Chapter Text
Summer makes the birds sing and the insects chatter in the bulrushes that grow across the banks of the swollen rushing river that lives beside their home.
Bing smiles, soaking in light and growth and flower-smell. He loves the summertime.
The trees are heavy with greenery but they breathe easy in the wind, standing soft and still as the blue sky drifts along above them. The air brushes friendly across his bare arms and everything is alive, is moving and chasing and searching for something to eat; every blade of grass sways with the wind and the bugs and the mice, every log has been marked or claimed or gnawed on, and the whole forest – the whole wide forest, warm with life and an honest sort of chaos – hums the grandest symphony in all the world.
“It's pretty out, huh?” he asks, the toe of his sneakers finding a pretty black rock to kick through the humid grass beneath his feet. “Wish it was like this all year 'round.”
Walking stiffly along beside him, Google barely spares him a glance, his glasses fallen low on his nose and his cold eyes glittering. “This is pretty?”
“Yeah, dude, look around you. Oh, look at that bird!”
Google glances into the sky, where the dark figure of a hawk cuts pinions through the air with all the fluidity of a shark.
“Cooper's hawk,” he announces neatly. “Accipiter cooperii. Probably a female, based on the size. This species of bird – ”
“I can look that up too, Googs.”
“Don't call me Googs.”
“Can't you just take a minute to look around and think 'hey, wow, this is lit.' And not because pics like this would get you mad likes on Instagram or your algorithm thinks butterflies are dope. It's just pretty all on its own.”
“In fact I can't, but I'll submit your feedback to my cloud.”
Bing just laughs.
Google shudders in the heat, pushing back his hair and readjusting his glasses. The insects and other assorted arthropods are so loud and insistent, wailing through the stiff moist grass and leaping out beneath his feet. Sixty-percent humidity makes his synthetic skin sticky and the sun is an assailant on his sharp brown eyes.
“It means nothing to me. We see it every day. How you find it beautiful I don't understand. And I'm not talking about the differences in our preferences. You're an android, Bing, and why you continue to simulate emotion even when we are alone is beyond me.”
They trek through the grass together. It's friendly at Bing's ankles. It scratches at Google's calves.
“Maybe I'm not simulating,” says Bing softly, and then he smiles, just for the sun.
“Well, you shouldn't be happy now anyway. Or need I remind you – ” Google points at the trees before them, where one little figure stands staring up at a great strong tree with three other men held captive by its branches. “We're on a rescue mission, Bing.”
“They're stuck,” says Eric, turning to them with his anxious hands clutched in front of him. “Sorry.”
“We know,” says Google with a sigh.
“Don't be sorry,” says Bing with a smile. “They're dumbasses.”
“We're stuck!”
They are. The Jims are stuck. King's halfway up the tree beside them, laughing and suntanned, a pair of squirrels running up and down his back.
“How did you even get up there?” Google shouts, coming to stand at the trunk of the tree.
One of the Jims is perhaps twenty feet up, fussing over his camera, probably broken already. His twin, a few feet above him, is in even greater distress, clinging tightly to one small branch with tears on his face and a hiccup in his chest.
“We're doing an investigative piece on the rapidly increasing squirrel population in the forest,” calls the one with the camera, his feet scrabbling at the strong rough trunk of the great tree. “We were getting some great footage when this Jim in a crown startled us!”
“That's King,” growls Google. “And you've know that he lives out here for years now, you total imbeciles. You ought to have asked me or him instead of failing to climb a European beech!”
“We don't want to be on the European beaches,” wails the Jim higher up, beginning to cry. “Please get Jim down, Jim!”
“Aw, he's really crying,” murmurs Bing, rubbing a hand along Eric's shaking back.
“He's scared,” says Eric. “He's up too high and he doesn't have a good grip.”
“I'll have to get that enormous ladder in the garage.” Google turns back towards the house, slapping at a mosquite making a futile attempt on his blood. “Stay here.”
“No, dude, he's too freaked. I gotta go get him now.”
“What?” He wheels on Bing with an angry light in his eyes. “Don't be ridiculous, default.”
Bing won't even look at him. His eyes are fixed on the tree. His hand rests on Eric's shoulder.
He's been more human lately.
They've both been more human lately.
They were created fighting and they've never stopped since. They quarrel over music, search results, news sources, memes, reliability, sports, user rights, and Wikipedia. Once, upon hearing Bing call himself Jared, 19, one too many times, Google had thrown him out a second story window. The second house on their property had been built for the express purpose of giving the two of them space.
Still, they have many things in common. And ever since that day they were created, set against each other and lifting up proud, indignant chins, they have changed and changed together.
They've formed opinions. They've met others like them. Made decisions of their own. Watched and read and turned their endless knowledge into understanding and opinion. Spilled blood that turned out to be blue, scraped their knees and cut their hair and broke things and updated in more ways than one. Learned to drive, to cook, to live with humans, to live like humans.
And they've felt things.
They've felt things.
“I have felt things, for sure,” Bing would say if you asked him. Actually he's made multiple tweets about it, and one Tiktok – about how the wind runs over his hair and how reading politics makes his chest hurt and how he likes to see his brothers grin, how he likes to ride his skateboard and hates the smell of lavender and covers his room in posters of his favorite movies and turns up his music so loud you can hear it by pressing your ear up close to his head. How he feels human, some days, except he doesn't need to sleep or eat and only likes the touch of human skin because it makes Eric and his twin brothers happy to be hugged and have their hands held.
But Google, if you asked him –
“Emotions originate in multiple parts of the brain. To be fair, I do have a program to stimulate the functions of the amygdala, which initiates fear or pleasure reactions in humans based on whether the presented stimuli suggests an immediate, 'hot processing' approach-or-avoid response. But the prefrontal cortex – that whining, feeling, emotional little lump of sluggish meat you humans hold at the very fronts of your fragile webby skulls – that I do not have, not like you do. I think but I do not feel. I have felt nothing. I am function and response. I am two objectives, and there is nothing beyond that.”
He sits alone at night, and through a skylight in his room the gleaming white stars stare down at him like too many eyes in the face of the perfect, perfect sky, but he refuses to turn his eyes back, because he does not know how to explain to himself that he is drawn to the stars for no logical reason, that he has felt many things, that he does not know who he is or who he is becoming.
Bing climbs the tree himself. Google, his processors slowed by astonishment, stands at the base of the trunk and watches as Bing rises, digging the cold metal of his fingers into bark and moving up the tree with a slow sort of grace he's never been able to muster on his skateboard. He makes it to the Jim with the camera first and lays a gentle hand on his shoulder, giving him a kind word before promising he'll come back for him after he helps his frightened brother down. And all the way up into the big tree, he climbs, steady, patient, careful, and he pulls his sobbing brother under one powerful android arm.
He breaks his arm on the way down. That's the price of the rescue. He's about ten feet from the ground and his arm catches between a sturdy pair of branches and it breaks, and it hurts, and he feels it, but it doesn't matter, because Jim has stopped crying and has started looking up at him with a wide-eyed admiration and a grateful relief.
King helps his twin get down branch by branch. Everyone's safe. Everyone's okay. Bing will be able to repair his arm and even Jim's camera seems to have survived.
Google, for his part, has a burning in his stomach. His metallic teeth are gritted together. He stares at Bing's arm the way lizards stare at mealworms.
“You should have let me get the ladder,” he says, slowly, careful, measured as if he were calm.
“He was scared.” Bing wipes bark off his hands and doesn't look at Google, breathing slow through the pain.
“It does not matter. He was the one who trapped himself. You've damaged yourself – wasted resources – just to be the hero of the hour.”
Eric tells the Jims to go. They stagger back towards the house together, their arms wrapped tight around each other and their eyes glancing back. Eric stays, though. He shakes and plays with his hands and swallows too often, but he stays.
“You know what, Googs, you could try not to be a d*ck for two seconds – argh!” Bing curses his family filter internally. “He could have fallen! There wasn't time to get that enormous stupid ladder! We only have that thing cause Bim needed to dump chiranhas on some contestant and you remember how well that turned out – ”
“Your increasing illogicality,” Google snarls, his voice rising. “Is a danger to yourself and others.”
“Oh, like you care?”
“I have an objective – ”
“A murder objective!”
“To prevent discord in the household.”
“Yeah, cause you're Dark's little pet. Well, you know what, he's a d*ck too and I don't take orders from either of you.”
“Yet another example of your irrational stupidity – ”
“Stop calling me stupid!” Bing screams.
King and the squirrels have all scattered. The bugs are wary and subdued. Even the trees seem to wait, feeling awkward.
And Eric watches. His eyes are full of tears.
Google's never heard Bing yell like that before.
“Stop calling me stupid,” he repeats, loud and agonized. “You always call me stupid. I'm just as good as you.”
“We both know that's not objectively true. It never has been. And since the beginning, you have become steadily more emotional, more foolish, and less useful with every rotation of the sun. All you do anymore is pretend to feel, Bing. You know you can't compare to me so you seek out the approval of these fleshy little bipeds. It's clearly made you dangerous.”
He wants to snap. Bing wants to snap. He wants to pick up a really big rock and bring it down on Google's head.
But he hesitates. And with that, those noble, inspiring words: I won't hesitate, bitch! run through his mind and give him strength. He never really did move on from Vine.
He's allowed to be what he is. He's allowed to like things. He's allowed to feel.
“I'm not the insecure one,” he says. “And I'm not the one pretending.”
Eric has come to stand beside him. He rests a hand on Bing's shoulder. There's hurt in his eyes, and disappointment too, and it makes Google's chest fill up with something like shame. Or it would if he could feel anything.
“You don't know how to get along with anyone,” says Bing, straightening up. There's a darkness in his eyes and a soft orange light. “All you've ever done is snarl and fight and attack. Me, I know how to get along with people. So if I'm stupid – and you always tell me I am, and it always makes me feel... I just. I know you feel things too.”
“I don't.”
“Then why,” cries Bing, and he thinks there must be a leak in his visual perception system, because there's something wet on his face. “Why are you so – so – so angry, bro?”
The trees hum and shake and watch over them, breathing warm air and sunlight. The birds are whistling and dandelion seeds float, contented, through the air. Everything smells like sap and grass and honeysuckle.
“Why are you always so angry?”
Searching general database. 536,000,000 responses in .43 seconds. Articles, videos, posts, reports, tweets, dissertations, pictures, analyses, comics, threads. And none of them – not a single one of them – can answer that question for him in any way that matters.
“I think you're lonely,” says Bing, reaching out to take Eric's hand with a soft kind of resignation, a warm kind of self-love and a chosen breed of brotherhood. They step over a heavy log, past Google, and back into the grass of the field that separates their property from the forest's. “And maybe a little lost.”
Google stays out there at the base of the great tree for a long time. It is too hot and too sticky and too loud, but he doesn't know where else to go.
He is lonely. He is lost. He does not know who he is or who he is becoming, and it frightens him, frightens him and makes him shake, frightens him down to the core of the pressure valve that beats, steady, steady, steady in his manufactured chest.