You are the most prolific farmer in federation space. Today marks the sprouting of your two-trillionth concurrent ear of corn. The local news operation sent a crew to your cottage in the centre of the field to ask you about it.

BY MADI CYR

IMAGE BY MEAHA CAUDLE-CHOI

You tell them how you have it automated, that it has been the same since your grandfather redesigned the system in ‘88. You stay humble, while making clear that the idea to replicate the process somewhere less inhabited than Earth was entirely yours. You talk about the festival the farming colony is holding in your honour this evening. Ironically, they’ve imported corn from off-world to serve. You’re pretty sure it’s because they don’t want to mess up your numbers. The reporter laughs. 

It’s more corn than anyone could ever eat. Mostly, corn gets fed to livestock, you explain. Around 40 per cent goes to other farmers in the system, who feed it to their livestock. Entire planetary economies subsist on the corn your machines grow. Another big chunk goes to fuel. Your machines are completely autonomous.  

There’s something you don’t tell the reporter, though. You’ve been losing machines. They’re not tracked by location; in a field this large, they form entire nomadic societies to survive. A few weeks ago, one of them set up camp within eyeshot. You sat out on the roof and watched its stilts go up, assembling the portable preservation and processing equipment a few feet off the ground so as not to trample any produce. They return to the storehouse about four times a year. If they were any smarter, they would go to war with each other. It’s a blessing that all they want to do is grow corn.  

Regardless, location data for each worker would be impossible to stream back to your cottage and even harder to monitor. You always know when one isn’t coming back, though. 

In the early days, when the local star hit the lowest valley of your orbit around it, the workers would get too hot to function around the middle of the day. You set up an alert on your phone: each time one of them got too hot to move, it would let you know. Back when you had about 200,000 acres, you would trudge out into the field for a day or two with your eyes peeled, repair the bot once you found it, and make the trek back.  

Your grandfather used to walk the fields. Once, you got separated from him. Too short to see over the stalks at the time, you panicked. There is no meaningful distinction between one place and another deep in the field. You just drive now, trying to ignore the trampled corn when you use it to find your way out of the field. 

That was then. Now, even during the planet’s winter, hundreds at a time, the workers will heat up, stop working, and stop transmitting altogether. You asked a few of your friends what this could mean before you understood yourself. Since you found out, you haven’t told anyone else. 

Part of your field is on fire. Your field is roughly four times the size of the great state of Texas. You have no idea where the fire is.  

Your home is an homage to your grandfathers. Your grandmother has a scar across her right wrist. The plastic cover of a family photo album burned her arm. They learned a lesson from that. When you helped re-plant that spring, a red line was painted in a circle, 12 feet away from the nearest building. The cottage was rebuilt in keeping with modern fireproofing standards. The machines were rebuilt to operate without their failure-prone ethanol generators.  

12 feet is about 12 rows, depending on the crops. The solar-only machines broke down more often. These things combined created significant losses. The new cottage was ugly. The fireproof siding was modeled against something like the old wood boards, but the plastic molding process lost enough detail to make the whole thing look like a dollhouse. 

Your grandfather’s home was a revival of some sort when it was built. The copy, like the original, is either all wood or mostly wood. The architect enjoyed flipping through those old photo albums with you. She said it ‘harkened back’ to the former glory of some humble farmer such as yourself. It would burn down in an instant if any part of it caught fire. In the past, a candle set a curtain on fire, and you have not lit a real candle since.  

Your machines run off a mixture of solar and ethanol, processing their fuel out in the fields wherever they need it, just like the old ones. A few times a day, when the shipments come back from various groups, you inspect the leaves, looking for traces of smoke. Maybe, in their infinite capacity for self-sacrifice on behalf of corn, a worker could have plucked a singed ear from the edge of the burn. It would have to be perfect; too dead, and the ear would be mulched, not to mention a burned worker never made it back to deliver, but if any of them came out just barely blackened, you could find out where the fire was. You could get that machine to replay its last program. You could follow it to the fire. 

Fire can be unpredictable. Every week, like clockwork, the planet’s heavens open up and drop a few inches of rain onto most of the field. It is almost the perfect place to grow corn. Yet, week after week, you lose more and more workers to the fire. 

You have become resigned, in a way. By the time you know where the fire is, it will likely be too big to put out. You take some comfort in the borders between yourself and the neighboring farms, but not much.  

Early in the morning, while you finish your first cup of coffee and second cigarette, you stare down at the edge of the crop from your porch. At the front of your home, there is a 12-foot gravel driveway between the wood sticking out of your foundation and the nearest stalk. At the edges of the house, there is barely an inch. 

The one saving grace, you think, is that corn tends to burn at a fairly controlled rate. If the fire is at the edge of the field–which could be one explanation as to why you haven’t seen any singed corn–you estimate you have about a year left if the rains keep up as they have. 

It’s not around the edges, though. That was the first place you checked. The field–the size it is right now–can be circumnavigated in about a week. You have no idea how long you have left. You’ve thought about moving, but then what would you do? There would be questions. People would panic. No, best to stay.  

In the meantime, though, all that stands between you and annihilation is the speed at which corn burns, and the rains.  

You regret not planting more corn. 

Madi Cyr is a graduating Humber Journalism student and fiction writer fascinated with existential horror, labour politics, and niche online micro-communities.

Image: Meaha Caudle-Choi, Orange and Vessels, oil paint on canvas, 2019.

Edited for publication by Haley Bentham, as part of the Professional Writing and Communications Program.

The HLR Spotlight is a collaboration between the Faculty of Media & Creative Arts and the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Innovative Learning at Humber College in Toronto, Ontario. This project is funded by Applied Research & Innovation.