Dr. Identity (13 page)

The other figure was a professional vigilante’s ’gänger. It also wore the apparel of its kind: stiff Toughskin jeans and a burlap sailor jacket and a Charles Bronson snowcap. Its hands had been surgically replaced with .457 magnums.

Neither of them saw my eyeball seeing them.

I flicked an incisor with the tip of my tongue. My eye retracted. I squished it back into its socket and took an exploding razorwire yo-yo out of my pocket. I opened the Smaug’s belly further and leaned out. They were about ten feet below us.

I whistled.

Both figures glanced up at me. The bounty hunter was startled and the blade fell out of his mouth. It struck a railing and flipped behind him and plummeted…On its way down the sharp edge of the blade struck his heel just so and sliced it off. Blood gushed out of the heel hole in powerful spurts. The bounty hunter lost his footing.

Seconds later his cursing body surpassed the blade.

I raised an eyebrow to Dr. Blah Blah Blah. “That was easy.” He ignored me.

The ’gänger shouted, “Hey! I see you up there!”

“I know you see me. I’m staring straight at you.” I kicked the Smaug’s belly all the way open and spun down the yo-yo…

On its first drop the yo-yo sliced off the ’gänger’s ear. It removed an eyebrow and the tip of a nose and half a lip and a slice of chin on its second visit. Florescent green Inframan blood flowed out of its face. The ’gänger didn’t flinch. I wondered what brand of pain receivers it had.

The yo-yo was on safety. I took it off safety and spun it down a third time.

The yo-yo rammed into the android’s temple. It ticked. It tocked.

It exploded.

I slammed shut the Smaug’s belly. Ersatz brains and chunks of skull splattered the glass.

I leaned back in my seat. “This is a piece of cake, Dr. ’Blah. Remarkable precision, these futuristic weapons. Don’t you think?”

No response. No reaction at all. He stared into his lap and poked the insides of his cheeks with his tongue. Was he angry? Sad? Psychotic? Apathetic?

Did I care?

The Napoleon mask itched. I removed it and stretched on a syntheskin Abraham Lincoln mask complete with wart and bearded undercarriage and stovepipe top hat. “If I took my hat off I could probably pass for Henry David Thoreau. Don’t you think so?”

Dr. ’Blah looked at me in disgust. “I don’t think so. Thoreau was a goddamn hobbit. He was shorter than a male movie star. His head was half the size of Lincoln’s. Be lucky if it was the size of Lincoln’s fist.”

“I’m not talking about size. I’m talking about physiognomy. Do I really have to point that out?”

“Anyway what was the story with those two assholes’ beards? Where’d their mustaches go? What, were they Amish or something? They looked like fucking cartoon characters or something.”

“They weren’t Amish. As far as I know they weren’t cartoons. They were Amerikans.”

“Whatever. Did we lose them?”

“I don’t know. I don’t see anybody else out there right now. Give it another minute or two.”

My original appeared to slip into a deeply meditative state. He broke out of it. “
Walden
sucks. The mass of men don’t lead lives of quiet desperation. They lead lives of quixotic douchebaggery.”

“Interesting.” I glanced at Dr. ’Blah and smiled. “When all this is over, I think I’ll write a memoir about our experience. Or a novel. Better yet, a comic book. Apropos I’ll call it
Dr. Identity
. No,
Dr. Blah Blah Blah
. Unless you remember your real name, that is. The twist is that you’ll be my plucky sidekick rather than the other way around. We’ll live in a world where androids dominate and surrogate themselves with humans. I’ll play the plaquedemic and you’ll be my holocaustic ’gänger. Or maybe I’ll make you a peaceful character. I’ll make everything peaceful. We could live in a ridiculous utopia where everyone gets along and hugs each other. Instead of operating according to the Darwinist scheme of things, everyone will stink of altruism and good will. The setting will be pastoral—a jungle on Mars. We’ll drink lemonade and eat apples and call each other ‘sport.’”

Dr. ’Blah eyeballed me.

“Right. Hardly a marketable idea. Consumers pay for realism, not fantasy. It’ll have to be a dystopia. And you’ll have to be a homicidal maniac. More like the world we live in.”

I tried to imagine the pictures that ran across Dr. ’Blah’s mind’s screen…

…and we were surrounded again.

And again they were mostly Papanazi. Some hovered in the air. Some clung to the Smaug’s limbs. Some dangled from ropes out of hydracopters and hangtanks. They wielded every imaginable brand name of camera. We were drowned in heat lightning. I could feel it. For a moment I thought my beard had caught fire.

I took the Smaug off of standby.

I jacked in.

I pushed my body off the platform and tumbled into a gangly freefall. The Papanazi that clung to me lost their grips and shot into the sky. A few held on. I swatted or stabbed them with my tail until only one remained. He had crept onto the center of the Smaug’s belly and wore a Stickem suit. Artificial spider legs jutted out of the suit’s gooey flanks for auxiliary adhesiveness. His head was shaved and covered with thick-lipped jacks. The Papanazi blinked at Dr. ’Blah and me one at a time with illuminated blue eyes. Tattooed across his forehead was his name.

66.799

The Papanazi nodded politely at me. I nodded back.

Dr. ’Blah screamed.

I popped the childproof corks off my fangs with my tongue. I craned down my neck and took a vicious bite out of the Papanazi’s back. By accident I tore out his spine.

The light in his eyes flickered out. His neck flopped back and his dead lips flapped in the whistling wind. His jacks wailed.

I spit out the spine and peeled the shell of Achtung 66.799 from my stomach as the ground sped up to meet us.

Dr. ’Blah screamed.

“I won’t sell out entirely,” I continued in a matter of fact tone. “I’m willing to cater to a mass readership in terms of
Dr. Bah Blah Blah
’s setting. Characterization and stylistics, however, are another issue. I refuse to develop my characters and make them round. My protagonists will be the epitome of flatness. You and I will lack histories. There will be no traumatic kernel of sociodesiring-production in our lives. We will exist on the surface of things. We will glide across the ice of the diegetic present without being able to dip down into the waters of history or leap into the sky of futurity. I will kill all metaphor and empower us by characterizing us as BwMs. It is only on the surface of the Body without Meaning, after all, that real issues like ultraviolence, perversion, and technosocioeconomic subjectivity can be addressed and explored. Also, character development takes too long. I don’t have the patience for it, and I can’t be bothered by it.”

Dr. ’Blah screamed.

“Holster that drama.”

I opened my wings. I energized my turbothrusters. I swam into the air in a stylish supersonic arch.

A pack of Papanazi suicide bombers had swandived off of the building after us without any means of propulsion. They snapped photos and recorded footage all the way down. I heard their bodies splat against the street as I swooped upwards.

Multiples of Papanazi stuck with us. And the Pigs and vigilantes and bounty hunters had caught up.

The chase was on.

I climbed into the sky. A building across the street imploded. I felt its impact in my sinuses and sneezed Spaghetti-Os.

Dr. ’Blah said, “Why couldn’t you just let us crash! I’m sick of being alive! Enough already!”

“You don’t want to die, Dr. ’Blah.”

“Do I look like I’m enjoying being alive? Quit calling me ’Blah, damn you!”

A trough of Pigs jetted behind me and arbitrarily hacked at my legs with samurai swords. The scales of my skin consisted of a durable aluminopleather. The swords shattered when they struck it. But the Pigs just kept pulling more swords out of the trough. They seemed to have an endless supply.

I made a shishkebob out of them. I aligned myself with the trough and thrust my tail through their pink chests one after the other.

The trough fell out from beneath their speared bodies and smashed into a fangliding Papanazi. The fanglider snapped in two and caught on fire…

“Another thing.
Dr. Blah Blah Blah
will be told from multiple perspectives.” I dodged a volley of construction beams. I whiplashed the Pigs into a vidbuilding. “I’ll employ various unreliable third-person narrators and diverse, perceptually inadequate first-person narrators. The primary reason for this aesthetic is flagrant: such a broken, scatterbrained multiperspectivalism will reflect the fragmented, schizophrenic, technosocioeconomic landscape of the comic’s diegetic reality. Under this auspice, I have the freedom to be atemporal and alinear at will and nobody can hold me accountable for not piecing together a coherent, edge-of-your-seat, empathic, hyperformulaic story. Monoperspectival stories with beginnings, middles and ends are a one-way ticket to Ennuiville. That’s what the 1% of the consumer public who still reads wants, of course, but I won’t cater to that excremental demographic. I’ll create something pure and new.
Dr. Blah Blah Blah
will be an original production.”

I began to spit Spaghetti-Os over my shoulders at random intervals. Most of the pursuers I hit fell. A few ’gängers ate their way through the artillery.

“You can’t create something new,” said Dr. ’Blah. “The new is just the old in disguise. Making something new is merely the process of disguising something old in a seemingly creative way. The disguise is the thing—not the thing itself. You’re living proof of this, Dr. Identity. You are the ‘new’ disguise of the me-thing. All ’gängers are.” He folded his arms across his chest triumphantly.

“That’s an insightful point. Well spoken indeed.”

“Fuck you.”

“Even more insightful.”

I dizzied our antagonists by circling a vidbuilding in a highspeed candystripe path. “Who will be my narrators?” I said rhetorically. “What will be the ratio of human to android narrators? What will this ratio suggest about the universe of my text? How will I represent the thinking of a machine? You and I exhibit similarities in our cognitive praxes, for instance, but there are marked differences, namely in that the meat of my psyche is constituted by digits, numbers and equations whereas yours is constituted mainly by media images. But this is my comic book world. Cognition doesn’t need to be a narrative factor. I could care less about cognition anyway. What matters is how one extends oneself, not how one conceives of extending oneself. Action, reaction—not clockwork. The only narrative factors I care about are description and dialogue. Everything else is bird shit. Plot especially. Plot is for plaquedemics. So is exposition. There will be no outright exposition. Any insight into the machinery of my diegesis and its characters will have to be extracted from the context of the comic’s descriptive momentum, which will be conducted by visual imagery. Luckily my program consists of drawing and illustrating skills. These skills are limited to just a few out-of-vogue styles, but if I mix and match them in the proper way, I suspect I can devise a cartoonesque aesthetic that at least approaches my current vision of
Dr. Blah Blah Blah
. You know what Benjamin says: ‘The work of art is the death mask of its conception.’ But I have a feeling my death mask will surprise you. I dare say it will transcend the acuity and
savoir faire
of its conception. Hold on.”

We reached the top of the vidbuilding. I landed on the edge. I turned around sharply and karate chopped a bounty hunter. The lightweight fabric of its superhero suit and the texture of my skin wasn’t a good combination for him. My aluminopleather claw passed through his babysoft flesh and sliced him in two. His screaming torso tumbled into the spinning tentacles of a hydracopter and shredded…Blood and entrails splattered the hydracopter’s windshield. The vehicle swerved out of control…

Cameras popped and flashed and focused and clicked and blipped and winked and blinked and blasted and machinegunned and fluttered and fizzed and smoked and snapped and exploded…I jumped off of the vidbuilding. I fell into a daredevil dive. I planed out and set a course back towards the heart of Bliptown. Bouffant Butte faded into the distance behind the teeming swarm of mediatized warriors.

Dr. ’Blah had grown silent. He wasn’t moving. His face wasn’t even twitching. His eyes were empty. I asked him if he was all right. He made a sound that resembled the greeting of a sick duck.

I said, “Not to worry, Dr. ’Blah.
Dr. Blah Blah Blah
will be a great success. I can see the entire project unfolding into the horizon of my mind’s screen. I suspect the completed work will garner a Bliptown Book Award. Perhaps it will even receive the illustrious Stick Figure Prize. What a treat that would be.” The Stick Figure Prize was the most widely respected and desirable commendation in technoliterature named after a man who was born an actual stick figure with twiglike legs and arms and a nearly featureless bowling ball for a head that sat atop his pencil-neck. His body was jet black and seemingly two-dimensional. They named the prize after him not because he was a literary auteur or benefactor but because technically he wasn’t supposed to exist. In other words he was a living fiction. “I know you’ve had aspirations of receiving the Stick Figure Prize for your own work. Maybe if you finish the comic book you’ve been writing for the past ten years? No hard feelings if I happen to receive it. I know you’ll be supportive. Why wouldn’t you be supportive? I’m your ’gänger. My accomplishments are a direct reflection of your character.”

“Quack,” said Dr. ’Blah.

I liquidated a handful of Papanazi. “Speaking of your character, I think I’ll represent you as a drag queen. I must admit I’ve discerned certain transsexual tendencies in your mentality and behavior since the day you purchased me. The question, then, is what sort of dresses will I put you in? I have a masculinized fashion sense and I’m not altogether keen on feminine apparel. Here is the research element of the project.”