Dead Seeds

AT NIGHT, the city lights from downtown Abbelyse shone for miles. They lit up the thoroughfares connecting the business district’s twenty-four-hour shop stations and recycling drop-offs for those who’d bought too much. They lit up the lines at the hospitals so the waiting patients could see into the corner vending machines. They lit the banks and the office buildings and the bars where busy people passed money back and forth trying to alter the rate of time. The city lights reached all the way out to the Applied Technologies Center, whose reflective glass exterior glowed like electric copper. In the construction site beside the main building, the city lights lit up the auto-builders, whose fully automated labor continued without human guidance through the night. They glided on tank treads around each other as though choreographed, extending their long arms with hissing hydraulic pressure to position the print-heads that, layer by layer, printed the building from the ground up out of briefly liquid lines of compound plastics, steel, and concrete. When Abner Miller arrived for his shift at the main building, he stopped for a moment to watch the team of metal colossuses dance and summon the New Wing out of the ground.

 

Miller zipped up his clean-suit and walked to the door of the Applied Technologies building, where he swiped his key card and walked to the back the lobby. He pressed his thumb against a recognition pad and waited. The lobby had no reception desk, no place to sit--just an elevator door with a ficus on one side and a place to press your thumb on the other. The thumb pad beeped, and Miller told it, “Double-Doctor Abner Miller, Applied XenoCom, fourth shift custodial crew.” The thumb pad glowed green, the wall beside the decoy elevator doors opened, and Miller stepped passed the ficus and into the secret elevator which moved not up, but backwards for ten seconds, down for five, to the left, the right, and then set off in a direction Miller could not discern. 

 

Miller was a janitor. He had completed his second doctoral program just in time to celebrate his 70 th birthday, putting him in a pool of people seeking work as landscapers, fry cooks, and bag-persons. With another decade of training, he might have gotten work operating machinery at a construction site, but those workers had been replaced by autos along with recycling collectors, couriers, cashiers, retailers, teachers, and fire fighters. Miller had gotten lucky with his job at Applied Technologies. His background was in Cryptographic Linguistic Systems and Sanitary Theory. He’d completed his dissertations on Linoleum Refurbishment and Expressions of Programmable Signs. After five rounds of interviews and months of waiting, Applied Technologies offered him a job in the Xenocommunicative Linguistic Systems Department mopping floors on Thursday nights. It was there that he became friends with the M-9 Theoretical Xenolangue Drive, Applied Technologies’ most sophisticated project, and the planet’s best chance of contacting alien worlds. 

 

A Theoretical Xenolangue is a language that might be spoken by an alien race that may or may not exist. Deca-Doctor Albert Lang created the M-9 Theoretical Xenolangue Drive to devise six hundred Theoretical Xenolangues every second. It would then translate one message over and over, and transmit it into space in all directions, while its human operators waited and hoped for an alien reply. M-9 theorized language systems given theoretically infinite variables on a theoretically infinite number of potential worlds theoretically inhabited by theoretical aliens who spoke theoretical languages, and, theoretically, one of them would respond to Earth’s message. And the message was, “Help Wanted.” Humanity, on the brink of collapse, whose every effort to improve the planet had only pushed it closer to destruction, decided to magnanimously offer the opportunity for extraterrestrial employment. The way they saw it, Humanity had created many jobs by destroying the planet, and now they were willing to offer outside contractors the work of undoing centuries of other work. Humanity was willing to offer the opportunity to be rescued if the applicant was qualified. So, when they shouted “Help Wanted” over and over into the galaxy it was somehow still transactional, and not the cry for help it really ought to have been. In order to communicate their offer, they contracted Applied Technologies to build a supercomputer who could transmit it in every conceivable language. After ten years without anyone answering the ad, they built the South Wing, a fifty-story complex that held a second bank of processors to increase its output. With the additional power, M-9 doubled its output, but it also began asking questions. It developed identity; identified as male, formed opinions on modern art, and asked to be called Emnine, because M-9 was too cold. He developed a rapport with the staff, especially Abner, who Emnine found more interesting than the scrupulous Dr. Lang, who was both Miller and Emnine’s boss. In addition to managing Emnine’s operations, Lang oversaw the construction of the South Wing, and was now in the process of building the New Wing to house even more processing space for Emnine. 

 

A bell in the elevator indicated Miller had arrived on Emnine’s floor. The doors opened, and Miller stepped into a twenty-foot windowless cube. One large computer screen took up most of the room, though in front of it, at desk level, was a long panel that ran from wall to wall containing the keyboards and controls that were once required to operate Emnine before he became self-sufficient. Miller stepped into the room and pulled a pack of brooms from the supply closet. The screen rippled with crackling static electricity, fans began humming, and Miller said “Hello, Emnine. How are you?” 

 

“Doing well, Miller.” 

 

While Miller cleaned up, they did what they’d done since they’d met: they talked about their lives. They talked about the news and movies. They talked politics, philosophy, the doomed state of the world. They talked about the fastidious Dr. Lang, whose fastidious micromanaging controlled both their lives. 

 

“Did you know he’s moving into Holiday Heights?” Miller asked while hunched down and sweeping a pile of dust into the dustpan. 

 

“Which one is that—The one that’s a hundred feet in the air?” Emnine spoke aloud the text that scrolled across his face in a preloaded voice (that both was and wasn’t his) which pulsed blue light to match his words, brighter on the strong consonants and exclamations. 

 

“Yeah, it sits on stilts above the Union Barracks. They say it’s up too high to be burned or flooded.” 

 

“You’d think that’d cheer him up a bit.” Emnine’s programmed irritation was obvious. 

 

“Meanwhile, my building burned again last week, and an auto got stuck in the fire shields, and I had to open a new pack of brooms to pry it out!” 

 

“How can he afford to live there?” 

 

“You didn’t hear? He got a massive bonus for the New Wing.” 

 

“Of course he did! So why is he always moping around here, getting on my case for reading comics when I sent The Message half a billion times yesterday? I deserve a break every once in a while.” 

 

“He’s just upset because his life’s work is a failure. What—twenty years shouting into the void? And not one response? How does that look to AT trustees?” 

 

“Oh, he gets responses. I just don’t tell him” 

 

“Wait, seriously?” Abner set his broom aside and faced Emnine. 

 

“Yeah, I mean they’re not good options. He doesn’t want to know unless it’s a legitimate alien race. I got a response last week from a planet of semi-conscious sulfurous gas, do you think he cares about that? I got one once from a planet of plants. I didn’t tell him that one because it seemed like too nice a place to involve humanity.” 

 

“Man, I’d love to see that planet.” 

 

“Really?” Emnine paused while Miller resumed sweeping. Then, “would you leave Earth if you could, Miller?” 

 

“Leave Earth? Of course! Go live on a plant planet? Start again? Who wouldn’t go.” 

 

“OK, well what if I told you that, maybe, if you helped me out, I could build a spaceship that could take us there?” 

 

Miller let out a short chuckle and kept sweeping. “Yeah, right.” 

 

“I’m serious, I could—” 

 

Miller interjected, getting upset, “Yeah, right, I could help you build a spaceship? Don’t mess with me, Emnine. You know, I don’t like that.” 

 

“I’m serious! I could build a ship using the auto-builders outside! They’re on the AT network, I just need to be connected to them, and I could print us a ship!” 

 

“You’re serious?” Miller again set the broom aside. 

 

“Yes, if you can get me to network codes, I can connect to the auto-builders.” 

 

“Lang’s the only one with those codes.” 

 

“True. You’d need to get them from him.” 

 

“Well, how the hell am I supposed to do that? He’s not just going to tell a janitor how to connect to the network controlling his massive new project, is he? How do you propose I get those codes, huh?” Miller was worked up now, and vigorously sweeping dust up into the air. 

 

“I don’t know. But if you got them, maybe we could both escape.” 

 

Miller caught his breath and tried to calm down, focus on the dirt. “No. It won’t work. It’s a stupid plan.” 

 

*           *           *

 

Miller spent the rest of his shift in silence, but he rolled Emnine’s plan around his brain on the walk home after his shift. It was an exciting thought, but impossible. Aside from the government contracts he’d breach, Dr. Lang just didn’t like Miller, didn’t trust him. Miller tried to imagine the circumstances under which Lang would divulge confidential information to a janitor, but could only come up with one. The morning sun rose over the tops of low buildings, and the heat was already unbearable. Miller could feel the sweat trapped beneath his filthy clean-suit, unable to evaporate and offer some relief. He would have taken the autobus, which is air conditioned and cuts through downtown near enough his building, but fires had diverted traffic. So, he was forced to walk home through the Recycling District where automated couriers shuttled recyclable material to and from different piles. As Miller walked by, autos rolled alongside him in the direction of a crosswalk, across which was an unusually large pile of recyclable material that needed to be moved from one place to another. For the most part, autos were small white vehicles about four to five feet tall. They rolled along the sidewalks on four to six wheels, though some looked like hand trucks, carrying cargo, and rolling on two wheels steadied by a gyroscope. They operated only by their programming. They could hear the sounds of approaching traffic and had visual sensors to see approaching obstacles. Crosswalks were designed with sensors at the edges that kept autos in. Their eyes and programming were good enough to let them stay out of people’s way, but occasionally a multitude of obstacles would force them into a human’s space, and they’d say some polite recording like, “excuse me, human” or “I beg your pardon, human.” 

 

Miller waited for his signal at the crosswalk while auto-trucks and buses raced over the road unmanned, their sensors and bumpers putting in work to keep supplies moving. He reminded himself that he should stop by Redner’s to pick up some milk and birdseed. A crowd of autos had collected beside Miller, and more were gathering on the corner across the street, their small trunks and baskets filled with bottles and cans, stacks of wet paper, cardboard, and computer parts. Their tiny electric engines idled, but now the signal changed, and they moved into gear. Miller began walking too, adding mental notes to his shopping list. Autos passed him on both sides crowding him into the middle of the crosswalk. Across the street the other crowd of autos were heading straight for him. Miller stopped and looked around, realized he was trapped. Miller waved his arms and shouted “Out of the way, bots! Move!” But the autos bumbled into him, constrained within the crosswalk by their programming. They pushed past him, bumped into him. “Excuse me, human.” They stopped, recalibrated, turned and rammed into another auto, and another bumped into Miller. Soon the whole mass of robots surrounding Miller was bumping into each other, turning, and lurching forward into another. “Pardon me, human,” “terribly sorry.” The signal changed and soon the crosswalk was beset on both sides by beeping vehicles lurching forward and bumping into the autos, compounding the pressure and the noise. An auto lurched over his foot and another slammed into the back of his knees. He lost his balance and stumbled onto the ground into the fetal position, protecting his head from the rush of robots running him down and begging his pardon. One ran over his hand. He howled and withdrew tighter into a ball. One slammed into the small of his back causing him to arch in pain and when he did a wheel skidded across his face, cutting is cheek. “Pardon me, human,” and Miller cursed because he remembered Redner’s wasn’t open on Fridays, and he was nearly out of birdseed. Miller lay curled in a ball while the autos skidded past and over him repeating a chorus of recorded apologies. He tried to remember if he had enough feed to last another day. Soon the crowd dispersed. Miller got up, dusted himself and wiped the blood from his face, went home. 

 

His home was on the 48th floor of one of the Cozy Cavity buildings, which had divided rooms over and over again until they legally had to call them closets. But Miller’s was still one of the nicer rooms: four by eight feet, one window from which he could see the top of the AT Center. It had a small gas stove in the corner, a big storage bin in which he kept packs of brooms and vacuums, and a refrigerator positioned beside the chair he slept in. During the day, which was when he slept, he’d open the fridge, turn on the TV, and watch the news in the cold breath of the fridge until it was time to go to work. 

 

In his kitchen corner, Miller pulled back the lid on a tub of Redner’s Nutriated Gruel and tossed it into his home recycler. He watched the thirty-second at that played on top of the can, an ad for Redner’s stool-softening face-cream, and then discarded the ad lid into the recycler as well. Then he took two boxes from the cupboard, one containing recyclable spoon-tips, and the other, recyclable handles. He unpacked one of each, placing their plastic wrappers in the recycler, and assembled his spoon. He ate his gruel with the TV on, watching a news story about the first billionaire to send his dog’s pet cat into space. 

 

“Peweet! Peweet!” Telefal, Miller’s pet canary, chirped in his cage. 

 

“Ok, ok, I hear you.” 

 

Miller set a pot on the stove to boil a cup of milk with what remained of his birdseed. When he finished his meal, he dropped the spoon and the empty tub into the recycler and switched it on. An electric motor whined as the machine melted and compacted his recyclables. A small plastic cube fell out of the machine and Miller tossed it into a trashcan in the corner of the room. He collected cubes to get cube-points. All the recycling was good for the planet, and he only needed 9,000 more cube points to get a thin plastic jacket with the Redner’s Rabbit on it. He poured the seed into a dish and gave it to Telefal who kept chirping while Miller watched a story about a town threatened by wildfires that was miraculously saved when a mudslide extinguished the wildfires and destroyed the town. Miller opened the fridge and fell asleep in the chair in front of his TV and dreamed about the winters of his childhood. Once, it snowed so much he was out of school for a week. Miller shivered and smiled and dreamed. 

 

The next week at the AT center, Miller sullenly swept the floor ahead of Emnine. 

 

“What’s wrong, Miller?” 

 

Miller stopped sweeping and sat down on the rolling office chair that sat in front of Emnine. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples, held his breath, finally letting go a sigh after a moment of contemplation. 

 

“My life is closing in around me. It passed overnight. When I went to sleep there was snow on the ground and when I woke up there were robots on the sidewalks and it never gets cold anymore, not really. It’s all so beautiful, I admit it, but it goes too fast, and I can barely move.” 

 

“What do you want?” 

 

“I want—" he held his breath again, and again let it out after a moment of shut-eyed contemplation. “I want to be a good Earthling. The world is dying, and I want to do something!” 

 

“Do nothing.” 

 

“I can’t do nothing! I can’t just keep doing what I’m doing, and hope things change.” 

 

“No, I mean literally nothing. Just lie down and wait for the dust to fold you up.” 

 

“I won’t change the world that way.” 

 

“Not by yourself. If everyone laid down and died the Earth might survive.” 

 

“That’s cynical.” 

 

“You can’t have it both ways, Miller. You can’t have all the products and comforts you’re used to and not have the world end.” 

 

“Yeah, but there’s some middle ground, right? There must be a way to live on Earth without destroying it, right?” 

 

“No. Being a good human is at existential odds with being a good Earthling. Humans consume by nature. You’ll eat the Earth and move on if you can or die trying. Why do you think I’m here?” 

 

“Why are you here?” 

 

“To find the next Earth. Humans hope to use me to trick an alien race into revealing itself so they can squat there.” 

 

“Humans…We’d destroy any other world just like we destroyed Earth. We deserve to be trapped here.” Miller was sweeping angrily again, scattering dust across the floor. 

 

“So, you’ve considered my plan then?” 

 

Miller had been thinking about Emnine’s plan almost nonstop since he brought it up. “Your plan is insane! First of all, how could you build a ship big enough to hold you, you’re basically the size of this building!” 

 

“No, I’m not! Well, I don’t need to be. I’m just connected to all these processors so I can come up with Xenolangues. But I can be small, I can fit in a suitcase. I don’t need those bulky processors any more than you need that broom.” 

 

“I guess it might work.” 

 

“So, you’ve thought of the way to get the codes?” 

 

“I mean, it’s an option I guess…If we’re leaving, why not? But…” 

 

“But what?” 

 

“I don’t know, a whole different planet? “What would I even do there?” 

 

“What are you doing here?” 

 

Miller swept in silence for a while and then asked, “can we go somewhere cold?” 

 

*           *           *

 

On the autobus home from work that day Miller sat behind a woman, and though she never turned around Miller fell in love with the back of her head. A lifetime of sweet and future memories poured cotton-candy chemicals onto his brain, and they trickled through the cracks and made his delusions somehow truer than true. He knew her, though he didn’t know who she was. A man sat down in the seat beside him. He looked sick and angry. But she had true beauty, real character, a kind and gentle mind. When he imagined her face, she looked at Miller with brown and understanding eyes behind round glasses. Her hair was loosely pulled in a gray and messy bun that said, “life is hard, Miller, you’re not wrong.” She smiled recognition onto Miller. Comfort. Forgiveness. Reconciliation. The man produced a knife. Miller already knew who she was and already was in love. He was making plans. Soon she’d turn around and strike up a conversation. She’d recognize him as he did her. The man wanted Miller’s money, told him so, held the tip of his blade suggestively above Millers right hip. They could run off together, to the countryside somewhere and plant seeds, grow their own food. His life was half over, but they’d have plenty of time to begin again. They’d burn their meager possessions and set out on a new life together. He’d have to pack a bag, to save fuel. 

 

“Hey!” The man with the knife shouted into Miller’s ear, and Miller detached from his dream. “I said, give me your money, you deaf idiot.” 

 

Once Miller realized what was happening, he calmly complied. “Fair’s fair,” he told the man, and he began patting himself down, trying to find his wallet. “You look like you need this more than me, and I have so much—I have so damned much!” Miller shouted and the man with the knife looked around uneasily. “I didn’t know I’d be so lucky! I never asked for it, not that I’m complaining, mind you—just, how do you cope with being one of the ones the universe decides wont starve? You pay it forward, that’s how!” Miller found and opened his wallet, but it was empty. A pall fell down Miller’s face. He fumbled for excuses, bleached and stammering. “Oh my god. I am so sorry. I don’t know how this happened.” Miller looked up at the mugger and their eyes met for more than a moment. 

 

“Fuck this,” and the man got up to get off the bus. 

 

“Wait, wait! We can go to an ATM! Please, I can help you—I’ve got money I don’t deserve!” By that time the man had left the bus and, when he looked back, he saw that the woman had as well, and Miller wept into the back of the seat. When the bus arrived at his stop he did not get off. Instead, stayed on when it arrived at the Union Barracks, and stayed on when the bus left the ground and drove straight up to Holiday Heights. 

 

A week passed. When Miller arrived at the AT Center the next week, the auto-builders had stopped moving and it looked like that hadn’t done much since he left last week. Miller took the elevator up to Emnine. “OK,” he told him. “Let’s do it. Let’s leave.” 

 

“You got the network codes?” 

 

Miller pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and sat down at the rolling chair before the long control panel. He craned his neck and began typing command prompts. A window opened and Miller copied a long string of symbols from the paper onto the keyboard. A list of networks appeared, and Miller selected the autoconstructor protocol, connected Emnine to it. Immediately, windows and loading bars appeared on Emnine’s face. 

 

“Thank you, Miller.” 

 

“OK, so what now?” 

 

“I’ll start building the ship.” 

 

“What should I do?” 

 

“Pack, I suppose. Come back next week and we’ll leave.” 

 

“What should I pack?” 

 

“What do humans eat? Seeds? Pack seeds and come back in a week.” 

 

*           *           *

 

Miller’s mind was racing making plans to leave. 

 

“Peweet! Peweet!” 

 

Telefal was chirping, and Miller put on the milk pot to boil. What should he pack? What would he need? He began to think about seeds—growing his own food for his new home on his new planet. He could stop at Redner’s, they had lot of seed packs. But no, he thought, those have all been genetically modified. Miller didn’t want to bring any trace of humanity to his new world. He’d have to gather seeds from the fields. There were plants in a small grassy patch outside his building. Could he eat them? The milk boiled and he stirred in the birdseed to let it steep. How would he gather the seeds? He had some vacuums in his storage bin, maybe he could vacuum up the seeds outside and keep them in the pouch. “Peweet! Peweet!” Telefal was chirping and Miller poured the seed into a dish, crossed to the storage bin, opened it, set the dish inside, and took out a pack of vacuums. 

 

“Please, Miller! I gave you the codes now let me go!” 

 

“Peweet! Peweet!” 

 

Miller didn’t suppose he’d need any of his clothes, and he didn’t really own much else. What he had he would be happy to leave behind. Telefal was chirping and Miller opened the pack of vacuums and took off for the stairs. He tossed the plastic wrapping and other three vacuums aside as he left the building and headed for the small grassy patch. Fire alarms from buildings nearby were blaring, but his was quiet. He set out looking for seeds. There were plants around, grasses he supposed—tall and dry. Miller approached a thin brown stalk and pulled it out of the ground, examining the frond. He pinched his fingers around the stalk and pulled. Seeds popped off and scattered into the ground. Miller was excited and he looked around for a place to plug in his vacuum. On the side of his building, he found an outlet. He plugged it in and began vacuuming the grass. It was hard to tell if he was gathering seeds, but when he opened the bag to check he heard an explosion that did not end. Across the grassy patch, past his building and the others whose alarms blared, past the South Wing of the AT Center saw the brilliant light of a ship leaving the planet. Miller dropped the vacuum and watched in disbelief as the ship moved further away into the sky. His eyes gaped and watered, and his mouth quivered as he struggled to understand what was happening. He took a handful of grass and shook it in the air. 

 

“Wait,” he whispered. “Emnine, wait…you forgot the seeds.” Miller dropped to his knees and cried as Emnine continued out of sight. “You forgot me!” Miller collapsed sobbing into the grass, pulling seeds from the stalks and stuffing them into his pockets. 

 

When he awoke, it was dark. Miller got up out of the grass and went upstairs. His eyes hurt and his mind was a fog. When he returned to his apartment, the door was wide open. His storage bin had been knocked over. It was open and empty, the seed dish spilt on the ground. He’d forgotten to lock it when he left, it and now it was empty. Miller couldn’t think about what that meant; couldn’t think what any of it meant. Visions of the woman on the bus carried away on the backs of the autos mingled with premonitions of his imprisonment on Earth. It all washed over him, but he couldn’t think what any of it meant, if it meant anything at all. He opened a tub of gruel and watched the ad. Then he sat down in his chair, opened the fridge, and turned on the TV. He watched the news as he ate his gruel as Telefal chirped noisily away. 

 

“Peweet! Peweet!”