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“You do remember that we deliberately swept the apartment and all our stuff for bugs when we moved in, right,” Steve says. “And you still want to bring that—that—that thing into our house?”
Bucky doesn’t seem perturbed. “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature,” he says, then snickers at his own dumb joke like he’s both halves of Laurel and Hardy.
“It creeps me out that it’s listening to us all the time,” says Steve. “Does it even have an off button?”
“I dunno,” Bucky says cheerily. “But it can tell me what the weather’s like in Australia.”
“Why do you need to know what the weather’s like in Australia! We’re not in Australia!”
“Yeah, that’s why it’s so cool,” Bucky says. He sits up from his determined slouch on the sofa. “I hope you know how much Natalia is going to make fun of you for being old and technologically impaired when she finds out about this.”
“You’re older than me,” Steve grumps. “Listen, Buck, I’m just worried about supporting monopoly companies, you know? Capitalism is bad enough as it is—don’t look at me like that, you know as well as I do how much that thing cost, and all the unpaid labor from, from, fuckin’ child workers who get paid less than I did in 1933, tell me that’s not unethical—”
Bucky grabs Steve’s book off the coffee table and waves it at him. “Do you and Bertrand Russell need some more time alone, babydoll?”
“Don’t call me that,” Steve complains.
Bucky’s been insufferable with the pet names ever since he and Natasha had invaded the little brownstone during one of Natasha’s “girls’ nights” and watched the entire filmography of Captain America movies. They’d both found the affectatious language of the more modern ones—not to mention Steve’s stilted scenery-chewing in the authentic ones—absolutely hilarious, and taken to imitating the most egregiously anachronistic of the bunch.
“I’m being serious, it’s like everyone forgot what happened during the Depression. And now things are supposed to be all better, but everyone talks about ‘progress’ and ‘society’ and ‘innovation’ like those words matter when you’ve got blue-collar workers barely scraping by despite working forty hours a week, and the rich are sitting on fortunes ten times over—I remember standing on the line for Christmas of ’36 when the New York auto workers’ solidarity strikes were happening after the Wagner Act, for Christ’s sake! Things were supposed to get better after the Fair Labor Standards Act, but the same sort of shit that was happening in General Motors in ’36 is happening now in Amazon warehouses, and the government is still turning a blind eye. You know the minimum federal wage in the United States hasn’t increased since 2006, and if there’s anyone who knows what inflation does to revenue then it’s me, for fuck’s sake, I’m supposed to be Captain America, I can’t support this sort of, of, this ludicrous, relentless, parasitic—”
“I already know about your hate boner for Jeff Bezos,” Bucky says, “intimately. If you want a more ethical alternative, that at least probably involves less child slave labor, then I’m sure Stark would be happy to whip something up in a cinch—”
Steve flops back on the couch and throws both of his arms over his face with a prolonged groan.
“At least with Tony we’d know for sure it was spying on us,” Bucky says helpfully.
“Shockingly,” Steve says, “that does not, actually, make me feel better.”
Bucky snorts. “And the truth comes out: Captain America’s a dirty commie.”
Steve winces; he’s been doing his share of research on the time he missed while he was under the ice, of course, as well as the extent of what Bucky suffered while in the Soviet Union, and he isn’t exactly as comfortable with the label as he was back before the war. During the 1930s, the news coming from Russia hadn’t been anything but inspiring to the local Communist party.
“I think the press would straight-up have a conniption if I actually talked about politics beyond the generic ‘I think somebody should do something,’ that bullshit. Or they’d just assume, oh, Captain America’s from the forties, he doesn’t understand how a SmartPhone works, hardy har, instead of reigniting a national dialogue about the very real dangers of the ever-present nature of technology in the modern world.”
“I’m choosing to ignore that you just said ‘hardy har,’ by the way. That’s a decision I’m making and you should be proud of me for making that choice,” Bucky says. “But yeah, I don’t know if the world is ready for that particular side of Captain America.”
“It doesn’t matter if the world is ready or not,” Steve says. “I’m not going to let myself be watered down because people can’t handle the concept that things need to change. I’m not going to recuse myself from this conversation because some people think I don’t know what Instant Messages are.”
Bucky grins at him. “It’s toeing a line that you’ve already been very public with the fact that you condemn the current administration,” he says, as though Steve doesn’t vividly remember the enraged call from his SHIELD-appointed publicist. “And I swear Natalia nearly choked on her yerba mate when you described Instant Messages as ‘telegrams, but faster.’”
“I wasn’t wrong!”
“No, you weren’t,” Bucky says fondly. “Although you have to admit it was hilarious when that reporter found out you hadn’t voted for FDR as soon as you were eligible.”
Steve can’t help but smile a little at the memory. He’d cast his first ballot in 1936 for Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party of America. Thomas hadn’t won, hadn’t even made a dent in the results, but it had been the principle of the thing that had counted in the end.
“Oh, and that’s funny to you?” says Bucky, accusatory. “You think it’s real fuckin’ funny that this dumb pundit thought they had the right idea about Captain America, vintage old fogey?”
“Like you weren’t at home laughing your head off,” Steve says.
Bucky doesn’t deny it. He’s still holding the book as though he’s forgotten about it. “You know I support your political rabble-rousing,” he says, “and would gladly lend a—”
“Don’t you fuckin’ dare—”
“—word of advice, what did you think I was gonna say?”
Steve says, “Right, so are we not done talking about the panopticon guard you’ve decided to bring into our home?”
“I like that it plays music,” says Bucky.
“A goddamn wireless radio can play music! And it doesn’t spy on you!”
“Yeah, tell that to the bug you found in your stereo,” Bucky says.
Steve points at him. “Listen—”
Bucky hums thoughtfully, tapping the fingers of his left hand on the cover of the Bertrand Russell book. “The technology is real fuckin’ fascinating though, even you can’t deny that,” he says eventually. “This thing knows it’s me even when I’m using a fuckin’... Eastern Latverian accent, do you know how many people here even know where Latveria is?”
“So it has voice recognition software that could potentially be used to impersonate you later—that’s not fascinating—”
“Pal,” Bucky says. “I spent the better part of the last century getting all up close and personally acquainted with the inside of one of the most notorious totalitarian surveillance states in all of history. If the goddamn Secret Police wanted to come up with a convincingly legal-seeming reason to detain me indefinitely in Rikers Island, nothing the Amazon capitalist robot is going to overhear is going to sway their hand. They know me inside and out.”
“You were cleared of all charges,” Steve says, muffled due to the fact that he’s speaking into his inner elbow.
“Only because no one wanted to admit I even existed, because western governments are touchier than the fuckin’ Hulk after a bad trip.”
“Did someone give Bruce drugs?” asks Steve, horrified. He had learned what that particular euphemism meant courtesy of Natasha’s impromptu introductory course into 21st century American slang.
Bucky snorts. “’S called a hypothetical example, sweetheart.”
“I still don’t want people listening in on me all the time! I fought against the implementation of Project INSIGHT for this exact reason,” Steve says, tentatively removing his arms from his face.
“If the baby robot tries to murder us both in our sleep because it determines we might eventually pose a threat to its world domination,” Bucky starts.
Steve buries his face in his arms again. “Don’t say that while the robot’s listening!”
“‘A robot may not harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm,’” Bucky says, sounding altogether too gleeful at the prospect of a nefarious robot uprising. “Hey, I think it’s real cute that you still pronounce robot like it’s the 1920s. In fact, I think you should go to Stark’s labs and do it as much as possible.”
“If the—goddamn robot doesn’t finish you off,” Steve threatens him.
Bucky snickers.
“It just frustrates me that the process of creating this sort of technology is so innately connected with the exploitation of labor,” Steve says. “I know you saw the news about the workers’ strikes in the Amazon factories, all these people working all day for a quarter of what living wage is in their area, and meanwhile the CEOs of these companies are buying a cruise ship or, or—”
“Or an Iron Man suit?”
“Yeah! Or that! I don’t even want to think about how much one of those things fucking cost to build,” Steve says vehemently. He sits up to glare in Bucky’s direction. “You remember when Harry and Burt organized that Workers’ Union protest in the city when there was talk of that new Social Security program being underfunded—”
“It was 1935, everything was underfunded,” Bucky says. “But yeah, I remember you went and stood in the rain and nearly got pneumonia cause I had to drag your dumb ass home after six hours when the cops showed up, if that’s what you mean.”
“The problem isn’t that there’s no jobs, the problem is that the workers aren’t being paid,” says Steve. “You know how much the CEO of Amazon makes every hour? Every fucking minute, even? You wanna ask your robot that question?”
“Okay, okay!” Bucky holds his hands up in supplication. “I get the point, pal. You don’t need to lecture me on how mechanization is the worst part of the Industrial Revolution, Little Tramp.”
“‘M not—”
“I said I agreed with you! Especially considering that if there’s anyone out there who’s a living testament to the dangers of replacing humans with machines—”
“I just—”
“Shh, I said I agreed with you, quit while you’re ahead,” Bucky says, “but hey, there is one feature about it that I think you’ll appreciate—”
“Buck...”
Bucky grins at him, the same grin he’d sported during the 1930s when they’d been enthralled by the concept of advanced robotics as a theory instead of an all too vivid reality. “Hey, Alexa,” he calls out. “Play ‘The Star-Spangled Man Wi—’”
“NO,” Steve shouts, and jumps on him.