by Andrew Smith
Nobody likes things to not be about me.
The giant blue fetus in space got closer and closer to the Tennessee.
He Makes a Great Gasket
Our visitors’ ship had a difficult time docking with the Tennessee.
We watched for at least an hour as it spun around in an attempt to properly align with the opening to the docking bay. Clearly, the point of entry onto the craft was the giant fetus’s face, which was disturbingly calm and satisfied in its appearance, most likely so as to create a welcoming attitude among the few humans on board the Tennessee, or wherever else a few humans might happen to be.
Billy Hinman said, “A face like that says, ‘I promise I will not murder you.’ ”
“Why would you just let anyone come on board the ship?” I said, “Especially someone flying inside a gigantic baby?”
Billy Hinman shrugged. “You’re the captain. Tell them to go away.”
“I don’t think anyone would listen to me, dressed like this.”
“You should have taken Captain Myron’s hat. That would have given you an air of proper authority,” he said.
I pushed Parker away from me. He’d been standing so close, his chest leaned into my back, and I was starting to sweat.
“Look. I know it’s crowded in here, but personal space, Parker.”
Finally, the big blue baby fully pressed its face up to the locking portal on the Tennessee, but it did not fit properly. Everyone could clearly see wide gaps between the spacecraft and the air lock’s doorway.
Then the fetus’s mouth yawned open, and a thin blue man who looked remarkably human, except he was the color of a parakeet’s chest feathers, climbed out of the visiting ship.
“The baby’s vomiting out more babies!” Lourdes shrieked. “I’m so happy! I feel like I’m a mother! Wheee! Wheee! I am spontaneously lactating!”
The thin blue man moved like some underwater migrating crab, pulling himself along the surface of the baby face with his pincer fingers until he reached the gap in the lock’s doorway.
“He must be able to hold his breath for a long time,” Billy said.
“I could do that, even in my underwear. Maybe he’s a cog,” Parker guessed.
The blue guy in the air lock was not in his underwear, though. He wore an obvious uniform, speckled with strange symbols that covered his entire body up to his neck. And the uniform jumpsuit was the exact color of the man’s face, so it looked like it could have been his skin.
But the blue man was not a cog. Once he reached the opening between the spacecraft and the air lock, the blue man’s body liquefied, surrounding the baby face and sealing off the air lock like a massive blob of blue peanut butter, so that the only recognizable thing that was left of the man was his face, which looked a little pained as he stared out into the empty air lock.
The interior lights in the air lock came on, and oxygen filled the newly sealed chamber. We watched and waited for someone else to come out of the baby’s mouth. Once whoever it was got sprayed with the disinfectant showers, it would be safe to open the arrivals gate.
Lourdes cheered and danced. Then she farted. Dr. Geneva, whom we’d snaked away from in the press of the crowd, was dramatically lecturing on the origins of the Julian calendar and New Year’s Eve, even though nobody was listening to him. Reverend Bingo continued to lament his buyer’s remorse over the obviously satanic nonblue car, adding with vehemence that we had arrived at Armageddon. From somewhere in the crowd of attendants, an outraged cog was screaming about freeloading aliens taking away cogs’ jobs and dignity, and Parker confirmed that he had an erection again.
On the screen the giant blue baby face smiled and yawned its mouth open.
“It is kind of a cute gigantic blue fetus baby,” Billy Hinman said.
We pushed our way to the front of the crowd. After all, whether the cogs on board recognized it or not, I was captain of the Tennessee now, despite that it flew by itself, that I was not wearing Captain Myron’s feathered bicorne (because it was disgusting), and that I was standing there in my underwear.
“I am so happy to see our guests! Yeee! Yeee! I just pooped myself multiple times!” Lourdes squealed.
And out of the baby’s mouth crawled two more slender blue people: a man and a woman. The man looked like a twin brother to the first guy—the one who’d turned himself into an enormous sealing gasket—but the woman, who was also completely blue, wore a calf-length cape, an elegant spiked crown, and a sash across her chest that said QUEEN DOT on it.
Queen Dot raised her hand, and Billy Hinman and I felt compelled to raise ours in a gesture of greeting as well. None of the cogs raised their hands, though. Cogs are just cogs, after all. But I did notice Parker tugging on his penis.
Dr. Geneva kept talking and talking.
And Queen Dot said, “ ‘I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill.’ Ha ha ha!”
Dr. Geneva made a slow outward sweeping wave with his hands like he was scattering the seeds of his brilliance into the fertile fields of his audience’s attention. “ ‘It made the slovenly wilderness surround that hill.’ ”
I would have felt bad for him, but I desperately wished another cog would eat the rest of Dr. Geneva’s face, so maybe he would shut the fuck up.
“Greetings to the human beings of the Tennessee! The last time we visited Earth was nearly two centuries ago, but we’ve been waiting thousands of years for this precise moment to arrive!” Queen Dot waved at the air lock’s camera, certainly unable to estimate how many actual human beings of the Tennessee she was talking to, much less whether or not what she had been waiting thousands of years for was actually worth a shit.
Probably not.
Then the fire-hose-strength pressure showers came on inside the air lock, and Queen Dot screamed and fell backward against the fetus’s chin. The skinny blue guy who’d crawled out of the baby head with Queen Dot didn’t fare so well either. He slid around on the floor of the air lock like a blue ice cube on hot waxed linoleum. The third blue man—the gasket—seemed to hold up well enough by just closing his eyes and mouth.
I had to admit, he seemed to make a great gasket.
When the hoses of disinfectant fluid shut off, Queen Dot and Blue Guy Number Two stood up and shook themselves off. Despite the assault of the shower spray, neither one of them looked wet at all; they were as tidy and as perfectly blue as when they first emerged from the giant smiling fetus’s mouth.
Queen Dot adjusted her crown and raised her hand again.
Billy and I still had our hands in the air. Also, Billy had been laughing, because it was actually pretty funny to see those skinny blue creatures getting hosed off like that.
“I am so happy to see you! Wheee! Yeee! Yeee! I offer you great heaping mounds of juice-soaked welcomes as the cruise director of the Tennessee!” Lourdes danced and thrust her hips wildly, and farted again.
And Queen Dot said, “Thank you. We have been so anxious to meet your humans. Can we see them, please?”
I leaned over Lourdes’s shoulder and whispered, “Ask her if they eat or enslave human beings.”
Naturally, Lourdes did what I told her to do.
Queen Dot’s mouth stretched into a wrinkled blue smile. “Certainly not! Human beings are the most entertaining life-form we’ve ever seen! We absolutely adore human beings. We would never eat them. Unless we had to.”
All the assembled cog’s eyes were on me and Billy, which made me feel just a little weird since we were standing there in our underwear. And then I actually had to remind myself of two things. First, cogs are machines. I was not pleased with what had been happening to me ever since being stranded up here on the shithole that is the Tennessee: I was beginning to think of the cogs here—Parker, Lourdes, Milo, Dr. Geneva, and the others—as individuals who actually had something to contribute to my existence beyond serving my meals, doing laundry, or going on scavenger hunts for appliances I didn’t even know how to use. I had to stop that. And sec
ond, if Queen Dot and her blue boys didn’t have too much experience with human beings, then how could they not be impressed by me and Billy Hinman, even if we were practically naked? After all, here we were, the last human beings anywhere.
And I had to admit that even in our underwear, Billy Hinman and I looked pretty good.
And Queen Dot said she adored us.
I looked at Billy Hinman, who nonchalantly shrugged. Of course I already knew that Billy would not be afraid of meeting our visitors. Billy Hinman would try anything once, and most things more frequently than that, with the exception of getting on anything that went too high or too fast. And I was a pampered and spoiled piece of shit who was pretty much afraid of doing anything on my own.
But as long as Billy was with me, I could do almost anything.
I glanced back, desperately trying to see if Rowan had appeared somewhere in the crowd, but he was not there. I even took a deep breath—trying to smell him, or maybe smell the other humans I knew were with us here on the Tennessee—but all I saw were cogs, and all I could smell was the metallic and nauseating odor of all the gallons of cog juice that seeped from the dozens of wounded machines that had packed into the arrivals deck with us.
Dr. Geneva tried pushing his way toward Billy and me.
“Cager! Would you like a man of medicine, and an expert in poetry if I do say so myself, to accompany you to receive our distinguished visitors?”
Did he just call himself a man?
“Um, no thanks, Dr. Geneva.”
Dr. Geneva bumped into the cog who’d been throwing a tantrum. The attendant cog immediately shouted at him, “Don’t make this about you! How dare you diminish my significance with your selfish interests! I’m the victim here, not you! Not you! You don’t get to be the victim! This is about me!”
Then Dr. Geneva placed his hands on the outraged cog’s shoulders and took a bite the size of a grapefruit out of the back of the cog’s neck.
The world was upside down.
Duncan’s cogs.
None of the cogs nearby seemed to mind, but what could I expect from a bunch of self-ambulatory eggbeaters? I one time saw Rowan accidentally drop a spoon into the garbage macerator in our kitchen. None of the other spoons were saddened by it. Still, despite my inner struggle, I leaned toward Parker and whispered, “Just stay with me and Billy. Whatever you do, keep away from Dr. Geneva.”
And Parker said, “It is the only thing I want—to do whatever you ask me, Cager.”
So I said, “Don’t make this about you, Parker. I’m the victim here.”
And Parker, being a cog, a talking spoon with legs and a penis, just didn’t get it.
“Wheee! Wheee! I’m opening the doors! I’m so happy, I could dance!” Lourdes gurgled.
And, naturally, dancing is exactly what Lourdes started doing while the air-lock doors quietly slid open and we stood there, face-to-face with two blue people and one blue gasket dude, who clearly were not from Earth.
Tricky Words
It is a natural consequence, when meeting alien beings from another world, to be curious about things like what they eat, bodily functions, and reproduction.
It’s like being a scientist, right?
But if anyone ever assembled a list of questions one should never ask a queen, those three areas of natural curiosity would undoubtedly be near the top of the list.
On the other hand, if you have your own cog who happens to be your personal valet and has sworn that he would do anything you ask him to do, no matter how disgusting, there are ways of having your curiosity satisfied.
So as Billy, Lourdes, Parker, and I stepped toward the open doors of the docking bay, I whispered to Parker, “At the first opportune moment be sure to ask Queen Dot what she eats, how she poops, and if the blue people have sex.”
And Parker whispered back, “Are you interested in having sex with one of the blue people?”
“No. Don’t be an idiot. I just want to know.”
“It makes me so excited to be asked to do things for you, Cager.”
Whatever.
The four of us stood in front of Queen Dot and Blue Guy Number Two, while Blue Guy Number One continued making one hell of a good seal around the fetus head.
“Are we supposed to bow or something?” Billy asked.
“I don’t really know. Remember those fucking etiquette classes for boys we had to take? They taught us what forks to use first and how to tie a bow tie but never told us what to do in front of a queen,” I said. “I’m pretty sure we’ve broken all kinds of rules of formality by being in our underwear.”
“I’m guessing the blue creatures don’t have any idea what underwear even is, much less a salad fork,” Billy said.
Then Queen Dot, in a very regal and resonant voice, said, “Why are you two human boys—and you, machine boy—in your underwear? Is this a new thing with human adolescents?”
“Um, we weren’t expecting visitors?” I guessed.
That was the first time all morning that I truly felt self-conscious. After all, Queen Dot was a person, not a machine—albeit a blue person.
If Albert Hinman wanted to produce a v.4 cog that felt like a guilty, embarrassed, entitled piece of shit, I would be the perfect end guy to code it for him. Except for the fact that I don’t know the first thing about coding a machine.
And Queen Dot obviously was fully expert at telling living human beings from cogs, which was something that the majority of living human people had a difficult time doing.
The blue people turned out to be liquid. They could make themselves look like anything they wanted to, which made me wonder—but only to myself, since they were royalty and all—why they had chosen to look so unattractive. And there were only three of them traveling in the gigantic baby ship, Queen Dot and her twin sons: Livingston, who was not the gasket, and Gweese, who was going to have to stay there, smeared like window putty around the face of the fetus, for as long as Queen Dot and her boys extended their visit on the cruise ship to end all cruise ships.
Billy Hinman and I shook Livingston’s hand. It was cold and felt like a wet hard-boiled egg.
“Do you want to see me do a trick?” Livingston said.
I said, “Um.”
“Trick” is a tricky word. You can never be prepared for it when someone does something they claim is a trick and it ends up killing you or slamming you in the balls or something.
Billy Hinman knew this. “Is it going to hurt us? Or spray any fluids on us? Because neither one of those things is good, as far as humans are concerned.”
“Ha ha! No!” Livingston said. “Watch me!”
And then Livingston’s blue jellified body transformed right in front of us. He became an exact replica of Billy Hinman—underwear and all. Then he rearranged his liquidness and morphed into Parker, and finally me, before turning back into himself.
And I thought, man, if a guy could make himself look exactly like anyone he wanted to, why would he want to be a skinny blue dude who crawled out of a fetus’s mouth?
But the liquid people were pretty amazing.
“You know what else I like to do?” Livingston, who was obviously rather lonely after all that time being inside a giant baby with his mother and twin brother, said.
“Guessing games with aliens can be kind of tricky,” I answered.
“Ha ha! I like you!” Livingston said.
And Parker whispered, “I don’t want him to like you, Cager.”
Whatever.
So Livingston continued, in a lowered, conspiratorial tone, “I really like to cuss. You human beings have the best fucking cuss words anywhere.”
“Now, Livingston,” Queen Dot said.
“Motherfucking balls!” Livingston, as much as a blue guy who just came out of a baby’s mouth could, looked overjoyed.
“Yipeee! Yipeee!” Lourdes danced and gurgled. “I am so delighted our guests are happy, and not embarking on a murderous rampage!”
She farted.
; And I said, “You’ve met other beings, besides humans?”
“Oh, holy shit yes,” Livingston said. “Do you want me to show you what one of the fuckers looks like?”
“Only if it won’t give me nightmares,” I said.
Apparently, Livingston, who was well versed in human swear words, was entirely clueless when it came to the content of our most terrifying dreams. Apparently, also, there was a place in the universe where the people looked like enormous slimy octopuses with tufts of spiny hair growing from random circular spots all over their bodies and tentacles, and they had seven pairs of eyes, with faces and mouths like giant lampreys.
I closed my eyes and turned away.
Billy Hinman said, “Sweet dreams, motherfucker.”
I also had to resist the urge to vomit. “Um. That’s really cool, Livingston. And I never want to see that again, if you don’t mind.”
Livingston transformed back into his skinny, spiderlike blue self. And then immediately he became a large puddle of blue goop that spread out all over the floor of the air lock.
“Oh, now, Livingston!” Queen Dot explained, “He gets embarrassed very easily. What can you do? He’s just a kid. Pull yourself together, Livingston.”
I felt like such an idiot. “Uh, I apologize, Livingston. Human beings—especially ones who are practically naked—can be a bit sensitive.”
“It’s okay,” said the blue puddle on the floor.
Then Livingston sprang back up from his pool of embarrassment.
Since Gweese didn’t really have a hand, on account of his body being smeared around the docking port like blue cream cheese, I avoided an awkward handless handshake and gave him a dude nod.
I said, “I’ve got to admire a guy who can make himself into one hell of a great gasket.”
“It hurts,” Gweese said. “It really, really hurts. And it’s boring. I wanted to come play with the humans on the Tennessee and have fun with the other kids, but it was Livingston’s turn to have fun. Whatever. Happy fucking New Year. Ow! Fuck!”