Dr. Identity Read online

  He shook it off. Bliptown was barely functional in the wake of Voss Winkenweirder’s death, and he needed footage of the movie star’s killers for his own financial well-being as much as for the emotional well-being of a general public who wouldn’t be satisfied until they gorged themselves on a sufficiently overwhelming feast of media imagery featuring the plaquedemics and their antics. Achtung 66.799 transformed into soldier mode. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and flexed the flaccid cords and wires in his body that were supposed to be muscles.

  Beneath the corkboard was a console. Achtung 66.799 could use it to track the plaquedemics’ position in the Schizoverse. He began to fiddle with the controls…and one of his jacks woke up. It emitted an obnoxious yawn and complained about a nightmare and persistent halitosis. Its bitching woke up the rest of the jacks, who also began bitching about bad dreams and bad breath.

  Achtung 66.799 pinpointed his mark and then surveyed the designer plugs that would deliver him into the Schizoverse. They came in all brands and fetishes, ranging from ordinary kitchen knives to hacked off human fingers to petrified eels to a slue of biological dildos.

  “One of you is in for a treat,” smiled the Papanazi. The jacks keyed up. All at once they screamed, “Me! Me! Me!”

  The jacks on his skull were the most efficient, supplying the cleanest Idside experience, whereas the ones on his back were mostly for show.

  Achtung 66.799 told the jacks that, to be fair, he would eenie-meeni-mini-moe a winner. “That’s the kind of gentleman I am,” he said, hoping they would appreciate the gesture.

  They didn’t. They accused him of being a pussy and lacking the balls to take charge of situations by means of his own conscious volition. Then they began attacking the character of his penis. Achtung 66.799 reminded them they lacked eyes and had never seen his penis or interacted with it in any way for that matter. They told him they knew all about his penis based upon his personality, which was fraught with deep-seated insecurities. They continued to emasculate him until Achtung 66.799 gave up trying to reason with them and selected a course of entry.

  The Razortickler was a living, breathing organism that emitted an orgasmic sigh when he clenched its handle. It cried out in ecstasy somewhere inside of his head when he rammed it into the loudmouth above his right temple. Blood splashed out of the jack as the microblades took their toll.

  An aura of static electricity formed around Achtung 66.799’s body. Then his flesh, bone and Inner Beast slurped up, up and away…

  His Ego hung its metaphorical head as the voice of his Superego reaffirmed what the jacks had told him about his manhood.

  13

  SCHIZOVERSE, PART 1 – 3RD PERSON

  They looked distinctly computer-generated yet purely organic. Their ragtime fedora hats were as acutely defined as their black-and-white physiognomies and the blades of the hypersharp hardware clenched in their mitts.

  One of them smiled an upside-down smile. The other nodded and leapt twenty feet in the air. He slipped into slowtime on his ascent, trenchcoat fluttering…When he reached his peak, a rhizome of lightning flashed overhead, illuminating a boundless skyscape of ultraviolence. Infinite Ids and feminIds of all figurations clashed and inflicted the maximum degree of damage. A steady downpour of blood, viscera and body parts rained from the skyscape. Most of the carnage caught fire and vaporized before it struck the ground as terminated players were evicted back to their realtime selfhoods. Nonetheless if you were scrimmaging on the battlefield of the Schizoverse, the iconography of your body was invariably soaked in hot, sizzling gore…

  The warrior slipped into fasttime on his descent. His opponent countered the maneuver and gauged a striking distance…He spun out of the way. His attacker came down on the spot of ground that was supposed to be his opponent’s head. His knees locked and exploded like sticks of dynamite. Thin jet streams of saliva rode the wave of the scream that ushered out of his round, white mouth…

  The calves, ankles and feet of the kneeless warrior crumbled to neon ashes beneath him. He fell onto the gaping, bleeding stumps of his legs. Another wet scream. The body teetered and swayed…then tilted forward…His beaklike nose slammed into the terracotta street.

  His opponent dodged a severed head the size of a Japanese football that had been catapulted at him. Fights the likes of this one spanned the length and breadth of SS (Schizo Street) Bongodome. Every warrior was in constant danger of fallout from every direction.

  He triumphantly approached his victim…Impossible slime and gristle gushed out of the stumps, and a moat of mud boiled around his head as he struggled to wrench his nose free…A boot stomped on the back of his head, burying it underground…Extremities flailed in the bloodshower…Trenchcoats fluttered, eyes blazed white…A glistening glowsword brandished, set against the scintillating night…

  He sliced the body in two. Its lower half helicoptered away while its torso remained planted upside-down in the ground. Viscera poured out of the fresh wound with renewed vigor.

  It was at this moment that Achtung 66.799 made the scene.

  Crouched in a fetal position, the naked Id cooed and sucked his thumb. He quickly shook off this piece of return-to-the-wombitis, however, and stood up. Squirming black entrails singed from his gray skin. His jacks were gone, confined to the matrix of the real world…

  The Papanazi darted across the street towards the saloon. His hyperbolic, overinflated penis led the way.

  The triumphant Id had set his sights on him now. He charged, swinging the glowsword from hip to hip in fasttime.

  Achtung 66.799 couldn’t allow himself to be killed. There were times when it had taken him days to colonize a stillzone of the Schizoverse. He would jack in and immediately be offed and his flesh would be thrown back out into the real world. Then he would be denied access to that particular region of the Schizoverse for a 24 hour period—a universal punishment for being terminated there. If terminated now, he would have to jack into a different, adjacent region and make his way back to this one, a trek that would certainly see him pseudomurdered again along the way. By then the plaquedemics would be gone, jacked out or relocated.

  The great burden of Achtung 66.799’s elephantine genitals was a common, natural condition in nearly every male and shemale who jacked in. It necessitated that battlefielders strapped the genitals to their legs or looped and tied them around their waists. This of course became problematic when the thrill of combat and ultraviolence incited a sexual reaction and one’s penis stiffened without warning. But the Papanazi was already stiff, his Id-body still adjusting to the eroticized diegesis of the Schizoverse. Even if he wasn’t stiff, he had no time to stow away the terminal extremity. He hugged it against his chest as he plodded towards the entrance of the saloon.

  Two steps from a little stairway that led up to overtall swinging doors, his antagonist dealt him a flying kick to the kidney. The Papanazi somersaulted forward, twice, and landed on his epic penis. The wind was knocked out of him and he couldn’t breath.

  He turned his head and glanced over his shoulder. He wanted to see what was coming. Death meant nothing in the Schizoverse. An Id could die again and again in any number of creative, tortuous, and obscene ways and come back for more as often as he, she or it pleased. The only way out of the Schizoverse was death, in fact. Unfortunately death hurt. The Schizoverse was a psychological fiction. But the pain one experienced Idside of that fiction was very real. For some reason, pain and death didn’t hurt Achtung 66.799 quite as much if he were in a position to watch how somebody inflicted it on him.

  The skyscape exploded with lightning again. Looming over the Papanazi, the Id was shadowcast except for his brilliant grin and eyes. His flared, flapping trenchcoat resembled a cape, and he looked vaguely like a cartoon. His image belonged in a comic book, Achtung 66.799 thought, remembering, as if for the first time, that the entire Schizoverse was a comic book world, a video game, basically, with exceptional graphics and a perverted realization of the potentials of
digitized flesh.

  He tried to beg for his Id’s life. An inarticulate wheeze came out. The shadow of his antagonist’s head nodded, his grin disappeared, he flaunted his weapon…

  The weapon toppled out of his grasp as his opposing arm was ripped out of its socket by a feminId in an arachnosuit with iron fangs. Blood sprayed out of the wound in a potpourri of neon red sparks. The feminId ate half of the arm in two gruesome bites and spit the remainder out. Then she leapt onto the Id and squeezed the Technicolor juices out of him with razorwire legs. Both creatures emitted uniquely horrific cries.

  Achtung 66.799 crawled up the stairs, across the porch and into the saloon…

  “Safe!” hooted an Id as the Papanazi entered the swinging doors. Appropriately, the Id had on an umpire uniform with spiked shoulder pads and a mask that was a baby kangaroo’s ribcage. He made a gracefully overindulgent cutting motion with his arms and asked, “May I interest the new mister in a fashion and/or weapon statement, cutting edge or otherwise?”

  “Please,” Achtung 66.799 panted.

  He followed the umpire’s lead into a coffin, his erection dipping to half mast. Some Ids and feminIds preferred nakedness in the Schizoverse, namely the orgiastics, which comprised roughly thirty-five percent of the population of the Schizoverse at any given time, a healthy compliment to the majority populace of battlefielders. The Papanazi preferred the comfort and reassurance of vogue. Even when time didn’t permit it. Right now his mind was set on a very specific vogue.

  The coffin stood on end in a dusty, cobwebbed corner. Its door opened. A creaky, metallic voice invited Achtung 66.799 inside. The door shut behind him. The voice asked if he was having a good day.

  “What’s a good day?”

  The coffin’s glimmering, pulsing walls geometrically unfolded…bifurcated…multiplied…morphed…in fasttime, in fasttime…Ten seconds later he stood on a driftdisc in the middle of a virtual ADW. Surrounding him was a labyrinth of shelves and racks containing the most elite, middle- and low-class clothing and artillery available on the market. Most of the clothing consisted of new-and-improved brands of trenchcoats and fedoras—the Schizoverse’s signature articles of fashion—and the artillery consisted mainly of technetronic blades, swords, throwing stars, chainsaws and other slice-and-dice objects. Guns, while not illegal, were far less effective media for inflicting the highest extreme of ultraviolence and eliciting the most pain and gore from the human body.

  Achtung 66.799’s mind automatically linked to the driftdisc. He told the mechanism what he wanted and it guided him across a quarter mile of empty green space to a set of hangers and shelves containing the day-to-day visages of any number of plaquedemics. He sifted through them and selected one. Far too expensive. But home base would comp him if he landed a money shot, and given his near miss with pseudodeath a minute ago, he was in a gambling mood. He stared at the barcode on the product long enough for it to read and rob his retinal databank. Then he stared at the barcode on a vintage ray gun. Bad form, no doubt, but he might need the protection. And at some point he would need a way back into the real world. He preferred suicide to being butchered by a stranger.

  The ADW collapsed and the walls of the coffin reformed around the driftdisc as quickly as they had blown apart.

  The coffin door opened.

  Out walked the figuration of Humidor Tang, twenty-second century speculative fiction writer and distant relative of the inventor of Tang orange-flavored drink crystals, Charles Mayfield Tang a.k.a. William “Doll Hair Bill” Mitchell. The Papanazi had done a little research on Dr. ——— and learned that he held Humidor Tang in high literary esteem; he hoped dressing like the writer would allow him to get close to the plaquedemic, if not befriend him.

  Tang looked the role. He had a slight hunchback, a dandruff-strewn whirligig hairdo, a lopsided beer belly, a fixed I-have-low-self-esteem facial expression, a tiny v-beard beneath his underlip, surgically altered Vulcan ears, and no sense of fashion whatsoever—all symptoms of the proverbial speculative fiction writer. The synthetic facemask felt heavy on Achtung 66.799’s cheeks and neck. He adjusted to it quickly. He never adjusted to his outfit—worn black clogs, skintight burlap bellbottoms, flashy wildwest belt buckle, moth-eaten T-shirt, flannel overshirt with too-short sleeves—but that was inevitable in terms of appearance. In terms of comfort, he hoped that the outfit’s prosthetic stomach would offset and balance out its prosthetic hunch. It didn’t. Both attachments seemed to want to tug him in different directions. When he walked, it looked like he was being punched gently in the shoulderblade and the bellybutton, one at a time.

  Achtung 66.799 finger-saluted the umpire as he turned the corner. He lumbered through another set of swinging doors and entered the main room of the saloon. Behind him the umpire called another Id safe.

  Crowded here. Shoulder-to-shoulder in some areas. Genital-to-genital in others. Powerful, high-paced banjo Melodrome ripped through the joint like a tornado, occasionally knocking bodies off of their feet. The Schizoverse was a playspace and most of the saloon’s occupants were human save the odd ’gänger. In the past androids couldn’t lawfully enter the Schizoverse. At one point it was collectively referred to as the Last Human Frontier. Eventually people became disinterested in recreation, however, and started to send their ’gängers in to play for them.

  Ironically ’gängers’ Ids and feminIds looked perfectly human except for their big white eyes. Human Ids and feminIds, on the other hand, retained the shadow of their basic appearance, but they looked more like stock EBEs with hairless gray skin, thin limbs, sharp black eyes, pointy chins, and bald bulbous heads. This assumed one wasn’t in costume. Most costumes were incredibly lifelike and ranged from giant insects and vermin to cartoon characters to mythical beasts to talk show hosts and movie stars. Achtung 66.799 noticed a surplus of Voss Winkenweirder lookalikes. He knew Dr. ——— and Dr. Identity would be disguised. He just hoped they weren’t disguised beyond recognition.

  He spotted the plaquedemics despite a layered haze of smoke and steam that rose from the floor to the ceiling. Dr. ——— gave them away. He was naked and slouched over an enormous martini at a table on the far side of the saloon. He sipped the martini with a straw and stared at his lap. Achtung 66.799 fluttered his eyes until he had zoomed in to an extreme close-up on the plaquedemic’s faceggggNo expression save a subtle frown and a bead of liquid flowing down his chin. He snapped a photo, zoomed back out. And closed in…

  Voss Winkenweirder sat across from Dr. ———. Had to be Dr. Identity. It dressed in a zoot suit whose fabric was a patchwork of handheld and compact mirrors. Penny-sized mirrorshades covered its eyes. Its neoElvis hairdo was a lard-laden wall that rose out of its forehead and seemed to dare people to try and knock it over. Its facemask contained the trademark Winkenweirder chin, distinguished by a trilogy of bullethole dimples, as well as the movie star’s celebrated wingtip cheekbones, which had won four Hackademy Awards for Best Facial Feature. Unlike its companion, the android sat erect, smoking a long, sentient cigar. The cigar squeaked and squirmed in agony upon each inhalation. Achtung 66.799 zoomed, snapped…Now if he could get Dr. Identity to take off its mask…

  He bypassed lion tamers and disco dancers. He ducked flying shuriken and shrunken heads. He stepped over the thrashing limbs of orgiastics. Stench of raw sex. Taste of dry ice…

  Achtung 66.799 wondered why the plaquedemics retreated into the Schizoverse. To conceal themselves? If so, why wasn’t Dr. ——— incognito? It didn’t make sense.

  He stopped in his tracks. What if the Ids didn’t belong to the plaquedemics at all? Maybe the Id that resembled Dr. ——— was just another Id dressed up as Dr. ———’s Id. It was possible. The massacre at Corndog University had only occurred that morning. But incalculable paraphernalia created in both plaquedemics’ images were already for sale. T-shirts, action figures, cereals, jetpacks, keychains, cigarettes, cologne, hairdos, jewelry, paper goods, weapons, press-on eyelashes and fingernails, household c
leaners and appliances—all products carried the plaquedemics’ brand name. No reason why the plaquedemics’ Ids wouldn’t be for sale, too. At the same time, Achtung 66.799 didn’t see any other Dr. ———s. Nor did he see any Dr. Identities. The absence worried him. But it probably meant that the doctors were authentic.

  He moved forward again, sidestepping an angry, musclebound feminId that tried to karate chop him. She muttered something in Schizospeak. Her dialect was a polylinguistic stream of technojargon and rhizomatics. Achtung 66.799 only understood bits and pieces of it.

  He smiled innocently at her.

  The feminId flexed her pectoral muscles and growled a metallic growl. Her nippleless fake breasts leapt to stony attention. Throbbing black veins consumed the surface of her ashen skin. A few of the veins burst. Spurting, gushing cords thrashed in the wounds. She got even madder.

  He squeaked at her.

  She said something else in Schizospeak, this time totally unintelligible.

  Somebody elbowed Achtung 66.799 in the back. He looked behind him.

  The Id was a replica of President-thing Grimley Bogue and stared at him as if in a trance.

  “Yes?”

  The Id broke out of his trance, frowned as if insulted, and disappeared into a large cluster of Fruit-of-the-Loom characters and feminIds in flapperwear.

  Flustered, Achtung 66.799 looked at his antagonist.

  She had nabbed another passerby and put him in a headlock. The Id’s face was purple, almost black from suffocation. When the head snapped off, it burst into confetti and his body melted and frothed away.

  The feminId emitted a Tarzan hogcall.