An excerpt from 600ppm by Clarke Owens....
Of course, even with hand-pollination, fruits are severely rationed, and you can get jail time for buying black market fruit. Fruit addiction is a serious problem, though. It seems you can't stop some people from getting their hands on it, crime or no crime. Of course, if you've got enough money, you can get a special permit to buy fruit from a government store. I guess there's no fruit shortage for the rich. For the rest of us, it's black market or nothing.
One night Tom and Irene took me and Kareena to a speakeasy for some black market fruit.
The term "speakeasy" comes from Prohibition days, it says on the vids. It was back in the 1920s when it was illegal to possess alcohol. So they had these bars where you went to the door and gave a password, and they let you in and you could buy liquor.
We have the exact same thing, only instead of liquor, you buy apricots or bananas or peaches or plums. They serve you banana splits or other ice cream dishes with strawberries or cherries or raspberries or blueberries in them. They sell mango juice and pomegranate juice and papaya nectar – stuff you can never get in a non-government store at a reasonable price.
The place we went to was called Uncle Donald's. It was on the east end of town, near the antique railroad tracks, in the back of a two-storey house. You went around the side of the house, and through a low fence. There were a bunch of trees close together. You had to brush the low-hanging branches aside to get to the door in back, which was dark blue. Tom gave a special rap on the door – Rap. Rap. Rap-rap-rap.
A little square peep hole opened up at eye level, about six inches wide, and a pair of blue eyes stared out.
"Where you from?" said a voice attached to the eyes.
"Strawberry fields," said Tom.
Strawberry fields was the password. It was based on some old song.
We heard the door unlock, and then it opened with a shudder. It was a pretty flimsy-looking door, overall.
The blue eyes we'd seen through the peep hole belonged to a grinning old guy with a long, curly white and sand beard. He laughed when he let us in, and you could see several gaps in his crooked teeth.
Behind him was a bar. There was a row of men sitting there, and we could see only their backs. They had plates in front of them, and they were eating peach slices, grapefruit, all kinds of colorful fruit you'd never see in any store. The whole room had this kind of fresh, citrusy smell.
There were little tables closely spaced around the room, and men and women hunched over them, talking in confidential tones or laughing at private jokes, all of them with some kind of fruit concoction, from berry cobblers to strawberry daiquiris. The whole place seemed so incredibly happy, compared to the gruel bars where we ate most of our meals, or to the state run carry outs where you bought fortified wafers made of approved ingredients.
In the history vids, you could learn that fruit was once legal. People used to eat it all the time, especially in places like California, where they once had these huge farms that cranked the stuff out like a factory. All those farms were owned by Standard Oil, they say.
That was a big oil company that is only into publishing vids now.
That was before the honeybees went extinct, which I mentioned before.
Honeybees were insects that used to live in hives and they would fly out and pollinate all kinds of fruit plantlife, and the result was an abundance of fruit. When the bees went extinct, government and industry partnered to promote jobs for people to pollinate the plants by hand, and that's what we do now, but it's not anywhere near as efficient, they say. Consequently, fruits and fruit products are high-priced and many are only available with special permits. Without permits, the forbidden ones are illegal to possess.
But you can never stop people from getting their hands on something they really want, especially if it's something really great to eat and is good for you, like fruit is.
The cackling guy with the long curly beard showed us to a table near a fragrant potted plant. There were several of these plants scattered among the tables, and some small potted trees as well. The plant next to us had big, green, rubbery leaves, but I don't know what it was.
"So what do you guys want?" asked the bearded guy.
"Banana ice cream with blueberries and raspberries," said Kareena.
"A nectarine," I said. "One with lots of spots on it, and plum colored."
"Lime sherbet with a kiwi," said Irene.
"I don't know if I can remember all this," said our waiter, and then he decided to fumble in his apron for a virtual pad. "What about you, guy?" he prompted Tom.
"A bowl of mango slices," said Tom, with his mind already made up. "A bowl of mango slices."
He swore to us that mango slices were food for the gods. But we each had our favorites that we'd been saving up to enjoy for a long time. It had been almost five months since I'd had any contraband fruit, and back then it was a dried apricot. Five months earlier had been winter, and nectarines had been out of season. I couldn't remember the last time I'd had one, but I knew it had been great, and I wanted one again.
We knew it was dangerous. We knew we could be raided at any time. But we just had to have that fruit. And, as it turned out, problems with the law came in a different form, just a couple of days later.
600ppm releases in July 2015, you can advance order your copy here; AMAZON US | AMAZON UK
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