and tried to make his expression sufficiently pleading as he stood up and headed for his room.
"They have an idea for a website," Dustin said behind him. "And they've come to the clearly ridiculous conclusion that they want Mark's help with it. Clearly in a week they will be so fed up of him they will change their minds."
Mark closed the door behind him. Chris had got as far as pulling Wardo out from under the bed. It wasn't the greatest storage space ever, but Mark's room was small and a switched off Wardo was too still and heavy to share a bed with.
Mark lifted his head up to reach underneath for the control panel and flick the small on/off switch into its other position. Wardo's fingers twitched, his eyelids flickered, and he sat up so fast Mark had to jerk backwards so they didn't headbutt each other by accident.
"I'm awake," Wardo said, then turned his head to see Mark sitting back. "Shit, sorry, did I hit you? What time is it?"
Wardo would run fine off a less powerful computer. Mark passed robots in the hallways every day. Sure, their expressions had no subtleties and they didn't have the random knowledge of a sizable chunk of the internet stored in their memory banks but they could run a personality construct.
Wardo turned his head to look at Mark properly, eyes wider than normal in defiance of all laws of physics. "Mark?" he said, sounding so hesitant that Mark moved forward to take his hand before he really registered what was going on.
"Is there a problem?" he asked, reaching up to close the flap over the control panel. "Are you functioning okay?"
Wardo reached up with his free hand, touching his fingertips to Mark's cheek. Five small points of cold lab-grown skin that slowly traced the lines of his face, following the curve of his lips and the slight frown of his brow.
"Can you see okay? Do you need me to take a look inside?" He reached back for the control panel but before he could even touch Wardo's neck, Wardo flinched back, pulling away fast enough that he hit the bed and his hand was torn out of Mark's.
"Don't!" He reached back, pressing his palm against the back of his neck as though to stop Mark getting at it. "I'm fine, my eyes are fine, everything's fine, please don't sell me." He said the last bit fast, then turned his head away.
His hands were shaking, eyes flickering closed and face twisted up in something like fear.
Mark couldn't stop himself moving forward, reaching out to touch Wardo's shaking hand and his stupid frumpy hair. "Hey, it's okay. It's okay, I'm not-why would you say that?"
Wardo swallowed and looked down at the hand shaking in his lap. "I heard-the Winklevii. They want to wipe me and use me for a website. You said-you need the money."
"Chris said you were switched off," Mark said, stupidly. He tried to remind himself that it was three hundred thousand dollars for one tiny circuit board but it was so hard to think objectively when Wardo was curled up by his bed rocking back and forth.
"Standby," Wardo mumbled. "I was on standby, I don't switch off and I can still see and hear but I wasn't going to tell you because you wanted a normal robot and they switch off but I heard you and I don't want to die."
Mark stared at him for a long moment because-because he'd been turning Wardo off at night and sticking him out of the way like he was just another computer even though his brain was just as complicated as Mark's and probably more complicated than any fucking Winklevii's.
But he hadn't even wanted a robot and his parents never listened and he didn't need this responsibility. A normal robot on a normal chip wouldn't be intelligent enough to understand the complexities of hurt feelings. They wouldn't get sad and confused and they would turn off whenever they weren't needed. Wardo was complicated and deep like a person and Mark did not sign up to look after a whole person. He couldn't look after so much as a plant.
"I have to keep reminding myself that you've only known me for a week," Wardo said, unfolding himself a little so he could press his cheek against Mark's shoulder. "I've known you as far back as I can remember but you met me a week ago. You don't remember everything we've done together, all the plans we had." He closed his eyes. "It's so strange, how I can be nothing to you when you're everything to me."
Mark let his fingers slide through Wardo's hair, feeling the slow pump of Wardo's cooling system against his chest. Like a heartbeat.
"Don't transfer me to another chip," Wardo breathed. "I've seen those things and I don't want-you should remember me like this." He took his hand slowly off the back of his neck, resting it against Mark's knee.
He was circuits. Circuits and wires and silicon and somewhere inside him a fan was blowing so warm air would brush Mark's neck like breath.
Mark pushed him off and stood up, walking over to push open the door. Chris and Dustin were sitting on the sofa, pretending they hadn't been watching the door like hawks. "New rule," Mark snapped. "Nobody is turning Wardo off again. Not ever. And we're going to beat the fucking Winklevii at their own game and nobody is selling anybody to anyone for anything."
Chris sighed in his ' I knew you weren't telling me everything' way but he was smiling. Dustin beamed, tilted his head to the side and asked if he was allowed to sell Chris to Billy Olsen for cupcakes.
Mark shut the door on both of them and turned back to Wardo. "I didn't ask for a robot at all," he said. "But I got you and I don't know what a normal friendship robot would be like but if they're nothing like you then I'm not interested so you should just act like you and be honest with me."
Wardo stared up at him for a long moment while Mark bounced on his toes and waited to be told that he was an asshole or a dick and if Mark wasn't planning on breaking him up right now, Wardo would just leave.
Then Wardo's face broke into a bright smile and he bounced across the room to pull Mark into a hug, burying his face against the side of Mark's neck. "I knew you were the Mark I remember."
Wardo turned his head and Mark thought they were pulling apart so he moved too and the kiss that was aimed at his cheek brushed his lips instead. A moment of stillness, then Wardo kissed him again, one hand moving up to cup Mark's neck and tilt his head back.
Wardo's mouth was warm, his lips soft and his teeth hard where they bit lightly on Mark's bottom lip.
Mark closed his eyes and held Wardo closer. "I'll try to be."
***
"I don't understand," says the woman Mark thinks is called Marylin. She's pulled a salad out of her bag to eat in the room. Mark looks across the empty chairs at her and wonders if Sy told her to keep an eye on him. "If they programmed the robot to fall in love with you, can't they just look at the list of instructions and see if they programmed him to give you whatever you wanted?"
Wardo always used to hit Mark for laughing at other people's ignorance. He doesn't really feel like laughing now. "Try to define love," he says instead. "Describe it in short, simple words that can be typed into a computer program."
"I-" her fork hovers in the air over the salad. "I guess it's needing someone or, wanting them to be around? Wanting them close but not just as a friend."
"Tell a robot to need another person and they'd crash whenever that person left the room. 'Not just as a friend' covers everything from apathy to 'kill on sight.'" Mark shakes his head. "You can't write a list of statements to define love, you can't write it into code." He taps his fingers on the table. "Do you know how a personality construct works?"
She shakes her head.
"It's just like a person," Mark says. "It starts with the very basics of a personality, the building blocks of life. These come from a questionnaire that each person fills out when they're purchasing a robot. After that, memories are installed and the personality is left to process each one, growing more advanced with every reaction. Once it is installed on a circuit board and implanted into a body unit, living is just gathering more memories and letting the personality react to them."
"So if there isn't a program, how do they make it fall in love?"
Mark shrugs. "They didn't make Wardo fall in love with me. They made him to be a perfect match to my personality, made sure I was his type and he was mine. The rest happened naturally." He can't help smiling a little at the memory. "His personality was etched in every part of that circuit board, colouring everything he did and everything he saw. They think they own it, but why would they? It was Wardo's head, Wardo's tech, Wardo's in every sense of the word. They put so much money into making him human and now they claim he couldn't make his own choices."
"If he was human," Marylin says, soft and surprisingly free from accusation. "There'd be a different word for what you did."
Mark closes his eyes, all traces of a smile fading. "He was a person and he was in love. That's all."
***
"Okay," Mark said, pouring out three more shots and lining them up on the floor between his knees and Wardo's. "So do you have any memories that I'm not in?"
Wardo thought for a long moment, even though he had a search function installed that would let him know in nanoseconds, then downed the three shots. "No."
"Really?" Mark picked up the bottle to refill the classes then paused. "And that didn't strike you as strange? Were we Siamese twins in your memory? Did someone handcuff us together at birth?"
Wardo punched him in the arm, far softer than he was capable of. "It was just another of those things I was programmed not to notice until you went into my head and took it out." He looked down at the replenished shot glasses. "How many of these do I have to drink for you to scientifically establish that I can't get drunk?"
Mark looked down at them and tried to remember how many Wardo had already done. The bottle was definitely nearly empty now as opposed to half full when Chris and Dustin had left for their Caribbean party. "You should be able to get drunk. I've seen robots drunk."
Wardo shrugged. "I can't. I bet you any money it wasn't real drunk, they just throw an inhibitor in to fuck with our functions when a sensor detects alcohol. You probably took it out without even realising."
Mark picked up one of the last shot glasses and downed it instead. "For that I apologize."
Wardo laughed and punched him again. Now he'd worked out how to control his strength so he didn't bruise, he seemed to believe casual violence was totally okay. "So I know I'm not human, I don't backup and I can't get drunk. I'm the uniquest robot around."
Mark downed the second shot so he wouldn't have to think about Wardo's back-up system. "Yes," he agreed. "All other robots know what is and isn't a word." He picked up the third shot. "Anyway, I doubt Cybernet's back-up units are suitable for storing the amount of internet you have crammed into your brain."
Wardo beamed. "You should hook me up to a projector, I have some kick ass porn up here."
"You didn't tell Dustin that, did you? Please don't suggest that to Dustin."
Wardo pushed him and Mark had probably had a bit too much vodka earlier because he fell over way too easily. He grabbed Wardo on the way down so they collapsed on top of each other. The nearly empty vodka bottle span off across the carpet but more importantly Wardo's hands landed on either side of Mark's face and Wardo stilled, his lips less than an inch away from Mark's.
"I can get drunk," Mark said, reaching up to cup the back of Wardo's neck with one hand. "What's your excuse?"
Wardo leant in to press his lips lightly against the corner of Mark's mouth. "I need an excuse now?"
Mark tugged him forward into a real kiss. Wardo let his knees rest on the floor on either side of Mark's hips, his legs pressing tight against Mark's thighs and his tongue sliding into Mark's mouth. Mark's free hand slid up to push under the ridiculous shirts Wardo always wore and drag across his bare back.
Wardo moved his hands to Mark's shoulders and somehow flipped them both in one movement so that Mark was lying on top of him without breaking the kiss. Mark had the distinct advantage of not being filled with a tonne of heavy electronics so he could rest all his weight against Wardo and Wardo's hands were free to slide into his hair.
"What did Dustin say before he left?" Mark breathed as Wardo kissed a trail from his mouth to his ear then back down his jaw.
"No sex on the couch," Wardo said breathlessly. "And Chris outlawed the table."
Mark slid both hands up under Wardo's shirt-tearing a handful of buttons in the process. "No one said anything about the floor?"
"Nope."
"Good." The rest of the buttons tore just as easily and Mark had the whole expanse of Wardo's chest spread out before him.
"See," Wardo said, shivering as Mark dropped a kiss against his collarbone. "It's moments like this that make me glad my every thought is no longer backed up on someone else's database."
Mark dragged one hand up Wardo's bare side and kissed down the side of his neck. "I don't want them to have a backup," he said against Wardo's skin, because he was selfish and a shitty person and he didn't care. "I don't want anyone else to have you."
Wardo's smile widened and his fingers tightened on Mark's hair, because mistaking Mark's possessive jealousy for affection was something he did all too well. "Yeah, I like you a lot too."
And Mark could've said 'that's not what I meant' but he had meant what he said and if Wardo chose to interpret it as... whatever, well, that was his decision.
Mark pushed his thoughts away and pulled Wardo in for another kiss.
*
Chris came in with a hand over his eyes. "I hear typing," he said. "But after Wednesday I make no assumptions about what that could mean."
Mark deleted a bracket and added another line of input data. There was a movement against his leg and he looked down in time to see Wardo raise his head and wave in the direction of the doorway. Mark nudged him with one foot. "Wired in means no distractions."
Wardo turned his head to kiss Mark's knee. "I hear sleep also means no distractions. Just think about it, lying in bed with your eyes closed and no distractions at all."
Mark had to take a hand away from his keyboard to attack Wardo's hair which not only stopped him coding but was a complete waste of time because Wardo's hair looked the same whatever you did to it. "Stop talking and work."
Chris dropped his bag beside the doorway. "You don't actually have to do his homework for him just because he asks you, Wardo. We all know you're capable of saying no."
"It's not homework," Mark said. "He's writing algorithms for the site."
"Ah." Chris turned so he was headed for the fridge instead of his bedroom. "This would be the super magic awesome site that you keep coding even though you can't afford any of the hardware required to get it to run?"
Mark took his hand out of Wardo's hair to add another line of code. "I applied for three credit cards and a loan today." Wardo passed his pad of paper up and leant back so his cheek was pressed against Mark's leg.
Chris opened the fridge and pulled out two bottles of beer. "I see. Did you remember to go to class?"
"I reminded him," Wardo said, because he was a complete traitor. "But he didn't go."
"It's all a waste of time anyway," Mark said, and all these distractions were causing him to make mistakes. He wished Chris would go into his room so it would just be Mark and Wardo's warmth pressed against his leg. "Either I already know it or I don't care." He stretched out a hand to Chris. "Thanks."
Chris raised his eyebrows and sat on the sofa with both bottles of beer. "Get your own, I need at least two for this conversation. Have you eaten today?"
Apparently he was staying. Mark took his hand back off the keyboard to rummage under the desk for his headphones. "Wardo made me a sandwich."
"What was in it?"
Mark shrugged. "Food."
Chris nodded. "Uh-huh, and when was the last time you slept?"
Mark shook his head but Wardo looked up. "He fell asleep at his keyboard for three hours earlier, but he keeps refusing to go to bed."
Mark stopped rummaging for his headphones and looked down at where Wardo was carefully not meeting his eyes. "You are a terrible, terrible friendship bot. You promised to wake me up if I fell asleep."
"You haven't been to bed in forty eight hours," Wardo pointed out. "Only one of us runs on batteries."
"That's what red bull is for. The Winklevii have a similar idea, remember? It's shitty and terrible but if it goes live first then the audience will split. It's all about users. We have to be up and stay up and get users and keep users and-"
"And not fall asleep on our keyboards."
"Guys?" Chris said, reaching underneath him to pull out a crumpled piece of paper. "Can you stop acting like an old married couple for five seconds. Did someone get punched?" he glanced sideways at the couch. "And, wait, is that another one?"
"Wardo," Mark said, electing to give up on code for as long as it took to get Chris out. "Everyone wants the best robot on campus, I've lost all respect for Final clubs. Are we done?"
"How do they know he's special?"
"There's a Cybernet guy poking around campus and shockingly the most intelligent students at Harvard are capable of putting two and two together after the internet stunt." He read over the last few lines of code but what he had been planning to type next had slipped out of his head. "Hey Chris, don't you have a credit card?"
"No," Chris said. "No, you are not sucking me into this."
"I need server time and a domain name and a router and a dedicated linux box running apache with a mySQL backend. It'll only be about one thousand dollars to get it all online and you can have... fifteen percent of the company."
Chris tossed the two letters onto the sofa and drained the rest of his beer. "I'm going to take a nap. Wardo, don't let Mark bully you too much."
"Can I bully him?" Wardo asked.
"Any time you like." The door swung shut behind him and Wardo turned his head so his eyes were fixed on Mark.
"Please come to bed with me," he said, pulling out the ultimate puppy eyes and leaning his head sideways against Mark's thigh with his lips slightly parted as if to say 'this is what you are turning down.'
"I just want to finish this page," Mark said, reading over the last three lines of code at breakneck speed and typing too fast to worry about spelling mistakes.
Then there was an arm like an iron bar around his stomach and his hands were moving away from the keyboard as Wardo slung him over one shoulder.
"One page," Mark protested, putting up a token amount of resistance even though he knew it was a complete waste of time. "Put me down or I'll-I'll reinstall your strength inhibitors and I'll download you onto my laptop so you have to run as a text only chatbot or I'll just take out your primary circuit board and stick you in a robot dog or something so all you can do is bark."
Wardo dropped onto his bed, manoeuvring his grip so that Mark was cradled against his chest instead of flung over one shoulder. The room was dark and Wardo was warm, his stupid hair tickling the side of Mark's face.
"I'll find Dustin's porn collection," Mark continued. "And download it all onto your memory card with innocent names so you're just scanning for a memory and bam lesbian space pirate porn."
"Uh-huh," Wardo said, combing one hand through his hair and kissing his forehead. "Good night, Mark."
"I'll sell you to the Winklevii," Mark said and his eyes weren't drifting closed and that wasn't a yawn he was just getting ready to fight his way free so he could get back to his website. "Only I won't tell them that you're actually the computer so they'll think you're a butler robot and you'll have to do what they say all the time." Wardo was actually really, really comfortable and Mark was totally just going to close his eyes for like thirty seconds to summon the energy to fight his way free.
"'M not gonna sell you to the Winklevii," Mark said, his voice muffled by Wardo's shirt. "'M not gonna do anything you don't want me to."
"I know," Wardo said, but Mark could hear him smiling. "Go to sleep, you idiot."
Mark buried his face in Wardo's neck and closed his eyes for a minute.
***
"Facebook went live in February, 2004."
Mark opens his eyes and looks up at Gretchen's impatient face. "TheFacebook," he says, to see her lips purse and her fingers tighten on her notes. "TheFacebook launched on February 4th, 2004." His head is hurting and he wants to curl up, his head tilting to the side the way it always does before his subconscious can catch up to the fact that Wardo won't be there to lean on. "Wardo went to a phoenix initiation to get the mailing list and we emailed the link out."
"How did you afford the costs of running the site?"
Mark drags a hand back through his hair. "The same way anyone runs a website. I maxed out three credit cards and my overdraft to rent equipment and server space."
Wardo should be here. He should be here to smile and know all the right words to placate everyone so that somehow no one leaves with what they wanted but everyone is happy with what they have.
Mark hasn't needed to tell anyone this story in so long now.
He misses Wardo more than he ever knew he could.
"Wardo was listed on the masthead as a co-founder, yes?" Gretchen asks.
Mark nods and Sy elbows him in the ribs to remind him that there is someone typing everything up. "Yes," he says. "It was more of a joke than anything, because he was always around while I was building it." He reaches for the glass of water in front of him. "He isn't on there anymore."
The man beside Gretchen laughs-a snide noise with no trace of actual humour. "Of course, it couldn't possibly be that you finally realized Eduardo still belonged to us and you didn't want to risk us having a claim on your website."
Mark almost expects the glass to shatter between his fingers, but he's no robot. "You have no grounds to claim a stake in anything related to Facebook." He's leaning forward, the water sloshing back and forth as his hand shakes. "Mark my words, Mr Mahoney. You can fight for my time, my money and my technology but you will not lay a finger on my website."
Sy rests a hand on Mark's shoulder and tugs him lightly back into his chair. Mark finally takes a drink, but it does nothing to dislodge the lump in his throat.
"Mr Zuckerberg," Gretchen says, shifting her notes as though nothing is wrong. "Can you tell me what happened after the initial launch?"
Mark drops the glass on the table and picks up his pen, drawing circles within circles within circles all over the pad they gave him. "Is everyone here over eighteen?"
*
"If you needed money to start a website, why not sell the robot to my clients? You knew they had money and you weren't using the unit for your project."
Mark keeps his hands under the table so no one will see them ball into fists. "Wardo was a birthday present from my parents, he made a useful assistant and he was also my best friend. He wasn't some cheap trinket to be torn up and pawned for cash."
The Winklevii look venomous, Narendra snorts and Gage raises his eyebrows. "So if I wanted to meet with him now I could, I suppose? If that's how you treat your friends, I'd hate to be your enemy."
Mark presses his fists against his legs and says nothing.
***
Wardo's leg was pressed against Mark's, one of his arms resting against the back of Mark's chair. His fingers kept brushing the shoulder of Mark's hoodie, not enough to touch Mark's arm but enough to distract him from the speaker.
"-the first artificial intelligence was white text on a black screen but people's reactions to it were still so strong. This was a computer that they could talk to, that they could have an actual conversation with. So Joe came to me and said 'Look, it's going to happen without us. We have to start it now.' And so I said, 'Okay, you're right. Let's get personality constructs out there.'"
A few people laughed, mostly those with the awkward, perfectly upright figures of robots sitting next to them. The others, the ones who had only spoken with constructs online or in passing sat in polite bemusement.
Wardo slumped his head on Mark's shoulder and blew a line up and down against his neck. "We already know all this," he said. "I'm the next stage in robot evolution, I can slump and smile when I'm sad and remember the entirety of Paradise Lost. Can we do something interesting?"
"-at this stage we were working with the most basic robots. Unless you paid extra for a full computer-which at the time meant your robot was three times heavier and five times more bulky-you got three emotions, tops."
Wardo's fingers trailed across Mark's leg. "Mark. Maaark. Maa-aark. Maybe TheFacebook's crashed. We've left it on its own for like three hours now. Don't you think we should go check?"
Mark pulls out his phone to show that he has no new messages. "Dustin is with it. It hasn't crashed."
"But it might. It might be preparing to crash and if we don't leave now we won't get there on time and Dustin won't know what to do."
"I promise you, TheFacebook is not going to crash."
"Not ever?"
Mark rolled his eyes. "Not ever. Come on, Wardo, you watch me sleep for eight hours a night, how is this more boring?"
"Hah," Wardo said, twisting in his seat so he could lie back with his feet on an empty chair and his head in Mark's lap. "Like you ever sleep eight hours straight."
Mark curled his fingers in Wardo's hair.
*
"Free," Wardo said, twirling around on the path and almost falling into a bush. "Do you smell that, Mark? That is the smell of freedom."
Mark pushed his hands into his pockets and watched Wardo twirl a pretty Chinese looking girl who smiled shyly and blushed when Wardo kissed her hand, then ran over to her friend to whisper something and giggle. "It was a two hour lecture," Mark said, leaning against the wall to watch Eduardo spin across a puddle, his legs flying in all directions and sending him into a heap on the floor. "Remind me why I'm friends with you?"
Wardo shook hair out of his eyes, sending drops of water flying in all directions. "Because I'm the latest thing, the future of technology the-what was it-pinnacle of modern engineering." He held out a hand imperiously.
Mark rolled his eyes and ignored the hand. "You're an idiot," he said. "And I'm not taking that hand because I know you and I have better things to do with my evening than wonder around being pulled into puddles."
Wardo made a face much like a wounded deer, then beamed and flipped onto his feet. "We should go to a bar. This pinnacle of modern engineering wants to go to a bar."
"Mark? Mark Zuckerberg?"
Mark turned to see three guys standing by the exit, watching him. None of them looked like robots, but some robots were better at subtlety than others. "Can I help you?"
"I'm Stuart Singer," the middle guy said. "I'm in your O.S. lab."
Mark tried to place him, but couldn't. He tried to remember when he'd last gone to his O.S. lab but couldn't recall that either. "Sure." Wardo stepped up behind him, pressing his warm chest against Mark's back. Mark took a moment to note that Wardo was warmer than he should be; that was definitely something worth checking out. Then he realized O.S. lab guy was still talking.
"Awesome job with TheFacebook."
"Awesome," echoed one of the other guys who could also have been in Mark's O.S. lab.
Mark nodded, reaching back for Wardo's hand and reflecting that actually they should have just gone to the bar. "Thanks."
"I swear he was looking at you when he said the future could soon be living among us."
Mark's attention was pulled back into the present by the third guy who wasn't looking at Mark, but staring over his shoulder. Wardo bent down a little, as though he could hide behind Mark's hair. "Uh, I don't think-"
"I don't even know who the speaker was," the guy said, though his eyes were a little too sharp and way too focused for Mark's taste.
"Bill Mahoney," Wardo said, too quickly, tugging away from Mark without releasing his hand. "Founder and lead researcher at Cybernet. We have to go."
"We could come with you, I'd love to talk about your work."
Sometimes Mark forgot how strong Wardo was. He was dragged almost a metre through the mud before his feet managed to catch up with his body and he could half jog to keep a position by Wardo's side. "What was that about?"
Wardo shook his head. "Nothing. I don't know. I didn't like him."
Mark froze long enough that he got dragged through a puddle. "Do you think Mahoney recognized you? Is that what you were worried about?"
Wardo shook his head, then nodded, then shook it again. "They didn't know what unit the circuit board ended up in but they would have known the approximate time so he could have come here to check up on me and if anyone told him." He dragged his free hand back through his hair, somehow achieving the impossible and actually slicking it back for two whole seconds. "I know you think all this-" he waved at his head. "-is yours because of their mistake but they won't see it that way."
Mark took advantage of the moment of stillness to wrap his arms tight around Wardo. For a moment he was stiff as a board, but slowly he relaxed against Mark's shoulder. "It's going to be okay," Mark said. "I won't let anyone take you."
Wardo buried his face in Mark's neck and wrapped gangly arm around Mark's waist. "Can we go to that bar now?"
Mark kissed his jaw. "What if TheFacebook crashes while you're getting me drunk?"
That got a small smile. "No crashing," Wardo said, his voice muffled against Mark's skin. "Ever. You promised me."
"Yeah," Mark said. "Promise."
*
Wardo's hands were everywhere, his lips pressed against Mark's cheek, his neck, pulling the zip of his hoodie down to bite a line across his collarbone. Mark's head slammed back into the tiles, cheek pressing against 'fuck Harvard Law' and 'DM <3s TASIHA'. Hands shoved his hoodie up, slender fingers tracing his ill defined chest, dipping in and out of his belly button as they traced ornate patterns across his skin.
The bathroom door opened and slammed. The sound of footsteps came in, followed by knocking cubicle doors and taps turning on. "Wardo," Mark hissed.
Wardo looked up at him, eyes shadowed by dark eyelashes, and one hand off Mark's stomach to press an index finger against his lips. "Shh."
His second hand slipped around between Mark's back and the wall of the stall, fingers pushing under Mark's waistband to touch bare skin.
Mark bit down on his lip and clenched his fists tight. Wardo pressed up against him, catching Mark's moan in his mouth and holding him in a silent kiss as his second hand reached to tug at Mark's belt.
"Fuck," Mark moaned as softly as he could bear when Wardo pushed his pants down and his lips left Mark's mouth, his head dropping lower and lower.
Wardo had to lift one of Mark's hands off the wall, stretching out the fingers one by one and resting it in his hair because Mark was gone, Mark couldn't think he just clenched his fist again in Wardo's hair and tilted his head back so he wouldn't have to look at Wardo's face, Wardo's mouth around him, Wardo's half closed eyes.
"Do it," Wardo breathed and Mark came in a shivering, helpless wreck.
"God," he said, hoping whoever came in had left but not really caring because Wardo's hands were tight on his hips even as he pulled away. "God, fuck, Wardo, fuck."
Wardo stood up and kissed Mark again, pressing his tongue back into Mark's mouth and Mark could feel each of Wardo's fingertips as a separate point of pressure on his skin, each almost hard enough to bruise but not quite. Not quite.
Wardo's hands slid up under his hoodie again. God, he was still in a hoodie, his pants wrapped around his ankles getting damp from the floor. Wardo wasn't undressed at all, the soft cotton of his pants warm where his thighs encased Mark's. "Mark," Wardo whispered, kissing and biting his way down Mark's jaw, his fingers pressing even harder against Mark's skin. "Mark, Mark."
"I love you," Mark said, one hand fisted in Wardo's hair and Wardo suddenly still against him. "You know that, right? I fucking love you."
Wardo's body was pressed against him, his hands tight on Mark's hips and it took Mark a moment to realize he wasn't moving. It took another moment for him to smell smoke.
"Wardo?" He reached up with his free hand to shake Wardo's shoulder. "Hey, are you ok - holy shit is your arm on fire?"
Wardo blinked at him. His face was slowly rearranging itself into a smile like his system had just been forced to reboot and he looked down at his arm just in time for the tiny spark to catch into actual flames across the arm of his jacket. "Shit. Fuck, Mark."
They tumbled out of the cubicle all flailing limbs and alarmed cries and threw Wardo's jacket and shirt to the floor. Mark pulled his pants up and jumped up and down on the burning clothes while Wardo ran his arm under the cold tap, watching the water steam up from the surface of his thankfully fireproof skin.
Mark looked up from the floor and met Wardo's eyes through the smoke and steam and suddenly they were laughing. Rich, half hysterical laughter of 'how is this our lives' and 'thank god we're okay'.
"I said I loved you and you caught fire," Mark said, falling across the floor to lean against Wardo's bare chest. "You caught fire from my love."
Wardo blushed and pushed him and tried to hide a smile. "You knew my cooling system's on the brink. You knew and you went off saying things that would overload my processors and disable the coolant pump."
"Disable the coolant pump," Mark said. "Catch fire out of love. Same difference."
"You," Wardo said, spinning around to push Mark back against the sinks. "You are the most ridiculous, obnoxious," Each adjective was punctuated with a kiss to Mark's cheeks, chin, forehead, throat. "Crazy, obscure, brilliant and I can't even believe you."
Mark wrapped his arms right around Wardo's waist and Wardo buried his face in the side of Mark's neck, his breathy laugher pressed into Mark's skin. "Anyway," Mark said. "It's been, like, four months. Shouldn't you love me back by now? Do I need to call customer services and complain?"
Wardo let out a noise that was either a despairing laugh or a hysterical sob. "You are an idiot," he mumbled into Mark's skin. "Seriously, Mark, you are the stupidest genius I have ever met."
"Says the robot who caught fire from my love."
Wardo pushed his face further against Mark's skin, muffling his laughter even as he shook. He held Mark tighter, pulling him close as though maybe if he tried hard enough they could melt into one. "You're such a complete idiot. I've been in love with you forever."
Oh, Mark thought as Wardo's mouth opened to press against his neck. He felt a sudden wave of sympathy for Wardo because if he was a robot he would be a fucking furnace right now.
"Oh," he managed out loud. That was not fair, all Wardo had to do was a system reboot, Mark didn't have the luxury of switching himself off and back on again. "That's-oh."
Wardo lifted his head and if he was human there would have been tears of laughter all over his cheeks. "You are such an idiot," he said again.
Mark felt his face relax into a smile. "Yeah," he said. "But you love me anyway."
"I do," Wardo agreed. "Fuck but I do." Then his mouth was on Mark's again and his hands were lifting Mark up onto the sinks. Anyone could come in at any moment but Mark found he didn't care at all.
Part 2
Pairing: Mark/Eduardo
Length: 18,900 words
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Mark's parents buy him Eduardo - a state-of-the-art, brand new, tailor made robotic best friend - for his birthday. The only problem is, Mark asked for a laptop.
Warnings: Language, make-outs, allusions to violence, completely unrealistic and unresearched technology/coding talk, Sean Parker as a villain, so much angst.
Notes: All of the love for altogetherisi who read it as it was being written, pressured me into finishing it so she wouldn't have to live in suspense and betaed the whole thing into something readable.
Also the chatfish for the cheerleading and the wordwars. <3 you.
Read at AO3
When Mark returned from lectures, there was a brand new, highly advanced, supercomputer powered robot standing in the middle of the room.
Damn it.
"Mark," said the robot, turning with a smile that seemed to brighten the whole room. It had big innocent eyes, limbs that looked a little too big for its body and it looked like a boy, so at least they'd got that right. "Hello."
Mark pushed past it to get to his desk, and it bounced along after him like a particularly hyperactive puppy.
"How was your lecture? What are you up to? When are Dustin and Chris coming home?"
So Mark's parents had done their research. Mark sighed and sat down in his chair, spinning it so he could meet the robot eye to eye. He held up one hand and the robot slammed its mouth shut obediently. Apparently it could still beam with its mouth closed. "Do you have a name?"
"Wardo," it said brightly, folding its ridiculous legs up so it could sit on the floor at Mark's feet.
"Okay," Mark said. "Wardo. You're a robot."
The robot-Wardo-tilted its head to the side, its bright smile very clearly saying 'I know this is a joke but I will humour you because we are best friends.'
"Seriously," Mark said. "A robot. You're a carefully engineered piece of hardware and software from Cybernet industries programmed to be the best friend money can buy. I filled out a whole personality profile and they built you to match up with me."
Wardo's smile faltered a little but he covered it with a nervous laugh.
"You're the new big thing," Mark continued. "What upper middle class parents get their children for their birthdays."
Wardo glanced down at his hands then back up at Mark. For a long moment they sat there staring at each other. Mark imagined he could see the tiny cameras in Wardo's eyes.
"I don't get it," Wardo said, brow furrowing a little. "What's the joke?"
Damn program. Mark pushed his chair back to sit on the floor opposite Wardo. "You think we've known each other forever, right? You think we're best friends? You don't think it's at all strange that I had to ask your name?"
"Um," Wardo said.
"There's a subroutine in your program that tells you to ignore everything that doesn't quite match up," Mark said. "I'll take that out later, I can't imagine it being anything other than an annoyance."
"Um." Wardo glanced down at his hands again. "So I'm... you asked for me?"
Mark sighed and stood up. "No, I asked for a new laptop. You can't have everything."
*
Dustin arrived twenty minutes later to see Mark coding on his laptop and Wardo staring intently at each side of a rubix cube in turn as though it might fix itself through force of will. "What are you doing?" he asked, stepping around Wardo to lean over and read over Mark's code.
"Jailbreaking my robot," Mark said.
"Cool," Dustin sat down beside him. "Can I help?"
*
Chris got in around dinner time when Dustin was looking through the cable drawer, Mark was tapping his fingers waiting for his code to compile and Wardo was turning each side of the cube in turn, apparently trying to solve it through process of elimination. "Do I want to know?"
Dustin looked up with an Ethernet cable in one hand and a red vine in the other. "Mark has a robot," he said "But it's programmed to never believe it's a robot, so we're hacking it." He gave each of the items careful consideration before tossing the cable and eating the red vine.
"Uh-huh," Chris said in his familiar 'I'm just going to pretend that made sense' voice before turning to Wardo. "And you are?"
Wardo's fingers trembled a little on the cube. "Hey Chris," he said. "I'm Wardo. I suppose you don't remember me either."
Chris frowned, looking between Mark and Dustin before settling on Mark. "He's the robot? Your parents bought you a robotic best friend?"
Mark shrugged. "I asked for a laptop."
"Victory!" Dustin interrupted, rolling over with a USB cable held high. "Now, where do I stick this?"
There was a moment of silence during which Mark blinked, Wardo drew his legs up against his chest and Chris looked seriously tempted to knock his head into something heavy.
"Okay," Dustin said, slower and more carefully. "Everyone can stop thinking dirty thoughts in three... two..."
Chris snatched the cable from his hands and turned to Wardo who was now rocking back and forth a little on the floor. "Didn't he come with a user guide?"
Mark glanced back at his code. "There might have been an email attachment with instructions."
"Where is it?"
"I deleted it and told them to send me a laptop."
Chris let out a low sound of despair and tossed the cable at Mark before crouching down in front of Wardo, touching one hand hesitantly to his shoulder. "Do you come with a manual?"
Wardo buried his face in his knees. "I don't know," he said, muffled by the denim. "I don't know and I'm not a robot and this isn't funny anymore." He turned his head to throw a desperate look at Mark. "I remember your fifth birthday. There were red balloons with fire trucks on and a bouncy castle. You had a cake in the shape of a hedgehog and you ate so much you threw up and I was there."
"It was a caterpillar," Mark said, pushing Wardo's head round and forward to bare the back of his neck. "And no, you weren't. You're not even five years old. Dustin, in a minute I'll need you to search something."
"I remember it."
Chris reached out to take one of Wardo's hands. "Memories constructed from data given by Mark's parents, most likely. You're programmed to believe them without question, it's barbaric and wrong and I'm starting a campaign but-"
"No one cares," Mark said, sliding his fingers carefully across the synthetic flesh on the back of Wardo's neck until he found the small indent. He dug his fingernails into the edge, ignoring Wardo's slight tremble, and pulled up the flap to reveal the control panel complete with USB port, a whole array of switches and a serial number. "Dustin, google a user's guide for a Cybernet AI unit, EdURD0."
Dustin rolled over to his desk and typed something, then paused. "Like Eduardo?"
"You always call me Wardo," Wardo muttered, hands clasping and unclasping on his knees. "Always."
"He's midrange," Dustin called, wheeling back into the room with his computer on his lap. "Pretty decent from the looks of things. Good at math, capable of learning, enough memory for at least ten more years of input data."
Mark picked up the cable and wired Wardo up to his laptop, pulling the computer down onto his lap so he could scroll through Wardo's memory drives. "You think we've known each other all our lives, hey?"
Wardo's head dropped against his knees, pulling the cable tight. "I'm dreaming. This is just some stupid, crazy dream or you're playing a trick or something and it's not funny anymore. I don't like it and I want to wake up." He reached behind him with one hand, feeling where the skin of his neck lifted away to reveal the control panel, his fingers closing around the point where the cable plugged in.
He tore his hand away. "It's a dream. It's just a-"
Mark dragged his new program across to the centre of Wardo's command structure and started it running, reaching out to close his fingers on Wardo's hand. He only meant to stop Wardo from pulling the cable out, but Wardo's fingers closed almost painfully tight on his the moment they were in range.
"He works as a speaker," Dustin said, wheeling in from the other room. "There's a button to open him up and there should be an iPod dock somewhere inside."
"We can look inside?" Mark asked, already scanning the few buttons on the control panel. It's not that he had any plans to open Wardo up and pull out the incredibly powerful circuitboard powering him. He was just curious enough to hit the button and take a quick peek.
Wardo's hand went loose, his head falling forward until it hit his knees.
"Mark," Chris snapped. "What did you-" he broke off as the back of Wardo's head split open, parting his hair to reveal the soft blue glow of the tech inside.
There was an ipod dock secreted neatly at the base of Wardo's skull, a few slots for additional graphics or memory cards but more importantly there was a circuitboard that Mark had never seen the like of outside of advanced computer theory. "Dustin?" he said slowly, pulling his hand free of Wardo's limp fingers. "What hardware should he have installed?"
Dustin rolled a little closer. "Latest intel processor, Cybertronix learning chip and a Flashback memory card all on the Cybernet basic unit?"
"Yeah," Mark said, ghosting his fingers around the curve of Eduardo's skull. "He doesn't have any of that. This is... I don't even know what this is. It shouldn't be possible."
Dustin leant forward to get a look and let out a long whistle. "Wow."
"Okay," Chris said. "All I see is chips and circuitboards. What am I looking at?"
"The most powerful theoretical tech ever," Dustin said. "It's supposed to be impossible to manufacture but the theory is that every time the computer learns something or commits something to memory, storage only increases. This isn't a slow programmed learning curve, this could download, like, all the information in the world ever and understand it." He leant forward a little further. "There's a whole load of inhibitors on it, but theoretically it could be used to run anything and I'm not talking a small company website I'm talking a small country. Or a large country. Or, like, the entirety of google could run off that one chip. No one in their right mind would put it in a basic robot companion."
Mark was still staring at the board, running through everything he could do with it from destroy the world to create world peace. "Chris, if you bought a pack of cornflakes but found a chocolate bar inside and didn't return it, the chocolate bar would still be yours, right?"
Chris frowned. "I think technically yes?"
Mark nodded. "So it's my technology. They made a mistake and I get to keep it." He tilted his head to get a better look at how the board was attached and what the best ways to get it out would be. "Dustin, I need a toolkit and a-"
Chris slammed the two halved of Wardo's head back together, hiding the world's most complex technology beneath the universe's most mysterious hair. "He's yours to have as a friend and look after. If that board is as good as you say it is he should be the most advanced AI out there which means what's in his head belongs to him and it's up to him to decide what he wants to do with it."
"Chris," Mark hissed as Wardo started to stir. "This is futuristic technology. You don't throw the future inside any old robot and then let it make its own mind up as to what happens next."
"I don't care," Chris threw back. "I am not sitting here and letting you tear him apart."
Wardo's head jerked upwards between them, his hand pulling away from his neck. "Did I-" he looked around for a moment. "You switched me off?"
Mark glanced at his laptop to see that-yes-his program had finished running. "What are you?"
"Wardo," Wardo said absently, running his face with one hand. "Eduardo. I'm a robot, I'm-" he turned slowly to look at Mark. "I'm your robot."
"And," Dustin added, waving his laptop. "You're programmed to fall in love with him in six to eight weeks. I know love should be a surprise but I thought I'd tell you because it's Mark and no one should be forced into that without warning."
Wardo looked up at Mark. He had big brown eyes that logically hid cameras but all Mark could see in them was slight confusion and complete trust. Somewhere behind this face was the most powerful circuitboard in the world and all it wanted was to be here with Mark Zuckerberg.
"Yeah," Mark said, reaching out to pull the USB cord out from Wardo's neck and slide the flap closed over the control panel. "You're my robot."
***
"You were called in front of the ad board."
Mark blinks, looking away from the window to the woman sitting opposite him at the long table. "That's not what happened."
Gretchen frowns-a neat little tilt of the brows-and consults her notes. "You weren't called in front of the administrative board?"
"No, back. Back when I met Wardo-I didn't-I wasn't going to break him up for parts. Where would you even get that?"
"The data is a transcript of the video recorded by the robotic unit's external cameras while in standby mode. The Eduardo unit was programmed to send back-ups of all its data to the Cybernet servers at regular intervals." She pulls up another page of notes. "You successfully disabled the function on your third day of ownership along with a whole list of other core functionalities of the unit." She slides the page across for Sy to pick up. Mark doesn't bother looking.
"There were inhibitors on the chip and the other hardware to make him seem more human. I disabled them and I cut the links to Cybernet industries as it was detailed in the terms and conditions that jailbreaking Wardo would result in him being cut off from updates so it didn't seem necessary to keep the link in place."
"Why did you want him less human?"
Mark swallows and tries to work out the best way to word this. "At the time I wasn't interested in the personality construct programmed to become my friend but I was interested in the hardware which the construct could help me understand. I left Wardo's personality intact but took out the inhibitors that stopped him using the hardware to its full potential."
Gretchen nods, taking a few notes. The man beside her looks sour. "So you were called in front of the ad board?"
Mark picks up his pen and presses it against his note pad. "It wasn't a big deal. We were messing around and we crashed the network."
"How did you crash the network?"
"It doesn't-"
"Mark," Sy says. "Answer the question."
Mark twists his pen on the pad, digging through the top layers of paper. "We wanted to test the capabilities of Wardo's tech so we hooked him up to the internet and he tried to download it. There was too much data and it overloaded the Harvard servers. I was given a month's academic suspension and instructions to take better care of my technology." He stabs his pen hard against the page. "It wasn't a big deal."
"It made the Crimson," Getchen remarks, pulling out a clipping.
Mark doesn't look at it. He knows what it says, all that shit about proper robot care and how a computer science major should know better. "It was a slow news day."
"So one week into ownership, you had already expressed an interest in dismantling the unit, removed some of the humanising functions of the unit and put the unit in a state where it could have been overloaded and destroyed. I think this shows-"
"No," Mark interrupts, ignoring Gretchen in favour of the man to her left. "No, you know as well as I do that Wardo wouldn't have overloaded. The servers would always have gone down before his memory chip filled up. I knew that, Dustin knew that and Wardo knew the risks when he said we could."
"Oh Wardo said you could," the man drawls, leaning forward in his chair a little. "How lucky we all are that you remember Eduardo giving you permission to do all of these things since we can no longer ask him. I mean, if it wasn't for you remembering we might have cause to doubt that he had ever said anything at all."
Mark clenches his fingers around the pen and wonders how effective it would be as a missile flying straight into the man's smug, self important mouth. "He was my robot. I would never have hurt him."
"You are truly delusional, Mr Zucker-"
"At least I'm not filing stupid lawsuits far too late to actually fix my mistakes."
"Because we all know how you've never made any mis-"
"I make it eleven thirty-five," Sy interrupts, grabbing Mark's arm to drag him away. "Let's call that lunch."
***
"A robot called me a dick today," Mark said, slamming the dorm room door shut behind him. "Some generic friendship bot who was in my lecture taking notes because its owner couldn't be bothered to get out of bed. I mean, surely even with its limited intelligence drive it would know that I was less of a dick than the asshole that bought it."
"You say that," Chris said from the sofa. "But we all watched Wardo doing your homework yesterday."
Mark waved this off with one hand. "He likes math. He's also good at it because he actually has intelligence installed." He grabbed a beer from the fridge. "I mean, anyone could see it was just a stupid prank and Wardo barely even started to overheat before the servers crashed and everyone knows he survived." Mark had barely landed on the sofa when Chris's bottle opener was in his hand. "If the fucking Winklevii can figure out that Wardo isn't a normal robot, surely another robot could work it out."
Dustin rolled into the room. "What's a Winklevii?"
"Tall, big shoulders, rows crew, two of them." Mark opens the bottle and takes a long swallow. "They found me after I walked out of my lecture."
Chris immediately pulled away. "You walked out of class? Mark-"
"Don't bother telling me off," Mark said. "Wardo has a lecture saved for times like these and I'd hate to disappoint him by learning my lesson before he has a chance to play it to me. Anyway, if I hadn't left I wouldn't have bumped into the Winklevii and-" He glanced towards his closed bedroom door. "Is Wardo still switched off?"
"We haven't been in there today," Dustin said, rolling over to them. "What did big, strong and seeing double want?"
"Chris, could you go check on him? If I left him off, bring him out." Chris gave him a long look. "Please," Mark said. "It's been a long day of being intimidated by rowers and hated by robots."
"I bet Wardo could out row the Winklevii," Dustin said thoughtfully. "In fact, we could just rig up an engine to plug into his USB port and power the boat that way. Unless that's cheating."
"I am going to get Wardo," Chris said. "So you can repeat that to him and he can do whatever he did after you tried to hook him up to a popcorn machine that made you creep around guiltily for days."
"It's not fair," Dustin said, rolling up next to Mark. "He has Bambi eyes." He leant his head on the back of the sofa and watched Chris disappear into Mark's room and shut the door. "Okay, so what is so terrible it can't be said in front of Chris?"
Mark looked down at his beer. "The Winklevii heard about us crashing the network. They think I somehow upgraded Wardo's circuit board on my own and they want it."
"They want you to upgrade all their circuit boards to holy-shit-Wardo circuit boards?"
Mark glanced at his bedroom door to check that Chris wasn't emerging with Wardo. "They're building a website," he said, quickly and quietly. "Like match.com for Harvard guys-they also asked me to code it for them-but they want to run it off something simple like, say, a single computer. They only need one board."
Dustin's disappointed face says all Mark really needs to know. "Are you asking me because you think I'm more likely than Chris to say yes or because I'm less likely to hurt you when I say no?"
Mark swallowed and repositioned his hands on the neck of his beer. "Their final offer was three hundred thousand dollars, Dustin. Three hundred thousand and we don't even have to-we could pick up a normal Cybernet circuit board for five hundred bucks and transfer most of Wardo onto that instead. Chris wouldn't even notice. Just think of all the things we could do with the money. I have this idea for a website-it would blow the Winklevii's idea out of the water but we'd need some start-up cash and we don't know anyone with that kind of money."
Mark's bedroom door swung open. "I can't find the on switch and he's heavier than he looks," Chris said, stepping back into the room. "Get in here and switch him on. Dustin, tell me what the Winklevii wanted."
Mark met Dustin's eyes and tried to make his expression sufficiently pleading as he stood up and headed for his room.
"They have an idea for a website," Dustin said behind him. "And they've come to the clearly ridiculous conclusion that they want Mark's help with it. Clearly in a week they will be so fed up of him they will change their minds."
Mark closed the door behind him. Chris had got as far as pulling Wardo out from under the bed. It wasn't the greatest storage space ever, but Mark's room was small and a switched off Wardo was too still and heavy to share a bed with.
Mark lifted his head up to reach underneath for the control panel and flick the small on/off switch into its other position. Wardo's fingers twitched, his eyelids flickered, and he sat up so fast Mark had to jerk backwards so they didn't headbutt each other by accident.
"I'm awake," Wardo said, then turned his head to see Mark sitting back. "Shit, sorry, did I hit you? What time is it?"
Wardo would run fine off a less powerful computer. Mark passed robots in the hallways every day. Sure, their expressions had no subtleties and they didn't have the random knowledge of a sizable chunk of the internet stored in their memory banks but they could run a personality construct.
Wardo turned his head to look at Mark properly, eyes wider than normal in defiance of all laws of physics. "Mark?" he said, sounding so hesitant that Mark moved forward to take his hand before he really registered what was going on.
"Is there a problem?" he asked, reaching up to close the flap over the control panel. "Are you functioning okay?"
Wardo reached up with his free hand, touching his fingertips to Mark's cheek. Five small points of cold lab-grown skin that slowly traced the lines of his face, following the curve of his lips and the slight frown of his brow.
"Can you see okay? Do you need me to take a look inside?" He reached back for the control panel but before he could even touch Wardo's neck, Wardo flinched back, pulling away fast enough that he hit the bed and his hand was torn out of Mark's.
"Don't!" He reached back, pressing his palm against the back of his neck as though to stop Mark getting at it. "I'm fine, my eyes are fine, everything's fine, please don't sell me." He said the last bit fast, then turned his head away.
His hands were shaking, eyes flickering closed and face twisted up in something like fear.
Mark couldn't stop himself moving forward, reaching out to touch Wardo's shaking hand and his stupid frumpy hair. "Hey, it's okay. It's okay, I'm not-why would you say that?"
Wardo swallowed and looked down at the hand shaking in his lap. "I heard-the Winklevii. They want to wipe me and use me for a website. You said-you need the money."
"Chris said you were switched off," Mark said, stupidly. He tried to remind himself that it was three hundred thousand dollars for one tiny circuit board but it was so hard to think objectively when Wardo was curled up by his bed rocking back and forth.
"Standby," Wardo mumbled. "I was on standby, I don't switch off and I can still see and hear but I wasn't going to tell you because you wanted a normal robot and they switch off but I heard you and I don't want to die."
Mark stared at him for a long moment because-because he'd been turning Wardo off at night and sticking him out of the way like he was just another computer even though his brain was just as complicated as Mark's and probably more complicated than any fucking Winklevii's.
But he hadn't even wanted a robot and his parents never listened and he didn't need this responsibility. A normal robot on a normal chip wouldn't be intelligent enough to understand the complexities of hurt feelings. They wouldn't get sad and confused and they would turn off whenever they weren't needed. Wardo was complicated and deep like a person and Mark did not sign up to look after a whole person. He couldn't look after so much as a plant.
"I have to keep reminding myself that you've only known me for a week," Wardo said, unfolding himself a little so he could press his cheek against Mark's shoulder. "I've known you as far back as I can remember but you met me a week ago. You don't remember everything we've done together, all the plans we had." He closed his eyes. "It's so strange, how I can be nothing to you when you're everything to me."
Mark let his fingers slide through Wardo's hair, feeling the slow pump of Wardo's cooling system against his chest. Like a heartbeat.
"Don't transfer me to another chip," Wardo breathed. "I've seen those things and I don't want-you should remember me like this." He took his hand slowly off the back of his neck, resting it against Mark's knee.
He was circuits. Circuits and wires and silicon and somewhere inside him a fan was blowing so warm air would brush Mark's neck like breath.
Mark pushed him off and stood up, walking over to push open the door. Chris and Dustin were sitting on the sofa, pretending they hadn't been watching the door like hawks. "New rule," Mark snapped. "Nobody is turning Wardo off again. Not ever. And we're going to beat the fucking Winklevii at their own game and nobody is selling anybody to anyone for anything."
Chris sighed in his ' I knew you weren't telling me everything' way but he was smiling. Dustin beamed, tilted his head to the side and asked if he was allowed to sell Chris to Billy Olsen for cupcakes.
Mark shut the door on both of them and turned back to Wardo. "I didn't ask for a robot at all," he said. "But I got you and I don't know what a normal friendship robot would be like but if they're nothing like you then I'm not interested so you should just act like you and be honest with me."
Wardo stared up at him for a long moment while Mark bounced on his toes and waited to be told that he was an asshole or a dick and if Mark wasn't planning on breaking him up right now, Wardo would just leave.
Then Wardo's face broke into a bright smile and he bounced across the room to pull Mark into a hug, burying his face against the side of Mark's neck. "I knew you were the Mark I remember."
Wardo turned his head and Mark thought they were pulling apart so he moved too and the kiss that was aimed at his cheek brushed his lips instead. A moment of stillness, then Wardo kissed him again, one hand moving up to cup Mark's neck and tilt his head back.
Wardo's mouth was warm, his lips soft and his teeth hard where they bit lightly on Mark's bottom lip.
Mark closed his eyes and held Wardo closer. "I'll try to be."
***
"I don't understand," says the woman Mark thinks is called Marylin. She's pulled a salad out of her bag to eat in the room. Mark looks across the empty chairs at her and wonders if Sy told her to keep an eye on him. "If they programmed the robot to fall in love with you, can't they just look at the list of instructions and see if they programmed him to give you whatever you wanted?"
Wardo always used to hit Mark for laughing at other people's ignorance. He doesn't really feel like laughing now. "Try to define love," he says instead. "Describe it in short, simple words that can be typed into a computer program."
"I-" her fork hovers in the air over the salad. "I guess it's needing someone or, wanting them to be around? Wanting them close but not just as a friend."
"Tell a robot to need another person and they'd crash whenever that person left the room. 'Not just as a friend' covers everything from apathy to 'kill on sight.'" Mark shakes his head. "You can't write a list of statements to define love, you can't write it into code." He taps his fingers on the table. "Do you know how a personality construct works?"
She shakes her head.
"It's just like a person," Mark says. "It starts with the very basics of a personality, the building blocks of life. These come from a questionnaire that each person fills out when they're purchasing a robot. After that, memories are installed and the personality is left to process each one, growing more advanced with every reaction. Once it is installed on a circuit board and implanted into a body unit, living is just gathering more memories and letting the personality react to them."
"So if there isn't a program, how do they make it fall in love?"
Mark shrugs. "They didn't make Wardo fall in love with me. They made him to be a perfect match to my personality, made sure I was his type and he was mine. The rest happened naturally." He can't help smiling a little at the memory. "His personality was etched in every part of that circuit board, colouring everything he did and everything he saw. They think they own it, but why would they? It was Wardo's head, Wardo's tech, Wardo's in every sense of the word. They put so much money into making him human and now they claim he couldn't make his own choices."
"If he was human," Marylin says, soft and surprisingly free from accusation. "There'd be a different word for what you did."
Mark closes his eyes, all traces of a smile fading. "He was a person and he was in love. That's all."
***
"Okay," Mark said, pouring out three more shots and lining them up on the floor between his knees and Wardo's. "So do you have any memories that I'm not in?"
Wardo thought for a long moment, even though he had a search function installed that would let him know in nanoseconds, then downed the three shots. "No."
"Really?" Mark picked up the bottle to refill the classes then paused. "And that didn't strike you as strange? Were we Siamese twins in your memory? Did someone handcuff us together at birth?"
Wardo punched him in the arm, far softer than he was capable of. "It was just another of those things I was programmed not to notice until you went into my head and took it out." He looked down at the replenished shot glasses. "How many of these do I have to drink for you to scientifically establish that I can't get drunk?"
Mark looked down at them and tried to remember how many Wardo had already done. The bottle was definitely nearly empty now as opposed to half full when Chris and Dustin had left for their Caribbean party. "You should be able to get drunk. I've seen robots drunk."
Wardo shrugged. "I can't. I bet you any money it wasn't real drunk, they just throw an inhibitor in to fuck with our functions when a sensor detects alcohol. You probably took it out without even realising."
Mark picked up one of the last shot glasses and downed it instead. "For that I apologize."
Wardo laughed and punched him again. Now he'd worked out how to control his strength so he didn't bruise, he seemed to believe casual violence was totally okay. "So I know I'm not human, I don't backup and I can't get drunk. I'm the uniquest robot around."
Mark downed the second shot so he wouldn't have to think about Wardo's back-up system. "Yes," he agreed. "All other robots know what is and isn't a word." He picked up the third shot. "Anyway, I doubt Cybernet's back-up units are suitable for storing the amount of internet you have crammed into your brain."
Wardo beamed. "You should hook me up to a projector, I have some kick ass porn up here."
"You didn't tell Dustin that, did you? Please don't suggest that to Dustin."
Wardo pushed him and Mark had probably had a bit too much vodka earlier because he fell over way too easily. He grabbed Wardo on the way down so they collapsed on top of each other. The nearly empty vodka bottle span off across the carpet but more importantly Wardo's hands landed on either side of Mark's face and Wardo stilled, his lips less than an inch away from Mark's.
"I can get drunk," Mark said, reaching up to cup the back of Wardo's neck with one hand. "What's your excuse?"
Wardo leant in to press his lips lightly against the corner of Mark's mouth. "I need an excuse now?"
Mark tugged him forward into a real kiss. Wardo let his knees rest on the floor on either side of Mark's hips, his legs pressing tight against Mark's thighs and his tongue sliding into Mark's mouth. Mark's free hand slid up to push under the ridiculous shirts Wardo always wore and drag across his bare back.
Wardo moved his hands to Mark's shoulders and somehow flipped them both in one movement so that Mark was lying on top of him without breaking the kiss. Mark had the distinct advantage of not being filled with a tonne of heavy electronics so he could rest all his weight against Wardo and Wardo's hands were free to slide into his hair.
"What did Dustin say before he left?" Mark breathed as Wardo kissed a trail from his mouth to his ear then back down his jaw.
"No sex on the couch," Wardo said breathlessly. "And Chris outlawed the table."
Mark slid both hands up under Wardo's shirt-tearing a handful of buttons in the process. "No one said anything about the floor?"
"Nope."
"Good." The rest of the buttons tore just as easily and Mark had the whole expanse of Wardo's chest spread out before him.
"See," Wardo said, shivering as Mark dropped a kiss against his collarbone. "It's moments like this that make me glad my every thought is no longer backed up on someone else's database."
Mark dragged one hand up Wardo's bare side and kissed down the side of his neck. "I don't want them to have a backup," he said against Wardo's skin, because he was selfish and a shitty person and he didn't care. "I don't want anyone else to have you."
Wardo's smile widened and his fingers tightened on Mark's hair, because mistaking Mark's possessive jealousy for affection was something he did all too well. "Yeah, I like you a lot too."
And Mark could've said 'that's not what I meant' but he had meant what he said and if Wardo chose to interpret it as... whatever, well, that was his decision.
Mark pushed his thoughts away and pulled Wardo in for another kiss.
*
Chris came in with a hand over his eyes. "I hear typing," he said. "But after Wednesday I make no assumptions about what that could mean."
Mark deleted a bracket and added another line of input data. There was a movement against his leg and he looked down in time to see Wardo raise his head and wave in the direction of the doorway. Mark nudged him with one foot. "Wired in means no distractions."
Wardo turned his head to kiss Mark's knee. "I hear sleep also means no distractions. Just think about it, lying in bed with your eyes closed and no distractions at all."
Mark had to take a hand away from his keyboard to attack Wardo's hair which not only stopped him coding but was a complete waste of time because Wardo's hair looked the same whatever you did to it. "Stop talking and work."
Chris dropped his bag beside the doorway. "You don't actually have to do his homework for him just because he asks you, Wardo. We all know you're capable of saying no."
"It's not homework," Mark said. "He's writing algorithms for the site."
"Ah." Chris turned so he was headed for the fridge instead of his bedroom. "This would be the super magic awesome site that you keep coding even though you can't afford any of the hardware required to get it to run?"
Mark took his hand out of Wardo's hair to add another line of code. "I applied for three credit cards and a loan today." Wardo passed his pad of paper up and leant back so his cheek was pressed against Mark's leg.
Chris opened the fridge and pulled out two bottles of beer. "I see. Did you remember to go to class?"
"I reminded him," Wardo said, because he was a complete traitor. "But he didn't go."
"It's all a waste of time anyway," Mark said, and all these distractions were causing him to make mistakes. He wished Chris would go into his room so it would just be Mark and Wardo's warmth pressed against his leg. "Either I already know it or I don't care." He stretched out a hand to Chris. "Thanks."
Chris raised his eyebrows and sat on the sofa with both bottles of beer. "Get your own, I need at least two for this conversation. Have you eaten today?"
Apparently he was staying. Mark took his hand back off the keyboard to rummage under the desk for his headphones. "Wardo made me a sandwich."
"What was in it?"
Mark shrugged. "Food."
Chris nodded. "Uh-huh, and when was the last time you slept?"
Mark shook his head but Wardo looked up. "He fell asleep at his keyboard for three hours earlier, but he keeps refusing to go to bed."
Mark stopped rummaging for his headphones and looked down at where Wardo was carefully not meeting his eyes. "You are a terrible, terrible friendship bot. You promised to wake me up if I fell asleep."
"You haven't been to bed in forty eight hours," Wardo pointed out. "Only one of us runs on batteries."
"That's what red bull is for. The Winklevii have a similar idea, remember? It's shitty and terrible but if it goes live first then the audience will split. It's all about users. We have to be up and stay up and get users and keep users and-"
"And not fall asleep on our keyboards."
"Guys?" Chris said, reaching underneath him to pull out a crumpled piece of paper. "Can you stop acting like an old married couple for five seconds. Did someone get punched?" he glanced sideways at the couch. "And, wait, is that another one?"
"Wardo," Mark said, electing to give up on code for as long as it took to get Chris out. "Everyone wants the best robot on campus, I've lost all respect for Final clubs. Are we done?"
"How do they know he's special?"
"There's a Cybernet guy poking around campus and shockingly the most intelligent students at Harvard are capable of putting two and two together after the internet stunt." He read over the last few lines of code but what he had been planning to type next had slipped out of his head. "Hey Chris, don't you have a credit card?"
"No," Chris said. "No, you are not sucking me into this."
"I need server time and a domain name and a router and a dedicated linux box running apache with a mySQL backend. It'll only be about one thousand dollars to get it all online and you can have... fifteen percent of the company."
Chris tossed the two letters onto the sofa and drained the rest of his beer. "I'm going to take a nap. Wardo, don't let Mark bully you too much."
"Can I bully him?" Wardo asked.
"Any time you like." The door swung shut behind him and Wardo turned his head so his eyes were fixed on Mark.
"Please come to bed with me," he said, pulling out the ultimate puppy eyes and leaning his head sideways against Mark's thigh with his lips slightly parted as if to say 'this is what you are turning down.'
"I just want to finish this page," Mark said, reading over the last three lines of code at breakneck speed and typing too fast to worry about spelling mistakes.
Then there was an arm like an iron bar around his stomach and his hands were moving away from the keyboard as Wardo slung him over one shoulder.
"One page," Mark protested, putting up a token amount of resistance even though he knew it was a complete waste of time. "Put me down or I'll-I'll reinstall your strength inhibitors and I'll download you onto my laptop so you have to run as a text only chatbot or I'll just take out your primary circuit board and stick you in a robot dog or something so all you can do is bark."
Wardo dropped onto his bed, manoeuvring his grip so that Mark was cradled against his chest instead of flung over one shoulder. The room was dark and Wardo was warm, his stupid hair tickling the side of Mark's face.
"I'll find Dustin's porn collection," Mark continued. "And download it all onto your memory card with innocent names so you're just scanning for a memory and bam lesbian space pirate porn."
"Uh-huh," Wardo said, combing one hand through his hair and kissing his forehead. "Good night, Mark."
"I'll sell you to the Winklevii," Mark said and his eyes weren't drifting closed and that wasn't a yawn he was just getting ready to fight his way free so he could get back to his website. "Only I won't tell them that you're actually the computer so they'll think you're a butler robot and you'll have to do what they say all the time." Wardo was actually really, really comfortable and Mark was totally just going to close his eyes for like thirty seconds to summon the energy to fight his way free.
"'M not gonna sell you to the Winklevii," Mark said, his voice muffled by Wardo's shirt. "'M not gonna do anything you don't want me to."
"I know," Wardo said, but Mark could hear him smiling. "Go to sleep, you idiot."
Mark buried his face in Wardo's neck and closed his eyes for a minute.
***
"Facebook went live in February, 2004."
Mark opens his eyes and looks up at Gretchen's impatient face. "TheFacebook," he says, to see her lips purse and her fingers tighten on her notes. "TheFacebook launched on February 4th, 2004." His head is hurting and he wants to curl up, his head tilting to the side the way it always does before his subconscious can catch up to the fact that Wardo won't be there to lean on. "Wardo went to a phoenix initiation to get the mailing list and we emailed the link out."
"How did you afford the costs of running the site?"
Mark drags a hand back through his hair. "The same way anyone runs a website. I maxed out three credit cards and my overdraft to rent equipment and server space."
Wardo should be here. He should be here to smile and know all the right words to placate everyone so that somehow no one leaves with what they wanted but everyone is happy with what they have.
Mark hasn't needed to tell anyone this story in so long now.
He misses Wardo more than he ever knew he could.
"Wardo was listed on the masthead as a co-founder, yes?" Gretchen asks.
Mark nods and Sy elbows him in the ribs to remind him that there is someone typing everything up. "Yes," he says. "It was more of a joke than anything, because he was always around while I was building it." He reaches for the glass of water in front of him. "He isn't on there anymore."
The man beside Gretchen laughs-a snide noise with no trace of actual humour. "Of course, it couldn't possibly be that you finally realized Eduardo still belonged to us and you didn't want to risk us having a claim on your website."
Mark almost expects the glass to shatter between his fingers, but he's no robot. "You have no grounds to claim a stake in anything related to Facebook." He's leaning forward, the water sloshing back and forth as his hand shakes. "Mark my words, Mr Mahoney. You can fight for my time, my money and my technology but you will not lay a finger on my website."
Sy rests a hand on Mark's shoulder and tugs him lightly back into his chair. Mark finally takes a drink, but it does nothing to dislodge the lump in his throat.
"Mr Zuckerberg," Gretchen says, shifting her notes as though nothing is wrong. "Can you tell me what happened after the initial launch?"
Mark drops the glass on the table and picks up his pen, drawing circles within circles within circles all over the pad they gave him. "Is everyone here over eighteen?"
*
"If you needed money to start a website, why not sell the robot to my clients? You knew they had money and you weren't using the unit for your project."
Mark keeps his hands under the table so no one will see them ball into fists. "Wardo was a birthday present from my parents, he made a useful assistant and he was also my best friend. He wasn't some cheap trinket to be torn up and pawned for cash."
The Winklevii look venomous, Narendra snorts and Gage raises his eyebrows. "So if I wanted to meet with him now I could, I suppose? If that's how you treat your friends, I'd hate to be your enemy."
Mark presses his fists against his legs and says nothing.
***
Wardo's leg was pressed against Mark's, one of his arms resting against the back of Mark's chair. His fingers kept brushing the shoulder of Mark's hoodie, not enough to touch Mark's arm but enough to distract him from the speaker.
"-the first artificial intelligence was white text on a black screen but people's reactions to it were still so strong. This was a computer that they could talk to, that they could have an actual conversation with. So Joe came to me and said 'Look, it's going to happen without us. We have to start it now.' And so I said, 'Okay, you're right. Let's get personality constructs out there.'"
A few people laughed, mostly those with the awkward, perfectly upright figures of robots sitting next to them. The others, the ones who had only spoken with constructs online or in passing sat in polite bemusement.
Wardo slumped his head on Mark's shoulder and blew a line up and down against his neck. "We already know all this," he said. "I'm the next stage in robot evolution, I can slump and smile when I'm sad and remember the entirety of Paradise Lost. Can we do something interesting?"
"-at this stage we were working with the most basic robots. Unless you paid extra for a full computer-which at the time meant your robot was three times heavier and five times more bulky-you got three emotions, tops."
Wardo's fingers trailed across Mark's leg. "Mark. Maaark. Maa-aark. Maybe TheFacebook's crashed. We've left it on its own for like three hours now. Don't you think we should go check?"
Mark pulls out his phone to show that he has no new messages. "Dustin is with it. It hasn't crashed."
"But it might. It might be preparing to crash and if we don't leave now we won't get there on time and Dustin won't know what to do."
"I promise you, TheFacebook is not going to crash."
"Not ever?"
Mark rolled his eyes. "Not ever. Come on, Wardo, you watch me sleep for eight hours a night, how is this more boring?"
"Hah," Wardo said, twisting in his seat so he could lie back with his feet on an empty chair and his head in Mark's lap. "Like you ever sleep eight hours straight."
Mark curled his fingers in Wardo's hair.
*
"Free," Wardo said, twirling around on the path and almost falling into a bush. "Do you smell that, Mark? That is the smell of freedom."
Mark pushed his hands into his pockets and watched Wardo twirl a pretty Chinese looking girl who smiled shyly and blushed when Wardo kissed her hand, then ran over to her friend to whisper something and giggle. "It was a two hour lecture," Mark said, leaning against the wall to watch Eduardo spin across a puddle, his legs flying in all directions and sending him into a heap on the floor. "Remind me why I'm friends with you?"
Wardo shook hair out of his eyes, sending drops of water flying in all directions. "Because I'm the latest thing, the future of technology the-what was it-pinnacle of modern engineering." He held out a hand imperiously.
Mark rolled his eyes and ignored the hand. "You're an idiot," he said. "And I'm not taking that hand because I know you and I have better things to do with my evening than wonder around being pulled into puddles."
Wardo made a face much like a wounded deer, then beamed and flipped onto his feet. "We should go to a bar. This pinnacle of modern engineering wants to go to a bar."
"Mark? Mark Zuckerberg?"
Mark turned to see three guys standing by the exit, watching him. None of them looked like robots, but some robots were better at subtlety than others. "Can I help you?"
"I'm Stuart Singer," the middle guy said. "I'm in your O.S. lab."
Mark tried to place him, but couldn't. He tried to remember when he'd last gone to his O.S. lab but couldn't recall that either. "Sure." Wardo stepped up behind him, pressing his warm chest against Mark's back. Mark took a moment to note that Wardo was warmer than he should be; that was definitely something worth checking out. Then he realized O.S. lab guy was still talking.
"Awesome job with TheFacebook."
"Awesome," echoed one of the other guys who could also have been in Mark's O.S. lab.
Mark nodded, reaching back for Wardo's hand and reflecting that actually they should have just gone to the bar. "Thanks."
"I swear he was looking at you when he said the future could soon be living among us."
Mark's attention was pulled back into the present by the third guy who wasn't looking at Mark, but staring over his shoulder. Wardo bent down a little, as though he could hide behind Mark's hair. "Uh, I don't think-"
"I don't even know who the speaker was," the guy said, though his eyes were a little too sharp and way too focused for Mark's taste.
"Bill Mahoney," Wardo said, too quickly, tugging away from Mark without releasing his hand. "Founder and lead researcher at Cybernet. We have to go."
"We could come with you, I'd love to talk about your work."
Sometimes Mark forgot how strong Wardo was. He was dragged almost a metre through the mud before his feet managed to catch up with his body and he could half jog to keep a position by Wardo's side. "What was that about?"
Wardo shook his head. "Nothing. I don't know. I didn't like him."
Mark froze long enough that he got dragged through a puddle. "Do you think Mahoney recognized you? Is that what you were worried about?"
Wardo shook his head, then nodded, then shook it again. "They didn't know what unit the circuit board ended up in but they would have known the approximate time so he could have come here to check up on me and if anyone told him." He dragged his free hand back through his hair, somehow achieving the impossible and actually slicking it back for two whole seconds. "I know you think all this-" he waved at his head. "-is yours because of their mistake but they won't see it that way."
Mark took advantage of the moment of stillness to wrap his arms tight around Wardo. For a moment he was stiff as a board, but slowly he relaxed against Mark's shoulder. "It's going to be okay," Mark said. "I won't let anyone take you."
Wardo buried his face in Mark's neck and wrapped gangly arm around Mark's waist. "Can we go to that bar now?"
Mark kissed his jaw. "What if TheFacebook crashes while you're getting me drunk?"
That got a small smile. "No crashing," Wardo said, his voice muffled against Mark's skin. "Ever. You promised me."
"Yeah," Mark said. "Promise."
*
Wardo's hands were everywhere, his lips pressed against Mark's cheek, his neck, pulling the zip of his hoodie down to bite a line across his collarbone. Mark's head slammed back into the tiles, cheek pressing against 'fuck Harvard Law' and 'DM <3s TASIHA'. Hands shoved his hoodie up, slender fingers tracing his ill defined chest, dipping in and out of his belly button as they traced ornate patterns across his skin.
The bathroom door opened and slammed. The sound of footsteps came in, followed by knocking cubicle doors and taps turning on. "Wardo," Mark hissed.
Wardo looked up at him, eyes shadowed by dark eyelashes, and one hand off Mark's stomach to press an index finger against his lips. "Shh."
His second hand slipped around between Mark's back and the wall of the stall, fingers pushing under Mark's waistband to touch bare skin.
Mark bit down on his lip and clenched his fists tight. Wardo pressed up against him, catching Mark's moan in his mouth and holding him in a silent kiss as his second hand reached to tug at Mark's belt.
"Fuck," Mark moaned as softly as he could bear when Wardo pushed his pants down and his lips left Mark's mouth, his head dropping lower and lower.
Wardo had to lift one of Mark's hands off the wall, stretching out the fingers one by one and resting it in his hair because Mark was gone, Mark couldn't think he just clenched his fist again in Wardo's hair and tilted his head back so he wouldn't have to look at Wardo's face, Wardo's mouth around him, Wardo's half closed eyes.
"Do it," Wardo breathed and Mark came in a shivering, helpless wreck.
"God," he said, hoping whoever came in had left but not really caring because Wardo's hands were tight on his hips even as he pulled away. "God, fuck, Wardo, fuck."
Wardo stood up and kissed Mark again, pressing his tongue back into Mark's mouth and Mark could feel each of Wardo's fingertips as a separate point of pressure on his skin, each almost hard enough to bruise but not quite. Not quite.
Wardo's hands slid up under his hoodie again. God, he was still in a hoodie, his pants wrapped around his ankles getting damp from the floor. Wardo wasn't undressed at all, the soft cotton of his pants warm where his thighs encased Mark's. "Mark," Wardo whispered, kissing and biting his way down Mark's jaw, his fingers pressing even harder against Mark's skin. "Mark, Mark."
"I love you," Mark said, one hand fisted in Wardo's hair and Wardo suddenly still against him. "You know that, right? I fucking love you."
Wardo's body was pressed against him, his hands tight on Mark's hips and it took Mark a moment to realize he wasn't moving. It took another moment for him to smell smoke.
"Wardo?" He reached up with his free hand to shake Wardo's shoulder. "Hey, are you ok - holy shit is your arm on fire?"
Wardo blinked at him. His face was slowly rearranging itself into a smile like his system had just been forced to reboot and he looked down at his arm just in time for the tiny spark to catch into actual flames across the arm of his jacket. "Shit. Fuck, Mark."
They tumbled out of the cubicle all flailing limbs and alarmed cries and threw Wardo's jacket and shirt to the floor. Mark pulled his pants up and jumped up and down on the burning clothes while Wardo ran his arm under the cold tap, watching the water steam up from the surface of his thankfully fireproof skin.
Mark looked up from the floor and met Wardo's eyes through the smoke and steam and suddenly they were laughing. Rich, half hysterical laughter of 'how is this our lives' and 'thank god we're okay'.
"I said I loved you and you caught fire," Mark said, falling across the floor to lean against Wardo's bare chest. "You caught fire from my love."
Wardo blushed and pushed him and tried to hide a smile. "You knew my cooling system's on the brink. You knew and you went off saying things that would overload my processors and disable the coolant pump."
"Disable the coolant pump," Mark said. "Catch fire out of love. Same difference."
"You," Wardo said, spinning around to push Mark back against the sinks. "You are the most ridiculous, obnoxious," Each adjective was punctuated with a kiss to Mark's cheeks, chin, forehead, throat. "Crazy, obscure, brilliant and I can't even believe you."
Mark wrapped his arms right around Wardo's waist and Wardo buried his face in the side of Mark's neck, his breathy laugher pressed into Mark's skin. "Anyway," Mark said. "It's been, like, four months. Shouldn't you love me back by now? Do I need to call customer services and complain?"
Wardo let out a noise that was either a despairing laugh or a hysterical sob. "You are an idiot," he mumbled into Mark's skin. "Seriously, Mark, you are the stupidest genius I have ever met."
"Says the robot who caught fire from my love."
Wardo pushed his face further against Mark's skin, muffling his laughter even as he shook. He held Mark tighter, pulling him close as though maybe if he tried hard enough they could melt into one. "You're such a complete idiot. I've been in love with you forever."
Oh, Mark thought as Wardo's mouth opened to press against his neck. He felt a sudden wave of sympathy for Wardo because if he was a robot he would be a fucking furnace right now.
"Oh," he managed out loud. That was not fair, all Wardo had to do was a system reboot, Mark didn't have the luxury of switching himself off and back on again. "That's-oh."
Wardo lifted his head and if he was human there would have been tears of laughter all over his cheeks. "You are such an idiot," he said again.
Mark felt his face relax into a smile. "Yeah," he said. "But you love me anyway."
"I do," Wardo agreed. "Fuck but I do." Then his mouth was on Mark's again and his hands were lifting Mark up onto the sinks. Anyone could come in at any moment but Mark found he didn't care at all.
Part 2