Episode 6 - Thunder Across a Blue Sky

  Chapter 51 - Biofilm

  “Good morning, welcome to Stand Up.”

  I shuffle into place, tugging on my dark green rubber gloves and adjusting my ID badge on my chest. We make a team of six janitors - neat little workers all in a line - in our grey overalls and knee-high rubber boots.

  Supervisor Torres marches down the line like a military captain, dark narrow eyes appraising each of us.

  “Today’s task is cleaning Units IK through IP for a fresh round of tomato crops. Usual protocol, we’ll shut everything down, harvest up all the old biomass, drain and get to cleaning. Disassemble, stack trays and begin stripping the tubing. We’ll get a few carts going for anything heading to the autoclaves.”

  Ed Foster jams a playful elbow into my side. “Better than pollination duty?” He’s a slim, pale man, with soft-brown hair and bangs that constantly fall into his eyes. And he fights back when you poke him, which is always a quality I appreciate.

  I bat his arm away. “Till you get covered with biofilm scum. Sure.”

  Ed grins, an adorable smile that springs to life dimples in each cheek. “What’s life without a little filth? I know you don’t balk at it, eh, Conrada?”

  “Dorrien! Foster! Got something to say to all of us?”

  I straighten, snapping my eyes forward. Ed and I in unison bark a crisp, “No, Sup Torres.”

  “Cause it sure sounded like you had something pretty important if it’s worth interrupting my stand up?” says Supervisor Torres, peering close at my face.

  I don’t give him the satisfaction of flinching, keeping my gaze steady and forward past the side of his head. “My apologies, Sup Torres. Won’t happen again.”

  “Better not,” he hisses, withdrawing and giving Foster a similar glare. “You’ll be in teams of two. Foster and Dorrien, I was going to put you both on biomass hauling, but you get scrub duty now.”

  My bottom lip twitches, but I take the reprimand in silence. Another few days and I’ll be out of here. Fucking Torres can get his kicks lording over some other newbie then. I hope he gets reprimanded when I go missing for not noticing their newest team member is actually here to rob them.

  Berlinger Agricultural Operations has been my home for the past month, embedded as a fresh hire in their janitorial teams. The place has been a nightmare, 12-hour shifts and constant backbreaking labor. I could not imagine the toll a lifetime of this would take on a body. Puts into perspective how easy lab work was. You’d get a little stiff standing at a bench, sure. But a day spent doubled over with a vibrating rod pollinating row after row of tiny yellow flowers? Or on your feet mopping up nutrient fluid spills and carting tubs of dirty water around?

  “Any questions?” asks Torres as he finishes up his explanation for the day's activities, dragging my attention back to the work in front of me.

  All six of us reply in unison. “No Sup.”

  “Good. Off with you then. See you tomorrow morning.”

  We march as a team of six through the greenhouses. Around us, mechanical scaffolds carry tray after tray of fresh fruits and vegetables skywards in stacked, rotating monoliths. Bright pink LEDs hang from ?above, sterile white and silver surfaces below punctuated by the bright vermillion paint used on structural scaffolds, or laboratory blues of control systems flashing status readings with green LEDs. Fans hum, driving a constant breeze through the greenhouses, carrying carefully controlled humidity from the wet walls at one side of the facility. I’m already sweating the moment I step within the first unit.

  Every unit is calibrated and designed for the food crops within. Lettuces and leafy greens line long white trays. Cubes of grow media support tomato and bean vines. The greenery was overwhelming when I first got here.

  Every color you could imagine, from deep phthalo green hues, through to bright viridians, to muddier sap and oxide greens. Between the verdant abundance - a wealth of fruits and vegetables. Red tomatoes and orange peppers hang heavy on stringy stems stripped of leaves to make harvest easier. Yellow squash, some long and thin, others squat and rounded, nestle within carefully arranged vines. Ripe melons, their skins spidered with veins. Royal tyrian aubergine, some large as my head and others small and streaked with white. I could spend the day naming them all, gushing about the colors and textures of all the different leaves.

  Then I’ll see someone trimming the leaves, collecting them for composting in the big, blue plastic tubs. Or I’ll smell the bleach and acids we use for cleaning. Then the greens shrink away, and the sterile white and medical steel will overwhelm my eye again, and my heart will grow a little heavier each time I lower my eyes back to my labor here.

  I might feel that it was beautiful, that this is what nature looks like, if I didn’t have the ghosts of other memories in my head. Glimpses of trees, and drifting shadows, and falling leaves.

  There are hundreds of thousands of hungry mouths to feed, and operations like Berlinger make excellent incomes even if employment at their greenhouses takes a toll on the body and they need to find a constant churn of new bodies for workers. There’s one thing that is usually true at every company I’ve been to now, people always eat well. Diverse and filling meals satiate more than just hungry bellies.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  There’s also a steady stream of free-men with nowhere better to go, and Berlinger’s recruiters are like the scavengers of the HR world. Unlike serfs, which can be difficult for a company to dispose of if their employment is no longer desirable given they are often tied to the physical land used by company operations, free-men have no such entanglements and can be fired. If they have a desirable symbiont, many will be picked up by recruiters without issues. Generators always need electricity, water treatment and carbon scrubbers symbionts who can separate elements or run water pumps. Heat pumps will always find homes in kitchens and bars or laboratories running freezers. Large vertebrates capable of pulling weights can become laborers or vehicles in the bigger cities for high-power executives who never suffer the indignity of walking.

  But if you have a little scrappy Rattus or a small feathered Columba options are thin, and your human labor becomes a more valuable commodity.

  None of the symbionts walk with us today; they’re probably contained to bunks or stables. In the barracks, I see them sitting at the ends of beds, dull eyes watching their hosts go to work each day. The valuable ones for agriculture are simians, and their hosts get private bedrooms. Not so, my fellow janitors. Many of the people here are taking their second chances seriously, keeping eyes lowered and their attitudes meek from day-to-day.

  Then there are the fun ones, like Ed Foster, who I’m certain was fired from his previous employer for stealing. I might actually miss him when I’m done.

  Before long, my mood is entirely ruined by the day's labor. The old tomato vines are all browned and wrinkled, and we gather them up for composting. We disassemble the root trays, carefully un-threading silicone tubing that once ran nutrient-rich water through the system, and scrape dank green biofilm from plastic surfaces till they gleam white again. I get crud and organic filth on my boots and pants and chest as I bend into reservoirs at the end of each bank of trays to wipe them down with peroxide cleaner. Through it all, the humidity hangs around us, more oppressive than even the most attentive supervisor, and by our midday break I am soaked in my own sweat.

  I strip my rubber gloves off as lunch break arrives. I could almost tip them upside down and drip the accumulated moisture in them on the floor. With a sigh, I pick free a few strands of my silver-streaked hair that are plastered to my forehead.

  Foster is bent in two, catching his breath.

  “I’m almost considering getting myself fired again,” he remarks as he straightens, flexing back the other direction to stretch his back.

  “It’d be the same anywhere else,” I comment idly, watching one of the few security patrols pass over his shoulder. One of the lab coats is with them.

  “Eh? What you been up to Conrada that you know so much, hmm?”

  I give him a knowing grin back. “Oh, you know. Bit of this, bit of that.”

  The lab coat pauses to scan their ID into the demountable clean rooms where the tissue cultures are kept. The guards turn their backs, flanking each side of the doorway into the labs.

  “No, I’m serious. You obviously didn’t end up here as your last choice-” mutters Foster.

  “You like me, right?” I interrupt suddenly.

  “I, uh?” Foster stumbles to silence, blushing slightly at the corners of his high cheekbones.

  “Get my lunch for me?” I ask innocently, drawing close to whisper the words against the side of his face.

  He blinks. “What do you want?”

  “Hmm, you pick for me? Nothing spicy.”

  “Uh, sure. Be back in a minute then.”

  I keep my eyes fixed on the tissue culture lab. As Foster leaves, I duck into the hanging canopy of dead tomato vines we haven’t cleared yet and draw a little closer. As I crouch to watch, a black and yellow insect spirals from higher up the vines down to my face and lands on the helix of my ear.

  “Are we operational for tonight?” I ask aloud despite being alone. A few louvered windows pop open as the lab coat shuffles around from window to window. I can just see the white banks inside the room behind clear plastic sheeting, tiny glass jars of growth gel and cell-cultured plants within.

  The insect, a sharp-faced Vespa wasp, vibrates its wings in my ears. From within the drone of the hum, words form. The voice is masculine, with a tired drawl, like talking bores the speaker. “Confirming that we are go for tonight. Everything in position?”

  Pooka, it’s time.

  We drop from the rafters above, gravity catching us as we keep our wings held tight to our sides. Our talons are curled beneath us, and we dive between the mechanical towers. Our wings snap open, arresting our fall with confident, perfect accuracy, wheeling us in a tight arc around one tower then the next. As we pass between the tight apertures of metal scaffolds, we withdraw our carbon-black wings and tuck them close to us, stretching our feet to grab and steady our passage when to dive through.

  As we approach the open windows of the lab, our form sublimates, our mass dispersing to black fog that passes through the louvers and lands unseen in the lab. We drop to paws against the ground - about the size of a Canis, but with hunched shoulders and longer forelimbs and a mane of black hair down the spine of our back - and tuck underneath a lab bench, lips drawn back over gleaming teeth.

  It stinks of fake earth. This is too clean. These are not plants.

  You only have to wait a few hours. I’ll come back for you tonight.

  These are dead little creatures, torn apart and forced to regenerate far beyond their natural life, growing in tainted water.

  It’s the dead little creatures we are here for. I’ll be back in a few hours, then we can go back to Aquila.

  I straighten, picking an old, crunchy tomato leaf from my shoulder and linger a moment longer watching the guards.

  I can’t wait to get out of here tonight. Fuck everything about Berlinger. The only thing truly alive is the algal slime growing in the nutrient broths pumped to the plants, somehow surviving the paranoid sterilization of every surface with a stubbornness I can respect. Smeared on my knees and elbows in mank green and brown stains are the dying remnants of the only real thing here.

  A Tear in Space (Airlock)" by Glass Animals (I really love this as an open).

  "Water, running down my face

  Water, running different ways

  Water, like a billion waves"

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