It’s not that people don’t expect life to change, it is the way that change comes about that always catches them unprepared. Sometimes it is as trivial as rain on the day of the picnic that everybody had spent months planning and looking forward to, or as significant as a shift in circumstances that makes one’s life plans lose consistency, but these are things that people usually adapt to, that they talk about with their loved ones, and then, after sufficient time had passed, they put behind them and move on.
Other changes can’t be assimilated gradually, because they just don’t fit in the general understanding of existence, and they put a kink in the smooth passage of time, a singularity of sorts, that divides life into before and after. The reality of the plant belonged to the second category, and no amount of commiseration could make it blend gradually into the fabric of life.
Richard had made his choice the first time he had laid eyes on the defiant sprout that it was something worth protecting, so his heart wasn’t conflicted over the unreasonable changes that it had imposed on life as he knew it. Come to think of it, he was probably the only person in town that didn’t see the plant as a harbinger of the apocalypse.
The fact that he had helped it along and unwittingly facilitated its integration into every single aspect of life in the city was something that he liked to keep to himself, not that he was ashamed of it, or anything, but he wasn’t very sure that his loved ones would appreciate it.
“I so miss all that time when life was peaceful, and easy, you know?” Carol liked to complain to her friends, over the phone. “Before that plant dropped in from God knows where and ruined our lives,” she sighed, placing another basket of laundry in front of the Biologix self-sorting washer.
The machine went to work, diligently, assessing the clothes by color, level of dinginess and set in stains and separating them into neat piles.
“Remember?” Carol told her friend, “how uncomplicated things used to be?”
She stopped talking, to give her friend a chance to reply and at the same time she muted the phone to remind the environmental controls that Tom had complained the living room was too hot the night before and to point out to Brenda that the hot water temperature was set at 125 degrees, when she really would have preferred 120.
“I know, me too, right? It’s just this stupid plant, May, driving us all crazy!” Carol replied to her friend’s comment, coming from the other end of the line. “Want to meet later, grab a cup of coffee?” she ended the conversation, smiling politely, even though she was aware that her friend couldn’t see her through the phone.
“It’s like they’re obsessed, obsessed, I tell you!” Richard couldn’t help venting frustration as soon as he met with Jack later at the malt shop. “I can’t picture a single annoyance that they wouldn’t find a way to blame on the plant! Sometimes I wish it were that omnipresent, at least they’d have a real reason to whine about it!”
“Knock on wood, dude!” Jack shuddered. “Do you know my mom’s patient base grew significantly since last year? Apparently that plant of yours drives a lot of people nuts.”
“You’re spending way too much time with your mother, man,” Richard scolded him. “Where is the Jack that didn’t hesitate to break an entering?”
“Breaking an entering is one thing, having a plant automatically adjust the sound levels in your room is another,” he revealed the source of the latest inconvenience he attributed to biologically derived machines. “Do you know that my mother replaced my old music player with this new one that looks like it’s going to crawl into my ear and eat my brains, only because she was concerned about the level of decibels I feel comfortable with? I can’t turn up the sound on the new player, it just self-adjusts to a vibration level it finds acceptable,” he pointed out the irony of the situation. “She just got me a device that adjusts the settings to accommodate its own needs, not mine! And she’s happy with that, because she didn’t like the music running through my eardrums at a hundred decibels. But she never ceases to complain about how the biological machines are destroying life as we know it. Go figure!”
“Why don’t you let me take a look at it,” Richard offered. “Maybe I can adjust it for you.”
“That’s just it, you can’t! The music player is alive, it will wilt if subjected to a broader range of vibrations, if you adjust it for the decibel level it’s going to break down,” Jack explained.
“Not to be a pest, dude, but why would you want to be subjected to a noise level that can kill a plant?” Richard tried to defend his argument.
“Because I’m not a plant!” Jack protested. “I’m not going to contract powdery mildew either!”
“Maybe it’s because the device is made of regular plant cells, maybe if we could make it out of the transgenic ones,” Richard got an idea.
“NO!” Jack jumped, terrified. “You’re not unleashing plantzilla on me, Snake! Not in my own home!”
“It was just a thought,” Richard backed down. “Maybe we could try a sturdier plant for the material?” he offered an alternative.
“Forget it, man, I was just trying to make a point,” Jack waved, irritated, trying to put an end to the subject. “So, what else is new?”
“I got an A in bio,” Richard mentioned.
“No! Really?” Jack commented, mentally adding the latest A to the rest of Richard’s list.
“What can I say,” his friend replied, offended by his lack of interest. “My life is really not that exciting.”
“Now why do I find that so hard to believe?” Jack gave him a probing stare. “You know I envy you, Snake? You love everything you do, those weird gizmos, the darned plant! You don’t spin your wheels like the rest of us, complaining to your handheld Plantech dictation device about the dissociative effect of biologically derived machines on society,” he confessed.
“I don’t own a Plantech,” Richard corrected him.
“That’s not the point!” Jack snapped. “If you had one you’d probably use it to bring frozen plant sections with you to study on vacation!” he tried to explain his point of view. “Everybody is trying to get away from this giant sweeping wave, you’re just running straight into it!”
“There is nothing wrong with biologically based machines!” Richard protested.
“Of course not, that’s just the problem,” Jack tried to explain. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with them, and yet, our lives will never be the same.”
“And why is that bad?” Richard asked, with an innocent look on his face that felt like ice through Jack’s veins.
“See, that’s what I’m talking about, you’re running into the wave again,” Jack pointed at him, almost belligerent, “you must be the only one who can’t see it!”
“Maybe I like the wave,” Richard retorted.
“Oh, I don’t doubt that you do!” Jack stared, frowning.
“It introduces a whole new level of intricacy to constructed devices that we wouldn’t have a prayer of building, not in our lifetimes!” Richard argued his point.
“Which scares me witless, you introduce a new set of variables into a closed system that you don’t have the means to control and you just hope to God that it adjusts itself before devouring us whole,” Jack mumbled, frustrated.
“You can’t control your own bodily functions either, and yet you still trust them to function normally! What you’re saying is that you’d prefer to be able to control your digestive tract!” Richard said. “Heck, if we worried about this stuff all the time, none of us would ever be able to poop again!”
“Just because I can’t control my autonomous bodily functions, that doesn’t mean…” Jack started, and then he stopped to think. “You know what? If I had the choice to control my autonomous bodily functions, I’d very much like to,” he declared, defiantly.
“You have some serious control issues, dude,” Richard barely managed to stifle a giggle.
“How can you be so comfortable with a thing that ate an entire pipe distribution manifold and spit it out with alterations and enhancements to accommodate its own needs! That’s not a machine, dude! That’s a living thing!”
“Most certainly!” Richard replied, excited. “Which is exactly why I don’t want it hurt in any way!”
“I just want it as far away from me as humanly possible,” Jack insisted, stubborn.
“Why?” Richard asked again, in a voice that sounded almost hurt.
“Because I can’t make it do what I want!” Jack blurted, almost against his will.
“There is a whole host of things you can’t make do what you want, Jack, most of them destructive. Don’t be angry at the one that is actually beneficial,” Richard said, in a soft tone of voice, almost a whisper.
Richard couldn’t understand what was wrong with grown-ups. He sometimes felt like they waited for him to get interested in something, just to enjoy the privilege of forbidding him to pursue it. Tom and Carol concluded that their son was spending way too much time buried in his books and tinkering with his gadgets, and they decided to enroll him in as many extracurricular activities they could manage to cram into his schedule. They required full involvement and were time intensive, but most importantly, they all had one thing in common: they consisted of activities that at best were indifferent to Richard, and at worst he simply couldn’t stand. They included, for instance, track and field, local field trips with historical themes and glass making seminars.
Despite his natural aversion towards strenuous physical activity, Richard hoped that there may be at least some benefit to all that running and jumping, that hopefully he might get to build up his physique a little bit and stop looking like a string bean, not realizing that nature, in its transcendent wisdom, decided to keep him that way, in spite of all efforts, so that he would continue to be able to slip through the fence.
At the end of the day, between running around in circles, handling hot glass and filling up flash quizzes with extraneous details about historical artifacts, Richard was usually too tired to dig into his books, but he did it anyway, the best he could, just to keep the things he loved from getting lost in the fray.
He wished he could make more Brendas, but there just wasn’t enough time, between his school projects and his other scheduled activities, and since many of the real enterprises in the city took up the challenge of creating biology based devices, somebody always made his dream gadget before he even had a chance to really think about it.
Considering the fact that one’s path is charted by the day to day activities, Richard had to come to terms with the fact that his life stopped being about his own interests and hobbies, and became about the things he had to do, but didn’t necessarily enjoy, and in those moments he rooted for the plant even more, for its annoying resilience, for its refusal to submit, and most of all for the fact that, to quote his best friend, people couldn’t make it do what they wanted.
He loved it because it had managed to make its way up the chimney and through the wall, and because you couldn’t cut it with shears; he loved it because it defied every rule of man and nature, and succeeded in its task. He loved it because it had made its own micro-climate, and because it bloomed indoors. He loved the plant, because, in his mind, it represented freedom.
That afternoon he had just finished a five mile run, and he was in his room, getting ready for yet another activity, when he heard the familiar rapping of pebbles on the window.
“Jack, thank heavens! If I have to catalog another stone spearhead from the Neolithic period I’m going to lose my mind! Please get me out of here, I beg of you! I’m supposed to get ready for this old pottery exhibit, is there any way you could use your creative skills and get me out of it?” Richard besought.
“Your wish is my command,” Jack mock-curtseyed.
He climbed out of the window and went to the front of the house, to have an animated conversation with Tom and Carol. Richard didn’t get to hear what his friend told his parents, but the latter were very eager to make sure that their son was able to accompany Jack to wherever he was supposedly going.
“What on earth did you tell them?” he asked, amazed at the spectacular change in his very rigid schedule.
“A magician never reveals his tricks!” Jack said, serious.
“Must have been quite a story, I gather,” Richard tried to tease the truth out of him.
“What do I always say?” Jack smiled, “a good story is all about emotions, Snake!”
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Fancy a trip to the factory, to see how the plant is doing?” Jack asked.
“Right now?” Richard said.
“Do you have someplace better to be? Wanna stop by that museum, see the old pottery exhibit?” his friend asked, very serious.
“Please don’t even joke about that!” Jack shuddered.
Upon their arrival at the factory, Richard didn’t even notice the changes, because he was just too happy to run around his old hunting ground, moving from pressure valves to vacuum pumps, eager to take in the familiar image and reconnect with the place that inspired all his love for design. The plant had reached maturity and was extending thick ropes covered in flowers and berries over the nets stretched overhead. Richard’s heart melted instantly at the sight of this deceptively strong lattice of criss-crossing vines, whose metallic foliage gleamed in the light.
“How can you not love it?” he exclaimed, trying to persuade his friend that the plant was a gift to their generation, and that it opened the door to whole new industry and still unknown innovations in the future.
“I guess it grows on you,” Jack said. “Did you see the glass dome?”
“Interesting how it didn’t need a kiln that burns at fifteen hundred degrees,” Richard noticed, his knowledge still fresh from his glass blowing classes.
“In all fairness, the plant itself is hot all the time,” Jack replied.
“This is like a little greenhouse!” Richard exclaimed, excited by the sight of the glass dome. “I can’t believe I missed so much of its development!”
He looked at all the major components, and also at the new branches that the plant had built for itself, and he noted, satisfied with the progress of his beloved:
“Well, I guess it doesn’t need us anymore!”
“I’m sure that’s exactly what everybody is worried about,” Jack mumbled, mostly to himself.
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