I think my parents have done a great job raising me, you know, all things considered. They don’t have it easy. They’re struggling the retrace of value providers. Long gone are the days when people used to sign employment contracts and then just show up to ‘work’. With, like, bOssES and tasks and job descriptions. That’s for history books. My parents, they have to factor everything in: insurances, pensions, subscriptions, legal advice, markets, the economy, trends, indicators and indexes, microinvestments, local policies, sentiment trends, and above all, THE CLIMATE.

THE CLIMATE is ruling their lives, and I hate it. We need to protect it, cherish it, treasure it, be part of it, enable it, fix it, guard it, save it, make it, do it, build it and most of all, LOvE it. But me, I’m kinda done with this doctrine. This religion of fear. They said there would be storms, hurricanes and floods. They happened, and we’re still alive and thriving. And they said there would be plastic waters. So we stopped them flowing into the oceans, and now the turtles are back. They said stop eating red meat, and then stop with the white meat, and we did. We eat cultured meat: energy efficient AND supercheap. They said fumes caused cancer, and we fixed cancer. They said sea level rise. We spent billions to relocate. And we got everyone collaborating, the whole planet, in the green revolution, and we revolutioned the rich and the governments out of their ivory towers and defenestrated magnates and we invented the global TER as our currency so we can ALL FEEL LIKE WE’RE IN IT TOGETHER. Seems to me like we did a good job. THE CLIMATE might not be how it was four hundred years ago, but it ain’t dying either. Shall we stop it with the fearmongering? With the irrational fears? With the green doctrine? Can we close the environmentalist bible now? Can we finally get our big boy pants on and turn the temple of Thunberg into the museum of Greta?

See, that’s the kind of talk that cancels me from the dinner table. That’s why, on one particularly feisty evening, when the sun had just finished broiling, I told my parents that me and Lena are going to go on a journey of discovery, effort-neutral. No money needed, no work needed either. Lena, my digital mate, will handle all the admin. And me, I’ll do what people do best: think, create, experience, and search for some meaning in this world of confusion. That night, I asked Lena to find a way to take us to the European Federation for free. I’d always dreamed, as a child, to see the famous Brussels – Munich vactrain, which can reach one thousand kilometres an hour, or to rest under the shade of palm trees on the Seine, or to witness the desert of Madrid for myself, and to drive over the Pillars of Hercules, still the worlds largest megaproject as it stretches for almost twenty kilometres across the Gibraltar strait. I wanted to see for myself the invasive coral reefs of Ibiza, or to take in the historical brutalist architecture of the European quarter, which is where the European Federal Republic is governed from.

Lena found us a free trip on the Boston – Rotterdam ferry, she offered her own processing time in exchange. So she used half capacity during our one-week trip and found us an old custom built caravan in the Rotterdam repurpose junkyard, which is a circular economy initiative in Greater Holland. It had all we needed: electric engine, a good battery, wind and solar electricity arrays, a bed, steering wheel, bathroom module, a couple printers… Only trouble was the color, a bland off-white like unbrushed teeth. We both said ‘NO’ and painted it a bright-green hue which made it look like a zucchini. Hence its name.

Lena drove the ZUCCHINI into Amsterdam, where we started our journey with a visit to the edgy Nieuwe Wallen creative labs. The Nieuwe Wallen are Amsterdam’s plan B for sea level rise, in case the intricate series of dams, canals and storm barriers around it fails. They are hugely massive walls built around the historic centre. Since they’re not currently used for purpose (thank God), the small area around them has been given to creative types. We checked out AR artists, material ephemerialists and game geeks, but the best time was the morning with the CRISPR bioengineers, who between a couple hallucinogenic plantpuffs started whispering about the cat’s tits, the Nirvana of coolness, the place where all kiddies with a dream want to go, the Markense Plassen. I asked Lena to check it out and the web was silent about it. The engineers said the people of Marken are deliberately removing mentions of their community from the web, because they want to keep closer to their spirit and old ways. So naturally, I jotted down an address and we set off in search of meaning.

***

It was around forty minutes drive from Amsterdam. We drove onto a sort of paved sandbar on the IJmeer, a big freshwater lake on the top of Greater Holland. I was just coming down from the hallucinogenic trip when they stopped us in the middle of the road and had me come out. Turns out, the ZUCCHINI was not allowed further, cars were not allowed in the community. I said okay and went to download Lena on my personal deck. As I stepped out again, I saw a tall, slim and ginger bearded man outside, and at his side a fairly young dark-skinned woman. They were both waiting with a neutral expression. When I came out, the man introduced himself to me as Jacob, my mAndAtoRY guide. His companion, Anna, simply extended a hand and without more details asked whether I was planning to bring any AI with me on my deck. I hurriedly said yes, to which she told me that is also not allowed. I did explain that Lena and me were mates, but she didn’t want to hear it: ‘This is not America, sir. We do things differently here.’ She sparked a fire in me: what is there so special about these people? What lies beyond this road? I had to see. Lena was hesitant when I gave her a digikiss and left her and the ZUCCHINI behind, but there was not much I could do. There was a calling in me; I had to answer. Jacob was welcoming, though serious and annoyingly masculine with his bushy beard and carbonfibre clogs. He gave me the history of the place: how it started as a protestant fishing island village called Marken, then over the years it turned into a tourist trapdump, then around 2060 the locals sued the government for privacy and earned the right to be forgotten. How they are still practicing flat agriculture, they raise livestock (special permission from Brussels) and are big on aquaculture. This resonated with me, I like it when peeps make nature work for them instead of the other way around. 

We hopped on Segways – SEGWAYS! The landscape turned into tall shrubs and trees. I recognised willows and oaks. Without Lena by my side, it was hard to know more. I asked Jacob about patterns on the cobbled stones below, including white stones peppered at regular intervals. He said they were used by workbots for navigation. Yes, they did use workbots, NO, they were not intelligent, and definitely not as bright as ‘your Lena’. He sounded dismissive yet respectful when he said it, as if she was mine to control. Soon, we heard voices in the distance and water lapping against the vegetation. ‘Is this where the aqua farms are?’ I asked naively. To which Jacob answered: ‘We can only tour tomorrow. But you can look from the pontoon?’ I said yes, so he pulled right on a dirt path and showed me a canal and the canal was brimming with barges – nothing more than floating carbon platforms – all loaded with massive copper-green stacks of glistening seaweed. ‘Forest kelp’, Jacob said. ‘Good for fibres’. Then he backtracked on his Segway without another word. Not the talkative type, my guide.

We arrived at the village and I set eyes on the first houses: traditional Dutch style, thin, tall and with steep roofs. The window and door frames were painted white, a sharp contrast to the red interlocking bricks of the facades. Doors were a deep forest green and so were the shutters. Many had adaptive nano carbon attachments – the workshops – as well as stylish whitewashed plumbing for hydroponics, out which myriads of flowers, plants and herbs were springing out. Jacob got animated and started pointing them out: blood-red poppies, marigolds, tainted roses, thyme, lavender, tomatoes flowing down and creeping up, basil, rosemary, bright yellow cucumber flowers, strawberry plants, watercress, mustard, fennel, rhubarb. Celery, spring onion and chives, parsley, thistle-looking knapweeds. Postcardish table-and-chair sets would sometimes be placed outside, brimming with pots and vases filled with tulips or primroses or geraniums. Shit was pretty. Pretty and neat. On the streets, kids were running up and down. Segways everywhere, in all gardens. No locks, nothing fancy, basic models, just colourful designs easy to mix and fix.

Worn out cobbles on the streets, peppered with the white inserts for workbots. The bots themselves, every once in a while we’d see one, casually strolling on fat, deflated tyres (‘for the mud’, Jacob said) and trimming an overgrown hedge, cleaning up a gutter, harvesting a tree, fixing a thatched roof and a solar panel, or just idling. Random tubes and hardened cables sticking out. They had vivid colours, green or burnt red and some were salmon, with white-painted edges. The canals intertwined with houses and streets via tens of miniature wooden bridges, trees growing everywhere with no rhyme to them, greenhouses, the church – medieval and scholastic, wooden boats like walnut shells on the water, the ‘Brokken Keyboard’ tavern and inn with smells of fried fish, onion and boiled potatoes, the unassuming mayorship, and then in the distance some of the processing facilities: ‘Glasswort canneries, a hydrogen station, smokers, and the freshwater shrimp processing plant’, detailed Jacob.

When it turned evening I was running on empty so I asked about dinner. Jacob took me back to the inn, where the locals were already starting to gather. I observed a couple patrons eying me, and made me feel an obvious foreigner, yet Jacob invited them over to our table. And so we met Bart and Simon, twins, awkward and with a bounce in their speech, who sat next to us and began talking about their morning ritual of duck hunting. I believe they were taking the piss about the hunting, it’s probably not allowed in the European Federated Republic. But at one point Simon went serious: ‘I always send my workbot to fetch my quarry. You know, our workbots always do what we tell them to. And if they don’t, then we rewire them. They don’t get to have opinions. That’s exclusive for people.’ Isn’t that so, Bart? And Bart said ‘Yea, we don’t take them in bed with us here. It hurts my ribs!’ And other tables smiled. ‘What about you? Do you give yours a goodnight kiss before sleep? And he pursed his lips in a moist ‘muah’. Jacob looked him sternly and said a few words in Dutch, then Simon leaned back in his chair, content with what he’d accomplished. The food arrived, fried haddock with soy sausage and something called zeekraal stamppot. ‘It’s glasswort’, Jacob said, ‘we farm a freshwater variety here.’ It was juicy, crunchy, sweet and salty, it paired well with mashed potatoes and the fish. 

Anna came in and Jacob asked her to join us, not after whispering some stuff in her ear and pointing at the twins, which by then had left our table and were drinking at the bar. ‘Anna is our programming headmaster and electronics teacher. And she’s a foreigner like you.’ Okay, time to hear what’s going on.

First thing she did was apologise on behalf of Bart and Simon. ‘They don’t get it’, she said. ‘We’re not digiphobes here. We just focus on open-source landscapes instead, and that comes with limitations as well as benefits.’ We spent the better part of our dinner talking, a riveting conversation if there ever was one. She was intriguing. Her parents, rich descendants of the IKEA family, chose for a full option design baby in the clinics of Singapore, where she was given genes to be disease-resistant, live longer, and have high intelligence. After many years of elite education, Anna came across Marken twenty years ago when she was twenty-six (with one completed PhD already) and was inspired by the community to start an open-source movement. She took inspiration from the principles of the founding fathers of programming: open access to source code, shared ownership and transparent development. So she set up shop, asked her family for funding, and got to work to update the fairly stupid workbots with new software. As she dug deeper into the complexities of human – software relationships, she found that her work needed continuity and volume, so she set up a school to teach the Markense kids – as well as willing adults – the beauty of writing community code. She designed her own OS which she uploaded on the workbots in Marken. So far, all general AI code and hardware has been proprietary, and that’s the reason she didn’t want Lena in. ‘I don’t know who she’s sharing her datastream with. Surely you understand’ she said. I kinda did, but I also kinda didn’t.

By now, it was nighttime. The food had been both filling and delicious, but I needed a pick-me-up so I asked about synthetics. I was looking forward to some clean amphetamine or at least neocoke, but Jacob cut me short: ‘close the doors on this nonsense, we don’t tolerate it here. It’s not allowed.’ ‘Hard as rocks you people, raw dogging life as you do’, I told Jacob and he gave a faint smile. ‘I’m spending the night’ I told him and he just said ‘Yes’ and went to arrange with the proprietress. She had blonde curls and a sturdy build, surprisingly nimble as she danced around the tables delivering food and drinks in her flat sole sneakers and Mickey Mouse shirt, which made her seem like she thought herself younger than she actually was. She came over to our table, eyes blue and lips full, big smile on her face. ‘Mariel’, she introduced herself. ‘I’ll prepare a room for you upstairs, mister America. You’ll love it.’ Then she leaned over, her ass brushing against my arm: ‘Jacob tells me you want some pixie dust.’ I felt embarrassed and only nodded, to which she laughed out loud: ‘Make yourself welcome here, we don’t bite!’

It was around ten when I decided to call it. It had been fun and Jacob had finally opened up after drinking several beers. He told me to get ready for the next day when we’d visit the aquafarms, which I was very excited about. The tavern felt lively, people cheering and laughing and merrying it up. It was a pity to leave, but I was exhausted. Without some synthetics in my body, I couldn’t keep up. I asked Mariel for the keys to my room. She offered to walk me up, I agreed. We walked up the stairs to the second floor, the animated voices down below were now muffled as she led the way through the corridor. Her hips were swaying – ‘Number 42’, she smiled. The rattle of her massive keychain as she cycled through them. She picked one, turned her back, unlocked the door, then pressed the handle to open it. The room was clean, it smelled like stale wood. Mariel reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled a couple small bags: ‘coke or Molly?’ she asked. I must have looked puzzled, so she looked me straight to my face and said ‘Choose or I’ll make the choice for you’. I finally got the hint and reached out for the Molly. She pulled her hand away and opened it up herself, then stuck her white-pink tongue out and placed the pill on it. I reached to pick it up with my own tongue, swallowing the pill and some of her spit.

***

The next morning I woke up with the familiar mollycrash and began questioning my choices the night before. At home when Lena cooks for me, she also prepares the jujuvenating brew to wash the crash away. It didn’t seem like I’d get any of that here, so I laid in bed contemplating the darkness of life for what seemed like a few hours, then I got up for some water. I noticed a letter underneath my door, it was from Jacob telling me to take my time waking up and come up to his place when I’d be ready to continue my tour. Just the thought of having to walk outside – sunny and beautiful as it may have been – gave me such a hangover that I immediately went to throw up, and so I was forced to spend my day doing nothing. Time slowed down to the crawl of a zombie, so I had headspace to ponder sinister thoughts and images of rotten vegetables – the inside of my body – of mouldy cauliflowers – that was my brain – and leafy dark forests schwlashing in the wind – that was what my lungs felt like. Interspersed were concerns that Lena might freak out not having heard from me for a whole day, which was in itself an unreasonable thought considering I had specifically told her I did NOT know how long I’d be. I then moved to contemplating the people and things I’d seen the day before and whether they did have an impact on me and why, and also experiencing a light elation at the idea that the beginning of this trip was not bad at all, actually it was pretty exciting. Umami for the soul, is what I was going through.

Back home, my people and especially those the age of my parents, they’d be enslaved to the gods of reason and responsibility. Thousands of miles away from them, I could experience life as I wanted. I told myself: the mollycrash is part of this life and even though disproportionately unpleasant, its a consequence that I can, should and must endure, simply because it is caused by my actions and mine alone, and I should treasure the gift of freedom with all its ups and downs. Yes, there are struggles and weaknesses, likely more to come, but they bok differently when you own them wholeheartedly. I could just have easily chosen the satchel of coke and spring about a totally different flavour of awful, or I could have chosen nothing at all and wake up refreshed, all equally valid alternate realities that will NEVER be. What a joyous revelation, to make my choices in the KNOW as I’m building my own self piece by rotten piece, one trip to the barf-let at a time, and how lucky to exist in a world in which such elections can be made freely and with forethought. I let my newfound strength of spirit envelop me and love me in a blanket of infrared light as I drifted off to the next day.

***

The next day, I was ravenous. Went to open the curtains to racing clouds against a light-grey sky. I walked to the bathroom and drank water directly from the tap. Downstairs, Mariel looked at me with a neutral face. ‘I didn’t see you yesterday’ she queried. ‘No. I didn’t feel well. I felt garbage actually.’ ‘You know what we say,’ she turned her back to me, arranging some glasses, ‘if you’re a man at night you should be a man in the morning’. I stood shook at her coolness. Was my sex game any good? Had I made any impression on her? I asked her for breakfast and ate a full plate of soy sausage and reheated grilled veggies, then I inquired about Jacob’s house. She directed me to one of the aqua farms instead, telling me today the whole village was called upon for kelp harvest, and he’d likely gone there.

I found much activity on the pontoons. Jacob spotted me from one of the barges and sent a small raft over; I had to balance myself as it slowly ferried me to him. People were coming up from underneath the water, handing him tools to recharge or swap, and in the meantime he’d point at stuff, adjust a waterbot, or just issue commands. In between, he pointed at a suit in one of the boxes and asked me to put it on. I observed him and the workers in silence as they harvested. Most of the action was underwater; there were bubbles of air coming up all around. Kelp was cut by hand then allowed to float to the surface where the waterbots would pull it out, roll it swiftly on a drum and then deposit the coiled seasnakes neatly on the barges. They could fit tens on one barge, but there were so many of them that I imagined the denseness of the forest underneath the surface.

Soon, people started to emerge for midday and I could observe they were not wearing diving tanks, just swimming goggles. They gathered on some of the shores and through the reeds I could see others making their way over, the harvest was also happening outside our view, on many other canals. Bots came in with food and some juveniles joined in from the land, curious and naughty. Music started playing from some speakers. My guide pulled a sandwich which he wolfed down and asked me to join him underwater. ‘Let me show you  what you’re here for, the Markense plassen’, he smiled with pride.

One needs to do some solid psylocibin before witnessing the radical farming practices in the shallow waters of Greater Holland. To begin with, the reason nobody is wearing diving gear is because the breathing apparatus is splayed across the floor, an enormous mesh of flexible tubing with air pumping through. Four meters below the surface, tens of regulators, their hoses lashing and writhing like the tentacles of an overturned Cthulhu. We’d grab one, breathe, move around with it coiling behind, and when we reached the end of the hose we’d simply reach out for another, and we could travel endlessly like this. The bottom was a carpet of oysters and mussels, clearly they had freshwater oysters here and they were just growing on top of each other: tens, thousands, tens of thousands, millions. The dead ones would crack under my feet, others felt sharp through the metal weave of my footwear. Visibility was really good, mostly because there was no mud to be disturbed, all of it quickly engulfed by the shellbed. Jacob gestured to follow him and in a few minutes we hopped and skipped to an area where the shellreef was so thick, it was breaching the surface. We walked up and out and I could see houses through the grass, we must have been just a few meters away from someone’s backyard. ’This is how we make new land and expand the village’, Jacob said. ‘The shellbed grows so much it reaches the surface of the water, so we layer it with gravel, add soil and are ready to build on top. Half of the town is built on shellbeds. It’s so carbon-intensive, we have to pump atmospheric carbon dioxide INTO the water to keep the oysters spawning. Otherwise they’d cleanse so much of it that the kelp would asphyxiate due to oxygen imbalance.’ He showed me an autonomous machine on a big ledge, its hydrogen engine was purring like a sleeping Maine Coon. It was sucking air, processing the carbon dioxide and forcing it through hoses directly into the shellbed. ‘Are they alive?’ I asked. ‘The oysters under your houses’. ‘Most are, we need to keep them alive, otherwise they become brittle.’

There was more. Jacob put me on a small boat and we went out into the open waters, fifteen minutes or so from the busy network of lowland and canals. We dropped again to see that the shellbed had spawned all the way over, in what must have been tens of square kilometres of the stuff. The farmwork here was more automated. Specialized waterbots with photo lenses swam around us, they kept tabs on fish farms bustling with life: salmons darting up and down, eels slithering like crazed snakes on 3x speed, the minute northsea shrimp swarming by the millions at the weave of their enclosures. A shoal approached, all silvery shimmer, two waterbots at each side. It drew closer and closer until it swallowed us whole, metallic confetti whizzing through the water, and its disco ball reflections of the sun above overwhelmed my eyes and disoriented me. I locked my hand to the regulator and planted my feet firmly as the volume of glitter enveloped my legs, torso and hands. It felt as if I was running headfirst through an aluminium snowstorm, and expected it to completely wipe me off my feet and pull me with it. When it moved on, I signalled Jacob to go up. He grabbed my arm and gestured to wait. And sure enough, in a few minutes, I caught my first glimpse of a real, olive-brown and streamlined, tuna. It was a darting bullet, with an array of backfins and bright orange tips, chasing after the shoal. I was flabbergasted when we finally surfaced. ‘Indeed’, Jacob said, ‘we saw a tuna chasing after a school of smelt. They’re interbred with pike for freshwater. That’s where the green color comes from. Crazy huh? Farming tuna?’

Evening was coming and Jacob invited me to spend the night again, but I felt like not. I asked to be taken back to the ZUCCHINI and he obliged. I thought about dropping by the ‘Brokken Keyboard’ to say goodbye to the blonde Mariel, but then thought against it. Lena was happy to see me, understandably so, and I gave her a digihug and a digikiss. ‘Shall we go to Brussels?’ She asked. ‘You can tell me all about your visit while I drive. Then we can even go into analysis mode if you’d like.’

‘You need to see this’, I said. ‘We need to get you in.’