Dr. Identity (8 page)

The industry was dangerously popular. Papanazi soldiers outnumbered other non-Papanazi people two and a half to one. Each stood to make a million, but 99.999 percent were tier 26 neobourgeois proles in terms of income. This perturbed and pathologized more than a few Papanazi, but not as much as what was known as The Terminal Stipulation, which dictated that Papanaziism was the only profession in which workers could not surrogate themselves with androids. While they were difficult to monitor in light of the Papanazi’s vast numbers, offenders faced the maximum degree of the Law’s absurd wrath.

Prior to walking into the Department of Mediatization, Achtung 66.799 had owned a different name. It was wiped from his memory. Every now and then the name’s ghost came back to haunt him, but even the most inept sideshow exorcists had little trouble getting rid of it. For the most part Achtung 66.799’s makeshift, massified identity was perfectly stable. Stable or unstable, though, anybody could shoot a celebrity.

There was a new celebrity in town. Two of them, and they had become megastars in record fasttime. Achtung 66.799 was filled with hope when he heard the news. Feelings of hope also welled up in Achtung 66.800, Achtung 204.111, Achtung 4.003, Achtung 56.309, Achtung 3,983.145, Achtung 51.582, Achtung 366.472, Achtung 77.340, Achtung 77.341, Achtung 77.342, Achtung 7,342.342, Achtung 1.001, Achtung 344.822, Achtung 8,196.342, Achtung 99.999, Achtung 999.999, Achtung 9,999.999, Achtung 99,999.999…

07

LITTLEOLDLADYVILLE, PART 2 – 1ST PERSON ('BLAH)

“I want my old name back.” I flicked a ladybug off the sleeve of my golf shirt. “No reason to call myself ——— anymore. No reason to call myself doctor or professor anymore, for that matter.”

Dr. Identity stood on his tip-toes and removed a fetus from the shelf. The fetus was floating in a smart Güntergrass bottle of formaldehyde. “What about Blah Blah Blah?”

“That’s not funny.”

“It’s funny.” Dr. Identity examined the apparently female fetus, concentrating on the shriveled umbilical cord that spiraled from its navel like a rotten pigtail. The android’s pupils dilated as they zoomed in and out. “I don’t believe I even know what your real name is. Not that it really matters to me. Names are mere signs. They have nothing to do with the bodies they signify and are forcibly connected to.”

“What are you, Ferdinand de Saussure? I don’t need a lesson in structuralism. I need a lesson in how to achieve agency from a crazy fucking ’gänger.”

Dr. Identity said, “This piece is fantastic. A vintage fetus. They don’t make them like this anymore. What’s it doing in the speculative weapons department?”

The fetus opened its eyes and mouthed the words HELP ME. I said, “What the hell is formaldehyde anyway? I have no idea. I wonder if you can drink it and live.”

Dr. Identity placed the fetus back on the shelf and removed a shockstick nunchaku. “I can. I can drink hot lava.” It sized up the weapon, palming and gauging its weight. “I recall one occasion when a student-thing thought he might play a joke on me by offering me a drink from a thermos full of hot lava he smuggled into class. He passed the substance off as a hip brand of coffee. Sipperella 007 if memory serves. I suppose he thought my jaw would melt.” It leisurely began to fling the nunchaku through the loopholes of its body. “The lava actually tasted all right. I guzzled the whole thermos. Then I burped in the student-thing’s face and singed off his unibrow.”

I looked awry at Dr. Identity. “Anyway, I’m going back to my original name.”

“Good for you. Good for you.” The nunchaku accelerated. “What’s your name again?”

I opened my mouth to respond…and realized I had no response. I had forgotten my original name.

Dr. Identity smirked. “I see.”

I was infuriated. And vaguely nauseous. I had only given the name up a year and a half ago. How could I have already forgotten it? “I’m sure I have it written down somewhere,” I said helplessly. I felt like smashing something.

The nunchaku moved so quickly I couldn’t see them. Nor could I see my ’gänger’s arms. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll remember your name. Right now there’s more pressing matters at hand, yes? Weapons and disguises. And a bit of food, of course. Weapons first, though, weapons first.” Abruptly it stopped wielding the nunchaku and returned them to the shelf. “Too heavy. And I honestly prefer swords. They’re more to the point, if you’ll excuse the wordplay. We’ll need guns, too. Lots of guns.”

“How do you plan to carry all of this goddamn artillery?” My ailing memory harrowed me. Frantic, I pawed through its murky depths, searching for my identity…

Dr. Identity shook its head and pointed at its crotch. “We’ve got enough space between us in here to carry a small army—literally. The pockets in these pants are de la Footwa’s Black Holes. Didn’t you know? It’s my understanding that Beesuppies are delivered into existence readymade with de la Footwa’s sewn in their dress pants. They’ve got a lot to hide, after all. You might want to check your pockets. On the way over here I found a few questionable objects in mine.”

De la Footwa’s Black Holes. I’d heard of them. But I’d never really believed in them, if for nothing else than they were far too expensive to afford on a plaquedemic’s salary, no matter how distinguished you were in the Biz. According to their inventor, Jean-Claude Baudelaire Hillary Wapakoneta de la Footwa, they were inspired by an old cartoon show called
Henri Hackensack
starring a German “curt jester” of the same name who had a bad habit of arbitrarily pulling entire alternate realities out of his navel. The pockets molecularized all material objects you put inside of them, and when you took the objects out, the pockets molarized them back to their original form. Some versions even had room for psychic storage in the event that a wearer experienced an overload of schizophrenic personalities, a common experience in Bliptown. In fact, I discovered a discarded personality when I reached into one of the pockets. I gripped it by the mane and pulled it out. It looked like Benito Mussolini with its big head and commanding overlip, only after the Italian tyrant had been executed: one side of its face was melted off and there were gaping bullet holes in its chest. The personality shouted something in Schizospeak and ran off. Other items I removed from my pockets included a leatherbound steering wheel, a tennis racket, a set of golf clubs, a briefcase (full of Saltines and miniature packages of peanut butter), a file drawer (full of dirty vidzines), and the corpses of two dogs, one a bloodhound, the other a teacup Yorkshire terrier. All of this baggage was filthy, stained in blood and dirt, and slick with ectoplasm. I tossed the items on the floor one by one.

A trashcan standing at attention on the ledge of a catwalk four stories above us caught sight of the mess. It dove off of its perch, jetted down to Dr. Identity and me, devoured and digested the contents of the Beesuppie’s pockets in one great vaporizing inhale, scolded me for being a litterbug, informed us that it had been watching our movements, warned us that we only had a few minutes left before being found guilty of not buying anything, and finally disappeared into a trap door that suddenly opened beneath it.

I looked at Dr. Identity.

“Don’t give me that look. I didn’t do anything to deserve that look.”

I raised my voice. “You didn’t do anything? Are you kidding me?”

“Yes. Let’s get to work.” Cool and businesslike, it started taking weapons off the shelves and shoving them into its pockets. Its movements fell somewhere between realtime and fasttime. Whenever a weapon vanished into the obscurity of the android’s pockets, it fizzled out in a puff of holographic sparks. “Not much time to waste,” it added without pausing. “I sense a shitstorm about to break.”

Traffic in the aisle was nominal. Just a few grandmothers snailing here and there interrupted by the occasional wolfpack of teenagers. Nobody minded anything but themselves and their shopperly duties. But that didn’t matter. The Babettas were what we had to worry about. And the Bug-Eyed Monsters. Despite the speed with which it played thief, Dr. Identity was in all likelihood already being clocked by some extension of Littleoldladyville’s surveillance system. It was only a matter of seconds before the proverbial dogs were set on us.

I tried to map out how things would go down. I had a little fighting experience and knew how to swing a blade—like most boys, I spent virtually all of my early adolescent spare time scikungfi swordfighting in the Schizoverse. I could handle a gun, too. Shortly after I was born, my mother-thing developed an addiction to firearms, a condition provoked by one of her boyfriends. He was a door-to-door plasma gun salesman. She took me to a shooting gallery before I was old enough to speak, and as far back as my memory carried me, our cubapt looked more like an arsenal than a place to live. I hadn’t so much as picked up a gun since my mother-thing died eight years ago. Even if I had, I wouldn’t be able to fend off the collective wrath of whatever mindless contraptions were sicced on me. Not with any type of weaponry. Not even with Dr. Identity, who had proved itself to be an effective (albeit psychotic) war machine. In other words, I fully expected to die within the next few minutes. Who was I kidding? I was as adept with a sword and a gun as I was negotiating the feelings and complaints of ornery student-things. I wondered how Skyler Buhbye, the protagonist of
Technofetahshit Salad
, a neurorealistic novel I taught last semester, would have felt in my shoes. I wondered how I felt for that matter: at that particular moment I couldn’t determine whether I was frightened beyond recognition, hopelessly apathetic, or helplessly euphoric.

A line from a Hardy Boys novel came to me:
The boys leapt into the red convertible like handfuls of loose change
…

I walked down the aisle and removed a plague sword from the shelf. It was light, thin, the color of TV static. Impossibly sharp. I could almost feel it slicing through my gaze as I looked it over.

I thrust the sword into my pocket. A plume of cold sparks tickled the skin of my hand.

I collected more weapons, trying to catch Dr. Identity. I loaded up on guns, ammunition, swords, entropics. I was especially attracted to coagulators. In many of the science fiction texts I taught, coagulators were fearsome biological weapons. They inflicted damage to living body tissue, rearranging and scrambling one’s musculature, nervous system, and internal organs in hideous ways.

The pockets were extremely user-friendly. No sense of weight at all in my britches. The more I filled them up, in fact, the lighter they seemed to become. I started to feel like I might float away.

I didn’t know how much time passed before it began. As little as fifteen seconds. As much as two minutes. Probably closer to fifteen seconds—any longer and a BEM would at least have us in its sights.

One moment I was grabbing speculative weapons. The next I was the centerpiece in a montage of gore and ultraviolence.

I blacked out…

Dr. Identity told me about the skirmish later. We were sitting in a bratwurst bar, sipping cognac and eating pâté. “What do you remember?” it asked.

“Nothing. Nothing.”

“Nothing twice over. Hmm. Well. We looked good. Our disguises were state-of-the-art. But that didn’t stop the Babettas. Or the Bug-Eyed Monsters.”

Not coincidentally, they looked exactly like aliens who belonged to the universe of pulp science fiction. Each BEM had been patterned after a creature illustrated on the cover of an early issue of
Amazing Stories
, a twentieth century pulp science fiction magazine whose founder and editor, Hugo Gernsback, had in recent years been retrospectively held accountable for the terminal depthlessness of the film industry. The bulk of the BEM’s body, of course, consisted of two gigantic, greasy eyes. Its other prominent features included shark’s teeth, long crablike pincers, and a scorpion’s tail fully loaded with venDom, a substance that, once injected, literally turned victims into commodities, rearranging their molecular structure so that they metabolically devolved into the product they had purchased most frequently at Littleoldladyville. Hilda Grumpstead was an avid reader of
Amazing Stories
as a little girl, even though the magazine had long been out of print, and this particular BEM terrified her. Hence she recruited it as her scarecrow and executioner.

I would have never survived on my own.

Dr. Identity told me how it played offense and defense for both of us. I stood there dumbly.

The first BEM galloped towards me, snorting like a rhinoceros. Veins popped out of the great whites of its eyes. Its tail loomed above its grotesque head. The BEM’s stinger was a drooling vampire’s mouth complete with blood red lips and fangs.

“You reminded me of a crash test dummy I once knew,” Dr. Identity remarked. “I’ve scarcely witnessed such passivity before in the line of fire, especially from a human. My my my.” It removed a bratwurst ball from the tower of hors d’oeuvres that a stickbot with a gondolier mustache set down in front of us. It examined the ball apprehensively…

Dr. Identity took out the BEM, hacking off its tail with a swarm sword and then driving the blade between its eyes. The BEM’s body twitched as if electrocuted. The vampire mouth of its tail cursed in an extinct Romanian dialect.

I stood there dumbly.

The razorsharp spidersteel bees that constituted the swarm sword melted out of formation and, at Dr. Identity’s behest, projected towards two more attacking BEMs.

Dr. Identity yanked a superchilled scythe out of its pocket. It leapt ten feet in the air and came down on another BEM like a sledgehammer, spearing it with the commanding fluidity of a matador. Dr. Identity became one with the alien—its arm, its shoulder, its cheek pressed against a clammy eye. The BEM froze from the inside out. Dr. Identity stomped on its head and shattered it. Adopting the full-fledged stance of a matador now, my ’gänger conjured a red cape and exhibited a series of graceful veronicas as BEMs charged us. He finished each of them off quickly and somewhat cleanly with a different brand of technosword, then pulled out a sawed off ray gun and incinerated an entire herd.