Codename Prague (5 page)

Beauty said, “It’s difficult to know things, sometimes.”

Truth said, “That’s what I say. The only way to really be sure about things is to write them down. And the more detailed you are when you write things down, the better. The word
CARBONATED
on my grocery list is an example of extreme detail. There’s no questioning it. There’s no denying it. It’s big and black and underlined.”

Beauty said, “Like an ocean at midnight if you look at the ocean upside-down.”

Truth looked askance at Beauty. “I’m not sure about that simile. I’m not sure if it works. I don’t even think it makes sense.”

Beauty said, “It makes sense to me.”

Truth said, “Everything makes sense to you. You’re like a—”

“Enough!” The doktor finished his glass of wine, stared at the glass for a moment, and then hurled it across the kitchen. It shattered against the pantry door. A Mr Clean robot in white T-shirt and jeans exited a closet and cleaned and sterilized the mess with multipurpose mechanical arms. The robot bowed and returned to the closet, its white eyes burning brightly around two almost imperceptible black pupils.

The assistants looked willfully at Dr Teufelsdröckh. “I’m not quite sure where to begin,” he said, feeling unable to holster the temper tantrum that welled up in him. “I suppose I should point out that merely writing something down does not ensure its truthfulness, and it certainly doesn’t mean I said it. Do I even have to say this aloud?” He paused. He clicked his jaw. “Let me just say…Good afternoon. I’m uncertain why you have elected to victimize and sabotage me. I’m not the best employer. I’m aware of that. I’m aware. But I’m not the worst employer either—far from it. Etcetera. Viz., and so forth.” Retrieving another bottle of wine from a cupboard, Dr Teufelsdröckh exited the kitchen, abandoning the soufflé he had intended to make himself for dinner.

Beauty peered at Truth. “You’re scheming on a thing,” he droned. “That’s sabotage.”

Truth rearranged his lips…

Dr Teufelsdröckh strode down a hallway, slid open an oily chain-link fence and stepped into an elevator. He threw a switch. The elevator clanked and grumbled to life.

“Lah-bor-ah-tory.”

The slow descent took five minutes. On the way, he considered the prospect that Truth had actually been telling the truth. Truth almost always lied, but for the sake of speculation, he pretended that he didn’t almost always lie, or rather, he put faith in the small percentage of Truth’s character that wasn’t a dissembler. He didn’t like the prospect. It meant that he had deliberately requested carbonated olive oil, a request that had no
raison d’être
. Perhaps he had been thinking about carbonation. Had he dreamt of carbonation the night before? Had the idea of carbonation leaked from his unconscious into his preconscious mind, then sidestepped his conscious mind and surfaced in his discourse? If so, what were the chances that carbonation would emerge in his discourse precisely when he conceived to utter (and then uttered) the words “olive oil.” Preposterous. Absurd. And yet not impossible. He recalled drinking a certain variety of club soda that resonated with his palate. When had he sipped that club soda? Only last week. Clearly he had been preoccupied with the club soda. Clearly he had not forgotten what it had done to him.

Sometimes he wished there was a hole. A hole without principle, merit, significance or dynamism that formed where something else used to be. It came from nowhere. It led nowhere. It did nothing.

He might climb into that hole and disappear forever…

By the time the elevator clattered to a halt, Dr Teufelsdröckh had convinced himself that Truth was telling the truth, at least in the case regarding the errant bottle of carbonated olive oil, while in the kitchen, Truth explained to Beauty just how one commits a true act of idiocy.

“Lights.”

The laboratory came alive with a hydraulic grandeur, with ticking clocks, vibrating wires, glass tubes of canned voltage running from floor to ceiling, whistling pipes and pan-flutes, swinging levers and light bulbs, streamlined aquariums teeming with sturgeon and suckfish, Bunsen burners the size of torch lamps, purple and red and blue and yellow spotlights, test tubes and beakers and percolators and vials that frothed and bubbled, ergometers, enameled pedals, discs and balls, homunculi that crossed and recrossed their eyes pickled in great jars…The technologized rattle and hum clashed with the sound of a sentient theater organ that played and replayed the overture from Andrew Lloyd Weber’s
Phantom of the Opera
. A long wallscreen ran fasttime footage of
Frankenstein
adaptations and offshoots, skidding into slowtime only when a mad scientist exclaimed, “It’s aaaalliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiivve!” The footage oscillated between monochrome and Technicolor…

Grinning, Dr Teufelsdröckh stepped into a pair of crab slippers that delivered him to the opposite end of the room where a red velvet curtain had been draped over what might have been a hat rack, or a floor lamp, or a mailbox. He ran his fingers over the delicate fabric of the curtain. Then he clenched the curtain and yanked it aside.

…The skin of the stick figure was black—so black it seemed two-dimensional. And yet its body clearly possessed depth. There were no features. There were no fingers or toes. Its gender was difficult to place; the figure lacked genitals and looked androgynous. Something about it, though, was altogether human. Or rather, more human than human. Or, as the doktor liked to think, more human than more human than human (and, in some senses, even more human than that).

He placed a hand on the stick figure’s chest as if to feel its heartbeat, then leaned over and whispered something into its tympanic membrane. Static electricity played on his lips.

03

Interview with a MAP Man

SAMSA. Syncretic Amerikan Metaformulaic Stock Agent.

There were SAMSAs everywhere.

Vincent Prague dodged a charging bull as he strode down the hallway. He was taller than the SAMSAs and saw the animal coming, so he had plenty of time to duck out of the way. Shoulder-to-shoulder traffic in the hallway, though, and he tripped and fell…Somebody caught him. SAMSA…067. That’s what his hat claimed, anyway.

Prague said, “They got you up and running again already? I kicked your ass two seconds ago. These weird bastards are quick.”

“Quick is a frame of mind, Mr Prague,” said the SAMSA icily. “I see you’ve managed to—”

The SAMSA was ripped from Prague’s line of vision as a horn pierced his chest and another bull carried him away…

…Prague kicked open the door. Its hinges came off and the door sailed across the office and slammed into a glass trophy cabinet, shattering it.

Commodore Rabelais sprung to his feet. His knees knocked against the edge of his desk. He fell back into his chair. He doubled-over and vanished beneath the desk.

Prague scratched an Achilles tendon with the toe of his opposing shoe.

Moaning, Cdre Rabelais crawled back into the chair and stared at Prague as if he had murdered his children. “
Scheiße!
Do you how much a nice door costs? What’s the matter with you?
Scheiße!
” He pushed a button and reported the damage. A swarm of nanomites flowed into the office through a ceiling vent and ate the door on the floor. Two SAMSAs in orange jumpsuits appeared and installed a fresh door while a mouth in the wall opened and sucked in the smashed trophy case—sound of imploding wood and metal—and then spit out a new trophy case. A SAMSA speedswept the floor, placed a receipt on Rabelais’s desk, and left. Everything was back to normal in under a minute.

Massaging his knees, Rabelais said, “That expense is coming out of your ass. I don’t joke about doors. Here.” He held out the receipt. Prague took it and stuffed it in his pocket. “Trophy cases are another matter,” continued the Commodore. “Particularly when they’re decorative. Particularly when they’re for show. Doors have use-value. Doors open and close and so forth.”

“I see,” said Prague.

Rabelais huffed. “Do you? I wonder sometimes. I wonder if you see anything.”

“Well, you know what they say about perception. Perception is a daunting mosaic of catacombs down which the hairy members of anonymity flow like a—”

“Can the birdshit, Vinnie. No time. All told, I’m glad you’re here, even if you’re late.” He stood again and walked out from behind the desk. Rabelais’s attire surprised Prague. Instead of a standard-issue UMU (Upper Management Uniform), he wore a forgettable business suit. He almost looked like a SAMSA. But he looked more like a scarecrow with his big head in the shape of an overinflated paper bag. And Prague could still fit the little creep in his britches.

“Somebody die?” Prague chirped. “What’s with the shiteating threads?”

Rabelais smiled. “It’s Friday,” he said. He didn’t say anything else.

Prague shrugged. “I was gonna dress up for you. But I got sidetracked. I don’t feel like dressing up anymore. Costumes dictate performativity, if only in spirit, and I’m just not in a performative mood.”

“That’s magnificent,” he replied through a slit of mouth. “Are you finished? Have a seat. Talking to you is exhausting. A little bit of smartass goes a long way. Too much ends up nowhere.” A sentient chair crawled across the office floor and tapped Prague on the thigh. Prague rolled his eyes as the chair struck him in the back of the knees, breaking his stance, and cradled him into a sitting position.

“There we are.” Rabelais returned to his chair and lit a cigar the size of a baby’s arm. Taking an egregious puff, he tapped a sheet of paper on the desk. “Congratulations Mr Anvil-in-Chief. This is your assignment. First, however, you’ll have to excuse me. It’s been over fifteen minutes. At least.”

The Commodore uttered something into an intercom in a derivation of Noirspeak that Prague didn’t recognize. He spoke five derivations himself, but there were over sixty in City City alone, each as different from the next as apples and Agent Orange.

Another mouth opened in a wall and coughed two zombies into the corner of the office. They were stock Romero zombies that smarted of wax figures more than the real McCoy: flashy glamrock makeup, jointless limbs, foam latex bite wounds and slash marks and rotting flesh…At first they petted, fondled and tapped each other, like wrestlers getting a sense of the opposition. Before long they graduated to cannibalism and ripping off limbs. Green slime sprayed out of one zombie, white mucous out of the other. The battle culminated with an exhibition of furious brain eating after which the victorious zombie tore off its own growling head and cracked it open on its knee. Stinking maggots, roaches and eels exploded from the rupture and the zombie’s body melted into a pool of hot sludge. Rabelais squeaked in ecstasy…

As always, the slaughterhouse’s ardent janitorial lackeys cleaned up the bloodbath at record-breaking speed. They also provided Rabelais with a fresh pair of undergarments and suit pants.

Prague looked on blankly, sighing and shifting in his chair as it all came back to him. Interviews with Rabelais were prolonged and tedious. What should have taken five minutes took fifty, especially given the Commodore’s voyeuristic addiction to ultraviolence. Day and night, he needed to witness some form of over-the-top butchery at regular intervals. Failure to do this educed disorders ranging from apoplectic fits to unruly psychotic interludes. TV was insufficient. Lucid dreams were insufficient. Pharmaceuticals didn’t work. Ultraviolence needed to be enacted in real life (and at close range) for Rabelais to temporarily suppress the strange flows of his desires. In general, the disorder manifested in Tier One citizens who could afford enough androids on an hourly basis to keep themselves in balance. It was almost unheard of in government employees. But Rabelais’s connections were deep and wide.

“One leg at a time,” remarked the Commodore as he put on the new pants. They zipped and buckled themselves. He sat back down and retrieved his cigar. He admired the ember. “This is a fine cigar. I insist on smoking fine cigars.”

Prague studied his lap.

“Wake up!”

Prague flinched. “Who’s there?”

“Your boss, Hamlet.” He leaned back in his chair. “Did you know ‘Who’s there?’ is the opening line of
Hamlet
? Did you know that I know every opening line of every Shakespearean play by rote? R-O-T-E. Every play can be analyzed
in extremis
through the filter of its opening line. In
Hamlet
, for instance, ‘Who’s there?’ introduces, first of all, an element of mystery, of something unseen, perhaps nonexistent, yet
present
, if only in the mind of the player who speaks the words, who is
on guard
, if you will, literally, as he is a guard by vocation. This initial reading is deepened when we recognize that it is night and the guard speaks into the darkness, a foreboding setting for obvious reasons, viz., night and darkness symbolize death, misery, horror, dread, and so forth. Ultimately the guard’s query signifies a rift between what may appear to be real and what is actually real—in other words, between reality and fantasy, between the world of consciousness and dreams. In that moment, the guard can’t discriminate between one and the other, not until his partner answers him and moves into the light of his torch. It is this very moment that holds the diagnostic key to the rest of the play. To varying degrees, the same can be said for all of Shakespeare’s plays. Which means that there’s no reason to read the plays. It would be a waste of time. All one needs to read are the opening lines. In fact, anybody who reads more than the first line of a Shakespearean play is a fool, in fact.”

“You said ‘in fact’ twice.”

There was a long silence.