Author: Jeremy Belcher

The beeping was coming from the back of his skull. Softly at first, then loudly, it crescendoed violently and rattled him awake.

Blearily, he opened his eyes to the silhouette of an enormous, hulking machine. Its high intensity spotlights were trained on him, bleating out its aggressive, high pitched beeping.

Waiting. Idling. Beeping.

His eyes tried to focus, slowly, against the blinding light. The machine was starting to come into focus.

Was that…no, can’t be. Was that…an auto-harvester?

He looked around, eyes still trying to focus. Still dazed, fighting back panic and the strong urge to puke. He was in some kind of field. From the looks of it it appeared to be…corn?

“Where the hell am I?” he thought to himself.

Looking up, he could see the last deep purples of the sunrise fading into pink. Lazy clouds rolled across an endless sky. Wherever he was, it was a far cry from the super-talls of the city where this night, or maybe nights, had begun.

He awkwardly stumbled to his feet, falling backwards before finding his footing. Once upright, he cleared out of the machine’s path. Placated, the beeping ceased and the lumbering machine calmly resumed its work, the high pitch hum of the electric motor and the sounds of blades cutting through the morning birdsong, continuing on its singular task.

“Fuck,” he said out loud. The physical hangover was already rough, but the shame from the emotional one was quickly outpacing it. This was bad, even by the already low expectations he had for himself. He was starting to put together whatever pieces he could.

It began how it often does, with him pouring himself a drink to calm his nerves after the last contract had gone sideways. One turned into two, then another, then to the bar with the cute bartender for a few more. He then inevitably called the guy for something a little stronger. The guy had instead sold him on trying some new synthetic out of the floating colonies. It offered a new type of trip, something “interstellar,” the guy had said with the effortless charisma of the salesman who truly believes in his product. His own predictable lack of self control made it an easy sell.

He vaguely remembered opening the packet and pouring the powder under his tongue on the Skyrail trip back to his apartment, his eyes darting around the train car to make sure nobody was looking. Things got shiny, then wobbly. Then they went black. Now here he was.

He turned slowly in a circle, trying to piece it all together. “Where the hell am I?”

He tried connecting to the farm’s network to find out, well, anything. But since the breach that shut down farm operations worldwide and caused the crop failures a few years back, the gigacorps had locked all the networks down tight. There was no other signal, there probably hadn’t been a human on these automated farms in decades. He was alone out here, and he would have to improvise.

He chased down the lumbering auto-harvester, jogging alongside it until he found the footholds. He grabbed on and hoisted himself to the top. He sat on the top of the machine as it continued on with its task, catching his breath and trying to keep the contents of his stomach where they were. He looked around from this new vantage point, hoping to understand how he ended up here. There was nothing but corn in every direction, all the way to the horizon.

After some searching, he found the control panel and pried it open. He found what he was fairly sure were the wires to the GPS and very much hoped were not the wires to the network antennae. He held his breath, ripped out the wires, and waited. The lumbering machine slowly rolled to a stop. The hum of the electric motor and harvest rotors faded away, replaced by the surrounding birdsong.

A tinny, robotic voice came through muffled speakers. “Guidance error. A surveillance diagnostics drone is being dispatched.” He realized he was still holding his breath, and let out a long, slow exhale.

After a few tortured minutes sitting on top of the dead machine, trying to put the night back together, he was grateful to hear the high pitched hum of the drone rotors headed his way, slowly getting louder.

It lowered itself to eye level, the camera light activated, and the video screen came on. The cherubic, pasty face of a young man with thick black glasses appeared on the screen.

“Uhh, hello,” the man said, uneasily. “Who are you and what are you do…?”
“I need a little help,’ he interrupted. “Look, I promise I’m not here to fuck with anything. I know this sounds insane, but I just had a long night and, uh, well, woke up here.”

It hurt just to say it.

“You…woke up there? Um, Ok. You’ll understand why that’s hard to believe. How did you get there?”

“Decades of poor impulse control,” he thought to himself, but simply answered with a shrug.

“Just a minute.” The man muted his mic, having a conversation with someone in the room. Another face joined the screen, a stern looking woman in a uniform. Her dark hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, an astonished look on her face. A quiet, animated conversation followed.

The man turned the mic back on.

“The boss says we’ll send a security team out for you. They will bring you back here to the control center. We’ll have to hold you for a while to ask you a few more questions, but if what you say is true you can probably get a ride out from here.”

“Uh, thanks. Appreciate it.”

He sat waiting on top of the silent, hulking machine, trying to put the night together. Trying to put his life together. Failing to do both.

The dawn was fading into day. The birds still singing.

“How did I get here?”