Dr. Identity (7 page)

Dr. Identity narrowed its eyes at me. “Why are you whispering?”

I gnawed on my lip. “I don’t know,” I said in a normal voice. “Anyway, I’m hungry. But we need weapons first.”

“I know what we need. I know you’re hungry. You don’t have to keep telling me. Over and over you tell me.” The android surveyed the insane parade of aisles that stretched over and ahead of us like a galactic cornfield. “We need an entropy projector. And organic weaponry. Biological claws, tentacle wads, piranha balls, maybe a few monsters-in-a-can. We’ll want vibronic munitions. A glaive for me and a tetronix for you. Cutting edges are essential. Fusion stilettos, razor fans, razor tentacles, toxic flechettes, force projector shurikens. I’d like a hypersharp Vorpal sword. And a monofilament whip. And a razorwire yo-yo. We shouldn’t forget about guns. I prefer blades, but one likes to be well-rounded. We would do well to amass everything from idiot guns to biologic, electric, psychic, metaphysical, phenomenological and linguistic firearms—the latter three for kicks, of course. I’ve always wanted to pump someone full of French turns-of-phrase with a
raison d’être
MK-7. I’ve always wanted to turn someone’s reality inside-out with a stream of excited quarks fired from a lepton pistol. We don’t have time for these kinds of fun and games. But one likes to keep up an air of theatrics.”

My ’gänger spoke in a detached monotone. I didn’t know if it was kidding or serious. Either way, it was unwell. I wondered when psychosis would fully set in and short-circuit its nervous system.

“I’ve let you teach too many science fiction classes,” I said.

Dr. Identity’s pupils mutated into large asterisks. “It’s possible. More likely, however, I’m just a product of the future. And the future’s been extinct for a long time.”

06

ACHTUNG 66.799 & CO. – 3RD PERSON

Achtung 66.799 came up with the idea of a stainless steel cuckoo clock while doing secretarial work for Dodo, Meese & Bolshevik, a company that produced the number six for several successful brands of holographic, digital and corporeal clock faces. At the time he was getting reprimanded by the secretary-in-chief for fooling around in the Schizoverse during working hours. The secretary-in-chief was being surrogated by her ’gänger. Its breath smelled like sulfur. Achtung 66.799 stared over its shoulder at the antiquated Weiner wood cuckoo clock hanging on the wall as the android accused him of laziness, lack of enthusiasm, a mild case of anthropomorphism, and “inexorable loutishness.” The clock struck nine, a door irised open, and a mechanical bird tentatively poked out its head. It was Tuesday and the clock’s real bird, a clone of a crimson-breasted shrike, had the day off. Although new and tentative about telling the time, the surrogate finally produced an irresolute squawk.

The surrogate was made of stainless steel. Achtung 66.799 liked the way it gleamed in the light of the office. The guise worked for the bird. Why not for a whole clock?

“Hey!” shouted the secretary-in-chief’s ’gänger. “Pay attention to me when I’m tearing you a new asshole!”

Achtung 66.799 nailed the android with a right hook. The punch broke two of his knuckles. He screamed out his resignation and puttered to the nearest surgery stand on the broken wings of a blue-collar jetpack.

As a street surgeon rebuilt his knuckles, he mulled over the particulars of his would-be new invention, wondering where he might get the capital to produce it. There were also the formalities of cuckoo clock copyrights and a patent to consider. He didn’t know shit about those things. Nor did he know much about clocks in general. He barely knew how to tell time.

Achtung 66.799 realized that quitting his job may not have been the wisest course of action. He was too proud to beg for it back. But it didn’t matter. Within minutes of his departure surely a fresh assistant secretary replaced him. He would have to get another job. Fast. He only had enough savings to last him six, seven hours at most…

The next morning he secured a position as a lawn jockey. Had he kept track, he would have discovered that this was the 183rd position he had secured in his young adult life.

The two and a half square footage of yard he had to pose on was rather large considering its location in a densely populated neighborhood and rooftop. He had plenty of room to stretch on the occasion that nobody looked in his direction and caught him not being perfectly frozen and sculpturelike.

His outfit consisted of a glazed white terracotta helmet, a skintight red riding coat, beige polyester pants that flared out at the thighs, and shiny black kneehigh boots. Now and then the owner of the lawn, Mr. Archibald Grapesmuggler, asked him to dress up in blackface.

Things went smoothly for a few days. He came to work on time every morning, posed, took a break for lunch, posed, and left at dusk. Then he let his guard down. He came to work with a hangover. A bad one. He could barely keep his eyes open. And his arm hurt: the strain of holding up a kerosene lamp seemed insufferable. Thinking nobody was watching, he lowered the lamp and sat down on the grass for a minute to rest. Seconds later he was curled up in a fetal position, snoring and drooling.

He didn’t know that his employer had been spying on him from a gopher hole in the lawn.

Mr. Grapesmuggler pushed his head through the hole and crawled out like a zombie from the grave. Achtung 66.799 woke up, tendered his resignation, and ran away…

He came back a few minutes later and said he was sorry. Mr. Grapesmuggler accepted the apology and handed him a handkerchief. “You’re drooling.”

An idea came to him. It wasn’t like the others. This one was sound, realizable—an anti-drool serum. One specifically designed to turn off (or at least tone down) salivary ducts during sleep. His friend Dale Begonia dabbled in street chemistry. The two of them could invent such a commodity extraordinaire if they put their minds together. And once it appeared on the market, the split would be 70/30 in favor of Achtung 66.799. He would market the product, after all, and marketing was more valuable than scientific innovation and practice. The value of science was in fact only as good as the marketability of the merchandise produced by science. He rethought the split and decided on 80/20. He rethought three more times and finally settled on 86/14. Then he kneed Mr. Grapesmuggler in the nuts and tendered his resignation a second time…

The plan failed. Dale Begonia turned out to be more of a hack than he thought; apparently his skills as a chemist didn’t go much further than a rudimentary knowledge of the periodic table, an ability to define the term
isotope
, and holding test tubes full of Sea Monkeys over Bunsen burners until they boiled and exploded. Achtung 66.799 had also forgotten about the patent again. The blow to his optimism was devastating. He went on a drinking binge that lasted a half hour before the time came to sober up and find (and lose) another job.

Over the next year, he found (and lost) work as a stapler slammer, an underapprentice to a magician, an assistant palm reader, an assistant moth wrangler, an assistant to an assistant eyebrow plucker, a window shade, a pied piper, and a turtleneck dickey model, among others. For a while he was even subcontracted by a ’gänger to surrogate the human high school teacher that the ’gänger was supposed to be surrogating.

All the jobs ended the same way: Achtung 66.799’s imagination took advantage of his better judgment.

“I have so many ideas,” he told Dale one night as they sat in his 1/3-bedroom cubapt on either side of a Bunsen burner drinking glasses of Rippentrop’s Foggy Foggy Dew. “I don’t know what to do with myself. The world can’t keep up with me.”

“You also don’t have a graduate degree,” Dale noted. “A man can’t do anything without a graduate degree these days. If you misbehave, they kill you in some cities without one, or at least feed you to a rainforest. Happened to a friend of mine in Synthesizer City. Eddie Horkheimer was his name. Papanazi said the Law caught him philosophizing in public without a Ph.D. They catapulted him over the city walls and a fucking three-headed dinosaur mutilated and devoured him before he even hit the ground. Papanazi caught the whole thing. No shit. I think I might even have a clip of it lying around here somewhere.” He began to dig through the piles of debris that littered his cubapt.

Achtung 66.799 took a swig of Foggy Foggy Dew. The drink billowed into his mouth. “I once knew a guy named Eddie who shaved the hair off of his body and it grew back the wrong way. The hair grew backwards, I mean, inside of his body. Except for his face and scalp. I remember his chest and back was so bushy he looked like a porcupine or something. It was the first time he’d shaved his whole body. Maybe the hairs did it out of revenge. They felt betrayed and weren’t expecting to be offed. Maybe he had some kind of subcutaneous condition. Whatever the reason, eventually the little bastards got so long they strangled and suffocated all of his muscles and internal organs. Once he realized what was going on, he tried to have them surgically removed, but they were too long and there were too many of them. Eddie’s autopsy showed that before he died he was really just a scarecrow, stuffed from neck to ankle in wet black hay. Talk about ingrown hairs.”

Dale looked at him. “Is that true?”

“Does it matter?” Achtung 66.799 hit his bottle until it was empty. “The point is I don’t want to end up like a goddamn scarecrow.”

“What’s a scarecrow got to do with your situation?”

Achtung 66.799 thought about the question. “I don’t know what it has to do with me. It’s just that getting killed by your hair is lousy. That’s all. And I feel lousy. I always feel lousy.”

“Maybe you need a new hobby.” Dale returned to his search for the clip of Eddie Horkheimer’s execution.

“I don’t need a new hobby. I need a lobotomy. I’m sick of thinking about things. All day long, all I do is think about things. My brain’s like a Tasmanian devil in overdrive. And I’m too impulsive. Something pops into my head and I act on it without thinking it through first. I can’t hold down a job, no matter what it is. I don’t have any money, not matter how much I try to save. I never get laid. I’m lonely. I’m ugly. Nobody loves me. I have no prospects or talent. What I’m trying to say is I’m no good. I’m nothing. Oddly enough I’m not suicidal. Still, my life is a stand up routine. What am I gonna do? I can’t afford to be out of work for another hour.”

Dale hated throwing pity parties. They made him uncomfortable to the point of hysteria. So he pretended that his friend wasn’t there. He glanced around his cubapt with a confused expression, as if he might have heard somebody say something but wasn’t sure.

“Dale?” said Achtung 66.799.

Dale opened up a window and stuck out his head. “Who said that? How do you know my name? Answer me!”

Before leaving, Achtung 66.799 filled up a test tube with Sea Monkey powder, added the appropriate chemicals, watched the creatures sprout into existence, and fried them over the Bunsen burner.

Depression. His body hung limply from his jetpack on the flight home. He couldn’t remember feeling worse. Maybe he was suicidal after all. Killing himself would certainly solve his problems. He would be doing the jampacked world a favor, ridding it of an excess body. Plus he would ease his parents’ consciences; in the wake of his death, they no longer had to worry about him being an irretrievable failure. All he had to do was unbuckle his jetpack and he would plummet into the trellis of flyways beneath him where an engine or propeller or wingblade would rip him to shreds. It would be quick, easy. And morally commendable. He owed it to the world to kill himself. By not killing himself, he was doing the world a disservice as he contributed absolutely nothing to civilization and the betterment of humanity. He had no excuse for not committing suicide. The very thought of allowing himself to live repulsed him…

He came to a sharp halt. An alaristrian had been riding his ass and smashed into him. His jetpack stalled and he swore at Achtung 66.799 as he sunk like an anchor, trying to get the engine started again. Achtung 66.799 whispered a halfhearted apology and quickly ducked off the flyway. Hovering in the air, he stared doggedly at the advertisement on the vidbuilding across the street.

HONOR! VALOR! FATALITY!

ARE YOU IN THE MOOD FOR BEING SECOND TO NONE?

NO BETTER FRIEND, NO WORSE ENEMY

SEMPER FEE-FIE-FOE-FUM…
I SMELL THE BLOOD OF AN EVERYMAN

BECOME THE ARM OF DECISION

BECOME HELL IN A HANDCAMERA

JOIN TODAY!

Beneath the script was the gigantic image of a smiling head distinguished by an anvil chin, a Picadilly bouffant hairdo, and two surgically altered animé eyes. Achtung 66.799 slipped into a trance. He had seen similar advertisements before. Tens of thousands of them on tens of thousands of occasions. But only now, as he stood on the doorstep of self-annihilation, did it command his attention. All his life, the idea of becoming “second to none” had been inconceivable. Not only was it generally considered to be the absolute lowest, most despicable form of employment (despite the fact that its workerbees were ubiquitous), his father had always threatened to disown him if he joined, claiming that the life of a serial killer or plaquedemic would be a more respectable fate. That didn’t matter now. Better to be alive and working than dead and useless. Not in his father’s eyes, but he never really liked his father anyway. And in the end he was far too afraid of death to kill himself.

In less than an hour, Achtung 66.799 stood in a line that ran halfway across Bliptown, enjoying his soon-to-be-flushed-down-the-toilet identity and reflecting on the vagaries of his short career as a dysfunctional postcapitalist…

Achtung 66.799’s experience wasn’t unique. His perpetual failure as a functional postcapitalist was in fact the definition of contemporary normalcy. The yellow brick road he skipped down had been stained with multitudes of muddy footprints centuries before he came along. And they all led to the same place.

The legion. The proud.

The Papanazi.

As in the former military, anybody could join. Years ago it had been required by Law to serve in the Papanazi at some point between the ages of 20-28 for at least three years. Nowadays service was optional. Nonetheless thousands flocked to the profession daily. No education was required—graduate, postgraduate or otherwise. One only needed a semi-serviceable brain and a downright fascist willingness to covet imagery at the expense of pride, morality, ideology, and life.