WikiWorld

MURDER IN GEEKTOPIA

Max Moritz is the moniker on my NC license, and, yes, I’ve heard all the obvious allusive wisecracks already.

“Funny, you don’t look Prankish.”

“I heard you keep all your cats in jam jars.”

“What strength monofilament you use for chickens?”

“Did your Mama stick dirks in her bush?”

But of course I haven’t let smartmouth cracks like those bug me since I was twelve years old, and just finishing my third-level synergetics course at GBS Ideotorium Number 521. (Our school motto that year, picked by the students of course: “A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.” From one of my favourite Shaw and Raymond pictonovels, Major Barbara versus Ming the Merciless.)

And of course after I left GBSI Number 521 that year for my extended wanderjahr before declaring my major and minor passions, I fell in with a variety of older people who politely resisted the impulse to joke about my name.

Except when they didn’t.

But that’s just the Geek Way, anyplace you go.

Still, I wasn’t about to change Moritz to something else. Family pride, and all that. Would’ve killed my mother, who had worked hard with my Pop (and alone after his death) to make the family business a success. Moritz Cosplay was known worldwide for its staging of large-scale (ten thousand players and up) recreational scenarios, everything from US Civil War to Barsoom to Fruits Basket, and Mom—Helena Moritz—regarded our surname as a valuable trademark, to be proudly displayed at all times, for maximum publicity value.

Not that I was part of the firm any longer—not since five years ago, when I had told Mom, with much trepidation, that I was leaving for a different trade.

Mom was in her office, solido-conferencing with the head of some big hotel chain and negotiating for better rates for her clients, when I finally got up the courage to inform her of my decision. I waited till she flicked off the solido, and then said, “Mom, I’m switching jobs.”

She looked at me coolly with that gesture familiar from my childhood, as if she were peering over the rims of her reading glasses. But she hadn’t worn eyeglasses since 1963, when she had gotten laser-eye surgery to correct her far-sightedness. Then out the glasses went, faster than Clark Kent had gotten rid of his in Action Comics #2036. (But Lois Lang still didn’t recognize Clark as Superman, since Clark grew a moustache at the same time, which was really a very small shapeshifting organism, a cousin of Proty’s, who could attach and detach from the Kryptonian’s upper lip at will to help preserve Supe’s secret identity.)

Anyway, I had made my decision and announcement and wasn’t about to quail under a little parental glare.

“What’re you planning on doing?” Mom asked.

“I’ve just gotten my NC license. I’ve been studying in secret for the past six months.”

“You? A nick carter? Max, I respect your intelligence highly, but it’s just not the Sherlock-Holmes-Father-Brown-Lincoln-Powell variety. You had trouble finding clean socks in your sock drawer until you were ten.”

“I aced the exam.”

Mom looked slightly impressed, but still had an objection or two. “What about the physical angle? You’re hardly a slan in the strength department. What if you get mixed up with some roughnecks?”

“Roughnecks? Shazam, Mom! What century are you living in? There hasn’t been any real prevalence of ‘roughnecks’ in the general population since before I was born. At GBSI Five-twenty-one, one of the patternmasters spent half a day trying to explain what a ‘bully’ was. The incidence of sociopathic violence and aggressive behaviour has been dropping at a rate of 1.5 percent ever since President Hearst’s first term—and that was nearly three-quarters-of-a-century ago.”

“Still, the world isn’t perfect yet. There’s bad people out there who wouldn’t hesitate—”

“Mom, I also got my concealed weapons licence.”

Mom had a technical interest in weapons, after hosting so many SCA tournaments and live-action RPG events. “Really? What did you train on?”

“Nothing fancy. Just a standard blaster.”

I didn’t tell Mom that I had picked a blaster because on wide-angle setting the geyser of charged particles from the mini-cyclotron in the gun’s handle totally compensated for my lack of aiming abilities. But I suspected she knew anyhow.

Mom got up from her chair and gave me a big hug. “Well, all right, Max, if this is really what you’ve got your heart set on. Just go out there and uphold the Moritz name.”

So that’s how, on August 16, 1970 (Hugo Gernsback’s eighty-sixth birthday, by coincidence; I recall watching the national celebration via public spy-ray), I moved out of the family home and hung up my shingle in a cheap office on McCay Street in Centropolis.

Now, five years later, after a somewhat slow start, I had a flourishing little business, mostly in the area of thwarting industrial espionage.

All Mom’s fears about me getting into danger had failed to come true.

Until the morning Polly Jean Hornbine walked through the door.

Business was slow that day. I had just unexpectedly solved a case for ERB Industries faster than I had anticipated. (The employee dropping spoilers on the ansible-net about ERBI’s new line of Tarzan toys had been a drone in the shipping department.) So I had no new work immediately lined up.

I was sitting in my office, reading the latest copy of Global Heritage magazine. I had always been interested in history, but didn’t have much Copious Spare Time these days to indulge in any deep reading. So the light-and-glossy coverage of GH provided a fast-food substitute.

I skipped past the guest editorial, a topical poem written by Global Data Manager Gene McCarthy himself. Where he found the time to churn out all these poems while shepherding the daily affairs of billions of people around the planet, I had no idea. Everyone else, myself included, bright and ambitious as one might be, looked like a lazy underachiever next to our GDM.

Beyond the editorial, the first article was a seventy-fifth anniversary retrospective on President Hearst’s first term of office, 1901–1905. Even though the material was mostly familiar, it made for a lively, almost unbelievable story: the story of a personal transformation so intense that it had completely remade, first, one man’s life, and then the collective life of the whole world.

Few people recalled that William Randolph Hearst had been a money-grubbing, war-mongering, unscrupulous newspaper publisher in the year 1898. A less likely person to become a pacifist politician and reformer would be hard to imagine. But there was a key in the rusty heart of the man, a key that would soon be turned.

And that key was Hearst’s son.

In 1879, at age twenty-six, Hearst had been vacationing in England. There, through mutual friends, he met a poor but beautiful woman named Edith Nesbit, aged twenty-one. The American and the Englishwoman fell in love and married. The couple returned to America. The next year saw the birth of their son, George Randolph Hearst.

In 1898, spurred on by his father’s jingoist rhetoric, the teenaged boy enlisted in the Army and went off to Cuba to fight in the very conflict his father was so ardently promoting, the Spanish-American War.

And there young George Randolph Hearst died, most miserably, on the point of a bayonet and subsequent peritonitis.

The death of their son first shattered, then galvanized William and Edith. Recanting all his past beliefs, Hearst vowed on his son’s grave to use all his skills and resources to bring an end to armed conflict on the planet. A titanic task. But he would be aided immensely by Edith. Her hitherto undisclosed writing talents and keen political sensibilities were brought to their joint cause.

In early 1899, Hearst and Edith formed the US branch of the Fabian Society, based on the parent UK organization that Edith had ties to. Backed by his media empire, Hearst ran a feverish, spendthrift campaign for the Presidency of the United States under that banner, and indeed defeated both McKinley and Bryan.

And that’s when Hearst started changing the world—

My robot annunciator interrupted my downtime reading then. “Chum Moritz, you have a client in the reception room.”

I swung my feet off my desk, and checked my appearance in a mirror hanging on the back of the door to reception.

My blue T-shirt bearing the image of Krazy Kat and Ignatz with the legend “Hairy, man!” was relatively clean. A small cluster of pinback buttons on my chest displayed the logos or faces of Green Lantern, Frank Buck, Lil Abner, Les Paul, Freeman Dyson, Dash Hammett, Bunny Yeager, Jean Harlow (still gorgeous at age 64), and the Zulu Nation. The pockets of my khaki cargo shorts were stuffed with the tools of my trade. My high-top tennis shoes were fresh kicks.

There was nothing I could do about my perpetually unruly cowlick or thin hairy shanks, so out I went.

A pretty woman under thirty—roughly my own age, stood up as I entered. Her thick auburn hair crested at her shoulders and curled inward and upward, and her wide mouth was limned in that year’s hot colour, Sheena’s Tiger Blood. She wore a green short-sleeved cashmere top that echoed her green eyes, and a felted poodle skirt that featured a snarling Krypto. Black tights, ballet slippers. She looked like a page of Good Girl Art by Bergey come to life.

She extended her hand forthrightly, a sombre expression on her sweet face. “My name’s Polly Jean Hornbine, and I’m here because the police don’t believe someone murdered my father.”

Her grip was strong and honest. I got a good feeling from her, despite her unlikely introductory claim. “Let’s go into my office, Ms. Hornbine.”

“Call me PJ, please. That’s—that’s what Dad—”

And then she began to weep.

Putting my arm around her slim shoulders, I conducted her into my office, got her some tissues and a spaceman’s bulb of diet Moxie (I took a Nehi for myself out of the Stirling-engine fridge), and had her sit. After a minute or so, she had composed herself enough to tell me her story.

“My father is—was—Doctor Harold Hornbine. He was head of pediatric surgery at David H. Keller Memorial. Until he was murdered! The authorities all claim he died of natural causes—heart failure—but I know that’s just not true!”

“What leads you to believe his death was murder, PJ?”

“Dad had just undergone his annual physical, and his T-ray charts revealed he had the physiology of a man much younger. He followed the Macfadden-Kellog Regimen religiously. All his organs were in tip-top shape. There was no way his heart would just stop like it did, without some kind of fatal intervention.”

“An autopsy—”

“—showed nothing!”

This woman’s case was starting to sound more and more delusional. I tried to reason with her gently. “Even with current diagnostic technology, some cardiac conditions still go undetected. For instance, I was just reading—”

“No! Listen to me! I might have agreed with you, except for one thing. Just days before Dad died he confided in me that he had discovered a scandal at the hospital. Something in his department that had much more widespread implications. He claimed that the wrongdoing at Keller would implicate people all the way up to the GDM himself!”

“I find that hard to believe, PJ. In nearly thirty years, Global Data Management hasn’t experienced any scandal worse than the use of some public monies to buy a few first editions for the private libraries of the occasional greedy sub-manager. And even that was resolved with simple tensegrity counselling. No, the GDM is just too perfect a governmental system to harbour any major glitch—especially not something that would involve murder!”

PJ stood up determinedly, a certain savagery burning in her expression. I was reminded immediately of Samantha Eggar playing Clarrissa MacDougall in 1959’s Children of the Lens. I found my initial attraction to her redoubling. I hadn’t felt like this since I fell in love with Diana Rigg (playing opposite Peter Cushing) when I first saw her onscreen in Phantom Lady Versus the Red Skull when I was fifteen.

PJ’s voice was quavering but stern. “I can see that you’re not the man for this job, Max. I’ll be going now—”

I reached out to stop her. I couldn’t let her leave.

“No, wait, I’ll take the case. If only to put your mind at ease—”

“It’s not me I’m concerned about. I want you to find the people who killed my father!”

“If that’s where the trail leads, I promise I’ll run them down.”

A thought suddenly occurred to me. “How’s your mother figure in all this? Mrs. Hornbine. What’s she got to say about your father’s death?”

PJ softened. “Mom isn’t with us anymore. She died five years ago, on the way home from Venus Equilateral.”

I whistled. “Your Mom was Jenny Milano?”

PJ nodded.

Now I could see where PJ got her spunk.

Jenny Milano had managed to nurse the leaky reactor of her crippled spaceship, the GDM Big Otaku, for thousands of miles until she finally achieved Earth orbit and spared the planet from a deadly accidental nuclear strike. Today her ship currently circled the planet as a radioactive memorial to her courage and skills.

According to PJ, Dr. Hornbine hadn’t been conducting any independent research prior to his demise. And he didn’t see any private patients outside the clinical environment. Therefore, whatever scandal he had uncovered had to originate at David H. Keller Memorial itself. At first, I assumed that to learn anything I’d have to go undercover at the hospital. But how? I certainly couldn’t masquerade as a doctor. Even if I managed to get some kind of lowly orderly job, I’d hardly be in any position to poke around in odd corners, or solicit information from leet personnel.

So I abandoned that instinctive first approach and decided to go in for a little social engineering.

I’d try to infiltrate one of Dr. Hornbine’s karasses. Maybe amongst those who shared his sinookas, I’d learn something he had let slip, a clue to whatever secret nasty stuff was going on at the hospital.

Assuming the beautiful PJ Hornbine wasn’t as loony as Daffy Duck.

Hopping onto the a-net, I quickly learned what constituted the Doc’s passions.

He had been a member of the Barbershop Harmony Society.

No way I could join that, since I could carry a tune about as well as Garfield.

The Doc had also belonged to the Toonerville Folks, a society dedicated to riding every municipal trolley line in North, Central and South America, a life-quest which few members actually managed to achieve, given the huge number of such lines. (The old joke about the kid who parlayed a single five-cent transfer for a ride from Halifax to Tierra del Fuego, arriving an old man, came readily to mind.)

But this karass mainly encouraged solitary activity, save for its annual national conventions. No good to me.

Pop Hornbine also collected antique Meccano sets.

Again, that wasn’t going to put me into social situations where I could pump people for dirt.

But at last I hit gold, like Flash discovering Earth-Two.

Harold Hornbine was also known as Balkpraetore, common footpad and strangler.

The Centropolis sept of the Children of Cimmeria called itself the Pigeons from Hell. That was Balkpraetore’s crowd. Every weekend they had a melee with other regional groups. These were the tight friends with whom Hornbine would have shared thoughts on what had been troubling him, even if he hadn’t ventured into full disclosure.

This group I could infiltrate. No reason I had to assume warrior guise. I could go as a bard or mage or tavern-keeper.

Today was Thursday. That gave me plenty of time to prepare.

So that sunny Saturday morning found me riding the Roger Lapin trolley line out to the Frank Reade Playing Fields, several hundred acres in the heart of Centropolis devoted to cosplay, recreations, re-enactments, live RPG and other pursuits of that nature. I was dressed like a priest who might have been Thulsa Doom’s wimpy mouse-worshipping cousin. I figured nobody would want to waste a sword-stroke on me. I didn’t stick out particularly amongst my fellow passengers, as half of them were attired in similar outfits. And besides, most were busy reading books or zines or pictonovels, or watching movies and cartoons on their pocket-solido sets.

After I boarded at the Dunsany Towers stop, a little nervous at carrying out this imposture, I dug out that issue of Global Heritage that I had been reading when PJ first showed up.

Once in the Oval Office, President Hearst quickly assembled an official cabinet—and a semi-secret cabal of assistants and advisors—who could help him carry out his radical disarmament and re-education program. The list leaned heavily towards scientists and reformers and what passed for media people in those days, deliberately excluding the tired old politicians. Hearst hired Havelock Ellis and Thomas Edison. Mrs. Frank Leslie and Nikola Tesla. Edward Stratemeyer and Margaret Sanger. Frank Munsey and Percival Lowell. Lee de Forest and even old rival Joseph Pulitzer.

(Cabinets during Hearst’s subsequent six terms as President would include a new generation of younger luminaries such as Buckminster Fuller, Huck Gernsback, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, Robert Goddard, B. F. Skinner, Thomas Merton, Vannevar Bush, David Ogilvy, Marshall McLuhan, Claude Shannon, Dorothy Day and A. A. Wyn. Service in the Hearst administration became a badge of honour, and produced a catalogue of America’s greatest names.)

These men and women set about dismantling the cultural foundations of belligerence, both domestic and international, substituting a philosophy of intellectual passions, encouraged by education and new laws.

And one of their prime weapons in this initially subliminal war was the same yellow journalism that had once fomented violence.

Specifically, the Funnypaper Boys.

Hearst wanted to reach the largest percentage of the population with his message of reform. But there was no radio then, no spy-rays or ansible-net or ether-vision or movies. Mass media as we know it today, in 1975, was rudimentary, save for zines and newspapers.

And most importantly, the newspaper comics.

The funny pages. Already immensely popular, comprehensible even by the nation’s many semi-literate citizens, able to deliver concealed subtextual messages behind entertaining facades.

Thus were born the Funnypaper Boys, artists who were really secret agents for Hearst’s program.

Outcault, Herriman, Dirks, McManus, McCay, King, Opper, Schultze, Fisher, Swinnerton, Kahle, Briggs, and a dozen others. They were motivated by Hearst’s grandiose humanistic dreams to create a Golden Age of activist art, full of humourous fantastical conceits.

No one could deny the power and influence of such other eventual Hearst allies as pulpzines and Hollywood. But the Funnypaper Boys were first, the Founding Fathers of a republic soon informally dubbed Geektopia. (“Geek” became the in-term for the fanatics who followed the Funnypaper Boys due to Winsor McCay’s association with carnival culture, where the word had a rather different meaning.) Their utopian artwork swept the nation—and the globe. American comics proved to be potent exports, with or without translation, and were adopted wholeheartedly by other cultures, carrying their reformist messages intact and sparking similar native movements.

(America’s oldest and staunchest ally, Britain, was the first to fully join the Hearst movement. The Fabians, Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Wells, Stapledon, Haldane, the many brilliant Huxleys, publisher Alfred Harmsworth, Edward Linley Sambourne and his fellow cartoonists at Punch— They soon had complete control of the reins of governmental power.)

Reprint books of newspaper strips began to appear in America. And then the original pictonovel was born. That’s when the tipping point was reached—

And my trolley had reached its destination as well, as the conductor announced over clanging bell.

I left my GH magazine behind on the seat and climbed down the stairs to join the costumed crowds surging into the Frank Reade Playing Fields.

Past fragrant food carts and knickknack booths and bookstalls, costume-repair tents and armouries, taverns and daycare corrals, I strolled, heading toward the fields assigned to the Children of Cimmeria. (My Mom’s business had a hand in running all this, of course.)

I decided to take a shortcut down a dusty path that angled across the vast acreage, and there I encountered a startling sight.

In a tiny lot mostly concealed by a tall untrimmed privet hedge, a few people were playing what I think was a game once called “football.” They wore shabby looking leather helmets and padding, obviously homemade. The object of their contention was a lopsided, ill-stuffed pigskin.

I chanced upon the game when it was temporarily suspended, and I spoke to one of the players.

“Are you guys seriously into this antique ‘sports’ stuff?”

The player made a typically Geekish noise indicative of derisive exasperation. “Of course not! This is a simulation of sports, not real sports! Frank Merriwell stuff. We’re just trying to recreate a vanished era like everyone else. But it gets harder and harder to find re-enactors. This sports stuff never really made much sense to begin with, even when it wasn’t dead media.”

I left the football players behind and soon arrived at the dusty turf allotted to the Conan recreators. I registered with the gamemasters and quickly inserted myself into the action.

For the next several hours I ministered in my priestly role to the dead and dying on the mock battlefield, liberally bestowing prayers and invocations I had learned off the a-net on their hauberked torsos and helmeted heads. For a big he-man guy, Conan’s creator Thomas Wolfe sure had a way with the frilly, jaw-wrenching poetry.

It was hot and sweaty work, and I was grateful at last to hit the nearby grog tent for some shade and mead. While listening to a gal in a chainmail bikini sing some geeksongs about the joint adventures of Birdalone and the Grey Mouser, I spotted the Pigeons from Hell crowd, recognizable from their a-net profiles. One of them was Ted Harmon, an anesthesiologist compatriot of Hornbine. As he wasn’t engaged in conversation, I went up to him.

“Hey, Ted—I mean, Volacante. Neat ruckus. I saw you get in some wicked sword thrusts.”

Ted looked at me for a moment as if to say, Do I know you? But his weariness and the mead and my compliments and the congenial setting disarmed any suspicions.

“Thanks. Been practicing a lot.”

“I just wish old Balkpraetore could’ve been here to see your display of talent. Shame about his death.”

We clinked flagons in honour of Dr. Hornbine. Then Ted said, “Yeah, a damn shame. You know, when I first heard about him kicking it, I thought—”

“Thought what?”

“Oh, nothing…”

“C’mon, now you got me curious.”

Ted leaned in closer. “Well, he was just so nervous the last time I saw him. Something was obviously bothering him. It was almost as if he expected something bad to happen to him.”

“Oh, he was always like that.”

“Are you serious? You never saw Balkpraetore without a grin and a joke. It was only after he had that visit at the hospital—”

“Visit?”

“Yeah, from a drug rep. Guy named, uh, Greenstock. From MetamorPharma. I remember the rep’s name because it reminded me of the Green Man. The Green Man’s always been a minor passion of mine. You see, it all started with a Henry Treece novel when I was twelve—”

I cut Ted off in a practiced Geek manner. I couldn’t indulge him in a passion-rant now. “Queue it up. Back to Greenstock. What do you think he proposed? Something shady?”

“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 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.

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 vast, 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.

Zarthar composed himself with aplomb, smoothing his robes. His next words did not immediately address PJ’s accusation.

“My friends, have you ever considered the problems our world still faces? To the average citizen, it seems we occupy a utopia. And granted, two-thirds of the world—the portion under GDM—deserves that designation. But that still leaves millions of people living in pre-geek darkness. And these seething populations are actively anti-GDM, seeking constantly for ways to undermine and topple what we’ve created. They are ruthless and violent and cunning. All we have to oppose them is our brains and special geek insights.

“I realize that you’ve learned about my plan to create a new generation of ultra-geeks, especially talented individuals who could develop new strategies, new ways of looking at the world that would extend the GDM way of life to those benighted portions of the planet. If you just stop a moment and reflect, you’ll see that this program is a dire necessity, not anything I do out of personal aggrandizement.”

“But why the secrecy?” I said. “Surely you’d find plenty of parents willing to enroll their kids in such a program.”

“KannerMax is still highly experimental. We can’t predict whether those who undergo the treatment will emerge as geniuses or idiots. Results point to the first outcome, with a large percentage of certainty, but still…. If parents were to enroll their young children who can’t decide for themselves, and the lives of these children were ruined, the parents would recriminate themselves endlessly. Better for one man to shoulder that responsibility, I thought.”

PJ and I contemplated this for a while. Zarthar seemed sincere, and his dreams had merit. But there remained one obstacle to our endorsement of his plan.

“Dr. Hornbine—” I began.

“—committed suicide. A self-administered dose of potassium chloride stopped his heart. You can see him inject it here.”

Zarthar activated a monitor, and an obvious spy-ray recording, time-and-date-stamped with the GDM logo, showed Dr. Hornbine alone in his office. He tied off his arm with surgical tubing to raise a vein, picked up a hypodermic—

“No, stop it!” PJ yelled.

Zarthar flicked off the recording. PJ sobbed loudly for a time, and when she had finished, Zarthar spoke.

“After contacting me, your father was so despondent that KannerMax would not work on adults—that he himself would be deprived of its benefits—that he chose not to live in a world where he would soon be Darwinically superseded. And this is another reason for secrecy. So as not to instill a similar mass despondency in the population. Let everyone think that these bright new stars are random mutations. It’s more merciful that way.”

I had come here ready to bring Zarthar down in the media with a public shaming. But now I found myself ready to enlist in his cause. I looked to PJ, who raised her red-rimmed eyes to mine, and saw that she felt the same.

And then I knew that our children would rule the sevagram.