Harvest

by Olga Werby

  “I will focus on humans here, because that’s what I wrote my book about. Which reminds me: I will be signing copies in the lobby right after the end of the lecture. I’m required to say this by my publisher.” There were a few chuckles. Good. Vars hated dull groups. It was hard to speak without feedback. “Agoraphobia and claustrophobia, fear of dark places and of heights, ophidiophobia and arachnophobia, instinctual disgust of bodily fluids—blood, urine, pus, feces—all of these are innate for us humans. We are born to avoid tight places and grand expanses. We naturally avoid snakes and spiders even if we’ve never seen or heard of them before. But we have also learned to overcome these fears. We had to if we were going to go into space. Our spaceships are extremely cramped, and they float in vast expanses of space. Astronauts are forced to recycle their bodily fluids and to no longer be afraid of extreme heights and absolute darkness. Although I may never overcome my fear of snakes and spiders…” She shivered dramatically and earned a few more laughs. “And perhaps, one day, we will meet other explorers out there. And we might have more innate fears to shed.”

  Vars talked for another quarter hour about the importance of different sensory apparatuses and the need for access to easily extracted raw resources, but it was getting late, and she could feel that the energy had drained from her audience. She was tired, too. She needed to catch a redeye tonight and try to squeeze in a few more hours of sleep before another lecture tomorrow.

  Before she was even aware of it, there was hearty applause, and then it was time for smiling, handshaking, and book signing. She’d come to learn that the only people who still bought paper books were the ones who attended these book tour lectures. She was grateful to all of them, and yet she couldn’t wait to get out of there.

  “Dr. Volhard?” The voice was a nice soft baritone. “May I have a moment of your time after you’ve finished autographing?”

  Vars raised her head, a fake smile plastered on her face, and tried to identify the speaker. There were still half a dozen people waiting, each clutching a copy of her book. But none of those was the speaker. So she went back to signing, and soon enough, like magic, it was done. She rubbed her wrist, which had started to cramp up, and slid the contents of the table—brochures, pens, and leftover business cards—into her bag. She would deal with sorting it all out later.

  “Coffee?” the baritone asked again. “I know you take it with sugar and milk. But I wasn’t sure of the proportions.”

  Vars looked up again. A tall, slightly graying man in rimless glasses with a slight yellow tint was standing in front of her, holding a recyclable coffee cup. He was dressed in jeans, a dress shirt with no tie, and a wool jacket—easy elegance, her literary agent would call it. She tried to do something similar for these lectures—approachable, smart, and interesting were her original goals. But at this point in the lecture tour, all she could hope for was clean, awake, and present. Dressing in all black helped.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said. “Do you have a book for me to sign?”

  “That would have been lovely,” the man said, “but I bought an e-version of your book.”

  “I can sign your data pad,” Vars offered. She still didn’t take the coffee from his extended hand. And she wasn’t planning to.

  “What a lovely idea.” He smiled. “Do you mind if we talk a bit? I know you’re tired—”

  “And I have a plane to catch.” Vars spoke more harshly than she’d meant to; the man did buy her book, after all.

  She tried to go around him, but he wouldn’t budge. She looked past him for a security guard at the door. Shouldn’t someone be getting everyone out of here? Perhaps escorting her to a taxi? She was getting annoyed and a bit alarmed.

  “My name is Ian Rust,” the man said.

  “Dr. Vars Volhard.”

  “Of course.” He smiled again.

  “I really do have to go, Mr. Rust,” Vars insisted. She tried to push past the man, her suitcase ready to roll behind her.

  “The thing is, Dr. Volhard, we really need your expertise as soon as possible,” Rust said.

  “Sir, I’m an evolutionary socio-historian. My direct expertise is rarely required on an emergency basis. Contact my university office, and I’m sure I would be able to fit you in during one of my ample office hours after I get back.”

  “Ah, but there are exceptions,” he said. “We’ve read everything that you’ve published—”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything. And you have a unique set of expertise that my team at Earth Planetary Space Agency urgently requires.” He pulled out his EPSA credentials. “Our car is waiting outside, Dr. Volhard. Won’t you please follow me? Do you mind if I call you Vars?”

  “Sure,” Vars said automatically.

  “Then please call me Ian.” He handed the coffee to her.

  EPSA was the umbrella agency that had taken over for NASA, ESA (European Space Agency), ASA (Australian Space Agency), and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency). So it wasn’t entirely “planetary”—China and Russia still ran their own space exploration programs—but it was the largest and best-funded agency, and it was the one that was actively pushing the Mars colonization program and comprehensive exploration of the solar system.

  Vars had always dreamed of working for EPSA, even as a girl. But somehow, somewhere along the way, her academic career had veered into anthropology, and then evolution, and then…well, here she was. The evo devo diva of anthropology.

  And now she was riding down the dark, empty streets in the back seat of a black driverless car, with Dr. Ian Rust, head of the exobiology research team at EPSA, sitting by her side.

  Chapter Two

  Vars slept on the plane…or tried to. She was too confused, too keyed up to really sleep. That coffee might have been a mistake. Ian said that he couldn’t tell her anything until they arrived at his EPSA office in Seattle, which was conveniently her own hometown where she lived with her dad. The man just smiled a lot and talked about how much he had enjoyed reading Vars’s new book.

  There was a strange edge to their interaction. If Vars hadn’t believed Ian’s credentials, she would have bailed on him a long time ago. Even so, she felt like she was being kidnapped. And, in a way, she was. She’d had to cancel the last two lectures of her book tour and apologize to her agent over and over again. Ian had promised that EPSA would send an official excuse letter, but Vars still felt like she let her agent and publisher down.

  They landed at a general aviation airport, and another black car whisked them to EPSA’s headquarters, just outside of Seattle’s city limits. She was taken to a conference room on the top floor of the EPSA science building, which Ian called the “tree house.” She immediately understood why—it was surrounded on all sides by a balcony planted with a row of trees and some shrubbery. It was quite nice, but Vars couldn’t enjoy it; she was simultaneously exhausted and adrenalized. It was just a matter of time before she crashed.

  She must have looked it, too, because someone handed her a very big, very steamy cup of coffee. She sipped it gratefully, completely oblivious to how she came to be holding it. It was still very early in the morning, way before Vars even liked to get up, much less attend a meeting.

  About a dozen EPSA people joined her and Ian around the conference table. Vars noticed that several paper copies of her book were laid out; some even looked read, with cracked spines and dog-eared pages.

  “So,” she said to Ian. “Is now a good time and place for you to tell me what this is all about?”

  “Now is perfect,” Ian said with a big smile. “We are very grateful to have you with us today, Dr. Volhard. This is my exobiology team.” He pointed one by one to the people on one side of the table. “Dr. Alice Bear. Dr. Greg Tungsten. Dr. Bob Shapiro. Dr. Saydi Obara. Dr. Evelyn Shar. And Dr. Izzy Rubka.”

  Vars had heard of some of these people by reputation, of course, but never met a
ny of them personally. EPSA people were a reclusive bunch, tending to mix with their own to the exclusion of others, even with the same research interests. It was one of the reasons Vars always wanted to join the organization—to get access to the best and the brightest minds and a chance to discuss the origins of life over coffee... But the introductions were happening so fast, there was no chance that she would remember how any of these names linked up with faces. Vars doubted she would even recognize these people walking down the street.

  But Ian just continued. “And this group,” he gestured to two men and a woman, “is on loan from JPL—Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. Trish Cars, Dr. Ron Silverman, and Dr. Benjamin Kouta.” Vars gave up on remembering who was who. “And these two,” Ian said, nodding to a pair of identical twins sitting next to him, “are Ibe and Ebi Zimov, our computer science wunderkinds from EISS, European Institute of Space Science.”

  Ian pronounced their names as eye-bee and ee-bee; it was the only introduction Vars was likely to remember fully, as the siblings were the most interesting looking pair in the room. They seemed young—Vars guessed not older than twenty—and she was honestly uncertain whether they were male or female or one of each. They were dressed the same—sweatshirts with the EISS logo embroidered on the left, black jeans, black canvas shoes—and both had their hair dyed jet black, shaved on the sides and long on top, falling over their eyes. Vars could see impressive sets of D-tats on the exposed parts of their necks and jaws and peeking out of the twins’ sleeves. Other people around the room presumably had D-tats too, but nothing so obviously ostentatious as these two.

  “And before you ask,” Ian said, “yes, they are related to Dr. Sergey Aphanasievich Zimov.”

  That name sounded vaguely familiar, but Vars had no idea who Dr. Zimov was.

  She also noted that the other two people present—two men in military uniforms—were not introduced.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you all,” she said. “Please call me Vars.” She smiled at everyone, then turned to Ian. “But once again… Please, I’d very much like to know why I’m here.”

  “I was just getting to that.”

  She noticed that he looked tired, too. He hadn’t slept much on the plane either. Then again, pretty much everyone in the room looked haggard. Deep circles under the eyes were the norm, not the exception.

  Before Ian could continue, one of the women from the exobiology team spoke up. “In your book, Dr. Volhard, you mentioned an example of how robots developed by collectivist cultures would be less likely to kill. Would you mind elaborating on that?”

  Vars didn’t know what she expected—but it wasn’t this. “You flew me out here before dawn to talk about killer robots?”

  The discussion of robots in her book was just an illustrative example, and a frivolous one at that. It was just a funny way of explaining the differences in value systems between collectivist and individualist cultures. She’d almost cut it from the final draft, but David Gatewood, her editor, had insisted she keep it in.

  “Of course not,” Ian said. “Robots are just a small part of it. But if you don’t mind answering Alice’s question…” He gave Vars a pleading look.

  “You’re serious?” Vars still couldn’t believe it. She’d worked four years on the book, and what had caught EPSA’s interest was a stupid joke. I guess David was right, she thought. People, even smart people, grab on to the most flamboyant metaphors.

  “Should I explain the differences between collectivist and individualist societies first?” Vars asked. She looked around the room; she didn’t want to assume what these people knew, but at the same time, talking down to the top minds of the Earth Planetary Space Agency was completely unacceptable.

  “If you don’t mind,” Ian said. He composed himself as if awaiting a lecture. In fact, every face in the room had that look of composed concentration that Vars was used to seeing in her grad students.

  “Okay.” There was nothing to do but move forward. She launched into her introductory lecture on socio-evolution. “While there are many ways of classifying the various human cultures that arose in the last fifty thousand years or so, one division that can be made is focused on the perception of the role of an individual within the group. In collectivist cultures, the group needs are judged above the needs of an individual; in the individualist cultures, it’s the opposite, naturally.”

  “Naturally,” echoed an older, tiny, dark-skinned woman with bottle-thick glasses and tightly cropped hair, the one who asked the original question. Alice something. Vars wasn’t familiar with the woman’s work. And she hadn’t encountered too many people, other than herself...and well, Ian, who wore glasses. In his case, Vars was almost certain it was all about self-image. She wouldn’t have been surprised if they were simple tinted glass. But Alice’s glasses were thick corrective lenses and far from attractive. Most everyone had their vision corrected in this day and age. So either Alice had a strange affectation or an aversion to treatment. Or perhaps she had a defect that couldn’t easily be fixed, which was rare.

  “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” said one of the youngish-looking men from the JPL team. Vars knew enough popular culture to know he was quoting a character from an old space-exploration series. Star Trek?

  This is too basic, she thought, and she raised her discourse up a notch. “Let’s just jump right into the robot anecdote. Robots designed by collectivist cultures would be less likely to kill. They would have a stronger focus on the theory of mind, understanding and taking perspectives of others—”

  “Can you backtrack a bit?” Ian asked.

  “Sure.” Vars thought she now understood the Goldilocks zone she was to lecture to. “Consider guilt. Guilt is one of the strongest human psyche compulsions. We use guilt and embarrassment as tools for social compliance all the time. Guilt is motivational, so to speak. Our social media landscape is full of guilt traps. We finger people who don’t pay taxes or contribute in a positive way to our society. We name people who don’t recycle or who drop trash on the road or who still use personal transportation vehicles. We social-shame not only the anti-social behavior but even the way people dress and look.”

  A man in the back spoke up. “We are all familiar with cyber bullying, Dr. Volhard. EPSA is a large, multicultural organization, and we’re all required to take classes and workshops in antisocial behavior and sensitivity training.”

  “I do too, as a university professor and researcher,” Vars assured them. “But my point is that social shaming works.”

  “On robots?”

  “I’m getting there,” Vars said with a smile. “People from collectivist and individualist societies experience guilt differently. A person from a collectivist culture feels guilt as ‘What will people think of me?’ While someone from an individualist culture perceives it as ‘How will I live with myself?’ See the difference?”

  “So outcomes vary?” Ian asked.

  “Precisely! Consider a criminal,” Vars said. “A person who commits a crime in an individualist culture can’t escape guilt, for the feelings of guilt are experienced internally, whether anyone is aware of the crime or not.”

  “Are you implying that in collectivist cultures, a criminal won’t experience guilt the same way?” Alice asked.

  “That’s precisely it, Alice.” Vars made herself say the name of the woman to reinforce it in her memory—a simple mnemonic trick. “It’s easier to commit a crime if you’re convinced that no one will learn of it and you live in a world where it’s only the opinion of your group that matters.”

  “So a murderer won’t lose sleep over his deed if he was raised in a collectivist culture?”

  “I’m saying that the guilt is assessed differently,” Vars said. “And it’s always about the extremes of the spectrum: the extreme form of collectivism, the extreme form of individualism. Of course, we live in a world t
hat is both a little collectivist and a little individualist. I’m giving you the very antipodes to make my point clearer.”

  “Of course, Dr. Volhard,” said Ian. “So the robots?”

  “Yes, the robots. I’m getting to that, but first one more point.” Vars took a big gulp of coffee. It was cold and bitter now, but she needed the caffeine.

  She must have made a face, for Ian was instantly on his feet, getting her a refill in a fresh cup. She waited for him to sit back down.

  “Thank you, Ian,” she said, taking a sip. “Much better.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “And this is a perfect example of my next point: the theory of mind. Ian saw my expression when I took a sip from my cold cup and guessed that I was dissatisfied with my coffee.”

  “It was obvious,” Ian said.

  “To you.”

  “I think it was obvious to everyone in the room,” he said with a smile.

  A few people chuckled.

  “That bad? Well, good. Then everyone here has a good theory of mind. You were all able to interpret my feelings, thoughts, and experiences even though you had no direct access to my taste buds. The theory of mind is necessary for higher-order thinking skills. It’s necessary for communication, for understanding multiple points of view. Not all animals on Earth have this ability, and even human children take several years to master this skill. Before the age of about four, kids are unable to switch perspectives and understand what motivates others. And even after that age, the theory of mind continues to develop into and throughout adulthood.”