Paul Di Filippo - After the Collapse

Williedell made a rude noise at this bit of righteous FarmEarth catechism, and I felt compelled to stand up for Anuta by banging my drill bit into Williedell’s machine.

Vernice said, “All right, all right, I give up! We’re stuck here, so let’s just do it. And you two, quit your pissing contest!”

The six of us went back to moodily chewing up strata.

After a month of this, our little set had begun to unravel a tad. Each day, when our secret shift of moonlighting was over, none of us wanted to hang together. We were all sick of each other, and just wanted to get away to play with our Master status.

And that supreme privilege did indeed almost make up for all the boredom and tedium of the scut work.

Maybe you’ve played FarmEarth as a Master yourself. (But I bet you didn’t have to worry, like us six fakes did, about giving yourself away to the real Masters with some misplaced comment. The paranoia was mild but constant.) If so, you know what I’m talking about.

You’ve guided a flock of aerostatic effectuators through gaudy polar stratospheric clouds, sequestering CFCs.

You’ve guarded nesting mama Kemp’s Ridley turtles from feral dogs.

You’ve quarried the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for materials that artists riding ships have turned on the spot into found sculptures that sell for muy plata .

You’ve draped skyscrapers with vertical farms.

You’ve channeled freshets into the nearly dead Aral Sea, and restocked those reborn waters.

You’ve midwifed at the birth of a hundred species of animals: tranked mamas in the wild whose embryos were mispositioned for easy birth, and would have otherwise died.

That last item reminds me of something kinda embarrassing.

Playing FarmEarth with big mammals can be tricky, as I found out one day. They’re too much like humans.

I was out in Winnemucca, Nevada, among a herd of wild horses. The FarmEarth assignment I had picked off a duty roster was to provide the herd with its annual Encephalomyelitis vaccinations. That always happened in the spring, and now it was time.

My effectuator was a little rolligon that barreled across the prairie disguised as tumbleweed. When I got near a horse, I would spring up with my onboard folded legs, grab its mane, give the injection, then drop off quickly.

But after a while, I got bored a little, and so I hung on to this one horse to enjoy the ride. The stallion got real freaky, dashing this way and that, but then it settled down a bit, still galloping. I was having some real thrills.

And that was when my ride encountered a mare.

I hadn’t realized that spring was breeding time for the mustangs.

Before I could disengage amidst the excitement and confusion, the stallion was sporting a boner the size of Rhode Island, and was covering the mare.

I noticed now that the mare wore a vaccinating effectuator too.

The haptic feedback, even though it didn’t go direct to my crotch, was still having its effect on my own dick. It felt weird and creepy—but too good to give up.

Before I could quite climax in my pants, the titanic horsey sex was over, and the male and female broke apart.

Very cautiously, I pinged the other FarmEarth player. They could always refuse to respond.

Anuta answered.

Back home in my bedroom, my face burned a thousand degrees hot. I was sure hers was burning too. We couldn’t even say a word to each other. In another minute, she had broken the communications link.

When we next met in the flesh, we didn’t refer to the incident in so many words. But we felt compelled to get away from the others and make out a little.

After a while, by mutual consent, we just sort of dribbled to a stop, without having done much more than snog and grope.

“I guess,” said Anuta, “that unless we mean to go all the way, we won’t get to where we were the other day.”

“Yeah, I suppose. And even then….”

She nodded her head in silent agreement. Regular people sex was going to have to be pretty special to live up to the equine sex we had vicariously experienced in FarmEarth.

I felt at that moment that maybe FarmEarth Master privileges were kept away from us kids for a reason.

And a few weeks later, when everything came crashing down, I was certain of it.

* * * *

My Moms and Dad were all out of the house that fateful late afternoon. I was lying in bed at home, bored and chewing up subsoils with my pals and their effectuators, eking out a conduit which we had been told, by Adán, represented the last few yards of tunnel, in accordance with our schematics, when I felt a poke in my ribs. I disengaged from FarmEarth, coming out of augie space, and saw my dull-faced brother Benno hovering over me.

“Crispian,” he said, “do you know where you are?”

“Yeah, sure, I’m eating up hydrocarbons in the Gulf. Nom, nom, nom, good little Crispy Critter.”

“Your statement exists in non-compliance with reality.”

“Oh, just go away, Benno, and leave me alone.”

I dived back into augie space, eager to get this boring “Angry Sister” assignment over with. We were all hoping that the next task Adán gave us would be more glamorous and exciting. We all wanted to feel that we were big, bold cyber-cowboys of the planet, riding Gaia’s range, on the lookout for eco-rustlers, repairing broken fences. But of course, even without star-quality assignments, we still had the illicit Master privileges to amuse—and scare—us.

“Hey,” said Mallory when I returned to our subterranean workspace, “where’d you go?”

“Yeah,” chimed in Vernice, “no slacking off!”

“Oh, it was just my stupid grebnard brother. He wanted to harass me about something.”

Cheo said, “That’s Benno, right? Isn’t his mom Zoysia van Vollenhoven? I heard he’s hot stuff in FarmEarth. Inherited all his Mom’s chops, plus more. Maybe he had something useful to tell you.”

“I doubt it. He’s probably just jealous of me now.”

Anuta sounded worried. “You don’t think he knows anything about what we’re doing?”

“No way. I just mean that he sees me playing FarmEarth eagerly all the time now, so he must have some idea I’m enjoying myself, and that pisses him off. He’s always been jealous of me.”

At that moment, I felt a hand clamp onto my ankle in meatspace, and I was dragged out of bed with a thump ! I vacated my John Deere and confronted Benno from my humiliating position on the floor.

“What exactly is the matter with you, Ben? Do you have a short-circuit in your strap-on brain?”

Benno’s normally impassive face showed as much emotion as it ever did, like say at Christmas, when he got some grebnard present he had always wanted. The massive agitation amounted to some squinted eyes and trembling lower lip.

“If you do not want to admit your ignorance, Crispian, I will simply tell you where you are. You are at these coordinates: sixty-three degrees, thirty-eight minutes north, and nineteen degrees, three minutes west.”

I didn’t bother using my memtax to look up that latitude and longitude, because I didn’t want to give Benno’s accusations any weight. So I just sarcastically asked, “And where exactly is that?”

“You and your crew of naïve miscreants are almost directly underneath the Katla volcano in Iceland. How far down you are, I have not yet ascertained. But I would imagine that you are quite close to the magma reservoirs, and in imminent danger of tapping them with your tunnel. Other criminal crews spaced all around the volcano are in similar positions. May I remind you that whenever Katla has gone off in the past—the last time was in 1918—it discharged as much toxic substances per second as the combined fluid discharges of the Amazon, Mississippi, Nile, and Yangtze rivers.”