It was difficult to decouple brand and quality. That was why the groceries from General Grocer had surprised me. The dull packaging made me think that the contents would be as well. Like the unappealing MREs that I had seen pictures of, but somehow worse because it wasn’t pre-made into a meal. Instead, as I tasted the omelette that I had spent unnecessarily long preparing—what else was I supposed to do with my time?—the fullness of the flavour surprised me. The ham pieces I sprinkled across added a smoky aroma to it. The porridge I made tasted even better than what I was used to making back on the surface. On the surface. There was something about adopting that phrase that felt not only odd, but like a capitulation. The acceptance of the culture of these people who, if all had gone well, I wouldn’t have ever met. I shook off the melancholy that came with the realisation. Despite the unexpectedly decent breakfast, I couldn’t help but feel annoyed—even indignant—at the lack of mediocrity. Yes, I had taken the effort to make it, but I had done so with Receiverist products. They had no right to be decent. I would have derived far greater satisfaction at the thought that my captors lived in mediocrity.
Irene and I had only conversed briefly yesterday. But before she had left, she told me to expect her the next morning. That I might benefit from a “guided tour” rather than wandering around like a “poor puppy”. She seemed to have a penchant for getting under my skin, but I didn’t respond to her provocations.
Restlessness was a core component of my day-to-day life. I had no illusions about my workaholism. But what kind of an academic wasn’t? What researcher doesn’t spend the vast majority of their consciousness and unconsciousness thinking about their work? What academic truly had weekends? I wasn’t sure whether research turned people restless, or restless people just naturally gravitated towards its inescapable event horizon that stretched our lives into impossible shapes. But ever since my mid-teens, I had always been that kind of person. Even when I wasn’t doing or thinking about research, I was always reading something. Often the news. Here, however, I couldn’t do that. I had no work. Perhaps taking a break from it all was a good thing, if it weren’t for the fact that I had nothing else either. No television. No computer. The handheld approximated a phone, but it was clearly designed under a different philosophy. It wasn’t a source of entertainment. And I couldn’t openly query information from it, albeit I suspected it was a constraint unique to me. This was why I had taken over twenty minutes to cook what should have been a five-minute breakfast. This was why I had laid in the bath for so long that my fingertips turned into pink prunes. And so when Irene had arrived at my doorstep, there was a sense of relief in spite of myself.
“Irene.” I nodded after opening my door.
“Alex,” Irene said. I could have sworn there was an undercurrent of mockery in her tone. “Ready to go?”
“Home? Absolutely,” I said as I closed the door behind me.
“Didn’t think you’d call Sanctuary home so quickly,” Irene said as she walked slightly ahead of me, leading the way. “Soon you’ll be calling yourself a Receiverist.”
For a split second there was a jab of panic at the implication that I would remain at Sanctuary for the rest of my life. Deciding that she must be cruelly making fun of me again, I refrained from entertaining her. And even if there was an ounce of foreboding in her words, I figured the best policy was to remain ambiguous. To pointedly not acknowledge that such a verbal proposition had ever taken place.
“Never,” I said.
Irene hummed ambiguously. After reaching the elevator, she pressed the button and waited.
“So,” I started after a few seconds of silence, “where are you taking me?”
“A couple of places,” Irene answered flatly. “Places that you wouldn’t have wandered into on your own.”
“Are you going to tell me where, exactly?”
“What would be the point of that?” Irene asked rhetorically. The elevator doors opened and she walked inside. Irene pressed the third level and the door closed. I had correctly predicted that the elevator doors would open at level three to reveal a street.
The city-esque layout felt almost familiar now. The architectural aesthetics and functionality of the buildings that paralleled the streets was undeniably forming a deeper impression on me. A character itself. I was gradually becoming more attuned to it. Small details that had seemed unquestioningly normal were now actively interrogated by my critical faculties. For instance, breakfast hour had already passed. The food court I had passed by was almost empty, save for a few lonesome customers. Yet—
“Why are all the restaurants filled to the brim?” I asked.
Irene looked back at me, bemusement etched onto her eyebrows. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“The restaurants,” I said. “Every single one that we passed, there wasn’t any vacant table. It’s nearly ten. Surely it’s not breakfast hour.”
Irene looked towards the direction of a restaurant that I nodded towards. It was called A Night In Bangladesh. A Night, implying that it wasn’t appropriate for ten in the morning.
“Oh. It’s our ticketing system,” Irene said. “Restaurants are classified as luxury services, not essential services. So while we more or less have unlimited access to food courts and groceries, that doesn’t apply to restaurants. You need to book ahead of time.”
I already had the sense that food and groceries were totally free here, but hearing it said out loud was still astounding. “Huh. Okay. But why do people book reservations at this hour?” I asked.
“Everyone wants a gourmet meal in the evening, so you’d need to book it weeks or months ahead of time. But before noon? It’s much easier. So you take what you can get.”
A couple of people riding scooters passed by us on the bridge. I looked out of the windows and into the dense forest of monoliths.
“So everything is free in this city?” I asked.
“Essentially, yes,” Irene answered.
I didn’t get it. “Then what incentive is there for people to work?”
“To contribute to something meaningful,” Irene said. “The Receiverist project.”
“A sense of altruism?” I said incredulously. “That doesn’t make sense. People consider themselves before anyone else.”
“We think differently here,” Irene said. “Everyone understands how their efforts play a role in our society. Our algorithms help with that. They make recommendations on where we can be most effective and fulfilled.”
“How do you know your algorithms are that good?” I asked. “Maybe it’s all placebo?”
“Even if that’s the case, does it really matter?”
I thought for a moment. “I suppose not.” If a system works, there wasn’t much point in questioning it. Even if it was all smoke and mirrors. In that sense, it wasn’t too different from the idea of a god. If the thought of god watching over someone can make them a better person, then that was all that mattered. The question of existence was neither here nor there. Not that God ever did me any favours, I thought wryly.
“Selfishness is also less of a thing without scarcity,” Irene continued. “People here don’t need to step over each other to get what they need. So they don’t.”
“Makes sense, I guess.”
“Also,” Irene started, but there was a moment of hesitation. As if she wasn’t sure if she should continue, but decided to since it was too late. “The determinism principle.”
That piqued my interest. “The determinism principle?”
“Receiverists are determinists,” Irene spoke, but in a quieter voice. She seemingly didn’t want to be overheard.
“Determinists? Like fate?”
“Something like that,” Irene said.
She didn’t want to elaborate further, but I pressed on. “That doesn’t make sense. If anything, the belief that everything is predetermined would absolve a selfish person of guilt about doing terrible things.”
Irene sighed. “It’s an optimistic determinism. That we’ll ultimately contribute to something greater. And therefore we have no choice but to do so.”
“But you’d need to know that for a fact, in the first place,” I challenged.
“You’ve seen the power of our predictive algorithms,” Irene said.
Again with the algorithms, I thought in exasperation. I supposed it made sense. If the algorithms were truly accurate beyond a doubt, and they proved time and time again to successfully predict my actions, then perhaps I would be a determinist too. And if they then told me that I was destined to play my part in human prosperity, then maybe—just maybe—I’d be an optimist too. I could see how most people could be convinced by this line of reasoning and end up as optimistic determinists. But not me. I was a mathematician. A probabilist. My own understanding of probability theory—of which all predictive models were based on—and its inherent inability to fully account for everything, prevented me from embracing determinism. Even if Lennox had given me a cruel firsthand account of the accuracy of their models, they were still just numbers and maths. Mere approximations of the chaos of the universe. But there was something in the way that Irene explained the determinism principle, something in her voice, that made me feel like she was leaving something out. That there was a reason why she hesitated. I wondered if she herself believed all that.
After walking through a couple of buildings, Irene took me into an elevator. She placed her handheld near the interface, received a tone, before pressing the first level. Unlike the other floors, the first three—zeroth, first and second—were highlighted with a grey. The use of Irene’s handheld confirmed my suspicions that their access was restricted. That made me feel uneasy.
“Why are the first three levels greyed out?” I asked.
“We call them the sub-base levels,” Irene said. “They form the foundations of Sanctuary. Anything from energy production to manufacturing takes place down there.”
The door opened. I found myself in the lobby of a large complex. There was no one at the reception. The large plaque situated above displayed “Crop Facility 5-7”. Irene typed away into her handheld as we stood near the reception desk.
“So,” I began, trying to fill the silence, “a farm, huh?”
Irene looked at me briefly, before looking back down at her handheld. The silence was even more uncomfortable after that. Some moments later, a man entered from a set of doors behind the reception. He wore grey overalls and a sheepish smile on his dark, slightly flushed face.
“Sorry I’m late,” the man said. “I was at the other end of the farm when I got your message.”
“José, this is Alex. Our temporary helper,” Irene said.
“Nice to meet you Alex,” the man named José said. “I’m one of the agricultural engineers around here.” He extended his hand. I looked at it for a second before I took it.
“Likewise,” I said awkwardly.
“So you came from the surface?” José asked. “Wow. Must really be something to be surrounded by so much green, huh?”
“Uh.” I didn’t quite know how to respond. “Well it depends. I guess when you’re away from the city, you might get a lot of… grass.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
José’s eyes were wide as he mouthed a silent “wow”. Irene gently cleared her throat.
“Irene asked me to take you through our crops. This way, please,” José said. He gestured to the doors he came from before leading the way.
My jaw dropped as I entered the room. It seemed absurd that José had asked me about what it was like to be surrounded by green, when its presence in this room was dense and inescapable. This place could barely be called a room. The small walkway between the dizzyingly many rows of foliage teased the immense span of the floor, and the ceiling above me was much further than I had expected. The green extended in all three dimensions. Layers upon layers of crops stacked on top of one another, with warm lights fitted beneath each layer. There was a low humming noise. Finding the source of the sound, I initially thought it was a bee flying in between the green blades. But it wasn’t that it was small, merely that it was farther than I had initially thought. A drone glided at a steady speed along a row several stacks above me.
“This is all wheat,” José said. But I had already known. The nutty aroma that voraciously engulfed my olfactory sense had given it away. “We’re one of the five farms in Sanctuary that produce wheat. The second oldest, sure, but this old guard never fails to punch above her weight every yield. That, I can promise.”
“This is… really something else,” I admitted. “This, and the other four farms, produce enough wheat for this whole city?”
“More than enough,” José said proudly as he led us through the narrow walkway. “A lot more. So much so that there are talks to repurpose the crops in two of the farms to something else. At the current rate of progress, the yield reduction from losing the two crops would be recuperated in only a few years.”
“What do you mean by progress?” I asked.
“Oh, agricultural advancements, of course,” Jose said. “Operations research into optimal farming, developments in automation, genetic modification and all that. It’s how we accomplished maturity acceleration to increase harvests.”
“That seems as impressive as it is overkill,” I remarked.
“This isn’t just for the sake of Sanctuary is it, José?” Irene asked rhetorically.
José beamed. He stuttered a little as he said, “No, definitely not. All this—” he gestured broadly with his hands—“may seem too much for one city, but it’s just a drop in the bucket required to feed the world one day. So we need to keep pushing. There’s a lot more work to be done. I’m happy to be a part of that.”
“The world? That’s one hell of an ambition.”
“You may call it an ambition, but we can’t afford to think about it like that,” José said. “It’s necessary. A bare minimum we need to meet when it happens.”
“It? What’s it?” I asked.
“The Event,” Irene said. “Calamity. The end of society as you know it.”
“And that’s when you guys will swoop right in and take the world in your welcoming arms, right?” I asked wryly.
“Exactly, my friend,” José answered with an exuberant smile, not at all detecting the cynicism in my voice. For a brief moment, I wondered what it was like to have his perspective. I felt a prick of envy. “We need to be ready. And so I’ll do my duty.”
“What is your duty?” I asked. “In here, I mean. What do you—”
“Hey, look over at that side of the farm,” José pointed towards a perpendicular path from the one we were on. There was a clear difference not only in the colour—a richer shade of green—but also in the shape. It wasn’t blades of grass anymore, but leaves.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Soybeans. One of the foundational crops. And the only other crop in this farm. We make more of that than wheat.”
“More than wheat? Really?” I asked.
“I mean, there’s a lot you can do with soy. All of the vegan meat here is soy-based. And soy also makes real meat—Receiverists!” He chuckled at his own joke.
“Did you really think that was real ham and sausage we’ve been feeding you the whole time?” Irene asked. Her voice was flat, but there was an amused twinkle in her eye.
“I couldn’t tell the difference,” I said.
“Exactly. Ninety-nine percent of the tastiness of meat comes from knowing that it’s meat,” José explained. “They still serve that stuff in some of the restaurants, but not as many since I was a kid.”
I raised an eyebrow. “So you were born here?”
“Mhm,” José hummed. “Born a Receiverist. Anyway I think I sidetracked your question earlier. Sorry. What was it? Oh right, what I do. Well, most of the time I manage and schedule drones. Aside from doing the manual work, they also constantly gather data from the crops and track thousands of metrics. I monitor that too.”
“So no farmer actually does any manual work here?” I asked.
“It depends on what you mean by manual,” José said. “The drones and machines will sometimes break down. And when they do, it’s on me to get them up and running. Assuming they break down during my shift that is. But anyway, that’s only the farming aspect of my job.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What’s the other aspect?”
“Research. I work on the genetic engineering of crops. I have a bunch of ongoing projects. Some about robustification. Some about yield maximisation. Some about both.”
I couldn’t help but be impressed by this younger man in front of me. The tour continued with José taking us through what he had called the “machine room”, where drones idled. On the way out, he said he hoped to see me around. I found it difficult to tell him that I hoped that wouldn’t be the case, so I merely thanked him.
“This is one hell of a society,” I said as I followed behind Irene.
With her hands in pockets, she turned her head to meet my eye and said, “In a good way, I hope.”
“Not really.”
Irene slowed down and I found myself beside her. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“People here don’t seem to work as a means to something else. They work as an end in itself. Sure, José may say that he works to prepare humanity for the future, but he’ll never see that. It’s a false distinction. The endless hamster wheel of work is his purpose.”
“You make it sound like we’re getting exploited,” Irene said.
“I mean, aren’t you?” I asked. “Having a sense of purpose in something so intangible as ‘preparing for some calamity in the future’ is the ultimate opium of the people. A blissful sense of contentment as you unquestioningly do the work that the algorithm—” I quoted with my fingers—“tells you to. Because it’s good for humankind.”
“As opposed to the surface world?” Irene challenged in her patented dispassionate tone, as if pointing out the blatantly obvious. “Where half the people think they’re working to ‘make it’, and the other half are working to put the bare minimum on the table? Where half the people are fervent believers of your system, while the other half are resigned cynics? Where everyone is exploited for a wage in a race to the bottom?”
I thought for a moment. “You’re not wrong,” I said. “But it’s always better to know how things are from the outset than to be lied to.”
“It seems to me that the dishonesty is up there,” Irene said. “The lie of social mobility. The lie that everything will somehow work itself out, without needing to change the way that things are being done. You’ve seen our progress. It’s tangible. And Receiverists happily contribute to it because they believe in something.” Irene struggled. “Seems like a better deal to me.”
They? I found it strange that Irene chose that pronoun. I dismissed the thought. “And yet at the end of the day, life down here is all about productivity. Maybe even more than life up there.”
“Well, that’s not entirely true,” Irene said as we turned around a corner. There was an elevator. “I think you’d be surprised at how normal things are around here.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” Irene said as she pressed the button to call the elevator.
“And what is it that you actually do around here?” I asked. “Your job, I mean.”
Irene sighed. “I’m an officer. Special operations.”
I looked at her inquisitively.
“I handle things that fall outside the jurisdiction of other operations branches. For me, most of the time that’s things relating to the surface world. And you—” Irene looked me in the eye—“are one of those cases that fell onto my desk.”
The elevator opened and we went inside. Irene pressed the button with the number three, before the doors closed. I thought for a moment.
“Is that what you get out of this… my case?” I asked. “That you’re preparing for humanity’s future?”
“Nope,” Irene said, punctuating with a pop.
“Then what?”
“A promotion,” she said simply.
There was a moment of anticlimactic silence. It was absurd that I felt disappointed at her answer.
The elevator doors opened to green. Except this time, it was vast. An openness that I had dearly missed. Like a long lost lover returning. The reunion was overwhelming. My heart thumped and rattled against the confines of my chest. My mind struggled to make sense of it. The elevator had spat us out into a different world. One that appeared endless. A horizon. A sun. Clouds. The ground was contoured. It no longer had the perfect flatness of artificiality. The aromatic smell assured me that the grass that blanketed the ground was real. There were bushes. Trees. A wandering path of pebbles connected the sparse elevators and exits extended to the horizon, punctuating the expanse. There was a body of water large enough to justify the quaint wooden bridge that extended across it. Its surface reflected the convincing sky above. I heard a chirp and turned to its direction. Several English oaks crowded around near the centre. Are those birds real? I wondered. The question seemed trivial, but the answer mattered to me. Rationally, I knew that the boundaries had to be there, yet the illusion was seductive.
“Impressed?” Irene asked with a smirk.
“This is certainly something,” I admitted.
Unconsciously, I took the lead. We strolled towards a large body of water. Walking past a lonesome hazel, I saw several pigeons resting underneath it, sitting with their necks and legs somehow retracted into their small, oval bodies. When we reached the edge of the water, I squatted for a better view of the koi fishes of black and silver swimming leisurely beneath the surface.
As I stood up, I noticed the other people in this garden. Some were in pairs, enjoying the simple pleasure of having a conversation on the grass. A person sat at a bench looking into their handheld. But what had caught my gaze was a picnic in the distance. A family of four. A boy and his younger brother. The older boy was trying to teach his younger sibling a game with his fingers. When the latter didn’t follow, the elder slapped his hand. The woman slapped the elder in the same fashion and retorted. Her mouth moved but I could hear no words. The man only grinned in amusement at the whole affair.
There was a wave of nausea. It came on so strongly and suddenly that the vertigo threatened to undo me. I looked around frantically. I briefly saw Irene’s confused eyes on me, before noticing the bench several paces away. I staggered towards it before plopping myself onto the wooden surface with a thump. With my elbows on my knees, I rested my head in my hands with my eyes closed. It took a few moments before the disorientation faded into a low hum at the back of my head. When I opened my eyes, I saw amorphous shapes, before my eyes adjusted and the world washed through. And when it did, I saw Irene’s inscrutable grey eyes on me. Is she worried? Is she studying me? And when did she sit down?
“I’m fine,” I said preemptively.
“Hm,” Irene hummed. It could have meant anything, everything, and nothing at all.
I looked away from her. In the silence that stretched, my gaze swept across the garden.
“It’s impressive,” I said. “But why bring me here?”
“To show you that there’s more about being a Receiverist than having a grand plan,” Irene said.
“So you’re trying to convince me that you’re really just normal?” I asked.
Irene chuckled. I looked at her in bemusement. “Your scepticism never ceases to amuse me,” she said after a moment. “Yes. I’m trying to convince you of something. But when I present to you the evidence for it, your fixation isn’t on the evidence or the conclusion, but on my delivery of that evidence towards that conclusion. It’s really funny. You’re funny.”
“I feel like you’re making fun of me,” I said. There was an absence of accusation in my tone.
“Maybe I am,” Irene said with a shrug.
“Well I think my scepticism is fair,” I said. “First, you people kidnap me. Then, you tell me I need to stay here for a week to decide if I want to leave or not, and you present to me this—” I gestured wildly in every direction—“world that seems too good to be true. So of course you’re trying to convince me of something, and you have an incentive to do it even by misrepresenting reality.”
“So you do admit it,” Irene said. “That this place seems ideal. That if it weren’t for your scepticism, you’d jump at an opportunity to live here.”
I blinked. I wanted to deny it, but I knew it would be pointless. She would see right through my lie and it would be humiliating. “Sure,” I said, with an effort to do so as casually as possible, as if it didn’t contradict any of my positions. “But that’s neither here nor there.”
“You’re so prideful,” Irene said. “So sure of your own ideas and notions about the world. So much so that you can’t help but try to fit everything into your own framework. That unless it fits, it doesn’t make sense. Even when sometimes the answer is staring you in the face. Even when giving up your framework would be beneficial to you, you still cling to it.”
I turned my gaze away from her and looked up to the projections of clouds. “I’m a mathematician,” I said. “Everything fits a pattern. Every system may have different configurations of constraints, but they’re all governed by the same laws in the end.”
“And maybe that’s why you’re a terrible mathematician,” Irene said. My gaze snapped back to her. It didn’t sound like she was taunting me, yet there was a twinkle of provocation in her eyes. “You’re too afraid to revisit your assumptions. Because everything has to follow from something you already think you understand. And so when the problem doesn’t fit into your framework, you feel wrong. Maybe even physically.”
I turned away. We fell into silence after that. At some point, Irene abruptly stood, regarded me for a moment, and walked away. I remained for much longer. I didn’t want to leave. I knew that the moment I leave this place, I would feel more confined than ever before. Other people came and went, but I continued to sit and absorb the fantasy like an addict that couldn’t get enough of the poison. The fake, sporadic breeze tugged at the edges of my hair. The surface of the pond occasionally bubbled with the mouth of a koi. Even the feeling of the wooden plank against my face spoke volumes to the primal part of me that my rationality couldn’t reach. I closed my eyes and allowed my other senses to tell me where I was.
My parents didn’t like to cause a scene in public. And so the impossibility of the agitation unfolding in the only nature reserve I had seen in a long time was obvious. It started as a harmless bicker, a common skirmish in our household. But it was a spark that led to a sudden conflagration that couldn’t be stopped. My brother at first panicked, before looking resigned to the inevitability. In the distance, on the other side of the large pond, is a wooden bench that seated a familiar woman with eyes that I knew matched the grey of her jacket. She watched as the flames ate away at my flesh.