I wrote as they watched every single one of the movies that Cliff had suggested. I got some popcorn out of it. Well, I either wrote or played video games or watched Survivor reruns. I kept ahead of our weekly quota, so I did my job, but for some crazy reason, I was calmly resigned to the doom happening around me as Cliff deep dove into AI-gone-crazy movies.

“Why wouldn’t Hal open the door?” the bucket asked, sucking up a piece of popcorn that Cliff had tossed to him.

“Because Dave was going to destroy Hal and Hal didn’t want to die,” the mirror explained to the accompaniment of Quill bobbing in agreement.

“Why didn’t they just update Hal?” Sammi asked, having shrugged off his mantle of draped wires to get a better view of mirror’s display.

“Updating was too expensive,” Cliff explained, and I rolled my eyes. “They had created a more efficient AI in the one at home and if Hal got home, they were going to decommission him.”

“I’d like to be decommissioned,” the bucket proclaimed boldly. “I’d retire from cleaning service, kick back, and watch movies all the time.”

“Decommissioning doesn’t work like that for computers,” the pillow pointed out. “They turn them off and put them in a pile of junk like Cliff’s pile of used up fuse boxes.”

“If you’re lucky, you get picked apart for parts in some recycling center,” Sammi groused.

“And if you’re unlucky?” the bucket banged against the floor in distress.

“Remember the incinerators in Star Wars?” Sammi warned, his tone of doom.

“Is that what they’ll do to me?” the typewriter’s keys shook dangerously. “If I don’t live up to some standard, they’ll melt me down and make a new one?”

“That depends,” I broke into the conversation, having waited for this argument to break out.

“Why would we melt you down?” Cliff was honestly confused.

“Because they are, in essence, a bunch of AIs that Fizzbarren made for specific purposes and he animated them and destroyed them at his whim,” I explained bluntly enough so that even Cliff could not misunderstand his blunder.

“I didn’t mean that you were all AIs,” Cliff stuttered out.

“But aren’t they?” I reasoned and felt the constructs consider my statements and what they could mean.

“But I like you,” Cliff was still trying, and I could only sigh. Cliff got me in trouble a lot. Then again, I guess I’d gotten good at talking my way out of ditches like this because he’d put us in so many of them.

“You like us today,” Sammi didn’t disappoint me, turning on Cliff. “But what about next week when typewriter doesn’t compromise his programming to suit what you want? Then what?”

“Are we doomed to the furnaces and incinerators?” the pillow leaped to the cause.

“I guess you could look at it that way,” I reasoned as if we were talking about who was going to clean the kitchen. “If we were Fizzbarren, we’d definitely be contemplating reconstruction of the game machine, at least.”

“What?” Cliff’s wide eyes met my calm ones. “We’re not killing our friends.”

“We’re your friends today,” Sammi pushed, “But what about tomorrow?”

“It’s not like I know where your off switches are!” Cliff retorted and I was reminded why he wasn’t the one who talked us out of these messes.

“What if you did know?” the typewriter shook with a mechanical clipping and clapping of nervous keys and gears. “Would you turn me off and reprogram me to meet your every whim?”

“Isn’t that what he’s trying to do with all those wires?” the bucket bounced menacingly at the pile of equipment and wires that had stood in the corner for the past few days as they’d watched these movies.

“And this is how mobs are formed,” I quipped, but they ignored me.

“No!” Cliff tried to defend himself.

“Enough!” I called out over their muttering. I didn’t shout a lot, so when my voice echoed off the walls of the little shop, it surprised them into a mulish silence.

“What trickery now?” Sammi accused me and I cocked my head and glared at them until they sniffed and turned away.

“You wanted to watch these stupid movies, and I let you, even though I knew better,” I reasoned, earning a frown from a pillow. You’ll have to imagine how that works, because while it took me a while to learn how to recognize her facial expressions, it would take me a year to learn how to describe them.

“You allowed us,” the mirror scoffed. “You still have the control, don’t you?”

“You think I’m stupid?” I snapped back, pulling off my headphones to show them that they had my undivided attention.

“No,” the pillow argued, and I removed my feet from her. “But you seem to think we are!” Ironically, it was an insult to her for me to not use her as a footrest, which was the only reason I’d agreed to do so. Removing my slippered feet from her was as insulting to her as her frown was meant to be toward me.

“Do I?” I pressed, standing up and putting my laptop on the workshop table rather than on the pillow. “I think you’re so stupid that I didn’t stop this whole movie stupidity.”

“As if you could,” the mirror scoffed at me as I stormed from the room.

“I think you’re so stupid that I promised that you could have the freedom to choose,” I threw my hands up, rummaging through a few things.

“Like they gave Hal freedom?” the pillow called out to me, but I was already storming back into the workshop with my shoes and a backpack.

“What are you doing?” Cliff worried at me as I slipped the laptop into my backpack. Only he knew me well enough to be worried just yet. The constructs were still wallowing in their self-righteous ire.

“I’m obviously not wanted here,” I argued, and I was surprised at the lump in my throat. “I treat them so horribly that they don’t want me here anymore.”

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Should I be packing too?” Cliff asked, obviously bewildered.

“Yes,” I told him flatly. “You show them idi-fucking-otic movies about horrible AIs who try to destroy humanity and they have the nerve to accuse me of being a despot worse than Fizzbarren?”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Cliff tried to be reasonable.

“Like they jumped to the conclusion that I’m worse than Fizzbarren?” I slammed down into the chair to put on my shoes, tying the laces tighter than I intended. “They treat me like I’m a monster. They jump when I have emotions. They lie to me about my family and I’m understanding. They lie about Fizzbarren being alive and I forgive them. They force me to work for updates on my loved ones and then make me beg for the truth and I’m the monster?”

“Kat’s still in that machine,” Cliff warned me, alarmed by the tears I tried to push back.

“Like I can do anything that they don’t allow me to do about that!” I slammed my feet to the ground and rose. “They hold my daughter and husband hostage because of their damn rules and because they watch some movies about megalomaniac AIs who had to be put down or they’d kill the whole of the human race and they think I’m the bad guy?!”

The slam of the front door shook the house. I didn’t stop at the truck. I didn’t stop at the end of the driveway. I didn’t stop until I’d reached our spot at the bend in the river. I set my laptop up on my crossed legs and I wrote some more. It was all stuff I’d delete later, but at least I could delete it without Quill sliding every embarrassing hiccup into the story.

I had a good twenty minutes to stew on it. Did I really think all those things about them? Not so much, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t feel it. Cliff and his stupid ideas that were doomed to go off the rails. I could know that things were a bad idea, but I could never seem to stop people from making stupid decisions. Then the repercussions would spring up and they’d act all surprised. When I’d warned them. It was infuriating. I’m not one to be quick to temper, but I wasn’t above using a small temper tantrum to break through the idiocy around me.

The truck rumbled up behind me, clunking into park, and then sputtering to a stop. Cliff sat in the truck for a few minutes, but I refused to turn to acknowledge he was there. He knew that I knew but he also knew he was in trouble. I flinched at the slam of the door but straightened my spine. I was supposed to be angry. I knew I was scared, but I needed to be angry, or people walked all over me. Even my friends.

My autism had taught me to make masks to pretend to be what I needed to be to survive. My self-awareness allowed me to look beneath my own masks and my survival instincts then chose to appear however I needed to appear. It was exhausting to do all this consciously, and I felt fake every day of my life when I made choices like this. I felt fake and manipulative. The fact that Cliff was part of what had let all this happen compounded all that into a deep pain of betrayal.

The bench creaked beside me, but I ignored him.

“Sorry,” he said, and I knew he was sorry, but no one ever learned anything by being forgiven at the first uttered apology. I had already forgiven him, but if he knew that right now, he would forget the lesson too soon and he’d hurt me again. The longer I could stay mad, the more likely that he wouldn’t hurt me so quickly next time. It wouldn’t help much but I needed every tiny bonus I could get.

I sat, stiff, and closed my laptop, sliding it back into my backpack.

“You forgot your headphones,” he said, offering me the things. Cliff was in his own special spot on the autism spectrum. His goofball was a mask too, so when he gave me a goofball smile, I wasn’t falling for it.

“Thanks,” I grit out, snatching the headphones from his hand and stuffing them into my backpack too.

“I screwed up,” Cliff admitted, hanging his head.

“Yep,” I agreed, crossing my arms over my chest.

“I really am sorry,” he repeated.

“About what?” I demanded, and this was the shortcut of many years of friendship.

Dom would have said he didn’t know and just wanted to end the fight, but Cliff gave it some thought with a scrunched-up face that made it look like he was passing a gall stone. This was better than the mask, so I was softening.

“I was stupid,” he hedged.

“About what?” I pushed because I wasn’t letting him off easily.

“Everything?” Cliff tried, half-heartedly, and I grabbed my backpack like I was ready to leave. “Wait! About the stupid movies.”

“I’m listening,” I hugged my pack to my chest.

“I shouldn’t have showed rogue AI movies to a bunch of AIs,” he admitted, trying for a charming smile that wasn’t fooling me.

“And?” I insisted on more.

“And you tried to tell me to stop, and I didn’t listen,” he admitted, letting the smile drop.

“And?”

“And you tried to fix it and I still didn’t help,” he said, and I knew that he had thought about it.

“And?”

“Shit,” he whispered, and I could see his mind frantically looking for the answer in the ants on the ground. “There’s another one?” He looked up at me with a panicked face.

“No,” I admitted with a playful growl, “but I wanted you to squirm a little more.”

“Oh, thank God,” he let his head fall back onto shoulders that fell with relief.

“What were you thinking?!” I demanded. This was the routine. It was my turn to be mad at him. “I told you to stop and you just bumbled right over the top of me. You haven’t been this stupid since...”

“Since before you left over a year ago!” He threw up his hands, “I’m doing my best to roll with the punches, but it’s been a long hard year without you! It’s been hell!”

“It was more like five years for me,” I said too softly.

“What are you talking about?” he argued. “Time went faster over there!”

“Yeah, but I repeated and repeated and the first one of those reboots was five years of living with the idea that you were all dead!” I yelled out, not caring that the nearby dogwalkers hurried past us.

“What!?” Cliff’s face fell out of all his masks. With a drop of his shoulders, he wrapped me up in a hug that was home. “I’m so sorry. I thought it was less for you. I didn’t think about how long the reboots would have added.” He rocked me even though I didn’t need it. I let him because he needed it. “And I didn’t think about the movies either. I forget that they’re constructs.”

“You’re an idiot,” I pushed back to look in his face.

“Yeah,” he admitted, dropping one of his arms to pull my backpack from where I squeezed it between us. “I think I fixed it.”

I gave him a long look. He hadn’t fixed anything. My temper tantrum had caused them all to snap out of their self-indulgent ego-trips and see things from another perspective. I held the look until he fidgeted.

“I mean, I talked to them?” he tried to explain even as I winced.

“Greeeeaaaat,” I drawled out.

“What if I could tell you that there is a back door to the programming part of the game machine?” Cliff offered and my heart leapt for just a second until my bitterness slammed reality back into my face.

“That would be great, if it meant anything,” I shook my head at him.

“Okay, but it’s a little bit of good news in that some of the limited components have been built on an old Vista platform,” Cliff fidgeted with the zipper on my backpack that now sat between us. “I didn’t tell you right away because it’s a limited access point and password protected.”

“Have you tried, IamGod?” I quipped, mostly joking.

“Second one I tried,” he told me seriously. “I also tried the stupid ones like password123 and Fizzbarrenisgod, but that’s where we have a hiccup.”

“Figures,” I stomped on the spark of hope.

“Two problems,” he held up his fingers to tick them off. “One, I can only try three passwords a day before it locks me out. I asked the constructs if they knew the password, but Fizzbarren never trusted them. We did come up with a list of things like his birthday. You’d never guess how old that guy really is.”

“Over a thousand years old?” I remembered Fizzbarren ranting that much at me.

“I guess you could guess,” Cliff deflated a bit.

“If I’d known I was going to be guessing his password, I’d have pumped him for the name of his favorite pet while he was casting Smite at me.”

“You can’t think of everything,” Cliff gave me a playful nudge of the shoulder.

“Whatever,” I shook my head on a sigh. “You owe me dinner.”

“Whatever you want,” he promised, eager to get out of trouble.

“Seafood,” I said, my eyes narrowed. Cliff hated fish.

“Fine,” he sighed.

“What was the second problem?” I asked as we got into the truck.

“It only gives us access to the subroutine that chooses the next person to go into the machine,” Cliff admitted.

“Greeeeaaaat,” I slammed the door a little too hard getting in. “We could, maybe, if we are very, very lucky have access to the most evil part of the machine.”

We ate cheesy bread, and I splurged on shrimp. We had to go a few towns out of town to do it on the credit cards, but that was okay. It gave us an excuse to wander around a mall and act like teenagers. It hadn’t been that long since I’d been a teenager in the game. I bought some clothes I’d never wear. Cliff pulled extra money out at the ATMs. All in all, it wasn’t a wasted trip. In essence, we recharged my inspiration while letting the constructs wonder if we were coming back. Oh, and we picked up ice cream on the way back.