Welcome to the Greenhouse

by Gordon Van Gelder

  “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 there, too, I had already forgotten how bored and disappointed playing FarmEarth had left me.

  But apparently, Cheo had not.

  The vertical playsurface 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, 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, “Haha, 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 was 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, 8:00 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 faceful!”

  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 usual, Williedell made sure we were all supplied with drinks. We joked that he was going to grow up to be a flight attendant on an 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 knew, this was true. Cheo’s big brother Adán had gotten 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 thi
nk FarmEarth is being run too conservatively. The planet is still at the tipping point. We need to do bigger things faster. No more tiptoeing around with little fixes. No more being overcautious. 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 foursquared 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 yot-ta-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 back-lit, 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 un-traceable 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 desert 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.