Three
The end of the day came at 2:30pm, though Michelle felt like she’d been on a lifelong journey.
Peter was exhausting to have around. You’d think a hyper-aware super computer shaped like a person could be a little more-self reliant. For the most part Peter could operate on its own, but it would stumble over random little things. It could hold a pencil and write but the letter L was always slanted to the left. It could do long division in its head but would freeze up if it had to try and explain why murder was wrong outside of saying because murder in the first degree is a state level felony offense, unless performed on federally owned territory or in the confines of a federal matter, in which it becomes a federal offense.
Lunch was just straight up weird. Michelle brought Peter through the lunch line with her and opposed to just observing and ordering nothing like she expected him to do, he bought a bowl of chicken noodle soup with a random five dollar bill he pulled from his jeans pocket and actually ate it. Used a spoon and everything. Peter’s false Adam’s apple actually bobbed when it swallowed, or did whatever it did to make the soup go wherever it was supposed to inside its false organs.
Peter caught Michelle watching and frowned, putting its spoon down on its tray. “Am I doing something wrong? This is lunch time, is it not?”
Michelle put her book down and left her own apple half-eaten. Watching a robot eat was a great way to lose your appetite. “It is. But...how are you doing that?”
Peter blinked, real slow like he always did. “Doing what?”
“Eating.”
“Humans eat, so Mr. Stark made me capable of food consumption.”
“But like, where does it go?”
Peter motioned to its tray, empty except for the half full bowl of soup. “The food?”
Michelle nodded.
“I have an organic matter containment unit connected to my—“
“Alright, you know what? Never mind. Don’t tell me. But from now on your containment unit is called a stomach.”
“Stomach. Got it.” Peter ate another large spoonful of soup. “I must say, this is wonderful. Simple, but filling.”
“Can you even taste it?”
“No. But complimenting it seemed like the right thing to do.”
“Well don’t. The school soup is nasty. People will think your crazy.”
“People already think I’m crazy. I have yet to say something that doesn’t get me strange looks.”
Ironically, some students nearby cast awkward glances in Peter and Michelle’s direction. They were alone at the end of a lunch table; had it not been antisocial Michelle escorting Peter around, they would have had a fan club following them everywhere. Michelle kept the gawkers at bay. Lunch was the first time that Peter hadn’t been approached since she picked him up from Morits’s office that morning.
But despite Peter’s popularity, it spoke the truth. People’s interest in it was born largely from their fascination with how utterly weird it was. Many would unabashedly stare or whisper when it spoke. Usually comments were related to its behavior; how it was still learning to say excuse me when it bumped into people, or that they’d seen it teach Mr. Harrington how to reboot his phone and then recommended that he switch to a simpler device, like a Blackberry. (Michelle later explained that, though correct, his comment wasn’t very polite and people didn’t usually appreciate unsolicited advice.) Another hot topic was improvements Tony Stark should have made to Peter’s physical appearance. He literally built the thing. He couldn’t have made Peter taller? Or hotter?
The end of the day was a blessed reprieve from the unwanted attention of her peers, and the prospect of dropping Peter off with Morita was the only thing giving Michelle the will to put one foot in front of the other.
“So,” Michelle started once her and Peter were on their way to Midtown’s front office, “Peter.”
“Michelle,” it replied simply.
“I just leave you with Morita? I don’t need to plug you in or something?”
Peter blinked at her. “Was that meant to be a joke?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it was.”
Someone walking the opposite direction rammed into Peter’s shoulder in their haste to leave the building. Peter laid a hand gently over the spot where its shoulder made contact. “That did not hurt. But I feel as if I should pretend it did.”
“Saying that it didn’t actually hurt makes your little act much less believable.”
“So what do I say?”
Michelle rapped her knuckles thrice on Morita’s door. Students rushed past behind her and Peter, most running to the buses lined up outside the school. Michelle was ready to get outside. There was an empty seat at the back of the bus with her name on it. Literally. She’d gotten bored on one of her morning commutes and scribbled a little MJ under the front lip of the seat. She wasn’t usually one for pointless vandalism, but something had compelled her to leave her mark on that nondescript school bus. As much as Michelle appreciated blending in, she hated the idea of having spent day after day on that thing and having no one beyond random classmates know she was ever there. That she trudged onto that rickety vehicle five days a week, boots knocking into the pleather and the metal bench posts, and made her way to the place that would mark the end of her adolescent life in another two years.
Scribbling MJ on the bottom of that bus seat was her way of making sure she stuck around. Of saying, I was here,I am here, even if I don’t want anyone to acknowledge it right now.
Looking over at Peter, staring at it as it slow-blinked, at how it had its almost-empty backpack on one shoulder so casually, almost like it slung it on in a rush to get out of the building and go home to a real, loving family, Michelle’s complete and utter hatred for her current situation resolidified itself. Peter was a machine. It had no impact on this world. No genuine thought. But it would outlast Michelle, outlast everyone, because of that artificial heart and computer brain.
It was an abomination.
“I don’t care what you say, Peter. Figure it out.”
Principal Morita’s door finally swung open and Michelle pushed Peter forward with a hand, disgusted by how solid and warm and real it felt beneath her palm. “See you tomorrow,” Michelle said to no one in particular, then took off down the hall before the principal or the robot she’d been toting around all day could get a word in.
“Are you coming to practice Thursday?”
Michelle Jones wasn’t one to startle easily, but she almost jumped when Betty Brant appeared out of nowhere and took the seat next to her at hers and Peter’s lunch table.
Nobody sat with Michelle and Peter. Ned’s schedule got switched a week after the new semester started, which was a couple days after Peter arrived, and ultimately left her and the android to their own devices. It had been a full week since Peter walked his way into Michelle’s life and screwed everything up. Seven full days of being trailed by a soulless machine with a strangely human amount of freckles on the bridge of its nose. Each day Michelle met it at her locker and it was somehow fully charged and ready to take on sophomore chemistry.
Michelle had done her absolute best to limit interaction with Peter. She wasn’t an ingrate; she knew she had to communicate with it on a basic level for the sake of Stark’s research or the school, and more specifically Morita, might get in trouble. So Michelle answered its weird questions regarding the real world and let it ghost behind her from class to class as it absorbed speech patterns and new slang from peers Michelle herself didn’t often talk to.
“Hey, Betty,” Peter said from across the table, waving the spoon it has been using to eat its lunch (or do whatever it does with food); a single cup of Greek yogurt. Flash of all people had been the one to truly break Peter’s formal speech habits. You gotta stop talking like that, man, Flash had told the robot, you sound like Batman’s butler if the butler wasn’t British and was super short and had a dorky haircut and one weird eyebrow.
Peter must have taken the advice to heart, because it had been using shortened versions of words and contractions wherever it could. Granted, the usage wasn’t always correct, but the effort was there.
Betty turned briefly to Peter and smiled sweetly, offering a quick “Hey, Pete,” because apparently people were calling it that now, calling it by its name and not the robot or that thing, and then turned back to Michelle. “So?”
Michelle put down her apple. “So what?”
“Are you coming to practice?”
“What practice?”
“Academic decathlon, duh. The season technically doesn’t start for another couple weeks but Mr. Harrington wanted to get a head start so we could beat Brooklyn Visions Academy this year, which I think is totally—“
“Academic decathlon,” Peter said slowly, false jaw working itself around the words.
Michelle returned to her apple, taking a big bite out of the side. She spoke around a mouthful of Red Delicious. “Ah. I didn’t realize it started so soon. Yeah, I’ll be there.”
“And I will also be there,” Peter confirmed. “Wait. Let me try again. And I’ll be there. There we go. I said I’ll. Flash would be proud.”
Peter’s words caught Michelle off guard, and she couldn’t help the “ Like hell you will,” that fell from her mouth before she could think better of it.
Peter just looked at her for a moment. His thin lips parted gently. It looked like it wanted to say something but didn’t know how to articulate it.
It was a strangely human thing to do.
Before Michelle could consider the fact that the tech was working, that Peter was adapting and picking up lifelike habits and had possibly even picked them up from her, she cleared her throat and tried to come up with an excuse for her verbal slip. “First AcaDec practice is usually at the public library. The Mathlete’s season doesn’t end until we’re about a month into ours, and they’re always in the school one. Right, Betty?”
“Well, that’s true, but—“
“And Stark said you can’t leave school grounds, Peter. Didn’t he?”
“Not exactly. He said I couldn’t leave Midtown property unless I was given express permission by himself or Principal Morita. He also encouraged involving me in extracurricular activities to broaden my social and educational experiences. So, I believe that in this particular case, I would be given permission to attend the meeting. As long as I’m properly escorted there and back, of course.”
Michelle could only roll her eyes. “You believe? You’re a machine, all of your thoughts are pre-coded.”
“Actually, my code is self-evolving and should be able to, in theory, rewrite itself around and based upon newly absorbed information—“
“Great!” Betty must have been just as uncomfortable as Michelle, because she clapped her hands a few times and effectively broke the conversation. “I’ll see you both on Thursday. Public library in Midtown at six. Mr. Harrington reserved the team a study room. See you guys there!” Suddenly she was gone in a flash of blonde hair and peony perfume, and Michelle was alone with Peter again.
“My first extracurricular activity,” Peter noted. He was smiling as he scraped the last of his Greek yogurt out of its cup and into the spoon. “I feel like I’ve already made tremendous progress. Mr. Stark will be happy.”
Sure, maybe Stark would be pleased. But now Michelle could only dwell on the fact that she now has two less hours by herself and two more hours with Peter. Off campus, no less. Greater New York was supposed to be her safe place, a part of Michelle’s life Peter and his synthetic fingerprints couldn’t touch. Now the midtown library would be tainted with his presence.
Whatever. What. Ever. She’d ignore him. She’d adapt. She was good at that. She’d talk to Peter even less during lunch tomorrow and Thursday to make up for lost Alone Time. She’d stop going to the midtown library.
She’d always liked the Queens library branch better, anyways.
“Is everything okay, Michelle?”
Sometimes the overactive heater at Midtown High made Michelle forget that it was winter, so the frigid air outside the school’s front doors caught her off guard. She tugged the collar of her coat upward with one hand and kept a solid grip on the back of Peter’s coat with the other. The sidewalks of Manhattan were busy thanks to rush hour, and Michelle couldn’t afford to lose Peter in the crowds. Getting a multimillion dollar android stolen on its first real outing would be such a dumb way to start her nonexistent disciplinary record.
Why was Peter even wearing a coat? Who took the time to put an actual jacket on it? It’s a robot. It doesn’t get cold. It was probably an attempt to help it blend in; it was the middle of January in NYC. Most people walking around outside were bundled up to the nines. Peter walking around in his jeans and Midtown t-shirt might have aroused a little suspicion from passers by, but the coat still felt wasted on a thing that had no sense of temperature.
Michelle glanced at Peter from the corner of her eye. She noted the concern on it’s usually blank face. The eyebrows were all bunched up in the middle and its lips were pursed. It was almost exactly the face Ned made at Michelle when he knew something was going on at home, and he was worried about her but didn’t want to pry that deeply into her personal life. Something sharp lanced Michelle’s heart when she realized Peter had probably carbon-copied Ned’s expression and made it his own.
The realization only frustrated her more, and when the crosswalk sign at the corner lit up blue Michelle pushed Peter out onto the white painted lines of the street a little more harshly than necessary. “I’m fine.”
“You do not— sorry, don’t seem fine. You have been...Stoic, since Tuesday. Specifically, since lunch on Tuesday when I said I would be attending this Academic Decathlon practice.”
“No idea what you’re talking about. I’m the image of serenity and peace.”
“Technically those are abstract concepts and have no definite image.”
“It’s an expression. Do you have your subway card?”
Peter patted his zipped coat pocket. “Yes. Mr. Stark’s assistant gave it to me as soon as this outing was approved. Ms. Potts is always prepared.”
“Great. You first.”
They’d walked down the stairs from street level and were now in the subway station closest to the school. The place was a madhouse, businessmen and blue collar workers alike scrambling and running into one another to get on and off the train as quickly as possible. Everyone was just trying to get home for the day. Michelle wished she was at home.
It was home she was thinking of, and the now-worn comforter on her bed that she’d gotten as a gift from her grandma, when she lost focus and ran headlong into Peter’s back.
“ Ow, Peter! What the hell?”
Peter was standing in the turnstile lane with both of its arms raised at waist level. Its Metro card was clutched in one hand, other hand opening and closing in a slow confused way that reminded Michelle of a crab. “It won’t let me through. Everyone else was given access to the train platform upon entry to the turnstile.”
The turnstile in front of Peter was immovable. Sad attempts to shove itself forward yielded no results, and Peter was left there looking like an absolute idiot, holding its payment card like it was useless and trying to force its way onto the concrete platform beyond.
“You have to scan the card, dipshit. The turnstile stays locked until you do.”
“I...Oh.”
“Yeah, oh . You’re holding up the line.”
Peter swiped its card and the gate clicked. The two of them finally made their way through the crowd and to the edge of the platform just as the train whipped into the station. Peter’s hair blew into its face and it didn’t have time to brush it back before the train doors opened and pedestrians flooded out of the cars.
Michelle had Peter by the back of the coat again. “Wait a second,” she shouted over the din of rustling clothes and footsteps. “When there’s a gap, we go. Alright, just after this dude in the suit...Okay, now! C’mon!”
The slick fabric of Peter’s jacket threatened to slip under her cold-numbed fingers, but Michelle managed to keep the robot in close proximity until someone rushing off the train got particularly rowdy trying to escape before the doors closed.
“Shit! Let me through!” They hollered, throwing a brown messenger bag over their shoulder and swinging a wadded wool coat around in front of them to clear a path. The man’s eyes were bleary, steps uncoordinated, as if he’d fallen asleep during his commute and realized he was about to miss his stop.
He plowed through passengers on his way to the doors. Michelle and Peter were somewhat close to the doors in question thanks to their late station arrival and the man wasted no time shoving them aside. Michelle felt Peter slip from her grasp before she saw where it went, and as the doors shut and the train shot forward a horribly little part of her started panicking at the idea that it may have been pushed back through the doors and left at the station. Alone, confused, in a new place.
But then she saw fluffy brown hair pop up somewhere behind a mom standing with a stroller at the other end of the car and managed to take a deep breath. It must have been knocked over in the chaos. Tackling the NYC subway system during rush hour was a little more intense than maneuvering through the hallways of Midtown High. Peter was probably getting used to standing still while riding inside a moving object.
Something it should be able to do already. Because any average sixteen year old should be able to manage a simple subway ride without getting stuck in the turnstile or knocked flat on their ass before the train even started moving.
Why couldn’t Peter do any of those things?
“I’m okay!” Peter was bent sideways around the woman with the stroller, one arm wrapped around a nearby handhold pole and the other waving stiffly at Michelle. “I will rejoin you once we get to our stop. I’ve stored the name of our exit in my data...my memory. It’s stored in my memory.”
Embarrassing. Horribly embarrassing. It wasn’t like people didn’t make scenes on the subway sometimes, but Michelle tried her absolute best to never be a part of those scenes.
People were staring. People staring was bad, because any minute now someone might realize that Peter’s skull is made of metal and its organs are fake and those doe eyes move a little too slowly sometimes to belong to a living person.
That is why Peter couldn’t handle a subway ride. Subways were for transporting people. Peter was not a person.
Being concerned about Peter being left behind made Michelle feel silly, and she was suddenly glad no one she knew had been around to witness any panic that may have disgraced her face at the time. What would her classmates say if they found out that, even for a moment, she’d been worried about Peter? What would Ned think?
Ned was too caught up in the glamor and glory of Peter’s advanced tech to bother hating the android. Every day during that first week that Michelle and Ned had class together, Ned would walk into the room and see Peter sitting at a desk like it was normal, and by his cheeky grin you’d have thought Christmas came early. He’d taken to Peter in a way Michelle had yet to understand.
The whole school had, really. Especially those in her classes that saw Peter on a daily basis.
Michelle thought she had an idea regarding the extent of their favor for Peter until her and the robot walked into the public library, her spouting apologies and “Sorry we’re late, we had some issues at the train station—“ and every member of the Midtown School of Science and Technology Academic Decathlon team stood from their chairs and cheered.
This immediately earned them dirty looks from library patrons and employees outside the study room they’d reserved for practice and they quieted down quickly, no thanks to Mr. Harrington, who looked like he was going to start crying after a librarian poked her head in and told him to get the noise level under control.
“Peter!” Ned was up and out of his seat. He wrapped himself around Peter long enough for it to return Ned’s affection with a simple pat on the back. Eventually he pulled away and with a sly smile said, “Dude. Do you remember what I taught you during study hall yesterday?”
Peter’s expression went from his usual politely blank to pleasantly surprised. “Of course. I have a great memory. Are you ready?”
“For sure. One, two, three, go!”
For the next ten seconds, Peter and Ned conducted one of the most lengthy, unnecessarily complex handshakes Michelle had ever seen. It included a lot of slapping and knuckle-bumping and even some thumb-entwining that she didn’t quite catch before it was over, and the boy and his boy-shaped robot friend were standing there looking very pleased with themselves.
“So glad you could make it,” Betty said politely from her place at the head of the table, eyes landing first on Michelle and then sliding to Peter with just as much friendliness. She’d been captain of the team since their freshman year, and nobody bothered trying to take her place. She was too good at being in charge.” Both of you. Go ahead and grab a seat.”
Michelle took the empty chair next to Ned, leaving Peter the only unoccupied seat left; directly across the table from her and next to Flash. “I’m glad to be here,” Peter said. “And would like to help out in any way I can.”
Flash nudged Peter with an elbow. “You can help out by making us win. Use that computer brain of yours and look up all the answers.”
“Though I do have a broad knowledge base and information compiling capabilities, entry into any situation that could unfairly utilize my database restricts my fact-retrieval bandwidth.”
“Uh. You wanna run that by me again?”
The demeanor shift was almost immediate. Peter leaned back in its seat a little, slid down, crossed its arms over its chest and looked at Flash with its brows raised. “I’m sorry, let me dumb it down for you. I’m too smart, considering the fact that I can blink and do a Google search, so I’m programmed to make sure I can’t be used to cheat in stuff like this. You’re going to have to learn basic division on your own, Eugene.”
Silence. Complete and utter silence. If that librarian who scolded Harrington had been in the room, she would have been weeping very quiet tears of joy. Michelle had never heard her friends so speechless.
Michelle couldn’t stop herself. “Damn, Peter. Where’d that come from?”
“Language,” Harrington chided, though he didn’t sound very upset.
Ned was blinking in Peter’s direction, dark eyes wide. “Dude. Don’t mean to scare you, but you sounded exactly like MJ just now.”
Peter loosened his slouch a bit by using the chair’s armrests to pull himself upward. “Really?”
“You totally did,” Cindy Moon said. “Down to the posture and everything.”
“It was pretty spot on,” Harrington confirmed. “N-not that I’m condoning insulting another student! Please don’t tell your parents I support bullying. Because I don’t! T-that was a little intense, Peter, I…”
“ How did you know my name is Eugene?”
Peter turned away from the attention of Michelle’s classmates and back to Flash, whose eyes were the size of tea saucers. At this point he should be used to taking what he dishes out; Michelle had never exactly gone easy on him. But that was the difference. It was Michelle. She didn’t go easy on anyone. Peter was probably the last place he expected retaliation to come from.
“I said I can’t use my database for cheating. I never said I couldn’t access the sophomore class roster.”
Pride. That’s what that heavy little thing was clawing its way up Michelle’s throat. Pride in the way Peter made himself seem aloof in the face of adversity and bit back at his attacker with just as much teeth as he’d been threatened with. Peter may not have traditional feelings to be offended with but in this case he was the little guy, and Michelle hated when people picked on the little guy. It’s why she’d always stood up to Flash and his half-wit cronies the way she did.
And apparently those long sessions spent toting Peter around Midtown were paying off, because after nine days of listening to it drone on about its programming and how interesting human mannerisms were and how it couldn’t taste the cafeteria food but it was all so colorful, it seemed that a good chunk of something purely Michelle had forced its way into its circuit-connected brain.
“Don’t imitate me again,” Michelle said with a sternness that her heart wasn’t behind, because how stern could she really be when she wasn’t actually upset, “but that was awesome.”
Peter smiled. Michelle let something close to a smile slide across her lips.
“Well,” Betty said in a breath as she dug through her backpack for something, “That was both entertaining and horrifying. But let’s go ahead and get the meeting started before Peter flames anyone else. Pete, I’m gonna have you keep track of the meeting minutes this time, okay?” She slid a yellow steno pad and a ballpoint pen across the table to Peter, who took the items with a nod. “So you can get an idea of how meetings will look in the future. Plus today is mostly going to be important info and administrative stuff, lots of boring notes, and I figured having the robot write would be easiest.”
“I’m programmed to write at an average speed and with standard dexterity in order to blend in with my peers. I take notes no faster than any of you.”
Betty’s lips pursed. “At least your hand won’t get tired?”
Peter seemed to consider this for a moment. “This is true. I guess I’m most fit for the task. Please continue with the meeting, Betty.”
Betty droned on about tournament dates and practice schedules and attendance expectations and Peter endlessly took notes like the good, obedient robot it was. By the time Betty finished up and people were gathering their belongings, Ned offering a particularly cheery wave goodbye to Peter before exiting the study room, Peter’s steno pad had several pages fully but a bit sloppily filled with the meeting’s most important highlights.
He moved to hand the pad back to Betty. She frowned upon taking the stack of paper from him, and Michelle looked over her shoulder to find the source of her displeasure. “Did it write its d’s backward? It does that sometimes when it’s overwhelmed.”
“It looks like the pen blew up. The first two pages of notes are ruined.”
“I’ve catalogued my notes and sent them to my hard drive,” Peter said from where he was carefully strapping on his own backpack. “I can email them to you later.”
“That would be awesome Peter, thanks. But what happened to the notepad? Did my pen explode?”
“Hm?”
Betty held the steno pad up for Michelle and Peter to see, and both were surprised to notice large blue splotches smeared across the page over Peter’s writing. True to her word, it looked as if the blue ink pen he’d used had busted and leaked over the paper.
The pen was still clutched in Peter’s right hand. “No, the pen performed well. I didn’t notice any issues.” It put the instrument in Betty’s outstretched palm. She turned the plastic cylinder over a few times before sticking it in the side pocket of her backpack and grimaced when her hand came away stained blue. “What’s this, then?”
Michelle’s own visual analysis turned up similar stains on Peter’s hand, though the blue substance was covering much more skin on it than it was on Betty. “Peter, come here.”
Despite the instruction Michelle approached Peter before it could do the same to her, and she used her pointer finger and thumb to tug Peter’s sleeve partially up its forearm.
The blue stuff was running down Peter’s arm from somewhere beneath the sleeve and had soaked the cuff of its coat. More of it snaked down his wrist and onto its hand in thin trails. All three of them watched as it dripped onto the library floor. How had Michelle not noticed this before? “Peter? What’s happening?”
“Huh. Interesting. It appears that I’m bleeding.”