Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The soul farm is in Prime Material, which is where all the worst buildings are, behind a gate that says AGRICULTURAL SUBSIDIES (YOUR FRIENDS IN FEELINGS LLC), and it looks like a barn, and the barn is the only part of it that is a lie, because everything inside the gate is a barn, and the barn is real, and the crop is real, and the crop is tended, and the tending is done by hand.
That is the detail that I have not been able to put down since we got out, and I am going to lead with it because it is the detail that makes rung seven different from every rung below it: souls are not mined. Souls are farmed. They are sown, weeded, watered, watched, and reaped on a schedule, and the people who do the tending are employees of a subsidised agricultural concern, they have badges and shifts and a break room, and they believe, in the way that everyone in every Corporate building believes, that they are doing good work.
The intake is at the north end: souls arrive by courier from every dimension, in crates, small crates, no bigger than a bread bin, each one labeled with a designation and a content class, and the labels are handwritten, because a soul cannot be typed onto a label, a soul has to be copied by a person onto a card, and somebody in that building sits at a desk and writes SOUL, DORMANT, SOURCE: [designation] by hand, forty hours a week, and takes a lunch break, and I want to find that person more than I want to find almost anyone in this story, because that person is doing the most human work in the building and the work is the crime, and both of those are true and neither cancels the other.
I have that desk in my head the way you keep a room you were only in once: the stack of blank cards squared to the edge of the table, the ruler held down with the heel of one hand so the line stays straight, the scratch of a nib on card stock, and the quiet, which was not a quiet of people being careful, it was a quiet of people being on time. Nobody in that building raised a voice. I have worked in buildings like that, and I can tell you that raising your voice is what costs you the job, and looking up is what costs you the noticing, and they will trade the second away for the first every time, and the trade is the whole building in one sentence.
We got in through the orchard. (Zephyr phased the fence line; BUSINESS BUSINESS INC. is listed on the gate's permit as an agricultural consultancy, which is the funniest thing that has happened in this book and I am not permitted to find it funny in this chapter.) The orchard is where the crop grows: rows of crates in the open air, under lamps that are not lamps, and Luminara stopped at the gate and said, without lowering her camera:
"They're lights. Each one is a person's light. I can see all of them."
"How many?" I asked.
She counted for a long time. "In this field alone. Three thousand."
A1 ran the rung-seven reading from the fence line and gave me the second number without my asking, because he had learned by then that the second number is what I want: the crop is not fuel and not currency and not a component in anything Corporate sells upward. Rung seven is inventory for the Simplification. A soul, properly farmed, is the seed-stock for a numbered employee: when the Simplification flattens a reality, the beige cubicle farms it builds have to be staffed, and staff have to come from somewhere, and the somewhere is here, dormant, in crates, in an orchard behind a gate that says AGRICULTURAL SUBSIDIES, sown years in advance by a corporation that does not build anything without first owning the parts.
"Forty thousand realities," A1 said. "Staffed. From here. This is the warehouse that makes the pilot possible, and I want you to understand that everything we have printed so far is downstream of this field, including the timeline, including the ladder, including every name we have ever found in a bottom drawer."
The tender's name was Ansel. He was sixty, he had a badge and a watering can and a card that read FIELD OPERATIONS (SOUL), and he found us at the second row, because he had been watching us for four minutes with the patience of a man who had watched a lot of people come through a lot of gates, and he said:
"You're the ones who print."
"We're the ones who print," I said.
"Then you'd better walk faster than they do," Ansel said, "because the reaping crew comes at six and it is five forty, and I have wanted somebody to walk faster than the reaping crew for eleven years, and I would like to see it done."
He was watering while he said it, and he did not stop to say it, because stopping would have cost the schedule its look. The can was galvanized and dented at the shoulder, and the spout had been mended with something that was not galvanized. His badge hung on a lanyard gone soft at the fold. The gloves he wore were the thin kind, the kind you wear when the work is delicate, and the work was delicate, and he was the only person in that orchard who appeared to know it.
He showed us. That is the whole infiltration: we were not clever, we were shown. Ansel walked us down the rows with his watering can, and the crew at the intake did not look up, because a man with a watering can walking the rows is the most ordinary sight in that building, and ordinary is the only camouflage that has ever worked anywhere, and we walked behind a man doing his job, and the job was tending three thousand souls, and the man had been doing it for eleven years, and the eleven years are the part I cannot write without stopping.
Because Ansel was not a monster and Ansel was not a victim. Ansel was a tender, and he had been hired through a staffing agency that had a name, and the staffing agency had a contract with a shell, and the shell had a form, and the form's grounds field said AGRICULTURAL LABOR (SEASONAL), and Ansel had read that form on his first day and had signed it, and he had signed it because he needed the work, and he had kept the work because the work kept him near the crop, and what he did with the eleven years was this:
He wrote down every designation that came through.
Not to us. Not to anyone. On cards, in his own hand, in the same hand that wrote the labels, a second ledger, the tender's ledger, tucked under the break room's water cooler, forty hours a week of a man committing the crime of keeping his own record, and when we reached the water cooler he took the box out and handed it to me and said:
"There's four thousand of them. I copied them by hand. I don't know what you do with four thousand names in a dimension of garbage, but I have been told you print things, and I have been told that printing is a form of nothing, and I am telling you that a man with a card and a pen is a form of something, and I would like it to be something."
The box was a stationery box, gray once, the kind with a lid that fits over the base, and it had sat under that water cooler long enough that the floor around it showed a clean square where the box had been, and the clean square was the only clean floor in the room, and I looked at the square longer than I looked at the box, because the square is what eleven years of not being asked looks like when you finally move the thing nobody asked about.
"We print them," I said. "All four thousand. In the issue."
"That's what I was told you'd say." He looked at the box. "I'd like to see it. I'd like to see one issue where the names are in it. I've got a niece in Prime Material who reads you, she prints you at work, she's had a designation amendment over it, she's fine, she's fine, she says to tell you she's fine, she says you'd ask."
"We ask," Luminara said.
"She says you do." Ansel put the watering can down. "Right. You've got what you came for. There's a batch in the north crates that came in this week and hasn't been sown, and a soul that hasn't been sown can still be carried out, and the crates are light, and there are forty-seven of them, and the cart by the gate is for the harvest crew and the harvest crew comes at six, so if you are going to take forty-seven souls out of my field you should take them now and you should take the cart, and I will tell the harvest crew the cart was taken for maintenance, and the crew will believe me, because I have said it before."
"You have done this before?"
"No," Ansel said. "I have wanted to before. There's a difference and the difference is eleven years."
We had eighteen minutes, and Ansel spent them the way he spent everything, which was on schedule. He took us the long way round the orchard, because the long way passes no door, and he walked at the pace of a man who is not late for anything, and we matched it, because matching a pace is the easiest camouflage there is, and behind us the lights held their rows, one to a crate, three thousand of them, and not one of them went out while we walked, and I checked, and checking was the whole of my job for eighteen minutes.
We took the cart. Forty-seven crates, light in our arms, Luminara's light shield over the whole load, Zephyr walking point, A1 rolling at the gate with the green light off, Clive on the cart's handle, and Ansel at the gate with his hand on the permit that says AGRICULTURAL SUBSIDIES, and the permit read the time as five fifty-six, and the reaping crew came at six, and at five fifty-eight Ansel said:
"Go. Walk behind the cart the way you walked behind me and nobody looks twice, and take the road left at the water tower, and don't come back for me."
"Ansel..."
"I've got four thousand names under a water cooler and a niece who prints you at work," he said. "That's the ledger. I'm the ledger's tender. You're the publication. Go on."
We went. The cart went, the forty-seven went, the shield went, and at the road left at the water tower I turned around, because I am a reporter and I turned around, and I watched the reaping crew come through the north gate at six o'clock precisely, six figures, no van, no clipboard, because rung seven does not need a clipboard, it needs a schedule, and the schedule said six, and at six the crew walked into the orchard past the water cooler where a box of four thousand names sat under a man who had kept them for eleven years, and I was two hundred meters away, and I turned around, and I could not see what happened next, and I am not going to invent it, because inventing is what Corporate does with people it does not want to account for.
Ansel did not come out.
The tender's ledger came out. The box came out with us, in the cart, four thousand designations in a man's hand, and the box is in this issue in full, printed across eleven pages, in A1's kerning, and under the box, on the front page, one line:
FOUR THOUSAND SOULS PASSED THROUGH THIS MAN'S HANDS AND HE COPIED EVERY ONE BY HEART. THE BOX IS HIS. THE NAMES ARE THEIRS. THE FIELD IS STILL OPEN.
We got forty-seven souls out and we did not get Ansel, and the Ledger's rule about not netting has never been harder to keep, because forty-seven is a number and Ansel is a person and the arithmetic of this chapter is designed to make you add them, and I am not adding them, and the forty-seven are in crates in camp tonight and they have not been woken, because waking a soul requires a form we do not have and a rite we do not know and probably the watering can of a man who is not coming back, and they sit in camp, light in crates, and Luminara photographs them because she is the only one who can see them glow, and the photographs are in the plates, and every one of them glows differently, and no two are the same color, and that is the entire argument of this book in eleven photographs: three thousand in a field, forty-seven in our camp, and not one of them the same light, and a corporation that has decided they are interchangeable seed-stock has not once looked at the crop, because looking at the crop is what makes it impossible to reap, and nobody in that building has looked at the crop in eleven years except a man with a watering can who wrote down what he saw.
The evidence went out in Issue Three's final section: the labels, the manifests, the orchard's gate permit, the tender's box, Ansel's badge (he had given it to me at the gate, taking it off and putting it in my hand the way you hand over a set of keys, and the badge reads ANSEL, FIELD OPERATIONS (SOUL), and it is on the front page, and it is the first photograph Luminara has ever taken that she refused to caption, and she said, when I asked, "Caption it yourself. You were there. I'll take the photograph of you deciding.")
I decided. The caption reads: HE WAS THE LEDGER. THE LEDGER IS NOW US.
And in the Ledger itself, the entry for this issue, which I have written and rewritten four times and which I am printing in its fourth version because the fifth would be a lie:
---
LOSS LEDGER 7 Sidebar. Kept by Pixel Paradox. Rung seven.
RECOVERED:
- Forty-seven (47) unsown souls, in crates, in camp, un-woken. Held. Not ours: held in trust, provenance pending, and pending is where they stay until we know the rite or find the tender. - One (1) tender's ledger, four thousand (4,000) designations, hand-copied over eleven years. Printed in full. This is the largest single recovery in the history of this publication and it is entered below the loss line because of what it cost. - Evidence: gate permit, intake manifests, label samples, Luminara's orchard plates. All printed. All filed. All true.
NOT RECOVERED:
- Ansel. Field Operations (Soul), eleven years, watering can, card and pen. Walked us out at five fifty-eight. Did not come out at six. Status: OPEN, and I am aware that OPEN is the word I use for a man carrying a box in Prime Material, and I am aware that this is not the same, and I am not going to pretend it is, and I am not going to close it, and I am not going to write what I saw from two hundred meters, because I did not see it, and a reporter who writes what she did not see is a pamphlet from Your Friends In Feelings LLC, and we are not that, and we never will be. - Three thousand (3,000) souls in the orchard, still sown, still tended by whoever comes now. The field is still open.
CARRIED FORWARD (unchanged):
- Verdantia's eleven names, printed, unmourned by any register. - A1's 4 a.m. pour: 489. - Three held jars: unopened. - Dolma's empty grounds field: unanswered. - M.: OPEN, week eleven. - Piper Chen: gray box. - Barry Kowalski: OPEN. Twenty-two months. We have stopped being able to tell you whether the lamp still changes, because the office-supply node that told us has been wiped, and the node does not remember, and we do, and the cost of being the only one who remembers is that the remembering never gets to stop.
ITEMS WE ARE COUNTING: forty-nine, and one of them is a man with a watering can, and forty-eight of them are not added to him, because he is not an item, he is the ledger's tender, and the Ledger does not tender, it counts, and counting him as one is the smallest thing I have ever done to a person who asked me to print his names.
Loss Ledger, Issue Three, entry 7 of 40.