I looked at Rowan.
Rowan looked at Billy.
I said, “Do you guys feel anything?”
Billy shrugged. “A little guilty over what I did with Mrs. Jordan, maybe.”
The preacher, whose name turned out to be Reverend Bingo, widened his eyes to the size of billiard balls, clutched at his throat, and flung himself backward, down into the oozing gravy and burbling cogs on the floor of the bridge.
“I come unto you speaking in diverse tongues!”
Reverend Bingo kicked and splashed and choked himself.
“I should have bought the blue car! I should have bought the blue car! I should have bought the blue car!”
Reverend Bingo, whom I theorized was Pentecostal, appeared to be channeling a message from a higher source that may have been a car dealership.
Reverend Bingo also happened to be lying on top of a crewmember cog that was spewing milky snot from his nose and mouth. Both of his arms had broken off.
Reverend Bingo continued his speaking in tongues, screaming, “I should have bought the blue car, motherfucker! I should have bought the blue car, motherfucker!”
And the armless cog beneath the preacher burbled, “I have an erection.”
Billy Hinman said, “This is the most church I’ve been to in my entire life.”
Getting Out of the Memphis Hotel
Meg said, “Here, put your helmet on.”
“I’m going to need to see a doctor,” Jeffrie said. “I’m going to eventually need my implant recharged. Lloyd gets the blockers for me, and he gives me my medicine. But if we can’t go back home . . . I’m scared.”
“I know.”
The room inside the Memphis Hotel had gone completely dark.
The girls snapped their helmets into place. Spotlights activated from the sides of each of them.
“We should try to get out of here now,” Meg said.
Meg Hatfield and Jeffrie Cutler walked through the wreckage of Deck 21, which sounded like a cave with a thousand aquariums percolating air bubbles inside it. Not all the cogs on the deck had been destroyed. Some lay sleeping in puddles of slime, waiting for human passengers to arrive so they might wake up. But a few others had been jostled into their artificial existence by the blip in gravity, and they wandered around in their gambling or sex-trade costumes, simultaneously proclaiming their glee, shouting outrage, expressing their despondence, or talking about their erections.
“Do you think we’re going to die?” Jeffrie asked.
“Probably not for a really long time.”
As the girls neared the entryway to Deck 21, they saw one of the security-guard cogs who patrolled the door to keep out underage kids. At first the security cog didn’t pay attention to Meg and Jeffrie; he was too preoccupied eating the dripping forearm of another cog.
“Why are they eating each other? Are they supposed to do that?” Jeffrie whispered.
Meg shook her head. “This is crazy. Something is really wrong.”
And that was exactly when the guard noticed the girls.
“What are you doing in those suits? Don’t trigger me! Don’t trigger me! I am grievously offended! How dare you force me to confront something that disagrees with all my constructs!”
All the while as the security cog expressed his outrage, he spewed little moist bits of cog flesh and dripped milky ropes of snotty hydraulic fluid from his mouth.
“Safe space! I’m being victimized by limiting parameters of what I expect to happen! I don’t deserve this! It is not nice! Why are you inflicting such abuse on me?” he sprayed. “Why? Why? Why?”
The security guard began punching himself in the eyes. It sounded like coconuts banging together.
Meg and Jeffrie hurried past him to the door. They could see from the end of the street that opened up on the city of Deck 21 that the door had been stuck open by the corpse of a security cog who was missing both of his arms.
Finally, they had a way out of Deck 21.
“I am violated! I have been violated!” the cog shrieked while he continued pounding his fists into his own face.
Meg grabbed Jeffrie’s wrist and pulled her along. “Come on.”
Thanks for Not Killing Me
Nothing went back to normal on the Tennessee, not that it had ever actually been there to begin with.
It was just like Earth!
We spent the rest of the night—if that’s what it could be called—cleaning up the messes in our rooms, just so we could get some sleep. Although we offered, Rowan refused to allow me and Billy to help him put things back in order inside his stateroom.
Typical Rowan—we never so much as caught a glimpse of what the inside of his room looked like.
Rowan was always such a dick about letting anyone observe the outside chances that he might actually be a human—like, God forbid, see that the guy owned real socks and underwear, or that he brushed his teeth, like everybody else.
After Billy and I turned out our lights, it was impossible for me to go to sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about how badly I’d messed up everybody’s everything, and, yes, I was worried about Parker.
I had to assume that like the majority of cogs on board the Tennessee, Parker was lying in pieces somewhere, an armless and legless torso gushing warm fluids, and babbling on and on about his unrequited erection.
Poor Parker!
And in the absolute dark of our room—because there is nothing as absolutely dark as the lightlessness of space—Billy Hinman said this to me: “Cager? I just want to say I’m sorry.”
I practically choked. Was he kidding?
“For what? It’s my fault we nearly died up here. Just give me a day or two. I may still succeed in getting us killed after all.”
Billy Hinman laughed, and in the split second of silence that followed I thought about how I couldn’t remember the last time Billy laughed like that—a real, genuine, normal kid kind of laugh.
And Billy said, “Well, I do have to say that I admire your talents when it comes to nearly getting us all killed. But thanks for getting off the Woz, Cager.”
“Oh. Okay. You know I’d do anything for you.”
“Really?”
Then I had to laugh. “Well, almost anything.”
Billy Hinman was that guy who would eagerly have sex with anyone.
“Damn.”
“Yeah. Well. Um, sorry, Billy.”
“I forgive you.”
Then he said, “You’re not doing anything stupid, like trying to find any Woz up here?”
I heard Billy turn over in his bed. I could feel him staring across the room at me, even if it was impossible to see anything.
I said, “Well, I’m not going to lie. Of course I’d always want some again. I even thought about trying one of the schools on board. But I’d never do something as crazy as enroll in school just to get a few puffs of Woz. I just don’t know if I’ll ever not like getting hacked up.”
“Cheepa Yeep,” Billy said.
“Yeah. Cheepa fucking Yeep.”
“So. Are you scared?” Billy asked.
I thought about it. “I think every day, down there, I was always more scared about things that would never happen to me than I am up here with all the things that really might happen to me.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“And besides, I’ve got you here with me. I’d be out of my mind without you here,” I said.
“And Rowan,” Billy pointed out.
“Rowan’s such a dick sometimes.”
“I know.”
“We should really get him drunk. Or laid. Or both.”
“That’s really sick, Cager,” Billy said. “Well, maybe we could get him drunk, though. And, Cager?”
“What?”
“I’m glad you’re not mad at me about all this. Thanks for being here too. You’re my only friend.”
“Oh man. Shut up. If we both start crying, we’re going to end up sacked up together before morning, whatever morning is up here.”
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“Crying is good for you, Cager.”
Billy Hinman was no quitter.
I said, “Um.”
And Billy said, “Good night.”
“Good night, Billy. I love you, dude.”
“Yeah.”
Out of Bed and Into the Tennessee
Cager? Cager?”
At first I struggled to concentrate enough to figure out where I was and what was going on.
Billy Hinman knelt at the side of my bed, grabbing onto my bare shoulder and shaking me, to wake me up.
“Is something wrong?” I said.
“No. But come on, get out of bed. Rowan’s not up yet, and I want to leave before he wakes up.”
“Leave? We can’t leave. Dude, we’re in space.”
I closed my eyes, like that was all I needed to say.
“Look: I don’t even know how long we’ve been up here. . . .”
“A week or so.”
Billy Hinman and I hadn’t stepped outside our stateroom for nearly two days. Rowan insisted we stay put until he was confident the Tennessee had stabilized. So we’d basically been trapped, prisoners of Rowan’s unwavering commitment to always take care of me.
Rowan had been bringing our meals, and we entertained ourselves as reasonably as we could, but being stuck here, and waiting for Rowan to give us permission to leave, quickly proved to be unbearably boring.
And we could no longer stand to watch Rabbit & Robot. Nobody who wasn’t on Woz could ever make it through that program.
Billy sighed. “Whatever, Cager. Okay, a week . . .”
“Maybe more, if you count the trip on the transpod.”
“Shut up. Will you listen to me? I’ve—we’ve—been up here a long time, and we haven’t seen or done anything fun yet. And I want to get out of here before Rowan makes us be all responsible and well groomed.”
“What about Parker? What about Lourdes? They’re pretty fun,” I argued.
Then I was sad again, because Parker and Lourdes were most likely dead.
We hadn’t seen either of them in days—since before the little gravitational blip.
Billy Hinman ripped the covers away from my bed and threw them onto the floor.
“Dude. Get out of bed, put some clothes on, and let’s go,” he said.
I sat up and stretched. “I never thought I’d see the day when you’d tell me to put on clothes.”
“Whatever, Cager, as you like to say.” And Billy added, “And how can you tell it’s a day, anyway?”
“You’re not going to take me to church, are you?”
Billy shook his head.
I said, “As long as there’s no Reverend Bingo involved, I suppose I could sneak out with you, even if we are poorly groomed.”
“Get some pants on.”
I got up and stood in the middle of the floor, barefoot and in my underwear. There was no way of telling whether I’d been asleep for five minutes or twelve hours. Space fucks with you in that way, and I wouldn’t recommend it to any human beings who may one day read this. We used to have this highly underappreciated thing called THE SUN that gave us regular cycles of day and night.
It was something!
I kicked around in the scattered bedding on the floor and uncovered some socks, a pair of pants, and a reasonably clean T-shirt, but I was very much in favor of Billy Hinman’s lets-not-be-well-groomed edict.
So Billy Hinman and I, after all that time, went out to do the kinds of things that teenage boys are supposed to do when they’re stuck in a shithole as big as the Tennessee.
And the Tennessee was a big shithole.
We spent more than an hour riding the elevator from one deck to another, finding nothing but dark and empty floors of unoccupied staterooms.
“This place is kind of creepy,” Billy said.
And I added, “It’s like a horror movie.”
“Heh. It’s kind of like that stupid fifty-year-old movie we watched at Paula’s house—Eden Five Needs You 4. Remember? The one where those two teenage boys are taken into space so their sperm can be used to start a new race of human beings?”
“That movie was so dumb,” I said. “Nobody in their right mind would ever want to start a new human race.”
“Well, who knows? It could happen, Cager.”
“No one’s using my sperm, Bill.”
“Whatever.”
Eventually, we made it out of the empty hotel decks and arrived at Deck 19, which turned out to be one of the Tennessee’s recreation levels.
Deck 19 was named Alberta.
Alberta was an exact model of the kind of sprawling green wilderness you’d find in the Canadian Rockies during midsummer. I wondered if there was any kind of contingency plan to rename the deck as something non-Canadian, on account of the invasion of Pennsylvania and such.
No matter, though. Who was left to care about such pointless things as grudges, anyway?
Designing attractions like Alberta was something the people at Hinsoft International did better than anything else. It was enormous and open—so big that you couldn’t even tell there was a ceiling overhead. When Billy and I came out of the elevator, we stepped under the signpost identifying the deck and then walked out into a massive forest with tall evergreens that seemed to stretch infinitely on ahead of us into the distance. Of course, none of it was real, but it all looked and sounded and smelled real, and in space that’s pretty much good enough. Also, as far as we could see, nothing had been destroyed or rearranged during the gravitational accident.
And although it looked like Billy and I were entering an area of absolute wilderness, it was impossible to get lost here. After all, this was the Tennessee, the cruise ship to end all cruise ships, where nothing could go wrong. Well, hopefully nothing else could go wrong.
So Billy and I walked through the perfectly manicured forest along a path following arrowed signs that promised somewhere ahead of us was the Alpine Tea House.
“Tea sounds good,” Billy said.
“Okay.”
The trail followed the shoreline of a blue-green lake—a scaled-down replica of Canada’s Lake Louise. There were patches of fake snow here and there along the exposed borders of the trail, but naturally—or unnaturally, as the case may be—nothing in the Tennessee ever got colder or hotter than human comfort levels.
“People are going to get really bent out of shape when they see all this Canadian shit,” Billy said. “What if someone like Charlie Greenwell and his buddies ever came up here?”
I shook my head. “Billy, there aren’t going to be any more people coming up here. Probably not ever. But the bright side is, at least we own this place.”
“Maybe. For all that’s worth,” Billy said.
I stopped at the edge of the lake and sat down beside the path. There, Billy and I threw rocks out into the water. It was probably the most normal thing the two of us had ever done in our lives, except for being in outer space, alone on a cruise ship.
I said, “Have you ever thrown rocks in a lake before?”
“It’s a fake lake,” Billy said. “And these are fake rocks, and it’s probably fake wet stuff only pretending to be water.”
“It’s close enough to the real thing to occupy our time,” I argued.
“I guess it is pretty nice,” Billy said.
“It’s weird, isn’t it?”
Billy Hinman didn’t answer me. He didn’t have to. He just threw another rock.
So I said, “Have you ever thought about all the things you’ve never done? Or thought about the things you’ll probably never get to do again?”
“Like Justin Pickett? Or Mrs. Jordan? Or Katie St. Romaine? Or watch you snort Woz while we play Hocus Pocus with our fake friends?”
“Please tell me you did not have sex with Katie St. Romaine.”
“Don’t be an idiot. She was your girlfriend. But I would have, if I could. And why are you getting all morbid and shit, anyway?” Billy asked.
“I don’t know. Because
I don’t think we’re ever going to get out of here.”
“So what? We have a lake, even if it is fake. We have Rowan, even if he doesn’t act like a human being most of the time. What else do we need?”
“Whatever.”
So Billy Hinman and I took off all our clothes that day—or whatever it was—in the woods, and the two of us went swimming in the Tennessee’s fake Lake Louise.
The water was warm and felt nice enough, I suppose, but no matter how far out from the shore Billy and I swam, the lake never got more than chest deep. What would you expect from a fake lake, right?
A good fake lake will be designed to minimize real drownings.
At least it was one more of those normal kid things that I could check off my list, even if a normal kid would never be able to go swimming naked with his best friend while also orbiting endlessly around the moon up on the Tennessee.
We stood in the middle of the lake, and Billy said, “See? I knew we’d be able to find something fun to do without Rowan around to watch us. I bet there’s all kinds of shit to do here. Like, enough to last us forever.”
I kept thinking about the girl I saw through the wicket on Deck 21.
“Hey, Cager! I’m here! Hello!”
The sudden interruption startled us from the lull of being in bath-warm fake lake water. Billy and I both turned to look at the shore, by where we’d left our clothes.
And Parker was there, perched in the branches of an evergreen, about twenty feet above the trail.
My valet cog waved with one arm while desperately hugging the trunk of his tree with the other. “Cager! Hello! Guess what? I found a can opener for you! There was one in the tea house!”
“You are really weird,” Billy said.
For some stupid reason I was so embarrassed, and not just because a stupid cog had been watching Billy and me swimming naked together in fake Lake Louise, but because I was actually happy that Parker was still alive.
Or turned on. Or whatever.
“Can you help me?” Parker shouted.
That could mean anything, coming from a cog who’d been programmed like Parker.