Mark is sick of this room. If he didn’t need the approval of the people inside, he might be tempted to light the heavy, teal curtains on fire and watch the whole place burn. It could do with a remodel; every time Mark opens the door, it’s like stepping into a swamp.
There’s a long table across the room, and the four, hunched men sitting behind it look like old turtles lined up on a log. They move their pens lethargically when they move them at all and rarely bother to raise their eyes from the table’s surface. The two student members of the Honor Board sit to the left of the administrators and professors. The one closer to Mark is slumped over his own knees. It looks like he just rolled out of bed, even though it’s nearly 1:00 PM. In fact, the girl beside him is the only member of the board who looks more than halfway awake. She’s tied her hair back in a sharp ponytail, and her back is straighter than Mark’s homophobic, freshman-year roommate. In contrast to her hoodie-wearing neighbor, she’s buttoned into an immaculate, white blouse, and her pen is poised over her notepad, ready to go.
The Chair of the Honor Board, a sixty-year-old man named Steven Krasinski, removes his reading glasses and lifts his droopy eyes to meet Mark’s for the first time since the meeting started. “Mark,” he sighs. Mark has gotten used to the many slight variations with which Steven Krasinski says his name, and he can predict how the rest of the session will go from his tone alone. “While character references would aid your case in murkier circumstances, the evidence in this instance is concrete.” He pushes the letter from Mark’s electrical engineering professor to the side and sighs again. “This is the third time we’ve seen you this month. Unless new evidence emerges that miraculously clears you, please stop wasting our time. I’ll now open the floor to any contrasting opinions.”
The only sound is the quiet tapping of the spring rain on the windows.
“Mark?” Steven Krasinski prompts, indicating that it’s Mark’s turn to speak.
Mark doesn’t have anything to say that they haven’t heard before, and he doesn’t have the energy to be angry anymore, so he just restates what he’s already told them and hopes that, this time, it will move them to belief. “I didn’t do it. The paper Professor Harcourt got isn’t the paper I turned in. I don’t know what else to say. I just didn’t do it.”
“Unfortunately, the evidence indicates otherwise,” says Steven Krasinski, clearly unmoved. “If you have nothing else to show us, I have no choice but to uphold this board’s initial decision. Mark Atkins, you are no longer a student at this university. Please feel free to show yourself out.”
Mark doesn’t even slam the door behind him. He did that the first time, and they billed him for the microscopic dent he left in the frame. He has enough student debt to last a lifetime; no need to add repair costs.
“Any luck?” Sloan, the woman at the front desk, asks as he crosses the reception room.
Mark tugs his face into a smile and shakes his head. Sloan makes a point of talking to him every time he comes and goes, and he’s starting to get the feeling it goes beyond friendliness. Fortunately or unfortunately, he’ll probably never see her after today, so they’ll never have to have that awkward conversation where Mark explains that he’s about as straight as his small intestine.
Once outside on the wet paths and lawns of campus, Mark keeps his head down, hoping that no one else will ask if he’s cleared his name. Every time he fails to convince the Honor Board, he can see the doubt encroaching slightly further into his classmates’ minds, the suspicion that maybe, just maybe, Mark really did lift his entire term project from some graduate student at NYU. It wouldn’t be unheard of; there’s at least one plagiarism-related expulsion every year. Mark fills the 2016 quota.
There’s a tangible sense of relief, a lightening of his limbs, as he crosses the street that separates the university’s property from the surrounding city. Even before the plagiarism charges, Mark was tired of campus. It’s the last semester of his senior year; his whole class is ready to be gone. Before this whole shit-show, Mark had a job lined up. The last two months seemed almost superfluous. As long as he didn’t fail any classes, his future was secure. Of course, the company rescinded their offer the second he was expelled; he was ordered to vacate the dorms; and he has exactly nothing to show for the past four years of money and effort he poured into his education.
The bus ride back to Andy’s place, where Mark has been staying for the past three weeks, feels unusually long. It’s not raining anymore by the time he arrives, but the ground is damp; even the air is damp. His clothes haven’t dried from the initial walk to the bus stop, and they stick to him in a variety of uncomfortable ways.
When Mark slumps through the door to the shared house, he just wants to shower—and then bake a cake, or maybe set something on fire—but he should probably let Andy know what went down with the meeting first.
He spots Cory and Jay in the living room to the left of the entry hall, facing away from him as they play Mario Kart on the massive TV. They don’t see him, but the door is an old, whiny thing, and they spin around to peer over the back of the couch when they hear it.
“Hey, Mark,” says Cory.
“Mark, my man!” says Jay. “Are you free still or did the system reclaim your soul?”
“Free,” Mark says and shoots him a peace sign because Jay, who’s the closest thing Mark’s ever met to a professional loafer, wouldn’t understand his bitterness. “Hey, is Andy here?”
“Upstairs,” Cory and Jay chime together.
“Cool,” says Mark, kicking off his soggy shoes and heading for the staircase.
Andy is in his bedroom, though calling it a bedroom is probably too generous. To be fair, there is a bed; it’s just barely visible behind the stacks of textbooks, papers, robotic parts, electrical wires, odd-smelling petri dishes, and a pair of clunky machines that look something like photocopiers but no doubt serve a much more sinister purpose.
Mark hasn’t dared to venture beyond the doorway since he knocked over the agar-based home of some bacterial colony last winter and Andy had made a dive for an aerosol can of something that he sprayed all over Mark and the overturned dish and then insisted on monitoring him for the next twenty-four hours.
Luckily, Andy is usually visible from the doorway since he spends most of his time standing at his desk. Even there, Mark doesn’t quite understand the setup. He has five computers under the table, each a different model, some that look like they date back to the 90s, and they’re all hooked up in a nightmarish tangle of cords to just two monitors. Mark has never asked. He asked about the bacterial colony, and Andy didn’t answer, and really he thinks, when it comes to Andy, it’s usually better to not know.
“Hey,” he says, since Andy is, per the norm, too engrossed in whatever it is that he’s doing to notice Mark standing in the doorway.
Andy’s head spins like an owl. “Hey!” he says. “How was the meeting, trial, death-by-combat thing?” He doesn’t give Mark time to respond before continuing, “It’s actually good that you’re back; I need to borrow your body again.” It’s only after he’s crossed the room and grabbed Mark’s wrist that he pauses and adds, “If that’s okay and time and things.”
Mark is too numb to Andy’s unfortunate way with language to bother commenting on it. “Yeah, sure,” he says. “I still owe you for letting me hole up here. I should give up on the case and get a job, shouldn’t I?”
“Realistically, yes,” says Andy, tugging at his arm to get him moving. “I saw a hiring notice outside the McDonald’s down the street.”
The sad part is that he’s honestly trying to be helpful. Or, at least, Mark thinks he is. Maybe that’s Andy’s greatest con and he’s actually a massive troll, but Mark won’t believe it until there’s more evidence.
“Is this the thing in the basement again?” he thinks to ask as Andy drags him back down the staircase towards the first floor. “With the scan?”
“Yes,” says Andy. “The first model sold well, but there were some complaints about skin texture, and I received a few reports that the pupils weren’t tracking quite right, though those may have been defective individuals and not a problem with the design. Still, best to check.”
“Wait, sold?” Mark stops, and Andy (because he’s still holding Mark’s wrist) has to stop, too. They’re at the door to the basement. “I thought this was for some school project.” It occurs to Mark that maybe his ‘never ask Andy’ policy needs revision. He thinks Andy’s wording last time had been something along the lines of, “Do you have an hour? I’d like to scan you for one of my projects,” and he supposes he really should have asked then what the project was about, but he hadn’t thought much of it, even when the scan had involved stripping naked in the basement and copying the odd sequence of movements Andy led him through. Andy had asked him to do stranger things; Mark wasn’t terribly self-conscious; and it really had only taken an hour.
“No, no,” Andy says, like they’ve talked about this. “It’s for the android line I’m developing. I’ll show you. I mean, I don’t have any physical models because they’ve all sold, but I’ll show you the website. I’m really happy with how it’s turned out actually. I was worried about the graphic design—it’s never been my strong suit—but I read a bunch of blogs on color theory, and I think I did pretty well. Come on.”
Andy tugs again, and Mark, against his better judgment, lets himself be pulled through the basement door and down the squeaky staircase.
The house’s fourth and final permanent occupant lives here, which Mark found out in unpleasant fashion on the day of his first scan when, after the hour was up and Mark had started putting his clothes back on, Andy had turned to a dim corner of the room and said, “Thanks for letting us use your space!”
Mark had subsequently learned that the guy was named Dave, but he hadn’t thought there was much point in formal introductions after Dave had seem him spinning about in the nude for an hour. Mark doesn’t know much about Dave, except that he’s quiet, rarely ventures into the main body of the house, and has, for some unknown reason, allowed Andy to set up a satellite office in his living space. Like Andy’s room, it looks more like a lab than someplace habitable, which, Mark thinks, is a reasonable enough excuse for his initial failure to realize he was getting scanned in a stranger’s bedroom.
He doesn’t immediately spot Dave today, but that doesn’t mean he’s not there. Andy barely gives him enough time to step off the staircase, never mind conduct a thorough search, before he drags Mark over to one of the monitors. Only then does he finally drop Mark’s wrist to stab at the keyboard.
“Here it is!” he says, pointing at the screen as if Mark isn’t right there looking.
And honestly, he wishes he wasn’t. The website, at first glance, is like a knockoff of every startup homepage that Mark’s ever seen, except that there, front and center, is a picture of Mark, and the title…
Really, Mark’s a very chill guy, but he can’t quite keep his voice even when he spins on Andy and blurts, “You turned me into a gay sex robot!?”
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