Federal and state troops sent in to sweep the outlaw towns seldom found anything. But after each search a few men would fail to report back. Some had sold their weapons and burned their uniforms, and others had come too close to the contraband thay had been sent to find.
After three months, Parker wanted out, but goods were the only safe passage through the army cordons. His chance came only by accident: Late one afternoon, skirting the pall of greasy cooking smoke that hung low over the Jungle, he stumbled and nearly fell on the body of a woman in a dry creek bed. Flies rose up in an angry cloud, then settled again, igoring him. She had a leather jacket, and at night Parker was usually cold. He began to search the creek bed for a lenght of brushwood.
In the jacket's back, just below her left shoulder blade, was a round hole that would have admitted the shaft of a pencil. The jacket's lining had been red once, but now it was black, stiff and shining with dried blood. With the jacket swaying on the end of his stick, he went looking for water.
He never washed the jacket; in its left pocket he found nearly an ounce of cocaine, carefuly wrapped in plastic and surgical tape. The right pocket held fifteen ampules of Megacillin-D and a ten-inch hornhandled switchblade. The antibiotic was worth twice its weight in cocaine.
He drove the knive hilt-deep into a rotten stump passed over by the Jungle's wood-gatherers and hung the jacket there, the flies circling it as he walked away.
That night, in a bar with a corrugated iron roof, waiting for one of the 'lawyers' who worked passages through the cordon, he tried his first ASP machine. It was huge, all chrome and neon, and the owner was very proud of it; he had helped hijack the truck himself.
If the chaos of the nineties reflects a radical shift in the paradigms of visual literacy, the final shift away from the Lascaux/Gutenberg tradition of a pre-holographic society, what should we expect from this newer technology, with its promise of discrete encoding and subsequent reconstruction of the full range of sensory perception?