Dr. Identity (24 page)

“ACHTUNG!!!”

Another lightning bolt. The Papanazis fell into formation, scurrying into a line, thrusting out their chests, turning into statues.

The Sergeant General wafted down the rank on a driftdisc and inspected the troops. Most of them wore SS or Grim Reaper fatigues. Achtung 66.799 had on a cheap Goodbody suit. The Sergeant General stopped in front of him.

“What the fuck is this shit!”

“Sir!”

“Who the fuck do you think you are!”

“Sir!”

“How the fuck do you explain yourself!”

“Sir!”

“What the fuck!”

“Sir!”

“What the fuck!”

“Sir!”

“What the fuck!”

“Sir!”

“What the Fuck!”

“Sir!”

The Sergeant General was a behemoth, seven-foot-tall cyborg. Outsized mechanical hands hung from his bulk like crab claws and he had a giant papier-mâché Joseph Stalin head. His dialect even had a tinge of a Russian accent. He lightly smacked Achtung 66.799 and told him to mind his fashion sense. The blow severely dizzied the Papanazi, but he remained standing in rank. The jacks in his skull, however, were knocked out cold.

Somebody down the line sneezed.

“What the fuck!”

The Sergeant General glided over to the insurgent. His punishment turned out to be stiffer than Achtung 66.799’s. Luck of the draw.

“What’s your name soldier?” the Sergeant General asked in a decidedly feminine voice.

“Sir! My name is Achtung 446.5—”

The Sergeant General grabbed his head with one great hand and squeezed…The sauce of the soldier’s head oozed through the creases of his metal fingers like Play-Dough. He loosened his grip and kicked the corpse in the chest. It sailed end over end across the Kontrol Center into a body basin.

“Anybody else need to sneeze? Anybody have to use the toilet?”

A Papanazi at the end of the rank tentatively raised a hand.

“I admire your honesty,” said the Sergeant General. He pulled out an antimatter pistol with an elongated barrel, aimed and fired. The atomic structure of the Papanazi twisted into infinite knots. He melted, molted, congealed, contorted, sparked, flared…Primordial soup was the end of him.

The Sergeant General liquidated two more Papanazi with the antimatter pistol for no reason. He sheathed the weapon. “Enough fun and fucking games. You’re here for a reason. Brass tacks.”

“Sir!!!”

“At ease then. But stay away from the hors d’oeuvres until we fucking convene.”

“At ease” meant the same thing as “achtung” in terms of a soldier’s standing position. It just meant a soldier was safe from being murdered by an authority figure.

The Sergeant General quick-drew the antimatter pistol and reduced a Papanazi standing next to Achtung 66.799 to soup.

“I couldn’t resist, goddamn it! Pretend I didn’t say at ease before. At ease for real now.”

Achtung 66.799 flexed his jaw…

The Sergeant General glided to the opposite end of the room. A 3D holoscreen sprouted out of the floor. The heads of a human and his ’gänger dissolved into view and rotated around a central axis like planets around a sun. A code of schematics unfolded beneath them.

“Observe the future of Papanaziism,” the Sergeant General said, clicking his heels together. “By future, I mean the next twenty-four hours. Possibly the next twelve hours. Maybe one hour. It all depends on the Media now. It all depends on you now.” He slammed his fists together. “These are the perps. They killed Voss Winkenweirder and emotionally incapacitated his ’gänger. They’re plaquedemics! They teach English! They’ve already committed two holocausts this morning. The Law has calculated that they will commit up to eight holocausts by noon. Reasons unknown. Reasons incidental!” He slammed his fists together. “The ’gänger’s name is Dr. Identity. It is rumored to possess superheroic strength and scikungfi skills. It stands six feet three inches tall. Its sense of fashion is stable. Its psychological disposition is unstable. It has a distinguishing scar on its forehead. Currently it has no publications under its belt. The human’s name is Dr. ———. He is rumored to possess limited strength and scikungfi skills. He stands six feet three inches tall. His sense of fashion is stable. His psychological disposition is unstable. He has no distinguishing scars. Currently he has three publications under his belt. All are literary criticism. His most recent essay, ‘The Post(post)/post-post+postmodern Icklyophobe: Ultra/counter\hypernihilism in Fiona Birdwater’s Megaanti-micronovel,
The Ypsilanti Factor
,’ appears in Issue 2, Volume 6 of an underground, staple-bound journal whose name is irrelevant.”
Slam!
“Nicknames for the plaquedemics currently include the Dystopian Duo, Team Hatewave, Warlords of Wickedness, the Dawgs of Plaquedemia, and Bartleby’s Fangs. New nicknames are being considered for publication. Submissions should be forwarded to Papanazi headquarters. Payment for publication is a get-out-of-death-free coupon at any Littleoldladyville.”
Slam!
“Payment for footage of the plaquedemics, footage of any fucking kind, is full retirement with benefits. This is a code blackhead, gentlemen. The plaquedemics should be treated like red hot movie stars straight out of a Big-Budget, Hackademy Award-winning blockbuster. Bear in mind they prefer the air to the streets. Jetpacks and Stickem suits are highly recommended. Questions?”

A Papanazi raised his hand. The Sergeant General hurled a throwing star at him. It slammed into his forehead. He flew backwards in a snarl of limbs and landed in the body basin like a slam dunk.

The Sergeant General passed through the holoscreen, which disintegrated into the floor behind him. He nodded at the remaining soldiers. “You have your orders, gentlemen. Semper fee-fi-fo-fum…I smell the blood of an everyman.” The Sergeant General’s driftdisc morphed into a black hole and sucked him into it. Then the black hole imploded with a dull snap.

The Papanazis’ chests popped like balloons. Gasping for air, they peered at each other out of the corners of their eyes, watchful, calculating…

They fell on the hors d’oeuvres.

Achtung 66.799 salvaged a meatball, then crawled into a storeroom and signed out a jetpack and Stickem suit with accessories. He was billed a pound of flesh. He was billed another pound of flesh for the cost of the surgery it took to patch him up.

For the first time in his life, Achtung 66.799 felt a sense of hope. He wondered how long it would last.

He wondered if it had already passed…

22

DÉNOUEMENT – 1ST PERSON ('BLAH)

Dr. Identity selected a mid-level rooftop in Chop Suey Square. Day and night it was Bliptown’s busiest sector. Trafficways of all forms, genres, creeds and velocities stretched above, below and beyond us…

Baryames Bornagainandagain knelt on the edge of the rooftop with his hands locked behind his head. He oscillated between calling us names and offering us royalties from his better-selling films. Dr. Identity had stalked and kidnapped the movie star with the intention of assassinating him, live, in front of the entire city. The android stood behind the actor, a roaring chainsword brandished over its head. It transmitted its POV onto every skyscreen and vidbuilding in Chop Suey Square.

I stood at a safe distance from the scene, making small talk with the curator of a hot dog stand.

Bornagainandagain said, “I’ll give you half of my earnings from
The Robobarista
.” His real last name was McDarnit. He changed it after a second comeback from BBB-movieland to semi-mainstream cinema. Since the change he had managed not to slip back into obscurity, although if he did again, he resolved to simply tack an ellipsis onto the end of the alias and leave it at that.

Dr. Identity revved the chainsword.

“Sideshow,” grumbled Bornagainandagain.

Dr. Identity rapped its knuckles across the movie star’s skull, then offered the following overture, which blasted out of every surroundsound satellite in the immediate vicinity: “Citizens of Bliptown! Behold as I, Dr. Identity, remove yet another cultural artifact from the degraded, devolved museum of postcapitalist life! Before me kneels Baryames Bornagainandagain, star of countless low-grade films, sell-out commercials and plotless pornos, but he was an extra in the Papanazi-acclaimed
Honkies & Catnip
, and Patrick Swayze is his distant relative! His death is a flagrant act of terrorism and inexcusable bastardry. I give it to you!”

Dr. Identity threw out its arms, daring somebody to stop it. Its afro trembled in the wind.

Despite the prevalence of Papanazi, professional vigilantes, bounty hunters and Pigs in the trafficways, nobody responded. A few seconds later my ’gänger lost the signal to the skyscreens and vidbuildings…

“Shit!” Dr. Identity tossed the chainsword aside, yanked tight its glitterglove, pulled a carrot out of its Thriller jacket and snapped into it.

“Can I go now?” Bornagainandagain asked, unlocking his fingers.

Dr. Identity chewed the carrot with Bugs Bunnylike relish. “Fine. Go.” It kicked the movie star in the back. Bornagainandagain toppled forward and fell, fell, fell…

Dr. Identity joined me at the hot dog stand. Its pupils had become hallucinogenic swirls.

I said, “You know, you’re mixing time periods there. The glove came after the jacket. Jackson didn’t start with the glove until after the
Bad
album. And your afro is from
Off the Wall
, before he started playing dress-up and molesting children. Not to mention your facemask. It wasn’t an actual skull until he got into his hundreds.”

“Since when do you know so much about the King of Pop?” Dr. Identity removed the facemask with the glitterglove and inspected it.

“I know lots of things. I’m a plaquedemic.”

“Not anymore.”

We fell silent. The hot dog curator glanced back and forth between us, wondering if we were going to buy something. Dr. Identity looked bizarre. It had developed a strange fetish for carrot-eating recently. Overindulgence of beta carotene had turned its eyes a bright orange color.

“At any rate,” it said, “there’s nothing wrong with exhibiting a little temporal diversity. Fashion plates have been doing it for years.”

“Fashion plates?”

“Don’t say it.” Dr. Identity removed the afro and stuffed it into a de la Footwa. He did the same with the facemask and the glitterglove. He kept the Thriller jacket on. “This is discouraging. I’m sick of being ignored. Nobody gives a shit about us anymore. You should have programmed me to deal more effectively with rejection.”

I pointed at a corndog and the curator leapt to the task. “That’s what happens when you lay it on too thick. People get a bad taste in their mouths. Then the taste just goes away.” We had stopped being pursued long ago. Not only did the Law and the Media grow bored with us, there were too many people impersonating us to bother trying to apprehend the real perpetrators. The passing of President-thing Bogue’s law against acknowledging our holocaustic behavior didn’t help. Nor did the hottest-selling perfume on the market, Plaquedemic Fringe, laced with the scent of our DNA. Even my credit was operable again: thousands of impersonators had opened up bank accounts in my name and numbers…

I was happy. I still didn’t know my real name. But I was happy. Unfortunately the Pigs had sold my wife-thing to a small tribe of Frankenstein monsters who lived in the rainforest outside of Bliptown’s nine o’clock gate. But foul play begets foul play.

Dr. Identity was having difficulty coming to terms with being out of the limelight. Every now and then he committed a holocaust or murdered a celebrity, hoping to return to mediatized grandeur. It never worked. Since my ’gänger’s original act of ultraviolence, it seemed, everybody was committing holocausts and murdering celebrities. The Law decided that that’s the way things had been for years and nothing could be done about it by human intervention or rationalization. “Bliptown will shakedown and shakeout its own riffraff in its own time,” the Mayor-thing of the city was quoted as saying. Additionally, the Amerikan government decided that there was an overpopulation of celebrities and they needed to be brought closer to extinction so as to accentuate their market value and public interest.

“Something to eat?” I asked Dr. Identity.

It shook its head. “I’m too depressed to eat.”

I paid for my corndog and took a bite. It tasted good. “There’s no need to be depressed. Think about your comic book. That’s something to look forward to. You’ve constructed a very detailed outline already. Now all you have to do is draft it. We may want to rethink your title. We may want to rethink some of its minutia. I’d be glad to provide you with constructive criticism.”

Dr. Identity glared at me. “The comic book is mine.”

I shrugged. “Fair enough. I’ve got plans of my own anyway.”

“No doubt.”

“I’ve been in touch with a group of investors. I told them I was interested in establishing my own university. There are so few left in Bliptown since you came into vogue and popularized making mincemeat out of university property. Copycats of your work are legion. Some of the investors were hesitant. But I reassured them I knew what I was doing and their contributions would pay off. I’m going to be a Dean. I’m not sure what kind of Dean yet. But a Dean nonetheless. And I’m hand-picking every single plaquedemic that works at my university. No more eccentrics. No more absurdists. No more tumbleweeds.”

“I see. What will you call your university?”

“I’m torn. Either Blah Blah Blah State University or the University of Blah Blah Blah. Maybe just ’Blah College.”

Dr. Identity’s pupils morphed into turning cogs. “You’re delusional.”

I took another bite of the corndog. “Perhaps. But it’s a new world now. One man’s delusion is another ’gänger’s reality.”

That night Dr. Identity and I went to my cubapt. I hadn’t been there since the morning of the initial holocaust. Dr. Identity hadn’t been there since I purchased him. The cubapt was a theater of war. The walls were blood-stained, the furniture was burnt and ripped apart, and none of the appliances worked except for an old television set, a 1947 Motorola VT105 I had bought at an underground vintage ADW as a graduate student. We lay on the floor and watched the news. Around midnight I told Dr. Identity I was going to bed. The android said goodnight and I turned it off.