seedrunner

… 

Tragedy seeks the seedrunner who hunts alone. My mother told us this the first and final time Anya and I left Earth for the life of a cosmic smuggler. Ever since the majority of Earth’s soil solidified to clay and evaporated into sand, plants slowly ceased to exist on our home planet. Earth became a desert, oxygen masks became essential, and fresh food became nonexistent. Eventually, scientists managed to bioengineer a similar substance to soil, but all seeds remained buried deep below the sand. The only hope for growth would be found on greener planets far far away. Thus the need for seedrunners arose. We were independently contracted by biotech companies to traverse galaxies and collect seeds “by any means necessary”. If we had to steal, kill, or destroy ecosystems in order to harvest them, we were paid handsomely. A pound of seeds was worth millions.

My younger sister and I had taken the job so our beloved mother could regrow her garden. In our youth, Mother had existed solely in the garden. It was the only place where she could breathe easily. Cultivating the land was her reason for living, and our only means of eating. The day came when her last vine shriveled in the increasingly radioactive rays. She hung her straw hat, went to bed, and stayed there. After weeks of rummaging in the trash to feed her, the neighbors took notice. They began to leave small liquid meals on our doorstep, which we could sip through our oxygen tubes. This charity came as a sigh of relief. Now, Anya and I had time to sit outside our mother’s door and plot. How could we fix this? Our lives? Our world?

When our neighbor’s son left abruptly to pursue seedrunning and get rich, the idea rooted in our minds. It would be dangerous; many seedrunners died horrific deaths and faced punishments unlike any known in Earth’s justice system. But, we promised our mother to work harder than the rest. At the foot of her bed, we swore on our knees this and more, and her sunken face lit up for the first time since Anya’s birth. She blessed our decision and warned us tragedy would surely strike if we ever separated. On Anya’s eighteenth birthday, our mother left her bedroom for the first time in seven years to watch us walk away. She was so thin, yet she squeezed the air out of me and whispered in my ear these parting words, “Tragedy always strikes the treasure hunter. Never do we truly deserve the treasure we seek.”

… 

“Big Brother,” Anya started to say, when a tentacle smashed into her stomach. I watched silently, imprisoned by a similar tentacle wrapped thickly around my throat. It was only our first mission. After months of stowing away on commercial space ships, we finally reached a planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere. We sought the most exquisite farmland and begged with our lives and our bodies for a handful of seeds. The reigning species of this planet closely resembled octopi, with poisonous tentacles and a fair knowledge of the nature of humans. After being denied a lawful exchange, we had tried and failed a heist which many seasoned seedrunners had succeeded at before. 

The acid oozing from the slimy arm burned a ring around my throat. Anya was doubled over now, nearly unconscious, when two tentacles wrapped around her skinny ankles. I watched as she slid away, her face dragging in the dirt. Slowly, slowly, my vision began to edge. I felt the whisper of wind on my naked face. Anya began to scream out from beyond the surrounding darkness. I breathed in the damp earth one last time. We would have done anything for paradise again. Mother was wrong; this is what we deserved.