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Not surprisingly, the brief commercial that played before our in-flight entertainment was produced by Hinsoft International. It was a sure bet that the next advertisement on the flight would be from a Grosvenor brand. After all, there was almost nothing at all in existence that didn’t come from the guys whose sperm made me and Billy Hinman.
The Hinsoft ad was all about the New! Revolutionary! v.4 cog, and how seamlessly it blended in to the human world—satisfying the demand for anything people no longer wanted to waste their time doing, which was just about everything you could list, besides being a bonk, a coder, or maybe a department store Father Christmas. The commercial showed happy cogs, which I was already getting sick of after spending about forty-five minutes with Lourdes, shouting cogs, a chorus line of singing cogs, cogs performing surgery on human beings, road-building cogs, and even naked ones. It was perfectly okay to show full nudity in public media displays—as long as the nakedness in question involved unclothed cogs, who were strikingly anatomically correct—because, after all, cogs were cogs. It was like looking at a Renaissance sculpture of a Greek god or some biblical character’s penis or breasts. It was actually like looking at a naked electric toaster, when you thought about it. As long as they weren’t actually people, everyone was pretty much okay with whatever cogs did.
And the commercial’s British-accented and most likely cog narrator said, “Hinsoft v.4 cogs—so lifelike and functional, so smart and reliable, you might find yourself falling in love.”
Wonderful, I thought.
The more disturbing thing was what followed the v.4 ad. What came next was an episode of Rabbit & Robot.
Billy Hinman perked up from the melancholy that pervaded our cabin. He had an almost conspiratorial look on his face. Neither of us was ever allowed to watch my father’s program, so this was like sneaking a drink or a smoke, except those were things that Billy Hinman and I did whenever we wanted to. Watching Rabbit & Robot, on the other hand, was entirely forbidden in the Messer and Hinman households.
I glanced over at Rowan. “Hey!”
Rowan said, “Would you like me to have Lourdes turn it off?”
Billy answered, “No. We’re stuck and there’s no turning back at this point. I want to see it.”
And on came the opening song. It was meaningless and absurd, sung as a duet by Rabbit, the bonk, and Mooney, the cog, but for whatever reasons it brightened my mood. I think it was most likely the case that if there was such a thing, the song was written in the key of Woz, since everyone who was addicted to the program was also, like Cager Messer, addicted to Woz.
Oh, Rabbit and Robot, Robot and Rabbit
Behind your eyes, the kingdom we inhabit!
The land of asynchronous transfer mode,
Go fight wars, and write that code!
Oh, Rabbit and Robot, Robot and Rabbit
Oh, Rabbit and Robot, Robot and Rabbit
Oh, Rabbit and Robot, Robot and Rabbit
Oh, Rabbit and Robot, Robot and Rabbit!
Like I said, it was really dumb, to the point that I felt uncomfortable—embarrassed, even—because I always knew Rowan was exceedingly judgmental about stupid shit. And there was no getting around it here. But I liked it. It made me happy. Just as Billy said, we were stuck on this shit ride.
And while Mooney and Rabbit—and Lourdes—sang to us, a shotgun storm of images blasted all around the screen—scrolling strings of code commands, and short staccato clips of bonks doing what bonks do, the types of things that were big thrilling hits at Charlie Greenwell’s “engagement parties.”
The last time we’d been to Charlie’s apartment on a Woz buying mission, Charlie Greenwell told us this: “Every week or so, the boys in my unit would get together and drink and get hacked on Woz, and we’d tell our stories about the people we’d killed in engagements. That’s what we called ’em—engagements. It was an engagement party. Ha ha!”
“Yeah. Funny,” Billy had said, completely deadpan.
“I’m not lying,” Charlie said.
Neither one of us thought Charlie Greenwell was lying. I could smell the runny eggs Charlie Greenwell had eaten that morning for breakfast, and that he’d drunk some vodka too. It kind of turned my stomach.
“And I’m not embarrassed to say what happened, either,” Charlie said. “But, you know, it was weird, but that’s what we were there to do. Twenty-seven wars don’t just fight themselves, you know?”
“Twenty-eight,” Billy corrected.
“What fucking ever, Hinman,” Charlie said. “Anyway, it was how we blew off steam—telling about all the rabbits we’d shot, and what it was like. And I ain’t lying, neither, but most of us bonks would get pretty worked up after a few hits and all the stories we’d tell about whacking rabbits. Most of us got pretty horned up just thinking about it.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “You fucking got horny while telling stories about killing people?”
“Well. Yeah. It was no big deal, Hinman. Everyone does,” Charlie said.
I could only imagine Charlie Greenwell had no clue about what everyone did, and now there he was, back in the good old United States of America, smoking Woz with me, and walking down the same streets and visiting the same shopping malls as everyone else.
Charlie Greenwell was on state disability. Everyone in America who was old enough to work was either a bonk, a coder, on disability, or maybe on disability and doing part-time gigs as human department-store Santas, or completely invisible, except for people like Billy and me, and that was just because of our parents. It had nothing to do with us.
Rabbit & Robot turned out to be meaningless and riveting at the same time. There was something about the song and the images that seemed to connect directly with the Woz receptors in my brain.
I always knew this was why Billy and I had been kept away from the show—and supposedly from Woz—for our entire lives.
When the assault of the song and pictures finally ended, and the quiet opening of the first scene replaced it, I felt my shoulders relax. I slumped comfortably back in my seat.
“I love this show! I love this show so much, I want to rip my clothes off and rub Rabbit & Robot all over my naked body!” Lourdes gurgled. Her hair was a mess, and her skirt had twisted around, due to all the wild dancing she’d been doing. If she were a human, she would have been soaked in sweat, and quite possibly ashamed of herself too.
But I love v.4s, even if I was calculating in my mind how unbearably long the two-day journey to the Tennessee would actually be with Lourdes running as juiced-up as she was.
Rowan shrugged and shook his head.
If the opening song was stupid, the episode of Rabbit & Robot we watched adequately matched or exceeded that quality.
The episode we saw—well, the one I saw, since Billy Hinman was obviously trying to force himself to not watch it—was about a mistake that had been made with Mooney’s work classification. He had been drafted into the army, which made Mooney the cog very confused, and Rabbit the bonk extremely angry.
But Mooney, being the patriotic and dutiful cog that he was, reported to boot camp along with his partner, Rabbit (which didn’t really make sense, since Rabbit was already an accomplished bonk, but sense making was not something the program was necessarily praised for), and zany high jinks ensued. And even though nearly every episode of Rabbit & Robot included Mooney’s violent destruction at some point, people regularly told us how hilarious it was, and lavished us with undeserved vicarious praise for our television-program-and-spaceship-producer and cog-and-thumbphone-manufacturing sperm-donor fathers. When the other bonks in Mooney’s squad at boot camp found out they were sharing their barracks with a cog, they were understandably outraged. They found out because Rabbit outed Mooney when he was drunk, which was something Rabbit routinely was in the show too.
Oops.
So the other bonks in Mooney’s squad waited until after lights-out was declared and, on the third night of boot camp, dragged Mooney the cog outside and set him on fire while he screamed and screamed. Actually, they set him on fire after cutting off his arms and legs so he couldn’t run away or attempt to pat out the flames with his cog hands. It was all very funny, especially when the bonk recruits began singing a bonk song called “Making Rabbit Stew.”
Everyone knows that it is barbaric and uncivilized to allow cogs to participate in the glories of human warfare. What purpose could that possibly serve? Nothing would ever get solved if people let wars just fight themselves.
Even Charlie Greenwell knew that.
Cheepa Yeep!
In with the Cogs
“You two! Go to gate forty-four. Do I have to say it again?” A male cog in a very tight, red Grosvenor Galactic smock flailed his arms as though he were cutting through a swarm of insects flocking between him and Meg. “This is ridiculous! Why are you victimizing me? Why are you doing this to me? What gives you the right to publicly disgrace me like this?”
“What the fuck?” Jeffrie said.
The v.4 in charge of getting the cogs on board was more than mildly huffy.
“I . . . I . . . don’t get it,” Meg said.
“Why do I have to tell you twice? Why do you feel entitled to demean me?”
Meg Hatfield and Jeffrie Cutler didn’t have much experience with cogs at all.
“Are you sure we should do this?” Jeffrie whispered.
“Are you scared?”
“This place needs to burn.”
Then Meg asked the cog, “Why are you so mad at us?”
The cog behind the check-in counter gagged and screamed like he was being stabbed. Then he threw himself onto his back and thrashed his arms and legs wildly. “Why? Why are you making me the bad guy in all this? What have I ever done to you? I don’t know you! I don’t know you! I didn’t do anything to you! I owe you no debt of suffering!”
He tugged big handfuls of hair from his scalp and scratched at his cheeks with his perfect fingernails.
This is what v.4 cogs do all the time. Well, at least the irritated ones.
Meg grabbed Jeffrie’s arm. “Come on.”
The girls joined the assembling crowd of passenger cogs and followed them toward the doorway beneath a sign that read TO ALL GATES.
Although there was no need for medical screenings, since cogs were either alive or dead, running or not running, with no in-between states of disease, all cogs still had to go through the same decontamination showers and suit-up procedures as living human passengers, in order to prevent the transportation of biological pathogens into space. Except cogs, being cogs, were handled a little more roughly than fragile human beings, which was more than a little discomforting to Meg Hatfield and Jeffrie Cutler.
Meg and Jeffrie happened to be in a group that was mostly made up of very, very happy cogs. A few of the cogs were depressed. One of them wept incessantly, although being a cog, he shed an oily hydraulic fluid, as opposed to actual tears.
The jets in the cog showers were not heated and came on like fire hoses. Eleven cogs, male and female models, were packed with Meg and Jeffrie into a shower stall the same size as those intended for only one or two humans. Jeffrie was lost in the press of naked cogs, all of whom were taller than she was. She squeezed into a corner of the stall away from Meg. It wasn’t the best place to be. When the blast of disinfectant came on, Jeffrie was knocked backward and ended up on the floor of the shower, looking up between tangled and nude cog legs.
“Whee! Yippee!” one of the cogs squealed.
“This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me!” said another, prancing from foot to foot.
From somewhere in the crush of bodies came, “I never want to leave this place! Except I need to dance! And there’s not enough room! I want to dance!”
“I can’t stand myself. Can someone please kill me? I don’t think I’ll ever pull myself out of this hole of darkness,” one of the nonweeping depressed cogs added.
The shower lasted exactly ten seconds. When it stopped, most of the cogs were laughing and jumping up and down, which was the only direction they could move.
The sobbing cog continued his sobbing.
Jeffrie got stepped on and kneed in the head. She couldn’t get up from the floor. When the group of naked cogs exited the shower and Jeffrie could finally rise to her feet, she saw that one of the male cogs had broken in half at his midsection. It was hard to tell if he had been one of the happy cogs or one of the depressed ones. But he was broken, naked, and dead, and he was also abandoned and forgotten on the floor of a chemical disinfectant shower.
And things like that happened all the time.
Jeffrie cupped her hands in front of her groin and, dripping, followed all the naked things to the dressing area, where Meg waited for her. Jeffrie was embarrassed and frightened, and felt so terribly small among all the cogs, who despite not being human still had sexually mature human bodies. Jeffrie had been implanted with hormone arrestors, which Lloyd had stolen for her three years earlier, so she wasn’t growing and changing the way her body’s own code had programmed her to do.
“I thought I lost you,” Meg said.
Jeffrie wouldn’t look at Meg. She kept her eyes down, watching the parade of feet ahead of her. “I want to go back to Antelope Acres. I want to darf this fucking place with Lloyd.”
Meg didn’t say anything.
Both girls knew it was too late to leave, much less to light anything on fire now. They were shivering and freezing cold. Of course, none of the cogs had any idea about the temperature of the showers, or that Meg and Jeffrie were not cogs. They were all too overcome by joy, outrage, or deep despair, depending on which cog you paid attention to.
Meg Hatfield and Jeffrie Cutler slid into their orange jumpsuits.
“So. You saw, didn’t you?” Jeffrie asked.
“Saw what?” Meg said.
Meg was not good at lying to Jeffrie.
“We’re going to the Tennessee! We’re going to the Tennessee! I think I just released my bowels!” one of the cogs burbled.
“Ha ha ha!” laughed a chorus of happy cogs.
“I’m going to clean toilets on the Tennessee! I love cleaning human feces and other bodily secretions!” another cog yipped.
“I get to clean bedrooms! Give me a soiled human bed, and I’ll be happy for all eternity!”
“I want to release my bowels too!” someone shouted.
“I’m so lonely. I’m so desperately alone. Someone please help me,” the sobbing cog cried.
Are We There Yet?
Besides killing off Mooney, and the ridiculous songs containing repetitive sequences of code and the brand names, models, and calibers of the most popular military weaponry, one of the regular components of my father’s show, Rabbit & Robot, was a weekly feature called “Code from Home,” where kids got to send in their own coder programs for Mooney.
Each week, the best submission actually got uploaded into Mooney, so people could witness the ridiculous nonsense some lucky coder enjoyed making the poor cog do.
The episode we watched—well, the one I watched and Billy Hinman tried to ignore—featured a winning code sequence that made Mooney the cog instantly fall asleep whenever he got about one-fourth of the way across a street. It was called “Crosswalk Narcolepsy,” and it didn’t end well for poor Mooney, but I’m sure it was a great hit with the viewers down on Earth.
I thought it was funny.
Rabbit laughed and laughed about it too. So did Lourdes, who floated around the cabin in our gravity-free transpod, not minding at all that her skirt drifted up and down like hypnotic sea fans in an underwater current. I found myself in a desperate dilemma as I tried to figure out what was morally worse: watching an episode of Rabbit & Robot or getting turned on by looking at a v.4 cog’s panties.
Either way I looked at it, I was completely ashamed of myself.
I was a total mess, and I needed some Woz.
Two days of this was going to be unbearable.
But, apparently no matter what horrible fate Mooney was subjected to, there were always plenty of replica Mooney cogs to stand in and wrap up every “Code from Home” segment. And he’d sing a song that ended with these lines:
As long as there are young coders like you, There’s nothing that humans won’t eventually try to do!
And I thought, yes, as a species, we probably always have had a great need to watch the Mooneys we produce lie down in front of crowded and speeding streetcars.
Pink polka dots. Really small ones. And the cursive word “Thursday.” That was the pattern printed on Lourdes’s panties, even though it was a Monday.
I mean, I was pretty sure it was still Monday.
Lourdes pushed herself through the projection of the screen and drifted down the aisle so she could seal off the portal between our first class and the shrieking, laughing, wailing calamity of peasants confined to second class.
Too bad, because I was just starting to smell something, which was probably only Lourdes’s food printer as it cranked out some protein-carbohydrate-fiber-mineral replications of shrimp scampi, niçoise salad, or chicken cordon bleu.
After all, there really was nothing we humans wouldn’t eventually try to do.
When Rabbit & Robot was over, I looked at Billy, who pretended to be asleep.
I said, “I need some Woz. And I need to pee.”
And Billy Hinman told me, “Wait. We’ll be able to get some Woz when we get there.”
I knew he had to have been lying to me. He’d threatened plenty of times that he was going to oversee some forced acquisition of my sobriety.
Fuck you, Billy.
Rowan waved his hand in the air. “Miss? Lourdes? The boy here—my charge—well . . . he needs to use the toilet.”
“Oh my! I’m so thrilled to help out! This makes me want to pee too! Have you ever been to space? What a beautiful, heroic, brave, and astonishingly sexy young man! This makes me so happy! This gives me hope for the future and makes me want to deliberately ovulate!” Lourdes burbled. She grabbed the hem of her skirt and, for reasons entirely unknown, flagged it up and down and up and down, as though she were fanning the flames on a blacksmith’s forge.
One doesn’t simply “pee” in the weightlessness of space, however. That could be a disaster. Fortunately, the Tennessee had its own gravity-generation system, which made all kinds of wonderful things possible: swimming pools, urination, and even a full-size zoo, for example. One of my father’s first Grosvenor Galactic cruise ships, the Kentucky, did not have a gravity generator. Everyone thought people would love to spend some time in zero gravity on a luxury liner, even one with a zoo.
Father quickly learned that floating Siberian tigers and king cobras were very difficult to get along with, however.
It was a real mess, along the same lines as all the shit on the Kansas.
But the Tennessee was heralded to be the “cruise ship to end all cruise ships.”
We certainly found out the truth of that on our own, Billy, Rowan, and I.
In any event, before I could get out of my seat to pee, Lourdes was required to show us a video presentation called “How to Urinate and Defecate On Board Grosvenor Galactic Cruise Ships in Space.”
I had been through the identical video lesson on every R&RGG flight I’d been on, and every time I watched, it still made me feel incredibly awkward and embarrassed.
But the vacuum of space leaves no room for personal shyness.
Still, I felt myself turning red and wondering if Billy and Rowan were looking at me as the instructional video ran through its three important sequences: How to Safely Defecate, Female Urination Safety Procedures, and, finally, Male Urination on the Grosvenor Galactic Fleet, during which Billy said, to no one in particular, “That sleeve tube looks like it could be a lot of fun.”
It kind of made my stomach turn. But vomiting in weightlessness was potentially worse than peeing, which is why they gave us all anti-nausea injections directly into our stomachs during the ordeal of our physical examinations.
Besides, all the actors in “How to Urinate and Defecate On Board Grosvenor Galactic Cruise Ships in Space” were v.4 cogs, so it wasn’t like we were watching actual humans taking dumps and pissing into weird vacuum hoses. But it was still repulsive to look at, even though my brain had been lulled by the subliminal coding effects of Rabbit & Robot.
I always tried to hold it to the point of pain whenever I went up into space. Any normal guy would, right?
I unhooked myself from the seat and swam past Lourdes, who opened her eyes as wide as twinned mineshafts and nodded proudly at the prospect of teaching me how to safely urinate as a male in space. Her smile seemed to split her face like an overripe tomato.
I groaned, then turned to Rowan and said, “Are we there yet?”
Printer Ketchup
Meg Hatfield had to figure things out on her own.
There were no instructional videos played for the cogs in second class. It was unnecessary. Cogs knew everything they needed to know and never had to learn anything else.
They also never needed to pee.
It must be very nice.
In fact, after the first few hours of wailing and moaning— and cheering, dancing, and applauding—every one of the second-class cogs, on their way to report for duty aboard the Tennessee, the cruise ship to end all cruise ships, went into silent sleep mode while Meg Hatfield and Jeffrie Cutler discussed plans to feed themselves and take care of other corporeal needs.
It didn’t matter much, because Meg and Jeffrie could have done anything they wanted to do and they would have appeared to be invisible as far as the cogs and flight attendants on the Grosvenor Galactic transpod were concerned, due to the code Meg had uploaded from her thumbphone earlier that day.
“I could totally darf this thing and nobody would ever know,” Jeffrie said.
“Nobody would know because nobody is actually on this flight, except for us,” Meg pointed out. “We’re packed in with a bunch of machines.”
“I saw a boy up there.” Jeffrie nodded her chin toward the barrier that sealed in the privilege of first class. “He was really cute, but I think he was hacked up on Woz or something.”
Meg said, “Cute? I’ve never heard you call a boy cute before. How old are you?”
“Fifteen. And shut up,” Jeffrie said. “He really is cute.”
“He’s most likely a cog.”
“No. I saw his eyes. I can tell.”
“That’s what you think,” Meg said.
Meg opened up her thumbphone.
“What are you going to do to us now? More code?” Jeffrie asked. “Why don’t you turn this thing around, and make them take us back home?”
“No. This time I really am going to call my dad.”
Jeffrie Cutler, like most of the burner kids from Antelope Acres, did not have a Hinsoft phone implanted inside her fingertips. “Ask him if he could let Lloyd know I’m with you.”
Nobody liked Lloyd Cutler, and Meg Hatfield’s father was no exception.
“Okay.”
But when Meg called, nothing happened.
“This sucks,” Meg said. “I guess there’s no phones up here in space.”
“Um, well, in that case, when are we going back?” Jeffrie asked.