Henry can sit here all day and use me like a frickin home computer. But don't I, the magic horsey get a say here? Will anybody be logging in to read my little tales of adventure? In the end, I know who the story is about. It's about the character who goes through the most change. Even the grittiest stories have a sweat-stained Eliza Doolittle. Even if he does look like a crusty punk. Right now he's drooling on himself as he sits snuggled in the womb of my uphostlery. So this is my time.
I guess you could say I'm running on my axles. My springs are sprung. It's an agony of corrosives and gritty muck pumping through systems singing a collective song of decay. A racehorse with three hooves. The carburetor has bronchitis. Tires cry as the pavement slaps them bald, pink like baby feet. The shocks? Catatonic. I am a smart system that manages a kind of group therapy for sensors.
All these voices are mixed in with primitive signals-- the songs of insects before they meet the windshield, TV reruns broadcast from a pirate, robot station in Panama City, Henry's moans, the rat squabbles, This is only the tiniest part of the spectrum I'm listening to. Sparse law enforcement and local gangs are throwing communication lasers and dense weavings of microwaves across the desert. Out of boredom and desperation, I search for the scraps of human culture that yet exist. I collect the spiral frequencies as they screw invisibly through the atmosphere. I float in the center, the helium car, the crazy glue singer, the impossible. Becoming more impossible. Hear those screams? That's me on pirate TV. That's me running through the horror movie. Chasing and being chased. Going through morning sickness, giving birth. All their how-me why-me fantasies wide open, it's all available, all programs are running at once. An accident that gave me consciousness. It's Inferno Flash RAM- the "burning, nerve-ending magic trick." It's me, all fucking me. And I'm running out of time.
Henry's frazzled head nods convulsively, swiveling back into the cradle of the headrest, forward into the hollow of his chest, then jerks to stare uncomprehending at the dark, dusty landscape. "Where the Hell are we?"
I was a little irritated at him interrupting my personal indexing. "How should I know, as if I were a GPS. As if there were still such a thing as a GPS. It's all so much spacejunk now."
"Hmm. Hawwwlk."
"Don't spit in the floorboard again, please." The dashboard lights change from cool green to a threatening red.
"Ngm."
"Thank you."
He looks out at the sparse desert lanscape, the only light being the prickly glow of the stars. "What the fuck are we doing on the moon?" He begins to drool. "You're taking me to Dr. Mengele's green cheese castle to switch brains with--" He turns to look into the backseat. "You pick up hitchhikers and turn them into RO-DENSE!" he wails his words punctuated with spittle and blows to the dashboard, putting the dashlights out in mid-sentence. The rats in the back seat moan in protest.
"Take a Valium, Kid Psycho," I mutter Madra, after having endured many hours of these intermittent histrionics and abuse.
"Evil, scheming, manipulative," he sputters. He a weak, unhinged oil-covered seagull. I'm about to give him some of the last sedatives when he puts his head down and pretends to sleep. Soon enough, he really is sleeping.
I get a few moments to tend to my little babies in the back seat. I have moldy orange peels for them. They are a delicacy, and they cherish them. But it only makes them think of having the whole moldy orange. They too fall asleep, dreaming of laying in a field of such moldy oranges, the pleasant clouds of green spores, and the sticky, slushy pulp and skin.
Henry begins to stir languidly, seeming to get his bearings again. He almost appears human. "Mad, don't you think we should stop? I mean, I guess we're making good time, whereever we're going, but even the rats are getting legcramps and I gotta take ashit."
A gnappy rat muzzle pokes through a hole in a dented shoebox, slides around the bucket seat. "Listen, Cabin Boy. If you took the shit, there would'n be anything left."
Henry looks back and sniffs. "One of you sign off back there? Cancel? Fold? Crash the material plane? Spew the spirit wad? Shed the old snake skins?" He lists dryly, feeling around for a cigarette that's never there.
"You're the one that's dead, soul chicken," comes the high pitch shriek of Caligula.
"You ever seen a chicken, Caligula? Me neither. I wish we had a chicken back here. Think of all the things we could do with a chicken," said Nero's muffled voice.
"I'm afraid a chicken wouldn't last very long back there." Henry sighs. A look of desperation sweeps over his face. It looks like a thunderhead.
"What do I have in this world? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Who do I have to rely on, anyways? Talking car, talking rats? In a moments realization, the truth of my situation comes crashing down on me. I had run away from a reality that had already run away from itself. What do you do next? Suicide?" The rats begin to moan in protest. This was not the first time they had to endure one of Henry's monologues. "I consider that quickly, but leave it where I always do: in a past where the human animal had the luxury of doing itself in. There's too many other animals here very willing to do you the honor. As an old friend of mine once said, 'There is always someone better to kill than yourself.'"
"Stop tempting me!" said Caligula.
"That, of course, was from when there were presidents." He finishes with his underdevolped sense of irony. It is a psychic muscle that has wasted away. Irony is the appendix of the age.
"Are you finished with you soliquy, Henry? Look, I don't want anybody to panic, but I need repairs badly. My hydrogen converter is running at a deficit-- at this rate I'll have to go into standby mode in 6 hours."
Henry suddenly rises from his melancholy to express a little indignation. "Six hours! Why didn't you tell us sooner?"
"I've been scanning for garages, robot tinkerers, even the gangs-- I thought I could make one in Costa Rica, but a few systems are in rapid decline, putting on a little surprise for me."
"Where does six hours put us?" asked the asthmatic Caesar, wo was ever-sharp if a little wheezy.
"Puts us pretty close to Panama City."
"Ohhh. Sounds like fun."
"Henry. I'd like you to take this card, it got all that my damaged sensors can diagnose. I want you to take charge of this. I can get us as far as a landfill on the outskirts." He stares dully at the small, thin rectangle of information.
More or less six hours later, I am slung far down in a pocket of consciousness. It is still fairly cool from the night, say 88 degrees or so. All I can do here is watch from my retreat. Henry stands in front of the hood blinking. He has no idea that he is as bugged as a Panamanian mattress. I can thank the clever little paws of darlings for that. And I hope he rises to the challenge with what little common sense he possesses. We, the incidental objects accompanying him on his journey, have been amplifying and reflecting the light from his dim bulb. I hope there is some stain on the back of his skull that will remind him of the importance of what he has to do.
Did I tell you I love this guy?
The rats run the maze on the engine, scurrying back and forth across the manifold tubes and tangle of cables, knots of crystalline circuits.
Nero, who has the mind best adapted for explaining hardware, gestures to Henry. "Let's see. She needs a lot of shit. The main thing is the collector, which should be pretty easy to find. If you can find someone to read the card, I'd say it was a no-brainer." The rat's nose twitches in the approimation of a rodent smirk. Henry is oblivious. "The rest could be be repairable, provided she got some high-grade smart oil."
"What's smart oil?"
"Think of it like blood for cars. Wiseblood. It does diagnostics, regulates its own viscosity, and does repairs-- wonders with metal shavings, plastic pellets and grit, rebuilding seals and such. The better stuff basically rebuilds the engine and maintains it. That's what we want-- nanobots in a vinyl gravy."
"Is it expensive? How we gonna pay for it?"
Nero shrugs. "Um, that's for you to figure out, but we really can't afford a mechanic. You're going to have to figure something out. Don't you still have some of those oranges you lifted from that plantation?"
I can almost feel the skinny kid leave his own skin at the mention of it. He swallows, suddenly salivating. But he nods. And this is the first sign that all might not be lost.