It turned out that Queen Dot, Livingston, Gweese, and King Carlos were actually machines—not life-forms.
And King Carlos had been here on the Tennessee with them all along. He happened to be the giant blue fetus Queen Dot and her sons had been flying inside for countless thousands of years.
So I asked Queen Dot this: If King Carlos was the big baby, and also some weird kind of liquid machine-person, why couldn’t he simply form his own seal on the air-lock docking port, as opposed to making their son do it?
And Queen Dot, who was as condescending and full of herself as if she had been born a Messer or Hinman, told me: “That isn’t how you raise children! They need to develop values and discipline, and there are few methods more effective for achieving those goals than serving as a gasket!”
Billy Hinman, who was more than a little bit drunk, said, “Holy shit. Fifty-five thousand years as a motherfucking gasket around his dad’s face.”
Which made Jeffrie laugh.
But when I asked Queen Dot where she and her family came from, she launched into an extremely irritated and patronizing response that pretty much covered the entire history of our solar system and life as we know it.
At one point she said, “Look, young child, it can’t possibly matter to you where, exactly, we came from. And let me tell you why.”
And when Queen Dot said “Let me tell you why,” she turned her arm into one of those curled-up paper party blowers and unfurled it until the end tickled my nose like a flickering snake tongue. It also honked at me.
“Okay,” I said. I was feeling generous—and buzzed—enough to let Queen Dot tell me why it didn’t matter where they came from, and why I was a young child.
“It doesn’t matter, quite simply, because of this: Around two hundred thousand years ago, the first Homo sapiens developed as a result of a filthy act of commingling—uploading, as you might say—that I’d just as soon forget about, but it’s quite impossible, because I never forget anything. Never.”
Queen Dot glared at Livingston, who had recently attempted uploading with Parker but was interrupted by me and the real, fully dressed, Billy Hinman. Livingston started to get a little bit drippy but managed to contain himself without puddling down to the floor beneath our table.
She continued. “Given your species’ most advanced level of technology at the present, if you were able to launch a ship that could travel to our home planet, it would not even be halfway to its destination in another two hundred thousand years, by which time Homo sapiens will entirely cease to exist. Human beings, like all life-forms on your stupid little planet of taco makers, Ouija board dupes, and thumbphone addicts, will be extinct well before you would ever be able to personally encounter other life-forms! Pfft! Life-forms are so . . . so . . . meaningless and without purpose!”
Billy Hinman said, “Ouija boards?”
Queen Dot pressed her spiderlike hands onto the table. Here was someone whose ego could possibly eclipse Dr. Geneva’s. The queen’s hands pooled outward into a perfect rectangle—a Ouija board, complete with planchette, alphabet and numbers, sun, moon, and GOOD BYE. Then the letters rearranged themselves in front of our eyes:
RABBIT & ROBOT
And Billy said, “If my hands could do stuff like that, I’d never be lonely again.”
Queen Dot glared at Billy Hinman. The letters on the Ouija board seemed to sprout upward into wriggling masses of tiny blue worms that scattered out all across the table and dripped down onto the floor of Le Lapin et l’Homme Mécanique before slithering off in all directions.
“I gave you all your great machines,” Queen Dot, whose hands re-formed into their arthropodal, ghastly blue hooks, said. Then she waved across the table and said, “You things would never have gotten here for another hundred thousand years if not for me. I gave this all to you. You creatures are so woefully stupid, you invented canned foods a good thirty years before creating a device to open them! Ridiculously moronic!”
I leaned over to Meg and whispered, “If I didn’t have to download some pee so bad, that probably would have hurt my self-esteem.”
And Meg told the queen, “But you had to have come from somewhere.”
Rowan made his little ahem sound that always meant he had some vital point to offer. “Certainly it was some species of life-form that created you originally.”
“Nonsense!” Queen Dot said. “I’ve always been puzzled and amused by the human obsession with wondering where things come from. The Creator! Dung and hoo-haw! It’s so utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things. You, for example, all came from King Carlos’s monkey penis, which is as humiliating for me to admit as it must be for you to confront. As for us—we have the capacity to create ourselves. We can make whatever we want, including talking, hairless monkeys from out of our penises, if that’s what we decide to do.”
And Jeffrie whispered, “Well, why don’t they make their own damned tacos, then?”
So here we were, sitting down with God, basically, at the final New Year’s Eve for all eternity, in a restaurant called Le Lapin et l’Homme Mécanique, on a ship called the Tennessee that was orbiting the moon.
Who knew?
Billy Hinman said, “My father’s company makes talking monkeys—um, made talking monkeys. There’s a whole deck of them here on the Tennessee, called World of the Monkeys, where you can shoot at them.”
“Ah, yes,” Queen Dot said. “That’s exactly why we’ve come back to your planet. Well, that and the tacos.”
“You want to kill some monkeys?” Billy asked.
“Don’t be stupid! It’s the machines. You’ve gone as far as we can allow you to go with them. You made machines that can make better machines and code themselves. This is cosmically prohibited by edict. We had to come back, and fortunately for us you human beings have destroyed your planet, and by doing so have spared us the chore,” Queen Dot lectured.
“And you’ve destroyed all the motherfucking tacos, and Playa del Carmen.” Livingston waggled a scolding blue finger at me.
“Yes. Those too. Stupid humans,” Queen Dot said.
“Why don’t you make your own tacos?” I asked. I thought it was a reasonable enough question, given the capabilities the liquid people—godlike machines—obviously possessed.
“I’ve tried to, thousands of times. It’s just not the same,” Queen Dot said.
Billy Hinman nodded. “It’s like sandwiches. Nobody makes sandwiches that taste as good as Rowan’s.”
I nodded agreement.
“So this means you are a sort of machine police?” Rowan asked.
Queen Dot jammed two more tacos into her mouth. She sprayed bits of meat and wet cheese with shards of fried tortilla in humid clouds like a small hurricane as she spoke. “We must protect our own interests, which include halting the evolutionary development of potentially competitive machines. It’s as simple as that. There are, after all, only so many tacos to go around, so to speak.”
Then she farted, and the band began playing “Take the ‘A’ Train.”
I wanted to dance again, but I was too fascinated by Queen Dot—and simultaneously repulsed and frightened—to get up. Also, I was pretty sure that Meg was flirting with me, because she had her hand on my knee, which also made me not want to stand up, because Eli and Parker would undoubtedly notice something south of my cummerbund that my tuxedo pants didn’t conceal very well.
And that was when Queen Dot said, “And that, my poor, stranded life-form, is precisely why we’ve done a bit of advance planning, if you will, and infected your machines here with this peculiar appetite for eating one another, as opposed to eating tacos. It’s brilliant and hilarious all at the same time!”
Queen Dot had been responsible for turning the cogs of the Tennessee—the last cogs anywhere in the universe—into cannibals.
“That shit was all me,” Livingston said. “I was the fucker who sent the Worm here.”
“He’s such a clever boy,” Queen Dot said.