Rogue Farm
CHARLES STROSS
Charles Stross, fifty-three, is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. The author of seven Hugo-nominated novels and winner of three Hugo awards for best novella, Stross’s works have been translated into over twelve languages. His most recent novel, Dark State, was published by Tor in January 2018; his next novel, The Labyrinth Index is due out from Tor.com and Orbit (in the UK) in October 2018. Like many writers, Stross has had a variety of careers, occupations, and job-shaped catastrophes in the past, from pharmacist (he quit after the second police stake-out) to first code monkey on the team of a successful dot-com startup (with brilliant timing he tried to change employer just as the bubble burst). Along the way he collected degrees in pharmacy and computer science, making him the world’s first officially qualified cyberpunk writer (just as cyberpunk died).
Here he gives us a fast, funny, and highly inventive look at a deceptively bucolic future where nothing is quite as simple—or as harmless—as it seems….
It was a bright, cool March morning: mare’s tails trailed across the south-eastern sky towards the rising sun. Joe shivered slightly in the driver’s seat as he twisted the starter handle on the old front-loader he used to muck out the barn. Like its owner, the ancient Massey-Fergusson had seen better days; but it had survived worse abuse than Joe routinely handed out. The diesel clattered, spat out a gobbet of thick blue smoke, and chattered to itself dyspeptically. His mind as blank as the sky above, Joe slid the tractor into gear, raised the front scoop, and began turning it towards the open doors of the barn—just in time to see an itinerant farm coming down the road.
“Bugger,” swore Joe. The tractor engine made a hideous grinding noise and died. He took a second glance, eyes wide, then climbed down from the tractor and trotted over to the kitchen door at the side of the farm house. “Maddie!” he called, forgetting the two-way radio clipped to his sweater hem. “Maddie! There’s a farm coming!”
“Joe? Is that you? Where are you?” Her voice wafted vaguely from the bowels of the house.
“Where are you?” He yelled back.
“I’m in the bathroom.”
“Bugger,” he said again. “If it’s the one we had round the end last month…”
The sound of a toilet sluiced through his worry. It was followed by a drumming of feet on the staircase, then Maddie erupted into the kitchen. “Where is it?” she demanded.
“Out front, about a quarter mile up the lane.”
“Right.” Hair wild and eyes angry about having her morning ablutions cut short, Maddie yanked a heavy green coat on over her shirt. “Opened the cupboard yet?”
“I was thinking you’d want to talk to it first.”
“Too right I want to talk to it. If it’s that one that’s been lurking in the copse near Edgar’s pond I got some issues to discuss with it.” Joe shook his head at her anger and went to unlock the cupboard in the back room. “You take the shotgun and keep it off our property,”she called after him: “I’ll be out in a minute.”
Joe nodded to himself, then carefully picked out the twelve-gauge and a pre-loaded magazine. The gun’s power-on self test lights flickered erratically, but it seemed to have a full charge. Slinging it, he locked the cupboard carefully and went back out into the farmyard to warn off their unwelcome visitor.
The farm squatted, buzzing and clicking to itself, in the road outside Armitage End. Joe eyed it warily from behind the wooden gate, shotgun under his arm. It was a medium-sized one, probably with half a dozen human components subsumed into it—a formidable collective. Already it was deep into farm-fugue, no longer relating very clearly to people outside its own communion of mind. Beneath its leathery black skin he could see hints of internal structure, cytocellular macro-assemblies flexing and glooping in disturbing motions. Even though it was only a young adolescent, it was already the size of an antique heavy tank, and blocked the road just as efficiently as an Apatosaurus would have. It smelled of yeast and gasoline.
Joe had an uneasy feeling that it was watching him. “Bugger it, I don’t have time for this,” he muttered. The stable waiting for the small herd of cloned spidercows cluttering up the north paddock was still knee-deep in manure, and the tractor seat wasn’t getting any warmer while he shivered out here waiting for Maddie to come and sort this thing out. It wasn’t a big herd, but it was as big as his land and his labour could manage—the big biofabricator in the shed could assemble mammalian livestock faster than he could feed them up and sell them with an honest HAND-RAISED NOT VAT-GROWN label. “What do you want with us?” he yelled up at the gently buzzing farm.
“Brains, fresh brains for baby Jesus,” crooned the farm in a warm contralto, startling Joe half out of his skin. “Buy my brains!” Half a dozen disturbing cauliflower shapes poked suggestively out of the farms back then retracted again, coyly.
“Don’t want no brains around here,” Joe said stubbornly, his fingers whitening on the stock of the shotgun. “Don’t want your kind round here, neither. Go away.”
“I’m a nine-legged semi-automatic groove machine!” Crooned the farm. “I’m on my way to Jupiter on a mission for love! Won’t you buy my brains?” Three curious eyes on stalks extruded from its upper glacis.
“Uh—” Joe was saved from having to dream up any more ways of saying fuck off by Maddie’s arrival. She’d managed to sneak her old battle dress home after a stint keeping the peace in Mesopotamia twenty ago, and she’d managed to keep herself in shape enough to squeeze inside. Its left knee squealed ominously when she walked it about, which wasn’t often, but it still worked well enough to manage its main task—intimidating trespassers.
“You.” She raised one translucent arm, pointed at the farm. “Get off my land. Now.”
Taking his cue, Joe raised his shotgun and thumbed the selector to full auto. It wasn’t a patch on the hardware riding Maddie’s shoulders, but it underlined the point. The farm hooted: “why don’t you love me?” it asked plaintively.
“Get orf my land,” Maddie amplified, volume cranked up so high that Joe winced. “Ten seconds! Nine! Eight—” Thin rings sprang out from the sides of her arms, whining with the stress of long disuse as the Gauss gun powered up.
“I’m going! I’m going!” The farm lifted itself slightly, shuffling backwards. “Don’t understand. I only wanted to set you free to explore the universe. Nobody wants to buy my fresh fruit and brains. What’s wrong with the world?”
They waited until the farm had retreated round the bend at the top of the hill. Maddie was the first to relax, the rings retracting back into the arms of her battle dress, which solidified from ethereal translucency to neutral olive drab as it powered down. Joe safed his shotgun. “Bastard,”he said.
“Fucking A.” Maddie looked haggard. “That was a bold one.” Her face was white and pinched-looking, Joe noted: her fists were clenched. She had the shakes, he realised without surprise. Tonight was going to be another major nightmare night, and no mistake.
“The fence.” They’d discussed wiring up an outer wire to the CHP base load from their little methane plant, on again and off again for the past year.
“Maybe this time. Maybe.” Maddie wasn’t keen on the idea of frying passers-by without warning, but if anything might bring her around it would be the prospect of being overrun by a bunch of rogue farms.” Help me out of this and I’ll cook breakfast,” she said.