First Person Peculiar

by Mike Resnick

  “No,” muttered Julie Balch from NyVid, “we came all this way to stand in this cold wet breeze and admire your clothes.”

  A few of us laughed, and Cotter looked just a bit annoyed. I made a mental note to buy her a drink when the tour was done.

  “Now let me see a show of hands,” said Cotter. “Has anyone here ever seen a live Butterball?”

  Where did they find you? I thought. If we’d seen one, do you really think we’d have flown all the way to hell and gone just to see another?

  I looked around. No one had raised a hand. Which figured. To the best of my knowledge, nobody who didn’t work for MacDonald had ever seen a Butterball in the flesh, and only a handful of photos and holos had made it out to the general public. There was even a rumor that all of MacDonald’s employees had to sign a secrecy oath.

  “There’s a reason, of course,” continued Cotter smoothly. “Until the international courts verified Mr. MacDonald’s patent, there was always a chance that some unscrupulous individual or even a rogue nation would try to duplicate the Butterball. For that reason, while we have shipped and sold its meat all over the world, always with the inspection and approval of the local food and health authorities, we have not allowed anyone to see or examine the animals themselves. But now that the courts have ruled in our favor, we have opened our doors to the press.” Screaming bloody murder every step of the way, I thought.

  “You represent the first group of journalists to tour the farm, but there will be many more, and we will even allow Sir Richard Perigrine to make one of his holographic documentaries here at the farm.” He paused. “We plan to open it to public tours in the next two or three years.”

  Suddenly a bunch of bullshit alarms began going off inside my head.

  “Why not sooner, now that you’ve won your case?” asked Julie, who looked like she was hearing the same alarms.

  “We’d rather that you bring the initial stories and holos of the Butterballs to the public,” answered Cotter.

  “That’s very generous of you,” she persisted. “But you still haven’t told us why.”

  “We have our reasons,” he said. “They will be made apparent to you before the tour is over.”

  My old friend Jake Monfried of the SeattleDisk sidled over to me. “I hope I can stay awake that long,” he said sardonically. “It’s all rubbish anyway.”

  “I know,” I said. “Their rivals don’t even need the damned holos. Any high school kid could take a hunk of Butterball steak and come up with a clone.”

  “So why haven’t they?” asked Julie.

  “Because MacDonald’s got fifty lawyers on his payroll for every scientist,” answered Jake. He paused, his expression troubled. “Still, this guy’s lying to us—and it’s a stupid lie, and he doesn’t look that stupid. I wonder what the hell he’s hiding?”

  We were going to have to wait to find out, because Cotter began leading us across a rolling green plain toward a barn. We circled a couple of ponds, where a few dozen birds were wading and drinking. The whole setting looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell or a Grandma Moses painting, it was so wholesome and innocent—and yet every instinct I had screamed at me that something was wrong here, that nothing could be as peaceful and tranquil as it appeared.

  “To appreciate what Mr. MacDonald has done here,” said Cotter as we walked toward a large barn on a hillside, “you have to understand the challenge he faced. More than five billion men, women and children have serious protein deficiencies. Three billion of them are quite literally starving to death. And of course the price of meat—any meat—had skyrocketed to the point where only the very wealthy can afford it. So what he had to do was not only create an animal as totally, completely nutritious as the Butterball, he had to also create one that could mature and breed fast enough to meet mankind’s needs now and in the future.”

  He stopped until a couple of laggards caught up with the group. “His initial work took the form of computer simulations. Then he hired a bevy of scientists and technicians who, guided by his genius, actually manipulated DNA to the point where the Butterballs existed not just on the screen and in Mr. MacDonald’s mind, but in the flesh.

  “It took a few generations for them to breed true, but fortunately a Butterball generation is considerably less than a year. Mr. MacDonald then had his staff spend some years mass-producing Butterballs. They were designed to have multiple births, not single offspring, and average ten to twelve per litter—and all of our specimens were bred and bred again so that when we finally introduced the Butterball to the world two years ago, we felt confident that we could keep up with the demand without running out of Butterballs.”

  “How many Butterballs have you got here?” asked the guy from Eurocom International, looking out across the rolling pastures and empty fields.

  “We have more than two million at this facility,” came the answer. “Mr. MacDonald owns some twenty-seven farms here and in Australia, each as large or larger than this one, and each devoted to the breeding of Butterballs. Every farm has its own processing plant. We’re proud to note that while we have supplied food for billions, we’ve also created jobs for more than 80,000 men and women.” He paused to make sure we had recorded that number or were jotting it down.

  “That many?” mused Julie.

  “I know it seems like we sneaked up on the world,” said Cotter with a smile. “But for legal reasons we were compelled to keep the very existence of the Butterballs secret until we were ready to market them—and once we did go public, we were processing, shipping and selling hundreds of tons from each farm every month right from the start. We had to have all our people in place to do that.”

  “If they give him the Nobel, he can afford to turn the money down,” Jake said wryly.

  “I believe Mr. MacDonald is prepared to donate the money to charity should that happy event come to pass,” responded Cotter. He turned and began walking toward the barn, then stopped about eighty feet from of it.

  “I must prepare you for what you’re going to—”

  “We’ve already seen the holos,” interrupted the French reporter.

  Cotter stared at him for a moment, then began again. “As I was saying, I must prepare you for what you’re going to hear.”

  “Hear?” I repeated, puzzled.

  “It was a fluke,” he explained, trying to look unconcerned and not quite pulling it off. “An accident. An anomaly. But the fact of the matter is that the Butterballs can articulate a few words, just as a parrot can. We could have eliminated that ability, of course, but that would have taken more experimentation and more time, and the world’s hungry masses couldn’t wait.”

  “So what do they say?” asked Julie.

  Cotter smiled what I’m sure he thought was a comforting smile. “They simply repeat what they hear. There’s no intelligence behind it. None of them has a vocabulary of more than a dozen words. Mostly they articulate their most basic needs.”

  He turned to the barn and nodded to a man who stood by the door. The man pushed a button, and the door slid back.

  The first big surprise was the total silence that greeted us from within the barn. Then, as they heard us approaching—we weren’t speaking, but coins jingle and feet scuff the ground—a voice, then a hundred, then a thousand, began calling out:

  “Feed me!”

  It was a cacophony of sound, not quite human, the words repeated again and again and again: “Feed me!”

  We entered the barn, and finally got our first glimpse of the Butterballs. Just as in their holos, they were huge and roly-poly, almost laughably cute, looking more like oversized bright pink balloons than anything else. They had four tiny feet, good for balance but barely capable of locomotion. There were no necks to speak of, just a small pink balloon that swiveled atop the larger one. They had large round eyes with wide pupils, ears the size of small coins, two slits for nostrils, and generous mouths without any visible teeth.

  “The eyes are the only part of the Butter
ball that aren’t marketable,” said Cotter, “and that is really for esthetic reasons. I’m told they are quite edible.”

  The nearest one walked to the edge of its stall.

  “Pet me!” it squeaked.

  Cotter reached in and rubbed its forehead, and it squealed in delight.

  “I’ll give you a few minutes to wander around the barn, and then I’ll meet you outside, where I’ll answer your questions.”

  He had a point. With a couple of thousand Butterballs screaming “Feed me!” more and more frantically, it was almost impossible to think in there. We went up and down the rows of small stalls, captured the place on film and tape and disk and cube, then went back outside.

  “That was impressive,” I admitted when we’d all gathered around Cotter again. “But I didn’t see any two million Butterballs in there. Where are the rest of them?”

  “There are more than three hundred barns and other enclosures on the farm,” answered Cotter. “Furthermore, close to half a million are outside in pastures.”

  “I don’t see anything but empty fields,” remarked Jake, waving a hand toward the pristine enclosures.

  “We’re a huge farm, and we prefer to keep the Butterballs away from prying eyes. In fact, this barn was built only a month ago, when we finally decided to allow visitors on the premises. It is the only building that’s as close as a mile to any of our boundary lines.”

  “You said that some of them were in pastures,” said Julie. “What do they eat?”

  “Not grass,” answered Cotter. “They’re only outside because they’re multiplying so fast that we’re actually short of barns at the moment.” He paused. “If you looked carefully at them, you noticed that grazing is quite beyond their capabilities.” He held up a small golden pellet for us to see. “This is what they eat. It is totally artificial, created entirely from chemicals. Mr. MacDonald was adamant that no Butterball should ever eat any product that might nourish a human being. Their digestive systems were engineered to utilize this particular feed, which can provide nourishment to no other species on Earth.”

  “As long as you tinkered with their digestive systems, why didn’t you make them shit-eaters?” asked Jake, only half-jokingly. “They could have served two purposes at once.”

  “I assume that was meant in jest,” said Cotter, “but in point of fact, Mr. MacDonald considered it at one time. After all, some nourishment does remain in excrement—but alas, not enough. He wanted an animal that could utilize one hundred percent of what we fed it.”

  “How smart are they?” asked one of the Brits. “When I was a child, I had a dog that always wanted me to feed it or pet it, but it never told me so.”

  “Yes it did,” said Cotter. “It just didn’t use words.”

  “Point taken,” said the Brit. “But I’d still like to know …”

  “These are dumb farm animals,” said Cotter. “They do not think, they do not dream, they have no hopes or aspirations, they do not wish to become Archbishop. They just happen to be able to articulate a few words, not unlike many birds. Surely you don’t think Mr. MacDonald would create a sentient meat animal.”

  “No, of course not,” interjected Julie. “But hearing them speak is still a bit of a shock.”

  “I know,” said Cotter. “And that’s the real reason we’ve invited you here, why we’re inviting so many other press pools—to prepare the public.”

  “That’s going to take a lot of preparation,” I said dubiously.

  “We have to start somewhere,” said Cotter. “We have to let the people know about this particular anomaly. Men love to anthropomorphize, and a talking animal makes doing so that much easier. The consumers must be made to understand, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that these are unintelligent meat animals, that they do not know what their words mean, that they have no names and aren’t pets, that they do not mourn the loss of their neighbors any more than a cow or a goat does. They are humanity’s last chance—note that I did not even say humanity’s last best chance—and we cannot let the protestors and picketers we know will demonstrate against us go unanswered. No one will believe our answers, but they should believe the answers of the unbiased world press.”

  “Yeah,” I said under my breath to Jake. “And if kids didn’t want to eat Bambi, or Henry the Turkey, or Penelope Pig, how is anyone going to make them dig into Talky the Butterball, who actually exists?”

  “I heard that,” said Cotter sharply, “and I must point out that the children who will survive because of the Butterballs will almost certainly never have been exposed to Bambi or Henry or any of the others.”

  “Maybe not for a year or two,” I replied, unimpressed. “But before long you’ll be selling Butterburgers on every street corner in the States.”

  “Not until we’ve fulfilled our mission among the less fortunate peoples of the world—and by that time the people you refer to should be prepared to accept the Butterballs.”

  “Well, you can hope,” I said.

  “If it never comes to that, it doesn’t really matter,” said Cotter with an elaborate shrug. “Our mission is to feed Earth’s undernourished billions.”

  We both knew it would come to that, and sooner than anyone planned, but if he didn’t want to argue it, that was fine with me. I was just here to collect a story.

  “Before I show you the processing plant, are there any further questions?” asked Cotter.

  “You mean the slaughterhouse, right?” said Jake.

  “I mean the processing plant,” said Cotter severely. “Certain words are not in our lexicon.”

  “You’re actually going to show us Butterballs being … processed?” asked Julie distastefully.

  “Certainly not,” answered Cotter. “I’m just going to show you the plant. The process is painless and efficient, but I see no value in your being able to report that you watched our animals being prepared for market.”

  “Good!” said Julie with obvious relief.

  Cotter gestured to an open bus that was parked a few hundred meters away, and it soon pulled up. After everybody was seated, he climbed on and stood next to the driver, facing us.

  “The plant is about five miles away, at almost the exact center of the farm, insulated from curious eyes and ears.”

  “Ears?” Julie jumped on the word. “Do they scream?”

  Cotter smiled. “No, that was just an expression. We are quite humane, far more so than any meat packing plant that existed before us.”

  The bus hit a couple of bumps that almost sent him flying, but he hung on like a trooper and continued bombarding us with information, about three-quarters of it too technical or too self- serving to be of any use.

  “Here we are,” he announced as the bus came to a stop in front of the processing plant, which dwarfed the barn we had just left. “Everyone out, please.”

  We got off the bus. I sniffed the air for the odor of fresh blood, not that I knew what it smelled like, but of course I couldn’t detect any. No blood, no rotting flesh, nothing but clean, fresh air. I was almost disappointed.

  There were a number of small pens nearby, each holding perhaps a dozen Butterballs.

  “You have perhaps noticed that we have no vehicles capable of moving the hundreds and thousands of units we have to process each day?” asked Cotter, though it came out more as a statement than a question.

  “I assume they are elsewhere,” said the lady from India.

  “They were inefficient,” replied Cotter. “We got rid of them.”

  “Then how do you move the Butterballs?”

  Cotter smiled. “Why clutter all our roads with vehicles when they aren’t necessary?” he said, tapping out a design on his pocket computer. The main door to the processing plant slid open, and I noticed that the Butterballs were literally jumping up and down with excitement.

  Cotter walked over to the nearest pen. “Who wants to go to heaven?” he asked.

  “Go to heaven!” squeaked a Butterball.

  “Go to h
eaven!” rasped another.

  Soon all twelve were repeating it almost as if it were a chant, and I suddenly felt like I was trapped inside some strange surrealistic play.

  Finally Cotter unlocked their pen and they hopped—I hadn’t seen any locomote at the other barn—up to the door and into the plant.

  “It’s as simple as that,” said Cotter. “The money we save on vehicles, fuel and maintenance allows us to—”

  “There’s nothing simple about it!” snapped Julie. “This is somewhere between blasphemy and obscenity! And while we’re at it,” she added suspiciously, “how can a dumb animal possibly know what heaven is?”

  “I repeat, they are not sentient,” said Cotter. “Just as you have code words for your pet dog or cat, we have them for the Butterballs. Ask your dog if he wants a treat, and he’ll bark or sit up or do whatever you have conditioned him to do. We have conditioned the Butterballs in precisely the same way. They don’t know the meaning of the word ‘heaven’ any more than your pet knows the meaning of the word ‘treat,’ but we’ve conditioned them to associate the word with good feelings and with entry into the processing plant. They will happily march miles through a driving rain to ‘go to heaven.’”

  “But heaven is such a … a philosophical concept,” persisted the Indian woman. “Even to use it seems—”

  “Your dog knows when he’s been good,” interrupted Cotter, “because you tell him so, and he believes you implicitly. And he knows when he’s been bad, because you show him what he’s done to displease you and you call him a bad dog. But do you think he understands the abstract philosophical concepts of good and bad?”

  “All right,” said Julie. “You’ve made your point. But if you don’t mind, I’d rather not see the inside of the slaughterhouse.”

  “The processing plant,” he corrected her. “And of course you don’t have to enter it if it will make you uncomfortable.”

  “I’ll stay out here too,” I said. “I’ve seen enough killing down in Paraguay and Uruguay.”

  “We’re not killing anything,” explained Cotter irritably. “I am simply showing you—”