When Bob came outside, Deanna was kneeling, picking up a handful of earth and staring at the horizon. “I often wonder what my daddy would have thought of all this,” she said.
A generation ago, a strain of genetically modified crops—which grew sulphuric acid in their stems at the end of the seasonal cycle—had been experimented with to eliminate tillage. The trials were abandoned, but not before the gene jumped into the wild, burning away a swath of America before it was stopped. With traditional farming already on its last legs, a Defense-sponsored program to root out the damage and replant the Great Plains with semi-wild perennial crops began, using robotic drones to tend and harvest the multicrop.
“Did your family own the place a long time?” Bob asked as they drove into town. Not everything was in the databases.
“A few generations of farmers. But it’s not like when I grew up here. Nobody left, not the old ones, anyway.”
Perennials and robotics had saved the heartland, reducing emissions and erosion, but it had also eliminated the need for humans. Most of the center of America, away from the coasts, became deserted, with herds of reintroduced buffalo again roaming the skeletons of ghost towns strewn across the plains. Food production slid under control of the newly formed Defense Agricultural Division. The Great Plains had become a drone-infested wilderness, and DAD was now feeding the country.
“So were you and Vince, well, were you ever…” Bob struggled to find the right words. He’d been itching to ask since they got here, but he was trying to resist his constant urges to pry. Everything about coming out here—hiding, staying quiet, confined to one place and one small group of people—ran against the grain of Bob’s character.
Deanna laughed. “Yes, we were. A long, long time ago. I met him when my family sent me to MIT to study robotic harvesting, to try to keep up.” She sighed. “And look where that got us.”
DAD had been created at the outbreak of the Weather Wars, when maintaining the food supply became a critical national security function—but it also had a darker purpose. The tens of millions of drones used in food production could be repurposed in the event of an attack, from inside or out. As their pickup truck rumbled its way along the gravel road into town, Sid was covering them, hacking into the sensor systems of the thousands of drones that were recording the truck’s passage, erasing the image of Bob sitting next to Deanna.
“When did you last see Vince?”
She laughed. “Before three weeks ago—when you all arrived—I hadn’t seen or heard from him in more than thirty years.”
“And you just took us in when he showed up on your doorstep?” Bob shook his head. He liked Vince, but the man had a way of taking people for granted that rubbed Bob the wrong way.
Deanna turned to look at Bob. “Vince isn’t so bad, you know. Sure, he can be conceited, loves to talk more than get things done—”
“Superior, controlling,” Bob continued for her.
“Someone’s in a bad mood,” laughed Deanna. “Yeah, all those things, and wouldn’t you be if you were him?” She shook her head. “But you know, he’s also incredibly clever, and no matter how shallow he can be sometimes, you’ll never find a more dedicated friend. He’s not used to dealing with real people.”
Now Bob laughed. “That’s a problem for everyone from Atopia.”
“That’s better.” Deanna smiled. “And you know what?”
The truck bounced on a rock in the road, knocking Bob into the air. He steadied himself. “What?”
“Ten years after Vince and I last spoke, twenty years ago now—just after PhutureNews started to take off—I received a message from the land registry people that someone bought the deed to my family’s farm.”
“What do you mean?” Bob had assumed she owned the place.
“When things went bad here, my family lost it after working the land for nearly a hundred years. But someone bought it and put it back into my name.” Tears welled in Deanna’s eyes. “I never found out who, but I know. That man looks after his own. Taking you in and hiding you was the least I could do.”
Bob looked away. He had to admit, Vince was dedicated. He’d spent a fortune already, and he never wavered. Bob turned back and smiled at Deanna. “He is a good guy, sorry, you’re right.”
Bob released his primary presence again to skim out above the fields. Coming up on the edge of town, they passed abandoned gas stations and grain silos and minimarts. Derelict farmhouses dotted the landscape. Further in the distance, larger, aggressive-looking new developments hugged the foothills. These were massive, a tribute to the new materialism version 2.0 that the explosion of the robotic ecosystem had brought to America. This area of Montana, along the eastern edge of the Rockies stretching up from Yellowstone, was one of the few areas of the interior of America experiencing an influx of new residents, but they weren’t here for the farming.
The reason was below, the magmatic upwelling that brought abundant geothermal power.
It was also the reason the Commune was here.
“It’ll just take me a minute to authenticate this package.” Deanna hopped out of the truck. “Why don’t you follow the bots to the lumber yard? I’ll be there in a sec.”
Bob sent a splinter to find out what a “lumber yard” meant. Thousands of references opened and he began assimilating the data. He eased down the lever that opened the aging pickup’s door, marveling at the mechanics of it. As he jumped out, the robotic carriers clambered out of the bed of the pickup, bouncing the truck up and down on its suspension.
Deanna watched him, amused. “Just follow the bots. They know where they’re going.” She closed her door.
Embarrassed, Bob closed down the lumber splinter. “Sure.”
The quad-bots, nearly as old and dented as the pickup, waited for a cargo transport to pass on the road before running in their awkwardly graceful trot toward a large building down the other side of the street. With a wave to Deanna, Bob burrowed his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and followed them.
It was nearing midday on Monday, and work crews from the surrounding area were stopping in for lunch in the town center. The wide sidewalks, built in an earlier and more optimistic time, felt empty. Trucks and cars competed with robots, legged carriers, and VTOL turbofans for parking spots along the side of the road. Bob scanned the faces he passed, sending splinters to hack and tap into the cameras and sensors nearby to search for anything that might be threatening. Just to be on the safe side, he initiated the identity-theft algorithm from Sid that morphed his ID from one person to the next as he passed them.
At the intersection he stopped and looked up at the traffic signals, the colored lights like ancient semaphores. A knot of workers emptied from a bar at the corner behind him. Bob couldn’t help staring at them, forgetting that he was staring from his physical body and not through an invisible ghost in the wikiworld.
“What you looking at, kid?” said one of the workers, the metal elbow of a robotic prosthetic limb poking through the ripped flannel of his shirt. He took a step forward, wobbling back and forth. Both of his legs had to be mechanical as well.
“Sorry.” Bob looked down and kept walking.
Many of the people here were mandroids of one form or another, Weather War veterans with wrecked bodies replaced by robotics. As ever, rural communities were providing more than their fair share of fodder for the Wars. Bob shook his head, a faraway splinter scanning the scorched earth around the city.
Something triggered an alarm.