Codename Prague by D. Harlan Wilson

Bill,” yawned Prague. Still, the taunt worked. Prague despised the Butcher’s arrogance, even if it was coded into its system. This codedness, in fact, reinforced his enmity. He had dished out Hard Goodbyes to more than ten Bill the Butcher androids in the past few years. Didn’t matter how effektively. The moment its clockwork stopped ticking, a flatline signal transmitted to one of the MAP’s many Culture Factories and a new Butcher was taken off a warehouse shelf like a toy in a department store.
    Prague let the android get real close. He even let it give him a whack in the chops with its acidic mitts.
    He grinned like a lizard as ham juice singed his cheek and mixed with martini blood. “It burns,” he said…and executed one of his many token moves, the Horrorshow Splirt, a simple but devastating sleight of hand in which a Jungian psychogenetic implant allowed him to harness all of the repressed desire in his unconscious and unleash it in one mystical act of hatchetry. Contingent upon the success of the move were the retractable vibroblades implanted into the blades of his hands…
    The problem with the Splirt was the imperiling fatigue that followed its execution. But Prague figured he had wounded the other Scorsese Boys sufficiently. By the time they rallied—if they rallied at all—he would be up and running again.
    Reality slipped into slowtime as Prague sprung into the air, clapped his hands together, and swung down with all his strength…
    The Butcher came apart like a chopped log, flying into two symmetrical halves that each exploded with purple gore. The filmmakers shouted in triumph as they devoured the imagery.
    Prague collapsed.
    And the DeVito and Santoro sprang to attention. Despite grave wounds, they weren’t as moribund as they had let on, whereas the Cady had bled out. They bickered with each other in affected, high-pitched voices as they flipped Prague onto his stomach, hogtied him by the wrists and ankles, and dumped him into the trunk of a postvorticist Lincoln Town Car.
    In the stale darkness, Prague passed out and dreamt of a twelve-foot green monster with one brown shoe who he conjured into existence by sheer imaginative will and dexterity. At first their relationship was guarded, unsteady, and in some cases volatile. Things changed over time, and the monster evolved into an avuncular figure, teaching Prague how to do his taxes, ice fish, make beer from scratch, treat women properly, write coherent argumentative essays…One day Prague couldn’t find the green monster. He searched everywhere and finally discovered it in a forest of Bonsai trees. The monster looked up at him sadly from inside the heel of its shoe. “I shrunk!” it exclaimed. “Why did you forget about me, Marshall?”
    “Marshall?” said Prague, and was assaulted by a disorderly militia of men with goat heads…
    Prague snorted awake as the trunk opened and the two Pesci simulacra stabbed him repeatedly with anxiety ionizers packing enough umph to mellow out a hyperactive elephant. He slipped back into dreamland…and woke up to a stainless steel rat licking his face with a dry synthetic tongue. He grabbed the rat and squeezed it until it burst in an electric plume of tinsel and clock springs.
    He touched the cheek that the Bill the Butcher had punched. No scar. It had been fixed.
    He had been fixed.

05
    Cirque de Socius
     
    Question Mark Circus was Dr Teufelsdröckh’s cirque de preference . Unlike the hundreds of other circuses that popped their tents within the borders of the city, he felt a sense of camaraderie here. He wasn’t quite sure why—the other circuses were more or less the same jamboree with the exception of a few added scikungfi extravaganzas. Something about the place just felt like home. And the circus was a far better alternative than church or a discotheque.
    Dr Teufelsdröckh purchased a small bag of caramel corn and a Shasta from an organ grinder’s Grape Ape, then hunted for a seat. He