NOVEL SIMPLE Chapter 1: Breakfast of Champions
"In the beninging there was nothing. Then, Spark was unloading a truck"
-Spark’s Rise to Power: A Fan Rendition by Samurai Phoenix 2057
If you ever want to know what bliss is, it’s a nice bed with a multitude of pillows. Rough, smooth, squishy, or hard, they all feel great. Unfortunately for me, bliss is ever-fleeting.
“Spark! Get yer rear in gear! You’re burnin’ daylight!”
With an exhausted groan, I peeled myself away from pillow heaven and put on my glasses. Blearily I looked up at Aunt Nyra, who was trying and failing to hide her chuckles. Mumbling vows of revenge, I stood up and trudged to the bathroom. A quick face washing while avoiding the mirror's gaze later, and I was back in my room, changing into a pair of brown cargo shorts and a plain t-shirt.
A bothersome knock is soon followed by a teasing voice, “Spark, Mom says that you need to hurry up otherwise Benny gets your food.”
I opened the door to find my cousin Evie impatiently standing in the hallway. “Yeah yeah, I’m ready,” I grumble, shutting the door behind me as I step out around her, “I swear y’all act like I can’t handle myself at all.”
“Nah we just like keepin’ ya on your toes,” She said with a scoff, “Now hurry up! I want to get the gardening done and over with so we can be done with working in the damned sun!”
“Honestly,” I mutter, looking at a trail of sun flowing in through a window, “Fair.”
We both entered the dining room and sat down. A plate of scrambled eggs and bacon then plonked onto the table in front of me courtesy of Uncle Wyatt. Not even two seconds later, a grubby little hand grabbed for my bacon.
“Oi!” I slap the hand, getting a little grunt of displeasure, “Hands off my plate, you lil’ thief!”
The hand soon retreated, only to be replaced by a mop of dark red hair, “But Aunt Nyra said I get your food!”
“Yeah, but I’m right here!” Pulling my plate away, I stuck a piece of bacon in my mouth. “So hands off my food!”
Before Benny could retort, Nana swatted at him. “Cool it bucko, sit down and eat. If you keep bothering em’, I’ll make you do the dishes first. "
“But Nana, you said-,” Benny cried, but Nana didn’t let him finish. “Now listen here, kiddo,-”
Tuning out the scolding he was getting, I dug into my fluffy pancakes with relish, only coming up for air when Uncle Cyril began discussing the itinerary for the day in that rough and loud voice of his.
“Alright, today should be the last day of shelling corn! After that it’s just dryer management, post harvest tillage, then hauling out the lagoon and the pits.” Having run out of fingers on his hand, Uncle Cyril turned to me with a grin.
“No nothin’ for any Antithesis forecasts at the fields we have left, so Spark, you’re on dryer duty today. No need for an extra gun to hang around, and you can help in the garden. Everyone else is doing regular spots today,” He then turned and half-shouted into the kitchen, “Nyra! Is the drill ready to go?”
“No yeah, for sure!” Aunt Nyra shouted back, to which Uncle Cy responded, “Then go ahead and start sowin’ down at Benson’s! Prob best if ya take a lunchbox too so you don’t hafta worry ‘bout stoppin. I’ll send Spark and Wyatt down to bring extra seed before we get started!”
Aunt Nyra’s hand appeared in the doorway making a thumbs up, disappearing before the clatter of her lunch prep emanated from the kitchen.
With a nod, Uncle Cy went right back into assigning tasks, “Darrel, Xavier, Randi, before we head out, go ahead and take care of feeding. I’ll get the combine, cart, and trucks warmed up and ready to move by the time y’all are done.”
***
Noise levels on a farm are extremely variable, you have a few incredibly loud points like a silo blower (thank everything that is holy that we got the air system installed two years back), or relatively quiet things like an idling combine.
An active skid-steer is neither of those, instead it nestles itself right in the middle. Loud enough to be very noticeable when you are near enough to get run over by it, but not so loud it makes you want to bury your head in the dirt.
The source of my sound based introspection creeped forward, a pallet loaded down with seedbags on its fork. I, on the other hand, was giving hand signals to prevent Wyatt from punching a hole in the truck bed.
As much as I love fixing things and giving them a bit of flair to be even better than when they came into my workshop, mending holes in sheet metal sucks. I’ll take drywall fuckery over that any day.
Satisfied with where the pallet will end up, I waved him off and vaulted the sidewall as Wyatt sets the pallet down. Before he had a chance to drive off, I shouted at him over the skidsteer’s engine.
“How many?” After Wyatt thinks for a bit, he pantomimes a pistol before holding up two fingers, then mimics a shotgun followed by one finger.
I nodded before I rushed off to the ‘armory’, for lack of a better term. It’s a small building that's filled to the brim with all our military gear. Rifles, light armor, shotguns, sidearms, miscellaneous gear, and the ammunition to back it all up. I grabbed the requested weapons off their racks, gave them a quick spot check to make sure my hands wouldn’t get blown up by poor maintenance, then shoved them into one of the many duffel bags kept by the door. Additionally, I grab a corresponding ammo box for each weapon, as well as 3 mags each for the pistols.
My eyes flit over the room to make sure I didn’t forget anything this time, when they snap to my current pride and joy. A reinforced baseball bat that I modified to deliver electric shocks to whatever it hits, a tried and tested weapon of the ages! Except, I only finished it last week, so the only thing it’d zapped was our antithesis dummy target.
‘It really walloped that thing though…’
Anyways.
I grabbed the bat on my way out and rushed over to the truck. The gun bag got placed in the back seat, where it would be easy for either of us to reach back to grab it. I then hopped into the seat up front and started fiddling with my bat. ‘I can already see a few things that could be improved, more robust wiring here and here would increase the power output- ‘
My musing got cut off by Wyatt, who got into the driver's seat with a grunt, “Spark, if you shock me, I swear to fuck I will kick you out of the truck while we’re moving.”
“Oh hush, this baby won’t have any power moving through the circuits unless I need to test it,” I said with a roll of my eyes, “’Sides, I know better than to turn on a weapon in a tight space like this without proper reason.”
Wyatt only responded with a grunt, but I caught a poorly hidden smile as he began driving out of Homeplace and towards Benson’s, where Aunt Nyra was getting ready to start sowing wheat.
The familiar roadsides began to blur into lumps of unhealthy yellows where field stubble didn’t paint in various shades of brown or tan.
Out here in the county wastes, (as the saps in the cities would call it), there were two main types of land. Really unhealthy looking forests were the first, and the second was the arable ground that we and a few other families worked to produce the food a lot of one-percenters go out of their way to buy.
Frankly, it looked ugly as sin. All the plants were suffering, even including the crops that had been genetically modified to hell and back just to survive out here. The worldwide pollution was just that bad these days.
“You ok, Spark?” Wyatt looked at me with a bit of concern, gripping the steering wheel tight. “You’re glaring at the trees again.”
“Huh?, oh it's the same ol’ tired thing. The state of the environment out here pisses me off.” I sighed before continuing, “The old pictures Great-Grampa had of the land here is just…”
“Night and day?” Wyatt sighs and shakes his head, looking out at the road in front of him.
“Yeah, like their corn didn’t curl year round like ours does now! And everything in July was such a healthy deep green!” I slammed a fist onto my armrest, “The only time their crops went yellow was when there was legitimate issues like a long drought, or on the other hand, they could even have TOO much water in the spring, drowning out the crops!”
“Yeah, It’s definitely something to get angry about,”Wyatt chuckled, “I was only your age when the weather got so bad, Nonsanto had to push out ‘Pollution Ready Corn’, the greedy bastards.I honestly have no idea how Nyra and Cy kept us from getting bought out by those fucks. Great Grampa was rolling in his grave when all that went down, for sure.”
He paused for a few seconds before continuing, having gotten a bit into it, “This crap we grow now? Shit ain’t good for the soil either. It drains the soil beyond belief, way back when we’d only run a single round of anhydrous for corn. Now we apply it three times! It just makes it all slightly worse so we have to keep ramping application rates up!”
“We’re honestly incredibly lucky,” I said, “Ran into the Flints at the elevator last week, did you know their bean quotas went up again?” I grimaced, squeezing my armrests a bit harder than I probably should have, “They were already struggling last year to meet it and now? They might not have enough surplus to sell directly this year.”
“That’s only half of it from what I hear, they have to use whatever varieties those damn corpos want,” Wyatt lightly hit the steering wheel, scowling out at the fields we were quickly passing. “Funny, how those always end up being the damn expensive ones that require all of their own ‘Antithesis proof’ chemicals.
The mention of the antithesis brought the conversation to a screeching halt. We both knew what the fuckers could do; Plenty of biomass and fertilizer spread out in easy to collect rows meant the xenos could eat a 40 acre field, then use all of that to demolish all of an operation’s ground for the year. If you got lucky, the samurai would intervene early, and maybe even give the affected farmers an infusion of cash to pay off company contract failure fees so that they could feed themselves.
What most people ended up with when they showed up was destroyed fields that got polluted beyond use by their esoteric weaponry. All that, by a fucker who just casually dropped in, killed the xenos, and then left without a care about what they left behind.
And those farmers were the lucky ones.