2951-08-16 – Tales from the Inbox: The Bitter Harvest
Though I cannot verify today’s account, its author claims that he (through channels unspecified) acquired a cache of agricultural tooling and a partial seed bank stolen the Incarnation held world of MacNeil’s End.
Probably intending to turn this enemy materiel into a grey-market exotic goods business, our source, who identifes himself only as Evgeny, seems to have expected to find various fast-growing foodstuffs adapted from Sagittarius species, ideal for keeping a large infantry force in supply. Evidence from ration packages collected on the battlefield seems to suggest that our enemy does indeed grow the food for its invasion forces relatively close to the front lines and process it only very little before packaging, so his expectation was only too reasonable.
What Evgeny found himself growing, however, was decidedly not food. His little plot of land (he fails to specify the world he introduced the crops to, but I suspect it was one of the low-population Farthing’s Chain planets nearest the Frontier) became host to a very interesting phenomenon.
Evgeny leaned on the porch-rail of his prefabbed cabin, chin resting on the tips of his fingers. Between him and the shed at the other end of the only clearing in his hundred-acre wooded holding, six fenced-in garden beds held six different varieties of crop. At the middle of each bed, a silvery machine configured to tend that particular crop stood, its various spray-nozzles and articulated arms recessed into its sides.
Evgeny didn’t know much about the machines, except that they had done most of the planting, tending, and weeding in their respective plots themselves; he’d fed each a little cylinder of seeds, and they had read the instructions printed into a hexagonal data-crystal at the end of the cylinder. After that, all he’d needed to do was keep the water tower full, refill fertilizer hoppers when the lights started blinking, and keep the generator behind the cabin humming.
The problem with running unfamiliar machinery and unfamiliar crops, of course, was that when something went wrong, he had no idea what would fix it. When he’d gone to bed the previous night, the experiment had seemed poised at the edge of total success – all six beds had produced healthy-looking plants, and all the plants had produced healthy-looking fruits, tubers, leafy greenery, or cabbage-like buds. According to the plant-tending machines, the growth cycle would be over some time before dawn, so Evgeny had retired, looking forward to a very interesting morning’s harvest.
Instead, the late morning light had revealed that the garden had been thrown into a very interesting, and very concerning, state of pure bedlam. Red lights flashed forlornly on all the machines, which had apparently given up their efforts to prune and tend the crops when their timers had expired. This expiry had coincided with a very strange phenomenon – the vine-like, yellow-fruit bearing plants in plot number two had grown explosively overnight, and now their fuzzy tendrils were encircling the tuberous stalks in plot number one and forming a rather daintily attractive net around several of the giant-cabbage-looking bulbs in plot number five. Three had only avoided invasion because the previously shiny, broad-leafed plant growing there now dripped an oily secretion which seemed to wither all other plant matter on contact. Four had withered almost to death, and the foliage in number six was taking on an unhealthy yellowish-gray color.
That he was dealing with genetically altered life-forms, Evgeny knew from the beginning; most crops grown anywhere in the Reach were gene-tweaked in some fashion. He had expected the tweaks to adapt the crops to a fast growth cycle, and that seemed accurate, but he had not expected an explosive and suicidal growth spurt in the final few hours, overnight.
He had already checked the composition of the last batch of fertilizer, some of which was still in the machine hoppers, and it was identical to what he’d been using all along. He’d also already checked the water lines and the machines from his control board; everything was green. The machines had hit the end of their cycle and transmitted success codes only six and a half hours before he woke to this disaster. In that time, everything had apparently gone wrong.
As Evgeny stared out at the plants and wondered whether anything could be salvaged, he noticed that the yellowish fruit on the sprawling vines in plot number two still looked plump and healthy. Between them and the intact looking cabbage-things in five, he thought maybe he could get two of the crops out of the beds and see what they were good for. He didn’t have the intended agricultural harvesting machinery, but he had a good pruning hook and a basket; manual labor would have to suffice.
Still wondering what he might have done wrong, Evgeny headed for the shed to get his tools. He’d bought a piece of land with almost the same rainfall, soil, and solar energy conditions as the place where the seeds had been stolen from. True, those conditions were on another planet, but at first that hadn’t seemed to be a problem. As far as the machines were concerned, everything was going well right up until the end; it was almost as if the crops had been offended at their master’s late-sleeping habits and destroyed themselves in a rage between dawn and his rising.
Evgeny didn’t realize how preoccupied he was with such thoughts until he tripped over one of the vines spanning the path from number two to number five and nearly fell headlong. Scowling, he extracted his foot from the tangle and finished the transit. With a closer look at the oil-sweating leaves in number three, he thought that this might be intended – perhaps the plant was not a nutrient green after all, but a source of edible oils that could be easily refined. That those oils wilted other plants, however, did not give him any inclination to test the theory himself – certainly not without extensive lab work.
As he reached the shed, Evgeny heard a strange sound behind him, a sort of tinny clicking, like electrical connections being made on a live circuit. Fearing that his generator might have developed problems, he turned to check it, only to stop in place, mystified by the spasmodic jerking of the vines which had grown across the path. A single twitching wave seemed to start way back at the tendrils invading plot number one, then to work its way up the thickening vines to the roots, and back down the vines once more to end at the increasingly vine-encased cabbage-growths in plot five.
Evgeny had encountered many species classified as flora which possessed some motive power, so movement itself was not terribly concerning. What was concerning was the metallic, sparky clicking that accompanied each wave’s origin at the tuberous plants in plot one. It almost seemed like the vine was being electrocuted by those specimens, but that didn’t make any sense, did it? He had heard of electricity being used by natural species, even on Earth, but why would anyone develop an electricity-generating crop?
He didn’t have much time to ponder this question before he noticed that the destinations of the twitching movement – the cabbage-like plants encircled by vine tendrils – were beginning to hum ominously, and the hum was growing louder with every wave of electrical twitching. Worse still, they seemed to be swelling, their bulbous interior beginning to bulge haphazardly through the outer leaves and the net of tendrils.
Evgeny watched the cabbage-things in blank-faced bemusement for fifteen long seconds as the hum grew again and again. When the inevitable thought finally slipped through, it was almost too late. He scrambled into the shed and dove behind a heavy ground-tilling machine just as the first of the cabbage-plants exploded – not the wet, fleshy explosion one would expect from a vegetable, but a bright flash and a hail of splinters more crystalline than woody.
Evgeny cowered there until the resulting chain reaction finally subsided, and carefully peered over the machine and across his thoroughly ruined garden. Only then did he begin to revise his assumption about the nature of the seeds he’d acquired.
