The Strange Legend of Arturo X

I am a doctor, it is true, and NERCO were always at pains to introduce me as such and never once alluded to the fact that I am a doctor of musicology and not medicine or biology or even ethnobotany. Yes it was music that took me first to the Amazonas region, the borderlands of Brazil and Peru, the deepest forest where the vomit songs were still performed each year at the sacred ceremonies, albeit fleeting and reduced, hemmed in by the mestizo miners and ranchers, though that has now changed with the new emphasis on acquiring and keeping land pristine and wild. After the pandemics and the collapse of cryptocurrencies, wilderness became the new store of value. Wild is the new organic, wild is the source of every new drug of the future; but the problem remains, as NERCO knows only too well, only the shamen knows which tiny pocket of the imaginary forest is the place to start looking…

The hunt for jungle medicine started 150 years ago when curare was found to be a precise anaesthetic. More followed: every blow pipe poison and fish-stunning river potion was secured, copied in the lab and patented. But the real guardians of knowledge were not the tribal users it was those who sang the vomit songs , the shamens themselves.

The shaman does not speak, he sings, in a shape shifting secret language, one of puns and code words and allusions and rhymes- it is the basis of poetry, poetry being the diluted version of the shaman’s song.

My search took me further. With the ‘talking drum’ of the Kaowkin, I saw for myself how powerful it was in inducing trances. And in such a trance I glanced for the first time the double, that is, the insane version of myself. The shamen, an elderly fisherwoman living on the coast of Kamchatka, who earlier that day had cured a man of a badly healed broken pelvis by expectorating nettle juice repeatedly onto his exposed (and quite naturally shrunken) penis, yes, it was the extreme details of such cures that drew me in those days, this woman, at least eighty years old but still light and spry and deeply humorous told me something I would hear many times: respect your sleeping self when you meet in a dream. And if you see yourself sleeping do not wake yourself- because that can result in death, or madness.

Obvious nonsense. But the old woman told me something else, “One day you will find someone who will turn my world into yours!” And with that, her sparkling aged eyes broke up into a fit of cackling laughter…

Which brings me, of course, to Arturo X, my greatest technoshaman protege. He had an advantage: the son of an Amazonian ‘eco’ hunter, a privileged inhabitant of a private megapark. His mother sent him north with a heart shaped locket containing a dried epiphytic orchid, a legendary cure for heartsickness. His homecountry was a trillion dollar reserve of biodiversity, the forest again an indigenous sanctuary, but no longer were there hospitals and regular flights in to the bush landing strips. Giant virtual fencing encompassed the whole Amazon basin. Only those with an accredited implanted chip could enter, plant searchers and the super-rich, usually board members of the drug companies, who were allowed to illegally hunt for rare and endangered species.

Technoshamanism, once liberated from the dead hand of anthropology and inserted into the can-do atmosphere of big business, was the greatest advance of the early 22nd century. My background in music made me explore at first all the rhythmic based methods of inducing the different forms of trance state (there are nine). I knew from the extremely beautiful musicality of the Vomit Songs that using a decontextualized hallucinogen was not enough…Through experiment and guidance from the last extant shamens, we developed a combination of rhythmic means and pulsed doses of iboga and ayahuasca – finetuned to allow exploration of various trance ‘jungles’ where cures could be learnt and later extracted from plants in the real jungles of the world.

First came Mordrol- a pain killer twenty times as effective as Ibuprofen, as strong as a mild opioid but the first of the inverse drugs- the more you took the less effect it had- an overdose of a hundred would leave you with a stomach ache and little else. Next was Bofodril, which cured Malaria, Xanthin which finally stopped HIV in its tracks and Chronosal which ended the Covid pandemics that started in the 2020s and never seemed to stop.

And then Mycodrin. Though cancer had been better and better managed over the years its rates had also risen exponentially. No one seemed to realise that all that wireless radiation they loved in the 21st century, plus a drinking water supply full of hormonal run-off, was a major cause. Mycodrin was an activation drug- like ayahuesca itself- that only worked in the presence of stomach digestive juices of the wrong pH. It combated any form of cancer – at one stroke we had cured the biggest killer in the world.

NERCO naturally became greedy, the CEO and major shareholder, Martin Guderian, told me we were in danger of ignoring the first rule of Pharma: Never Kill, Never Cure. Keep them taking pills for ever. Maybe this was the first sign of the hubris stalking our planet. But our successes had changed the rulebook, patented and released after only one set of tests (with technoshamanic drugs the correct formulation appears first time and cannot be improved- this is the one we test), our drugs, NERCO’s drugs, generated huge income from the word go. But even by then we could not solve the real but unstated problem: an increasing sense of worry, non-specific anxiety, a growing need to control. Time and again the Technoshamens came back with the same news: we can heal the body but not the mind. Never healthier in a physical sense, indeed Angelic-80, which switched on the ‘guardian angel gene’ using a blisteringly complex series of tree vine alkaloids meant that a few top people would be living in perfect health until they were at least 200…yes even that simply added to the problem- in an insane world living longer just means more time in the asylum…

Arturo had spent months in the plant houses at NERCO together with extended trips in the Amazonas wilderness that were essential for a trainee technoshamen. It was then that he first made contact with the mythical Shipibo clan, long thought to be extinct. From the Shipibo’s last shamen he learnt how to traverse Meinong ’s Jungle without waking or falling into a coma. Real hunting skills were needed- but only in order to develop moral and later spiritual values.

Once in Meinong’s Jungle the most fearful and real seeming attacks could take place. Multi-headed pythons were common, along with the liquid jaguar, the wide jawed carnivorous capybara, the eyeball eating moth and the human sized spider with venom more poisonous than a bushmaster. To die in the jungle meant months of convalescence in the real world; most never recovered. Courage was needed, but to reach the next stage an act or several acts of selflessness were also required. Selflessness is almost the wrong word. Arturo preferred to call it ‘becoming transparent’. And therefore invisible to an attacking beast. To achieve this was obviously not easy, one had to develop, in the real world, the ‘observing self’, a non-judgemental detached observation of behaviour. In Meinong’s Jungle such a person could move at will, onwards through the caves to the desert beyond. In the desert were plants of even greater potential. I remember after Arturo’s first visit the board voted unanimously to buy the Atacama and drone fence the whole thing. Effectively expelling all mining companies by revoking their licences – a ‘legality’ long ago privatised…

Arturo told me that increasingly the technoshamens went into the trance-forest to escape humanity and its tendency towards schizoid paranoia. He jokingly suggested that once 85.7 % of the world were insane the result would be a complete collapse of every known system and restraint…the world as we knew it would shrivel up and die…

And be reborn as a place of unimaginable beasts…

It was only after Arturo crossed the desert that things began to change. As well as transparency a new skill was needed against the colossal predatory iguanas and swarming hyper-venomous ants that made the desert so deadly. The skill was sincerity, but in a different form to that which we know in the everyday world. In the dreamed desert, sincerity meant a love of truth for its own sake. Fed by wonder and awe, truth was most obviously apparent in the desert as the exceptional beauty of dusk and dawn. Or rather, this was one aspect where such sensitivity might be tested. An inability to respond to this beauty would mean being led down false trails to the wrong canyons, stone slots that narrowed to an inevitable death.

Arturo was changing with every report he brought back from the desert, a place he grew to love the more he studied its plant and animal life. It was there that it first became apparent that some cures of the most powerful kind, lay not in the plant world but deep within animals and birds, but the release of such knowledge required a human sacrifice of some kind. Naturally I dressed this up in corporatese for the board. No one wants to hear that next year’s profits depend on something so deplorably arcane as paying homage to the Gods with murder!

Of course the sacrifices had begun long ago, in every moment of anxiety and creeping dread… Those very board members who preferred a Heian tea ceremony before discussing mid-year bonuses were now drugged with the most basic tranquilisers, all quietly going insane. The lab was wrecked only months later; a mid-western city was poisoned by a lone saviour who found a recipe for a nerve toxin in uncollected garbage blowing through already half-deserted streets…

The complete collapse was apparent when the last stutterings of internet celebrities included detailed accounts of the strange monsters they had encountered strolling the corridors of their wrecked apartment buildings. Meanwhile, profuse vegetation began to push through the tarmac, uprooting the concrete reality of former times.

Even then Arturo was forever going further. The exit, the back door, the way out of the desert was up a huge ramp of natural stone, limestone pavement that soared from the sand high into the crimson clouds of nightfall. No other Technoshamen dared accompany him. They could sense the utter foreboding and difficulties in this skyward zone. He was gone for what he told us was a fortnight, though in terms of being in a trance state it was only a few hours.

Two weeks and he wouldn’t, no he specified, he couldn’t tell us what he’d seen. Only that now was the time to stop being a technoshamen….now he believed the only path open to him was to become a true brujo, a witch, a sorcerer, a perfected man…he took one of the last flights to Lima and then disappeared. On my desk he left an envelope addressed to me containing the locket, heart shaped but no words.

I knew then that I had truly neglected my family by not teaching them all I knew. Their insanity was my sacrifice, as I reluctantly entered the jungle alone to seek out Arturo and the others, those who would be known only by their patched cloak and impeccable training in the face of the imaginary monsters of our current world.