Fieldborn

There’s a Maypole in the corner of the town square. It’s nothing flashy—just a waist-thick steel tube a couple of meters high with a little curved bench in front. I’ve walked past it a hundred times on my way to the fry shop with my friends without giving it a second glance. Later tonight, I’ll go over there with a marker and write my name on it: Silas Tee, 2176, now that I’ve realised I’ve been Selected. 

I won’t tell my friends; no one ever does. Anyway, the night before May 1st is always a huge party. Everybody will be having hardcore fun, scared underneath and trying to drown it, relieved when the sun rises, and it’s not them. Anyway, I doubt if they’d believe me sober. People have been wrong before, but the memory is so real. That’s what people say: the aliens, or god, or whoever is doing it, reaches into your head, and suddenly, there it is, you’d been Selected, known all your life, known and made peace with it long since. I’d just forgotten until today. Maybe that keeps my mouth shut, smiling and drinking despite the marker digging into my leg as I dance like I wasn’t going to vanish tomorrow morning like all the rest.

Everyone says we brought it on ourselves. That we can blame the eight billion people on a broken planet, the weather all-to-hell and everyone fighting for their scrap of what was left. Then, on May 1^st 2054, one billion people vanished. Old, young, rich and poor, here one minute, then gone. People demanded answers; governments bristled at each other, except the people smugly calling it the end times. But the same goes for next year and for the two after that. The population of the earth halved, and that wasn’t all. Farm animals gradually became infertile: cows, pigs, chickens, you name it, and nothing anyone did made a scrap of difference. Of course, it threw farming into chaos; people starved and rioted, but still, no one had any answers or an idea who was responsible. They’d gone extinct within thirty years, and so was eating meat. That’s when the rumours started that our small blue, badly managed, precious planet had been noticed and watched, and when we didn’t fix it ourselves, they, whoever they were, had stepped in. 

There was a wildly popular book that came out about the same called “Intervention” that I’d read at school. It said we were being managed now, adjusted, and taught to be better stewards. It came out just at the same time that people started to remember things as I had, remember that they were going to disappear too. Not just Selections. Fusion, limitless cheap power, had been ‘just around the corner’ for a century, and that May, simultaneously, hundreds of physicists around the globe suddenly remembered that they just needed this waveform and that metal, and it was all very easy, really. Amazing that it had escaped them all those years. I think that’s when even the religious stopped refuting that an external agency was at work. Something trying to repair the planet with rough, hard, but necessary steps at the beginning, then a gradually refined lighter touch on the dominant species. Guiding us, I guess. Maybe it took time to work out how to put stuff in our heads? But from that day to this, not a thought from them or a presence in orbit in some vast ship. Nothing but effects: clean rivers and ice at the poles, a world where people work more together than they did perhaps, conscious we are under some eye. Nor have they stopped us from expanding out to the nearer planets, taking the first tentative steps to the stars. Every new mission getting debated, endlessly and pointlessly, as to whether they will approve. Nor does it let you escape Selection, being out there between worlds.

I leave a note to my parents and go to meet my friends. The town is buzzing, but as we walk down past the Maypole, I can’t help but wonder why people still get Selected. It’s far fewer now, maybe a million a year across the globe, a tiny fraction of those first great culls. Maybe it’s to remind us that they’re still watching, or it’s to make sure we stay on track to wherever they’re guiding us. There are a hundred explanations out on the net. And I don’t want it to be me, but if it wasn’t, it might be one of my friends – I’m not that much of a jerk. So hours later, I’m alone, a little, well a lot, drunk and standing by the Maypole almost too late. No one’s watching as I write my name and the date. I put the marker back in my pocket so as not to litter, and when I pulled out my hand, it’s gone transparent, gauzy. The sun has come up, shining down the street, and in an instant, I’m a billion motes of gold, still conscious and despite everything, hoping for some contact from them, some remembrance that it would be all right, some acknowledgement of Silas Tee. Knowing in the silence that all I am now is a damp name slowly drying on steel.