Free The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria by Carlos Hernández

he hurt, Ken?” asks Deeprashad.
    Seconds pass. Xiadon and Deeprashad exchange looks. Then: “No worries, Anita.” Cooper replies. “This jerk will have his day in court. He’ll probably just be wearing a cast on his gun arm that day.”

    Cooper has joined us at mission control, catching his breath after the chase. He sits barechested, the top half of the unitard hanging limply in front of him, his metal, bug-eyed panda helmet on his lap.
    He’s smiling like an MVP and, like an MVP, can’t wait to tell the press about his game-winning play.
    “The hardest part is getting back enough of your humanity before things go bad,” he says, pouring water alternately in his mouth or over his head. “That’s what happened to poor Greg. He just couldn’t become human again in time.”
    “So people lose control of themselves when they operate the pandas?” I ask. “Is that what happened to Furst?”
    “No,” says Xiadon.
    “Yes,” says Deeprashad.
    They have an eyebrow duel for a few minutes. Then Xiadon says, “Kind of. We train our jockeys relentlessly, and we have kill-switches and overrides here at mission control to take over if the jockey loses control. But we all blew it that day: Furst, me, Anita, everyone at mission control. It just happened too fast. Really, it was just like any other animal attack. You know when you hear how an animal trainer who’s been working with the same tiger or killer whale for years is suddenly mauled, out of nowhere? That’s what happened. Furst surprised us all, most of all himself.”
    “But Furst isn’t a tiger or an orca,” I say. “He’s a highly-trained human being doing highly-specialized work.”
    Cooper is shaking his head. “Gabby, I said it before and I’ll say it again. We’re not acting like pandas out there. Acting doesn’t work; the pandas see right through us. We go to great lengths to
become
pandas.”
    Talk like this makes me wince, especially from Cooper, who I knew in a former incarnation. It’s a little too crunchy for a girl who had tospend decades purging her Latina, magical-realist childhood out of her reason. “Look, I understand the importance of your work here. Really. You use robots so that they can look and smell right. You do everything you can to put yourselves in the right mindset. But at the end of the day it’s still acting. There’s no way to forget you’re just a human being playing the role of panda bear.”
    Xiadon and Deeprashad interrupt each other explaining how wrong I am. All the technology both inside (the nanotech, the chemicals) and out (the unitard, the helmet, the panda suit) give jockeys a near-perfect panda perspective of the world. Thanks to a process called “migraineal suppression,” the left brain’s ability to process language, reason causally, and in short think like a human will be reduced to be more in-line with ursine IQ; via “cerebellar promotion,” the mammalian brain will take over the lion’s share of the decision-making process; through “synesthetic olfactory emulation,” the operator’s sense of smell will become the primary way of getting information about the world, borrowing some processing power from the brain’s occipital lobe. And so on—they release a cataract of jargon, each doctor trying to out-science the other. They might as well be reciting from
Finnegan’s Wake
.
    Finally Cooper gets a word in edgewise. “With all due respect, Doctors, talking’s exactly the wrong way to go about this. Let’s get Gabby inside a bear. Then she’ll get it.”

Part 2
    I’m crawling into the suspended suit that will give me control of Funicello. The entrance to the suit is, of course, the ass. I have to goatse my way in. Lovely.
    It’s dark in there, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel: the neck-hole through which I’ll stick my head.
    The suit, still suspended on wires—couldn’t they have lowered it to make getting in easier?—sways gently as I earthworm forward. On the