Alex said, “Due to a city-wide epidemic…”
“Oh baloney. Government tool.”
“No, the planimal process. We can improve it, I’m certain.”
“My parents can’t afford those.”
“Neither can mine. But the city will give you food credits and compensations. It’s all arranged. I could show you how to build much more efficient Eco-Pods…”
“They voted against that scam. I would too, if I were voting age. Bye now.”
The Mousaka’s home had shutters and peeling paint. Alex knocked. A hunched, elderly woman answered. Alex said, “Due to a city-wide epidemic…”
“You’re from the city?”
“Yes, for school service.”
“My son used to work for the highway service until the autopilot road builders took his job.”
“I’m here about the chickens.”
“Are you from the city?”
“Yes, due to a city-wide epidemic…”
“The highway service was such a good job…”
“Is your son here? Can I talk with him?”
“Oh no, dear. He’s long gone. Left me all alone. Children grow and forget their parents.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“Are you from the city, the food service? I’m so looking forward to today’s meals.”
“They bring you food?”
“Yes, every day. Very reliable. I can’t cook anymore. Can’t follow the directions.”
Alex said, “I’m not the food service.”
“Well, goodbye then.”
“Bye,” said Alex.
She imagined marching straight through the protestors back to the city farm, but she still had to report to Chuckles and Miss Lancy. The Torvalds, the Kuangs, the Mousakas—none could accept the planimals, or like Mrs. Mousaka, who couldn’t even cook for herself, maybe they couldn’t manage to farm a planimal.
Alex knocked on the Lancy’s door. Chuckles answered, and he glared at her.
“I have to share news from the city,” said Alex. She passed him a report, and recited her speech in a practiced, flattened tone. “Due to a city-wide epidemic some of us lost our chickens at the city facility. Your chickens got infected and…”
“My body hurts,” he gestured with his arm in a 3d-printed geometric cast. He flushed and choked back tears. “I’m not allowed to talk with you.”
“You just did talk with me.”
Miss Lancy pulled Chuckles aside and said, “It’s nothing personal. I’m afraid you proved to be a bad influence. So you and he can’t play.”
“I’m sorry,” said Alex.
“Your dumb ideas hurt us!” said Chuckles.
“I’m sorry,” said Alex. She scowled and Chuckles backed away. “I had to kill all my chickens too.”
“Goodbye,” said Miss Lancy, closing the door.
Alex yelled through the door. “I’ll find a way to help you. I promise.”
Her legs hurt. Her mind reeled. The families she spoke to may as well have been her own flock of undead chickens, eyes burned out, clucking and yelling at her for killing them.
***
That evening Alex dozed, shuddering as if she felt her arms slap the road. She heard the crunch of twisting metal. Frumpy Bob squawked. Skeezy and Maisie burst into the air, their faces lit up by the truck’s headlights, their open beaks shocked and widened. Alex tried to breathe to calm herself, but her guts convulsed. She wailed.
Mom held her until Alex had no more air in her lungs. Alex gulped and began to sob again.
The pounding welt of her anger had been spinning for days. It felt awful and good to let it out, to let herself wail and cry. The welt of her heart slowed its spin, crystallized, and became a deeper concept. Alex calmed and choked back her sniffles. “I may have a different idea.”
Alex took Mom to the wallscreen and tapped on pictures of their coop’s feedback cycles and computer programs.
“How much? Prove it,” said her Mom. Alex called up the Blockie’s anatomical maps, circuit diagrams, and looped feedback cycles.
Mom said, “How do we test your idea?”
Alex shifted into full attention on the screen. “First we get the programming right. And fine-tune their sensors. Is that even possible?”
“Maybe?”
“And Mom, this isn’t about the contest. I don’t care about that anymore. This is much bigger.”
After another hour shuttling back and forth between programs, Mom fell asleep. But Alex’s calculations felt too easy, which on principle bothered Alex awake.
She drew more diagrams, layering feedback cycles and lists of every person she’d ever met: Mom, Dad, Miss Lancy, Chuckles, Mr. Hank, Elaine Hollis, her schoolmates, the Torvalds, the Kuangs, and all the families and numbered charts for all the people in town.
She tracked population dynamics and farm tactics. She drew new diagrams on the wallscreen, across series of hundreds of feedback cycles looped together with energy input and output equations, caloric restrictions, vitamin and mineral needs, micro-pumps and plans for printable, bendable circuitry to be implanted in the Blockies, and flocks of chickens tending the fields, enriching the compost for all. She re-organized all of her plans into a website and a free book. She put Miss Lasagna’s photo of Baby Chocochip on the cover. She titled it Inseparable: The Easiest Path to Get Over 80% Efficiencies with Planimals, Chickens, and People, Including You and Your Neighbors.
She placed the book on discussion forums for home farming. She set an automated program to repeat links to the book’s information wherever people discussed chickens. She collapsed into slumber, on the floor and among piles of her diagrams and drawings. Miss Lasagna pulled a blanket over her.
***
Dr. Nancy Corvalier arrived in an electric pick-up truck with dark windows. Alex held Miss Lasagna’s tiny plastic hand. The doll’s eyes recorded the scene. Mom and Dad watched from the doorway.
Corvalier said, “I love your book. And I’ve read so much about you, but do you know what it is about heroines?”
“No.”
“Compared to stories, heroines are always smarter and more complex in real life.”
Alex smirked, but kept her eyes down. Miss Lasagna kept her own eyes up. Dr. Corvalier knelt down to Alex’s level, and said, “And who is this fine robot here?”
The doll’s servomotors rotated her neck until she looked into Corvalier’s eyes, and said, “I’m Miss Lasagna, pleased to meet you. Alex is feeling a bit quiet these days.”
“Could you two show me your Blockie ecosystem? I’d very much like to see your innovations.”
Alex walked to the coop, with Miss Lasagna in tow. Corvalier ooh’d and aah’d over Alex’s newest designs. Corvalier sniffed the breeze, and said, “Now smell that air, a perfect farm-fresh soil, excellent musky dirt.”
“Calcium carbonate crushed by glaciers,” said Alex. Her eyes still faced the ground where most of what she saw was Corvalier’s black lace-up hiking boots, a practical, unobtrusive style. “I know about the contest’s efficiency percentages. They aren’t realistic measures. They’re just marketing. A rough tool. And I’m okay with using it for rough ideas and for marketing since you’re trying to help people. But the real thinking is subtler, and in the design compromises and balances for feedback into linked waste and re-use streams, even evaporation, you have to include people. People are a part of the equation. Everyone in the community. I mean people’s inputs and outputs, also, our innovations.”
“Good.” Corvalier tapped her boot against a stone. “Then we can discuss tough balancing acts and put this contest aside, after a little publicity, of course.”
When the photo crew arrived, Alex held Miss Lasagna, who waved her plastic hand, but Alex scowled. She accepted the grand prize with annual free Blockies and money to build or remodel an extensive home farming operation. She pulled on Corvalier’s sleeve and said, “Can you take me to Chuckles’ house? I need your help to tell him something.”
&
nbsp; ***
Behind the Lancy’s house, a ruined Eco-Pod stank of fungal rot, and in front, a crushed bicycle made a deranged lawn sculpture. Alex insisted that her parents stay in the car. Corvalier, Miss Lasagna, and Alex approached the Lancy’s front door. Miss Lancy answered and Chuckles watched, big-eyed and wary, from the dining room.
Alex said, “I won the grand prize but I’m giving it to you. Dr. Corvalier can arrange the paperwork.”
Corvalier shook out a big double-take, and said, “Are you sure Alex? That’s a lot of food and resources.”
Miss Lancy’s face flushed. “This is too much…”
Alex said, “I’m certain. Maybe you can share some dinners sometimes? Maybe we can grill Blockies? Maybe we can watch Space Survivor: Mars again?”
“I don’t know,” said Chuckles. But he showed his Commander Maxwell doll to Miss Lasagna. The dolls walked up to each other and hugged. Miss Lancy smiled so widely that she almost cried.
Alex produced a memory chip full of new drawings and plans for a new farming operation at the Lancy’s home. She showed them to Corvalier and Miss Lancy, and said, “See? This automates so that a single parent could gain well-balanced feedback cycles, as much as eighty percent ratings on average. Hook up pipes from the home, and air venting from the bedroom, with a little heat exchange from the basement and the more industrious folks could get up to two or three percent more with a bit of daily maintenance. This is how we solve world-wide problems. Little by little.”
They chatted over the plans. Chuckles listened and hugged his mom.
***
In their dining room, Dad popped open a bottle of champagne. Alex’s neighbors chattered and cheered. Dad pranced and curtsied when he gave Miss Lasagna a tiny glass. Alex kept a new chick, Baby Montague, in the fine and comfortable hollow of her overall’s front pocket.
Corvalier offered a toast, “To the end of world hunger.”
“Hear, hear!” said Mom and the others.
Corvalier added, “It won’t be done in a day, but one step at a time and we’re getting there. To the future.”
Everybody toasted again. Alex stepped around the old wooden table, frowned with concentration, and ‘helped’ Miss Lasagna drink her glass of syrupy-sweet bubbly. The doll said, “Hear, hear! Sometimes we just have to out-think the present-day.”
Mom said, “The future? We’ll have to give it up to Alex.”
“To me?” said Alex.
“Yes, up to you. You’ll have choices we never had. Good choices. Maybe you can start a farm on Mars?”
Alex cuddled into Miss Lasagna, careful to protect Baby Montague. She missed her chickens. “Well I’m the kind of woman who gets things done. Miss Lasagna and I think this is going to be difficult. But she says she’s up to the challenge.”
They arranged their dinner of Blockie steaks, kale and sweet potatoes in a roasted garlic sauce, with a sprig of rosemary and small slices of strawberry and sugared Wisconsin ginseng. Alex got to sit at the head of the table, with Miss Lasagna who wore her sequined party dress and a crooked pink bow in her frayed hair. Baby Montague poked out from her pocket, her feathers more full than ever, her scent nuttier and closer to the Earth. She rustled and cooed when Alex stroked her back where her feathers felt soft and smooth.
At the end of the evening, Alex tiptoed back to her room and fell fast asleep, smiling to herself. She dreamed of building a planimal farm on Europa, in a floating dome above the moon’s ice-cold surface. And they had enough oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon and complex molecules for people and plants and planimals and real live bugs and chickens, even Mrs. Chocochip and her baby who shared a basket-like spaceship and who wore fat silvery spacesuits and rounded helmets.
***
Massachusetts author-artist Gregory Scheckler crafts science fiction stories and cartoony artworks. His writings can be found at World Weaver Press, Crow’s Mirror Books, the Berkshire Eagle, the Berkshire Review for the Arts, The Mind’s Eye, and Thought & Action. When he’s not writing or artmaking, he and his wife can be found skiing and biking the Berkshires, watching their neighbor’s chickens, or tending their solar-powered home.
Cable Town Delivery
by M. Lopes da Silva
Pella cursed beneath her breath as she yanked on the rusty levers of the hopper. The left rear leg kept sticking. With a growl and a fierce pull she freed the frozen gear just in time, preventing the four-legged vehicle from tipping onto its side. She hit the emergency brake and slumped back in her seat, listening to the groan of the hopper’s legs. Pella blinked as sweat prickled her eyes. She’d been driving the hopper for over twenty hours, and halfway through the desert the air circulator had cut out. Hot, stale air reeking of metal and old paper sat in the back of Pella’s throat like an unwanted lozenge. She rubbed the back of her neck, grimacing at the knotted muscles.
Pella brought up the schedule on her flatpad—no time to dawdle. She was due in Cable Town in eight hours. And if she was late in Cable Town, then all the rest of the stops on the line would suffer. People had been waiting for years. Pella thought longingly about sponging the grime off the back of her neck, but instead unset the brake and got the hopper in motion again. She checked the battery levels; the solar panels plastered all over the hopper’s body like an insect carapace had finally sucked up enough juice from the persistent summer sun.
She activated the prop; a power-chomping propellor extended from the top of the hopper’s body, then began to spin. Slowly, the hopper lifted into the air. As soon as the hopper’s feet were scraping oxygen, Pella set the four limbs of the vehicle to the limp flight stasis mode that made her think of jellyfish arms.
She punched the radio on, expecting static and getting plenty of it, but soon fragments of a song began to fight the snarl of white noise. Pella raised the volume slightly. As the signal strengthened, and the song clarified, Pella realized that it was one that she knew. She raised the volume higher as drums and bass and flutes joyfully peppered the air, and hummed along. It had been a long drive, and would be longer yet, but Pella loved her job. She grinned as she drove the hopper through the beige-blue sky, forgetting the ache in her neck for a while.
***
Arc sat at the edge of the cable car’s open door, gently swinging her legs. Her dad would give her hell if he saw her sitting like that, but he was helping Lyka open a stall at the Complex. Arc loved the way her legs felt suspended over the steep concrete canyons, the forbidden hot winds from the desert toasting the tips of her toes. She could feel the gentle sway of the car as it rocked at the joint of the cable suspension above. The winds weren’t too strong, today. Arc frowned. She put down the glittering paper she’d been cutting with a pair of rusty shears, adding the heavy tool on top of the sheet as a paperweight. If the winds weren’t very strong, the Kite Festival wouldn’t get much business, and if there wasn’t much business, maybe dad and Lyka would have to go back to rat hunting.
Arc closed her eyes, listening to the metallic creaks and groans of all the cable cars suspended from thick black lines along the city’s skyward corridors. Dad called it “the free music”. She liked to listen to the free music, which would build with every ripple and swell of the wind, and dwindle with its passing.
Cable Town was a city built on the cavernous carcasses of several other cities. Odd structures were improvised along the planes and sides of collapsed skyscrapers, tenaciously clinging to the concrete skin like brilliant particolored mold. These buildings were built from salvaged scrap, and often dripped with edible succulents, which residents would plant on any surface that could manage to hold a bit of dirt in the face of the persistent heavy winds.
Above the buildings the endless rows of cable cars spanned, creating what Lyka called a “town of treehouses” (Lyka had seen trees before—this was a sore point with Arc, who had never seen any). Wind turbines loomed above like languidly-spun spurs. Bridges criss-crossed the sky at lower, less windy junctures. The view down any Cable Town alley was a dark
scribble of angular lines and boxes above a seemingly bottomless pit.
Arc had lived in Cable Town for all eleven years of her life. Lyka, her big sister, had lived in another place called Sum City, but she didn’t remember much about it, and their dad had to be in a rare mood to talk about the past. If prodded, he would just shake his head and say, “We’re better off.” Arc believed him.
It wasn’t that rat hunting was bad, exactly, it just didn’t pay very well anymore. That’s why they’d saved up and leased an extra car just for Lyka to grow her rare tea shrubs—a greenhouse in the sky—and painstakingly followed her every instruction for months and months on end.
If they didn’t at least break even at the Kite Festival, they’d have to surrender the car—rare plants and all. They’d already worn out the patience of the Cable Town bankers, who flashed their brass knuckles alongside every bright smile these days. Her dad had forbidden Arc to help out at the Complex, cautioning her not to let the rope ladder down for anyone she didn’t know.
Arc picked up the skeleton of her box kite, testing the strength of her amateur weaving at the joints. One of the corners fell apart after her prodding, and Arc shoved the collapsed mess away in disgust. Lyka had promised to show her how to make a kite this year, but she’d forgotten in all the flurry of preparation for the festival. Arc drew her knees up to her chin for a proper sulk. The bottoms of her feet felt shockingly cold on the metal floor of the car after the warm summer sirocco.
That was when she started to hear it—a stuttering mechanical drone reminiscent of a cicada. But this sound was louder, deeper than the voice of an insect; Arc grabbed one of the tethers secured to the car walls and stood, squinting at the dusty sky. She thought she saw something that looked like a flying tower. With a deep frown, Arc leaned out over the void, her knuckles white on the tether.
Suddenly the drone was oppressive, booming; a shadow fell over Arc’s torso and she twisted up to see a massize metal shape block the sun. The cable car tilted, and Arc glimpsed the remains of her kite—paper, shears, and mangled frame—begin to slide out the open doorway. Arc leaned over, reaching for the supplies, and just managed to grab them.
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