Free Codename Prague by D. Harlan Wilson Page A

froze. Dr Teufelsdröckh tentatively approached it.
    He touched its shoulder. He tugged on its genitals. He ran a finger over the flesh of its abdomen. Finally he stabbed it in the navel with a turkey baster and squeezed the bulb…
    The monster simmered, boiled…inflated. Its body erupted with muscle and its skin contracted against the muscle as if pulled taught by a drawstring. The final product was a hyperreal caricature of an anabolically enhanced human body that bore resemblance to an animatronic cartoon.
    “I stand corrected,” said Truth, itching his thighs, his knees. “This outfit is an atrocity.”
    “Wear it!” shouted Dr Teufelsdröckh.
    “Why are women who have miscarriages always whisked away?” wondered Beauty. “They’re never rolled away, or carried away, or wheelbarrowed away. They’re always whisked .”
    Truth snarled, “That doesn’t have anything to do with anything. Wake up.”
    “I’m awake.” He thought about the assertion. “I’m pretty sure I’m awake. I can’t be certain. This may be the nightmare of reality.”
    Truth attacked him.
    Dr Teufelsdröckh stroked the monster’s mustache. “Keats stands to profit by this manner of vivisection. Rumor was he had difficulty growing facial hair. Wordsworth wrote a long poem about it that was originally intended to be part of his Prelude , but Coleridge allegedly ate the manuscript one night in a doped up frenzy. This was when Wordsworth was living with his sister Dorothy at Dove Cottage in the Lake District. On the night in question, Dorothy tried to kick the author of ‘Kubla Khan’ out, but he rebuffed her, and he flew into a rage, and in addition to trashing the cottage and eating ‘Book XV: The Unbearded Nancy Boy,’ as it was called, he bit the head off of the Wordsworth’s canary and set fire to the dining room. Coleridge was a madman. But Wordsworth endured him. The point is, Keats couldn’t grow so much as a sideburn, and everybody made fun of him for it. Now look at him.” He stroked the mustache with increasing excitement. The monster frowned. Behind them, Truth and Beauty crashed and rolled through the carnage. “On another note, where would aesthetics be today in the absence of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi holocaust? Think of all the art that has been produced as a direct corollary to World War II-related hatemongering. Cinema, literature, music. Digigraffiti. Architecture. Countless artifacts of text and image. I believe the root cause of World War II was not German Aryanism but an entropic deprivation of the artistic spirit in the human condition on a global scale. There can be no art in the absence of evil deeds, after all. An artist can’t subsist on smiles and handshakes. The Giant Ogre of Cruelty and Violence must bear its screaming asshole to the world in order for an artist to sufficiently realize his talents. World War II was simply an instance of humanity giving itself a venue for future creative expression during a period of dangerous imaginative stasis.” The monster sneezed. Dr Teufelsdröckh began to stroke his own overlip. His assistants’ horseplay continued without remittance. “That reminds me,” he continued, “I still need to download and print out a thimble of daikaiju DNA. Where’s the computer? Where’s the prototyper? Look at this godforsaken zoo…”

08
    Houses of If
     
    It was a simulacrum of Edmond Dantès’ cell in the island prison Château d’If in Alexandre Dumas’ French adventure novel The Count of Monte Cristo . Prague knew because of the inscription on the stone wall. Which read: THIS IS A SIMULACRUM OF EDMOND DANTÈS’ CELL IN THE ISLAND PRISON CHÂTEAU D’IF IN ALEXANDRE DUMAS’ FRENCH ADVENTURE NOVEL THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO .
    He ran a fingertip over the words. “If…”
    The first year was the hardest. It took a long time to relegate the pangs of hunger, physically and psychologically; he had always possessed a vicious appetite and a speedy metabolism to keep