Tierra y libertad

In deepest September, the thick of the pistachio harvest, the autumn sky was usually veiled with dust thrown high as the shakers and receivers vibrated through the trees. But for weeks now, the machines had stopped. This left the whole orchard--almost a hundred thousand acres--more vulnerable to aflatoxin than ever. It was nice to see the stars again. It was also time for the robots to come back to work. "You know, this kind of thing doesn't happen in Iran," Stephens said. Dash's client was the biggest farmer in North America. He wore snakeskin and sandalwood and a linen suit that glowed in the predawn shadow. "What's in Iran?" Dash asked. His gaze wandered over the rows of heavily laden trees. "You ever been to Iran?" Everything about him screamed sales rep: his acid-peel face, his giant watch, the snap of taurine gum between his smiling jaws. The blockchain they developed to track the uranium suddenly developed sentience, and your agency is the only thing keeping us meatsacks from being turned to glass." Brand reps tended to treat Dash as though her work with inorganic species had contaminated her humanity in some irreversible way. Brand reps for agri-bots were apparently no different from the others. "Presuming that a machine intelligence wants to turn us into glass presumes that it cares what happens to us at all," she said. "Any theoretical intelligence would have as much reason to care about us as a cancer cell cares about a human lung.