Farmer One Read online

  Title

  License

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Footnotes

  FARMER ONE

  by Christian Cantrell

  This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

  Chapter 1

  Homestead Studio Extended Stay Suites

  Houston, Texas

  4:14 a.m.

  Brother Austin Lockwood is awakened by pounding on his door an average of 2.25 times per month. And so far, the news has never been good.

  Why his employer chooses to send men out to his apartment to wake him up and physically bring him in rather than simply picking up the phone, Lockwood has never understood. Perhaps there are international guidelines under which totalitarian governments are expected to operate mandating the use of intimidation over convenience and practicality. Lockwood imagines there is a syllabus for newly minted autocrats with required chapters from texts like Oppression for Dummies, and Ascension: How to Seize Power, Maintain Control, and Ensure Your Own Legacy. Students of despotism must learn the virtues of party emblems, secret police, and building-sized murals of their Dear Leaders. Techniques for getting citizens to accept institutions like Patriotic Reeducation Centers and Departments of Propaganda must be imparted. The subtle art of both promoting vices like excessive drinking and smoking while also condemning them must be mastered, and multitudes of gorillas must be trained to beat down apartment doors at four in the fucking morning.

  The hammering comes again, but this time it sounds slightly different. It is several centimeters lower on the door, and just a hair to the right — produced, it would seem, by a fist with minutely less mass. Lockwood's dream-laden brain calculates precisely where two shots would need to be placed in the metal to pierce both men's hearts, then imagines himself curling up with the warm smoking high-powered rifle and falling back into a deep and entirely guiltless slumber.

  But he knows he only has a few more seconds before his front door opens one way or another, so he heaves the heavy layers of blankets aside, swings his legs out over the floor, and clears his throat.

  "Coming, goddamnit!"

  The white-footed fox[1] Lockwood shares his apartment with is excited by the sudden movement, and she pounces on the mound of puffed-up covers, then looks frantically to either side of her as the pile deflates beneath her weight. Lockwood has found his glasses and slippers, and is shuffling in the dark across the wooden subfloor to the combined kitchenette/dining room/entry hall.

  He has been living in the Homestead Studio Extended Stay Suites since it was appropriated by the U.S. government a little under a decade ago. The property is not far from the Johnson Space Center, and it is mostly occupied by NASA personnel who have been compelled by various means to help the United States catch up to, and eventually surpass, the Chinese in space exploration and colonization. It's hard for some of the old-timers to believe that the nation is already on its second Space Race in its relatively brief but singularly tumultuous history.

  Having your very own bed, kitchenette, and toilet were meant to convey the incredible esteem with which the state held aerospace engineers — a blessing never allowed to wander far from the forefront of NASA employees' minds. You can always quit and go pitch yourself a tent like everyone else, they are frequently reminded by the myriad of managers who oversee their work. The rooms are roughly the shape of a poorly cut slice of pie (and scarcely much larger) with their front doors positioned at the blunt tip. His particular luxury suite was in the process of being remodeled down to its very studs when Lockwood moved in, however the project has been put on indefinite hold pending, it seems, multiple acts of God. The property manager's position is that Lockwood ought to be thankful to have the additional space which would otherwise be occupied by such superfluous indulgences as drywall and carpeting.

  Through the peephole, Lockwood sees precisely what he expects: two bulbous heads with overly gelled hair atop cartoonishly diminished bodies in cheap rumpled suits standing there on the remnants of old moldy lead-laced astroturf in the open-air hallway. Both men wear shades despite the fact that the sun is still somewhere far off over the Atlantic, and their crosses are out over their ties in accordance with the latest in Party fashion.

  Lockwood flips on the fluorescent ring in the kitchenette/dining room/entry hall, unchains the door, and lets the men in along with a rush of frigid April[2] air.

  "Are you Brother Austin Lockwood?" the tall one asks so convivially that it's a little creepy. Even with all the product in his hair, he is still blond, and up close, Lockwood can see that he's got a little yellow goatee going. He looks unusually well fed for such lean times, and seems to fit the profile of a man named Jones or Baker. Baker, Lockwood decides, since he knows damn well he will never know either man's true identity.

  The other one is smaller and suavely Latino — Puerto Rican, Lockwood resolves. A name like "Gomez" or "Rodriguez" would be far too common for someone with such perfect and bright white teeth behind such a winning smile. Henceforth he is to be known privately to Lockwood as Señor Poncherello — or maybe just Ponch for short.

  "Yeah, that's me," Lockwood confesses.

  Ponch retires his smile. Apparently it is time to dispense with the pleasantries and get down to business. "Brother Austin, we're going to have to ask you to come with us."

  "I gathered," Lockwood says. He notices that both the men's crosses are fashioned out of highly polished nails bound with a kind of thin gold filament. Standing there in his kitchenette/dining room/entry hall, the two of them look like a pair of Mormon vampire hunters.

  In contrast, Lockwood looks exactly like an aerospace engineer who has been roused from his warm bed on a cold morning. He is a short, slight man with a shaggy beard he makes no attempt to shape or tame beyond the trim that comes free with his monthly haircut. His substantial glasses are at least three fads out of fashion.

  "You'll want a coat," Baker advises. "It's a chilly morning."

  "Actually, I'll want to brush my teeth, take a shower, and get dressed," Lockwood tells the men. "Then I'll worry about the coat."

  "I'm afraid there isn't time," Baker says. "We need to leave right now."

  Lockwood is trying to work out a compromise in his head (perhaps these guys can be bribed by a slice of warm toast with marshmallow cream and a Yoo-hoo while he at least puts on a clean pair of underwear) when the mounting tension is shattered by the flushing of a toilet. Baker and Ponch reflexively put their hands inside their coats and lean around Lockwood.

  "Is there someone else here?" Ponch wants to know. The possibility that an engineer with a fierce neckbeard might not be alone clearly didn't even register.

  Lockwood turns in time to see his pet fox prance the few steps from the bathroom to the bed. She leaps effortlessly up as though propelled by unseen pneumatics, sits, and watches the goings-on warily, her tail twitching and ears turning like tiny satellite dishes.

  Ponch is the first to regain enough composure to speak. "Your cat uses the toilet?"

  "She's not a cat," Lockwood says. "She's a fox. And can I at least feed her before we go?"

  Lockwood doesn't wait for a response. He pulls open the fridge, leans in, and then a raw piece of chicken is heard slapping the plywood subfloor. From the only overhead cabinet, he takes down a bowl and a nearly empty liter of whisky, turns on the kitchen faucet, and mixes a pretty stiff drink. The fox has already started bolting the chicken breast by the time Lock
wood sets the bowl down beside it.

  "And she drinks scotch," Baker says with the matter-of-factness of a man who is just starting to come to terms with his own insanity.

  "She likes a little drink to wind her down at the end of the day," Lockwood says. He plucks a heavy woolen pea coat off a wooden peg by the door and begins pulling it on.

  "But it's morning," Ponch says.

  "She's nocturnal."

  Baker is watching the fox lap up the cocktail in the bowl. "Alcohol is a sin," he says with a reflexiveness that can only be instilled by very high-quality brainwashing.

  "Not for animals," Lockwood says, then adds, "and not for the people who take care of them, either."

  Lockwood finishes buttoning up his coat, then pulls on the ski hat that was stowed in its pocket. The two men are still transfixed by the incongruous combination of fluff and hard alcohol.

  "Shall we go?" Lockwood suggests. "Or should I put on some coffee?"

  "We're going," Baker says. He takes a step back and gropes behind him for the doorknob. "What's your cat's name?"

  "She's a fox," Lockwood says. "And her name is Farmer."

  Chapter 2

  Johnson Space Center

  Employee Parking Lot A

  Houston, Texas

  4:57 a.m.

  The JSC's reserved priority employee parking section has almost enough grass growing up through its fissures to play tackle football on. With patches of snow and frost covering the remaining asphalt, the area looks like an expanse of frozen Siberian tundra.

  There are three men huddled around a campfire close to the entrance, palms offered up to the warmth of the tall blaze, orange cigarette cherries glowing under their noses like fireflies. Lockwood starts to plot a course around the little homeless convention in order to avoid the inevitable solicitation for meal tickets and smokes since he has never been very good at saying no to anyone worse off than he is. In fact, on more than one occasion, Lockwood has given away so many food stamps that he found himself bumming protein and whiskey off Farmer by the end of the month. But as he gets closer to the ragged shivering pack, he recognizes one of the men as possibly the only man on the entire planet he actually enjoys saying no to: his boss.

  Len Sarek looks like a fat Vulcan. He has upswept eyebrows and pointy ears, but instead of telepathy, he has multiple chins. In Lockwood's experience, Sarek is the kind of boss who is not so much interested in actual productivity as he is in creating and maintaining a paper trail that can be used to demonstrate that productivity almost certainly took place. He is such a coffee fiend that his friends and family once staged a caffeine intervention which began well enough with plenty of the requisite tears and hugs, but ended with Sarek relapsing and putting on a fresh pot.

  In the flicker of the firelight, Lockwood now recognizes one of the other men as Christopher Noone — a fellow engineer and an astronaut who began shaving his head in his 20s when he started going bald, and according to the guys he shares the locker room with, didn't stop there. To supplement his income, Noone works as a snowboard instructor and guide in the Guadalupe Mountains whenever he can liberate one of NASA's twin-turbine choppers without actually signing it out which is usually accomplished by putting bars of chocolate into the right people's hands at the hanger.

  The third man is a tall, dark, beanpole of an Indian with a round bobblehead and asymmetrical mustache that has probably never been in style anywhere during any period of human civilization. His name is Parakala Prabhakar, and when he first started working in NASA's Human Spaceflight Program, he told everyone he liked to be called P.P. Fortunately, his colleagues forced the nickname "Prabs" on him, instead, although thanks to Noone, he has been known to answer to "Crabs" as well. Since neither Lockwood nor Prabs have computers at home, the two occasionally stay late to play old pirated[3] first-person shooters and real-time military strategy simulations on the LAN. To both men, this feels a lot like friendship.

  "What the hell is this?" Lockwood shouts when he judges he is within earshot. Baker and Ponch are lingering and observing from the shadows as secret police will do.

  "Ah, Brother Austin," Sarek says. "Thank you for joining us this morning."

  "Fuck that," Lockwood says. "What's going on?"

  Sarek takes the cigarette from his mouth and is suddenly grave. "It's the Chinese," he tells Lockwood. He has the deep, cheek-puffing delivery of an old military man with a lot of authority, but most people don't buy it for long.

  "No, I mean why are we standing around outside?"

  "Mr. Sarek forgot his ID," Prabs says with the melodious Hindi accent Lockwood loves to listen to, especially when he's talking smack after a virtual beat-down (Mr. Lockwood, I have just made you my bitch). For some reason, he holds his cigarette between his index finger and his thumb, palm up, like he has no idea what he's doing, yet he probably smokes at least sixty percent more than anyone else Lockwood has ever met.

  "So did you!" Sarek fires back.

  "We all forgot our IDs," Noone says diplomatically from around his cigarette. "Austin, did you bring yours?"

  "I didn't even have time to take a leak," Lockwood says.

  Sarek turns to Prabs. "Go get another flight manual out of my trunk. The fire's getting low."

  As Prabs disjoins himself from the group and is swallowed by the frigid darkness, Sarek shouts after him, "Nothing from the Apollo missions! Those are valuable!"

  "What are you doing with flight manuals in your trunk?" Lockwood wants to know.

  "Traction. They're easier for me to get than bricks, and much heavier."

  This seems to make a lot of sense to both Lockwood and Noone. They nod to themselves until Lockwood has a thought.

  "Wait! Isn't Hank in there?"

  "He won't let us in," Sarek says.

  "What do you mean he won't let us in? Of course Hank will let us in. We've all known Hank for years."

  "Not without our IDs."

  "Nonsense," Lockwood declares. "I'll talk to him."

  He leaps up onto the curb, suddenly energized by the prospect of warmth and coffee, and blows into his hands as he jogs to the glass entrance. Hank is inside with a thermos in one hand, and a folded magazine in the other. He is a balding black man with fluffy white hair that looks like glued-on cotton balls and a perpetual expression that leaves no doubt as to who actually runs the place. Lockwood gets his attention by rapping on the glass with a numb knuckle. Hank looks up and seems glad to see his old friend.

  "Hank!" Lockwood shouts through the glass. His breath causes it to fog, and he remembers he has not yet brushed his teeth this morning. "Can you let me in?"

  Hank mouths, DOOO YOOO HAAAVE YOOOUR EYEEE-DEEE?

  "I forgot it!" Lockwood shouts, then gives Hank his winning-most grin. "They dragged me out of bed!"

  EYEEE NEEEED TOOO SEEEE YOOOUR EYEEE-DEEE.

  Lockwood considers bringing up the fact that the two men have known each other for almost two decades, and have greeted each other roughly 6,240 times, but he figures he wouldn't be telling Hank anything the man doesn't already know. Lockwood gives up and jogs back to the bonfire, somehow feeling no ill will toward the lovable and unwavering Hank whatsoever.

  "See?" Sarek says as he hands Lockwood a freshly lit smoke. "The man has his orders. If we took our jobs even half as seriously as Hank, we probably wouldn't all be standing out here right now."

  Noone is not one to let a good segue go to waste. "So why are we all standing out here, boss? We might as well get started while we wait for the Director."

  "Oh, no," Prabs says. He rejoined the group while Lockwood was trying to schmooze Hank, and the Russian translated manual on the operation of zero gravity toilets[4] is giving the fire entirely new life. "The Director is coming? That is not good."

  "No, it's not good at all," Sarek confirms. "It's the Chinese. They launched something during the night."

  "So what?" Lockwood says. "They're always launching something."

  "This was big. Very big."
r />   "Nuclear waste headed for the sun?"

  "That's illegal."

  "So what? We do it all the time."

  "True, but there isn't enough radioactivity coming off it. And we believe the spacecraft is manned."

  It's Noone's turn to speculate. "Maybe it's just another component for Procellarum[5]."

  "Maybe," Sarek says, "but probably not. The trajectory isn't quite right."

  If Prabs is anything, he is a trajectory man. "What is wrong with the trajectory? Give me all the juicy details."

  "I don't know the details, Prabs," Sarek tells him. "It might just be an error. Or the Chinese might just be putting themselves into an orbit we've never seen them use before to avoid debris, or to steer clear of a lunar satellite we don't know about. But there's one other possibility."

  Lockwood already knows where his boss is going with this. "That they just want us to think they're going to the moon."

  "Exactly."

  "Which, I'm guessing, is why I'm here."

  "Right again," Sarek says. "We need the inside scoop on this one, Brother Austin. We need you to tap your contact."

  Lockwood nods, more to himself than the others. "It won't be cheap," he tells Sarek.

  "How much?"

  "He doesn't want money," Lockwood says. "At least not US dollars."

  "Then what does he want?"

  "Plasma propulsion. He's brought it up before."

  "No way," Noone says. He flicks his butt into the fire and begins lighting another. "That's off the table."

  "You cannot give him plasma propulsion," Prabs says. "That is our best shot at getting to Mars before the Chinese."

  "It's kind of a moot point if they're already on their way, isn't it?" Lockwood says. "And I'm not talking about handing over the schematics. It would probably be enough just to confirm that we have it."

  "How about confirmation that we're working on it?" Sarek says.

  "That might work."

  "Try it. If that's not enough, you can go as far as confirming a laboratory prototype, but that's it. Nothing beyond a scale model, and absolutely nothing about what we already have in orbit. That stays quiet at all costs."