The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

It’s not really slime-mold, of course. Nothing on this damn planet is anything you’d recognize, which is exactly why Inatec have us working the jungle in armored suits along with four thousand other corporates planet-side, all scrambling to find new alien flora with commercial applications so they can patent the shit out of all of it.

‘Slime-mold’ is the closest equivalent the labtechs have come up with. Self-organizing cellular amoebites that ooze around on their own until one of them finds a very recently dead thing to grow on. Then it lays down signals, chemical or hormonal or some other system we don’t understand yet, and all the other amoebites congeal together to form a colony that sets down deep roots like a wart into whatever’s left of the nervous system of the animal… and then take it over.

We’ve had several military contractors express major interest in seeing the results. Inatec has promised us all big bonuses if we manage to land a military deal – and not just the labtechs either. After all, it’s us lowly harvesters who go out there in our GMP suits to find the stuff.

Inatec’s got mining rights to six territories in four quadrants on this world. Two subtropical, one arid/mountainous, and three tropical, which is where the big bucks are. Officially, we’re working RCZ-8 Tropical 14: 27° 32' S / 49° 38' W. We call it The Green.

We were green ourselves when we arrived on-planet. The worst kind of naive, know-nothing city hicks. It was all anyone could talk about as we crammed around the windows – how fucking amazing it all looked as the dropship descended over our quadrant. We weren’t used to nature. We didn’t know how hungry it was.

The sky was rippled in oranges and golds from the pollen in the air, turning the spike slate pinnacles of the mountains a powder pink. The jungle was a million shades of green. Greens like you couldn’t imagine. Greens to make you mad. Or kill you dead.

Homelab squats in the middle of all that green like a fat concrete spider with too many legs radiating outwards. Uglier even than the Caxton Projects apartment blocks back home. Most of us are from what you’d call underprivileged backgrounds. The Caxton stats when I left were 89 per cent adult unemployment, 73 per cent adult illiteracy, 65 per cent chance of dying before the age of forty due to communicable disease or an act of violence. Who wouldn’t want a ticket out of there? Even if it was one-way.

Besides, our work is a privilege. We’re getting to work at the forefront of xenoflora biotech. At least that’s what it says on the ‘Welcome To Inatec’ pack all employees are handed when they’ve dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s on the contract. Or maybe just made an X where you’re supposed to sign. You don’t need to be literate to pick flowers. Even in a GMP.

Of course, by forefront, they mean front lines. And by harvesting they mean strip-mining. Except everything we strip away grows back, faster than we can keep up. Whole new species we’ve never seen before spring up overnight. Whole new ways to die.

You got to suffer for progress, baby, Rousseau would have said (if he was still alive). And boy do we suffer out there.

The first thing they do when you land is strip you, shave you, put you through the ultraviolet sterilizer, and then surgically remove your finger and toenails. It’s a biologically sensitive operation. You can’t be bringing in contaminants from other worlds. And there was that microscopic snail parasite incident that killed off two full crews before the labtechs figured it out. That’s why we don’t have those ultra-sensitive contact pads on our gloves anymore, even though it makes harvesting harder. Because the snail would burrow right through them and get under the cuticle, working its way through your body to lay its eggs in your lungs. When the larvae hatch, they eat their way out, which doesn’t kill you, it just gives you a nasty case of terminal snail-induced emphysema. It took the infected weeks to die, hacking up bloody chunks of their lungs writhing with larvae.

Diamond miners used to stick gems up their arses to get them past security. With flora, you can get enough genetic material to sell to a rival with a fingernail scraping. ‘Do we have any proof there was ever a snail infestation?’ Ro would ask over breakfast. ‘Apart from the company newsletter?’ he’d add before practical, feisty, educated Lurie could get a word in and contradict him. He was big into his conspiracy theories and our medtech, Shapshak, only encouraged him. They’d huddle deep into the night, getting all serious over gin made from nutri-oats that Hoffmann used to distill in secret in his room. It seemed to make Shapshak more gloomy than ever, but Ro bounced back from it invigorated and extra-jokey.

Ro was the only one who could get away with calling me Coco and only because we were sleeping together. Dumbfuck name, I know. Coco Yengko. Mom wanted me to be a model. Or a ballerina. Or a movie star. All those careers that get you out of the ghettosprawl. Shouldn’t have had an ugly kid then, Ma. Shouldn’t have been poor. Shouldn’t have let the Inatec recruiter into our apartment. And hey, while we’re at it, Ro shouldn’t have died.

Fucking Green.

Green is the wrong word for it. You’d only make that mistake from the outside. When you’re in the thick of it, it’s black. The tangle of the canopy blocks out the sunlight. It’s the murky gloom after twilight, before real dark sets in. Visibility is five meters, fifteen with headlights, although the light attracts moths, which get into the vents. Pollen spores swirl around you, big as your head. Sulfur candy floss. And everything is moist and sticky and fecund. Like the whole jungle is rutting around us.

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