“I don’t know,” Rowan said. “How can we know for certain? I think it would be most useful if we all just adopt a positive attitude. We’ll find a way back, Cager. It isn’t as bad as you think. And who really knows? I’ll wager there are people down below at Mojave Field who at this very moment are working on some method for our rescue.”
“When you say ‘rescue,’ it makes me feel like we’re trapped inside a burning building or something,” I said.
It Happens Here, I Guess
He’s missing part of his face,” Jeffrie said.
“Shh . . . There’s something really weird about this one. Don’t say anything till he leaves. He probably won’t notice us anyway, but I can’t be sure. I’ve never seen a cog with part of his face gone,” Meg said.
“He looks like a fucking monster.”
Meg put her finger on Jeffrie’s lips and shook her head.
In all the days they’d spent on the Tennessee, although they’d tried, the girls had not figured out a way of getting off Deck 21. They’d been exploring the vast and silent deck, which was made to look like a sort of diorama-display city from some distant time in American history.
Deck 21 was an adults-only deck. There were bath houses, and all kinds of clubs for drinking, watching strip shows, engaging in sexual activities, and so on. Meg and Jeffrie had been playing cards in one of the gambling clubs on the deck. The club was called the Rib Eye, and Meg already owed Jeffrie more than one hundred thousand dollars, just after a few hours of playing. That was when the man in white, who was missing part of his face, came in.
Captain Myron was the first infected cog.
Then came Dr. Geneva. And with that, the Worm became exponential, geometric. Replication and reiteration.
There was nothing they could do. Meg and Jeffrie only sat there at the card table, pretending to be cogs, while they watched Dr. Geneva as he moved from cog to lifeless cog.
“This is fucking weird,” Meg whispered.
Dr. Geneva stopped at a craps table. One of the croupier cogs stood behind the racks of house money and dice, perfectly still, in suspended animation, just waiting for the first humans to arrive. He stared straight ahead with unmoving, unblinking eyes.
Dr. Geneva unbuttoned the cog’s vest and shirt and placed his ear against the croupier’s chest.
“Have I ever told you my thoughts on the development of Eastern culture?” Dr. Geneva asked the cog, who, naturally, had no pulse or respiration and did the wisest thing imaginable when in the company of Dr. Geneva, who was missing part of his face and never shut up, which was to ignore him.
“No?” Dr. Geneva said, “Well, I was thinking on my way down here from the clinic just now. I was thinking about the history of the bagpipes.”
When Dr. Geneva said “bagpipes,” he said it as though he were unveiling a religious artifact that was destined to correct the hellbound paths of an audience of heathens.
“Well. The first true bagpipelike instrument was actually developed during the reign of the Chinese emperor Huang Ti, most likely around the year 3000 B.C.”
While Dr. Geneva spoke, he pressed an ear against the croupier’s chest and thumped his fake sternum with two fingers.
“Huang Ti, as it so happens, is also credited with the invention of boats, money, and religious sacrifice—that is to say, these things were invented during his rule. And all those things—along with the accordion, which at that time, in ancient China, was called the Quyù—are remarkably important in human history to this day, wouldn’t you say?”
Dr. Geneva struggled with removing the croupier’s shirt because the cog held a long stick in one of his hands, so Dr. Geneva just let the shirt hang there around the inanimate cog’s wrist while he continued with his lecture on Chinese music.
Dr. Geneva talked about music and Chinese history for nearly two hours.
“He is so fucking boring,” Jeffrie whispered.
“I need to pee,” Meg said.
“The Quyù was designed to be a representation of the legendary phoenix, and the tones it produced were reportedly perfect and impeccable. Still, and despite what has been written about the Huang Ti period, the earliest canoes predated his boats by an estimated five thousand years.”
Dr. Geneva paused for a moment, then once again placed his ear flat against the frozen cog’s chest. Then he talked about dugout canoes for twenty minutes.
“Did I ever tell you about the level of expertise I have in repairing ancient Chevrolet Camaros?” Dr. Geneva asked. “Let me say this: I impress even myself with my abilities as far as that worthless old internal combustion pile of shit is concerned.”
Dr. Geneva swiped his palm gently across the croupier’s forehead. “No? I haven’t?”
Then Dr. Geneva leaned forward, opened his mouth, and bit off the entire left nipple of the motionless croupier cog. Of course nothing happened as far as the doctor and the cog were concerned.
But Meg and Jeffrie both jumped in horror as the doctor chewed, swallowed, and went in for another massive bite of cog flesh from the side of the croupier’s torso. The cog just stood there, eyes open, shirt dangling, dripping milky-foamy hydraulic fluid.
“Well, I’ll tell you—give me a five-eighths-inch wrench, and I can pretty much do anything I want on an old Camaro. Anything!”
Then Dr. Geneva wiped the foam and grease from his face, part of which was missing, on the back of his now foamy and greasy white sleeve. He reached across to the non-stick-holding hand on his croupier cog meal and twisted off the thumb and first two fingers. Dr. Geneva jammed the cog’s thumb into his mouth and crunchily chewed the thing in his impeccably perfect cog teeth.
Then Dr. Geneva put the other two fingers in the breast pocket of his doctor’s smock and walked out of the Rib Eye.
“What the fuck was that?” Jeffrie asked.
“It was a cog. Eating another cog,” Meg said.
“Yeah. I know. But where the fuck does shit like that ever happen?”
“Here,” Meg said. “It happens here, I guess.”
A Pedestrian Assessment of Alsatian History
After nearly a week in space, the three of us—Billy, Rowan, and I—were at last able to sit down together for a proper dinner, the kind that spoiled shits like Billy and me were used to having, where self-absorbed wait staff lecture us on our inadequacies with silent expressions of disdain while despondent, sobbing busboys contemplating the immutability of status with heaving rib cages unfurl the surrender flags of napkins on our laps for us, and pats of butter come shaped like seashells on beds of crystal-clear ice.
There was no Captain Myron, no Dr. Geneva, and even my personal valet cog Parker was required to stand at his station next to the weird gigantic aquarium with the miniature sperm whales and the maître d’, who, appropriately enough, turned out to be one of those smug, know-it-all v.4s that made Dr. Geneva seem just so hackneyed.
“This is the first time you’ve ever eaten in front of me in my life,” I said.
Rowan cleared his throat and pretended to be preoccupied with the hem of his lap napkin. “No. As improper as it may be, I’ve eaten in front of you before, Cager. Maybe you just don’t remember, because you were still a baby at the time.”
“Everything’s different now,” I said. “You might as well cut loose and get drunk. Nothing we do matters. We are the last examples of humanity. Billy, maybe we should try to sneak into the adult decks, or go to a disco later and dance with some girl cogs.”
“Or boy cogs,” Billy added. “You’re so binary-slash-if-then, Cager. Besides, I’d give my left nut to see Rowan dance.”
“Hyperbole, Bill,” I said.
Billy Hinman nodded. “You’re probably right. I don’t think I’d give my left nut for anything. Not even a trip back to California to see Mrs. Jordan.”
Who probably no longer existed, I thought. But I would never say something like that out loud to Billy Hinman. No matter what I thought, saying things like that only made the frighteni
ng reality we’d all been imagining just seem that much more real.
The maître d’, a bald, freakish-looking cog named Clarence, with arms and legs like a spider’s, swooped over to the edge of our table, skillfully timing his appearance with the lapse in our conversation. “Let me begin by telling you the story of our special choucroute garnie, which begs an examination of the troublesome history of the Région d’ Alsace. Would you prefer my presentation to be in French, or the common, low, English?”
Milo, our busboy, stood behind him, weeping, his head lowered.
And I’ll be honest: I could tolerate, and frequently laughed at, the overjoyed and ecstatic cogs; I was somewhat amused and entertained by the horny ones; I was perplexed yet fascinated by the ones who could eat and piss; I enjoyed seeing a good cry now and then from the hopelessly depressed cogs like Milo; and, appreciating a good psychological meltdown as much as I did, I honestly loved the outraged cogs; but ones like Clarence and Dr. Geneva, who simply never shut up and constantly explained the minute details of things nobody cared about, or pointed out how stupid every human and cog they encountered was, I found to be completely unbearable.
Billy Hinman pretty much hated them all, even if he did admit he’d be willing to dance with some boy cog if we went nightclubbing.
So Billy raised his hand and said, “Oh, please! Spare us your pedestrian assessment of Alsatian history! I happen to be an expert.”
That froze Clarence, but only for a moment.
The maître d’ said, “Preposterous! You cannot possibly know more than I do! You’re a human!”
Milo shuddered and sobbed quietly.
Poor Milo! I kind of wanted to hug him. And then I thought, this was how it was going to be now, right? I was going to have to start behaving more kindly toward the cogs on the Tennessee—thinking of them as friends, appreciating their personal qualities, forming relationships (which almost made me vomit a little bit in the back of my throat)—because, after all, this was it.
This was it.
This was it.
There simply was nobody else. Not anywhere in the universe.
I glanced over at Parker. I shook my head. “No. No. No. No. No.”
I hadn’t realized I’d said it aloud.
“No what?” Rowan asked.
Billy Hinman, oblivious to the mental civil war that had broken out between my ears, said, “Then I assume you know all about the Matthäus-Dreschner incident?”
Clarence was stuck.
Billy Hinman hounded him, “Well? Can we discuss? It was certainly the most pivotal spy-sex scandal of the mid-twentieth century, and it nearly plunged the world into a massive global war.”
Clarence’s eyes moved from side to side. I’m sure if cogs could really think, he would have been wondering why in hell his coder hadn’t bothered to include details about the Matthäus-Dreschner incident.
“Oh. The Matthäus-Dreschner incident!” Clarence said. “Of course! It was a brutal affair!”
Clarence waited and waited for some contextual clue about something that never happened.
Billy Hinman sipped his ice water. After a good ten seconds of silence, he said, “If not for the cunning of brave Josephine Dreschner, the world, sadly, would never again have enjoyed munster cheese. You know, Munster d’Alsace.”
“It would certainly have been a global tragedy of biblical proportions,” Clarence agreed.
“I only just made that up,” Billy told the maître d’. “You’re a complete idiot.”
Clarence stood there at the edge of our table. His cog brain was utterly logjammed.
I leaned over to Billy Hinman and whispered, “If my dinner tastes like someone took a piss on it, I’m never speaking to you again.”
And Clarence, our maître d’ who knew everything there was to know about Alsatian history, except for the most pivotal spy-sex scandal of the mid-twentieth century, which was now permanently ingrained in his memory programs, stood there hovering above us, unmoving and silent, for the rest of the evening.
Milo wept.
I removed the napkin from my lap, stood, and hugged the busboy, which caused him to cry even harder.
A Cruise-Directing Phoenix from the Ashes
Clarence was hopelessly frozen.
During our entrée, Billy Hinman inserted slender green beans into each one of the maître d’s nostrils. He looked completely ridiculous. And sometime later that night, when Le Lapin et l’Homme Mecanique was deserted, maintenance cogs would inevitably come through and attempt to get the frazzled Clarence back online.
Or they’d simply toss him out with the garbage and replace him with a new cog maître d’ before the breakfast seating.
Things like that—seizing up—happened most frequently to cogs like Clarence and Dr. Geneva, who had no way of siphoning fiction from fact.
“I hope you’re proud of yourself,” I said.
Billy nodded. “It was some of my best work. Maybe we should undress him. Nobody wants to see a naked maître d’ in a restaurant where everyone is required to put on ties.”
“I agree, Billy. Nobody does want to see that,” Rowan offered.
“I can help you undress him!” Parker shouted from across the room.
“No. Shut up,” I said. “Besides, when you say nobody, Billy, keep in mind that there really is nobody on this thing besides us, and now here we are. With all this . . .”
I waved my arm dramatically and accidentally did a backhanded grope on Clarence, who was still frozen and had green beans coming out of his nose. It was embarrassing.
Rowan, always there to monitor my manners, said, “Say ‘excuse me,’ Cager.”
I glanced up at our dead maître d’. “Um, excuse me for hitting you in the dick, Clarence.”
Then Billy Hinman looked at me with a cool, determined expression. He cleared his throat. “Well, I suppose the Tennessee has everything we could possibly ever want or need. In fact, so much of it that we could never come close to running out. And there are Grosvenor schools on the Tennessee. That means there is Woz in space, Cage.”
I was a bit scared now. I’ll admit that I’d thought about those schools—how they couldn’t possibly function without Woz. And I’ll admit that when Billy said as much, my mouth watered a little bit.
“Well, I do know there’s one thing we don’t have: thumbphones. And without them we don’t have a map of the ship. We could look for years and not even get through half this place. By then I’d be too old to enroll in school.”
Billy Hinman smiled and shrugged. Then he looked over at Parker, my valet, who was standing by the aquarium with miniature sperm whales in it while he grappled with his cog penis.
And just then, the tense silence at our table was shattered.
“Hooray! Yippee!!! Whee! Whee! Whee! My people are here! My humanity! I am so happy, I could crap a dozen sharpened coconuts!”
It turned out Lourdes was not actually dead, or, well, splattered on the slopes of Pikes Peak, as we had been led to believe.
“Holy shit,” Rowan said.
“Hearing you say ‘shit’ makes me want to crap sharp coconuts too,” I said.
Rowan never swore.
“Yee! Yee! Yee!” Lourdes flailed her arms wildly, dancing and squealing her way past Parker and the aquarium, twitching and contorting like an earthworm on a hot plate as she made her way to our table.
“Oh my goodness! My friends! My friends!” Lourdes, shaking like a hummingbird wing, placed her palm on Billy Hinman’s cheek. “And you! You look so wonderful and good! You fill my sombrero with sexual pudding!”
I’ll be honest. I had never heard such a thing. But Billy Hinman was obviously a natural at filling people’s—or cogs’—sombreros with sexual pudding, I suppose.
And then Lourdes farted for a good five seconds.
Once again her skirt was twisted around and her blouse came untucked. But I could not catch a glimpse of her panties. Stupid gravity.
I also realized that I had
no idea what day it was. Stupid space travel.
“I’m afraid we’d assumed the worst when we learned the transpod went down,” Rowan said.
“Yee! Yee! No! What could be better than this?!! I failed to inform you that I was coming here too! I am cruise director for the Tennessee! Wait! What? Your waiter has green beans in his nose! This makes me so happy! Everyone should put green beans in their noses!”
Clarence did not move. He was as good as dead, as far as cogs go. But Lourdes reached down to my plate and grabbed some beans, then inserted them into her nostrils and ears.
“Yee! Yee! Yee!” she said. Then she started dancing again.
“Um, I was pretty much finished eating,” I said.
Then Lourdes began wildly thrusting her hips in the air. “I want to play shuffleboard with you boys so bad, I think I just inhaled my uvula!!!”
I asked Rowan, “What’s shuffleboard?”
And Billy Hinman, who knew these things, said, “Something people play right before they die.”
And from the other side of the room, Parker, my valet, announced, “Cager? I have an erection.”
“Whee! Whee! My bladder just emancipated all my bodily liquids!”
Eternity is a really long time.
Stupid forever.
Stopped at the Wicket
Why are we stopping here?”
I was alone in the elevator with Parker, which meant I was alone in the elevator. I had left Billy Hinman at the restaurant with Lourdes, Rowan, and the sobbing Milo as he served the table our dessert of crème brûlée while trying to avoid knocking over the petrified maître d’.
I’d told them I needed to go to bed, which was something that simultaneously was a lie and made Parker very, very excited.
But it was all too much for me. I worried about our being trapped here for the rest of our lives, Clarence and his green beans, the tireless enthusiasm of Lourdes, Milo’s incessant weeping, and, throughout it all, Rowan’s detached ambivalence.
And, if we were stuck here forever—and maybe this was just a naturally morbid thought for a teenage boy—I wondered who among us would die first, and who would ultimately be left alone.