Chapter Text
The air is saturated with the sickly sweet scent of sugar, sublime in its subsistence, stretching out from the soil to the sunset beyond the horizon. Even from here, on the other side of the barred iron gate, I can already see the acres of cookie plants shimmering in the morning light. But I have arrived with a job to do. Not to ogle, but to investigate.
“Rowan Dulcinea of the CRA, here for routine inspection.” I had came on account of rumors of unethical practices and environmental damage engaged on this very farm.
I present my card to the old farmhand as his tired eyes stare back into my stern, executive expression. He sighs and turns, leading me inside a barn with a silver pentacle mounted over the doorway as I cross its wooden gates.
“Alright, come in. But that suit won’t do ya any good out here,” he rasps, striding towards the side of the rustic interior and grabbing a rubbery hazmat suit, presenting it to me.
“I-Is that…?”
“Safety procedures. Ain’t that what you’re supposed to be investigatin’, fella?” The overseer smirked and shook his head, lightly scoffing as he tossed the protective suit to me. Well, there’s no such thing as too safe, as the motto goes. I take one step into the folded boots, then another. I pull the cuffs over, slowly encasing my body in rubber before concealing my face behind a gas mask. A visor of glass encases my vision, a portion blocked abaft of the metal veil. The gate opens automatically, and my step is irrevocable.
The bars close behind me after a moment with a rattling metallic click. Even when blurred by a gas mask, the farm looked idyllic in its scale. Rows upon rows of plants and trees line the fields with fresh cookies hanging like ripe fruit from their branches. As the morning sun glitters upon their surfaces, particles flutter and pervade the air around me. Spots of pollen and doughy seeds collect upon the visor; I slide them off from my view as I stride through the thin dirt lanes between the acres of foliage.
Amongst the dirt are patches of hard crumbs of tan mulch, the make of which I can’t discern due to my gloves’ insulation. Strangely, a soft rumble of the earth persists in waves wherever I walk. Across the fields, workers dressed in hazmat suits like me dot the plains, watering and tending to the plants in silent rows. I’m too far away to see the whites of their eyes.
“Careful, you’ll hit the sprinklers.” The overseer’s voice startles from behind, nearly prompting me to leap.
“I don’t see any—” Right then, a strong pressure lifted me off my feet like a thrash to my gut, knocking the wind from my lungs as I collapsed down on my back to the soil. The farmhand jolted my supine form backward as I coughed and wretched in pain, my suit’s midsection soaked.
“That there’s one of our pulsar sprinklers. See, they’re rotating so fast that you can’t even see ‘em. About, say, four thousand RPM. Give or take.” He lectured casually as if it were the most normal occurrence in the world to be struck by obscenely high-pressure water.
“F-Four thousand? B-But… that’s clearly overwatering; you can’t be serious—”
“Management says ‘no such thing as overwatering.’”
I shake my head in disbelief, staring at the pool of liquid beneath the affected plants. At a more careful look, I can see the mist collecting and distorting the air around it in a wide circle—that must be its range. But where overwatering comes, runoff follows. So, I tread off the path, circumnavigating past that damnable sprinkler on a journey to the edge of the farm.
On my way, I cross paths with one of the hunched workers, silently toiling, moving in and out of their rows. When I gaze beyond their visor, their faces are weathered and exhausted, as their ragged, aged breath eerily seeps through the gas mask. On their knees, they carefully shear off a tendril of a fungus. It pulses in their glove before they steadily replant the shroom. The tendril coils and ensnares the roots as its spores burst out from the cap, coating the growing plant. My gaze dilates worriedly, staring from side to side across my view at the dozens of elderly dotting the field.
“Volunteers, don’t mind ‘em.” The overseer pats me on the back, ushering me forth regardless. Sure, I couldn’t say anything for certain, but the air reeked of exploitation within its sugary veil. But I continued—better not to linger too close to whatever those spores were—even while masked.
In the distance, I spot a scarecrow in the visage of an uncannily human gingerbread man standing guard over the fields. Less of the sweet, bite-sized holiday snacks and more of a replica of crucifixion. Frosting trails down the scarecrow’s face and hands like a fired martyr. And yet, the icing grins with glee. Swiveling my path to inquire about this sight, a constant buzzing noise slowly amplifies as I approach, eventually whirring into a chainsaw-like hum.
There, crowded around the gingerbread scarecrow, like flies to a corpse, were a swarm of what looked like sugar bees, circling and jolting from leaf to leaf with aggressive fervor. Roughly and hastily, they writhed across the plant’s leaves, jostling as much pollen as possible out of its dried grains. Or perhaps they were pests, aggressively chewing down on the luscious, endless fields. Amongst the chaos, a cloud of scorching gas sweeps over the insects, causing them to scatter and fall.
What sprayed them away was not the overseer or an elderly worker, but something neither man nor cookie. A foliaceous, tripedal beast, with thick stems and wheat-like sheaths extending over 3 meters high. The leaves formed into a vine-like appendage holding a hose, showering away the invaders.
“W-I… I don’t even…” I stammered, barely even processing what was going on. This simple “farm investigation” had grown into something utterly bizarre. All I could do was try to stay on track.
“Are these pesticides up to code?” The overseer laughed at my mundane question, his cackle muffled behind the gas mask.
“And you’re not gonna question the triffid?”
“I don’t even know at this point. Just, it’s a health violation if excess residue of pesticides gets into the crops, or if any banned chemicals are being—”
Before I could even finish my sentence, the triffid swung one of its flaxen appendages at me, letting out an inhuman screech before the overseer quickly stepped in front of me.
“Hey, easy, easy! Agh, getting these fellas calm is harder than wrangling the lindworms,” he shouted over the hisses, grappling with the plant-like beast’s limbs. “Yeah, just don’t feed, pet, or talk to ‘em.”
“Wrangling the what.”
I wasn’t sure to be impressed or terrified at learning the source of the rumbling beneath my feet. The farmhand just cleared his throat and kept walking. He knows what I heard.
The horizon nears. Cabless tractors drive across, harvesting and compacting the yield without a care for anything in their path. The grumbling of beasts and pests fades away as I reach the border of the farm. There, I gaze upon the edge of the soil. Pools of deep brown liquid steadily run off, streaming towards a nearby river. On the border of the farm and the stream was a clog of viscous chocolate, clogging and choking the river with thick, dark syrup. It flows downhill, repainting the waterway’s glistening blue into a gradient of deep, muted shades of hazel. I could do nothing but stare in horror and rage at this blatant pollution, and without a second thought, I grasped the overseer by the shoulder.
“This is a brazen CRA violation, sir! Do you even realize what you’re doing with this? Villages downstream have been flooded by this chocolate; people are mucked solid, houses torn off of their foundations.” My verdant eyes tinged with vexation as I admonished the man. The CRA didn’t specify what to do with people so blatantly violating the rules, so I simply extrapolated from its harsh policies.
“And how else to get rid of all this water? What would someone like you know about all this?” He retorted, writhing easily out of my grasp.
“What I know is that this is wrong. Who knows what’s going on here? Are the pesticides leaking into the food? Are the crops genetically modified? Are the farmers even paid?” I grow paranoid with questions. The cookie industry was an idol of my work, and seeing someone squander and pollute it like this was hard to watch. And yet, all he did was calmly and sternly glare right back at me, his weathered eyes piercing through the barriers of glass.
“What you don’t know is that I haven’t done a damn thing but do what I was told to ‘maximize production.’ If I’m gonna get the yields to feed the people, this is what’s gonna have to happen. Go on, send another one of your boys out here, to any farm across the country, and I betcha they’ll see the same thing—same damn workers, same damn dough mulch, same damn chocolate rivers. Not like they’re not trying to shove as much syrup down as many gullets as possible, so hell no, they ain’t gonna get rid of this.”
Throughout the trek, the man had perhaps withheld information until a little too late or simply forgotten to expand upon things, but never once did he lie. No, he spoke too clearly to deceive. And it wasn’t in my nature to suspect such a thing from my fellow man. I stare down at the syrupy river and countless more flash before my eyes. The once-sweet chocolate is now reduced to ceaselessly pouring sewage. Fish scramble and swim frantically while their homes are suffocated along a mass of crushed cocoa, seeping its way into the water supply of millions of higher beings, into every crevice and pipe of every town or city across this side of the world.
“The… mulch is made of dough?” I ask, unable to process the larger implications of much else.
The overseer’s stern tone suddenly turns into a soft snort, lightly slapping the side of my arm.
“Aw, well… Perhaps I’m bein’ a bit too harsh. You’re just a bit new to this. Then let me give you a little warning for the future if you plan on investigating more.”
He leans in closer, the glass of his visor pressing against my own, his voice dropping to a low, ominous grumble.
“You ain’t seen the worst of it. Not even close.”
I remained silent, turning away from the river and back towards the endless fields of toiling and danger. This couldn’t be it, I thought to myself. This couldn’t be the truth. And yet, it was not just the truth, but only a piece of crust.
I joined the Regulatory Agency to make a difference. To make things right. And if I hadn’t seen the worst of it, then all that I must do was see, to prod deeper at this system until slowly, but surely, I'll pave my mark.
“Lower the speeds on the pulsars and install some filtration systems. And please, come back to the CRA with samples of that pesticide.”
"I’ll see what I can do,” he asserted, his expression hidden behind the metal veil once more as he trudged back through the field alongside me.
All I could hope for was the warmth of a reassuring smile below his featureless gaze.
And all I knew was that I wasn’t done either.