Dr. Identity (4 page)

Dr. Identity set the briefcase on the edge of my desk. There was blood all over it.

I felt sick.

Dr. Identity said, “I think I screwed up. Big time, as they say.”

“Okay. Okay.” Suddenly I remembered what I had been like before entering the universe of plaquedemia: stupid, ignorant, naïve, prejudiced—the happiest asshole in the world.

“I’m to blame. There’s no doubt I’m to blame. But it’s not my fault. My sense of fashion is keen. But I have limitations.”

I ran my tongue across my teeth. “What happened. Spit it out. That blood’s the wrong color.”

This got Dostoevsky and Petunia’s attention. “What did you do now?” Petunia chirped.

Dr. Identity shrugged. “I murdered a student-thing. St. Von Yolk. But it was an accident. I thought he was an android. He was wearing machinic contact lenses. Apparently it’s a new fashion statement that surfaced yesterday and was disseminated last night via the Schizoverse. It originated in Ez, France. It was conceived of by one Bismark Pierpont, a bar tender at a poor people’s casino in Monte Carlo. Pierpont derives from the Latin
De petre pont
, meaning stone bridge. Bismark is a type of jelly donut in addition to a first name. That’s all I know. That was the
de facto
scoop your student-things gave me.
To be nonhuman
. Nobody told me about that kind of technodesire. I’m not programmed to identify that kind of vogue.”

I closed my eyes, shook my head. Pinched the bridge of my nose.

Von Yolk. Son of Boris Von Yolk, a major player in Corndog University’s Alumni Association. Over the past decade he had contributed millions. His son was a spoiled little brat who would have no doubt grown up to be a spoiled big brat like his father. But even I wouldn’t have executed him. Just to be safe, I wouldn’t have executed his ’gänger either.

Dostoevsky snickered. He knew how much trouble I was in.

Petunia laughed out loud.

I lost my temper…

I removed a carton of cold fried chicken from my desk and gnawed three pieces to the bone.

Dr. Identity’s head drooped. “I’m sorry. My intention was not to irk you.”

I patted my ’gänger on the hip. “We’ll figure something out. I need a little time to think. I need a little time to think.” I paused. “Did I just repeat myself?” I paused again, licking chicken grease from my lips. “Did I just repeat myself…again? Sometimes I can never remember if I repeat myself, if I repeat myself…Pardon me for a minute or two. I’ll be back shortly. Don’t leave this office. In the meantime, Dr. Identity, I’d appreciate it if you’d rearrange my desktop files into some sort of meaningful order. Thank you. Thank you…Thank you.”

I reached behind the closet and depressed a lever. A door in the wall scraped open like a tombstone. The door scraped closed behind me as I stepped into a narrow passage, took three strides, and pivoted into another, slightly wider passage that ran parallel to my office.

A cognitive luge.

Illuminated by an industrial blacklight, the luge was a short hallway about twelve feet long just large enough to accommodate my frame. During my first month as a Corndog University employee, I had Dr. Identity hollow it out for me with a shovel and pick axe late one night. Nobody knew about it except for the occupants of my office. And nobody was allowed access to it except me. I didn’t know if the luge was illegal or not. Judging from my experience with the department’s illegalities so far, I assumed it was.

I retired to the luge at least once a day to pace away my anxiety. The idea came from Adolph Hitler. According to some sources, the fürher had constructed a secret room that he used solely for the “art” of pacing and meditation. Granted, his room was much larger and more luxurious than my dingy little corridor with its swinging purple light. But both served the same purposes.

Rumor had it that the speed at which Hitler paced was unparalleled, some said inhuman. In the recently discovered
Scherpilzflechte Diaries
, bodyguard Rudolf Hess claimed to have spied on Hitler through a gloryhole in the wall and clocked him with a stopwatch going over 30 mph. Apparently the faster he paced, the deeper his meditative trance. I couldn’t boast that kind of speed. Even if I possessed the physical capacity to achieve 30 mph, there wasn’t enough room in the luge: my elbows rubbed against the walls as I paced, and my pivoting technique was underdeveloped and awkward. Still, I could hold my own. On a good day I revved up to seven mph. But speed wasn’t important right now. Right now I had to figure out what the hell to do.

Dr. Identity wasn’t the first android to accidentally murder a human student-thing. Not in this department, not at this university. In fact, the practice was fairly commonplace. Unfortunately so was the punishment…

I worked up to a pace of three, maybe four mph. I may have hit five mph…Then I froze in my tracks like an exclamation point.

This is what I would do:

1. Return to my office and switch off Dr. Identity.

2. Tell Dostoevsky to do the same to Petunia and bribe him to stand by my plan with a pair of new state-of-the-art eyebag implants, plus an additional piece of plastic surgery.

3. When Dr. Hemingway comes looking for blood, explain that I was the one who killed St. Von Yolk. Like the student-thing, I had been wearing fashionable machinic contact lenses, too. Conclude with the following remark: “I have already employed Dr. Identity once this week in any event. As you and I both know, employing him again would be against the Law. I’m a tenure-track candidate. Why would I do that?”

4. When Dr. Hemingway replies, “Because it’s in your nature,” say, “That’s a matter of opinion.”

5. When Dr. Hemingway replies, “No, that’s a matter of objective reality,” say, “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

6. When Dr. Hemingway replies, “Why would you impersonate your own ’gänger?” say, “Despite popular opinion and praxis, our profession does not preclude us from exhibiting contemporary vogue.” Add the following: “At the same time, I wanted to make sure that my student-things were treating Dr. Identity with at least a modicum of respect. Hence the contact lenses functioned simultaneously as a shrewd disguise.”

Here a number of eventualities may or may not arise:

A. Dr. Hemingway will rebuke me for murdering such a seminal contributor’s son. He will put me in charge of establishing and maintaining a foundation dedicated to the memory of St. Von Yolk. My duties will entail sucking up to infinite grumpy old shitheads for an indefinite period of time. He will rebuke me again and stomp away in frustration.

B. Dr. Hemingway will sic Frick and Frack on me. He will excuse me from the murder of St. Von Yolk in lieu of the beating I will receive from his henchmen. He will spit on me and walk away.

C. Dr. Hemingway will ask me to produce the contact lenses that I claimed to have been wearing at the time of the murder. I will claim to have flushed them down the toilet “by accident” shortly after the “crime,” which was not a crime at all, I will remind him, as it is fully within my right as an assistant professor to murder student-things at my leisure. The conversation will then manifest itself as eventuality A or B.

The plan was hardly foolproof. But it was the best I could do given my time frame. I took a sharp breath and exited the luge.

Dr. Identity was waiting for me, arms folded behind its back. Its hair and suit were disheveled. It looked guilty.

“Now what?”

Dr. Identity giggled uncomfortably…

Bathing in the blue light of his computer screen, Dostoevsky sat stiff-backed in his chair with forearms resting on thighs. His head had been twisted 180 degrees so that his chin rested between his shoulder blades. One of his eyes had popped out of its socket; it hung down his cheek like a Christmas tree ornament. A vertebra appeared to be jutting out of his neck.

Next to the computer on Dostoevsky’s desk were the remains of Petunia Littlespank. The android’s extremities had been ripped apart and neatly stacked atop its torso.

Fighting vertigo, I slowly turned my attention back to Dr. Identity. It looked at the ceiling. I followed suit.

Lucille. Impaled like a giant hors d’oeuvre on my machete. Twitching, moaning. I think I even detected a faint call for help.

A drop of the lobster’s blood trickled down the handle of the machete and dripped onto my shoe.

I said, “Fuck.”

Dr. Identity smiled a small, crooked smile. “There’s more where that came from, I’m afraid.” It gestured at the office door.

…Reality slipped into dreamtime. My insides seemed to leak out of my toes and I felt slightly euphoric. I floated towards the door in flashes, still shots, creeping into the future one static beat at a time. Grey roses bloomed onto my screen of vision and my diegetic universe became a silent film. The office door opened and I jaunted into a soundless, black-and-white wax museum…

Bodies and limbs and innards littered the hallway and dangled from the ceiling. I moved through the jungle slowly at first, calculating the holocaust with the exactitude of a forensics expert. I became less attentive and more anxious the further I proceeded down the hallway. Eventually I was darting here and there at the speed of so many popping flashbulbs.

The English department bore the likeness of an exhumed graveyard. The mangled corpses of professors, student-things and their ’gängers had been strewn everywhere. The title of one of Phillip José Farmer’s preneurorealist novels rattled in my head:
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
…A light, swimming fog carpeted the hallway. I could almost see it growing thicker as the internal pipes of torn open androids spit out smoke and steam…I tripped over Gertie’s sluglike corpse, stumbled, and tramped on Dr. Dickens’ severed head. It cracked and caved in beneath my shoe…Blood and guts oozed down the walls…A pile of ravaged student-things barred my way into the English department’s main office. I climbed up the pile, lost my footing, tumbled forward and rolled into a standing position. The department secretary, Mary Kay Rumblepot, lay face down on its desk. The android was an older model. Its oily, neon brain leaked out of a hole in its onyx head.

Pieces of Frick and Frack had been stuffed into the faculty mailboxes. I recognized the monstrous jaw, the ham-fist, the antiquated brownshirt…

I flashed over to Hemingway’s office door and peeked inside.

Like Mary Kay, he lay face down on his desk. Instead of a hole in his head, however, there were three plastic forks.

I walked over to him. I grabbed a fork and pulled up on it.

Professor Hemingway’s beard had been ripped off of his face. In its place was a dripping chin of bone…

The smoke rose, thickened…I flashed down the hallway…

Sirens whined in the distance…

Back in my office, dreamtime reverted to realtime…I noticed a cut on Dr. Identity’s neck. Silver blood leaked from the wound. The android had retrieved Lucille from the ceiling and was turning over her corpse in its hands.

I shook my head at it in disbelief.

Dr. Identity made a frog face. “I guess I malfunctioned. But the one insurrection I committed is enough to merit the death penalty, despite its accidental nature. I figured a few more wouldn’t hurt.”

“You murdered the entire English department. You murdered my boss.” I hesitated, overwhelmed by desperation. “How am I supposed to get tenure now?”

Dr. Identity blinked. “I don’t understand the question.”

The sirens were close now, and I could hear voices. If only I had time enough to revisit the luge…

“Let’s go.”

Dr. Identity dropped Lucille and followed me out of the office.

03

PLAQUEDEMICS AT LARGE – 1ST PERSON ('BLAH)

Escaping the department wasn’t easy. The elevator was out of commission again. I told Dr. Identity to hotwire it. The android ripped off the control panel and jammed its finger into a tangle of fiberoptics. No dice: the system had crashed.

I climbed on Dr. Identity’s back, wrapped my arms around its neck and told it to head for the service stairway. The English department was on the 111th floor of the Boingboing Tower—not a chance of me descending that many floors on my own, especially in a hurry. When we emerged onto the landing, however, there was a herd of Pigs galloping towards us from two floors down. The genetically souped up pseudonyms-made-flesh flaunted German war helmets, oversized Fisher Price mirrorshades and martial arts weaponry. Surrogates of the police, they would tear us to shreds with ease. I got off Dr. Identity’s back, pulled it back into the department, slammed and bolted the door.

The smoke in the hallway had swelled to our waists. We hurried back to my office, stumbling over corpses and body parts, and retrieved my jetpack. I looked around for Dostoevsky’s piece. No sign of it. He must have taken a worm to work today.

I strapped the jetpack onto Dr. Identity. We darted back into the hallway just as the Pigs burst through the door. They chased us to the end of the hallway, hurling throwing stars, tessens, kamas, sais and Kozuka blades at our backs.

We dove through a tall bay window and vanished in an explosion of glass shards.

We freefell a half mile before Dr. Identity managed to activate the jetpack. Its obsolete, refurbished engine once belonged to a lawnmower and required a pull-string to start it. An apocalyptic scream lit a fire in my throat. Dr. Identity sported a calm, almost bored expression as he turned end over end and fiddled with the jetpack.

The contraption finally came to life. My ’gänger grabbed me by the armpits. We leveled out and I stopped screaming.

We ascended into traffic.

“Where to?” shouted Dr. Identity.

I tried to respond, but my voice was gone.

I pointed at the heart of the city.

Bliptown was an immense junkyard of architectures and geometries, a hulking assemblage of suburbs and strip malls that had been crammed together and stacked on top of each other. But a certain orderliness prevailed despite the swarms of construction beams that always-already swung across the city’s ever expanding periphery. Viewed from high enough in the air, Bliptown seemed to be breathing, inhaling and exhaling like a live thing. Its neoindustrial exterior mainly consisted of flickering neon logos, insignias, business monikers and vidbuildings showcasing the latest fashion statements, newsflashes, commercials and porno fetishes.