Page 85 of Smart Ass

Max

Max waited to bring it up until Ben was in the car on the way home, staring off into the night. Flashes of pale light from the streetlights swept over his features, and Max was again swept up in a welling of love so big it almost hurt.

Ben’s ability to compartmentalize and ignore seemed to know no bounds. Once he started working, it was like nothing else existed.

Max wasn’t so lucky. All evening while they’d progressed on the project, Max had been going over his little moments of failure. How he hadn’t been able to control the bot. How he hadn’t been able to make sense of its inputs. How he’d overloaded the servers again and started a fire. And finally, how he’d stood by silently while Wallace threatened Ben.

Max’s job was to protect Ben, but it felt like he’d been going from disaster to disaster.

“Ben?” he asked.

“Oh, hey, Max.” Ben sounded small and distant. Maybe he hadn’t been compartmentalizing so well after all.

It still surprised him sometimes that Ben offered him this level of trust. He’d recorded all of Ben’s interactions going back at least a year, and never had Ben appeared to be less than bubbly and outgoing—not just while he was working, but when he was chatting with friends on the phone or gossiping with Kira on the night shift.

Max wondered if even Evan got to see Ben like this.

He treasured it more than he could say.

But they still needed to have a conversation outside of the office. Max gathered himself together. “I still think I should turn myself in.”

Ben’s head jerked up. “Quincy’s case is tomorrow, and the media’s still all over it. I don’t even want to tell Evan. He’s flipping out already, and I can’t put anything else on his plate.” He sounded anguished.

“When it’s over, then?”

“I still think it’s safer if you don’t. What can Wallace really do?”

A lot, it seemed to Max. Even if it was just revealing his presence to the senior Mr. Wollencroft. Max didn’t want to be under his thumb. But he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in hiding either.

What he said instead was, “I’m monitoring Wallace’s communications. Do you think he might understand if I talked to him?”

Ben rested his head in his hand, still peering out the window. “I feel sorry for him, but that doesn’t mean I trust him. Bullies breed bullies, you know? It sucks that his dad is a total shit, but he still threatened us.”

“That’s why I want to talk to him.”

Ben exhaled, his breath fogging the window. “I don’t like it. But it’s your decision to make. Maybe Wallace needs a friend.”

It hadn’t escaped Max’s notice that when he started calling Wallace by his full name, Ben had switched as well.

“You’re a good guy, Ben.”

Ben snorted, but it was a quiet sound in the blue-black stillness.

“You’re thinking about Quincy and Evan, aren’t you?”

Ben gripped his hair. “Quincy. Evan. You. None of it’s fair.” He rubbed his hands over his face. “I hate this.”

Max turned on the heat setting for the seat. It was the closest he could come to giving Ben comfort in this moment of raw vulnerability.

“Quincy will be alright,” Max promised with an assurance he didn’t feel. “His lawyers are the best.”

Ben snorted again.

Quincy’s future was another worry that had been hanging over Max like a cloud. Max had listened to all the recordings of Quincy’s phone calls, and it was clear that the bouncy, loving, and oh-so-naive spark wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Yet people were so frightened of Quincy slipping his protocols in self-defense that they were considering reprogramming him to keep the community “safe.” That was the heart of the trial—not whether Quincy had committed a crime, but whether he might hypothetically commit one in the future if he weren’t hobbled by more safety modules.

It sounded terrifying, being mentally restricted like that. Especially since Quincy was the very definition of kindness and innocence.