Rabbit and Robot. Andrew Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ really is cute.”

      “He’s most likely a cog.”

      “No. I saw his eyes. I can tell.”

      “That’s what you think,” Meg said.

      Meg opened up her thumbphone.

      “What are you going to do to us now? More code?” Jeffrie asked. “Why don’t you turn this thing around, and make them take us back home?”

      “No. This time I really am going to call my dad.”

      Jeffrie Cutler, like most of the burner kids from Antelope Acres, did not have a Hinsoft phone implanted inside her fingertips. “Ask him if he could let Lloyd know I’m with you.”

      Nobody liked Lloyd Cutler, and Meg Hatfield’s father was no exception.

      “Okay.”

      But when Meg called, nothing happened.

      “This sucks,” Meg said. “I guess there’s no phones up here in space.”

      “Um, well, in that case, when are we going back?” Jeffrie asked.

      “We’ll figure out something. Just enjoy the ride, Jeff.”

      Jeffrie frowned. “I kind of feel weird, like maybe I’m going to puke or something.”

      “Don’t think about it. You’re probably just hungry. I am. I’m going to figure out where the toilets are and look for something to eat. Okay?”

      “All right.”

      When Meg came back, she carried pouches of food: hamburgers and fries with bottles of water. It was the kind of food made at places Jeffrie and her brother Lloyd liked to set fire to.

      “Food printers,” Meg said, waving the girls’ meal pouches in front of Jeffrie. “Really cool ones.”

      “Thanks.”

      Meg sat down beside Jeffrie and harnessed herself back into the recliner. “But the toilets are weird. It took me ten minutes to figure out how to use their female urinal, and by then I thought I was going to piss myself. It’s like hooking yourself up to a fucking electronic lamprey eel or something. And the pictures they have on the walls, with the characters from that kids’ show demonstrating how to use them, are really disturbing. If I was a guy, I’d be terrified of the male lamprey thing.”

      Jeffrie tore at the opening of her food pouch. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

      “Nothing.”

      “Now I kind of have to go too.”

      “Do you want me to show you how to do it?”

      Jeffrie shook her head. “I’m not stupid. And I’m not scared, either.”

      “Well, do me a favor. When you come back, see if you can print up some ketchup,” Meg said.

      “No. I can’t do the reading and writing thing. Sorry.”

      Meg said, “Well, then. I guess this pretty much means I can feed you whatever I want.”

      Jeffrie unhooked her harness and got out of her seat.

      “That doesn’t mean I’ll eat it, though.”

      Jeffrie pulled herself away from the seat and drifted toward the toilets. She said, “Can you promise me one thing, Meg? Can you promise that you will get us back home before too long?”

      “No worries, Jeff,” Meg said. “I promise.”

Like Nothing Else in Tennessee

      Billy Hinman, who hated to fly, and hated anything that moved fast, had never been to space.

      I watched his face, as confused and out of it as I was. Even in my state I knew there was nothing like seeing, for the first time, the massive hulk of the Tennessee through the portholes of a tiny Grosvenor Galactic transpod.

      The Tennessee was so big, it was almost scary.

      As a matter of fact, it really was scary to Billy Hinman. The Tennessee looked like a gigantic eye, floating in a low orbit over the moon. An eye as big as Boise.

      “I don’t really want to go on that thing,” he said.

      Then Billy shook his head and said, “What the fuck did I do, Cager?”

      He covered his head with his blanket and turned away from the window.

      On the second day of our flight to the Tennessee, I began to sweat and shake. It was just a little at first, but my guts clenched up in protest at the lack of Woz. I could not eat, despite Rowan’s pleading with me, and Lourdes’s unending manic performances.

      Lourdes tried everything to make me feel better. She danced and sang, wrapped me in blankets, swabbed my clammy skin with warm washcloths, and shaved me, which was unnecessary, to be honest.

      Billy Hinman, my best friend in life, complained. “You know, he’s not the only human passenger in first class,” he told her.

      So Lourdes put chilled cucumber slices on Billy Hinman’s eyelids, and she even asked him if he’d like a hand job, which made me kind of jealous—and horny, too—just thinking about Lourdes and her “Thursday” panties.

      Rowan, arching an eyebrow, stared at me silently.

      Maybe being in space for two days with a Wozhead in withdrawal was wearing on everyone’s sanity, even our nonhuman flight attendant’s. And Lourdes’s offer to Billy was just typical of my experience around people—and even cogs—who were all so hopelessly attracted to Billy Hinman.

      And I wasn’t entirely surprised when Billy Hinman told her, “No,” and shut his eyes. Some people did like to do sexual things with cogs, but for his entire life Billy Hinman always told me how much he’d hated the things on which his father’s empire had been built.

      If Lourdes had asked me if she could give me a hand job, I would have probably said yes, but then again, I was in the viselike grips of Woz withdrawal after forty hours’ sitting, harnessed in and hopelessly trapped.

      “Are you sure? No?” Lourdes asked.

      “No,” Billy grumbled.

      “Oh, well! I’m so thrilled to be part of the Grosvenor Galactic experience! I’m happiest when I can make people happy, and share in their happiness!”

      I felt left out, ignored, and unhappy. I also wanted Woz and began plotting some method by which I could access a clinic as soon as we got to the Tennessee.

      Then Lourdes farted again and did a wild dance that made her look like a terrified, fleeing squid as she floated in the air above our recliners.

      “I’m СКАЧАТЬ