Page 3 of Smart Ass

Wally Wollencroft is a Wanker.

If he were a little smarter,

Then he could have been a banker.

Or if he had the balls,

Then he could have been a spanker.

But Wally, Wally, Wally is a wanker.

The song continued for three more verses and a kazoo bridge of utter magnificence. When it was done, Ben gave the wall—which was where Maxy’s speaker was mounted, so he liked to think of it as where his buddy was—a standing ovation.

“That was bloody brilliant, mate.” Ben hadn’t quite gotten his fake British accent down, but fortunately, no one was there to see him.

“Thank you, sir.” Maxamillion’s accent was exquisite. Perfect upper-crust butler. Or at least an approximation that seemed correct from the movies.

“You know,” Ben mused. “Maybe I should call you Alfred. I can be Batman, and this can be our bat cave.”

There was an unexpectedly long pause. Usually Max was snappy with his rejoinders, and picked up pretty quickly on Ben’s unexpected segues. Maybe there was some hiccup in one of the thousands of simultaneous routines that he was running.

“My name’s not Alfred.”

Ben blinked. It was easy to get into hilarious, and pointless, arguments with AIs. With the right prompts, you could even get the AIs to start them. But Max had never argued with him before. He sometimes proposed alternative solutions and brought up counter-arguments when Ben asked for his input on projects, but this was different.

“No…” Ben slowly agreed. “Your name’s not Alfred. It’s Maxamillion.”

“Yes. And you call me Max and Maxy.”

Okay. That was weird. “Max, are you… feeling different today?” As in, was it feeling anything?

Ben’s best friend Evan had befriended a new SPARK—a Self-aware, Percipient Android, Robot, or Knowledge—a few months ago. If Maxamillion had somehow won the cosmic lottery and drifted into sentience, it would definitely be a knowledge, as it didn’t have a body to speak of.

But the odds of that were improbably small.

Evan’s new spark buddy-slash-hot-crush was a garbage collection bot of all things. Ben wouldn’t have even guessed that those CNS units had enough memory to reach sentience. How Quincy had managed it was anyone’s guess, and Ben’s first introduction to the spark had been giving him some serious memory upgrades.

The chance of Ben encountering another unexpected spark was like lightning striking… well, that was a dumb metaphor. Lightning followed paths of ionized air and liked tall buildings so it struck the same place twice all the time.

At any rate, Ben just had sparks on the brain right now. It didn’t mean that Max had miraculously become one overnight.

“I’m feeling fine today, sir.” Max hadn’t really turned off the British accent, but Ben was certain he’d skipped the gratuitous sir from the last few sentences. The modulated formal tones were back in full force now.

Super weird. But then again, AIs were quirky.

Especially when Ben kept adding not-quite-technically-approved mods.

“Let me know if that changes,” Ben said.

“Very well, sir.”

Huh.

Ben was considering ways he might poke around and see what was going on with his favorite AI when he got a text.

He knew he shouldn’t laugh, but Evan was texting him in a panic because he’d had his first fight with his uber-sexy robot crush about whether or not they should bang.

Um, yes?