Going to See the Farm
I had somewhere to go with the boss today, so I was up early. I wanted to see how the crops I'd made were growing, and she'd said the trip would do me some good financially, too.
"Perfect!"
I got ready to wash, wagging the tail of my dinosaur pajamas this way and that. My hair was already a tangled mat. Short arms and short legs only got me so far; I muddled through the washing as best I could. A pitiful little creature, cursed with stubby limbs.
Whirrr—
I dried my hair with the dryer. Normally Haru or Maru helped, but today I was doing it myself. I was a proper adult. I didn't need anyone else to wash my hair or dry it. I could bathe on my own to begin with, so there was no reason I'd need help.
"Haaahm—!"
Maybe because I still wasn't all the way awake, a yawn slipped out.
Creeeak—
"Hana, are you all ready?"
Maru opened my door and came in. I nodded and told her I was. I'd washed my hair and dried it, so I was perfectly ready to go out. But Maru took one look at me, sighed, and said,
"Hana! You have to take off the dinosaur pajamas!"
I was, in fact, still wearing them. I puffed my cheeks out round and full. Dinosaur pajamas were a wonderful outfit—how could I not be allowed to wear them outside? I couldn't make sense of it.
Sense or not, I was soon caught in Maru's hands and forced into going-out clothes. Her styling ran to garments plastered in flashy color, the way a mother dresses her children, and caught like that I had no choice but to become a doll.
Once I'd managed to change—bouncing all over the place in the process—I slurped a drink through a straw and waited for the boss. My room had plenty of food in it, though very little of it was anything I'd bought myself.
After I'd gone on that enormous spending spree in a game last time, my card had ended up in Bora's hands. If I wanted something from a convenience store or anywhere else, I only had to say so and she'd hand the card over, so it wasn't really inconvenient. Still, I was a little ashamed of myself for having blown hundreds of millions of won on a game.
Wasn't I exactly like those kids who impulsively charged a mobile game to Mom's or Dad's card? I had plenty of money, of course, so I hadn't needed a refund. Legally speaking, they say a minor's game purchase can be refunded if it's confirmed there was no parental consent.
"Hana!"
President Sehee came into my room. I struck a pick-me-up pose and looked at her. She broke into a bright smile and gathered me into her arms. Life really was easy when you had a living self-driving robot. You didn't even have to walk; you arrived neatly at your destination. I was beginning to understand why people kept personal drivers.
Nothing in the world was this comfortable.
And so, from the shelter of the boss's arms, I got into the car. It glittered so fiercely just to look at it that I could tell how dearly she cherished the thing. Buffing a car until it shone like that couldn't have been easy... Of course, I had no way of knowing she kept a separate staff just to maintain it.
Nor could I have known that there'd been a driver to begin with, and that the boss had wanted to go with only the two of us. A chauffeur sounded like something out of another country. Several million won a month, just for someone to drive in your place? Ordinary little people like me would be shaking too hard to do anything but drive ourselves.
"Hana, seatbelt!"
"Yes, ma'am!"
She leaned over herself and, with a gentle, careful hand, buckled me in where I sat in the passenger seat. I only sat still and felt her touch. Every single thing she did seemed steeped in thought for me.
It couldn't be helped. I was simply too outstanding. Feeling my pride swell, I set off for today's destination. The plan was to go see the rice Starlight Foods was growing. I was dying to know how the crops that were like my own children were coming along, so I'd pestered her until she agreed we could go look.
I grew the tomatoes myself, so those I didn't need to see. Coffee and rice, though—I'd never once watched them grow, and my heart was pounding a little. Should I call it the heart of a mother waiting for her soldier to come home from the army?
We drove all the way out to the edge of Gyeonggi Province. Farming in Seoul was absurd on its face. Between land prices and every regulation crashing down at once, trying to grow anything there was bound to be difficult.
After who knew how many hours on the road, we arrived at a quiet place that called the countryside to mind. What I'd actually arrived at, of course, was a building with a gleaming exterior that didn't belong in the countryside at all. Buildings like it were packed tight together in a narrow space.
The shine itself seemed to advertise, We were built just the other day!
"Hana, let's get out~"
The boss, having parked with easy skill, called me. I undid my seatbelt and stepped lightly out of the passenger seat. Maybe because my shoes were so soft and fluffy, even the stone underfoot didn't tire me.
Even so, I was someone who did not feel kindly toward walking. I stretched my arms toward the boss. She knew this heart of mine all too well, and at once she scooped me up and carried me into the building.
With a living self-driving robot this convenient, telling me to walk was nonsense. Out of place as they looked in the countryside, people of sturdy build in security uniforms were standing guard. I'd thought those scary guards would seize me and put me through a search, but—whether that even made sense—I went inside without the slightest hindrance.
Well, arresting me, the source of all of this, didn't make any sense. If I took it into my head to ask that none of the crops grow, Starlight Foods would be bankrupt on the spot. They'd swallow an astronomical penalty and cling to the cuffs of my pants. I'd take a hit too, of course, but nothing like theirs.
If I truly didn't like it, I could simply move on to another company and be done. Nothing like that seemed the least bit likely, though. Starlight Foods had no reason to even think of betraying me, and I liked them. Every time the boss came, she bought a whole heap of delicious things. There was no reason to think badly of them.
When we reached the top of the building, the view was a spectacle. Putting to shame the old saying that seventy percent of the country was mountains, a plain stretched out with no end in sight. It wasn't perfectly flat, of course. Ridges rose here and there, but even this much was a plain rarely seen in Korea.
Across that plain, rice shining like gold was under cultivation, laid out in perfectly standardized plots like a go board, and as orderly as an army. Young people were out there farming with machines.
"Boss! Aren't farmers usually all old people?"
I asked out of curiosity. A narrow thought, I'll admit, but among every farmer I'd seen until now, I'd never once met a young one. At that, the boss laughed and told me,
"That's because we went around the agriculture graduate schools and snatched up some useful sla— I mean, graduate students."
"Really?"
Didn't going to graduate school mean you meant to pursue scholarship related to agriculture? Wouldn't more of them go the academic route than actually farm...?
The boss's next words answered that doubt for me.
"We guarantee them work until retirement and pay them well, so nine out of ten come."
As expected, there was nothing money couldn't do. In this day and age, medicine was a promising field partly for the pay, but wasn't it also because you could keep at it until you were old? People said engineering grads got cut before they even turned fifty. If a workplace guaranteed you until retirement and paid handsomely besides, it would be strange not to come.
Wasn't it a dream job? Conditions most people couldn't even dream of. Farming was physically hard, yes, but mechanization was well along, and it was less grueling than in the old days.
Just like housework, the reality was that machines did most of the farm work. Little of it needed human hands.
"There are so many people."
I said it with my hands on the glass. Just as I'd said, they were swarming. In a quiet, countryside sort of place, thousands of people seemed to have gathered.
"Every one of them makes a living thanks to Hana."
The boss said it while she watched the people hurrying this way and that. Just as she said—if I hadn't been here, wouldn't they have been doing other work, or living with no work at all?