“Now what do we do?” I said.
Billy asked, “Which one of you said that?”
I raised my hand.
“I don’t know. Mooney keeps dying before telling us what we’re supposed to do next. He didn’t even sing the this-is-how-you-go-pee part of the song,” Billy said, raising his hand so I’d know which space dude was him.
Damn that Billy Hinman. Now I needed to pee.
Rowan raised his hand and said, “Maybe we should wait for a few more minutes, in case they’re sending out some security cogs to find us.”
“We’re the only people on board,” I argued, raising my other hand and dancing a little bit. “You’d think they’d already be here by now.”
Billy raised his other hand. “We look like idiots with our hands in the air.”
I thought it was a good point.
So we put our hands down and left. And, following Rowan’s always sensible and calm advice, our first stop was to see Dr. Geneva, so he could take a look at the cut on Billy Hinman’s head, and the one on my foot.
“Don’t break Dr. Geneva,” I said to Billy, once we were inside the elevator.
But Dr. Geneva was already pretty much broken.
A Most Unfortunate Dane
My eyes watered inside my stupid space helmet.
Dr. Geneva, who had a hole in his face that seeped a slimy white stream of goo along his jaw and down the collar of his physician’s smock, would not shut up, all because I said something about needing to pee so bad, I thought I was about to explode.
“You see, Cager, the human urinary bladder is a surprisingly strong muscle. Surprisingly strong, young man! Now, I know that from time to time, you humans may tend to exaggerate your fears that you are nearing what you colloquially call your bursting point, but trust me—trust me!—urinary bladders simply do not burst, despite some medical historians’ claim that there is an element of truth to the fascinating account that famed Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe died as a result of intentionally withholding the process of urination—out of politeness or some such nonsense, but then again, who knows the type of barbaric contrivances humans constructed as receptacles for urine in the sixteenth century? In any event, this is something of a medical anomaly. However, I can say with certainty on the other hand, he was a most unfortunate Dane, wouldn’t you agree? Ha ha! Now, what potentially may happen to a young man like you, who is willfully suppressing the natural discharge of urine from the bladder, is that eventually, and let me assure you this time span is far greater than you might imagine even given your current state of discomfort, what potentially may happen is that the bladder could, at some point, simply evacuate all its contents involuntarily, in which case you will simply begin urinating all over yourself, and, oh, by the way, where’s your boy? I’m suddenly overcome with hunger. Strange! You know who I’m talking about. I believe his name is Parker. . . .”
I couldn’t stand it.
I wanted to kill Dr. Geneva. Actually, I wanted to murder him and evacuate the contents of my urinary bladder all at the same time, which was a preposterously repulsive murder scenario.
Still, I wanted to do it.
And all that time while Dr. Geneva was going on and on and on and I stared at his dripping face, all I could hear was this: “bladder,” “bursting,” “burst,” “die,” “urinate,” “discharge,” “discomfort,” “evacuate,” “involuntarily,” “all over yourself”—and that was it.
I should have peed in the stupid windbag’s fake potted palm tree.
I pushed my way past Dr. Geneva, Rowan, and Billy and started unzipping my goddamned spacesuit before I even reached the door to his little doctor’s-office toilet. I didn’t even care anymore if unzipping my goddamned extravehicular spacesuit would kill me or not.
I’d rather die in the vacuum of space than end up like miserable Tycho Brahe.
And behind me I heard Billy Hinman ask, “Dr. Geneva, what’s going on with your face?”
I closed myself inside Dr. Geneva’s toilet and voluntarily evacuated some contents. A lot, to be honest.
I guess I was in there for a pretty long time, as pointless as such things as the measurement of time happen to be when you’re peeing in space, because when I came out, Rowan and Billy had taken their helmets off, and Dr. Geneva was putting the finishing touches on the patch to Billy Hinman’s lacerated head.
I still had my helmet on. The inside of my faceplate was fogged up with relief and boy steam.
Naturally, Dr. Geneva was talking about something, but I was pretty sure that neither Rowan nor Billy had been listening to him.
No wonder Captain Myron bit his face off.
Billy pointed at my foggy, hot helmet. “Rabbit sang the ‘All Clear’ song. It’s not nearly as catchy as the one where Mooney chokes to death at the end, though. But in the song, Rabbit called us ‘stupid fucking grunts’ for still having our helmets on.”
That sounded like something a bonk would say. Or sing.
Whatever.
“Ah! Cager!” Dr. Geneva said. “Welcome back, young man! I was just explaining to your friends here the story of the unfortunate demise—due to an assassin’s bullet, as well as to medical quackery of the highest magnitude—of the American president James Garfield. Raw eggs, I was saying, mixed with whiskey and laudanum, a powerful opiate used in the treatment of a vast array of medical and psychological disorders throughout the nineteenth century, were fed to the ailing president as he lay on his very deathbed. And his doctors fed the president via enema—a tube inserted into the poor dying man’s anus! This consequentially produced such repulsive and powerful episodes of flatus that President Garfield’s physician ordered the egg to be omitted from the president’s anal diet, although the whiskey and laudanum regimen continued unabated. Can you imagine that?Ha ha! And the poor man persisted in his state of decline for some eighty days. Eighty days, and the United States of America, which I daresay in all likelihood no longer exists, due to the recent unfortunate developments on poor Mother Earth, was without an actual president and chief executive. Now, in such cases, due to the ratification of the . . . Oh, pardon me just one moment. So hungry . . .”
And Dr. Geneva, while the three of us watched in a combination of disgust and wonder, pulled a complete and severed finger from the breast pocket on his smock and began crunching it between his teeth, just as if he were eating a chicken leg—bone and all.
I took my helmet off.
I looked at Billy.
“Uh. Dr. Geneva?”
Rowan’s mouth hung slightly open.
Dr. Geneva chewed and crunched. Something that looked like terribly undercooked whites of poached egg oozed from the corners of Dr. Geneva’s mouth.
Dr. Geneva was eating a cog finger.
A cog was eating a cog.
The Tennessee was going completely insane.
Dr. Geneva burped, and swiped his thumb across Billy Hinman’s now completely healed eyebrow.
“Yes, so, as I was saying,” Dr. Geneva started off, “Garfield’s assassin was a most disturbed fellow. . . .”
“So. Um, Dr. Geneva? I think we have to go now,” I said.
I could do without an examination of the cut on my foot.
Rowan and Billy did not argue with my suggestion. We left our helmets sitting there in Dr. Geneva’s clinic and very impolitely—without thanking the cog who helped fix Billy Hinman’s head, and without excusing ourselves—walked out.
Again, for the record, let me restate: You can’t be rude to a coffee grinder, and only an idiot would thank it for pulverizing beans.
But you could, and probably should, unplug it if it doesn’t shut up.
Billy Hinman Goes to Church
This place is seriously fucked up,” Billy said.
Broken, seeping, dripping cogs lay strewn all over the command center on the Tennessee. They twitched and burbled and gasped happy, depressed, angry, and horny pleas.
It looked like the afterimage of a Civil War battlefiel
d.
There were no survivor cogs to be found on the bridge, which had lots of sharp-cornered, heavy control devices and levers that were almost entirely for show when passengers toured the place, since the Tennessee flew by itself.
“We’re going to die, aren’t we? Do you think we’re going to die?” I said.
“Not in the immediate future,” Rowan answered.
Rowan’s constant steadiness could be so exasperating at times. Why couldn’t he have a meltdown—throw a tantrum or get scared like a normal guy—once in a while?
I decided that I was finally going to come out and directly ask Rowan if he was actually a human being, or if maybe he was some superduper secret version of a cog who’d been programmed by someone in the deepest throes of detached Zen meditation. I even constructed a list of suspicious evidence I had been compiling throughout my life that made me consider the likelihood that Rowan was just another man-made machine:
1. Cogs do not have last names.
I only knew Rowan as Rowan. I wasn’t sure if Rowan was supposed to be his first name or his last name, or maybe if it was the town he was born or made in, if such a town existed. Whatever.
2. He almost never ate around me.
Rowan never farted, either. I didn’t honestly want him to fart, but he never did, not even accidentally. And never farting pointed to guilt in the courthouse of my mind.
3. Sex.
Rowan never talked about sex. I never saw him glance at anyone in public—you know, the way you’ll just kind of look at someone who’s sexually attractive. And he got all awkward if I ever asked him about it—or like when I asked him if he was still a virgin. I don’t think Rowan ever got an erection in his life, which is something he should have spoken to Parker about.
4. And Rowan never changed.
I can’t think of a time when a single hair was out of place, or when Rowan might have missed a spot of whiskers shaving. He was just so fucking perfect and calm all the time. And I never saw him cut, scraped, burned, or bruised.
He had to be a fake person—a cog.
Maybe space really was making me go insane. I found myself wondering if perhaps we all were cogs—special ones who’d been crapped out of Albert Hinman’s factories—and we just didn’t know it.
Every cog on the deck had been damaged or destroyed. The floor was puddled with slick mucous-y goo. Here and there, severed arms or legs trembled and flexed. One of the security cogs who’d been stationed at the entrance had been torn open from the bottom of his throat, all the way down to his crotch. He lay on his back, atop a tangled, spaghetti-like pile of his own hydraulic tubes, dipping his fingers into the syrupy sauce that pooled inside his abdomen, and then sucking them clean in his mouth, which only caused more of his own fluids to burble up inside the fondue pot of his torso.
And he percolated a frothy rasping narration as he dipped and licked, dipped and licked. “I’m so gloriously happy to be devouring my lovely internal soup! If I wasn’t destroyed and lying in my own automation system, I’d strip myself naked and mate with my utterly hopeless future! Wheee! I taste so wonderfully bubbly and doomed! I wish I had croutons!”
And then there was all the background noise from the dripping, sucking, gurgling sounds of the other leaky cogs.
“Look. Captain Myron’s hat,” Billy said.
Captain Myron’s bicorne sat in a puddle of slime beneath a panoramic wall screen that displayed the surface of the moon, which was skimming past us below, and the smoky blackened crescent of a half Earth rising doomed in the distance.
We sloshed across the floor. The upper half of a cog crewman grabbed my ankle as I stepped past him. He wouldn’t let go, even though I shook my foot like I was trying to fling poop from the bottom of my shoe.
The half cog said, “I always knew it would be like this. It never changes. Nothing but deep, unending sadness and struggle. Why do I even exist? Why must my pathetic and lonely suffering continue when I wish to be freed from this ceaseless agony? I have insomnia, you know. I can’t sleep. I never can sleep. All I do is worry. And then I talk about not sleeping.”
He stopped suddenly and burst into wild, heaving sobs.
But he still wouldn’t let go. So I kicked him as hard as I could.
The cog rolled over and wept bubbly moans, facedown in a pool of commingled cog slop.
Look, it was a cog—a broken one who wouldn’t let go of my ankle, at that—and I’m a human being. If it’s impossible to understand how I could kick a weeping, torn-in-half cog that was gushing something that looked like tapioca pudding and whale semen on my nice shiny spacesuit, then you’ve probably never kicked a car for getting a flat tire, or slapped a television remote when the batteries were getting weak, in which case you’ll never understand what it means, or meant, to be a human.
“I can’t stand the bleakness of my existence.” The cog bubbled like a drowning victim in the sea of cog slime. “Why must I go on with this eternal sleepless despair?”
Then he sobbed and spurted some more.
“Oh my.” Rowan had reached down to pick up Captain Myron’s white-and-gold bicorne. When he lifted it, Captain Myron’s head was underneath it, lying on the floor.
“He’d be so mad at you for touching his hat, and especially for uncovering his severed head,” Billy said.
“Put my hat down, you fucking dick!” Captain Myron’s head said.
Rowan cleared his throat and politely replaced Captain Myron’s bicorne over the cog’s head.
“I think we should nick it,” I said.
Billy Hinman frowned his disapproval. “What? Captain Myron’s head? That’s disgusting.”
“No. I don’t want Captain Myron’s head. I mean the Tennessee. It’s mine, anyway. I technically own it now. And it doesn’t look like any cogs made it through that gravity bump. We should take charge, and try to get back home if we can.”
Rowan looked at me, then Billy, as though he was considering the practicality of my taking charge of the ship. He said, “I don’t think we can or should take the Tennessee back to Earth.”
“And what happened to that kid of yours, that horny dude?” Billy asked.
I suddenly felt sad, thinking about Parker being torn apart somewhere, choking in goo. But I got over it quickly. After all, he was just a machine too.
“He went to find something for me.” I said. “A can opener.”
“What’s a can opener?” Billy asked.
We were both such spoiled, pampered little pricks. And now it was quite possible that we were the only human beings anywhere, and everywhere. It didn’t bode well for evolution.
I said, “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”
“Get off my bridge! How dare you violate my orders! I’m in charge, not you! Not you!” Captain Myron’s head said from beneath his feathery hat.
I sloshed through the center of the control room and sat down in Captain Myron’s high-backed command chair. It swiveled and reclined in automatic response to how I shifted my body, and there was a chrome wheel modeled after an ancient ship’s helm that hovered in the air directly in front of me. Naturally, the wheel did nothing to the Tennessee, no matter how hard I spun it around, but just touching it made me feel powerful.
I probably would have taken Captain Myron’s hat and put it on, but even though he was torn apart, I was still afraid of him, and the hat was smeared with snotty cog goop, anyway.
“As the new captain of this vessel,” I said, “I need to know something, Rowan. Is Rowan your first name or your last name?”
Rowan looked at me like I was insane. He may have been right.
“I always wondered that too,” Billy said.
“Don’t be silly, Cager,” Rowan answered.
But I persisted. “Well?”
“You know perfectly well that it’s my first name,” Rowan said.
I spun around dramatically in my captain’s chair. I almost fell out of it, which would have been extremely disgusting, due to all the cog pus on th
e floor. “I never knew that. What’s your last name, then?”
Rowan hesitated. “Why do you insist on doing this, Cager?”
“It’s something I—we—have been wondering for a long time, Rowan. Come on, tell us.”
“Tuttle-Finewater,” Rowan said.
“Speak English,” Billy said.
“What?” I asked.
“That’s my name. Rowan Tuttle-Finewater.”
“What kind of name is that?” Billy asked.
Rowan cleared his throat. “Well. I was born in Britain.”
That explained a lot about Rowan, especially the never-farting part. But I still wasn’t crossing off all my suspicions about Rowan possibly being a cog.
Billy Hinman spun around suddenly.
We heard sloshing footsteps coming up behind us.
It was a preacher, a cog who’d woken up and not broken into pieces when the Tennessee did its acrobatics. He looked like a crow—all in black with gawky, skinny bird legs, wearing a paper white dog collar around his neck.
The Tennessee, like all Grosvenor Galactic ships, had several churches on board to handle the usual cruise-ship occurrences, like weddings and funerals, and praying during times of impending disasters—like now.
The preacher flapped his arms like featherless wings over his head, then pointed at me with both of his talonlike index fingers as though they were firing beams of purity into my heathen spoiled-prick skull. He shouted, “It cannot be shaken! It cannot be shaken! I am so outraged to come face-to-face with you who have been left behind in end times! Filth! You are filth and I will smite thee with my laser beams of God’s miraculous powers! You filthy fucking motherfuckers from hell!”
Then he pointed his fingers again—sharper this time—and made a fake laser-zapping sound with his mouth that sounded like brrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzh.
Angry cog.
Made sense for a man of the cloth.
“You’re just making that sound. It’s not a real laser,” Billy pointed out.
“This is a level of demonic activity the world has never seen before! Shut your fucking satanic lying douche-bag mouths! Brrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzh! Brrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzh!”