Work Text:
Setting one is for the easy days, days he doesn't think too much.
"Red Bull, Mark," the bot says. It slides a hand up Mark's back, settling at the nape of his neck and scratching gently at his scalp. Mark arches back to look up into the bot's—into Eduardo's eyes, he reminds himself. They don't crinkle around the corners when Eduardo smiles, not the way they had when Mark had seen the genuine article at a conference early in July. He'd laughed, nudging his pretty, female friend with his elbow, and then he'd seen Mark watching and angled himself out of Mark's line of sight.
"Thanks," Mark says absently, frowning at the can it had set beside his keyboard. He pops the tab but doesn't drink.
"What're you thinking for dinner?" asks the bot. Mark shrugs.
"Whatever you want."
"I want what you want," the bot says, and Mark chokes back a heavy sigh, slumping down in his desk chair and sliding his headphones into place.
"Not hungry," he mutters, restoring his window with a keystroke. He scrolls to the bottom of the program and then glances up, absently, and notes that the bot—Eduardo—has gone, without comment or protest.
His stomach growls. Frowning, he exits the program without saving and gets up to turn the lock to his study door. When a knock comes an hour later, he ignores it, and eventually there are footsteps on the landing, and he's alone again.
Setting one is problematic. There aren't many easy days. Not lately.
--
Setting two is for the days he's feeling nostalgic. "But not—not regret," he'd said to Dustin once, well into his fourth beer. "Nostalgia, because—anyway, there's an important distinction."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Dustin had said, because Dustin's never seen the bot, and if Mark is careful, he never will.
As much as Mark has tinkered with the programming—and he has, because while the hardware is well beyond him, and some of the software, too, the basic program is easily modified—he's had no success coaxing the bot into formulating its own opinions, its own preferences, creating something from nothing. He's given it a great deal of information with which to generate acceptable responses, but the bot itself is not intelligent. The bot will never be intelligent.
He doesn't want it to be. He never had hopes so high.
"Mark," says the bot suddenly, knocking his headphones off. Mark startles and then scowls up at him.
"What is it?"
"You've been tinkering with the same line for six hours. Take a break. We can order in." Eduardo grins. "A little bit of takeout, a little bit of tequila?"
Mark squints at his screen, sighing when a suitable protest fails to come to mind. "Chinese?" he says, grudgingly. "That place on the corner?"
"I don't like that one," Eduardo replies, straightening a picture of Mark's youngest sister on the mantel, and Mark shrugs and turns around, sure that Eduardo can handle picking a place without his input anyway. Something's nagging at him, though, like a name he forgot or a word just on the tip of his tongue. He swallows down the feeling, and a moment later, he hears a distant, tinny ring, and Eduardo says, "Hi, I'd like to place an order for delivery."
It isn't until hours later when he's lying on his back in the dark next to Eduardo listening to the sound of his simulated breathing that Mark remembers.
"This is the best Chinese food I've ever had," Eduardo had said, the real Eduardo, when he and Mark had ordered takeout from the new place on the corner late on his last night in Palo Alto before—well, just before.
"It's okay," Mark said mildly, and Eduardo had grinned, all fond, crinkled eyes, and passed him an egg roll. He'd eaten his leftovers the next day, and then he'd eaten Mark's, only grinning when Mark grumbled at him half-heartedly.
In the dark, Mark turns his head to look at the bot. Its chest rises gently and falls again. It isn't its fault, of course, Mark knows. No machine can rise above its programming.
Quietly, Mark gather his pillow and pads to the guest room. He leaves the door unlocked. Eduardo never comes.
--
Setting three—well, setting three is for the days on which Mark can find no comfort being where he is, in having been right about so many things and having come so far. Because there are those days sometimes, despite everything
Sitting stiffly in the armchair at the heart of the living room, Eduardo flips the page of his newspaper. Mark hovers uncertainly, steepling his fingers. He takes a breath and exhales. Eduardo doesn't look up. "Wardo," he starts, and then flounders.
There is a tense, excruciating break in the conversation, and then Eduardo replies, clipped, "Mark."
Mark scrapes his teeth over his lip, wincing when they irritate the chapped skin. "Are you—you wanna get something to eat?" he says, shoulders bunched. Eduardo hums, dismissive. "We could, I don't know, we could get a pizza from that place you like. If you want."
Eduardo flips a page again, turning to a new story with a loud swish. The soft glow from the cheap floor lamp next to the armchair casts an eerie shine on Eduardo—the bot's skin. "I don't want anything," the bot says.
"We could—"
"I can afford my own pizza," says Eduardo without inflection, but Mark can hear the unspoken, can see it in the way Eduardo holds himself, in the precise way he speaks, and Mark nods, pursing his lips.
"Yeah," he says, and rocks back on his heels. "Okay, yeah," and he waits, just a moment, but Eduardo doesn't look, never even sneaks a glance over-top his paper. Mark stuffs his hands into his pockets and slumps off.
He doesn't order the pizza. He doesn't have the appetite.
Eduardo doesn't come up to bed that night. Mark lies awake anyway, waiting.
--
"Didn't it work?" the developer asks, crestfallen, her mouth crumpled and downturned, shoulders slumped like the several years she spent developing the bot to Mark's specifications are weighing them down. Mark clears his throat, glancing away, as the handlers packs the unnaturally stiff and still body of the bot into the metal crate and the developer locks it with a code.
"You did research on Wardo," he says, staring down at his toes.
The developer tilts her head, confused. "Nothing invasive," she says uncertainly. "All within the bounds of his privacy. We didn't—"
Mark waves a hand. "What's he—how's he doing?" he asks, wincing at the tentative lilt to end of his sentence, the weakness in his voice. When she only looks at him, he shakes his head and turns away. She gives an order to the handlers, and they wheel Eduardo through the house. She starts to follow and then stops again, looking back at him. He clenches his teeth.
"Are you sure you don't want a refund?" she asks, one last time, and he leaves her to find her own way out, retreating to his study, settling in front of his computer, and securing his headphones.
He works through the night. In the morning, he erases it all and starts again.