Dr. Identity (6 page)

I was silent.

Dr. ——— unleashed a long-winded pyrotechnic surge of obscenities. It was an admirable surge and exceptionally lyrical and my original invented several alluring neologisms. The persistent spray of spittle on my face was disagreeable. But I waited patiently for him to tire out.

“Are you finished?”

Sweat glistened on Dr. ———’s overlip and brow. He caught his breath and said, “Yes. For now at least. But you will admit you’ve been acting like a psychopath. You
are
a psychopath. Something’s wrong with your program. You need help.
We
need help.”

“We need to be alert,” I insisted. “And nothing is wrong with my program. How many times do I have to tell you? My program is a crystalline manifestation of…”

My ears sharpened into antennae as my radar picked up the newsflash. It emanated from an old Philco 84B Classic Cathedral radio somewhere inside the ghost mall. The cold black pupils engulfed the warm whites of my eyes. For a moment I went blind.

Dr. ——— knew the score. He just couldn’t hear it. “What’s the matter? What’re you receiving?”

“Quiet.”

My vision slowly faded back in as the whites recolonized the landscape of my eyeballs.

“Oops.” My ears returned to their normal state.

“Oops? Oops what? What is it? Oops what?”

I flexed the muscles in my abdomen. “It looks like I’ve made another little booboo. Yes indeed. Apparently I’ve managed to murder Voss Winkenweirder. According to the Papanazi, I took his life during my most recent killing spree. Of course he was incognito and I had no way of knowing who he was. Do you recall the flâneur I chopped in half? A fine disguise. He must have been wearing a mask, too. Oh well. Even if I had known it was him, I probably would have killed him anyway. Without question I would have killed him. At any rate, the whole world is after us. Dead or alive, we’re worth more than Winkenweirder’s paycheck for his last three films combined.”

Dr. ——— cleared his throat. “You killed…a movie star?”

“Apparently so. How about that? Not many humans can say they’ve killed a movie star, especially one of such notoriety. Not bad for a simulacrum.”

Once again Dr. ——— resorted to verbal pyrotechnics.

Sometimes it was legal to kill movie stars. Particularly if they appeared in a bad film or their acting lacked sufficient realspace credibility. The legality was recently established to encourage filmmakers and their entourages to produce quality artwork as opposed to the trash the last two centuries had seen them put out. Not so with Voss Winkenweirder. The actor invariably starred in superb films and his performances were always watertight. The unsubstantiated murder of such a hypercelebrity would not only guarantee our deaths. It would guarantee torture and very likely public disembowelment. Dr. ——— had good reason to be upset. Nonetheless I put an end to his hysterics with a firm backhand across the face that sent him spinning. I caught him and apologized. He stared at me dumbly. I told him I didn’t strike him to shut him up. I did it to safeguard his voice box. Then I explained how I actually enjoyed the aesthetic beauty of his foul-mouthed diatribes. They demonstrated an industrious use of the imagination.

“Thank you, Dr. Identity,” whispered Dr. ———.

I shrugged. “That’s what friends are for.”

05

LITTLEOLDLADYVILLE, PART 1 – 1ST PERSON ('BLAH)

It was no use trying to escape Bliptown. The whole world knew about us now. No doubt commodity-paraphernalia created in our image was already in production. As early as tomorrow morning I expected to find Dr. ——— and Dr. Identity action figures in store windows. Our avatars were probably already for sale in the Schizoverse. Variations of our names would soon be affixed to jetpacks, hairdos, fast food. Book sales of the author I surrogated were probably on the verge of skyrocketing. No matter where we went, we would be hunted by countless human and machinic extensions of the Law. Every city on Earth and Mars was immediately accessible via the Schizoverse anyway. Bliptown seemed as good a place as any to suffer and die.

We could flee to the artificial rainforests, which had been constructed on the few remaining land masses between the cities. But that was tantamount to suicide. The last remaining agents of photosynthesis, the rainforests were full of mechanical dinosaurs, abominable snowmen, Frankenstein monsters, King Kongs and other artificial creatures disseminated by the government in order to discourage people from settling outside urban interzones. Dr. Identity and I wouldn’t last more than an hour in the wilderness. We were better off fending for ourselves against our fellow anthropomorphous assholes.

Initially the murder of Voss Winkenweirder terrified me. But I got over it. I no longer cared about what happened to us, and the fear of death dwindled to a dull, barely recognizable pulse somewhere in the basement of my emotional townhouse. At that moment I didn’t care about anything. I would very likely be dead within the next twenty-four hours. It didn’t matter. I had committed no actual crime myself. But Dr. Identity’s crimes were as good as my own. That’s a risk of purchasing and employing a ’gänger: the user is entirely responsible for his commodity’s actions. Before today I had been unwilling to take that responsibility. Now I was unconditionally willing.

This psychological numbness lasted for about thirty seconds. Then it disappeared, instantly, as if ripped out of me.

I screamed.

Dr. Identity picked me up and shook me. It set me back down.

I vomited. I cursed it for shaking me so hard.

“Your conduct, your discourse, and the flows of your desires belong to a child,” said the android. “I would prefer it if you acted like an adult from now on. At least play an adult.”

I blinked.

The Beesuppie Dr. Identity had thrown in the garbage crawled out. He slipped as he tried to throw his leg over the edge of the dumpster and landed on his face. His neck cracked. An uncannily bright red pool of blood oozed out of his mouth, nostrils and eyes.

Dr. Identity admired the pool. “Hammer blood,” it said. “I wish my veins pumped that piece of trendiness.” It bent over and inspected the blood with wide-eyed curiosity. “To inject vogue into the body—the ultimate fashion statement.”

The accidental death of the Beesuppie shocked me back into coherence.

“We have to go,” I said.

“Go where?”

“Littleoldladyville.”

Dr. Identity glared at me. “Why would we do a thing like that?”

“Because I say so. Get your jetpack on.”

Littleoldladyville was an ADW (Allpurpose Department Warehouse), which sold virtually every product imaginable. Imaginations themselves were available in a range of brands, styles and creative angles of incidence. While cheap, an imagination cost arms and legs to download. Most shoppers couldn’t afford it. And those that could afford it—the student-things that attended Corndog University, for instance—were uninterested in them. They gravitated more towards products like ’gängers, Schizoverse avatars, innovative slang terms (decreed commodities by the Law only last Spring), prosthetic genitals, disco and break dance moves, alternate voices, and other indicators of “personality.”

Littleoldladyville recently assimilated its last remaining competitors, rendering it the only extant ADW in the Amerikanized world. Every major city harbored five or six of them, and their great bulk constituted roughly thirty percent of each city’s superstructure. It was easy to get lost inside. I once got so lost it took me almost three days to get out. Precisely the idea. The elusive, labyrinthine structure of the ADW prohibited many shoppers from finding their way out when they wanted to. In order to maintain a sufficiently breakneck flow of consumerism under such conditions, a law was imposed:
No customer will exist for more than thirty minutes without buying at least $100 worth of products under the penalty of death.

Products could only be bought by means of retinal scans. Cashiers had gone extinct. All a shopper needed to do was run a product’s barcode across its eyes. At birth everybody’s vision was registered with the government so that they could buy things simply by looking at them. If shoppers failed to make a purchase inside of thirty minutes, a mechanical Bug-Eyed Monster attacked and swiftly tore them to pieces. Littleoldladyville had impeccable surveillance technology. On the occasion of my going astray, I forgot to buy something within the designated time frame, and just moments after a half hour elapsed, I heard the monster scuttling towards me from a nearby aisle. Luckily I made a purchase before it made an appearance. Although horrifying, the BEM was a nice touch from a literary perspective—yet another instance of reality imitating science fiction. In the end my three day misadventure skidrowed me. But I was already skidrowed. Everybody was always-already skidrowed.

The name
Littleoldladyville
had been devised by its founder, Hilda Grumpstead. Coincidentally she was a little old lady at the time of the name’s conception. A profound love as a child for her grandmother Babetta, a shopping queen who had won awards for her many consumer-capitalist accomplishments, had invoked a lifelong fantasy of a superstore full of grandmotherlike beings who might consume products to their heart’s content. Not until Hilda was a grandmotherlike being herself did she amass enough capital and technopolitical clout to bring her pipe dream to life. By then Babetta was long dead, although she had recreated an android in her image. She had recreated thousands of them. And whereas Hilda died last century and Littleoldladyville was hardly the utopian superstore she originally envisioned, the machinic versions of little old Babetta continued to populate the store—as managers, stock girls, aisle guards, mannequins, consumer spies, in-house plastic surgeons, and shoppers themselves. This demographic was complimented by the majority of the ADW’s shopping community, which predominantly included little old ladies and their ’gängers. Some came there to die. Others refused to let elderliness get their goats; for them, Littleoldladyville was an opportunity to prove that they still possessed youthful (or at least middle-aged) spunk. Others were senile and psychotic.

In addition to weapons and food, Littleoldladyville offered us new disguises. Our current disguises were necessary but unacceptable. We lacked facial hair and accoutrements, and the clothes were old, faded and unfashionable. Dr. Identity wouldn’t tolerate it for long. I could barely tolerate it.

Littleoldladyville also featured scores of surgery booths where we could have our faces reconstructed by a skilled Babetta. Facelifts were something to consider, but ultimately we didn’t need them. If we managed to evade the Law for long enough, eventually the thrill of the hunt would wear off and the government would set its DNA hounds on our tails. No matter where we fled, we would be sniffed out. First we had to concentrate on camouflaging ourselves with
en vogue
body armor and stocking up on our present arsenal of weapons, which now consisted solely of Dr. Identity’s appendages. The android was clearly an able-bodied killer. But going into Littleoldladyville amounted to going to war. And we lacked both the means and the intention to pay for our share of the battle.

We activated our jetpacks and ascended into the dark, contorted spiral of strip malls above us. Dr. Identity took the lead. I followed him through a web of flyways, shielding my face with my collar, dodging traffic, and trying not to focus on the torrent of images that accosted us at every turn. Bliptown was alive with our electronic headshots and Winkenweirder film clips, and Papanazis were ubiquitous, digitizing everything and everyone. Most were easily distinguishable. Jetpackers wore large Grim Reaper exoskeletons and robes, and the Papanazi standard issue vehicle was a souped-up Third Reich warplane, the Heinkel He-162 Volksjaeger. I had expected this kind of mayhem, but being in the middle of it terrified me. I pulled next to Dr. Identity and told him to speed up.

Babettas guarded either side of the palatial, Romanesque entrance of Littleoldladyville. They were about five feet tall, including the beehive hairdos, and signified late octogenarians. The original Babetta had been addicted to tanning booths and a dull orange color tinted their leathery skin. Their faces were sharp and birdlike. A hairy mole was artfully positioned on their chins, and coke bottle spectacles sat on their noses. The spectacles magnified their white, irisless eyes to an estranging degree. Hairy shawls covered their hunchbacks. Their pencil-thin legs were sheathed in netted stockings with fashionable tears in them. From afar, they looked like neckless, over-the-hill ostriches. They didn’t look much different close up.

Shoppers marched in and out of the entrance in a fluid, orderly swarm. Like the Babettas, most of them were short, frail-looking, and blue-haired. Dr. Identity and I stuck out like spraypainted sequoias as we slipped into the swarm and made for the door.

I nodded politely at the Babettas as we passed. They didn’t nod back. They stared at me with their giant eyes. One of them growled.

We entered the store and checked our jetpacks with another Babetta. It was illegal to bring anything into Littleoldladyville except the clothes on our backs, items that were themselves suspect, especially since most fashion statements entailed outrageously baggy outfits, the perfect hideaway for stolen merchandise. In effect, the ADW’s current board of directors was involved in litigation to have clothes banned from it. Soon the only permissible style of clothing on store grounds would be a birthday suit.

The Babetta flicked us a number and shuffled into a long, narrow hanger, dragging our jetpacks behind it like two dead animals. We would of course never see them again. This wasn’t a problem. If we lived, Littleoldladyville carried a vast array of jetpacks. We would simply add them to our list of needful things.

“I’m hungry,” I whispered out of the corner of my mouth. The stench of hot cabbage in the air grew stronger and thinned out as clusters of little old ladies toddled past us.