Chapter 84: Our Daily Bread

Chris

2105

No one could ever call Chris a shirker. He worked hard to pay off his debts to the distant City corporation to whom he was indentured and he might well have expected some kind of recompense for his loyalty and exertion. But the instructions received from distant Nanjing showed no appreciation of Chris' efforts at all. The shareholders scattered around the globe had approved the management board's recommendation that the company should consolidate its European agricultural assets. As Chris was as much a property of the Chi Chong Investment Bank as the ethanol trees, the meat vats and the asparagus collecting robots, he was now to be thrown onto the open market to the mercy of the highest bidder.

"How much more do you have to do to earn your freedom?" asked Chloe, Chris' wife and the mother of his five children. "Surely there can't be many more years of indenture. You've worked for Chi Chong for nine years now..."

"It's actually twenty-one years I've been indentured," said Chris. "I was just fourteen years old when I sold my labour to Chingford Christmas Trees. That was well before the company was bought up by the Chinese."

"It still can't be many years yet..."

"They cut my salary remember," said Chris. "That was a few years back. I don't think I'll ever earn enough to buy my freedom. As every year passes, there's always yet another obstacle on the way."

"Well, at least we get to keep a cottage in the village," said Chloe as she gazed through the cracked glass of the antique late twentieth-century window at the wind-generator in the garden just beside the vegetable plots that were an essential supplement to the family's diet.

"That's not certain either," said Chris. "We don't know what the new farm owners will do. Chester Beeches' business used to be mostly Christmas trees and livestock when I first started working there. Over the years, they've tried every kind of agriculture there is. It's whatever makes the most profit at the time."

"And what's that at the moment?" Chloe wondered.

Chris shook his head. He'd worked long enough to realise that you couldn't make predictions about what the far distant shareholders and business executives might decide, whether they were based in London, Nanjing or Chester. But he'd find out soon enough.

What he probably didn't expect was that not only would he no longer be working for Chi Chong, but that he would no longer even keep his home. This was a real shock to a man who'd lived all his life in Christleton and when he ventured beyond the county borders it was only as far as the occasional agricultural show in the outskirts of Manchester's urban sprawl. Chris hoped that whatever else might happen, he wouldn't have to live amongst the crime and squalor of a big city.

"The new owners are replacing us with robots," said Chris, still in shock when he returned home after the announcement and not yet able to really believe what he'd heard. "Robots!"

"That can't be so," said Chloe. "It doesn't make economic sense. Surely human labour is still cheaper than an expensive thing like an agricultural robot."

"Labourers are cheaper than they used to be," Chris admitted. "Especially since the banks decided to trade indenture for inherited mortgage and household debt. But robots have been getting cheaper and smarter and more capable all the time. They don't look anything like humans and you can't have much of a conversation with them, but if you see them in the fields—herding cattle, picking asparagus, ploughing fields, sorting out the produce—they're as good as a man would ever be. They're ten times more productive and their running costs are getting steadily lower."

"So there's no competition?" Chloe remarked bitterly.

"None," said Chris. "All the lads are being replaced by robots. Not just me. Everyone. Christleton will just become a ghost town. The local supermarket will have to close as well. Robots don't need groceries."

"And what about us?" wondered Chloe desperately. "The boys are still in school and the girls aren't at marrying age yet. What's going to happen to them?"

"Well, unless the administrators find a buyer for me, we won't be able to afford school fees for the boys," said Chris. "The other lads and me: we're all gonna be auctioned off with the other stock that the new buyers don't want."

"And who are the people who're taking over Chester Beeches Farm?" asked Chloe. "They sound soulless and cruel. To sell their indentured labourers as if they were nothing more than old tractors or beaten up combine harvesters..."

"It's a company I've never heard of before," said Chris. "International Consolidated Capital Investment or some name like that. I've heard they buy assets, sell what they don't want to the highest bidder, and make what's left as profitable as they can."

"And I take it that you and your mates are what they don't want?"

"I guess so," said Chris with hangdog resignation.

The day of the auction was rather sooner than Chris or his friends would have liked. The bad news had hardly sunk in that each and every one of them would soon be evicted from the cottages and terraced houses where most of them had lived all their lives and where, in most cases, so had their parents and grandparents all the way back to the days when fuel was cheap, jobs were more plentiful and town-folk would choose to escape from mundane suburbia to a house in the country. They had less than a week to prepare, while also having to work many times harder than usual to disassemble, dismantle and slaughter those assets that were deemed to have no significant resale value.

The labourers lined up along a makeshift stage and in front of each of them was displayed a printed brochure on which each of them was depicted in bland marketing prose. They were described mostly in terms of health, age and physical strength. There was also a detailed account of the numbers of years and months of likely continued indenture on a sliding scale of their anticipated value. Generally, the more menial the employment the longer the remaining period of indenture would be. For those like Charles and Stuart who were now old men in their early fifties, their age had so reduced their resale value that it was likely that they would die of old age within the next ten years well before they'd had a chance to pay off their debts.