A new story now and then by Kate Bryant
(C) 2009

A story I started several years ago inspired by Cascadian Farms & Whole Foods. Here’s Chapter 1, Part 1.

A slow greenish haze descends from the sky. The thwok thwok of helicopters breaks the morning spell. A warning siren blares. Kenna curses the alarm, grabs the universal home remote and presses a button to fade the black tint of windows and glass ceiling and revealing the contents of her apartment to all the world. Satisfied, the patrolmen continue their beat. She resets the tint to a calming blue with a seventy five percent opacity—just enough to let the morning light filter in while still maintaining some privacy, then closes the vents, the weekly pesticide spraying now settling on the buildings like a sickly moss.

A timer beeps, announces, “Your shower is ready.” Tuesday. Time for her biweekly shower ration. She haphazardly throws off her robe and dashes into the shower. Shampoo lathers from the shower head, then body soap, a warm rinse, then a cooler one. “You have twenty seconds remaining.” Ten. Nine. She savors the last few moments before the shower quit.

Twenty minutes later, Reika Chan, of the Second Land Order, brown/brown, 5’8”, 132 pounds, of Slavic/Mongolian/Cuban descent is dressed and ready for work. She grabs her universal ID/passkey, a can of mace, checked the chambers of her Mini Weiss and Weiss Revolver and heads out the door.

Javier peeks at the clock in his cubicle, the iris sensory scanner catching his glance dutifully announces the time, eight fifty two. Looks past the rows of books. He checks his computer monitor. Eight fifty three… Eight fifty four. With a relief, he hears the door open. It is Reika. One more late morning and he’d have to let her go. Nothing personal. Just doing his job. He straightens his tie. “Good morning, Reika. Glad to see you’re on time, today”

“Shove it. It took me an hour just to fuel up. Gas was down ten cents, those greedy bastards were swarming like buzzards on a dead cat.” She walks into the information corral and claims her post.

Javier goes back to his screen, hides a smile.

On another side of town, a man peruses the contents of his cupboards. Instant Indian Surprise with Reconstituted Green Peas and TransGenerational Cauliflower! Flav-O-Right First Generation GMO Mashed Potato Insta-Flakes. Wheat Stem Ramen Noodles with Real Rabbit Meat! He grabs a can of Open Berry Fresh with Real Sugar, and guzzles it down while perusing the rest of the refrigerator.

The Noodles would suffice. He scans the barcode over the KitchenSync Perfect Service and presses a button marked One Serving. Holding a pot under the tap triggers it to release exactly one and a half cups of water. He sets the pot on a halogen burner. Upon contact, the burner warms to the appropriate temperature, the water burrbles. Seconds later, a digital voice requests, “Please add one serving of Ramen Noodles now.”

Meanwhile…

“Lunch!” The farmers straighten. Relinquish the tools of their trade: hoes, picks, pruning sheers. Stretch. They uniformly line up next to the soft mounds, heavy with tomatoes, beans, peppers and lettuce. Immature corn stalks line the perimeter. A greenhouse then of gigantic proportions. One among hundreds stretching across the horizon like a bubbling brothy hive. A sign outside each declares FASTALL and KELLER ORGANIC FARMS INC. Smaller: This is a pesticide and herbicide free zone. NO SEEDS on PREMISES. Trespassers will be shot upon sight. NO EXCEPTIONS. Armed militants stand guard at the barbed wire fence, the watchtowers and at the SkyMover entrance. Abandoned buildings litter the immediately surrounding area. The single translucent vein of the SkyMover remains the only point of access to the city ten miles away.

Harpo Keller watches all the activity from a control room in the main watchtower. The moniters flicker from one camera to another. Workers lining up at the mess hall. The guards pacing, smoking, spitting. A lone farmer sneaking a cherry tomato and popping it into her mouth.

The Farms had begun with only good intentions. Or so claim the pioneers, Harvey Fastall and Joseph Keller. Only problem was, those intentions had long faded from memory.

To be continued.

When I was a student living in Okinawa Prefecture, I would occasionally hear about a little-known tourist attraction called Yurei No Kabe, or, The Wall of Ghostly Voices. Located on Iriomote Island near the Maryudu Falls, you’ll find hidden amid the dense overgrowth and lush coves of orchids and sweet alyssum, a deeply pocked overhang stretching seventeen metres tall. I have tried to find it on Google’s satellite imagery, but alas, close-in detail is not yet available.

According to legend, Buddhist monks, upon breaking their vows of silence were banished from the monastery and sealed into the caves where they lived out the remainder of their lives. Their voices, longing to be heard even after death, escaped their physical confines and tunneled into the caves to keep others from falling into similar unhappy fates.

In the past, answers came swiftly and accurately, but over time, the answers have degraded to the point where they are incomprehensible or not even forthcoming.

The reality, however, is that dime-sized fissures in the wall penetrate deep into the rockbed, some tunneling several hundred metres to reach the other side of the cliff. These tunnels are lined with an unusual specimen of flatworms, each only a couple centimetres long. Suckers at the head and tail allow these indigenous creatures to suction themselves to a surface such that their mucousy forms can either sway slack or stretch taut. In this manner, the slightest breeze of damp tunneled air causes the millions of worms to audibly vibrate at a frequency similar to a human voice.

Their bodies are sensitive enough that they can register the subtle nuances of human language and shift their forms to correspond in a complementary way to the question just posed. In this manner, their vibrations were able to provide “answers” to the hopeless souls that stumbled by the cliff.

Recent climactic fluctuations, however, have irreversably altered their fragile environment to the point where their sensitivities have declined and the species as a whole are quickly becoming extinct. An acquaintence of mine who recently visited the wall tells me how some of the fissures are so clogged with the deteriorating bodies of dead worms that human intervention is periodically necessary to clear out the debris to provide ventilation for the remaining flatworms.

Whispering a question into one of the clear passages, “What can we do to help you?” my friend received the following cryptic reply, “No creature stands still for long.”

®2009