The Philosophers' Harvest

The cracked pressure gauge read low. Too low. Kerra knelt beside the loose floor panel, her weight shifted to one leg like always.

Her hands shook. Not from the weight of what she pulled out. From what she knew was inside.

Three weeks since Tam died. Three weeks of telling herself she didn't need to look. The yellowing leaves on the nearest crop row curled inward like dying hands.

She couldn't ignore it anymore.

The journal's pages felt brittle under her fingernails. Yellowed. Edges crumbling where dirt had worked into the grain. She opened it slowly, breath catching in the damp air.

Tam's handwriting was precise. Methodical. An engineer documenting catastrophe with perfect clarity.

Page after page of names. Dates. Skills. All purged.

Her finger stopped on year seven. "Mira Voss, agricultural specialist. Erik Voss, soil chemist. Objected to food rationing plan. Refined."

The word stared back at her. Refined. Like they were sugar. Like they were oil.

Water dripped from the corroded pipes above. Each drop marked time running out. Each drop counted down to starvation.

Her parents didn't choose to leave. They were murdered for knowing how to grow food.

Kerra's hands trembled. The same hands that carried dirt she couldn't scrub away. The same hands that held the last remnant of knowledge the philosophers tried to erase.

The LED arrays flickered overhead. Shadows danced across the crop rows. Everything here was dying.

She turned the pages. More names. More skills. Carpenters. Welders. Electricians. Plumbers. All the people who knew how to fix things. All refined.

Tam had documented thirty years of systematic murder. Thirty years of ideological purity destroying practical knowledge. His words were careful, factual, damning.

"The Great Refinement was never about progress," he'd written in the margins. "It was about control disguised as enlightenment."

Kerra touched a dying plant absently. Checked its leaves out of habit. Brown at the edges. Curling. The nitrogen levels were wrong again.

She knew how to fix it. Tam had taught her. But the Council would never listen to a farmer.

Her throat tightened. She closed the journal, pressed it against her chest. The weight of truth was heavier than soil.

But Lyris might listen. Lyris, who'd grown up beside her in the collective. Lyris, who remembered before the philosophers taught them to value thought over hands.

Kerra stood slowly. Her knees ached from kneeling. Her back protested from hours bent over crop rows.

The thing is, she thought, using her own mental phrasing, I can't do this alone.

She slid the journal under her work shirt. The pages pressed cold against her ribs. Evidence. Proof. Burden.

The cracked pressure gauge ticked behind her. Counting. Always counting.

Time was running out for all of them.