
glassdimly.com/shaman
He fell into blackness, and then still further and deeper, into a pair of eyebrows that became a host of beetles, the gnashing of their pincers roaring like a dry rain all around him, swarming inside his mouth and nose, rustling against his naked eye. He felt the teeming mass press against his back in a thousand places, bearing him up, until he was floating on a river of beetles. He struggled, crying out, but the beetles were implacable, uncrushable.
He burst upwards with a start, with a buzzing hunger around his mindscreen. Dull, angry shapes, black and red, danced around the flame in his mindscreen. He leapt to his feet in panic. His bare forearm was pale and bright and the contrast made his heart leap. The dark shapes began to churn and coalesce nauseatingly.
“Stop!” He shouted. A keen rage lit him like hot bourbon, sweeping up the fire in his mindscreen and the dull red and black dancers with it. The Mind was calling him back. How long had he been away now?
The sudden movement stirred a throbbing deep in his head, and he felt terribly nauseous. He emptied his stomach into the overgrown cement with great heaves that shook his whole body.
Isaac slumped downwards, his hands on his knees, breathing heavily. The fire in the mindscreen had subsided to a dull ache. The pulsing pain was still there, but the nausea was much better.
What had the Jaguar put in his beer? And where was he? Around him was velvet darkness, and up above a pregnant moon. The air was summer-heavy, and the stars were dim against the city’s haze. He was in a small clearing, and he could see the ruins of a house nearby. Where was his car?
He felt in his pockets for his keys. They were gone. He checked his dreamcreds. The quantity bar was empty. The only thing remaining to him was his parent’s book, worthless to a thief.
Dread started as a heaviness in his intestines and moved up to grip his heart. How could he have been so stupid? Freedom from the Mind? He might as well have asked to be robbed.
He paced back and forth, thinking about punching the Jaguar in his false smile. But that would be stupid, and frustrating to even think about. He took a deep breath and started to take stock of the situation and sat for a little while.
He could feel that he was in the thinspace from the limited functionality, but his mapping worked. He was about ten minutes drive from the market. Nothing was marked nearby except for the road. He could see that he had at least ten unseen messages from his parents, but he didn’t open them. They would kill him if they knew what had happened. They would probably never let him drive again, even if he did manage to save up the dreamcreds. So calling the parents was out. At least until he had a plan for talking with them.
He looked down at the ground. The driveway was being slowly digested by the earth. He’d been lying on the eroded pieces of driveway: the hard little beetles from his dream.
He smiled slightly, in spite of everything. Natural dreams were funny. He followed the driveway with his eyes to a house crumbling with age. The porch sagged in splinters, and the white paint was peeling to expose the gray decaying wood beneath. The windows gaped sleepily. The treeline all around was as dark as his pain-flecked consciousness. He shuddered.
Since his dreamcreds were empty and he wasn’t going to call anybody, the only thing he could think to do was to head out to the road and hitch a ride. People used to hitchhike all the time. People nowadays were just too afraid of all the lúcidos. But mostly they were clustered along the thickways for the connectivity. He turned to walk along the attritted driveway, his footfalls crunching softly.
He pushed through the weeds at the entrance to the little cove he’d been dumped into, and onto the dark highway, abandoned except for unofficial vac traffic. But no cars could be seen along the ancient and crumbling highway.
He heard a soft “pat” like the message received notification, and he reflexively checked his inbox. No new message. Then the noise came again, to his left, startling him. Then it came all around. Oh no. That wasn’t a notification. The rain was coming.
A semi’s jake-breaking shattered the soft noise of oncoming rain like shots. The headlights grew with the noise, and he stuck out his thumb. The brightness was overwhelming, until the truck shot past him with a roar, leaving him in brights-blindness. He kept his arm out like a prayer until long after the truck’s noise faded. He let it fall as the rain ceased to be drops, becoming a single wave of sound that thoroughly drenched him.