Dr. Identity

by D. Harlan Wilson

  We reached the top of the vidbuilding. I landed on the edge. I turned around sharply and karate chopped a bounty hunter. The lightweight fabric of its superhero suit and the texture of my skin wasn’t a good combination for him. My aluminopleather claw passed through his babysoft flesh and sliced him in two. His screaming torso tumbled into the spinning tentacles of a hydracopter and shredded…Blood and entrails splattered the hydracopter’s windshield. The vehicle swerved out of control…

  Cameras popped and flashed and focused and clicked and blipped and winked and blinked and blasted and machinegunned and fluttered and fizzed and smoked and snapped and exploded…I jumped off of the vidbuilding. I fell into a daredevil dive. I planed out and set a course back towards the heart of Bliptown. Bouffant Butte faded into the distance behind the teeming swarm of mediatized warriors.

  Dr. ’Blah had grown silent. He wasn’t moving. His face wasn’t even twitching. His eyes were empty. I asked him if he was all right. He made a sound that resembled the greeting of a sick duck.

  I said, “Not to worry, Dr. ’Blah. Dr. Blah Blah Blah will be a great success. I can see the entire project unfolding into the horizon of my mind’s screen. I suspect the completed work will garner a Bliptown Book Award. Perhaps it will even receive the illustrious Stick Figure Prize. What a treat that would be.” The Stick Figure Prize was the most widely respected and desirable commendation in technoliterature named after a man who was born an actual stick figure with twiglike legs and arms and a nearly featureless bowling ball for a head that sat atop his pencil-neck. His body was jet black and seemingly two-dimensional. They named the prize after him not because he was a literary auteur or benefactor but because technically he wasn’t supposed to exist. In other words he was a living fiction. “I know you’ve had aspirations of receiving the Stick Figure Prize for your own work. Maybe if you finish the comic book you’ve been writing for the past ten years? No hard feelings if I happen to receive it. I know you’ll be supportive. Why wouldn’t you be supportive? I’m your ’gänger. My accomplishments are a direct reflection of your character.”

  “Quack,” said Dr. ’Blah.

  I liquidated a handful of Papanazi. “Speaking of your character, I think I’ll represent you as a drag queen. I must admit I’ve discerned certain transsexual tendencies in your mentality and behavior since the day you purchased me. The question, then, is what sort of dresses will I put you in? I have a masculinized fashion sense and I’m not altogether keen on feminine apparel. Here is the research element of the project.”

  “Quack,” said Dr. Blah.

  “And so your character’s penchant for ultraviolence will stem from a preposterous, unspoken insecurity regarding sexuality. An atrocious cliché, I know it. But I can’t help wondering—”

  An explosion rattled my sensorium. I was soaring down Grape Ape Alley at a speed approaching 100 mph and began to slow down. At first I didn’t realize what had happened.

  Then I felt the flames. My wings were on fire and a smoking hole beleaguered my back.

  I flapped and fanned my wings on the flames in hopes of putting them out.

  They spread.

  I jacked out of the Smaug and took the controls. “We’re going down.” The vehicle plunged into the whirling city.

  Dr. ’Blah regained the power of speech. “It’s about time!”

  The wind whistled. Outside the belly of the Smaug the world was fireworks and gore and electricity and burning flesh…

  I judiciously rearranged my top hat. I stroked my beard. I gripped the lapels of my shirt. “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher…”

  12

  CRONENBERG CIRQUE – 3RD PERSON

  Achtung 66.799’s jacks tried to pick another fight. They covered his skull like moon craters and ran the length of his scoliotic spine. His body vibrated in the torrent of their harangue.

  The jacks barked at a meteorologist in Biospeak. The meteorologist, Bario Ackalacka, worked for Channel 10,443. This morning his bright-eyed ’gänger informed the Papanazi that the local government had conjured and dispersed an übertsunami that was scheduled to sweep through his neighborhood this afternoon and give it a moral cleansing, countering and quashing the wave of crime that had recently crashed there. Ackalacka was a tall, bronze, ripped up body engineer with a purple face that looked like a fist. He had on a thong and cowboy boots with spurs. An exoskeleton of veins encrusted his skin. Achtung 66.799 wondered if the meteorologist could understand Biospeak. He hoped not. He wasn’t armed. Not with muscle, not with hardware. Not even with Biospeak.

  Served him right. He had bought the jacks from a street surgeon recommended by an underground talk show host. At first he was only going to have one jack installed. But they were dirt cheap and he decided to load up. Achtung 66.799’s identity demanded a multiplicity. So did his fashion sense. The street surgeon assured him they were no-nonsense implants. User-friendly and fully functional. But after installation the metallic rings that described their exteriors morphed into fleshy grey lips and their pistils became lizardlike tongues. They were sentient, too. Achtung 66.799 wondered if the surgeon had sold them to him because he didn’t like his looks, he wanted to play a joke on him, or he couldn’t get the things off of his hands. Probably all of the above.

  He knew a few words of Biospeak, mostly obscenities, so he understood some of the hash his jacks slung out. Ackalacka didn’t seem to notice. He continued to sip his drink and slap the ass cheek of the android standing next to him at the bar. The music was the usual vintage cacophony of synthesizers, riffblitzes and metronomics, but it wasn’t turned up that loud. The meteorologist probably didn’t speak the language.

  Achtung 66.799 tried to ignore his technology.

  Failed.

  He tried to reason with his technology.

  Failed.

  He tried poking and prodding his technology with a drink stirrer. That worked a little. His jacks’ hullabaloo grew louder and people started giving him dirty looks. But at least the hullabaloo was directed towards him now.

  At one corner of the bar, a Guy Smiley impersonator spooned rabbit pellet pasta, Cronenberg Cirque’s specialty dish, into an oversized ersatz grin. Sidling up next to him, Achtung 66.799 stole a noodle from the Smiley’s plate. He found a dark corner and used the noodle to methodically beat his jacks into submission. Initially they got mad, threatening to turn inside out and eat him. Then they got tired and fell asleep. A series of soft, electric snores escaped the Papanazi’s body…

  He had been following the plaquedemics when they ducked into Cronenberg Cirque. He had been following them all day, in fact, but still hadn’t retained a money shot. The ideal money shot would capture them red-handed in an au naturel moment, free of all masks and costumes. This was unlikely considering the plaquedemics’ egregious penchant for Halloweenlike behavior. He could still land a decent fee, however, for a clip of them in disguise, depending upon how he contextualized his report on the footage when he wrote it up. So far he couldn’t even manage to get footage of them in any form.

  No sign of the plaquedemics now. He suspected they had retired to a psychostall and jacked into the Schizoverse. Cronenberg Cirque’s psychostalls were first rate—a wide selection of wireless enterological instruments and almost no static on the Idside.

  One wore a white three-piece suit and beret and his face was a dark block of blunt edges. The other was decked out like a flapper—bobbed hair, dumb-looking smile, dress like a purple weeping willow tree, fishnet tights and high-heel clogs. Achtung 66.799 wondered if they were aiming for a Great Gatsby vogue; the male looked like Robert Redford in the 1974 film. He remembered the film from his brief stint in college. He remembered the novel, too. It was the only novel he read before getting expelled for running away from a plaquedemic who tried to cut his head off for answering a question incorrectly. Then again, maybe they were just voguing the Roaring 20s. A Roaring 20s fashion craze had materialized yesterday afternoon. It was outdat
ed now, but as always plenty of hangers-on refused to make the change to the craze of the moment, which, as far as Achtung 66.799 could tell, seemed to be a combination of Bohochic, Discofever and Diagnostic Zero. Still, the Dystopian Duo fit in just fine.

  Why they changed their outfits so often didn’t make sense to Achtung 66.799. They were like a couple of kids playing dress up. As a result, the Papanazi almost lost them a few times—especially when they ducked into phone booths or revolving doors on crowded streets, changed outfits in fasttime, and emerged in various Golden Age superhero disguises that allowed them to blend in with the odd flock of bounty hunters that prowled the streets, slideways and flyways. On one occasion they came out of a phone booth as animé versions of Batman and Robin. Their cartoon eyes were the same—two glossy, long-lashed orbs that appeared to be on the brink of shedding tears—and he couldn’t tell which was which. Clearly the plaquedemic playing Robin had had better days. His neon green briefs were too small and his testicles kept popping into view. Achtung 66.799 struggled to get a clean shot of him, but there were too many bodies, and a moment later they had each turned into somebody else…

  In addition to their ever-changing identities, the plaquedemics were difficult to track because they moved so quickly from place to place, perpetrating one holocaust after another. But the Law wasn’t the only doghouse that could sniff out DNA. Achtung 66.799 had his own sniffer. It wasn’t very fashionable. It was no more than a large rubber nose connected to a pair of plastic thick-rimmed spectacles and a fake bushy mustache. Hardly a DNA hound. But it did the job.

  Cronenberg Cirque had two hallways of psychostalls: business class, economy class.

  Achtung 66.799 slunk into the latter.

  A Hal 9000 eye embedded in the wall stopped him. “Excuse me,” it said blankly. “Payment please.”

  “Oops. Sorry.” Achtung 66.799 leaned over so that he was eye to eye with the HAL. The HAL scanned his retinal databank and extracted payment.

  “I can feel it.” It burped. “Have a nice day.”

  Buzzing blacklights hanging from the ceiling by long, macrobiotic tendrils swung back and forth. The air smacked of moth balls. Achtung 66.799 proceeded down the hallway, hurriedly peeling back velvet curtains, peering into this psychostall, that psychostall, and inhaling, inhaling, inhaling…Time was his enemy. No telling what the plaquedemics might look like when they left the place, or from what direction they might leave the place, or what sort of ultraviolence they might enact as they were leaving the place. Also, a Schizoversal clip of them would be priceless, no matter what form they took on the Idside. He could tangibly retire from the Papanazi. Assuming that they were even jacked in.

  They were. He smelled them. Suddenly their scent was so powerful he felt nauseous.

  He disappeared behind a curtain.

  Standing before him like two deactivated sentinels were the naked Egos of Dr. Identity and Dr. ———. The Egos were unidentifiable. As with all residual bodies, they existed as faceless, holographic, anthropomorphic bundles of nerves. No denying the stench of their DNA, though. Achtung 66.799 smiled and removed his nose.

  Despite how many times he had been in the presence of barenaked Egos, the sight unsettled him. When the Schizoverse confiscated your Id, it confiscated your body, the flesh being indivisible from Desire and Instinct. Left behind was a virtual incantation of the Ego, that psychic hard-on General Freud believed to be the mediator between the passionate, irrational Id and the guilt-ridden Superego as well as the conscious sense of the self and that which allowed the Id to negotiate reality. Triangulated in this way, the Ego figured as a dynamic “personality.” Separated from this triangulation, however, it was a soft jelly thing, a deserted, lackluster shell with nothing to do but listen to the whiny inner voice of its Superego complain about the social, moral, ideological, metaphysical and ontological terminal choices of its defiant Id.

  Jacking into the Schizoverse was not unlike being stuffed into a de la Footwa pocket. Achtung 66.799 knew this because he had suffered from the experience as a child.

  The memory still harrowed him. He was in the third grade. Don Jacoby Kish, mob boss of Tweedle Dee Elementary School, had fingered him for a hit because he didn’t like the way he chewed his food. “He chews too slow,” Don Kish informed his joeboys, “and he pushes his lips out too far. Deal with the turd.”

  Don Kish was one of only three children attending Tweedle Dee who owned pants sporting de la Footwa pockets. At the time the pockets were relatively new on the market. His father’s ’gänger’s ’gänger had rubbed out a rival family’s boss’s ’gänger’s ’gänger’s ’gänger and seized the pants as booty. (In many communities, even surrogates necessitated surrogates.) The joeboys nodded and waited for their boss to remove his pants. They were tight on his chubby little legs and it took a while for him to grunt and squirm out of them. The joeboys pretended like Don Kish’s struggle with the garment was perfectly natural, staring at their toes with their sharp dunce caps tilted just so…

  Recess lasted from nine to five at Tweedle Dee except for two fifteen minute class sessions in the morning and afternoon and a two hour midday break for lunch. As such, the protoplaquedemic faculty who worked at the school had sufficient time to conduct orgies without being bothered by the tedium of elementary education. Achtung 66.799 had just finished eating lunch. A hall monitor who refused to let him stay inside and study his times tables dropkicked him back out onto the playground. Friendless, he retired to a remote spot on the playground and recommenced burying boogers in the dirt. A mischievous protoplaquedemic once told him the boogers would grow into muscular scarecrows. He was planting a whole field of them in hopes that, someday, there would be enough scarecrows to play Duck-Duck-Goose with as well as to beat up anybody that fucked with him.

  He got worked over by three of Don Kish’s joeboys. They interrupted Achtung 66.799 as he lowered a booger into a hole by a fish hook, whispering encouragement to it. “You can do it. I believe in you. You have the power.” They crept up behind him and punched and kicked and picked him up. One of the joeboys had put on the don’s pants. The pants hung on his legs like two sewn together laundry bags and had to be held onto his waist by another joeboy while the third joeboy did the dirty work. Achtung 66.799 shrieked for help. The two playground supervisors on duty heard him, but they were 69ing in a treehouse and couldn’t be bothered. The joeboys flipped him over and his head deterritorialized into infinite molecules of raw, red consciousness…

  The pain was inexplicable. But it only lasted a moment.

  Achtung 66.799’s body reterritorialized inside of the de la Footwa in a much smaller, slightly altered form. Only 100,000th his actual size now, he was a featureless homunculus floating in a sea of hyperamniotic fluid. His arms and legs didn’t work. He couldn’t taste or smell or feel. He could barely see…aggressive mothman shadows…flickering stars and nebulae…random body parts and human bones…scores of Fisher Price weapons…thousands of Hostess products…

  He cried.

  He couldn’t cry.

  He went insane.

  He didn’t know how long he spent in the pocket. He figured he would die there.

  Then he was lying at the feet of Don Kish, hacking up algae and mud.

  “That’ll teach ya to chew your food like an asshole,” said the don, and urinated on him. The joeboys did the same.

  Achtung 66.799 exited the boy’s room that was Don Kish’s office and stumbled down the hallway. Nobody in sight.

  “Mom!”

  Hot yellow urine trickled down his arms, soaked through his clothes, dribbled from his ear lobes. One droplet seeped onto his eyeball. It felt like a bee sting. He clawed and scratched at his eye and tried to tear it out. He ran up and down the hallway, screaming, cursing…Nobody heard him. Nobody saw him.

  He decided to go to the gymnasium and hang himself from the basketball rim. He knew about hanging because his grandfather was a politician. Unlike his grandfather, however, he had a perfect
ly breakable neck…

  Inside of the gymnasium a teeming mound of protoplaquedemics conducted a great S&M orgy. The mound more or less encompassed the entire basketball court and rose halfway to the ceiling. Whips, chains and genitals flailed from its spurting, gelatinous body like the tentacles of electrified octopi.

  “Mother?” said Achtung 66.799.

  The assistant principle of Tweedle Dee, Mr. Beanfiend, was near the top of the mound and saw the boy come in. He holstered his penis, loosened his dog collar, slicked back his Mohawk, placed a megaphone to his lips and shouted, “Security!”

  The Pigs fell on Achtung 66.799 instantly…

  Shortly after the incident, Achtung 66.799 established the Community of People Who Are Interested in Eating Their Own Arms (CPWAIETOA). The idea was that if only a small piece of one’s arm were eaten at a time, a piece no bigger than a hangnail, then eventually the whole arm might be consumed with a minimal amount of pain and virtually no bleeding. He didn’t have many takers. As it turned out, he only had one taker aside from himself, a girl named Spinrad Gizzard born with a birth defect called phocomelia who didn’t have any arms to begin with: two long, boneless hands dangled limply from her shoulders. Achtung 66.799 himself only made it a tenth or so of the way down one of his pinky fingernails before abandoning the cause. In retrospect, he realized his misrepresented desire to found CPWAIETOA stemmed from the mental trauma inflicted on him by Tweedle Dee’s protoplaquedemics and ruling mob boss.

  Achtung 66.799 generally experienced happy days in the Schizoverse. But jacking in always reminded him of the time Don Kish sentenced him to a de la Footwa. The proximity of a plug, in fact, elicited feelings of anxiety and dread. As he stood before the Egos of Dr. Identity and Dr. ——— and regarded the wide variety of enterological plugs hanging on the corkboard behind them, vertigo swept over him and he nearly lost control of his bladder…