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.
Not surprisingly, the brief commercial that played before our in-flight entertainment was produced by Hinsoft International. It was a sure bet that the next advertisement on the flight would be from a Grosvenor brand. After all, there was almost nothing at all in existence that didn’t come from the guys whose sperm made me and Billy Hinman.
The Hinsoft ad was all about the New! Revolutionary! v.4 cog, and how seamlessly it blended in to the human world—satisfying the demand for anything people no longer wanted to waste their time doing, which was just about everything you could list, besides being a bonk, a coder, or maybe a department store Father Christmas. The commercial showed happy cogs, which I was already getting sick of after spending about forty-five minutes with Lourdes, shouting cogs, a chorus line of singing cogs, cogs performing surgery on human beings, road-building cogs, and even naked ones. It was perfectly okay to show full nudity in public media displays—as long as the nakedness in question involved unclothed cogs, who were strikingly anatomically correct—because, after all, cogs were cogs. It was like looking at a Renaissance sculpture of a Greek god or some biblical character’s penis or breasts. It was actually like looking at a naked electric toaster, when you thought about it. As long as they weren’t actually people, everyone was pretty much okay with whatever cogs did.
And the commercial’s British-accented and most likely cog narrator said, “Hinsoft v.4 cogs—so lifelike and functional, so smart and reliable, you might find yourself falling in love.”
Wonderful, I thought.
The more disturbing thing was what followed the v.4 ad. What came next was an episode of Rabbit & Robot.
Billy Hinman perked up from the melancholy that pervaded our cabin. He had an almost conspiratorial look on his face. Neither of us was ever allowed to watch my father’s program, so this was like sneaking a drink or a smoke, except those were things that Billy Hinman and I did whenever we wanted to. Watching Rabbit & Robot, on the other hand, was entirely forbidden in the Messer and Hinman households.
I glanced over at Rowan. “Hey!”
Rowan said, “Would you like me to have Lourdes turn it off?”
Billy answered, “No. We’re stuck and there’s no turning back at this point. I want to see it.”
And on came the opening song. It was meaningless and absurd, sung as a duet by Rabbit, the bonk, and Mooney, the cog, but for whatever reasons it brightened my mood. I think it was most likely the case that if there was such a thing, the song was written in the key of Woz, since everyone who was addicted to the program was also, like Cager Messer, addicted to Woz.
Oh, Rabbit and Robot, Robot and Rabbit
Behind your eyes, the kingdom we inhabit!
The land of asynchronous transfer mode,
Go fight wars, and write that code!
Oh, Rabbit and Robot, Robot and Rabbit
Oh, Rabbit and Robot, Robot and Rabbit
Oh, Rabbit and Robot, Robot and Rabbit
Oh, Rabbit and Robot, Robot and Rabbit!
Like I said, it was really dumb, to the point that I felt uncomfortable—embarrassed, even—because I always knew Rowan was exceedingly judgmental about stupid shit. And there was no getting around it here. But I liked it. It made me happy. Just as Billy said, we were stuck on this shit ride.
And while Mooney and Rabbit—and Lourdes—sang to us, a shotgun storm of images blasted all around the screen—scrolling strings of code commands, and short staccato clips of bonks doing what bonks do, the types of things that were big thrilling hits at Charlie Greenwell’s