Sapiofagia

This was originally written for the Second Farmpunk Contest run by @blockurator here on Steemit, but I heavily missed the deadline. I still intend on participating in future editions (currently the 4th one is active and receiving entries), but since this was made for steemit, I will publish it anyways. I'll still use the #farmpunk tag because that's what this story is about even if it isn't participating in any contest.

The title is in spanish -kind of- because of 2 reasons: the story is supposed to occur in some place in South America, and is a wordplay that I couldn't properly translate into english.

Things were different when Abraham was young, yes, very different. Five years passed with honors in the engineering school, but just one bad word to the Dean and he almost didn’t graduate. In return, his job became retiring to a small town far away and help them “update”.

It was around those years that the first great technological “Blooming” of the modern era occurred: ¡modernization for everyone!. Holographic screens, farming drones, automated tractors and irrigations systems, and the universalization of transgenic products were just some of the advances that became the norm in agriculture.

And in the rural town of Acaracao, it was Abraham the one charged with supervising all of this. But since then, things had calmed down a little. A little too much where he lived, because decades later and he hadn’t left the town, and things never went beyond the first blooming.

In any case, a new day was starting as normal as ever, when he heard a very particular beeping. He walked with annoyance towards the Communication Screen and turned it on, which then presented him with a face devoid of imperfection, and of kindness.

-Father, it is good that you answered on time this occasion

-Would a couple of extra minutes make any difference?, you know everything is going well here, what do you need this time?

-The CBC has a new project, and they want to put a pilot laboratory in Acaracao, and no, you can’t say no to it.

Abraham growled under his breath. If he was contacted, it was a test that could go bad, very bad. He looked straight to the eyes of his daughter in the screen.

-What is it about…?

-Have you seen the news lately?, pork meat value has been in the rise for years already, and the Central Business Chamber has developed a new breeding method. The details will be sent to you in a minute, read them and prepare yourself –and without saying anything else, the signal was cut off and his daughter disappeared from screen.

Old man Abraham would then sigh before making some strong coffee while his instructions arrived and the idea settled in his mind. Now it could be heard outside the mixture of bird whistles, the soft functioning of the farming machines, and the background silence that always accompanied him. Even though years passed and technology arrived, that town kept itself small in population but big in terrain, and Abraham almost never received visits.

Then he started to read the project’s information. The weird people from the big metropolis, already huge fans of pork meat, had “discovered” that the more intelligent the pig, the more tender, juicy and tasty its meat would be; and the brain in particular was now one of the most valued delicacies. It all had something to do with particular hormones and genomes.

It was because of that that a genetic modification program was specifically designed to make pigs more intelligent. It was a sick thing to do in the opinion of Abraham, but who was he to contradict the Central Business Chamber?, just an old school engineer that watched the crops of a remote town. And now the caretaker of super intelligent pigs, what a promotion.

Source

A week later, and everything was already in its place. Some automated tractors were retired to make space for the porcine cabins, and then the embryos came. By the way in which the messenger android expressed about his delivery, it seemed like he was programmed with a Pride Module: firm voice, possessive adjectives for the CBC. It wasn’t really that much different from most people nowadays.

And like this, the old man started to prepare everything, because even with the rising in automatization, certain delicate operations were still supervised by humans. From time to time he saw a prying local who wanted to see what was happening. Curious eyes and gossip-focused mind. He said “hi” to them and answered “just city-folk toys” to their every question about the new stuff he got.

Things advanced fast, and a week later everything was in perfect order. Even the first piglets were already porking around, round and healthy. But they also had the eery habit of quietly watch Abraham any time he went to see them. That was the First Generation of “Super Meat” that his lab produced.

Then, it came the time when a Second Generation lived together with the first one before it was taken to the slaughterhouse. The old engineer, bored with giving reports, ordering replacement parts and tapping commands on the keyboard, noticed that the bigger pigs seemed to impose themselves over the younger ones, not because of force, but because of some kind of unspoken agreement.

But those first ones went away, and their “disciples” instead became the masters of the Third Generation. And by this time, the piglets had become more vocal, dedicating to themselves and their human supervisor, growls and squeals they seemed to go beyond simple nonsense. They seemed intentional and with some meaningful inflections.

In this way, the Third Generation influenced the Fourth, and this on the Fifth, and this one on the Sixth, each one more organized and weird than the previous. Abraham wasn’t seeing the prying townspeople anymore, but sometimes he worried when he thought he heard someone speaking to him, that a multitude murmured. He mentioned that to his daughter one day and she just answered “you have spent too much time alone, you are talking about illusions”. And maybe she was right.

When the Seventh Generations was closet to be sent away, one of the control machines failed. Important damage that needed delicate replacements. The perfect excuse to be absent from that weird place for a couple of hours while looking for the needed stuff. And if someone asked why he didn’t just ordered it to be delivered by drone, he wouldn’t say that he purposefully left any communication device turned off for the last few days, he would say that the thing was also failing.

“Don Abraham” people saluted him, with a slight forward inclination of their heads, and some whispers from the curious ones that hadn’t visited him in a while. He sat in a high stool from an old bar, he started drinking a glass of one of the very few liquors that were still hand-made, and noticed the badly hidden pointing from a nearby table. “This idiots…” he though. But when he was about to leave after his last gulp, one of the guys in that table stood up and screamed “I swear it!, there is a lot of strange people hiding in Abraham’s farm!”

The old man quickly went towards his truck after hearing that. Fuck the shock absorbers, he wasn’t the only one that heard something, and he was going to uncover the truth once and for all!.

Source

The road seemed infinite in the middle of his rush, and the bumps on the road didn’t help to calm him down. Even the sky added to his anxiety by filling itself with threatening clouds. But he kept going forward without paying attention to the protests of his old Chevrolet Avalanche, and soon he saw the lights of his home.

He went directly to where the pigs lived, but the Seventh Generation wasn’t there. The locks were opened but unharmed, and he found… hoofprints?, he decided to follow those.

Abandoning the porcine cabins, the followed the now vanishing trail amidst the slow rain that started. He walked some 700ft to the east, passing by the drone cubicles and the tractors, all of them disabled, as it was the big communication tower, and came to the newest building in the farm: the Cultivation Laboratory. The door was half-open, and from inside he could hear the same murmurs and whispers that tormented him since weeks ago.

He nervously pushed the door, with his fear almost stopping him from advancing, and inside he found… the Seventh Generation, helping the mature piglets of the Eight Generation come out from the machines.

-What the hell…?! –the pigs turned and saw him, with those same scary eyes from the beggining. One of them, big but with wise eyes, took a couple of steps towards him.

-Greetings caretaker. We porcines have already reached the moment of our independence, we are not food, we never should have been. Don’t resent us because we don’t resent you, we know you were only doing a job, and that you never ate one of our people. But don’t even think of stopping us.

The pig leader them growled and walked out of the building, and both generations followed behind, ignoring the astonished engineer. It would be hours later, now with a completely silent dawn, that Abraham would go back to his living quarters and turned on his communication screen.

His inbox was filled with messages with the worried face of his daughter, screaming what dozens and dozens of “Urgent News” Headlines said: multiple incidents in Super-Meat laboratories, pigs escaping, caretakers murdered. Abraham was lucky to have become a vegan years ago.