Market The Jaguar

haman

Isaac had credits to spare and he wasn’t planning to slow his roll. His consciousness still felt pressed from beneath, as though the ten-thousand neurons that hold the tiny computations of decision-making mutinied: refusing to discard their data even though a P3a consciousness wave had already been sent to the frontal lobe and their data was no longer needed. But that consciousness wave had been long forgotten, smoothed over in dreams, unwritten to the memory. But how could the ten-thousand input neurons know their afferent wave had been ignored? How was it possible for them to insist on their contradictory pressing-upwards?

Isaac was only aware of his intuition pulling him towards the vac market he and Roman had visited briefly for Roman to pick up a snack while he waited in the car for what seemed like an eternity. Roman had refused to let him try anything from the vac market, even while he himself casually munched from the bag of toasted corn and beans, his face slightly flushed as he pulled away from the market. “Your gut bacteria can’t handle it. Too much time in the thickspace,” he’d said, his mouth full. Apparently, this was the Shaman’s Market, where El Jaguar plied his trade.

This time, Isaac was headed there alone, just an hour away, far outside the thickspace. As he drove, the mindscreen’s influence faded to dull pull. A holiday.

He pulled off the highway, wending his way through the potholes that pocked the old country road. Cardboard shacks pressed along the border between cement and abandoned farmland, with laundry strung out on lines to dry and cookfires burning. Women with bags of toasted corn and fried soybean stood by the line of slow-moving cars, “Setenta y cinco! Una soya! Tostados!,” they called to him as he crawled by.

These vacs were the ones that had been lured in waves by the lúcidos projected into the Central American countries. They hoped to find a better life, a cure for all the ailments of the everyday. And yet here they were, stuffed into makeshift immigrant camps while they waited to get their chips so they could be operated, scrounging dreamcreds from the gray market or from odd-jobs they worked for operated vacs. But the market attracted all types, from the chipped to the chipless.

He looked out on the encampment. The bright light shone on the dirty faces of the children, the dust-stained fabrics, and the dull aluminum pots of food. A naked child with beautiful brown eyes ran through the dirt, and just as his sister was about to catch him, he fell.

But there were no cords and the space was thin out here. How differently those children would grow up, out here in this green-tinted light. None of them had the mindscreen yet. And would they ever contract for it? Would they ever be operated, or would they just live at the fringes?

Hah. His vision returned to a woman with haggard eyes, squatting with heavy inertia. No collective intelligence, his teachers told him. Mindless. Competitive and poor. And to tell the truth, the freedom from the Mind looked kind of unsanitary and dangerous, he thought, eying the aluminum pots warming in the sun.

His little car bumped over the grass, moving slowly in the line of traffic. Part of a large field was cordoned off. A picto label floated, a car parking, repeating the motion endlessly. He could see the field beyond, patchworked with tarps and tents, grass and dirt. People moved among the tents, gesturing and looking.

A skinny man with a sun-faded purple baseball cap, and a droopy mustache motioned for him to pull in. The skinny man directed him toward a spot next to a dusty green pickup with a homemade wooden bed-cover. He stood in front of Isaac’s car and beckoned him to pull forward, forward, stop!

Isaac shut off the car, opened the door, and stepped out. “Cincuenta centavos, todo el dia,” the man said. His faded red t-shirt had letters on it. It was always strange to see real cloth.

“Accepta dreamcreds, señor?” Isaac looked up at him out his window. Would he accept dreamcreds? Most of the market operated in cash.

The man’s face crinkled as he prepared to deliver news he clearly didn’t relish to a young man who was either an operator or a fallen operator, marked by his white skin and his bad accent, “No, mi señor, lo siento. Es de solamente puedo hacerlo en efectivo.”

Isaac had expected as much. “Hay un cambiador aquí? Lo siento, no tengo efectivo ahora. Pero puedo regresar. Esta bien?” The parking attendant wanted cash, but he only had dreamcreds until he could find a money-changer.

The man nodded, “Si, esta bien. El cambiador esta pa’lla,” He gestured vaguely toward the the corner of the market closest to them, where Isaac could find a money-changer.

“Yo regres0,” said Isaac, promising to return as he headed off to change his dreamcreds.

As Isaac walked toward the back of the market stall tents he noticed a woman lying in the sun. She had long, black hair pulled into a messy pony tail, and her mouth was partly open, revealing slightly crooked, white teeth. She couldn’t have been older than 30. She wore a dirty white shirt with a small black tie, not a full tie, but a velvet string knotted in a bow, and a red poncho wrapped around her shoulders, despite the heat. Dirt caked her cracking toenails. She must be an indigenous woman, thought Isaac. Or at least, she was indigenous to Central America, once.

Now she was just another migrant pulled toward the overmind like a moth drawn toward a glass bulb, continually rebounding with a dry click, never consumed. How depressing that she was asleep here in the middle of the day, probably lost in some terribly thin lucid. The space scarcely even reached out here. Compassion flashed through him. But what could he do? He stepped over her outstretched foot and continued on.

The market buzzed as he rounded the corner into the first row of stalls, words in Spanish and English glittering like thousands of mirrors reflected into the eye, a single wave of incomprehensible light.

The cambiador was in the first stall, leaned against the edge of a folding table, his skinny arms crossed, a folded sheaf of bills in one hand a mindscanner in the other. His yellowish teeth shone through a triangular smile atop his pointed chin. His eyes never rested, sliding off the surfaces of things with inveterate distrust.

Isaac was nervous as he approached. Roman had taught him about money, but he still wasn’t terribly comfortable with it.

“Setenta y cinco mil dolares por un dreamcred. ¿Quanto quieres?”

That wasn’t a great exchange exchange rate, but it was fine. He’d exchange sixty, hopefully enough to pay for the information he needed from the Jaguar. He plugged the calculation into the mindscreen’s calculator. Forty million, five-hundred thousand dollars should be enough. About a tank of natural gas.

“Um, me gustaría cambiar sesenta dreamcreds,” he said.

The cambiador typed on his primitive button interface, calculating. “Bueno. Accepte el link,”

The request for the withdrawal popped onto his mindscreen, and he swiped at it with his mindhand, sending the payment. The cambiador watched his hand-held screen with a blank look until the moment he received the payment, when his hands sprang to life, slithering rapidly as bills flashed green.

He looked up, briefly catching Isaac’s eyes before looking to the right. “Venty millión. Cuentelo.” He handed the stack of bills to Isaac.

His sinuous hands rippled through the second stack of bills and waited with reptilian patience while Isaac laboriously laid out bill after bill, counting them and piling them up. Exhuasting Isaac looked up and nodded, and the cambiador handed him the second stack, taking the first back to recount. “Venty millión cinientos mil,” he said.

The cambiador counted the stack low, near his money belt. A man came up behind Isaac, “¿Ya acabaste? Tengo prisa.”

“Espera,” said Isaac, motioning with his hands for the other man to wait without looking back.

What a douche! Why was he in such a hurry? He lost track of his count and had to start over. The cambiador waited, while the man sighed, and cut in front of him. Isaac finished counting and nodded at the cambiador, who handed him the second stack while beginning a conversation with the short man, whose pink-shot eyes bulged from a pocky face.

On the way back from paying for parking, he nearly passed the sleeping girl a third time. But instead he stopped, pulled a dollar from his pocket, and placed it in her palm, folding her hand over it. She clutched it into a wad, pulling it to her chest, but then settled back to her thinspace lucid.

He glanced up and saw the cambiador meercatting over his pink-eyed friend’s shoulder to eye the sleeper’s closed fist with a rodent-like hunger. Isaac felt a rage flash up in him like the sudden eruption of a volcano. What kind of intelligence was it that organized the world this way?

He felt a conditioned flush of shame at questioning the Mind, as if he were in the thickspace and his thoughts were being scrutinized.

But when he realized his personal mind was sunk into pavlovian slavery to a Mind that wasn’t even watching, he felt a secondary flush of shame. The end result was just shame, deeper than if the Mind had triggered it. Which led to frustration that burned like an oily wick for the rage that heated his stomach.

But he mastered himself with reason, and breathed deeply to calm down, walking past the cambiador and putting him out of his mind. He was looking for the shaman. Hints had peppered his queries: shamans were the guides through ecstasy to liberation. Or at least guides to another place. On a rational level, Isaac didn’t believe in liberation, only different realities with different rules. But his male adolescent body believed in the liberations of explosions and triumph. Which is why he was here.

Pastor Dan couldn’t help him. Pastors are for ordinary times. Pastors are for fitting into the world and carrying on. That’s what Dan was, a pastor of the ordinary. An industrial pastor who pastored himself out of existence: he fit too neatly into a world that had no use for him. Shamans and prophets are guides to the dreamspace. And when there is a mismatch, they are the arsonists.

So where were the prophets of Dan’s faith? Maybe they lost their way in the twisted roads of suburbia and settled in some cul-de-sac, breathing the thicknet like the forgetting fog of marijuana, religion turned into just another high. Ecstasy can blind or quicken, that much Isaac knew from the neuroscience that fascinated him. And the Mind had ecstasy for anyone that wanted it.

And so he was going to find a shaman. El Jaguar. The night animal that stalked the edge of the diminishing jungle, never seen, the ghost of a disappearing world.

The stalls flashed with color and the din of unfamiliar smells. He was hungry and thirsty. But first, the Jaguar.

A man in a used appliance store beckoned him, “Liquadoras, microondas. ¡Amigo, te hago un buen precio!” The glass blender pitcher was frosted sepia by time, and a white microwave bore the scars of many culinary battles, the unpainted metal shining through knicks and dings. The Mind didn’t fix anything, it only made new things. Better for the GDP, and the operated couldn’t perform novel tasks like repairs.

The CDs in the music shop cut a battered rainbow. Whoah. People still listened to those? A ten-year-old boy seemed to be in charge of this stall, “Musica! Musica! Ven y escuchar!” How did they even play them?

The market was like a live thing, humming and buzzing with the noise of salesmanship and haggling. Where would he find someone who knew where he could find the Jaguar?

Clothes hung out for sale, used, but in good condition. “Come, come, fit you good!” A round old woman in a black hat and a gray poncho beckoned him. He approached her.

“El Jaguar?” he asked. Her smile faded and she motioned with her head further down the aisle, perhaps a row or two over.

“Thank you!” he called to her, but she was looking away.

He moved toward a stalls that held religious icons. The mood in this part of the market was darker. A rail-thing old woman in a mantilla sat still as a statue, perched on a stool above a table set green spiky fruits and tomatoes. Her eyes followed him without moving. Isaac glanced down and quickened his pace, passing several stalls.

When he looked up, he was directly in front of a dark stall. Inside, a woman stood heavy on her feet, her eyebrows cutting across her forehead, gesturing inwards to her nose with the ferocious intensity of a scarab. Her eyes were smoky and liquid, windows to the dark substrate of spirit and matter. Saint-candles glowed out of the darkness of her stall like screens stuck on a single image, their garish death-wounds raw and red, lugubrious eyes cast heavenward. Unlabeled herbs strung drying across the entrance: tiny flowers, leaves the size of a baby’s head, and twiggy stalks. Would she know where El Jaguar was?

“Señora desculpe. ¿Usted sabe donde esta El Jaguar?”

“El Jaguar? You want to find the Jaguar?” Her accent was thick. She seemed to absorb him slowly with her eyes. Isaac felt a small twinge of fear. Would she be able to sense his weakness before the Mind? Her expression was unreadable.

“Yes, do you know where he might be found?” he said. In that, at least, he wasn’t ashamed.

She nodded and looked at him again with a kind of questioning intensity, “Blood flows in one direction. Even skipping hearts bleed out. The done cannot be undone.”

For a moment it was as though her stall had dropped away and he was gazing into a great darkness, his life clustered behind him like a farewell party that pressed him forward with smothering affections. With difficulty, he took a step back into them, away from the cliff. He stood confused by her words, by the strange suddenness of his vision.

Who was this woman? Was she a part of the Mindnet? Isaac looked back up to see her smiling slightly. Was she a psychic?

Nope, he said to himself, ending the matter with curt reasoning. Doesn’t matter. In fact, she was right: the Overmind inside him was already bleeding. He looked her straight in the eye, “Señora, do you know where I can find The Jaguar?” he asked for a third time.

“Par’ alla,” she said, nodding toward a cluster of white picnic tables in the shade of a solitary tree. A man in a massive brown-and-white striped alpaca poncho leaned far back in front of an empty styrofoam plate drinking a beer, his legs crossed in front of him, smoking. When Isaac looked over at him he waved.

“Amigo!” he called, beckoning.

Not really the Jaguar Isaac was expecting. He looked to the psychic-woman questioningly and she nodded with a slight shrug.

As Isaac approached, he noticed that the Jaguar was tall, probably six foot six. A scar split his eyebrow in two and continued past his eye to a pink worm on the side of his broad, flat nose.

The Jaguar smiled, “Sit down, my friend. Have a beer. You want a beer? I can get you a beer,” said the Jaguar.

“Uh, sure.” He’d never had a beer before so he watched the Pictopedia entry quickly.

The Jaguar leaned around and called behind him, “Niña, dos mas, por favor.” A woman with slumped shoulders and a grease-stained apron over a red dress rummaged in a cooler, popped the caps off of two beers, and set them listlessly on the counter in front of her. The Jaguar got up with surprising grace, his large body blotting out the beers and the woman like a furred mountain. There was a long moment.

“Muchas gracias, amiga,” said the Jaguar, nodding at the woman in the apron. She scowled at him and then looked over at Isaac a second longer than normal, before breaking off and turning back to her shelves of food to rummage around.

“So.” The Jaguar looked at Isaac with an arched eyebrow. “What can I do for you?”

Isaac took a sip of his beer and grimaced. It tasted terrible.There was a faintly herbal edge beneath the fermented grains. Hops, maybe? He took another gulp.

“I hear you know another path through dreams.” It seemed like the right thing to say, like a western picto.

“Of course.” The Jaguar shrugged slightly with his mouth, dismissing the trivial. “All dreamers find their own path.”

“No, but like liberation from the Mind.” Isaac held his beer awkward and cold against his thigh.

The Jaguar took a long drag from a Marlboro cigarette and smiled as the smoke dribbled from his mouth, climbing his craggy face like a slow, ghostly spider. “You want that?”

Did he want that? Did he have the will to become something other than a lúcido? Would he lose his family if he lost the Mind?

“Maybe. I think I would have to know more about what happens.”

“Want a brochure?” The Jaguar laughed uproariously as though a brochure for falling from the Mind was totally hilarious. He took a swig of beer and gestured at Isaac’s, “Drink, my friend.”

So, this was to be some sort of puzzle. Isaac took a long pull of beer. It still tasted awful, but there was a pleasant buzzing in his skull which made him think that it wasn’t so bad. Danger ran hot beneath the surface. If he slipped off… he had to stay alert. But he knew from Pictopedia that one beer couldn’t really cloud his wits.

“Alright, so how do you do it?” Isaac asked.

“the Mind takes true dreams and gives you its own. You must learn to dream your true dreams again.”

“Right.” Isaac rolled his eyes. “Just start dreaming true dreams. But what if your dreams have always been the Mind’s dreams? What if you can’t even find what’s you and what’s it?”

“Yes!” The Jaguar pounded his fist on the table. The plastic thudded listlessly. “Yes. You have to purge the false dreams from you like bad food. Drink, my friend!”

“Right. So how do you do that?” Isaac took another pull. This man was something short of a full deck.

“You have to lose everything. Then, you pick up the pieces and see what’s left.”

“Hmm. Right. So I need something practical. Something real,” said Isaac.

The cigarette smoldered in the Jaguar’s relaxed hand. “Drink, my friend,” said the Jaguar softly his voice sunk to a purr.

Isaac looked at his beer. All that remained was two fingers. He looked back up at the Jaguar. His spine tingled. And then the world around him started spinning off its orbit.

The last thing he remembered was looking up at the Jaguar as his face distended and morphed like the superimposition of mindscreen data over the real. Funny, thought Isaac. More like a coyote than a jaguar.