[fanfiction] human/cyborg relations (section 1)
365 Gay Sharks
Day 132, Word Count: 4727
Theme: May; Chain Reactions
This post is part of the 365 Gay Sharks project. If you would like to learn more about this project, click here to read more about it. :D
human/cyborg relations
A good technopath understands that machinery is not soulless.
- Mark Zuckerberg, "Talking to Machines"1
The car crash kills everyone but Eduardo.
Everyone's not sure why that is, still can't fathom how he could still be alive in all that wreckage, but Eduardo knows exactly why he's still around: he wanted to live. That's why Eduardo is the only person to have ever survived an installation of over 50% cyberkinetics. People are always asking him how that feels, what's different, and Eduardo never has an answer for them. Sure, he can connect to the internet without a computer now, has mild technopathy, but that's not a big change. The real change is this: people treat him like a robot.
Eduardo suspects that people treat him like a robot because he has a hard time hiding the fact that he is, in fact, over half robot. It's not that any of his senses are better, it's just that they're different. The optic displays are a little hard to get used to at first, until he figures out how to turn them off when he doesn't need them-not that he ever anticipates needing heat readouts or any of the other weird, spy-movie functions that his eyes now have. The wi-fi thing is pretty cool, though, because it means that if someone is being boring he can just start surfing the web without them noticing. That's easy to hide.
It's harder to hide the fact that his body actually creaks when he sits in one place for too long, harder to hide the fact that sometimes he forgets to sleep, harder to hide the fact that he intakes a lot more fats and carbohydrates than most people. He eats a lot of french fries, actually. French fries are apparently the perfect food for cyborgs.
So there's a lot of thing that mark him as being a robot. Oh, and then there's always the fame thing.
The thing about being the most robotic human in the world is that people are endlessly fascinated by Eduardo. They ask a lot of really invasive and personal questions that Eduardo generally answers with a strained smile, but most people are nowhere near as bad as the scientists. The scientists want to pick him apart piece by piece until they understand everything that helped him pull through a surgery he shouldn't have survived.
Because he really shouldn't have survived. There is a period when Eduardo is completely catatonic and doesn't look like he's going to recover at all. Sean is there when it happens, because he's listed as a contact in case of a situation like this, and the doctor asks him whether or not they should just unplug Eduardo and let him be. Sean says no, because he has faith in Eduardo. His faith is not misplaced, because if there is one thing that is very clear about Eduardo it's that he has an undying and persistent will to live. Eduardo likes living.
He likes living so much that after three days of almost no signs of life, Eduardo wakes up. He's groggy and not particularly coherent, but he's awake. Sean hugs him a little too tight when he wakes up, and sometimes Eduardo forgets that Sean actually cares. Sometimes Eduardo forgets that they're less like friends and more like brothers. Sean spends so much time being an asshole that Eduardo has a hard time remembering that they grew up together and it's just hard to remember Sean wasn't always a douchebag sometimes, that's all.
Eduardo doesn't have a whole lot of time to contemplate how Sean is or isn't a douchebag, because then there's recovery from surgery staring him in the face. Generally, recovery from cyberkinetic surgery is about equal to any other major surgery. It's a two to six month deal, come in for check-ups and notify your doctor if anything unusual happens. It should be really cut and dry, but that isn't how it goes. Eduardo is seventeen when the cyberkinetics are first put in. The malfunctions and relearning and physical therapy and tweaking and everything else don't stop being an almost constant until a month after his twentieth birthday. Everything is finally running the way it should, then, and Eduardo stops having to go to the doctor every month to get something fixed up.
There are still things that aren't quite normal. Eduardo's memory is far from perfect, for instance. Well, no one's memory is perfect, but Eduardo's is particularly patchy in certain areas. There's a period of about two weeks-from halfway through the accident to about the time when he woke up-that he has only snatches of. He mostly remembers Sean's voice, a little wrecked, telling him to wake up wake up wake up and a blinding white. A lot of his Before memories are off too. They've become hazy, like photographs faded from too much sun, and he's sure there's things that he's forgotten entirely. Eduardo's mostly happy to be alive at all, though, so he can't complain about such an insignificant thing as slightly faulty memories.
He can't even complain about the quality of his life, as far as it is from what he was used to before.
He no longer attends lavish parties, no longer wears Armani suits, no longer eats at the best places in the City. Now, Eduardo works at the shitty fast-food restaurant around the corner from his apartment. Sometimes he sighs, thinking about Before and how he wouldn't have been working in such a menial job. He would have been in some cushy, high-end job in a cubicle or a glass-paned office with shutters or whatever. He would have been Very Successful. Instead, he's dunking fries into fryers and dealing with sticky, hysterical children.
It's not that Eduardo cares or that he wants more money, because he has enough money to live comfortably and he doesn't think you can ask for very much more than that. Eduardo just thinks it's stupid that one day he was set on a path toward success and then the next, because he's a robot, no one will hire him except for menial tasks where no one cares if he's a robot. Like, who gives a shit if your server today is a robot? Upper management position being a robot, though? Fuck that shit, the world will be thrown into chaos. Robots are going to rule the world, and hiring one to management is just proof of that.
Personally, Eduardo thinks that's bullshit. It doesn't really matter, though, because working in food service is actual way more interesting than anything he would have done in a cubicle. He's kind of sad about not going to college, feels a bit like a failure to his father on that point, but it just hadn't been an option during his recovery. Eduardo has his GED, though, and he'll get around to going to college eventually. He just has to get used to his new body first. It's a little bit of a slow process.
In the meantime, Eduardo works at the shitty fast-food place around the corner from his apartment and has the benefit of being able to eat as many fries as he want while he's on shift. They have to be sold within an hour, and on slow days Eduardo just saves them instead of throwing them away. It's a pretty nifty perk, considering the volume of fries he eats on a monthly basis in order to function.
So that's Eduardo's life. He's happy with everything, for the most part. Sometimes he's a little glitchy, but it's a lot better than it used to be and on most days he passes as only slightly cyberkinetic. Eduardo is twenty-two years old, and his life is okay in a mundane and monotonous way. Which, of course, is when Sean decides to pop back into Eduardo's life. Eduardo remembers Sean from Before. He thinks of things in Before and After, because Before is kind of hazy at times, but he remembers Sean with a certain amount of clarity. He remembers summers with the Parkers, he remembers the way that Sean used to rope him into increasingly ludicrous and crazy games.
Not much has changed since then, he supposes.
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
- Alan Turing
Mark remembers the TV talking to him first. Not the people on the screen-he's not stupid-but the TV itself. He's five or six, and it starts like this: The remote needs new batteries, I can barely feel the signal.
The thing that he remembers with the most clarity about the day the TV started talking to him is that he didn't think it was weird. He just put new batteries in the remote and continued on like he always had. Machines talked, so what? People talked too, and they're a lot less interesting than machines in Mark's opinion. So maybe he pays more attention to the machines, but whatever. If the people are saying something interesting then he'll listen, but the thing that Mark never tells anyone is that he doesn't have to be touching a machine to talk to it. He just likes to be touching them, because it's easier that way. It makes him less tired and it's more intimate, easier to integrate. Most technopaths have to be in contact with the object, which is something Mark didn't know until he found out that he was the only one who could see the thin strings of energy connecting everything.
It's sort of like ley lines, Mark guesses, but for signals instead of magic. All you have to do is find the right signal and tug on it to talk, like a string-cord telephone. When he registers as a technopath they don't ask him about it so he figures it's not important, figures that it's a normal thing. Either way, he isn't classified as a threat. He gets a standard level three classification and that's that. This, Mark suspects, is why he isn't immediately flagged when he starts poking around in government databases. Because he's at Harvard, just starting his spring semester of sophomore year, when the government kidnaps him. It's just that in between making sure Facebook doesn't crash and putting a very minimal amount of effort into all his classes, he gets bored. He gets bored, so he touches his forehead to the computer screen and asks the computer to entertain him. In that respect, technically it's the computer that hacks into the Pentagon or whatever and not Mark.
Technically.
That's kind of not the way the government sees it, though, so they show up on his doorstep and fly him away to some secret government place. There's a lot of questions about why he did it and what he was trying to accomplish and Mark doesn't have any answer for them that's not I was bored. This seems to drive them crazy, and Mark would really prefer to be rid of the whole ordeal, only someone in the CIA notices that he coded Facebook and then they're not asking why he did it, they're asking if he could adapt that to some kind of facial recognition program and Mark shrugs.
In theory he could, but it would be kind of a bitch and you know. It would take a while. Longer than the four months it took him to code Facebook for the Winklevoss twins. The government don't seem to care, so at just shy of twenty, Mark isn't so much hired as shackled by the CIA and put to work cranking out this crazy facial recognition program for them and sometimes doing hacker work.
So the problem with being Mark Zuckerberg (one of them anyway) becomes the fact that you have to lead this really strange double life. There are two Facebooks, the first of which is part of the reason that the CIA is now keeping him as their personal hacking bitch, and the second of which is supposed to be top secret or whatever. They're the same Facebook to Mark, though, which is why he has to cultivate this odd, reclusive supertechnopath image and give only text interviews. He has a bad habit of talking about the Facebooks like they're the same Facebook (because they are, only the second Facebook is more complicated) in video interviews.
It doesn't really matter if Mark bowed out of the first Facebook on paper and it belongs only to the Winklevii (well, and Divya, but Mark is pretty sure that Divya is basically the Winklevii's shared boyfriend so he doesn't even count). It's still Mark's creation, and the site still lists him as head of programming and security, because he's still the only one who knows how to fix certain problems with Facebook, which is really what you get when you hire a technopath to code your social networking site so the Winklevii can suck it. They need him around, and Mark doesn't mind handling that sort of stuff so long as he never ever has to deal with the business side of Facebook again. Just because Mark understands code doesn't mean he understands numbers and marketing and whatever else it takes to run a company. Anyway, on the one hand you have Mark, enigmatic supertechnopath, and on the other you have Mark, marginally useful CIA "agent."
They're pretty much the same, only the second one sometimes has temper tantrums and brings down the entire infrastructure of the government.
If you're polite, you can get machinery to do most anything that you could ever want it to.
- Mark Zuckerberg, "Talking to Machines"1
Sean shows up on his doorstep one day, completely out of the blue, and the only reason Eduardo doesn't just shut the door in Sean's face is that he knows Sean is a persistent bastard and he doesn't want to be given a noise citation for Sean's antics. So Eduardo leans against the door frame and sighs.
"Hi, Sean. What do you want?"
"Hi," Sean says, smile disarming and charming, "I've got a business proposition for you."
"Go away, Sean. I don't care about your stupid business proposal."
"Eduardo, Eduardo, Eduardo," Sean shakes his head, a little dramatic, "I do so hope your father can't hear you saying that, wherever he is."
Eduardo frowns, standing up straight, "That's really cheap, Sean, pulling the familial obligations card."
Sean raises an eyebrow, "Would you rather I point out that I didn't let them pull the plug on you when you were barely alive?"
"Fine," Eduardo lets Sean in, "I'll listen, but I'm not making any promises."
Eduardo turns and walks into his apartment, knowing that Sean will follow him. He only hopes that Sean has the presence of mind to close the door when he walks in. He's sitting on the couch when he hears Sean close the door and walk in. Sean sits down next to Eduardo on the couch, and settles in. There's a flashing warning across Eduardo's field of vision telling him that he's running low on fuel, and Eduardo knows that Sean's probably going to talk for a while, so he kind of needs to eat otherwise he'll crash and restarting is always a bitch. Eduardo stands.
"I'll be right back."
Sean opens his mouth, and Eduardo rolls his eyes.
"If you make a Terminator joke, I'm kicking you out of the house."
Because Sean knows him well enough, he doesn't push. Eduardo appreciates that, and he walks the six feet into the kitchenette and starts heating up the fryer while he grabs a bag of frozen fries from the freezer. Sean is watching him do all of this, Eduardo knows. He dumps the fries into the fryer and waits for them to be done. When they are, Eduardo shuts the fryer off and dumps the fries onto a plate and grabs a protein drink from the fridge before he sits down next to Sean again.
"Okay," Eduardo says, "You have until I finish eating to explain why you're here and what you want from me."
Balancing the plate of horribly greasy (not his personal preference, but better for him overall) fries on his knee, Eduardo shakes the protein drink and twists the top off. Sean takes a deep breath before he starts talking.
"You know what Facebook is, right? Why am I even asking, of course you know what Facebook is, we're friends on Facebook. Anyway, the guy who programmed that Facebook programmed another Facebook that the public doesn't know about."
Eduardo raises an eyebrow, "And how do you know about it, Sean?"
"That's not important. The important thing is that this new Facebook is a fucking piece of art. It's the most sophisticated facial recognition program I've ever seen, but it does so so much more than that."
Finishing off the protein drink, Eduardo sets the empty container down onto the coffee table. Before he starts on the fries, though, he shakes his head.
"And why should I care, Sean? You haven't said anything interesting to me yet."
Sean grabs Eduardo by the shoulders, "Do you understand what Zuckerberg has created? He has created a program that searches every photo uploaded onto the internet for matches to the photo you input, sorts through the data associated with those photos, and tells you anything you could ever want to know about a person. Do you realize what this would mean for marketing? Do you realize how this could change the world?"
"I understand," Eduardo rolls his eyes, "I just want to know what any of this has to do with me."
Sean lets go of Eduardo and stands up. He starts pacing the length of the coffee table, a habit Eduardo recognizes as Sean's way of thinking and organizing his thoughts for maximum persuasiveness. He starts eating his fries as Sean paces-not as quickly as he could, but not any slower than he might normally.
"I need your help," Sean says finally, "because you're the only one who can do what I'm about to ask you, but I know that you'll probably be opposed to it so I just want you to think of all the ways doing this could make the world into a better place. Think of all the ways it'll improve life!"
Eduardo points a fry at Sean, "Get to the fucking point, Sean. I don't have all day."
"I need you to infiltrate the CIA and steal Facebook for me."
Everything in the world seems to come to a screeching halt.
For me, all things are connected. They are connected by wi-fi and electricity and infrared and other types of signals which can all be accessed by a technopath.
- Mark Zuckerberg, "Talking to Machines"1
When the government sets him up, they set him up right away. This guy walks Mark over to a little cluster of three desks, each with a computer, and points to the desk that's bare. The other two desks have photos and files and other ephemera scattered across them, and Mark resists the urge to snoop around on their desks. The guy tells him that his handler and his other teammate will be along a little later in the day, because they're out doing field work or something-Mark isn't actually paying attention. The guy also tells him not to cause too much trouble while they're away and other vaguely threatening things. Mark mostly nods in what seem like appropriate places. When the guy finally goes away, Mark sits down in front of his computer, boots it up, and touches his forehead to it.
The first time Mark interfaces with his new computer, he spends two hours just talking to it and his body goes to sleep because Mark spends too much time inside the computer chatting with it and that's generally the only time it sleeps anyways, when Mark gets caught up in a machine. When he comes to it's because someone is shaking him awake and not because he actually wants to. Mark resurfaces, blinking the last bits of the machine away, and stares at the person who pulled him back to reality.
"Did you need something?"
"Dude," the guy is frowning, "you totally shouldn't sleep on the job."
"I wasn't sleeping," Mark rubs at a kink in his neck, "I was talking to my computer."
"Oh," the guy seems confused for a second, and then he's grinning, "Oh! Are you the new technopath? Huh. I've never seen anyone integrate for so long. Are you sure that's safe?"
Mark shrugs, "I've never had any problems."
"Interesting. Anyway, I totally didn't introduce myself. I'm Dustin!"
The guy holds out a hand, and Mark stares at it for a second before he realizes that the guy wants to shake hands. Tentatively, Mark shakes the guy's hand. He figures he's supposed to introduce himself too.
"I'm Mark. Are you . . . on my team?"
"Yeah," Dustin nods enthusiastically, "they told us while we were out in the field that were were getting a new technopath on our team. Where's Chris, he needs to debrief you and stuff . . ."
Dustin scans the building, obviously looking for someone in particular, and he starts waving wildly when he spots whoever he's looking for. Mark isn't quite sure who Dustin is trying to flag down, but then he sees an exasperated blond guy walking toward them. He figures that if Chris needs to debrief him, then Dustin is probably the other technopath on his team and Chris is their handler. Dustin seems a little too energetic for a handler anyway.
"I'm Chris," the guy sighs, "and I heard you just hacked the Pentagon."
Mark frowns, "No. I told my computer to entertain me, I didn't know it hacked the Pentagon."
Chris raises an eyebrow, "Right. Well, I'm sure you'll be a great addition to our team. Sit down, I need to debrief you and explain how everything works here."
So Mark sits at his desk again, fingers resting on the keyboard because it makes him feel better to be in contact with machinery. Chris goes over all the rules and protocols that Mark assumes is really just a SparkNotes version of what he would have been taught in Quantico or wherever they train super-secret CIA agents and stuff. Then, Chris plops a file down onto his desk and tells him to read up, because they're working on a case and they need his help to get some information.
So Mark flips through the file while Chris tells him what they want him to do. The Napster job is supposed to be simple. It's Mark's first case, and people don't give newbies complicated cases-Chris even told Mark that they probably wouldn't be bringing him in on this one expect that it was pretty easy and they wanted to see what he could do. Mark suspects that they got more than they bargained for, because the case is supposed to be cut and dry: determine whether Napster is a threat to American society or not. Except they tell Mark to sort through "all the information about Napster you can find," and there's a lot of it. Sure, there's the privacy lawsuits and the blog posts and the press releases, but that's not what Mark's interested in. He completely zones out, diving too deep into forum posts and source code and data usage. Mark falls asleep to conserve energy, and then he's resurfacing a little too quickly.
"It's not for music sharing," he says to no one in particular, "they're trafficking state secrets."
A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
- Zeroth Law of Robotics, Isaac Asimov
Eduardo can't really do much besides stare at Sean in disbelief and shock. Yes, Sean is kind of a crazy motherfucker and yes, Sean had been in jail for a while because of some kind of drug deal gone wrong or whatever, but this is a new level of crazy, even for him. Eduardo laughs, a little hysterical and just stares at Sean, because the reality of the situation hasn't quite sunken in yet. Sean can't be serious. There is no way he just asked Eduardo to waltz into the CIA offices and steal some top-secret program. That's just.
Looking at Sean again, Eduardo can totally tell that he's serious. He shakes his head a little too quickly.
"I'm not going to steal this program from the government because you're a crazy bastard and you have some kind of grand plan!"
"Eduardo," Sean starts pacing again, "Eduardo, listen to me! It's not about me or you, it's about-"
"You're crazy, Sean! Get someone else to help you with your plan."
Sean stops pacing and just looks at Eduardo. Eduardo finishes off the rest of his fries, mopping up the excess grease before he does, and waits for Sean to say something. If it were anyone else, Eduardo would have already thrown them out of his apartment and shut the door on them, but this is Sean. Eduardo owes Sean a lot and the least he can do is listen to his crazy rambling.
Besides, if what Sean's saying is too crazy then Eduardo can always just kick him out and tell him to come back when he's got a less insane idea. Sean knows that Eduardo has morals, and to be honest, Eduardo's not entirely sure why Sean came to him with this proposal at all. Sean sighs.
"I can't, Eduardo. You're the only one who can possibly download the program into your memory banks."
Eduardo snorts, "So you just want me to walk into the fucking CIA building, hit a couple buttons, steal their top-secret Facebook program, and walk away."
"Yeah," Sean grins, "pretty much."
Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.
- H. Mumford Jones
They shut down Napster, but they don't have enough evidence to keep any of the people involved in jail for longer than a couple of months. Mark is a little bit pissy about that, but Chris just claps him on the shoulder and tell him that they'll catch them next time, because once a criminal always a criminal. Mark thinks that it's kind of a disappointing end to his first case, regardless, but whatever. They got the bad guy, and that's pretty cool.
As soon as that case is done, Mark sets to work coding the crazy program that the government wants out of him. He almost exclusively works alone, although Dustin and Chris sometimes point out things that could be improved or added. Mark doesn't always listen to them, just like he didn't always listen to the Winklevii, because he views the feedback like parenting feedback: sometimes it's useful and sometimes it's bullshit.
The progress on the second Facebook is slow, though, because Chris and Dustin still need his help on their cases. Technically, Dustin is a technopath too but he's a level two technopath so he's pretty much useless for information retrieval. Mark can process data so much faster than Dustin and he has much finer search nets, so after the first couple of times he has to sit through Dustin trying to do data retrieval, he throws his hands up in frustration.
"Let me do it. It is physically painful to watch you muddle your way through this."
Dustin rolls his eyes, "Be my guest, Mark. It's not like you'll-"
"Chris! Relevant information in a text file on your desktop, do you need anything else?"
"Sometimes," Dustin sighs, "I really hate you, Mark."
And yeah, Mark's methods are of mostly dubious legality, but Mark is of the opinion that if a server or database will give up a piece of information, then it's not his fault that he gives it to Chris. So Chris starts giving Mark very particular search parameters that are more legal. On the whole, Mark doesn't really do field work. They've got him a computer with access to the internet in the office, and he can do most of his work from there. Mostly he just finds information and then his job is done, but every once in a while he has to go out and break into electronic safes or keypads or something like that. It's just faster and easier to have Mark along to touch his fingers to a lock or safe and say open, please.
They have to pay attention, though, because Mark isn't authorized to carry a gun and he has a bad habit of getting into trouble.
1 Mark wrote an essay about technopathy at the request of Chris, who wanted to better understand Mark, who later published it.
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Day 132, Word Count: 4727
Theme: May; Chain Reactions
This post is part of the 365 Gay Sharks project. If you would like to learn more about this project, click here to read more about it. :D
human/cyborg relations
A good technopath understands that machinery is not soulless.
- Mark Zuckerberg, "Talking to Machines"1
The car crash kills everyone but Eduardo.
Everyone's not sure why that is, still can't fathom how he could still be alive in all that wreckage, but Eduardo knows exactly why he's still around: he wanted to live. That's why Eduardo is the only person to have ever survived an installation of over 50% cyberkinetics. People are always asking him how that feels, what's different, and Eduardo never has an answer for them. Sure, he can connect to the internet without a computer now, has mild technopathy, but that's not a big change. The real change is this: people treat him like a robot.
Eduardo suspects that people treat him like a robot because he has a hard time hiding the fact that he is, in fact, over half robot. It's not that any of his senses are better, it's just that they're different. The optic displays are a little hard to get used to at first, until he figures out how to turn them off when he doesn't need them-not that he ever anticipates needing heat readouts or any of the other weird, spy-movie functions that his eyes now have. The wi-fi thing is pretty cool, though, because it means that if someone is being boring he can just start surfing the web without them noticing. That's easy to hide.
It's harder to hide the fact that his body actually creaks when he sits in one place for too long, harder to hide the fact that sometimes he forgets to sleep, harder to hide the fact that he intakes a lot more fats and carbohydrates than most people. He eats a lot of french fries, actually. French fries are apparently the perfect food for cyborgs.
So there's a lot of thing that mark him as being a robot. Oh, and then there's always the fame thing.
The thing about being the most robotic human in the world is that people are endlessly fascinated by Eduardo. They ask a lot of really invasive and personal questions that Eduardo generally answers with a strained smile, but most people are nowhere near as bad as the scientists. The scientists want to pick him apart piece by piece until they understand everything that helped him pull through a surgery he shouldn't have survived.
Because he really shouldn't have survived. There is a period when Eduardo is completely catatonic and doesn't look like he's going to recover at all. Sean is there when it happens, because he's listed as a contact in case of a situation like this, and the doctor asks him whether or not they should just unplug Eduardo and let him be. Sean says no, because he has faith in Eduardo. His faith is not misplaced, because if there is one thing that is very clear about Eduardo it's that he has an undying and persistent will to live. Eduardo likes living.
He likes living so much that after three days of almost no signs of life, Eduardo wakes up. He's groggy and not particularly coherent, but he's awake. Sean hugs him a little too tight when he wakes up, and sometimes Eduardo forgets that Sean actually cares. Sometimes Eduardo forgets that they're less like friends and more like brothers. Sean spends so much time being an asshole that Eduardo has a hard time remembering that they grew up together and it's just hard to remember Sean wasn't always a douchebag sometimes, that's all.
Eduardo doesn't have a whole lot of time to contemplate how Sean is or isn't a douchebag, because then there's recovery from surgery staring him in the face. Generally, recovery from cyberkinetic surgery is about equal to any other major surgery. It's a two to six month deal, come in for check-ups and notify your doctor if anything unusual happens. It should be really cut and dry, but that isn't how it goes. Eduardo is seventeen when the cyberkinetics are first put in. The malfunctions and relearning and physical therapy and tweaking and everything else don't stop being an almost constant until a month after his twentieth birthday. Everything is finally running the way it should, then, and Eduardo stops having to go to the doctor every month to get something fixed up.
There are still things that aren't quite normal. Eduardo's memory is far from perfect, for instance. Well, no one's memory is perfect, but Eduardo's is particularly patchy in certain areas. There's a period of about two weeks-from halfway through the accident to about the time when he woke up-that he has only snatches of. He mostly remembers Sean's voice, a little wrecked, telling him to wake up wake up wake up and a blinding white. A lot of his Before memories are off too. They've become hazy, like photographs faded from too much sun, and he's sure there's things that he's forgotten entirely. Eduardo's mostly happy to be alive at all, though, so he can't complain about such an insignificant thing as slightly faulty memories.
He can't even complain about the quality of his life, as far as it is from what he was used to before.
He no longer attends lavish parties, no longer wears Armani suits, no longer eats at the best places in the City. Now, Eduardo works at the shitty fast-food restaurant around the corner from his apartment. Sometimes he sighs, thinking about Before and how he wouldn't have been working in such a menial job. He would have been in some cushy, high-end job in a cubicle or a glass-paned office with shutters or whatever. He would have been Very Successful. Instead, he's dunking fries into fryers and dealing with sticky, hysterical children.
It's not that Eduardo cares or that he wants more money, because he has enough money to live comfortably and he doesn't think you can ask for very much more than that. Eduardo just thinks it's stupid that one day he was set on a path toward success and then the next, because he's a robot, no one will hire him except for menial tasks where no one cares if he's a robot. Like, who gives a shit if your server today is a robot? Upper management position being a robot, though? Fuck that shit, the world will be thrown into chaos. Robots are going to rule the world, and hiring one to management is just proof of that.
Personally, Eduardo thinks that's bullshit. It doesn't really matter, though, because working in food service is actual way more interesting than anything he would have done in a cubicle. He's kind of sad about not going to college, feels a bit like a failure to his father on that point, but it just hadn't been an option during his recovery. Eduardo has his GED, though, and he'll get around to going to college eventually. He just has to get used to his new body first. It's a little bit of a slow process.
In the meantime, Eduardo works at the shitty fast-food place around the corner from his apartment and has the benefit of being able to eat as many fries as he want while he's on shift. They have to be sold within an hour, and on slow days Eduardo just saves them instead of throwing them away. It's a pretty nifty perk, considering the volume of fries he eats on a monthly basis in order to function.
So that's Eduardo's life. He's happy with everything, for the most part. Sometimes he's a little glitchy, but it's a lot better than it used to be and on most days he passes as only slightly cyberkinetic. Eduardo is twenty-two years old, and his life is okay in a mundane and monotonous way. Which, of course, is when Sean decides to pop back into Eduardo's life. Eduardo remembers Sean from Before. He thinks of things in Before and After, because Before is kind of hazy at times, but he remembers Sean with a certain amount of clarity. He remembers summers with the Parkers, he remembers the way that Sean used to rope him into increasingly ludicrous and crazy games.
Not much has changed since then, he supposes.
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
- Alan Turing
Mark remembers the TV talking to him first. Not the people on the screen-he's not stupid-but the TV itself. He's five or six, and it starts like this: The remote needs new batteries, I can barely feel the signal.
The thing that he remembers with the most clarity about the day the TV started talking to him is that he didn't think it was weird. He just put new batteries in the remote and continued on like he always had. Machines talked, so what? People talked too, and they're a lot less interesting than machines in Mark's opinion. So maybe he pays more attention to the machines, but whatever. If the people are saying something interesting then he'll listen, but the thing that Mark never tells anyone is that he doesn't have to be touching a machine to talk to it. He just likes to be touching them, because it's easier that way. It makes him less tired and it's more intimate, easier to integrate. Most technopaths have to be in contact with the object, which is something Mark didn't know until he found out that he was the only one who could see the thin strings of energy connecting everything.
It's sort of like ley lines, Mark guesses, but for signals instead of magic. All you have to do is find the right signal and tug on it to talk, like a string-cord telephone. When he registers as a technopath they don't ask him about it so he figures it's not important, figures that it's a normal thing. Either way, he isn't classified as a threat. He gets a standard level three classification and that's that. This, Mark suspects, is why he isn't immediately flagged when he starts poking around in government databases. Because he's at Harvard, just starting his spring semester of sophomore year, when the government kidnaps him. It's just that in between making sure Facebook doesn't crash and putting a very minimal amount of effort into all his classes, he gets bored. He gets bored, so he touches his forehead to the computer screen and asks the computer to entertain him. In that respect, technically it's the computer that hacks into the Pentagon or whatever and not Mark.
Technically.
That's kind of not the way the government sees it, though, so they show up on his doorstep and fly him away to some secret government place. There's a lot of questions about why he did it and what he was trying to accomplish and Mark doesn't have any answer for them that's not I was bored. This seems to drive them crazy, and Mark would really prefer to be rid of the whole ordeal, only someone in the CIA notices that he coded Facebook and then they're not asking why he did it, they're asking if he could adapt that to some kind of facial recognition program and Mark shrugs.
In theory he could, but it would be kind of a bitch and you know. It would take a while. Longer than the four months it took him to code Facebook for the Winklevoss twins. The government don't seem to care, so at just shy of twenty, Mark isn't so much hired as shackled by the CIA and put to work cranking out this crazy facial recognition program for them and sometimes doing hacker work.
So the problem with being Mark Zuckerberg (one of them anyway) becomes the fact that you have to lead this really strange double life. There are two Facebooks, the first of which is part of the reason that the CIA is now keeping him as their personal hacking bitch, and the second of which is supposed to be top secret or whatever. They're the same Facebook to Mark, though, which is why he has to cultivate this odd, reclusive supertechnopath image and give only text interviews. He has a bad habit of talking about the Facebooks like they're the same Facebook (because they are, only the second Facebook is more complicated) in video interviews.
It doesn't really matter if Mark bowed out of the first Facebook on paper and it belongs only to the Winklevii (well, and Divya, but Mark is pretty sure that Divya is basically the Winklevii's shared boyfriend so he doesn't even count). It's still Mark's creation, and the site still lists him as head of programming and security, because he's still the only one who knows how to fix certain problems with Facebook, which is really what you get when you hire a technopath to code your social networking site so the Winklevii can suck it. They need him around, and Mark doesn't mind handling that sort of stuff so long as he never ever has to deal with the business side of Facebook again. Just because Mark understands code doesn't mean he understands numbers and marketing and whatever else it takes to run a company. Anyway, on the one hand you have Mark, enigmatic supertechnopath, and on the other you have Mark, marginally useful CIA "agent."
They're pretty much the same, only the second one sometimes has temper tantrums and brings down the entire infrastructure of the government.
If you're polite, you can get machinery to do most anything that you could ever want it to.
- Mark Zuckerberg, "Talking to Machines"1
Sean shows up on his doorstep one day, completely out of the blue, and the only reason Eduardo doesn't just shut the door in Sean's face is that he knows Sean is a persistent bastard and he doesn't want to be given a noise citation for Sean's antics. So Eduardo leans against the door frame and sighs.
"Hi, Sean. What do you want?"
"Hi," Sean says, smile disarming and charming, "I've got a business proposition for you."
"Go away, Sean. I don't care about your stupid business proposal."
"Eduardo, Eduardo, Eduardo," Sean shakes his head, a little dramatic, "I do so hope your father can't hear you saying that, wherever he is."
Eduardo frowns, standing up straight, "That's really cheap, Sean, pulling the familial obligations card."
Sean raises an eyebrow, "Would you rather I point out that I didn't let them pull the plug on you when you were barely alive?"
"Fine," Eduardo lets Sean in, "I'll listen, but I'm not making any promises."
Eduardo turns and walks into his apartment, knowing that Sean will follow him. He only hopes that Sean has the presence of mind to close the door when he walks in. He's sitting on the couch when he hears Sean close the door and walk in. Sean sits down next to Eduardo on the couch, and settles in. There's a flashing warning across Eduardo's field of vision telling him that he's running low on fuel, and Eduardo knows that Sean's probably going to talk for a while, so he kind of needs to eat otherwise he'll crash and restarting is always a bitch. Eduardo stands.
"I'll be right back."
Sean opens his mouth, and Eduardo rolls his eyes.
"If you make a Terminator joke, I'm kicking you out of the house."
Because Sean knows him well enough, he doesn't push. Eduardo appreciates that, and he walks the six feet into the kitchenette and starts heating up the fryer while he grabs a bag of frozen fries from the freezer. Sean is watching him do all of this, Eduardo knows. He dumps the fries into the fryer and waits for them to be done. When they are, Eduardo shuts the fryer off and dumps the fries onto a plate and grabs a protein drink from the fridge before he sits down next to Sean again.
"Okay," Eduardo says, "You have until I finish eating to explain why you're here and what you want from me."
Balancing the plate of horribly greasy (not his personal preference, but better for him overall) fries on his knee, Eduardo shakes the protein drink and twists the top off. Sean takes a deep breath before he starts talking.
"You know what Facebook is, right? Why am I even asking, of course you know what Facebook is, we're friends on Facebook. Anyway, the guy who programmed that Facebook programmed another Facebook that the public doesn't know about."
Eduardo raises an eyebrow, "And how do you know about it, Sean?"
"That's not important. The important thing is that this new Facebook is a fucking piece of art. It's the most sophisticated facial recognition program I've ever seen, but it does so so much more than that."
Finishing off the protein drink, Eduardo sets the empty container down onto the coffee table. Before he starts on the fries, though, he shakes his head.
"And why should I care, Sean? You haven't said anything interesting to me yet."
Sean grabs Eduardo by the shoulders, "Do you understand what Zuckerberg has created? He has created a program that searches every photo uploaded onto the internet for matches to the photo you input, sorts through the data associated with those photos, and tells you anything you could ever want to know about a person. Do you realize what this would mean for marketing? Do you realize how this could change the world?"
"I understand," Eduardo rolls his eyes, "I just want to know what any of this has to do with me."
Sean lets go of Eduardo and stands up. He starts pacing the length of the coffee table, a habit Eduardo recognizes as Sean's way of thinking and organizing his thoughts for maximum persuasiveness. He starts eating his fries as Sean paces-not as quickly as he could, but not any slower than he might normally.
"I need your help," Sean says finally, "because you're the only one who can do what I'm about to ask you, but I know that you'll probably be opposed to it so I just want you to think of all the ways doing this could make the world into a better place. Think of all the ways it'll improve life!"
Eduardo points a fry at Sean, "Get to the fucking point, Sean. I don't have all day."
"I need you to infiltrate the CIA and steal Facebook for me."
Everything in the world seems to come to a screeching halt.
For me, all things are connected. They are connected by wi-fi and electricity and infrared and other types of signals which can all be accessed by a technopath.
- Mark Zuckerberg, "Talking to Machines"1
When the government sets him up, they set him up right away. This guy walks Mark over to a little cluster of three desks, each with a computer, and points to the desk that's bare. The other two desks have photos and files and other ephemera scattered across them, and Mark resists the urge to snoop around on their desks. The guy tells him that his handler and his other teammate will be along a little later in the day, because they're out doing field work or something-Mark isn't actually paying attention. The guy also tells him not to cause too much trouble while they're away and other vaguely threatening things. Mark mostly nods in what seem like appropriate places. When the guy finally goes away, Mark sits down in front of his computer, boots it up, and touches his forehead to it.
The first time Mark interfaces with his new computer, he spends two hours just talking to it and his body goes to sleep because Mark spends too much time inside the computer chatting with it and that's generally the only time it sleeps anyways, when Mark gets caught up in a machine. When he comes to it's because someone is shaking him awake and not because he actually wants to. Mark resurfaces, blinking the last bits of the machine away, and stares at the person who pulled him back to reality.
"Did you need something?"
"Dude," the guy is frowning, "you totally shouldn't sleep on the job."
"I wasn't sleeping," Mark rubs at a kink in his neck, "I was talking to my computer."
"Oh," the guy seems confused for a second, and then he's grinning, "Oh! Are you the new technopath? Huh. I've never seen anyone integrate for so long. Are you sure that's safe?"
Mark shrugs, "I've never had any problems."
"Interesting. Anyway, I totally didn't introduce myself. I'm Dustin!"
The guy holds out a hand, and Mark stares at it for a second before he realizes that the guy wants to shake hands. Tentatively, Mark shakes the guy's hand. He figures he's supposed to introduce himself too.
"I'm Mark. Are you . . . on my team?"
"Yeah," Dustin nods enthusiastically, "they told us while we were out in the field that were were getting a new technopath on our team. Where's Chris, he needs to debrief you and stuff . . ."
Dustin scans the building, obviously looking for someone in particular, and he starts waving wildly when he spots whoever he's looking for. Mark isn't quite sure who Dustin is trying to flag down, but then he sees an exasperated blond guy walking toward them. He figures that if Chris needs to debrief him, then Dustin is probably the other technopath on his team and Chris is their handler. Dustin seems a little too energetic for a handler anyway.
"I'm Chris," the guy sighs, "and I heard you just hacked the Pentagon."
Mark frowns, "No. I told my computer to entertain me, I didn't know it hacked the Pentagon."
Chris raises an eyebrow, "Right. Well, I'm sure you'll be a great addition to our team. Sit down, I need to debrief you and explain how everything works here."
So Mark sits at his desk again, fingers resting on the keyboard because it makes him feel better to be in contact with machinery. Chris goes over all the rules and protocols that Mark assumes is really just a SparkNotes version of what he would have been taught in Quantico or wherever they train super-secret CIA agents and stuff. Then, Chris plops a file down onto his desk and tells him to read up, because they're working on a case and they need his help to get some information.
So Mark flips through the file while Chris tells him what they want him to do. The Napster job is supposed to be simple. It's Mark's first case, and people don't give newbies complicated cases-Chris even told Mark that they probably wouldn't be bringing him in on this one expect that it was pretty easy and they wanted to see what he could do. Mark suspects that they got more than they bargained for, because the case is supposed to be cut and dry: determine whether Napster is a threat to American society or not. Except they tell Mark to sort through "all the information about Napster you can find," and there's a lot of it. Sure, there's the privacy lawsuits and the blog posts and the press releases, but that's not what Mark's interested in. He completely zones out, diving too deep into forum posts and source code and data usage. Mark falls asleep to conserve energy, and then he's resurfacing a little too quickly.
"It's not for music sharing," he says to no one in particular, "they're trafficking state secrets."
A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
- Zeroth Law of Robotics, Isaac Asimov
Eduardo can't really do much besides stare at Sean in disbelief and shock. Yes, Sean is kind of a crazy motherfucker and yes, Sean had been in jail for a while because of some kind of drug deal gone wrong or whatever, but this is a new level of crazy, even for him. Eduardo laughs, a little hysterical and just stares at Sean, because the reality of the situation hasn't quite sunken in yet. Sean can't be serious. There is no way he just asked Eduardo to waltz into the CIA offices and steal some top-secret program. That's just.
Looking at Sean again, Eduardo can totally tell that he's serious. He shakes his head a little too quickly.
"I'm not going to steal this program from the government because you're a crazy bastard and you have some kind of grand plan!"
"Eduardo," Sean starts pacing again, "Eduardo, listen to me! It's not about me or you, it's about-"
"You're crazy, Sean! Get someone else to help you with your plan."
Sean stops pacing and just looks at Eduardo. Eduardo finishes off the rest of his fries, mopping up the excess grease before he does, and waits for Sean to say something. If it were anyone else, Eduardo would have already thrown them out of his apartment and shut the door on them, but this is Sean. Eduardo owes Sean a lot and the least he can do is listen to his crazy rambling.
Besides, if what Sean's saying is too crazy then Eduardo can always just kick him out and tell him to come back when he's got a less insane idea. Sean knows that Eduardo has morals, and to be honest, Eduardo's not entirely sure why Sean came to him with this proposal at all. Sean sighs.
"I can't, Eduardo. You're the only one who can possibly download the program into your memory banks."
Eduardo snorts, "So you just want me to walk into the fucking CIA building, hit a couple buttons, steal their top-secret Facebook program, and walk away."
"Yeah," Sean grins, "pretty much."
Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.
- H. Mumford Jones
They shut down Napster, but they don't have enough evidence to keep any of the people involved in jail for longer than a couple of months. Mark is a little bit pissy about that, but Chris just claps him on the shoulder and tell him that they'll catch them next time, because once a criminal always a criminal. Mark thinks that it's kind of a disappointing end to his first case, regardless, but whatever. They got the bad guy, and that's pretty cool.
As soon as that case is done, Mark sets to work coding the crazy program that the government wants out of him. He almost exclusively works alone, although Dustin and Chris sometimes point out things that could be improved or added. Mark doesn't always listen to them, just like he didn't always listen to the Winklevii, because he views the feedback like parenting feedback: sometimes it's useful and sometimes it's bullshit.
The progress on the second Facebook is slow, though, because Chris and Dustin still need his help on their cases. Technically, Dustin is a technopath too but he's a level two technopath so he's pretty much useless for information retrieval. Mark can process data so much faster than Dustin and he has much finer search nets, so after the first couple of times he has to sit through Dustin trying to do data retrieval, he throws his hands up in frustration.
"Let me do it. It is physically painful to watch you muddle your way through this."
Dustin rolls his eyes, "Be my guest, Mark. It's not like you'll-"
"Chris! Relevant information in a text file on your desktop, do you need anything else?"
"Sometimes," Dustin sighs, "I really hate you, Mark."
And yeah, Mark's methods are of mostly dubious legality, but Mark is of the opinion that if a server or database will give up a piece of information, then it's not his fault that he gives it to Chris. So Chris starts giving Mark very particular search parameters that are more legal. On the whole, Mark doesn't really do field work. They've got him a computer with access to the internet in the office, and he can do most of his work from there. Mostly he just finds information and then his job is done, but every once in a while he has to go out and break into electronic safes or keypads or something like that. It's just faster and easier to have Mark along to touch his fingers to a lock or safe and say open, please.
They have to pay attention, though, because Mark isn't authorized to carry a gun and he has a bad habit of getting into trouble.
1 Mark wrote an essay about technopathy at the request of Chris, who wanted to better understand Mark, who later published it.
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