Nobody Home: an excerpt from FIANCHETTO, Book II

 After leaving the Outer Banks in the wake of his defeat of the EM ARAKHNA, Victor goes on a sentimental journey back to Fysikós Farm. There he discovers aspects of this past he never knew, traces of his lost lover, and the what happened to Farm after his mother's death/

Notes: the "Dirty Drone" incident mentioned was a terrorist attack on the Washington Monument in which a dud tactical nuke contaminated much of the National Mall with its unexploded plutonium warhead. As a result of this attack, Frances Clarke (Victor's mother) and most of the adults from the Farm were killed by plutonium poisoing.

FIANCHETTO Book I is available on Amazon as a Kindle e-book. Trade paper print-on-demand copies are likewise available there.

3. Nobody Home

            The sun was going down when Victor crossed the Chatham County line. Hurrying westward to avoid rush hour traffic, he skirted the Research Triangle Park and town of Chapel Hill, proceeding directly to the Farm. Crossing the bridge over the Haw River, the settling sun stabbed at his eyes. He'd ridden this route many times as a kid, clinging to a handhold on the transit system buses that made daily runs from Chapel Hill to the Chatham County seat, Pittsboro. Adults from the Farm always accompanied these field trips to the University library or to the medical complex at UNC when someone needed treatment. Sometimes they could go shopping, but that meant double the number of chaperones. Adults went along not only to assist the Farm kids, but to make sure they didn't sample any forbidden technology.

            The Ford Famiglia followed the route he requested, off the highway onto a rural road. Better kept than the dead zone roads of eastern North Carolina, the way to the Farm was still used by locals. Near the last turnoff, the car slowed. Feeling like a sleepwalker, Victor went to the front window and stared at the unpaved side road.

            "Pull over here." The car rolled into the high grass and stopped.

            He got out, locking the Ford. Off to the left was a wide dirt path studded with large boulders set half their height into the ground. This had been Frances's way to keep unwanted vehicles off the premises. No one could drive over the stones, and the closely growing trees on both sides of the path also discouraged intruders. Victor wound his way through the boulders just as he used to as a child, trailing the fingers first of one hand, then the other, over the worn granite blocks.

            The Farm was a full kilometer back from the paved road. It got darker as Victor wandered amid the stones. Peepers began to sing in the trees and crickets joined the chorus. It was strange, very strange. Victor had spent the first eighteen years of his life here and he hadn't been back since the day in August 2058 when he'd left for college. Predictably, he'd had a scene with Frances when he announced his intention to leave.

            Face clouded with anger, she stood in the doorway of her cabin, barring the way out.

            "I know what you're doing. You're chasing after her!"

            He rolled his eyes. "I'm going to N.C. State to study electrical engineering."

            She grabbed his arms, hard. "Stay away from her! She's dangerous!"

            He broke her grip. "To you, maybe. Not to me."

            "Do my wishes mean nothing to you?"

            He thought about it, then said, "Yeah, nothing."

            That was the last time they spoke. The next day, Victor lugged all his worldly possessions--clothes, books, and a small boxed chess set stuffed into an old Navy duffle bag--down the path to the road. He had to hike all the way to the highway to catch the CTS bus. Frances stood on her cabin's porch, watching him go. Two weeks later he was served with a restraining order forbidding him to set foot on the Farm ever again. Victor was so proud of the injunction he printed it and tacked it to the door of his dorm room. He still had it, carefully filed away at home.

            The path descended at a shallow angle, bottoming out in the ancient floodplain of the river. He could see buildings ahead through the trees--white siding mildewed green, galvanized roof panels heaped with drifts of pine needles. The only sounds were mindless insect songs in the underbrush. Victor sniffed the air. There ought to be cooking smells from the canteen and white light from battery-powered lamps in the buildings. Lights and odors were notably absent.

            He soon saw why things were so quiet. A curled, one use scripter was stuck to the door of the Farm office. It was a sheriff's notice. The owners were in default on their taxes. September 2, the site was going up for auction.

            Victor bent forward and peeked into a dusty window. It was black as ink inside, but he glimpsed some shelves and the soft silhouettes of furniture. Papers, bright in the darkness, were scattered about.

            He went to Frances's cabin next. It was padlocked. He couldn't see them, but he felt the plank door for the letters carved there a dozen years ago. B-I-T-C, he read like a blind man. Every time his future lover finished a letter, Victor got a kiss. Time ran out and she never got around to whittling the H. Funny, Frances must have seen the letters, yet she never mentioned them, or tried to remove them. By that time in their relationship, Frances seemed to regard every affront as an affirmation.

            Slowly, he walked to the Hall. Here he'd lived thirteen years, and here he'd met her. The door was not barred, so he pushed it in and surveyed the long, dark room, lined on both sides with bunks. How small it was. The Hall had both passive and active solar panels, generating electricity and hot water. In winter there sometimes wasn't enough sunlight to power the heaters or make enough hot water to keep the place comfortable. Victor and the others layered on socks and sweats until it was hard to move. The best solution was to cling close to someone. That's what they had done. In cold weather everyone dragged their futons to the floor and huddled close together for warmth. When spring rolled around and the weather warmed, the other kids migrated back to their beds. She and Victor moved to her bunk. Neither asked the other to stay, they just did.

            Standing in the center of the old Hall, looking over the empty bunks, Victor heard the distinct sound of a guitar being strummed. Music filtered through the walls like a sweet aroma. The Farm wasn't completely abandoned.

            A man sang:

            There's a pale, drooping maiden who toils her life away,
            With a worn heart whose better days are o'er:
            Though her voice would be merry, 'tis sighing all the day,
            Oh! Hard times come again no more.

            Outside and around the corner he spied a warm aura of light. He hurried to it, curious to see who remained in this forgotten, empty place.

            Behind the Hall was a small shed once used to store potatoes and other vegetables for the winter. It was small, about three meters square, with a sloping tin roof. A man was sitting on the steps in front of the shed. He held a battered six-string guitar on his lap. At his feet a Coleman lantern burned brightly.

             Victor slowed his approach. When he reached the outer boundary of lantern light he halted.

            "Boris?"

            The old man stopped strumming. He squinted into the darkness.

            "Who's there?" His voice had the round corners of someone who'd lived his entire life in rural North Carolina.

            Victor stepped forward. "It's Victor."

            "Victor? Victor Leventon?" He always pronounced it Lee-ven-ton instead of Lev-un-ton.

            "Yeah, Boris, it's me." He approached the stronger circle of light.

            "I'll be damned. I ain't seen you in what, ten, twelve years?"

            "Not that long," he replied, smiling. "It's only been seven."

            He sat down on the plank porch beside the old man. Boris--Victor never knew his last name--was one of the original members of the commune. Most of the land the Farm occupied had belonged to his family. To Victor, Boris had always been an old man, but looking at him now he realized Boris was no more than seventy, which made him sixtyish during Victor's youth.

            "Are you alone?"

            Boris nodded. "Been alone for a while. Frances and the team went off to D.C. and never come back."

            That was in the summer of 2059, exactly six years ago. Victor asked what happened to the Farm after Frances and 'the team' failed to return.

            "We kept going awhile, then the county came in and took all the kids away. Social Services, you know. We told them we was their legal guardians, but they didn't listen."

            "Did all the adults go to Washington with Frances?"

            "All of 'em but me, Cookie, and Dave."

            Cookie was the Farm's nutritionist. Dave was the Farm's chief mechanic. Victor didn't know their last names either; no one ever used them on the Farm. That meant twelve people, including Frances Clarke, died in the Dirty Drone incident.

            "Cookie and Dave moved to Siler City, but I stayed here," Boris said.

            "Why stay here all by yourself?"

            He shrugged. "It's my home." Boris gave the old Alvarez instrument a slow strum. "What about you, Victor? What you been up to?"

            Having no contact with the outside world, Boris would not have heard about ARAKHNA or his challenge to the EMs. He tried to explain what he'd been doing, about facing FORT in the near future.

            "I didn't know machines could play chess. How do they move the little men around?"

            Victor had to smile. "They announce their move, and somebody moves the pieces for them."

            "Is it hard to beat them?"

            "Pretty hard, but I can do it."

            He looked back over Boris's shoulder at the silent shed. "I remember this place."

            "The tater shed."

            "They locked her up here, that time."

            Boris coughed a little and looked at his feet. "Stormy girl. You still see her?"

            "Sometimes."

            "She okay?"

            He wondered that himself but said "Sure."

            Boris played a bit. "You sang to her, the night they locked her in the shed." Victor remembered. "'Dream a Little Dream.' Made her cry. Never heard her cry, before or after."

            "She didn't!"

            He held up his right hand. "On my oath! After you finished, I sat here a while. I heard her."

            Victor could not imagine his lover crying. She was only fifteen then, and he was twelve, but unless physically injured he'd never known her to cry for as long as they lived on the Farm.

            "Victor, why'd you come back?"

            "I wanted to see what was left. I beat the Russian machine at chess a couple days ago, and before the year's out I expect to play the Swiss machine. They say it's the best, most powerful artificial mind in the world. I'll beat it, though. Coming here was just a reminder."

            "Reminder of what?"

            "How I got to be who I am."

            Boris held out a hand. Victor shook it firmly.

            "I know you'll win," he said. "You come from smart people. Frances and the Doc, they were real sharp. Makes sense you'd be smart too."

            "Thanks, Boris."

            Up close the old man wasn't too clean. If the Farm's solar panels weren't serviced properly, the electric well pumps would give out and there'd be very little fresh water. Victor also wondered if Boris got enough to eat.

            "Can I give you some money?"

            "I ain't got a box to put it in." He meant he had no PDL to accept a transfer of funds.

            "How do you eat? How do you pay your bills?"

            He grinned, showing gaps in his teeth. "I don't do much of either. I work the gardens in summer, and Welfare brings me paks of food twice a month."

            Victor bolted to his feet. "That's ridiculous! Let me start an account for you, get you a PDL!" He could put a few thousand in the account every month. Boris didn't have to starve.

            The old man strummed a few bars. "Don't know how to use one," he said. "Too old to learn."

            This was intolerable. Victor resolved to find a proxy nearby, probably in Pittsboro, to see to it Boris got regular meals, and a warm place to stay in winter. He didn't tell Boris. The old man would shrug off his offer. The Farm's doctrine of the evils of technology was a hard habit to break.

            Victor bid Boris goodbye, but the old man asked him to wait. Getting unsteadily to his feet, he said, "I got something for you."

            He started across the yard to Frances' cabin. Victor called after him that the door was locked. Boris held up a ring of keys.

            "I go anywhere I want."

            He fumbled a bit fitting the old-fashioned metal key in the padlock, but he got it open and pushed the door in. Victor stepped into the once-dreaded heart of Fysikós Farm. Boris's Coleman lantern hissed in the closed, quiet space, filling the front room with warm light.

            Here time had stopped. There was a calendar chalked on the wall declaring it to be 2059. Her old desk was there, papers neatly piled on the front corners. Just as Victor remembered, the walls were covered with beautiful murals of meadows of wild flowers, a hardwood forest, and the shore of an idealized mountain lake. Frances had painted them herself. They were well done, but had no people in them, lending the room even more of a liminal feeling.

            Victor went through the door behind the desk into his mother's private quarters. There was a thrift store dresser and wardrobe, a Hollywood bed frame, and a plain, twin-sized mattress. An odd thought occurred to him: was he conceived on this austere, joyless bed?

            Victor shook off such thoughts when Boris called him. Back in the office, the old man had Frances' file cabinet open. He extracted a green hanging file and gave it to him.

            "Yours."

            It was weighty, about fifteen centimeters thick. Because Frances wouldn't use any sort of digital media, everything was written on paper in her distinctive, highly legible script. Page one read, in toto:

LEVENTON, VICTOR ADAM

2 MARCH 2040 C.E.

WEIGHT AT BIRTH 3.67 KG

There followed a pair of smudgy footprints, inked impressions of the soles of baby Victor's feet.

            "Thanks, Boris." Before he closed the file, he stole a glance at the remaining folders. Her name glowed among the others.

            "I'll take that one too."

            "Not yours," Boris protested.

            "I'll give it to her when I see her."

            The old man didn't like it, but he grudgingly agreed. Victor hauled out her file. It was massive, maybe twenty centimeters front to back. A quick riffle through the pages showed everything from her birth certificate to police citations, copies of court summons, and many Farm disciplinary reports. Stormy girl indeed.

            He started for the door, but Boris called him back. From Frances's desk he produced a wide, leather-bound album. The cover was unmarked, but inside were numerous flat, 2D photos.

            Victor's breath caught. He saw pictures of himself as a baby, and as a toddler. Frances was holding him, and smiling. A handsome man with dark blond hair and closely trimmed beard stood next to her.

            "That's Doc," Boris said. Victor stared. He'd never seen an image of his father before.

            "Can I keep this?"

            "Sure. Should be yours. It's all about you. Show it to your kids someday."

            His eyes stung. Victor resisted an urge to hug the old man.

            "Thanks," he said.

            He offered to give Boris a lift to Pittsboro or Chapel Hill, but he declined. It was night, Boris said. Time to go to sleep.

            Victor walked slowly back to the boulder strewn road. Boris sat on a maple stump and played "Hard Times Come Again No More," though this time he did not sing along.

            Burdened as he was with files and photo album, the walk back to the car was longer and hotter than the journey in. The night was steamy, and mosquitoes haunted the woods in clouds. Victor could barely keep them off his face with his hands so full. To keep his morale up, he began humming 'Dream a Little Dream' as he marched.

            It was warm the night he serenaded her in the potato shed. The adults had locked her up for fighting. He heard she knocked someone out cold, but he never found out who. She spent two weeks inside, on a punishment diet of spring water and raw vegetables. One of Cookie's pet theories was that meat fed the body's temper, making carnivores more excitable, more violent. Victor's lover told him living on carrots and broccoli would make anyone peaceful--from sheer malnutrition.

            Frances forbade anyone talking to her while she was confined. Victor's literal twelve-year-old mind took this to mean singing was okay. On her first night locked in he rounded up Boris and his guitar and they sat on the steps of the potato shed. Victor asked the old man to play the song, and Victor sang in his newly broken, adolescent voice. Several adults came out to see what was going on. They listened, but no one tried to stop him. When the song was over, Victor ran back to the Hall. En route he passed Frances, standing in the deep shadows outside her office. Their eyes met, but neither of them said a word.

            Back at the car, he dumped the files and album on the seat and got in. It felt like midnight, but the Ford's clock said it was only a little before ten. He linked to Lex Bradley. His former Farm-mate advised Victor to meet him at his store, Village Surplus and Vintage Tech, on the north side of Chapel Hill, off Interstate 40. Victor dialed in the destination. The Famiglia climbed out of the weeds, headlights piercing the rural night.

            Along the way Victor had a look at the files. The front of his folder contained mundane medical information: growth charts with his height and weight at different ages, vaccinations, minor injuries. He'd forgotten about the time he found the dead raccoon by the compost heap and Frances worried he'd been exposed to rabies. Fortunately tests of the carcass revealed no sign of the disease, so Victor was spared the lengthy and painful vaccination series.

            Other entries dealt with school, test scores, and such. Several of the adults on the Farm were credentialed educators, and Frances gave them free rein to test personal pedagogical theories on the Farm kids, as long as these theories didn't conflict with the cardinal rule of No Information Technology.

            According to various tests, Victor's intelligence was above average, but not startlingly so. His problem-solving ability did provoke comment. His third-grade teacher wrote: Victor took apart a broken electric fan in the classroom and fixed it. It now runs perfectly. When I asked him how he knew how to do this, he said he saw a picture of the inner workings of an electric motor in the encyclopedia and figured out how to repair the fan just by looking at this illustration. Frances had underlined the last thirteen words in green pencil.

            As to behavior, early pages labeled him as "deeply introverted," "withdrawn," "friendly but extremely shy." By age ten these assessments changed to "independent, kind, loyal," and "exhibits superior problem-solving ability in daily tasks." By the time he was a teen these had changed to "arrogant," "opinionated," "discounts others' feelings."

            She started figuring in his entries about then. "Victor has developed a close association," "They are always together," "Victor followed her into the girls' lavatory and had to be forced to leave."

            The Ford entered Carrboro, the bedroom community and bohemian suburb of Chapel Hill. With more street lights around, he was able to read the penciled notes more easily.

            Victor has formed a premature attachment, Frances wrote. The object of his affection is anti-social, aggressive, and rebellious. He does not display these characteristics himself, but his devotion to her is obvious and growing. She is a leader type, and he is her follower. I don't want him to go where she takes him.

            Her handwriting grew cramped as she scribbled with obvious force. As one of the greatest assets of the Farm, I cannot allow him to get involved in such an unhealthy relationship. Then: I fear they have crossed a line that cannot be uncrossed. Michelle [one of the girls in the Hall, and a snitch] says they sleep in the same bunk every night. None of the children dare speak to her about this for fear of a beating.

            There was more, about Frances's attempts to wean him away from her. Nothing worked. Favoritism from adults made his life hell with the other kids, and punishment only pushed them closer together.

            Near the end he found: She's left the Farm; good riddance. I give her six months before she ends up in jail or dead. And: Victor is inconsolable. She couldn't have hurt me more if she'd stabbed me in the heart. How can I reclaim Victor after this?

            Face burning, Victor skipped a whole page of his mother's private invective. It ended with: Poor Victor. I hope he knew how to say no.

            He'd never said no to her. Maybe one day he'd have to learn how.

The illustrations with this excerpt were created using an online AI. The results are eerie and unexpectedly good, especially "girl crying in a shed." I found the app adept at interpreting my instructions. The results are not art, but represent the ideas I wanted illustrated quite well.