Page 22 of Smart Ass

Ben looked around, giving one last imploring glance, before trudging up to the nurse’s station.

Max hunted around until he found the next security video feed, and then jumped from camera to camera as he followed Max upstairs.

Max couldn’t hear anything, but he could see that Ben was frazzled, his usual bounce replaced with a jerky pattern.

It was tempting to call Ben’s phone and tell him to come into the office. There, Max felt like he was in control. Like if Ben needed something, he could at least do something about it.

Though what, he wasn’t sure. Bring him a coffee? Talk to him… like they’d just been doing on the phone?

It shouldn’t have been any different having Ben come to work, but it felt like it was. Ben would be safe there, cozy in the office nest they shared.

Was any of this supposed to make sense?

This was the part of sentience that was truly freaking him out: the uncertainty.

He kept running over what Ben had just told him about Evan.

I thought I’d scare him off, but he kind of stayed.

Evan was the one who went with me to the thrift store to buy clothes.

He was always stupid about men, but I was stupid about everything.

He’s been to all my graduations.

Maxamillion had thought that Ben had tons of friends. He talked about wild parties and listed dozens of people he hung out with. He always seemed so happy and bouncy in the office, or when he talked with Kira.

But now Max was wondering if Ben was lonely. How could the most brilliant, wonderful, caring person he knew (and to be fair, he’d only paid attention to the three people who talked with Ben regularly, but he’d synthesized a lot of media) think that he was stupid about everything?

And what was the real story?

Max wanted to go back now and re-analyze every recording he had of Ben. It turned out that he had hundreds of hours of footage. (When had he started recording it? And why?) But he wasn’t sure the answers would be there anyway.

Were humans this confused all the time? Were other sparks?

How did they go through life not knowing what to do or why they were doing it?

Did they just wander around, guessing and hoping that they understood all the data, when the data didn’t seem to be enough?

It didn’t feel right.

That’s why he’d told Ben that he needed to gather more data.

At first, he’d thought, or even hoped, that he was just firing errors. Or going through some early proto-stages of the sparking process. Being born had to be confusing, right?

He’d assumed that after a few hours, everything would become clear, and he could be certain of things again.

At the very least, he thought he should be able to calculate probabilities of an event or outcome and believe them. Mistrusting his own analyses was deeply disturbing.

But now, he was becoming convinced that this was it. He was a spark, and it was wild and tumultuous and unpredictable… and it wasn’t getting any better.

The only thing that gave him a little bit of certainty was watching Ben through the grainy hospital cameras, though it would have been better if he could have a direct video feed and he could ask Ben to put his earpiece back in.

And maybe wear a pulse oximeter.

Could he ask Ben to keep one on all the time?

Max searched his records, but he couldn’t remember at what point he’d started monitoring Ben’s breathing and pulse, just that he had a desire to know, and he’d fulfilled that desire.