I couldn’t wait until I turned thirteen, so I could play FarmEarth. I kept pestering all three of my parents every day to let me download the FarmEarth app into my memtax. What a little makulit I must have been! I see it now, from the grownup vantage of sixteen, and after all the trouble I eventually caused. Every minute with whines like “What difference does six months make?” And “But didn’t I get high marks in all my omics classes?” And what I thought was the irrefutable clincher, “But Benno got to play when he was only eleven!”
“Look now, please, Crispian,” my egg-Mom Darla would calmly answer, “six months makes a big difference when you’re just twelve-point-five. That’s four percent of your life up to this date. You can mature a lot in six months.”
Darla worked as an osteo-engineer, hyper-tweaking fab files for living prosthetics, as if you couldn’t tell.
“But Crispian,” my mito-Mom Kianna would imperturbably answer, “you also came close to failing integral social plectics, and you know that’s nearly as important for playing FarmEarth as your omics.”
Kianna worked as a hostess for the local NASDAQ Casino. She had hustled more drinks than the next two hostesses combined, and been number one in tips for the past three years.
“But Crispian,” my lone dad Marcelo Tanjuatco would irrefutably reply (I had taken “Tanjuatco,” his last name, as mine, which is why I mention it here), “Benno has a different mito-Mom than you. And you know how special and respected Zoysia is, and how long and hard even she had to petition to get Benno early acceptance.”
Dad didn’t work, at least not for anyone but the polybond. He stayed home, cooking meals, optimizing the house dynamics, and of course playing FarmEarth, just like every other person over thirteen who wasn’t a maximal grebnard.
The way Dad—and everyone else—pronounced Zoysia’s name—all smug, reverential and dreamy—just denatured my proteome, and I had to protest.
“But Benno and I still share your genes and Darla’s! That’s ninety percent right there! Zoysia’s only ten percent.”
“And you share ninety-five percent of your genes with any random chimp,” said Darla. “And they can’t play FarmEarth either. At least not maybe until that new generation of kymes come online.”
I knew when I was beaten, so I mumbled and grumbled and retreated to the room I shared with Benno.
Of course, at an hour before suppertime he just had to be there, and playing FarmEarth.
My big brother Benno was a default-amp kid. His resting brain state had been permanently overclocked in the womb, so even when he wasn’t consciously “thinking” he was processing information faster than you or me. And when he really focused on something, you could smell the neurons burning.
But no good fairy ever gave a gift without a catch. Benno’s outward affect was, well, “interiorized.” He always seemed to be listening to some silent voice, even when he was having a conversation with someone. And I’m not talking about the way all of us sometimes pay more attention to our auricular implants and the scenes displayed on our memtax than we do to the person facing us.
Needless to say, puffy-faced Benno didn’t have much of social life, even at age sixteen. Not that he seemed to care.
Lying on his back on the lower bunk of our sleeping pod, Benno stared at some unknown landscape in his memtax, working his haptic finger bling faster than the Mandarin’s grandson trying to take down Tony Stark’s clone in Iron Man 10.
I tried to tap into his FarmEarth feed with my own memtax, even though I knew the dataflow was encrypted. But all that happened was that I got bounced to Benno’s public CitizenSpace.
I sat down on the edge of the mattress beside him, and poked him in the ribs. He didn’t even flinch.
“Hey, B-man, whatcha doing?”
Benno’s voice was a monotone even when he was excited about something, and dealing with his noodgy little brother was low on his list of thrills.
“I’m grooming the desert-treeline ecotone in Mali. Now go away.”
“Wow! That is so stellar! Are you planting new trees?”
“No, I’m upgrading rhizome production on the existing ones.”
“What kind of effectuators are you using?”
“ST5000 Micromites. Now. Go. Away!”
I shoved Benno hard. “Jerk! Why don’t you ever share with me! I just wanna play too!”
I jumped up and stalked off before he could retaliate, but he didn’t even bother to respond.
So there you have typical day in the latter half of my thirteenth year. Desperate pleas on my part to graduate to adulthood, followed by admonitions from my parents to be patient, then by jealousy and inattention from my big brother.
As you can well imagine, the six similar months till I turned thirteen passed by like a Plutonian year (just checked via memtax: 248 Earth years). But finally—finally!—I turned thirteen and got my very own log-on to FarmEarth.
And that’s when the real frustration started!
* * * *
Kicking a living hackysack is a lot more fun in meatspace than it is via memtax. You can feel muscles other than those in your fingers getting a workout. Your bare toes dig into the grass. You smell sweat and soil. You get sprayed with salt water on a hot day. You get to congratulatorily hug warm girls afterwards if any are in the circle with you. So even though all the kids gripe about having to leave their houses every day for two whole shared hours of meatspace schooling at the nearest Greenpatch, I guess that, underneath all our complaints, we really like being face to face with our peers once in a while.
That fateful day when we first decided to hack FarmEarth, there were six of us kicking around the sack. Me, Mallory, Cheo, Vernice, Anuta, and Williedell—my best friends.
The sack was an old one, and didn’t have much life left in it. A splice of ctenophore, siphonophore, and a few other marine creatures, including bladder kelp, the soft warty green globe could barely jet enough salt water to change its mid-air course erratically as intended. Kicking it got too predictable pretty fast.
Sensing what we were all feeling and acting first, Cheo, tall and quick, grabbed the sack on one of its feeble arcs and tossed it like a basketball into the nearby aquarium—splash!—where it sank listlessly to the bottom of the tank. Poor old sponge.
“Two points!” said Vernice. Vernice loved basketball more than anything, and was convinced she was going to play for the Havana Ocelotes some day. She hugged Cheo, and that triggered a round of mutual embraces. I squeezed Anuta’s slim brown body—she wore just short-shorts and a belly shirt—a little extra, trying to convey some of the special feelings I had for her, but I couldn’t tell if any of my emotions got communicated. Girls are hard to figure sometime.
Williedell ambled slow and easy in his usual way over to the solar-butane fridge and snagged six Cokes. We dropped to the grass under the shade of the big tulip-banyan at the edge of the Greenpatch and sucked down the cold soda greedily. Life was good.
And then our FarmEarth teacher had to show up.
Now, I know you’re saying, “Huh? I thought Crispian Tanjuatco was that guy who could hardly wait to turn thirteen so he could play FarmEarth. Isn’t that parity?”
Well, that was how I felt before I actually got FarmEarth beginner privileges, and came up against all the rules and restrictions and duties that went with our lowly ranking. True to form, the adults had managed to suck all the excitement and fun and thrills out of what should have been sweet as planoforming—at least at the entry level for thirteen-year-olds, who were always getting the dirty end of the control rod.
“Hi, kids! Who’s ready to shoulder-surf some pseudomonads?”
The minutely flexing, faintly flickering OLED circuitry of my memtax, powered off my bioelectricity, painted my retinas with the grinning translucent face of Purvis Mumphrey. Past his ghostlike augie-real appearance, I could still see all my friends and their reactions.
Round as a moon pie, framed by wispy blonde hair, Mumphrey’s face revealed, we all agreed, a deep sadness beneath his bayou bonhomie. His sadness related, in fact, to the assignment before us.
Everyone groaned, and that made our teacher look even sadder.
“Aw, Mr. Mumphrey, do we hafta?” “We’re too tired now from our game.” “Can’t we do it later?”
“Students, please. How will you ever get good enough at FarmEarth to move up to master level, unless you practice now?”
Master level. That was the lure, the tease, the hook, the far-off pinnacle of freedom and responsibility that we all aspired to. Being in charge of a big mammal, or a whole forest, say. Who wouldn’t want that? Acting to help Gaia in her crippled condition, to make up for the shitty way our species had treated the planet, stewarding important things actually large enough to see.
But for now, six months into our novice status, all we had in front of us was riding herd on a zillion hungry bacteria. That was all the adults trusted us to handle. The prospect was about as exciting as watching your navel lint accumulate.
At this moment, Mr. Mumphrey looked about ready to cry. This assignment meant a lot to him.
Our teacher had been born in Louisiana, prior to the Deepwater Horizon blowout. He had been just our age, son of a shrimper, when that drilling rig went down and the big spew filled the Gulf with oil for too many months. Now, twenty years later, we were still cleaning up that mess.
So rather than see our teacher break down and weep, which would have been yotta-yucky, we groaned some more just to show we weren’t utterly buying his sales pitch, got into comfortable positions around the shade tree (I wished I could have put my head into Anuta’s lap, but I didn’t dare), and booted up our FarmEarth apps.
Mr. Mumphrey had access to our feeds, so he could monitor what we did. That just added an extra layer of insult to the way we were treated like babies.
Instantly, we were out of augie overlays and into full virt.
I was point-of-view embedded deep in the dark waters of the Gulf, in the middle of a swarm of oil-eating bacteria, thanks to the audiovideo feed from a host of macro-effectuators that hovered on their impellors, awaiting our orders. The cloud of otherwise invisible bugs around us glowed with fabricated luminescence. Fish swam into and out of the radiance, which was supplemented by spotlights onboard the effectuators.
Many of the fish showed yotta-yucky birth defects.
The scene in my memtax also displayed a bunch of useful supplementary data: our GPS location, thumbnails of other people running FarmEarth in our neighborhood, a window showing a view of the surface above our location, weather reports—common stuff like that. If I wanted to, I could bring up the individual unique ID numbers on the fish, and even for each single bacteria.
I got a hold of the effectuator assigned to me, feeling its controls through my haptic finger bling, and made it swerve at the machine being run by Anuta.
“Hey, Crispy Critter, watch it!” she said with that sexy Bollywood accent of hers.
Mumphs was not pleased. “Mr. Tanjuatco, you will please concentrate on the task at hand. Now, students, last week’s Hurricane Norbert churned up a swath of relatively shallow sediment north of our present site, revealing a lode of undigested hydrocarbons. It’s up to us to clean them up. Let’s drive these hungry bugs to the site.”
Williedell and Cheo and I made cowboy whoops, while the girls just clucked their tongues and got busy. Pretty soon, using water jets and shaped sonics aboard the effectuators, we had created a big invisible water bubble full of bugs that we could move at will. We headed north, over anemones and octopi, coral and brittle stars. Things looked pretty good, I had to say, considering all the crap the Gulf had been through. That’s what made FarmEarth so rewarding and addictive, seeing how you could improve on these old tragedies.
But herding bugs underwater was hardly high-profile or awesome, no matter how real the resulting upgrades were. It was basically like spinning the composter at your home: a useful duty that stunk.
We soon got the bugs to the site and mooshed them into the tarry glop where they could start remediating.
“Nom, nom, nom,” said Mallory. Mallory had the best sense of humor for a girl I had ever seen.
“Nom, nom, nom,” I answered back. Then all six of us were nom-nom-noming away, while Mumphs pretended not to find it funny.
But even that joke wore out after a while, and our task of keeping the bugs centered on their meal, rotating fresh stock in to replace sated ones, got so boring I was practically falling asleep.
Eventually, Mumphs said, “Okay, we have a quorum of replacement Farmers lined up, so you can all log out.”
I came out of FarmEarth a little disoriented, like people always do, especially when you’ve been stewarding in a really unusual environment. I didn’t know how my brother Benno kept any sense of reality after he spent so much time in so many exotic FarmEarth settings. The familiar Greenpatch itself looked odd to me, like my friends should have been fishes or something, instead of people. I could tell the others were feeling the same way, and so we broke up for the day with some quiet goodbyes.
By the time I got home, to find my fave supper of goat empanadas and cassava-leaf stew laid on by Dad, with both Moms able to be there too, I had already forgotten how bored and disappointed playing FarmEarth had left me.
But apparently, Cheo had not.
* * * *
The vertical play surface at Gecko Guy’s Climbzone was made out of MEMs, just like a pair of memtax. To the naked eye, the climbing surface looked like a gray plastic wall studded with permanent handholds and footholds, little grippable irregular nubbins. But the composition of near-nanoscopic addressable scales meant that the wall was instantly and infinitely configurable.
Which is why, halfway up the six-meter climb, I suddenly felt the hold under my right hand, which was supporting all my weight, evaporate, sending me scrabbling wildly for another.
But every square centimeter within my reach was flat.
The floor, even though padded, was a long way off, and of course I had no safety line.
So even though I was reluctant to grebnard out, I activated the artificial setae in my gloves and booties, and slammed them against the wall.
One glove and one bootie stuck, slowing me enough to position my second hand and foot. I clung flat to the wall, catching my breath, then began to scuttle like a crab to the nearest projecting holds, the setae making ripping sounds as they pulled away each time.
A few meters to my left, Williedell laughed and called out, “Ha-ha, Crispy had to go gecko!”
“Yeah, like you never did three times last week! Race you to the top!”
Starting to scramble upward as fast as I could, I risked a glance at Anuta to see if she were laughing at my lameness. But she wasn’t even looking my way, just hanging in place and gossiping with Mallory and Vernice.
Sometimes I think girls have no real sense of competition.
But then I remember how much attention they pay to their stupid clothes.
Williedell and I reached the top of the wall at roughly the same time, and gave each other a fist bump.
Down on the floor, Cheo hailed us. “Hey, Crispian, almost got you that time, didn’t I!”
Cheo’s parents owned the Climbzone, and so the five of us got to play for free in the slowest hours—like now, eight AM on a Sunday. Cheo had to work a few hours on the weekends—mainly just handing out gloves and booties and instructing newbies—so he couldn’t climb with us. Of course, he had access via his memtax to the wall controls, and had disappeared my handhold on purpose.
I yelled back, “Next time we’re eating underwater goo, you’re getting a face full!”
For some reason, my silly remark made Cheo look sober and thoughtful. “Hey, guys, c’mon down! I want to talk about something with you.”
The girls must have been paying some attention to our antics, because they responded to Cheo’s request and began lowering themselves to the floor. Pretty soon, all five of us were gathered around Cheo.
There were no other paying customers at the moment.
“Let me just close up the place for a few minutes.”
Cheo locked the entrance doors and posted a public augie sign saying BACK IN FIFTEEN MINUTES. Then we all went and sat at the snack bar. As always, Williedell made sure we were all supplied with drinks. We joked that he was going to grow up to be flight attendant on a Amazonian aerostat—but we didn’t make the joke too often, since he flared up sensitive about always instinctively acting the host. (I think he got those hospitality habits because he was the oldest in his semi-dysfunctional family and always taking care of his sibs.)
Cheo looked us up and down and then said, “Who’s happy with our sludge-eating FarmEarth assignments? Anyone?”
“Nope.” “Not me.” “I swear I can taste oil and sardines after every run.”
That last from Mallory.
“And you know we’ve got at least another six months of this kind of drudgery until we ramp up maybe half a level, right?”
Groans all around.
“Well, what would you say if I could get us playing at a higher level right away? Maybe even at master status!”
Vernice said, “Oh, sure, and how’re you gonna do that? I could see if Crispy here maybe said he had a way to bribe his Aunt Zoysia. She’s got real enchufe.”
“Yeah, well, I know someone with real enchufe too. My brother.”
Everyone fell silent. Then Anuta said quietly, “But Cheo, your brother is in prison.”
As far as we all knew, this was true. Cheo’s big brother Adán had got five years for subverting FarmEarth. He had misused effectuators to cultivate a few hectares of chiba in the middle of the Pantanal reserve. The charges against him, however, had nothing to do with the actual dope, because of course chiba was legal as chewing gum. But he had misappropriated public resources, avoided excise taxes on his crop, and indirectly caused the death of a colony of protected capybaras by diverting the effectuators that might have been used to save them from some bushmeat poachers. Net punishment: five years hospitality from the federales.
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.”
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.”
Holy shit! Could he be right? My voice quivered a little, even though I tried to control it. “And why would we be in such a place?”
“Because Los Braceros Últimos plan to unleash the Pinatubo Option.”
Now I started to really get scared.
Every school kid from first grade on knew about the Pinatubo Option, named after a famous volcanic incident of the last century. It was a geoengineering scheme of the highest magnitude, intended to flood the atmosphere with ash and other aerosols so as to cut global temperatures by a considerable fraction. Consensus wisdom had always figured it was too risky and uncontrollable a proposition.
“I cannot let you and your friends proceed with this. You must tell them to halt immediately.”
For a minute, I had almost felt myself on Benno’s side. But when he gave me that order in his know-it-all way, I instantly rebelled. All the years of growing up together, with him always the favored one, stuck in my throat.
“Like hell! We’re just doing what’s good for the planet in the fastest way possible. Los Braceros must have studied everything better than you. You’re just a kid like me!”
Benno looked at me calmly with his stoney face. “I am a Master Class Steward, and you are not.”
“Well, Mr. Master Class Steward, try and stop me!”
I started to climb to my feet when Benno tackled me and knocked me back down!
We began to wrestle. I expected to pin Benno in a couple of seconds. But that wasn’t how things went.
I had always believed my brother was a total lardass from all his FarmEarth physical inactivity. How the heck was I supposed to know that he spent two hours every weekend in some kind of martial arts training? Was I in charge of his frigging schedule? We didn’t even share the same mito-Mom!
I found myself snaffled up in about half a minute, with Benno clamping both my wrists together behind my back with just one big strong hand.
And then, with the other hand, he rawly popped out my memtax, being none too gentle.
I felt blinded! Awake, yet separated from augie space for more than the short interval it takes to swap in fresh memtax, I couldn’t access the world’s knowledge, talk to my friends, or even recall what I had had for breakfast that morning.
Next Benno stripped me of my haptic bling. Then he said, “You wait right here.”
He left, locking the bedroom door behind him.
I sat on the bed, feeling empty and broken. I couldn’t even tell you now how much time passed.
The door opened and in walked Benno, followed by his mito-Mom, Zoysia van Vollenhoven.
Aunt Zoysia always inspired instant guilt in me. Not because of anything she said or did, or any overbearing, sneering attitude, but only because of the way she looked.
Aunt Zoysia was the sexiest female I knew—and not in any kind of bulimic high-fashion designer-label manner either, like those thoroughbreds the Brazilians engineer for the runways of the world. I always thought that if Gaia could have chosen to incarnate herself, she would have looked just like Aunt Zoysia, all overflowing breasts and hips and wild mane of hair, lush wide mouth, proud nose and piercing eyes. She practically radiated exuberant joy and heartiness and sensuality. In her presence, I always got an incipient stiffy, and since she was family—even though she and I shared no genes—the stiffy was always instantly accompanied by guilt.
But this was the one time I didn’t react in the usual manner, I felt so miserable.
Aunt Zoysia came over and sat on the mattress beside me and hugged me. Even those intimate circumstances did not stir up any horniness.
“Crispian, dear, Benno has described to me the trouble you’ve gotten into. It’s all right, I completely understand. You just wanted to play with the big boys. But now, I think you’ll admit, things have gone too far, and must be brought to a screeching halt. Benno?”
“Yes, mother?”
“Please find a fresh pair of memtax for your brother. We will slave Crispian’s to ours, and bring him along for the shutdown of Los Braceros Últimos. It will be highly instructional.”
Benno went out and came back with new memtax in their organic blister pack. I wetted them and inserted them, and put on my restored haptic bling. I booted up all my apps, but still found myself a volitionless spectator to the shared augie space feed from Zoysia and Benno.
“All right, son, let’s take these sneaky bastards down.”
“Ready when you are, Mom.”
You know, I thought I was pretty slick with my Master Class privileges, could handle effectuators and the flora and fauna of various biomes pretty deftly. But riding Zoysia’s feed, I realized I knew squat.
The first thing she and Benno did was to go into God Mode, with Noclip Option, Maphack, Duping and Smurfing thrown in. That much I could follow—barely.
But after that, I was just along for the dizzying ride.
Zoysia and Benno took down Los Braceros Últimos like a military sonic cannon disabling a pack of kittens. Racing around the globe in augie space, they undercut all the many plans of the Pinatubo-heads, disabling rogue effectuators and even using legal machines in off-label ways, such as to immobilize people in meatspace. I think the wildest maneuver though was when they stampeded a herd of springboks through the remote Windhoek encampment where some of the conspirators were operating from. The eco-agitators never knew what hit them.
The whole roundup lasted barely an hour. I found myself back in my familiar and yet somehow strange-seeming bedroom, actually short of breath and sweaty. Zoysia and brother Benno were unruffled.
“Now, Crispian,” said my Aunt sweetly, no sign of the moderate outlaw blood she had spilled evident on her perfect teeth or nails, “I hope you’ve learned that privileges only come to those who have earned them, and know how to use them.”
“Yes’m.”
“Perhaps if you hung out a little more with your brother, and consented to allow him to mentor you….”
I turned to glare at Benno, but his homely, unaggressive expression defused my usual impatience and dislike. Plus, I was frankly a little frightened of him now.
“Yes’m.”
“Very well. I think then, in a few years, given the rare initiative and skills you’ve shown—even though you chose to follow an illegal path with them—you should be quite ready to join us in ensuring that people do not abuse FarmEarth.”
And of course, as I’ve often said to Anuta, wise and sexy Aunt Zoysia predicted everything just right.
Which is why I have to say goodbye now.
Something somewhere on FarmEarth is wrong!