******
I made my way to the pig cave. It was long, bathed in twilight and cool. A low rumble of grunts and snorts provided background noise. About twenty rows of cubicles, triple stacked, lay before me. I couldn’t make out the end of the rows. The light was too poor. I accessed my implants and found out the cave held approximately 10,000 pigs at any one time. The smell…well I guess it’s farming smell. Not bad, but different from the city.
The complex foreman rushed out of his office to greet me. I saw the look of dread and worry on his face when he realized who I was. He was a big, heavyset guy, with gunmetal gray hair cropped close to his head.
“Yes sir? I’m Farmtech First Class Harrison. I’m currently responsible for the complex here. How can I assist?”
He was twitchy and eager to help. Most techs always are. They’re just a demotion or two away from worker bee status and know it.
“Harrison, I’m Detective Sergeant Ben Andropov, Cavern Security. I’m looking for Farmhand Kyle Schmidt. I need to escort him to HQ for questioning. If everything checks out, he should be back at work tomorrow. Where is he?”
Harrison pulled out his pad and tapped in a few times.
“He’s working Row C, Section three. The pigs there are ready to harvest, and he’s been tasked to detach the waste tubes. You want me to call him in?”
I shook my head. “No. Not necessary. I’ll go get him. Just point me in the right direction.”
I could have had Schmidt report to me, but damn it, I wanted to see the animals.
I looked at the foreman and saw he was getting nervous.
“Is there a problem?” I asked.
“No! No…no…but sometimes the occasional pig can start thrashing around. Not a big deal, as long as it stays in its cube. But if it doesn’t…well you might get hurt. Also, it can upset the other pigs, and then we have a bit of a mess on our hands. We try to keep things calm around here. They ain’t smart, but they can tell if something is wrong. We figure it’s the vibrations or something.”
“I’ll try not to disturb the little beasties.”
“Yes sir, I’m sure you won’t, but—” he reached into a side pocket on his coveralls and pulled out a black stick about half a meter long and offered it to me.
“I’d feel better if you carried this, it’s a tranquilizer wand. Everyone who works here carries one. If a pig begins to act up it can spread like wildfire and cause a lot of damage. We use the wand as a last resort. Press this end against him and then flip the safety cap and push the red button on the other end. CO2 activated. It’ll flood the pig with Class A neurotoxin and kills it. It makes the pig useless for eating, but it's better to waste one than to have a major incident. Here, take it…I just charged mine with a full dose.”
I warily looked at the stick. Class A neurotoxin was strong stuff and a drop was enough to kill ten men. I patted my gun.
“No thanks, I’ll stick to the devil I know. Anyway, I’m hunting man, not pig. This won’t take long. Now where is Row C?”
He shrugged, put the stick back in his pocket and pointed to a nearby row.
“There, Row C is to your left. Schmidt should be less than a half a klick down that way.” I thanked him and took off down the row.
As I strolled down the row to get Schmidt, I looked at the pigs. They were triple stacked on either side of the ten-meter wide walkway. To my right, the pigs were facing me; their eyeless, small skulls with too large, mobile snouts constantly reaching in and shoveling in food from the trough just below their nose. To my left, massive rounded haunches that quickly tapered to fleshy, pink tubes about two centimeters in diameter. Plastic tubes ran up from the drainage tanks below. You could see the black stitches that joined them. Both tubes, flesh and plastic, were slowly quivering as the creatures’ waste was expelled from their bodies.
I was surrounded by mountains of twitching, snorting flesh, and I was wishing I had just told the foreman to send Schmidt to me instead of going to get him myself.
After a few minutes walking, I noticed that the pigs to my left had the plastic tube disconnected. I swallowed and gave it a closer inspection. It looked like the plastic tube had been cut and melted shut a centimeter short of where the pig’s flesh ended. I assumed they had quit feeding the animal before they did this, because from what I had just seen, it wouldn’t take long for the pig to explode if they hadn’t.
I guessed was getting near Schmidt.
Sure enough, soon I could make out in the hazy twilight of the cave, a hundred meters or so down, the figure of a man working on the rear end of a pig.
I’m sure management could have automated this process, but it was a conscious decision on their part to keep as many tasks manpower intensive as possible in order to give the masses something to do. When the mission of a society is to develop and expand the gene pool as much as possible in anticipation of the eventual resettling of the home world, too much automation leads to a bored and dangerously restive populace. Hence, the street sweepers, cab drivers or food prep techs. Anything to make idle hands useful, including connecting and disconnecting the rectums of pigs from sewer lines.
And my family wondered why I opted to be a Caveman.
I was about ten meters away from Schmidt when he noticed me. He saw the stripes. He saw the gun. He knew what I was immediately. I looked him over. I had his record in memory. A twenty-one year old single farmhand. He was ten centimeters shorter than me and rail thin. His hair was black and short.
I did the formalities.
“Are you Kyle Schmidt, citizen number 932-198-Z1029?", I asked, knowing damn well that he was.
He stared at my shoulder holster.
“I’ll ask again, are you Kyle Schmidt?”
He jerked up his eyes to meet mine. He was sweating.
“Yeah. I’m Kyle Schmidt."
“You need to come with me. We have some questions we want to ask you about Jean McSwain. I believe you know her?”
He gulped once and nodded his head.
“Can I finish these last two hogs? That’s all I got left of this batch. It will only take a minute.”
I shrugged my shoulders and said it was alright. I felt sort of sorry for the poor dumb bastard.
A mistake on my part.
The kid went up the pig on the lower berth. He was holding a tool in his right hand. It looked like a pair of pliers. He reached for the pig’s waste tube grabbed it and then clamped down on the plastic tube just below where the pig was connected. I heard a sizzle, saw a wisp of smoke and the punk let go of the tube. The plastic tube was melted in two, with only a small section still attached to the pig.
I was wondering how it was done. The pliers must have a power-pack that cut and melted the plastic tubes.
I was filing away that bit of useless information when Schmidt reached up to disconnect the beast in the upper berth. I idly noticed his hands were shaking as he reached up to clamp off the tube.
I heard a sizzle and immediately that great beast let loose a god-awful screech of agony. Schmidt had accidentally clamped and burned the pig, not the plastic.
He and I were stunned as that huge hog began to writhe and thrash about, sending great booming shocks and vibrations along the floor. Immediately, the other pigs sensed something was wrong. I was instantly aware of the increased movement and twitching of the pink walls of flesh around me. We were going to have a goddamn porcine riot, and if they got loose, there was a damn good chance I’d get crushed. I pulled my gun and turned to shoot the injured pig.
The farmhand was way ahead of me. He pulled his black tranquilizer wand out and in one motion had jammed it up against the wounded pig. I heard a muffled “pop” as the CO2 cartridge let go.
The pig immediately slammed down into his cube. The great body quivered a few milliseconds and then was still. Schmidt and I just sat there a half a minute or so, as the other beasts slowly began to calm down. My heart was pounding.
Schmidt looked up at me and then back at
the now dead animal. His right hand still was holding on to the wand. He gripped it and slowly pulled it away from the pig. As he pulled it out, I saw how the wand worked. A long, slender needle-like steel tube had been ejected from the stick, the yellow fluid of neurotoxin still dripping from its end. The CO2 charge obviously slammed the needle into the massive muscle of the pig and then forced a liberal amount of neurotoxin into the animal. Simple and efficient.
And as I looked at the almost ten centimeter long needle, I realized I knew what had killed Jean McSwain.
I looked at Schmidt. He knew it was all over. His eyes said it all. The hurt, the anger and finally, the fact that he wasn’t going down without a fight.
I don’t know what he saw in my eyes.
Probably not much.
I had the gun already in my hand and began to swing it up to shoot. It shouldn’t have been a fair fight. I had the reflex enhancing implants and the gun…but I guess the booze takes its toll.
Before I could get my gun into play, Schmidt stabbed at me with the stick. Instinctively, I used my hand to ward off the blow, and the needle went completely through my left palm.
Immediately, my implants went into emergency mode. As I began spraying darts from my gun in the general direction of the kid, my left bicep, in a desperate attempt to stop the flow of deadly neurotoxin, cramped so hard into a tourniquet that I heard my arm break. As I felt my mind detach from my body, I was aware my ‘plants were screaming on all frequencies that an officer was down and my location. As I fell to the ground, my body convulsed a couple of times as my implants fought to keep my heart beating. My last thought right before I shut down was that for first time in a while, I didn’t feel like I needed a drink.
******
When I came to, I was in a hospital bed located on a shaded porch, overlooking the Grand Canyon at sunrise. The 3-D view was gorgeous, and I felt good.
I looked at hands and arms. My skin was clear, soft and slightly tanned. I breathed deep. My nose tingled as I smelled the lightly scented air. My energy level was up, and as I moved around, I felt loose and limber. Finally, it dawned on me that I had spent some time in the Re-Generative tanks.
I checked in with my implants to see how long I had been out. Over two months had elapsed since I had my run-in with Schmidt. I was also surprised to find out I had a whole new set of the latest implants wired into me.
I signaled the staff. A few seconds later, a doctor and nurse came in and began to look me over.
“You’re a lucky man Mr. Andropov,” the doc said to me after checking me out. “Most men die after a run-in with Class A toxin. You almost did, but the medics got to you in time.”
All I wanted was to get out, and I told the doc so.
“Patience officer, we just woke you up out of your healing coma, and we have a few more tests to run now that you’re up. You should be home in a day or two, Ok?”
No arguing with the medics and after they finished running a few more tests and getting a sample of blood, they left me alone. About an hour later, Harvey Ling came in to visit.
We chatted a few minutes on nothing, in particular. Finally, I asked about Schmidt.
“Oldest story in the book, as you probably realize, Ben. Boy meets Hooker; Boy falls in love with Hooker; Hooker's laughs at Boy and Boy gets even. Schmidt told us about how he used the empty tranquilizer wand on the girl. A quick, clean nasty piece of work.”
“Yeah, I had just figured that out when he nailed me.”
“Lucky for you, you got him just as he was getting you. Local security and the medics found you both unconscious at the scene—you were in bad shape, Ben. We almost lost you.”
“I take it the kid—”
“Was ‘cycled within five hours of the incident. You’re wearing his liver and kidneys.”
I sort of sat there and took it in. Harvey went on.
“The Re-Gen tanks can do a lot, but the toxin had all but destroyed your liver and kidneys—and by the way, your liver wasn’t in too good a shape anyway—so the docs used the first set handy. SOP.”
“And what about the upgraded implants? A reward for almost letting a young punk kill me?”
Harvey chuckled and shook his head.
“Nope. I might as well tell you. Human Resources liked the way you handled that scene at the bar. That’s the kind of ballsy crap they look for in an operative. You’ve been promoted, and that means after you get out of here and have a couple of weeks leave, you report to Berlin Cave Complex Security, Human Resources. Lucky they had their eye on you. Not everyone gets to be rebuilt in the Re-Gen tanks, only those management really want to keep around—” he saw the look in my eyes, “Ben, relax and accept it—better than being killed on a pig farm—right?”
He patted my arm, got up and left the room. I turned to look at the Grand Canyon in all its glory. I turned it off and stared at the blank walls.
I wanted a drink.
The End
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