The Drug of Fear

A long time spent in the fields, a lifetime, can do this," replied Adam. "It’s the spores of the fruit. It doesn’t have an effect on you or me now, but some of these people have tended the fields and done what you will do for the most part of twenty years. They have developed a dependency on the drug, created from the long-term exposure they have suffered in the fields. They cannot live without verandis now. They cannot live unless they are here."

"They don’t look alive even now," said Jeremy.

"Verandis has destroyed their lives," said Adam. "They love and hate it as they love and hate themselves. They need it to live; oh, how they crave it. But they cannot bring themselves to touch it for all it has done to them. It twists their hearts and their minds. It has consumed them so that what we see here hardly lives, only tortured souls."

"Will it do that to me?" asked Jeremy.

"Not if you get out," said Adam. "Not if you don’t let the fields become your life, as they have for these people… as they have become for me." His voice took on a heavier quality. "You do not always have to be exposed for the fields to consume you."

"I won’t let them," said Jeremy, spoken with conviction, a solemn vow to himself and the winds.

"Then you might be the strongest of us all. Come on. Let’s get you started," Adam said. "Just like I told you before. Find me when you have filled your baskets and I’ll show you around the processing plant."

Adam stood there for a few moments with the wind touching his back and bending the stalks of the verandis plants, watching Jeremy pick a few of the fruits. They dropped into the basket quickly, efficiently, without much exhibited emotion on Jeremy’s part. That was the heart of a good harvester. He would not let the rest get to him. Jeremy would work out well, if he did not succumb to the fear always itching at the back of his mind.

He turned to leave him and had made it a dozen paces before Jeremy called out, making him pause. "Mr. Garcia. Is it worth it?"

Adam turned his head to look back at the boy. "It’s what keeps us alive," he said, and continued on.

This question he had asked himself many times before. There were many evils as well as positives attributed to verandis, and as the producers of the drug of fear the Sekotians bore much responsibility. Verandis was needed because it made people feel alive in this traumatised world, in a world numbed by pain and suffering, but that did not change much of its adverse impact.

The total truth was that verandis saved lives and it destroyed them.The people reaching for what they could never touch in the fields. Children now accustomed to living with a constant sense of fear, robbing them of their innocence, of the chance to dream. The existence of blue fear, a fear so potent that exposure drove people insane. Suicides from fear. It was an entire generation being raised on paranoia and terror where even as it helped people connect with their emotions, the underlining shadows it created made it hard for them to trust another person, to love selflessly. It made people feel alive, but made them forget what it was to truly live, murdered parts of their souls in the same moment.