I always tried to hold it to the point of pain whenever I went up into space. Any normal guy would, right?
I unhooked myself from the seat and swam past Lourdes, who opened her eyes as wide as twinned mineshafts and nodded proudly at the prospect of teaching me how to safely urinate as a male in space. Her smile seemed to split her face like an overripe tomato.
I groaned, then turned to Rowan and said, “Are we there yet?”
Printer Ketchup
Meg Hatfield had to figure things out on her own.
There were no instructional videos played for the cogs in second class. It was unnecessary. Cogs knew everything they needed to know and never had to learn anything else.
They also never needed to pee.
It must be very nice.
In fact, after the first few hours of wailing and moaning—and cheering, dancing, and applauding—every one of the second-class cogs, on their way to report for duty aboard the Tennessee, the cruise ship to end all cruise ships, went into silent sleep mode while Meg Hatfield and Jeffrie Cutler discussed plans to feed themselves and take care of other corporeal needs.
It didn’t matter much, because Meg and Jeffrie could have done anything they wanted to do and they would have appeared to be invisible as far as the cogs and flight attendants on the Grosvenor Galactic transpod were concerned, due to the code Meg had uploaded from her thumbphone earlier that day.
“I could totally darf this thing and nobody would ever know,” Jeffrie said.
“Nobody would know because nobody is actually on this flight, except for us,” Meg pointed out. “We’re packed in with a bunch of machines.”
“I saw a boy up there.” Jeffrie nodded her chin toward the barrier that sealed in the privilege of first class. “He was really cute, but I think he was hacked up on Woz or something.”
Meg said, “Cute? I’ve never heard you call a boy cute before. How old are you?”
“Fifteen. And shut up,” Jeffrie said. “He really is cute.”
“He’s most likely a cog.”
“No. I saw his eyes. I can tell.”
“That’s what you think,” Meg said.
Meg opened up her thumbphone.
“What are you going to do to us now? More code?” Jeffrie asked. “Why don’t you turn this thing around, and make them take us back home?”
“No. This time I really am going to call my dad.”
Jeffrie Cutler, like most of the burner kids from Antelope Acres, did not have a Hinsoft phone implanted inside her fingertips. “Ask him if he could let Lloyd know I’m with you.”
Nobody liked Lloyd Cutler, and Meg Hatfield’s father was no exception.
“Okay.”
But when Meg called, nothing happened.
“This sucks,” Meg said. “I guess there’s no phones up here in space.”
“Um, well, in that case, when are we going back?” Jeffrie asked.
“We’ll figure out something. Just enjoy the ride, Jeff.”
Jeffrie frowned. “I kind of feel weird, like maybe I’m going to puke or something.”
“Don’t think about it. You’re probably just hungry. I am. I’m going to figure out where the toilets are and look for something to eat. Okay?”
“All right.”
When Meg came back, she carried pouches of food: hamburgers and fries with bottles of water. It was the kind of food made at places Jeffrie and her brother Lloyd liked to set fire to.
“Food printers,” Meg said, waving the girls’ meal pouches in front of Jeffrie, “Really cool ones.”
“Thanks.”
Meg sat down beside Jeffrie and harnessed herself back into the recliner. “But the toilets are weird. It took me ten minutes to figure out how to use their female urinal, and by then I thought I was going to piss myself. It’s like hooking yourself up to a fucking electronic lamprey eel or something. And the pictures they have on the walls, with the characters from that kids’ show demonstrating how to use them, are really disturbing. If I was a guy, I’d be terrified of the male lamprey thing.”
Jeffrie tore at the opening of her food pouch. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Now I kind of have to go too.”
“Do you want me to show you how to do it?”
Jeffrie shook her head. “I’m not stupid. And I’m not scared, either.”
“Well, do me a favor. When you come back, see if you can print up some ketchup,” Meg said.
“No. I can’t do the reading and writing thing. Sorry.”
Meg said, “Well, then. I guess this pretty much means I can feed you whatever I want.”
Jeffrie unhooked her harness and got out of her seat.
“That doesn’t mean I’ll eat it, though.”
Jeffrie pulled herself away from the seat and drifted toward the toilets. She said, “Can you promise me one thing, Meg? Can you promise that you will get us back home before too long?”
“No worries, Jeff,” Meg said. “I promise.”
Like Nothing Else in Tennessee
Billy Hinman, who hated to fly, and hated anything that moved fast, had never been to space.
I watched his face, as confused and out of it as I was. Even in my state I knew there was nothing like seeing, for the first time, the massive hulk of the Tennessee through the portholes of a tiny Grosvenor Galactic transpod.
The Tennessee was so big, it was almost scary.
As a matter of fact, it really was scary to Billy Hinman. The Tennessee looked like a gigantic eye, floating in a low orbit over the moon. An eye as big as Boise.
“I don’t really want to go on that thing,” he said.
Then Billy shook his head and said, “What the fuck did I do, Cager?”
He covered his head with his blanket and turned away from the window.
On the second day of our flight to the Tennessee, I began to sweat and shake. It was just a little at first, but my guts clenched up in protest at the lack of Woz. I could not eat, despite Rowan’s pleading with me, and Lourdes’s unending manic performances.
Lourdes tried everything to make me feel better. She danced and sang, wrapped me in blankets, swabbed my clammy skin with warm washcloths, and shaved me, which was unnecessary, to be honest.
Billy Hinman, my best friend in life,complained. “You know, he’s not the only human passenger in first class,” he told her.
So Lourdes put chilled cucumber slices on Billy Hinman’s eyelids, and she even asked him if he’d like a hand job, which made me kind of jealous—and horny, too—just thinking about Lourdes and her “Thursday” panties.
Rowan, arching an eyebrow, stared at me silently.
Maybe being in space for two days with a Wozhead in withdrawal was wearing on everyone’s sanity, even our nonhuman flight attendant’s. And Lourdes’s offer to Billy was just typical of my experience around people—and even cogs—who were all so hopelessly attracted to Billy Hinman.
And I wasn’t entirely surprised when Billy Hinman told her, “No,” and shut his eyes. Some people did like to do sexual things with cogs, but for his entire life Billy Hinman always told me how much he’d hated the things on which his father’s empire had been built.
If Lourdes had asked me if she could give me a hand job, I would have probably said yes, but then again, I was in the viselike grips of Woz withdrawal after forty hours’ sitting, harnessed in and hopelessly trapped.
“Are you sure? No?” Lourdes asked.
“No,” Billy grumbled.
“Oh, well! I’m so thrilled to be part of the Grosvenor Galactic experience! I’m happiest when I can make people happy, and share in their happiness!”
I felt left out, ignored, and unhappy. I also wanted Woz and began plotting some method by which I could access a clinic as soon as we got to the Tennessee.
Then Lourdes farted again and did a wild dance that made her look like a terrified, fleeing squid as she floated in the air above our recliners.
“I?
??m a squid! I’m a squid!” she said. “I am so happy! We are almost at the Tennessee! I am a happy flying squid!”
And Lourdes’s skirt lifted up again.
Rowan caught me staring at her underwear.
In the weightlessness of space, you might not be able to get Woz, but if you’re a sixteen-year-old guy, you can always get erections.
I was embarrassed. Stupid thin paper orange spacesuits.
So I said, “I don’t know what’s happening to me, Rowan.”
“It’s been a long trip, Cager. I think we’ll all feel better when we get off this transpod,” Rowan said.
And I added, “Hand job from a robot or not.”
Rowan, as usual, was not flustered by my comment.
And Lourdes gurgled, “Whee! Whee! Strap yourselves in for docking! This is my favorite part! I think I just bubbled out some squid ink in my undies!”
I wondered what color “Friday” was.
And behind us, through the sealed doorway that separated us from second class, as the cogs I’d nearly forgotten about stirred to their active modes, came the muted sounds of imitation humanity: cries of joy, and pained screams of outrage. And inconsolable sobbing, too.
All of human history was with us, hardwired into the circuitry of machines that had never been born and were not predestined to ever die.
The first thing that happens after the docking mechanisms link on the Tennessee is the sudden generation of gravity on the transpod. It’s a deeply sickening feeling—like suddenly being uncomfortably full after a ridiculously large meal. It hurts in the deepest pits of your stomach—like you’ve just been kicked in the balls.
It takes a while to catch your breath. Unless you’re a cog, that is. The ones in second class were all as noisy, happy, furious, and despondent as they had ever been.
Billy Hinman groaned and cupped his hands under his balls.
I said, “That always happens to me, too.”
And before the deck crew on the Tennessee opened the portal to allow the first-class passengers out, Lourdes came through the cabin with an eye scanner that would automatically identify us, assign and unlock our cabins, and credit our accounts with money—something that was limitless as far as a Hinman or Messer was concerned.
We also had to sit through one last presentation—a show with Mooney and Rabbit and a bunch of actor cogs in orange flight suits—demonstrating the terrifying procedure for getting into one of the Tennessee’s lifeboats, which were smaller versions of transpods designed for twenty passengers, if we were ordered to do it. I shuddered to think how horrifying it would be if we ever had to evacuate the Tennessee, and what might possibly cause that to happen.
I tried to ignore the show, but it was impossible.
“Don’t worry, folks!” Mooney told us. “We’ve never had to use lifeboats on a Grosvenor Galactic cruise ship! Yet! Ha ha ha! Just kidding, folks!”
Then Mooney got sucked out an open bay door on the lifeboat deck and shrieked wildly as he contorted dancelike in the weightless black of space.
It was the stupidest and most frightening thing I ever had to sit through.
The hatch finally came open, and I was immediately assaulted by all the strange smells of the Tennessee. It definitely did not smell anything like burning and toxic Los Angeles.
“I hope you feel better! Have a wonderful time on the Tennessee! It made me so happy to spend this time with you! I can’t wait to see you again!” Lourdes squealed as Billy passed her. Then Lourdes threw her arms around Billy Hinman and clutched his hair passionately in her coggy fingers and began humping her hips into his.
“Whee!” she gurgled. “Whee! Whee! Whee!”
Things like that just seemed to happen to Billy all the time.
Rowan pried his hands between them like he was shucking apart an enormous part-man, part-machine oyster. “Please. Lourdes. Get a grip on yourself.”
Then Lourdes farted and started dancing again.
We left the transpod and stepped out into the vast arrivals hall of the Tennessee.
I sighed. The next couple of days were going to be impossible.
Parker, My Valet
Once Billy and I were inside our room, I came unglued, then went back together the wrong way, and fell apart again.
It felt like bugs were crawling all over my skin.
I tore at the paper spacesuit I’d been wearing. Billy tried to calm me down, told me to take a shower. Although there were showers on the transpod, I hadn’t taken one in days. Billy pointed out the clean clothes and underwear that had already been prepared for us in advance of our arrival, but nothing he did seemed to make any difference to me.
I panicked. I was covered with bugs.
I tore the spacesuit off and began scratching everywhere, leaving railroad tracks of red welts all over my skin.
“Dude. Get into the shower. You’ll feel better.”
“I can’t make them go away,” I said.
Billy Hinman ran to the bathroom and turned on the water, then wrestled me into the shower, holding me under the stream until I stopped scratching.
It must have been pathetic and frightening for Billy.
I finally calmed down. The water poured through my hair and into my mouth. Billy was soaked. He looked like he was in pain, like he was about to cry.
But crying was something I had never in my life seen Billy Hinman do.
And then I said, “You’re so perfect, Billy. Everyone loves you. If I hadn’t watched you grow up, I’d swear you were a fucking cog.”
Billy turned off the water. He managed to get me to lie down on my bed and tried to cover me with a sheet, but I kept kicking it away.
“Whatever,” Billy said. “I’m going to get Rowan. I’ll find some help for you, Cager.”
“Fuck you, Billy. Get me some Woz. You promised you’d get me some Woz.”
* * *
I had no idea how long I’d been dead.
That’s what it was like, crashing from Woz. There were no dreams, just an empty and sweat-soaked blackness. When I woke up—maybe it was two hours later, maybe it was four days, not that such measurements amounted to much up here where time loses its calibration with suns and shadows—I was twisted up in my sheets, completely naked, and I felt as though I’d been entirely hollowed out, as though the skin that contained what there was that made Cager Messer Cager Messer was nothing more than an eggshell. It was like I was a desiccated husk that if you pressed into it hard enough would dissolve into a faint puff of dusty smoke.
Billy Hinman was gone, and the room was dark.
I had a dim memory of being on the transpod, of tearing off the orange paper suit that had been required flight gear.
“Billy? Are you here?”
Nothing.
I wobbled to my feet, wrapping my sheet into a toga, and made my way to the bathroom so I could put water on my face. I ended up drinking three glasses and got a stomachache.
Rowan’s room was next door. Maybe Billy was with Rowan, I thought.
I stepped out through our door and into the hallway.
“Hey! Are you guys in there?” I called out.
I leaned against the wall between our door and Rowan’s. I opened my thumbphone. I thought about calling Mr. Messer, or my mom. That would have been stupid. What had they ever done to fix anything in my life? I punched in Katie St. Romaine’s number. Nothing. No answer there, either.
Something was wrong. Something was wrong with everything.
“It’s quite impossible to lock yourself out of your room.”
I hadn’t noticed that my personal Tennessee attendant had been standing in the hallway, watching me.
There were personal valet cogs assigned to me on every one of my father’s ships. Their job was to take care of anything a young, unmonitored teenage Messer could possibly want. And, given the number of cogs on board, and since the three of us—me, Rowan, and Billy—were the only human beings on the ship, it meant that each of us had hundreds of hel
pful and potentially angry, happy, depressed, horny, or condescending v.4 cogs all to himself.
What fun.
It turned out that my Tennessee valet was incredibly needy and simply would not leave me the fuck alone.
My deck valet—a young, soft-voiced male v.4 made to look like some big-eyed and innocent teenage bellhop—continued, “Simply wave your palm in front of your door and it will unlock for you. Here. Do you want me to show you how?”
I closed my phone screen. The cog walked toward me.
I said, “No.”
The valet stopped on the other side of Rowan’s door and tilted his head slightly as he stared at me. I know that cogs are just machines, but I’ve always been a bit creeped out by people—especially ones who are not exactly alive—who stare directly into my eyes.
“My name is Parker,” he said. “I’m your personal valet, here to help with whatever you want or need, Cager Messer.”
Parker kept staring and staring at me. I looked at the floor.
“Let me show you how to do it,” Parker said.
Well, he certainly was not outraged, depressed, or overjoyed. I was trying to decide if Parker was one of those know-it-all, smug v.4s, or if maybe he was a horny one. Either way, I immediately decided I did not like Parker, my personal valet.
“No thanks. Really. I know how, and I’m not locked out.”
Then Parker touched my naked arm.
I said, “Um. Parker.”
Undeterred, my valet continued, “But, poor thing, haven’t you found your clothes? Do you need me to show you where the clothing we’ve prepared for you is located? I could help you get out of this bedsheet and dressed into something nicer. Wouldn’t that feel better? You’ll need a tie and jacket for dinner, besides. Please allow me to serve as your valet and help you dress and groom. It’s my job, after all.”
Parker was still staring into my eyes. And he was uncomfortably close. He brushed his fingers over my hand, and that was it.
“Look. Parker. I’ll tell you what: You go back to your post over there, and I promise I will come get you when I need help getting dressed for dinner. Okay?”