Rabbit and Robot

I said, “I’ll tell you what. Let us go say bye to our friend Charlie Greenwell, and we’ll be right back. Okay with you?”

Texas Dude lowered his gun, grabbed his dick, and then fiddled with one of the silver arrows piercing his nipple. He nodded. “Charlie Greenwell is a hell of a rabbit.”

“The best,” I agreed.

“Do you realize you almost got us killed down there?” I said.

“Whatever, Cager.”

We rode the rickety and urine-fouled elevator up to Charlie’s floor.

It was fortunate for everyone, even the insane guys in the lobby, that we arrived at Charlie Greenwell’s apartment when we did.

We didn’t knock. Knocking scared Charlie. Walking in on whatever Charlie Greenwell was likely doing scared me, but I was not insane and heavily armed, so we just walked right in, as we always did.

Charlie was attempting to set fire to a Canadian flag that he’d draped over a sofa in his living room. There was a tipped-over can of barbecue starter fluid beside his bare right foot, and Charlie was flicking the flint wheel on a dead plastic cigarette lighter.

Charlie was in his underwear. For whatever reasons, Wozhead insane ex-bonks didn’t like to wear clothes very often. Also, like most bonks—insane and otherwise— Charlie Greenwell was covered in tattoos. One of them particularly fascinated me. It was a colorful grizzly bear on the right side of Charlie’s chest, walking upright, smiling, and carrying a tattered American flag over his shoulder. The grizzly bear was wearing a flat-brimmed straw campaign hat with a band on it that read VOTE RED OR I’LL TEAR YOUR FUCKING THROAT OUT! It was completely absurd. On the opposite side of Charlie’s chest was an octopus wearing a monocle and a derby hat and holding various unidentifiable types of firearms in each of his eight tentacles.

That tattoo made me feel inadequate, because I didn’t know what any of the guns were.

Apparently, Charlie Greenwell was a fan of hats and wildlife.

“Hi, Charlie!” I said as cheerfully and calmly as I’d ever spoken to him in my life. “I think those guys downstairs are going to get all bent out of shape if you burn the Kenmore down and kill us all.”

“Huh?” Charlie Greenwell’s eyes were completely glazed over with Woz. He put the lighter down when he realized who we were, which didn’t happen right away. “Oh. Hey, Bill. Cager. Want to get hacked?”

“Got any beer?” Billy asked.

“Sure. Come on in. I was just getting ready to do something, but I don’t remember what it was,” Charlie said.

“Put on trousers?” I guessed.

Charlie looked down at his bare legs and shook his head. “No. That wasn’t it.”

The Hotel Kenmore burned to the ground that afternoon.

People naturally blamed it on burners—arson gangs— but nobody was too concerned about it. Every one of the insane ex-bonks, in various stages of undress, managed to get out. And they were all rounded up and moved to another abandoned Hollywood hotel that day—a place called the Wilshire Marquis, which had once been made famous for having been the site of a suicide from heroin overdose by one of the original actors who’d played Rabbit in my father’s program.

Everyone in Los Angeles—and this is not hyperbolic—always loved stories like that.

But now, despite his plan being in full effect, Billy Hinman was exceptionally drunk. It was the only way he’d ever get inside anything that flew.

I had no idea.

Billy and I sat in the backseat—Rowan playing the role of chauffeur, as usual—and I watched the blurry, barren landscape of the abandoned and pointless California desert smear past us as we sped out toward Mojave Field.

The Woz was particularly strong.

“So where, exactly, are we going now?” I asked.

“You’ll see. It’s a birthday surprise,” Billy said.

Rowan, who never lied, shifted in the front seat and cleared his throat.

“I need to pee again. Maybe Rowan can just pull over for a minute,” I said.

“We’re almost there. You can pee when we get there. Trust me,” Billy said.

Maybe it was one of my infinite flaws, but I always did trust Billy Hinman.

Getting On Board

I’d read something about how people used to complain a long time ago about all the procedures they’d have to go through before being permitted to board an airplane. Whatever. The stuff we had to do to get on a transpod— one that my father owned, no less—for a flight into space was as regimented and absurd as Maoist reeducation.

And although I was out of it on booze and Woz that day, I still suspected something was not right.

“I don’t understand why we have to take showers and put on entirely different sets of clothes, just to visit Tennessee,” I said.

I have a foggy memory of Rowan and Billy telling me something about taking a train to Tennessee. I had never been to Tennessee. I didn’t actually want to go to Tennessee, but I trusted Rowan and I loved Billy, so I would do anything with him, especially because whenever I’d fall into one of my depressed moods, I would generally find myself trying to calculate all the normal human experiences I would never be permitted to have.

“It’s a Tennessee thing. A custom. Trust me,” Billy told me. “It’ll be worth it. I hear they have great food.”

On Woz, I wasn’t much of an eater, but Woz makes everyone so compliant and malleable.

I countered, “I already took a shower today, and my clothes are nicer than this stupid orange suit.”

Ever since the incident with all the shit on the Kansas, passengers on Mr. Messer’s R&RGG cruises had to go through medical examinations, take disinfecting showers, and put on specially sealed, full-body suits made from recycled paper. Passengers were not allowed to bring anything with them from Earth, not even the clothes they wore into the terminal.

Besides, everything anyone could possibly need was already waiting on the Tennessee. Clothes, food, recreation— all managed by my father’s company. It only took a quick scan of our eyes—mine, Billy’s, and Rowan’s—and the v.4 cog at the Mojave Field terminal whisked us through our medical scans and into the changing rooms.

A Messer could write his own ticket anywhere on Rabbit & Robot Grosvenor Galactic.

I still thought we were in a train station, about to go to Nashville.

Embarrassing.

My father’s transpods looked ridiculous—all painted in the clown-suit colors of his television program, with caricatures of Rabbit, the bonk, on one side, and Mooney, the robot, on the other.

The process of preparing to board the transpod was a little personal and awkward for us. Billy felt it was necessary to stay with me so I wouldn’t do anything weird, like getting lost or passing out and drowning in the chemical showers. I’d been to space plenty of times—on the Tennessee when it was in the final stages of construction, and a couple times on the Kansas before the shit thing (I was also lucky that the sewage system on board the Kansas worked just fine when I sailed on it)—so I knew the routine.

But I believed Billy Hinman when he told me that nothing out of the ordinary was going on.

Woz.

We completely stripped out of all our clothes and left them in sealed locker vaults. Then we had to endure a medical examination from a depressed male nurse orderly v.4 cog who stared and sighed and put his grabby, poking hands on a little too much of me for my comfort, even if he was a cog—a sad one, at that.

After our exams, the nurse led Billy and me, naked, into a decontamination shower cubicle.

Together.

Yeah. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Billy kept saying, “Isn’t this train station great?”

“But we’re naked,” I pointed out.

“So what?” Billy said.

In all honesty, Billy Hinman had seen me naked plenty of times in our lives. I had seen Billy Hinman, who was thoroughly comfortable without clothes, naked just about every day I’d known him. When we were babies, Rowan, or sometimes Hilda, used to give us baths together.

“We haven’t taken a bath together in . . . forever,” I said.

“It’s almost like we’re four years old again,” Billy said.

I looked down at my bare legs, like I couldn’t believe my trousers were missing. I patted my thighs as though trying to convince myself my pockets were actually no longer there. I was a mess. “Where are my clothes? When can I get them back? I left a lot of money in my trousers.”

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.