“They always leave me places. Fuckers,” Livingston said.
We had gone down to the arrivals deck just in time to see the giant blue baby thing disappearing from view on the wall screens outside the air lock.
“One time, when we were moving to California, my father drove off and left me in a gas station toilet,” Meg said. “It took him more than an hour to realize I wasn’t in the motor home with him.”
“These assholes do this to me on purpose, all the fucking time,” Livingston said.
Normally, I would have worried—contemplated, at least—what having Livingston aboard the Tennessee with us for an indefinite stay of perhaps twenty or thirty thousand years would be like, but there were too many other things on the arrivals deck to be preoccupied by, and most of those things were partially eaten or dead.
The floor was slick with inch-deep lakes of slimy cog goo that splashed up over the tops of our very nice dress shoes. The stuff had a nauseating scent of motor oil and warm raw eggs. Most humans couldn’t smell it, but it made me nearly gag. Dead and half-functioning cog corpses were scattered everywhere. If these had been real people, the scene would have been the most horrid nightmare imaginable; but, being that they were only cogs, my overall impression of it was softened by constant self-reminders that they were only cogs.
“Happy New Year!” Billy said.
“Yes! Thank you very, very much! Wheee! Happy New Year to you, too! I love New Year’s Eve more than anything else in the universe! It makes me so happy!” said a cog head that was attached to a right shoulder and arm but nothing else at all.
“Who do you think you are? What gives you the right to be more injured than me? I suffer more than you! You have no right to be more harmed than me! Why are you diminishing my suffering by inflicting the narrow constraints of your market psychology on my paradigms in this unjust way? I’m the real victim here, not you! Not you! Parasite! Thieving capitalist! Impostor! Fraud!” said another cog that was just a head and torso belching out anger and mucilaginous creamy goo from multiple wounds where arms and legs used to be.
I tried not to look at him, but when I did I saw that he was the same outraged security v.4 who’d nearly arrested me at the wicket to Deck 21. I’ll admit I was kind of happy to see he’d been snacked on.
And Dr. Geneva was here too. He was busy, but he wasn’t helping cogs so much as helping himself to them.
“If there is going to be a last-cog-standing contest,” I said, “Dr. Geneva might be the odds-on favorite.”
“Please don’t let him eat me, Cager,” Parker said.
“Don’t worry. He’s got to be getting pretty full, anyway.” I patted Parker’s shoulder, then immediately felt stupid and embarrassed for doing it.
“Can I kiss you, Cager?” Parker asked.
“No.”
“May I hold your hand?”
“No to that, too.”
Parker tugged on his crotch.
Dr. Geneva was coated like a glazed doughnut from head to foot in the snotty snail-pus sheen of cog goo. Although he still had a burbling hole in his face where Captain Myron had bitten off his cheek, Dr. Geneva was remarkably intact and fit, considering the obvious feeding frenzy that had been taking place on the Tennessee. He chewed on a destroyed cog’s face with the enthusiastic commitment of Queen Dot assailing a taco.
Cog society on the Tennessee had split into two classes: Eaters and Feeders. There were two other Eaters on the arrival deck with Dr. Geneva—a female v.4 who was dressed like she worked in one of the clothing or perfume shops on board, and a male cog who wore a chef’s hat and uniform from Le Lapin et l’Homme Mécanique.
It was difficult to tell exactly how many Feeder cogs the pigs had gone through, due to the scattered limbs and hodgepodge of innards and slime, but it was a large number—perhaps thirty or more.
Dr. Geneva made a kind of Snarf! Snarf! Snarf! noise as he ate. Then he paused, blew a few bubbles in the cog goo pooled around his mouth, and looked up at me.
“Ah, Cager!” Dr. Geneva rose to his knees. “Please excuse my small indulgence here.”
I waggled a scolding finger at him. “Shame on you! This is completely rude, Dr. Geneva.”
“Now, now.” Dr. Geneva, apparently torn between the delights of feasting on the quivering cog he had pinned to the floor and explaining everything in the fucking universe to me, said, “Did you know, Cager, that the earliest fossilized record of cannibalism among humans was found in Europe?”
They eat stuff like brains and pickled herring there, so I wasn’t surprised.
Dr. Geneva, as I expected, went on. “Yes, it’s true. The earliest of your ancestors—Homo sapiens—seemed to delight in the practice of feeding upon one another.”
And I thought that made a lot of sense, considering they came from King Carlos’s monkey sperm.
Dr. Geneva wiped a mucus-smeared arm across his equally mucus-smeared face. “Not only that, but Christian crusaders from Europe also ate the flesh of their Muslim enemies in the Syrian outpost of Ma’arraa. There is still some significant debate as to whether this record of cannibalism was an act of necessary fulfillment—satiation—or psychological warfare. Personally, I opt for the former. As a matter of fact, during the early Renaissance, it was a common medical practice to use the flesh, urine, blood, and fat harvested from cadavers as edible prophylactics against all manner of malady! Delightful!”
Dr. Geneva took another big bite.
I knew there was a good reason I never trusted doctors.
“So, historically, cannibalism falls into two general categories: cannibalism of desperation—for example, the Jamestown settlement in the year 1610—and cannibalism for pleasure, examples of which would include—”
“It’s impolite to talk with your mouth full, Dr. Geneva,” I said.
I shook my head and walked away from him.
Snarf! Snarf! Snarf!
Dr. Geneva, unaffected by my rudeness, resumed his meal.
An alarm bell buzzed in the hallway, and the air-lock door opened.
“Fuckers. Dumb fuckers,” Livingston said.
The abandoned blue offspring stomped into the air lock and sealed the entry behind him. Then Livingston turned himself into a smaller version of King Carlos, the giant blue baby thing, opened the outer lock, and drifted out into space, floating away after his family, skimming over the surface of the moon, and vanishing from sight.
“Well, I suppose at this moment it might be appropriate to say ‘Beware of flying blue babies bearing gifts,’ ” Rowan said.
Billy Hinman shook his head. “What are you talking about, gifts?”
Rowan swept his arm across the gruesome panorama of cogs feeding on cogs.
“This.”
And Parker stood behind me, positioning himself away from Meg and Jeffrie. “Please don’t let them eat me, Cager.”
“I’m not a cog, you idiot,” Meg said.
I grabbed Parker’s little valet jacket. “Come on, Parker. We better get you out of here.”
As we left, through every sound system on board the Tennessee came the dirgelike drone of Mooney, the robot, and Rabbit, the bonk, singing a weepy duet of “Auld Lang Syne.”
It truly was the beginning of the last year ever.
We stopped.
We looked at each other.
I shook Rowan’s hand as Jeffrie and Meg hugged each other. Then I hugged Billy Hinman, who kissed me on the cheek. I didn’t mind, and it wasn’t the first time he’d kissed me, anyway. There was something about this moment that called for it, I thought, so I kissed him back, square on his mouth. Then each of us gave polite, tuxedo-wearing kisses to Meg and Jeffrie.
“What about me?” Parker said.
I patted his felt valet cap like a drum. “Don’t say anything else for the rest of the night, Parker.”
Then I kissed the little machine on the forehead.
If machines could faint, I think Parker was just about ready to hit the floor.
I must have been going insane.
But I couldn’t help but wonder, in the caste system of cogs, would my valet ultimately become an Eater or a Feeder?
First Night of the Neveryear
Meg Hatfield could not worm her way inside the stubborn brains of the computer command systems on the Tennessee. But she never gave up trying; she worked at it for the entire day until she became so exhausted, her eyes would no longer focus.
Of the five of us humans left alive in our solar system, Meg Hatfield was the smartest by far.
And that day, the morning after New Year’s Eve, the ship had become a sort of mechanized slaughterhouse in which the girls had to remain hidden in order to avoid the hungry attraction of infected cogs. To the cogs on the Tennessee, Meg Hatfield and Jeffrie Cutler were just another pair of v.4s. Walking dinner. And, despite feeling weak and useless for doing it, I tried my best to keep Parker, Milo, and Lourdes safe too.
Billy Hinman, who hated cogs, wanted nothing to do with my rescue mission.
I knotted docking cables like nooses around their necks and left the three of them lashed to mooring bolts in the air lock.
“Trust me. It’s for your own good,” I told them. It made me feel shitty and hypocritical, because I was saying the same thing to Parker, Milo, and Lourdes that my parents said whenever they’d beat the crap out of me. And it was basically what Billy Hinman had said to me too, when he’d tricked me into coming with Rowan and him on the Tennessee. If that wasn’t a noose that had been tightened around my neck, then nothing ever would be.
It was a disturbing task.
While I tied the cables around their throats, Milo shuddered and cried, “This is all there is, isn’t it? Just waste and uselessness. I deserve to suffer. I deserve it.” Parker asked if I would touch his penis one final time, to which I pointed out there would be no granting of last requests, and that he wasn’t going to die, anyway.
And Lourdes shrieked, “Hooray! I love being strangled! Wheee! Wheeee! Yippeeee! I’m so happy I’m being hanged, I could poop a ukulele!”
Then she farted and began dancing, with a black noose around her neck.
So I closed them inside the air lock and left them there. From the arrivals deck I opened the outer door and watched on the viewing screen while Lourdes, Milo, and Parker bobbed and floated inside the open air lock, in the deaf vacuum of space.
Lourdes seemed to enjoy it very much. Milo wept incessantly, and Parker never stopped being turned on. Even the complete absence of air pressure and gravity coupled with the absolute zero of space could not stop my little valet cog’s automatic penis from setting the mechanized boy on a hopeless and unfulfilled mission.
Watching them dangle like that was a gruesome thing to do. The three of them looked like corpses floating around the empty dock. Except for Lourdes, who danced and wriggled and was most likely squealing with joy about being a flying squid or something equally ridiculous.
“Don’t be a sap,” Billy Hinman had told me after I’d discussed my plan for saving the cogs with him. “They’re just fucking cogs. What’s wrong with you?”
And I said, “What about Meg and Jeffrie? You’d save them, wouldn’t you? They’re not cogs, but as far as everyone else on the Tennessee is concerned, they are.”
“You said ‘everyone.’ ” Billy Hinman sighed and shook his head. “ ‘Everyone’ is just me and you. Maybe Rowan, but I have my doubts sometimes.”
I’ll admit it now: I liked my cogs. And I felt sorry for them too.
I suppose I had gone completely insane; or I’d somehow changed into something else—maybe something not quite human. Maybe everything that Queen Dot had told me about how she’d singlehandedly manipulated human evolution with her machines and Worms was true, and I was just another victim of time and progress.
I wished I could be more like Billy and not care, or even Rowan, and be emotionally sedate, but I was helpless.
We decided we all had to remain together.
Rowan, as always, kept to himself, though. It was the caretaker role he never deviated from—caring for me without actual closeness.
I couldn’t let Meg and Jeffrie stay by themselves in their room below us. They would have been such easy targets for predators like Dr. Geneva. So we hid them in Billy’s and my stateroom, which meant the only proper thing I could do was to sleep next to Billy Hinman in his bed. It made me feel strange, like maybe Billy and I should sleep together, but Billy didn’t mind at all, naturally, and the girls were both willing to put up with the arrangement. Billy Hinman slept with his arms around me. He told me we were all going to die soon anyway. I believed him.
I always believed Billy Hinman.
It was weird.
Everything was going to shit.
On the night after Livingston abandoned ship, the first night of the Neveryear, while Jeffrie and Billy slept, Meg Hatfield and I whispered a conversation from bed to bed—like we were connected by some private transcontinental cable that stretched across the still ocean of my room.
I lay on the edge of the bed staring over to where Meg and Jeffrie were, in the absolute dark of our stateroom. I imagined what Meg would look like and tried to think that she was looking toward me, too, and wondering the same things. Billy had his arm over me, his chest on my shoulder. I felt the tickle of his breath in the hair on the back of my neck.
I said, “If you could back things up, knowing what you know now, would you have stayed down on Earth with everyone else, or would you have come up here anyway?”
Meg didn’t answer for a while. I imagined she thought I was stupid, or stuck-up because I was Anton Messer’s kid, or both. Then she said, “Why do you have such a hard time facing the fact that we’re the luckiest people in the universe?”
“Being the luckiest doesn’t count when you’re also the only,” I pointed out.
She didn’t have anything to say about that, and I felt guilty for being an argumentative piece of shit.
So I added, “I don’t believe I’m lucky, because I feel like everything’s my fault—or our fault—Billy’s and mine. Because of what our dads do. Did, I mean.”
“We aren’t our fathers.”
“They got us where we are,” I said.
“I’m happy for that. Even if it meant spending most of my life invisible, drifting around from nowhere to nowhere in a motor home parked next to a bunch of burners and lunatics,” Meg said.
“Stop talking crap about me,” Jeffrie said.
“I’m not talking about you. Go back to sleep, Jeff. I’m just talking about Cager and me. Not you.”
Beside me in bed, Billy Hinman moved but didn’t wake up.
“Do you miss anyone?” I asked.
Admittedly, my question was a pedestrian tactic for trying to find out if Meg had a person in her life she felt close to.
Meg Hatfield was smarter than me. She caught on.
“If you’re trying to ask if I have a boyfriend, you’re pretty stupid. Things like that don’t mean anything to me. They never did, and I can’t imagine it changing now.”
“Oh.”
I felt like I’d been slugged in the stomach. Then nothing happened at all. We lay there in total silence, in absolute darkness, for so long I thought Meg must have fallen asleep.
Then she said, “I hurt your feelings by calling you stupid. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“It’s okay.”
“What about you? Do you miss anyone?” Meg asked.
I thought about Katie St. Romaine, whom I was sad for but I didn’t miss, and how Meg Hatfield was just trying to be nice to me now when she didn’t need to at all.
“My parents used to beat the shit out of me.”
“You? Anton Messer’s kid? Why?”
“I’m not good enough at anything,” I said.
“You’re a good dancer,” Meg said.
“Thank you.”
“But it was only a dance. For New Year’s Eve. Don’t take it as anyth
ing else.”
“Okay. Sorry if there’s something wrong with that.”
“You’re an okay guy. You’re not pushy like Lloyd.”
I asked, “Who’s Lloyd?” But I was almost afraid to hear what her answer would be.
“Jeffrie’s brother. He always wants to have sex with everyone,” Meg said.
I thought about Billy Hinman, who was pressed up against me as close as he could get. “Some guys are just like that.”
“I’m going to get into that fucking computer,” Meg said.
I believed her. There was something about Meg Hatfield’s matter-of-factness that made me feel safe.
“I think you will too,” I said.
“I’m not tired anymore,” she said. “I want to go back and try again now.”
“Now?”
“Yes. Right now.”
“You can’t go alone,” I said.
“Well?”
“Let me get my pants on.”
“Okay.”
It’s Time to Eat Now, and I Become Aware of My Balls
Reverend Bingo, looking something like a black, four-legged arachnid suspended in a web, stood in front of the elevator, his ghastly, slender and too-long arms outstretched across the width of the doorway.
His chin was tilted up like he was downloading some private data from God, so we couldn’t see whether or not his eyes were open.
Meg and I stopped in the hallway about fifty feet from the elevator and the insane priest.
I whispered, “I’ll bet you anything he’s going to complain about the color of his car.”
I shouldn’t have whispered. Cogs can hear everything.
It was probably a highly desirable feature in a cog who was also a priest, I thought.
Reverend Bingo snapped his chin down. His yellow eyes widened like his skull was attempting to poop them out of his face.
“Satan! Satan! Fuck you to hell! Stand still, so I can throw something at you!”
Then Reverend Bingo looked around frantically, obviously trying to find something to throw at me, but there was nothing at all in the hallway. So Reverend Bingo removed one of his shoes and he threw it as hard as he could. His shoe hit the floor about two feet in front of him.