Kandis Elliot: Evolution in Guadalajara

“Shit,” Ziggy snarled, scrambling to refocus. “What’s this guy got?” With the integrity argument fizzled, he hit the venture capital funding and flogged entertainment stocks, offering building portfolios with virtual 3-Ds of the mountain. Dude Mex took form. Stockholders grabbed in for ultra-long-range mergers and acquisitions. The resulting synergy and operational efficiency offered a launch of hot offerings, including a trivestiture gain from horses, bird watching, and roller-blading trails.

The opponent countered with Embalmed Palms International, a Korean conglomerate. We’d tussled with those guys before. They always waded in to offset our nature gig—soaked plant leaves in something to preserve them and stuck them in plastic-and-cast-steel stems and trunks. No watering, no reinforcing of hotel or mall floors to support a big pot of soil; the only maintenance an annual dusting. EPI had made whole lobbies into jungles; they could make mini-forests of dead-but-lifelike.

Ziggy snorted at the audacity. “Wait a minute. How can you compare the volatility of a growth investment like Dude Mex with that of a Pacific Rim company on the Nasdaq? Them’s apples and oranges!”

Hardhat grinned. We suddenly noticed his venture capital skyrocketing. Dead-but-lifelike was a screen to arbitrage for interest-rate derivatives versus Australian pork-belly futures. He’d acquired properties in a deregulated market. Meanwhile Ziggy’s debt was compounding faster than future assets.

“Oh, feeuwww,” Inez groaned, making a face. Administrative bloat popped all over us like sulfide-gas balloons.

“Cash flow negative!” I yelled. “Cash out, Ziggy!”

Capital gains taxes and redemption fees buzzed angrily around our heads. Ziggy winced, taking the brunt of the stings, but gamely kept chiseling at the enemy’s clammed executive package. “What is this? A megaplex?”

The guy was comp-opting an eight-million-dollar entertainment center, fifty thousand square feet of indoor video arcade, next to a restaurant, merchandise mall, and virtual reality theater. Bongs and wails of vid-games drowned out the last of birdsong.

That in turn was drowned by a fleet of Virtual Harvesters eating their way up the slopes. Selected trees were felled, their limbs removed, and cut into logs of pre-programmed length—each in less than thirty seconds.

I found myself offering spiritual energy to Ziggy, seeing him not for the first time as a lonely battler against unfair and evil odds, a crusader whose cause is nothing but confetti. Why was nature and the world that spawned her human race so content to be broken into sad little bits here and there around the globe? Not asking for help, not fighting back, willingly letting herself get mutilated, entombed by concrete and asphalt, all her flowers and hummingbirds rendered into brown foam flushed down a stagnant river. Ziggy the anachronism, charging ultimate windmills. A warm drop trickled from my eye and fell on The Royal We, snapping a bright spark in the dimming sunshine.

Ziggy countered bravely. Dude Mex assumed a 15-million-dollar debt and ante-upped with the pharmaceuticals. “We trade at 23 3/ 8, up from 11, with an earning ratio of almost 50!” He leered at the mega-fun-plex guy. “Virtual entertainment is bullshit. All you do is tie ’em in a black box, show a movie and shake ’em up till they puke. People want the real thing—trees and cliffs and mountain climbing.” At once the public bought up a third of our 14.9 million shares outstanding.

“Nature trails, my ass,” the guy laughed. “They want fucking roller coasters.” With a sickening grin of victory he tapped swiftly, decisively on his silly little ThinkPad. The atomic battery started to whine. Suddenly junk bonds, investor groups, and volatility swings poured from his modem port and buried him to the knees in venture capital, stunning us all. He had a market capitalization of 5.1 billion, 6 times forward sales and 28 times forward earnings. With 70 percent interest, his outfit was worth over a billion on electronic paper alone, and that was just the beginning. He held up the bottom line: 2 percent of the global Gross Domestic Product!

His burger, Coke, and vid-joint-on-steroids, whatever it was, nailed Ziggy to an electronic cross.

“You can’t do this,” Ziggy yelled inanely, flicking melted bits of laptop keys from his fingers. “Seventy-five percent of humanity lives in developing countries. In order just to provide them a basic subsistence diet we need to increase food supply by more than 400 percent. Without a major technological breakthrough, the rats won’t even have food! And any such impossible miracle will be at the cost of total deforestation, topsoil depletion, and pollution of all the freshwater on the planet!”

Inez and I both gasped. Quickly, she said, “Doctor Zygidaynus, they don’t want to hear that —” but her warning came too late. A whistle of crashing stocks shrieked over our heads, impacted the slopes, the craters immediately used for foundation excavations. Ziggy’s laptop vibrated, convulsed out of Inez’s benumbed hands, turned cherry-red, white, ignited in sparklers.

Failure. The monkey-ear tree already was but one monstrous, ornately carved, and gaudily painted door in a solidifying wall that appeared to shove out like a fortress around the entire summit area. Leaves, sand grains, half-page memos, mot-mot tail feathers, wads of cotton-candy, paper pesos and dollars, and sharp needles cracked from the Dow Jones industrials, CRB Futures Index and the S&P 500 filled the air. Swirling detritus gained volume and velocity, the tornado nearly ripping The Royal We from my arms. Trees crashed down, facades sprang up; the mountain beneath our feet started to rock. Huge diplodocus cranes reared cherry pickers and elevator frameworks in the dust-haze; hardhats wearing lumberjack shirts and jeans or Armani suits and silk ties swarmed through the warping landscape.

“Back in the car,” Ziggy ordered, pushing us toward the Volkswagen. We dived in just in time; a wrecker was backing up to the front bumper. Inez wheeled the little car around and put the pedal to the metal. We flew down-slope as branches, leaves, bales of Spanish moss, and other forest detritus shot around and past us. High-tension power lines reared up alongside the road, which was now a concrete snake, splitting into multiple lanes, keeping Inez far too occupied to use her customary let-the-car-steer-itself techniques. Ziggy, I, and We looked back. The mountaintop vanished behind a wall cloud like the epicenter of a nuclear blast. Construction flowed down the mountain behind us, a lava amalgam of tarmac, huge buildings in strange shapes and oddball colors, vast tangles of miniature train tracks, and gigantic erector-set structures that sprouted bright, car-sized Christmas-tree ornaments filling with screaming kids.

“They’re amusement rides of some sort,” I said, dumbfounded.

“Hell,” Ziggy moaned, “it’s a goddamn theme park!”

At that moment we sped past the perimeter of what had been a natural area and the base of a mountain, hitting the flats between two towering pillars that spewed out a fifty-foot steel gate and seventeen ticket booths just behind us. A curved thirty-foot-tall sign arced above the gate in a dayglo-orange and purple rainbow. Ersatz Aztec symbols etched themselves over the sign and the gates. Twenty-foot-tall yellow neon letters sizzled into being, proclaiming Monte de Manantlan, now shaved and overlaid with pyramid-theme restaurants, grandstands, racetracks, hotels, water playgrounds, acres and acres of rides and other amusements, to be Mex-Disney AztecLand.

The highway finally settled down into a six-lane transcontinental viaduct. Our three lanes leading back to downtown Guadalajara were fairly empty, but the other side, a beeline to the new theme park, was already bumper-to-bumper with campers and trailers. Both sides of the highway was a stripmall from park to city limits. At dusk we reached the river chasm bridge, which now bisected the sea of gangrenous waste that had filled, then jumped, the gorge and flowed four miles beyond.