The Tennessee was insane, and as far as we knew we were now the only human beings anywhere in the universe.
And here I was, in an elevator with Parker and his preprogrammed penis.
“This is Deck Twenty-One,” Parker said.
“I can see that. Also, it is red. So, why are we stopping here?”
“Well”—Parker adjusted his boner—“I heard you telling your friends at dinner that you wanted to sneak in to an adults-only deck.”
Cogs have very sensitive hearing.
“And you can get us in?” I asked. I may have been a little excited at the chance.
“I don’t know.” Parker shrugged. “I can try, even though it’s a bad place for boys your age, so I hope I don’t get in trouble over this. I thought that maybe since you’re the only humans on board, it quite possibly wouldn’t matter.”
The elevator’s door whooshed open and we stepped out into a brightly lit foyer—a welcoming room, all done in black, white, and red ceramic tiles with the number 21 inlaid as a mosaic on every wall, and again at the top of the large red door that promised to admit entry to a vast emporium of limitless sin and fun.
Parker waved his hand across the door. A blank wicket screen opened up in the middle of the door, and an announcement sounded.
Human visitor at the door. Human visitor at the door.
And through the illuminated wicket screen I saw what looked like a movie set for a 1950s city scene: a wide street with parked bubble-shaped automobiles, a movie house called the Astor, and a couple of brightly lighted signs above what had to have been adults-only clubs—the Rib Eye and the Memphis Hotel.
But it smelled like humans here—and these were not humans I’d ever met before.
“There’s someone else on this deck, Parker.”
Parker nodded and licked his lips. “It’s only you and me, Cager. We are alone now.”
“No. I can definitely smell another person. A girl. There’s a girl in here,” I said.
Parker shook his head. “There can’t be. There are no other humans on the Tennessee. I have the manifest uploaded in my memory. There are no other humans, Cager.”
Human visitor at the door. Human visitor at the door.
But the door would not open. We waited. I stood behind Parker, and I kept my eyes fixed on the wicket.
Then I saw her.
For a moment I thought she may have been a hallucination brought on by the endless frustrations of being in space—thinking about Lourdes’s panties, coping with the lack of Woz in my system, and having lost all sense of time and day. Because she was one of the most alive things I had ever seen, and I desperately wanted her to be real. I needed her to be real, and to let me inside so I could smell her and talk to another human being who wasn’t named Rowan or Billy, and who wasn’t a boy, and, hopefully, wasn’t a Wozhead.
At first I think the girl in the wicket was startled to see Parker and me, but then the separation of the screen between us made her stare directly at me, as though there was something just as powerful fueling her curiosity about the boys on the other side of her doorway.
And she was so beautiful. Her hair was the color of the desert grass in California, and it fell softly in thick waves over her relaxed shoulders. She wore some type of orange uniform suit that had the number 21 patched above her left breast. The neckline was unbuttoned, and I could see the perfect, smooth skin on her chest, just where her collarbones curved downward.
“Can you please let us in?” Parker asked.
The girl in the wicket shook her head. “I don’t know how to open this door.”
“Nonsense. You work here,” Parker said.
I edged in front of Parker so I could see her better. “Are you real? Are you a person?”
“No,” Parker said. “She is definitely a cog. I can read her.”
It was so disappointing, so frustrating.
I hated space. I hated the Tennessee, even if it had to have been a hell of a lot better than being on Earth at that exact moment.
The girl turned away and vanished from the screen. She was replaced by a male cog in a security uniform, which made him look like a bonk. It was ironic and weird. Everyone knows how barbaric it is to use cogs for military matters.
“Cager Messer? You’re in violation of in-flight statutes, young man,” the security officer said. “You’ll have to wait a few more years before you can have access to Deck Twenty-One. Now run along back to your room and play or something, or I’ll have to notify your parents and take you to a detention kiosk in handcuffs.”
“My parents aren’t here. And my parents own this ship, by the way, which means they own you,” I pointed out.
The guard cog paused and stared blankly through the wicket screen. Then he said, “Don’t trigger my outrage, you little wadded-up piece of shit! If I come out there, I’m going to place you under arrest, strip you naked, put you in jail, and make you eat string and paper and whatever garbage I can find!”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.
“Why are you doing this to me? This is outrageous! Outrageous! Do not trigger me! I can’t deal with this! The trigger! The trigger! You cannot be here! I’m going to seize your belongings! You are stabbing me with rage and hatred! How dare you impose false definitions on my constructs! How dare you, you piece of shit!”
Then the security cog smashed his face squarely into the wicket screen and screamed.
The screen went blank.
“Why would anyone eat string?” Parker asked.
“I don’t know. He’s an idiot.”
And Parker said, “I have an erection, Cager.”
The Boy from First Class, and a Fire in the Bank
I saw the boy from first class. You were right. He is real,” Meg said.
“I told you he was,” Jeffrie said. Where did you find him?”
“At the door. He wanted in, but he couldn’t open the door. Then a cop came and I got scared and ran away.”
Meg Hatfield had to think.
Meg, as useless as she may have been down on Earth, could solve any problem. So it stood to reason that she could figure out a way to open the door to Deck 21.
She didn’t want to scare Jeffrie, but there was something very unnerving about the failure of her thumbphone. Phones connected to satellites, and satellites were everywhere, running constantly and automatically. Something had to have been terribly wrong down on Earth, she thought. Worse, there was something terribly wrong with at least some of the cogs up here on the Tennessee.
Machines aren’t supposed to eat other machines.
There had to be some way into the system on the Tennessee. It just hadn’t revealed itself to Meg Hatfield yet. So the girls went from building to building on Deck 21, looking for Meg Hatfield’s entryway to the brain of the Tennessee.
Eventually, Meg and Jeffrie broke into the Grosvenor Bank of Tennessee. It was a very unsubtle, un–Meg Hatfield entry. The girls bashed in the front window of the bank using a jack handle from one of the lifeless cars parked on the street outside.
“Score,” Meg said. “Banks have computers. And computers are how I get in.”
“Get us back to Antelope Acres, then,” Jeffrie said.
“Believe me, if I can do that, I will. I promise, Jeff.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
Meg booted up every computer in the bank. There were five of them. That was it—nothing else. No paper currency, which was no longer used anywhere, no forms to fill out, no bank vault—just a few potted plants, some swivel chairs, pressed-wood Danish Modern–style desks, cheap bristly carpet, and rows of inactive wall screens.
Meg used one of the computers to try to reset her thumbphone. Nothing. Another provided her with the passenger manifest for the Tennessee. There were only three people listed on the entire ship—five if she counted Jeffrie and herself, the stowaways. And there were countless cogs after that.
On the fourth computer, Meg found her way in to the
system. It was neither a perfect nor an elegant way, but it was an opening. She could change the two boys’ dates of birth on the manifest by just enough. If that boy had the guts to come back, she thought, she and Jeffrie might be able to get out of Deck 21.
The third human passenger was only listed as “adult male.” He had an unspecified date of birth.
Jeffrie turned on a bank of wall screens. She sat down and watched Rabbit & Robot while Meg probed the innards of the bank’s computer.
“This is the stupidest show I’ve ever seen,” Jeffrie said. “I don’t see how so many people can be addicted to this show.”
“It’s for fucking Wozheads,” Meg said.
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!
In the particular episode Jeffrie watched, Rabbit and Mooney were decluttering their apartment and left a pile of outdated gadgets beside their front door as a donation for a local charity rummage sale. But when the pickup crew came to take the objects, they also mistakenly took the sleeping Mooney, the cog, and sold him off by accident to a circus, where Mooney was forced to assist in the disgusting procedure of artificially inseminating the circus’s Bactrian camels, and he also had to perform a thrilling high-wire act with no safety nets.
Unfortunately for Mooney, he got kicked in the face by an overly enthusiastic male camel, and he also didn’t make it even halfway through his debut on the wire.
Poor Mooney!
But everyone—well, at least everyone on Woz—would have thought watching Mooney get kicked in the face and cascade to his death was hilarious. Jeffrie and Mooney, however, did not.
And Jeffrie was bored and frustrated at being stuck up on the Tennessee, despite the abundance of food and the availability of almost anything she could ever want. So while Meg worked on inserting bracketed if-then commands inside the string of entrance protocols for Deck 21, Jeffrie started a small fire in the corner of the bank’s lobby.
Setting the fire made Jeffrie feel better, like she had some power over things.
Setting fires was what Jeffrie Cutler lived to do.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Meg rushed around the row of teller stations and stamped out Jeffrie’s fire, which had only charred a cantaloupe-size ring of carpet.
“I hate this place,” Jeffrie said.
“You asked to come with me.” Meg pointed at her. “Are you trying to get us killed?”
Jeffrie shrugged and repeated, “I hate this place.”
“So you’d rather live with Lloyd in the back of a dirty camper shell in the desert?”
“Yes.”
“No fucking fires. Got it?”
“Meg?”
“What?”
And Jeffrie said, “I think you need to change it back so they see us as humans.”
“Why?”
“Because eventually I’m going to need to see a doctor about something, you know.”
Jeffrie’s hormone implants would not last forever.
That frightened Meg, but not as much as the cog she saw stepping through the bank’s broken front window.
It was the croupier from the Rib Eye, come to pay a visit to the stowaways in the bank. The croupier cog was naked from the waist up, and his shirt dangled like a half skirt from the back of his trousers. He still carried his craps stick, and most of his chest and side had been eaten away, as had some of his fingers. From his belt down he was soaked in milky hydraulic fluid.
The croupier moved awkwardly. His mechanics were fried from the attack the other night, but he had his eyes pinned directly on Jeffrie. He stepped closer.
“Go back to where you belong,” Meg said.
The croupier paused, stuck for a moment, considering Meg’s command.
“I . . . ,” the croupier said.
“Go away!” Meg told him.
“I . . .”
The croupier cog kept his eyes locked on Jeffrie and took three more steps toward her. She kneeled on the floor beside the burned ring of carpet.
Then the cog said, “I’m outraged. So outraged. And horny, too. And I’m so happy, I could eat the rest of my hand.”
The croupier was confused. He was like every different v.4 cog all mashed up inside one synthetic brain.
He held up his dripping, oozing hand to display the fingers that had been removed by Dr. Geneva. Then he grabbed Jeffrie by the collar of her uniform and lifted her from the floor.
Jeffrie kicked and wriggled, but cogs—some of them—can be brutally strong.
And just as he opened his mouth to bite Jeffrie’s throat, Meg Hatfield bashed him across the back of his cog skull with her jack handle. He did not release Jeffrie, but the cog’s head did come clean off his body. The croupier’s head lobbed in an arcing bloop right out through the bank’s broken window.
If it were Skee-Ball, Meg Hatfield would have won a stuffed squirrel.
Jeffrie Cutler pushed herself free, and what was left of the croupier cog fell backward onto the floor, gushing and spraying white jellified goo.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Jeffrie said.
“Something weird. Really weird. Let’s get out of here.”
An Infinity of Nevers, and a Mission to Find a Can Opener
Cager?”
Once again I was in the elevator with Parker, who fumbled around, adjusting his confined mechanical penis. And I was in a very bad mood—the kind that would end in a beating if I were home, which is somewhere I most likely never would see again.
Cager Messer was having another of his darker episodes, and he needed to take it out on someone.
I held up my hand, flashing the warning sign of my palm. “Don’t say anything to me, Parker. Not even one more word.”
I’d been thinking about all the nevers confronting me: never going home, never having a girlfriend or a boyfriend or an anyfriend, never falling in love.
And I’d been counting and recounting all the finite experiences that had never seemed to matter at all: riding on a subway, getting sand in my shoes at the beach, being woken up by the sound of a neighbor’s barking dog.
Because, do you ever look at your life and say, hey, how many more times will I ever pack a suitcase for a trip, or write my name with a mechanical pencil, or use a tape measure?
Every experience we have, everything is finite. That’s what it is to be human—because everything we ever do, or don’t do but think about doing, is strained through our awareness of limits. Maybe there was some comfort, some beauty, in being a cog, where the infinite was feasible.
And then there are the things I’ve never done. Things that matter more than anything, and things that don’t matter too. But if I spent enough time thinking about them, they might just become obsessions—the stuff that keeps me awake at night.
I was so angry.
Cager Messer has never had sex; and he’s also never used a fucking can opener in his life. What if I found a can opener here on the Tennessee and then used it to open a can of something? Something I’ve never seen before—like canned corn. And what if that was the only time in my life—the final time in my life—that I would ever use a can opener?
I have never stolen anything from a convenience store, or gone swimming naked in a lake with my friends. I only have one friend, anyway. What if Billy Hinman was the last friend I ever had? And what if he no longer wanted to be my friend?
I felt myself falling apart, and I wanted to punch Parker.
And I had also never punched anyone in my life. What if I punched Parker and never had the opportunity to punch anyone else, ever again?
Parker wasn’t even a human being. Could punching him be satisfying in any
way?
I might as well punch a fucking can opener.
“When we get back to my room, I’m sending you out to find something for me, Parker. Don’t bother coming back if you don’t get it.”
Parker, if a machine could do such a thing, looked thrilled. He tugged at his penis. “Are you sending me for something to have sex with?”
“No. Don’t be an idiot. I want you to go find a can opener and bring it back to me.”
Parker was stuck. I was sure he was thinking about how can openers might be used for sex.
“Cager, are you sad about something?”
“I need you to do what I asked and leave me alone now.”
Captains Get to Do Whatever They Want to Do
It was at just about the same time that I was stopped at the wicket in the door to Deck 21, and after Rowan and Billy had finished their dessert at Le Lapin et l’Homme Mécanique and gone back to the rooms, that Captain Myron came down to the empty restaurant.
He was looking for a midnight snack.
There was something very wrong with Captain Myron. Cogs are not supposed to eat cogs.
The minions of their race.
If machines could get sick, Captain Myron had come down with a bug that had been fed to the Tennessee by approaching visitors.
The Worm had traveled very far, had been coming for centuries in the twisting folds of time that raveled through the endlessness of space.
And as usual, Captain Myron was outraged. He was particularly set off by the unresponsive Clarence, our maître d’, who had green beans coming out of his nose.
“What do you think you’re doing to me?” Captain Myron howled at Clarence. “You are making a bear trap of hatred and rage in my soul! I am the captain—not you! Me! Me! I am in pain! What gives you the right to abuse me like this?”
But Clarence didn’t say or do anything. Billy Hinman had frozen Clarence’s processors earlier with his fictitious argument about cheese and Alsatian history. Clarence was broken.
“Why? Why? Why are you treating me this way? I am the victim! You are not the victim! You are victimizing me by acting like you’re the victim, when the victim is ME! You cannot intrude on my space! This is my space to be a victim! Get out! Get out, you bastard!”