Slopulism
Data Centers | Fable 5
Val’s sign reads NO SERVER FARMS IN FARM COUNTRY, and she is still waiting for somebody to appreciate the pun.
Eleven of them hold the corner of the courthouse square, between the war memorial and the crosswalk. There is a folding table, a clipboard with nine signatures, a thermos that belongs to no one, and a stack of fliers Val printed at the library for ten cents a page. When the light changes she offers fliers to the people crossing, and they take them the way people take receipts, folding without looking. Every few minutes the woman with the bullhorn restarts the chant, hey hey, ho ho, data centers have got to go, and Val gives it her whole chest, because her shift starts at four and this is the part of her day that matters.
The old man in the big overcoat is the first person to read the flier all the way through. He stands at the edge of the crosswalk with a white pharmacy bag hanging off one finger, front of the page, then the back, then the front again.
“Millions of gallons,” he reads. “Of water. Millions over what, though? A day? A year?”
“It’s millions,” Val says.
“Sure. Over what stretch, is my question.” His face gives her nothing to push against. “A number without a denominator is just a mood.”
She looks down at her own flier as if it might have grown a footnote. “In total,” she says. “Probably.”
“I grew up two counties west of here moving irrigation pipe,” he says. “Every one of those green circles you see from the highway drinks tens of millions of gallons a summer. Two rows of corn out of every five go to ethanol, which we mandate into gas tanks, and which as far as I can tell wastes the corn and the water both.”
“That’s different,” Val replies hastily.
“How so?”
Val opens her mouth with total confidence and stands there while nothing arrives. A truck goes through the intersection. “It’s food,” she says.
“It’s fuel. That’s the part I mind.” He is kind about it, which makes it worse.
He lifts the pharmacy bag a little, like evidence. “You want to know what keeps me up at night? My premium went up sixty dollars a month in January and the deductible reset behind it, and I’m one of the lucky ones on my street. And the interest on the national debt runs bigger than the whole Pentagon budget now, they say. My grandkids inherit that bill. I would stand on this corner for either of those, if I believed corners helped.”
“Healthcare is, like.” Val regroups. “A whole systemic thing.”
He waits. He is good at waiting; it seems like a skill he has had time to practice. Nothing else comes.
“Where did this one find you?” he says. “The data centers.”
“What do you mean, find me?”
“How’d you first hear about it?”
The true answer takes a while to get out. “Videos.”
“TikTok?”
“Some of them cite sources,” she says, hearing it as she says it.
“Ever chase one down? A paper. The county did a water study, it’s public, I read it at the same library where you printed these.” He taps the flier. “Anything with a methods section in it.”
She has forty-minute videos saved for later. Saving them had always felt like something, like it counted. Surely there were sources there, she figured. It does not survive being said out loud, so she doesn’t say it.
The old man folds her flier into quarters and puts it in his coat pocket, which is somehow courteous, the keeping of it. “I think you wanted something to be angry about,” he says, “and this one got to you first. No shame in it. That wanting might be the most natural thing there is.” He says it the way you would tell a stranger their taillight is out. Then he touches the edge of his wool cap and goes on up Main, the white bag swinging.
The chant starts again behind her. Val’s sign comes down to her shoulder, then to her side, one cardboard corner touching the sidewalk. The library is open until eight. She could go tonight after her shift, find the water study, read the actual number over the actual denominator, and know something the way you know a thing you went and got for yourself.
Her phone buzzes.
The video is forty-one seconds long. A man points at a satellite map with a red circle drawn on it. WHAT THEY’RE NOT TELLING YOU ABOUT THE NEW BUILD. By second nine her chest is doing the hot, certain thing again. By thirty she has the shape of a comeback she wishes she’d had a minute ago. She likes the video. She saves it for later.
The sign goes back up over her head, all the way this time.
“Hey hey,” she starts. “Ho ho.”