Rabbit and Robot

Everything that could burn in California had burned, time and time and time again.

The city was on fire at the time. There was nothing left to burn on the naked, scorched hills, but houses, restaurants, schools, and tax offices still contained combustible components. What would Los Angeles possibly be without its fires and smoke?

“I can smell a school on fire, and a Korean restaurant too,” I said.

Billy Hinman and I were standing in an alley at my father’s studio, waiting for Charlie Greenwell to show up, so I could get high with him.

“I don’t get how you can do that,” Billy Hinman said.

I shrugged. “Neither do I. It’s just that nothing else smells like burning smart screens, or a Samgyeopsal-gui restaurant that’s been set on fire.”

“I guess so,” Billy conceded.

Charlie Greenwell wasn’t much older than Billy and me when he came back all messed up from War Twenty-Five, or whatever. He liked to hang out around the studio lot where they produced my father’s show. And, usually, Charlie Greenwell and I would smoke or snort Woz together in the alley while Billy just watched.

Neither of us liked Charlie Greenwell, so I never really understood why we’d listen to his shit stories about all the people he’d shot, and how great it was to be a bonk. But then again, the way things were, sometimes I’d put up with just about anything to get high, which is why Billy and Rowan, my caretaker, concocted a scheme to get me on board the Tennessee and clean me up before I killed myself with the stuff.

Billy was done arguing with me about it a long time ago.

Sometimes we speculated how we might have ended up if we had been born to a regular family—if we’d have ended up bonks or coders. I’m pretty sure Billy Hinman would have gone to war, just like Charlie Greenwell did, and that I would have gone to an industrial lab, but I always told Billy to his face that we would have ended up in the same place together.

Ending up in the same place together is actually exactly the way things turned out for me and Billy Hinman.

I make lists of things I’ve never done. I kept them as voice recordings on my thumbphone, until it stopped working on the flight to the Tennessee. This book is the list of my life adrift, compiled while we all make a hopeful attempt to get back home.

That’s really what all books are, isn’t it? I mean, lists of secrets and things you only wish you’d done—a sort of deathbed confession where you’re trying to get it all out while the lights are still on.

The big difference: It does not matter who my confession is written to, because nobody will ever see this—or, if someone does, it will probably be hundreds or thousands of years from now, and whoever picks this up won’t understand a goddamned thing about what it meant to be the last human beings left in the universe.

Anyway, who cares?

Something smells like human.

Cheepa Yeep!

Hocus Pocus, and Kansas Is Full of Shit

The only time in my life I’d ever seen Rowan look anything close to being embarrassed came when I asked him if he was a virgin.

That was two years ago now. I was fourteen at the time and was just learning so much about all the surprises of life. Also, being fourteen, I was not yet aware that there were certain questions that guys weren’t supposed to ask, even if Rowan was closer to me, and certainly knew more about me, than my own parents.

But Rowan wouldn’t tell me. He changed the subject to laundry or bathing or driving me somewhere, or some shit like that, which was how Rowan routinely handled me when I asked questions he didn’t want to answer.

And even now, at the age of sixteen, I was still constantly monitored by Rowan. At least I was usually permitted to bathe myself, though. But Rowan still did my laundry and got me dressed. And the terrifying thing was that Rowan had told me he was going to teach me how to shave before Christmas, which was something that I really did not think I needed to start doing.

A few days before we ended up marooned on the Tennessee, Billy Hinman and I had a play date with kids who were supposed to show us what being normal was all about. Rowan waited for us, as he always did, parked out on the street while Billy and I attended what we called a real-kids party.

It wasn’t much of a party.

But Billy Hinman and I were not real kids. Until we turned eighteen, or until we were somehow liberated, we considered ourselves to be our parents’ fancy pets, tended to by insomniac caretakers like Rowan.

Billy Hinman’s caretaker was an actual v.4 cog named Hilda. She was one of the early releases, like most of the cogs who worked on the Tennessee, so she had wild and unpredictable mood swings. Most people—humans, that is—didn’t like the v.4s. I thought they were hilarious, though. And they also made Albert Hinman—Billy’s dad— the richest man in the world.

Not that any of that would amount to shit by the time we got stuck on the Tennessee.

Our parents had decided early on that the best way to socialize us, since we were not attending school or watching Rabbit & Robot like everyone else in America, would be to create an artificial “friends group” of kids the same age as Billy and me. Our friends group went through several iterations over the years for various reasons. And the kids’ families had to apply and go through a screening process.

Not just anyone in the world could be a “play buddy” with a Messer or a Hinman.

Our real-kid friends’ parents were paid, naturally.

The only two members of our group who’d been with us since the beginning, when Billy Hinman and I were four years old, were Katie St. Romaine, who was my girlfriend for nearly a year, and a boy named Justin Pickett.

Katie and I had never had sex, although we did come close a few times. It was always me who’d be the one to chicken out. And where did that get me? Stuck on the Tennessee, alone, with Billy, Rowan, and a couple thousand v.4 cogs. Ridiculous.

Whatever.

Billy Hinman did have sex with Justin Pickett. Billy told me everything. He was one of those guys who, according to him, didn’t like to be pinned down by expectations regarding his sexuality.

Billy Hinman called himself “fluid,” which sounded incredibly foreign to me. I just thought he was horny all the time. And, yes, Billy Hinman did ask me more than once if I’d like to fool around sexually with him, to which I answered that if I was too afraid to try anything with Katie St. Romaine, I was definitely too afraid to do anything with him.

And we left it at that, because nothing could really get in the way of our friendship, especially because of how honest and sometimes sad Billy Hinman was. Also, we needed each other. We were the only real human beings either of us truly knew.

All our fake friends were on Woz. They all went to school, so this was natural. All schoolkids had prescriptions for Woz. It helped you learn things. Billy never had Woz once in his life that I was aware of, but I was pretty much an out-of-control addict ever since I was about twelve. Still, I felt like I’d learned plenty of stuff. Rowan was also my tutor; Billy’s, too, when he’d pay attention to stuff.

You couldn’t really tell much of a difference between Wozheads at school. The doses they received were perfectly adjusted to help future coders concentrate, or to cull out the obvious future bonks. It was guys like Charlie Greenwell and me who were the unfortunate casualties of the culture of Woz.

I did it for fun, and I had too much fun.

The party was awkward, to say the least. For one thing, it was at Paula Jordan’s house, and Mrs. Jordan was there, which meant that I’d probably have to stay around and “wait” for Billy Hinman after all the other kids left.

I had only broken up with Katie St. Romaine two days earlier, and she was there, sitting as far across the room from me as she could possibly get and still qualify her parents for payment for her attending this week’s “normal kids” group.

Such fun.

Katie looked unhappy. It kind of made me feel drawn to her, and simultaneously sad, too, because I worried that I may have hurt Katie St. Romaine’s feelings, and nobody likes to do that, right?

I sat on a couch, next to Billy and Justin. There were four other teenagers with us: Paula Jordan; Stuart Michelson; Dani, who was Stuart’s twin sister; and another kid who had just joined our play group a few weeks earlier. His name was Craig or Ken or something. Whatever. Craig or Ken tried too hard to talk to me and Billy. He acted like a fucking v.4 cog that was stalled out on friendliness or something. But he was definitely a human. I could smell pee stains in his underwear. Oh well, I’m sure Craig/Ken’s parents were beyond thrilled that their boy got to hang out with a couple of kids like Billy Hinman and me.

“Don’t mess up the game, Cager,” Justin Pickett said.

“I’m not even really playing. I don’t care about the game,” I said.

I leaned forward and dropped four Woz tabs on the table screen in front of the couch. We were all supposedly playing a game with our thumbphones. The playing field rose up in three dimensions from the table. The game was called Hocus Pocus, and it was one of those trendy party games that was supposed to get people to talk about all kinds of personal stuff, but none of us was really talking that day.

It was Paula’s turn. She had to either make a sacrifice to one of the other players, or she had to get up and change something on someone. She decided to change Billy Hinman’s hairstyle. So she walked around the table while I worked at grinding up my drugs, then Paula began combing his hair back from his forehead. It was easy enough for Paula to do; Billy was always loose and relaxed, and his hair was long and hung down in front of his face.

“I like my hair down in my face,” Billy protested.

“Nonsense,” Paula said. “And you look better this way, besides.”

“Nonsense right back at you,” Billy told her.

Katie St. Romaine looked sad. I think she’d told everyone else bad things about me. I’d imagined she’d told the other kids things like Cager Messer doesn’t like girls, as it turns out; or, Cager tried to force me to have sex with him, and then he got scared when I told him I wanted to, or dumb shit like that. Whatever. The truth is, I broke up with Katie St. Romaine because how could a guy like me trust anyone who was on my dad’s payroll?

But for the record, and now, in light of me being stuck up here on the Tennessee, I do sincerely regret having broken up with her, and especially not having sex.

No one wants to die a virgin, unless you really, really believe in God, and, well . . . whatever.

I pulverized my Woz tablets into a small mound of blue powder at the edge of the game field while Paula finished fixing Billy’s hair. She was right. Billy Hinman did look good with his hair combed back, but Billy was exceptionally handsome anyway. He would have looked good if she shaved him bald. Some guys get all the breaks. And they’re the ones who generally throw most of those breaks away, too.

I snorted the Woz.

I sighed.

“That’s too much, Cager,” Billy said. “You’re going to get sick and puke in the car going home.”

Billy put his arm around me and hugged me close. I knew what he was trying to do. Distraction.

I said, “I’m sorry in advance if I puke in Rowan’s car, Billy. You know I love you.”

And that’s about how thrilling our real-kids parties got. Kids got their hair combed, or ended up dressed in new outfits, or had to give away something they liked as a sacrifice to one of the others until our next session of Hocus Pocus.

Also, I passed out, unconscious on the couch beside Billy and Justin Pickett. So I was in a terrible mood, and physically unmanageable, when Billy tried to wake me up and take me to Rowan, who’d been waiting in the car for us for the past five hours.

Mrs. Jordan was disappointed. Nobody got what they wanted that day, I suppose.

“Sometimes you’re disgusting,” Billy said.

He could say stuff like that to me. I wouldn’t put up with it from anyone else, though.

And I said, “And the rest of the time, when I’m not disgusting, what am I?”

“I don’t know.”

“Fabulous?”

“Whatever.”

I leaned all my weight onto Billy’s shoulder. He nearly fell over.

“I need to pee before we go,” I said. “Come with me and hold me up, Bill, so I don’t bust my head open.”

“No.”

“What do you think I could do to get Cager off this shit, Rowan?” Billy asked from the backseat.

I sat right next to Billy Hinman. He knew I was awake. It wasn’t like he was trying to keep any secrets from me.

“You should get hacked up with me sometime, Billy. Rowan too. That would be fun,” I said.

“No,” Billy answered.

Rowan drove. He said, “Perhaps a birthday vacation is in order. Maybe that would help. You know, take some time away. Take Cager up on the Tennessee with you.”

My father’s ship the Tennessee was as big as a midwestern city, staffed by hundreds of v.4 cogs, and affordable only to people like us—or the people who ran the government and military.

“Isn’t that the one that got all filled with shit, and the people on board got sick because they had other people’s shit all over themselves and in their food and shit?” Billy asked.

One of my father’s first lunar cruise ships, the Kansas, had a minor “incident,” as Mr. Messer liked to call it. It was actually not minor. The toilet systems reversed, spewing tons and tons of shit and other stuff that human beings put in toilets back out into every room and every deck. People got very sick, and a few dozen actually died. Also, nobody wanted to help the ones who were transported back to Earth. Nobody likes to touch someone who’s puking and covered in other people’s shit.

I said, “No. That was the Kansas. The Kansas was the one that was full of shit. They fixed it, though. Well, they didn’t fix it, really. They just sailed it into the sun.”

“Sounds like a reasonable way to clean up a bunch of shit,” Billy said.

“Mr. Messer likes simple solutions.”

I called my father Mr. Messer. I said, “Nobody would have gone on it after the shit thing. That’s why they built the Tennessee. No shit problems, so far.”

Actually, the Tennessee didn’t have any glitches yet because it was new and it had never carried any human passengers besides the few coders who’d gotten it online and powered up. I’d visited it one time, before it was fully operational.

Billy Hinman stretched out in the seat, extending his legs over to my side, so our feet touched. Billy Hinman was always horny. I kicked him.

He said, “Well, you’d never get me up on one of those shit things. Cruises are what old people do right before they die. Trust me. I learned that.”

Billy wasn’t entirely wrong about cruises either. When we were both ten years old, Billy and I went with his parents on an ocean cruise across the Pacific, from Los Angeles to Sydney. It was a very long cruise. Five octogenarians died before we got to Australia.

Cheepa Yeep!

A Visit to the Hotel Kenmore

I calculated that at about the same time Billy Hinman and I finished our fourth beer of the afternoon, the twenty-eighth war started.

Twenty-eight!

And it was my sixteenth birthday, too.

Like Charlie Greenwell told us, wars don’t just fight themselves.

Bonks were on the move, and this time the boys got to stay close to home. During beer four—or possibly five for Billy—the Canadian Navy sailed across Lake Erie and pounded the shores of Ohio and Pennsylvania with artillery.

Canada was really mad at us. They had their reasons, I’m sure.

Not too many people cared about it, outside of Pennsylvania and Ohio, that is, but the event did provide an opportunity for some undeployed bonks to get to work.

“We should leave this shithole,” Billy said.

We drank beer in Mr. Messer’s attic office. Well, to be honest, Billy Hinman was doing most of the drinking. I did have some beer, though, just because it was the right thing to do, us being best friends, and it being my birthday and all. Of course Rowan was in on Billy’s conspiracy—he got the beer for us—but Billy Hinman was convinced that in drinking beer I’d finally grown some balls, as he put it, and come to my senses about how useless and boring our lives were. Not that I didn’t agree with him that our lives were useless and boring. But they were about to get a lot more exciting.

I had no idea.

“You mean we should get out of Los Angeles?” I asked. “It is kind of a shithole, isn’t it?”

Billy nodded and burped quietly. I was lagging behind him in the number of empty cans I contributed to our pile on the office floor. It tasted awful, but I was already feeling a bit dizzy and energized.

“I’m drunk,” I announced.

“Good,” Billy said.

“And now I want some Woz,” I said.

Billy said, “You practically OD’d in Rowan’s backseat last night.”

“Oh.”

“But if you want, I’ll ask Rowan to take us over to Charlie Greenwell’s so you can hook some up. Then let’s go somewhere and have fun.”

“Where?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Billy lied. “Somewhere.”

This would be fun, right?

Charlie Greenwell’s place was a deranged lunatic circus.

Charlie lived in an old hotel in the east end of Hollywood that had been converted to a kind of rehab home for bonks who’d come back from their various wars with holes in their brains. The news about Canada had really cheered up the residents at Charlie Greenwell’s complex. The place reeked of Woz smoke. Guns and flags were everywhere.

As we walked into the lobby, Billy Hinman said, “I wonder if Charlie and the other ex-bonks are getting turned on, thinking about killing Canadian rabbits.”

He was a little drunk, and he said it a little too loud.

“Rabbits” was what bonks called other bonks.

It was weird, but it was one of those slang words that nobody who wasn’t a bonk was ever allowed to use. The unwritten social code: Only bonks can call bonks rabbits. Charlie Greenwell didn’t mind if Billy or I used the word around him, but then again, Charlie Greenwell’s ability to care about shit had been blasted out of his head four or five wars ago. And “Rabbit” was even in the title of—and the main character in—my father’s television program, which was all about getting kids to embrace their inner bonks and coders. Or, at least, that’s what I knew about the program, despite never actually having watched it.

Well, to be honest, never is an exaggeration. How could anyone not catch a glimpse of Rabbit & Robot here and there, a few seconds at a time, even if it’s just out of the corner of an eye? The show was on almost constantly, in virtually every country of the world, even in most of the twenty-eight we were at war with.

In fact, my father’s show was playing on one of the wall screens in the lobby of the Hotel Kenmore when Billy Hinman and I walked in, which was when Billy asked, a little too loudly, a rhetorical question about Canadian rabbits and horny bonks.

The other wall screens in the lobby were playing muted coverage of Canadian rabbits on the rampage in Ohio.

Unfortunately for Billy and me, there were two ex-bonks sitting together in a pair of vinyl reclining chairs watching Rabbit & Robot when he said it. One of them—he was shirtless and wore thick eyeglasses with one of the lenses blacked out so you couldn’t see the vacated eye socket that was inevitably behind it—stood up right away and puffed out his hairless, tattooed chest. His nipples were pierced with silver barbs that looked like hunting arrows, and he was also holding some type of machine gun.

I have to admit that I felt so nonmasculine for my lack of nipple piercings, as well as my inability to recognize specific models of firearms. It seemed like every boy in America—future coders and bonks alike, thanks to Rabbit & Robot—knew the precise make, caliber, and specs of every gun in existence, even if none of our boys could accurately point out more than two or three countries on a map of the world.

Grosvenor was an outstanding school system.

Cheepa Yeep!

“Hey!” The old ex-bonk with a missing eye and a tattoo of the state of Texas on his belly jabbed a finger at us. “What did you just say, little fucking Canadian queer boy?”

All bonks were trained to—or at least pretended to— hate homosexuals. It was so fifty-years-ago, but clinging to the past was what armies are good at, right?

And now they hated Canadians, too.

Billy Hinman wasn’t exactly queer, though. Billy would have sex with anyone if he liked them well enough. Most people I knew were like that, which made me feel rather odd and isolated. And Billy wasn’t Canadian, either. So, kind of wrong on both assumptions.

“Um, your friend doesn’t have trousers on,” Billy Hinman pointed out.

Billy was right. In the tension of our drunken entrance, I hadn’t noticed that the other insane ex-bonk who’d been watching Rabbit & Robot beside the guy with Texas on his stomach was completely naked except for his old army-issue corporal’s shirt and cap. He did have boots on, though.

This was life in the Hotel Kenmore. We’d been there enough times before that seeing such things wasn’t ever surprising to Billy and me.

I put my hands up as a conciliatory gesture, and also because everyone knows that putting your hands up when a pair of half-naked insane people are pointing machine guns at you has a generally soothing effect.

“Wait, wait, wait. Billy didn’t mean any offense, guys. In fact, he’s just on his way down to the recruiter’s and stopped by here to say good-bye to our pal Charlie Greenwell before going off to kill Canadians.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Billy said.

In his defense, Billy Hinman was a bit drunk, so his stupidity was somewhat excusable. He went on, “I thought I told you we were going to do something fun.”

I persisted in trying to defuse the situation. “Are you guys watching Rabbit & Robot? This is my favorite episode!”

I still held my hands in the air. Billy stared at me. The insane ex-bonk with no trousers softened a bit and lowered his machine gun so it was pointing at our knees instead of our faces.

“This is my favorite episode too,” the naked guy said. “But I wish that fucker Mooney would shut up and die.”

Mooney, the “robot” in my father’s program, was a v.4 cog who sang ridiculous, overly repetitive songs that helped kids memorize code sequences for school. Mooney was also a cog that was stuck on the emotion of “outrage.” For some reason, an awful lot of v.4 cogs were either outraged or elated, both of which are highly unattractive attitudes. Some v.4s were horny, which was extremely awkward. They picked up their emotional tracks from the coders who put them online. I guess some coders, if they weren’t outraged or elated, were horny, even on the job.

Whatever.

But it was understandable to me that the naked guy wanted Mooney to die. As far as I could tell, nobody liked Mooney, and he died at one point or another in most episodes.

Billy Hinman hitched a thumb at me. “His dad’s Anton Messer.”

“Anton Messer?” Texas Dude was so impressed, I’m pretty sure he was getting a boner. It might have been because the screens behind Billy and me were showing the Canadians, though. Who knows for sure?

“You boys should sit down with us and watch the war, and Rabbit & Robot,” Naked Guy, who may just as well have been an elated v.4 cog, said.