Читать книгу Rabbit and Robot - William Hughes, Andrew Smith - Страница 18

Besides killing off Mooney, and the ridiculous songs containing repetitive sequences of code and the brand names, models, and calibers of the most popular military weaponry, one of the regular components of my father’s show, Rabbit & Robot, was a weekly feature called “Code from Home,” where kids got to send in their own coder programs for Mooney.

Each week, the best submission actually got uploaded into Mooney, so people could witness the ridiculous nonsense some lucky coder enjoyed making the poor cog do.

The episode we watched—well, the one I watched and Billy Hinman tried to ignore—featured a winning code sequence that made Mooney the cog instantly fall asleep whenever he got about one-fourth of the way across a street. It was called “Crosswalk Narcolepsy,” and it didn’t end well for poor Mooney, but I’m sure it was a great hit with the viewers down on Earth.

I thought it was funny.

Rabbit laughed and laughed about it too. So did Lourdes, who floated around the cabin in our gravity-free transpod, not minding at all that her skirt drifted up and down like hypnotic sea fans in an underwater current. I found myself in a desperate dilemma as I tried to figure out what was morally worse: watching an episode of Rabbit & Robot or getting turned on by looking at a v.4 cog’s panties.

Either way I looked at it, I was completely ashamed of myself.

I was a total mess, and I needed some Woz.

Two days of this was going to be unbearable.

But, apparently no matter what horrible fate Mooney was subjected to, there were always plenty of replica Mooney cogs to stand in and wrap up every “Code from Home” segment. And he’d sing a song that ended with these lines:

As long as there are young coders like you, There’s nothing that humans won’t eventually try to do!

And I thought, yes, as a species, we probably always have had a great need to watch the Mooneys we produce lie down in front of crowded and speeding streetcars.

Pink polka dots. Really small ones. And the cursive word “Thursday.” That was the pattern printed on Lourdes’s panties, even though it was a Monday.

I mean, I was pretty sure it was still Monday.

Lourdes pushed herself through the projection of the screen and drifted down the aisle so she could seal off the portal between our first class and the shrieking, laughing, wailing calamity of peasants confined to second class.

Too bad, because I was just starting to smell something, which was probably only Lourdes’s food printer as it cranked out some protein-carbohydrate-fiber-mineral replications of shrimp scampi, niçoise salad, or chicken cordon bleu.

After all, there really was nothing we humans wouldn’t eventually try to do.

When Rabbit & Robot was over, I looked at Billy, who pretended to be asleep.

I said, “I need some Woz. And I need to pee.”

And Billy Hinman told me, “Wait. We’ll be able to get some Woz when we get there.”

I knew he had to have been lying to me. He’d threatened plenty of times that he was going to oversee some forced acquisition of my sobriety.

Fuck you, Billy.

Rowan waved his hand in the air. “Miss? Lourdes? The boy here—my charge—well . . . he needs to use the toilet.”

“Oh my! I’m so thrilled to help out! This makes me want to pee too! Have you ever been to space? What a beautiful, heroic, brave, and astonishingly sexy young man! This makes me so happy! This gives me hope for the future and makes me want to deliberately ovulate!” Lourdes burbled. She grabbed the hem of her skirt and, for reasons entirely unknown, flagged it up and down and up and down, as though she were fanning the flames on a blacksmith’s forge.

One doesn’t simply “pee” in the weightlessness of space, however. That could be a disaster. Fortunately, the Tennessee had its own gravity-generation system, which made all kinds of wonderful things possible: swimming pools, urination, and even a full-size zoo, for example. One of my father’s first Grosvenor Galactic cruise ships, the Kentucky, did not have a gravity generator. Everyone thought people would love to spend some time in zero gravity on a luxury liner, even one with a zoo.

Father quickly learned that floating Siberian tigers and king cobras were very difficult to get along with, however.

It was a real mess, along the same lines as all the shit on the Kansas.

But the Tennessee was heralded to be the “cruise ship to end all cruise ships.”

We certainly found out the truth of that on our own, Billy, Rowan, and I.

In any event, before I could get out of my seat to pee, Lourdes was required to show us a video presentation called “How to Urinate and Defecate On Board Grosvenor Galactic Cruise Ships in Space.”

I had been through the identical video lesson on every R&RGG flight I’d been on, and every time I watched, it still made me feel incredibly awkward and embarrassed.

But the vacuum of space leaves no room for personal shyness.

Still, I felt myself turning red and wondering if Billy and Rowan were looking at me as the instructional video ran through its three important sequences: How to Safely Defecate, Female Urination Safety Procedures, and, finally, Male Urination on the Grosvenor Galactic Fleet, during which Billy said, to no one in particular, “That sleeve tube looks like it could be a lot of fun.”

It kind of made my stomach turn. But vomiting in weightlessness was potentially worse than peeing, which is why they gave us all anti-nausea injections directly into our stomachs during the ordeal of our physical examinations.

Besides, all the actors in “How to Urinate and Defecate On Board Grosvenor Galactic Cruise Ships in Space” were v.4 cogs, so it wasn’t like we were watching actual humans taking dumps and pissing into weird vacuum hoses. But it was still repulsive to look at, even though my brain had been lulled by the subliminal coding effects of Rabbit & Robot.

I always tried to hold it to the point of pain whenever I went up into space. Any normal guy would, right?

I unhooked myself from the seat and swam past Lourdes, who opened her eyes as wide as twinned mineshafts and nodded proudly at the prospect of teaching me how to safely urinate as a male in space. Her smile seemed to split her face like an overripe tomato.

I groaned, then turned to Rowan and said, “Are we there yet?”