We should have known all along. I could tell something was different when we reached this tribe. All of the other groups downriver strongly feared the power of these shamen. I had been told they were immortal, that they're shapeshifters, that they don't need to eat, that they're watching every moment, everywhere. I didn't believe it, but it's true. They showed me their magic. The ceremony involves a boiling cauldron with the leaves of different plants and sometimes animals involved. I never saw them use less than 3 separate plants but usually the brew also included two others. Any animal flesh used would be sampled by a sharp razor, usually an amount smaller than a grain of rice. This sample was always placed on the drinker's tongue before drinking the brew. They call the brew Ometeo. Apparently, this means duality, like light/dark, man/woman, hot/cold. Most of the first ceremonies I attended were frog, or butterfly ceremonies. The shamen would all sample the small animal and drink the brew together. They told me they did this in order to improve their hunting abilities. On that first evening, it seemed to me that nothing was going to happen. Come morning, they were very proud of the small protrusions they had growing on their bellies. Only 2 days later, the process had complete. The frogs were grown and each shaman detached the frog and it hopped away. They claimed to be controlling it and told me about some of their visions from the remote frogs that I was able to later confirm with my assistant. They told me that they had a network of animals spawned from their bodies that covered the entire continent. I didn't see it but they also claimed to have held jaguar and shark ceremonies. They say that their secret combination of plants was discovered by a great snake who their ancestors saw eating the plants together with an insect, then watching the insect emerge from the snake's body and fly away, giving it knowledge of the location of all prey nearby. The shamen, in seeking the power of the snake, noticed they could incubate other creatures as they wished. Many generations later, the more advanced and extremely private ceremony of the self-replication was revealed to me. In this event, a small bite is taken of one's finger and in a few months, the body splits in 2, revealing a twin. Of course, I had to ask if they ever combine animal samples during a ceremony, perhaps mixing part bird with part human. This is when they became angry and told me to leave and never return. I was able to collect plant samples on my way out and have been studying them. Something in there is turning their DNA processing into a kind of xerox machine. I'm back at my lab in Bogota now with a small nursery containg all 5 of the species collected from the remote tribe. Some people here had heard the rumors but nobody believes it to be true. I plan to settle the debate. For my first experiment, I got a small bird and consumed a tiny patch of its abdomen with my own recreation of the brew. In three days, the small bump had grown feathery. In a week, it flew away. But it was me. It was as much me as my arm or my leg. I flew around the city. Above the tiled rooves, it was better than any dream. I didn't tell anybody. I told my colleagues that nothing happened and the shamen must be playing a trick. What I've come to realize is that the shamen are the only people I've ever met who are honest about their capabilities. I've consumed the brew thousands of times now. I can see from so many points of view. I experience every link in the food chain. I'm beginning to notice that there's other superobservers like me. It takes a keen eye to recognize one of the extrabodies of a specific shaman. It's not just shamen that have extrabodies though. I had one of my bird bodies fly down into a mine shaft where I'm almost certain that the workers had all been extrabodies of the owner. Nobody talks about it. It's considered private, so private that its not in any laws or books. But it's everywhere. I kept it a secret as best as I could. Of course, anybody would. The potential to profit was so great. But now, things have changed...