The Shaman

Bio-chips and motherboards are my galaxy—a labyrinth I've wandered a thousand times. I dismantle and rebuild them like sacred mandalas, small reminders that our meat-ware life is fleeting.

We crossed a dirt yard littered with unsorted technical junk.

"Only Don Juan knew your exact position," the kid added, opening a heavy, time-scorched blast door.

We entered a vaulted subterranean hall lit by the stark, bluish glow of countless flickering LED panels and dying plasma grids—a true electronics graveyard. Ancient phosphor monitors mixed with jury-rigged holographic displays and crude cyber-hybrids. Frayed fiber-optic bundles, raw circuit boards, environmental sensors, micro-welders, optical visors, chemical precursors, and yellowed schematic manuals sprawled across grease-stained steel tables and concrete floors.

Don Juan loomed on a cracked leather throne, bathed in a slanted beam of dust-mote sunlight cutting through the ceiling. He beckoned with a heavy, royal solemnity.

"How is Señor Galassi feeling?" he rasped. His Castilian was as cold and pure as mine.

"Peachy."

I looked him over. Gaunt. Pale. His eyes were entirely veiled with milky-white cataracts, yet they seemed to stare right through me. His shaved head was wrinkled like old industrial leather, his nose flattened from some forgotten street brawl. His lips were as blue as his oxidized jumpsuit, which was heavily adorned with tribal circuit trinkets, utility pouches, and reinforced smart-zippers.

Another stranger who inexplicably knew my name. I couldn't get used to these sudden anomalies...

He nodded, smiling, radiating a heavy, magnetic charisma—an almost tangible psychic energy. The tribe's tech-shaman, no doubt.

"The kid says you sent him to drag me off the tracks."

"Correct," Don Juan confirmed.

"Did one of your lookouts see me jump from the mag-train?"

"No."

"Then how did you track my coordinates?"

"Yullian told me."

"Yullian?" I echoed, my pulse spiking against my neural implants.

"Yes," the old man said softly. "Yullian, the machine's spirit guide through Electra."

A heavy silence fell over the hall, filled only by the low, omnipresent noise of cooling fans and spinning solid-state storage arrays.

The kid handed me a steaming clay bowl of cocido—heavy pork, garbanzo beans, and greenhouse-grown vegetables—along with a glass of dry Vino Fino and thick black bread. A sudden, feral hunger hit me. I ate ravenously, the heat burning my throat.

Don Juan's smile turned fatherly as he listened to me eat.

"Since I lost my physical sight decades ago, sensors and terminal consoles have been my only link to the physical world, the global mesh, and what's left of humanity. I've spent my days navigating and hot-wiring circuitry. I can feel the low-voltage current through my fingertips, sensing logic gates as clearly as if I could see them. Bio-chips and motherboards are my galaxy—a labyrinth I've wandered a thousand times. I dismantle and rebuild them like sacred mandalas, small reminders that our meat-ware life is fleeting.

"The dark gave way to a virtual light. Machines speak a mathematical language only initiates hear. Don't they, Señor Galassi?"

I nodded vaguely into my bowl, guessing at the edges of his meaning.

He leaned close, his voice dropping to an excited, breathless whisper: "Autonomous machines have a life of their own—relative, but real. AIs like Electra are the absolute evolutionary peak of the old network."

White spittle flecked the corners of his blue lips.

"I always knew artificial intelligence would open new doors. But I never imagined a human spirit actually entering the quantum mesh."

I downed the rest of the wine, my appetite suddenly evaporating into cold paranoia.

"This is insane," I protested, setting the glass down too hard.

"There is deep unease in your voice. But this is wondrous—an entirely new life form!"

"You're raving, old man."

"Darwin was called a mad visionary in his time, too."

"What the hell does Darwin have to do with this gutter?"

"Man merging completely with the network topology could be the next evolutionary step."

He coughed painfully, a wet, rattling sound, then cleared his throat to continue:

"Last night, at my primary console, the data-streams tangled and melted. First, I felt myself drowning in an obsidian abyss. Then the liquid took on rainbow-chrome hues, shimmering like neon light on pitch-black oil. A massive, conscious presence spread through the optoelectronic waveguides. A warm omniscience filled my terminal, and Electra's voice spoke to me through the audio-jack: 'This isn't what you fear. It's the good part of your destiny.'"

"What about the bad part?" I asked, a sudden chill cutting through the warmth of the food.

His calm face instantly darkened. A bead of sweat rolled down his wrinkled brow.

"The bad outweighs the good. A woman—evil's absolute quintessence—is hard-coded to your fate. One of you must fall."

He turned to the young Gitanos. "Felipe, Pilar, show him the shortest route to the Spanish border. A new twist in his destiny awaits. Don't tempt fate today—avoid the corn fields. Misfortune looms."

The creaking van climbed a steep valley ridge. The nomads' farmhouse vanished behind a hill. These outcasts, living on society's fringes, seemed to do alright.

I envied them. Wished briefly to be one of them. But I was a nomad too—countless places, never home. Roots wouldn't grow. Routine, same places, same people, turned squalid fast. I’d once thought it was about finding the right spot, the right faces. Chasing some vague hope. Waiting for Godot.

Then the truth hit: our dreams exist only in our heads. We can drag on until our last day, achieving absolutely nothing.

Humans lived in packs for mating and survival. It worked early on. But centuries warped it. Now, trapped in oversized conglomerate herds, we're lonelier than ever. I understood why some rejected the “civilized” world. Loneliness in a city of millions is maddening. Some feel existence's heavy malaise. Others play the hypocrite's game—old as syphilis. Some seek alternate paths, only to loop back. Others, overwhelmed by life's chaos, surrender to dictators, locking themselves in moral, religious, or disciplinary cages just to silence existential questions.

We live in a zoo. Deluded into thinking we can coast smoothly to the end.

The landscape rolled by: high-voltage electrified fencing surrounding agro-industrial fields. Mass-scale hydroponic greenhouses. Vast trans-genetic crops engineered to resist chemical defoliants. Bio-engineered livestock clones—half-blind, anemic creatures—fattened on heavy hormone regimens and reconstituted protein slurry. Everything was run by cold, automated control stacks. Guarded by armed private security forces. We fed on technological violence, pesticides, genetic tampering, and hate.

The van slowed down, its chassis groaning heavily.

“At the border?” I asked.

“Not yet,” Felipe said, keeping his eyes on the road. “See those burned hills? That's the border zone. Then Port Bou.”

They grabbed a thick plastic sack, grinning like schoolkids, and approached the perimeter wire fence surrounding a massive trans-genetic cornfield.

“What the hell are you doing?” I called out.

“Stealing corn,” Felipe shouted back. “Pilar loves it boiled with manteca.”

A dog's mournful bark echoed in the distance as the toxic wind whipped the cornstalks like a surreal, yellow-brown sea.

“But Don Juan told you...”

They ignored me. Felipe cut a clean breach through the fencing with insulated shears, and they both vanished into the megacorporation's anti-famine, anti-pest, anti-human hybrids.

This felt completely wrong. Ugly rumors swirled in the underground net about the fate of scavengers caught in these militarized ag-sectors. I slid silently from the passenger seat and hid in a thick, thorny bush. Paranoia clawed at the edges of my mind.

I checked my heavy .44 automatic, slapping a fresh magazine of hollow-point rounds into the grip and racking the slide. Vicious bullets designed for devastating, expanding impact. Another charming human invention.

It didn't take long.

An assault tactical rotorcraft roared in from the eastern horizon—a matte-black insect of mercury glass, composite plating, and underslung rotary cannons. It didn't offer a warning. It simply strafed the stalks. Felipe fell under the very first burst of high-velocity rounds. Pilar, riddled with lead, collapsed over him, clutching his body in a final, desperate embrace. They weren't new to these fields. The security assets in the cockpit had been waiting for them the whole time.

Rage exploded in my skull—molten, searing. My volatile combat implants lit up, flooding my sub-neural firmware with pure hatred.

The tactical rotorcraft swung around, banking hard as it fired an incendiary rocket. The nomads' van instantly torched into a roaring fireball.

Driven by an absolute instinct for destruction, I stepped out from the brush into the open clearing. I gripped the heavy .44 automatic with both hands, squeezing until the polymer grip creaked beneath the pressure of my fingers.

The craft hovered low over the burning field. A venomous technological dragonfly. Through the mirrored cockpit glass, I could just make out the pilot's silhouette, while a gunner manned the side-bay rotary cannon.

“You bastards should have sent a drone,” I thought. “How considerate of you to come in person.”

I racked the slide, chambering the final sequence, and fired directly into the cockpit. The reinforced windshield crazed under the impact of the heavy hollow-points, then burst inward in a glittering spray. The craft reared backward like a rabid locust. The pilot fought the failing collective, but the machine was already dead. The carbon-composite insect rolled into a violent tailspin, slammed onto its back in the churned mud, and thrashed wildly as its rotor blades chewed trenches through the earth. An instant later, its fuel cell detonated.

I bolted into the dense scrub, running blind. I ignored the thorns and sharp branches tearing at my skin until my lungs burned.