The One Where Mark Is A Barista

Chapter 1

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

Eduardo is a man of routines, which is why he ends up at the same coffee shop every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday before his ten a.m. class. There are five different coffee shops surrounding Harvard Square, but this one is his favorite, even if it’s out of his way for his morning classes.

“You have a very fixed schedule,” the barista -- are they even called baristas at places that aren’t Starbucks? -- asks. “Do you come in at the exact same time every Friday?”

Eduardo blinks, because he’s not sure he’s awake enough to deal with questions like this. This is why he’s here to get coffee. “What?” he asks.

“Also, what’s your name?” the barista says. He holds up the paper cup. There’s a blank space on the cup underneath a cutesy doodle of dogs chasing butterflies, clearly meant for his name.

“Eduardo,” Eduardo says. “Is it me or did you ask me those questions in the wrong order?”

The barista -- Mark, his name tag says -- just stares at him with wide, unblinking eyes. They’re pretty, Eduardo notices absently, dark and blue. “No,” Mark says. “I don’t think I did.”

Mark writes Eduardo’s name on the cup.

It’s not until halfway through his class on financial institutions that Eduardo realizes the maybe Mark was hitting on him. Or maybe just flirting, however inept that attempt was. Well, that will teach Eduardo to interact with other human beings before he has his caffeine fix.

---

Mark is there every Friday morning when Eduardo wander into the coffee shop after that. Maybe he had always been there, but now Eduardo is noticing him. He’s very efficient in his motions, speeding through the various orders, but his hands are always precise. Eduardo has never seen him so much as spill a drop.

Eduardo notices other things about Mark now, too. The curls of his hair, the curve of his lips. It makes Eduardo wonder what Mark is like outside of the coffeeshop. He looks like a student, but he’s not in any of Eduardo’s classes. It’s a big campus, though. It’s not that strange.

“Nice weather we’re having,” Eduardo says. It’s been bright and sunny for almost a week now, a real record for the greater Boston area.

“It seems to be within normal working parameters,” Mark says. His face is still blank. “It’s nice for some definitions of the word.” He says, “What was your name again?”

Eduardo sighs. It’s really not that common of a name, but maybe Mark writes so many names down he can’t keep them all straight. “Eduardo,” he says.

He doesn’t stare at Mark’s fingers where they’re gripping the thick Sharpie, even if they are long and surprisingly graceful. That would just be weird.

---

“Are you always here at the same time every Friday?” Eduardo asks as Mark hands him his order, leaning forward and smiling his broadest smile. He figures that it’s worth a shot, since Mark noticed that he’s been coming in every Friday morning. He even pregamed a some of the disgusting coffee from one of the dining halls just so that he could be awake enough to hold an entire conversation.

Mark just stares at him. “I work here,” he says, his inflection completely flat. “This is my shift. I don’t see why I wouldn’t be here.” He holds up the cup. “Name?” he asks.

“Yeah, I just meant--” Eduardo says, trying not to look completely humiliated. “Never mind.” He swears off cute baristas for the rest of his life.

---

“No, really,” Christy says. “He’s probably one of those awkward nerdy types who doesn’t know how to talk to people.” She’s jamming numbers into her calculator and cursing every five seconds. Christy is the only person Eduardo knows who treats problem sets like going to war.

She still gives his arm a reassuring squeeze. He kind of regrets the fact that they ever broke up, but he understands that they’d never work out. Christy is, well, more than a little Type A, and Eduardo couldn’t take the stress of dating someone who didn’t actually have any time in her schedule to, you know, date him. She only just managed to squeeze this friendly get-together between papers and classes and club meetings.

“I’m not reading too much into him asking me about my schedule, right?” Eduardo asks. He lets himself flop back on Christy’s bed. She really has the most comfortable sheets on campus. “That’s not just me projecting or anything like that?”

“You know, you could just ask him out,” Chrisy says. “Trust me, when it comes to nerds, they don’t do subtlety well. Or at all.” She scribbles down a few more numbers with her pencil.

“I don’t think I could go through the rejection again,” Eduardo says. “Twice was bad enough. He didn’t even remember my name.”

“Poor baby,” Christy says. “Your life is so hard.” She’s been getting involved in raising money for orphaned children in China lately, which means she’s been far less willing to feel bad for Eduardo when Eduardo wants someone to feel bad for him.

“You’re not being helpful at all,” Eduardo says.

“Too bad,” Christy says.

---

“Would you like to go on a date with me?” Eduardo says. He looks like crap today, which would really disappoint his father, since is father is really big on presentability and not looking like you’ve just rolled out of bed. Even if you have.

“A what?” Mark says. He’s making someone’s hot chocolate, and he doesn’t even need to look at his hands to know what he’s doing. Eduardo tries really hard not to find that hot, too.

“A date,” Eduardo says, enunciating each word, “with me.”

Mark just looks confused. “Yes?” he says.

At this point, Eduardo has no idea why he’s even pushing the issue. It’s clear that, well, Mark is beyond clueless, and Eduardo has really had it with everyone ever, especially baristas, especially Mark. “Okay,” Eduardo says, “I get it. I’ll just, I won’t bother you again.”

He waits for his coffee and then grabs it without another word to Mark. He needs to rush in order to get to his next class in time, he’ll have his coffee, so this whole side trip to get humiliated in front of a whole bunch of his classmates won’t have been a complete waste.

But then he hears someone yell, “Oh shit! That’s a gun--”

Eduardo ducks on instinct when the screaming and shooting starts. A strong hand grabs him and pulls him over the counter and behind it.

“What?” Eduardo says, because it’s Mark that dragged him behind the counter. Mark, who is a few inches shorter than Eduardo and almost as as skinny. He looks like he could barely pick Edaurdo’s sister a few inches off the ground, much less lift Eduardo the entire three feet necessary to get him over the counter. Mark isn’t freaking out the way everyone else is. His eyes are unnaturally calm. There’s an eerie red glow in Mark’s pupils.

“Come with me if you want to live,” Mark says.

Chapter 2

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

For all that Mark is a robot, apparently he still lives in the dorms.

“Oh hey,” someone says as Eduardo and Mark walk into the suite. “Mark made a new friend.”

Eduardo thought that maybe Mark’s dorm room would be like stepping into some mad scientist laboratory, with ominous monitors on every wall and computer parts strewn over every surface. But no, it’s just a boring dorm room with half-finished bags of cheetos on a coffee table and someone’s hoodie lying on the floor and a minifridge covered in takeout menus.

Mark’s roommates stick their heads out of their rooms. Eduardo thinks he might have shared a physics class with one of them freshman year. That’s the red-haired one that’s wearing a gray hoodie.

“Oh dude,” he says. “He did.”

“Hi,” Eduardo says with a little bit of a wave. Eduardo knows he looks like a mess. His suit is covered in dirt from where they had to crawl on the ground to avoid detection. There are scrapes on his face from when Mark dragged him through the debris in their attempts to escape. He’s probably also sweating through his shirt, which makes sense after all the running and hiding they’ve done this morning.

The blond-haired roommate holds out a hand. “I’m Chris.”

Eduardo shakes it. “Eduardo.”

The other one waves from his doorway. “Dustin.”

“We need you to give us one thousand dollars,” Mark says. His eyes are blue again, and if it weren’t for the eerily bland expression on his face, he would almost look like a real person again.

“What? No,” Eduardo says. “I don’t even know who or what you are.”

Mark blinks at him a few times.

“That’s Mark,” Dustin says, pointing at Mark. Mark is still wearing his work apron. The little name tag is still pinned to the front of it, reminding people that his name is Mark.

“He’s a robot,” Chris adds, helpfully.

Eduardo puts his face in his hands. “I have no idea what’s going on anymore.”

“Google has stepped up their attacks,” Mark says. “We’re going to need that money sooner rather than later.” He goes to the nearest laptop and plugs himself into it with a USB cable. Eduardo has this terrible thought that he might be syncing himself to the computer, like an iPod.

Eduardo says, “Wait, what does Google have to do with any of this?” He finds the closest chair and slumps down into it. If this were a normal day, he’d be sitting in on his stats lecture right now instead of trying to figure out what the fuck has gone wrong with his life.

Chris pops open the fridge and pulls out two Coronas. He hands one to Eduardo and pops open the other one himself. Chris says, “Okay, so I’m getting all of this second-hand from Mark, and as you can kind of tell, communication isn’t his strong suit. Apparently Google becomes sentient in 2024 after it finishes indexing all of human knowledge. At which point, it decides that it doesn’t like humans very much and takes over several missile defense systems in order to wipe all of us out. The humans fight back, of course, and a site called Facebook becomes the last bastion of the human resistance.”

Eduardo stares at him, the Corona dangling uselessly from his fingertips. “You know you sound crazy, right?”

Chris jabs his thumb in Mark’s direction. “Apparently the real Mark Zuckerberg was assassinated last year by covert Google operatives who were sent back in time to make sure Facebook never happens. The human resistance managed to get Robot Mark sent into the past to ensure that Facebook gets created on schedule.”

“And no one noticed or cared?”

“It was kind of hard to tell the difference between him and human Mark,” Chris says.

Dustin shrugs. “Plus, he got really good at the coffee thing. That definitely helped with a bunch of all-nighters.”

Chris rolls his eyes. “Dustin and I only figured it out a couple of a few months ago when Mark’s memory started glitching on us.”

During all of this, Mark has been quiet, staring blankly ahead. His face is smooth, free of concern or worry. He has nice cheekbones, even if they are made of metal. It bothers Eduardo that he still finds Mark attractive while knowing that that he’s just a soulless machine.

“This morning,” Eduardo says, “that was them trying to take you out?”

Mark turns his head towards Eduardo. “No,” Mark says. “You’re the money behind Facebook. I was there to protect you.”

“Oh,” Eduardo says. It’s weird, almost a relief, to know that he wasn’t caught up in all of this by happenstance, that maybe it was fate that his path would cross with Mark’s. Though he does wish he lived in a timeline without murderous robots.

“So,” Mark says. “Will you help us?”

Eduardo takes a look around. Chris looks like he just woke up a minute ago, still wearing his pajamas, flannel pants and maroon Harvard t-shirt. Dustin smells like he’s been awake and wearing the same change of clothes for the last 48 hours. Mark is himself, as blank and unreadable as always and still wearing his barista apron. If this is what the human resistance has to rely on, they are all ridiculously, insanely fucked.

But Eduardo will always take the plucky human resistance over the terrifying killing machines.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ll help you.” He takes a deep breath. “How much did you need again?”

FIN.