Last Farmer
D.N. Robertson
For all of you that put up with this crazy pursuit of mine,
For my husband who believes in me unreservedly,
For my family & friends, who have helped me become who I am
And for all of you who took a chance on me -
With love, thanks and gratitude.
Copyright © 2015 by Danica Robertson
First Edition – July 2015
All rights reserved.
No part of the publication may be reproduced in any
form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or any information browsing,
storage, or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publisher.
Published by Danica Robertson
Index
Chapter One – School’s Out
Chapter Two – Making the Grade
Chapter Three – The Pod
Chapter Four – Underground
Chapter Five – Beyond the Bubble
Chapter Six – One Track Mind
Chapter Seven – Seeds of Knowledge
Chapter Eight – Blast from the Past
Chapter Nine – Hunt for Cache
Chapter Ten – Seeds of Change
Chapter Eleven – Reg’s Legacy
Chapter Twelve – Breathe a Sigh of Relief
Chapter Thirteen – How ‘Bot’ That?
Chapter Fourteen – On the Run Again
Chapter Fifteen – Duck and Cover
Chapter Sixteen - Gone
Chapter Seventeen - Amethyst
Chapter Eighteen – The Hunt
Chapter Nineteen - Stake Out
Chapter Twenty – The Rescue
Chapter Twenty-One – And Then There Were Five
Chapter Twenty-two – On the Road Again
Chapter Twenty-Three – What’s in a Name?
Chapter Twenty-Four – Eau de Joie
Chapter Twenty-Five – Sands of Time
Chapter Twenty-Six – Stanger than Fiction
Chapter Twenty-Seven – The Edge of Change
Chapter Twenty-Eight – Faith or Folly
Chapter Twenty-Nine – Out of Our Depth
Chapter Thirty – From the Mists of Dreaming
Chapter 1 – School’s Out
An electric charge raced over my skin, raising the hairs on the back of my hand, but I barely registered the sensation. Automatically, I reached for the volume sensor on the inside of my wrist, forgetting that emergency announcements overrode any control I had over my ICD. I was fairly immune to the food recalls now, but an Integrated Computing Device is hard to ignore when it emits an electric jolt that kick starts your adrenal glands. I listened with forced alertness to the insta-com; adrenaline will do that to you.
“Genfoods Holistic Inc. requests that customers return the affected organic insta-meals to the nearest wellness station. Exchanges are being offered for all items with production dates between June and September of last year…”
I shook my head and shrugged at my car share buddy. I didn’t know the guy’s name, but had seen him a few times over the past year. It would have been pointless trying to hear each other over the emergency blurb and I was leaving at the next stop, so neither of us bothered to strike up a conversation.
As I stepped out of the auto-transport, I took a moment to ponder my lack of concern for yet another recall. They were coming almost daily now. The politicians couldn’t agree on who was to blame, so our food quality tanked and, now, even our MPs were eating the same chemical slop as the rest of us. It was a far cry from the stories my great-grandfather told about families sitting down at a table and sharing a meal; breaking bread, he called it. Food clichés, while ingrained in our language, were basically lost on anyone from my generation or younger.
A sharp blare shook me from my musing; I was clogging the transport stop, standing right between the exit stiles. The auto attendant let out a repetitive high-pitched tone until I moved away from the scanner’s sensors. It used to be a video graphic and voice over, to get you to move, but it took up too much band width to run the bite. I kind of missed the sultry computerized voice saying “Please do not block the exit”; maybe the recent anniversary of my divorce was making me maudlin. With a sigh, I headed toward the building where I’d spent the last year trying to find meaning in a thankless job.
School was winding down, thank God. I missed the days of on-line classes, where I could teach in my pyjama bottoms and a Grateful Dead shirt while my avatar, dressed respectably and well shaven, presented itself to the class. Sadly, the grid couldn’t support so much online traffic, so I was stuck in a collared shirt and unashamedly stubbly, preaching to a somnambulist class of teens.
I think I was almost as desperate to be done as they were. I was just glad that I only had to get through the final project, having enough seniority to pass off the final exam to a dewy eyed newbie still aflame with the passion of teaching. For the most part, I no longer wondered what had happened to my zeal, even though I could sometimes feel the ghost of my old self; keen and passionate, eager to mould young minds. I’d burnt my candle down to a nub, so I was about as done as a proverbial dinner. I needed a break and was relieved to see summer fast approaching; all I wanted was to get the hell out of the building.
Being a burnt out history teacher didn’t give me much to look forward to, but one of my students changed that. As a government ward, I hadn’t expected much for him, but he’d been my salvation; an anomaly in an otherwise predictable term. I had almost ignored him, knowing that he was in the system. You can’t expect a lot from state raised kids and the government doesn’t really give them a chance to sneak in under the radar. Their names give them away; letting everyone know that they’re system kids or “SKs” upon introduction. Their first names are short and always start with a J, K, L or M and their surnames come from the street of their orphanage. It was ironic to me that there were tons of orphans out there in the world with only two things in common; their last names and being victims of the country’s unrelenting drug problem. But this kid, Jake, didn’t let any of that hold him down. He was a ward of the state, but not your normal crack baby. Of course, crack was long gone, but the moniker stuck.
The kid was interesting and smart. Born an addict, he’d survived not just the habit, but the Ward System and even high school, with grit and enthusiasm. At the start of the term, he’d surprised me which wasn’t an easy thing to do. His proposed essay title had captured my attention right away: “Where Did All the Farmers Go?” Most of my students would be hard pressed to define farming, let alone build an entire essay on it. I hoped he’d done his research and not just pulled up some old term that he found interesting. There wasn’t a lot of government approved information out there about the topic, so he was going to have to dig hard. I’d find out soon if he was playing me or not; today was the deadline and I knew I’d be reading through several yawn inducing essays on “The Power of the Internet – Fact or Fiction?”, “Restaurants – the Historical Significance” and other uninspired looks into the fairly recent past, but I was hoping that Jake had come up with something meatier.
I climbed the steps of the school, a relic of the past, built of brick and devotedly maintained by the School Historical Society. The ladies of the Society almost died in a fit of indignation when it was suggested that the school be replaced with something more energy efficient. High efficiency solar panels and CO2 converters were hidden strategically on the roof, meeting the new eco-standards and everyone was happy.
I was
glad this would be my last hike up the front staircase, no escalators here. No, the blue hairs of the SHS were set on authenticity. The building seemed to agree with them, as most of the recently installed security tech failed more often than it worked. I stood in front of my classroom door, feeling even more tired than usual. I guess the adrenaline had finally worn off.
As I passed my hand over the scanner to unlock my classroom, the double beep told me that the system was on the fritz again, so I fumbled around in my jacket pocket for the key. If not always easier, old school was so much more reliable.
I watched the kids trickle in and noted that their usual indifference was coloured with a bit of hopeful eagerness. They could sense freedom. For a good portion of my students, it was the summer of their emancipation. They no longer be wards of the system and could throw off the fetters of federally sanctioned trackers and what was tantamount to house arrest. They could go out and screw up their lives however they chose, as long as they didn’t ask our fine government for any assistance while doing it. I didn’t hold out much hope for most of them. They’d be caught up in the wheel that guided our existence – lulled into a sense of comfort while they pushed buttons and read reports that did nothing and had no meaning, but ensured a place to lay their head and enough meal supplements to survive. A few of them were smarter than all that, but in a society that was basically a façade of an economy, expectations were fairly low. It was moments like this that made me wonder why the school board even bothered with education, let alone history. What was the point? We couldn’t learn from our mistakes…we, as a race, had burned nearly every bridge without a thought and were deluded enough to think that it didn’t matter. This belief was backed by a fairly aggressive government campaign that a friend of mine liked to call “Operation Rose Coloured Glasses”; equivalent to the idea that there’s nothing to see here, everything’s fine. They’d buried our embarrassing history under piles of revisionist laws and pretended that everything was normal. I see that now.
I realized the kids were staring at me, waiting for the final speech that would release them out into the world. What could I possibly say? It’s not like I had any words of wisdom. Wasn’t I just as pathetically tied to the farce that was life? I ran my fingers through my hair, trying to clear my thoughts and pushed my glasses back up to the bridge of my nose.
“Hand in your memory cards and I’ll stay for the hour in case any of you have questions about the final exam.” Inspiring!
I could see most of them smiling and fishing around in their pockets for their projects. Mentally, I wagered that at least ten of them would shortly be sporting quizzical looks, as if they just realized they didn’t have their term paper. ‘I swear, Dax, I put it in my pocket…someone must have lifted it!’ I mean how many times, in how many years, had I heard that one? My other favourite was ‘the grid must have failed…I sent the file to you, honest!’ I had to give them credit, they were earnest enough about their fictitious files, but I always answered the same way; “Five percent penalty for every day it’s late.”
I lost my own wager; sixteen of them didn’t have their papers, but that was on them. They’d known since the beginning of the year that this day would come. I pointed to an old faded poster that read “A lack of planning on your part doesn’t create an emergency on mine.” The graphic was enhanced by the photo of a dog wearing thick black framed glasses, sitting behind a desk, and holding a ruler in its paw. The true irony was that real pets were a thing of the past, not enough food for us…definitely not enough food for Fido. The classroom slowly cleared with grins or grumbles, depending on the status of their final project. Jake was the last one to hand in his memory stick.
“I hope you like it, Dax,” he mumbled in textbook teenaged fashion. Letting the kids use my nick name was my attempt at giving the whole system the middle finger, as sorry as that seemed.
“I’m looking forward to it,” I answered honestly. I gave him a quick once over as was my habit with the SKs. “What’s going on, man? You look beat.” He raised one shoulder in feigned disinterest, but I could see that something was on his mind. “Worried about being cut out of the system?” I didn’t think that would bug him, but you never knew. Some of these kids were so institutionalized they couldn’t cope with the idea of freedom.
“Nah, nothing like that.” He paused, sized me up, as many of the SKs seemed to do. “Dax?” I nodded encouragingly. “I’m going to find one of them…out in the Burn Zone.”
“One of who, Jake?” I know, I should have said whom, but screw it; I was almost done with teaching, at least for a bit.
“A farmer.” He whispered it like he was talking about the Lock Ness monster. In truth, he might as well have been; there weren’t any farmers left in this part of the world or any other part that I knew of, so he might just as well go out and look for a unicorn. My face must have given away my thoughts as he flushed a little bit, before he continued. “Look, 4Gig, he helped me a bit with my paper and we found this blog thing on the net. I didn’t get much info before the grid crapped out, but I know that he’s somewhere out there, beyond the dome. The entry was dated a few years or so ago.” I could tell that he really wanted me to believe him and by dropping the name “4Gig” he made it a lot easier. How he hooked up with my hacker buddy was a mystery, but if anyone could find something on the net it would be Reggie – good old “4Gig” as he was known to hackers, other crackpots and, apparently, overly intelligent SKs. Reggie was a notorious conspiracy theorist, a point on which we agreed to disagree, but I liked him just the same. Sure, the world is severely messed up, but seriously, a government conspiracy against the people, and I mean every single one of us? I let the thought go back to wherever it came from and concentrated on Jake.
“A lot of things can change over time, Jake,” I cautioned, even though the idea was kind of exciting, in an ‘off your meds’ kind of way.
“4Gig found the page again and printed some of it off. I think there’s enough detail to at least get a start.” He looked down at his sneakers, some sort of composite plastic and like-linen that echoed a Converse shoe. My great-granddad had owned an original pair, so I knew the real thing, but the fakes were good enough that most folks didn’t even notice the difference. “I’m leaving in a couple of days.” I knew his 18th birthday was the next day, but it took a day or two to get an appointment at the orphanage to have the tracker chip removed; he wasn’t letting any dust gather on him. “Read the paper and tell me what you think.” He gave me a lopsided smile and turned to leave, but stopped at the door. “Dax?”
“Yeah, Jake?”
“Do you think 4Gig is right about the whole conspiracy thing?” The tone of his voice made me look at him a bit more closely. I could see a faint twitch in his hand before he jammed his fingers in his pocket and I also noticed an over-the-top wary look in his eye. It was more than just idle curiosity.
“I don’t know. Seems a bit far fetched, but what do you think?” Again he shrugged with one shoulder.
“Ever since we found that blog…” he paused almost embarrassed to continue; I could only nod encouragingly. “I kinda feel like someone’s watching me. There’s been an off-track transport outside my building for over a week and I saw it again today, on my way here.” Seeing a transport that ran off the track system was rare at the best of times and it would be better to err on the side of caution. I thought about what Jake was planning to do. I wasn’t sure where it would lead, but I was certain that he didn’t know half of what was coming his way.
“Well, watch out, there are still some weirdos out there, especially the rich ones.” I advised, not encouraging the conspiracy part of his worries. Jake nodded, realising full well what I didn’t say, as much as what I did. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as he walked through the door and I found myself chasing him down the hall.
“Jake!” He paused between the staircase and the elevator, a pre-SHS relic. “Once you’re emancipated and if you think there’s still trouble, giv
e me a ring. We can always meet at my place or 4Gig’s.”
“Thanks, Dax.” His lopsided grin felt like a reward for following my gut. The stairwell door closed and I walked back to my classroom feeling good that I’d done what I could. At least nothing could happen to him until he got that chip removed. I grabbed up the memory sticks and packed up my desk. I had precious little; no pictures of kids or mementos from trips, just a laser pointer, the battery long dead, a couple of insta-meal packs and my tablet. I’d leave the poster up for the next rube to fill my desk. I hadn’t told anyone yet, but I didn’t plan to be back. I was suddenly feeling lucky and pressed the elevator button. I held my breath as the doors closed with a rattle and it shuddered down to the main floor. With quickening steps, I made for the exit.
With the old building and mindless work behind me, I felt almost happy. I had a sense of expectation that seemed completely foreign to me; and it was all because of my new plan.
It had been 10 years, almost to the day, since my marriage fell apart unexpectedly; well, at least from my point of view. The now ex-Mrs. Dudley Allison Xavier discovered that my DNA was less than perfect for the optimum progeny and with that one test, she packed her bags and moved back in with Mommy and Daddy. Without top notch kids, she would be cut off from her trust fund – her parents’ way of filtering out any undesirables – me, for example.
Time has a way of sneaking up on you and one day I realised I was forty-six, single, in an unfulfilling job, with nothing to look forward to. This was the summer that I was going to fix all of that. I was ready to get my life back and this is what gave me a sense of optimism. I finally finished my thesis for my PhD in history which meant - once I defended it - I could take a cushy professorship at McGill, leaving all the heavy lifting to TA’s and other keeners. The salary would entice the right kind of woman and I could settle down, just like my father, and his father, and all the Xavier men that came before me. Perhaps that would kill the desperate look in my mother’s eye, as she watched the good ship “Grandchildren” disappearing over the horizon, full sail, crushing her dynastic dreams. I took a moment to enjoy the irony of my parents’ wishes ruling my life, then washed the thought from my head and turned towards home.
Last Farmer: Last Farmer Series - Book 1 Page 1
