Hooker T is a specialist. No one, and I do mean no man woman or child alive, can make that patch of robot skin like Hooker! Reinforced Hip Rotation Re-Stabilizer Manufacturers come and go, Third Quadrant Ambulatory Chest Cavity Mainspring welders are a dime a dozen. But if you need the inside of an elbow on the left arm of your robot to be top of the line, you call Hooker. Accept no substitute.

True story: The DigiMark Smashbot 4021 was designed by Amalgamated MotorFolks to infiltrate enemy landscapes, erect entire, confusing, urban backdrops, entice soldiers to throw down their arms and enter the strip clubs, booze joints, head shops, and massage parlors willy-nilly, then self detonate and kill them all in a blast that not only killed them, but killed them in such a way that they were killed while sinning, thus destined for hell. When General Panzer investigated a warzone and wanted to know if it was his robot or the enemy's that had laid waste to a thousand boner-fide soldiers, he just looked for that little piece of inside left elbow robot skin, because, children, Hooker always made is so good, it could even survive a nuclear blast and sin and killing!

Speaking of hell, Hooker was not all work and no play. He was not a dull boy. Once, he made a website. He wrote his own code for it. No stinking Java! No stinking Javascript! No stinking Cascading Style Sheets! PHP? Hello? No. He took his own initials, added Hell to the end, got H.T.M. Hell, and was voted by the League of Nations as the single most evil and perverse human on the face of the planet for making such an awful pun. "We are all kittens in Azreal's Commode, so long as Hooker T. Miller is allowed to code websites!" read the brief, but strangely poignant commandus profundi of the Judge Advocate for the Offense. Hook was sentenced for execution.

Jail was tough on Hooker T. Miller, but tougher on the rest of the world. Sure, he had to go without the wild parties, the women, the 5-days booze binges, the rock cocaine and simulated sex with half of the Roscoe Rangers cheerleading squad on suped-up modified tricked-out virtual-reality enhanced Wendy's shake machine blenders duct-taped to fifteen pound bags of grape jello. But the hardest thing about prison was not being able to continue making the skin for the inside of the left elbow for robots.

It was tougher on the rest of the world, of course. Sure, Hooker was able to find distraction in single-handedly kicking the living snot out of half the prisoners and making the other half his harem of personal bitches who stole cigarettes for him and helped him form a penitentiary foosball league. But the rest of the world had no such distractions.

A mother of four in Butane, Mississippi purchased a Milleniark Roboscraper to help remove the dried paint from the side of the garage. And when "Chuckles " as she called the 8 ton robot, was infected by the Elvis Virus, an airborne Robovirus constructed by Mountain Steve Willowbligh, leader of the Band of the Hand, an anarchists group, where do you think it was that the Secret Service Robodocs discovered that the virus had entered? Yup, at the left elbow. Hooker hadn't been on that one, and so the 'bo crashed.

Or the 'bo Dr. Elliot Neverwear purchased from a Target in Gotham, South Dakota. It was sleek. It was sexy. It had Veruca Six all-radial tires, a PiratePack cooling chamber in its nautilus banks, and fifteen, yes, FIFTEEN flame resistant ecolocution nodules in its chromium-pi memory hex. Seriously, you almost wanted to make love to this 'bo. You almost wanted to lick it. In fact, if you did, it could convert the calories in your saliva into enough energy to toss your ass half-a-mile away onto haystack with straw-width accuracy. This bad mamma made the Foxytown 940-B from Mercedes Mannequins look like one of those crappy-ass doggy robots Sony put out at the end of the last century. This mean suckuh had enough chi-flow circuits to make Deep Felt, the IBC supercomputer and world Cribbage Champion, cry like crack baby. It once, even, under Dr. Neverwear's guidance, spanked, that is, literally slapped the ass, of Chunk, the personal security android that Angelina Jolie had to purchase after she got married to ex vice president Dick Cheney. But folks, you know what's coming. You know what this massive, awesome, beautiful, omnipotent robot's Achilles heel was. It was its elbow. Left elbow. On the inside. The skin. One day, a kid chomping on a Popsicle tossed the orange-flavored stick over his shoulder, hitting the 'bo right where only Hooker T. Miller could have protected it, and the rest, as they say in the burn wards where the victims of the resulting explosion were treated, is history.

So they let him out.

Now, Hooker was exceptional but he was not just about robotic elbow skin. He once built an entire robot. He called her Emma. E.M.M.A. stood for Elegiac Matriflexi Manascopic Android. He designed her right down to the atom. Right down to the quirk. He collected quirks, arranged them, formed them, sculpted them, programmed them--you'd need a Davis Eleven Chrono-Dater to tell these quirks weren't together 15 seconds after the big bang. You couldn't tell Emma's nerve cells from that of a real human being. He made her autonomous, too, from the ground up, no control panels, no remotes, no wires, no nuthin. For all intents and purposes, she was a real human being. She claimed to have feelings, was excellent in the sack, could reproduce, and loved Mozart.

But. The best of her. Seriously. I swear. You know what it was. The inside left elbow. Poetry.

Do you know Hooker T. Miller? No. You do not. Maybe you have met him. Maybe you have had dinner with him. Maybe you and Hooker T., bored, once spent three weeks fighting fires in the SuperGrowth Project Sahara Forest, drinking tequila shots every night as the orangeish glow of a billion burning trees lit up the night sky, reminding you and Hook of a hard day's work ahead, drunk on tequila shots and your and his own good looks and the stink and sweat of fighting damn fake fires in a damn fake forest all damn day. Still, you don't know him. No one does. Because he is Hooker T. Miller. He walks alone. He builds robots. He's a God.