These scenes of extreme cognitive dissonance comprised the smallest part of Dinky Allepo’s many thousands of disparately sized action figures. They covered every available 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.