First published in the USA in 2018 by Simon & Schuster BFYR, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

First published in Great Britain in 2019

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

Text copyright © 2018 Andrew Smith

Jacket illustration copyright © 2018 Mike Perry

The moral rights of the author and illustrator have been asserted

First e-book edition 2019

ISBN 978 1 4052 9398 3

Ebook ISBN 978 1 4052 9399 0

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

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For Amy Sarig King

I’ve been wading through all this unbelievable junk and wondering if I should have given the world to the monkeys.

—ELVIS COSTELLO

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

—WALLACE STEVENS

Education makes machines which act like men

and produces men who act like machines.

—ERICH FROMM

CONTENTS

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Tyger Tyger, Burning Bright ♦ Cheese Ball! ♦ I Am the Worm ♦ Cager Messer’s List of Things He’s Never Done ♦ Hocus Pocus, and Kansas Is Full of Shit ♦ A Visit to the Hotel Kenmore ♦ Getting On Board ♦ Mojave Field ♦ Rabbit & Robot ♦ In with the Cogs ♦ Are We There Yet? ♦ Printer Ketchup ♦ Like Nothing Else in Tennessee ♦ Parker, My Valet ♦ The Longest Elevator Ride of My Life ♦ Dr. Geneva, and What Space Does to Teenage Boys ♦ Of Clocks, Cogs, and the Sense of Smell ♦ Captains Outrageous ♦ Canard à l’Orange ♦ Good King Wenceslas, and a Serious Obelisk of Friendship ♦ Deck 21 ♦ I Am the Worm ♦ Never Send a Human to Do a Cog’s Job ♦ It Really Is Christmas ♦ The Proper Way to Prepare a Curry ♦ I’m Pretty Sure We’re Upside Down Now ♦ It Happens Here, I Guess ♦ A Pedestrian Assessment of Alsatian History ♦ A Cruise-Directing Phoenix from the Ashes ♦ Stopped at the Wicket ♦ The Boy from First Class, and a Fire in the Bank ♦ An Infinity of Nevers, and a Mission to Find a Can Opener ♦ Captains Get to Do Whatever They Want to Do ♦ Right Side Up, Upside Down ♦ There’s a Bright Side to Just About Everything ♦ Unless You Happen to Be Dying to Die ♦ We Raise Our Hands ♦ A Most Unfortunate Dane ♦ Billy Hinman Goes to Church ♦ Getting Out of the Memphis Hotel ♦ Thanks for Not Killing Me ♦ Out of Bed and Into the Tennessee ♦ The Lost Girls, and the Boy in the Bucket ♦ Duncan’s Horses ♦ Put Your Welcome Faces On! ♦ The Giant Blue Fetus in Space ♦ He Makes a Great Gasket ♦ Tricky Words ♦ The Things We’d Never Seen Before ♦ Happy New Year, Happy No Year ♦ Freedom, and an Unemployed Cog in the Hallway ♦ Billy Hinman, Billy Hinman ♦ This Was the Tennessee ♦ We Dance, and Queen Dot Accounts for Mexican Cuisine and Human Evolution ♦ In Which We Find Out Where King Carlos Is and Suffer a Blow to Our Self-Esteem ♦ Herman Melville Would Be Pleased ♦ Eaters and Feeders ♦ First Night of the Neveryear ♦ It’s Time to Eat Now, and I Become Aware of My Balls ♦ The Cruise Ship to End All Cruise Ships ♦ The Nicest Giraffe I Ever Met ♦ A Sleep Sandwich ♦ Dumb Pointless Optimism ♦ You Better Watch Out for the Monkeys ♦ Cager Messer’s Can-Opener and Push-Ups List ♦ Times That Aren’t Now ♦ A Normal California Boy ♦ Getting the Wrong Idea ♦ Shakespeare’s Crowbar ♦ The Porridge of Officer Dennis ♦ If Thy Right Eye Offend Thee ♦ What Kind of World ♦ Mooney, Mooney! ♦ This Is What We Saw ♦ Are You One of Us? ♦ Moon to Moon ♦ Just Like Home ♦ Helpless, Helpless, Helpless ♦ V.1 Human Beings ♦ Caveman & Spaceman ♦ The Unlock Code ♦ Righting the Ship ♦ The Doctor and the Reverend ♦ Epilogue: It Took Dominion Everywhere

Acknowledgments

I smell humans.

I am very happy about that.

Someone else is here on the Tennessee with Billy and me. We are not alone after all.

I might begin by explaining that we are either the last or the first of our kind, and I wonder what time it is that this has come to you—how long our story has waited to be told.

We are trapped inside a moon to our moon, in a home—a lifeless jar—called the Tennessee, where we spend our time, absurdly enough, with talking animals and machines that grow increasingly human by the hour.

Are you a person, or are you some kind of cog?

Either way, I feel a compelling obligation to tell you what it meant to be a human, at least as far as I can describe it accurately.

None of this is a lie.

Tyger Tyger, Burning Bright

“Is that a fucking tiger?” Billy Hinman asked.

“I think it is a fucking tiger,” I said.

I’ll admit that I had never seen a fucking tiger before.

It was certainly a day for checking things off Cager Messer’s infinite list of things he’s never done.

“An actual fucking tiger,” Billy whispered.

Even when you’re a half mile away from a tiger and you’re standing naked and chest deep in the middle of a lukewarm fake lake, it is an atavistic human instinct to make as little noise as possible.

“I think the Zoo of Tennessee must have broke,” I theorized.

“What the fuck are we going to do?” Billy said.

“I have no plan.”

“Cager? Do you know what that is?” Parker hollered.

Parker had been hiding up in the branches of a fake pine tree. It could have been a cedar. I don’t know anything about trees. He’d been watching me and Billy swim.

Since I didn’t want to draw the tiger’s attention to us, I decided to think about things for a while.

So Billy offered, “You should tell Parker it’s a tiger, and tigers are friendly, and that he should climb down from the tree and give the tiger a hug because tigers love to be hugged by horny teenagers. That way, while the tiger is distracted by clawing the fucker to pieces, we can make a run for it.”

“But what about our clothes?”

Our clothes were scattered on the shore beneath the tree where Parker was hiding.

“Cager. It’s a fucking tiger,” Billy told me.

For some reason, ever since I’d been forced off Woz, my best friend, Billy Hinman, did make a lot of sense at times.

“I can’t tell Parker that,” I whispered.

“Why not? He’s a fucking machine.”

“I know that. I just can’t, is all,” I said. And, yes, I felt stupid and embarrassed for as much as confessing to Billy Hinman that I had some measured feeling of empathy—or maybe even friendship—for Parker, who was, after all, just a fucking machine.

So I continued, “Besides, the tiger is just a machine too, right? It’s a cog. It won’t do anything to us.”

“What do you mean by us?” Billy said.

Damn all this clarity.

“Well, he’s not supposed to do anything to us.”

“You mean you.”

“Are you daring me to get out of the water and tell the tiger to go away?” I asked.

“Not at all. You should make Parker do it,” Billy said. “You said it yourself, Cager: The tiger’s just another cog. And cogs don’t eat cogs, right?”

That was becoming increasingly debatable on the Tennessee.

The Tennessee had been going to shit, and neither of us had any idea how to stop it from spiraling completely out of control. Worse yet, Billy and I were alone; we were stuck here.

Parker, who was my personal attendant on the Tennessee, called out, “Can you hear me, Cager? What is that thing with stripes and orange hair? Do you know? Will he be kind to me?”

I waded in a little closer to shore, but only about three steps. Then I backed up one. I tried to make my voice as normal sounding and calm as possible. There was no need for me to shout at Parker, because the guy did have pretty good hearing.

“How did you get up in the tree?” I asked him.

But Parker had to yell for me to hear him clearly, which certainly agitated the tiger, who clawed at and chewed on the trousers I’d dropped beside the lake. “I floated up here, two days ago when the gravity turned off. The thing with the stripes who is eating your trousers right now has been walking around here in Alberta ever since.”

When the Tennessee’s gravity failed, all the animal cogs must have gotten out of the zoo.

A zoo without gravity can easily become a battlefield for clashing survival instincts.

The tiger chewed and chewed.

“Tell him to stop eating my fucking trousers,” I said.

I was mad!

And Parker, being the rigidly programmed horny but obedient valet cog that he was, said, “You! Thing! Stop eating Cager Messer’s fucking trousers!”

And the tiger, being the rigidly programmed large predatory cat cog that he was, snorted and growled, shook my trousers wildly in his teeth, and ripped them to shreds.

“Bad idea,” Billy whispered.

“Fine. Now I don’t have any trousers. Stupid fucking tiger.”

“Tigers are dicks,” Billy said.

“I think I should wait up here in the tree for a few more days, Cager,” Parker said.

“It’s only a tiger, Parker.” But I wondered when—if ever—in the history of humankind, anyone had ever said It’s only a tiger. “But he’s a cog. He won’t do anything to us. Watch. I’ll show you so you can climb down from the tree.”

Then I cupped my hands around my mouth, forming a megaphone with my fingers, and said this: “Attention, tiger! You need to go back to the zoo immediately! My name is Cager Messer, and my father owns this ship! Do you hear me? I am Anton Messer’s son, Cager, and I am telling you to return to the zoo!”

And that was when the tiger ate Billy Hinman’s trousers too.

No animals, not even fake ones, like being in zoos.

Billy Hinman said, “Plan B: Cager and Billy stay naked in the lake for the next five days, waiting for a fucking tiger to die of boredom.”

What could I say? I never had a Plan A to begin with.

Fortunately for us, we did not have to wait five days in the lake. Something else, which was enormously tall, judging by the rattling and swaying of the fake cedars or pines—or whatever—that didn’t grow or photosynthesize on the recreation deck called Alberta, came crashing toward the lake through the woods.

It was another refugee from the Tennessee’s compromised zoo: a giraffe. The thing’s head, nearly as high as the branch Parker sat on, came crashing through the canopy of Alberta’s fake forest.

And Parker yelled, “Cager?”

What did he want? I refused to be my horny cog’s fucking safari guide.

“Giraffes are nice, right?” I whispered to Billy.

Billy nodded. “And they’re bisexual.”

“What?”

“They really are,” Billy said. “Totally bisexual. They’re, like, the greatest animals ever.”

“How do you know that?”

Billy shrugged. “I just do.”

The giraffe stopped at the edge of the woods on the opposite side of the trail from where the tiger continued thrashing Billy Hinman’s trousers. The giraffe looked directly at Billy and me. He cocked his head slightly, as though waiting for one of us to say hello or something.

Also, I may as well admit this: I had never seen a giraffe before. It was very tall. And I was terrified of it too.

“Would you boys like to climb up onto my back, so I can carry you out from the lake?” the giraffe said.

He had a French accent.

“That giraffe is from France,” Billy said.

“Why the fuck would your dad make a French giraffe that talks?”

“I think the more important issue is why he would make a fucking tiger that eats trousers,” Billy said.

The tiger thrashed and thrashed.

“Bonjour, les jeunes garçons! My name is Maurice,” the giraffe said. And if giraffes could smile, Maurice was smiling at us. “But, please, let me offer you boys a ride on my back. The Alpine Tea House serves magnificent waffles. It’s just over there, at the bottom of the hiking trail. Are you hungry? J’ai très faim. Heh heh . . . I am, as you say, very hungry.”

Cogs were not supposed to get hungry. Ever. Something had been twisting out of whack on the Tennessee.

“He seems really nice, and I love waffles,” Billy said.

“Billy, I am naked. There’s no fucking way I’m riding naked on a bisexual talking giraffe to go get waffles with you,” I argued.

And Billy countered, “Cager, like you said: It’s an opportunity for you to do one of those things you may never get a chance to try doing ever again. Who’s ever gotten to ride naked on a giraffe to go get some breakfast?”

As it turned out, Billy Hinman and I did not need to carry our argument to any definite conclusion. Maurice, being the hungry French giraffe that he claimed to be, became fascinated by the tiger, who had finished eating Billy’s trousers and had moved on to his next course, which was my T-shirt.

Maurice looked at Billy and me, then apologetically said, “Excuse me. Excusez-moi, s’il vous plaît.”

Maurice spread his front legs wide and stiffly lowered his head toward the oblivious tiger, who was apparently an expert at sorting laundry and was now eating Billy’s T-shirt and socks.

Maurice cocked his head back and in one powerful thrust stabbed his pointy giraffe face directly through the tiger’s midsection.

Maurice made a sound like Mmmph mmmph mmmph! as he wriggled his face deeper inside the tiger’s body, gulping and slurping the internal components of the cat’s mechanization.

Billy Hinman said, “Okay. I take back the thing about him being the greatest animal ever.”

And the tiger, who had no discernible European accent, said, “Ow! That fucking hurts! This is all there is to life, isn’t it? Sadness and pain.”

The tiger wept and sobbed as great gushing blobs of viscous, semenlike hydraulic fluid burped from the gaping holes Maurice pierced in his torso.

Maurice ate and ate as the tiger cried and cried.

Maurice burbled, “Cette viande de tigre est délicieux!”

Four or five days in the lake was starting to look like a pretty good idea.

Parker shouted, “Cager, what do you suggest I do now?”

“Tell him to ride the giraffe,” Billy whispered.

And the tiger wailed, “Sartre was right—I cannot escape anguish, because I am anguish!”

Mmmph mmmph mmmph! went Maurice.

Cheese Ball!

“There was a time when people theorized the moon was made of cheese.

Up here on the Tennessee, though, I can see it is more likely made of ash. Probably all the ashes from all the fires of all our pasts, forever and ever.

And I can turn and, in one direction, see the surface of this enormous cratered ashball as it skims below us like a moving sidewalk; and, in the other, the smoke-shrouded Earth—our lost home—burning itself out, exhaling ash one last time.

Among the enterprises that made my father one of the five wealthiest people in America (and those ventures included a television program called Rabbit & Robot, as well as a line of lunar cruise ships like the one Billy and I were trapped on) is transporting deceased loved ones— not their ashes, but their actual bodies—to the surface of the moon, where they are laid out like vigilant sentinels, eternally gazing down, or up, or wherever, at the planet of their origin. They never decay, never change. Billy and I can see the bodies every time the Tennessee passes above Mare Fecunditatis, which oddly enough means “Sea of Fertility.”

There are more than thirteen thousand fertile and dead sentinels floating there atop that sea of ash, staring down at everything that had come before them, and everything that came after.

They just lie there, dressed in their outfit of unquestioned permanence—military uniforms or perfect white smocks, every last dead and fertile one of them.

Billy Hinman and I are trapped inside a moon to our moon called the Tennessee.

Because Billy Hinman and I nicked a fucking lunar cruise ship that belongs to my dad.

Well, to be honest, it was kind of an accident. We didn’t mean to steal it, but it’s ours now, no question about it.

It kind of just fell into our hands, you could say.

And we are at the end of everything.

So, let me back up a bit.

I Am the Worm

Here are some of the things Billy Hinman and I have never done: At sixteen years of age, we have never attended school like other kids. And we also have never seen my father’s television program, Rabbit & Robot, which, like school, is only for other kids—definitely not for Billy and me.

And Billy Hinman, who never lied to me, has also never taken Woz, which is something they only give to other kids, to help them learn, so they can become proper bonks or coders, to help them “level down” when watching Rabbit & Robot.

Billy never took it, but I am an addict.

It does not embarrass me to admit my addiction to Woz. It’s about the same thing as admitting my feet are size fourteen, and that I have a painfully acute sense of smell: all true, all true. The drug became the glue that held me together, even if the source of my cohesion was, according to my caretaker, Rowan, destined to kill me.

This is why Billy and Rowan concocted the scheme to get me up to the Tennessee.

Their plan ended up saving—and condemning—all of us.

Cager Messer hears me.

Sometimes when he wakes up in the mornings—no, let’s be honest, it’s more like the afternoon, and frequently it’s evening—he says he feels good and strong, and his head is clear, and he thinks he’s not going to smoke or snort or suck down the worm, and I tell him, Cager, who are you fooling? I’ll tell you who you’re not fooling: all of creation minus one, kid.

The kid listens to me, but only because I never tell him what to do. Maybe “listens” is the wrong boy word. He hears me. Yeah, that’s what he does.

He hears me.

Which is an unbalanced social dynamic, you might say. Right? I’ve got ears. Look at me. I hear him. I know what he wants; what he isn’t getting; what he will never get; how he’s passively letting that monster-size ball roll down the hill. Gravity, take control, because Christ knows the kid doesn’t want to.

I am the Worm.

There was an episode of his father’s program, Rabbit & Robot, titled “I Am the Worm.”

Oddly prophetic, that one.

I need a cigarette, and I don’t even smoke. Whenever I ask Cager to bring me some cigarettes, he laughs and tells me I can’t smoke. So I say, fine, then bring me a gin and tonic.

In the episode called “I Am the Worm,” there are these blue space creatures who can turn themselves into anything they want to be—alligators, Abraham Lincolns (Or is it Abrahams Lincoln? This is why I need a cigarette), Phillips-head screwdrivers, frying pans, whatever—and they send out this little blue worm, wriggling through the solar system, and it ends up crawling up inside Mooney’s nose.

The worm, not the solar system.

Mooney is one of the main characters—the robot.

The worm that went up his nose reprogrammed him and made him go insane.

Bad things like that happen to Mooney in practically every episode.

Formula.

The “Rabbit,” who doesn’t really have a name, is a bonk—a soldier who’s come back from one or three, or eighteen, wars. He’s insane too.

It’s a lot of fun.

And Cager is not allowed to watch it.

Mr. Messer doesn’t want the worm to crawl up his son’s nose.

Cager Messer’s List of Things He’s Never Done

There are things that your friends will do for you that you just don’t have the guts to do for yourself.

Because, let’s face it: Cager Messer— me— I was a messed-up drug addict who had one foot—and probably most of the rest of my body too—in the grave by the time other guys were stressing over getting driver’s licenses, and losing or not losing their virginity.

Most people who were allowed to have an opinion on guys like Billy and me would conclude that I was a loser, and that we were both spoiled pieces of shit.

But Billy Hinman was my best friend. I know that now.

He saved me.

Unfortunately, saving me resulted in things no one could ever have foreseen.

Because Billy Hinman and I nicked a fucking cruise ship.

Billy stared out the window as we drifted away on the R&RGG transpod, sad and bleary-eyed. Billy was terrified of flying.

He said, “Good-bye, California. Have a happy Crambox, Mrs. Jordan.”

It was two days before Christmas; two days before Billy Hinman and I would find ourselves trapped on the Tennessee.

It was also my sixteenth birthday.

Happy birthday to me!

Billy Hinman kept no secrets from me. He and Mrs. Jordan—our friend Paula’s mother—had been having sex since Billy was just fifteen years old.

Of course I was jealous, in a sickening kind of way. What sixteen-year-old virgin guy wouldn’t be jealous of a best friend who had actual sex as often as Billy Hinman did? He had sex with just about everyone.

But Billy Hinman still called Paula’s mother Mrs. Jordan, which was creepier than shit.

One thing I have never done: I do not go to school.

Grosvenor High School’s mascot was the Shrieking Weasel. We no longer had competitive sports in high school (a thing I understand was commonplace fifty years before our time), but at assemblies and career fairs the students of Grosvenor High School thrilled themselves by screaming the cry of the Shrieking Weasel, which sounds like this: Cheepa Yeep! Cheepa Yeep!

This past summer, Billy Hinman turned sixteen. Also, the United States of America was involved in twenty-seven simultaneous wars.

Twenty-seven!

And up here in heaven, we look down and watch the world burn.

I have this memory from a few months before Billy and Rowan kidnapped me. It was fire season in Los Angeles.

I have never set fire to anything.

Fire season lasted ten months out of the year. The two months that were unofficially not-fire-season were only less flammable because they tended to be a little too chilly for most arsonists—burners—to go outdoors.

Everything that could burn in California had burned, time and time and time again.

The city was on fire at the time. There was nothing left to burn on the naked, scorched hills, but houses, restaurants, schools, and tax offices still contained combustible components. What would Los Angeles possibly be without its fires and smoke?

“I can smell a school on fire, and a Korean restaurant too,” I said.

Billy Hinman and I were standing in an alley at my father’s studio, waiting for Charlie Greenwell to show up, so I could get high with him.

“I don’t get how you can do that,” Billy Hinman said.

I shrugged. “Neither do I. It’s just that nothing else smells like burning smart screens, or a Samgyeopsal-gui restaurant that’s been set on fire.”

“I guess so,” Billy conceded.

Charlie Greenwell wasn’t much older than Billy and me when he came back all messed up from War Twenty-Five, or whatever. He liked to hang out around the studio lot where they produced my father’s show. And, usually, Charlie Greenwell and I would smoke or snort Woz together in the alley while Billy just watched.

Neither of us liked Charlie Greenwell, so I never really understood why we’d listen to his shit stories about all the people he’d shot, and how great it was to be a bonk. But then again, the way things were, sometimes I’d put up with just about anything to get high, which is why Billy and Rowan, my caretaker, concocted a scheme to get me on board the Tennessee and clean me up before I killed myself with the stuff.

Billy was done arguing with me about it a long time ago.

Sometimes we speculated how we might have ended up if we had been born to a regular family—if we’d have ended up bonks or coders. I’m pretty sure Billy Hinman would have gone to war, just like Charlie Greenwell did, and that I would have gone to an industrial lab, but I always told Billy to his face that we would have ended up in the same place together.

Ending up in the same place together is actually exactly the way things turned out for me and Billy Hinman.

I make lists of things I’ve never done. I kept them as voice recordings on my thumbphone, until it stopped working on the flight to the Tennessee. This book is the list of my life adrift, compiled while we all make a hopeful attempt to get back home.

That’s really what all books are, isn’t it? I mean, lists of secrets and things you only wish you’d done—a sort of deathbed confession where you’re trying to get it all out while the lights are still on.

The big difference: It does not matter who my confession is written to, because nobody will ever see this—or, if someone does, it will probably be hundreds or thousands of years from now, and whoever picks this up won’t understand a goddamned thing about what it meant to be the last human beings left in the universe.

Anyway, who cares?

Something smells like human.

Cheepa Yeep!

Hocus Pocus, and Kansas Is Full of Shit

The only time in my life I’d ever seen Rowan look anything close to being embarrassed came when I asked him if he was a virgin.

That was two years ago now. I was fourteen at the time and was just learning so much about all the surprises of life. Also, being fourteen, I was not yet aware that there were certain questions that guys weren’t supposed to ask, even if Rowan was closer to me, and certainly knew more about me, than my own parents.

But Rowan wouldn’t tell me. He changed the subject to laundry or bathing or driving me somewhere, or some shit like that, which was how Rowan routinely handled me when I asked questions he didn’t want to answer.

And even now, at the age of sixteen, I was still constantly monitored by Rowan. At least I was usually permitted to bathe myself, though. But Rowan still did my laundry and got me dressed. And the terrifying thing was that Rowan had told me he was going to teach me how to shave before Christmas, which was something that I really did not think I needed to start doing.

A few days before we ended up marooned on the Tennessee, Billy Hinman and I had a play date with kids who were supposed to show us what being normal was all about. Rowan waited for us, as he always did, parked out on the street while Billy and I attended what we called a real-kids party.

It wasn’t much of a party.

But Billy Hinman and I were not real kids. Until we turned eighteen, or until we were somehow liberated, we considered ourselves to be our parents’ fancy pets, tended to by insomniac caretakers like Rowan.

Billy Hinman’s caretaker was an actual v.4 cog named Hilda. She was one of the early releases, like most of the cogs who worked on the Tennessee, so she had wild and unpredictable mood swings. Most people—humans, that is—didn’t like the v.4s. I thought they were hilarious, though. And they also made Albert Hinman—Billy’s dad— the richest man in the world.

Not that any of that would amount to shit by the time we got stuck on the Tennessee.

Our parents had decided early on that the best way to socialize us, since we were not attending school or watching Rabbit & Robot like everyone else in America, would be to create an artificial “friends group” of kids the same age as Billy and me. Our friends group went through several iterations over the years for various reasons. And the kids’ families had to apply and go through a screening process.

Not just anyone in the world could be a “play buddy” with a Messer or a Hinman.

Our real-kid friends’ parents were paid, naturally.

The only two members of our group who’d been with us since the beginning, when Billy Hinman and I were four years old, were Katie St. Romaine, who was my girlfriend for nearly a year, and a boy named Justin Pickett.

Katie and I had never had sex, although we did come close a few times. It was always me who’d be the one to chicken out. And where did that get me? Stuck on the Tennessee, alone, with Billy, Rowan, and a couple thousand v.4 cogs. Ridiculous.

Whatever.

Billy Hinman did have sex with Justin Pickett. Billy told me everything. He was one of those guys who, according to him, didn’t like to be pinned down by expectations regarding his sexuality.

Billy Hinman called himself “fluid,” which sounded incredibly foreign to me. I just thought he was horny all the time. And, yes, Billy Hinman did ask me more than once if I’d like to fool around sexually with him, to which I answered that if I was too afraid to try anything with Katie St. Romaine, I was definitely too afraid to do anything with him.

And we left it at that, because nothing could really get in the way of our friendship, especially because of how honest and sometimes sad Billy Hinman was. Also, we needed each other. We were the only real human beings either of us truly knew.

All our fake friends were on Woz. They all went to school, so this was natural. All schoolkids had prescriptions for Woz. It helped you learn things. Billy never had Woz once in his life that I was aware of, but I was pretty much an out-of-control addict ever since I was about twelve. Still, I felt like I’d learned plenty of stuff. Rowan was also my tutor; Billy’s, too, when he’d pay attention to stuff.

You couldn’t really tell much of a difference between Wozheads at school. The doses they received were perfectly adjusted to help future coders concentrate, or to cull out the obvious future bonks. It was guys like Charlie Greenwell and me who were the unfortunate casualties of the culture of Woz.

I did it for fun, and I had too much fun.

The party was awkward, to say the least. For one thing, it was at Paula Jordan’s house, and Mrs. Jordan was there, which meant that I’d probably have to stay around and “wait” for Billy Hinman after all the other kids left.

I had only broken up with Katie St. Romaine two days earlier, and she was there, sitting as far across the room from me as she could possibly get and still qualify her parents for payment for her attending this week’s “normal kids” group.

Such fun.

Katie looked unhappy. It kind of made me feel drawn to her, and simultaneously sad, too, because I worried that I may have hurt Katie St. Romaine’s feelings, and nobody likes to do that, right?

I sat on a couch, next to Billy and Justin. There were four other teenagers with us: Paula Jordan; Stuart Michelson; Dani, who was Stuart’s twin sister; and another kid who had just joined our play group a few weeks earlier. His name was Craig or Ken or something. Whatever. Craig or Ken tried too hard to talk to me and Billy. He acted like a fucking v.4 cog that was stalled out on friendliness or something. But he was definitely a human. I could smell pee stains in his underwear. Oh well, I’m sure Craig/Ken’s parents were beyond thrilled that their boy got to hang out with a couple of kids like Billy Hinman and me.

“Don’t mess up the game, Cager,” Justin Pickett said.

“I’m not even really playing. I don’t care about the game,” I said.

I leaned forward and dropped four Woz tabs on the table screen in front of the couch. We were all supposedly playing a game with our thumbphones. The playing field rose up in three dimensions from the table. The game was called Hocus Pocus, and it was one of those trendy party games that was supposed to get people to talk about all kinds of personal stuff, but none of us was really talking that day.

It was Paula’s turn. She had to either make a sacrifice to one of the other players, or she had to get up and change something on someone. She decided to change Billy Hinman’s hairstyle. So she walked around the table while I worked at grinding up my drugs, then Paula began combing his hair back from his forehead. It was easy enough for Paula to do; Billy was always loose and relaxed, and his hair was long and hung down in front of his face.

“I like my hair down in my face,” Billy protested.

“Nonsense,” Paula said. “And you look better this way, besides.”

“Nonsense right back at you,” Billy told her.

Katie St. Romaine looked sad. I think she’d told everyone else bad things about me. I’d imagined she’d told the other kids things like Cager Messer doesn’t like girls, as it turns out; or, Cager tried to force me to have sex with him, and then he got scared when I told him I wanted to, or dumb shit like that. Whatever. The truth is, I broke up with Katie St. Romaine because how could a guy like me trust anyone who was on my dad’s payroll?

But for the record, and now, in light of me being stuck up here on the Tennessee, I do sincerely regret having broken up with her, and especially not having sex.

No one wants to die a virgin, unless you really, really believe in God, and, well . . . whatever.

I pulverized my Woz tablets into a small mound of blue powder at the edge of the game field while Paula finished fixing Billy’s hair. She was right. Billy Hinman did look good with his hair combed back, but Billy was exceptionally handsome anyway. He would have looked good if she shaved him bald. Some guys get all the breaks. And they’re the ones who generally throw most of those breaks away, too.

I snorted the Woz.

I sighed.

“That’s too much, Cager,” Billy said. “You’re going to get sick and puke in the car going home.”

Billy put his arm around me and hugged me close. I knew what he was trying to do. Distraction.

I said, “I’m sorry in advance if I puke in Rowan’s car, Billy. You know I love you.”

And that’s about how thrilling our real-kids parties got. Kids got their hair combed, or ended up dressed in new outfits, or had to give away something they liked as a sacrifice to one of the others until our next session of Hocus Pocus.

Also, I passed out, unconscious on the couch beside Billy and Justin Pickett. So I was in a terrible mood, and physically unmanageable, when Billy tried to wake me up and take me to Rowan, who’d been waiting in the car for us for the past five hours.

Mrs. Jordan was disappointed. Nobody got what they wanted that day, I suppose.

“Sometimes you’re disgusting,” Billy said.

He could say stuff like that to me. I wouldn’t put up with it from anyone else, though.

And I said, “And the rest of the time, when I’m not disgusting, what am I?”

“I don’t know.”

“Fabulous?”

“Whatever.”

I leaned all my weight onto Billy’s shoulder. He nearly fell over.

“I need to pee before we go,” I said. “Come with me and hold me up, Bill, so I don’t bust my head open.”

“No.”

“What do you think I could do to get Cager off this shit, Rowan?” Billy asked from the backseat.

I sat right next to Billy Hinman. He knew I was awake. It wasn’t like he was trying to keep any secrets from me.

“You should get hacked up with me sometime, Billy. Rowan too. That would be fun,” I said.

“No,” Billy answered.

Rowan drove. He said, “Perhaps a birthday vacation is in order. Maybe that would help. You know, take some time away. Take Cager up on the Tennessee with you.”

My father’s ship the Tennessee was as big as a midwestern city, staffed by hundreds of v.4 cogs, and affordable only to people like us—or the people who ran the government and military.

“Isn’t that the one that got all filled with shit, and the people on board got sick because they had other people’s shit all over themselves and in their food and shit?” Billy asked.

One of my father’s first lunar cruise ships, the Kansas, had a minor “incident,” as Mr. Messer liked to call it. It was actually not minor. The toilet systems reversed, spewing tons and tons of shit and other stuff that human beings put in toilets back out into every room and every deck. People got very sick, and a few dozen actually died. Also, nobody wanted to help the ones who were transported back to Earth. Nobody likes to touch someone who’s puking and covered in other people’s shit.

I said, “No. That was the Kansas. The Kansas was the one that was full of shit. They fixed it, though. Well, they didn’t fix it, really. They just sailed it into the sun.”

“Sounds like a reasonable way to clean up a bunch of shit,” Billy said.

“Mr. Messer likes simple solutions.”

I called my father Mr. Messer. I said, “Nobody would have gone on it after the shit thing. That’s why they built the Tennessee. No shit problems, so far.”

Actually, the Tennessee didn’t have any glitches yet because it was new and it had never carried any human passengers besides the few coders who’d gotten it online and powered up. I’d visited it one time, before it was fully operational.

Billy Hinman stretched out in the seat, extending his legs over to my side, so our feet touched. Billy Hinman was always horny. I kicked him.

He said, “Well, you’d never get me up on one of those shit things. Cruises are what old people do right before they die. Trust me. I learned that.”

Billy wasn’t entirely wrong about cruises either. When we were both ten years old, Billy and I went with his parents on an ocean cruise across the Pacific, from Los Angeles to Sydney. It was a very long cruise. Five octogenarians died before we got to Australia.

Cheepa Yeep!

A Visit to the Hotel Kenmore

I calculated that at about the same time Billy Hinman and I finished our fourth beer of the afternoon, the twenty-eighth war started.

Twenty-eight!

And it was my sixteenth birthday, too.

Like Charlie Greenwell told us, wars don’t just fight themselves.

Bonks were on the move, and this time the boys got to stay close to home. During beer four—or possibly five for Billy—the Canadian Navy sailed across Lake Erie and pounded the shores of Ohio and Pennsylvania with artillery.

Canada was really mad at us. They had their reasons, I’m sure.

Not too many people cared about it, outside of Pennsylvania and Ohio, that is, but the event did provide an opportunity for some undeployed bonks to get to work.

“We should leave this shithole,” Billy said.

We drank beer in Mr. Messer’s attic office. Well, to be honest, Billy Hinman was doing most of the drinking. I did have some beer, though, just because it was the right thing to do, us being best friends, and it being my birthday and all. Of course Rowan was in on Billy’s conspiracy—he got the beer for us—but Billy Hinman was convinced that in drinking beer I’d finally grown some balls, as he put it, and come to my senses about how useless and boring our lives were. Not that I didn’t agree with him that our lives were useless and boring. But they were about to get a lot more exciting.

I had no idea.

“You mean we should get out of Los Angeles?” I asked. “It is kind of a shithole, isn’t it?”

Billy nodded and burped quietly. I was lagging behind him in the number of empty cans I contributed to our pile on the office floor. It tasted awful, but I was already feeling a bit dizzy and energized.

“I’m drunk,” I announced.

“Good,” Billy said.

“And now I want some Woz,” I said.

Billy said, “You practically OD’d in Rowan’s backseat last night.”

“Oh.”

“But if you want, I’ll ask Rowan to take us over to Charlie Greenwell’s so you can hook some up. Then let’s go somewhere and have fun.”

“Where?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Billy lied. “Somewhere.”

This would be fun, right?

Charlie Greenwell’s place was a deranged lunatic circus.

Charlie lived in an old hotel in the east end of Hollywood that had been converted to a kind of rehab home for bonks who’d come back from their various wars with holes in their brains. The news about Canada had really cheered up the residents at Charlie Greenwell’s complex. The place reeked of Woz smoke. Guns and flags were everywhere.

As we walked into the lobby, Billy Hinman said, “I wonder if Charlie and the other ex-bonks are getting turned on, thinking about killing Canadian rabbits.”

He was a little drunk, and he said it a little too loud.

“Rabbits” was what bonks called other bonks.

It was weird, but it was one of those slang words that nobody who wasn’t a bonk was ever allowed to use. The unwritten social code: Only bonks can call bonks rabbits. Charlie Greenwell didn’t mind if Billy or I used the word around him, but then again, Charlie Greenwell’s ability to care about shit had been blasted out of his head four or five wars ago. And “Rabbit” was even in the title of—and the main character in—my father’s television program, which was all about getting kids to embrace their inner bonks and coders. Or, at least, that’s what I knew about the program, despite never actually having watched it.

Well, to be honest, never is an exaggeration. How could anyone not catch a glimpse of Rabbit & Robot here and there, a few seconds at a time, even if it’s just out of the corner of an eye? The show was on almost constantly, in virtually every country of the world, even in most of the twenty-eight we were at war with.

In fact, my father’s show was playing on one of the wall screens in the lobby of the Hotel Kenmore when Billy Hinman and I walked in, which was when Billy asked, a little too loudly, a rhetorical question about Canadian rabbits and horny bonks.

The other wall screens in the lobby were playing muted coverage of Canadian rabbits on the rampage in Ohio.

Unfortunately for Billy and me, there were two ex-bonks sitting together in a pair of vinyl reclining chairs watching Rabbit & Robot when he said it. One of them—he was shirtless and wore thick eyeglasses with one of the lenses blacked out so you couldn’t see the vacated eye socket that was inevitably behind it—stood up right away and puffed out his hairless, tattooed chest. His nipples were pierced with silver barbs that looked like hunting arrows, and he was also holding some type of machine gun.

I have to admit that I felt so nonmasculine for my lack of nipple piercings, as well as my inability to recognize specific models of firearms. It seemed like every boy in America—future coders and bonks alike, thanks to Rabbit & Robot—knew the precise make, caliber, and specs of every gun in existence, even if none of our boys could accurately point out more than two or three countries on a map of the world.

Grosvenor was an outstanding school system.

Cheepa Yeep!

“Hey!” The old ex-bonk with a missing eye and a tattoo of the state of Texas on his belly jabbed a finger at us. “What did you just say, little fucking Canadian queer boy?”

All bonks were trained to—or at least pretended to— hate homosexuals. It was so fifty-years-ago, but clinging to the past was what armies are good at, right?

And now they hated Canadians, too.

Billy Hinman wasn’t exactly queer, though. Billy would have sex with anyone if he liked them well enough. Most people I knew were like that, which made me feel rather odd and isolated. And Billy wasn’t Canadian, either. So, kind of wrong on both assumptions.

“Um, your friend doesn’t have trousers on,” Billy Hinman pointed out.

Billy was right. In the tension of our drunken entrance, I hadn’t noticed that the other insane ex-bonk who’d been watching Rabbit & Robot beside the guy with Texas on his stomach was completely naked except for his old army-issue corporal’s shirt and cap. He did have boots on, though.

This was life in the Hotel Kenmore. We’d been there enough times before that seeing such things wasn’t ever surprising to Billy and me.

I put my hands up as a conciliatory gesture, and also because everyone knows that putting your hands up when a pair of half-naked insane people are pointing machine guns at you has a generally soothing effect.

“Wait, wait, wait. Billy didn’t mean any offense, guys. In fact, he’s just on his way down to the recruiter’s and stopped by here to say good-bye to our pal Charlie Greenwell before going off to kill Canadians.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Billy said.

In his defense, Billy Hinman was a bit drunk, so his stupidity was somewhat excusable. He went on, “I thought I told you we were going to do something fun.”

I persisted in trying to defuse the situation. “Are you guys watching Rabbit & Robot? This is my favorite episode!”

I still held my hands in the air. Billy stared at me. The insane ex-bonk with no trousers softened a bit and lowered his machine gun so it was pointing at our knees instead of our faces.

“This is my favorite episode too,” the naked guy said. “But I wish that fucker Mooney would shut up and die.”

Mooney, the “robot” in my father’s program, was a v.4 cog who sang ridiculous, overly repetitive songs that helped kids memorize code sequences for school. Mooney was also a cog that was stuck on the emotion of “outrage.” For some reason, an awful lot of v.4 cogs were either outraged or elated, both of which are highly unattractive attitudes. Some v.4s were horny, which was extremely awkward. They picked up their emotional tracks from the coders who put them online. I guess some coders, if they weren’t outraged or elated, were horny, even on the job.

Whatever.

But it was understandable to me that the naked guy wanted Mooney to die. As far as I could tell, nobody liked Mooney, and he died at one point or another in most episodes.

Billy Hinman hitched a thumb at me. “His dad’s Anton Messer.”

“Anton Messer?” Texas Dude was so impressed, I’m pretty sure he was getting a boner. It might have been because the screens behind Billy and me were showing the Canadians, though. Who knows for sure?

“You boys should sit down with us and watch the war, and Rabbit & Robot,” Naked Guy, who may just as well have been an elated v.4 cog, said.

I said, “I’ll tell you what. Let us go say bye to our friend Charlie Greenwell, and we’ll be right back. Okay with you?”

Texas Dude lowered his gun, grabbed his dick, and then fiddled with one of the silver arrows piercing his nipple. He nodded. “Charlie Greenwell is a hell of a rabbit.”

“The best,” I agreed.

“Do you realize you almost got us killed down there?” I said.

“Whatever, Cager.”

We rode the rickety and urine-fouled elevator up to Charlie’s floor.

It was fortunate for everyone, even the insane guys in the lobby, that we arrived at Charlie Greenwell’s apartment when we did.

We didn’t knock. Knocking scared Charlie. Walking in on whatever Charlie Greenwell was likely doing scared me, but I was not insane and heavily armed, so we just walked right in, as we always did.

Charlie was attempting to set fire to a Canadian flag that he’d draped over a sofa in his living room. There was a tipped-over can of barbecue starter fluid beside his bare right foot, and Charlie was flicking the flint wheel on a dead plastic cigarette lighter.

Charlie was in his underwear. For whatever reasons, Wozhead insane ex-bonks didn’t like to wear clothes very often. Also, like most bonks—insane and otherwise— Charlie Greenwell was covered in tattoos. One of them particularly fascinated me. It was a colorful grizzly bear on the right side of Charlie’s chest, walking upright, smiling, and carrying a tattered American flag over his shoulder. The grizzly bear was wearing a flat-brimmed straw campaign hat with a band on it that read VOTE RED OR I’LL TEAR YOUR FUCKING THROAT OUT! It was completely absurd. On the opposite side of Charlie’s chest was an octopus wearing a monocle and a derby hat and holding various unidentifiable types of firearms in each of his eight tentacles.

That tattoo made me feel inadequate, because I didn’t know what any of the guns were.

Apparently, Charlie Greenwell was a fan of hats and wildlife.

“Hi, Charlie!” I said as cheerfully and calmly as I’d ever spoken to him in my life. “I think those guys downstairs are going to get all bent out of shape if you burn the Kenmore down and kill us all.”

“Huh?” Charlie Greenwell’s eyes were completely glazed over with Woz. He put the lighter down when he realized who we were, which didn’t happen right away. “Oh. Hey, Bill. Cager. Want to get hacked?”

“Got any beer?” Billy asked.

“Sure. Come on in. I was just getting ready to do something, but I don’t remember what it was,” Charlie said.

“Put on trousers?” I guessed.

Charlie looked down at his bare legs and shook his head. “No. That wasn’t it.”

The Hotel Kenmore burned to the ground that afternoon.

People naturally blamed it on burners—arson gangs— but nobody was too concerned about it. Every one of the insane ex-bonks, in various stages of undress, managed to get out. And they were all rounded up and moved to another abandoned Hollywood hotel that day—a place called the Wilshire Marquis, which had once been made famous for having been the site of a suicide from heroin overdose by one of the original actors who’d played Rabbit in my father’s program.

Everyone in Los Angeles—and this is not hyperbolic—always loved stories like that.

But now, despite his plan being in full effect, Billy Hinman was exceptionally drunk. It was the only way he’d ever get inside anything that flew.

I had no idea.

Billy and I sat in the backseat—Rowan playing the role of chauffeur, as usual—and I watched the blurry, barren landscape of the abandoned and pointless California desert smear past us as we sped out toward Mojave Field.

The Woz was particularly strong.

“So where, exactly, are we going now?” I asked.

“You’ll see. It’s a birthday surprise,” Billy said.

Rowan, who never lied, shifted in the front seat and cleared his throat.

“I need to pee again. Maybe Rowan can just pull over for a minute,” I said.

“We’re almost there. You can pee when we get there. Trust me,” Billy said.

Maybe it was one of my infinite flaws, but I always did trust Billy Hinman.

Getting On Board

I’d read something about how people used to complain a long time ago about all the procedures they’d have to go through before being permitted to board an airplane. Whatever. The stuff we had to do to get on a transpod— one that my father owned, no less—for a flight into space was as regimented and absurd as Maoist reeducation.

And although I was out of it on booze and Woz that day, I still suspected something was not right.

“I don’t understand why we have to take showers and put on entirely different sets of clothes, just to visit Tennessee,” I said.

I have a foggy memory of Rowan and Billy telling me something about taking a train to Tennessee. I had never been to Tennessee. I didn’t actually want to go to Tennessee, but I trusted Rowan and I loved Billy, so I would do anything with him, especially because whenever I’d fall into one of my depressed moods, I would generally find myself trying to calculate all the normal human experiences I would never be permitted to have.

“It’s a Tennessee thing. A custom. Trust me,” Billy told me. “It’ll be worth it. I hear they have great food.”

On Woz, I wasn’t much of an eater, but Woz makes everyone so compliant and malleable.

I countered, “I already took a shower today, and my clothes are nicer than this stupid orange suit.”

Ever since the incident with all the shit on the Kansas, passengers on Mr. Messer’s R&RGG cruises had to go through medical examinations, take disinfecting showers, and put on specially sealed, full-body suits made from recycled paper. Passengers were not allowed to bring anything with them from Earth, not even the clothes they wore into the terminal.

Besides, everything anyone could possibly need was already waiting on the Tennessee. Clothes, food, recreation— all managed by my father’s company. It only took a quick scan of our eyes—mine, Billy’s, and Rowan’s—and the v.4 cog at the Mojave Field terminal whisked us through our medical scans and into the changing rooms.

A Messer could write his own ticket anywhere on Rabbit & Robot Grosvenor Galactic.

I still thought we were in a train station, about to go to Nashville.

Embarrassing.

My father’s transpods looked ridiculous—all painted in the clown-suit colors of his television program, with caricatures of Rabbit, the bonk, on one side, and Mooney, the robot, on the other.

The process of preparing to board the transpod was a little personal and awkward for us. Billy felt it was necessary to stay with me so I wouldn’t do anything weird, like getting lost or passing out and drowning in the chemical showers. I’d been to space plenty of times—on the Tennessee when it was in the final stages of construction, and a couple times on the Kansas before the shit thing (I was also lucky that the sewage system on board the Kansas worked just fine when I sailed on it)—so I knew the routine.

But I believed Billy Hinman when he told me that nothing out of the ordinary was going on.

Woz.

We completely stripped out of all our clothes and left them in sealed locker vaults. Then we had to endure a medical examination from a depressed male nurse orderly v.4 cog who stared and sighed and put his grabby, poking hands on a little too much of me for my comfort, even if he was a cog—a sad one, at that.

After our exams, the nurse led Billy and me, naked, into a decontamination shower cubicle.

Together.

Yeah. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Billy kept saying, “Isn’t this train station great?”

“But we’re naked,” I pointed out.

“So what?” Billy said.

In all honesty, Billy Hinman had seen me naked plenty of times in our lives. I had seen Billy Hinman, who was thoroughly comfortable without clothes, naked just about every day I’d known him. When we were babies, Rowan, or sometimes Hilda, used to give us baths together.

“We haven’t taken a bath together in . . . forever,” I said.

“It’s almost like we’re four years old again,” Billy said.

I looked down at my bare legs, like I couldn’t believe my trousers were missing. I patted my thighs as though trying to convince myself my pockets were actually no longer there. I was a mess. “Where are my clothes? When can I get them back? I left a lot of money in my trousers.”

Billy didn’t answer me.

And I had a feeling I would never see my clothes, or anything I’d left behind, again. I turned out to be right, but for reasons I’d never considered.

The showerheads came on. They sprayed from above and all around us—up from jets on the floor, and out from the sides of our cubicle, which was big enough for more than two people, spraying us with a warm coating of mist and then a downpour of warm water. It was actually very nice.

“Don’t worry about it,” Billy said. “Trust me. You don’t need money or your clothes right now, and we can get some Woz for you in just a little bit.”

“You’re my best friend. I love you, Billy. And the shower feels really nice.”

I felt myself beginning to fall asleep on my feet, standing on wobbly legs in the steaming mist.

Of course, my caretaker Rowan went through his medical screening and decontamination process ahead of Billy and me, and once we met him on the other side, sterilized and uniformed, the three of us were led down a walkway toward what I still assumed was our train to the Volunteer State, among a group of cogs dressed in identical uniforms.

It was hard for me to tell if anyone among our fellow travelers was human, or if we were isolated in a platoon of cogs. We all smelled exactly the same in our disinfected orange paper flight suits, which was to say we smelled like nothing at all. As soon as someone burped or started sweating, though, Cager Messer’s cursed nose would pick it up, and I’d get some clear sense of whether or not we were completely alone.

But I was pretty sure that with the exception of Billy, Rowan, and myself, none of the sixty or so passengers with us were human. But what did I know? Because their coders may have been hungry during final program uploads, some v.4s ate printed food too, which was the only kind of food we’d be getting now. But a cog that can eat may just as well be human, with or without their proclivity for obsessing over a single emotion.

Plenty of v.4s were like that. They were just beginning to exhibit the ability to act with human emotions, although their range was narrowly constrained to just one mood— angry, depressed, horny, happy, and so on. Billy’s father, Albert Hinman, who owned Hinsoft International, the company that manufactured the world’s supply of cogs, thought the new, emotional v.4s were funny.

Albert Hinman was also the richest man in the world.

Billy Hinman and I were spoiled pieces of shit, in my opinion.

And Billy detested cogs, especially the ones that were exceedingly happy or mad, or horny, for that matter.

There have always been plenty of human beings like that too—people who only eat, and then obsess on how depressed or outraged or horny they are, and nothing else.

It would end up taking two miserable days for us to get to the Tennessee, not that things like days counted up in space the way they counted down on Earth. It was going to be a rough ride, and it was made worse by the flight attendant in our first-class section, a v.4 cog stuck in an endless loop of elation.

The attendant cogs in second class were all outraged, which had to have been even more unbearable.

In fact, before the transpod slid out of the terminal on its gleaming runway rails (I was still convinced we were on a train), we heard a shouting attendant in the cabin behind us. Chances were that she was probably yelling at nobody. Outraged cogs frequently did that.

“Sir! You need to buckle your restraints immediately! This is outrageous! I am so angry right now! I can’t take your rubbish! Sir! Hold your rubbish until after takeoff! This is so unfair to me! I am filled with rage! I can’t take your rubbish! This is complete racism! I quit! I fucking quit! Get me out of here!”

Of course, it was already too late for anyone to get out of the transpod, and cogs are not allowed to quit, no matter what. The doors had been sealed, and we were about to depart.

They bother most people, but I love v.4s. They were the best things Billy’s dad ever made, even if about one-third of them hated human beings. Well, hated everything, really.

I said, “What the fuck is this place, Billy?”

Billy cleared his throat. “Um. We’re on our way to Tennessee, Cage. Trust me. Are you hungry or thirsty?”

Billy buckled me into my seat.

“Why are you tying me up?”

“Trust me, Cager. Do you want some more Woz? We can get some in just a little while.”

Rowan sat across the aisle from us. We were the only three passengers in first class. Rowan waved at our attendant, and she stepped from her post in the galley as the transpod slid away from the gate.

“Can you bring us three beers before takeoff?” Rowan asked.

“This is so fantastic!” our attendant, whose name tag identified her as Lourdes, said. “I’d be extremely happy to! So happy! I also need to pee! This is so exciting!”

Cogs do not pee. Well, most of them don’t. Lourdes was just so happy, she didn’t know what to think.

“Would Grosvenor Beer be all right for you gentlemen?” Lourdes’s eyes, astonished to the size of apricots, looked at each one of us as she showed a wall of perfect white teeth behind the breach of her smile.

“That would be fine,” Rowan said.

“Perfect! Perfect! Perfect!” Lourdes nearly exploded on us.

Then she whirled around to her galley station and sang a Mooney song to herself while she poured our beers.

Add Action,

Add Action,

Execute switch void ever never,

Execute switch satisfaction.

Nobody likes Mooney.

I woke up a bit when the thing we were in started moving. I pivoted my head from side to side, alternately looking out my porthole and the one next to the empty seat beside Rowan.

“Is this a fucking plane?” I asked.

“I promise you it’s not a plane,” Billy said.

Lourdes returned with a tray of beers. “Drink them fast! We’ll be taking off shortly! This is so exciting, I think I just pooped a little!”

Lourdes placed the beers down on each of our service tables and watched us with unblinking and thrilled eyes while we sipped. Well, to be honest, Billy gulped his down in one tip, which made Lourdes even happier.

“If this is a fucking plane, Billy . . . Where are you taking me?” I said.

Billy hated anything that went high or fast. It was impossible for me to consider that he’d ever feel so desperate as to actually get on a plane—and only for me. But it was too late for him to do anything about it now.

As long as I’d known him, Billy Hinman had told me he would rather die than go into space.

“Here, Bill. Maybe you should finish my beer for me,” I said.

Billy Hinman emptied my glass, and Lourdes came to collect our service items. Then we reclined our seats flat and waited for all hell to break loose.

Mojave Field

Meg Hatfield knew more about programming than most of the coders who designed the reasoning architecture in the v.4 cogs that Hinsoft International distributed all over the human world.

“It took me a solid week to figure out the code sequence to get in. Writing you into it was easy. The cogs at the gates scan our eyes and they only see code. They think we’re a couple of v.4s,” Meg said. “Stupid fucking machines.”

“I never went to Grosvenor School a day in my life,” Jeffrie told her. “I came here with Lloyd when I was ten. I could never figure out something like that.”

Jeffrie and her brother Lloyd were burners—arsonists.

“Here” was Antelope Acres—a chain-link-enclosed squatter’s camp in the desert north of Los Angeles.

“You set a mean fire, though,” Meg said.

“Lloyd does, mostly. I just watch.”

Lloyd Cutler had a thing for Meg Hatfield. Meg knew that was why Jeffrie didn’t want her brother to come with them. Besides, Meg didn’t like Lloyd—she didn’t like burners in general, but especially Lloyd, who’d tried to lure her into his camper to have sex ever since she and her father had moved in to Antelope Acres. Meg was afraid Lloyd might get out of control and burn the place down if he came along. So she was relieved that Jeffrie told her not to write him in too, that the girls should go alone.

But Meg liked Jeffrie. Jeffrie Cutler was different from most burners. She didn’t just burn things out of anger. Meg Hatfield knew there was something else Jeffrie was trying to get rid of.

A few days before Christmas, the girls hiked down from Missing Boy Mountain on a trail that led to the highway across from Mojave Field’s glimmering terminal complex. They sat at the edge of the desert and waited for late afternoon, which Meg explained was the busiest time, and the most opportune for the girls to get inside.

“What happens to Lloyd if we don’t come back?” Meg said.

Jeffrie shrugged. “He’s grown up. He can take care of himself.”

“Won’t he worry about you?”

“No.” Jeffrie shook her head. “What about your dad?”

“I’ll call him. He’ll be okay. I’ll come back if he needs me to.”

“Okay.” Jeffrie bit her lower lip and nodded. “What’s it like, writing code?”

“It’s like talking in dog,” Meg said. “It’s an ugly language, because there’s no space for interpretation, which is the difference between cogs and us.”

“I’d rather light stuff up than interpret it,” Jeffrie said.

“No burning here once we’re in. Okay?”

“I promise.” And Jeffrie asked, “Which one of those planes have you been in?”

Across the highway, set a quarter mile behind rows of fencing, sat a rust-smeared and tired old herd of derelict passenger airliners.

“We’re not going in one of those. We’re going inside the place where the big stuff happens,” Meg said.

When it was time, Meg Hatfield drew a rectangle in the air between her thumbs and index fingers. Her thumbphone screen lit up in the space she drew with her hands.

“Are you going to call your dad?” Jeffrie asked.

“No. I’m getting us inside.” She entered a sequence of numbers and letters. The screen floating before them in the air scrolled rapidly with line after line of bracketed and meaningless poetry. Then Meg Hatfield hit send, and she said, “Come on, Jeffrie. Let’s cross the road now.”

Rabbit & Robot

“Happy almost-Crambox Eve, Cager,” Billy said.

“Fuck, Billy. Why are you guys doing this to me?” I needed to vomit.

Puking in space is not good; just ask anyone who’d survived the Kansas ordeal.

In the absence of gravity, sewage, like hungry tigers and venomous snakes, is incomprehensibly terrifying.

The transpod shuddered and roared as it picked up acceleration down the railway of the takeoff strip. Rowan turned his face toward us and watched what was going on. I could tell he felt bad for me and Billy, so there was a lot of feeling miserable going on in first class.

Except for Lourdes, our flight attendant, who squealed, “Whee! Whee! I am so happy! I am so happy! I could poop myself, I’m so happy! Whee!” From her rear-facing seat, she paddled her high-heeled feet as though she were doing the backstroke.

I couldn’t help but catch a glimpse of her panties.

“Well. I thought it would be a nice gift for you, Cager. You know. Just us—well, and Rowan, too—up there on that enormous ship, where we can do whatever we want and basically run the place. Think of it, how much fun that will be.”

“Yeah. Whatever, Bill.”

“Come on. It will be great. Tell him how fun it will be up there, Rowan,” Billy said.

“You may never want to come back,” Rowan confirmed.

The transpod got noisier and noisier as it approached liftoff speed.

My hand trembled next to Billy’s on our armrest. I watched as my skin drained to the color of skim milk. I felt terrible, so I grabbed Billy’s hand.

And I’ll admit the truth: When a Grosvenor Galactic cruise transpod lifts off, there are undeniable moments of terror. The noise is so tremendous that you can’t hear the other passengers scream, which they always do (and Billy, who had never traveled to space, was doing right now), and the entire craft shakes like it’s about to fall to pieces. And then there’s that instant when your feet are pointing directly upward and your head fills to capacity with whatever blood was previously circulating in your system. Thankfully, it’s all over in a minute or so, and then you’re just floating along in silence—and if it’s your first time up there, chances are you’re wondering if this is what death is actually like.

Billy Hinman’s fingernails dug into my hand.

“This may have been the dumbest mistake I’ve ever made,” he said. “Get me down.”

“Ow,” I said. “Your fingernails are sharp.”

Rowan’s expression showed a bit of concern—possibly worry—over how I was handling my abduction. And then Rowan said the worst thing imaginable, which was this: “It’s all perfectly smooth sailing now, Billy. Look at how high we are.”

Rowan extended his hand toward the porthole.

Billy Hinman, who was terrified of flying, groaned. He fired a dirty look at Rowan, and that’s when he said good-bye to Earth, and to California.

Billy opened a rectangle between his hands, and his thumphone screen hovered in the air above his lap. I watched without saying anything as Billy Hinman attempted to call his dad, who was somewhere in India.

There was nothing. No message, no fake ringtone. Only static. It was weird, and it made me want to try my phone too, or at least offer to loan mine to Billy, because Hinsoft thumbphones worked everywhere—even in space. But I pretended not to pay attention to what Billy was doing, even though I obviously was doing exactly that.

Billy closed out the screen and said, “Fuck this, stupid no-signal in space.”

Behind us, one of the attendants in second class screamed and cried about being unfairly persecuted by a bigoted passenger.

Being on a transpod was almost like being stuck inside Gulliver’s Travels, I thought. I imagined that if I’d spent a few days in second class, I’d come out acting like the raging flight attendant behind us. As it was, I could only hope that being in the front affected all of our moods in a more positive way.

Lourdes unhooked from her seat and gleefully announced that she would begin in-flight service and entertainment. She activated the transparent screenfield at the front of the cabin and said, “I am thrilled to present our in-flight entertainment selection for first-class passengers on R&R Grosvenor Galactic! Our feature will begin after a brief advertisement! I love this so much!”

Lourdes’s face scrunched and she farted. Then she danced. With no music, and for no reason at all that any of us could figure out.

V.4 cogs can fart. There is no Woz in space. Another war was bound to begin on Earth—it was only a matter of time—while the first one between Billy Hinman and Cager Messer was just getting started somewhere between home and the moon.

I did not want to speak to Billy Hinman.

I knew our trip would be tough. There was no turning back, even if I tried using the no-credit-limit impact of my name. And although there was something especially painful in knowing that my best friend was trying to do something nice and positive for me, it was something I didn’t want anything to do with. So I found myself pendulum-swinging between regret for being angry at Billy and trying to rationalize the truth that if he’d have let me alone, I would not have lived much longer. I suppose that was selfish of me. And it seemed that every beating I’d ever received at the hands of my mother or father always included some type of it’s-for-your-own-good justification, which I knew was bullshit. Just like I knew that what Billy Hinman was doing to me was bullshit too.

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.

“We’ll figure out something. Just enjoy the ride, Jeff.”

Jeffrie frowned. “I kind of feel weird, like maybe I’m going to puke or something.”

“Don’t think about it. You’re probably just hungry. I am. I’m going to figure out where the toilets are and look for something to eat. Okay?”

“All right.”

When Meg came back, she carried pouches of food: hamburgers and fries with bottles of water. It was the kind of food made at places Jeffrie and her brother Lloyd liked to set fire to.

“Food printers,” Meg said, waving the girls’ meal pouches in front of Jeffrie. “Really cool ones.”

“Thanks.”

Meg sat down beside Jeffrie and harnessed herself back into the recliner. “But the toilets are weird. It took me ten minutes to figure out how to use their female urinal, and by then I thought I was going to piss myself. It’s like hooking yourself up to a fucking electronic lamprey eel or something. And the pictures they have on the walls, with the characters from that kids’ show demonstrating how to use them, are really disturbing. If I was a guy, I’d be terrified of the male lamprey thing.”

Jeffrie tore at the opening of her food pouch. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Now I kind of have to go too.”

“Do you want me to show you how to do it?”

Jeffrie shook her head. “I’m not stupid. And I’m not scared, either.”

“Well, do me a favor. When you come back, see if you can print up some ketchup,” Meg said.

“No. I can’t do the reading and writing thing. Sorry.”

Meg said, “Well, then. I guess this pretty much means I can feed you whatever I want.”

Jeffrie unhooked her harness and got out of her seat.

“That doesn’t mean I’ll eat it, though.”

Jeffrie pulled herself away from the seat and drifted toward the toilets. She said, “Can you promise me one thing, Meg? Can you promise that you will get us back home before too long?”

“No worries, Jeff,” Meg said. “I promise.”

Like Nothing Else in Tennessee

Billy Hinman, who hated to fly, and hated anything that moved fast, had never been to space.

I watched his face, as confused and out of it as I was. Even in my state I knew there was nothing like seeing, for the first time, the massive hulk of the Tennessee through the portholes of a tiny Grosvenor Galactic transpod.

The Tennessee was so big, it was almost scary.

As a matter of fact, it really was scary to Billy Hinman. The Tennessee looked like a gigantic eye, floating in a low orbit over the moon. An eye as big as Boise.

“I don’t really want to go on that thing,” he said.

Then Billy shook his head and said, “What the fuck did I do, Cager?”

He covered his head with his blanket and turned away from the window.

On the second day of our flight to the Tennessee, I began to sweat and shake. It was just a little at first, but my guts clenched up in protest at the lack of Woz. I could not eat, despite Rowan’s pleading with me, and Lourdes’s unending manic performances.

Lourdes tried everything to make me feel better. She danced and sang, wrapped me in blankets, swabbed my clammy skin with warm washcloths, and shaved me, which was unnecessary, to be honest.

Billy Hinman, my best friend in life, complained. “You know, he’s not the only human passenger in first class,” he told her.

So Lourdes put chilled cucumber slices on Billy Hinman’s eyelids, and she even asked him if he’d like a hand job, which made me kind of jealous—and horny, too—just thinking about Lourdes and her “Thursday” panties.

Rowan, arching an eyebrow, stared at me silently.

Maybe being in space for two days with a Wozhead in withdrawal was wearing on everyone’s sanity, even our nonhuman flight attendant’s. And Lourdes’s offer to Billy was just typical of my experience around people—and even cogs—who were all so hopelessly attracted to Billy Hinman.

And I wasn’t entirely surprised when Billy Hinman told her, “No,” and shut his eyes. Some people did like to do sexual things with cogs, but for his entire life Billy Hinman always told me how much he’d hated the things on which his father’s empire had been built.

If Lourdes had asked me if she could give me a hand job, I would have probably said yes, but then again, I was in the viselike grips of Woz withdrawal after forty hours’ sitting, harnessed in and hopelessly trapped.

“Are you sure? No?” Lourdes asked.

“No,” Billy grumbled.

“Oh, well! I’m so thrilled to be part of the Grosvenor Galactic experience! I’m happiest when I can make people happy, and share in their happiness!”

I felt left out, ignored, and unhappy. I also wanted Woz and began plotting some method by which I could access a clinic as soon as we got to the Tennessee.

Then Lourdes farted again and did a wild dance that made her look like a terrified, fleeing squid as she floated in the air above our recliners.

“I’m a squid! I’m a squid!” she said. “I am so happy! We are almost at the Tennessee! I am a happy flying squid!”

And Lourdes’s skirt lifted up again.

Rowan caught me staring at her underwear.

In the weightlessness of space, you might not be able to get Woz, but if you’re a sixteen-year-old guy, you can always get erections.

I was embarrassed. Stupid thin paper orange spacesuits.

So I said, “I don’t know what’s happening to me, Rowan.”

“It’s been a long trip, Cager. I think we’ll all feel better when we get off this transpod,” Rowan said.

And I added, “Hand job from a robot or not.”

Rowan, as usual, was not flustered by my comment.

And Lourdes gurgled, “Whee! Whee! Strap yourselves in for docking! This is my favorite part! I think I just bubbled out some squid ink in my undies!”

I wondered what color “Friday” was.

And behind us, through the sealed doorway that separated us from second class, as the cogs I’d nearly forgotten about stirred to their active modes, came the muted sounds of imitation humanity: cries of joy, and pained screams of outrage. And inconsolable sobbing, too.

All of human history was with us, hardwired into the circuitry of machines that had never been born and were not predestined to ever die.

The first thing that happens after the docking mechanisms link on the Tennessee is the sudden generation of gravity on the transpod. It’s a deeply sickening feeling—like suddenly being uncomfortably full after a ridiculously large meal. It hurts in the deepest pits of your stomach—like you’ve just been kicked in the balls.

It takes a while to catch your breath. Unless you’re a cog, that is. The ones in second class were all as noisy, happy, furious, and despondent as they had ever been.

Billy Hinman groaned and cupped his hands under his balls.

I said, “That always happens to me, too.”

And before the deck crew on the Tennessee opened the portal to allow the first-class passengers out, Lourdes came through the cabin with an eye scanner that would automatically identify us, assign and unlock our cabins, and credit our accounts with money—something that was limitless as far as a Hinman or Messer was concerned.

We also had to sit through one last presentation—a show with Mooney and Rabbit and a bunch of actor cogs in orange flight suits—demonstrating the terrifying procedure for getting into one of the Tennessee’s lifeboats, which were smaller versions of transpods designed for twenty passengers, if we were ordered to do it. I shuddered to think how horrifying it would be if we ever had to evacuate the Tennessee, and what might possibly cause that to happen.

I tried to ignore the show, but it was impossible.

“Don’t worry, folks!” Mooney told us. “We’ve never had to use lifeboats on a Grosvenor Galactic cruise ship! Yet! Ha ha ha! Just kidding, folks!”

Then Mooney got sucked out an open bay door on the lifeboat deck and shrieked wildly as he contorted dancelike in the weightless black of space.

It was the stupidest and most frightening thing I ever had to sit through.

The hatch finally came open, and I was immediately assaulted by all the strange smells of the Tennessee. It definitely did not smell anything like burning and toxic Los Angeles.

“I hope you feel better! Have a wonderful time on the Tennessee! It made me so happy to spend this time with you! I can’t wait to see you again!” Lourdes squealed as Billy passed her. Then Lourdes threw her arms around Billy Hinman and clutched his hair passionately in her coggy fingers and began humping her hips into his.

“Whee!” she gurgled. “Whee! Whee! Whee!”

Things like that just seemed to happen to Billy all the time.

Rowan pried his hands between them like he was shucking apart an enormous part-man, part-machine oyster. “Please. Lourdes. Get a grip on yourself.”

Then Lourdes farted and started dancing again.

We left the transpod and stepped out into the vast arrivals hall of the Tennessee.

I sighed. The next couple of days were going to be impossible.

Parker, My Valet

Once Billy and I were inside our room, I came unglued, then went back together the wrong way, and fell apart again.

It felt like bugs were crawling all over my skin.

I tore at the paper spacesuit I’d been wearing. Billy tried to calm me down, told me to take a shower. Although there were showers on the transpod, I hadn’t taken one in days. Billy pointed out the clean clothes and underwear that had already been prepared for us in advance of our arrival, but nothing he did seemed to make any difference to me.

I panicked. I was covered with bugs.

I tore the spacesuit off and began scratching everywhere, leaving railroad tracks of red welts all over my skin.

“Dude. Get into the shower. You’ll feel better.”

“I can’t make them go away,” I said.

Billy Hinman ran to the bathroom and turned on the water, then wrestled me into the shower, holding me under the stream until I stopped scratching.

It must have been pathetic and frightening for Billy.

I finally calmed down. The water poured through my hair and into my mouth. Billy was soaked. He looked like he was in pain, like he was about to cry.

But crying was something I had never in my life seen Billy Hinman do.

And then I said, “You’re so perfect, Billy. Everyone loves you. If I hadn’t watched you grow up, I’d swear you were a fucking cog.”

Billy turned off the water. He managed to get me to lie down on my bed and tried to cover me with a sheet, but I kept kicking it away.

“Whatever,” Billy said. “I’m going to get Rowan. I’ll find some help for you, Cager.”

“Fuck you, Billy. Get me some Woz. You promised you’d get me some Woz.”

I had no idea how long I’d been dead.

That’s what it was like, crashing from Woz. There were no dreams, just an empty and sweat-soaked blackness. When I woke up—maybe it was two hours later, maybe it was four days, not that such measurements amounted to much up here where time loses its calibration with suns and shadows—I was twisted up in my sheets, completely naked, and I felt as though I’d been entirely hollowed out, as though the skin that contained what there was that made Cager Messer Cager Messer was nothing more than an eggshell. It was like I was a desiccated husk that if you pressed into it hard enough would dissolve into a faint puff of dusty smoke.

Billy Hinman was gone, and the room was dark.

I had a dim memory of being on the transpod, of tearing off the orange paper suit that had been required flight gear.

“Billy? Are you here?”

Nothing.

I wobbled to my feet, wrapping my sheet into a toga, and made my way to the bathroom so I could put water on my face. I ended up drinking three glasses and got a stomachache.

Rowan’s room was next door. Maybe Billy was with Rowan, I thought.

I stepped out through our door and into the hallway.

“Hey! Are you guys in there?” I called out.

I leaned against the wall between our door and Rowan’s. I opened my thumbphone. I thought about calling Mr. Messer, or my mom. That would have been stupid. What had they ever done to fix anything in my life? I punched in Katie St. Romaine’s number. Nothing. No answer there, either.

Something was wrong. Something was wrong with everything.

“It’s quite impossible to lock yourself out of your room.”

I hadn’t noticed that my personal Tennessee attendant had been standing in the hallway, watching me.

There were personal valet cogs assigned to me on every one of my father’s ships. Their job was to take care of anything a young, unmonitored teenage Messer could possibly want. And, given the number of cogs on board, and since the three of us—me, Rowan, and Billy—were the only human beings on the ship, it meant that each of us had hundreds of helpful and potentially angry, happy, depressed, horny, or condescending v.4 cogs all to himself.

What fun.

It turned out that my Tennessee valet was incredibly needy and simply would not leave me the fuck alone.

My deck valet—a young, soft-voiced male v.4 made to look like some big-eyed and innocent teenage bellhop— continued, “Simply wave your palm in front of your door and it will unlock for you. Here. Do you want me to show you how?”

I closed my phone screen. The cog walked toward me.

I said, “No.”

The valet stopped on the other side of Rowan’s door and tilted his head slightly as he stared at me. I know that cogs are just machines, but I’ve always been a bit creeped out by people—especially ones who are not exactly alive— who stare directly into my eyes.

“My name is Parker,” he said. “I’m your personal valet, here to help with whatever you want or need, Cager Messer.”

Parker kept staring and staring at me. I looked at the floor.

“Let me show you how to do it,” Parker said.

Well, he certainly was not outraged, depressed, or overjoyed. I was trying to decide if Parker was one of those know-it-all, smug v.4s, or if maybe he was a horny one. Either way, I immediately decided I did not like Parker, my personal valet.

“No thanks. Really. I know how, and I’m not locked out.”

Then Parker touched my naked arm.

I said, “Um. Parker.”

Undeterred, my valet continued, “But, poor thing, haven’t you found your clothes? Do you need me to show you where the clothing we’ve prepared for you is located? I could help you get out of this bedsheet and dressed into something nicer. Wouldn’t that feel better? You’ll need a tie and jacket for dinner, besides. Please allow me to serve as your valet and help you dress and groom. It’s my job, after all.”

Parker was still staring into my eyes. And he was uncomfortably close. He brushed his fingers over my hand, and that was it.

“Look. Parker. I’ll tell you what: You go back to your post over there, and I promise I will come get you when I need help getting dressed for dinner. Okay?”

Parker stared and stared. His mouth hung open slightly. If cogs could drool, Parker would be doing it right now, which was completely disgusting.

Then Rowan’s door opened and my caretaker stepped out into the hall.

If Rowan had ever looked surprised and shocked in his life, he was both of those things in that instant when he stumbled into the moment I’d been sharing with a v.4 cog personal deck valet named Parker who wanted to put his hands on me and undress me. I can only assume that Rowan must have thought Lourdes and her polka-dotted “Thursday” panties had gotten me a little too excited over the course of our two-day flight to the Tennessee.

But Rowan would have been wrong about that.

Whatever.

Rowan raised one eyebrow and looked at me, then at Parker, then at me again without saying anything.

“I. Um,” I said.

“Good morning, Cager.” Rowan glanced at his wrist. “Well, nearly evening, to be precise. I’ll just get a dinner outfit ready for you.”

And Rowan, being the dutiful caretaker that he had always been throughout my life, went into my room and selected an entire outfit for me.

“No necktie,” I said, standing in the doorway, wrapped in my sheet. “I’ll put it on before we go to dinner.”

And Parker—if he could feel such things besides horniness—would have been so jealous that I had my own valet, who most likely was not a cog, to help me get dressed. But Rowan was so Rowan all the time.

“Does he help you get dressed?” Parker asked.

I looked down at my sheet, at my pale bare legs sticking out from the bottom. Then I shook my head and went inside, leaving my personal valet alone in the dark of the hallway.

And as I slipped on the clothes Rowan had picked out, I thought, I am a spoiled piece of shit rich brat who lets some other dude draw my bath and choose my outfits down to my socks and underwear, and whose best friend most likely thinks I hate him.

Once I’d gotten dressed, I went in the bathroom and puked until nothing would come out of me.

Then I left without telling Rowan where I was going.

That’s what addicts do, right?

Maybe the ship’s doctor could give me some Woz— just like he would any regular teenage kid, not that regular teenage kids would ever be allowed up here on the Tennessee.

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