Rabbit & Robot

Tyger Tyger, Burning Bright

Is that a fucking tiger?" Billy Hinman asked.

"I think it is a fucking tiger," I said.

I’ll admit that I had never seen a fucking tiger before.

It was certainly a day for checking things off Cager Messer’s infinite list of things he’s never done.

An actual fucking tiger, Billy whispered.

Even when you’re a half mile away from a tiger and you’re standing naked and chest deep in the middle of a lukewarm fake lake, it is an atavistic human instinct to make as little noise as possible.

I think the Zoo of Tennessee must have broke, I theorized.

What the fuck are we going to do? Billy said.

I have no plan.

Cager? Do you know what that is? Parker hollered.

Parker had been hiding up in the branches of a fake pine tree. It could have been a cedar. I don’t know anything about trees. He’d been watching me and Billy swim.

Since I didn’t want to draw the tiger’s attention to us, I decided to think about things for a while.

So Billy offered, You should tell Parker it’s a tiger, and tigers are friendly, and that he should climb down from the tree and give the tiger a hug because tigers love to be hugged by horny teenagers. That way, while the tiger is distracted by clawing the fucker to pieces, we can make a run for it.

But what about our clothes?

Our clothes were scattered on the shore beneath the tree where Parker was hiding.

Cager. It’s a fucking tiger, Billy told me.

For some reason, ever since I’d been forced off Woz, my best friend, Billy Hinman, did make a lot of sense at times.

I can’t tell Parker that, I whispered.

Why not? He’s a fucking machine.

I know that. I just can’t, is all, I said. And, yes, I felt stupid and embarrassed for as much as confessing to Billy Hinman that I had some measured feeling of empathy—or maybe even friendship—for Parker, who was, after all, just a fucking machine.

So I continued, Besides, the tiger is just a machine too, right? It’s a cog. It won’t do anything to us.

"What do you mean by us?" Billy said.

Damn all this clarity.

"Well, he’s not supposed to do anything to us."

"You mean you."

Are you daring me to get out of the water and tell the tiger to go away? I asked.

Not at all. You should make Parker do it, Billy said. You said it yourself, Cager: The tiger’s just another cog. And cogs don’t eat cogs, right?

That was becoming increasingly debatable on the Tennessee.

The Tennessee had been going to shit, and neither of us had any idea how to stop it from spiraling completely out of control. Worse yet, Billy and I were alone; we were stuck here.

Parker, who was my personal attendant on the Tennessee, called out, Can you hear me, Cager? What is that thing with stripes and orange hair? Do you know? Will he be kind to me?

I waded in a little closer to shore, but only about three steps. Then I backed up one. I tried to make my voice as normal sounding and calm as possible. There was no need for me to shout at Parker, because the guy did have pretty good hearing.

How did you get up in the tree? I asked him.

But Parker had to yell for me to hear him clearly, which certainly agitated the tiger, who clawed at and chewed on the pants I’d dropped beside the lake. I floated up here, two days ago when the gravity turned off. The thing with the stripes who is eating your pants right now has been walking around here in Alberta ever since.

When the Tennessee’s gravity failed, all the animal cogs must have gotten out of the zoo.

A zoo without gravity can easily become a battlefield for clashing survival instincts.

The tiger chewed and chewed.

Tell him to stop eating my fucking pants, I said.

I was mad!

And Parker, being the rigidly programmed horny but obedient valet cog that he was, said, You! Thing! Stop eating Cager Messer’s fucking pants!

And the tiger, being the rigidly programmed large predatory cat cog that he was, snorted and growled, shook my pants wildly in his teeth, and ripped them to shreds.

Bad idea, Billy whispered.

Fine. Now I don’t have any pants. Stupid fucking tiger.

Tigers are dicks, Billy said.

I think I should wait up here in the tree for a few more days, Cager, Parker said.

It’s only a tiger, Parker. But I wondered when—if ever—in the history of humankind, anyone had ever said It’s only a tiger. But he’s a cog. He won’t do anything to us. Watch. I’ll show you so you can climb down from the tree.

Then I cupped my hands around my mouth, forming a megaphone with my fingers, and said this: Attention, tiger! You need to go back to the zoo immediately! My name is Cager Messer, and my father owns this ship! Do you hear me? I am Anton Messer’s son, Cager, and I am telling you to return to the zoo!

And that was when the tiger ate Billy Hinman’s pants too.

No animals, not even fake ones, like being in zoos.

Billy Hinman said, Plan B: Cager and Billy stay naked in the lake for the next five days, waiting for a fucking tiger to die of boredom.

What could I say? I never had a Plan A to begin with.

Fortunately for us, we did not have to wait five days in the lake. Something else, which was enormously tall, judging by the rattling and swaying of the fake cedars or pines—or whatever—that didn’t grow or photosynthesize on the recreation deck called Alberta, came crashing toward the lake through the woods.

It was another refugee from the Tennessee’s compromised zoo: a giraffe. The thing’s head, nearly as high as the branch Parker sat on, came crashing through the canopy of Alberta’s fake forest.

And Parker yelled, Cager?

What did he want? I refused to be my horny cog’s fucking safari guide.

Giraffes are nice, right? I whispered to Billy.

Billy nodded. And they’re bisexual.

"What?"

They really are, Billy said. Totally bisexual. They’re, like, the greatest animals ever.

How do you know that?

Billy shrugged. I just do.

The giraffe stopped at the edge of the woods on the opposite side of the trail from where the tiger continued thrashing Billy Hinman’s pants. The giraffe looked directly at Billy and me. He cocked his head slightly, as though waiting for one of us to say hello or something.

Also, I may as well admit this: I had never seen a giraffe before. It was very tall. And I was terrified of it too.

Would you boys like to climb up onto my back, so I can carry you out from the lake? the giraffe said.

He had a French accent.

That giraffe is from France, Billy said.

Why the fuck would your dad make a French giraffe that talks?

I think the more important issue is why he would make a fucking tiger that eats pants, Billy said.

The tiger thrashed and thrashed.

"Bonjour, les jeunes garçons! My name is Maurice, the giraffe said. And if giraffes could smile, Maurice was smiling at us. But, please, let me offer you boys a ride on my back. The Alpine Tea House serves magnificent waffles. It’s just over there, at the bottom of the hiking trail. Are you hungry? J’ai très faim. Heh heh . . . I am, as you say, very hungry."

Cogs were not supposed to get hungry. Ever. Something had been twisting out of whack on the Tennessee.

He seems really nice, and I love waffles, Billy said.

Billy, I am naked. There’s no fucking way I’m riding naked on a bisexual talking giraffe to go get waffles with you, I argued.

And Billy countered, Cager, like you said: It’s an opportunity for you to do one of those things you may never get a chance to try doing ever again. Who’s ever gotten to ride naked on a giraffe to go get some breakfast?

As it turned out, Billy Hinman and I did not need to carry our argument to any definite conclusion. Maurice, being the hungry French giraffe that he claimed to be, became fascinated by the tiger, who had finished eating Billy’s pants and had moved on to his next course, which was my T-shirt.

Maurice looked at Billy and me, then apologetically said, "Excuse me. Excusez-moi, s’il vous plaît."

Maurice spread his front legs wide and stiffly lowered his head toward the oblivious tiger, who was apparently an expert at sorting laundry and was now eating Billy’s T-shirt and socks.

Maurice cocked his head back and in one powerful thrust stabbed his pointy giraffe face directly through the tiger’s midsection.

Maurice made a sound like Mmmph mmmph mmmph! as he wriggled his face deeper inside the tiger’s body, gulping and slurping the internal components of the cat’s mechanization.

Billy Hinman said, Okay. I take back the thing about him being the greatest animal ever.

And the tiger, who had no discernible European accent, said, Ow! That fucking hurts! This is all there is to life, isn’t it? Sadness and pain.

The tiger wept and sobbed as great gushing blobs of viscous, semenlike hydraulic fluid burped from the gaping holes Maurice pierced in his torso.

Maurice ate and ate as the tiger cried and cried.

Maurice burbled, "Cette viande de tigre est délicieux!"

Four or five days in the lake was starting to look like a pretty good idea.

Parker shouted, Cager, what do you suggest I do now?

Tell him to ride the giraffe, Billy whispered.

And the tiger wailed, "Sartre was right—I cannot escape anguish, because I am anguish!"

Mmmph mmmph mmmph! went Maurice.

Cheese Ball!

There was a time when people theorized the moon was made of cheese.

Up here on the Tennessee, though, I can see it is more likely made of ash. Probably all the ashes from all the fires of all our pasts, forever and ever.

And I can turn and, in one direction, see the surface of this enormous cratered ashball as it skims below us like a moving sidewalk; and, in the other, the smoke-shrouded Earth—our lost home—burning itself out, exhaling ash one last time.

Among the enterprises that made my father one of the five wealthiest people in America (and those ventures included a television program called Rabbit & Robot, as well as a line of lunar cruise ships like the one Billy and I were trapped on) is transporting deceased loved ones—not their ashes, but their actual bodies—to the surface of the moon, where they are laid out like vigilant sentinels, eternally gazing down, or up, or wherever, at the planet of their origin. They never decay, never change. Billy and I can see the bodies every time the Tennessee passes above Mare Fecunditatis, which oddly enough means Sea of Fertility.

There are more than thirteen thousand fertile and dead sentinels floating there atop that sea of ash, staring down at everything that had come before them, and everything that came after.

They just lie there, dressed in their outfit of unquestioned permanence—military uniforms or perfect white smocks, every last dead and fertile one of them.

Billy Hinman and I are trapped inside a moon to our moon called the Tennessee.

Because Billy Hinman and I nicked a fucking lunar cruise ship that belongs to my dad.

Well, to be honest, it was kind of an accident. We didn’t mean to steal it, but it’s ours now, no question about it.

It kind of just fell into our hands, you could say.

And we are at the end of everything.

So, let me back up a bit.

I Am the Worm

Here are some of the things Billy Hinman and I have never done: At sixteen years of age, we have never attended school like other kids. And we also have never seen my father’s television program, Rabbit & Robot, which, like school, is only for other kids—definitely not for Billy and me.

And Billy Hinman, who never lied to me, has also never taken Woz, which is something they only give to other kids, to help them learn, so they can become proper bonks or coders, to help them level down when watching Rabbit & Robot.

Billy never took it, but I am an addict.

It does not embarrass me to admit my addiction to Woz. It’s about the same thing as admitting my feet are size fourteen, and that I have a painfully acute sense of smell: all true, all true. The drug became the glue that held me together, even if the source of my cohesion was, according to my caretaker, Rowan, destined to kill me.

This is why Billy and Rowan concocted the scheme to get me up to the Tennessee.

Their plan ended up saving—and condemning—all of us.

*  *  *

Cager Messer hears me.

Sometimes when he wakes up in the mornings—no, let’s be honest, it’s more like the afternoon, and frequently it’s evening—he says he feels good and strong, and his head is clear, and he thinks he’s not going to smoke or snort or suck down the worm, and I tell him, Cager, who are you fooling? I’ll tell you who you’re not fooling: all of creation minus one, kid.

The kid listens to me, but only because I never tell him what to do. Maybe listens is the wrong boy word. He hears me. Yeah, that’s what he does.

He hears me.

Which is an unbalanced social dynamic, you might say. Right? I’ve got ears. Look at me. I hear him. I know what he wants; what he isn’t getting; what he will never get; how he’s passively letting that monster-size ball roll down the hill. Gravity, take control, because Christ knows the kid doesn’t want to.

I am the Worm.

There was an episode of his father’s program, Rabbit & Robot, titled I Am the Worm.

Oddly prophetic, that one.

I need a cigarette, and I don’t even smoke. Whenever I ask Cager to bring me some cigarettes, he laughs and tells me I can’t smoke. So I say, fine, then bring me a gin and tonic.

In the episode called I Am the Worm, there are these blue space creatures who can turn themselves into anything they want to be—alligators, Abraham Lincolns (Or is it Abrahams Lincoln? This is why I need a cigarette), Phillips-head screwdrivers, frying pans, whatever—and they send out this little blue worm, wriggling through the solar system, and it ends up crawling up inside Mooney’s nose.

The worm, not the solar system.

Mooney is one of the main characters—the robot.

The worm that went up his nose reprogrammed him and made him go insane.

Bad things like that happen to Mooney in practically every episode.

Formula.

The Rabbit, who doesn’t really have a name, is a bonk—a soldier who’s come back from one or three, or eighteen, wars. He’s insane too.

It’s a lot of fun.

And Cager is not allowed to watch it.

Mr. Messer doesn’t want the worm to crawl up his son’s nose.

Cager Messer’s List of Things He’s Never Done

There are things that your friends will do for you that you just don’t have the guts to do for yourself.

Because, let’s face it: Cager Messer—me—I was a messed-up drug addict who had one foot—and probably most of the rest of my body too—in the grave by the time other guys were stressing over getting driver’s licenses, and losing or not losing their virginity.

Most people who were allowed to have an opinion on guys like Billy and me would conclude that I was a loser, and that we were both spoiled pieces of shit.

But Billy Hinman was my best friend. I know that now.

He saved me.

Unfortunately, saving me resulted in things no one could ever have foreseen.

Because Billy Hinman and I nicked a fucking cruise ship.

Billy stared out the window as we drifted away on the R & R G G transpod, sad and bleary-eyed. Billy was terrified of flying.

He said, Good-bye, California. Have a happy Crambox, Mrs. Jordan.

It was two days before Christmas; two days before Billy Hinman and I would find ourselves trapped on the Tennessee.

It was also my sixteenth birthday.

Happy birthday to me!

Billy Hinman kept no secrets from me. He and Mrs. Jordan—our friend Paula’s mother—had been having sex since Billy was just fifteen years old.

Of course I was jealous, in a sickening kind of way. What sixteen-year-old virgin guy wouldn’t be jealous of a best friend who had actual sex as often as Billy Hinman did? He had sex with just about everyone.

But Billy Hinman still called Paula’s mother Mrs. Jordan, which was creepier than shit.

*  *  *

One thing I have never done: I do not go to school.

Grosvenor High School’s mascot was the Shrieking Weasel. We no longer had competitive sports in high school (a thing I understand was commonplace fifty years before our time), but at assemblies and career fairs the students of Grosvenor High School thrilled themselves by screaming the cry of the Shrieking Weasel, which sounds like this: Cheepa Yeep! Cheepa Yeep!

This past summer, Billy Hinman turned sixteen. Also, the United States of America was involved in twenty-seven simultaneous wars.

Twenty-seven!

And up here in heaven, we look down and watch the world burn.

*  *  *

I have this memory from a few months before Billy and Rowan kidnapped me. It was fire season in Los Angeles.

I have never set fire to anything.

Fire season lasted ten months out of the year. The two months that were unofficially not-fire-season were only less flammable because they tended to be a little too chilly for most arsonists—burners—to go outdoors.

Everything that could burn in California had burned, time and time and time again.

The city was on fire at the time. There was nothing left to burn on the naked, scorched hills, but houses, restaurants, schools, and tax offices still contained combustible components. What would Los Angeles possibly be without its fires and smoke?

I can smell a school on fire, and a Korean restaurant too, I said.

Billy Hinman and I were standing in an alley at my father’s studio, waiting for Charlie Greenwell to show up, so I could get high with him.

I don’t get how you can do that, Billy Hinman said.

I shrugged. Neither do I. It’s just that nothing else smells like burning smart screens, or a Samgyeopsal-gui restaurant that’s been set on fire.

I guess so, Billy conceded.

Charlie Greenwell wasn’t much older than Billy and me when he came back all messed up from War Twenty-Five, or whatever. He liked to hang out around the studio lot where they produced my father’s show. And, usually, Charlie Greenwell and I would smoke or snort Woz together in the alley while Billy just watched.

Neither of us liked Charlie Greenwell, so I never really understood why we’d listen to his shit stories about all the people he’d shot, and how great it was to be a bonk. But then again, the way things were, sometimes I’d put up with just about anything to get high, which is why Billy and Rowan, my caretaker, concocted a scheme to get me on board the Tennessee and clean me up before I killed myself with the stuff.

Billy was done arguing with me about it a long time ago.

Sometimes we speculated how we might have ended up if we had been born to a regular family—if we’d have ended up bonks or coders. I’m pretty sure Billy Hinman would have gone to war, just like Charlie Greenwell did, and that I would have gone to an industrial lab, but I always told Billy to his face that we would have ended up in the same place together.

Ending up in the same place together is actually exactly the way things turned out for me and Billy Hinman.

*  *  *

I make lists of things I’ve never done. I kept them as voice recordings on my thumbphone, until it stopped working on the flight to the Tennessee. This book is the list of my life adrift, compiled while we all make a hopeful attempt to get back home.

That’s really what all books are, isn’t it? I mean, lists of secrets and things you only wish you’d done—a sort of deathbed confession where you’re trying to get it all out while the lights are still on.

The big difference: It does not matter who my confession is written to, because nobody will ever see this—or, if someone does, it will probably be hundreds or thousands of years from now, and whoever picks this up won’t understand a goddamned thing about what it meant to be the last human beings left in the universe.

Anyway, who cares?

Something smells like human.

Cheepa Yeep!

Hocus Pocus, and Kansas Is Full of Shit

The only time in my life I’d ever seen Rowan look anything close to being embarrassed came when I asked him if he was a virgin.

That was two years ago now. I was fourteen at the time and was just learning so much about all the surprises of life. Also, being fourteen, I was not yet aware that there were certain questions that guys weren’t supposed to ask, even if Rowan was closer to me, and certainly knew more about me, than my own parents.

But Rowan wouldn’t tell me. He changed the subject to laundry or bathing or driving me somewhere, or some shit like that, which was how Rowan routinely handled me when I asked questions he didn’t want to answer.

And even now, at the age of sixteen, I was still constantly monitored by Rowan. At least I was usually permitted to bathe myself, though. But Rowan still did my laundry and got me dressed. And the terrifying thing was that Rowan had told me he was going to teach me how to shave before Christmas, which was something that I really did not think I needed to start doing.

A few days before we ended up marooned on the Tennessee, Billy Hinman and I had a play date with kids who were supposed to show us what being normal was all about. Rowan waited for us, as he always did, parked out on the street while Billy and I attended what we called a real-kids party.

It wasn’t much of a party.

But Billy Hinman and I were not real kids. Until we turned eighteen, or until we were somehow liberated, we considered ourselves to be our parents’ fancy pets, tended to by insomniac caretakers like Rowan.

Billy Hinman’s caretaker was an actual v.4 cog named Hilda. She was one of the early releases, like most of the cogs who worked on the Tennessee, so she had wild and unpredictable mood swings. Most people—humans, that is—didn’t like the v.4s. I thought they were hilarious, though. And they also made Albert Hinman—Billy’s dad—the richest man in the world.

Not that any of that would amount to shit by the time we got stuck on the Tennessee.

Our parents had decided early on that the best way to socialize us, since we were not attending school or watching Rabbit & Robot like everyone else in America, would be to create an artificial friends group of kids the same age as Billy and me. Our friends group went through several iterations over the years for various reasons. And the kids’ families had to apply and go through a screening process.

Not just anyone in the world could be a play buddy with a Messer or a Hinman.

Our real-kid friends’ parents were paid, naturally.

The only two members of our group who’d been with us since the beginning, when Billy Hinman and I were four years old, were Katie St. Romaine, who was my girlfriend for nearly a year, and a boy named Justin Pickett.

Katie and I had never had sex, although we did come close a few times. It was always me who’d be the one to chicken out. And where did that get me? Stuck on the Tennessee, alone, with Billy, Rowan, and a couple thousand v.4 cogs. Ridiculous.

Whatever.

Billy Hinman did have sex with Justin Pickett. Billy told me everything. He was one of those guys who, according to him, didn’t like to be pinned down by expectations regarding his sexuality.

Billy Hinman called himself fluid, which sounded incredibly foreign to me. I just thought he was horny all the time. And, yes, Billy Hinman did ask me more than once if I’d like to fool around sexually with him, to which I answered that if I was too afraid to try anything with Katie St. Romaine, I was definitely too afraid to do anything with him.

And we left it at that, because nothing could really get in the way of our friendship, especially because of how honest and sometimes sad Billy Hinman was. Also, we needed each other. We were the only real human beings either of us truly knew.

All our fake friends were on Woz. They all went to school, so this was natural. All schoolkids had prescriptions for Woz. It helped you learn things. Billy never had Woz once in his life that I was aware of, but I was pretty much an out-of-control addict ever since I was about twelve. Still, I felt like I’d learned plenty of stuff. Rowan was also my tutor; Billy’s, too, when he’d pay attention to stuff.

You couldn’t really tell much of a difference between Wozheads at school. The doses they received were perfectly adjusted to help future coders concentrate, or to cull out the obvious future bonks. It was guys like Charlie Greenwell and me