squeezed into a corner of the stall away from Meg. It wasn’t the best place to be. When the blast of disinfectant came on, Jeffrie was knocked backward and ended up on the floor of the shower, looking up between tangled and nude cog legs.
“Whee! Yippee!” one of the cogs squealed.
“This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me!” said another, prancing from foot to foot.
From somewhere in the crush of bodies came, “I never want to leave this place! Except I need to dance! And there’s not enough room! I want to dance!”
“I can’t stand myself. Can someone please kill me? I don’t think I’ll ever pull myself out of this hole of darkness,” one of the nonweeping depressed cogs added.
The shower lasted exactly ten seconds. When it stopped, most of the cogs were laughing and jumping up and down, which was the only direction they could move.
The sobbing cog continued his sobbing.
Jeffrie got stepped on and kneed in the head. She couldn’t get up from the floor. When the group of naked cogs exited the shower and Jeffrie could finally rise to her feet, she saw that one of the male cogs had broken in half at his midsection. It was hard to tell if he had been one of the happy cogs or one of the depressed ones. But he was broken, naked, and dead, and he was also abandoned and forgotten on the floor of a chemical disinfectant shower.
And things like that happened all the time.
Jeffrie cupped her hands in front of her groin and, dripping, followed all the naked things to the dressing area, where Meg waited for her. Jeffrie was embarrassed and frightened, and felt so terribly small among all the cogs, who despite not being human still had sexually mature human bodies. Jeffrie had been implanted with hormone arrestors, which Lloyd had stolen for her three years earlier, so she wasn’t growing and changing the way her body’s own code had programmed her to do.
“I thought I lost you,” Meg said.
Jeffrie wouldn’t look at Meg. She kept her eyes down, watching the parade of feet ahead of her. “I want to go back to Antelope Acres. I want to darf this fucking place with Lloyd.”
Meg didn’t say anything.
Both girls knew it was too late to leave, much less to light anything on fire now. They were shivering and freezing cold. Of course, none of the cogs had any idea about the temperature of the showers, or that Meg and Jeffrie were not cogs. They were all too overcome by joy, outrage, or deep despair, depending on which cog you paid attention to.
Meg Hatfield and Jeffrie Cutler slid into their orange jumpsuits.
“So. You saw, didn’t you?” Jeffrie asked.
“Saw what?” Meg said.
Meg was not good at lying to Jeffrie.
“We’re going to the Tennessee! We’re going to the Tennessee! I think I just released my bowels!” one of the cogs burbled.
“Ha ha ha!” laughed a chorus of happy cogs.
“I’m going to clean toilets on the Tennessee! I love cleaning human feces and other bodily secretions!” another cog yipped.
“I get to clean bedrooms! Give me a soiled human bed, and I’ll be happy for all eternity!”
“I want to release my bowels too!” someone shouted.
“I’m so lonely. I’m so desperately alone. Someone please help me,” the sobbing cog cried.
Besides killing off Mooney, and the ridiculous songs containing repetitive sequences of code and the brand names, models, and calibers of the most popular military weaponry, one of the regular components of my father’s show, Rabbit & Robot, was a weekly feature called “Code from Home,” where kids got to send in their own coder programs for Mooney.
Each week, the best submission actually got uploaded into Mooney, so people could witness the ridiculous nonsense some lucky coder enjoyed making the poor cog do.
The episode we watched—well, the one I watched and Billy Hinman tried to ignore—featured a winning code sequence that made Mooney the cog instantly fall asleep whenever he got about one-fourth of the way across a street. It was called “Crosswalk Narcolepsy,” and it didn’t end well for poor Mooney, but I’m sure it was a great hit with the viewers down on Earth.
I thought it was funny.
Rabbit laughed and laughed about it too. So did Lourdes, who floated around the cabin in our gravity-free transpod, not minding at all that her skirt drifted up and down like hypnotic sea fans in an underwater current. I found myself in a desperate dilemma as I tried to figure out what was morally worse: watching an episode of Rabbit & Robot or getting turned on by looking at a v.4 cog’s panties.
Either way I looked at it, I was completely ashamed of myself.
I was a total mess, and I needed some Woz.
Two days of this was going to be unbearable.
But, apparently no matter what horrible fate Mooney was subjected to, there were always plenty of replica Mooney cogs to stand in and wrap up every “Code from Home” segment. And he’d sing a song that ended with these lines:
As long as there are young coders like you, There’s nothing that humans won’t eventually try to do!
And I thought, yes, as a species, we probably always have had a great need to watch the Mooneys we produce lie down in front of crowded and speeding streetcars.
Pink polka dots. Really small ones. And the cursive word “Thursday.” That was the pattern printed on Lourdes’s panties, even though it was a Monday.
I mean, I was pretty sure it was still Monday.
Lourdes pushed herself through the projection of the screen and drifted down the aisle so she could seal off the portal between our first class and the shrieking, laughing, wailing calamity of peasants confined to second class.
Too bad, because I was just starting to smell something, which was probably only Lourdes’s food printer as it cranked out some protein-carbohydrate-fiber-mineral replications of shrimp scampi, niçoise salad, or chicken cordon bleu.
After all, there really was nothing we humans wouldn’t eventually try to do.
When Rabbit & Robot was over, I looked at Billy, who pretended to be asleep.
I said, “I need some Woz. And I need to pee.”
And Billy Hinman told me, “Wait. We’ll be able to get some Woz when we get there.”
I knew he had to have been lying to me. He’d threatened plenty of times that he was going to oversee some forced acquisition of my sobriety.
Fuck you, Billy.
Rowan waved his hand in the air. “Miss? Lourdes? The boy here—my charge—well . . . he needs to use the toilet.”
“Oh my! I’m so thrilled to help out! This makes me want to pee too! Have you ever been to space? What a beautiful, heroic, brave, and astonishingly sexy young man! This makes me so happy! This gives me hope for the future and makes me want to deliberately ovulate!” Lourdes burbled. She grabbed the hem of her skirt and, for reasons entirely unknown, flagged it up and down and up and down, as though she were fanning the flames on a blacksmith’s forge.
One doesn’t simply “pee” in the weightlessness of space, however. That could be a disaster. Fortunately, the Tennessee had its own gravity-generation system, which made all kinds of wonderful things possible: swimming pools, urination, and even a full-size zoo, for example. One of my father’s first Grosvenor Galactic cruise ships, the Kentucky,