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.
