Dr. Identity

by D. Harlan Wilson

  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. Franklin. 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.

  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.”