“Well okay, Maurice. It was nice seeing you again,” I said.
I blamed it on space and Meg Hatfield—that I had totally lost my mind and was exchanging pleasantries with an out-of-control predatory machine-giraffe.
And Maurice, always polite and warm, said, “But, tell me, would you like to join me? Perhaps you would enjoy a ride on my back, peu jeune garçon?”
I half faked a yawn. “No thanks, Maurice. I need to get some sleep.”
“Well then, come visit me again at the lake. Come swimming with your little friend. We can all have tea together at the petite maison de thé!”
“Sure, Maurice. I’ll see you around,” I said.
I went back to the control room after saying good-bye to Maurice.
Meg shook her head. Her elbows rested on the desktop, and her face was pressed into her palms.
“There’s something wrong with me. I just can’t get it.”
“You’re just tired. Maybe you should try to get some sleep.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “What happened to Captain Myron?”
“You mean Captain Myron’s head. Well, um, let’s just say that thanks to a giraffe named Maurice, the ship’s a little less angry now,” I said.
And at the opposite end of the Tennessee, in the lower west arrivals deck air lock, which was open to space and the barren surface of the silent moon, my three cogs bobbed and drifted from black cable nooses, floating gracefully like slow-motion sea fans.
Lourdes danced and wriggled and kicked her legs and farted.
“Yeee! Yippeee! I never want this to end! This is the greatest endlessly boring moment of my life!”
Unfortunately, I had failed to calculate the lengths of the nooses I’d tied around the necks of my cogs. Parker’s was too long, so my valet cog ended up trailing the Tennessee on the outside of the air lock, flying like a tethered satellite, alone and exposed in the nothingness between us and the moon.
Parker looked at the white-gray cavitied surface of the moon, tugged at his crotch, and said, “I have an erection.”
And Milo, still missing one of his trouser legs from the seahorse attack, wept and wept. “I’m so cold. I’m so desperately alone and empty. Can someone please help me?”
A Sleep Sandwich
Meg refused to go to sleep.
But I was exhausted. And, in my exhaustion, all the frustration and worry that had been simmering inside me began to boil their way into my brain. I selfishly wanted Meg to come back to my room and go to bed. I imagined us sleeping together—just sleeping—the same way Billy Hinman liked to sleep with me.
I had never slept with a girl. It was just another one of those never-have-been, never-will-be things for Cager Messer, one of the richest kids in the world, or in lunar orbit, or wherever the fuck I was.
I didn’t give a damn about what else happened on the Tennessee. They were all just cogs, after all, and who honestly gave a shit if all the cogs on the Tennessee ended up eating each other? We could keep Meg and Jeffrie safe until the last of the cogs was gone.
Right?
But then I wondered about who would feed me, and who would bring me clean clothes. Rowan couldn’t be expected to do everything for me for all eternity. What if Rowan started to get too old for his job?
And what if I got lonely when all the cogs had been destroyed by Queen Dot’s Worm?
What a spoiled piece of shit I was.
And I hadn’t even spent a moment thinking about the three cogs I’d left dangling from nooses in the air lock—Parker, Lourdes, and Milo—because I hated myself for caring about them, as though they were something a little bit more than just a trio of v.4s. What if they caught whatever disease was cycling through our population of cogs? Would I have to watch them eat each other, or, worse yet, destroy them when they came for Meg and Jeffrie?
Cogs were just machines, nothing more. Like Captain Myron was, and Dr. Geneva and the insane Reverend Bingo and Maurice the giraffe and the can opener Parker found for me but I still hadn’t used.
I really wanted to go to bed.
With Meg Hatfield.
I needed to know I was human.
“Please, let’s go back and take a nap,” I said, “We’ve been awake for days.”
Meg didn’t answer; she just looked at me with an expression that said no.
“What’s a day?” Meg asked.
“A sandwich made between slices of sleep bread,” I said.
“Great. Now I’m hungry, Cager.”
But this time Meg Hatfield was smiling with her tired eyes, and I bit the inside of my lip.
“Do you want me to get us something to eat?” I asked.
“I was just kidding.”
“How can I ever know these things?”
“You’ll learn,” Meg said. She pushed herself to her feet. “There’s something else I need to try. I got my way into a computer here, but it was in a bank on Deck Twenty-One. Will you go there with me?”
That was a dumb question. I would have walked into an open air lock with Meg Hatfield.
“Um, yes.”
In the elevator Meg told me how she’d used a tire iron on Deck 21 to knock the head completely off a cog who’d been trying to eat Jeffrie.
She was incredible. I fantasized about being a valet cog and confessing to her right there in the elevator, matter-of-factly, that I had an erection. I kind of envied Parker, even if he was swinging from a noose in the absolute vacuum of space.
Whatever.
“We could pick up a couple of jack handles from those old cars there, just in case we need them,” Meg said.
“I’m still fully loaded with sneakers, too.”
“You’re funny.”
“I’m learning,” I said. “But what if I can’t get into Deck Twenty-One? What if I end up in security-cog jail?”
“Don’t worry. I changed your age when I got into the computer in the bank office. Billy’s, too. You are now an official, legal adult,” Meg said.
I considered all the things I could now get away with, and it also explained why nobody—no cog—hesitated to get Billy and me drunk on champagne at the New Year’s Eve party. But being an adult was also stupid, pointless.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
“I was trying to get Jeffrie and me out of Deck Twenty-One. I kind of thought—was hoping—you’d come back, and then the door would open for you.”
“You were hoping I’d come back?” I said.
“I only wanted the door to open, Cager. Nothing else.”
“What else did you change about me?”
“Let’s see. I made you a dropout from Grosvenor School, and you’re a former bonk who’s been in a mental ward for the past two years.”
I struggled to keep from saying anything dumb. Meg had to have been joking. I was just so stupid at figuring her out.
The elevator stopped, and the door opened onto the familiar entry foyer to Deck 21. It seemed like so long ago that I had first set eyes on Meg Hatfield through the wicket in the door.
“Wait,” I said. “How did you get through the doorway?”
“There was a dead cog propping the door open when we got out. Now’s our chance to see if I really did turn you into a twenty-one year-old,” Meg said.
“And a bonk,” I added.
“Rabbit.”
“I guess that makes you the robot.”
“I’m hungry again, in that case.”
I think I was actually starting to get Meg Hatfield.
“Well, here goes, Mooney.”
And when I walked up to the door below the enormous number 21, it slid open, exposing an old American city that looked like it had just come through a war, and not on the winning side.
Even up here in heaven, aboard the Tennessee, wars don’t just fight themselves.
Dumb Pointless Optimism
Hey. Hey, wake up.”
Jeffrie Cutler leaned over the bed and shook Billy’s shoulder.
“What do
you want?”
“I’m scared. Meg and your boyfriend left a couple of hours ago, and they’re not back.”
Billy Hinman reached back and felt around in the bed with his open hand.
“Cager’s not my boyfriend,” he said.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Whatever. But I’m sure they’ll be okay. Don’t be scared. How long have I been sleeping?”
Jeffrie looked at the time display on the wall above the girls’ bed. “I don’t know. Like, three or four hours.”
Billy groaned. “Oh. All right. We should just go back to sleep for a while.”
“Where do you think they went?”
“I have a rule about never talking to people when I’m asleep.”
Jeffrie turned the lights out and went back to her bed.
“You’re not crying, are you?” Billy asked.
“Shut up. I have a rule too.”
Jeffrie Cutler was obviously crying.
Billy sat up and put his feet on the floor. “Look, they’re okay—seriously. I bet Rowan’s with them, besides. No one can ever get into trouble around Rowan. That guy is boringness on legs.”
“I want to go home.” Jeffrie’s throat constricted on each word.
“I didn’t plan to get stranded here either. Rowan and I tricked Cager into getting on the transpod. And flying scares the shit out of me, but I was desperate to try to get Cager to clean up and stop doing so much Woz. And now I guess we’re trapped, so we might as well make what home we can here. Personally, I can’t even stand to look out the windows.”
Jeffrie lay in her bed and cried.
Billy sighed. Billy Hinman hated seeing anyone sad. “So. Um, before outer fucking space, where did you used to live?”
“Antelope Acres.”
“I never heard of it.”
Jeffrie took a long breath. “It’s a camp. In the desert by Mojave Field.”
“A camp?”
“I live in an old camper truck, with my brother.”
“You lived in a car? Oh my God—”
“Screw you, rich kid.”
“Hey, look, I didn’t mean anything. I just—well, Cager and I grew up like we were fucking museum pieces on display or something. Neither one of us ever knew any real people. I guess that’s why we need each other the way we do. Our parents even paid other kids to be fake friends for us,” Billy said.
“Oh. That sucks. I’m sorry.”
“It’s no big deal. But Cager would have killed himself down there,” Billy said. “He was all hacked up on Woz. Constantly.”
“But he didn’t go to school?”
“No.”
“Weird.”
“He used to smoke it or snort it every day—all day long—with a nutcase ex-bonk named Charlie Greenwell. He would have died if we didn’t trick him into coming up here. And he hated me for it at first, but me and Rowan saved his life.”
“Well, considering what’s happening down there now, I guess Meg saved my life by breaking into the code stuff and bringing me up here too. But we should go look for them,” Jeffrie said.
“The Tennessee is too big. We’d never find them, and we’d probably end up getting lost.”
“I’m really scared.”
“We’ll be okay. Keep telling yourself that.”
“Why?”
Billy said, “I don’t know. Dumb pointless optimism can work sometimes, right?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Yeah. Neither do I.”
You Better Watch Out for the Monkeys
The place smelled like stagnant water, gunpowder, detergent, butterscotch, and cog slime.
I gagged and covered my mouth and nose with my hand.
“What’s wrong?” Meg asked.
I pointed at my nose. “I can smell stuff that other people can’t smell.”
“What’s it smell like?”
“A moldy wet tennis shoe.”
“Oh.”
“Was it as bad as this when you left?”
Meg said, “It was kind of worse, because there were broken cogs all over the place. Now they’re pretty much all gone.”
“Well, not all of them,” I said.
Up on the ledge of a hotel building was a row of spike-headed gargoyles. Two of them had impaled cogs, slick with dried cog pus, their broken backs causing them to bend like melting wax figures. The impaled cogs moved their eyes and fingers. One of them, a woman cog with a cigarette display dangling from a belt that wrapped around her neck, smiled at me and Meg and said, “Oh! It’s so wonderful to see a human visitor on Deck Twenty-One! This is the happiest moment of my life! I’m so happy, I could rip my face off and throw it down so I could kiss you! Would you like a cigarette, handsome human boy?”
“Um, no thanks,” I said. “And please don’t rip your face off and throw it at me, cigarette lady.”
Then the cigarette-lady cog pointed at Meg and said, “But you better watch out for the monkeys! They’re hungry little darlings! Wheee! I am so happy!”
Meg and I stood beside a bloated yellow taxicab that was tipped upside down. The windshield had shattered into thousands of jagged diamonds all around our feet.
“Monkeys?” Meg said.
“I think we should look for one of those jack handles.”
Down the street, in front of the smashed window of a place called the Talisman Bath House, sat two large chimpanzees, their legs bent and their hands resting on the fake pavement of Deck 21’s Main Street, as though they were getting ready to launch themselves into a run. Their eyes were pinned on Meg.
Meg saw them too.
She glanced back toward the entrance as though gauging whether it would be possible to outrun them, but even I, with all my lack of ever having to figure out much of anything for myself, could see right away that it was not a feasible option.
Meg said, “Try to stall them if you can.”
The apes sprang forward and chimp-sprinted toward us, using their massive arms like speed-pistoning crutches. Well, they weren’t running at me; they were running for Meg. I may just as well have been invisible to them.
Meg got down on her hands and knees and crawled inside the overturned cab.
“That’s not a good place to hide!” I said.
“Shut up, Cager. I’m not hiding.”
And Meg, grunting, began to pull away the backrest of the rear seat in order to access the taxi’s trunk.
Once again, I marveled at how smart Meg Hatfield was.
But I only marveled for about a second and a half, because the chimps were so big and hairy and ugly that I nearly pissed myself in fright.
I held up my hands like I was doing standing-up push-ups. (By the way, I have never done a push-up in my life, and this made me add “do some push-ups” to my can-opener list.)
“Stop right there, cog chimps!” I said. “Get away from me. You’re ugly.”
The chimps paused and looked at each other in what I could only assume was startled confusion. The one on the left—an obvious male, which was nasty—turned to me and said, “Ugly? So now I’m ugly, too? I don’t even understand how I can go on from day to day. This is all so agonizing, so pointless.”
Then he fell into heaving, uncontrollable sobs.
Also, he had a thick German accent. Apparently, the Hinsoft division in charge of making the cog zoo animals for the Tennessee had offshored a lot of their coding.
“Stop crying! How many times do we have to go over this, Friedrich? How dare you draw all the attention onto yourself? I can’t stand this outrage! I am so filled with rage, I could explode! Shit! Shit, I hate you, fucker! Fuckboy! The fury! The fury wicked burns me!” The other chimp, a gray-haired male who sounded like he came from South Boston, howled.
“I sicken myself. I’m so sorry for being pathetic, Boner,” Friedrich said, weeping.
Boner sounded like a good South Boston name.
“There you go again, making this all about you! It is NOT about you, fuckface! Don’t trig
ger my boundaries! I know what’s best! I lived the experience! Fucker! Fuckboy!” Boner yelled. “We came to eat! It’s about the meal! And it’s about MY victimization and MY suffering, not yours, fuckboy! And it’s about camaraderie, you piece of German shit! I am SO WICKED FUCKING MAD RIGHT NOW!”
Clink.
A thick metal bar landed on the pavement beside my foot. I caught a glimpse of Meg’s hand slipping back through the window of the overturned taxi.
From inside she whispered, “Use it, Cager.”
And while the German chimpanzee sobbed and moaned, the one named Boner threw himself down onto the broken glass and pavement and began tearing tufts of hair from his own neck and punching himself in the balls.
“I hate you so much! I HATE YOU SO MUCH!”
I bent down and picked up the metal bar. It was shaped like a big black X, with two of its points formed into wrenches, and the others forged into a pry bar and a hammer claw. I found myself marveling at what a normal human-boy thing it was to hold a tool like this. Although I’d never be able to figure out its actual intended use, it made my hands pleasantly dirty.
And Meg Hatfield’s intended use for the thing involved Cager Messer bashing in the skulls of a couple of insane chimpanzees.
But they weren’t actual chimpanzees. They were just machines, right? A pair of short-circuited toaster ovens that served no purpose.
Also, I felt extremely manly in taking advantage of the opportunity to physically defend Meg Hatfield, even if I also was simultaneously sickened and terrified by what she was actually expecting me to do.
I took a deep breath.
Okay.
Boner had to go first.
Nobody likes tantrum-throwing chimps from South Boston.
“I deserve all this unending despair. Kill me first,” Friedrich wailed.
Boner punched and tore at himself. He kicked his opposably thumbed feet in the air and urinated. “How dare you? Stop making this all about yourself, fucker! You’re so fucking selfish! This is about ME! IT HAS NEVER BEEN ABOUT YOU!”
To be honest, Boner had a point.
Then Boner jammed his fingers down his throat and forced himself to vomit cog slime all over his chest.
I was beginning to see why Billy Hinman hated cogs so much, but at the same time I almost felt like I could watch this show all day.