Chapter One

 

“James Riggins, don’t you ghost me! You pick up this call, right now!”

Jim sighed, a deep exhalation that seemed to deflate his whole being. He could feel that sigh to his very core even though he couldn’t hear it over the roar of his John Deere Cometduster 5000. He didn’t pick up the call but he didn’t hang it up either. He just let the young lady who wanted to be his girlfriend continue to chew him out on her end of the connection as he maintained a nice steady pace across his cornfield, careful to keep his tires between the rows. It was early in the season. Later on the young plants would be too tall for him to drive through here like this. As the woman’s voice became more irate in his earbuds, he watched his workforce of FarmHandy Bots as they patrolled the field, looking for any sign of cutworms, seedcorn maggots, wireworms, or billbugs. It had been a huge investment to buy a half-dozen FarmHandy Bots, but they were already keeping Jim caught up on things he’d always been behind on before. Since they’d come off the truck and he’d charged them up and turned them on, he’d actually been able to work only 10 to 12 hours a day instead of 14 to 16. A couple of them were even building that new barn he’d been planning for years but never gotten to get started.

In his earbuds, it sounded as if Missy’s anger was spent and she had emotionally shifted into other forms of persuasion. “You know, Jim. I had a really good time last night. I thought it was interesting all the tech that you’ve bought for your farm. I enjoyed the tour, except for the animal smells. Your animals are stinky, especially the pigs. But maybe you get lonely out there, working all the time, all by yourself. Maybe you should spend more time with someone who cares about you. Just something to think about, farm boy.”

Beep! The call ended. Finally, she had hung up. Jim had made it out of the cornfield and drove the tractor over to where he liked to park it, right in front of where the new barn was going up, the new barn that was going to block his view of the sprawling megacorp Good4U Foods production/packaging facility to the north of his land. The views in the other four cardinal directions weren’t that great either. Corporate operations surrounded the Riggins farm. Once, in Jim’s grandfather’s time, the county had all been family farms, handed down for generations. Not anymore. Not for many years. And not if the megacorps had their way. One or the other of them was always trying to get Jim’s farm away from him. That would end his bloodline’s legacy with that land right there. But what legacy if there are no kids to leave a legacy to? he wondered. And who am I supposed to have kids with anyway? Someone like Missy?

As soon as Jim’s feet hit the ground after getting off the tractor, his earbuds beeped again.

“Jimmy, your last call took fifteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds. Looking at your call log, I see Missy called…again.”

Only one entity since his mom had passed ever called him Jimmy.

“Well, Ophelia, what can I say? Chicks dig me.”

Jim’s personal instance of OPtimized HElper Live Interaction Assistant, aka OP.HE.L.I.A. didn’t seem amused.

“The FarmHandies are making good progress on the new barn. It should be done in about 32 hours if they work straight through the night without charging and charge when they’re done if that’s ok with you. Two of the sows in the farrowing house gave birth last night……”

Jim listened absently, mechanically, as if he, too, were a machine while Ophelia updated him on his farm’s status. His legs were sore from how many hours he’d been on the tractor and they didn’t respond to his commands to walk him over to the fence line without cramping in protest. His pained, awkward gait reminded him of the way the FarmHandies walked.

When he got to the fence, he leaned over and, with a groan, pulled up a shoot of the tall grass that grew at the base of the fence and put it between his teeth. It tasted like his land…his land, his father’s and grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s before him. He rested against the same Thinking Spot along the fence his father had used as a Thinking Spot. There, carved into the fence, from a time when his father had been courting his mother, was a crudely carved heart with “JR + AM” in it. Jim had heard that his grandfather had been very mad that the fence had been carved on. What ruined the Thinking Spot was that, these days, it wasn’t adjacent to the land of a friendly neighbor. These days it looked out on the Good4U Foods megacorp facility.

Jim stared with a frown at the smokestack that rose from the main building belching crap into the air. Fortunately, most days the wind blew it away from the Riggins farm, but not every day. Ophelia had wound down her report in Jim’s earbuds and was waiting for some kind of response from the young farmer.

“Ophie, do you think my parents would be proud of the way I run the family farm?”

This was apparently not the response that OP.HE.L.I.A. had been expecting, so there was a pause. AIs usually always knew what to say. They anticipated the probable conversational arcs ahead of time.

“Yes, Jimmy. Based on all available data I have of your parents, which includes a lot of your own personal telling me about them, yes, I believe they would be.”

“Thanks,” murmured Jim, chewing his blade of grass, staring at the megacorp facility, and realizing just how well Ophie knew him, because she didn’t talk anymore. She let him lean on the fence, in the Thinking Spot, for a long, long while.