Meg Hatfield could not worm her way inside the stubborn brains of the computer command systems on the Tennessee. But she never gave up trying; she worked at it for the entire day until she became so exhausted, her eyes would no longer focus.
Of the five of us humans left alive in our solar system, Meg Hatfield was the smartest by far.
And that day, the morning after New Year’s Eve, the ship had become a sort of mechanized slaughterhouse in which the girls had to remain hidden in order to avoid the hungry attraction of infected cogs. To the cogs on the Tennessee, Meg Hatfield and Jeffrie Cutler were just another pair of v.4s. Walking dinner. And, despite feeling weak and useless for doing it, I tried my best to keep Parker, Milo, and Lourdes safe too.
Billy Hinman, who hated cogs, wanted nothing to do with my rescue mission.
I knotted docking cables like nooses around their necks and left the three of them lashed to mooring bolts in the air lock.
“Trust me. It’s for your own good,” I told them. It made me feel shitty and hypocritical, because I was saying the same thing to Parker, Milo, and Lourdes that my parents said whenever they’d beat the crap out of me. And it was basically what Billy Hinman had said to me too, when he’d tricked me into coming with Rowan and him on the Tennessee. If that wasn’t a noose that had been tightened around my neck, then nothing ever would be.
It was a disturbing task.
While I tied the cables around their throats, Milo shuddered and cried, “This is all there is, isn’t it? Just waste and uselessness. I deserve to suffer. I deserve it.” Parker asked if I would touch his penis one final time, to which I pointed out there would be no granting of last requests, and that he wasn’t going to die, anyway.
And Lourdes shrieked, “Hooray! I love being strangled! Wheee! Wheeee! Yippeeee! I’m so happy I’m being hanged, I could poop a ukulele!”
Then she farted and began dancing, with a black noose around her neck.
So I closed them inside the air lock and left them there. From the arrivals deck I opened the outer door and watched on the viewing screen while Lourdes, Milo, and Parker bobbed and floated inside the open air lock, in the deaf vacuum of space.
Lourdes seemed to enjoy it very much. Milo wept incessantly, and Parker never stopped being turned on. Even the complete absence of air pressure and gravity coupled with the absolute zero of space could not stop my little valet cog’s automatic penis from setting the mechanized boy on a hopeless and unfulfilled mission.
Watching them dangle like that was a gruesome thing to do. The three of them looked like corpses floating around the empty dock. Except for Lourdes, who danced and wriggled and was most likely squealing with joy about being a flying squid or something equally ridiculous.
“Don’t be a sap,” Billy Hinman had told me after I’d discussed my plan for saving the cogs with him. “They’re just fucking cogs. What’s wrong with you?”
And I said, “What about Meg and Jeffrie? You’d save them, wouldn’t you? They’re not cogs, but as far as everyone else on the Tennessee is concerned, they are.”
“You said ‘everyone.’ ” Billy Hinman sighed and shook his head. “ ‘Everyone’ is just me and you. Maybe Rowan, but I have my doubts sometimes.”
I’ll admit it now: I liked my cogs. And I felt sorry for them too.
I suppose I had gone completely insane; or I’d somehow changed into something else—maybe something not quite human. Maybe everything that Queen Dot had told me about how she’d singlehandedly manipulated human evolution with her machines and Worms was true, and I was just another victim of time and progress.
I wished I could be more like Billy and not care, or even Rowan, and be emotionally sedate, but I was helpless.
We decided we all had to remain together.
Rowan, as always, kept to himself, though. It was the caretaker role he never deviated from—caring for me without actual closeness.
I couldn’t let Meg and Jeffrie stay by themselves in their room below us. They would have been such easy targets for predators like Dr. Geneva. So we hid them in Billy’s and my stateroom, which meant the only proper thing I could do was to sleep next to Billy Hinman in his bed. It made me feel strange, like maybe Billy and I should sleep together, but Billy didn’t mind at all, naturally, and the girls were both willing to put up with the arrangement. Billy Hinman slept with his arms around me. He told me we were all going to die soon anyway. I believed him.
I always believed Billy Hinman.
It was weird.
Everything was going to shit.
On the night after Livingston abandoned ship, the first night of the Neveryear, while Jeffrie and Billy slept, Meg Hatfield and I whispered a conversation from bed to bed—like we were connected by some private transcontinental cable that stretched across the still ocean of my room.
I lay on the edge of the bed staring over to where Meg and Jeffrie were, in the absolute dark of our stateroom. I imagined what Meg would look like and tried to think that she was looking toward me, too, and wondering the same things. Billy had his arm over me, his chest on my shoulder. I felt the tickle of his breath in the hair on the back of my neck.
I said, “If you could back things up, knowing what you know now, would you have stayed down on Earth with everyone else, or would you have come up here anyway?”
Meg didn’t answer for a while. I imagined she thought I was stupid, or stuck-up because I was Anton Messer’s kid, or both. Then she said, “Why do you have such a hard time facing the fact that we’re the luckiest people in the universe?”
“Being the luckiest doesn’t count when you’re also the only,” I pointed out.
She didn’t have anything to say about that, and I felt guilty for being an argumentative piece of shit.
So I added, “I don’t believe I’m lucky, because I feel like everything’s my fault—or our fault—Billy’s and mine. Because of what our dads do. Did, I mean.”
“We aren’t our fathers.”
“They got us where we are,” I said.
“I’m happy for that. Even if it meant spending most of my life invisible, drifting around from nowhere to nowhere in a motor home parked next to a bunch of burners and lunatics,” Meg said.
“Stop talking crap about me,” Jeffrie said.
“I’m not talking about you. Go back to sleep, Jeff. I’m just talking about Cager and me. Not you.”
Beside me in bed, Billy Hinman moved but didn’t wake up.
“Do you miss anyone?” I asked.
Admittedly, my question was a pedestrian tactic for trying to find out if Meg had a person in her life she felt close to.
Meg Hatfield was smarter than me. She caught on.
“If you’re trying to ask if I have a boyfriend, you’re pretty stupid. Things like that don’t mean anything to me. They never did, and I can’t imagine it changing now.”
“Oh.”
I felt like I’d been slugged in the stomach. Then nothing happened at all. We lay there in total silence, in absolute darkness, for so long I thought Meg must have fallen asleep.
Then she said, “I hurt your feelings by calling you stupid. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“It’s okay.”
“What about you? Do you miss anyone?” Meg asked.
I thought about Katie St. Romaine, whom I was sad for but I didn’t miss, and how Meg Hatfield was just trying to be nice to me now when she didn’t need to at all.
“My parents used to beat the shit out of me.”
“You? Anton Messer’s kid? Why?”
“I’m not good enough at anything,” I said.
“You’re a good dancer,” Meg said.
“Thank you.”
“But it was only a dance. For New Year’s Eve. Don’t take it as anything else.”
“Okay. Sorry if there’s something wrong with that.”
“You’re an okay guy. You’re not pushy like Lloyd.”
I asked, “Who’s Lloyd?” But I was almost afraid to hear what her answer would be.
“Jeffrie’s brother. He always wants to have sex with everyone,” Meg said.
I thought about Billy Hinman, who was pressed up against me as close as he could get. “Some guys are just like that.”
“I’m going to get into that fucking computer,” Meg said.
I believed her. There was something about Meg Hatfield’s matter-of-factness that made me feel safe.
“I think you will too,” I said.
“I’m not tired anymore,” she said. “I want to go back and try again now.”
“Now?”
“Yes. Right now.”
“You can’t go alone,” I said.
“Well?”
“Let me get my pants on.”
“Okay.”