Reaping

by Makansi, K.

  “Remy,” I whisper, awed. “Are you on infrared?”

  There’s a pause as she activates her infrared contacts and then she gasps, and together we stand there for a moment, taking in the size and scale and weirdness of what we’re seeing. There are enormous, two-story high towers of heat, pulsing gently, probably twenty of them, spaced evenly throughout the facility. As I look more closely, I realize they are slatted, sheets stacked upon sheets inside round containers. The tall vats are surrounded on our level by a wraparound balcony. Right in front of us, a walkway leads to a small elevator spanning this level and the ground level. Although what moonlight there is filters through the domed glass ceiling, the place is still shrouded in deep shadow.

  “What is this?” Remy says, hushed.

  “No idea,” I respond.

  We continue along the platform, which leads right up alongside the blocks of heat. There’s a powerful scent of antiseptic, and something else I don’t quite recognize, something fresh and heavy but off-putting somehow, not a little revolting. Remy leans closer, but I keep my head up, trying not to get too close.

  “Should we risk a light?” she asks, peering down into the containers.

  “We should confirm there’s no additional security, first,” I whisper. “Nothing that might trigger as we start poking around.”

  Remy nods in assent.

  “Let’s do a quick sweep, then. Disable anything you see.”

  I follow her down the stairs at the end of the suspended walkway. We split up and scan the area. I keep my eye out for cameras or internal security, but there is none. No guards. Doesn’t even look like there’s a guard station. The strangeness of this place has set me completely on edge.

  “Looks like the puppet masters never imagined the puppets would cut their strings and go exploring,” she says, her eyes gleaming, her thoughts echoing my own. “No security at all.”

  “I don’t like it,” I respond. “This is the largest building at the Farm, with minimal exterior security and none on the inside. They obviously don’t think anyone would ever come in here. But why?”

  “Rose mentioned once that she thought this was a greenhouse, but that made no sense since there are no windows. But if that’s what the workers are told, and they believe it, no questions, why would they try to break in?”

  “Wouldn’t some of the workers work here? Unless the place is automated. Maybe whatever’s going on in here doesn’t require a lot of manpower.”

  “Let’s flip on a light and see what they’re keeping so quiet,” she responds, her voice conspiratorial, almost eager. I wish I shared her enthusiasm. The whiff I got earlier unsettled me and almost turned my stomach.

  Remy pulls a biolight out of her pocket and flips it on. We both blink back into visible spectrum. She turns to the nearest vat and moves right up to the edge. She presses her gloved fingertips against the glass, staring into the large container.

  It’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen.

  There are thin slats of some sort of bioplastic film layered horizontally all the way up the glass container. At the top, the slats are mostly empty, but as the slats go down, they are fuller, loaded with gelatinous material, some almost honeycombed, some more liquified than anything. At ground level—waist heigh for us—the material is fully solidified and, from my perspective, utterly revolting.

  We stand and stare at it, stunned at the weirdness, and then it hits me. I remember back to one of my history classes at the Academy: As the population spiraled out of control in the Old world, raising animals naturally became not only an insufficient method of production, but impractical because of clear-cutting of forests for grazing and subsequent soil degradation and mineral depletion. When scientists discovered it was possible to grow protein tissue in petri, a new industry arose, one that replaced the unethical and unhygienic industrial animal processing facilities. But these protein companies, too, succumbed to the profit motive as they expanded too rapidly, competing for market share in the race to displace conventional industrial animal farms. To undercut competitors, businesses grew meat products with little to no nutritional value leading to rampant vitamin deficiency. Lax regulation coupled with poor oversight resulted in routine outbreaks of illness from Salmonella, E. coli, and listeria monocytogene poisoning.

  I pull back from the glass and fight the temptation to retch. Remy, however, doesn’t seem to have quite caught on.

  “Remy,” I say, my voice louder than it should be, “it’s a protein lab. They’re growing meat.”

  She turns to stare at me, and then quickly turns back to the vats.

  “Oh my god,” she whispers. “I thought this was illegal?”

  “It is illegal. The third tenet of the OAC’s incorporation doctrine was that they would never grow meat laboratory style, like the protein industries of the Old World.”

  “So why is this here? Surely they don’t put this in the MealPaks?” Remy doesn’t seem to share my revulsion, her fingers still pressed up against the glass, leaning forward and staring into the vat like a child seeing a new animal for the first time.

  “What else would they do with it?” I swallow my disgust and step up to the glass next to her. I point upwards. “I’m just guessing, but I think this is how it works. Up there is where the protein starts, for lack of a better word, gestating. The sheets are moved slowly downward as the protein develops until down here, it’s fully formed. At this point,” I point to the handles that pull out to open the vat, “whoever’s working here can pull out the bioplastic, cut the meat off, and prepare it for serving. The plastic probably gets cleaned somewhere nearby and then reused. Or maybe it’s recycled. In the old days, the lattices were made from organic material and actually became a part of the meat. Like cartilage.”

  Remy wrinkles her nose.

  “Gross.”

  I pull out my own little light, and point it around us. Off in the corner, I see a door that leads into a closed-off space.

  “Over there,” I say, pointing to the door. Half of my desire to move is motivated by curiosity, a need to understand this place; the other half is pure revulsion, the twist in my stomach telling me to back away before I get sick.

  “It’s gruesome,” Remy says, as she follows me to the corner, “but so weird I want to keep looking at it.”

  I shudder, aghast at the thought that I’ve probably been eating that stuff for the vast majority of my life, now more thankful than ever for the Resistance food.

  We try the door which is locked and secured with a palm and retinal scanner. Still no cameras.

  “I guess they don’t want people in here,” Remy says.

  “But they also don’t think anyone would try to break in,” I respond. “If they did, they’d have something more than just entry identifiers.”

  “There’s a window,” Remy says, pointing. She walks over to it and presses her biolight up against the glass. “Hard to see in, though.”

  Through the glass, I can just make out a few plasma screens, pulsing a soft red light that indicates they’re in sleep mode. There’s also a series of microscopes, a laser scope, as well as a mass spectrometer. Beyond that, it’s hard to identify any of the equipment.

  “This must be where they monitor the protein growth,” I say.

  “I suppose it’s easier to customize the chemical components in the meat when you’re growing it in a lab than when you’re growing it on the bones of a living animal,” Remy says. “It’s just another step in the OAC’s control over the food chain. And they’re breaking their own law to do it. In a twisted way, it makes sense. Why raise real animals when you can grow meat in a lab?”

  “Especially since the demand for meat in the Old World and the clear-cutting of rainforests for grazing was a major contributor to global warming. It also contaminated the groundwater with the effluent from the meat farms. Lab meat was seen as an ecologically sound practice.”

  “Makes sense in theory. Except then they went and screwed it up. When all
the meat a population eats comes from just a few huge laboratories, the chance for contamination is high, and that’s exactly what happened. I don’t remember the details, but a huge industrial accident, a major contamination and leak of some sort, led to thousands of deaths.”

  “But the Sector Assembly blamed the outbreak on the Southwestern Confederation and declared it an Act of War—industrial sabotage, murder. At least that’s why I remember from my history classes.”

  Remy nods. “Yeah. The Sector accused them of purposefully introducing the disease into our food supply and so banned in-vitro meat production. It was a big deal. Since then, the Sector has been talking the talk about all the ‘back-to-the-earth’ farming practices. But really they’re cooking up these globs in a lab.” She shakes her head and shudders. “At least I’ve been off it for three and a half years. I feel bad for you and Miah.”

  “And Bear,” I respond, and the smile fades off her face. “And everyone here at the Farm who still eats it, every day. And they have no idea that—”

  “It’s a farce.” She’s quiet for a moment, her almond eyes narrowed to uncompromising slits, staring into the darkened lab. “Everything is a lie,” she says.

  I hold my breath, move my hand a half-inch closer to hers, pressed against the glass pane.

  “Not everything,” I whisper.

  Remy looks up at me, and for a second, I think I see something like admiration, or tenderness. My heart leaps as a wire-thin smile plays around her lips. But then her eyes narrow again, and her tentative smile settles into something harder.

  “I know what we need to do,” she says, her voice full of determination.

  “What?” I ask, almost afraid of the answer.

  “Cut off the power supply to this building.” I stare down at her, amazed at her temerity, her courage. “Without power, their monitoring systems won’t work, their heating systems won’t work, the air ducts won’t work. The meat will rot. Quickly. They’ll be forced to turn elsewhere for protein. Just when we’re flying in loads of supplies from our own stores.”

  I turn to face her. “We’d have to make it look like an accident, and—”

  “Now,” she says. “We need to do it now. While we’re here. We know where their power source is—we passed it on the way in. The solar harvesters, on the roof.”

  “It’s not as simple as just cutting the wires, Remy, we’ll have to—”

  “I know,” she cuts me off again, and places her hand on mine, now resting on the railing. “We’re going to do it anyway.” She squeezes my hand and then turns and hurries back toward the stairs, her biolight swaying as she walks. I follow her, wondering what I’ve gotten myself into, what Remy’s getting us into. If we cut off the power supply, they’ll know as early as tomorrow morning that something wrong, and it won’t be long after that that they’ll discovered it was tampered with. They’ll call in OAC guards. They’ll crack down on security. They’ll suspect it was us. They’ll hunt us down. They’ll punish the workers. They’ll—

  “Let’s get the harvesters,” Remy says, stopping the run of paranoid thoughts in my head. We’re standing at the door to the roof, where we entered earlier. Remy pushes it open a crack.

  “Wait!” I put my hand on the door. “You sure? If we do this, there’s no going back. We can’t undo it.” I look down at her, the glow of the biolight wrapping us in an unearthly aura. She is beautiful, fierce, like something out of a fairy tale.

  “You sound like Soren.”

  “I’m not Soren. I’m just saying—”

  “There is no going back, Vale. Not for me.” She looks up, her eyes searching my face, waiting. Expectant. “What about you? Any going back for Valerian Orleán?”

  I’m surprised Farm security can’t hear the thudding in my chest. I meet her gaze and shake my head. “No, Remy. No going back for me.”

  There are no words to fill the silence as I hold her gaze a moment longer. Then I push open the door, and she steps out onto the roof.

  “Wait,” I say. “Why don’t we just cut the main power supply and get out of here?”

  “Won’t they notice that? If we steal the harvester films, it will take them longer to discover the cause of the outage.”

  “Won’t take them that much longer.” We head over to where the solar arrays tie into the main power line, and I stop and look out over the farm. “You know what?”

  “What?” she says.

  “I like your idea better. Besides, the Resistance can probably find a good use for the harvesters.”

  Her face lights up. “Let’s get to work.”

  She cuts off to the right, following the conduits of power cords, encased in bioplastic for protection from the elements, while I walk straight ahead to the solar arrays.

  At the first solar cell, I stop and drop my pack, digging out a small screwdriver and a pair of tweezers. I pry off the clear, protective layer of plastic, and then start to unscrew the photovoltaic panel from the rest of the array. The tricky part is getting the voltaic fibers to pull apart from the metal that supports them and conducts the electricity to the main system. Using the tweezers and the screwdriver in conjunction, I try to wedge the screwdriver in between the fiber panel and the metal supports.

  After a few seconds, I’ve got it, and I use my fingers to pry the rest of the panel off the support. These are wafer-thin sheets of fibers, a combination of plant material and rare earth metals salvaged from the vast, decrepit solar arrays of the Old World, refashioned into much more efficient solar harvesters. They’re thin but sturdy, so thin I can roll this one up into a tight little scroll and stuff it in my pack.

  Working quickly, I move from cell to cell, first removing the plastic cover, and then peeling off the voltaic fiber panel, rolling it up, and jamming it in my bag. By the time Remy rejoins me, I’m halfway through the panels.

  “They are all fairly new,” I respond. “Probably deployed within the last year. My dad said these new ones have a ninety-percent conversion and retention rate. It’s the thermotunnelling that makes them so efficient.”

  She lets out a breath, long and low. “Wow,” she says. “I didn’t even know that was possible.”

  As much as I’d love to explain the physics, there’s no time. Instead, I show her how to disassemble the units, and soon she’s deftly peeling the fiber panels away at my side. Working in tandem, we’re able to finish the second half of the harvesters in about a half-hour.

  “Okay,” Remy says, looking at our packed bags. “Let’s get out of here. It’s going to be a lot harder on the way out, carrying all this stuff with us.”

  I nod, sling my pack over my shoulders, and follow her as we walk through the now-destroyed solar array and back towards the air duct system she climbed to get up here. Remy goes first, climbing back down the pipes and fans, and I follow. We can’t risk the rope, as we’ll have no way to untie it, and leaving it would be pretty clear evidence.

  “I want them to think that maybe, just maybe, someone on the inside did this,” she says, as she goes over the edge. “After all, they don’t know we’re here. They’ll first suspect the Farm workers, but why would they do something like this? Their next step will be to turn inwards, to go after anyone who has access to this building. The longer we can keep them guessing, the better.”

  By the time I hit the ground, I’m giddy with adrenaline and a sense of rebellious accomplishment. Remy’s enthusiasm is contagious. Together we’ve done something that will make a difference. That will set the ball of rebellion rolling. When the Farm Enforcers and Dieticians find out that the MealPak formulas have been tampered with and the solar harvesters have been removed, they’ll pull the plug on the Farm worker’s food supply until reinforcements arrive. When that happens, the workers will either go hungry or come to us.

  We creep along the edges of the buildings, keeping to the shadows until we’re far enough from the buildings to pick up the pace. Then we jog toward the perimeter through the stillness, the peaceful beauty of the lan
dscape shrouded in darkness. We go up and over the fence with a little more difficulty than the first time, now that our packs are full of fiber panels.

  On the other side, Remy pauses for breath, panting a little from the exertion of hauling herself over the fence.

  “I’d love to see their faces in the morning,” she says, almost gleefully, with a light in her eyes that speaks of both danger and promise. “The fire has been lit, Vale. Now, we just have to carry the torch.”

  18 - REMY

  Spring 9, Sector Annum 106, 02h03

  Gregorian Calendar: March 28

  I half expect Eli or Soren to be pacing out in front of the cave, waiting for our return, but the area is eerily quiet. Just in case, someone is awake inside, though, I pull up short before we go in. I put my hand on Vale’s arm and he stops, turns toward me. We didn’t say a word as we jogged back in the dark, watching our footing, and trying to get as far away from the Farm as quickly as possible before the early birds get up and start the work day. It’s nearly four in the morning, and now, it seems like there’s too much to say. What we’ve done … it’s just beginning to sink in. Sabotaging the formulas in the Dieticians lab was one thing, but this … this is a whole order of magnitude more dangerous.

  “Any regrets? Second thoughts?” I whisper.

  “We’ll get read the riot act as soon as the others find out, but no. No regrets.”

  “This is just the beginning. We’ve started the revolution. I don’t want anyone else to die, Vale, but it has to stop. It….”

  “I know,” he says. “And you didn’t start it, Remy. They did. My parents. Aulion. Everyone on the Board, in the Assembly, at the OAC. Everyone who knew and looked the other way … Now we have to finish it.”

  “Thanks,” I say, my voice, barely a whisper. “For … for going along with my crazy idea. If it’d been Soren, he would have—”

  “You should know,” he says, interrupting, his voice low, sonorous. “I would do—” He stops, clears his throat, and then continues, “I’m glad I was there.”