Chapter Text
Winston's knees were bruised.
Every time he returned home, alone, his first action after closing his door and turning towards the interior of his apartment was to collapse to the hardwood floor. He didn't land face-first - the consequences of turning up the next morning with a bruised jaw and having to face either the embarrassment of explaining how he had acquired it or the sting of indifference towards it aside, it was a well-established human reflex to catch oneself on one's hands when falling forwards. The protective extension reflex, he had heard. This meant he always landed on his knees and the heels of his hands, the former of which were now persistently aching with tender bruises. Recently, he had begun to feel the same shooting pain in his hands - far from ideal in a profession that necessitated the use of his hands over many other body parts.
His hands, and his brain. The brain that ran at a mile a minute, processing every ounce of input it could gather before generating an appropriate response. It bore the weight of producing and debugging thousands of lines of code every day, but also the task of shifting his muscles in the right ways (and not shifting them in all the wrong ways), of forming the right words in his head and guiding his tongue and larynx to develop them. Inevitably, he would almost never get this right - there would be flaws that necessitated a re-run with modifications, or else the single line would throw the running off-course. He'd learned that the hard way.
The only way to circumvent this was to write the script in his head beforehand and run it over and over, at least a dozen times, squashing as many bugs as he could detect, fine-tuning it to walk the narrowest tightrope that was the social norm but somehow also needing not to seem scripted because that was against social norms too but how was he fucking supposed to do that without accidentally inserting another bug? Last time he had done this, it hadn't even worked, at least not immediately. He'd been prepping specifically what he'd wanted to say to Taylor since they'd announced their plan to not pay them for the work they'd done. Winston had unloaded on them the second he was given a chance, the lines running out of his mouth with a Japanese proverb integrated for good measure, only for his carefully cultivated words to be ignored in favour of ad hominem attacks. All that work, and he hadn't even been granted a worthy acknowledgement (apart from being proven absolutely right on his point that they were being socially pressured into deferring payment - and apparently he didn't understand social rules?). He'd been left in the dirt, edging towards a grave that didn't need to be his.
Okay, maybe that wasn't entirely true, considering the aftermath of that incident was Taylor listening to him and scrapping their plan to withhold bonuses. In terms of worthy responses, he really couldn't have asked for more. He should be happy (and don't be so fucking needy).
With that thought, his hands both betrayed and saved him. His wrist twitched, causing his whole hand to flutter from where it had been lying on his thigh. The motion aggravated the smarting in his palm as well as probably not helping the bruises, but Winston was too burned out to care. After a full day of masking, disallowing anything that may be deemed more conspicuous than drumming his fingers on the armrests of his swivel chair (the incident with Dollar Bill had dashed the option of going to the bathroom to release his urges), he was entitled to some relief in the privacy of his apartment. Trying to control his stims fidgets felt akin to that scene in the opening of the movie Charlotte's Web in which Fern's attempts to keep the piglet Wilbur hidden in her school desk resulted in said desk jutting open at inopportune moments and eventually the offending animal being revealed. He hadn't thought about that movie in years, the book in even longer.
Reeerow.
Speaking of offending animals ... Winston's head eventually lifted from its slumped position to focus on the sleek feline form that had slipped his way under his flailing fingers. Schrödinger's pitch-black fur rendered him almost invisible in the shadows of the apartment with only his pale yellow eyes standing out like round moons. Winston's hand automatically went to petting him in greeting. The cat responded by arching his back into his caress as if he was just as touch-starved as his owner.
Winston finally heaved himself off the floor, turning the lights on so that neither he nor Schrödinger would be subject to the humiliation of bruising their faces on hard surfaces. Now he was more alert, his nose detected the acrid tang of cat urine somewhere in his apartment. The times when Schrödinger would actually pee in his litter box were about as predictable as radioactive decay, but at least the probability of him shitting in the box was significantly higher than 50%. The cat was currently sniffing around the apartment in the same nooks and crannies he had inspected a thousand times before - behind the desk, under the couch, in the grooves of the skirting board. Winston eventually found and mopped up the pungent puddle, under the single chair in the kitchen. "Bastard," he muttered, causing Schrödinger to mew brightly and trot over to his side. He answered to the exclamation just as readily as his given name, having been called it even more often. If Winston didn't know better, he would've thought the Bastard was proud of the mess he made of his owner's New York apartment and wore the insult like a badge of honour.
(Winston's younger cousin had even suggested naming him Mr Pee Pee after the seventeenth time he had stunk up the apartment in the first month of owning him. Winston had scoffed at the typically childish notion from his cousin, but the name had stuck with him nonetheless - three months into his cat's tenure in his apartment, complete with the requisite pissing as well as thankfully fewer piles of shit, he'd officially been christened Mr Schrödinger P. Bastard. Mr Bastard had celebrated by marking the carpet as his territory).
An hour later saw the weary quant collapsed on his couch, a half-empty Bud Light clasped in his hand that, like every mundane thing in his apartment, caught Schrödinger's olfactory attention. He didn't seem the least bit offended by the smell, as evident by his next move being to climb onto Winston's chest, curling his tail close to his body and staring owlishly at him. Was it even appropriate to describe a cat as owlish? Another long-buried memory from childhood suddenly awoke in his brain - that poem of The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear they'd read in second grade. Would he have preferred an owl?
Nah.
Winston downed the rest of his beer and let his arms wrap around the furry creature, gently pressing the warm bundle of fur, bones and muscle closer to his chest. He knew Schrödinger wouldn't mind - when he wasn't marking his territory on every inch of the apartment, the kitty was as docile as a stuffed toy. Hell, that was part of the reason Winston had adopted him in the first place - cuddling up to a pet felt less lonely more dignified than clinging to a teddy bear (or even a fucking body pillow, dear God, not even he was that desperate - he'd march into Hell armed with nothing but a snowball before proving Wendy "Don't be so fucking needy" Rhoades right on that). Likewise, he was glad for the reason to come home in the evenings.
With Bobby Axelrod breathing down the necks of Taylor and all their employees, the building had somehow become more claustrophobic than his old quant dungeon. This might've made anyone else more eager to leave when the day was out, but Winston found himself staying long after everyone else had left, feeling more able to relax and work productively without the extra stimuli. The productivity boost in the short-term, however, came with the price of dry eyes, chronic headaches and a botched circadian rhythm that served no advantage to his mood or his relationships with his colleagues. He'd adopted Schrödinger from the local shelter in the hope that arriving home would seem less like something worth childishly procrastinating over, and to the cat's credit, it had worked and worked well. Even though Winston would take coming home to the stink of his latest mess any day over an apathetic room that only accentuated his raw solitude, he was also aware that the longer he left it, the worse the smell would linger and the more cranky his pet would be when his owner turned up, and that simply wouldn't do.
Shaking these thoughts away, Winston grabbed the remote and flipped through the channels to some dime-a-dozen sitcom, something that wasn't worth using much of his frazzled brain to process. The canned laugh track was predictably obnoxious but at least consistent enough that he was able to tune it out. His physical drowsiness caught up to him, the blurry hum of the background noise, the effects of the beer and the warmth of Schrödinger on his chest making him yet more lethargic.
Then came the blow.
"The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, available now on Disney Plus, along with the whole-"
That name struck him like a poison arrow, sharp enough to instantly penetrate Winston's blanket of fatigue. Before it could get too potent (it was too potent when it arrived), Winston's arm snapped up the remote and zapped the TV off, causing Schrödinger to cling to his shirt with his claws to prevent slippage. Schrödinger mewed at his owner's sudden change in mood, but Winston was too busy trying to calm his panting to notice. Of all the places to have an unregulated, visceral reaction to something others would consider innocuous ... there was never a right place or time, but in his apartment with no one but his cat around to witness it was probably the least wrong time, especially to something so childish. Yes, he realised that it was petty at best and unhealthy at worst to still be affected by things that had happened over 18 years ago, but the behaviour of the human mind to store away information of harmful events wasn't something that could be easily circumvented or erased.
Human. Why did he keep coming back to that? Why did he constantly need reassurance that he was, in fact, human? Not some advanced but still faulty AI? Sure, he was organic, with flesh and blood and muscle and connective and neural tissue, and he had definitely physically grown like a living organism, but the way the whole system operated was always just off in some way or another, ways that required more effort to rectify. Speaking in the right ways and times was the biggest one - at times, the final result of his script, complete with his tone and delivery that was also ill-fitting and needed yet more adjustments, plunged right to the bottom of the linguistic uncanny valley. Was it possible for a non-computer to fail the Turing Test?
Why could his brain shell out an algorithm that served as the bedrock for an entire hedge fund and calculate Sharpe ratios faster than his hands could type and yet overheated and lagged when forced to tackle one of the most basic of human behaviours? Complex equations that demanded solving? His cerebrum could break down and answer them unbidden. Trying to say the right thing in conversation? The Siri on his iPhone probably had a better grasp of that than him. Winston considered how long it had taken to get computers to talk vs how long it had taken to get them to play chess. Both were back-and-forth exchanges that required all parties to pay attention to themselves and each other, constantly re-running and re-evaluating their own strategies. Being a chess master was considered a high-cognitive skill in humans, more so than holding a conversation long enough to endear you to other people (Of course, there were always anomalies, and one Taylor Mason indeed stuck out as the most enigmatic anomaly of all).
The earliest computers had been used to crack Enigma.
Schrödinger's pointy ears grazed Winston's hand as he realised he had been flapping it again, the cat pawing at his heaving chest as he chased the shaky appendage practically offering pets. The pressure plus the familiar, comforting texture helped to ground Winston as he tried to focus on the strong bone and muscle shifting beneath the furry, supple skin. It took more effort than it probably should have to direct his attention away from his musings (as well as what had triggered them in the first place), but Schrödinger was all too happy to enjoy the prolonged strokes. It was certainly a welcome change to have a companion that not only didn't mind his stims but found their own form of pleasure in them. The outside world commanded that he keep them to a minimum, in public and especially at work, but he had to allow himself some leeway. So long as his face didn't divulge his internal battle, his hands could twitch in any small way they wanted. His face might be a mask, but his hands told the truth.