Boxing
Taking place just after the "Out of the Box" ad.


Mac has made a home movie. Mac has created a website. Mac has tried out his built-in Camera. It works.

Now he's bored.

He peeks in on PC, who has not gotten started yet. The other computer is gingerly poking at trial software and trying to prod extraneous media players out of default. But mostly he's sitting patiently and pleasantly in his drab brown box and waiting for someone to connect a mouse and a keyboard to him and go to town. Mac's pristine and humiliatingly virginal white box sits empty near by. It makes Mac feel vaguely ashamed. Like he's showing off. And for what? Sure, PC is impressed, but it's not like he needed impressing. He'd sat in his box and done his silly warm up stretches and listened to Mac rattle off his specs with a smile and an occasional and sincere "neat", and Mac feels kind of like a jerk now. Sometimes he wonders why PC doesn't just tell him to shut up. This is not a Switch ad. PC is not going to Get A Mac! (well...).

He also wonders how PC can stand to be fighting the battle of the bloat right out of the box. He's probably already uncomfortable, and Mac wonders how a machine can live like that: knowing you're always going to feel just a little unwell all of the time. A little bit heavy and slow. That every day is going to be a fat-pants day. If there was ever a guy who didn't deserve it, it's PC. But he takes most everything they load on him without complaint and with a smile. Even the stuff Mac loads on him, which is not software, obviously, but is, Mac realizes, really a projection of his own insecurities. You know, those ones he swears he doesn't have? That he should have no reason to have?

He taps on the side of PC's box. The other computer looks up with a broad smile.

"Hello."

And then PC's eyebrow's knit together behind his wire-rimmed glasses as Mac places one foot, then the other into PC's drab brown box.

"What are you doing? There isn't possibly enough room for...oh, I guess there is."

Mac slides down until they're on the same level, his knees pressed against PC's knees.

"You were taking so long, so I thought I'd keep you company," Mac says, in typical vaguely insulting Mac fashion.

PC just smiles as though it was kind of Mac to think of him and entirely not backhanded. In a way that's true, because what he said isn't what Mac meant at all, of course, but he's not yet at a point where he can say what he means. However, he does feel he can count on PC not to take his comments to heart. Or to to at least take them with a grain of salt.

He reaches out and tickles the roll of plump flesh that bulges above PC's belt when he's sitting...and also most other times, honestly, and makes PC giggle until he's red in the face. Although PC exclaims Mac's name several times in fits of laughter, he never asks him to stop.

Mac highly suspects PC is a stronger machine than he could ever hope to be.