Growth

The Office of the Controller called early, waking Kathleen up. She had to go in.

Kathleen brushed her teeth while checking the weather on the screens lining one wall in her two-room place. There was rain moving over the sorghum fields, which was encouraging, but a low pressure front heading across the very south of the Production Continent could affect pollination in the region. Kathleen made a mental note to point this out to the Controller.

She swallowed her vitamin pill then poured coffee, which was still nostalgically named ‘Kenyan Highland Blend’ by the Dwelling Coffee Corporation, into a cup with a top and headed to the office.

The building was the most important in the world, so Kathleen had to pass three sets of locked gates minded by armed guards. They smiled grimly at her, recognising the early start.

Kathleen was briefed by the Controller herself then she briefed the key staffers. There were rumours. A name. A leader. Someone who’d somehow overcome his or her mental training, discovering their free will, long latent. The terrifying prospect of revolt rippled from the heart of the Production Continent to the Office of the Controller.

~

Strong sunlight drilled through the hole in sky’s bowl, giving the silent endless fields a garish glow, but Filament was unperturbed. He was thinking about Happen’s lesson from last night while he was on weeding duty. Happen had explained to his band of followers, who were simply his squadron of twelve, that they didn’t have to do what they were programmed to do. They didn’t have to tend the fields in their cycle, embedded in them like circadian rhythms. Happen explained that the people on the Dwelling Continents were just like them, except that they’d been taught to believe from birth in something called self-determination. Whether they believed in a truth or fiction, Happen did not say.

Like all the growers on the Production Continent, Filament was illiterate and educated only in planting, pollinating, harvesting and so on. He had an in-built sense of the seasons, the growth of the crops, the shifting populations of insects. To Filament, it felt like he had been born with this sense of the growing landscape, but in fact it was thanks to a systematic programme of immersive lessons, to which all growers were subject.

The other key lesson consisted of an amazing manipulation of their sense of free will. Using decades of research into purpose and notions of autonomy, a fine line was trod, whereby growers could make helpful decisions regarding fertiliser choices, timings of harvests and the release of pollinating insects, or even quite radical agricultural decisions, such as crop rotation. However, in other parts of their lives, such as when to eat or sleep, where to go and what to think about their role in the Post-Transition globe, they were incapable of making conscious decisions. In short, he was an agricultural savant, but oblivious of almost every other aspect of human culture and society. Until now, that is.

Happen had exposed some of them to impossible new ideas, head-scratchers for sure. Happen suggested that he was ‘freeing their minds’. But then the concept of a mind had needed some explaining. The growers, though they would not have been able to articulate a philosophical position, were inherently materialists – they did not have a body, they were a body. And even then, there was a sense that they were together part of some larger organism, a giant animus that held sway over the plant life of the Production Continent.

Filament was struggling to picture the Dwelling Continents. He knew what buildings were, of course; he and his squadron lived in a long, low dormitory block surrounded by their fields, and they had larger buildings to park the tractors in. But Happen had said:

‘On the Dwelling Continent, there are no fields, and no crops. Everywhere, there a huge buildings prodding into the sky, and everywhere, there are people.’

This was a difficult idea for Filament and the other nascent revolutionaries. The biggest group of people they’d seen in one place at one time was at breeding time. Their squadron of twelve male growers were ordered into a tractor trailer and driven through many hectares of swaying corn, wheat and millet to the dorm block of a squadron of female growers. There, they were commanded to fuck, with rough demonstrations for those aged fifteen or sixteen, so inexperienced. Thus was the grower population maintained. They never returned to the same squadron of female growers; this was to prevent inbreeding. But Happen had described countless crowds of people, buildings reaching the clouds, roads which were illuminated after the sun had gone down, and parts of the Dwelling Continents where it was so cold that the rain fell as white frozen powder flakes.

‘How can you know all this?’ a grower called Shuttle had asked Happen in the meeting. So Happen explained.

‘Once, I lived on a Dwelling Continent.’

There were gasps at this.

‘It was soon after they had set up the Production Continent, where we are now. They moved every last person out of this place. It was called Africa back then. Giant machines came in and flattened the landscape, including people’s houses. They churned everything into dust and brought over soil, on ships from other lands. They turned it into a continent of food production, for everyone in the Dwelling Continents. You see, the land was shrinking because the sea was growing, and there were too many people. So an international… you won’t know what that means. So a group, called the Transition Council, made this happen. But they needed people to look after the crops here. In the early days, they hadn’t invented the growers like you yet. They sent criminals… people who’ve done something wrong… to work here.

‘I was one of those people.

‘I am not a grower, like you, but I am just like you in other ways. And, more importantly, you can become more like me. We just have to free your minds.’

The group of eleven listeners was flabbergasted enough, but Happen had more.

He explained how the Transition Council soon realised that sending these criminals to work was a bad idea. Many of them were poor workers, crops were not looked after properly, and some of them fought back against the Auditors. So they developed a training scheme, where children were taken at birth and taught how to farm, but also taught that they were not free to make choices; that their role was to tend the crops and that is all.

Anything else, any other option, was unthinkable.

These were the growers, perfect drones, and before long the Transition Council was ready to replace the criminals. So, Happen said, the Auditors simply went from dorm block to dorm block, killing every person there. Their bodies were ground into fertiliser.

However, Happen was overlooked. When the Auditors got to his dorm block, in their green uniforms, it was after sundown and the men were in bed. Happen paused a long while before the next part.

‘But I was in bed with another of the men. They shot into my bed, not realising in the low light that it was empty. They shot into the top bunk where me and the other man lay, but only hit him. His body protected mine. He died, but I survived the massacre.’

This was the part that sat most uncomfortably in Filament’s mind that morning in the fields. More than the idea of buildings full of people, more than the image of solid rain, even more than the idea of many people being shot, it was the idea of Happen in bed with another man. In his education, Filament had learned about procreation, of course. He had also learnt that it was wrong for two men to be together like that, and had believed that it was impossible for it to happen. But this description of Happen in bed with another just propagated a little sensation in Filament’s brain, a dubious and ill-formed feeling that he could not yet put into words, yet he couldn’t dislodge it.

~

Kathleen urged caution, to see if anything else developed, but the Controller wanted to act fast. She knew her stock had fallen after the late delivery of the oats from the forty-fourth sector last harvest, and had some point-scoring to do with the Transition Council. She was mindful that a merciless response would get her back in favour.

The rumours lacked detail, but there was a whisper that one of the original exiles had survived the cull. Finding him or was the Controller’s priority, and it fell to Kathleen to gather information. She spoke at length to various Chief Auditors, those singularly chalky men and women who spent half of every year on the Production Continent, and always seemed bitter about it. Mostly, they just complained about how stretched their teams were, with most farmsteads and their squadrons only being seen every fortnight.

‘Would it be possible, even, for squadrons to organise? Can they even communicate with each other? They can’t write,’ Kathleen asked, knowing that mixing was not sanctioned, apart from for reproduction, but would be hard to police.

The Chief Auditors tended to struggle with this question. One did not want to admit to the Office of the Controller that one wasn’t exactly sure.

‘It is possible,’ said one. ‘Although the dorm blocks are a long way from each other, their fields are adjacent. Fences were obviously judged a poor investment by the Council.’

Kathleen could not see it: growers coming to the edges of their farmsteads to exchange messages, plot against the Controller and overthrow their Auditors. It was just too absurd! She had met growers, of course, during the official tour of the Production Continent, which the Controller was obliged to carry out from time to time. This brainwashed subspecies, childlike in their wonder at the Controller’s entourage, were ignorant beyond belief. They lived like beasts, and commanded the language like beasts. Kathleen couldn’t stomach the idea of them rebelling: her conclusion was that an Auditor had gone rogue.

She took the idea to the Controller.

‘Some liberal, intellectual freedom fighter could have slipped through psychometric screening. And now they fancy themselves as some sort of messiah to the growers.’

~

After dark, and long after the squadron fell asleep, Filament lay alert. He was busy generating some nerve.

He had found that he fully believed in his ability to do it; acknowledgement of the possibility of an encounter with Happen was enough to stir that contrary optimistic nodule in the mind of all people. The same nodule that tells us ‘it could be me’, and, indeed, ‘that won’t happen to me’. So all Filament needed now was nerve.

Filament whispered, ‘Happen,’ then immediately let his mind think of something else. He found that it was not so bad, so he tried it again a couple of times. Happen, in the bunk opposite him, eventually answered.

Filament and Happen talked for most of the night. Filament, without the inhibitions born of living in conventional society, poured out his feelings and his fascination with Happen. He revealed, thought Happen, a desperate desire for freedom that the others in the squadron had not, at least not yet.

Happen, with his pre-transition flair for secretiveness, suggested a rendezvous the next day during tilling duty.

It would not take place.

~

The Auditors, a team of four, came into the dorm block as the twelve men were eating their breakfast of cornmeal gruel and the obligatory vitamin pill apiece. The Auditors were agitated like Filament had never seen and waved their mace cans about.

‘Tags, you drones!’

One Auditor moved between them with a scanner. He passed it over the forearm of each of the growers and checked the display.

On Happen, he scanned, then stepped back slowly and gestured to his colleagues. Two grabbed Happen under the arms and dragged him backward off the bench.

‘We’ve got an Oh-Two model here!’ the Auditor with the scanner was shouting. ‘We’ve got him!’

Another landed a thump on Happen’s jaw. ‘How’d we miss you then, flower?’ he growled.

Filament felt a new emotion, not recognising rage. He leapt over the table to the captors and aimlessly beat at them with his fists. The fourth Auditor calmly stepped forward and sprayed. Filament felt a blizzard of pain, like he had stabbed himself with hot quinoa stalks, but multiplied, and in his eyes.

By the time his eyesight had recovered, all was quiet, and the Auditors, and Happen, were gone.

~

Kathleen let the Controller into the impromptu cell. It was actually the executive bathroom, used only when the stakeholders’ board met each month. Happen was awkwardly cuffed to the pipes under a sink.

The Controller asked Kathleen to leave them.

‘What is your name?’

‘Happen.’

‘A verb! Last of your kind. All growers are nouns now, inanimate objects. But you’d know that, as something of a rabble-rouser. Happen, somehow you made it through the Refreshment Scheme of eight years ago. I do hope you are the last who did. I don’t want to know how you escaped, but you did and here we are.

‘Things were a lot more untidy, unseemly even, back then. Poor Gibson resigned his commission after ordering the Refreshment, of course, so here I am. But, Happen, I am a very precise person. Production may be huge, but my eyes are everywhere. It was eight years late, finding you, but I don’t think you’ve had time to cause a mess as yet.

‘No, you won’t get the chance to disrupt my systems. You see, the Production Continent is the only way. The world relies on it. Don’t think that the rest of us didn’t make sacrifices for it too. We can only grow grain, for efficiency. I, for one, greatly miss eating fruit. The sheer number of people here on Dwelling means we didn’t have a choice. It isn’t easy here, either. Ten thousand people in a block. Two rooms each. A lottery for who has to live in old Siberia, and who gets to live on the old Mediterranean. In some ways, Happen, you have more freedom there on Production. Even the growers: and if they don’t know what to miss, how can they miss it?’

‘Are you going to kill me?’ Happen sounded resigned as he interrupted.

‘Actually, no. You’ll be sent back. Just, we’re going to try something new first. An experiment, if you like.’

~

Filament still thought it strange that Happen’s spot on the squadron had not been filled yet. Many days had passed, and after a death on the squadron growers were usually replaced within days. The others picked up the extra work without complaining. He had tried to bring up Happen at mealtimes, talk about the remarkable ideas he had seeded, but they ignored him or told him to stop, saying he’d seen what happened.

There was an additional layer to their self-control now.

Then, Auditors heading to the dorm block as the growers came back from the fields for their dusk meal. They had someone with them.

Happen was changed. He spoke in grunts. He did not look directly at others, and his eyes were dull. He ate more, and worked faster. There was not a glimmer when Filament mentioned the Dwelling Continent, asking him about freeing his mind, or even when he asked him about that other man, who had died.

However, Happen did let Filament climb into his bunk after the others were asleep and encircle him with his arms, pressing his face into his neck.