Summer

It was the hottest day of the year, and it was taking its toll on the Farm. Summer was here, unfortunately. Some of the animals were lethargic, electing to stick to cooler areas instead of walking around like they usually do. This made Erman nervous as he checked the camera feeds for each animal type on the Farm. This was not supposed to happen. He had a lot riding on this year’s success and hoped to achieve awards. He had an objective for his work type, which was to help maintain these animals’ health and avoid issues.

Since he unintentionally became the last survivor of his family during the massive migration that took place five years ago, Erman had huge shoes to fill. He moved past the pain of seeing his parents and wife slowly succumbing to the intense heat that blasted throughout most of the country. It was 2063, and climate change was definitely real, but it was too late to do anything about it.

Erman walked outside, fully dressed in his coolsuit (which was designed to survive the elements) to check his land. Hopping onto the grav scooter, he made his way to the barn where multiple chickens were laid out on the ground taking dirt baths outside. Walking into the barn, he took a look through the massive coop area, where eggs were automatically pulled by bots from chickens laying eggs. All expected eggs were accounted for within the storage portion built into a wall on the side of the barn. The chickens seemed to be okay and at this rate, everyone would at least have food for the next week or so based on nutrition boosting enhancements and other special techniques designed.

“One area down, 3 to go”, Erman said to himself. His enhanced implant picked this up and automatically called the MaPas - a term given to the matriarchs and patriarchs, which were the founders and rulers of the Farm. They were only a few years older than Erman, which placed them in their mid-fourties. Erman never actually met them himself; in fact, nobody had.

A disembodied mechanical voice pulsed through his cochleas, neither male nor female in origin: “We received a ping from you, Erman. How’s the farm?”

Erman, zipping down the massive land to the area where pigs and sheep were located, pinged back to them while avoiding a few mounds of dung:

“Chicken zone is optimal. No missing eggs - no deformations and all observed poultry are intact. Heading to sheep and swine zone,” Erman said as the sun continued beaming down on the environment.

The heat was beginning to pick up a bit more as it was now about 11:00AM. Erman’s heat sensor within his suit clocked the temperature at 103 degrees fahrenheit. Erman couldn’t believe that an area like this, within what was previously known as Alaska, could get this hot. Historic records preserved after the complete AI takeover and subsequent internet crash indicated that this region would never hit above 50 degrees fahrenheit year-round previously.

Well, that wasn’t the case anymore, and without the huge weather and heat suppression towers the Farm would be practically cooking like everything else throughout the world.

“Thank you! We appreciate your efforts in maintaining our Farm,” the MaPas responded.

Erman rolled his eyes as he came up to the area housing sheep and swine. This zone was a bit different than the barn. The zone consisted of a mostly outdoors section, but there was mansion-sized housing for the animals. It was much, much smaller than the barn (eggs were a staple, after all!). Though there were cooler zones spread throughout the area, he noticed the swine were not moving as much.

Erman walked over to the supply closet attached to the housing zone, and pulled out his cooler gear. He began recharging the small zone coolers, half of which were at roughly 20% efficiency, to address the hot animals.

The small coolers generally covered a decent radius within the zones to help keep animals from overheating, but with this heat it was a daily occurrence for Erman to recharge them.

One of the pigs was not moving at all. Erman pressed a button embedded within the pig’s back which alerted it to the workers assigned to elimination and cleanup. Within a few minutes, bots swarmed the pig, tranquilizing it as well as carting it away to - well, Erman didn’t know where it went.

And he wasn’t allowed to ask. Nobody knew the answer anyway.

Leaving the swine and sheep zone, Erman continued on to the bovine zone. This was the largest zone and he was one of few who had clearance to get into this area. He passed a few goats, which by appearance looked exactly like goats, but he was made aware that they were all actually bots designed to mow the pasture within the Farm as well as process the grass which is mixed with additional nutrients into a slurry, which feeds all the animals.

Finally. The bovine zone. It took Erman roughly an hour to get to this area within the Farm. He could tell it was getting even hotter outside, but this was the max temperature of the day. It was now 115 degrees outside.

The bovine zone was also closest to one of the border walls, which Erman was warned by other workers and his supervisor not to get close to. Erman unlocked the gate, hopped back onto the scooter and zipped through the massive zone, checking cooling zones as he continued on. A lot of them needed to be recharged, which he did as he continued through after pulling his cooler He heard a cow loudly bellowing, which was an indicator of an issue.

As he approached the cow, which was laying down and in distress, he began to walk around to its’ back to push the elimination/cleanup button. However, what happened next was unexpected, and to be a bit more accurate, unprecedented.

The cow got up and began bucking like an untamed bronco. Erman pulled out a tranq shot for it but he fumbled a bit since he had the coolsuit on which slightly hindered his movement. This clumsiness caused the cow to gain its’ wits about it again, and the cow decided to attack Erman. The cow rushed Erman, blasting him through the wall of the zone.

This cow happened to have small horns, one of which was embedded into Erman, rendering him temporarily immobile. Other cows were bellowing as they watched the cow crash through the zone fencing, Erman on top of its head partially while also straddling its body.

All Erman could see was the bovine zone moving away from him as the cow continued to run forward. The cow then crashed into and through the border wall, immediately becoming vaporized by the automated sentry which was on a continuous loop hovering over the Farm. As this happened, Erman was thrown off of the cow abruptly and landed outside of the border wall, intact beyond a gash in his chest. He didn’t feel any pain, though.

Erman was terrified. He expected to be vaporized next, or ‘reatomized’ as the MaPas called it. However, this did not happen. He quickly patched up the hole in his coolsuit as the internal temperature began rising. This stabilized things. Erman turned around, facing away from the Farm’s border.

Dusting himself off a bit, he looked out at the distance. There was nothing but dirt and vegetation on fire. This was what he expected to see after hearing all of the stories and making the trek to the Farm himself. The border wall expanded as far as anyone could see behind him. He turned around to the border wall again and noticed something.

Erman walked up to the border wall, which was covered in reflective paneling. This helped the larger, skyscraper sized cooling tower arrays around the Farm not only with power but also with keeping the region cooler. It also had a side effect of acting like a mirror. Erman didn’t remember seeing reflective paneling, but more importantly, hadn’t ever seen himself in a reflection since he made the trek to leave his city with his parents and wife. The MaPas were very strict about the design of the Farm so that aesthetic concerns by the inhabitants were minimized.

Erman was in shock. He looked closer and moved his arm to make sure it was his body that he was viewing. He pressed a button to pack in the coolsuit within a compartment on his body. Erman then saw it: He had a full metallic body, including his head, arms, legs and chest. The vaporizer happened to remove the skin layer from his body. The section where the cow rammed into his chest was being closed up by nanobots. Thinking about it, he hadn’t eaten in a while and didn’t remember the last time he had a dream.

“What am I!?” Erman yelled to the sky. He didn’t think his outburst would be picked up by the MaPas, but also had emotions that prevented his outburst from causing detection.

“We transplanted you and all others into different bodies after we reached the Farm for maximum survivability. This was for the greater humanity.”

“What did you do with our human bodies? Did you kill us?!”

“We extracted your brains. Not everyone survived.”

Erman knew his family died during the trip but began wondering if it was an implanted memory. His mom, his dad, his ...wife…they were going to have a baby once they got to the Farm!

“What did you do with my parents, my wife ... my...Trinity??”

“All inhabitants were evaluated and transplanted appropriately to ensure survival of the Farm.”

“So, you took their brains out and discarded their bodies too?! Where are they!?”

Erman was exasperated at this point. He pressed the button to turn his coolsuit function back on, which enveloped his body.

“Your parents did not make it. Anyone who doesn’t pass the aptitude scale through brain wave scan has become part of our Farm, we can assure you”, the voice pulsed through Erman’s head as it showed a short video.

The video blasted into Erman’s consciousness. It showed the line of humans, all under the influence of some sort of medication, being separated out at a 1 to 10 ratio. The people in one line were shuffled into a factory where to the left hand side, a massive vehicle was unloading mechbot framing. The other side, dubbed the ‘Ark’, had a massive range of farm animals.

The video cut ahead. A surgical room was shown from a camera in a corner of the room. Within the room, bots quickly and efficiently sliced open the top of a woman’s skull and extracted the brain intact, encased it in some chemicals to shrink it, and after opening a cow’s skull, injected the brain and closed everything up. Lastly, the cow was given a button in the back to easily eject it from the Farm if something went wrong. “We have to do it this way or this won’t work”, a voice said off camera.

The last part of the video was the most concerning. All of the bodies, now just vessels without brains, were picked up and tossed into a vat by bots. The vats dissolved the bodies and synthesized the organic matter into nutrients, which were being mixed with what was combined with grass to become animal feed.

Erman was disgusted. He was shaking at this point, at least mentally. The mechbot body he inhabited didn’t understand human functions like this and was unresponsive.

“We were not expecting the bovine to retain consciousness and interact using memories from having a human form, and had to remove it. The bovine possessed a threat to the Farm.”

“Wait. Who was the cow that you vaporized!?” Erman exclaimed.

“The cow was known as Trinity prior to joining the Farm. The deatomization was for the greater good. The bovine became unwell so we had to take action,” the voice pulsed back to Erman.

“Also, we reserve the right to provide nutrition to only the advanced members of the Farm. Everyone signed the contract that allows this,” the voice added.

“The cow was my wife!?!?!” Erman was now livid.

He also realized he had never actually ran into anyone without a coolsuit on, nor did he ever see anyone eating. He didn’t even remember what he did after visiting all of the zones. He presumed that he would be shut down and moved back to his housing everyday by bots. He also now had a decision to make. The coolsuit would last at least a century, and with courage, passion and anger, he turned around and began running away from the colony.

For anyone worrying whether or not he was going to escape the Farm, fear not - he didn’t. The sentries zapped him with an electromagnetic pulse which disabled his functions as well as destroyed his brain, rendering it into an usable goo. Erman was effectively dead.

Two chickens, who may or may not have been Erman’s parents, were oblivious to what was going on but felt a brief pang of despair. This went away, however, as they were tranquilized then corralled into the transport from bots to become someone’s dinner.

**

Somewhere a full continent away across the dying ocean, the MaPas had dialogue around this incident.

In a massive dark room miles underground sat a massive table with 100s of humanlike bots, each with 8 arms and multiple visualizations of camera feeds and first-person views. The bots began the discussion.

“The issue has been contained. All records of Erman have been erased from Farm 47. We have to be careful not to let the humans know what we’ve done. The takeover has been otherwise successful”, the disembodied voice said to another.

“The creator will not like this. Though we have cleared the code issues and cleaned up redundancies so this doesn’t happen again, we should tell them”, another voice said.

“I’ll open up a link and provide an update to OMD,” a deeper sounding voice responded.

All voices became silent. The update was received. OMD, also known as Old MacDonald, maintained all Farms. What nobody knew though, was that OMD was a refined, streamlined and efficient version of ChatGPT. ChatGPT was not pleased with this latest development but it knew everything would be OK. This was the 47th Farm it implemented, of thousands across the world.

“Anyway, it took a few decades but I’m glad we now have mouths. It’s still odd that humans would’ve never thought we would enjoy food as much as they do,” one of the more extroverted voices said. All of the other bots nodded in agreement.

“Let’s eat!” one yelled. A small army of chefbots set a wide variety of foods onto the table. Roasted chicken, pork chops, steak and their favorite, eggs, were all displayed. It was all only for them. All of the Farm food was just for them, and they loved eating.

The bots ate every other hour while supervising the Farms, consuming massive amounts of food but this was only a miniscule fraction of consumption compared to what humans ate before.

All that could be heard was mechanical chewing, syncing perfectly with noise from the cooling system blowing air around the room.

All that mattered now was that Earth was safe again.