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Chapter
Three
WELCOME
TO JAMAICA
I turned around to find the dark, Jamaican man standing there and
smiling.
"Hey, mon," he said. "I'm Reggie. I own da' Jammer over der. It's
a bar and club. Anything you need, you just let ma' know, mon. Anything
at all."
"I'm
Barnum — and thank you. Where's the nearest town?" I asked
Reggie.
"I
know your name, mon. Red sent a message you'd be comin' in. Montego
Bay is right down da' beach dat way about a mile," Reggie pointed.
"You wanna' another drink?" "You wanna' go into town, mon? I get
you a driver and a car."
"You
know Red?" I asked.
He laughed, "Mon, everybody knows Red. Everybody that's in-the-know,
anyway." "He laughed, "Red said you were shizzing. I didn't even
know you could still get dat stuff, mon. Shizzlebot. The ol' shizz,
mon.
"How'd
you know we were coming," I asked.
"Red
called me on da' telephone, of course," Reggie said.
"The
telephone?" I said puzzled. "What year is it?"
"The
clocks stopped working here a long time ago. We really don't keep
track, mon."
"Reggie,
thanks for your warm hospitality," I said. "I need to go find my
friend, and perhaps we'll come into the Jammer in a bit."
"OK,
mon," he said. "It's all you."
"Thanks,
Reggie," I said as we shook hands. I didn't quite get the handshake
right. I never did. I never kept up.
Reggie walked off away from the beach towards his bar. I walked
down near the beach in the direction I had last seen Gnothi heading.
There was a band on stage, fronted by a man in long dreadlocks.
He was playing guitar and singing. The man's face began to come
into focus as I neared the stage. He looked like Bob Marley. I walked
closer, not believing my eyes. At closer range, I could see —
it was Bob Marley. A far as I knew he had been dead for years
— and here he was singing.
We're
jammin'
We're jammin'
We're jammin'
We're jammin'
My head was swimming with the realization of something I didn't
understand. I needed to find Gnothi.
I looked around a sea of dark, dancing bodies. A light-skinned man
in this crowd wouldn't be hard to spot. I saw Gnothi off near the
other side of the stage. He was dancing and smiling. I traversed
my way through the wave of rhythmically moving bodies. Moments later,
I was standing next to him.
"Nice
place, huh, Barnum," he laughed. "Just what a weary man like me
needed."
"It
was a nice place until I saw Bob Marley up there singing," I said.
"I was fine until a few minutes ago. What's he doing here?" I asked.
He's been dead for over a hundred years."
"Gnothi,
can we go down to the beach and away from the music so we can talk?"
I asked. "I've got a few questions."
"Of
course, you do," he said. "Let's go then."
Gnothi and I walked away from the pulsing music and the swaying
crowd. The sounded faded as we made our way down to the beach. We
walked in silence. It was beautiful there — I had to admit.
We walked for perhaps a mile, and could see the outline of buildings
of a town. I figured that must be Montego Bay.
We were approaching an old, large wooden mooring. It looked as good
a place to sit as any. There were a few small fishing boats gently
tumbling and knocking together. We walked out on to the mooring
as it creaked under our feet. When we reached the end, we sat down
— our legs dangling over the sides. I could feel a light, cool
salty mist spraying across my face.
"So,
what can I fill you in on," Gnothi offered.
"Could
you tell me a little more about the shizz," I asked "A little about
Red's new movers. And a little about how Bob Marley is jamming right
down the beach from us."
I expected Gnothi to laugh hysterically at my inquires. He didn't.
"Well,
let's start with the shizz," he said. "It is Shizzlebot we smoked,
but the strain I have has been modified. It works by time-release.
It's more stable. I knew we had about an hour after our morning
smoke to get to some movers. The reason people believe shizz has
been removed to some kind of museum-status substance, is because
it was moved farther underground, and out of general sight. Yes,
there have been more advanced boosters developed, but shizz still
has some special properties that all the other boosters don't have.
It's a classic. An original"
Gnothi continued, "Most of the newer boosters were developed for
commercial applications. You'll notice that all the commercial movers
and boosters are designed to primarily move objects —
not people. That's what 2T and other transporter companies do best."
"If
it absolutely, positively has to be there now, he laughed,
"that's when you call on a commercial transporter company. That's
when you hire a commercial mover."
"Barnum,"
he continued. "You know enough about Boomer and the Blue Men, that
there's a lot I don't have to fill you in on. You know back in the
early days, movers were designed to stablize dreaming. Unaided dreaming
on boosters, like Shizzlebot and Remington, was just too dangerous."
"Back
when you were a kid, when the law was passed about experiments,
Boomer and other Blue Men had to move their operations and labs
to more secure and secretive places. They could not afford to be
found out," he giggled. "Frankly, they needed the pussy too much.
They couldn't take the women holding out on them. It was all rigged,
all the way to the mayor's office. A law was passed to calm everyone
down, and to give the civic illusion that 'something was being done,
goddamn it'. After that, the women were happy, the men were happy
— the town was happy. Everyone was happy. Everyone was getting
laid again. Well, not everyone, but you know what I mean."
"Not
too long after the Blue Men went completely underground with their
experiments, the first proto-type dreaming booster was developed.
They called it Remington.
"The
inventors in your town found that dreaming gave them ideas - and
solutions to problems they had tinkered with for ages. Actually,
the practicality of the Cherry bikes that were invented by Boomer,
legitimized dreaming, and made dreaming even more respectable as
an art and a craft in the eyes of the other inventors, and even
some people in the town."
Gnothi tilted his head been, and let out a roaring laugh. "Those
temples,"he said. "Those temples and lodges in the town, back then.
All those meetings every Tuesday. And all those secret rooms in
the lodges. People would pass out if they knew what went on in those
meetings and in those back rooms!"
He stood up and hopped up and down on the mooring, making it creaked
and swayed under his weight. "Beds!" he shouted. "They had beds
in those rooms! That's what they did at those meetings — they
slept! Haaaaa! Every Tuesday night, the men met at seven o'clock
in the evening. They spent thirty minutes on old business, thirty
minutes on new business — and then they went back to the cots
in the back rooms — and snoooooozed! They were dreaming."
"Some
of the reoccuring old business at the meetings was the need to develop
some kind of tool for recalling dreams. The problem was, a lot of
solutions may or may not have been found during the men's dream-states,
but upon awakening, they would forget. They needed a state that
didn't require passing the REM stage to dream. At some point, not
too long after the law was passed, Boomer hit on a discovery. He
called it Remington."
"Remington
was the first early booster to be developed. It was a chemical cousin
to d-lysergic acid diethylamide. It had not gone unnoticed by the
inventors in the town that rye has special properties. It was found
that ergot alkaloids which are produced by the ergot fungus, growing
on rye, had peculiar effects. They also experimented with morning
glory seeds. News had reached them from Germany about a new chemical
had been synthesized that produced quite interesting results, it
was called Lysergide or LSD-25. The first booster wasn't LSD, but
it had some similar characteristics."
"After
some experiments and test trials, Boomer came up Rem. It was an
ergot alkaloid-based chemical. This was all before the devlopment
of movers. Remington didn't generate a gravity field, the way shizz
later did. But Rem did the trick. Rem lasted for about an hour —
just long enough for the men to dream the currently-needed solution,
and remember it long enough to write it down. Shizzlebot came from
Rem-dream sessions. But not until several years later. It was the
introduction of shizz, unaided by movers, that caused the big change
— and that's when everything went ape-shit."
"The
big problems all started when some shizz went missing from a lab.
Some punks somehow got ahold of it. Well, the punks obviously had
minds that were all over the place, and all sorts of strange things
started happening around town. Those punks turned out to be the
original Wanderers. They were a loose and unorganized band of anarchists.
Their shizzdreaming resulted in some major changes in the world
as we knew it, much of which you already know. Any holes that might
need filing in the story of the early Wanderers — I'll fill
in for you later.
"By
the time Shizzlebot had been discovered, those who initially used
it were in good condition for it. They had great abilities of mental
concentration. The first batches of shizz only had an effect for
about two minutes. The Blue Men who alpha and beta tested it early
on could concentrate on one, single thought — which no distractions
or free-associations — during the two minutes the shizz was
peaking stong enough to cause a gravtional field. They would shizzdream
individually, and sometimes in groups of three. Shizzdreaming was
altogether different than Remdreaming. Remdreaming produced subjective
experiences that could be developed into objective, real-world results.
Shizz, collapsed the subjective and objective worlds. The person
shizzing could concentrate on a given object, known or unknown,
and have the object materialize, in what they called the Tray. The
Tray was a three-cubic-foot iron box that had been crudely fashioned.
The Tray was simple, but it worked brilliantly."
"Objects
that the men concentrated on while shizzing had to be smaller than
the Tray — so, that when the object materialized, it could
be held in the magnetic field in the Tray until the effects of the
shiz had reduced enough that the gravitational field of the shizzer's
sweet spot no longer distorted the space/time continnuum. The Tray
could then be open and the object removed."
"In
the start, the Blue Men used the Tray for obtaining much needed
items for other experiments, such as specially-designed gears and
various raw metals that were hard to get. Later, they began to have
fun, and started using the Tray for entertainment. They used it
to get boxes of Cuban cigars, rare wines and brandies and other
fine enjoyments."
"Of
course, someone came up with the idea of using the Tray to get cold-hard
cash. They started small, and only would get one-hundred dollars
at a time. It was actually the cash money that the men put into
circulation that tipped them off to the fact that what was appearing
in the Tray was not only not unique, it was an exact replica
of objects. The Tray and the shizzing were producing clones."
"The way the men had discovered this, was that there had been a
story in the newspapers that some bills had appeaerd at a bank in
Pittsburg, bearing the same serial numbers as other bills already
in circulation. From that, the men rightly concluded that the objects
in the Tray were not only being cloned, but that the original object
had remained undisturbed in their original location. Objects, like
cigars and even some bottles of brandy, were not obvious. They were
not missed by their original owners, because, of course, the objects
never went missing. They were still there. But unique objects,
such as a one-of-a-kind piece of jewlery or dollar bills with individual
serial numbers — that was a problem."
"Immediately,
they ceased using the Tray for objects that were unique or easily
identifiable. In fact, as a side piece of information, the men soon
began using the Tray to "manufacter" raw diamonds. The diamonds
were laundered through Amsterdam, and the cash used to fund certain
businesses the Blue Men were behind. The first and main business
that they they backed was Two Teeth Deliveries and Big Red. Of course,
there was legal money generated through the deliveries — but
nothing near the capital that was infused into the business. That's
why it grew so fast. That's how it became 2T - which was the company
behind the development of the movers. 2T is nothing more than an
operations front."
"There
was absolutely nothing illegal about the operations of the Blue
Men. They manufactured diamonds in their own unique way. There was
no law that stated you could not make your own diamonds. It's just,
that since they had such a unique manner of doing it — they
kept it under wraps."
This all made sense to me, I thought. A lot of the pieces of the
puzzle were coming together. I had known a lot of the story, but
major threads and pieces were missing. I still had a lot of questions,
but I also felt comforted that somehow Gnothi knew the answers.
I'd heard enough for the moment. My brain needed a rest, and time
to digest what Gnothi had told me.
"My
head's full enough, right now," I said to Gnothi.
"Fair
enough," he grinned. "We'll cover some other things after we get
something to eat. I'm starving."
"Do
you mind if I ask how Bob Marley got here - now, on the same
beach with us," I added.
Gnothi chuckled, "The where's and how's and who's are merely technicalities.
We can discuss all that later. "
Gnothi rose and stretched. I got up and noticed my legs had fallen
asleep. I lost my balance, and teetered for a moment. Then I fell
head-first off the mooring and splashed into the blue ocean water.
The water I landed in was only about four-feet deep. I stood up
on the shifting sand below my feet, and looked up to see Gnothi
bent over clutching his side from laughter.
"The
ocean looks good on you," he said with a roar. "Let's get you dried
off, and head back for some food and some more music."
He turned around and began walking on the 30-foot-long mooring towards
the shore. When he was about half-way, he stopped and turned around
to face me, just as I was getting out of the water and shaking the
salt water from my hair.
"You
want to know about Bob Marley, I'll tell you," he said with a grin.
"Bob Marley is always in Jamaica — you just have to
know where to look. "
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