CHAPTER 2

VOLUNTEER 4711

I’ve been in this place I call ‘the farm,’ for a few months, I don’t know how long exactly because I’ve lost track of time. Although it didn’t take me long to figure out, I’m in a brothel slash farm slash mad scientist’s home. Most of my days are exactly the same. I’m required to do farm work, clean, and sometimes help the mad scientist, who I call ‘the doctor’ with his sadistic work. I’ve no idea what we are farming, I assume, food, but as I don’t recognize the shoots coming up and I still don’t have a translator, I can’t be sure. It could be drugs which would go along better with the prostitution and all the strange technology the doctor has in his large house behind the living quarters. But I’ve not received any drugs myself, and this isn’t from a lack of asking.

My days are long in the fields. In the morning, the skies are purple, then they fade to pink at midday, and then back to purple in the evening. About every other day, alien males, not just silvery ones, come to the farm to have sex for money. There are a variety of aliens here on the farm, all the aliens here are volunteers too, but none of us have translators, not even the Silver farmers or the doctor. So it’s obvious that I’ll never get a translator. I suppose it makes me a better worker not to have one. All the other aliens have the same tattoo I have on their faces. It looks like an upside-down arrow with a semi-circle around it with some dots. I’ve tried to ask what it means, but it’s a ridiculous question as without a translator, I can’t understand the answer, even though I know enough of the alien language to ask the question.

Every day I try to learn some new words in the Silver’s language, but it’s daunting, and I have a nagging suspicion, by the way the other people treat me, that they don’t believe that I’m not worth the effort to teach me how to speak Silver. I assume they assume, I won’t be here long, which isn’t a comforting thought.

The farm is a strange place. The farming part is straightforward. I haven’t seen a full season yet, but so far, I’ve been involved with the harvesting. I imagine there’ll be seeding in a few months. I don’t know why they don’t use technology for this, which makes me think what we’re doing is illegal, and any technology would draw attention to it with tracking devices. Someday, I’ll get up the courage to eat what I’ve picked just to see what happens.

As for the brothel, the aliens that come looking for sex don’t look particularly threatening, nor do they seem to be violent. The other alien volunteers who accommodate these sexual transactions don’t seem to have suffered physically. But I feel lucky every time I stand in line, and I’m not chosen for sex.