Chapter 8
Diggs never thought he’d find his death on a farm. There were plenty of other places where old, disgruntled miners found their end in Adalia, and it was usually fast and violent. In this instance, he was simply taking a gander through the greenhouse, as he had done three or four times over the last few weeks since the building has been completed.
The farm, or greenhouse, or ‘bioreactor’, as the engineers might call it, is a pale shadow of what might have been. The long tubes of soil and irrigation and gas flows were originally developed to allow the people of the great generation ships to grow food for the centuries they would travel through the void. They were meant to be abandoned and all but forgotten. But the Arvad didn’t arrive at a planetary system full of living soil and running water. It had not a single planet with a breathable atmosphere, not a single surface to safely stand on, with gravity that could someday hold on to such a blanket of air. What Adalia had were hundreds of thousands of rocks, big and small, with no air or liquid water on any of them. But the people of the Arvad, now the people of Adalia, knew how to survive in the vacuum. The greenhouses of the great generation ship were dismantled and lovingly transported down to the surface of Adalia Prime, the largest of the asteroids, and from under its surface came the raw materials to make plastic half tubes, tall as two men, soil to fill them, and water and carbon dioxide to flood them with, and from that soil came more and more soil, and new bioreactors, and the land could be teeming with life.
Of course, the steel and robotics at first stripped from the Arvad were nowadays brought in from distant asteroids, where a broader spectrum of metals and chemicals could be sourced. That made bioreactors expensive enterprises. The working population of Adalia Prime, slowly getting smaller, running out into the belt and its finer opportunities, was also causing a downturn in demand for food and other organic products. Both these facts were on a collision course of financial doom.
That wasn’t the only thing on his mind. Diggs had just visited the warehouse at the heart of his small mining and processing facility. Containers of calcite and apatite were lined up with no potential buyers in the foreseeable future. Worse than that, the payments he made on the leases for this little facility were quickly accumulating to more than what he would make, even if he sold a hundred tons of food, which would be a great success, in and of itself, if he managed to sell it at all.
He came over to check on the first batch of potatoes. That was his excuse, at least, to himself. He didn’t tell the others he had been coming here. The plants did not seem to be growing at the rate he was expecting. The way Lyra described it, when she was done programming the drones and clockwork irrigation machines, was that the first crops should be ready within three months. Diggs didn’t know much about how potatoes grew, but two months have gone by and the vines had not yet reached a third of the height they were meant to span on the grid of plastic struts that was placed for them to climb.
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He could continue to sell off his op-codes, which he had done a couple of times already, besides the first code he had sold to lease these lands to begin with. But he had no idea what he would do when they ran out, or if some government official will show up at some point to let him know he was accidentally using someone else’s codes and what kind of trouble he is in right now. This wasn’t just the money running out that he was considering. The whole point of developing such an operation had been to produce something useful, something worthwhile for the people of Adalia. So far, it seemed that paying the money he got from his op-codes back to the Prime Council, in the form of tens of thousands of SWAY per month in rent, was the biggest contribution he was making to the Adalian economy. If the business was only losing money, he would have to shut it down, eventually. What would he do then? What would his crew do?
The moist air was refreshing to him, after breathing the dry and recycled air of the hab and the vac-suit. The dim lights after the sun went down, and the smell of the soil under him gave him some comfort. He hovered over the rows of stunted potato stems, with his helmet and gloves dangling at his side. Occasionally he would sink down to the floor and run his fingers through the soil. This was his getaway, his one quiet place, where he could let his worries melt away. This was the real reason he liked coming here.
But today he felt none of it. He dug deeper into the soil, trying to feel the size of the tubers and gauge how much they’ve grown. He was breathing heavy. The whole operation, his career and his crew’s, hinging on the size of the damned potatoes. His heart was pounding. He could feel sweat dripping from his face and slowly falling to the ground.
It wasn’t just the crops. There was a sense of panic that rose in him. He wouldn’t find buyers for these crops, even if they were ready today. The prices kept falling and his expenses kept churning away his reserves. What was his plan? A financial plan. That’s what he needed, but he never really knew how to make one. He could feel his lungs trying to expand, and yet he couldn’t fill them.
“Keep it together, Diggs”, he whispered to himself, thinking he had not had a panic attack since he was in his twenties. His breath was wheezing and the edges of his field of view grew dark. Something was wrong. He finally gave up on the endless spiralling thoughts about money and guilt, and a certain calm came over him, as his breath seemed to stop altogether. It was weird, he thought calmly, to die in a greenhouse, of all places. He was bent forward, and his arms gave way. His body, weighing as much as a handful of stunted potatoes in the weak gravity of Adalia Prime, sank slowly to the ground. He felt the moist soil against his cheek. It wasn’t nearly as horrible a way to die as you could imagine, he barely managed to think.
He felt himself lifted up. Carried away from the plants, his arms and legs tingling and numb, the image of the greenhouse tunnel growing more distant and dim. He felt himself float down gently to the hard metal floor of the bioreactor entrance hall, with a loud bang that he didn’t even feel as he hit the floor. An angel stood over him. She had a round aura surrounding her face, with lights flashing all around it, nearly blinding him. She bent towards him, as if to take him away from this desolate wasteland, and into greener pastures. He could barely see, but noticed she drew a beautiful silhouette. Pretty cheekbones, he thought vaguely. He heard the rushing of air, like the flapping of great wings, or the sound of pressure doors sliding and air cycling above him. He felt the cool breeze on his face, it tasted sweet.
“Breath, Diggs! Damn it, just breathe!” She said. He did what she asked. “Good, deep breaths. I can’t let you die in one of my buildings, boss. I would never find another job.”
