Rachel, for her part, had spent the morning on her dirtbike. She had woken up late, at around 9:30am, and checked her phone for drone captures. She saw the black screen and went to take a look, finding it fallen into a puddle with one of its propellers buried in the dirt. This was just a camera so it wasn't thaaat important, but it was still probably a good idea to get it fixed since it was almost ready for planting, and so she sent dad the text. She took the drone and put it in her basket and biked over to the shed ready to crack it open. She parked her bike outside and grabbed a screwdriver, screwhead, and pry tool to pry open the casing. She unsurprisingly found that prying it open wasn't very difficult and that the motherboard was just covered in green gunk and dirt and shit. Dad had come in right after she had gotten it unscrewed.
After speaking with Dad, she went over to pick up a planting drone off the shelf and brought it to the computer. She plugged in the serial line and started PuTTY and used the default configs that Dad had set, and configured the IP address with a few simple commands as 44.36.9.99 255.255.255.0. Very simple and straightforward stuff, and she was done within a few minutes. All she had to do was type start and take out the wires and out the door it went on its merry way. She monitored it on her phone for a bit, and she still saw that 44.36.9.9 was blank while 44.36.9.99 showed brown dirt and water.
After her dad had finished, she gave 44.36.9.99 a command to head back to the shed, which it did after a few minutes. She turned it off and plopped her bike on Dad's truck, and the two headed back to the criminal plot and watched the drone above. She pulled out her phone and saw herself on the feed for 44.36.9.9, so they were ready to head back home and have lunch and maybe take a nap.
In the car, Dad went on one of his usual diatribes. "You know Rachel, these drones revolutionized farming back when we finally figured out how to use them properly. Used to be that you really only use drones in like, Hollywood since they replaced the aerial shots you would've needed helicopters for. Then YouTube happened and suddenly everyone wanted a drone to take their own aerial shots of their houses or forests or whatever, and some farmers used them for monitoring their fields or diagnostics. Like, you could take a drone up about 2 or 300 feet and get a good look at your fields and see if one area was yellow and one area was brown, or if one area was having trouble sprouting or trouble with weeds. You used to have to rent a plane for that, or you just took your truck up the highest hill you could find. But most farms don't have hills so that's not useful a lot of the time."
We headed back home and Dad started slicing a ham, cheese, and egg sandwich. "But then, almost everything revolutionizes farming somehow. Replaceable parts won wars through being able to fix guns and gun mills, and also through being able to replace screws in farm equipment yourself. The steam engine meant that we didn't need to feed an animal to plow our fields, and the cow engine meant we didn't need to feed a human to plow our fields."
After a few slices and some kale, Dad cut the sandwich diagonally, poured out some chips, and started talking through his food. "Not to mention farming itself meant that we could settle down in one place and grow attached to stuff and make art and make specialization of labor and society and laws and all of human history. It all goes back to food. Hitler ate food every day, and he used food as a weapon to starve or discrimate the Jews he hated. Roosevelt ate food every day, as did the Japanese in the internment camps. It all goes back to food. Food is intimately related to how we think of ourselves and our cultures. Back when Facebook and Twitter started becoming a thing, people were talking about how it was cultural appropriation for a white woman to write noodle recipes or whatever, because food is an element of culture. So food is a union of both technology, in that technology affects how we make our food and how we grow our food, and culture, in that how we grow our food is intimately tied to who we are. Einstein ate food every day, as did Oppenheimer, as did Plato and Diogenes and Aesop and Confucius. Food affects every part of our lives, and yet no one knows where their food comes from anymore."
Rachel hadn't been listening; she had heard versions of this diatribe for all 19 years of her life. She had exactly two things on her mind: applying to college, and om nom sandwich.
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