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thedeadparrot) wrote2011-05-12 08:52 pm
thedeadparrot) wrote2011-05-12 08:52 pm
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DVD commentary: SYN/ACK
OKAY, I am doing this and I am not going to freak out about doing this at all. I had a bit of a panicky moment when I originally posted this story, because I wasn't sure I wanted to. Not so much that I thought it was bad, as much as the fact that it's a story that feels a little too personal to me. I wasn't sure I wanted to put it out into the wider world. I'm not sure why I decided to overshare some more, except that I love geeking out about computers, and this story is pretty much about me geeking out about computers anyway.
So, welcome to the DVD commentary. I hope it is illuminating and interesting and all of that. I'll try to refer to Wikipedia as much as possible to keep this from getting too dry and technical. You can also read the original without all the extra annotation if that appeals to you more.
Title: SYN/ACK
Fandom: The Social Network
Pairing: Mark/Eduardo
Rating: PG-13
Word count: ~7000
Summary: There are differences between Eduardo and him that Mark doesn't think they'll ever really resolve, that they'll ever be able to overcome. A love story about packet loss.
Notes: I'm not sure I would have posted this if it weren't forzulu, who picked up beta duties on top of being encouraging.
Let's start with the title/summary/driving theme, which refers to TCP, the Transmission Control Protocol which is, in fact, what most of the internet runs on. It is super good at redundancy and not entirely good at security, but that's another point for another time. That second-to-last section where it basically four paragraphs of technobabble is basically me trying to describe some of the ways in which TCP tries to ensure data fidelity in a way that hopefully makes sense for people. The three steps of the mentioned handshake are SYN, SYN-ACK, and ACK, short for syn(chronize) and ack(nowledge). Hence the title. And also the summary. I wanted to get across the idea that over the course of this story, Mark and Eduardo are talking on like, completely different planes of existence, and losing/dropping each other's packets along the way.
Mark has always loved his systems classes, loved learning how an operating system is built from the the inside out. He loves all of it, really, loves virtual memory and schedulers and file systems yup, all important parts of operating systems. Look them up if you want to know what they are. They're not really relevant for this story beyond the fact that they exist and that they're part of operating systems., but it's the networking stack that really holds his attention.
There are all these parts to it, from the hardware layer to the application layer It's actually interesting to see how the layers separate out. There's a good diagram of what they are and what sorts of protocols sit where. TCP is nestled comfortably in the transport layer. Usually, it's considered a package deal with Internet Protocol (IP), and so you'll see TCP/IP referenced in a lot of places, but they are at different levels of the stack., and they all have to work together, and work with the hardware, and work with this whole ecosystem of routers and switches and servers. Mark spends a lot of time wondering what it must have been like, constructing these things, putting together the building blocks of the internet, creating something that would bring everyone together, that would make the world smaller and bigger all at once. He's just young enough to remember a time before the world wide web. He's seen how it's changed everything.
Early on, when they only have about a few hundred accounts, Dustin made a graph I am still so paranoid that people don't realize that I'm talking about a very mathy, specific definition of graph here, and not the kinds of graphs they make you do in grade school. Graphs are a big thing in CS, since they can be used to represent data data, and there are lots and lots of graph algorithms that are very fundamental to computer science. Binary search trees are probably one of the simplest examples. of the entire site out of boredom. It was massive when he was done rendering the whole thing. From far away, it looked like a mess, tiny blue dots representing people, tangled lines representing friendships. Mark stared at it for an entire hour, just following the connections from person to person with his fingers. It was almost like he could touch the intangible social ties that hold them all together, the world translated into something concrete, that could be recorded and stored on a computer. About 90% of the time when you get word problems for graph algorithms, they comes with semi-contrived real world examples of when you would want to apply one of them. About half of these examples refer to social relationships. Sometimes this is about how social awkwardness will ensue if you accidentally group a particular set of nodes together. Nodes apparently have really torrid relationships with each other. Eduardo found him staring at it and insisted on dragging him off to dinner, but that image of thefacebook, of that web of relationships, of this thing that Mark had helped bring to life, lingered in his mind for days.
---
"What the fuck," Eduardo says when he finds Mark asleep and drooling onto his keyboard, surrounded by potato chip crumbs, tuna fish tins, and half-empty bottles of Mountain Dew. "This is so fucking disgusting."
His face is scrunched up in horror and disbelief, as if Mark had decided to sacrifice kittens to the computer gods on his desk or something weird like that. Mark sits up and rubs his eyes. He sniffs his shirt to figure out if it's too disgusting to wear again today. It seems fine. He checks to make sure there's no mold growing in the tuna fish or in the Mountain Dew bottles. He can't see any. "Fuck off, Wardo," Mark says. Despite spending all his free time with a bunch of programmers, Eduardo still becomes appalled whenever Mark behaves like one. If Eduardo is under the impression that Mark reeks right now, he should never set foot inside any of the computer science labs, even on a good day. Fact: CS people en masse are pretty disgusting. It's probably a good thing that I don't have a sense of smell, because I have heard stories about how bad the chairs in our computer labs smelled. In this scene, I just wanted to go straight for the grossness that I think a lot of people gloss over. If Mark isn't eating (properly) and isn't showering at all, he's not going to be very pleasant to be around. For serious. Well, unless you're Eduardo.
Eduardo rolls his eyes. He has his biggest wool coat on, which may mean it's cold outside of it may mean that it's still in the high forties. High forties is still flip-flops-without-socks weather as far as Mark's concerned. I usually wait until it hits the 50s before I start doing the Adidas flip-flops thing. But then again, Mark is willing to wear socks with his flip-flops. I think that's cheating. The sky outside Mark's window is a pale gray, and the drafts coming from underneath their door are warm and heavy with humidity. "I really have a hard time believing that you will ever get a job that will allow you to be this gross on a regular basis," Eduardo says.
There's a cursor blinking next to the last line of code Mark wrote while still conscious, bits and pieces of a unified Javascript library that will consolidate all the existing Javascript that's been hacked together and scattered across the site. Javascript (not be confused with Java, as they are not related at all) is one of those languages that is deeply important to the internet. It's really powerful, and it allows for more dynamic content on web pages. It runs in the browser as opposed to the server, and now Chrome, Firefox, and Opera are all battling it out to get the fastest JS engine out there. Ah, isn't competition grand? Mark scrolls around a bit to make sure he remembers where he was. He's about to start working again when he hears the bed springs squeak. Eduardo's has taken up residence on Mark's bed. There are textbooks on investments and game theory I think I love writing Eduardo's technobabble almost as much as I love writing Mark's. spread out on Mark's pillow in front of him. His open notebook is covered in neatly written equations. Mark raises an eyebrow at him.
"Oh, go back to work," Eduardo says as he settles in, folding his legs into a cross-legged position, his notebook balanced precariously on his knee. "Also, you know you're going to need to take a shower at some point, right?" He's smiling as he says this, and there's something else in his expression that Mark doesn't understand, as if maybe he's referring to something besides the fact that Mark's hair has taken on an oily sheen over the last few days.
Mark turns back to his computer, settling his fingers onto the home keys. He dives right back into the code, because he had an idea for refactoring some of Dustin's sloppier functions into things that actually make sense. "Refactor" in CS parlance means "reorganize the shit out of everything except keep it working the way it was before." It's really important once your code becomes unweildy.At this point Mark will usually put on some noise cancelling headphones and blast some techno, something with a thick, heavy beat to keep his thoughts steady CS people seem to like (a) techno, (b) heavy metal or (c) hip-hop when coding. I suspect I just need a larger sample size., but it's quiet in his room today, and Eduardo is here. Eduardo's forehead is creased with thought, and his fingers are tapping an irregular rhythm against his thighs. There's the vaguest hint of a smile lingering on the corners of his lips. Mark turns back to his code.
They stay like that for a few hours before Eduardo has a meeting or a class or something. He leaves with a jaunty wave, his messenger bag slung over one shoulder. Mark keeps working. After a few minutes, he needs to put his headphones back on.
---
People have been telling Mark that he'll be the next Bill Gates ever since he wrote his very first "Hello, world!" program in Atari BASIC when he was twelve. Zuckerberg's first language really was Atari BASIC, and it's almost an inside joke at this point that the first program most people write is how to print out the words "Hello, world!". If you don't believe me, pick up a programming/programming language book the next time you're in a bookstore. Let me know what the first program they have you write is. He's never thought of it as a big thing, just something people say when they don't understand what Mark does. There are thousands and thousands of people out there who know their way around a computer, and they're not exactly swimming in money. Bill Gates revolutionized how people use computers, but that was mostly a luck thing. It's all about being smart in the right place at the right time. I sincerely believe that if it wasn't Bill Gates, it would have been someone else.
Mark managed to be smart in the right place at the right time. He still doesn't listen to people who talk to him about being the next Bill Gates.
It's that people think the Bill Gates thing is about the money, and it's not; it never has been. I think the movie doesn't quite know how to reconcile its vision of Mark-who-doesn't-care-about-money and Mark-who-fucks-people-over, but I think it's easier when you think about it from the angle of (a) intellectual snobbery and (b) genuine dedicated passion for what he does. Mark wants to be the best at everything and he's willing to run over whoever he needs to in order to get there.Mark would be programming even if there wasn't any money in it, even if it wasn't a respectable career. Mark will never get over the visceral thrill of it, of typing and typing and understanding how to put it all together in order to make it work, understanding how to make it beautiful. On occasion, He does think about what it would be like if he got some other nine-to-five job doing something idiotic and boring and filled with corporate bullshit, and he knows he'd still be in front of his computer on weekends, writing patches for the Linux kernel or for MySQL or for Apache or doing his own thing, desperate to get that feeling back.Of course, all the things listed are open source projects willing to take patches (basically code fixes) from anyone who wants to submit them. Whether or not your patches cause a flame war is an entirely different matter.
I sort of laughed myself silly during the DVD commentary when Armie Hammer talks about how he can't believe that Mark wanting a dedicated Linux box with Apache and MySQL would only cost $200 more. Dude, with the exception of the hardware, all those things are free.
---
"Dijkstra?" Dustin yells to the sky, his voice carrying over the traffic. "I barely know ya!" This is referring to Edsger Dijkstra, a famous computer scientist best known for creating an algorithm for finding shortest paths in a graph. I like this joke, because it comes and goes so quickly most people probably don't even think about it too hard. But the CS people probably got a bit of a lol out of it.
Eduardo laughs at Dustin's joke, even thought he probably doesn't get it, his head thrown back and his eyes bright. Eduardo's good at that sort of thing, the smiling and being happy thing. Mark is bad at that particular brand of bullshit. He's always loathed family photos, because he hates faking happiness almost as much as he hates standing still just because someone else wants him to. Eduardo shoots Mark a look, a smaller, more secret smile, and Mark has to smile back just a little, even if he doesn't understand why. It's mid-spring, and the remaining snow that lines the streets of Cambridge is half-melted and disgusting, all browns and yellows mixed in with the white and piled into misshapen lumps. All the cars that drive by them are covered in salt stains. The air smells cold and wet and deeply unpleasant, like mud and rotting vegetables mixed together. The wind is howling between the buildings. Boston/Cambridge is totally like this when it starts getting warm out. It's pretty disgusting.Mark tugs his hoodie tighter around his shoulders and thinks it's ridiculous that anyone could enjoy seasonal weather. I kind of love that Mark and I occasionally have completely opposite opinions on everything. This is one of those things. You'll pry my seasonal weather out of my cold, dead hands.
Dustin accidentally steps in a puddle of half-melted snow as they try to cross Mass Ave. The water soaks through his shoes and socks and the bottom cuffs of his jeans. "Shit," he says. "We're definitely doing that California thing, right, Mark?" He makes a face and starts limping slightly, as if that will make his pants dry any faster.
"Yeah," Mark says. Silicon Valley is still the mecca of computer programmers, of young startups and established businesses, and Mark knows they need to be there. There will be all-day coding jags and angel investors and sunny days and everything Mark could possibly want. Sean will be there, too. "That's the plan right now."
Eduardo's smile goes stiff and uncomfortable, and that light Mark saw earlier dims on his face. Mark wonders if this is the part where he's expected to make stupid jokes about Nash equilibria or Pareto optimality to cheer him up, but Eduardo never really laughs when Mark is trying to be funny. Nash equilibrium is a fundamental game theory concept. Pareto optimality is a more general econ concept. They are both named after people and sound funny when you say them out loud. That was pretty much my only criteria for selecting them. I'm not entirely sure Mark really understands what either of them are. Eduardo says, "Enjoy yourselves. I will be having fun on this coast while you're gone." He doesn't quite look like he means it, but he still tosses his arm around Dustin's shoulders and slaps Mark's back, a solid thump that Mark feels heavy in his chest.
"You could--" Mark start to say. As much as Mark needs a summer of just Facebook, his head deep inside the PHP with only some alcohol and a pool to distract him, it seems weird that they'll be there without Eduardo coming along to back them up. Eduardo doesn't really sit in on their coding sessions, but he's always flitting in and out, peeking over Chris's shoulders to see what's happening or annoying Dustin into working on whatever moronic new feature Christy wants added to the site or asking Mark whether or not they need more servers. This technobabble is probably the most accessible it gets. Enjoy it while it lasts.
It won't be the same without him there.
"I can't," Eduardo says. He rubs his hands together because he forgot his gloves, and he's staring at the CVS across the street instead of meeting Mark's eyes. "You know, internship, my father..."
"Right," Mark says. "Sure." I love how this line of Mark's is so non-committal it doesn't really mean anything. NO WONDER EDUARDO DOESN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE SAYING, DUDE.
---
There are differences between Eduardo and him that Mark doesn't think they'll ever really resolve, that they'll ever be able to overcome. Eduardo knows how to move mountains and mountains of money on the strength of one beautiful algorithm, but he'll never understand what it's like to build an entire world -- an entire fucking galaxy -- with just the tips of his fingers.
Okay, this section is kind of one of those ones that are super pretentious and I don't even care, because I can totally understand Mark's resentment. Fuck you, I built this, and you'll never truly understand what that means.
When I start writing a new story, I sometimes just sit down and write scenes and then figure out how they fit together into a story at some later point, which is why they can seem so disjointed and strangely put together at times. This section war originally written after the Eduardo section down below. The Eduardo section and the Mark section above were actually part of the same section, but then I split them up, and then I decided that this would be a good transition section between them.
---
There's a party at someone's house near Central, a friend of a friend of Chris' or something like that. The location of this apartment switched around a few times. I thought that maybe Central was too townie and that Kendall didn't really have any houses like the one I was describing and Davis/Porter were too out of the way. I think Central is the best compromise. Mark doesn't have all the details, but it doesn't really matter because people still whoop and cheer as they step inside like they're bosom buddies or something. The house looks like every other off-campus house in New England, old and big and wooden and cut up into smaller apartments for college students. This is all true. I've lived in them. Some of my friends still live in them. There are a few lamps lighting the rooms a soft orange, and the music -- something hip hop that gets played all the time over the radio but that Mark doesn't recognize specifically -- is loud enough to make Mark's eardrums twitch in discomfort. Someone shoves a red plastic cup filled with a liquid that smells like beer into Mark's hand, and so he downs it with one long gulp, just because he can.
Eduardo says, "What the fuck, man?" He's doing that appalled thing again, eyes wide, mouth pulled into an incredulous grimace.
Mark shrugs, because he doesn't feel like yelling over the noise. They're here to have fun; Mark is just starting early. Chris insisted that they not pre-game before getting on the T, and now they need to make up for lost time.merisunshine36 mentioned that the pre-gaming struck her as being a surprise because people didn't write about it as much. Um, I think I saw it in fic myself and then went, "Hey, right! People do that." and then added it myself. Mark is totally enough of a douche to pre-game.
Eduardo rolls his eyes.
The party is in full swing as they head towards the main living room, which just goes to show that it does pay to be fashionably late on occasion. Mark doesn't know most of the people milling around, though he does recognize a few of the CS majors. Most of the female ones are neither hot enough nor slutty enough for Mark to bother with them, and a lot of them are likely to still hold a grudge over that whole Facemash thing.Mark, you giant misogynistic jerk. One thing that always makes me laugh is that scene in the systems class where there were waaaaaay too many women for that to be a genuine systems lecture. I liked adding nerdy girls into Mark's life, though. There's a sore lack of any interaction with them in the movie. Whatever. Mark doesn't need to awkwardly hit on girls to have a good time. He can just help himself to some free alcohol instead.
An hour into the party, Mark's just drunk enough to get into an intense, if also inarticulate, argument with Angela Chen in the kitchen over the relative advantages and disadvantages of using PHP vs. Perl for web development. Of course she's really wrong about everything, and Mark is halfway through explaining how completely broken the typical permissions scheme for CGI scripts are when Eduardo comes up behind Mark and wraps his arms around Mark's neck. Perl was the first really well-used web development language, and the way it worked was through CGI scripts. There are weird permissions issues with CGI scripts that I sort of half-remember, but which I can't really remember enough to explain to anyone else. PHP was the new cool web language when Mark was starting up Facebook, as it was specifically designed for web development and it had gained a lot of traction in that space at that time. It's still incredibly popular, but it's also sort of still in vogue to make fun of PHP for being a very badly designed language. These days, Facebook apparently still uses it for frontend stuff, but their backend stuff is, well, a lot more complicated these days.
"You're supposed to be having fun," Eduardo says loudly, louder than he needs to considering that Mark's ear is right there. Eduardo's not squeezing tightly enough for Mark to worry about his windpipe, but it's a close thing. Angela smirks at Mark's obvious discomfort. God, he hates her so much. If there's one person in this fucking university that is more condescending than Mark is about matters related to computers, it has to be her. It's especially galling that she's right at least 80% of the time. Ahahahaha. I kind of really wish I had bothered to write out this entire conversation, because I'm 100% convinced that it had completely devolved into "You're wrong." "No, you're wrong." at this point. There's a very particular level of condescension necessary for an argument about CS with computer nerds. It's like music geekery. There's a requirement that you have to be completely dismissive of the other person's arguments and 100% confident in your own.
Eduardo must be completely sloshed at this point, because he gets just like this when he's drunk, loose-limbed affectionate and handsy. His breath is warm against Mark's ear. Mark detaches from him just enough to be able to turn around, just far enough way that he can see the alcohol-soaked curl of Eduardo's smile. Mark says, "I am having fun." I kind of love the new sort of ~*implications*~ that this scene takes on once you find out what's already happened before. You know, the other time Eduardo's drunk.
"Not you-fun," Eduardo says, "real-people-fun." He pats Mark on the head, and Mark shoves his hand away. Eduardo always gets a little ruder when drunk. Dustin likes to joke that he becomes more like Mark. Mark likes to tell Dustin that he should shut the fuck up. Eduardo also doesn't pick up on hints while drunk, and so he leans forward, overcompensating for the distance that Mark has put between them, and he ends up falling into Mark's shoulder. His lips are mashed up against the fabric of Mark's hoodie. He's still giggling. Mark wraps an arm around his back to keep him upright.
Mark doesn't bother explaining why real-people-fun doesn't work for him, because Eduardo usually understands the concept well enough while not drunk. No point in repeating himself unnecessarily. Mark has already learned his lesson about arguing with drunk people tonight. Angela has disappeared, probably into the living room again. Mark doesn't mind too much, except now he no longer has the opportunity to crush every single one of her arguments to dust.
Eduardo blinks a few times at Angela's absence, his forehead furrowing with thought. "Oh, sorry about that," he says. "I didn't--"
Mark snorts, waving off Eduardo's apologies. "You couldn't pay me to sleep with her," he says. He half-leads, half-drags Eduardo out of the kitchen and towards something that resembles an empty couch seat in one of the living rooms. Eduardo is taller than Mark and he's heavy against Mark's shoulder and Mark already has enough back problems from sitting in front of his computer all day. The seat they find is only really designed to fit one person, but Mark and Eduardo are friends, and they're both fairly skinny, so they fit. I had so much fun writing around Mark's feeeeeeeelings in this. They're everywhere, but Mark is incapable of handling them, so they don't even register in his internal monologue. But they're totally there.
Eduardo smiles at Mark as they settle in, still so open and happy with the alcohol loosening him up. Their bodies touch from shoulder to hip. Yeah, there goes Mark's totally unsubtle pining.
---
In the beginning, Mark goes to Eduardo because Eduardo is someone who's been trained from birth to run shit like this. Mark's known that since the very first day he met Eduardo, when Eduardo had straightened the cuffs of his very expensive and very classy shirt and mentioned that he was going to be concentrating in Econ. It was pretty obvious even then that Eduardo had basically been pre-admitted to every MBA program known to man. Mark was certain that Wharton had already finished dusting off its red carpet. The whole essay-writing-and-application-form thing was just a formality for people like Eduardo, and even Eduardo knew that. So, I don't think fandom really touches a lot on this. Like, how Eduardo's future looks in the eyes of other characters. It's very clear where he's going, and everyone can see it. He's that guy. Let's be honest here, what sort of impression would you get from an econ major who wears suits to all his classes? Yeah, I thought so.
Still, the reason why Mark liked him, why Mark trusted him, was that it was clear that -- unlike most Econ majors Mark knew -- Eduardo wasn't too stupid to do CS. He understood algorithms and he had a handle on the problem solving, and he ate Stata and SAS and SPSS and R for breakfast All of the things I mentioned are statistical packages with their own programming languages. Given what we know from the movie, Eduardo pretty much has to know at least one of them very well, since you need them to do the sort of predictive analysis that got him $300,000 dollars. On the whole, the type of programming Mark does is a lot more complicated than the algorithms Eduardo has worked on, but the math Eduardo has to do is a lot harder. He could have learned to do what Mark does, if he'd wanted to.
That was never really likely, though, since Eduardo would never lower himself to do something as blandly, painfully, middle class as engineering. There's definitely something very middle class about studying engineering in college. I get the very firm impression that Mark is upper middle class and he's never really cared about going up from that so much as he's cared that people look down on him for it. I really don't think the whole final clubs thing makes sense in the context of Mark Zuckerberg's life, especially his relationship to money, but whatever. This is movieverse. We'll roll with it. He was always expected to go higher and farther than that. He was supposed to get punched by the Phoenix, and he was supposed to go into business school, and he was supposed to make his father proud.
But somewhere along the way, he decided to befriend a few computer programmers, befriend Mark, and Mark doesn't think he ever understood why. He doesn't think he ever will. I don't entirely think this is true IRL. They were both brothers at AEPi, and really, frats make you do shittons of forced bonding exercises. But it works better with my ~*theme*~ this way. So once again, rolling with it.
---
Eduardo comes out to visit Palo Alto right before he starts his internship in New York. Mark and Dustin and Chris and their interns are still in the process of moving in. The summer already seems like it will last forever, like it will last a lifetime. Mark is already in love with California by that point, already in love with the dry, sunny days and the amount of space and the way he can get away with staring at a computer screen for as long as he wants without classes getting in the way. Boston is tiny and wet and too cold (or too hot in the summers) by comparison. Boston is ancient, and it carries that oldness in its bones, infects everything in it with that same oldness. California, Silicon Valley, is the best place in the entire fucking world to build a start-up right now. Mark knows this. He can feel it in the early light of the morning after an all-night coding binge. He knows it every time they go to a bar or a club and meet more people who work at Google or Sun or Amazon who understand what they're doing, who think it's cool and interesting. I'd hate California. But I can see the appeal of it for Mark. Kind of. I tried. Boston's definitely more my kind of city. I think I'd cry if I had to live in Palo Alto.
When Eduardo visits, the house is still full of half-unpacked boxes. Most of them are located in the kitchen, because no one uses it unless someone has hot pockets or leftover takeout to microwave. They've also cleared a path to the refrigerator, because that's where the beer is. Chris sometimes makes coffee in their brand new coffee maker, but that migrated into the main living room where the computers are, and soda and Red Bull are far easier sources of caffeine, anyway. Heh. Coffee is just inefficient, man. You need to make it before you start ingesting it. I definitely knew a programmer who liked to talk about how he'd buy a 2 liter bottle of Mountain Dew and would finish it in a night of coding. So. Yeah. The movie got that right at least.
Mark picks Eduardo up from the airport after Eduardo takes a red eye out from JFK. Mark is still half-wired into his code (he needs to sanitize some inputs and there some really obnoxious edge cases and he thinks that SQL query he just wrote might be returning more data than they need and --) This section was me trying to capture what it feels like for me when I really get in the groove of programming, which I guess is what the movie means about being wired in. You sort of have a mental checklist of everything you need to hit/fix, and you really want to get back into it so that you can finish it. Sanitizing inputs is a security thing, because sometimes people will try to put code into text boxes and if you're not careful, you might accidentally cause that code to run on your system with all of your permissions, which is not a good idea. Relevant XKCD. Edge cases are when your data comes in non-typical forms that can't be handled with a general rule. SQL is the language you use to talk to databases. Sometimes you accidentally pull more data than you need with a query, and that means you're putting strain on the database than you need to be., so he's only half listening when Eduardo describes his apartment in New York.
"It has an amazing view of a brick wall on one side," Eduardo says. "You'll have to come by and see it sometime." He says this as if Mark can be dragged away from Facebook for more than a day, like Mark would allow himself to be away from Facebook for more than a day.
"Sounds good," Mark says. He pulls the company car (borrowed from Dustin's parents for the summer) off the freeway.
"And there was this one time when I was on the subway, and this homeless guy comes up to me and says--" Eduardo's voice trails off. He's staring at Mark's face. Mark wonders what he sees there. Eduardo says, "You're not even listening to me, are you?"
"How's Christy?" Mark asks, because it's a stupid question, and he doesn't want to answer it.
Eduardo shrugs. "Christy's good." On top of not having any free time, Mark won't ever go to New York because being the fifth wheel around Eduardo and Christy is Mark's last idea of fun. It's not that Eduardo and Christy are still in the kissy-face stage of their relationship -- they're not. It's that Mark has never quite understood how to talk to her, even more than most girls, even more than most of Eduardo's girlfriends. She always looks at Mark with vague resentment, like Mark is some sort of interloper in her grand romance. Most of the time, Mark wants to just smile at her and tell her to fuck off. This entire conversation is such proof that I really do not write dialogue like Aaron Sorkin. And I'm okay with that.
He and Eduardo are greeted by a sleepy-eyed Chris when they pull up to the driveway. Seeing him, Mark realizes he's beginning to feel the last twenty hours he's been awake weighing on him. The night air is cool on his face. There's morning dew on their front lawn. Mark slams the car door behind him and walks inside. Sometime after that, he manages to crawl up to his bed and fall asleep, but he doesn't really remember how any of that happens.
It's not until later, when he wakes up again, that he realizes that he never offered to help Eduardo settle in. Mark knows he should have done that already because Eduardo's his friend. On the other hand, Eduardo's also not a moron, and he can probably find the couch himself. It's afternoon -- Mark's watch says 1 PM -- and the sun trickles through the windows along with the sound of splashing water. Mark's room overlooks the pool, and when Mark peeks outside, he sees Eduardo swimming laps. Eduardo must still be on east coast time. Mark and the others have become half-nocturnal since they moved out here. So many CS people I knew in college were nocturnal. Some of them still kind of are.
Mark slips outside just as Eduardo's pulling himself out of the pool, water dripping from his face, his hair. The swimming trunks he's wearing are clinging to his thighs. He looks even more tan in the sunlight, radiant and golden. Mark has turned maybe one shade darker after he got really bad sunburn during his first week in California. After that, he decided that he liked it better indoors anyway. Eduardo smiles at Mark as Mark walks over, still flushed and happy from the exercise. Mark toes off his flip flops and lets his feet dangle in the water as he perches on the edge of the pool. It's hot outside with the sun still high in the sky, but the water is cool and soothing, relaxing. Eduardo wipes is face with a towel. I tried really hard to excise all specific description of Mark's feelings towards Eduardo, like Mark isn't really capable of letting himself feel it, especially in the scenes where they interact. However, the feelings sort of leak through when Mark describes Eduardo himself, because Mark is totally pining his heart out at this point.
"It's an awesome place, isn't it?" Mark asks.
Eduardo tilts his head to the side. "Yes, it is. I'm sure this summer is going to be great."
Mark feels a smile tugging at his own lips. "It's going to be fucking amazing," he says. It's a fact at this point. "You should stay." Mark can see the future from here, from where they are at this very moment. It stretches to infinity, stretches as far as the eye can see. Mark wants Eduardo to see that. He's not sure Eduardo can.
Eduardo shakes his head. "I'm sorry. I can't." Mark isn't really expecting anything different from him. Eduardo's head, heart, and circadian rhythm are clearly back in New York, after all.
Mark blinks, turns his head away. "Yeah," he says, because he can hear all the things Eduardo isn't saying out loud. Man, Mark is so very good at making up motivations for other people, isn't he? I love how quickly he jumps to conclusions. It made this story so much easier to write, because I didn't need to work against his excellent observational skills.
---
Mark doesn't regret any of it, not really. Yeah, he regrets that it all came to that, but he doesn't regret the choices he made in the end. Or even in the beginning. He doesn't regret going to Eduardo for the start up costs and doesn't regret diluting Eduardo's shares.
Eduardo had seen Facebook as a student project, a stepping stone to better things, a line on his fucking resume, a good bullshit story when he needs to interview for jobs at consulting firms or investment banks or whatever the fuck he's doing now. God, I love those interview questions about projects you've worked on. I can just imagine some interviewer asking Eduardo, "So, tell me about a conflict you had while working with other people and how you resolved it." And Eduardo saying, "Well, he didn't pick me up at the airport, so first I froze the bank account, and then he pulled an underhanded trick to boot me out of the company, and then I sued him for $600 million. I think we might still be talking to each other these days." Yeah, I can see that going over well. He thought this whole thing would blow over in a few years, like CourseMatch, like Facemash. He thought that it made more sense to treat Mark as a friend, rather than a business partner, which would have been fine for throwing birthday parties and giving Mark shit about the state of Mark's hair, but it's not okay when he's fucking over Facebook's finances.
It's ironic, really, that Eduardo was always better at people than Mark was, but he never understood Facebook or the people who use it or why Mark cared about it so much. Of course, Mark isn't projecting here or anything like that. Eduardo was groomed to be old money, to know how to suck up to gray-haired middle managers, to control the flow of money around a stock exchange. Eduardo had never bothered to understand about anything about the internet or about Silicon Valley or about startups or CS nerds, because he thought that he'd never have to deal with them outside of Mark and Dustin and Chris. Fuck no, Mark doesn't regret what he did. There's definitely a hugely different vibe to a new tech company than the companies like the ones Eduardo was interning for. And I think there's a definitely a certain resentment towards I-bankers and other finance people amongst some of the really hardcore computer scientists. There are plenty of tech jobs in the finance industry, and there are definitely CS people who decide that all they want is the monies, but that is viewed as selling out a bit. juuuuust a little.
(But he does regret, just a little, the look on Eduardo's face on that last day at the Facebook offices, betrayal and fury and horror written along the lines of his mouth, the crease of his forehead, the dark brown of his eyes. Mark regrets that he didn't stop Sean when he could have. He regrets that in the end that he was forced to make the choice between Facebook and friendship and everything else.)
(Mark also kind of regrets that he hadn't committed any of his code before Eduardo smashed up his laptop. Ah, the mention of version control finally appears. Maybe I'm just an asshole, but I am half-waiting for someone to write about a crisis at Facebook that would have been easily fixed with the proper use of Subversion (like, where they have an intern that accidentally causes the site to break and all they would need to do is back it out of their test branch by reverting all of his changes or whatever). There is zero chance that Facebook isn't using version control of some sort. There is zero chance that, at any point, Facebook wasn't using version control, even in the early days when Mark is basically the only one working on it. But it had been easy enough to recreate after the fact, and he probably did deserve it, just a little.)
---
On the last day of depositions, Mark manages to corner Eduardo in the men's bathroom during their lunch break, despite the best efforts of both their lawyers to keep them apart. It's a new building, and everything in the bathroom gleams, all white porcelain and stainless steel. Eduardo is washing his face when Mark enters, scrubbing his forehead, his neck, the bags underneath his eyes. So I felt this story needed at least one confrontation scene. This is what happened.
"What the fuck are you even doing here, Mark?" Eduardo hisses, meeting Mark's eyes the bathroom mirror. He doesn't put as much nastiness into his words as he could. He sounds as tired as Mark feels. Physically, they haven't changed much from their college days. Eduardo looks exactly the same as Mark remembers. Maybe his hair is different. Mark could never never keep track of the various permutations of Eduardo's hair.
"I want to know why you did this," Mark says. He shoves his hands into his pockets, unsure of what to do with them. It's a large building, lots of employees, but none of them are here, and the bathroom feels too big for only two people. Mark's voice echoes as he speaks. He thinks their lawyers would flip their shits right now to see them here, hashing things out without anyone else to mediate. Not that Mark gives a fuck. It's not that Mark hates lawyers, per se. Lawyers are very useful. It's just that Mark only rates lawyers slightly higher than people who feel smug about going to third-rate Ivies like Brown, people who believe that vi is superior to emacs, and people who still use COBOL. Okay, I'll fess up that I only added this whole joke about lawyers because I wanted to squeeze some more inside jokes into the story. There's a lot of inter-Ivy resentment, mockery, and vague hatred. But there's also a level of solidarity as well. Harvard likes to think they're hot shit because they're Harvard, though.
The thing between emacs and vi(m) is serious business in the programming community of people who care too much about text editors. The movie clearly depicts Mark as a filthy, disgusting emacs user, and so I kept that in place here. (If it wasn't already obvious, I am a vim user myself.)
COBOL is one of those ancient languages that sticks around forever in legacy code. I'm trying to remember if it's that language where you could accidentally set 1 equal to 2 if you weren't careful enough, but I'm not sure. Maybe that was FORTRAN.
Eduardo snorts. "I thought that would be obvious, considering that we just spent all day talking about this very subject." He squeezes soap onto his hands and then rubs them quickly underneath the tap. His face is a riot of emotions that Mark can't entirely parse. He's refusing to meet Mark's eyes.
"Yeah," Mark says, "but I don't think this is just about Facebook." He's not as much about the twitchy mannerisms as some of the nerds he knows, but he wants to tap his feet or bounce his leg or curl his fingers into the straps of a backpack he's not carrying.
Eduardo shuts off the tap and tears himself more paper towel than he needs. His expression has resolved into anger, something cold and hard and sharp. "What makes you say that?" Eduardo asks. He glares at Mark, his eyes steady and unblinking. Eduardo's anger at Mark during college tended to come and go quickly, a quick burst that faded almost immediately. Now it's a low key, steady undertone to every conversation that they have. Mark wonders if it will ever go away. I think Mark is still hoping for half a reconciliation here, not that he'd ever admit it.
Mark shrugs. "What you said back there, about your being my only--"
Eduardo's face twists in surprise, eyes going wide, his mouth a flat grimace. Mark knows that he's managed to fuck this up already, but he's not sure what sets it off. He didn't even have time to get out a complete sentence. "You wouldn't understand it anyway," Eduardo says. "Fuck off, will you?" He shoves Mark out of the way and exits the room, letting the door slam shut behind him.
Man, I love how in almost every single conversation they have, only about 5% of the meaning of anything they say gets through.
---
It's funny, the way Eduardo says, "He owned Mark after that dinner," as if Mark had decided right then and there that he was going to fuck Eduardo over and kick Eduardo out of the company.
Sean hadn't owned Mark during that dinner, but he'd understood what Facebook was, what Facebook could become. He had said, "You don't want to ruin it with ads, because ads aren't cool," and he had said, "You don't even know what it is yet, how big it can get, how far it can go."
And Mark had thought -- for the first time all week -- Yes, that's exactly it. Yes.
I think what's so seductive about Sean is how well Sean understands Mark. And in keeping with the now very unsubtle metaphor of the entire story, Sean is on the same plane of existence that Mark is. They're speaking the same language, and Mark gets a little high off of that understanding.
---
Halfway through freshman year, Mark figures out that he's a lot better at programming while drunk. There's something about the fuzziness in his head that makes it easier for plug in, like he's tearing down a wall between and his code. All the other distractions seem to fall away. Relevant XKCD
"No," Eduardo says one week before the whole Facemash thing, right after Mark explains this theory to him. Shoehorned in positioning of this scene into the timeline, whee! "I call bullshit. It's not humanly possible." He shaking his head and laughs, like Mark has told the funniest joke he's ever heard.
Mark rolls his eyes. "My grades say otherwise."
But Eduardo still isn't convinced, and that's how they end up getting drunk in Mark's room together when Mark has one night -- eight hours, really -- to write a ray tracer for his graphics class. Ray tracers are one of those very fundamental ideas in graphics. They're all about trying to correctly model the way light moves throughout a scene by following each "ray" of light that will hit your eyeball. You'll probably follow a ray bouncing off several objects in order to get the proper sort of reflections and ambient color bleed going on.
"Really," Eduardo says. He's resting his arms on Mark's shoulders, pressing down on Mark's back as he leans over Mark's head to squint at Mark's code. "This is really amazing to watch, like paint drying or cows grazing or something like that. And you really do type fast enough that I'm amazed you don't have some sort of carpal tunnel yet. Are you sure that compiles?" I am so amused by the idea of programming heckling. I am also amused that no one has mentioned the possibility of Mark developing some sort of RSI from doing all that typing he does according to fandom. Seriously, that shit spreads really badly throughout a CS department, especially if they have no outside hobbies.
Compiling code is a process where the high level code written in text is then translated into a low level machine code and turned into a binary file that can be read by the computer. Sometimes this takes a while. Relevant XKCD. Not all programs need to be compiled before they can run. Interpreted languages are languages that get run through an interpreter so that they basically can be run immediately with the trade-off that you lose whatever optimizations a compiler would give you and whatever overhead the interpreter contributes. The rule of thumb of whether not a task will be compiled or interpreted is how fast it needs to get done. Graphics eats computations with a spoon (which is why we have graphics cards so powerful that people use them to do protein folding) and so Mark is probably writing his ray tracer in C or C++.
Mark takes a vicious bite out of his Twizzler and takes a swig from his beer bottle -- Harpoon IPA, generously donated by Eduardo. Harpoon is sort of a Boston thing. I don't know, but I decided to toss it in here, even though I think Mark probably drinks something else on a regular basis.The flavors don't mix quite right, but that's part of the appeal. "Don't you have some econometrics problem sets to do or something?"
"No, I'm quite happy to stand here and watch this instead. It won't be a random distribution of colored pixels this time, will it? Because that was a real let down the last time you tried to test it." When you write your intersection detection badly or when you screw up your x and y axes in a graphics class, it is incredibly easy to produce some very, very odd images.
"Shut the fuck up," Mark says.
It takes Mark another hour to get the simplest test image to render properly and then another half hour to figure out why some of the reflections were so fucked up in some of the images. By that point, Eduardo is napping on Mark's bed, but he wakes up after Mark hands in his assignment and slams the lid of his laptop shut. It's late, so late that Mark tries to figure out how many hours it will be until morning and whether or not he cares about watching the sun rise. He's seen it enough times that it's lost its appeal.
"Done?" Eduardo asks, his voice still a little slurred. He rubs his eyes, and he looks all of about five while doing so. A really drunk five-year-old, but a five-year-old nonetheless.
"Done," Mark says. He stretches his arms and gets his shoulders to crack.
Eduardo grins and grabs another beer bottle from the mini-fridge, pops off the cap on the edge of Mark's desk. "Congratulations," he says, handing the bottle over.
Mark accepts the drink without another word, allowing himself to slump in his chair for the first time that night. Eduardo opens a new bottle for himself and takes a deep gulp from it, his head tilted back so that Mark can see the line of his neck, so that Mark can can watch his Adam's apple bob as he swallows. "That was beautiful," Eduardo says, because he doesn't have any real brain-to-mouth filters while drunk. He grabs Mark's arm and gives it a squeeze. His fingers are cool and slightly wet from where they were touching the bottle.
"You didn't even see any of the final renders," Mark says. Man, they really never end up having the same conversation about anything ever. This whole section happened by accident, because I picked graphics as the class he was working on arbitrarily and then this bit of miscommunication happened, and I fell a little in love with it. JUST LIKE EDUARDO LOVES YOU, MARK. His eyelids are beginning to droop without any deliberate effort on his part. The alcohol is beginning to make its presence known now that he's back in his own head and not in the code. He contemplates shoving Eduardo aside so that he can get some sleep himself before morning classes. Eduardo probably wouldn't mind, because he has his own ridiculously early classes to get to, and Mark's pretty sure Eduardo's not enough of a homophobe to get freaked out by sleeping in the same bed as Mark. Mark's not particularly squeamish about that either.
"I didn't have to," Eduardo says. He starts to sprawl on Mark's bed, his beer bottle forgotten on Mark's desk. Mark elbows him over and squeezes into bed himself, stealing back a portion of the blankets, ready to call it a night.
Eduardo kisses him. Their bodies are bent at awkward angles so that they can both fit on the bed, and Eduardo's mouth tastes like sleep and alcohol, and Eduardo's fingers are tangled in Mark's hair. It's easy, so easy, for Mark to kiss Eduardo back, for Mark to simply fall into the feeling of it. It's not a rough kiss or a particularly frantic one. It's lazy and comfortable and good, and they're both too tired and too drunk to go any farther than this. Mark doesn't mind. Mark likes it. Mark likes the softness of Eduardo's lips and the smell of Eduardo's skin and the way Eduardo's other hand is cupping Mark's cheek.
Somewhere along the line, Mark falls asleep with his nose mashed against Eduardo's neck and his lips pressed against Eduardo's collar.zulu brought up the fact that things, for the most part, in this story move forwards in time with the exception of this section. I think it needs to be that way, though. This is sort of the giant elephant that Mark never thinks about in the previous sections, like he can't think about it. When I was mentally arranging this story in my head, it needed to be here.
Mark wakes up the next morning with a deeply unpleasant hangover that makes his head ache and his ears ring. He's also alone. Mark would think that all of the last night was a very strange dream if his bed didn't still smell like Eduardo and if there wasn't a small collection of empty beer bottles on Mark's desk. It's not a big deal that Eduardo's gone, because he has classes and he probably went home to take a shower and collect some books. Mark understands that. Mark's having a rough morning himself.
They meet up for lunch like they always do, and Eduardo is exactly the same as he always is after an all night bender. He doesn't smile more or touch Mark's hand or kiss Mark's cheek or do anything weird like that. Mark figures that he must not remember or that he regrets it a little or whatever. Mark can do that, too, of course. Mark can pretend like it never happened. It works. It's fine. Ahahaha. Of course it is, Mark. You keep telling yourself that. He shrugs when Eduardo asks him if he's going to the next AEPi party. Dustin shows up to bother Mark about their next systems problem set.
After Dustin leaves, they head out towards the Yard. Fall is coming, and the leaves on campus are beginning to change. Not all at once, but in stages. The yellows always come in first. I debated taking this bit about the colors out, because the Zuck is red-green colorblind, but I decided I liked the description too much to do that. The sun is bright today, not a cloud in the sky, and the air is dry and cold. Eduardo shifts awkwardly on his feet, which feels wrong. Eduardo is rarely as awkward as Mark, especially when he's around Mark. "Look," Eduardo says. "It was-- I'm sorry. It was late and we were drunk, and I know you're still dating Erica --" He looks embarrassed, a flush chasing its way up his neck, as if making out with Mark while drunk is something to be embarrassed about.
"It's fine," Mark says, because it is. He fiddles with the straps of his backpack.
Eduardo smiles -- beams, really -- and says, "Good. That's good." So I definitely know what I was trying to convey here with Eduardo's dialog, but I've heard other interpretations, and I like the ambiguity of it. Eduardo's signals are not coming across clearly, and Mark can't read them anyway. And like with almost every other scene in this story, they're headed straight for disaster.
And just like that, the last twelve hours of Mark's life have been deleted, reformatted, wiped perfectly clean. So I totally cheated here, and I'm surprised that no one threw anything at me for it. Most reformatting these days doesn't actually wipe a hard disk clean. It just prepares the disk for overwrite at a future date. But I like the rhythm of the way it's written right now. And maybe you could argue that he's really referring to a low level format.
---
The thing about networks, the kind that make the whole internet run, is that there's redundancy built into the system to make sure that information gets where it needs to go. There are sequence numbers on packets so that the data can be properly reassembled and checksums for each packet to verify that it hasn't been corrupted in the transfer and the retransmission of unacknowledged packets to make sure that all of them are received. In order to establish a connection in the first place, there's three step handshake before any actual data gets involved, just to ensure that someone's listening on the other side. All features of TCP! The extra redundancy actually makes TCP non-ideal for things like VoIP (i.e. Skype) since it takes longer to confirm that you've sent all the data, etc. Sometimes you just need to prioritize speed over accuracy. There's another protocol called UDP that just sort of sends shit off into the ether and hopes you get it. Skype uses a sort of TCP/UDP hybrid which I don't know much about.
It's kind of hokey to think about it this way, but Mark sometimes imagines what it must be like to send out that first part of the handshake, what a leap of faith it must be, what it must be like to trust, to hope you'll receive an acknowledgement in return. With that very first packet, there are no guarantees that it will be accepted or understood, not even a guarantee that it will ever reach its destination.
But it gets sent anyway. And that, my friends, is the sound of Chekov's gun being loaded. I think this is a little hokey, especially for Mark, but I like to imagine that he does have a sense of wonder, a sense of joy, when it comes to things like this. I don't think he could do what he does without it.
What Mark is describing is a SYN packet, but I didn't want to ever say that in the story, mostly because then I was making it way too obvious for everyone about what the meaning of the title is.
Mark thinks human connections are like that too, fragile and prone to failure and reliant on the amount of effort you put into making sure they work. There aren't any guarantees with them human relationship either. You just keep speaking and speaking, hoping to be heard. This refers back to the section above, the idea of having to retransmit packets in order to be understood. Oh, Mark. I see him as someone who isn't without feelings, but he believes that he's beyond them and acts accordingly. Except then all the feelings are still there and he doesn't know how to handle any of it so it all comes out in code or really stupid things to say or fucking over his friends or whatever. That's where the vaguely robotic thing comes from. I don't really buy stories where Mark doesn't understand feelings. I think Mark totally, 100%, understands feelings. He's just enough of an asshole to believe that since he's above it all, everyone else should be, too. Which is, of course, incredibly wrong, but also, an attitude that is incredibly prevalent amongst nerd boys.
---
Late at night, Mark is flipping through Facebook, just going through friends and friends of friends and friends of friends of friends. Facebook is far, far too big to graph these days, but he still likes seeing it unfold in front of him, even more vast and complicated and beautiful than the number of users could ever encapsulate. Aw, sometimes I genuinely like my Mark. And then I question how long I've been trying to live in his head and whether or not this has compromised my judgement.
He's the only one left in the office, and there's a calm here, a quiet. Mark loves being around other programmers while he works, loves the hum of their machines and the sounds of their arguments, but he likes this too. He likes being alone in his head without anything trying to distract him. No lawsuits, no meetings, no signatures, no arguments about system architecture. This is where he feels the most like himself. I kind of love listening to arguments about CS stuff, just to hear different angles on everything and to just hear the way people care about things. It's amazing how educational an argument can be.
He doesn't really mean to, but Mark stumbles onto Eduardo's Facebook page somewhere along the way. He knew Eduardo kept it, knew that it was as much about saving face as it was about actually wanting to still be on Facebook. The profile is carefully blank, stripped of any sort of interesting or relevant details, of any sort of genuine social context. Mark has seen the profiles of people who live their life on Facebook. Eduardo isn't one of them.
His profile picture is a professional full-body shot of Eduardo smiling for the camera, dressed in a smart business suit. He looks immaculate, put-together, happy, more like Eduardo than the tense, angry person who had sat across from Mark during the depositions. Bizarrely enough, they are still Facebook friends, which just goes to show how often Eduardo must use it.
It's almost enough -- it is enough, actually -- to make Mark to click on the "Send Message" button. This is one of those whims Mark gets, like Facemash or making a version of HarvardConnection but better or taking Peter's offer in the first place. Hopefully he isn't too young and too stupid to understand what he's doing this time around. I think yeah, the Mark in this scene is older and wiser, someone who has matured enough to understand where he fucked up even if he's not really sure how to fix it.
I'm sorry, he types into the message box. No subject line.
He clicks "Send" before he can talk himself out of it. He doesn't know if Eduardo still has a valid email address attached to his account or if Eduardo ever checks that email address if it does exist. He doesn't know if Eduardo will read it or if Eduardo will understand it or if Eduardo will care. This is Mark's own leap of faith, his own way of trying to establish a connection. In case it hadn't been immediately obvious, I see this as Mark sending out his first SYN as part of the handshake. REAL DEEP.
He's never hated Eduardo. He's resented Eduardo at times, for the Phoenix Club and for the New York internships and for wanting Christy when Mark was right there See? Mark is all grown up and willing to admit that he even has feeeeeeeelings. Mostly., but Mark has never hated him. He still doesn't regret what he did, still doesn't regret putting Facebook first, but he wishes he could go back before then, back when things were only starting to go wrong. He wishes he could revert to a much older revision and work forward from there. Version control reference #2! I mean, here it's basically super undo button, but whatever, it still works. In version control, there's a repository of code, and when you commit your latest version of code to it, it gets stored as a revision. The nice thing about having a tool like this is that you can basically let yourself experiment and go off on wild tangents because you'll always have a stable version to go back to if you need it. I know people who put almost everything they write under a type of version control or other.He's not lying at all when he sends the message. He hates how things are between the two of them. He wants things to be better.
Mark knows he won't be able to fix things, but he can try to patch things as best he can.
It takes a few days for Eduardo to get back to him. There isn't a subject line on his message either.
I'm sorry, too, is all it says. Eduardo sends back a SYN-ACK, and it's like they're actually capable of saying things that the other one understands. It's amazing!
Mark closes his eyes and steadies his breath, unclenching his fists as calmly as he can muster. He was mostly expecting Eduardo to ignore him, to let that apology hang unacknowledged between them. At best, Mark was hoping for a Fuck off or a nine page list of every single one of Mark's many and varied character flaws. This is-- this is not what Mark had expected at all.
He opens his eyes and stares at the screen. The words are still there, black text on a white background. Mark feels a smile forming on his face, something small and almost painful.zulu mentioned all the smiling. I dunno, you guys. My Mark is a smiley guy. He's not used to it, but it feels good, like scratching off a scab to reveal the new, pink skin underneath. It feels like a chance to do this right.
He clicks "Reply" and begins to type. Okay, confession time. I logged into my Facebook account for the first time in several years in order to get the various pieces of the messaging system correct. (Or maybe not correct, because apparently Facebook doesn't have subject lines for their messages anymore even though I totally see it in the messaging popup?) This is what I do for you, fandom! I hope you appreciate it. I think The Onion News Network sums up my feelings about Facebook very nicely.
FIN.
SO THAT WAS A STORY. I know some people have talked about how sad it is, but for me, it's not really all that sad at all. Bittersweet, probably. Maybe I'm just really mean, or maybe as the writer, I can see all the places where they can go from here, and I have greater faith that they can patch things up. I don't know. After this, I can see them becoming friends again, and maybe during a Facebook company party, Eduardo gets drunk and says, "You know, I kind of always wanted to kiss you again after that one time." and Mark says, "Wait, what?" and Eduardo sort of gives a demonstration while the rest of Facebook lets out a cheer. And then maybe they end up in Mark's bed again, but this time when he wakes up, Eduardo is still there, snoring and drooling a little, and Mark feels something tight and painful in his chest, like there's too much pressing against his ribcage, trying to get out.
Maybe later, when Eduardo wakes up, Mark says, "You don't have to-- You could--" because he needs to keep asking even if Eduardo's answer never changes.
And maybe Eduardo interrupts him, maybe Eduardo says, "Yes. Not immediately, because I have other things to take care of, but yes, I want to move out to California."
Maybe they move in together, and Eduardo takes over the extra bedroom and turns it into a study. On weekends, Eduardo will be at his desk and Mark will be on the couch and they won't say anything to each other for an entire afternoon, so wrapped up in their own little worlds, but the distance between them won't feel so very big.
Maybe they cause a bit of a scandal on Valleywag after photos of the two of them making out end up on Mark's Facebook page.
Maybe they get a dog named Max, who gets the nickname "the Zuckerburglar" after she steals Dustin's socks and chews giant holes in them. Maybe Mark is responsible of cleaning up the dog shit and Eduardo is responsible for spoiling her silly, but they switch roles every time Facebook rolls out a new big feature.
Maybe they turn into one of those couples, the ones who have conversations like, "Do you remember that thing next to the--" "Yeah. And you always had to--" where they can finish each other's sentences without even trying too hard. Maybe they get to the point where Mark wakes up every morning thinking how the hell is this my life? and Eduardo tells him that his breath smells with just one facial expression and Mark thinks about the long, winding trip their relationship has taken. He thinks about how he could have done things better, but he also thinks that maybe he had to fuck everything up in order to understand why it was so important that he fix it. Maybe he kisses Eduardo just like that, smelly breath and all.
Maybe their lives go on.
And in the end, maybe Mark learns how to be happy.
I CAN TOTALLY WRITE SAPPY SCHMOOP TOO, OKAY?
Anyway, this story is so deeply personal and so deeply filled with the things I love that I can't feel sad when I re-read it. I think at its heart is the joy you feel when you do something you love and the amazement you feel when you see that you're on the cusp of something new and beautiful. And this is why I can't ever hate Mark too much, even though he's a giant asshole. Whatever. I was in House fandom after all. Most of Mark's douchery is pretty tame by comparison.
I feel like in some ways, this was my Social Network manifesto. I don't think I need to ever write anything ever again in this fandom after this, because everything I needed to say has been said right here. This is who Mark and Eduardo are to me, and this is why they ended in misery and tragedy, and this is what I think Mark sees when he looks at Facebook, and this is how they could try to get back from the bad place they're at right now.
So yeah. Feel free to ask questions about any of this, because I love talking about computer shit and also people's messed up, tragic feeeeeeeelings. Or writing! I can talk about writing!
So, welcome to the DVD commentary. I hope it is illuminating and interesting and all of that. I'll try to refer to Wikipedia as much as possible to keep this from getting too dry and technical. You can also read the original without all the extra annotation if that appeals to you more.
Title: SYN/ACK
Fandom: The Social Network
Pairing: Mark/Eduardo
Rating: PG-13
Word count: ~7000
Summary: There are differences between Eduardo and him that Mark doesn't think they'll ever really resolve, that they'll ever be able to overcome. A love story about packet loss.
Notes: I'm not sure I would have posted this if it weren't for
zulu, who picked up beta duties on top of being encouraging.Let's start with the title/summary/driving theme, which refers to TCP, the Transmission Control Protocol which is, in fact, what most of the internet runs on. It is super good at redundancy and not entirely good at security, but that's another point for another time. That second-to-last section where it basically four paragraphs of technobabble is basically me trying to describe some of the ways in which TCP tries to ensure data fidelity in a way that hopefully makes sense for people. The three steps of the mentioned handshake are SYN, SYN-ACK, and ACK, short for syn(chronize) and ack(nowledge). Hence the title. And also the summary. I wanted to get across the idea that over the course of this story, Mark and Eduardo are talking on like, completely different planes of existence, and losing/dropping each other's packets along the way.
Mark has always loved his systems classes, loved learning how an operating system is built from the the inside out. He loves all of it, really, loves virtual memory and schedulers and file systems yup, all important parts of operating systems. Look them up if you want to know what they are. They're not really relevant for this story beyond the fact that they exist and that they're part of operating systems., but it's the networking stack that really holds his attention.
There are all these parts to it, from the hardware layer to the application layer It's actually interesting to see how the layers separate out. There's a good diagram of what they are and what sorts of protocols sit where. TCP is nestled comfortably in the transport layer. Usually, it's considered a package deal with Internet Protocol (IP), and so you'll see TCP/IP referenced in a lot of places, but they are at different levels of the stack., and they all have to work together, and work with the hardware, and work with this whole ecosystem of routers and switches and servers. Mark spends a lot of time wondering what it must have been like, constructing these things, putting together the building blocks of the internet, creating something that would bring everyone together, that would make the world smaller and bigger all at once. He's just young enough to remember a time before the world wide web. He's seen how it's changed everything.
Early on, when they only have about a few hundred accounts, Dustin made a graph I am still so paranoid that people don't realize that I'm talking about a very mathy, specific definition of graph here, and not the kinds of graphs they make you do in grade school. Graphs are a big thing in CS, since they can be used to represent data data, and there are lots and lots of graph algorithms that are very fundamental to computer science. Binary search trees are probably one of the simplest examples. of the entire site out of boredom. It was massive when he was done rendering the whole thing. From far away, it looked like a mess, tiny blue dots representing people, tangled lines representing friendships. Mark stared at it for an entire hour, just following the connections from person to person with his fingers. It was almost like he could touch the intangible social ties that hold them all together, the world translated into something concrete, that could be recorded and stored on a computer. About 90% of the time when you get word problems for graph algorithms, they comes with semi-contrived real world examples of when you would want to apply one of them. About half of these examples refer to social relationships. Sometimes this is about how social awkwardness will ensue if you accidentally group a particular set of nodes together. Nodes apparently have really torrid relationships with each other. Eduardo found him staring at it and insisted on dragging him off to dinner, but that image of thefacebook, of that web of relationships, of this thing that Mark had helped bring to life, lingered in his mind for days.
---
"What the fuck," Eduardo says when he finds Mark asleep and drooling onto his keyboard, surrounded by potato chip crumbs, tuna fish tins, and half-empty bottles of Mountain Dew. "This is so fucking disgusting."
His face is scrunched up in horror and disbelief, as if Mark had decided to sacrifice kittens to the computer gods on his desk or something weird like that. Mark sits up and rubs his eyes. He sniffs his shirt to figure out if it's too disgusting to wear again today. It seems fine. He checks to make sure there's no mold growing in the tuna fish or in the Mountain Dew bottles. He can't see any. "Fuck off, Wardo," Mark says. Despite spending all his free time with a bunch of programmers, Eduardo still becomes appalled whenever Mark behaves like one. If Eduardo is under the impression that Mark reeks right now, he should never set foot inside any of the computer science labs, even on a good day. Fact: CS people en masse are pretty disgusting. It's probably a good thing that I don't have a sense of smell, because I have heard stories about how bad the chairs in our computer labs smelled. In this scene, I just wanted to go straight for the grossness that I think a lot of people gloss over. If Mark isn't eating (properly) and isn't showering at all, he's not going to be very pleasant to be around. For serious. Well, unless you're Eduardo.
Eduardo rolls his eyes. He has his biggest wool coat on, which may mean it's cold outside of it may mean that it's still in the high forties. High forties is still flip-flops-without-socks weather as far as Mark's concerned. I usually wait until it hits the 50s before I start doing the Adidas flip-flops thing. But then again, Mark is willing to wear socks with his flip-flops. I think that's cheating. The sky outside Mark's window is a pale gray, and the drafts coming from underneath their door are warm and heavy with humidity. "I really have a hard time believing that you will ever get a job that will allow you to be this gross on a regular basis," Eduardo says.
There's a cursor blinking next to the last line of code Mark wrote while still conscious, bits and pieces of a unified Javascript library that will consolidate all the existing Javascript that's been hacked together and scattered across the site. Javascript (not be confused with Java, as they are not related at all) is one of those languages that is deeply important to the internet. It's really powerful, and it allows for more dynamic content on web pages. It runs in the browser as opposed to the server, and now Chrome, Firefox, and Opera are all battling it out to get the fastest JS engine out there. Ah, isn't competition grand? Mark scrolls around a bit to make sure he remembers where he was. He's about to start working again when he hears the bed springs squeak. Eduardo's has taken up residence on Mark's bed. There are textbooks on investments and game theory I think I love writing Eduardo's technobabble almost as much as I love writing Mark's. spread out on Mark's pillow in front of him. His open notebook is covered in neatly written equations. Mark raises an eyebrow at him.
"Oh, go back to work," Eduardo says as he settles in, folding his legs into a cross-legged position, his notebook balanced precariously on his knee. "Also, you know you're going to need to take a shower at some point, right?" He's smiling as he says this, and there's something else in his expression that Mark doesn't understand, as if maybe he's referring to something besides the fact that Mark's hair has taken on an oily sheen over the last few days.
Mark turns back to his computer, settling his fingers onto the home keys. He dives right back into the code, because he had an idea for refactoring some of Dustin's sloppier functions into things that actually make sense. "Refactor" in CS parlance means "reorganize the shit out of everything except keep it working the way it was before." It's really important once your code becomes unweildy.At this point Mark will usually put on some noise cancelling headphones and blast some techno, something with a thick, heavy beat to keep his thoughts steady CS people seem to like (a) techno, (b) heavy metal or (c) hip-hop when coding. I suspect I just need a larger sample size., but it's quiet in his room today, and Eduardo is here. Eduardo's forehead is creased with thought, and his fingers are tapping an irregular rhythm against his thighs. There's the vaguest hint of a smile lingering on the corners of his lips. Mark turns back to his code.
They stay like that for a few hours before Eduardo has a meeting or a class or something. He leaves with a jaunty wave, his messenger bag slung over one shoulder. Mark keeps working. After a few minutes, he needs to put his headphones back on.
---
People have been telling Mark that he'll be the next Bill Gates ever since he wrote his very first "Hello, world!" program in Atari BASIC when he was twelve. Zuckerberg's first language really was Atari BASIC, and it's almost an inside joke at this point that the first program most people write is how to print out the words "Hello, world!". If you don't believe me, pick up a programming/programming language book the next time you're in a bookstore. Let me know what the first program they have you write is. He's never thought of it as a big thing, just something people say when they don't understand what Mark does. There are thousands and thousands of people out there who know their way around a computer, and they're not exactly swimming in money. Bill Gates revolutionized how people use computers, but that was mostly a luck thing. It's all about being smart in the right place at the right time. I sincerely believe that if it wasn't Bill Gates, it would have been someone else.
Mark managed to be smart in the right place at the right time. He still doesn't listen to people who talk to him about being the next Bill Gates.
It's that people think the Bill Gates thing is about the money, and it's not; it never has been. I think the movie doesn't quite know how to reconcile its vision of Mark-who-doesn't-care-about-money and Mark-who-fucks-people-over, but I think it's easier when you think about it from the angle of (a) intellectual snobbery and (b) genuine dedicated passion for what he does. Mark wants to be the best at everything and he's willing to run over whoever he needs to in order to get there.Mark would be programming even if there wasn't any money in it, even if it wasn't a respectable career. Mark will never get over the visceral thrill of it, of typing and typing and understanding how to put it all together in order to make it work, understanding how to make it beautiful. On occasion, He does think about what it would be like if he got some other nine-to-five job doing something idiotic and boring and filled with corporate bullshit, and he knows he'd still be in front of his computer on weekends, writing patches for the Linux kernel or for MySQL or for Apache or doing his own thing, desperate to get that feeling back.Of course, all the things listed are open source projects willing to take patches (basically code fixes) from anyone who wants to submit them. Whether or not your patches cause a flame war is an entirely different matter.
I sort of laughed myself silly during the DVD commentary when Armie Hammer talks about how he can't believe that Mark wanting a dedicated Linux box with Apache and MySQL would only cost $200 more. Dude, with the exception of the hardware, all those things are free.
---
"Dijkstra?" Dustin yells to the sky, his voice carrying over the traffic. "I barely know ya!" This is referring to Edsger Dijkstra, a famous computer scientist best known for creating an algorithm for finding shortest paths in a graph. I like this joke, because it comes and goes so quickly most people probably don't even think about it too hard. But the CS people probably got a bit of a lol out of it.
Eduardo laughs at Dustin's joke, even thought he probably doesn't get it, his head thrown back and his eyes bright. Eduardo's good at that sort of thing, the smiling and being happy thing. Mark is bad at that particular brand of bullshit. He's always loathed family photos, because he hates faking happiness almost as much as he hates standing still just because someone else wants him to. Eduardo shoots Mark a look, a smaller, more secret smile, and Mark has to smile back just a little, even if he doesn't understand why. It's mid-spring, and the remaining snow that lines the streets of Cambridge is half-melted and disgusting, all browns and yellows mixed in with the white and piled into misshapen lumps. All the cars that drive by them are covered in salt stains. The air smells cold and wet and deeply unpleasant, like mud and rotting vegetables mixed together. The wind is howling between the buildings. Boston/Cambridge is totally like this when it starts getting warm out. It's pretty disgusting.Mark tugs his hoodie tighter around his shoulders and thinks it's ridiculous that anyone could enjoy seasonal weather. I kind of love that Mark and I occasionally have completely opposite opinions on everything. This is one of those things. You'll pry my seasonal weather out of my cold, dead hands.
Dustin accidentally steps in a puddle of half-melted snow as they try to cross Mass Ave. The water soaks through his shoes and socks and the bottom cuffs of his jeans. "Shit," he says. "We're definitely doing that California thing, right, Mark?" He makes a face and starts limping slightly, as if that will make his pants dry any faster.
"Yeah," Mark says. Silicon Valley is still the mecca of computer programmers, of young startups and established businesses, and Mark knows they need to be there. There will be all-day coding jags and angel investors and sunny days and everything Mark could possibly want. Sean will be there, too. "That's the plan right now."
Eduardo's smile goes stiff and uncomfortable, and that light Mark saw earlier dims on his face. Mark wonders if this is the part where he's expected to make stupid jokes about Nash equilibria or Pareto optimality to cheer him up, but Eduardo never really laughs when Mark is trying to be funny. Nash equilibrium is a fundamental game theory concept. Pareto optimality is a more general econ concept. They are both named after people and sound funny when you say them out loud. That was pretty much my only criteria for selecting them. I'm not entirely sure Mark really understands what either of them are. Eduardo says, "Enjoy yourselves. I will be having fun on this coast while you're gone." He doesn't quite look like he means it, but he still tosses his arm around Dustin's shoulders and slaps Mark's back, a solid thump that Mark feels heavy in his chest.
"You could--" Mark start to say. As much as Mark needs a summer of just Facebook, his head deep inside the PHP with only some alcohol and a pool to distract him, it seems weird that they'll be there without Eduardo coming along to back them up. Eduardo doesn't really sit in on their coding sessions, but he's always flitting in and out, peeking over Chris's shoulders to see what's happening or annoying Dustin into working on whatever moronic new feature Christy wants added to the site or asking Mark whether or not they need more servers. This technobabble is probably the most accessible it gets. Enjoy it while it lasts.
It won't be the same without him there.
"I can't," Eduardo says. He rubs his hands together because he forgot his gloves, and he's staring at the CVS across the street instead of meeting Mark's eyes. "You know, internship, my father..."
"Right," Mark says. "Sure." I love how this line of Mark's is so non-committal it doesn't really mean anything. NO WONDER EDUARDO DOESN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE SAYING, DUDE.
---
There are differences between Eduardo and him that Mark doesn't think they'll ever really resolve, that they'll ever be able to overcome. Eduardo knows how to move mountains and mountains of money on the strength of one beautiful algorithm, but he'll never understand what it's like to build an entire world -- an entire fucking galaxy -- with just the tips of his fingers.
Okay, this section is kind of one of those ones that are super pretentious and I don't even care, because I can totally understand Mark's resentment. Fuck you, I built this, and you'll never truly understand what that means.
When I start writing a new story, I sometimes just sit down and write scenes and then figure out how they fit together into a story at some later point, which is why they can seem so disjointed and strangely put together at times. This section war originally written after the Eduardo section down below. The Eduardo section and the Mark section above were actually part of the same section, but then I split them up, and then I decided that this would be a good transition section between them.
---
There's a party at someone's house near Central, a friend of a friend of Chris' or something like that. The location of this apartment switched around a few times. I thought that maybe Central was too townie and that Kendall didn't really have any houses like the one I was describing and Davis/Porter were too out of the way. I think Central is the best compromise. Mark doesn't have all the details, but it doesn't really matter because people still whoop and cheer as they step inside like they're bosom buddies or something. The house looks like every other off-campus house in New England, old and big and wooden and cut up into smaller apartments for college students. This is all true. I've lived in them. Some of my friends still live in them. There are a few lamps lighting the rooms a soft orange, and the music -- something hip hop that gets played all the time over the radio but that Mark doesn't recognize specifically -- is loud enough to make Mark's eardrums twitch in discomfort. Someone shoves a red plastic cup filled with a liquid that smells like beer into Mark's hand, and so he downs it with one long gulp, just because he can.
Eduardo says, "What the fuck, man?" He's doing that appalled thing again, eyes wide, mouth pulled into an incredulous grimace.
Mark shrugs, because he doesn't feel like yelling over the noise. They're here to have fun; Mark is just starting early. Chris insisted that they not pre-game before getting on the T, and now they need to make up for lost time.
merisunshine36 mentioned that the pre-gaming struck her as being a surprise because people didn't write about it as much. Um, I think I saw it in fic myself and then went, "Hey, right! People do that." and then added it myself. Mark is totally enough of a douche to pre-game.Eduardo rolls his eyes.
The party is in full swing as they head towards the main living room, which just goes to show that it does pay to be fashionably late on occasion. Mark doesn't know most of the people milling around, though he does recognize a few of the CS majors. Most of the female ones are neither hot enough nor slutty enough for Mark to bother with them, and a lot of them are likely to still hold a grudge over that whole Facemash thing.Mark, you giant misogynistic jerk. One thing that always makes me laugh is that scene in the systems class where there were waaaaaay too many women for that to be a genuine systems lecture. I liked adding nerdy girls into Mark's life, though. There's a sore lack of any interaction with them in the movie. Whatever. Mark doesn't need to awkwardly hit on girls to have a good time. He can just help himself to some free alcohol instead.
An hour into the party, Mark's just drunk enough to get into an intense, if also inarticulate, argument with Angela Chen in the kitchen over the relative advantages and disadvantages of using PHP vs. Perl for web development. Of course she's really wrong about everything, and Mark is halfway through explaining how completely broken the typical permissions scheme for CGI scripts are when Eduardo comes up behind Mark and wraps his arms around Mark's neck. Perl was the first really well-used web development language, and the way it worked was through CGI scripts. There are weird permissions issues with CGI scripts that I sort of half-remember, but which I can't really remember enough to explain to anyone else. PHP was the new cool web language when Mark was starting up Facebook, as it was specifically designed for web development and it had gained a lot of traction in that space at that time. It's still incredibly popular, but it's also sort of still in vogue to make fun of PHP for being a very badly designed language. These days, Facebook apparently still uses it for frontend stuff, but their backend stuff is, well, a lot more complicated these days.
"You're supposed to be having fun," Eduardo says loudly, louder than he needs to considering that Mark's ear is right there. Eduardo's not squeezing tightly enough for Mark to worry about his windpipe, but it's a close thing. Angela smirks at Mark's obvious discomfort. God, he hates her so much. If there's one person in this fucking university that is more condescending than Mark is about matters related to computers, it has to be her. It's especially galling that she's right at least 80% of the time. Ahahahaha. I kind of really wish I had bothered to write out this entire conversation, because I'm 100% convinced that it had completely devolved into "You're wrong." "No, you're wrong." at this point. There's a very particular level of condescension necessary for an argument about CS with computer nerds. It's like music geekery. There's a requirement that you have to be completely dismissive of the other person's arguments and 100% confident in your own.
Eduardo must be completely sloshed at this point, because he gets just like this when he's drunk, loose-limbed affectionate and handsy. His breath is warm against Mark's ear. Mark detaches from him just enough to be able to turn around, just far enough way that he can see the alcohol-soaked curl of Eduardo's smile. Mark says, "I am having fun." I kind of love the new sort of ~*implications*~ that this scene takes on once you find out what's already happened before. You know, the other time Eduardo's drunk.
"Not you-fun," Eduardo says, "real-people-fun." He pats Mark on the head, and Mark shoves his hand away. Eduardo always gets a little ruder when drunk. Dustin likes to joke that he becomes more like Mark. Mark likes to tell Dustin that he should shut the fuck up. Eduardo also doesn't pick up on hints while drunk, and so he leans forward, overcompensating for the distance that Mark has put between them, and he ends up falling into Mark's shoulder. His lips are mashed up against the fabric of Mark's hoodie. He's still giggling. Mark wraps an arm around his back to keep him upright.
Mark doesn't bother explaining why real-people-fun doesn't work for him, because Eduardo usually understands the concept well enough while not drunk. No point in repeating himself unnecessarily. Mark has already learned his lesson about arguing with drunk people tonight. Angela has disappeared, probably into the living room again. Mark doesn't mind too much, except now he no longer has the opportunity to crush every single one of her arguments to dust.
Eduardo blinks a few times at Angela's absence, his forehead furrowing with thought. "Oh, sorry about that," he says. "I didn't--"
Mark snorts, waving off Eduardo's apologies. "You couldn't pay me to sleep with her," he says. He half-leads, half-drags Eduardo out of the kitchen and towards something that resembles an empty couch seat in one of the living rooms. Eduardo is taller than Mark and he's heavy against Mark's shoulder and Mark already has enough back problems from sitting in front of his computer all day. The seat they find is only really designed to fit one person, but Mark and Eduardo are friends, and they're both fairly skinny, so they fit. I had so much fun writing around Mark's feeeeeeeelings in this. They're everywhere, but Mark is incapable of handling them, so they don't even register in his internal monologue. But they're totally there.
Eduardo smiles at Mark as they settle in, still so open and happy with the alcohol loosening him up. Their bodies touch from shoulder to hip. Yeah, there goes Mark's totally unsubtle pining.
---
In the beginning, Mark goes to Eduardo because Eduardo is someone who's been trained from birth to run shit like this. Mark's known that since the very first day he met Eduardo, when Eduardo had straightened the cuffs of his very expensive and very classy shirt and mentioned that he was going to be concentrating in Econ. It was pretty obvious even then that Eduardo had basically been pre-admitted to every MBA program known to man. Mark was certain that Wharton had already finished dusting off its red carpet. The whole essay-writing-and-application-form thing was just a formality for people like Eduardo, and even Eduardo knew that. So, I don't think fandom really touches a lot on this. Like, how Eduardo's future looks in the eyes of other characters. It's very clear where he's going, and everyone can see it. He's that guy. Let's be honest here, what sort of impression would you get from an econ major who wears suits to all his classes? Yeah, I thought so.
Still, the reason why Mark liked him, why Mark trusted him, was that it was clear that -- unlike most Econ majors Mark knew -- Eduardo wasn't too stupid to do CS. He understood algorithms and he had a handle on the problem solving, and he ate Stata and SAS and SPSS and R for breakfast All of the things I mentioned are statistical packages with their own programming languages. Given what we know from the movie, Eduardo pretty much has to know at least one of them very well, since you need them to do the sort of predictive analysis that got him $300,000 dollars. On the whole, the type of programming Mark does is a lot more complicated than the algorithms Eduardo has worked on, but the math Eduardo has to do is a lot harder. He could have learned to do what Mark does, if he'd wanted to.
That was never really likely, though, since Eduardo would never lower himself to do something as blandly, painfully, middle class as engineering. There's definitely something very middle class about studying engineering in college. I get the very firm impression that Mark is upper middle class and he's never really cared about going up from that so much as he's cared that people look down on him for it. I really don't think the whole final clubs thing makes sense in the context of Mark Zuckerberg's life, especially his relationship to money, but whatever. This is movieverse. We'll roll with it. He was always expected to go higher and farther than that. He was supposed to get punched by the Phoenix, and he was supposed to go into business school, and he was supposed to make his father proud.
But somewhere along the way, he decided to befriend a few computer programmers, befriend Mark, and Mark doesn't think he ever understood why. He doesn't think he ever will. I don't entirely think this is true IRL. They were both brothers at AEPi, and really, frats make you do shittons of forced bonding exercises. But it works better with my ~*theme*~ this way. So once again, rolling with it.
---
Eduardo comes out to visit Palo Alto right before he starts his internship in New York. Mark and Dustin and Chris and their interns are still in the process of moving in. The summer already seems like it will last forever, like it will last a lifetime. Mark is already in love with California by that point, already in love with the dry, sunny days and the amount of space and the way he can get away with staring at a computer screen for as long as he wants without classes getting in the way. Boston is tiny and wet and too cold (or too hot in the summers) by comparison. Boston is ancient, and it carries that oldness in its bones, infects everything in it with that same oldness. California, Silicon Valley, is the best place in the entire fucking world to build a start-up right now. Mark knows this. He can feel it in the early light of the morning after an all-night coding binge. He knows it every time they go to a bar or a club and meet more people who work at Google or Sun or Amazon who understand what they're doing, who think it's cool and interesting. I'd hate California. But I can see the appeal of it for Mark. Kind of. I tried. Boston's definitely more my kind of city. I think I'd cry if I had to live in Palo Alto.
When Eduardo visits, the house is still full of half-unpacked boxes. Most of them are located in the kitchen, because no one uses it unless someone has hot pockets or leftover takeout to microwave. They've also cleared a path to the refrigerator, because that's where the beer is. Chris sometimes makes coffee in their brand new coffee maker, but that migrated into the main living room where the computers are, and soda and Red Bull are far easier sources of caffeine, anyway. Heh. Coffee is just inefficient, man. You need to make it before you start ingesting it. I definitely knew a programmer who liked to talk about how he'd buy a 2 liter bottle of Mountain Dew and would finish it in a night of coding. So. Yeah. The movie got that right at least.
Mark picks Eduardo up from the airport after Eduardo takes a red eye out from JFK. Mark is still half-wired into his code (he needs to sanitize some inputs and there some really obnoxious edge cases and he thinks that SQL query he just wrote might be returning more data than they need and --) This section was me trying to capture what it feels like for me when I really get in the groove of programming, which I guess is what the movie means about being wired in. You sort of have a mental checklist of everything you need to hit/fix, and you really want to get back into it so that you can finish it. Sanitizing inputs is a security thing, because sometimes people will try to put code into text boxes and if you're not careful, you might accidentally cause that code to run on your system with all of your permissions, which is not a good idea. Relevant XKCD. Edge cases are when your data comes in non-typical forms that can't be handled with a general rule. SQL is the language you use to talk to databases. Sometimes you accidentally pull more data than you need with a query, and that means you're putting strain on the database than you need to be., so he's only half listening when Eduardo describes his apartment in New York.
"It has an amazing view of a brick wall on one side," Eduardo says. "You'll have to come by and see it sometime." He says this as if Mark can be dragged away from Facebook for more than a day, like Mark would allow himself to be away from Facebook for more than a day.
"Sounds good," Mark says. He pulls the company car (borrowed from Dustin's parents for the summer) off the freeway.
"And there was this one time when I was on the subway, and this homeless guy comes up to me and says--" Eduardo's voice trails off. He's staring at Mark's face. Mark wonders what he sees there. Eduardo says, "You're not even listening to me, are you?"
"How's Christy?" Mark asks, because it's a stupid question, and he doesn't want to answer it.
Eduardo shrugs. "Christy's good." On top of not having any free time, Mark won't ever go to New York because being the fifth wheel around Eduardo and Christy is Mark's last idea of fun. It's not that Eduardo and Christy are still in the kissy-face stage of their relationship -- they're not. It's that Mark has never quite understood how to talk to her, even more than most girls, even more than most of Eduardo's girlfriends. She always looks at Mark with vague resentment, like Mark is some sort of interloper in her grand romance. Most of the time, Mark wants to just smile at her and tell her to fuck off. This entire conversation is such proof that I really do not write dialogue like Aaron Sorkin. And I'm okay with that.
He and Eduardo are greeted by a sleepy-eyed Chris when they pull up to the driveway. Seeing him, Mark realizes he's beginning to feel the last twenty hours he's been awake weighing on him. The night air is cool on his face. There's morning dew on their front lawn. Mark slams the car door behind him and walks inside. Sometime after that, he manages to crawl up to his bed and fall asleep, but he doesn't really remember how any of that happens.
It's not until later, when he wakes up again, that he realizes that he never offered to help Eduardo settle in. Mark knows he should have done that already because Eduardo's his friend. On the other hand, Eduardo's also not a moron, and he can probably find the couch himself. It's afternoon -- Mark's watch says 1 PM -- and the sun trickles through the windows along with the sound of splashing water. Mark's room overlooks the pool, and when Mark peeks outside, he sees Eduardo swimming laps. Eduardo must still be on east coast time. Mark and the others have become half-nocturnal since they moved out here. So many CS people I knew in college were nocturnal. Some of them still kind of are.
Mark slips outside just as Eduardo's pulling himself out of the pool, water dripping from his face, his hair. The swimming trunks he's wearing are clinging to his thighs. He looks even more tan in the sunlight, radiant and golden. Mark has turned maybe one shade darker after he got really bad sunburn during his first week in California. After that, he decided that he liked it better indoors anyway. Eduardo smiles at Mark as Mark walks over, still flushed and happy from the exercise. Mark toes off his flip flops and lets his feet dangle in the water as he perches on the edge of the pool. It's hot outside with the sun still high in the sky, but the water is cool and soothing, relaxing. Eduardo wipes is face with a towel. I tried really hard to excise all specific description of Mark's feelings towards Eduardo, like Mark isn't really capable of letting himself feel it, especially in the scenes where they interact. However, the feelings sort of leak through when Mark describes Eduardo himself, because Mark is totally pining his heart out at this point.
"It's an awesome place, isn't it?" Mark asks.
Eduardo tilts his head to the side. "Yes, it is. I'm sure this summer is going to be great."
Mark feels a smile tugging at his own lips. "It's going to be fucking amazing," he says. It's a fact at this point. "You should stay." Mark can see the future from here, from where they are at this very moment. It stretches to infinity, stretches as far as the eye can see. Mark wants Eduardo to see that. He's not sure Eduardo can.
Eduardo shakes his head. "I'm sorry. I can't." Mark isn't really expecting anything different from him. Eduardo's head, heart, and circadian rhythm are clearly back in New York, after all.
Mark blinks, turns his head away. "Yeah," he says, because he can hear all the things Eduardo isn't saying out loud. Man, Mark is so very good at making up motivations for other people, isn't he? I love how quickly he jumps to conclusions. It made this story so much easier to write, because I didn't need to work against his excellent observational skills.
---
Mark doesn't regret any of it, not really. Yeah, he regrets that it all came to that, but he doesn't regret the choices he made in the end. Or even in the beginning. He doesn't regret going to Eduardo for the start up costs and doesn't regret diluting Eduardo's shares.
Eduardo had seen Facebook as a student project, a stepping stone to better things, a line on his fucking resume, a good bullshit story when he needs to interview for jobs at consulting firms or investment banks or whatever the fuck he's doing now. God, I love those interview questions about projects you've worked on. I can just imagine some interviewer asking Eduardo, "So, tell me about a conflict you had while working with other people and how you resolved it." And Eduardo saying, "Well, he didn't pick me up at the airport, so first I froze the bank account, and then he pulled an underhanded trick to boot me out of the company, and then I sued him for $600 million. I think we might still be talking to each other these days." Yeah, I can see that going over well. He thought this whole thing would blow over in a few years, like CourseMatch, like Facemash. He thought that it made more sense to treat Mark as a friend, rather than a business partner, which would have been fine for throwing birthday parties and giving Mark shit about the state of Mark's hair, but it's not okay when he's fucking over Facebook's finances.
It's ironic, really, that Eduardo was always better at people than Mark was, but he never understood Facebook or the people who use it or why Mark cared about it so much. Of course, Mark isn't projecting here or anything like that. Eduardo was groomed to be old money, to know how to suck up to gray-haired middle managers, to control the flow of money around a stock exchange. Eduardo had never bothered to understand about anything about the internet or about Silicon Valley or about startups or CS nerds, because he thought that he'd never have to deal with them outside of Mark and Dustin and Chris. Fuck no, Mark doesn't regret what he did. There's definitely a hugely different vibe to a new tech company than the companies like the ones Eduardo was interning for. And I think there's a definitely a certain resentment towards I-bankers and other finance people amongst some of the really hardcore computer scientists. There are plenty of tech jobs in the finance industry, and there are definitely CS people who decide that all they want is the monies, but that is viewed as selling out a bit. juuuuust a little.
(But he does regret, just a little, the look on Eduardo's face on that last day at the Facebook offices, betrayal and fury and horror written along the lines of his mouth, the crease of his forehead, the dark brown of his eyes. Mark regrets that he didn't stop Sean when he could have. He regrets that in the end that he was forced to make the choice between Facebook and friendship and everything else.)
(Mark also kind of regrets that he hadn't committed any of his code before Eduardo smashed up his laptop. Ah, the mention of version control finally appears. Maybe I'm just an asshole, but I am half-waiting for someone to write about a crisis at Facebook that would have been easily fixed with the proper use of Subversion (like, where they have an intern that accidentally causes the site to break and all they would need to do is back it out of their test branch by reverting all of his changes or whatever). There is zero chance that Facebook isn't using version control of some sort. There is zero chance that, at any point, Facebook wasn't using version control, even in the early days when Mark is basically the only one working on it. But it had been easy enough to recreate after the fact, and he probably did deserve it, just a little.)
---
On the last day of depositions, Mark manages to corner Eduardo in the men's bathroom during their lunch break, despite the best efforts of both their lawyers to keep them apart. It's a new building, and everything in the bathroom gleams, all white porcelain and stainless steel. Eduardo is washing his face when Mark enters, scrubbing his forehead, his neck, the bags underneath his eyes. So I felt this story needed at least one confrontation scene. This is what happened.
"What the fuck are you even doing here, Mark?" Eduardo hisses, meeting Mark's eyes the bathroom mirror. He doesn't put as much nastiness into his words as he could. He sounds as tired as Mark feels. Physically, they haven't changed much from their college days. Eduardo looks exactly the same as Mark remembers. Maybe his hair is different. Mark could never never keep track of the various permutations of Eduardo's hair.
"I want to know why you did this," Mark says. He shoves his hands into his pockets, unsure of what to do with them. It's a large building, lots of employees, but none of them are here, and the bathroom feels too big for only two people. Mark's voice echoes as he speaks. He thinks their lawyers would flip their shits right now to see them here, hashing things out without anyone else to mediate. Not that Mark gives a fuck. It's not that Mark hates lawyers, per se. Lawyers are very useful. It's just that Mark only rates lawyers slightly higher than people who feel smug about going to third-rate Ivies like Brown, people who believe that vi is superior to emacs, and people who still use COBOL. Okay, I'll fess up that I only added this whole joke about lawyers because I wanted to squeeze some more inside jokes into the story. There's a lot of inter-Ivy resentment, mockery, and vague hatred. But there's also a level of solidarity as well. Harvard likes to think they're hot shit because they're Harvard, though.
The thing between emacs and vi(m) is serious business in the programming community of people who care too much about text editors. The movie clearly depicts Mark as a filthy, disgusting emacs user, and so I kept that in place here. (If it wasn't already obvious, I am a vim user myself.)
COBOL is one of those ancient languages that sticks around forever in legacy code. I'm trying to remember if it's that language where you could accidentally set 1 equal to 2 if you weren't careful enough, but I'm not sure. Maybe that was FORTRAN.
Eduardo snorts. "I thought that would be obvious, considering that we just spent all day talking about this very subject." He squeezes soap onto his hands and then rubs them quickly underneath the tap. His face is a riot of emotions that Mark can't entirely parse. He's refusing to meet Mark's eyes.
"Yeah," Mark says, "but I don't think this is just about Facebook." He's not as much about the twitchy mannerisms as some of the nerds he knows, but he wants to tap his feet or bounce his leg or curl his fingers into the straps of a backpack he's not carrying.
Eduardo shuts off the tap and tears himself more paper towel than he needs. His expression has resolved into anger, something cold and hard and sharp. "What makes you say that?" Eduardo asks. He glares at Mark, his eyes steady and unblinking. Eduardo's anger at Mark during college tended to come and go quickly, a quick burst that faded almost immediately. Now it's a low key, steady undertone to every conversation that they have. Mark wonders if it will ever go away. I think Mark is still hoping for half a reconciliation here, not that he'd ever admit it.
Mark shrugs. "What you said back there, about your being my only--"
Eduardo's face twists in surprise, eyes going wide, his mouth a flat grimace. Mark knows that he's managed to fuck this up already, but he's not sure what sets it off. He didn't even have time to get out a complete sentence. "You wouldn't understand it anyway," Eduardo says. "Fuck off, will you?" He shoves Mark out of the way and exits the room, letting the door slam shut behind him.
Man, I love how in almost every single conversation they have, only about 5% of the meaning of anything they say gets through.
---
It's funny, the way Eduardo says, "He owned Mark after that dinner," as if Mark had decided right then and there that he was going to fuck Eduardo over and kick Eduardo out of the company.
Sean hadn't owned Mark during that dinner, but he'd understood what Facebook was, what Facebook could become. He had said, "You don't want to ruin it with ads, because ads aren't cool," and he had said, "You don't even know what it is yet, how big it can get, how far it can go."
And Mark had thought -- for the first time all week -- Yes, that's exactly it. Yes.
I think what's so seductive about Sean is how well Sean understands Mark. And in keeping with the now very unsubtle metaphor of the entire story, Sean is on the same plane of existence that Mark is. They're speaking the same language, and Mark gets a little high off of that understanding.
---
Halfway through freshman year, Mark figures out that he's a lot better at programming while drunk. There's something about the fuzziness in his head that makes it easier for plug in, like he's tearing down a wall between and his code. All the other distractions seem to fall away. Relevant XKCD
"No," Eduardo says one week before the whole Facemash thing, right after Mark explains this theory to him. Shoehorned in positioning of this scene into the timeline, whee! "I call bullshit. It's not humanly possible." He shaking his head and laughs, like Mark has told the funniest joke he's ever heard.
Mark rolls his eyes. "My grades say otherwise."
But Eduardo still isn't convinced, and that's how they end up getting drunk in Mark's room together when Mark has one night -- eight hours, really -- to write a ray tracer for his graphics class. Ray tracers are one of those very fundamental ideas in graphics. They're all about trying to correctly model the way light moves throughout a scene by following each "ray" of light that will hit your eyeball. You'll probably follow a ray bouncing off several objects in order to get the proper sort of reflections and ambient color bleed going on.
"Really," Eduardo says. He's resting his arms on Mark's shoulders, pressing down on Mark's back as he leans over Mark's head to squint at Mark's code. "This is really amazing to watch, like paint drying or cows grazing or something like that. And you really do type fast enough that I'm amazed you don't have some sort of carpal tunnel yet. Are you sure that compiles?" I am so amused by the idea of programming heckling. I am also amused that no one has mentioned the possibility of Mark developing some sort of RSI from doing all that typing he does according to fandom. Seriously, that shit spreads really badly throughout a CS department, especially if they have no outside hobbies.
Compiling code is a process where the high level code written in text is then translated into a low level machine code and turned into a binary file that can be read by the computer. Sometimes this takes a while. Relevant XKCD. Not all programs need to be compiled before they can run. Interpreted languages are languages that get run through an interpreter so that they basically can be run immediately with the trade-off that you lose whatever optimizations a compiler would give you and whatever overhead the interpreter contributes. The rule of thumb of whether not a task will be compiled or interpreted is how fast it needs to get done. Graphics eats computations with a spoon (which is why we have graphics cards so powerful that people use them to do protein folding) and so Mark is probably writing his ray tracer in C or C++.
Mark takes a vicious bite out of his Twizzler and takes a swig from his beer bottle -- Harpoon IPA, generously donated by Eduardo. Harpoon is sort of a Boston thing. I don't know, but I decided to toss it in here, even though I think Mark probably drinks something else on a regular basis.The flavors don't mix quite right, but that's part of the appeal. "Don't you have some econometrics problem sets to do or something?"
"No, I'm quite happy to stand here and watch this instead. It won't be a random distribution of colored pixels this time, will it? Because that was a real let down the last time you tried to test it." When you write your intersection detection badly or when you screw up your x and y axes in a graphics class, it is incredibly easy to produce some very, very odd images.
"Shut the fuck up," Mark says.
It takes Mark another hour to get the simplest test image to render properly and then another half hour to figure out why some of the reflections were so fucked up in some of the images. By that point, Eduardo is napping on Mark's bed, but he wakes up after Mark hands in his assignment and slams the lid of his laptop shut. It's late, so late that Mark tries to figure out how many hours it will be until morning and whether or not he cares about watching the sun rise. He's seen it enough times that it's lost its appeal.
"Done?" Eduardo asks, his voice still a little slurred. He rubs his eyes, and he looks all of about five while doing so. A really drunk five-year-old, but a five-year-old nonetheless.
"Done," Mark says. He stretches his arms and gets his shoulders to crack.
Eduardo grins and grabs another beer bottle from the mini-fridge, pops off the cap on the edge of Mark's desk. "Congratulations," he says, handing the bottle over.
Mark accepts the drink without another word, allowing himself to slump in his chair for the first time that night. Eduardo opens a new bottle for himself and takes a deep gulp from it, his head tilted back so that Mark can see the line of his neck, so that Mark can can watch his Adam's apple bob as he swallows. "That was beautiful," Eduardo says, because he doesn't have any real brain-to-mouth filters while drunk. He grabs Mark's arm and gives it a squeeze. His fingers are cool and slightly wet from where they were touching the bottle.
"You didn't even see any of the final renders," Mark says. Man, they really never end up having the same conversation about anything ever. This whole section happened by accident, because I picked graphics as the class he was working on arbitrarily and then this bit of miscommunication happened, and I fell a little in love with it. JUST LIKE EDUARDO LOVES YOU, MARK. His eyelids are beginning to droop without any deliberate effort on his part. The alcohol is beginning to make its presence known now that he's back in his own head and not in the code. He contemplates shoving Eduardo aside so that he can get some sleep himself before morning classes. Eduardo probably wouldn't mind, because he has his own ridiculously early classes to get to, and Mark's pretty sure Eduardo's not enough of a homophobe to get freaked out by sleeping in the same bed as Mark. Mark's not particularly squeamish about that either.
"I didn't have to," Eduardo says. He starts to sprawl on Mark's bed, his beer bottle forgotten on Mark's desk. Mark elbows him over and squeezes into bed himself, stealing back a portion of the blankets, ready to call it a night.
Eduardo kisses him. Their bodies are bent at awkward angles so that they can both fit on the bed, and Eduardo's mouth tastes like sleep and alcohol, and Eduardo's fingers are tangled in Mark's hair. It's easy, so easy, for Mark to kiss Eduardo back, for Mark to simply fall into the feeling of it. It's not a rough kiss or a particularly frantic one. It's lazy and comfortable and good, and they're both too tired and too drunk to go any farther than this. Mark doesn't mind. Mark likes it. Mark likes the softness of Eduardo's lips and the smell of Eduardo's skin and the way Eduardo's other hand is cupping Mark's cheek.
Somewhere along the line, Mark falls asleep with his nose mashed against Eduardo's neck and his lips pressed against Eduardo's collar.
zulu brought up the fact that things, for the most part, in this story move forwards in time with the exception of this section. I think it needs to be that way, though. This is sort of the giant elephant that Mark never thinks about in the previous sections, like he can't think about it. When I was mentally arranging this story in my head, it needed to be here.Mark wakes up the next morning with a deeply unpleasant hangover that makes his head ache and his ears ring. He's also alone. Mark would think that all of the last night was a very strange dream if his bed didn't still smell like Eduardo and if there wasn't a small collection of empty beer bottles on Mark's desk. It's not a big deal that Eduardo's gone, because he has classes and he probably went home to take a shower and collect some books. Mark understands that. Mark's having a rough morning himself.
They meet up for lunch like they always do, and Eduardo is exactly the same as he always is after an all night bender. He doesn't smile more or touch Mark's hand or kiss Mark's cheek or do anything weird like that. Mark figures that he must not remember or that he regrets it a little or whatever. Mark can do that, too, of course. Mark can pretend like it never happened. It works. It's fine. Ahahaha. Of course it is, Mark. You keep telling yourself that. He shrugs when Eduardo asks him if he's going to the next AEPi party. Dustin shows up to bother Mark about their next systems problem set.
After Dustin leaves, they head out towards the Yard. Fall is coming, and the leaves on campus are beginning to change. Not all at once, but in stages. The yellows always come in first. I debated taking this bit about the colors out, because the Zuck is red-green colorblind, but I decided I liked the description too much to do that. The sun is bright today, not a cloud in the sky, and the air is dry and cold. Eduardo shifts awkwardly on his feet, which feels wrong. Eduardo is rarely as awkward as Mark, especially when he's around Mark. "Look," Eduardo says. "It was-- I'm sorry. It was late and we were drunk, and I know you're still dating Erica --" He looks embarrassed, a flush chasing its way up his neck, as if making out with Mark while drunk is something to be embarrassed about.
"It's fine," Mark says, because it is. He fiddles with the straps of his backpack.
Eduardo smiles -- beams, really -- and says, "Good. That's good." So I definitely know what I was trying to convey here with Eduardo's dialog, but I've heard other interpretations, and I like the ambiguity of it. Eduardo's signals are not coming across clearly, and Mark can't read them anyway. And like with almost every other scene in this story, they're headed straight for disaster.
And just like that, the last twelve hours of Mark's life have been deleted, reformatted, wiped perfectly clean. So I totally cheated here, and I'm surprised that no one threw anything at me for it. Most reformatting these days doesn't actually wipe a hard disk clean. It just prepares the disk for overwrite at a future date. But I like the rhythm of the way it's written right now. And maybe you could argue that he's really referring to a low level format.
---
The thing about networks, the kind that make the whole internet run, is that there's redundancy built into the system to make sure that information gets where it needs to go. There are sequence numbers on packets so that the data can be properly reassembled and checksums for each packet to verify that it hasn't been corrupted in the transfer and the retransmission of unacknowledged packets to make sure that all of them are received. In order to establish a connection in the first place, there's three step handshake before any actual data gets involved, just to ensure that someone's listening on the other side. All features of TCP! The extra redundancy actually makes TCP non-ideal for things like VoIP (i.e. Skype) since it takes longer to confirm that you've sent all the data, etc. Sometimes you just need to prioritize speed over accuracy. There's another protocol called UDP that just sort of sends shit off into the ether and hopes you get it. Skype uses a sort of TCP/UDP hybrid which I don't know much about.
It's kind of hokey to think about it this way, but Mark sometimes imagines what it must be like to send out that first part of the handshake, what a leap of faith it must be, what it must be like to trust, to hope you'll receive an acknowledgement in return. With that very first packet, there are no guarantees that it will be accepted or understood, not even a guarantee that it will ever reach its destination.
But it gets sent anyway. And that, my friends, is the sound of Chekov's gun being loaded. I think this is a little hokey, especially for Mark, but I like to imagine that he does have a sense of wonder, a sense of joy, when it comes to things like this. I don't think he could do what he does without it.
What Mark is describing is a SYN packet, but I didn't want to ever say that in the story, mostly because then I was making it way too obvious for everyone about what the meaning of the title is.
Mark thinks human connections are like that too, fragile and prone to failure and reliant on the amount of effort you put into making sure they work. There aren't any guarantees with them human relationship either. You just keep speaking and speaking, hoping to be heard. This refers back to the section above, the idea of having to retransmit packets in order to be understood. Oh, Mark. I see him as someone who isn't without feelings, but he believes that he's beyond them and acts accordingly. Except then all the feelings are still there and he doesn't know how to handle any of it so it all comes out in code or really stupid things to say or fucking over his friends or whatever. That's where the vaguely robotic thing comes from. I don't really buy stories where Mark doesn't understand feelings. I think Mark totally, 100%, understands feelings. He's just enough of an asshole to believe that since he's above it all, everyone else should be, too. Which is, of course, incredibly wrong, but also, an attitude that is incredibly prevalent amongst nerd boys.
---
Late at night, Mark is flipping through Facebook, just going through friends and friends of friends and friends of friends of friends. Facebook is far, far too big to graph these days, but he still likes seeing it unfold in front of him, even more vast and complicated and beautiful than the number of users could ever encapsulate. Aw, sometimes I genuinely like my Mark. And then I question how long I've been trying to live in his head and whether or not this has compromised my judgement.
He's the only one left in the office, and there's a calm here, a quiet. Mark loves being around other programmers while he works, loves the hum of their machines and the sounds of their arguments, but he likes this too. He likes being alone in his head without anything trying to distract him. No lawsuits, no meetings, no signatures, no arguments about system architecture. This is where he feels the most like himself. I kind of love listening to arguments about CS stuff, just to hear different angles on everything and to just hear the way people care about things. It's amazing how educational an argument can be.
He doesn't really mean to, but Mark stumbles onto Eduardo's Facebook page somewhere along the way. He knew Eduardo kept it, knew that it was as much about saving face as it was about actually wanting to still be on Facebook. The profile is carefully blank, stripped of any sort of interesting or relevant details, of any sort of genuine social context. Mark has seen the profiles of people who live their life on Facebook. Eduardo isn't one of them.
His profile picture is a professional full-body shot of Eduardo smiling for the camera, dressed in a smart business suit. He looks immaculate, put-together, happy, more like Eduardo than the tense, angry person who had sat across from Mark during the depositions. Bizarrely enough, they are still Facebook friends, which just goes to show how often Eduardo must use it.
It's almost enough -- it is enough, actually -- to make Mark to click on the "Send Message" button. This is one of those whims Mark gets, like Facemash or making a version of HarvardConnection but better or taking Peter's offer in the first place. Hopefully he isn't too young and too stupid to understand what he's doing this time around. I think yeah, the Mark in this scene is older and wiser, someone who has matured enough to understand where he fucked up even if he's not really sure how to fix it.
I'm sorry, he types into the message box. No subject line.
He clicks "Send" before he can talk himself out of it. He doesn't know if Eduardo still has a valid email address attached to his account or if Eduardo ever checks that email address if it does exist. He doesn't know if Eduardo will read it or if Eduardo will understand it or if Eduardo will care. This is Mark's own leap of faith, his own way of trying to establish a connection. In case it hadn't been immediately obvious, I see this as Mark sending out his first SYN as part of the handshake. REAL DEEP.
He's never hated Eduardo. He's resented Eduardo at times, for the Phoenix Club and for the New York internships and for wanting Christy when Mark was right there See? Mark is all grown up and willing to admit that he even has feeeeeeeelings. Mostly., but Mark has never hated him. He still doesn't regret what he did, still doesn't regret putting Facebook first, but he wishes he could go back before then, back when things were only starting to go wrong. He wishes he could revert to a much older revision and work forward from there. Version control reference #2! I mean, here it's basically super undo button, but whatever, it still works. In version control, there's a repository of code, and when you commit your latest version of code to it, it gets stored as a revision. The nice thing about having a tool like this is that you can basically let yourself experiment and go off on wild tangents because you'll always have a stable version to go back to if you need it. I know people who put almost everything they write under a type of version control or other.He's not lying at all when he sends the message. He hates how things are between the two of them. He wants things to be better.
Mark knows he won't be able to fix things, but he can try to patch things as best he can.
It takes a few days for Eduardo to get back to him. There isn't a subject line on his message either.
I'm sorry, too, is all it says. Eduardo sends back a SYN-ACK, and it's like they're actually capable of saying things that the other one understands. It's amazing!
Mark closes his eyes and steadies his breath, unclenching his fists as calmly as he can muster. He was mostly expecting Eduardo to ignore him, to let that apology hang unacknowledged between them. At best, Mark was hoping for a Fuck off or a nine page list of every single one of Mark's many and varied character flaws. This is-- this is not what Mark had expected at all.
He opens his eyes and stares at the screen. The words are still there, black text on a white background. Mark feels a smile forming on his face, something small and almost painful.
zulu mentioned all the smiling. I dunno, you guys. My Mark is a smiley guy. He's not used to it, but it feels good, like scratching off a scab to reveal the new, pink skin underneath. It feels like a chance to do this right.He clicks "Reply" and begins to type. Okay, confession time. I logged into my Facebook account for the first time in several years in order to get the various pieces of the messaging system correct. (Or maybe not correct, because apparently Facebook doesn't have subject lines for their messages anymore even though I totally see it in the messaging popup?) This is what I do for you, fandom! I hope you appreciate it. I think The Onion News Network sums up my feelings about Facebook very nicely.
FIN.
SO THAT WAS A STORY. I know some people have talked about how sad it is, but for me, it's not really all that sad at all. Bittersweet, probably. Maybe I'm just really mean, or maybe as the writer, I can see all the places where they can go from here, and I have greater faith that they can patch things up. I don't know. After this, I can see them becoming friends again, and maybe during a Facebook company party, Eduardo gets drunk and says, "You know, I kind of always wanted to kiss you again after that one time." and Mark says, "Wait, what?" and Eduardo sort of gives a demonstration while the rest of Facebook lets out a cheer. And then maybe they end up in Mark's bed again, but this time when he wakes up, Eduardo is still there, snoring and drooling a little, and Mark feels something tight and painful in his chest, like there's too much pressing against his ribcage, trying to get out.
Maybe later, when Eduardo wakes up, Mark says, "You don't have to-- You could--" because he needs to keep asking even if Eduardo's answer never changes.
And maybe Eduardo interrupts him, maybe Eduardo says, "Yes. Not immediately, because I have other things to take care of, but yes, I want to move out to California."
Maybe they move in together, and Eduardo takes over the extra bedroom and turns it into a study. On weekends, Eduardo will be at his desk and Mark will be on the couch and they won't say anything to each other for an entire afternoon, so wrapped up in their own little worlds, but the distance between them won't feel so very big.
Maybe they cause a bit of a scandal on Valleywag after photos of the two of them making out end up on Mark's Facebook page.
Maybe they get a dog named Max, who gets the nickname "the Zuckerburglar" after she steals Dustin's socks and chews giant holes in them. Maybe Mark is responsible of cleaning up the dog shit and Eduardo is responsible for spoiling her silly, but they switch roles every time Facebook rolls out a new big feature.
Maybe they turn into one of those couples, the ones who have conversations like, "Do you remember that thing next to the--" "Yeah. And you always had to--" where they can finish each other's sentences without even trying too hard. Maybe they get to the point where Mark wakes up every morning thinking how the hell is this my life? and Eduardo tells him that his breath smells with just one facial expression and Mark thinks about the long, winding trip their relationship has taken. He thinks about how he could have done things better, but he also thinks that maybe he had to fuck everything up in order to understand why it was so important that he fix it. Maybe he kisses Eduardo just like that, smelly breath and all.
Maybe their lives go on.
And in the end, maybe Mark learns how to be happy.
I CAN TOTALLY WRITE SAPPY SCHMOOP TOO, OKAY?
Anyway, this story is so deeply personal and so deeply filled with the things I love that I can't feel sad when I re-read it. I think at its heart is the joy you feel when you do something you love and the amazement you feel when you see that you're on the cusp of something new and beautiful. And this is why I can't ever hate Mark too much, even though he's a giant asshole. Whatever. I was in House fandom after all. Most of Mark's douchery is pretty tame by comparison.
I feel like in some ways, this was my Social Network manifesto. I don't think I need to ever write anything ever again in this fandom after this, because everything I needed to say has been said right here. This is who Mark and Eduardo are to me, and this is why they ended in misery and tragedy, and this is what I think Mark sees when he looks at Facebook, and this is how they could try to get back from the bad place they're at right now.
So yeah. Feel free to ask questions about any of this, because I love talking about computer shit and also people's messed up, tragic feeeeeeeelings. Or writing! I can talk about writing!
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And thank you for providing explanation about/context for all the CS stuff (with bonus XKCDs!); I am both fascinated and confused by it. :D
And lastly, thank you for cracking me up so very hard with this:
And Eduardo saying, "Well, he didn't pick me up at the airport, so first I froze the bank account, and then he pulled an underhanded trick to boot me out of the company, and then I sued him for $600 million. I think we might still be talking to each other these days."
and this:
The movie clearly depicts Mark as a filthy, disgusting emacs user, and so I kept that in place here. (If it wasn't already obvious, I am a vim user myself.)
(...) I'm trying to remember if it's that language where you could accidentally set 1 equal to 2 if you weren't careful enough,
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I'm glad that you got a little more context out of it, because computer science is this huge area of study and I only barely scratched the surface with this story. It's not all just typing code and hacking, I promise!
I tried to do the whole method thing and used emacs for about five seconds before I freaked out and closed it in disgust. There aren't any modes! You have to do all these chords to do anything! It was really weird, okay?
And yes, I could give the boring technical reason why it's possible to accidentally set 1 equal to 2, but I think it's more amusing for people to try to make up their own explanations.
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And yes, version control! I cannot imagine ever running any sort of site without version control, and am always so amused when people write fictional crisis that could be reverted easily.
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And yes. I have yet to see anyone else even reference version control. I also haven't seen people in this fandom write any fictional crises that could be fixed with version control. But I think it's just a matter of time.
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(Though I have used CVS as well, and SVN is a humongous improvement over CVS.)
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I kinda love how I knew all the xkcds before I even clicked on the links. There need to be more facebook fics with xkcd in them! That onion clip was really funny, haven't watched the onion in a while. That's exactly the reason why I don't have a facebook account.
All that's really missing here is a lolcat joke. ;)
Great commentary, I've enjoyed it.
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And heh, the XKCD comics I used are all very well known. I wish I could say that I remember any of the more obscure ones, but I really don't. I have a Facebook account, but all of my info on it is really out to date.
As for lolcats, would this lovely image do?
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The fandom does get things hilariously wrong sometimes. One thing that seems to happen often and really throws me out of the story is "programming codes" or "computer codes". It happens in passing as well, with people who know enough not to try technobabble.
Also, is a story written from Mark's or Dustin's POV realistic without any jargon or computer metaphors? I know that my conversation is completely steeped in it, and I have more outside interests than obsessive CS students or kids in a tech startup.
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I think my own use of computer metaphors and jargon tends to be something I code switch on, because they don't translate very well for people who don't know them. So I can buy POVs from them where they don't talk in jargon and computer metaphors, and I much prefer a complete lack of computer references if I can go through a story without going WTF, I DON'T THINK THAT WORD MEANS WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS.
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I especially loved the part about inter-ivy beef (puck frinceton!) and also this:
Let's be honest here, what sort of impression would you get from an econ major who wears suits to all his classes?
I totally was that econ major until I realized I was becoming a douche (shhhh don't tell)
eta: It is only fair that I confess to legit teary-eyes at the very end part of this commentary, because I am a lame sap. Stop giving me all these ~feelings~, okay? I can't handle it.
In conclusion: This fandom needs an XKCD promptfest ficathon, amirite????
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I totally was that econ major until I realized I was becoming a douche (shhhh don't tell)
I'm glad that you escaped while you still could!
And I am sure I am really just a giant sap myself, and the idea that they could grow up and grow a little around each other makes my cold, black heart grow three sizes.
Okay, yes. XKCD promptfest ficathon sounds awesome, and I have all these ~*ideas*~ about how to run one. We'll see if I ever become not lazy enough to actually go ahead and do that.
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Man, I feel all wistful now. I had this phase in like seventh grade where I discovered programming, and me and a friend did nothing else but try to program in Visual Basics for a month straight. And then a well-meaning teacher signed me up for a Java class that was so nightmarish I gave up on coding forever. TSN fandom is making me wish I'd stuck with it, at least a little.
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Here I really wanted to write a story where the technobabble, the computer nerdery, was so intertwined with the heart of the story that you couldn't extricate it, where it just wouldn't make as much sense if you replaced all the references to code to something else, like baking or writing or basket-weaving.
Anyway, I hope you get back to it! I know it can be so discouraging to have bad CS teachers, especially when you're just starting out, but I know the AO3 is always looking for more volunteers. :)
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also, such a creeper but i am always super excited when people write cambridge (ma) and your description with the awful muddy snow + WIND TUNNELS is perfect. just a note though, isn't porter closer to harvard than central? :x
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Anyway, I say that Porter is out of the way because it's in the direction that's away from Boston and less full of that city-ish vibe. I didn't go to Harvard, but I feel like it's far more likely that they'd head towards central Cambridge than towards Somerville. Also, Google Maps claims that Porter and Central are equidistant.
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(Anonymous) 2011-06-05 05:10 pm (UTC)(link)this comment is like two years too late but
Re: this comment is like two years too late but
I'm really thrilled that this story actually encouraged you to study CS! :D That is something I never would have expected would happen. CS is a subject I love a lot and I'm really glad that I could make it just that much more accessible to someone who was hesitant about it before.
UH
(Anonymous) 2021-03-22 05:44 am (UTC)(link)anyway, i wanted to thank you because even though it’s intimidating and sometimes i feel like i’m not smart enough, you introduced me to something that makes me very happy!! :) i come back to this fic every once in a while to see how many things i understand implicitly and i’m pleased to say it continues to be accurate :))
yes!! cool!! i’m probably going to study cs in college next year and maybe it’s cringe that it’s bc of the fucking social network but im so excited!! and i thought u deserved to know
thank u and goodbye