The other one pulled at the door handle on my side. “This is just the start!” he yelled. “Crops that can beat the rain can be modified to warp your thinking! Free to be Fatties!” he shouted, again and again, hand slapping the car in time to his chant. “Free to be Fatties! Free to be Fatties! Free to be Fatties!”
“You’re not even fat,” I snarled at him, feeling hot and angry as we headed out of the village and the start of the maze of country roads we would have to take to get back home.
✥
“I’m really sorry,” Ricky said, his image scratchy, shrugging into the webcam as we connected on Skype. “They say the skies won’t be safe for weeks.”
What could I say? Ricky was employed by WEErd Wonders as project leader, to make sure they harvested the hybrid plant we called the Clingers, the new crop that was being trialled on our land. He wasn’t working for me. His dad had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, smashing into a pile-up on the Great Ocean Road, as he headed north from Melbourne on a business trip. I couldn’t blame the kid for wanting to leave and fly across the world to check on his father who was in a bit of a state. Broken limbs and tangled innards, to use one of my technical terms. Now Ricky was in the wrong place at the wrong time, stuck in Australia as flights were grounded all because of a volcanic eruption further away from Cairns than my farm back in Scotland.
“Nothing you can do about it, except maybe take a slow boat to China,” I eventually replied, half-joking. “Just get back here in time for the first leaves to appear.”
We said our goodbyes and the brightness died on the screen. I stared at my own slightly warped reflection, my own ghost curving away from me. The room behind was full of “stuff” as Ali called it, belonging to my father, or my grandfather, all sheep farmers, and I was the last sheep farmer standing, or sitting—or at least I used to be. I reached out and closed the laptop, thinking. Nothing can go wrong, so Ricky had said, but that didn’t allow for cars slamming into each other above miles and miles of beautiful beaches on the Great Ocean Road, or passengers stranded by volcanic ash. I turned my head listening to the wind racing around inside the chimney, loosening stones. Sleet was falling outside the window. This was supposed to be Spring, but it isn’t these days. Spring is a moveable season that sometimes doesn’t happen at all. For WEErd Wonders this project is just one of several, but for me and the family it is everything, our livelihoods, maybe even our futures.
✥
We used to get our sheep stolen. There were organised gangs on quad bikes, sometimes with a van, or a lorry, sometimes bearing crossbows—or a gun if they really meant business. If a drone showed me someone carrying a gun then I didn’t try and intervene. Then there was Joe Bloggs out in his car, who looked over a hedge into a field and suddenly decided he would like some lamb. If I was lucky I would get a fence alert, and one of the drones could capture the registration number of the car, and the police would be waiting for them when they got home. More often than not, these people weren’t organised criminals, not like the gangs, but still smart enough to clone a number plate when they drove into the countryside, maybe even from the same model of car. Right car, wrong number. Private drones aren’t allow to follow any vehicles on to the motorway, for fear they cause an accident. All of that—the organised gangs, the tourist rustlers, as I call them, and the weather—adds up to the fact that we aren’t a sheep farm any more. It’s too dammed hard. The weather is unpredictable. Seasons come when seasons shouldn’t. Incessant downpours, even blizzards near lambing time, burying sheep about to give birth in feet of snow.
So hundreds of years of sheep farming has more or less stopped with me. Insert guilt here. Sure we keep the odd lamb, and the odd calf. The kids look after them. We tried having a farm shop, but couldn’t get the range of products and they are too expensive compared to the supermarkets. Times are hard and people can’t afford things that are double the price, not in the volumes we would need to sell. We even tried to make our own ice cream for a while, still do, occasionally, but the novelty has worn off. Holiday cottages? You name it, we’ve tried the lot.
✥
Ricky’s boss from WEErd Wonders, Bill Mathers, was standing in the Tech-barn they had built next to some old barns of my own. He was accompanied by some guys in white coats wielding tablets. They were doing some major modifications to the unit the drones passed through on a conveyor belt, which attached and removed the sprays the drones carried. I looked up at the sound of rain drumming on the roof. You would have thought they could have muffled that noise somehow with their fancy portable building, sometimes the sound of rain falling drives me crazy.
“We can do everything remotely from here,” Bill explained. “Since there’s not much of the trial period left.”
I didn’t know what to say. “You’re not replacing Ricky?”
He shook his head. “It’s a monitoring job, and tinkering with the sprays the drones deliver. They can still collect soil and air samples, see what the enemy is up to, so to speak.” His sweeping arm, gestured to the rows of equipment and machinery. On one surface three monitors showed graphs and waves and bands of numbers that meant nothing to me. “We can counteract everything they come up with using what’s here already.”
“Are you sure? Really?”
“Unless they want to scorch your earth, and they’d have to get past the Magnetic Trees to do it.” He snorted. “There’s enough scorched earth around anyway. Who needs more of it, eh?”
No-one, I thought, looking out of the window to the line of trees WEErd Wonders had planted. Staring as if I could see the land beyond them.
✥
Like Bill said, we have Magnetic Trees. They are not really magnetic, of course, but they are there to shield the farm and our fields, soak up any bad particles that might ruin our test crop. Bad particles that have somehow managed to stray here accidentally, because there is a lot of bad stuff in the air these days, just drifting about. Or it’s bad stuff deliberately released by groups who are against the use of nano-technology in food production, although not so much against it, that they won’t use their own bugs to get their way. Our adversaries are the ‘Free to Be Fatties’ who think growing crops to beat the weather will just be the first step in manipulating food supplies. Adding vitamins and minerals to food is good for the consumer, but they fear that things will be added to the crops that switch off parts of your brain, make you feel full, make you eat less, make scarce food resources go a little bit further in an overpopulated world with a crap climate.
Apart from the Magnetic Trees, being involved with WEErd Wonders means we get top of the range drones for spraying and security purposes. Trespassers beware, if they can get past the newly erected fences which border the farm, and you would need to be a pole-vaulter to manage that. We also get a state of the art smart fridge. The Blue Sapphire they call it, after Queen Elizabeth’s 65 years on the throne. I admit those thick blue stripes are more than a little garish. Ali hates them and wants me to paint the fridge white. I’m worried that might compromise the magic that works inside the thing so she’ll just have to put up with the blue stripes for as long as the fridge works. Given it came with a lifetime guarantee and downloads its own updates, I expect that to be a long, long time.
✥
We were airing one of the holiday cottages when Ali delivered her bombshell. The cottage was cold and smelled damp, but the view was nice, especially this early in the day. Fields stretching to rolling hills, topped with clouds. Some of what I could see belonged to us. You could see which part by the large WEErd Wonders fence marking the boundary.
“Maybe we should sell up,” she said, back turned to me.
I could feel myself swallowing as I looked at her. “You think? I mean if this works we won’t need to worry about keeping the wolf from the door, just down at the gate, but…”
“Suppose they take their business to other farms?” Ali said, concern etched on her face when she turned round. “Farmers more desperate than us? Who’ll take any offer?”
“We could be their main test site,” I insisted. “This is just the start, Ali. If the Clingers can beat the weather then you can start tinkering with them. Try and get better yields, add in more vitamins and nutrients.”
“So ‘Free to be Fatties’ are right after all?” she said, eyebrows raised. “It is all about making people thinner?”
“Healthier,” I countered. “There’s too many people and not enough food for everyone. The planet is gubbed. Too much water in some places and not enough water in others. Guess which part we live in?”
“I know it makes sense,” she said, striking another match too hard and snapping it. “This is about trying to grow food that can survive constant downpours, but as you said, it’ll soon be about growing food that makes people feel fuller, even when they eat less.”
“Is that a bad thing? Look at the smart fridge they gave us. The packaging reacts with the food and keeps it fresher for longer. The fridge reacts with the packaging and makes the food last even longer than that.” She shook her head. “Where does it stop, Grant? Food that can make you feel full might become food that can make you feel happy, content?”
“What’s wrong with that? Food has always affected people’s emotions, their cravings. People get hooked on certain foods, or need some at certain times. Like chocolate or coffee.”
“Yeah, because they are addicted to caffeine,” the green tea drinker of the family reminded me. “Like I said, we could sell the place, think of the development potential.”
“It’s Green Belt so you can’t build here,” I told her bluntly as something childish stirred to life inside me, wanting to shoot down every suggestion she came up with. “Besides the construction boom is long gone. Small, energy efficient units are what’s hot, and in the city, not in the countryside.”
“Then sell the farm to the company and let them run it.”
I could feel my eyebrows going up. “Really? That’s your solution? They could grow anything when we were gone.”
“But we’d be gone. Not our responsibility.”
“Okay, okay,” I raised my hands. “Let me think about it, right?”
“Make sure you do,” was her final comment as I headed for the door. I managed not to slam it.
✥
