The Farmer

They called him a farmer in wordplay, but it also fit somehow, if farmers worked without sunlight. They said he was short on intelligence but he had a particular aptitude for machines and so he was placed in the warehouse, a converted hangar filled with row on row of computer servers stacked 20 stories high, cables snaking down to the floor like Medusa’s hair caught inside a great humming hairdryer made of metal and cement. They thought he’d bear it better than most, being deaf.

The farmer’s job was to watch the machines and react when something went wrong. He carried a handheld fan, though in most instances of overheating this was not enough. For more serious malfunctions, he would carefully disconnect the aberrant calculator from its wire maze and carry it back to his office, where he would take it apart, adjust and test, and most of the time return it to its place within a few hours. In some cases, the electrical pulse was simply gone for good. These servers he stacked against the wall next to his table and the coffee maker, whose ON light was yellow.

His office was a small room added to the scaffold-cum-staircase halfway up the hangar, where he could sit and watch monitors, waiting for the orange light of a server summons. He spent most of the time pacing between rows on the clanking catwalks  full of spaces--looking down or up was like looking through a book of clockwork spiderwebs. He watched with his own eyes as the machines cranked from their shelves. Day after day they churned, each server with a blue light flickering its own irregular pattern. The sun came up from windows on one side of the warehouse, behind shades, and down on the other, behind shades.

Once the entire building lost power and the generators didn’t come on for an hour. Then the farmer paced the rows and reached his hand out, touching the machines lightly every so often to note the loss of vibration, heat dissipation.

Once they had introduced androids into the warehouse, presumably to help the farmer tend his rows. Instead they needed constant attention of their own, maintenance and direction and debugging. The farmer neglected his servers to fix them and became overly distressed when, as a result, a week’s worth of problems were backlogged. He went to his office and began watching for orange alerts from his chair for hours at a time, leaving only when needed and ignoring all else.

They removed the androids soon after, without a word to the farmer. One broken fleet member was left in a dusty corner of the warehouse. When the transport service later noticed the short number, they determined the  oversight was not worth a return trip.

The farmer played rummy alone, stopping to walk a lap of a level of the farm at each shuffle. He started at the top and went down.

He found the lone android one day in his fifth game, at 382 points, walking the 11th floor. It seemed dead. The farmer hoisted it over his shoulders, its plastic frame smaller and lighter than his but still awkwardly pointy. Took it back to the office, saw it was easy: one blown circuit. While the soldering iron heated next to the coffeepot, he drank a cup. Then he worked.

The android made a squealing sound while turning on that the farmer missed entirely, but he did see when its console lit up, green. The farmer couldn’t stare directly at it. He shooed the android out the door. It stood a moment, then walked off into the nearest row. The farmer watched until it turned a corner and was lost again.

He did not see the android in the maze, but sometimes he thought he saw a flash of green and would head that way, but it always disappeared.

Outside, the farmer found a wife. He brought her to the warehouse; she looked through the catwalk spaces, admired the machines, and after a few minutes complained of an awful headache. He’d forgotten about her ears. He found plugs somewhere in his office, but still she could not hear correctly for a few days. She decided she knew her husband a little better after that. He apologized and kissed her.

How can you make any sense of anything, all those flashing lights all day in the darkness? She asked.

It’s a system you get to know, he replied.

Later when she’d left, he thought of another question he might have asked: How can you hear, with all that noise? But then he looked out the window of his office and truly it was chaos in blues and spaces. So you look for the orange, and when you’re tired the yellow, and late at night maybe you will see a hint of green showing itself, he thought. For months the green was missing. He wondered, knowing the androids looked for orange as he did, whether the machine had found the sun behind the door and been drawn outside, to melt or burn or run in circles, east and then west and then east until all its power had drained. But the sun was hardly ever really orange, and the doors so far away and small.

From the top or the bottom of the warehouse the farmer always felt small. But in the middle he could stand just so where all the edges became only places he knew like a memory or a recipe and there he was wrapped up on all sides by electricity the same each way. In the middle he stood, Da Vinci’s man, measurable by protractor and pencil, the center of answers and he felt he should stick fingers and toes from each limb into sockets, plug himself in, set the warehouse spinning.

The machines never turned off. When he went home after turning the coffee off, the monitors black, and turned himself to his wife, they kept going. If he were to stay away, they would keep going. But the farmer always came back.


His dying vision was a smattering of blue lights blurred, his very last thought: there comes the green.

The android found him singed, bent strangely on the 12th floor, not far above where the farmer had once found it. His arm and forehead bled through the cracks, dripping down to floors 11, 10, and 9. The entire row of servers was black, still, reverent, the office a single orange scream.

The android carried the farmer to the table by the coffeepot. It assessed, pulled spare pieces from the pile at the wall. It filled his veins with coffee, his heart with gears. The farmer's very first thought: orange, everywhere.

He sat up. How long had it been? He turned to the android and they both moved out, returning to floor 12. They  began to fix the servers. Many were dark.

It must have been some time I was gone, thought the farmer, but he couldn’t say, felt warm and jumpy, a fuse in some joint not quite aligned; he had a recurring left leg twitch.

A clatter started on the ground floor, but neither man nor machine could hear it. It clanged up the stairs, level 1, 2, 3 …

The farmer and the android worked steadily -- it must have been a long time, thought the farmer, but he couldn’t tell anymore -- and yet there was half the row to fix, at least, other alerts piling up. We'll get there, thought the farmer. He needed juice and reached a finger instinctively for the nearest socket. Something under his skin felt warm, a pumping yellow glow.

He didn’t notice the dying of the buzz, but felt a sort of pressure leaving the air. His leg twitched.

The clatter was at 8, now 9, headed up to 12, coming noisy, careless.

A hundred years, thought the farmer, that’s how long we’ve been here fixing this row, at least. And then he thought, my wife -- has it been a hundred years for her as well? The android had taken a lead, his green light growing tinier by the minute, or was it the hour.

The clatter-makers arrived. They told the farmer to leave. He turned and saw darkness, no blue anywhere. At once the shades on either side of the building raised, and in rushed day. The android was still at work; they switched it off, carried it away.


The farmer left and stood outside, watching as workers disassembled the warehouse, took servers away piece by piece in boxes on forklifts.

His wife came running towards him, Darling, she called, Is it really you? She was old. So it had been a hundred years. They told me you were dead, she was crying. His skin dulled, leg started twitching, and he put out his arm to touch her face. But they figured it out, you see! she said. She held up an arm, glowing green from somewhere deep. I waited--and your ears, she said, They can let you hear, it’s amazing.

Had it only been minutes? He thought. Just that one row.

They embraced. Arm across her lower back, he felt for a button on her spine. He switched her off, carried her away.