by Andrew Smith
Billy didn’t answer me.
And I had a feeling I would never see my clothes, or anything I’d left behind, again. I turned out to be right, but for reasons I’d never considered.
The showerheads came on. They sprayed from above and all around us—up from jets on the floor, and out from the sides of our cubicle, which was big enough for more than two people, spraying us with a warm coating of mist and then a downpour of warm water. It was actually very nice.
“Don’t worry about it,” Billy said. “Trust me. You don’t need money or your clothes right now, and we can get some Woz for you in just a little bit.”
“You’re my best friend. I love you, Billy. And the shower feels really nice.”
I felt myself beginning to fall asleep on my feet, standing on wobbly legs in the steaming mist.
* * *
Of course, my caretaker Rowan went through his medical screening and decontamination process ahead of Billy and me, and once we met him on the other side, sterilized and uniformed, the three of us were led down a walkway toward what I still assumed was our train to the Volunteer State, among a group of cogs dressed in identical uniforms.
It was hard for me to tell if anyone among our fellow travelers was human, or if we were isolated in a platoon of cogs. We all smelled exactly the same in our disinfected orange paper flight suits, which was to say we smelled like nothing at all. As soon as someone burped or started sweating, though, Cager Messer’s cursed nose would pick it up, and I’d get some clear sense of whether or not we were completely alone.
But I was pretty sure that with the exception of Billy, Rowan, and myself, none of the sixty or so passengers with us were human. But what did I know? Because their coders may have been hungry during final program uploads, some v.4s ate printed food too, which was the only kind of food we’d be getting now. But a cog that can eat may just as well be human, with or without their proclivity for obsessing over a single emotion.
Plenty of v.4s were like that. They were just beginning to exhibit the ability to act with human emotions, although their range was narrowly constrained to just one mood—angry, depressed, horny, happy, and so on. Billy’s father, Albert Hinman, who owned Hinsoft International, the company that manufactured the world’s supply of cogs, thought the new, emotional v.4s were funny.
Albert Hinman was also the richest man in the world.
Billy Hinman and I were spoiled pieces of shit, in my opinion.
And Billy detested cogs, especially the ones that were exceedingly happy or mad, or horny, for that matter.
There have always been plenty of human beings like that too—people who only eat, and then obsess on how depressed or outraged or horny they are, and nothing else.
* * *
It would end up taking two miserable days for us to get to the Tennessee, not that things like days counted up in space the way they counted down on Earth. It was going to be a rough ride, and it was made worse by the flight attendant in our first-class section, a v.4 cog stuck in an endless loop of elation.
The attendant cogs in second class were all outraged, which had to have been even more unbearable.
In fact, before the transpod slid out of the terminal on its gleaming runway rails (I was still convinced we were on a train), we heard a shouting attendant in the cabin behind us. Chances were that she was probably yelling at nobody. Outraged cogs frequently did that.
“Sir! You need to buckle your restraints immediately! This is outrageous! I am so angry right now! I can’t take your rubbish! Sir! Hold your rubbish until after takeoff! This is so unfair to me! I am filled with rage! I can’t take your rubbish! This is complete racism! I quit! I fucking quit! Get me out of here!”
Of course, it was already too late for anyone to get out of the transpod, and cogs are not allowed to quit, no matter what. The doors had been sealed, and we were about to depart.
They bother most people, but I love v.4s. They were the best things Billy’s dad ever made, even if about one-third of them hated human beings. Well, hated everything, really.
I said, “What the fuck is this place, Billy?”
Billy cleared his throat. “Um. We’re on our way to Tennessee, Cage. Trust me. Are you hungry or thirsty?”
Billy buckled me into my seat.
“Why are you tying me up?”
“Trust me, Cager. Do you want some more Woz? We can get some in just a little while.”
Rowan sat across the aisle from us. We were the only three passengers in first class. Rowan waved at our attendant, and she stepped from her post in the galley as the transpod slid away from the gate.
“Can you bring us three beers before takeoff?” Rowan asked.
“This is so fantastic!” our attendant, whose name tag identified her as Lourdes, said. “I’d be extremely happy to! So happy! I also need to pee! This is so exciting!”
Cogs do not pee. Well, most of them don’t. Lourdes was just so happy, she didn’t know what to think.
“Would Grosvenor Beer be all right for you gentlemen?” Lourdes’s eyes, astonished to the size of apricots, looked at each one of us as she showed a wall of perfect white teeth behind the breach of her smile.
“That would be fine,” Rowan said.
“Perfect! Perfect! Perfect!” Lourdes nearly exploded on us.
Then she whirled around to her galley station and sang a Mooney song to herself while she poured our beers.
Add Action,
Add Action,
Execute switch void ever never,
Execute switch satisfaction.
Nobody likes Mooney.
I woke up a bit when the thing we were in started moving. I pivoted my head from side to side, alternately looking out my porthole and the one next to the empty seat beside Rowan.
“Is this a fucking plane?” I asked.
“I promise you it’s not a plane,” Billy said.
Lourdes returned with a tray of beers. “Drink them fast! We’ll be taking off shortly! This is so exciting, I think I just pooped a little!”
Lourdes placed the beers down on each of our service tables and watched us with unblinking and thrilled eyes while we sipped. Well, to be honest, Billy gulped his down in one tip, which made Lourdes even happier.
“If this is a fucking plane, Billy . . . Where are you taking me?” I said.
Billy hated anything that went high or fast. It was impossible for me to consider that he’d ever feel so desperate as to actually get on a plane—and only for me. But it was too late for him to do anything about it now.
As long as I’d known him, Billy Hinman had told me he would rather die than go into space.
“Here, Bill. Maybe you should finish my beer for me,” I said.
Billy Hinman emptied my glass, and Lourdes came to collect our service items. Then we reclined our seats flat and waited for all hell to break loose.
Mojave Field
Meg Hatfield knew more about programming than most of the coders who designed the reasoning architecture in the v.4 cogs that Hinsoft International distributed all over the human world.
“It took me a solid week to figure out the code sequence to get in. Writing you into it was easy. The cogs at the gates scan our eyes and they only see code. They think we’re a couple of v.4s,” Meg said. “Stupid fucking machines.”
“I never went to Grosvenor School a day in my life,” Jeffrie told her. “I came here with Lloyd when I was ten. I could never figure out something like that.”
Jeffrie and her brother Lloyd were burners—arsonists.
“Here” was Antelope Acres—a chain-link-enclosed squatter’s camp in the desert north of Los Angeles.
“You set a mean fire, though,” Meg said.
“Lloyd does, mostly. I just watch.”
Lloyd Cutler had a thing for Meg Hatfield. Meg knew that was why Jeffrie didn’t want her brother to come with them. Besides, Meg didn’t like Lloyd—she didn’t like burners in general, but especially Lloyd, who’d tried to lure her into
his camper to have sex ever since she and her father had moved in to Antelope Acres. Meg was afraid Lloyd might get out of control and burn the place down if he came along. So she was relieved that Jeffrie told her not to write him in too, that the girls should go alone.
But Meg liked Jeffrie. Jeffrie Cutler was different from most burners. She didn’t just burn things out of anger. Meg Hatfield knew there was something else Jeffrie was trying to get rid of.
A few days before Christmas, the girls hiked down from Missing Boy Mountain on a trail that led to the highway across from Mojave Field’s glimmering terminal complex. They sat at the edge of the desert and waited for late afternoon, which Meg explained was the busiest time, and the most opportune for the girls to get inside.
“What happens to Lloyd if we don’t come back?” Meg said.
Jeffrie shrugged. “He’s grown up. He can take care of himself.”
“Won’t he worry about you?”
“No.” Jeffrie shook her head. “What about your dad?”
“I’ll call him. He’ll be okay. I’ll come back if he needs me to.”
“Okay.” Jeffrie bit her lower lip and nodded. “What’s it like, writing code?”
“It’s like talking in dog,” Meg said. “It’s an ugly language, because there’s no space for interpretation, which is the difference between cogs and us.”
“I’d rather light stuff up than interpret it,” Jeffrie said.
“No burning here once we’re in. Okay?”
“I promise.” And Jeffrie asked, “Which one of those planes have you been in?”
Across the highway, set a quarter mile behind rows of fencing, sat a rust-smeared and tired old herd of derelict passenger airliners.
“We’re not going in one of those. We’re going inside the place where the big stuff happens,” Meg said.
* * *
When it was time, Meg Hatfield drew a rectangle in the air between her thumbs and index fingers. Her thumbphone screen lit up in the space she drew with her hands.
“Are you going to call your dad?” Jeffrie asked.
“No. I’m getting us inside.” She entered a sequence of numbers and letters. The screen floating before them in the air scrolled rapidly with line after line of bracketed and meaningless poetry. Then Meg Hatfield hit send, and she said, “Come on, Jeffrie. Let’s cross the road now.”
Rabbit & Robot
Happy almost-Crambox Eve, Cager,” Billy said.
“Fuck, Billy. Why are you guys doing this to me?”
I needed to vomit.
Puking in space is not good; just ask anyone who’d survived the Kansas ordeal.
In the absence of gravity, sewage, like hungry tigers and venomous snakes, is incomprehensibly terrifying.
The transpod shuddered and roared as it picked up acceleration down the railway of the takeoff strip. Rowan turned his face toward us and watched what was going on. I could tell he felt bad for me and Billy, so there was a lot of feeling miserable going on in first class.
Except for Lourdes, our flight attendant, who squealed, “Whee! Whee! I am so happy! I am so happy! I could poop myself, I’m so happy! Whee!” From her rear-facing seat, she paddled her high-heeled feet as though she were doing the backstroke.
I couldn’t help but catch a glimpse of her panties.
“Well. I thought it would be a nice gift for you, Cager. You know. Just us—well, and Rowan, too—up there on that enormous ship, where we can do whatever we want and basically run the place. Think of it, how much fun that will be.”
“Yeah. Whatever, Bill.”
“Come on. It will be great. Tell him how fun it will be up there, Rowan,” Billy said.
“You may never want to come back,” Rowan confirmed.
The transpod got noisier and noisier as it approached liftoff speed.
My hand trembled next to Billy’s on our armrest. I watched as my skin drained to the color of skim milk. I felt terrible, so I grabbed Billy’s hand.
And I’ll admit the truth: When a Grosvenor Galactic cruise transpod lifts off, there are undeniable moments of terror. The noise is so tremendous that you can’t hear the other passengers scream, which they always do (and Billy, who had never traveled to space, was doing right now), and the entire craft shakes like it’s about to fall to pieces. And then there’s that instant when your feet are pointing directly upward and your head fills to capacity with whatever blood was previously circulating in your system. Thankfully, it’s all over in a minute or so, and then you’re just floating along in silence—and if it’s your first time up there, chances are you’re wondering if this is what death is actually like.
Billy Hinman’s fingernails dug into my hand.
“This may have been the dumbest mistake I’ve ever made,” he said. “Get me down.”
“Ow,” I said. “Your fingernails are sharp.”
Rowan’s expression showed a bit of concern—possibly worry—over how I was handling my abduction. And then Rowan said the worst thing imaginable, which was this: “It’s all perfectly smooth sailing now, Billy. Look at how high we are.”
Rowan extended his hand toward the porthole.
Billy Hinman, who was terrified of flying, groaned. He fired a dirty look at Rowan, and that’s when he said good-bye to Earth, and to California.
Billy opened a rectangle between his hands, and his thumphone screen hovered in the air above his lap. I watched without saying anything as Billy Hinman attempted to call his dad, who was somewhere in India.
There was nothing. No message, no fake ringtone. Only static. It was weird, and it made me want to try my phone too, or at least offer to loan mine to Billy, because Hinsoft thumbphones worked everywhere—even in space. But I pretended not to pay attention to what Billy was doing, even though I obviously was doing exactly that.
Billy closed out the screen and said, “Fuck this, stupid no-signal in space.”
Behind us, one of the attendants in second class screamed and cried about being unfairly persecuted by a bigoted passenger.
Being on a transpod was almost like being stuck inside Gulliver’s Travels, I thought. I imagined that if I’d spent a few days in second class, I’d come out acting like the raging flight attendant behind us. As it was, I could only hope that being in the front affected all of our moods in a more positive way.
Lourdes unhooked from her seat and gleefully announced that she would begin in-flight service and entertainment. She activated the transparent screenfield at the front of the cabin and said, “I am thrilled to present our in-flight entertainment selection for first-class passengers on R & R Grosvenor Galactic! Our feature will begin after a brief advertisement! I love this so much!”
Lourdes’s face scrunched and she farted. Then she danced. With no music, and for no reason at all that any of us could figure out.
* * *
v.4 cogs can fart. There is no Woz in space. Another war was bound to begin on Earth—it was only a matter of time—while the first one between Billy Hinman and Cager Messer was just getting started somewhere between home and the moon.
I did not want to speak to Billy Hinman.
I knew our trip would be tough. There was no turning back, even if I tried using the no-credit-limit impact of my name. And although there was something especially painful in knowing that my best friend was trying to do something nice and positive for me, it was something I didn’t want anything to do with. So I found myself pendulum-swinging between regret for being angry at Billy and trying to rationalize the truth that if he’d have let me alone, I would not have lived much longer. I suppose that was selfish of me. And it seemed that every beating I’d ever received at the hands of my mother or father always included some type of it’s-for-your-own-good justification, which I knew was bullshit. Just like I knew that what Billy Hinman was doing to me was bullshit too.
Not surprisingly, the brief commercial that played before our in-flight entertainment was produced by Hinsoft International. It was a sure bet that the n
ext advertisement on the flight would be from a Grosvenor brand. After all, there was almost nothing at all in existence that didn’t come from the guys whose sperm made me and Billy Hinman.
The Hinsoft ad was all about the New! Revolutionary! v.4 cog, and how seamlessly it blended in to the human world—satisfying the demand for anything people no longer wanted to waste their time doing, which was just about everything you could list, besides being a bonk, a coder, or maybe a department store Father Christmas. The commercial showed happy cogs, which I was already getting sick of after spending about forty-five minutes with Lourdes, shouting cogs, a chorus line of singing cogs, cogs performing surgery on human beings, road-building cogs, and even naked ones. It was perfectly okay to show full nudity in public media displays—as long as the nakedness in question involved unclothed cogs, who were strikingly anatomically correct—because, after all, cogs were cogs. It was like looking at a Renaissance sculpture of a Greek god or some biblical character’s penis or breasts. It was actually like looking at a naked electric toaster, when you thought about it. As long as they weren’t actually people, everyone was pretty much okay with whatever cogs did.
And the commercial’s British-accented and most likely cog narrator said, “Hinsoft v.4 cogs—so lifelike and functional, so smart and reliable, you might find yourself falling in love.”
Wonderful, I thought.
The more disturbing thing was what followed the v.4 ad. What came next was an episode of Rabbit & Robot.
Billy Hinman perked up from the melancholy that pervaded our cabin. He had an almost conspiratorial look on his face. Neither of us was ever allowed to watch my father’s program, so this was like sneaking a drink or a smoke, except those were things that Billy Hinman and I did whenever we wanted to. Watching Rabbit & Robot, on the other hand, was entirely forbidden in the Messer and Hinman households.
I glanced over at Rowan. “Hey!”
Rowan said, “Would you like me to have Lourdes turn it off?”
