Nissi
We had actually done it. The walls and roof had been up for over a month, but I suppose it hadn't been real to me until this moment, as I stood in the open space of the northeast chamber of the greenhouse with the loamy scent of freshly-tilled soil in the air and a commercial-size bag of seeds at my feet. We were planting our first crop.
This entire chamber plus three more adjacent would to be devoted to potatoes, one of our two staple crops that would provide the majority of our calories and nutrients. Corn would be planted in the two southernmost chambers, and various crops of vegetables would take up the rest of the spaces between. We were planting these potatoes from seed, and would carefully select the most productive plants and best quality tubers to turn into seed potatoes.
Martin had rented a pair of rototillers with plow attachments but the planting had to be done by hand. Martin and Stansy were running their tillers to make neat rows in the ground. Wendy and I followed behind to plant seeds, and Nock and Stan hoed over them with fertilized soil. This one room of our greenhouse was more than three times the size of the entire greenhouse in Sasha's backyard.
It was hard work, but we had recently pushed up our calorie intake from 1500 a day to 2500, and on working days like today, it would be more like 5000. After years of deprivation, I had nearly forgotten what it felt like to get enough food to eat. Back in high school, I had clocked a time of 8.69 in the hundred meter dash, and my IQ had tested out at 164. Facing borderline malnutrition, my body conserved energy where it could, leaving me with a near-constant sense of fatigue and a sluggishness to my thoughts. Now, there was an edge of sharpness to my thinking that had long been missing, and my energy simply felt boundless.
I finished the second row of planting and started in at the end of the row Wendy had been working on, between the two I had completed. I could see that, after just thirty minutes of hauling the big bag and bending to place seeds at regular intervals, her juvenile body was beginning to tire. The muggy warmth in here wasn't helping either, and sweat streaked the smudges of dirt on her face.
"Why don't you take a rest?" I suggested as I drew near, yelling to be heard over the rumbling of Stansy's rototiller. "Sit down, have some water?"
Wendy looked up, just now realizing that I had planted nearly half of her row for her. She looked back at Nock, patiently waiting for her to finish, and groaned. "God, sometimes I really hate this stupid little girl body. What the fuck were my parents thinking?"
"Oh, I don't know," I said. I pointed to where Martin sat sprawled against one wall, guzzling water from a plastic bottle. Pushing those heavy machines through the dirt couldn't have been easy. Stansy had passed him up, starting her sixth row where he had only finished four. "I think you keep up with the normies just fine. Maybe Tilly can take a turn at planting for a bit?"
"Yeah, I guess," she said.
Tilly had mapped out the rows before work started and had moved from person to person, inspecting their work, correcting mistakes and jotting down equations in a notebook, no doubt adjusting her estimates for crop yield and water consumption. At Wendy's request, she came over and joined me in planting on the adjacent rows, but not before jotting down a few more figures in her book.
"So, how bad is it?" I quipped. "How long until we starve?"
Tilly laughed. "Never, I hope. We're about to get our second injection of money from Sasha's fraud scheme and the trust fund from Chile. We'll need to take a few more food shipments from Andy, but that will taper off early next year, and at some point the flow will reverse, and we'll start selling our surplus through him. If we're running our operation here at full capacity, I estimate a net profit of about sixty thousand to ninety thousand dollars per annum after Andy takes his cut, and if we assume that market rate for fresh vegetables at least holds steady."
"We could do a lot with that," I said. "Any ideas on how we can make more? Can we monetize this network of yours?"
At my words, Tilly paused in the middle of a step, balanced on one foot. I had to suppress a snigger at the sight. She slowly lowered the foot the rest of the way to the ground. She had that faraway look that she got sometimes when she was deep into a problem.
"I'm embarrassed to say that I hadn't really thought of that," she said. She spoke slowly, but gained in speed as she went, like a boulder rolling downhill. "It's actually obvious. Encrypted, point-to-point communications. Algorithmic analyses of language patterns and data traffic origination. Trust scoring. Whitelisting and blacklisting. The possibilities are endless!"
I understood about half of what she had just said. Okay, maybe one quarter. "That sounds fantastic," I said dryly.
"It is!" Tilly said. She had dropped the seed bag at her feet and whipped out her notebook again. The words were still spilling out of her at a rapid pace as she wrote. "We can use the same protocols that Stan and I developed. To be useful for most people, we'll have to build a kernel small and efficient enough to run from a terminal, but I'm sure we can manage that. The real trick is getting our product out to our users and gaining their trust. Andy could be our first beta tester. I'm sure he could find us additional contacts within the informal market. We would charge a small access fee to use the network, but with thousands of users nationwide, that could grow into a significant sum."
I was starting to see where she was going and jumped in before she tossed another word salad my way. "So you want to build a service for black marketeers to use to coordinate their buying and selling?."
"Yes, isn't that what I just said? It would also actively protect our users against the possibility of authorities in law enforcement gaining access to the network and attempting to ensnare its legitimate users. I'll need to develop some simple machine learning algorithms and feed it whatever data we can find that will help in identifying such authorities."
"That's great," I said. I knew I should be happy that Tilly had just come up with an idea that could make money for us.
"You're disappointed." Tilly looked at me keenly now, coming out of whatever mental space she had been in.
"No, I said, that really is great. I just had a different idea, but it's silly."
Tilly looked over her shoulder, prompting me to do the same. While we had been talking, Nock and Stan had begun to close the distance. In another minute, we would be holding them up. "Come on," she said. "Let's talk while we work. What is your idea?"
I sighed. "I just thought I could sell my music, maybe through your network somehow. I don't know, really."
"You mean as a songwriter?"
"I did it before, back before the Ban. It doesn't make a whole lot of money, actually, but it would be something."
Tilly was silent for a minute, still planting but glancing at me now and then as if considering something. "Nissi, can you sing?"
The question caught me totally off guard. The Nissi/Neri model was crafted with a clear and resonant voice, with a vocal range in the 99th percentile for humans. Our brains had been molded to intuitively understand complicated mathematics, to aid in understanding the underlying structure of music. We had nearly perfect control of pitch and instinctive breath control. It was no secret that elves had been greatly overrepresented in musical performance right up until the Ban.
"Well, yes," I said.
"And you are good." She did not pose it as a question.
I shrugged. "Good enough, I suppose."
"Would you mind showing me?"
