Paul Di Filippo - After the Collapse

Cheo looked a bit ashamed at his brother’s misdeeds. “He’s not in prison anymore. He got out a year early. He racked up some good time for helping administer FarmEarth among the jail population. You think we got shitty assignments! How would you like to steward gigundo manure lagoons! Anyhow, he’s a free man now, and he’s looking for some help with a certain project. In return, the people he takes on get master status. It may not be strictly aboveboard, but it’s really just a kind of shortcut to where we’re heading already.”

I instantly had my doubts about Adán and his schemes. If only I had listened to my gut, we could have avoided a lot of grief. But I asked, “What is this mysterious project?”

“In jail, Adán hooked up with Los Braceros Últimos . You know about them, right?”

“No. What’s their story?”

“They think FarmEarth is being run too conservatively. The planet is still at the tipping point. We need to do bigger things faster. No more tip-toeing around with little fixes. No more being over-cautious. Get everybody working on making Gaia completely self-sustaining again. And the Braceros want to free up humanity from being Earth’s thermostat and immune system and liver.”

“Yeah!” said Williedell, pumping his fist in the air. Mallory and Vernice were nodding their heads in agreement. Anuta looked with calm concern to me, as if to see what I thought.

Four to two.

I didn’t want to drag everyone else down. And I was pretty sick of the boring, trivial assignments we were limited to in FarmEarth. All I could suddenly picture was all the fun that Benno had every day. My own brother! Ninety percent my own brother anyhow. I felt a wave of jealousy and greed that swept away any doubts. The feelings made me bold enough to take Anuta’s hand and say, “Count us in too!”

And after that, it was way too late to back out.

* * * *

We met Adán in the flesh just once. The seven of us four-squared a rendezvous at the NASDAQ Casino where my Mom Kianna worked. The venue was cheap and handy. Because we weren’t adults, we couldn’t go out onto the gaming floor, where the Bundled Mortgages Craps Table and Junk Bond Roulette Wheels and all the other games of investa-chance were. But the exclusion was good, because that was where Mom hustled drinks, so we wouldn’t bump into her.

But the Casino also featured an all-ages café with live music, and I said, “We shouldn’t try to sneak around with this scheme. That’ll just attract suspicion. We’ve hung out at the Casino before, so no one will think twice to see us there.”

Everyone instantly agreed, and I felt a glow of pride.

So one Friday night, while we listened to some neo-Baithak Gana by Limekiller and the Manatees (the woman playing dholak was yotta-sexy) and sipped delicious melano-rambutan smoothies, we got the lowdown from Cheo’s brother.

Adán resembled Cheo in a brotherly way, except with more muscles, a scraggly mustache, and a bad fashion sense that encouraged a sparkly vest of unicorn hair over a bare chest painted with an e-ink display screen showing cycling porn snippets. Grebnard! Did he imagine this place was some kind of Craigslist meat market?

The porn scenes on Adán’s chest—soundless, thank god—were very distracting, and I felt embarrassed for the girls—although they really didn’t seem too hassled. Now, in hindsight, I figure maybe Adán was trying to unfocus our thinking on purpose.

Luckily the café was fairly dark, and the e-ink display wasn’t backlit, so most of the scenes were just squirming blobs that I could ignore while Adán talked.

After he sized us up with some casual chat, he said, “You kids are getting in on the ground floor of something truly great. In the future, you’ll be remembered as the greatest generation, the people who had the foresight to take bold moves to bring the planet back from the brink. All this tentative shit FarmEarth authorizes now, half-measures and fallback options and minor tweaks, is gonna take forever to put Gaia back on her feet. But Los Braceros Últimos is all about kickass rejuvenation treatment, big results fast!”

“What exactly would we have to do?” Anuta asked.

“Just steward some effectuators where and how we tell you. Nothing more than you’re doing now at school. You won’t necessarily get to know the ultimate goal of your work right from the start—we have to keep some things secret—but when it’s over, I can guarantee you’ll be mega-stoked.”

We all snickered at Adán’s archaic slang.

“And what do we get in return?” I said.

Adán practically leered. “FarmEarth Master status, under untraceable proxies, to use however you want—in your spare time.”

Williedell said, “I don’t know. We’ll have to keep up our regular FarmEarth assignments, plus yours.… When will we ever have any spare time?”

Adán shrugged. “Not my problem. If you really want Master status, you’ll give up something else and manage to carve out some time. If not—well, I’ve got plenty of other potential stewards lined up. I’m only doing this as a favor to my little bro’ after all.…”

“No, no, we want to sign up!” “Yeah, I’m in!” “Me too!”

Adán smiled. “All right. In the next day or two, you’ll find a FarmEarth key in your CitizenSpace. When you use it, you’ll get instructions on your assignment. Good luck. I gotta go now.”

After Adán left, we all looked at each other a little sheepishly, wondering what we had gotten ourselves into. But then Mallory raised her glass and said, “To the Secret Masters of FarmEarth!”

We clinked rims, sipped, and imagined what we could do with our new powers.

* * * *

The mystery project the six of us were given was called “Angry Sister,” and it proved to be just as boring as our regular FarmEarth tasks.

Three years later, I think this qualifies as some kind of yotta-ironic joke. But none of us found it too funny at the time.

We were tasked with running rugged subterranean effectuators—John Deere Molebots—somewhere in the world, carving out a largish tubular tunnel from Point A to Point B. We didn’t know where we were, because the GPS feed from the molebots had been deactivated. We guided our cutting route instead by triangulation via encrypted signals from some surface radio beacons and reference to an engineering schematic. The molebots were small and slow: the six of us barely managed to chew up two cubic meters of stone in a three-hour shift. A lot of time was spent ferrying the detritus back to the surface and disposing of it in the nearby anonymous ocean.

The mental strain of stewarding the machines grew very tiresome.

“Why can’t these stupid machines run themselves?” Vernice complained over our secure communications channel. “Isn’t that why weak AI was invented?”

Cheo answered, “You know that AI is forbidden in FarmEarth. Don’t you remember the lesson Mumphs gave us about Detroit?”

“Oh, right.”

A flock of macro-effectuators had been set loose demolishing smart-tagged derelict buildings in that city. But then Detroit’s Highwaymen motorcycle outlaws, having a grudge against the mayor, had cracked the tags and affixed them to Manoogian Mansion, the official mayoral residence.

Once the pajama-clad mayor and his half-naked shrieking family were removed from their perch on a teetering fragment of Manoogian Mansion roof, it took only twenty-four hours for both houses of Congress to forbid use of AI in FarmEarth.

“Besides,” Mallory chimed in, “with nine billion people on the planet, human intelligence is the cheapest commodity.”

“And,” said Anuta, “having people steward the effectuators encourages responsible behavior, social bonding, repentance and contrition for mankind’s sins.”