Rabbit and Robot. Andrew Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ on came the opening song. It was meaningless and absurd, sung as a duet by Rabbit, the bonk, and Mooney, the cog, but for whatever reasons it brightened my mood. I think it was most likely the case that if there was such a thing, the song was written in the key of Woz, since everyone who was addicted to the program was also, like Cager Messer, addicted to Woz.

       Oh, Rabbit and Robot, Robot and Rabbit

       Behind your eyes, the kingdom we inhabit!

       The land of asynchronous transfer mode,

       Go fight wars, and write that code!

       Oh, Rabbit and Robot, Robot and Rabbit

       Oh, Rabbit and Robot, Robot and Rabbit

       Oh, Rabbit and Robot, Robot and Rabbit

       Oh, Rabbit and Robot, Robot and Rabbit!

      Like I said, it was really dumb, to the point that I felt uncomfortable—embarrassed, even—because I always knew Rowan was exceedingly judgmental about stupid shit. And there was no getting around it here. But I liked it. It made me happy. Just as Billy said, we were stuck on this shit ride.

      And while Mooney and Rabbit—and Lourdes—sang to us, a shotgun storm of images blasted all around the screen—scrolling strings of code commands, and short staccato clips of bonks doing what bonks do, the types of things that were big thrilling hits at Charlie Greenwell’s “engagement parties.”

      The last time we’d been to Charlie’s apartment on a Woz buying mission, Charlie Greenwell told us this: “Every week or so, the boys in my unit would get together and drink and get hacked on Woz, and we’d tell our stories about the people we’d killed in engagements. That’s what we called ’em—engagements. It was an engagement party. Ha ha!”

      “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!

In with the Cogs

      “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 СКАЧАТЬ