Corvée

The Corvée are the generational unpaid labour who toil in the sprawling Agfields south of Megacity One. The life of the Corvée is pastoral — poor, and in some respects lacks the desperate squalor of the city’s urban tenements, but it is far from free.

The Agfields run to the horizon, from the walls of the megacity to the deserts where industrial irrigation networks finally run dry. Giant industrial harvesters stalk the fields, providing the calories for the masses of the cities.

Each Ag sector has its own banal overlord, charged with security, logistics, and bringing in the harvest. The Regime’s elite consider them provincial. They compensate with giant neo-feudal citadels, and rule the Corvée with an iron fist. Their arrogance has nowhere to go but down.

The Tag

Every Corvée wears one: a tab of orange plastic punched through the ear, the same clip a farmer snaps into the ear of a calf.

There is the official story, and it is even half true. The Agfields are vast and rural, and out here the machinery of watching does not hold — the towers stand too far apart, the maintenance never comes, and a subcutaneous chip is a poor thing to verify across such vast open distances.

But that is not the real reason.

The real reason is that the banal lords are small men. They could have chipped the Corvée. But they chose the ear. They chose the ear. They marked them the way you mark livestock, because it made them feel like lords.

Each sector keeps its own color. That is the only thing that changes from field to field. The tag itself never does.