Milk

Rick Schlaack

Old Man Rajvik was a king in the milk business, the last bulwark against conglomeration, and champion of privately-owned farming.

His company, Rajvik Dairy Products ("We Put the Moo in You!"), had distributors in thirteen states across the Midwest. It was about the biggest privately-owned dairy farm still operating in the U.S. Old Man Rajvik had put away a pretty penny for himself, and now felt he could leave the company in the charge of his two sons. Onslow would be CEO, and John would be in charge of the farm itself.

Rajvik Farms flourished and prospered under the Rajvik sons' leadership. It had about a thousand dollars for each of the thousand cows to his name, and they were all kept in a thoroughly high-tech, fully-automated stainless-steel milking center, where they were fed fresh hay and protein-mix every day, and whose udders were lovingly and efficiently caressed by only the gentlest, most biologically correct milking machines, whose every move was recorded by a massive and powerful computer. Every motion and mood of every cow was monitored minute by minute through the Automated Checkup Timer, and cross-checks were constantly made to ensure that the whole system worked cleanly and affectively, with no human hands to meddle with the controls. It was about the cleanest, most efficient system ever devised by an overpaid team of engineers.

And when it failed, it failed in the most spectacular, nauseous, horrific way imaginable.

It was someone down in the Flow Control room who first noticed something queer in the milk. He was a young man, and new to the control room floor, and as he watched the milk flow by through the observation porthole he was surprise to see a smoky pink stream running through it. He couldn't decide whether to tell anyone or not; he was new, of course, and being thus naïve and leery, he convinced himself it just a minor glitch in the process. Besides, no one had complained yet. And so he kept his mouth shut about it and went back to monitoring the flow from the computer bay.

The next change was a little more alarming. The pink stream was accompanied by some kind of particulate matter, also that same sort of salmony color. Flow Control sent a memo up to Bottling, telling them to watch for it; they did, but apparently none of it was coming out in the final product. It must have gotten caught in the pipe traps, the intestinal squiggles that filtered out such gunk. Anyway, the computers would catch it. That was what they were there for. And by the next day, sure enough, the flecks were gone.

But then there was the incident in the bottling plant – backed the whole process up for an hour. They actually had to shut the whole thing down while the maintenance crew scrambled to find the source. It was Spigot Number Nine, the new one with the suction power. They finally located the valve where the flow had stopped; it was somewhere far up in the machine, nestled securely within the serpentine bowels of metal and plastic tubing that carried the milk to the bottling line. José the maintenance manager reached up into the thoroughly modern, high-tech valve unit with a pair of heavy tweezers, poking around for the source. He finally found it. He looked up into the unit, and those standing next to him swore his dark face turned white as the milk in the assembly-line bottles.

"Here," he said to his assistant Gwen, "you fix it." Assistant Gwen took the tweezers, hardly noticing the wet hair stuck to its tip, and he reached up into the unit and gave a hard tug, and suddenly gray-tinged milk sprayed out all over his shoes. Gwen took one look at the object lying in the milk, and then he let out an awful moan, and vomited so hard a blood vessel broke in his eye.

As the milk ran toward the spill-drain in the middle of the floor, it carried with it the besotted, disintegrating body of a decapitated mouse. The thing floated gently, almost leisurely, toward the drain, stopping and spinning lazily until it slipped through a drain-hole and disappeared into the fetid darkness below.

But José was an old hand at smoothing things over. Why raise a fuss? It was only one mouse. His family had seen much worse in the old country. And Gwen was a good sport, he wouldn't go telling for such a little thing as that, especially not with an extra hundred dollars for his wallet. José was a good manager, a hell of a guy; and that was why his crew kept their silence – and their jobs – intact.

The next discoloration of the milk, however, was more difficult to cover up. The few human workers on the assembly line kept writing notes about it on their clipboards, noting how it turned from "pinkish" to "grey", and finally to "almost greenish". There was also that godawful smell around the injection nozzle mouth – smelled like something rotting. They cleaned it several times, often with some rather corrosive stuff from the basement, but the smell kept coming back.

They talked to Hal the Floor Manager about it, and he put his hands in his pockets and nodded his long head, and then he took a look at the milk, and then at the nozzle, and then he nodded some more and went back into his office.

Moments later several men in hazard suits came with a giant tank on a cart, and they took it on a lift to the top of the milk machine. The workers heard some clanging and metal squeaking, and then there was that same awful odor, intensified a hundredfold, and then it was replaced by a heady cleaning-solvent smell. Then they finally turned the machine back on, and the milk poured out strong and clear and white, the odor eliminated; all the workers clapped and cheered with relief and went back to their clipboards.

They were a little puzzled, though, by the new addition to the milk machine – the huge tank, with the pipe leading into the supply. Bottle Manager Dave made a comment to Floor Manager Hal, who nodded his long head and put his hands in his pockets and told him, oh, that'll be gone in a few weeks, don't worry, new FDA specs. A mere triviality. Nothing to worry about.

A week later the workers were pleasantly surprised to find they had received raises. No reason was given by the company, and the workers were too happy to speculate.

A month later the milk flow rate dropped through the floor. The computer was to blame. John Rajvik got mad, and ordered an expensive, system-by-system diagnostic report.

The reports came in from the computers: the Automated Checkup Timer had gone offline. The cows had gone unmonitored for three months. When the Checkups were run, the Controllers received some bewildering results. 999 cows registered excessive amounts of stress hormone and weight loss. At least thirty had respiratory infections, ranging from moderate to severe. Six of these were malnourished, two almost dead.

And then there was that anomalous report, the one too bizarre to even be possible...

The one from stall #367.

The computers had kept the milking house operation running with such precise self-sufficiency for so long that eventually all the workers had been laid off or transferred, and the milking house had been sealed up to allow the machines to function in peace. Now, as the humans cracked the seal on the door, they were instantly hit with the full, nauseating realization of machine fallibility. One retched; another ran to a chemical shed and procured gas masks. Desperate moans and mutters of cattle, scared and nauseated to madness by the smell of decay, assaulted the ears of the veterinarians as they hurried their way down the compound, stepping gingerly around the horde of mice which grew thicker and thicker as they approached. The smell was horrific. Flies buzzed absently in a droning cloud. The cattle in the stalls grew progressively worse with their vicinity to the stall, and the last cow was nearly unconscious, twitching and making pitiful noises through her muzzle. The veterinarians came to the opening of #367, and they already knew what they would find, but they had to look, and so they batted away the flies and poked their gas-masked noses out from behind the stall wall.

There she hung. #367, the tattoo on her hip still read, though the flesh was hairless and dark, its waxy surface reflecting the lights…The flies droned on and on. She hung her very heavy head over the feeding bin, where her drippings fell into her protein mix, and her empty eye sockets peered out with infinite horror. Her mouth was a mad, mad grin, oozing with worm and decay.

With a wooden snap the last of her legs fell off, and a swarm of maggots bloomed from the stump. Mice swarmed all over her decaying hulk, tearing, biting. They squirmed visibly in the rotting bag of her udders.

And then a circuit clicked, and a motor whirred. The puckered lips of the milking nozzles extended lovingly toward the ruined udders. And with a gentle schlup, the suction turned on…

Old man Rajvik, meanwhile, was at home in his kitchen, making himself a sandwich. He went to the fridge and got out a bottle of premium 2 Rajvik Farms milk and poured himself a tall, cool glass.

How satisfying, he thought, to be able to drink the result of your labors. Imagine, my sons running the company!

And then he chuckled about it, and took a long, slow drink.