Frostlands by John Feffer

Author:John Feffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2018-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

The security is beyond lax. That’s the first thing I notice about the Farm. No elaborate VR vetting. No Quarantine Room. No high-tech perimeters. There’s only a rather old-fashioned stone wall that a determined intruder could breach with nothing more sophisticated than a ladder.

“Just trees around here,” Ilona explains in heavily accented English as she gives me a tour of the greenhouses. “The logging here ended twenty years ago, and even then this part of the Piscataquis County was very much uninhabited. I do not think there were even 200 people living in an area almost twice the size of your Vermont. So forget about anyone just bumping up into us.”

The Farm is indeed located in a remote corner of a Maine forest. It’s too far away from Arcadia for any physical connection, and I’m not sure we would have maintained one even if this renegade offshoot were just down the road. Its founders, including Ilona and her husband, Aladar, left Arcadia almost a decade ago, along with thirty other dissenters. The split was painful. Even now I detect frostiness in Ilona’s attitude toward me. She was hesitant when I first contacted her about the visit. I emphasized the urgency of the situation, though, and she relented. I suspect she did so only to get an independent update on her son Zoltan.

Ilona and Aladar were mathematicians recently arrived from Hungary when they joined Arcadia. They’d been environmentalists in their home country, part of an international scientific project to model the effects of climate change. They’d decided to leave Hungary because of the increasing discrimination that Aladar, a Roma, was facing. They thought the United States would be safe. After only a couple years at Dartmouth, however, growing anti-immigration sentiment and know-nothingism sent them into double exile—to Arcadia. And then into triple exile on the Farm.

Like me, Ilona is in charge of the greenhouses. We trade stories about tomato blight, about yields and seed saving. It helps to have at least one common interest when you’re straining to be civil. The Farm is much smaller than Arcadia, only sixty people, but it maintains nearly as many greenhouses. In the decade it’s been in operation, they’ve managed to clear only modest acreage for planting. Cutting down trees and pulling out stumps is a laborious process, Ilona explains. And the Farm doesn’t have the luxury of nearby communities to trade with. Since it’s even more self-contained than Arcadia, greenhouse production is that much more essential to the community’s survival.

The Farm can ill afford to let its members spend their time on frivolities like coding AI. Ilona admits that they still do maintain a few screens for communication purposes. Courtesy of technology Arcadia once provided, part of the community is also VR-enabled, from the conference room in the Common House along a path to the greenhouses. This is fortunate, since I don’t have time to apply to use one of Arcadia’s two functioning hovercars to make the round trip. The technology has also

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