Robots vs. Fairies(38)
The Troubles.
They started before he went off to the army. A couple of bad seasons on the farm. Drought followed by leaf blight. Then more drought and the plant diseases born of dryness. Some years they barely made enough to pay the bank loans on the machines and seed stock. So it wasn’t all him. But then he was on foot patrol with a rifle squad in Afghanistan when the man in front of him stepped on the IED. Blew that guy back to Jesus and filled Duke with shrapnel. The medics and field docs later told him that he died five times and they brought him back each time. They grinned like football champs when they said this. And, sure, they were heroes. Good for them. But screw them, too.
As Duke swallowed another damn pill, he wondered how much of a favor those medics did when they saved him. The army paid for the first round of surgeries, and they even kicked in a chunk toward the heart replacement Duke got a year after he was discharged. But now that he was out, Duke discovered one of the ugly secrets of the military—they’ll do a crap-ton for you while you’re carrying a gun and fifty pounds of battle rattle through hot foreign sands, but once you’re a civilian, you’re nothing more than a nuisance. A drain on the society. That was what one of the congressmen said in an interview. Veterans were a drain on the society. Every year the benefits were cut and the red tape doubled.
Gramps called it a damned disgrace. But he didn’t give one of his patented “in my day” speeches, because it really wasn’t all that much better during the wars that followed 9/11, back when Gramps was nineteen. And they weren’t really better when Dad wore sergeant stripes in the second Deash War. War was war, and politicians needed soldiers in uniform and didn’t want the hassle of dealing with those who lived, crippled or not, once they were discharged.
That was when the real troubles started. After Duke’s discharge, because the actual transplant happened when he was a civilian. A short, ugly year later.
He couldn’t work the farm like everyone had hoped. Five years ago Duke was a bull. Tall as Gramps and as broad-shouldered as Dad. Well, as tall as Gramps had been, once upon a time. And Dad was dead now. Smashed along with Mom when their autonomous drive pickup went offline and sent them through a guardrail on Berkholder Ridge.
Troubles. Nothing but troubles.
When Dad died while Duke was overseas, the farm had started to die. Anyone could see it. Dad had the knack of keeping even the oldest and clunkiest of the machines running. Mom called him the bot whisperer. She wasn’t far wrong, either. Dad said it was all a matter of relating to them, and applying some blood, sweat, and tears. He said it wasn’t always about knowing the repair manuals cover to cover, but knowing the machines.
“They want to work,” Dad told him once when Duke was little. “Every single one of them machines wants to work. They want to work all day and night.”
“I don’t get it,” said Duke. “They’re just machines. They’re just circuit boards and gears. How can they want anything?”
Dad had smiled a strange little smile. The conversation had taken place out in the barn, and Dad was tinkering around inside the chest of a burly stump-remover bot. He’d painted the machine to look like the Incredible Hulk from those old comics. Big and green, with a scowly face. Dad spat on the corner of a cloth and then reached inside to clean some carbon dust from a rotor.
“You got to think like them, kiddo,” Dad said as he worked. “They’re built for farming and they got no other uses. This is why they exist. Like you and me. We’re farmers. We’re here to work the land and feed people with what we grow. If we stop being farmers, then what are we?” He shook his head. “The bots are no different. They work the land and get to know the land. It’s theirs every bit as it’s ours. You just have to know how to look at it. Some folks see oil leaking from a broke-down bot and they think it’s a useless pile of junk. Me? I see a hardworking farm machine who’s sweating oil and bleeding grease and who is just tired from all them long hours. It doesn’t mean the bot’s done or that it’s junk. You have to look inside, touch it, let it know that you feel the same, that if we bleed black or red it’s all the same. We’re farmers, Duke. Flesh and steel, breather and exhaust.”
The dark lights on the stump-puller bot suddenly flicked on and Dad leaned back, nodding, satisfied. He patted the green metal chest.
“Never forget, son, it’s his farm, too. And he wants to work for us because we’re his family. Just like he’s ours.”
That was almost the last conversation Duke ever had with his father before that bad night on Berkholder Ridge.
After that, Duke had taken over the maintenance of the bots. It took him a while to move through and past his grief and get to a clearer place; but once he did, he found that he understood some of what Dad had said. The robots and the family and the farm. It made sense to him.
He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to understand why he had ever left the farm to go to war.
Duke lifted another pill to his lips and gagged at the thought of taking it. He closed his eyes, took a breath, took a sip of water, and almost slapped the pill to the back of his throat, then drank more to wash it down. It went down like a brick.
Grandma handled the farm accounts, and she did a good job of intercepting the bills before Duke ever got a chance to see them. But he knew. He was sick, not stupid or blind. Grandma always looked so worried when Gramps went into town to refill his prescriptions. Since he’d been taking those pills, there had been fewer Christmas and birthday presents for the kids. Duke had seven nephews and nieces. None of his own. Grandma canceled the cable TV. There wasn’t meat on the table every night the way there used to be. Sometimes he heard Grandma on the phone with someone, asking for more time. And heard her crying afterward.