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Contract Cloaks for Couriers

Dreamed 2019/5/30 by Wayan

THAT DAY

I have shingles, painful and exhausting. Rash spread to around my eye. Take acyclovir--4 grams today! The stress of shingles has triggered a flare-up of this recurrent mystery infection I have, too. Joint aches, headache. Take Tylenol. Put off most calls & trips.

Get an erroneous phone reminder for a doctor's appointment I didn't make and can't go to, the time conflicts. I have to call & argue till they reschedule it a week from now.

Herbs arrive--ones I depend on to suppress these attacks. They sent the wrong thing, though the form shows I ordered right.

Health "providers", feh. Capitalists need customers. So why can't they do anything right?

THAT NIGHT Native American rider spreading part of a Contract Cloak. Dream sketch by Wayan. Click to enlarge.

I'm back in time, witnessing the very first encounter between Plains Indians and horses. Definitely a hard learning curve: they all fall off. Their top war chief falls off. Everyone laughs. And gets back on.

And yet just twenty years later, that tribe has the best riders in the world. Progress unbelievably fast. But then, every aspect of history zips by at ten times the speed I think. The Indian Wars are already over. Decades not centuries.

The tribe decides to muscle into the white economy and find niches they can make serious money in. But... how do you monetize horse-mastery?

They become the world's fastest couriers. And unlike railroads or the Pony Express, they'll go ANYWHERE--mountaingoating high in the Rockies, or deep into the North Woods to supply trappers, out into the desert to supply miners. Any scale, too, from mere messages to packages to substantial packtrains of gear. Wherever roads don't go, they do.

The tribe I follow has only a few dozen master couriers, but they average a million a year from it--in 1890s dollars, worth a good fifty million today. Their single best rider earns over a quarter of it--$290,000 a year to be exact.

They all talk of it as a quarter-mil, yet it's just as close to a third. Why? The lower figure makes sense because it's nominal--no Indian ever gets paid fully. A lot of whites renege, despite clear written contracts. White cheating is so common, for the tribe it's an expected business cost.

Their best rider proposes a solution. Contracts will be inked on hide capes, and prepayments will be in decoration and jewels. Flashy, silly, but if the hirer defaults, you have a collectible, and in the short term a contract-cloak will at least keep you warm. And it's harder to tear up or deny. More time & trouble to write, too; he suspects that alone will make whites businesses not violate them so casually. They'll have, literally, more skin in the game.

Trouble is, all the banks and businesses fight him fiercely--threaten him personally. They really hate the idea. Which is an admission of guilt! The plan just isn't that costly--except to firms that suddenly have to go honest after a generation of profitable cheating.

White Corporation Speak with Forked Tongue.

No news there...

NOTES IN THE MORNING



LISTS AND LINKS: timetravel & timeslips - the past & alternate worlds - Native Americans - horses - speed - business & capitalism, contracts & commitments, truth & lies, topdogs & underdogs - crime - money - racism - politics - clothes - writing - pencil dream art

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