by Ken Liu
Of course, by forefront, they mean frontline. And by harvesting they mean strip-mining. Except everything we strip away grows back, faster than we can keep up. Whole new species we’ve never seen before spring up overnight. Whole new ways to die.
You got to suffer for progress, baby, Rousseau would have said (if he was still alive). And boy do we suffer out there.
The first thing they do when you land is strip you, shave you, put you through the ultraviolet steriliser and then surgically remove your fingernails. It’s a biologically sensitive operation. You can’t be bringing in contaminants from other worlds. And there was that microscopic snail parasite incident that killed off two full crews before the labtechs figured it out.
That’s why we don’t have those ultra-sensitive contact pads on our gloves any more, even though it makes harvesting harder. Because the snail would burrow right through them and get under the cuticle, working its way through your body to lay its eggs in your lungs. When the larvae hatch, they eat their way out, which doesn’t kill you, it just gives you a nasty case of terminal snail-induced emphysema. It took the infected weeks to die, hacking up bloody chunks of lung writhing with larvae. And we got new gloves.
Diamond miners used to stick gems up their arses to get them past security. With flora, you can get enough genetic material to sell to a rival with a fingernail scraping. “Do we have any proof there was ever a snail infestation?” Ro would ask over breakfast. “Apart from the company newsletter?” he’d add before practical, feisty, educated Lurie could get a word in and contradict him. He was big into his conspiracy theories and our medtech, Shapshak, only encouraged him. They’d huddle deep into the night, getting all serious over gin made from nutri-oats that Hoffmann used to distil in secret in his room. It seemed to make Shapshak more gloomy than ever, but Ro bounced back from it invigorated and extra-jokey.
Ro was the only one who could get away with calling me Coco, and him only because we were sleeping together. Dumbfuck name, I know. Coco Yengko. Mom wanted me to be a model. Or a ballerina. Or a movie star. All those careers that get you out of the ghettosprawl. Shouldn’t have had an ugly kid, then, ma. Shouldn’t have been poor. Shouldn’t have let the Inatec recruiter into our apartment. And hey, while we’re at it, Ro shouldn’t have died.
Green is the wrong word for it. You’d only make that mistake from the outside. When you’re in the thick of it, it’s black. The tangle of the canopy blocks out the sunlight. It’s the murky gloom after twilight, before real dark sets in. Visibility is five meters, fifteen with headlights, although the light attracts moths, which get into the vents. Pollen spores swirl around you, big as your head. Sulfur candy floss. And everything is moist and sticky and fertile. Like the whole jungle is rutting around us.
The humidity smacks you, even through the suit, thick as +8 gravity, so that you’re slick as greased ratpig with sweat the moment you step out. It pools in your jock strap, chafes when you walk, until it forms blisters big as testicles (a new experience for the girls on the crew). Although walking’s not what we do. More like wading against a sucking tide of heat and flora.
The rotting mulch suffocates our big clanking mechanical footsteps. Some of the harvesters play music on their private channels. Ro used to play opera, loud, letting it spill into The Green, until it started attracting insects the size of my head. I put a stop to it after that. I prefer to listen to the servo motors grinding in protest. I have this fantasy that I’ll be able to hear it when my suit gets compromised. The shhht of air that lets through a flood of spores like fibrous threads that burrow into metal and flesh. The faint suck of algae congealing on the plastic surfaces, seeping into the seams of the electronics, corroding the boards so the nanoconnections can’t fire. The hum of plankton slipping between the joints of my GMP between the spine and pelvic plates, to bite and sting.
The base model Galvanic Mecha Primaries aren’t built for these conditions. The heat is a problem. The servo motors get clogged. The armor corrodes. The nanotronics can’t sustain. Every joint is a weak point. The damn flora develops immunity to every vegicide we try. Assuming they’re actually using vegicides, Ro would point out. Why risk the harvest when harvesters are replaceable?
Management has determined that the optimum number for a harvesting team is five. I’m the team leader. It helps that Shapshak sometimes slips me amphetamines which all the medtechs get under the counter from the labtechs (along with other pharmaceuticals he doesn’t share). Look, ma, leadership material, but it’s not like management don’t know. They’re happy if we’re productive and sometimes you need a little extra something to get through out there.
Lurie is our am-bot. A high school education and eight weeks of training in amateur botany specimen collection puts her a full pay scale above the rest of us plebs, plus she gets the most sophisticated suit—a TCD, with neuro-feedback tentacle fingers that aren’t suspectible to snail-invasion built into the hands for snagging delicate samples. Rousseau and Waverley were our clearers—manual labour, their GMPs suitably equipped with bayonet progsaws that’ll cut through rock, thermo-machetes for underbrush, and extra armor plating for bludgeoning your way through the jungle with brute force when everything else has failed.
In retrospect, we could have done with less brute force. Could have done with me spotting the damn stingstrings before we blundered into the middle of a migration. Could have done with being less wired on the under-the-counter stuff. One minute Waverley and Ro are plowing through dense foliage ahead, the next there are a thousand mucusy tendrils unfurling from the canopy above us.
This wouldn’t have been a problem usually. Sure, the venom might corrode your paintwork, leave some ugly pockmarks that’ll get the maintenance guys all worked up, but they’re not hectic enough to compromise a GMP.
Unless, say, someone panics and trips and topples forward, accidentally ripping a hole in Rousseau’s suit with the razor edge of the machete, half-severing his arm. Waverley swore blind it wasn’t his fault. He tripped. But GMPs have balance/pace adjustors built-in. You have to be pretty damn incompetent to fall over in one. If Ro wasn’t a roaming brain-dead corpse puppet right now, he might have been suspicious, might have thought it was a conspiracy to recruit more guinea pigs for the OPP program. We know better. We know Waverley’s just a fucking moron.
There was a lot of screaming. Mainly from Ro, until Shapshak shot him up with morphine, but also from Lurie threatening to kill Waverley for being so damn stupid. It took us ninety minutes to get back to homelab, me and Shapshak dragging Ro on the portable stretcher from his field kit, which is only really useful for transporting people—not armored suits—but it was too dangerous to take him out. Waverley cut through the undergrowth ahead of us—the only place where we would trust him, leaving traces of Ro’s blood painted across broken branches.
When we got to homebase, Lurie still had to file the specimens and we all had to go through decontam, no matter how much I swore at security over the intercom to just let us back in right fucking now.
We had to sit in the cafeteria, the only communal space in homelab, listening to Rousseau die, pretending not to. It should have been easy. The drone of the air-conditioner and the filters and the sterilizer systems all fighting The Green is the first thing you acclimatize to here. But Ro's voice somehow broke through, a shrill shriek between clenched teeth. We hadn't known anyone who’d ever died from stingstrings. The labtechs must have been thrilled.
Shapshak spooned oats into his face, drifting away from it all on some drug he wasn’t sharing. Lurie couldn’t touch her food. She put on her old-school security-approved headphones, bopped her head fiercely to the music. Made like she wasn’t crying. I restrained myself from hitting Waverley, who kept whining, “It wasn’t my fault, okay?” I took deep breaths against the urge to bash his big bald head on the steel table until his brains oozed out. If Ro was here and not twisting around on a gurney while the labtechs prepared the killing dose of morphephedrine, he would have cracked the te
nsion with a joke. About crappy last meals maybe.
The other crews were making bets on exactly what would kill him. Marking up the odds on the back of a cigarette packet. Black humor and wise-cracking is just how you deal. We’d have been doing the same if it wasn’t one of ours. Yellow Choke 3:1 Threadworms 12:7. The Tars 15:4. New & Horrible: 1:2.
Ro’s voice changed in pitch, from scream-your-throat-raw to a low groaning—the kind that comes from your intestines plasticinating. The spores must have got in to the rip in his gut through the tear in his armor.
OhgodohgodohgodeuggghgodOHpleasefuckgodOH
Across from us, Hoffmann from F-Crew leapt to his feet, whooping in delight and making gimme gestures. “Tars! I fucking knew it! Oh yeah! Hand over the cashmoney, baby!”
Ro’s screaming tapered off. Which meant either he was dead or just sub-auditory under the concert of laboring machinery. Waverley tried to say something encouraging, “At least we know it’s the fast-kind of fatal” and I punched him in the face, knocking porridge out of his mouth in a gray splatter tinged with blood—along with two teeth. I got a warning, but no demerit, “Under the circumstances,” human resources said. They declined my request to have Waverley reassigned to another unit.
“It’s for the best,” human resources had also said. Which was the same line my mom spun me when she took me to the sterilization clinic in Caxton, mainly for the incentive kickback the government provided, but also to make sure I didn’t end up like her: pregnant and homeless at twelve, working double shifts at the seam factory when she was thirteen to keep the pair of us alive. Which only makes me feel more guilty, for all the sacrifices she made so I could get out of Caxton. And here I am, letting my sometime-lover die on my watch. Sorry, ma, I think, but you don’t know what it’s like out here.
Within forty-eight hours, Ro’s replacement arrived. Joseph Mukuku. Another ghettosprawl kid, sprayed, shaved, irradiated, de-nailed and ready to go. We had three whole days to mourn while Joseph ran through the simconditioning and then we were back out there in the thick of it, harvesting. I found a request for stingstrings in my order log. The results of Ro’s venom burns were, according to the labtechs, “fascinating.” The note attached to the order read: Lash-wounds were cauterized. Unclear whether this is common to stingstrings or whether it was reacting with other flora or spores. Living specimens (ideal) required for further study. Deceased specimens okay.
We couldn’t get them. That’s what I reported anyway. Threatened to peel the skin off Mukuku if he said different. The kid learned quick, didn’t cause any shit and we made Waverley walk five meters up front where he’d only take out flora if he tripped again. Shapshak offered me chemical assistance from his stash of pharmaceuticals, but by then I was already contemplating other strategies and I knew drugs would only get in the way.
I didn’t want to get better. I wanted out.
It was my encounter with Rousseau that cemented it.
I’d managed to avoid him for twelve whole days after he died. Every time I spotted a Pinocchio shuffling down the corridor or standing spookily still, facing a wall, I did a 180 in the other direction. Didn’t make a big deal about it, just managed to spend more time in the gym or doing routine maintenance on my GMP. Anything to keep busy. It’s the thinking about it that kills me. I try to leave no space for thinking, or the weight of The Green just outside the doors crushing down on me.
I was doing leg-presses when he found me. It was the automatic door that tipped me off. It kept opening and closing, opening and closing, like someone didn’t have enough brains to get out of the way of the sensors. I knew it was him even before I saw the limp, sagging sleeve where his left arm should have been.
“What do you want?” I said, standing up and moving over to rest my hand casually on the 10kg barbells. Ready to club him to death. Re-death. Whatever. Not expecting an answer.
Through the faceplate, I could see a caul of teeming, squirming green over his face. You could still make out his features, still tell it was Ro under there. I thought about his cells starting to break down under his new slime mould skin, his organs collapsing, nerves firing sluggishly through sagging connections in dead tissue.
He opened his mouth, his tongue flopping uselessly inside. He worked his jaw mechanically. Individual amoebites, attracted by the motion, started sliding into the cavity, triggering others, oozing past his lips—coating his teeth, his tongue, with the seething furry growth. Inside the suit, Ro tipped his head back, his mouth open in something like a scream as more and more amoebites flooded in to colonize his mouth, soft furry spores spilling down his chin.
“Misfiring neurons,” human resources had assured us when they first let the Pinocchios out. “Nothing to worry about,” they said. Neither, it turns out, was the GMP progsaw I put to my forehead, positioning it right against my temple for maximum damage before I flicked the on-switch.
I have a dream about my mom, back when she still had the seam job. I am scampering over the factory floor, dodging the electric looms to collect scraps of fabric that she will sew into dishcloths and dolls and maybe a dress, to sell to the neighbors, illegally. We are not allowed to remove company property. They incinerate leftovers every evening, specifically to prevent this. Be careful, she whispers, her breath hot against my cheek.
But I’m not careful in the dream. As I duck under the grinding, whirling loom, the teeth catch my ear and shear down my face. My skin tears all the way down to my belly button and unfurls, flopping about obscenely, like wings, before the flaps stiffen and wrap around me like a cocoon. It ought to be a nightmare, but it feels like I am falling into myself. It feels safe.
I wake up in a hospital bed, with my right arm cuffed to the rail. There is a woman sitting on the edge of the bed wearing a pinstripe skirt and matching blazer. She is blandly pretty with blonde-streaked hair and wide blue eyes. Big, friendly teeth in a big, friendly mouth. The mom in a vitamin-enriched living commercial. Not someone I’ve seen in homelab before. Too neatly groomed.
I sit up and automatically reach up to touch my head, to the place where the progsaw had started ripping in to my temple, only to find layers of bandage mummifying my skull.
“We do pay attention, Coco.” The woman says, chidingly, and then adds, more softly, “I’m very sorry about what happened to Malan.”
“Who?” My cheek is burning. I try to rub the pain away and find a row of fibrous stitches running from my temple down to my jaw.
“Malan Rousseau? Your coworker? It’s quaint how you call each other by surnames. This isn’t the army you know. You’re not at war.”
“Tell that to The Green,” I mutter. I am angry to be alive.
“Yes, well. We installed new safety measures into the GMPs after the accident. Chemical agents that would clog up the blades of your weaponry with fibrous threads if it came into contact with human pheromones. It’s based on threadworm-bio. One of the technologies you’ve helped make possible, Coco. Saved your life.”
“Didn’t want to be saved.” My throat feels raw, like it’s been sandblasted from the inside.
“Pity about your face,” she says, not expressing any pity at all behind the words.
“Never going to be a model now.” I try to laugh. It comes out as a brittle bark.
“Unless it’s for a specialist scar porn, no, probably not.” Her casual offensiveness is way preferable, actually. “Do you want some water? It’s the painkillers making you so thirsty. Even with our new safety measures, you still managed to do quite a bit of ruin to yourself. No brain damage though.”
“Damn.” I deadpan, but the water is cold and sweet down my throat.
“My name is Catherine, I’m from head office. They sent me here especially to see you, and do you know why? It’s because you’ve made us reevaluate some things, Coco, how we work around here.” Now she just sounds patronising. And every time she says my name, it feels like someone punching me in the chest. A reminder of Ro.
“Don’t call me that.
It’s Yengko. Please.”
“As you prefer,” her mouth twists impatiently, “Ms. Yengko. You’ll be pleased to know, I think, that after your incident, Inatec has elected to relocate the OPPs—what do you call them?”
“Zombie puppets.” But I’m thinking Living prison cells.
She looks down to her hands folded in her lap, at her perfect manicure and smiles a little tolerant smile. But what I’m thinking is That bitch still has her fingernails, which also means she has no intention of sticking around. “Pinocchios, right? Isn't that it? That’s cute. But we’ve come to realize, well, you made us realize, that having them in homelab puts undue stress on our employees. I guess we were so busy focusing on this huge medical breakthrough—”
“Profit, you mean.”
She ignores me. “—that we didn’t think about how it was affecting you guys on a personal level. So, I’m sorry. Inatec is sorry. We’ve moved the OPPs to another facility. We’ve already paid stress compensation into everyone’s accounts, and we’re implementing mandatory counseling sessions.”
“He was trying to talk.”
“No. He’s dead, Coc—Ms. Yengko,” she corrects herself. “It must have been very upsetting, but he can’t talk. The OPP symbiote sometimes hooks into the wrong nerves. We’re still learning, still figuring each other out.”
“How buddy-buddy of you. Didn’t get that this was a partnership.”
“We’re a bio-sensitive operation. It’s about finding a balance with nature, no matter how foreign it is.”
“So what happens now?”
“We’d like you to stay on, if you’re willing. Under the circumstances, Inatec is willing to retrench you with two week’s payout for every year you’ve worked, plus stress bonus, plus full pension. Which is, I’m sure you’ll appreciate, very generous, considering your attempt to damage Inatec property and injure personnel, which would normally be grounds for instant dismissal. Your non-disclosure still applies either way, of course.”
