Otto and Toto in the Oort

Ninety percent of all the slackers who ever lived and didn't work are alive and not working in our century.

—John "Woodie" Campbell XXIV.

Barbituates and Dexedrine are dangerous drugs, but used with care they can smooth over the inevitable disturbances of travel most wonderfully. I carry them...

—Robert A. Heinlein, Tramp Royale.

Let's get this mother out of here.

—Concluding words of the Apollo program,
spoken on the Moon by Eugene Cernan.

Out around the asteroid belt, on what was turning out to be a mega-suppressor of a trip, the drugs began to wear off, and we knew it was time for another taste of the frog.

"Get Buffo out of his cage," Otto said.

"You get him," Toto replied peevishly. "I had to handle him first the last time, and he peed in my hands."

"Listen, who's the virtual human here, you or me?"

"You are."

Shaggy, immense, buck-naked, perfect twin to Toto, ursine Otto now rose up off his warm furred couch. "That's absurd! You know perfectly well that I created you out of cornucopions in my image. I didn't want to but I had to. All because of that stupid Pansystem legislation. 'Use it up, wear it out, waste some more...' I couldn't keep up with my assigned goals, and so I created you to help. You're registered with the authorities on Venus. Why, just look on the sole of your left foot and you'll see your tattoon."

Toto, still sitting on the edge of his own pilosofa, lifted his unshod and hairy left foot onto his right knee. The registration tattoon blinked beneath the bare skin of his sole.

Toto wiggled his long toes leisurely and somewhat disdainfully before replying.

"It's true. But what about your own?"

Otto narrowed his eyes suspiciously. "What do you mean?"

"Go ahead and look. Unless you're afraid..."

Otto, standing, cautiously bent his knee, exposing the bottom of his left foot. He peered at it over his shoulder. Slowly he lowered it.

"I'll be damned. It's true. I've got a tattoon too. When the hell did that happen?"

"It's always been there, since I created you. I only got a tattoon so you wouldn't feel lonely. You're losing your mind from too much frog. You think you're the real me."

Otto snorted like a pig. "Bull! You put it there while I was sleeping. Admit it."

"Maybe I did. And maybe I didn't."

"Well, this is pointless. I know that I'm the baseline and you're the copy. You're nothing more than an artificially constrained standing wave. And when I'm done with you, I'll dissolve you back into cornucopions."

"We'll see about that, virt-boy."

"The hell with this stupid argument! I'm getting me some frog!"

"Make it good and scary. And save some for me."

"Maybe."

Otto moved across the cruiser's cabin to where a bulpy box ventilated with a few slits sat on a shelf. He opened the latched door of the biopoly container and reached both hands inside. Withdrawing them, he brought forth an orange toad half as big as a breadbox. (The breadbox was right next to the cage and served handily as a comparative norm.) Otto clutched the toad around its squodgy midsection and held it at arms-length. Predictably, the toad released a copious stream of vivid purple urine into the air. The piss hit the duffish floor and was absorbed. Otto laughed.

"Damn," said the toad. "Didn't even get your foot."

"That's right Buffo. Because I'm Otto the Original, faster and smarter than Toto the Copy."

Toto refused to rise to the bait. "Just get on with it please. This trip has been boring enough so far without having to listen to your tired witticisms."

Otto locked gazes with the flaccid and hapless amphibian. "Buffo, are you scared?"

"No. Why should I be? I have plenty to eat, the ship is infallible and smarter than the two of you put together, and I know you'll never hurt me. So why should I be scared?"

Otto was a little taken aback. "Well, that's all true. But there's plenty of other things to be scared about."

"Like what?"

"Well, big things. Cosmic things."

"Such as?"

"Plague and pestilence."

"Every microbe has a serial number, and every virus is patented."

"Hunger and suffering."

"Everyone photosynthesizes or bites the constant. And if you're not distributed and renormalized, then you must want it that way, and you've got no one to blame but yourself."

"The sun going nova."

"We'll move all the planets to greener pastures."

"Alien invaders from light-years away."

"The cosmic waterhole is dry, it seems."

"The heat death of the universe, then!"

"That old chestnut. Besides, you already know how that will turn out."

Toto interrupted. "He's got you there, Otto. Have you forgotten the ghosts already?"

"I thought they were just frog hallucinations..."

"No, the ship recorded them. We really were visited by our far-future descendants voyaging through a temporal wormhole. Do you want me to replay it?"

"Hell, no! I just want to get this frog antsy enough for us both to go subplanckian!"

"A real human wouldn't have made that mistake about the ghosts..."

"This real human has too much on his mind to think about some greed-heads at the end of time who never did anything for us!"

Otto began to shake Buffo. "C'mon, get frightened!"

"I--I'm getting sick!"

Buffo regurgitated a gout of clear bile onto Otto's uncovered pelted chest. Disgustedly, Otto extended the toad to Toto.