Dr. Adder

by Jeter, K W

  “In building,” the old man quickly jabbered, “a society free from personal alienation and racial strife and war and, and, and ... all those other bad things I used to write about.” He looked up at the young interviewer cringingly. Someone in the classroom snickered.

  “How interesting,” said the young man. Limmit thought he could detect in his voice a slight tone of exasperation, as though the interview was not going as well as planned. “Mr. Kyrie, what do you think is the relevance of your writing to today’s high school student?”

  The old man hung his head without answering, as if ashamed. “Mr. Kyrie?” the young man asked gently.

  The old man did not look up.

  “Mr. Kyrie?” The young hand fell over the hidden buttons. The ancient head flung itself up. A secret switch within him seemed to have been thrown. He took a deep, rattling breath, almost a sob. “Fucked!” he screamed. “It’s fucked!” The young man looked too startled to comprehend.

  “My stuff is alive!” the old man continued to scream, in a frantic, reedy voice. “But they’re burying it all under a mountain of shit! I never thought what they did to Shakespeare”—the young man came alive suddenly, and slapped his hand full upon the concealed buttons—“they could do to me!” The old man’s eyes rolled up in his head and he started to sway back and forth. “When they first started teaching my stories in schoolrooms,” he gasped painfully, “I thought it was wonderful. I thought ... academic recognition—I longed for it!” The young man pressed furiously with both hands on the buttons before him. The old man’s face began to twitch erratically, as if it were about to fly apart. “I didn’t know it would come to this. I didn’t think ... I thought I was too vivid . .. alive ... for them to make me into a bore ... like all the others they did it to ... make you think I was one of them ... those gray teachers... on their reading lists...” This is ghastly, thought Limmit in horrified silence. “Cut! Cut!” he could hear the young man fiercely whispering to someone outside of camera range. “Get us off the air!”

  Kyrie was writhing in his chair now, in response to the young man’s pressure on the buttons. His head rolled on his shoulders and his arms began to flap spastically, like a crippled bird. His words continued to spill out in hoarse, explosive gasps. “I didn’t know ... first the colleges ... those professors were all right maybe ... they loved me ... but they’re dead ...” “Whaddaya mean, there’s no one in the control booth?”

  “... then in the high schools ... studying me and my friends ... until ... you were sick of us ...”

  “Goddamn this old fucker!”

  “... until ... you thought we were just old farts ... like all the other old farts ... your teachers ... and everyone else who had ever written ... that they got their dry hands on ... like leeches—”

  “Don’t give me that ‘automatic’ crap! Get us off the air!”

  .. leeches ... bloodsuckers ... dust-clogged filthy cocksuck-ing vampires . .

  The young man’s nerve finally broke. “Shut up!” he yelled, letting go of the buttons and springing at the old writer’s throat. As the two fell behind the desk, one maniacally throttling and the other, with his old yellowed eyes rolling and bulging from his head, weakly resisting, the screen finally went blank. A chorus of cheers and whistles resounded from the classroom audience, who had left off their conversations to watch the unplanned spectacular. The voice of a different announcer, equally unctuous, came on. “Be sure to attend tomorrow’s class, when our special guest will be the noted S-F author Alex Turbiner. This has been Augurs of Utopia, Audio-Visual Supplement. ”

  Limmit staggered to his feet and rushed blindly to the door of the classroom. Outside the door he vomited on the hallway carpeting. He sucked in a few ragged breaths and straightened up. He stared for a few seconds at the surrounding corridors and doors of the school, then, without waiting for Edgar, he trotted shakily in the direction of the main gate. There, one of the school’s uniformed guards glanced idly at him as he stumbled out into the day’s dim sun.

  Before he knew it, Buena Maricone High was out of view. He found himself walking down a strangely empty street, lined with enigmatic masses of buildings and full parking lots, when a blood-red car pulled alongside the curb, the door popping open. “Get in,” called Edgar.

  They jerked away from the curb as soon as Limmit had barely closed the door. Barreling down the road, empty of any other traffic, Edgar turned around behind the wheel, grinned, and said, “School’s out.”

  Limmit stared, uncomprehending.

  “I sold out,” said Edgar. “No more Adder-paks left. No point in staying, so I bribed the gate guard to let me out.”

  Numbly, Limmit nodded. “Where are we?” he asked, looking out at the buildings flashing by. “What’s this place?”

  “Industrial district,” said Edgar. “My father’s in there somewhere, turning out defense items for the Mid-ocean Autonomic Defense Fleet. Though who the fuck’s ever going to do anything about the USA except forget it even more than they already have, let alone invade it, is beyond me. Main industry here, though; every building’s part of it, working on some contract. Except, of course, that one.” He pointed to an imposing rectangular structure some blocks away but clearly visible over the other buildings.

  “What’s that?” asked Limmit.

  Edgar laughed. “A lot of things, but they’re all John Mox’s. His headquarters really—Orange County Broadcast Central. The Video Church of Moral Forces, and nearly everything else that shows up on the TV screen, comes from in there. All cables lead to Mox, you might say.”

  So that’s it, thought Limmit, studying the building from the changing angle caused by the car’s movement. That’s where all this originated from, a source of evil like a poisoned heart. That’s reached out to Phoenix and brought me here, to kill me amidst filth and disease. But never anything personal, of course. Limmit felt a cold flush drain through his vitals. There’s more, he knew, involved here than my life. A thought struck him. “Lars,” he said in a voice of quiet urgency. “Lars Kyrie’s in there.”

  “Yeah,” said Edgar. “Probably catching shit right now, too.” He felt something snap together beside his heart. “We should get him out of there,” he whispered. He turned to Edgar with wide, unblinking eyes. “Is there any way we can get some guns? And some more people?”

  Edgar stared at him for a second, then laughed. “You must be crazy. That place is stiff with MFers. And even if you could get in it wouldn’t do any good. You couldn’t get Lars Kyrie out.” “Why not?”

  “He’s not there—not really. He’s on tape in the archives. He was one of the first, before I was born even, to have his personality and memory programmed into the big computer banks they’ve got in there; that’s why his output is that dummy you saw on the screen this morning, a replica of his original body.” “That was a fake?”

  Edgar nodded. “Wires and gears. But with pain circuits built in so they can keep him in line. Now they’ve developed outputs where they use straight computer graphics. It’s still realistic, looks like the guy did when he was alive, but it’s really just a sophisticated animated cartoon.”

  Limmit slumped back into the car seat. It was hopeless. There was no way to attack Mox, guarded deep within his iron fortress, no way to take from him anything like what Limmit felt had been taken from himself. There’s nothing to do, he thought bleakly, but to sit here and wait for his gunman to catch up with me. Wait for the bullet through the base of my skull.

  They rode on in silence. Edgar seemed to be cruising purposelessly. The teenager’s hands clenched again and again on the steering wheel, as if something were on his mind. Finally he spoke. “Listen,” he said. “There is something you should know about the Society for the Prodigal Son. I’ll tell you if you let me have what you know about Dr. Adder.”

  A bitter edge pierced Limmit. “Don’t even bother,” he told the youth. “I doubt if you could make any money peddling this.” And besides, he said to himself, what do I care wha
t the truth is about the SPS? Let them be or do what they want. He felt himself turning into an object. Without volition, subject to the will of ... others. This must be what a stone feels like, he thought. Beyond pain.

  “Come on,” Edgar pleaded. “It’s important. Not for money —I mean for me.”

  “He’s dead.” The flat words seemed to burn up from his lungs. “Deader than Lars Kyrie even. Something happened to him during the Raid on the Interface.” He felt his voice tremble with the suppressed harmonics of grief and shame. “It burned out his brain. He’s an idiot, if he still hasn’t died all the way yet —a drooling, blank-faced idiot. He sits in the corner of a dark room in Rattown and is spoonfed and wiped clean by one of Mother Endure’s walking wounded.” Jesus Christ, cried Limmit to himself, I hope he is dead, clean-dead.

  “B-bullshit,” said Edgar, his face flushed. “He’s alive—I get new pics of him every week.”

  “Droit’s stringing you on,” said Limmit, and sighed. “He’s dead—go wait for the Resurrection.”

  Edgar slammed on the car’s brakes viciously, jerking Limmit forward against the dash. “Fuck you,” he snarled, his young face contorted with hate and fear. “Shit if you’re getting any info on the SPS for that bunch of lies.” He reached across Limmit and pushed open the car door. “Get out.”

  As the car roared away from the curb, Limmit turned around on the sidewalk to see where he had been dumped. He was standing in the gigantic triangular shadow of the Casa del Solitude residential complex. The Endpoint apartment was somewhere in its pyramidal mass. He trudged head down through the glass doors of the main lobby and headed for the elevator. This is my home now, he thought. He no longer felt horrified or bitter. I’m resigned to it, he thought, probing his feelings like a tooth that had stopped aching. I’ve earned it. I deserve to live here now.

  “You don’t have to show me around,” he told the elder Endpoint when he arrived home to find Limmit waiting for him outside the conapt door. “I think I’ve seen enough. I’m ready to come home.”

  “Nonsense, my boy,” Endpoint said heartily. He repocketed his door key and took Limmit by the elbow, steering him back toward the elevators. “I was going to wait until Edgar brought you home from his school, but since you’re here already, let’s go right now—you won’t believe it when you see it.”

  As Endpoint drove them through the late afternoon traffic, he elaborated. “Actually, you’re going to be a step ahead of most everyone else in Orange County. I got special permission to show you this because Arthur Fuller, the man in charge, is a brother member of the SPS. One of your uncles, so to speak.”

  The car pulled through the entrance of another of Orange County’s mammoth parking lots, crowded with vehicles. Limmit could see, over the tops of strangely green trees and an elevated railway, the peak of a miniaturized mountain, complete with ersatz snow gleaming in the dull sunlight. “This used to be one of the world’s most famous amusement parks,” said Endpoint proudly, pulling into a vacant parking space. “Now it’s pretty much just Orange County’s local fun spot. Christ, my glove compartment’s crammed with old unused ‘A’ tickets— from when I used to bring Edgar here.” His face clouded momentarily. “When he was younger and still liked to go. But it’s going to be different soon—you’ll see.”

  He led Limmit to a small, unmarked gate away from the garishly decorated ticket booths and main entrances, and showed a slip of paper to a bored security guard who waved them wordlessly inside. Endpoint pulled him into a large, pre-fabricated-looking building and down a corridor lined with doors bearing crudely stenciled numbers and designations. An almost tangible aura of activity exuded from behind the doors, like the hum emitted by giant machinery. Directly at the end of the hallway was a door marked FULLER—PRIVATE, upon which Endpoint rapped, then opened without waiting for a response. “Art?” he called into the room, then pushed Limmit inside with him. “Here he is. Ready for his little tour.”

  A balding man, shaped like an angular pear, rose from behind a desk cluttered with blueprints and schematics. He grasped Limmit’s hand in his own damp palms. “Welcome home,” he said sincerely, “to Orange County.”

  Limmit opened his mouth to speak, but Endpoint interrupted. “Not yet, Art,” he said. “You remember.”

  “That’s right, ” said Fuller, looking fondly at Limmit. “I hope our little exhibit will impress you favorably. We want you to feel that this is truly your home.”

  I feel it all right, Limmit thought to himself.

  “Shall we?” said Fuller, opening another door on the other side of the room. He ushered Endpoint and Limmit through it.

  Beyond the door, Limmit felt his internal organs shift sickeningly at the sight of the high-ceilinged room’s contents. Its entire length, stretching as far as he could see, was filled with duplicates of the Interface’s slaughtered whores, in various stages of completion. All the workers had apparently ended their shift and gone home. The enormous room was evidently an assembly line: far down its length, the figures were only skeletal metal frameworks slung from chains attached to a conveyor track in the ceiling. Then, at stations progressively closer, cylinders, tubes, other mechanisms, were hooked up in increasingly complicated arrangements; padding, heating elements, and artificial skin were fitted over the framework; finally, only a few yards from them, the completing articles of body hair, eyes, and miscellaneous details were being applied or inserted. A dozen or more of the finished products stood in frozen nudity before them. Holy shit, thought Limmit, nauseated. The old science fiction pulp wet-dream: the mechanical cunt.

  Fuller lifted the eyelid of a brunette and peered into the eye in a professional manner, checking out some detail. “There’s quite an involved rationale behind this whole project,” he said, an overfriendly lecturer. He dropped the plastic eyelid and turned to face Limmit. “Briefly, with the shutting down of the Interface, some replacement had to be created for the, ah, diversion it afforded the residents of Orange County. It was, shall we say, a vital release of tension. True, many are now finding their way to the appropriate people in Rattown, the pimps and whores who escaped the Moral Forces action. That’s easy enough, inasmuch as there actually is no siege surrounding that area—”

  “No siege?” echoed Limmit.

  “That’s right. Oh, I know that some people still think there is—mainly because of that silly Adder Siege Front the Rattown-ers organized. But honestly, how long do you think a motley collection of psychotics like that could last if the Moral Forces really wanted to go in and clear them out? Actually,” he added, his voice dropping to a dramatic whisper, “I hear that several of the Front’s leaders are in on the, um, traffic, if you know what I mean.”

  Limmit could feel his mind fragmenting into layers. One small section flashed a brief image of Eddie Azusa and the words It figures. But why? another part began to nag unceasingly. Why did Mox stop there? Had the Raid just been to kill Adder? The questions burned and sizzled in a tiny corner of his skull like drops of molten steel. Why did Mox send me with the flashglove to Adder?

  The rest of him watched in frozen repulsion as Fuller continued speaking. “So you can imagine how glad we all were here when the GPC exec board gave us the green light for our little pet project—the most innovative idea yet conceived for one of this amusement park’s ‘theme areas,’ as we call them.”

  “Fuckland,” said Endpoint, his insurance salesman’s face leering idiotically, and a strange visionary light in his eyes.

  “Mmm, yes,” smiled Fuller patiently, “that name has been considered. But we’re much more likely to opt for something with a little wider appeal, with less offensive connotations. After all, it is going to be a family amusement area. Something, of course, that the old Interface never was.” He took the dazed Limmit by one arm and led him up to one of the artificial whores. “Don’t be shy. Say hello to the little lady.”

  I’m going to be sick, thought Limmit. Right here. Fuller reached behind the thing’s back and flipped
a switch. The hooker came alive and smiled coyly at Limmit. Christ, he thought, how repulsive. Its plastic face looked eerily like the young girl to whom he had talked in Adder’s office so long ago. He felt a gentle stroking pressure on the inside of his thigh. Looking down, he saw what he hadn’t noticed before: the hooker was a simulated amputee. She had one hand resting on the shoulder of another automaton to balance herself, and was rubbing the stump of her right leg (only, thought Limmit, there never was a right leg) against him. He perceived another evidence of painstaking attention to detail. Right at the edge of the stump, where the synthetic whore’s real-life counterpart would have had her grinning snake’s-head tattoo, there was the amusement park’s own version of the mark. A little cartoon mouse’s head, two perfect black circles for ears, grinning insanely friendly with button nose and wide-sprung eyes.

  This is it, thought Limmit. Nausea and despair sucked at his interior. I’m never going to leave Orange County. I’ll die right here, only I’ll keep on walking. I’ll be dead, and I’ll settle down here in Orange County, marry a girl vague from TV and downers, and we’ll raise anonymous children together, removed from her body like loaves of bread while she’s knocked out, a widespread brainless oven of a girl. On weekends we’ll bring them here to Fuckland just like any other Orange County family. And nobody will know I’m dead until my rotting body starts to fall apart. Right here with this foam-rubber ersatz whore. My decaying prick will break off right in her polyethylene cunt. What a thing for the next customer to find.

  Limmit leaned his forehead against the hooker’s soft, gently heated breast. A tear dropped from his eye and beaded on the waterproof synthetic skin. I’m not dead, he thought in sick desperation. Don’t let me be dead. For the first time in a long while he found himself thinking of Mary. “I want to leave,” he said in a constricted, childlike voice. “I want out of here.” Behind him, Endpoint and Fuller exchanged quick, worried looks. Endpoint brought his face close to Limmit’s. “Do you mean,” he whispered, “Orange County? Or just this room?” “Here—” Limmit gulped, his cheeks burning and wet. “Orange County.”