“Yeah. Funny,” Billy had said, completely deadpan.
“I’m not lying,” Charlie said.
Neither one of us thought Charlie Greenwell was lying. I could smell the runny eggs Charlie Greenwell had eaten that morning for breakfast, and that he’d drunk some vodka too. It kind of turned my stomach.
“And I’m not embarrassed to say what happened, either,” Charlie said. “But, you know, it was weird, but that’s what we were there to do. Twenty-seven wars don’t just fight themselves, you know?”
“Twenty-eight,” Billy corrected.
“What fucking ever, Hinman,” Charlie said. “Anyway, it was how we blew off steam—telling about all the rabbits we’d shot, and what it was like. And I ain’t lying, neither, but most of us bonks would get pretty worked up after a few hits and all the stories we’d tell about whacking rabbits. Most of us got pretty horned up just thinking about it.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “You fucking got horny while telling stories about killing people?”
“Well. Yeah. It was no big deal, Hinman. Everyone does,” Charlie said.
I could only imagine Charlie Greenwell had no clue about what everyone did, and now there he was, back in the good old United States of America, smoking Woz with me, and walking down the same streets and visiting the same shopping malls as everyone else.
Charlie Greenwell was on state disability. Everyone in America who was old enough to work was either a bonk, a coder, on disability, or maybe on disability and doing part-time gigs as human department-store Santas, or completely invisible, except for people like Billy and me, and that was just because of our parents. It had nothing to do with us.
Rabbit & Robot turned out to be meaningless and riveting at the same time. There was something about the song and the images that seemed to connect directly with the Woz receptors in my brain.
I always knew this was why Billy and I had been kept away from the show—and supposedly from Woz—for our entire lives.
When the assault of the song and pictures finally ended, and the quiet opening of the first scene replaced it, I felt my shoulders relax. I slumped comfortably back in my seat.
“I love this show! I love this show so much, I want to rip my clothes off and rub Rabbit & Robot all over my naked body!” Lourdes gurgled. Her hair was a mess, and her skirt had twisted around, due to all the wild dancing she’d been doing. If she were a human, she would have been soaked in sweat, and quite possibly ashamed of herself too.
But I love v.4s, even if I was calculating in my mind how unbearably long the two-day journey to the Tennessee would actually be with Lourdes running as juiced-up as she was.
Rowan shrugged and shook his head.
If the opening song was stupid, the episode of Rabbit & Robot we watched adequately matched or exceeded that quality.
The episode we saw—well, the one I saw, since Billy Hinman was obviously trying to force himself to not watch it—was about a mistake that had been made with Mooney’s work classification. He had been drafted into the army, which made Mooney the cog very confused, and Rabbit the bonk extremely angry.
But Mooney, being the patriotic and dutiful cog that he was, reported to boot camp along with his partner, Rabbit (which didn’t really make sense, since Rabbit was already an accomplished bonk, but sense making was not something the program was necessarily praised for), and zany high jinks ensued. And even though nearly every episode of Rabbit & Robot included Mooney’s violent destruction at some point, people regularly told us how hilarious it was, and lavished us with undeserved vicarious praise for our television-program-and-spaceship-producer and cog-and-thumbphone-manufacturing sperm-donor fathers. When the other bonks in Mooney’s squad at boot camp found out they were sharing their barracks with a cog, they were understandably outraged. They found out because Rabbit outed Mooney when he was drunk, which was something Rabbit routinely was in the show too.
Oops.
So the other bonks in Mooney’s squad waited until after lights-out was declared and, on the third night of boot camp, dragged Mooney the cog outside and set him on fire while he screamed and screamed. Actually, they set him on fire after cutting off his arms and legs so he couldn’t run away or attempt to pat out the flames with his cog hands. It was all very funny, especially when the bonk recruits began singing a bonk song called “Making Rabbit Stew.”
Everyone knows that it is barbaric and uncivilized to allow cogs to participate in the glories of human warfare. What purpose could that possibly serve? Nothing would ever get solved if people let wars just fight themselves.
Even Charlie Greenwell knew that.
Cheepa Yeep!
“You two! Go to gate forty-four. Do I have to say it again?” A male cog in a very tight, red Grosvenor Galactic smock flailed his arms as though he were cutting through a swarm of insects flocking between him and Meg. “This is ridiculous! Why are you victimizing me? Why are you doing this to me? What gives you the right to publicly disgrace me like this?”
“What the fuck?” Jeffrie said.
The v.4 in charge of getting the cogs on board was more than mildly huffy.
“I . . . I . . . don’t get it,” Meg said.
“Why do I have to tell you twice? Why do you feel entitled to demean me?”
Meg Hatfield and Jeffrie Cutler didn’t have much experience with cogs at all.
“Are you sure we should do this?” Jeffrie whispered.
“Are you scared?”
“This place needs to burn.”
Then Meg asked the cog, “Why are you so mad at us?”
The cog behind the check-in counter gagged and screamed like he was being stabbed. Then he threw himself onto his back and thrashed his arms and legs wildly. “Why? Why are you making me the bad guy in all this? What have I ever done to you? I don’t know you! I don’t know you! I didn’t do anything to you! I owe you no debt of suffering!”
He tugged big handfuls of hair from his scalp and scratched at his cheeks with his perfect fingernails.
This is what v.4 cogs do all the time. Well, at least the irritated ones.
Meg grabbed Jeffrie’s arm. “Come on.”
The girls joined the assembling crowd of passenger cogs and followed them toward the doorway beneath a sign that read TO ALL GATES.
Although there was no need for medical screenings, since cogs were either alive or dead, running or not running, with no in-between states of disease, all cogs still had to go through the same decontamination showers and suit-up procedures as living human passengers, in order to prevent the transportation of biological pathogens into space. Except cogs, being cogs, were handled a little more roughly than fragile human beings, which was more than a little discomforting to Meg Hatfield and Jeffrie Cutler.
Meg and Jeffrie happened to be in a group that was mostly made up of very, very happy cogs. A few of the cogs were depressed. One of them wept incessantly, although being a cog, he shed an oily hydraulic fluid, as opposed to actual tears.
The jets in the cog showers were not heated and came on like fire hoses. Eleven cogs, male and female models, were packed with Meg and Jeffrie