Appleseed

by Matt Bell

  The faun puts his hands to a granite boulder taller than any man. Leaning his weight into its solidity, he tests its immovable resistance, the heft of its weight anchoring it in time; as a glitter-scaled lizard skitters over the boulder’s hulking bulk, he marvels at how the rock’s knobby surface appears softened by clumps of lichen and moss, by streaks of guano and bird shit. His breathing slows; he focuses on each breath filling his lungs, each breath emptying out his mouth and nose. Horseflies land in his fur and he doesn’t shoo them away, he lets them bite him if they choose; a dragonfly buzzes by his head, diving through a gathering of gnats off his left ear. Bright birds flit from branch to branch of their own accord, a red fox wanders by without a glance, padding lightly on nimble feet; a black bear cub appears, snuffling through the underbrush, hunting for nuts or berries.

  Chapman lets his attention fall lightly on the cub, not risking disturbing it; time passes, the sun moves, the trees’ shadows shift, but the cub stays, rolling around in the fallen leaves, then resting gently on its side. It’s harder to see if the old-growth trees accept Chapman’s willed impartiality, but he hopes they’re as happy to be left alone as any creature might be. He imagines the slow life of a tree, of many trees living together, of anything rooted in one place, taking on whatever weather might come; fur and bark, feather and leaf, whatever else the forest is, it doesn’t require Chapman, it doesn’t crave his thoughts or desires or impositions.

  If this forest is self-willed, living only for itself, then what of Chapman’s nurseries, what of Nathaniel’s saplings, the trees he means to sell to the west-bent settlers whose grateful dollars Nathaniel claims will make the brothers rich?

  Chapman considers the stumps that might be removed, the rocks that must be carried away, the earth needing to be tilled before the planting can begin; the building of brush fences, the pruning of suckers, the weeding of other plants trying to claim the cleared space. The brothers’ apple trees flourish wherever they are planted, they are in many ways indistinguishable from wild trees, but their lives exist first and foremost only to fulfill human desire.

  Nathaniel speaks in the eager language of the settler, proud of stewarding the land, of improving the country: for him the Territory is earth not put to its right uses until its swamps are drained and its forests made passable to man and horse and ox and wagon, until roads climb every hill and bridges cross every river, until the mountains are mined for their deep treasure troves of ore, riches owed to any hardy man strong enough to drag their glitter into the light.

  The given world wasn’t perfect, Chapman remembers Nathaniel saying, but it could be made so by the efforts of good men. God had made the world, God had given the world to men, and men would show God their thanks by perfecting His creation. After all, if it was by good works that a man showed his worth, could the world not be improved by the same, by being made into the shape in which it might best be used?

  Heaven on earth is our goal, Nathaniel had said. Nothing less than heaven on earth, with two kingdoms carved out of it, one for you and one for me.

  At dusk, Chapman descends a narrow ridgeline into a salt lick marred by poorly grown birch trees, the lick populated by a dozen elk does standing ankle-deep in scummy water: their brown bodies shine in the late light, weak sunbeams falling through the canopy, softening the edges of their fur. He comes upon the elk gently, passing between their number without any intent, wanting to be nothing more than a hooved beast among hooved beasts.

  At his approach, the largest doe lifts her swollen head, shaking her waddle of fur in unmistakable warning. The doe snorts and Chapman snorts back and the doe returns her attention to the ground, noisily licking loose minerals trapped in clay. The sun shines but the shadows are chilly, and Chapman shivers when he sees poking from the ground a series of preserved white ribs, stony bones not belonging to any elk, and beside them the curve of a single tusk, piercing the earth from below. How uninterested the elk are in these half-buried fossils, in whatever unseen mammal bore the ribs and tusk: gone, gone, gone, like so much else.

  Five years after this century turns, the last buffalo in Ohio dies. And then sometime after goes the last timber wolf. The last black panther. The last lynx. Every wild turkey soon dead and served for dinner. Every duck and goose and prairie chicken. The Ohio black bear, gone. The Ohio white-tailed deer, gone. The Ohio elk at this Ohio salt lick, every other one like them soon Ohio dead. By the time Nathaniel dies, other men like him will already be restocking new woods, placing tame deer beneath planted trees. But not every animal will be replaced, not every plant: only the ones men desire, and only if they do as men wish. Deer in the woods but not in the fields. Trees in the yard, their roots hacked back from the foundation. The given earth reduced to what belongs to man, populated by what man allows.

  This salt lick will vanish sooner, washed away by rushing water moving along new paths, spring floods able to track everywhere the forest was cut, the drained swamps no longer there to absorb the surge of floods. What comes next? Only Nathaniel’s dream: flat farmlands divided into neat squares of rowed crops, fenced-in acres for cattle, goats, sheep, and, for some of those homesteads, an orchard of trees planted by Chapman and Nathaniel.

  For ten years, Chapman has labored without complaint to make Nathaniel’s world appear, to make Nathaniel’s imaginings solid, touchable, ownable. His brother has told him this dream world is the world that’s meant to be, the one God tasked man with making, but Chapman knows what kind of world that will be. No place for elk, and no place for fauns either; a place made only for men, men and what men desire.

  Today the elk move freely about Chapman, no longer paying him any mind. Their wants are local and immediate. The elk have their pasts and futures, but Chapman doesn’t think they live much in either. Their past is gone, their future undiscovered. For them it is only the now that’s present, it’s only the present where they can act.

  Separated from Nathaniel and far from his nurseries, Chapman envies the elk, doomed as they are: at least they are not beset by unsolvable doubt, by unreasonable want. Chapman is only half a man but that half doesn’t know how to want less than the other settlers, how to say, This world is already enough, that it’s enough to be a mere part of it, taking nothing more than the one real moment constantly renewed, the present in which it might be possible to stay rooted simply by ceasing your craving for more.

  He says he doesn’t know how to want less, but what he means is that he’s choosing not to learn how, choosing not to give up his desires, the treasures he wants only for himself.

  After all, it’s not only Nathaniel’s wants driving the brothers ever deeper into the Territory, year after struggling year, but Chapman’s too: for him, there has been the Tree, above all else. Now his faith wavers. Can’t he admit that the Tree is only a story he tells himself, a twisting of a half-remembered tale torn from a holy book Chapman has never even seen?

  Maybe so—but stories have power too. Chapman believes this, has watched it in action: Isn’t the story Nathaniel is telling, that all the other settler men like him tell too, the most powerful tool come to shape this Territory?

  Story becomes belief, belief makes action, action creates reality. If Nathaniel can do this, so can Chapman—and if so, Chapman might never have to abandon his self-appointed quest for the Tree, despite the failure his search has so far engendered. Better this than the alternative, because Chapman can no longer avoid the truth of what giving up the story of the Tree would mean: if he decides to plant no more apple seeds, then perhaps he abandons Nathaniel too. And that faithful Chapman still tells himself he won’t choose, can’t choose, not even while hating how easy it was for Nathaniel to leave him first.

  John

  The newest superorchard trees are the healthiest specimens John has ever seen, with those in the outermost plots of the Farm growing three times taller than any heritage tree, their too-symmetrical crowns precisely pruned and girdled to the specifications of the algorithm sorting the hydration
and nutrient data captured by soil sensors and the air quality reports of the nanobees buzzing through the branches. Most of the new Volunteers smile at these wonders, their faces cautiously curious, happy enough as they parade down a packed dirt lane. John mimics their surprise at seeing for the first time the enormity of the trees’ black branches and shockingly green leaves and perfectly glossy apples, all the while looking past the trees to study the swarms of nanobees floating between the rows. He waits for the right moment, then steps out of line to let the thrumming yellow hum of the closest swarm break scattershot over his body, the drones buzzing angrily, spinning to protect the bright boluses of pollen sucked tight against their rotors.

  The first bees pellet against his skin, their shapes sharp as the stingers of the insects they’ve replaced, but the rest quickly modify their trajectories, the swarm rerouting around John like a school of fish avoiding a shark. These bots are an iteration of his earlier designs, now faster and smaller than he’d ever managed to make them. Subsequent generations would’ve been designed by artificial intelligence working with little to no human intervention, taking advantage of corresponding advances in printer technology, in sensor resolution and flight-ready materials; whatever else has changed, he can only hope no one’s discovered the security backdoor he installed years ago, in the first-gen nanoswarms.

  John’s out of line for only a few seconds, just long enough to squeeze his right fist to set his pebble vibrating. A moment later his pebble buzzes again: the bees messaging back, confirming his command override. Good enough. He hurries to rejoin the other Volunteers, keeping his bruised face painfully smiling as their tour continues. The Earthtrust guide explains: The Farm is laid out in a spiral grid of discrete plots, with the Tower and the oldest supergroves occupying the spiral’s center, surrounded by orchards containing newer generations of trees, plus other plots designated for growing resilient strains of corn and potatoes, soybeans and rice, new breeds of cattle and hogs and goats. In between are the neighborhoods of printed homes—stacked walls of quick-drying cement strands, solar roofs placed overhead by a rolling lifter—where these Volunteers will live, each family given their own house, plus a pale square of green-enough drought-resistant grass or bright turf printed directly into the hardpacked ground.

  John knows it’d be more efficient to build multifamily residential complexes painted with the same photovoltaic paint as the Tower, buildings that could be sustainably operated in ways individual family homes can never be. But the Farm is both fantasy and promise, a re-creation of a dried up and blown away dream: a house for every family, health care and education, real food grown in real fields, all paid for by meaningful manual labor.

  Real people, Eury said once, have a right to real work. If nothing else, we can give our Volunteers back their dignity. No more standing under fluorescent lights wearing a name tag beside a stack of clearance t-shirts screen-printed with brand names. No more clearing filthy plates off a table where you’d never be invited to sit. No more crushing your spine in an office chair, hunched in a cubicle, your blank expressionless face reflecting a monitor’s glow.

  The first morning in his newly printed house, John wakes to a work assignment doled out by the Farm’s central planning algorithm. An hour later, in the nearest superorchard plot, he picks bright red apples alongside several hundred other Volunteers, men and women of many ages, various ethnicities and backgrounds, come to the VAC from different doomed parts of the country. Children are exempted from work, assigned instead to education centers or day care facilities, so the children playing in the manicured grass today are other new arrivals, allowed to stay with their families until they acclimate. John smiles at their play, laughs at the jokes of the people working nearby, each Volunteer wearing a printed-weave bucket strapped around their chest, slowly filling it with apples designed to maximize size, color, resiliency. Backs ache and knees burn, but John doesn’t hear any complaints; there’s a golden quality to the light today, they’re outside in newly green lands, every tree they harvest is so bountiful it’s possible to forget the dust bowl they’ve all fled, to ignore the way some Volunteers are too thin for the smallest clothes the Farm had to offer.

  Malnourishment has weakened teeth and softened bones, diminished muscle mass, jaundiced skin: the Volunteers arrive hurt and tired, but the Farm will make them healthy, get them happy, give them hope. Every hour, loudspeakers crackle with Eury Mirov’s voice, repeating promises made when the VAC was established, when the federal government invoked eminent domain to grant Earthtrust the land it wanted. “Every Volunteer is important, necessary, productive,” Eury’s voice says. “Individually, we struggle, but together, we feed the world.” And every day this promise comes closer, the Farm and the other domestic VACs now producing enough food to feed the country, if only because there’s less America left than ever before.

  The Volunteers aren’t sharecroppers renting the land from Earthtrust, they’re not employees working for room and board—they are, Eury Mirov says, “heroes saving the world, after which it will be their world.” The work will not be easy, Eury admits; it took centuries to destroy this land, it might take decades to put it right, a task to be finished by this generation, the next generation, some generation to come, all so their children or grandchildren can live in the America they were promised.

  Eury’s voice says, “When the land is made right, Earthtrust will give you back the land.”

  The fulfillment of that promise is many years away, but today, the only day John can do anything about, is a good day. He jokes with his fellow apple pickers, he shakes hands and introduces himself, taking special care as he repeats his fake life story; he uses his body to work hard, he feels his strength and his capacity for the task he’s been assigned. By sunset, he’s freshly sunburned, a musk of sweat emanating from his printed clothes; he is, despite why he’s come back to this place, genuinely happy. He isn’t alone. The Farm wouldn’t succeed if it were a place of misery, a dystopian slave state. The Farm is, for most of the Volunteers, a good way of life come to replace one fully failed.

  If John and his compatriots succeed, they might take away this new world and its promise. He doesn’t yet know what that will cost, what stopping Pinatubo might cause to happen next, but in the meantime he worries: Isn’t it a crime to take a world from someone, no matter how wrong that world is, if you can’t guarantee a better world to come?

  Life at the Farm has a routine, much of it familiar enough. Before sunrise, John’s assignment is waiting on his telescreen, preceding the arrival of the electric trams shuttling Volunteers to their work. Three days after his arrival, John wakes to new orders, the day’s task taking him farther from his row of printed concrete homes and bright green turf lawns than he’s ever gone. He rides the tram to a cattle farm, where a thousand head wait hidden behind slat steel fencing. The cattle are bred and modified from Holstein and Chianina stock, the resulting animals frequently exceeding two tons and growing heavier every season, two-point-five meters tall at the shoulder, long horned, frightening to behold but also modified for extreme docility.

  John watches a rancher leading a parade of cattle toward the processing barn with nothing more than a hand gesture and a well-practiced whistle, stepping easily between the animals. His own assignment will require nothing so skilled. He and the other Volunteers file into the processing barn’s locker room to be fitted with yellow hazardous waste suits, baggy helmets at first unbearably stifling, then, once they’ve been shown their task, thankfully so. For ten despairing hours, John works the processing barn’s stalls, shoveling up truckloads of muddy manure. What both the apple picking and the shit shoveling have in common is that both jobs are cheaper to have humans do than to automate, an easy decision for the Farm, which has nothing in more abundance than surplus human labor.

  One of the Farm’s goals—according to Eury Mirov’s omnipresent voice—is zero waste.

  As John works, he detects slight pings from his pebble, vibrations indicating
a hacked nanobee flying nearby, part of the swarm zipping around the clumped cattle to read the pebbles inserted behind each cow’s right ear. Dump trucks come and go; flies and nanobees use the same entrance to move between the cattle and their waste. The flies stick to John’s suit and mask, his gloves and his shovel; the nanobees never land on any human but pass overhead with their cargos of air-sniffed data and gathered microsamples, collecting statistics on the efficiency and productivity of every Volunteer.

  Late in the day, one of these nanobees drops nearly invisibly out of formation to buzz John’s head, wirelessly passing a bit of information to his pebble; with his gloves on he can barely feel the telltale vibration marking the data packet’s arrival. He looks around the barn at the other yellow-suited, shit-spattered Volunteers, tries to empty his expression of curiosity or alarm. The bee buzzes his head a second time, the pebble vibrates again, and this time the sensation doesn’t abate. John clenches his fist, grunts behind his mask as blood vessels above his wrist break, the skin purpling beneath the sleeve.

  It’s several hours before he can return to the locker room to shed his protective gear, but even after he’s showered and clean, dressed in a printed gray t-shirt and blue jeans, he presses his arm to his side, keeping to himself on the crowded tram ride back to his neighborhood. Back at his house, he studies the widening bruise on his inner forearm. One of his hacked bees must’ve found Cal, pinged her pebble; she sent a message the only way she could, via a bit of code of Noor’s design capable of bursting an inkblot of broken blood vessels across John’s arm. At a glance, the bruise seems accidental, but Cal is a technician, precise in the ways she hurts him: the swelling mark soon resembles the face of a goat, a goat of blood swimming beneath the skin.