“I don’t know, but it freaked Hornbine out.”
“Some kind of bribery scheme maybe, to get a certain line of drugs into the hospital?”
“Maybe. But it seemed more threatening than that, almost like Greenstock could compel the Doc to do something bad against his will.”
I wanted to press for more information, but Ted began to turn a bit suspicious.
“Why’re we chewing up this old gossip? Tell me more about the slick way I took down that bastard Numendonia….”
I always tried to honour an individual’s passions as much as the next geek, but sometimes it’s hard work pretending to be interested. Especially when I was suddenly aching to tell PJ what I had learned.
Our waitress wore a transparent plastic carapace moulded to her naked breasts and torso, black lurex panties, tights and musketeer boots. Her hair was pouffed up and her makeup could’ve sustained a platoon of Calder gynoids. She carried an outrageously baroque toy blaster holstered at her hip. I didn’t know where to put my eyes.
I had decided to take Polly Jean Hornbine out for supper, rather than relay my news in my office. I chose the nearest franchise of La Semaine de Suzette, because it was a fairly classy low-budget place, and I was in the mood for French food.
The restaurant chain was named after one of the French zines that had gotten behind Hearst and his program shortly after the Brits came onboard. The French bande dessinée artists (and their Belgian stripverhalen peers) had joined the ranks of the utopian Funnypaper Boys with awesome enthusiasm and international solidarity. And in Germany, artists like Rodolphe Töpffer and Lyonel Feininger, and zines like Simplicissimus, Humoristische Blätter and Ulk weren’t far behind. And when the Japanese invented manga—
But like all geeks, I digress.
I knew that the waitresses at La Semaine de Suzette dressed like characters from their namesake zine. But during all my previous visits, their outfits had mimicked those of Bécassine and Bleuette, modest schoolgirls.
What I didn’t realize was that La Semaine de Suzette had also published Barbarella, starting in 1962, and that the waitress uniforms went in and out of rotation.
No matter how much you knew, it was never everything.
So now Polly Jean and I had to place our orders with a half-naked interstellar libertine.
It was enough to make Emma Frost blush.
Somehow we stammered out our choices. After Barbarella had sashayed away, I attempted to recover my aplomb and relate the revelations I had picked up from Ted Harmon.
PJ absorbed the information with dispassionate intensity, and once again I was taken with her quick intelligence. Not to mention her adorable face. When I finished, she said, “So a visit to this fellow Greenstock is next, I take it?”
I began sawing into my Chicken Kiev, which was a little tough. The chain keeps prices down by using vat-grown chicken, which is generally tender and tasty, but this meat must’ve been made on a Monday.
“That’s right. If we’re lucky, the trail will end there.”
She shook her head. “I can’t see it. If this were just a simple case of Dad refusing a bribe, there’d be no call for murder.”
“If it was murder—”
PJ’s temper flared again. “It was! And that could only mean a big deal, bigger than Greenstock and his company. You’ve got to find out who’s behind them!”
“I’m not leaving any tern unstoned, as the nasty little kid said when he was pitching pebbles at the shore birds.”
PJ relented and smiled at my bad joke. “Did you actually imagine I had never heard that one before?”
“No. But I did imagine that you would imagine that I would never be dumb enough to say it. And so it made you smile anyhow.”
“Touché…”
“Now let’s finish up. I’m going to take you to a show.”
“Which one?”
“The touring version of Metropolis.”
“With Bernadette Peters as Maria?”
“The one and only.”
“Let’s go!”
Was it cheating to have looked up PJ’s passions on the a-net? If so, I joined millions of other romance-seeking geeks.
After the show we ended up on the observation deck of the Agberg Tower of Glass. All of Centropolis lay spread out below us, a lattice of lights, and I felt the same epiphany experienced by Oedipa Maas in Thomas Pynchon’s The Cryonics of Blot 49, when she envisioned the alien spaceport as pure information.
This high, the air was chilly, and PJ huddled naturally into my embrace. We kissed for a long time before our lips parted, and she said wistfully, “This tower is the fourth-highest in the world.”
“But only,” I whispered, “until the completion of the Atreides Pylon in Dubai.”
The next day I took the trolley to the intersection of Kirby Avenue and Lee Street, to the HQ of MetamorPharma. Built in the classic Rhizomatic style pioneered twenty years ago by the firm of Fuller, Soleri and Wright, the building resembled an enormous fennel bulb topped with ten-storey stylized fronds. The fronds were solar collectors, of course.
Inside at reception, where giant murals featuring the corporate cartoon—the famed multicoloured element man—dominated the walls, I used the annunciator to rouse Taft Greenstock, sales rep, from whatever office drudgery he had been performing. In a few moments, he emerged to greet me.
Greenstock was a black man of enormous girth and height, sporting scraggly facial hair and an Afro modelled on Luke Cage’s, and wearing a polychromatic caftan and sandals. As he got closer, I smelled significant B.O. and booze. Aside from his sheer size, he was hardly intimidating. I had expected some kind of hard-nosed Octopus or Joker or Moriarty, the instrument of Hornbine’s murder, and instead had gotten a fourth-rate Giles Habibula.
I had been planning to show Greenstock a fake ID and profile I had set up on the a-net, and feed him a line of foma. But taking his measure as an unwitting proxy who might be frightened into spilling some beans, I shifted plans. After we shook hands and I showed him my NC license, I just braced him with the truth.
“Chum Greenstock, I’m here about the death of Dr. Harold Hornbine. We have cause to believe he was murdered.”
Greenstock looked confused, and began to sweat. I could smell metabolized gin. People passing in the lobby glanced at us curiously.
“I don’t know anything about that. He was just a customer. I deal with hundreds of medicos every week. He was fine the last time I saw him—”
“And what did you discuss with him during that visit?”
“A new product. A vaccine. KannerMax.”
“What’s KannerMax inoculate against?”
“It’s not for every child. It’s only recommended for those with certain chromosomal defects. I don’t know the hard scientific data, I’m just a salesman. I left him all the literature and a sample—”
Greenstock looked like he was about to collapse. I quit pushing.
“All right, that’s fine. You’ve helped me a lot, Chum Greenstock. I’ll be back if I have any further questions.”
I had the name of the compound that had seemingly been the catalyst in Hornbine’s murder. And murder I now indeed believed it to be. Greenstock’s visit introducing this new vaccine synchronized too well with Hornbine’s “heart attack.” The Doc must’ve learned something upon examination of the vaccine that earned him a death sentence.
Leaving the building, I knew just where to turn next.
Dinky Allepo.
Wonder Woman was sitting in Doc Savage’s lap, while Atom Boy rested on her shoulders. Godzilla was destroying Jonestown, home to the wacky Stimsons clan, while Maggie and Jiggs and Lil Abner and Daisy Mae applauded. Mutt and Jeff were herding approximately a dozen Felix the Cats toward the maw of Cthulhu. And my namesakes, Max and Moritz, were duking it out with Skeezix and Little Lulu.
These scenes of extreme cognitive dissonance comprised the smallest part of Dinky Allepo’s many thousands of disparately sized action figures. They covered every availa
ble table-top and shelf, much of the furniture, and a good portion of the floor. I had to walk as if through a minefield of sharp plastic shrapnel.
Having let myself in, I found Dinky in front of his a-net terminal, his usual habitat. He was surrounded by a midden of fast-food debris. On the walls of his study hung various film posters, mostly featuring busty, scantily clad scream queens: Tura Satana in The Female Man; Elke Sommer in The Left Hand of Darkness; June Wilkinson in Motherlines.
Dinky’s long greasy hair hung at an acute angle as he tipped his head back to drain a can of Brazilian guarana drink. His soiled t-shirt was printed with the molecular structure of caffeine.
“Em und Em, how can I help you today? Need some more dope on who’s ripping off whom in the exciting world of playware?”
“No, Dink, it’s something more serious this time….”
I explained to him everything I had on the Hornbine case. His dilated pupils widened even further with interest.
“KannerMax, huh? Let me see what I can learn—”
Dinky swung back to his a-net node and got to work.
Dinky Aleppo was one of the top fifty Nexialists in the GDM. If his synthesizing skills couldn’t connect the pieces of this puzzle, I wouldn’t know where else to turn.
Not wanting to disturb his work, I left the room.
Dinky’s den held a big ether-vision set, whose remote I grabbed. I dropped down into a chair and immediately sprang up with a shout. My left buttock had not taken kindly to being pierced by the spear held by Alley Oop. For a moment I was frozen in geekish reverie. I thought about how “Alley Oop” was a near anagram of “Aleppo,” and how if you added in the name of the caveman’s dinosaur, “Dinny,” you could almost get “Dinky” as well. Then I threw the action figure across the room.
The set came alive to a broadcast of Ziegfeld Follies of 1975. God bless our quondam President Hearst! He had loved chorus girls even after his marriage and spiritual reformation, and endowed the Follies as a subsidized National Treasure. But I wasn’t in the mood for all the leggy dancework, and I switched to one of the fifteen major history channels.
I arrived in the middle of a documentary on the 1930s.
After the gradual pacification of the world in the first two decades of the century, the thirties had been a march of progress unparalleled in history. Scientific, economic, artistic—that decade had seen the true flowering of geek culture as it spread across the globe. The first generation of True Geeks, their sensibilities fostered by twenty years of the Funnypaper Boys and other creators, had finally supplanted any remnant of old-school barbarism. The creation of Centropolis as the new capital of the nation had been the crowning achievement of that era, surpassed only by the establishment in the forties of Global Data Management as the civic superego of national governments.
I was just enjoying some old newsreels of Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich judging an Atlantic City beauty pageant awarding the title of “Sexiest Wilma Deering of 1939” (Alex was a healthy young man then thanks to the hemophilia cure invented by Linus Pauling), when Dinky called my name. I shut off the set and rejoined him.
“Have you ever heard of Kannerism before?” he demanded.
“No.”
“Well, neither had I. But his name in this new MetamorPharma ‘vaccine’ led me to him. Leo Kanner was a doctor in the 1930s, a specialist in child psychiatry. He had a theory about a certain kind of developmental glitch in the juvenile brain that would lead to a supposedly ‘aberrant’ personality type. He said such individuals were suffering from ‘Kannerism.’”
“What’d Kannerism consist of?”
“Oh, stuff like the ability to focus intensely on whatever your main areas of interest were. Your passions, in other words. Then you possibly got hypersensitivity to certain inputs. Some sensory integration problems.”
“What else?”
“Maybe some self-stimulating behaviours. Kannerist kids might also have difficulty interpreting facial expressions and other social cues. But they also had enhanced mental focus, excellent memory abilities, superior spatial skills, and an intuitive understanding of logical systems.”
I was baffled. “But—but that’s just a description of your average geek.”
“Pre-diddily-cisely. Kanner chose to unveil his theory just when the whole world was adapting a new standard of sanity, new geekcentric paradigms of mature adult behaviour. All the very qualities Kanner identified as defects were being hailed as the salvation of the species. Kanner was trying to define the new normal as crazy, and he got laughed into an early grave. Only one other researcher, some guy named Hans Asperger, took his side, and he soon met a similar fate.”
“This vaccine, KannerMax—what’s it do?”
“I got all the specs. It’s not a vaccine per se. That’s bullshit from MetamorPharma, to convince the medical establishment to introduce the drug to the right age cohort. This stuff regulates gene expression. It targets the chromosomes that seem most closely linked with Kannerism.”
A horrifying image walloped me then, of a planet reverting over the span of the next generation to the bad old violent days of pre-geekdom. “Let me guess—it shuts them off.”
Dinky gave a sardonic grin. “Nope. It ramps them up.”
My jaw dropped like Dippy Dawg’s upon seeing Clarabelle Cow in the nude. “What!”
“This drug is a recipe for the production of super-geeks. But it only works if administered to those younger than three. Otherwise I’d be brewing some up for myself right now.”
“But who’s behind this? I can’t see a small firm like MetamorPharma as the masterminds behind such a scheme.”
“They’re not. The research program was initiated by Global Data Management. Specifically, the head of the Bureau of Cultural Innovations.”
“Zarthar,” I said.
That night I met PJ at a branch of Tige and Buster’s convenient to both our residences. I didn’t want anyone overhearing our conversation, and knew the noise of the videogame arcade within the restaurant would shield us from both local and spy-ray eavesdroppers.
Our waiter, of course, was a midget dressed as Buster Brown, accompanied by a real dog. We had to practically shout above the screams of pixel-addled kids to order.
Once the little person left, I disclosed everything to PJ.
She sniffled a bit at this confirmation of her worst fears, but then bucked up, her intellect fastening on assembling a chain of deductions,
“So something made Dad mistrust MetamorPharma. He analyzed KannerMax and figured out what it would do. Dad was always a hella good molecular biologist. He obviously disagreed with the ethics of injecting this stuff without informed parental consent. So he contacted the guy behind it all—and was murdered!”
“Gee, do you want to come onboard Moritz Investigations as a junior partner?”
“Max, this is my Dad’s murder we’re discussing, remember!”
“Sorry, sorry. Please forgive.”
The words weren’t just pro forma. I realized I was sorry, and wanted her forgiveness. Because I couldn’t imagine being happy with PJ angry at me, or being happy at all without her in my life somehow.
PJ must have sensed my emotions, because she reached across the table and gripped my hand. But whatever romantic response she might have been about to utter just then got postponed to our hypothetical future together, because one of the Tiges wandering by chose that moment to piss on her foot.
Once we got that mess cleaned up, PJ was all business again.
“You’re going to see Zarthar, right?”
“Yup.”
“And I’m coming with you.”
Centropolis being the capital of both the USA and the GDM, the city was full of offices and officeholders.
The Bureau of Cultural Innovations was an impressive, civic temple-style building that occupied two square blocks bounded by Disney and Iwerks. PJ and I climbed its broad marble steps and passed between its wide columns to its brazen doors and entered the v
ast, well-populated lobby.
I had to surrender my blaster to security, and PJ confessed to carrying a vibrablade, which surprised me.
Once we were beyond the checkpoint and on our way up to Zarthar’s office, she volunteered: “Some geeks go way beyond grabby hands, you know.”
“Admitted.”
The GDM is open-source government. Citizens are encouraged to participate at all levels. Which is why we had been able to get a quick appointment with Zarthar himself.
I wasn’t exactly certain how we were going to confront the mastermind behind this secret scheme to produce übergeeks, but I figured some gameplan would present itself.
And then the door of Zarthar’s office opened to our annunciated arrival.
“All geeks are geeky, but some geeks are geekier than others.” Everyone knows George Orwell’s famous line from his novel Server Farm. But you haven’t really experienced it until you meet someone in that leet minority like Zarthar.
Zarthar had been born Dennis LaTulippe, but had refashioned his entire persona somewhere around age sixteen, when he was already well over six feet tall. He legally changed his name, permanently depilated his head and tattooed it with a Wally Wood space panorama, grew a Fu-Manchu moustache, adopted sandals and flowing floor-length robes of various eye-popping hues as his only attire, and declared his major passion to be Situationist Bongo Playing. (This was circa 1956, twenty years ago, when beat-zeks like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Doris Day were all the rage.) He revolutionized his chosen field, and his career since then had been successive triumphs across many passions, resulting in his appointment to his current position.
Zarthar’s voice resonated like Boris Karloff’s. “Chum Hornbine, Chum Moritz, please come in.”
We entered tentatively. I had just begun to take in the furnishings of Zarthar’s ultra-modern office when PJ hurled herself at the man!
“You killed my father! You killed him! Admit it!”
Attempting to choke Zarthar, PJ made about as much progress as Judy Canova might’ve made wrestling with Haystack Calhoun. And when multiple ports in the walls snicked open and the muzzles of automated neural disrupters poked out, she wisely ceased entirely.
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