I am the Worm.
There was an episode of his father’s program, Rabbit & Robot, titled “I Am the Worm.”
Oddly prophetic, that one.
I need a cigarette, and I don’t even smoke. Whenever I ask Cager to bring me some cigarettes, he laughs and tells me I can’t smoke. So I say, fine, then bring me a gin and tonic.
In the episode called “I Am the Worm,” there are these blue space creatures who can turn themselves into anything they want to be—alligators, Abraham Lincolns (Or is it Abrahams Lincoln? This is why I need a cigarette), Phillips-head screwdrivers, frying pans, whatever—and they send out this little blue worm, wriggling through the solar system, and it ends up crawling up inside Mooney’s nose.
The worm, not the solar system.
Mooney is one of the main characters—the robot.
The worm that went up his nose reprogrammed him and made him go insane.
Bad things like that happen to Mooney in practically every episode.
Formula.
The “Rabbit,” who doesn’t really have a name, is a bonk—a soldier who’s come back from one or three, or eighteen, wars. He’s insane too.
It’s a lot of fun.
And Cager is not allowed to watch it.
Mr. Messer doesn’t want the worm to crawl up his son’s nose.
Cager Messer’s List of Things He’s Never Done
There are things that your friends will do for you that you just don’t have the guts to do for yourself.
Because, let’s face it: Cager Messer—me—I was a messed-up drug addict who had one foot—and probably most of the rest of my body too—in the grave by the time other guys were stressing over getting driver’s licenses, and losing or not losing their virginity.
Most people who were allowed to have an opinion on guys like Billy and me would conclude that I was a loser, and that we were both spoiled pieces of shit.
But Billy Hinman was my best friend. I know that now.
He saved me.
Unfortunately, saving me resulted in things no one could ever have foreseen.
Because Billy Hinman and I nicked a fucking cruise ship.
Billy stared out the window as we drifted away on the R & R G G transpod, sad and bleary-eyed. Billy was terrified of flying.
He said, “Good-bye, California. Have a happy Crambox, Mrs. Jordan.”
It was two days before Christmas; two days before Billy Hinman and I would find ourselves trapped on the Tennessee.
It was also my sixteenth birthday.
Happy birthday to me!
Billy Hinman kept no secrets from me. He and Mrs. Jordan—our friend Paula’s mother—had been having sex since Billy was just fifteen years old.
Of course I was jealous, in a sickening kind of way. What sixteen-year-old virgin guy wouldn’t be jealous of a best friend who had actual sex as often as Billy Hinman did? He had sex with just about everyone.
But Billy Hinman still called Paula’s mother Mrs. Jordan, which was creepier than shit.
* * *
One thing I have never done: I do not go to school.
Grosvenor High School’s mascot was the Shrieking Weasel. We no longer had competitive sports in high school (a thing I understand was commonplace fifty years before our time), but at assemblies and career fairs the students of Grosvenor High School thrilled themselves by screaming the cry of the Shrieking Weasel, which sounds like this: Cheepa Yeep! Cheepa Yeep!
This past summer, Billy Hinman turned sixteen. Also, the United States of America was involved in twenty-seven simultaneous wars.
Twenty-seven!
And up here in heaven, we look down and watch the world burn.
* * *
I have this memory from a few months before Billy and Rowan kidnapped me. It was fire season in Los Angeles.
I have never set fire to anything.
Fire season lasted ten months out of the year. The two months that were unofficially not-fire-season were only less flammable because they tended to be a little too chilly for most arsonists—burners—to go outdoors.
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 re
ally 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 w
ouldn’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.”