Chapter Text
The park was filled with joggers, their breaths fogging in the cold air. Nathan wasn't among them, already in his business attire this early in the morning. He couldn't remember the last time he'd gone for a run that went somewhere, even if it was just going in a circle. He and the home treadmill were old friends.
He was going to have to get rid of it. Sell everything in that house that had never been his home.
Looping around the track for the final time, the man Nathan had been waiting for came into view. The bespectacled man made a beeline for the bench Nathan was occupying, jogging unhurriedly. Just seeing him lifted Nathan's mood. The jogger plopped down unceremoniously beside Nathan, residual warmth from the exercise radiating from his body. He was panting from his run, and Nathan could feel the heat of his skin through the layers of clothes between them. Nathan leaned in slightly to get comfy, softening the bite of the cold morning air.
Harold reached for Nathan's bottle of water (bought specifically for Harold, who never bothered), almost finishing it in three long swallows, before handing it back to its rightful owner. Nathan swished around the remaining water, wishing the plastic bottle had contained something a little stronger. Like whiskey.
"We signed the divorce papers today."
Harold turned his head to give his friend a look. Seeing it even from the corner of his eye mad Nathan sigh. It was a look that he knew quite well. This was an old argument between them, Nathan's infidelity to someone Harold considered a decent woman. And really, Nathan didn't dispute that. Olivia was smart, she was funny, she was good-looking as all get-out, but...
Olivia had been someone his parents had chosen for him. The trophy wife they'd all hoped would lead him into claiming the mayor's office, the one that was his to lose, back home in Texas. When he was younger, he'd welcomed it, welcomed her, as something inevitable in his life.
And then he'd met Harold in MIT.
The moment Harold had confided in him that he was on the run from the law, a youthful indiscretion gone terribly awry, Nathan knew that the course of his life would have to change. There was simply no way he'd risk exposing his best friend to that kind of scrutiny. Not for a position he didn't even want. Not when they'd gone through so much, first in MIT, then building their own company from the ground up. Not when Harold was finally starting to rebuild his life, and to rebuild it with Nathan in it.
It wasn't just Harold, of course. Nathan wouldn't be so insensitive as to lay all responsibility for his actions at Harold's feet. Nathan himself had begun to chafe under the weight of all the expectations placed on him by his parents. Even more so after the car accident, the expensive funeral. The phantom weight of their expectations still lingered, as if he was still expected to return home and fulfill their hopes and dreams for him.
Since he and Olivia had started their separation, Nathan had been vaguely searching for something meaningful in his life. For a purpose. It wasn't with other women, or at the bottom of the bottle. It wasn't in throwing his money at the world's problems. Even his and Harold's clandestine government contract couldn't get rid of the unsettled feeling he began to have under his skin. As if there was an itch he couldn't find, much less scratch.
Beside him on the bench, Harold bumped his knee with Nathan's, offering support. That made Nathan's mouth twitch into a brief smile. His friend so often sounded like a dictionary given vocal chords. So the idea of him being at a loss for words seemed funny to Nathan at that particular moment.
"It was a long time coming," he said, to himself or to Harold, he didn't know. "We'd been fighting for years, hadn't lived together for months."
Nathan ran a tired hand over his face. Was it wrong that he wasn't upset? No, neither was Olivia. No tears for their marriage; the two of them had simply gone their separate ways. Easier than some mergers Nathan had presided over, absorbing smaller companies into IFT.
That wasn't to say that he didn't have some... feelings, over the divorce. Just that his feelings were more about the divorce, than Olivia herself. More about losing the extremely high standard his parents had set-up for him. Nathan's parents were high school sweethearts, almost storybook in their union. They'd had their fair share of problems, Nathan knew, some of them even concerning him, but all in all, they'd been happily married for, what fifty years? That was half a century, jesus...
"Thank god we decided to wait on having a son. That would have been a disaster."
After a long moment to contemplate the bullet he and Olivia had managed to dodge, Nathan turned to his friend. He didn't expect a response from Harold about that, to his knowledge Harold had never seriously considered having children.
"Give me a distraction, Harold. What's our little science project been up to?"
At that, a familiar pinched look made its way to Harold's face. He hated referring to it as anything but 'The Machine,'. Nathan had told him that it sounded ridiculous. They bickered over this once in a while, the familiar arguments sliding on well-worn tracks.
Harold would say, "The Machine has a proper name, Nathan; use it."
To which Nathan would reply, "No, 'The Machine' is not a proper name, Harold-- it's barely a name at all."
"It's my creation, Nathan, I get to name it whatever I wish." would be the inevitable supercilious reply.
"But you're not," Nathan would insist. "The Machine is not a name, it's a noun we can use to talk about it in public."
And then Nathan would bring up the host of other fledgling AIs almost ready to be released on the market.
They were mostly kids' stuff, toys to play with. Siri, Cortana, Alexa. All of them were like small birthday candles to the bonfire of Harold's creation. And Nathan had no problem admitting that it was Harold's creation, that Nathan himself was nothing more than a vaguely glorified midwife to the whole process.
"The Machine," Harold was careful to enunciate, "has been glitching in your presence for the past few weeks."
"Oh?" Nathan raised a careful eyebrow. Hearing that was strange indeed. Both that Harold told him so (the man could be extremely close-mouthed about his, well, everything), and that there was a glitch that Harold couldn't figure out for weeks.
"It keeps trying to call your attention to this woman," Harold said, bringing out a cellphone. "She's here at the park right now, painting."
"Is she a terrorist, though?" Nathan felt the need to ask. Skill in painting, he reckoned, did not mean you couldn't design a bomb instead of a canvas. If you were so inclined.
"No, no," Harold shook his head, "By all accounts, she's a lovely woman, but completely ordinary. Nothing remarkable about her at all."
Nathan gave it about a second of thought, before slapped his knee once and got up.
"Well then, let's go meet this completely unremarkable woman, Harold."