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.

Flyways coursed across the skin of the city like varicose veins. Glinting, fire-breathing machinery flowed and surged in every direction. Dr. Identity and I weaved through the traffic, dodging as many construction beams as aircrafts, and slipped into an indiscrete alaristrian lane. There was no speed limit, but most of the alaristrians weren’t going more than 40 mph except for a few teenagers who darted to and fro like gnats.

We couldn’t go back to my cubapt. The Pigs would be waiting for us and no doubt destroying or pocketing whatever they could get their hooves on. They had probably given my wife-thing a going over by now. If she was still alive, divorce papers were imminent. I needed to get used to loss. In the wake of Dr. Identity’s act of ultraviolence, my life would never be the same again.

The Law in Bliptown was an automated speed demon. A few seconds after we dove out of the English department, an en masse APB was surely put out on us. Probably we would sail past a vidbuilding in the next minute or two showcasing our colossal wanted-dead-or-alive images.

To make matters worse, there was the legality of vigilantism to consider. In addition to the surrogates of the Law, Dr. Identity and I could also expect the families of the student-things, professors and ’gängers it killed to hunt us down—with the full support of Bliptown’s governing powers. If we wanted to survive, we needed more weapons than Dr. Identity’s hands and feet.

And we had no credit. No means of using credit anyway. The moment I spent a penny, the Law would have us.

Hunger besieged me.

High anxiety always had that effect. The more I worried, the more I ate—and needed to eat. Deathlike feelings accompanied boiling points. And they weren’t infrequent. A speedy metabolism helped me maintain a slender figure. Right now I felt like challenging the power of that metabolism. I reached up and tugged on Dr. Identity’s suit.

Dr. Identity glanced down at me. “What!”

“Sandwich,” I squeaked.

“What!”

I arched back my head so the android could see my mouth. “Sand-wich.”

Dr. Identity frowned. “You know I can’t read lips! What’s the matter with you!”

I pointed at my stomach. I punched myself in the face.

“Oh.” Dr. Identity’s pupils splashed against its eyeballs like mosquitoes on a windshield as it calculated what to do…

It exited the flyway and ascended to the rooftop of a nearby vidbuilding with a shopshack. It dropped me onto my feet. I tripped and fell into an ungainly somersault. Dr. Identity picked me up, dusted me off, and slapped me.

“What was that for?”

“Pain helps sometimes.”

The rooftop’s aesthetic was minimalist-medieval. A few stone tables and chairs near the edges. Tall, hollow suits of armor here and there. The shopshack was a rickety wooden structure that wore its merchandise on the outside. Inside crouched vendors in buzzard suits.

Not much of a crowd on the rooftop. A handful of cow-pigeons casually devoured whatever pieces of trash they could get their beaks on. Some alaristrians drank coffee, shined mirrorgoggles, cleaned their business suits with oversized lint brushes. Most were ’gängers, which wasn’t atypical in the public sector: corporate subjects surrogated themselves with much more frequency than plaquedemics.

A small group of ’gängers had gathered around an allotriophagic mime. Every minute or two, the mime spontaneously regurgitated a sequence of random, nonedible objects, took a garish bow, and held his bowler hat out for spare change. Now he disgorged what appeared to be a collection of small mechanical clocks. The timepieces dribbled out of his mouth and formed a pile between his feet. The audience observed the spectacle with a cool disconnectedness, idly checking their watches to see if they were synchronous with the mime’s vomit.

The canvas of sky overhead was a dull orange color. Sharp, thin clouds peeled across it in neat droves as if drawn there with an Etch-A-Sketch.

A shelf of prepackaged sandwiches caught my attention.

“I’m hungry,” I wheezed

“I know,” Dr. Identity said.

I licked my lips. “Garlic bologna.”

Dr. Identity strode to the shopshack. I told it to stop. “Wait. Wait. We can’t pay for anything.”

It kept going. I let it.

We were in trouble when we landed on the rooftop. Shortly after we left the rooftop, we were among the Papanazi’s ten most wanted snapshots.

Dr. Identity began fumbling through a row of sandwiches.

A claw reached out of the shopshack and grabbed the android by the wrist. Dr. Identity looked at the claw quizzically, then looked up. Two yellow eyes peered out of the shadows.

“Buy or fly,” said a snakelike voice.

Dr. Identity tried to shake its hand free of the vendor’s grip. “Get your mitt off of me.”

“Get your mitt off of my sandwiches.”

The android’s eyes pulsed. Within reach was a copper vase that contained a bouquet of Baasendorfer samurai swords. The vase sat atop a large antique television set. A syndicated episode of the science fictionalized version of Leave It to Beaver was on. I had seen the episode before. There was no plot or dialogue, only a scikungfi Battle Royal that took place between June Cleaver and Eddie Haskell in the living room. For a moment Dr. Identity seemed to be hypnotized by the show.

Then its head stiffened, its lips convulsed.

Moving in fasttime, it pulled a sword out of the vase and sliced off the vendor’s claw. The vendor shrieked. Dr. Identity reached into the shopshack and yanked it out by the neck. Feathers snowed off of its buzzard suit…

Dr. Identity tossed the vendor into the air and sliced it in half.

The vendor’s torso landed flat on its back. It panted, squirmed, gesticulated as its innards poured out like baked beans.

The vendor’s waist and legs pinwheeled out of control and struck a flâneur. He was a refined-looking gentleman wearing a top hat, mirrormonocle and razorcoat with tails. Somehow the legs wrapped around his chest and neck, then a foot kicked him in the head, knocking him cold.

Dr. Identity made quick work of him.

The severed head of the flâneur bounced past me like a discarded basketball, its mirrormonocle firmly in place.

Not until the head bounced off the roof did I process the murders. They both transpired in under ten seconds.

“Maniac!” I rasped. Somebody screamed.

Dr. Identity lobbed me a sandwich. “Relax. Eat that before you really freak out. It’s haggis and cheese. Closest thing I could find to garlic bologna. Excuse me for a moment.”

“No.” The sandwich hit me in the chest and fell on my feet.

Full of purpose and resolve, Dr. Identity brandished the samurai sword, swung it around its body with ninjalike dexterity, turned and leapt into the shopshack. The structure quaked and splintered. It collapsed when my ’gänger exited through a chimney pipe, somersaulting across the orange sky as if shot out of a cannon.

Dr. Identity landed squarely on its feet and didn’t falter. In addition to the vendors, it massacred everyone on the rooftop, including the allotriophagic mime. The mime tried to strike back, regurgitating and spitting hatchets at its attacker. But he was far too slow and had poor aim.

When it was over, the android flung the sword aside and strolled over to me. My face was a blank slate. The haggis sandwich lay at my feet. Dr. Identity picked it up and handed it to me. “I thought you were hungry? Eat this. Take it.”

I wasn’t hungry anymore. Anxiety gave way to rage. I slapped the sandwich out of its hand. “Are you kidding me?”

“Kidding?” Dr. Identity said. “There’s nothing funny about this scenario.”

“Scenario?”

Dr. Identity smirked. “Think of me as your Id, ’Blah. You can play Ego. How does that sound?”

I regarded my ’gänger hatefully. “Don’t call me ’Blah. Nobody can call me that anymore.”

“Pardon me. At any rate, as I already made clear, our actions no longer matter.”

“Our actions?”

“You know what I mean. Who cares if I imbibe in a little serial killing at this point? We’re both going to die. It’s just a matter of time. Are you all right? Don’t tell me you’re experiencing some kind of moral dilemma. Why would a solipsistic misanthrope like you care about the lives of other organisms?”

Dr. Identity had never spoken to me with such frankness and hostility. Clearly the trauma of the initial, accidental killing of St. Von Yolk had driven it insane.

“I…I…”

Dr. Identity frowned. “What is it?” It glanced over its shoulder.

Across the street from the vidbuilding beneath us was the Quicksilver Spire. Its mirrored exterior contained the colossal, distorted images of Dr. Identity and me. The footage had been shot by Dostoevsky one afternoon in our office. Both of us stared listlessly into the minicam…

I ran to the edge of the rooftop. Beneath our images in giant lettering was an announcement:

PLAQUEDEMICS AT LARGE!!!

Sirens dopplered towards us through the caterwaul of traffic in the flyways.

I glared at Dr. Identity. “Come on.”

We ditched my prehistoric jetpack and stole two new ones. Mine was an AK-Zingblinger. Other than being drenched in blood, it was in tiptop shape. I removed it from a soaking torso and strapped it on.

Dr. Identity was in the air first, gesturing for me to hurry up.

I retrieved the haggis and cheese sandwich before obliging him.