After the Pickville fiasco, JA-NL and her family were pushed to the edge of society and the only economic value they had left for the Boujees were as Vessels down on the Farm. JA-NL and her family arrived at their farm only a week after her and her father's musical insurrection.

During her second week of in-factory suspension, JA-NL grabbed a rope, lassoed one of the overseer drones and yanked it to the ground. She hacked its radio systems and switched off the techno pop that blared above the picking fields and deafened them from hearing each other.

With this audio-oppression gone, JA-NL microphoned her father and friends so their voices would be amplified through the sound system. As the hours rolled by, the sounds of their emotional resilience reverberated from every wall, cage and 24-pack of octuple-ply toilet paper.

It took five days before their electronic overseers sent a status report to the Brain managers of this facility. Buried beneath the data of steps per minute and shipments made was data on the sound levels inside the picking fields. The numbers looked fuzzy and on further inspection, it showed that the overall sounds were lower than they should be and had indeterminate peaks and valleys, whereas the sound system should boom a non-stop, always loud techno beat.

“Camera on!” Simon Legree, the foreman, sneered as he watched footage of the pickfield. “Singing! How dare they!”

Legree and his team of robo-guards marched to the picking floor.

“Cut the music!”

Silence sucked the sound from the factory as Marvin, JA-NL and the other pickers looked around.

Legree marched through the factory and grabbed the singers and pulled them to the front of the warehouse.

“Boy! I could beat the living shit out of you! But I don't wanna hurt my beautiful, un-callused hands. But don't you worry. You'll get all the pain a body like yours can feel... down on the Farm!”

As the robo-guards pulled Marvin, JA-NL and the other audio-rebels out, the few who were not caught singing stand at attention and mouth a song to them.

JA-NL's father was deep in debt to the corporation for not finishing his ten-year picker contract. Their future had been signed, sealed and they were delivered to the Farm. This was the best way they could pay off their debts. Their only option was to be sent to debtors' prison.

They were loaded into shipping containers with a thousand other newly acquired farm tools. They were transported along one of the last remaining arteries of flyover America. They didn't quite know what to expect since those who had gone before them had been shut off from society. JA-NL, Dy-Ana, Marvin and Tammi braced themselves. They heard rumors of what horrors awaited them at the end of this economic Trail of Tears.

The mass migration of humans who fell into this sticky safety net would be in for a rude awakening when they realized they were stuck in a spiderweb where corporations and Boujees feasted on their flesh.

Along crumbling roads, they rode.

To Missouri! Just past Kansas City, beyond the Truce of Troost, the dividing line where the invading whites, who had once receded from the city during white flight, had pushed back black residents and held them at bay beyond that boulevard.

Just 30 more miles!

After 20-hours of bouncing and jumbling in the windowless shipping container, JA-NL held her breath, hopeful for a bit of beauty in their new rural home. Sure their lives were falling apart, but they would make the best of their new frontier lifestyle. How bad could it be? But her stomach sank, knowing that the systems of the world she was trapped never cared about her happiness.

The container's gate rolled up to let the rays of sun in. A metal fence twitched to life and there were acres of grass on this flat land. Around 16,000 years ago, during the end of the last ice age, large glaciers slid over the central parts of America, pinning all hills under its monumental weight. And now the area's flatness allowed JA-NL to see for hundreds of miles in every direction.

The beauty succumbed to a harsh light as she was blinded by photons bouncing off the corrugated metal roofs of a dozen industrial barns that dotted the land. Twelve barns, each thirty feet high and stretching for just shy of an acre.

Sure, the Boujees created beautiful PR campaigns with quad-fold brochures and 4D-holocube ads bursting with bucolic images of rolling fields of wheat as an early-summer sun bloomed above. These marketing materials sold the farms as a paradise on Earth that the gracious and ever-magnanimous Boujees created to save the inept Lazies from squalor, now that automation had made 80% of them unemployable. Cardigan-clad, porcelain-toilet white Boujee men and their pearl- clutching alabaster wives cried on camera, describing how difficult it was for them to see the ravages of poverty in their backyards. They described the agony they felt looking up from their all-encompassing white faux-fur lotus-chaises to see the dirty faces and rickety homes.

“How horrid!”

“Someone had to do something!”

“Someone had to save our little brown and tawny-white brothers!”

The Boujees recognized that there was more than enough wealth to go around and that governments, which they still held a controlling stake in, had failed the lowliest of them. With heavy sighs and rounds of self-congratulations, they sacrificed funds to create a social safety net. They would take up the responsibility of the Boujee Man's Burden.

How great they were!

How deep was their sacrifice!

In truth, they only needed to raise taxes on themselves and their corporations by 3% to create a fund to pay for universal basic income for the un- and under-employed.

But!

This tax increase would diminish their power and carried the stench of a possibility that the money could be used to sabotage their Boujee lifestyles.

“Boujees know best. Why else are we so rich?”

They agreed it was best to retain complete control over rescuing the lower classes. And, if, in the throes of their overwhelming altruism, they could find an economic purpose for these poor Vessels, well, that would be a splendid way for these wretched ones to thank them for their generosity.

And thus the modern Farm was built.

After molding the urban areas and turning the suburbs, exurbs and megalopolises into a vast network to support their needs and their bottom lines, the Boujees set to transforming the hinterlands for the most pathetic among them.

The highest of the Haught Boujees, the Zuckerbilts, the Musks, the Thiels, the Brinegies (pronounced Brin-Ay-gees), the Pagiefellers and the Walgans cut red ribbons framing thousands of acres of dew-dappled grass, gleaming in the sunlight. As the wind blew, waves of wheat rolled and whistled as black, brown and tawny-white children ran through these fields, laughing and giggling.

But the reality was far more bubonic than bucolic.

The Vessels shipped here had been pretty happy in their towns. But as their affordable housing was razed as a Boujee economic imperative, five million Americans were displaced. The PR agents knew that they had to get out in front of this story by offering the hope of something better. This had always been the nature of dubious, self-serving philanthropy.

Ah, the agrarian dream!

America had not been a nation of farmers for more than a 130 years. Even though America birthed both the Industrial Revolution, in Waltham, Massachusetts, and the Automation Revolution, in Palo Alto, California, the population still held onto the myth of the noble farmer as core to their identity. But, less than 1% of the population worked in agriculture and most of the work was carried out by large automated threshers and tractors. Ironically, as the Boujees systematically denied basic living standards to the lower classes and stigmatized those who asked for assistance, one of the nation's largest welfare programs was to pay these comfortable farmers $30 billion a year not to work.

As automation gobbled up jobs, there were fewer opportunities for Grips and, as wages plummeted, Boujees knew they had to create a Final Solution for the dregs of society to save them.

“Put them out to pasture!”

What a simple and wonderful idea! Unused land in Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri was donated to create farms for the poor.

But as the Vessels were loaded into the back of trucks, none thought to ask what was to be farmed.

The Vessels. Of course.

The PR teams already knew how to put the perfect spin on human farming. For more than a century, they had been doing society-wide mythologizing about animal farming and this would just be a slight modification.

Industrialization had transformed the relationship between humans and the species they had domesticated. 1.7 billion cows were subjected to the will of humans. Many of these were horded into pens too tiny for them to turn around. These cows were impregnated by force and had their babies snatched and slaughtered and so they could be impregnated again, ensuring a never ending supply of milk to pour over their Cinnamon Toast Crunch^TM .

The mammary liquid of a forced impregnated mother who has her children slaughtered, it does a body good!

23 billion chickens were made and raised for human consumption each year. In large turnstiles, baby chicks were sorted by egg-laying ability, the useless males were ripped out and pulverized in grinders.

Many of the 3 billion pigs, the smartest domesticated animals and even more intelligent than human's distant cousin, chimpanzees, had their testicles sliced open and ripped out weeks after birth to pacify them. Behind locked doors, in silos, hidden from the sun, these animals were forced to cannibalize their own and injected with hormones and antibiotics.

None of these images were ever seen in popular culture, nor are the sounds of thousands of pigs squealing or the shredding of chicken bodies ever heard. Instead, the myth of quaint family farms with a few cows, chickens and pigs roaming acres of farmland were what filled human consciousness.

Human children were force fed this propaganda since infancy in television shows and with their “educational” toys. As they pulled their See and Say talking toys, an arrow matched farm animals with the sounds they wanted children to believe they made. As the toy twirled onto the pig, the sound wasn't blood-curdling squeals of terror from being trapped in a crate smaller than their body size, but a simple, cute “Oink, Oink, Oink.”

The first songs humans were taught to sing carried this propaganda.

“Old McDonald had a farm with large-scale systematic gendercide, cannibalism and forced impregnation.”

“E-I-E-I-O.”

“With a buzzsaw here and a bovine artificial inseminator there.”

“E-I-E-I-O.”

It just didn't have the same catchy ring and large-scale legitimization to it.

* * *

“Welcome to Manzanar!” The head farmer, Dr. Joey Mengele laughs.

“Move it!”

Guards give them each a swift nudge with the butt of their guns. What a warm welcome! JA-NL leaps out of the container and lands on the ground and steps forward.

“Yes, you all will get to enjoy this paradise.” Dr. Mengele booms. “But! You'll each have responsibilities. Think of these as chores on this working farm.

“In exchange for your room and board, you will each be assigned simple, easy to do tasks. This is just an simple way for you to give back for the great service that the Boujees have so graciously provided you.”

She and her family are sent to different buildings to receive their farming assignments. JA-NL realizes that all families are split. School marms collect the children. Military-garbed guards grab the men. The elderly and the infirm are shoved to the last building. JA-NL watches as a guard pushes her mom's wheelchair towards that last building. A team of nurses circle the young women, including Dy-Ana, and guide them to Building #9. JA-NL rushes after her sister, but a guard grabs and squeezes her arm.

“Ha! Not yet. You're not old enough for that chore. But soon.” He scans her up and down. “Real soon, you'll be ready. Come with me.”

She is yanked to Building #5, the Click Farm. Here, she tills and prunes the social media lives of paying Boujees customers. Locked to a computer for 14-hours a day, she scrolls a mouse and clicks the buttons that make the Boujees' personalities bloom: Likes, Loves, HA-HAs. Each swells the Boujees' egos, which grow each day, requiring more and more online adoration. In a month, she's assigned the more difficult task of shoveling large piles of hot shit into the comment fields beneath Boujee images.

“Oh-Em-GEE, Shann'O'Neill! UR Hair looks so great. I wish I could be as Purrdy as you.”

“WOW-E Trag'Dorf, u r getting so huge! Swole Goals met!”

“Love those ribs, Beck-Ah! Such a skinny-minny!”

Each layer of shit she pours into the empty text fields fertilizes the fragile Boujee egos, allowing each to grow larger and stronger.

Many companies had attempted to automate this coddling, but this was stopped after a few hackers switched the posts to chastise the Boujees for their disgusting opulence. Since that automation was centrally located, 27 million Boujees woke up one morning with harsh words screaming from every box of their online life. “Your excessive lifestyles are killing our planet,” and “You will never find true happiness.”

How #RUDE!

Never again!

Vessels would have to do the dirty work.

On her 82^nd day of click farming, JA-NL completed her daily ego enhancements in eleven hours. She snuck out of her barn and wandered the farm. A pale light came from Building #9 and she tiptoed to the window.

Shock hits her as she sees 8,000 pregnant women wandering in small rooms. In the distance, she sees her sister.

Dy-Ana was now 19-years-old and deemed super fertile, which was confirmed through analyzing her hip width and uterine length through a transvaginal ultrasound. She was found to be perfect for her Farm chore, surrogacy.

“Sure, we're giving you a choice, we're not gonna force you to get pregnant against your will.” A pleasant woman in overalls walked before the womb recruits. “Your choice is simple. You may become a surrogate for Boujee families, which will grant you the softest bed, the best food, moderate exercise and ten hours of sleep a night. Or you can choose to be a laborer, pounding rocks for twelve hours a day with only two small meals and living in quarters with 20,000 other people, all sleeping on the floor.

“But, the choice is yours.”

A month after arriving, Dy-Ana was pregnant. A Basic Petty Boujee farmed out her gestational duties so she could keep her waist skinny and stay caesarean-scar free. Also, this Petty Boujee wanted her vaginal opening to remain tight enough for her husband's underwhelming penis. He had forced her to get three separate vaginal tightening surgeries until the doctors had created a vaginal vise that satisfied his eeny, weeny, teeny, weeny, shriveled up short dick.

Dy-Ana's days are strictly regimented. The alarm sounds at 7 each morning as autonurses roll from pod to pod, injecting the women with their daily dose of prenatal vitamins. By 7:45, the women line up for baby yoga and then walk two miles around a lake on the farm. This is followed by an organic breakfast of oatmeal and fresh fruit. All coffee and sugars are forbidden for fear they could harm the precious cargo tucked in their uteri. In the afternoon, they underwent daily ultrasounds and blood work to ensure the health of the cargo they incubate.

By the third month, she began to adjust to this new life. But, the biggest indignity was that these birthing Vessels were banned from talking above a whisper. The science had proven that fetuses inside a womb could hear the outside world by at least the sixth month. Many of the Gentle Boujee Farmers believed that fetal auditory powers were acquired much earlier. Each birther wears a band around their bellies with two speakers on either side facing in to play sounds for the Boujees-in-waiting. Half the day, classical music played to expand the child's mind. The other half, recordings of their bio-parents cooed to introduce them to the sounds of their voices and indoctrinate them with their destiny.

“Oh you're so perfect!”

“Oh you're such a champ!”

“You're be soooo beautiful.”

“The whole world will be yours one day.”

“The poor will bow and quiver before you!”

“I love you, I love you, I love!”

What a fucking ridiculous tragedy, Dy-Ana thought. She had never heard a Boujee ever use a kind word in her presence. They only poured cold disdain and paternalistic pity on her. But now they sang sweetness to her.

At her?

Into her?

The obstinate obstetricians had wondered if they could stimulate the fetuses' eyes with some visual stimuli. A few of these farmed out Vessels were forced to have part of the skin over their bellies removed and replaced with a clear plastic lining to create a window for the baby Boujees. But the doctors decided that this womb with a view was too costly an endeavor and threatened the lives of the precious cargo. And even newly born babes could barely see beyond eight inches, so there wouldn't be too much of a benefit.

One day, as she looked out the window and felt the vibrations of the bio-parents voices roll up and down her sides, something felt different. This usually tickled her. Today, she filled with rage!

These Boujees would never notice her existence, but were so grateful to talk through her, to use her body and then toss her away afterwards.

As her heart raced with rage, her stress levels spiked and the monitor on her wrist blared a siren. Three doctors came running. They chloroformed her to knock her out, knowing any chemical sedative could hurt the fetus. At least twice a day, one of the surrogates was overcome with such rage and had to be carted off to the calming room. In the warm, dim, scented candle-filled room, she was fed chamomile tea. Over the intercom, I cooed sounds to soothe her, soft New Age music mixed with whale sounds and soft waves.

“Who can say where the road goes, where the day flows,” my voice sang, softly. Dy-ana, painfully aware of the structural challenges that trapped her, had a few answers for these questions. Instead of any of these, I warbled, “only time.”

After hours of semi-sedation, Dy-Ana crawled back to her pen. She knew that if she failed her strict regimen, the fetus would be terminated and she'd lose all her surrogacy privileges. Boujee life was already so cut throat, so competitive, that parents couldn't risk bringing a child into Metropolis that had the possibility of being subpar. The Haught Boujees regularly diversified their issue portfolios with three or more surrogates carrying their spawns. At eight months, they would decide which of the fetuses would be not only viable, but exceptional. The losers would be flushed out.

In the barn next to hers, Dy-Ana could see tall, beautiful blonde white women thrashing, screaming and hurling whatever they could. This behavior was not only accepted by the farmers, but almost expected. These were the donor Vessels.

“Where's my ice cream?!” One blonde screamed.

ClariBell was a 3^rd-year egg donor Vessel. She had a Petty Boujee pedigree that harvesters would pay top price for. She was the wild child of a rockstar and a model-turned-groupie-turned-lifestyle guru. But during her 2^nd year at St. Collette's Boarding School, her parents divorced. During deliberation, each discovered they had both lost their individual fortunes.

With no way to pay tuition, ClariBell was thrown out of school and spent a few years crashing at her friends' pool houses, picking up men and drug habits along the way.

Life spiraled for her until a judge offered to expunge her criminal record if she became a Vessel for ten years, selling her eggs to Boujees who wanted to plant her blonde hair, blue eyes and willowy genes deep into their family trees.

ClariBell's barn was filled with white castaways, these other rich girls, interrupted. Many came from prosperous families that gambled away their whole fortunes and were forced to sell their belongings and rent their children. Among the heiresses of those who erred were the granddaughters of Friendster, MySpace, and Juicero infamy.

Every four months, these beauties were pumped full of steroids and hormones to create ovarian hyper-stimulation, allowing them to pump out ten or more eggs each menstruation, which would be surgically scraped out with a scythe and frozen until sold to the highest bidder.

This was a two-fer. Farmers were always looking to optimize their yield. They realized the vitamins, hormones and steroids they force fed their donors made their blonde hair grow longer, thicker and shinier. So as their eggs are shucked, their hair is mowed and sold to become wigs for Boujee women constantly looking to switch up their face frames.

Across the field was the stud Farm. Thousands of strapping 6'2” or taller white men came here as a last resort from similar fallen families. They were much more productive and were milked thrice daily, each time ejaculating 400 million sperm, the male gamete for human life. This was mostly used for insemination purposes, but the extras were frozen and sold as cumscicles to fetishists.

The months passed until one day, Dy-Ana felt ready to crown a new Boujee noble. The Farm worked hard to delay birth until the fetus had been baked for 9-months at a minimum. For the last month, she was kept indoors with her feet elevated to ensure the fetus marinated for longer. She was injected with hormones to trick her body to not give birth until the tenth month.

Humans were quite the silly animal. Since they walked erect on two legs, their hips had narrowed during evolution. This intelligent species is known for its large heads, which meant that the babes had to be birthed long before they fully matured. Typical humans were born without fully-formed skulls, the ability to walk, or even focus their eyes. They were completely helpless. In contrast, four-legged horses can gallop minutes after their intrauterine escape.

But here on the Farm, they experimented with creating more robust Boujees by drugging the surrogates to brood their fetuses into the quadmester.

Dy-Ana carried this chosen child to superterm, 9 months, 3 weeks and 4 days. She found it painfully fitting that this blond-haired babe, in his moment of crowning, tore her vagina. At least she did get to share 2.3 pounds of her disgust when her bowels let loose and she shat on the newborn Boujee.

“Oopsies! Did I do that?” She said with a smile.

But her Farm work wasn't done. Even after the babe was ripped from her and shipped across the country, she was a lactating human and was forced to fulfill her mammalian destiny as a valuable wet nurse Vessel. Now, she was fed organic greens, greek yogurt and an assortment of fresh fruits so she would pump the highest grade, organic, free-range breast milk. This was bottled and sold to the parents on whose princeling she pooped. Since her mammaries were made to be super productive, the extras were be sold to any interested family. Ten times a day, she felt completely degraded as she lay prone as cold rubber was sealed around her breasts, now dubbed udders. She hated the slurping sound and tugging motion as she was pumped. Boujee women had long since turned their milk makers into purely ornamental orbs for their male admirers. Most had no sensation in their the nipples and had made these silicone balls so big that they weighed down their chests, making walking and breathing difficult.

Three months later, and only weeks after her fissure had healed, a fertilized egg was attached to her uterine wall. Even then, she was not free from her wet nursing duties and continued to be milked six times a day for no additional pay.

* * *

JA-NL's father was sent to the Tuskegee drug trial ward. This was Farmer Mengele's personal favorite. Before any treatment could be approved as safe and effective for Boujees, it had to be tested on humans. And who cheaper than the Vessels!? Mengele loved to A/B test twins in drug/placebo trials and to experiment with new surgical interventions on them. Since Marvin wasn't a twin, he was safe from the most invasive experiments. For the first year, he was on drugs for depression, heart disease and hair growth. Mostly, he found himself giddy and combing his thick, curly hair that sprouted all over his body, out his nostrils, ears and from his nipples and toes. It felt as if each follicle of his body oozed an oily rod.

During her second year on the farm, JA-NL was being prepped for surrogacy with a more biological chore at Barn #4, lovingly referred to as the Fudge Factory. As a 16 year-old with a fast metabolism and a low Body Mass Index, JA-NL was a perfect Vessel to mass produce her Gut Biome. She was fed a vegan diet of nuts, berries and leafy greens. Her main chore was to shit three times a day. Her poop was bottled and sold as fecal transplants for Boujees who wanted a healthier gut with a fast metabolism. The human body contained 100 trillion bacteria cells. This was more than ten times the amount of human cells. When tested, JA-NL's gut was found to grow 613 different species of bacteria. 60% of the solid matter in her shits contained these life-nourishing bacteria which could both create vitamins and reject unwanted fats and sugars. Her fertile stomach grew the healthy bacteria that allowed Boujees to eat all the doughnuts they wanted but prevented the fats and sugars from being absorbed.

It was the dream of glutinous Boujees everywhere! They could gorge on all their favorite foods without gaining a pound or feeling the damages of diabetes.

The secret to eternal skinniness, distilled from her shits!

When JA-NL was ready to make a deposit, she clenched over her squatty potty pail and pushed.

Out dropped 1.5 million bacteria with each turd she cut.

Plop! Plop! Plop!

Each dung drop in the bucket would be dried and compressed, making a hard nugget of her microbiome. This would then be sheathed in a cellulose capsule. Obese Boujees eagerly swallowed her jagged little poop pills. Their stomach acids tore open the capsule and poof! Her turdlets exploded and slathered the inside of these Boujee stomachs, intestines and colons with JA-NL's Grade-A crap. This treatment would be repeated for a week, or until her bacteria beat out the Boujee's bacteria, transforming their intestines.

Isn't it ironic? Don't you think?

A little too ironic.

But JA-NL had no time to think.

Along with her doo-doo duty, she still had to till the fields in the Click Farm. Even here, her tasks grew more advanced. Now she was in charge of sewing discord. The worst task was when she was called to sabotage her customers' enemies online, either through an elaborate Manti-Te'o-catfishing scheme or just some old-fashioned cyberbullying.

But at night, JA-NL was free. She would roam the fields of brown dirt pocked with crab grass in this dust bowl revival. Her favorite spot was between the metallic barns and the electrified barbwire fences. Here she would look up in awe.

There! Out in the darkness!

Stars!

For the first time in her short life, She saw stars. All the other years, the sky around her homes had been poisoned by yellow fluorescent beams that blocked out all the glory of above. Even now, the floodlights around the Farm seemed to obscure most of the universe.

“What are those? Where are they? How many are there?”

She spent the first few nights scanning the sky, held captive by these questions.

Her breakthrough came during the second month of her second year. Squatting over the trough toilet during one of her daily shit-ins, she reached for toilet paper and groaned as she felt a glossy sheet. The farmers in charge often cut corners wherever they could and she had been subjected to wiping herself with magazines, receipts, bank statements and graph paper. But this seemed different. She saw paragraphs of facts organized alphabetically on the dozen sheets awaiting her wipes. In the corner were page numbers. This led her to surmise that these papers came from a large book.

Its some sort of knowledge tome!

She went from trough stop to trough stop, trying to find clues of the papers' origin. She collected 54 pages and tucked them into her overalls before going back to her bunk. That night, she scoured the trash behind each barn and found it! The 32-volume set of the final, physical edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica sat at the bottom of one bin. JA-NL took these to an abandoned shed far from the barns and guard towers. Each night, she snuck out and poured this river of human knowledge over here. She spent the first three months reading the astronomy sections, wondering what stars and galaxies pulsed above her.

But the farm's lights were too bright. She only saw hints of what ached just beyond Earth's atmosphere.

A cool rush ran through her as she felt so tiny in comparison to the massiveness of the universe. As her awareness of her place in the galaxy grew, she became more angry and daring. How could they lock her up and use her and her family? She still hadn't seen her mother in over a year and her frustration boiled into rebelliousness.

That night, she would find her mom.

As the guards dozed just before dawn, JA-NL snuck to Barn #10. She climbed onto the roof and scurried across the steel panels. There were a few windows on the roof and, with a rope from the shed, she dropped from the ceiling to the barn floor. As she scoured the cubicles, she heard a voice.

Singing!

Slow and low, but it was unmistakable. She tiptoed through the lines of cots where a few hundred Vessels lay snoring. She followed that voice. Three rows down, two columns to the left, one more row up.

There!

She saw her mom's wheelchair and, under blankets in the bed next to it, she saw the tuffs of her mom's soft curly black hair. Beneath the sheets, a body shook.

JA-NL stood over her, hearing her sing to herself before she joined in with the chorus.

“Ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no valley low enough. Ain't no river wide enough, to keep me... to keep me from you.”

JA-NL began to sob. She hadn't heard her mom's voice since the stroke.

During a stroke, the left side of the brain is damaged. This stopped Tammi from forming words. But its the right hemisphere of the human brain that controls the ability to sing. Tammi discovered this power her first lonesome night at the farm. As the lights were dimmed, she tried to shout. But she was still unable to communicate. She felt trapped. She opened her mouth and a song poured out. Her emotional language, which had evolved in a different part of her brain, had survived the stroke. Not only could she hit notes and run scales, she could articulate words if they were tied to these notes. In the intervening year, she taught herself to communicate everything in song. When she had a question for her new friends, she'd sing these words with full zeal. As the doctors used her, she sang her sorrow, causing a few of the docs to pause before they gagged her.

And now her eye poked up over her blankets and she sang.

“JAAAaaaaaaaaaa-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-Neeeeeeeeelll—la-la-la!”

She filled the notes and the syllables with joy.

A terrible fear seized her as her voice rumbled commands in a low alto.

“No, no no no no no no! I neeeeeeeeed you to go go go go go go!”

“But mom, I love you! I miss you so much. Don't---”

“No, no no no no no no! I neeeeeeeeed you to go go go go go go!” Tammi yanks her blanket over her head.

“Mom, don't push me away, whatever it is, I'm here for you.”

“No, no no no no no no! Don't looooook at meeee!”

JA-NL grabbed her mom's blanket, and in the silvery moonlight, she pulled this back.

“Oh god!” JA-NL fell over screaming and crying as she saw the farm had saved the ultimate indignity for her mom.

The sun's photons, which bounced off the moon and then bathed her mom's bare shoulder, showed a line of ten white and yellow cauliflowery appendages that flopped as her mom sobs.

“Doooonnnnnn'tttt looookkkk at me-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-eeee!”

Ears!

Ears were growing on her mom's back. All at once, JA-NL realizes that her mom's body had been turned into fertile grounds for Organ Farming. The ears planeted on her shoulder were genetic replicas of some Boujees' originals. One had his ear sliced off while zip-lining through a Costa Rican cloud forest. Another became aurally-impaired when he programmed his sexbot to nibble his lobes, but its mandibles chomped too hard.

It proved too difficult and expensive to safely grow organs in a lab. Doctors needed fertile soil with DNA that was close to the Boujee host to incubate an organ. They had tried using pigs, but the swine genetic material on the organ tripled the likelihood that the Boujee's body would reject the new organ. Since 99.9% of all humans' DNA was the same, it was easier to grow organs on and inside other human hosts.

As the first wave of shock subsidies, Tammi realizes this may be the only thing that would scare JA-NL enough to escape. She pulls up her shirt to show scars along the side of her stomach.

“Li-i-i-i-i-i-i-verrrs.” She sings as JA-NL traces the cuts on her mom.

Every three months, Tammi's internal organs were pushed aside to add two new livers that she would grow until they were strong enough for a transplant. The Haught Boujees lived a hard-partying and hard-drinking life, and their livers often expired early. Cirrhosis and a dialysis machine would put too much of a damper on their partying. But now they could grow new, fresh and genetically identical livers. In a few months, they could just upgrade their organs and get right back to drinking. Tammi felt these organs grow inside of her. She became bloated and cramped as her abdominal cavity crowded.

Tears streamed from JA-NL's face as her mom rolled onto her stomach, exposing her back. From her black skin flaps a coat of many colors: tan, peach, light brown, pink, yellowish-tan. Her backside is used to grow a dozen skin grafts, again, genetic replicas of different Boujee customers. Most of the Haughties and Petties needed extra skin to cover their plastic surgery scars or use these to fuse a skin corset taut around their midsections.

Tammi rolled back to face her daughter. She grabbed her hand and looked deep in her eyes. She begins to shake her head, as tears of terror pour from her face and she sings.

“Get out!

“GET OUT!

“GET OUT! GET OUT! GEEEEEHHHHH-TA OOOO-OWWW-WAT!”

Her blood-curdling sounds wake up the entire Organ Farm. As guards race in and flick the lights on, JA-NL has snuck out onto the roof.

Shaken, she knows she needs escape.

But how?

JA-NL would have to free herself before she could free me.

         
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