Dr. Identity (12 page)

A restless pause. Then:

“I don’t feel good!” exclaimed a congressman-thing.

“Me either!” exclaimed a congressman-thing’s ’gänger.

“I don’t want to be a congressman-thing anymore!” exclaimed another congressman-thing.

And so on. As before, Gr. Auchboom waited for congress to tire out, threatened to tell Congressman-thing Expletive what was going on, and tried to reengage congress in a productive discussion. This happened four more times. Finally it was decided that the fate of Dr. ——— and Dr. Identity should be left up to everybody in the world save Bliptown’s governing powers, but congress would make the following official statement to be printed in the Papanazi’s foremost publications: “We the things of congress really, really encourage all Bliptownians to rise against and destroy the plaquedemic scourge that has beset our fine metropolis.”

Gr. Auchboom struck a fist against its palm. “I hereby declare this session of the Theater of the Perturbed dismissed,” it proclaimed. “Goodnight, gentlemen. Don’t forget about the party at His Tragedy’s estate this weekend. Mistresses only please. BYOB.”

Grieg’s symphony faded out as the members and surrogates of congress slipped out of their nooses and, massaging their necks and chins, filed out of the theater in an orderly line.

10

SMAUG TURBO GT – 1ST PERSON (IDENTITY)

The Gumbo was inspired by the soup and morphed at my command. Sometimes it morphed of its own volition. One moment I looked like a movie star. The next I was a featureless nobody. Occasionally it actually took on the quality of gumbo soup. If I stuck out my tongue I could taste my head.

The Captain Crunch rendered my head something like a bear trap. It operated as a weapon as much as a fashion statement.

The Burroughs 5000 was a living ass that shat uncontrollably and uttered off-the-cuff hipster maxims in equal amounts. It also operated as a piece of weaponized fashion.

I had more conservative tastes and preferred the visages of historical figures. I tried on masks of Winston Churchill and Billy the Kid and Moses and Philip K. Dick and Siddhartra and Rapunzel and Malcolm X and Barry Manilow…I settled on Napoleon. I had no choice. They picked up the scent of our DNA…

The Law and their mythological hound dogs. The Papanazi. Fleets of vigilantes and bounty hunters…Dr. ——— said it looked as if we were towing a galactic cirque du soleil across town. He described the scene like a passage in a novel: “A glance in the rearview mirror showed the plaquedemics’ carny skycraft and acrobats of all shapes, sizes and Technicolor costumes. It was a swarm of mad hatters, demonic trapeze artists, evil Elvis impersonators and unspeakable clowns. All of the alaristrians were technologized to the hilt. They jetpacked, rocketed, propellered and surfblazed after them alongside smartly insectlike turbogoblins, fangliders, Jackrippers, cloud cars, hangtanks, speedracers, Heinliners, hot air balloons and spitfire windmills, among other vessels. They shadowed the Dystopian Duo through a labyrinth of airways into the neoindustrial bowels of Bliptown with a balletic grace. There was no shaking the rabble off.”

“Not bad,” I said.

Dr. ——— clicked his tongue. “The end.”

…I had just finished hotwiring a Smaug Turbo GT when the first group of Papanazis spotted us. The vehicle was an older but not outdated model of Acme’s line of compact dragons. It was a two-seater with a small trunk and a barbed tail. Its long mouth contained spidersteel fangs and an oily tongue. Unfortunately it had been childproofed. Its fangs were corked. Its claws were manicured. And rather than fire it breathed Spaghetti-Os.

The engine of the Smaug was in its lungs. Its wiring was in its rectum. I stuck my fists into its anus and brought the beast to life…

The Papanazi opened fire on us.

The cockpit of the Smaug was in its plexiglass stomach. The flowfoam seats faced down but their backs were magnetically attracted to the spinal fluid of both humans and androids. We would have full movement of our limbs. But our backs would be fused to the machine.

I opened the cockpit. Dr. ——— and I huddled together and bent over. I commanded the Smaug to wake up and straddle us. The vehicle growled to sentience. It flapped its wings. It cracked its neck. Its iron knees crinkled and creaked as it stood up and positioned its open belly over us crooks.

Sparks ran down my lower vertebrae as we flew up into place.

“Ouch!” Dr. ——— shouted. He started to wheeze. “That stung. I think my back is broken.”

I clamped my feet into place. “You’re fine. Lock yourself in.” I surveyed and fiddled with the controls. I tested the central joystick. I closed the hatch and told the Smaug to go. Papanazis circled us in a vicious frenzy.

The vehicle’s barbed tail accidentally beheaded a Papanazi during liftoff. Achtung Whoever-It-Was had been wearing a propeller beanie. The head twirled up and away and disappeared into a cloud of towerfog. The Papanazi’s gesticulating body fell to the street.

I probably should have put the Smaug on autopilot. It could go faster and was more flexible and dynamic on its own. But I wanted to be in charge.

There was a retractable plug on the console. I shoved it into the cortical shunt behind my ear.

The Smaug’s eyes and body and sensorium flooded into mine.

Two Papanazi landed on the underside of my neck during our ascent into the trafficways. They wore Stickem suits and crawled towards the cockpit to get clean footage.

I wriggled the skin of my neck until they fell off. I nailed them with a mouthful of Spaghetti-Os. A thousand cans of Chef Boyardee struck and stuck to their bodies and they pinwheeled away…

“My back hurts,” Dr. ——— whined. “I’m getting hungry again. Food!”

“You’re such a little girl. Be a man for once.” I could communicate freely with my core body despite being jacked into the dragon.

“Be a man? Are you kidding me?”

“If I was kidding you I’d tell you so.”

“No you wouldn’t.”

“That’s true. At any rate, you don’t have to be a man to be a man, ’Blah. You simply can’t be afraid to serve the world a big silver platter of FUCK YOU now and then.”

“FUCK YOU? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“You know what it means. It means reality. It means truth. It means humanity.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. What are you, a student-thing?”

“No. I’m Dr. Identity.”

“What a stupid thing to say. What a lousy, stupid thing to say.”

“You programmed me. You programmed me from A to Z. Hence it is retroactively you who says lousy, stupid things.”

Dr. ———’s lips became a sphincter. “Don’t call me ’Blah, goddamn it.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not kidding. I’m hungry.”

“Check your pockets. You have enough food in your pockets to feed yourself until you die of old age. I don’t understand it. You raided countless refrigerators at Littleoldladyville. Have you lost your short-term memory? Tell me what happened ten seconds ago. Do it.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

“My pleasure. Do whatever you want.”

He reached into a de la Footwa and pulled out a small bottle of milk and a box of Galaxian cereal. He opened the box. Little spaceships flew out in slowtime. He guppied them down. He took a swig of milk. “Ah,” he said. He looked out of a porthole in the Smaug’s underarm and blinked absently at the head-on collision of a cloud car and a flock of goosebikes. Screaming heads and flailing limbs squirted from the flames of the subsequent explosion.

Dr. ——— yawned.

The turbothrusters built into the Smaug’s buttocks and calves kept us at a steady 80 mph. Its cumbersome wings were surprisingly resilient and acute. After a few bumpy warm-ups I was able to corner buildings and negotiate the narrow tunnels and pipelines and substreets of Bliptown with skill and precision.

The Law didn’t waver. Nor did the Media and the Mad.

I slipped into oncoming traffic on Elemental Express. The vehicles and alaristrians that dodged and tumbled over my body effectively hindered our pursuers as they smashed into them. “An autopocalyptic lightning storm of kaleidoscopic gore lit up the sky behind the runaway plaquedemics,” said Dr. ———…

I pulled ahead of the pack. I climbed and climbed and zigzagged through one grid of traffic after another. I penetrated the uppermost skyway and cut the power. I flapped in place and gazed down to see if anybody had stuck with me.

Just a few. Mostly Papanazi.

I drowned one in Spaghetti-Os. Another I impaled with the knifepoint of my tail. The last one I grabbed with my filed down claws.

A ’gänger. Stone-faced. Blinking at calculated intervals. Each blink preceded a powerful flash. I lifted the ’gänger to my eyes. Its pupils were silhouettes of pointing Uncle Sams.

I tightened my grip on the ’gänger. It continued to blink at me even as its bones fractured and splintered and it spurted designer blood. Finally its eyes burst and its head popped off. The blood surged out of its neck hole. I wondered if I could taste it through the matrix of the Smaug’s tongue.

I took a lick.

It wasn’t blood. It was wine. A medium-bodied Thunderlove Malbec produced eleven years ago according to my taste buds. Apparently the ’gänger operated as a wine receptacle and dispenser in addition to a vocational surrogate. Was it a fermenter and sommelier as well?

I drank the ’gänger dry. I burped. Pasta sauce swam up my throat. I coughed it out and discarded the empty body.

I told Dr. ——— that he ought to try that brand and year of Malbec.

“What are you, Dracula now?”

I reengaged the Smaug’s engine and made for the summit of Bouffant Butte. “You programmed me as a wine specialist,” I remarked. “Why is it you never filled my veins with wine? It’s very fashionable.”

“Fashionable my ass.”

Bouffant Butte existed in an accelerated state of destruction and reproduction. I skirted scores of construction beams as I soared to the top of a tower entirely circumscribed by fire escapes. I realized the tower was nothing but fire escapes clumped and woven together and tied into great knots in places. Thousands of bodies scurried up and down the twisted iron stairways with no apparent purpose.

A bombardment of construction beams swung our way as I swooped around the building. I landed on a small platform on its opposite side and sat down. Our antagonists would probably find us without too much difficulty. There was a chance they would pass us by. I didn’t care one way or the other.

I jacked out of the Smaug.

Dr. ——— was having some sort of fit. He looked vaguely epileptic. “I remember my name!” he shrieked. “Identity, I remember my name!”

I cracked my neck. “Oh? I see.”

“Do you?” The grin on his face seemed to want to wrap itself around his head. “It’s Frank! Frank…Noble? Yes. Frank Noble. That’s my name!”

“That’s not your name.” I shook my head. “That’s not your name.”

“Bull! I know what my name is!”

“Do you? What’s your middle name? Do you have a middle name? And is Frank short for Franklin? Perhaps it’s short for Frankfurter. Or Frankenstein. Or Frankly. Is your name Frankly?”

“That’s funny. I’m serious.”

I grabbed him by the shirt. “Look. You need to take it easy. Relax. Relax. Relax. Relax.”

“Quit saying that!”

“Frank Noble is the name of a character in a novel. A novel you taught only last semester. Well, I taught it for you, but we talked about it beforehand in some depth. Remember?”

“I’m Frank. Frank
lin.
Let go of me.”

I let go of him. “No. Franklin Noble is a fiction. And an android. It single-handedly saved the planet Deleuzoguattari from destruction in the diegetic universe of the book
The Bald Conceptualization
from a post-post+postcolonial community of aliens who wanted to recolonize Deleuzoguattari and turn all of its flora and fauna back into its natural state of various outlandish cheeses. You empathized deeply with this character. Not only for would-be megalomaniacal reasons, but because you admired its system of values. You’re simply projecting. You want to be in a position to save a world. Ironically, lately you’ve been demolishing a world. I have anyway. But that’s more or less the same thing. The point is, Frank Noble is nothing but a combination of words that don’t belong to you.”

“Says you. We’re not friends anymore. I want to go home. I miss my wife-thing.”

“Your wife-thing?”

“Yeah!”

I calculated a response…and decided against it. “Why this obsession with your name? Who cares what your name is? You’re defined by your actions and your technological extensions, not your signifier. Can’t you just acclimatize to this piece of amnesia? The human inability to adapt never ceases to amaze me. There was a time when you were an adaptable species, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that. I’m lucky you’re here to tell me things. What would I do without you?’

“Be bored. Be disgruntled. Be lonely. Be desensitized. Be worthless. Be helpless. Be absurd. Be—“

“That’ll do, Dr. Identity.”

The Smaug sat on its backside with its legs hanging over the platform. We had a clear view out of the belly. The building across the way was a strip club erected in the form of a colossal naked lady. In silence we watched a team of construction workers scurry out of its high heels. A few seconds later there was an explosion. The building vaporized section by section from bottom to top. Almost immediately the construction workers returned and began to rebuild it in fasttime. Five minutes later they had already rebuilt the naked lady past its knees and halfway up its thighs.

We waited to see what would happen next.

11

DR. BLAH BLAH BLAH, A COMIC BOOK – 1ST PERSON (IDENTITY)

“Did we lose them?”

“Shh.”

I leaned my forehead against the glass of the Smaug’s belly and peeked over its knees.

Two figures crept towards us on the exterior of a fire escape. I cracked open the Smaug’s belly. I unscrewed one of my eyeballs and reeled it down towards them.

One was a bounty hunter. Like all of his kin he wore a campy polyester superhero costume with skintight leggings and tank top and glittery cape and shiny kneehigh boots and utility belt. Clenched between his teeth was a lawn mower blade.