A traveling genetically modified eggplant salesman is driving through Idado with sample seed packets when his car's computer fails, leaving him stranded by a remote farmhouse. Too far for a motel, he walks to the house and knocks on the door just as a heavy thunderstorm hits. When no one answers, he enters. Empty of residents, the declining old farmhouse is clearly owned by a food commodity corporation, and the house is used only for the computers running the watering systems. But it's dry at least, and he huddles up for the night, using one of the computers to check email before going to bed.
The next morning, he is arrested by the FBI for corporate espionage and is later sentenced to 2 years in federal prison. Also, he is fired and fined $30,000 dollars. Also his wife leaves him, he loses his house, he is kicked out of the National GMO Eggplant Marketers' Association in disgrace, and his children thenceforth speak his name only in resentment and sadness.
When he is finally released from prison, he returns to the place out of pique, and as he walks in the vast, empty dusty field, he spies a strange object in the distance, and to his astonishment, approaches a 5 foot high, 15 foot long eggplant, exactly in the place where his car used to be.
As he softly rubs the enormous vegetable that is perhaps the last marker of his being, a beautiful blond girl with an expensive professional camera steps out from behind the eggplant, taking a series of shots of its deep purple hues framed against the flat landscape, broken in the East by jagged, dry mountains.
"Quite an eggplant!" he says, "You know, you'll never believe this, but...."
"Excuse me," she says, "I'm documenting the decline of life on earth."
No comments:
Post a Comment