Rabbit and Robot. Andrew Smith

in Space ♦ He Makes a Great Gasket ♦ Tricky Words ♦ The Things We’d Never Seen Before ♦ Happy New Year, Happy No Year ♦ Freedom, and an Unemployed Cog in the Hallway ♦ Billy Hinman, Billy Hinman ♦ This Was the Tennessee ♦ We Dance, and Queen Dot Accounts for Mexican Cuisine and Human Evolution ♦ In Which We Find Out Where King Carlos Is and Suffer a Blow to Our Self-Esteem ♦ Herman Melville Would Be Pleased ♦ Eaters and Feeders ♦ First Night of the Neveryear ♦ It’s Time to Eat Now, and I Become Aware of My Balls ♦ The Cruise Ship to End All Cruise Ships ♦ The Nicest Giraffe I Ever Met ♦ A Sleep Sandwich ♦ Dumb Pointless Optimism ♦ You Better Watch Out for the Monkeys ♦ Cager Messer’s Can-Opener and Push-Ups List ♦ Times That Aren’t Now ♦ A Normal California Boy ♦ Getting the Wrong Idea ♦ Shakespeare’s Crowbar ♦ The Porridge of Officer Dennis ♦ If Thy Right Eye Offend Thee ♦ What Kind of World ♦ Mooney, Mooney! ♦ This Is What We Saw ♦ Are You One of Us? ♦ Moon to Moon ♦ Just Like Home ♦ Helpless, Helpless, Helpless ♦ V.1 Human Beings ♦ Caveman & Spaceman ♦ The Unlock Code ♦ Righting the Ship ♦ The Doctor and the Reverend ♦ Epilogue: It Took Dominion Everywhere

       Acknowledgments

      I smell humans.

      I am very happy about that.

      Someone else is here on the Tennessee with Billy and me. We are not alone after all.

      I might begin by explaining that we are either the last or the first of our kind, and I wonder what time it is that this has come to you—how long our story has waited to be told.

      We are trapped inside a moon to our moon, in a home—a lifeless jar—called the Tennessee, where we spend our time, absurdly enough, with talking animals and machines that grow increasingly human by the hour.

      Are you a person, or are you some kind of cog?

      Either way, I feel a compelling obligation to tell you what it meant to be a human, at least as far as I can describe it accurately.

      None of this is a lie.

Tyger Tyger, Burning Bright

      “Is that a fucking tiger?” Billy Hinman asked.

      “I think it is a fucking tiger,” I said.

      I’ll admit that I had never seen a fucking tiger before.

      It was certainly a day for checking things off Cager Messer’s infinite list of things he’s never done.

      “An actual fucking tiger,” Billy whispered.

      Even when you’re a half mile away from a tiger and you’re standing naked and chest deep in the middle of a lukewarm fake lake, it is an atavistic human instinct to make as little noise as possible.

      “I think the Zoo of Tennessee must have broke,” I theorized.

      “What the fuck are we going to do?” Billy said.

      “I have no plan.”

      “Cager? Do you know what that is?” Parker hollered.

      Parker had been hiding up in the branches of a fake pine tree. It could have been a cedar. I don’t know anything about trees. He’d been watching me and Billy swim.

      Since I didn’t want to draw the tiger’s attention to us, I decided to think about things for a while.

      So Billy offered, “You should tell Parker it’s a tiger, and tigers are friendly, and that he should climb down from the tree and give the tiger a hug because tigers love to be hugged by horny teenagers. That way, while the tiger is distracted by clawing the fucker to pieces, we can make a run for it.”

      “But what about our clothes?”

      Our clothes were scattered on the shore beneath the tree where Parker was hiding.

      “Cager. It’s a fucking tiger,” Billy told me.

      For some reason, ever since I’d been forced off Woz, my best friend, Billy Hinman, did make a lot of sense at times.

      “I can’t tell Parker that,” I whispered.

      “Why not? He’s a fucking machine.”

      “I know that. I just can’t, is all,” I said. And, yes, I felt stupid and embarrassed for as much as confessing to Billy Hinman that I had some measured feeling of empathy—or maybe even friendship—for Parker, who was, after all, just a fucking machine.

      So I continued, “Besides, the tiger is just a machine too, right? It’s a cog. It won’t do anything to us.”

      “What do you mean by us?” Billy said.

      Damn all this clarity.

      “Well, he’s not supposed to do anything to us.”

      “You mean you.”

      “Are you daring me to get out of the water and tell the tiger to go away?” I asked.

      “Not at all.