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]

"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."