Devolve 2.0 The Reboot

Harvesting vegetables used to be a strange task for Jubilee. She'd liked it, that first year, picking home-grown fruits and vegetables, if only for the sensory experience of it. And it had been reassuring to know that every bit of food they could produce would help their cause and make them stronger. Yet that first year, it also felt foreign. She'd never done it before: she'd never spent days with dirt under her fingernails and sore arms from carrying huge baskets or spent so much of her energy thinking positive thoughts about vegetables. But all that had changed. Three years later and she was a pro. She wore gloves and knee-pads and a hat. Her pleasure in the process was tempered now by the awareness that every ounce of food was necessary just to keep them alive. Harvesting wasn't just a job now. It was a mission.

It was early evening, after dinner, the time of day when it cooled off enough that a few people would drift outside to put in a little more time. Ali Blaire would turn on the grow lights over the seedlings and smaller plants, which would make it light enough in the gardens to continue for a while longer. The grow lights were long narrow tubes, sometimes colored, that Ali kept suspended over the rows as she worked. Jubilee thought the lights looked like giant lightsaber lasers (or whatever) but she'd already discovered that if you walked through them, you just cast a shadow over the row and that's all. They always made the garden look ghostly, especially as the night beyond the fences progressed from sunset to total darkness. But it was still reasonably light out, enough that Jubilee noticed several other people drifting out to join them.