Andrew Smith - Rabbit and Robot

Rowan sat across the aisle from us. We were the only three passengers in first class. Rowan waved at our attendant, and she stepped from her post in the galley as the transpod slid away from the gate.

“Can you bring us three beers before takeoff?” Rowan asked.

“This is so fantastic!” our attendant, whose name tag identified her as Lourdes, said. “I’d be extremely happy to! So happy! I also need to pee! This is so exciting!”

Cogs do not pee. Well, most of them don’t. Lourdes was just so happy, she didn’t know what to think.

“Would Grosvenor Beer be all right for you gentlemen?” Lourdes’s eyes, astonished to the size of apricots, looked at each one of us as she showed a wall of perfect white teeth behind the breach of her smile.

“That would be fine,” Rowan said.

“Perfect! Perfect! Perfect!” Lourdes nearly exploded on us.

Then she whirled around to her galley station and sang a Mooney song to herself while she poured our beers.

Add Action,

Add Action,

Execute switch void ever never,

Execute switch satisfaction.

Nobody likes Mooney.

I woke up a bit when the thing we were in started moving. I pivoted my head from side to side, alternately looking out my porthole and the one next to the empty seat beside Rowan.

“Is this a fucking plane?” I asked.

“I promise you it’s not a plane,” Billy said.

Lourdes returned with a tray of beers. “Drink them fast! We’ll be taking off shortly! This is so exciting, I think I just pooped a little!”

Lourdes placed the beers down on each of our service tables and watched us with unblinking and thrilled eyes while we sipped. Well, to be honest, Billy gulped his down in one tip, which made Lourdes even happier.

“If this is a fucking plane, Billy . . . Where are you taking me?” I said.

Billy hated anything that went high or fast. It was impossible for me to consider that he’d ever feel so desperate as to actually get on a plane—and only for me. But it was too late for him to do anything about it now.

As long as I’d known him, Billy Hinman had told me he would rather die than go into space.

“Here, Bill. Maybe you should finish my beer for me,” I said.

Billy Hinman emptied my glass, and Lourdes came to collect our service items. Then we reclined our seats flat and waited for all hell to break loose.

Meg Hatfield knew more about programming than most of the coders who designed the reasoning architecture in the v.4 cogs that Hinsoft International distributed all over the human world.

“It took me a solid week to figure out the code sequence to get in. Writing you into it was easy. The cogs at the gates scan our eyes and they only see code. They think we’re a couple of v.4s,” Meg said. “Stupid fucking machines.”

“I never went to Grosvenor School a day in my life,” Jeffrie told her. “I came here with Lloyd when I was ten. I could never figure out something like that.”

Jeffrie and her brother Lloyd were burners—arsonists.

“Here” was Antelope Acres—a chain-link-enclosed squatter’s camp in the desert north of Los Angeles.

“You set a mean fire, though,” Meg said.

“Lloyd does, mostly. I just watch.”

Lloyd Cutler had a thing for Meg Hatfield. Meg knew that was why Jeffrie didn’t want her brother to come with them. Besides, Meg didn’t like Lloyd—she didn’t like burners in general, but especially Lloyd, who’d tried to lure her into his camper to have sex ever since she and her father had moved in to Antelope Acres. Meg was afraid Lloyd might get out of control and burn the place down if he came along. So she was relieved that Jeffrie told her not to write him in too, that the girls should go alone.

But Meg liked Jeffrie. Jeffrie Cutler was different from most burners. She didn’t just burn things out of anger. Meg Hatfield knew there was something else Jeffrie was trying to get rid of.

A few days before Christmas, the girls hiked down from Missing Boy Mountain on a trail that led to the highway across from Mojave Field’s glimmering terminal complex. They sat at the edge of the desert and waited for late afternoon, which Meg explained was the busiest time, and the most opportune for the girls to get inside.

“What happens to Lloyd if we don’t come back?” Meg said.

Jeffrie shrugged. “He’s grown up. He can take care of himself.”

“Won’t he worry about you?”

“No.” Jeffrie shook her head. “What about your dad?”

“I’ll call him. He’ll be okay. I’ll come back if he needs me to.”

“Okay.” Jeffrie bit her lower lip and nodded. “What’s it like, writing code?”

“It’s like talking in dog,” Meg said. “It’s an ugly language, because there’s no space for interpretation, which is the difference between cogs and us.”

“I’d rather light stuff up than interpret it,” Jeffrie said.

“No burning here once we’re in. Okay?”

“I promise.” And Jeffrie asked, “Which one of those planes have you been in?”

Across the highway, set a quarter mile behind rows of fencing, sat a rust-smeared and tired old herd of derelict passenger airliners.

“We’re not going in one of those. We’re going inside the place where the big stuff happens,” Meg said.

When it was time, Meg Hatfield drew a rectangle in the air between her thumbs and index fingers. Her thumbphone screen lit up in the space she drew with her hands.

“Are you going to call your dad?” Jeffrie asked.

“No. I’m getting us inside.” She entered a sequence of numbers and letters. The screen floating before them in the air scrolled rapidly with line after line of bracketed and meaningless poetry. Then Meg Hatfield hit send, and she said, “Come on, Jeffrie. Let’s cross the road now.”

“Happy almost-Crambox Eve, Cager,” Billy said.

“Fuck, Billy. Why are you guys doing this to me?” I needed to vomit.

Puking in space is not good; just ask anyone who’d survived the Kansas ordeal.

In the absence of gravity, sewage, like hungry tigers and venomous snakes, is incomprehensibly terrifying.

The transpod shuddered and roared as it picked up acceleration down the railway of the takeoff strip. Rowan turned his face toward us and watched what was going on. I could tell he felt bad for me and Billy, so there was a lot of feeling miserable going on in first class.

Except for Lourdes, our flight attendant, who squealed, “Whee! Whee! I am so happy! I am so happy! I could poop myself, I’m so happy! Whee!” From her rear-facing seat, she paddled her high-heeled feet as though she were doing the backstroke.

I couldn’t help but catch a glimpse of her panties.

“Well. I thought it would be a nice gift for you, Cager. You know. Just us—well, and Rowan, too—up there on that enormous ship, where we can do whatever we want and basically run the place. Think of it, how much fun that will be.”

“Yeah. Whatever, Bill.”

“Come on. It will be great. Tell him how fun it will be up there, Rowan,” Billy said.

“You may never want to come back,” Rowan confirmed.

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.