Dr. Identity (3 page)

I tried to stomp on Lucille as she hastened back into her hole.

01

ADVANCED NEUROREALISM – 3RD PERSON

Dr. Identity marched down the hallway carrying a briefcase in one hand and a box of homemade powdered sugar donut holes in the other. The briefcase contained three items: poorly constructed lesson plans, a hippopotamus whip, and a portable battle axe. The donut holes were for the student-things. Dr. ——— made this seemingly altruistic gesture at least twice a week to his classes, all of which met before 3 p.m. Generally speaking, student-things didn’t fully awaken until about 5 p.m. The donut holes were meant to perk them up a little with a sugar high. It didn’t always work, but the odds increased on the condition that, in addition to coating them in sugar, Dr. ——— also laced the donuts with ephedrine.

Between classes the hallway was a bee’s nest of activity. The dogs of plaquedemia were everywhere, zipping in and out of offices with heaps of books and papers crammed beneath their armpits. Dr. Identity nodded politely at Dr. Poe, Dr. Woolf, Dr. Byron as they bumbled passed. It didn’t nod at Dr. Stein. Dr. ——— had rewired his ’gänger to treat her, if only in passing, with an air of enmity and contempt. Like the modernist author she represented, “Gertie,” as she wanted to be called, was an arrogant, insecure primadonna who, similar to most plaquedemics, lacked the capacity to discuss anything but herself and her scholarly work. And there’s absolutely no excuse for holding a book the likes of
The Making of Amerikans
in high regard…

Dr. Identity only passed one other ’gänger on its way to class, a Charles Dickens lookalike with burning, bleached eyes like its own that had no irises, only small dark pupils. It was the one way to distinguish an android from its human counterpart. The two species hadn’t always resembled each other. Just under a decade ago, androids were large, obsidian stick figures that consisted of little more than circuits, transmitters and relay switches. Once the government became a sheer corporate enterprise, funding for certain media-related technologies skyrocketed. Suddenly the exteriors of the android and the human were virtually indistinguishable.

When it arrived at the windowless steel door of the classroom, Dr. Identity rearranged its posture and methodically cracked its neck. Its pleasant smile melted into a cold, thin slit.

Its eyes blazed with white light.

The door squeaked open and the ’gänger stepped inside the classroom and slammed and locked the door behind it. Tardy student-things wouldn’t be able to attend today. Present student-things wouldn’t be able to leave until the period ended. Even using the toilet was forbidden: student-things were required by the university to have catheters taped to their legs during business hours for just such an eventuality.

Dr. Identity’s Saussurian suit shapeshifted when confronted by the student-things’ fashion statements. For females, this consisted of lace-up tube tops, Daisy Dukes and thigh high heels, despite numerous rolls of fat and patches of cottage cheese. Males, on the other hand, were caked in vast folds of denim and canvas; their heads and sneakers barely peeked out of the getups. The student-things who had sent their ’gängers to class for them dressed likewise.

Student-things were not allowed to miss class except for deaths in the family, religious holidays, and exceptionally creative lies. Mere sickness, however life-threatening, had ceased to be an acceptable excuse. A surprising number of students skipped anyway and sent ’gängers in their stead. Penalties included irreverent tongue lashings, brutal ass kickings, expulsion from the college, and public executions, depending upon the individual professor’s policy.

Not all student-things could afford ’gängers, but most of them could, and the underprivileged few who couldn’t took out loans to pay for them. Corndog University was a private liberal arts institution, a honeymoon suite of the Ivory Towers. Young, mediatized men and women couldn’t become student-things here in the absence of sufficiently stockpiled bank vaults. More than that, though, it cost money to dress like glamtrash whores and overblown dirtbags.

Confronted by the student-things’ imagistic brutality, Dr. Identity’s suit began to bubble and fizz and change color. Its tie leapt out of its vest and morphed into a lightning bolt, a hissing snake, a flailing tentacle, a
sig heiling
arm and hand…The fabric of the suit rippled and undulated. Its puffed up shoulders rose, fell, gesticulated…Once the suit popped like a flashbulb, exposing the silhouette of Dr. Identity’s machinic skeleton. Then it abruptly calmed down. Acclimatized to the vogue of its new environment, it was no longer the chic, sharp-looking zoot suit it used to be. Now it was a ratty, nappy-looking burlap ensemble wracked with fleas and smelling vaguely of manure. As it placed the donuts and its briefcase on a podium and prepared to address the class, Dr. Identity negotiated the new outfit by mentally dulling its sense of smell and touch.

The normative state of a student-thing’s existence was a primitive state. Most of the males chased after the females. A few couples were having sex. Other males merely goosed, pet or made suggestive remarks about the objects of their desire. Or they masturbated quietly in the corners of the room while staring disinterestedly at the walls. Some females engaged in vicious catfights, biting and tearing each other’s flesh off with sharply filed teeth and nails. It was a typical pre-class spectacle of sex and ultraviolence. And when Dr. Identity strode into the room, the student-things didn’t skip a beat, ’gängers routinely not receiving a lick of respect.

In a loud but peaceful voice, Dr. Identity politely asked the student-things to stop antagonizing each other. It addressed a number of them by name, explaining that their conduct, if it failed to alter significantly in the next few seconds, may lead to a reduction in their overall grade for the course. Nobody listened, as Dr. Identity expected. But its program dictated that it always attempt to reconcile classroom nativism by means of the agreeably spoken word before resorting to more effective tactics.

The android gave the student-things one last chance to cease and desist. Again nobody listened. “Please St. Hellagood,” it said to a young man standing in front of the podium who was nailing goose eggs into his scalp with a ball-peen hammer, “I implore you to take your seat and set an example for the rest of the class. I have donut holes. I’ll give you an extra one if you do as I say.” Buddy Hellagood paused for a moment and cocked his head as if contemplating obeisance. Then he swung the hammer between his legs, doubled over onto the floor, and started to dry heave.

Dr. Identity’s eyes dilated until they were black. A series of switches and transmitters clicked like insects inside of its skull cavity.

Its eyes whitened. The android opened its briefcase, removed the hippopotamus whip and cracked it, screaming inarticulately at the top of its synthetic lungs. This eruption preceded a long-winded, foul-mouthed, highly articulate tirade during which Dr. Identity’s whip ebbed and flowed over the heads of the student-things, occasionally digging into one of them. Soon the android began to parade around the room, raining blows on everyone. Not until it had managed to beat and strangle nearly half the student-things to within an inch of their lives did everybody settle down.

Dr. Identity loosened the whip from the neck of the student-thing in its clutches. “Right. Take a moment to pull yourselves together. Today’s lecture will begin in…forty-five seconds and counting.”

As it wound the hippopotamus whip around its elbow and thumb and then draped the weapon over its neck, the student-things crawled into their seats, groaning, coughing, bleeding…Some were in worse shape than others. St. Yaketyak was unconscious and had to be resuscitated with smelling salts and assisted into his seat by his peers. St. Boozealot’s neck bone was sprained and had to be set in place with a popsicle stick and scotch tape. St. Blinkenod bled from multiple wounds; she licked them clean and bandaged them with torn up pieces of paper and scratch-n-sniff stickers. St. Plainjane and Bonk’s ’gängers lay motionless in two crumpled piles on the floor. Dr. Identity had snapped their necks and stomped on their heads. They were legitimate kills. Ersatz professors were allowed to assassinate ersatz student-things just as non-ersatz professors were allowed to assassinate non-ersatz student-things. Given the proper circumstances, such behavior was encouraged.

The instant forty-five seconds had elapsed, Dr. Identity picked up the box of donut holes and delivered them to St. Raviolo, a pale-skinned female sitting in the front row. “Pass these out please, young miss.” Like most of her counterparts, St. Raviolo possessed breast as well as love handle implants, the latter of which came into vogue last week and spread throughout the entirety of Bliptown with locustlike speed. Dr. Identity regarded her love handles idly before returning to the podium.

“Now then,” the android intoned, gripping the handle of the whip with one hand and its tip with the other, “as you have no doubt discerned, Dr. ——— is incapacitated and unable to attend class today. Hence I, Dr. Identity, am here in his place…
again
. I realize that I have already substituted for Dr. ——— once this week and that doubling up, as it were, is generally considered to be atypical and, in some circles, illegal. Nonetheless I ask you all to bear with me during this troubled time.”

The student-things stared at Dr. Identity like deer. A few of them had already fallen asleep in spite of their consumption of donut holes; heads tipped over their shoulders or buried in their arms, they snored soft, velvet sonatas.

Dr. Identity nodded. “Thank you for your support on this matter. Let’s begin today’s lesson. The topic is cyborg bodies. Would somebody be so kind as to inform me to what degree you have addressed said topic this semester?”

The student-things stared at Dr. Identity like deer. One of the sleepers slipped out of his chair, slumped onto the floor…

Dr. Identity’s pupils stretched into cat’s eyes. “I see. Perhaps I will assume you know nothing about cyborgs. Fine.” He peered down at the lesson plans. “I shall begin with an exegesis of the term itself.
Cyborg
is a morphological blending of the terms
cybernetic
and
organism
. It was originally popularized over two centuries ago during the early 1970s and denotes any entity that is a hybrid of the human and the machine. Science fictional representations of the cyborg date back to the genre’s beginnings, appearing most notably in Mary Shelley’s early nineteenth century novel
Frankenstein
. If I’m not mistaken, you have already read and studied this text. Correct?”

The student-things stared at the android like deer…

Sighing, Dr. Identity decided to pretend as if the student-things were absent and it was talking to itself. It discussed the literary and theoretical history of the cyborg, carefully explicating its transition from marginalized to mainstream phenomenon. As it had been told, it made sure to cite examples from texts written by William Gibson and Philip K. Dick, among them
We Can Build You
,
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
,
The Simulacra, Neuromancer, Burning Chrome
and Gibson’s posthumously published
Boohoo Mahoney and the Yesterday Kid
. He also cited more recent authors and texts like Scottrick Leete’s
Ministry of Bong
, Dorian Easterbunny’s
The Aluminum Occident
, and Stanley Ashenbach’s
I, Ashenbach
, underscoring the great contrast between how the cyborg used to be represented and how it was represented nowadays. When it finished the lecture, Dr. Identity turned its attention to the student-things again. “Any questions about this material?”

More than half the class was sleeping now. The sugar and ephedrine had taken effect on a few student-things. Wide-eyed and fidgety, they sat bolt upright in their seats. Some gnashed their teeth. Others chewed on their cheeks. Their faces glistened with beads of sweat.

One of them raised a hand.

It was St. Von Yolk’s ’gänger. Dr. Identity didn’t like it. In the past it had always given it a hard time for no apparent reason—clearly St. Von Yolk had programmed it to misbehave. But it had never misbehaved to a point that Dr. Identity saw fit to exterminate it.

Dr. Identity gestured at the android. “Yes?”

The android pulled its thick, layered collar away from its mouth so that it could speak. “Fuck you,” it said pointedly. Smiling, it ribbed the student-thing sitting next to it, reveling in what it perceived to be a razorsharp wit.

Student-things and their ersatz counterparts had addressed Dr. Identity far more caustically in the past. But “fuck you” would suffice for now…

In fasttime Dr. Identity removed the battle axe from its briefcase, cocked and hurled it…The blade of the axe struck its target between the eyes. The android’s head exploded like a piñata. Its body toppled backwards out of its chair and crashed onto the floor. Black jelly oozed and spurted out of the gaping wound.

Petrified, the student-things who were awake stared in amazement at Dr. Identity. A few of the sleepers woke up and cursed.

“Shit,” Dr. Identity parlayed.

But no. This was serious.

It rushed over to St. Von Yolk’s corpse, yanked the axe out of its head, picked it up by the scruff and studied its mauled face. One white eye fell open. The pupil was a tiny, fat swastika, a symbol that no longer retained the negative connotations of Nazism since its appropriation by the loveable preteen popstar Sindie Switch.

The ball bearing that was Dr. Identity’s Adam’s apple rose and fell as the contact lens slipped off of the boy’s eyeball and seeped onto his dead cheek.

02

LUGE – 1ST PERSON ('BLAH)

Petunia Littlespank was sitting on Bob Dostoevsky’s lap when Dr. Identity returned to the office more than twenty minutes early. A light stench of manure lingered on its suit. I sat hunched over my desk reading a Hardy Boys novel. Petunia had applied first aid to Dostoevsky’s face and made his eyebags look halfway presentable again, but he would need surgery if he wanted them to look authentic. Dostoevsky’s hairy chin balanced on the android’s shoulder. The android whispered tenderly in his ear and massaged his temples with its fingertips.