Foss stood still on the street corner, giving the wheels in his head time to turn. "Well, I don't see any corpses," Bender said to him, "so everybody must still be alive. What a relief. Can I go back to killing you now?"

"Not just yet," said Foss, fingering his chin. "According to Hermes, Leela lost her body and her mind. I know that Farnsworth's lab is equipped with a body-switching device, so for all we know, Leela may not be Leela at all. That may explain why she didn't recognize us, and why someone else is flying the ship."

"In that case," said Bender, "you should go up to her and introduce yourself. 'Hi, my name's Philaster Foss, and I'm your new boyfriend. Wanna have sex?'"

Foss reached up and straightened his glasses. "You, go into the building and see if anyone's still there," he directed the robot. "I'll follow Leela and see where she's going."

"Why should I take orders from you?" said Bender gruffly.

"Fine," said Foss. "I'll follow Leela, and you go into the building."

"Fine," said Bender.


"Raven," commanded Leela, "transfer helm control to Mildred Sykes, authorization 3-8-7-charley-2-alpha-theta-6-meatloaf-0-0-0-yoga-9."

"Invalid command code," the ship's intelligence replied flatly.

"Zigubu," grumbled Leela. (Zigubu is a Rigelian curse word which, roughly translated, means, "Your mother does unmentionable things with our nation's flag.")

"Proteus must have altered the ship's authorization codes," said Hermes. "Delta, how are your hacking skills?"

"How thoughtful of you to ask," responded the copper-haired fembot. "Most people, when they learn of my primary function, assume that I don't know the first thing about computers."

"But you are a computer," Amy pointed out.

"True," said Delta. "And you're a human, but that doesn't imply that you possess a perfect knowledge of how a human body works."

"Just tell me if you can hack into Raven, mon," said Hermes impatiently.

"My standard-issue positronic brain is capable of analyzing twenty billion codes per second," Delta told him. "At that rate, analyzing every one of the 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible codes would require a period of approximately one thousand years."

"Geesh," moaned Amy. "I wish I'd brought a clean sweatsuit."

Zoidberg dropped himself into the captain's Corinthian leather chair, watched the stars streak past for a second, and sighed. "Outer space will get boring after a few weeks," he remarked. "Do we have any good videos?"

"Please choose from the following categories," droned the voice of Raven. "Mockumentaries, shot-for-shot remakes, movies about royal sex scandals, chick flicks, flicks that make you wish you were a chick, badly dubbed martial arts, boy wizard movies, road movies featuring empowered women, Pixar-Disney animated shorts…"

Delta set to work promptly, inserting a cable from a compartment in her wrist into a port on Raven's control console. While she iterated through trillions of potential command codes, the other unwilling travelers passed the time in various ways. Amy sat on the bed in her quarters, chewed her fingernails, filed them, and chewed them again. Hermes used a vertically sliding door to practice his limbo bending. Zoidberg sat, empty-eyed, in front of the viewscreen as My Two Left Feet, a 2011 dance movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis, played out. Leela, still imprisoned in a freckled, curly-haired body, had bound her wrists to a pipe in a hot corner of the engine room (she had found that, in her new form, she was more comfortable in high temperatures).

When Amy stepped in to check on her, Leela was yanking furiously against her chains, growling, and pressing against the pipe with her boot. To Amy's eyes, the sweat-drenched redhead seemed more animal than woman. Leela cast a sideways, pleading glance at Amy, tugged on the chains a few more times, and began to take in deep breaths.

"We can hear you all throughout the ship," said Amy. "We don't know if you're trying to break free, or having a baby."

Leela lowered her now-brown eyes. "I'm sorry," she said in a raspy voice. "The rage comes and goes, but when it takes over, I can't fight it."

"Well, try to," said Amy.

"I don't know how Mildred lived with this," said Leela in a tone of desperation. "I don't know how much longer I can live with it. Is this what it's like to be a Chalnoth? Is homicidal rage as natural to them as hunger, and sleep, and love, are to us? No wonder they have to kill other races—it's the only thing that keeps them from killing each other."

The Asian intern walked closer, her eyes tinged with compassion. "Be careful," Leela warned her. "I may try to bite you."

"I'm here for you," said Amy. "If you ever need me, just holler. Once. Coherently."

Leela's blurred vision suggested that two Amys were present, both transparent, their intersection solid. Having two eyes can be so confusing, she thought. I want my uni-eye back.

"I almost killed Fry," she lamented. "If not for these chains, I probably would've killed one of you, or all of you. I want you to promise me something, Amy. I want you all to promise me something."

"Okay," said Amy, nodding.

"I don't know how long it'll take us to get back to Earth, or to wherever we're going," said Leela. "I may turn into a completely different person by that time, so I have to get this out now. If I ever lose control and harm another person, any person, I want you to…" She swallowed. "I want you to kill me on the spot."

A tear formed in Amy's right eye. "No…" she whispered, shaking her head.

"Promise me, Amy," Leela urged her. "You can't imagine the hell I'm going through right now. If you're a true friend, you'll make me this promise."

"I can't," said Amy, her voice quivering.

Leela sighed through her nose. "I expected as much," she said grimly. "I'll have to ask Delta to make the promise. Hopefully her feelings won't get in the way of doing what has to be done."

"No!" cried Amy, tears of anger bursting forth. "We'll find your body! We'll make Mildred pay!"

"Get out of here," said Leela emotionlessly.


To be continued! Please review!

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