by Johan Kalsi
An applied principle of autogenetic evolution, Biogenetic Seeds were initially generated through intentional or “active” bio data inputs, whereby an actor (typically an autonomous machine or human controller) inundates the latent genetic code of a seed with modifying information. As the science advanced, seeds became receptive to passive algorithmic inputs. Eventually, biogenetic seeds were able to respond to all variety of algorithms in the environment, to the point that primitive cultures encountering such “intelligent” seeds mistook the resulting vegetative products for sentient beings.
—Infogalactic Entry: Grand Category: Algorithms: Biogenetic Seeding
Farming 15,000 plots of modestly fertile land was lot of work for a one-man operation when things were going right.
Things weren't going right.
It was that fragile moment in the growing season when blight or insectoid plagues still threatened, but the natural algorithmic defenses of the crops were not yet a full strength. Every class of every crop he mastered -- polito, chomats, paradagas, corbolini, purple crone, zaim, yossa beans, and even the hardy gang roots -- were going wrong. They were behind schedule, maturing poorly or in several cases, mutating inconsistently.
The seasonal regulators had been malfunctioning, and there had been no rain for five weeks. One more week and it would be a drought. Even the Farmer's global positioning system was calculating projected yields incorrectly. He'd pay dearly in the futures market because of that glitch. If he couldn't deliver his baseline minimum of 270 million crop units to the Black Box by the end of this season, he'd be under probation. If it was much below that, he'd be replaced.
Worse, his robots, to a unit, had gone malfunk, from mild to severe. The milder ones had developed things like circle-drop, a drive failure that caused them to get caught in a loop of useless commands. His cattle, hooruts, and swine had wandered off twice in as many days, and only some of them had been recovered by the robots.
He audited the machines that morning, and had discovered an entire squad of robots butchering meat in the pastures. He had immediately shut down all of his robotic operations, except for two androids. The two he had left running had just murdered each other.
So, in the space of a week, the Farmer had detonated not one but two multi-million digicoin androids. He had lost half his livestock. His debt to the Black Box market was literally incalculable. Now his crops were going bad.
This is how he found himself astride his own Ontanso-44 tractor-processor, manually correcting bad readings and attempting to factor a uniform set of correcting algorithms. He’d purchased the corrections from a black market salesbot.
The salesbot, a fully unnetworked robot who went by the name Servo had told him, “Keep these two packets of information separate. The first one is a general defense – you can install it in your network and it will provide subroutines that will reverse some of the most commonly occurring instances of AlgoDecay. But this second packet? Run that only when you personally have isolated a special instance where the machine’s algorithms are breaking down.”
The first packet had indeed spared him. Using it, he had caught the malfunks who had gone slaughterbot on him.
Now, with the second packet in hand, he drove across his fields in an off-network vehicle, carefully scanning its outputs for error.
He rode high in the all-glass observation cabin of his trusted Intrepid-Abundance Class biogenetic tractor-combinator. The fields surrounding him had broken ridges and a bald patch or two but even so, were full of plants, albeit sickly ones. The cultivated hills surrounding the field were sunburnt, and the stalks of zaim were crisped and weak.
A shadow crept across the noonday western sky.
Finally! A break in the weather. The dark clouds looked like sweet molten choletto. They were fat and full of rain. The massive tractor rounded the middle of the plot of weak, pale green crops and circled the great ancient monument of a horned auroch being speared by a wild savage. The wind swept in, from mild to frenzy, in an instant.
A few splats against the glass started a pop and kick procession of water that just as quickly turned into sheets of rain pouring down and blinding him. The Farmer slowed the tractor, and studied the algorithms in the cab. All the numbers seemed to reflect reality. Bad crops, yes, but no signs that his algorithms – in machine or plantlife – had any instances of AlgoDecay.
He switched to digital, and transformed the view inside the cabin to an idyllic sunny day in the field. The roar of the rain and thunder, however, was louder than the tractor’s supplementary drive engines. He picked at a network node on a lower front tooth, first to remove grit, but then to enhance his ability to mine for any sign of AlgoDecay, either in the tractor or in the biogenetic inputs he received from the crops outside. He transferred a copy of the subroutines from the first packet to the console. Still no indication of AlgoDecay. Instead, he saw, in raw data, signs of the water flooding over the expansive field.
Shortly after that, the digital view of the cab blurred and disappeared. The cabin went clear again and the countryside was dark. A massive wind sheared the tractor, moving its tonnage back and forth. The farmer braked the machine and idled. He felt like he was in a little capsule, not a 22-ton behemoth. The water washing around the glass cab swirled and gushed and flashed with lightning.
A high whining pitch, like the distant roar of a cross-country rocket rail, began faintly, but built up quickly. The Farmer shut down the engines to full silence. The roar increased. He could see nothing in the pouring rain. In the blink of an eye, the pouring water whisked away, and he could see through the glass.
He could see a massive black swirl. He would have called it a tornado if he had known the word. He began to float in midair, like a spaceman. Then the cabin turned around him and he found himself falling hard against the side surface of the glass. The Ontanso-44 was the biggest machine he had ever owned. Its grain storage alone was large enough to comfortably house the average family of seven.
Now, it tumbled through the windstorm like a toy.
The Farmer had never missed a meal in his life, and now it had been two in a row, divided only by an embittered night's rest that could only generously be referred to as a nap. His stomach burned with hunger. The thin air in the cabin troubled him. Although it was not sealed from air, it had tight enough seals that, without the algorithmic venting, a carbon dioxide-breathing man might eventually outpace the osmotic transfer of oxygen into the cabin. That was his fear, at least. It steadily grew stuffier. He felt like he was cooking.
Sun filtered through the patches of mud. Kneeling at an awkward angle and pressing his face upward to the glass, the Farmer could see a tract of muddy soil, and some shattered greenery. He clicked his comm. He pushed the door above him. He thought of food.
He tried several tricks to squeeze a touch of power into the cabin. All failed. Finally, he accessed the second data packet that the black market Servo had sold him. He hard installed it to the dead console, hoping it would do something crazy and unexpected, or at least carry a blip of latent energy from his tooth to the cabin. Nothing happened at all.
Later that (morning? afternoon? He was upside down in every way.) The Farmer sat down on the side door that now faced the ground. The door made a sticky sound. Then it popped. It had not done that before. He tried the handle and the door dropped open a crack. It opened just wide enough for muddy water to flood in a little trench in the door. The Farmer pressed his lips against the water and sucked at it through the door opening. It tasted like rancid beets. As he pressed against it, the door opened wider, making a sloppy sound as it pressed into the water below and stuck into the mud under the water.
The Farmer's leg dropped from the edge of the door to outside the door. Water coursed up his pant-leg, tripling its weight. His leg went deep into the mud. He pushed down harder. The door opened under his weight and he slid into the mud, to his waist.
He looked around. There was nothing below the door but water, and he imagined noth
ing below the water but mud. Should he stop bracing himself and fall completely through the door, there was no guarantee that he'd be anything but pinned beneath the great machine. He had no concept of how badly his field had flooded. He could drown.
His training told him to wait for help. His instincts told him to go.
He went. Instantly he regretted it as the breathless world he entered tried to kill him right away. In the blackness he thrust his hand down to push himself back above the surface of the water. The mud held him fast. The more he struggled, the deeper it pulled him. Already his chest crushed in on him. The farmer forced himself to relax and began a slow, relaxed swimming motion. He fought his urge to inhale the muck. Slow strokes, closed eyes. His lungs burned. Better ways to die, he thought to himself. Better ways to die.
Now he was pressed between steel and mud. He navigated the steel by pressing his palm against the unmovable surface. He pushed himself along until he could hold his breath no longer. He spat and gasped and choked on chunks of dirt. His blinked his eyes many times until he could see. A big muddy trench where his body had been was already filling back in.
The disappearing trench emerged from the huge tractor which was flipped on its top, like a dead roach. The Farmer, gasping, rolled over to all fours. Everywhere he looked, there was water and mud and blasted crops. He could not conceive the depth of the power of the storm or the flooding. The footing was too sloppy to stand where he was. He crawled, and then waded. There was no solid path as far as he could see. There were only “looks” and “looks” of muck. Great pools extended along the blasted furrows. The overturned tractor was scorched along the side, and it was sinking gradually into the mire.
The cabin made a sucking sound. It was filling with water.
In the huge shadow of the savage slaying the auroch, the Farmer shivered. He crawled into the sunlight. It was blazing and the air was humid.
The mud clung to him and gathered more as he moved. It weighed him down. He found a husk of zaim floating in the water and snagged it. As soon as he bit it, he recoiled. It had soured badly and gave off a noxious odor. What could have happened to it? It was late growing season; the worst it should have been was weak and under-ripe, like his algorithms had indicated the day before.
He found another husk. Same thing. Stank of poison. Hard as a stone. For a fleeting moment he wondered if he would swoon, if the bog his plot had become would draw him again in to its suffocating pool. He crawled over the dirty lip of a destroyed furrow, and swam through mud.
“Next one,” he said, his hunger pangs intensifying. He pulled himself over another mound of dirt and through another channel of mud. “Just make the next one.”
His personal communications were drowned. He hoped they might self-heal if he could just get himself up and drying. It was a faint hope.
His muscles gave out before the sun set. With quaking arms, he pulled himself up on one of the higher mugels he had come across; a moist patch of grass a full finger-length above standing water. His entire plot, as far as he could see, was destroyed, a water-blasted wasteland. He curled up on the mugel and got most of his body on it. From there he looked back to mark his progress.
His heart sank. He could still see the tractor and the monument. He looked in the direction he was heading. Swamp as far as he could see. Grass was an odd thing to find here, as his only grass crops were several plots to the north. He snapped off a few blades of it and bit into the bunch. It snapped like twigs and hurt his mouth. He put his hand to his lips. They were bleeding. He threw away the grass.
He huddled on the mugel and wondered what it might be like to die of exposure, and if this was it.
He awoke before dawn, chilled and aching, but anxious to move. He plunged into a patch of mud, tread, swam, crawled and by the time the sun was mid-morning high, he had found more passable ground as the plot began a steady rise upward.
By afternoon, he could walk, and he took heart in this. His hunger constantly wore at him, and he had given up entirely on the husks. As he figured it, he was still a long walk to the next crop; dull yossa that seemed now like sweet candy in his imagination. He didn't quite make it that far by nightfall, but he was able to march for sometime in the dark. Delirious with hunger, he didn't even think to make a shelter, and eventually rested – minutes; only minutes, he promised himself. As soon as he lay down, he fell unconscious.
Hunger awakened him. It was still dark. He began to see things – ghosts and rescue lights – neither of which were real. He wandered in the dark. He stumbled. By the time the sun was shining, he realized he had spent many hours walking in a small circle. His yossa had been only a short jog away the entire time. He tried to run but couldn’t. He staggered over the uneven ground toward the treasure.
The sun took on an eerie light. At the edge of the yossa plot, he could see that what he had feared was true. His pale orange yossa plot was as much as a blasted wasteland as his zaim plot, just not quite as flooded. He tromped into the waterlogged mess and found a smashed cluster of yoss floating in a pool. He cupped the pool and drank. Then he bit the yossa bunch whole.
He spat them out.
He dug into the ground until he found a root. It smelled awful.
Inedible. Either his crops of carefully calibrated algorithmically sound roots and seeds had produced nothing during the season without him knowing it, or else something in the thunderstorm had triggered a fatal massive cross-species system error. He threw the rotten crops away from him.
His thoughts returned to the suspicious salesbot. Had it sold him – not a cure and not a placebo – but a corruption? Had the Servo hacked his weather regulators and biogenetically attacked his crops? Had it profited by trading him an entire system of AlgoDecay in exchange for his financial accounts?
The Farmer scratched at his tooth. He fumbled in his crusty pocket for a digital pick. He wedged the pointed end under the thin white square on his lower left front tooth and pried it off. He shivered, wondering if it had the biogenetic codes to rot his bones from the inside out. His gums at the base of his lower incisors ached.
He stood up. Ahead lay a broad glassy patch as wide across as a lake. Another flood. He looked back. The tractor was no longer visible, but the monument could have fit between his thumb and forefinger if he had sighted it that way. By going ahead, he would cut himself off from the only possible beacon for rescue. He’d just destroyed his personal communications and media. Surely rescue drones would be drawn to the wreckage of the tractor, but even they could not blanket every plot. In fact, now that he thought of it, he had seen absolutely no aircraft in the sky since he’d emerged from the tractor-tomb.
Even so, his fields were the proverbial haystack. He was now a needle.
After a decent half-day, the delirium of starvation began to bog him down more than the worst of the wetland ever had. His body slowed with his mind, which was slowed by obstructed obsessions on food. How could he have imagined that such a thing as food could be real, when clearly no such thing existed in his world? Food had been a dream. His farm had been a dream. He had always been a flickering ghost, impaled on a stake of hunger.
The heat did not relent. He made a shelter from the noonday sun using rotted reeds. He was sleeping more and more, walking less. He now avoided crossing any water, as his fatigue meant certain drowning. He began to hear voices. They told him that his family had died in the storm. That the country had. That the world had. That the storm had knocked out the Black Box that connected Otanso to the stream of the Galactic Empire, and that the Empire’s heart, the great and invincible Continent, the god of the Marketplace, has ceased to beat.
Days passed before he found a rare downward slope that didn't end in a deadly pond or sucking mud, so he took it. He fell down several times without bracing himself. He was disoriented and sun-blind and out of control.
At the basin of the slope was yet another massive plot, indistinguishable from the last. He staggered for hours through the soggy land, drinking the hot
black water when he could remember to do so.
Then he saw the great monument towering in the distance: a savage, slaying an auroch
He had wandered for ten days -- perhaps eleven or twelve -- in an enormous circle.
There was something different in what he saw though. At this distance, he couldn’t see the tractor, but there was a big patch of green. He was certain it was a mirage, but the color was a dazzling splash after so many days of waste and burning blindness.
The green expanded around the base of the monument in every direction. He walked toward it, expecting it to disappear, but it did not. Thin waves of steam came off the black water pools around him, but he forged on. He waded into a tangle of creeping green, stumbling and sloshing. As soon as the shade of the monument was over him, he could go no further. He fell among the plants.
Looking at the leaves of the greenery around him he could see that they were not normal, perfect, Mythagorean, proportional, symmetric triangles. Indeed, each leaf had its own roughly symmetrical shape and hue, as if every one had its own biogenetic algorithm, its own ugly but unique identity. In his weakness, it took him several moments to recognize what alien life the plants could be.
Then he remembered.
It was a weed. He recalled it from agricultural training corps. If his hazy memory was recalling correctly, it was the one of the most unusual yet most important weed on the planet. It was – as hard as it was to comprehend – a plant that existed without biogenetic algorithm. Its common name was spanch.
His skin began to itch mildly, but he didn't have the energy to recoil from the tangled field. The Farmer had never heard of anyone who had touched spanch and lived, as its lethal poison was the stuff of legends. Some people called it The Galactic Dark. According to the stories, it grew quickly, was highly invasive and most certainly led to death. The little leaves clutched at his clothing, and its tendrils coiled at his fingers. The itch was worse, and his lungs were hot.