Half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees [OTA]

[markwatney]

WHO: Mark Watney
WHERE: Fields and nearby
WHEN: 23 May, evening
OPEN TO: OTA
WARNINGS: Poop
STATUS: Open
NOTE: Please don't feel you have to talk to him about plants. I know how boring it can get.

---

The weather is starting to become a concern.

Now, I really am not a person prone to panic. Things have to be going pretty badly pretty abruptly for me to freak out. But I'm also aware of how nefarious a gradual change can be, and how dangerous to people not paying attention. Personally, I'm not interested in being a lobster in a slow-warming pot.

Then again, maybe I don't have much choice in that.

Point is, it's easier to pay attention to the fact that the sun is taking the opposite path in the sky than that we're getting way too warm too soon for this time of year. (And I could get into why it's implausible that the Earth has actually reversed rotation, including disruptions that would likely end all life, but it's way more boring than it sounds, so I'll just say I'm not buying it.) People are finding ways to cool off, and that's good -- Apart from physical health reasons, we don't get nearly enough opportunities to simply relax and have unfettered fun. The plants we've all been so tending so judiciously, though, don't have the option to take a dip.

The hail was bad enough. The damage was... Well, it wasn't great, obviously, but nothing we couldn't recover from. Assuming, of course, that everything stays relatively predictable. This heat and lack of rain? It isn't predictable.

I've been out in the fields all day today, even longer than normal, taking notes and measurements, doing what I can to ensure the plants are well fed and watered. We really cannot afford to lose a significant part of this harvest, not with the number of people in the village now. It's tedious, back-breaking work, but it has to be done.

And it's honestly probably a testament to how tedious and back-breaking it is that I am tired and distracted enough that I end up covered in shit. Not metaphorical shit; actual shit, courtesy of a poorly-timed misstep while I was shoveling fertilizer. Manure's coated all along the front of my thighs and torso, splashed up to my neck and chin.

"God damn it," I moan, picking myself up with a wince.

Comments

[markwatney]

"Nobody wants this job," I point out as I push myself to my feet and assess the damage. No piece of clothing was left unscathed, which means a complete change of clothes along with a bath.

"It would be very helpful of you could run over to my house, grab my overalls, a shirt and a bar of soap, and meet me down by the dock." If I track this into Helen's house, she'll definitely skewer me. "My bedroom's in the back; you'll know which one it is, it's full of plants."

[3ofswords]

Kira's happy enough to get his distance on Mark with a sure, you're up at Ravi's right and a whistle for Aurora's attention. He leaves her with the good doctor and his not-girlfriend, making good on his offer to let Ravi see her more often. The last thing he wants is for her to recreate all the times he saw stray dogs rolling in the fucking garbage with Mark's clothes.

When he finds Mark, he has a fresh set of clothes under one arm and a bar of Helen's soap in the other hand. "I'm glad we've reached the point in our relationship where we've both seen each other naked," he comments, making a wide berth of the shit-stained pile to hand them over. "Though I think we've established one of my hard-no's in the process."

[markwatney]

"You and me both," I answer with a snort. I've still got my underwear on, so at least there's that, but that doesn't mean anybody's lining up to fawn over my pasty thighs. Except, oddly, maybe Ravi.

I wave away the clothes, not wanting to touch them yet, and pluck the soap from Kira's hand. I brace myself as I wade into the water, but it's not nearly as cold as I remember it, which is concerning on a whole other level. It's still cool, but it's definitely warmed considerably since leaving its source.

"See, this is the sort of thing that makes for a great story when you're old and sitting around the fire," I call back as I begin lathering up the soap. "Remember when I had to bring you clothes because you were covered in shit? Good times."

[3ofswords]

Moving up-stream from Mark, Kira slips his feet free of his boots, perching Mark's fresh clothes on top of them. There aren't any pant legs to roll up anymore, and for a minute he feels like some deep-woods kid from one of the books they read in school, tore-up summer clothes and river water running over his bare feet, smooth stones under his toes.

There were probably people covered in livestock-shit in those too, he wouldn't really remember. Wedging his thumbs in his waistband to weight his elbows out against his posture, he looks slightly back at Mark, not really giving him privacy so much as having better things to look at: "If I'm old around a camp fire, you're living out of your bed, hotboxing all that weed you're growing at the house."

[markwatney]

"That's probably true," I allow as I reach for my shirt, rinsed earlier and slopped over a boulder along with my pants to keep them from floating away in the current. "If Ravi's still around at that point, it's definitely true." Not that I can't see the benefit in toking up every once in awhile, but the truth is that mostly, I'm just the guy who grows it.

I look up from where I'm scrubbing the shirt fabric between my hands. "If you want any of that weed, just let me know. As you saw, we have no shortage of it."

[3ofswords]

"I definitely want some weed," creative as he might have to get to smoke it. The carving tools left with him might find some use after all, unless he wants to get crazy with the probably lead pipes from the pillage of Ren's old house. "I'm definitely giving Ravi plenty of shit for not already supplying me with weed."

Waiting until a silver fish sidles over to examine his ankles, Kira gently kicks it toward deeper water. "Does he fuss over you and Helen very much, or am I occupying some kind of special category in his life?"

[markwatney]

"I think fussing is Ravi's default," I answer with a soft laugh. "At this point I mostly just let it roll over me and don't notice." Not for the first time, I wonder if he's always been that way or if it took the zombie apocalypse to bring it out of him. Probably the first.

"But let's be honest, considering how unstable life can be here, we're all probably a little more high strung than we used to be."

[3ofswords]

"Ignoring him is a tactic I haven't tried," Kira admits. Usually he's the one being ignored, telling Ravi in no uncertain terms and very much to his face to skip the lectures.

The devil's got his empty hands, an ailment as common as paranoia in the village, and likely contributing to it. There's no other circumstances in which he'd turn in the water, wander back over to mark and pick up the other leg of his pants, scrubbing one shit-stained bit against the other while Mark works the top with the soap. "You hide it well," he comments, like he himself doesn't.

After the way he went after Credence, he doesn't think so anymore.

[markwatney]

"Well," I say, the word heavy and standing in for a very long story that starts with getting a PhD and ends on a space ship on the way back from Mars.

"Let's just say that unpredictable though this place may be, I'm keenly aware of how much worse it could be," I settle on with a slight shrug. "Context is everything, as they say."

[3ofswords]

"I don't know," Kira replies, as understanding of the sentiment as he is inherently contrary. Sometimes for the sake of it, but the river is running in a new and choked direction around their thighs, the sun isn't even setting for all it dips in the east and circles back to rise from the west.

Sure, no one's shooting at them or trying to burn them out of the canyon on some megalomaniac mission to purge the world of an illness, but--"the sheer Eldritch horror of someone being able to make the earth spin the wrong way kind of beats the bullshit I came from."

[markwatney]

Pausing, I look up, trying to assess the level of sarcasm in play here. Let's face it, there aren't a lot of people here or anywhere else who casually toss out phrases like Eldritch horror.

"It's a simulation," I say with an arch of my eyebrows. "We wouldn't all still be living if that had actually happened."

I've had my suspicions for a long time -- Since that first day, as a matter of fact, with the wind and the siren. There have just been too many inexplicable changes to the weather, not to mention the impossible perfection of this canyon and everything in it. But the clean and quiet shift in the Earth's rotation had confirmed the theory.

[3ofswords]

"Science wasn't my thing," he admits, better equipped for Lovecraft or movie references than explaining helicopters to Credence or knowing what happened to the earth when you fucked with its poles. He'd barely explained the concept to Casey when he'd asked about the auroras. "I only know enough about space to tell you your horoscope, but I'll need you to get on that telescope and tell me if Mars is in retrograde."

Kira's pretty sure that already happened this year, and the next one won't be until 2017. It's a little late regardless to tell Mark to be careful of his actions.

The easy, confident way Mark asserts it makes the pill both more believable and a little easier to swallow. Hadn't he told Sonny, this place felt like a bad dream, the lot of them left on meathooks to bleed out? "How would you though," he asks, the magic if it more believable to him than a level of scientific achievement indistinguishable from it. "They'd have to manufacture--everything? How do you simulate people who can read minds, or become smoke?"

[markwatney]

"Maybe we aren't here at all," I reply, pausing to stand up from my hunch and pop my back. "We could all be plugged into a computer and this could be virtual reality. In that scenario, what wouldn't they be able to do? Think about the people that left and then came back. Moana was gone a couple of days and swears it was months."

[3ofswords]

So: The Matrix. Kira resists the reflexive urge to ask Mark if he knows kung-fu. If Mark knew the reference, he probably would have made it. Kira would feel a lot better if Mark had just made it.

"But how would they know what to put in, for each of us?" Movies and surveillance aside, there has to be something to the fucking human condition, something that can't be mimicked. "Couldn't you just as easily say our whole lives have been that, and they're running a new program?"

Eldritch horror feels like an understatement.

[markwatney]

"That's what I'm saying," I clarify. "Call me old fashioned, but even with what I've been through, I find it difficult to swallow when I'm told that people are essentially from what must be alternate realities. I'm all for speculative science, but I'm talking about Occam's Razor here. To me, the most simple explanation is that we've been and continue to be mentally manipulated rather than we've got a disparate group of people who have miraculously traveled through time and space."

I pause with a tilt of my head. "And I'm not suggesting that isn't fucking terrifying to consider. Shit, we could be completely simulated for all we know, a part of that computer program. But it makes more sense than that the Earth started rotating the opposite direction and there was no reaction."

[3ofswords]

It certainly puts falling into shit into perspective, and Kira's hands have idled to a pause, have dropped the pantleg back into the backward-running water. Far be it from him to argue with someone who by all evidence is much smarter than him, but--

But that's a fucking lie, he loves to argue, and this isn't something he can just accept. "And you just--walk around, okay with that? You just get up every day and put on your shit-pants and take care of some plants that might not be there? Is living in a bacta tank with a usb port in your head not speculative science?"

He has to take a step back, though he doesn't know what there is to take a step back from. "If none of it's real, how do we know anything?"

[markwatney]

"How did you know any of it was real in the first place? What difference does it matter to your experience if you were put here by evolution or a computer program or God?" I ask, watching Kira carefully. The kid looks like he's on the cusp of an existential breakdown. "It doesn't change anything for you. I put on my shit pants everyday because this is my reality regardless. Simulation doesn't necessarily mean not real; it's real to me. What good does it do anyone to wallow over the fact that I don't have complete control over my life? I never really did."

[3ofswords]

"I don't know," he answers, reflexive. All of it's reflex: argue, evade. Look for or make someone feel just as upset. A month ago he'd be calm through osmosis, soak Mark's up with the shit-water and keep it to himself that he thinks he's full of it. A month ago he'd be too tangled in the web of human emotion to consider that it might be lines of code.

Unless even that was simulated, his whole life, stripped out with a console command. "It just--" and his voice drops, some of the scaffolding in how he carries himself rusted out and folding. "It seems especially cruel, like it could all be better if someone just wrote it that way."

[markwatney]

"Maybe, maybe not. Maybe there's some bigger point we don't understand," I say with a brief shrug. "Maybe it's just not that simple. Look," I continue, tugging in the fabric so I can start wringing it out, "the parameters for your world haven't changed. If it's easier for you to think that the earth reversed rotation and all these people traveled through a wormhole, do that. If you want to be pissed at whoever is in control for not being more fair, do that. People have been doing that to God since nearly the dawn of time."