I panicked. I was covered with bugs.
I tore the spacesuit off and began scratching everywhere, leaving railroad tracks of red welts all over my skin.
“Dude. Get into the shower. You’ll feel better.”
“I can’t make them go away,” I said.
Billy Hinman ran to the bathroom and turned on the water, then wrestled me into the shower, holding me under the stream until I stopped scratching.
It must have been pathetic and frightening for Billy.
I finally calmed down. The water poured through my hair and into my mouth. Billy was soaked. He looked like he was in pain, like he was about to cry.
But crying was something I had never in my life seen Billy Hinman do.
And then I said, “You’re so perfect, Billy. Everyone loves you. If I hadn’t watched you grow up, I’d swear you were a fucking cog.”
Billy turned off the water. He managed to get me to lie down on my bed and tried to cover me with a sheet, but I kept kicking it away.
“Whatever,” Billy said. “I’m going to get Rowan. I’ll find some help for you, Cager.”
“Fuck you, Billy. Get me some Woz. You promised you’d get me some Woz.”
I had no idea how long I’d been dead.
That’s what it was like, crashing from Woz. There were no dreams, just an empty and sweat-soaked blackness. When I woke up—maybe it was two hours later, maybe it was four days, not that such measurements amounted to much up here where time loses its calibration with suns and shadows—I was twisted up in my sheets, completely naked, and I felt as though I’d been entirely hollowed out, as though the skin that contained what there was that made Cager Messer Cager Messer was nothing more than an eggshell. It was like I was a desiccated husk that if you pressed into it hard enough would dissolve into a faint puff of dusty smoke.
Billy Hinman was gone, and the room was dark.
I had a dim memory of being on the transpod, of tearing off the orange paper suit that had been required flight gear.
“Billy? Are you here?”
Nothing.
I wobbled to my feet, wrapping my sheet into a toga, and made my way to the bathroom so I could put water on my face. I ended up drinking three glasses and got a stomachache.
Rowan’s room was next door. Maybe Billy was with Rowan, I thought.
I stepped out through our door and into the hallway.
“Hey! Are you guys in there?” I called out.
I leaned against the wall between our door and Rowan’s. I opened my thumbphone. I thought about calling Mr. Messer, or my mom. That would have been stupid. What had they ever done to fix anything in my life? I punched in Katie St. Romaine’s number. Nothing. No answer there, either.
Something was wrong. Something was wrong with everything.
“It’s quite impossible to lock yourself out of your room.”
I hadn’t noticed that my personal Tennessee attendant had been standing in the hallway, watching me.
There were personal valet cogs assigned to me on every one of my father’s ships. Their job was to take care of anything a young, unmonitored teenage Messer could possibly want. And, given the number of cogs on board, and since the three of us—me, Rowan, and Billy—were the only human beings on the ship, it meant that each of us had hundreds of helpful and potentially angry, happy, depressed, horny, or condescending v.4 cogs all to himself.
What fun.
It turned out that my Tennessee valet was incredibly needy and simply would not leave me the fuck alone.
My deck valet—a young, soft-voiced male v.4 made to look like some big-eyed and innocent teenage bellhop— continued, “Simply wave your palm in front of your door and it will unlock for you. Here. Do you want me to show you how?”
I closed my phone screen. The cog walked toward me.
I said, “No.”
The valet stopped on the other side of Rowan’s door and tilted his head slightly as he stared at me. I know that cogs are just machines, but I’ve always been a bit creeped out by people—especially ones who are not exactly alive— who stare directly into my eyes.
“My name is Parker,” he said. “I’m your personal valet, here to help with whatever you want or need, Cager Messer.”
Parker kept staring and staring at me. I looked at the floor.
“Let me show you how to do it,” Parker said.
Well, he certainly was not outraged, depressed, or overjoyed. I was trying to decide if Parker was one of those know-it-all, smug v.4s, or if maybe he was a horny one. Either way, I immediately decided I did not like Parker, my personal valet.
“No thanks. Really. I know how, and I’m not locked out.”
Then Parker touched my naked arm.
I said, “Um. Parker.”
Undeterred, my valet continued, “But, poor thing, haven’t you found your clothes? Do you need me to show you where the clothing we’ve prepared for you is located? I could help you get out of this bedsheet and dressed into something nicer. Wouldn’t that feel better? You’ll need a tie and jacket for dinner, besides. Please allow me to serve as your valet and help you dress and groom. It’s my job, after all.”
Parker was still staring into my eyes. And he was uncomfortably close. He brushed his fingers over my hand, and that was it.
“Look. Parker. I’ll tell you what: You go back to your post over there, and I promise I will come get you when I need help getting dressed for dinner. Okay?”
Parker stared and stared. His mouth hung open slightly. If cogs could drool, Parker would be doing it right now, which was completely disgusting.
Then Rowan’s door opened and my caretaker stepped out into the hall.
If Rowan had ever looked surprised and shocked in his life, he was both of those things in that instant when he stumbled into the moment I’d been sharing with a v.4 cog personal deck valet named Parker who wanted to put his hands on me and undress me. I can only assume that Rowan must have thought Lourdes and her polka-dotted “Thursday” panties had gotten me a little too excited over the course of our two-day flight to the Tennessee.
But Rowan would have been wrong about that.
Whatever.
Rowan raised one eyebrow and looked at me, then at Parker, then at me again without saying anything.
“I. Um,” I said.
“Good morning, Cager.” Rowan glanced at his wrist. “Well, nearly evening, to be precise. I’ll just get a dinner outfit ready for you.”
And Rowan, being the dutiful caretaker that he had always been throughout my life, went into my room and selected an entire outfit for me.
“No necktie,” I said, standing in the doorway, wrapped in my sheet. “I’ll put it on before we go to dinner.”
And Parker—if he could feel such things besides horniness—would have been so jealous that I had my own valet, who most likely was not a cog, to help me get dressed. But Rowan was so Rowan all the time.
“Does he help you get dressed?” Parker asked.
I looked down at my sheet, at my pale bare legs sticking out from the bottom. Then I shook my head and went inside, leaving my personal valet alone in the dark of the hallway.
And as I slipped on the clothes Rowan had picked