A Wall of Bright

 Both sets of eye watched the march of the corn plants to certain doom -- hypnotic, plant after plant, the wind picked up, and blew across the tops of the stalks in a wave, hit the side of the combine and blew the piled up chaff into a swirling cloud; that converged with the sun, at ten in the morning, with not a cloud in the sky, into a massive wall of light to one side and in front of the combine.  Lucky slowed a bit, poor visibility, a strong gust hit, snapped the tops off from just above the ear; roared through the mirrors, antennas, cameras, and other dangles; and blew the amorphous wall of bright away.  Vogt snapped out of it and " do you have the latest survey maps of the subsidence".  blurted out, with out a check.  Lucky slowed even more,"thought I had the latest, but I don't have any survey marks". Just as he said it an external thought germinated, just breaking the through the surface realty, "just watch it kid": It was his neural I.D., so he was not being hacked into, not that such a thing had ever been done.  Was it even possible?  Just watch it kid?  Watch what?  Then it clicked, a bulb went on, a light came from within and illuminated this particular situation, and a thought formed of his own will: this guy is not a soil scientist and I do know him.  Then  the unsettling: the other Lucky faintly chimed in "you got it, now follow the breadcrumbs" 

Do Not Hand Feed the Reaper.

  "I have always been a soil scientist".  Expecting more in the way of a reply, Lucky settled in the chair, closed the standing well, looked out past Vogt to the trickle of grain coming out of the auger arm, shut down the P.T.O.(power take off) that stopped the auger, fold | ramp two thousand R.P.M, the massive electric motor made a few octave changes, flipped the safety switch that started the head,feeder,separator,thresher,knives,and other auxiliary reaping armaments; pushed the stick gently forward and started cutting.  Stalks twitched, violently slurped into the head, gnawing them down, chewing them up, and in a chronic explosive defecation event, ejected out the back.  Lucky concentrated on keeping the speed just right, the distance between the ground and the head was regulated by sensor, but only roughly, debris interference occurred.  Vogt look past Lucky into the unharvested field, map overlay on: a red outline with short regularly placed perpendicularly lines appeared about fifty yard to the left and forward,  it looked like he would be riding for a while.

Working at the Foundation Nut and Seed.

Lucky had been watching the journey from the wagon to the combine, and thought he recognized the guy.  He couldn't quite place him though. Just on the short end of average height, dark hair, slightly balding, kinda muscly, thin face , and he was wearing a watch, --weird-- nobody wore a watch.  An implanted or infected person always could call up the time.  In fact Lucky had to conditioned him self to not check the time, he had a habit before the implant, that armchair psychiatric types might have said was obsessive-compulsive clock watching.  He was sure it was a learned behavior, developed on the job counting modified hazel nuts that were all individually given an I.D..  A small team of workers, numbered one through four, (he was number three) counted the nuts.  Each plant had a number, each nut was grouped into lots of six sets, of seven seeds: so 201-50-5-1-P5, would denote bush 201,lot 50,set 5,seed 1, Pyramid 5(the owner of the plot).  All this had to be done in a set amount of time, not under or over by two minutes, if the time frame was blown that bush's nut's would go to the end of the line and have to be counted again.  lucky wasn't sure how all that fit into the genetic engineering of nuts, and years later became suspicious when he was implanted and became aware through his monthly bandwidth tracker, of how much he used to called up the time, usually a very low data consumer.  Could it have been a psychology experiment?  If it was what exactly was the purpose?  Was his fixation with time the intended result or just an artifact?  After the cognitive restructuring he went to P5 Foundation Nut and Seed, to see his old team leader, he no longer worked there, almost every one who worked with him at Foundation Nut,(that's what everyone call it) had moved on.  His team, he only new as One,Two and Four;...!...He's number Four, just a kid at the time, how he got the job he didn't know, he didn't look ,more than ten years old.