Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

It was over.

Eat me , said the vials Alice found at the bottom of the rabbit hole. Drink me .

It had been two full days since I’d devoured the chicken and rice and genuine new peas in the Albany government hospital. I hadn’t felt hungry: shock, anxiety, depression. All those can arrest appetite. But the body needs fuel. Even when hunger is absent, glucose levels fall. There are hidden storages of starch in the liver and muscles, but eventually these get used up. The blood needs new sources of glucose to send to the body.

Glucose is nothing but atoms. Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen. Arranged one way in food. Arranged another way in mud and water and air. Just as energy exists in one form in chemical bonds, and another in sunlight.

Y-energy rearranged the forms of energy so there would always be a readily available, cheap supply.

Nanotechnology rearranged atoms, which could be found everywhere and anywhere.

Under my clothes, I could feel the mud still caking the backs of my thighs. I tried to remember what those openings were called through which plants took in air, those minute orifices in the epidermis of leaves and stems. The word wouldn’t come. My mind was watery.

My body had fed.

I walked carefully, setting my foot down cautiously on each step, transferring my weight slowly from one foot to the other. My arms hovered protectively six inches from my side, to catch myself if I fell. I held my head stiffly. I made very slow progress up the embankment, and it felt excruciating. It seemed to me I had no choice. I moved as if I were something rare and fragile that I myself were carrying, as if I shouldn’t jar myself. Nothing must happen to my body. I was the answer to the starving world. No. Huevos Verdes was the answer.

Once that thought came, I could walk normally. I scrambled up the hill to town. I was not the only one. By now there were hundreds, thousands of us. Eden existed in a gravrail station in Albany, beside the sunshine machine. The entire town of Ti-monsville, Pennsylvania, had disappeared. Miranda Sharifi had gone public with the Cell Cleaner, the most comprehensible part of her project, over three months ago. And in the last month Huevos Verdes could have stockpiled oceans of serum in forests of slim black syringes. That’s what they were doing all over the country, in all those places the plague was not killing people. I was not the only one. I had only been the first. Except for the Sleepless themselves.

My body felt good, which is to say it felt like nothing at all. It disappeared from my consciousness, as healthy and fed bodies do. It was just there, ready to climb or run or work or make love, without depending on the Congresswoman Janet Carol Land Cafe. Without depending on CanCo Franchise agrobots %on political food distribution systems, on the FDA, on controlling the means of production, on harvesters and combines and the banks you owed them to, on forty acres and a mule, on the threshing floor, on the serfs in the field, on the rains coming this year and the locusts staying away, on Demeter and Indra and the Aztec corn gods. Seven thousand years of civilization built on the need to feed the people.

More in the syringe.

I could still eat normally — I had eaten chicken and rice and peas in the Albany hospital. But I didn’t have to. From now on, my body could “eat” mud.

I thought wildly of all the food I had consumed in my one single life. Beef Wellington, the pastry flaky around succulent medium-rare roast. Macaroons chewy with fresh-grated coconut. Potatoes Anna, crisp and crunchy. Bittersweet Swiss chocolate. Cassoulet. Alaskan crab as they did it at Fruits de la Mer in Seattle. Deep-dish apple pie…

My mouth watered. And then it stopped. A programmed biological counterresponse? I would probably never know.

Biscuits dripping with butter. But I could still have them. Lamb Gaston. Fresh arugula. // they were available. Strawberries in cream. But would anybody grow or raise the ingredients without a captive market?

A sudden wave of dizziness overtook me. I must have been in shock, or some kind of quiet hysteria. It was lightheadedness at the sheer size of the thing, the audacity. Miranda Sharifi and her twenty-six inhuman Supergeniuses, thinking in ways fundamentally different from ours, aided by technology they themselves built so that each step ahead opened six more pathways, and twenty-seven Superminds added to those branching possibilities… Miranda Sharifi and Jonathan Markowitz and Terry Mwak-ambe and the others whose names I didn’t remember from old newsgrids, whom I would never meet, who were not like us and never had been, and yet who had seen what would happen to a society they didn’t belong to and had planned a countermeasure. Planned, probably, for years, and carried out the unimaginably complex plans that would change everything for everybody—

And I had once thought that donkeys were perpetually dissatisfied and never found anything to be enough.

“How could she?” I said aloud, to nobody.

Dazed, I wandered past the station. A train pulled in and Annie and Billy and Lizzie stepped off the otherwise empty gravrail, carrying bundles. Lizzie saw me, shrieked, and ran toward me. I stood watching them, feeling lighter and lighter in the head, my cranium swelling like a balloon. Lizzie hurtled herself into my arms. She was taller, stronger, filled out, all in just a month. Billy’s face broke into a huge grin. He loped toward me like a man half his age, Annie trailing.

“Billy,” I said. “Billy—”

He went on grinning.

“We’re home now, us,” Billy said. “We’re all home.”

Annie sniffed. Lizzie squeezed me tight enough to crush ribs. Under my jacks I felt mud flake off the skin of my thighs.

“Hurry,” Annie said. “I want to get to the cafe, me, before the broadcast.”

“What broadcast?” I said.

All three of them looked at me, shocked. Lizzie said, “The broadcast , Vicki. From Huevos Verdes. The one all the Liver channels been talking about, them, for days. Everybody’s going to watch it!”

“I’ve been watching only donkey channels.” But if it were coming from Huevos Verdes, they could use all channels at once, Liver and donkey. They’d done it once before, thirteen years ago.

“But, Vicki, it’s the Huevos Verdes broadcast” Lizzie repeated.

“I didn’t know,” I said, lamely.

“Donkeys,” Annie said. “They never know nothing, them.”

This is Miranda Serena Sharifi, speaking to you on an unedited holo recorded six weeks ago. You will want to know what has been done to you.

I am going to explain, as simply as I can. If the explanation is not simple enough, please be patient. This broadcast will play over and over again for weeks, on Channel 35. Perhaps parts of it will become clearer as you hear it more than once. Or perhaps as more technically trained people — donkeys — use the syringes we are making available everywhere, some donkeys will explain to you in easier words. Meanwhile, these are the simplest words I can find for these concepts without losing scientific accuracy.

Your body is made of cells. A cell, any cell, is basically a complex of systems for transforming energy. So is an organism, including a human being.

Humans get their basic energy from plant food, either directly or indirectly, through a process called oxidative phosphorylation. Your bodies break down the bonds of carbon-containing molecules, and a significant portion of the food’s potential energy is repackaged into the phosphate bonds of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). When human cells need energy, they get it from ATP.