"Jesus, please don't tell me you're going to get all Jack Merridew on me and try to run the island," Eduardo sighs, a statement that's about ninety percent a joke, ten percent just double-checking. It's been years since he's read that book, and he never did all that well in English (well enough to do alright on the SATs and get into Harvard, but that speaks little about his enjoyment of it in his high school years, when he was still just struggling to learn the language, let alone keep up), but he remembers enough details from that one to be able to comment on it now. Mark really doesn't strike him as being that particular brand of crazy — backstabbing, yes, but nowhere close to homicidal or sociopathic — though there is the fact that he's coming from something of a position of power, Facebook having grown fantastically popular, back to being just one of a crowd. I'm not going back to that life, he remembers all too vividly Mark telling him (the night everything went to shit. It's a conversation that, Eduardo has realized in the time since, should have given him some sort of clue that something was wrong, one which consisted of a lot of lies. He should have thought through it, but he'd heard those four words, I need my CFO, and it meant the fucking world to him), and were Eduardo to let himself get carried away, that memory would probably be chilling right about now. He knows Mark, though. Maybe not a fraction as well as he thought he did, before his shares were diluted, but enough that the literary reference doesn't have to serve as anything more than a humorous analogy.
Still, he'll be steering clear of any boulders. Just in case.
Seizing on the other subject at hand, he shrugs. "It's fairly permanent," he explains, ready to continue before Mark can ask what that means. Even he still has trouble making sense of it, wants to be able to pin some scientific explanation on it, and he can't imagine that Mark will be any different. "People leave, but it's not... There's no way to control it; it's just out of nowhere. Just like showing up here is. And I'd say I don't buy it, but some of the people here, man, they're smart enough that they could probably teach our teachers. It's ridiculous. Somebody said to me the day I showed up that the average IQ of this place had to be well above genius, and they really weren't lying." He should probably get around to the fictional character thing, which explains a lot of it, but that's just so fucking weird that he hardly even knows how to breach the subject. Until he sees it in practice, Eduardo doubts Mark will really believe it, anyway, and he's already unsure as to how this news will go over. For good measure, he tacks on, "So at least you're in good company."
no subject
Still, he'll be steering clear of any boulders. Just in case.
Seizing on the other subject at hand, he shrugs. "It's fairly permanent," he explains, ready to continue before Mark can ask what that means. Even he still has trouble making sense of it, wants to be able to pin some scientific explanation on it, and he can't imagine that Mark will be any different. "People leave, but it's not... There's no way to control it; it's just out of nowhere. Just like showing up here is. And I'd say I don't buy it, but some of the people here, man, they're smart enough that they could probably teach our teachers. It's ridiculous. Somebody said to me the day I showed up that the average IQ of this place had to be well above genius, and they really weren't lying." He should probably get around to the fictional character thing, which explains a lot of it, but that's just so fucking weird that he hardly even knows how to breach the subject. Until he sees it in practice, Eduardo doubts Mark will really believe it, anyway, and he's already unsure as to how this news will go over. For good measure, he tacks on, "So at least you're in good company."