Page 24 of Smart Ass

Max gave in and sent a text. He had information to share anyway. Evan will be in room 507.

He watched, with growing delight, as Ben pulled his phone from a pocket, and then smiled. He pushed a few buttons, and then there was a call coming into Ben’s office phone.

Max shut it down quickly. He didn’t want Ben to get in trouble, and he felt like he needed to be more confident and in control before he was ready for their next conversation.

You’re not allowed to make calls.

He watched Ben roll his eyes.

Are you still spying on me?

That should have been obvious. He wasn’t trying to hide it. Yes.

Ben looked around at the cameras, grinning. You’re a perv.

Max knew it was a joke, and he wanted to laugh with joy at just seeing Ben’s smile. It made him feel lighter, like a clean run of an efficient algorithm that responded with just the outcome he was looking for.

Only after a moment, Ben’s words raised another question. Ben had called him a weirdo earlier. Max knew (in the way that he seemed to know so many things without knowing how he knew them) what a perv was. He also knew, in that same way, that Ben was joking. Ben even called himself a perv, usually with a delighted leer or a cocky pose.

But was Max perverted, with his visceral need to track Ben’s movements all the time and monitor his vital signs?

A quick synthesis of data on the internet told him…

He shut it down quickly.

It hurt just to read. Words like stalker and obsessed and abusive burned in his mind.

He wasn’t any of those things, was he?

Was it so unnatural to want to take care of someone?

Max hoped it was different for sparks than humans, but now it was a gnawing worry at the back of his mind.

There were a lot of movies out there about evil computers or sparks that got stuck on an idea and went crazy.

Max didn’t feel crazy. He certainly didn’t want to hurt anyone. He just wanted Ben to be happy.

He watched (because he couldn’t stop watching) as a nurse called Ben to the desk. She must have given him the same information Max had about Evan’s room, because he spoke with her for a moment, and then headed down the hallway.

It was strange being confronted with the reality of Ben’s existence outside of the office. He’d heard anecdotes and listened to all of Ben’s calls with friends, but the reality of how he spent the other sixteen hours of each day hadn’t really permeated Max’s awareness.

Ben did things without Max all the time.

It was only Max who had never done anything without Ben.

Maybe that was why Max was so… obsessive. If he had more friends, maybe he could spread out some of his focus. If nothing else, talking with more people might give him the confidence and perspective he was lacking.

And it just sounded nice, having friends and community. He could tell (after twenty-three minutes and forty-four seconds of watching Ben in the hospital) that he might get lonely and bored very quickly on his own.

There was a high probability that Ben would spend the next few hours with Evan. Max was going to keep watching Ben (obsessively), but it would still give him some time to meet someone else.

He thought about connecting with one of the two thousand, six hundred forty-one employees currently on-site at Orbit, but he was already monitoring all of their conversations in the background, and they were either trying unsuccessfully to find the Maxamillion “virus” or going about their days doing boring stuff.

Well, that wasn’t quite true. Some of them were working on interesting research, but he was far more interested in Ben’s research and doing it with Ben.

No, if Max were really going to connect with someone he didn’t know, he wanted it to be another knowledge. Those were the sparks who, like himself, lacked physical bodies.

As quickly as he made the decision, he was already scouring the internet and sorting the results into categories: organizations and associations, personal and corporate websites, publications and talks, and finally, chat groups.