While the town analyzed the feasibility studies for a new foundry, Richard kept refining his prototype until he brought it from the size of a table to that of a giant jellyfish. It looked like a jellyfish too, with one side smooth and rounded, glimmering with strange colored lights when its sensitive insides were stimulated by bouncing electrons, and the other featuring long and flexible transparent tubes, which moved of their own accord, like weird tentative tentacles trying to feel their way around their surroundings. The tubes twitched when the hot sap moved through them.
For all his open-mindedness, Jack was reluctant to touch the strange contraption, expecting it to be cold and slimy, like the skin of a frog.
“Get that thing away from me, man! It looks alive!” he recoiled.
“I sure hope so. She is,” Richard responded, his eyes shining with pride. “Don't you be mean to her!” he placed the squirming artificial jellyfish back in its box while giving Jack the evil eye.
“It's a she?” Jack laughed. “What do you mean she's alive?”
“Brenda. She is part plant, sort of,” Richard frowned, not knowing exactly what to call a synthetic entity that needed to eat and could feel touch, and whose sap flowed through its transparent tubes grace to the steady pulse of an artificial heart.
“Who's Brenda?” Jack teased.
“My grandmother,” Richard deflated his excitement.
“Have you finished it?” Jack asked, pulling closer to give the artificial jellyfish a closer look, and couldn't help flinching when the creature twitched its long tentacles unexpectedly. “Holy smokes!” he jumped backwards, freaked out. Richard started laughing.
“Pretty much! Care to accompany us to the factory and witness the big unveiling?” he asked.
“Wouldn't miss it for the world! When are we going?” Jack asked, still eyeing the gizmo with apprehension. “Oh, please, dude, put a lid on that box, that thing looks like it's staring at me!”
“Saturday, I think,” Richard covered Brenda, to make his friend happy. “I just want to make sure nobody's going to be there, they're surveying the factory endlessly since they started evaluating the plans for its expansion.”
They started out bright and early on a dreary Saturday, when mother nature added another challenge to the boys' full schedule of making excuses for the use of their time: they now had to explain to their parents what kind of rocks were so important to their school project that they justified braving the whims of the weather in the middle of wilderness.
They walked, wretched, in the soupy drizzle, not talking much, chilled to the bone and trying to keep dry as best they could.
“Nice day you picked for us, Snake!” Jack complained, shivering.
“The worse it is, the lower our chances to find somebody else there,” Richard felt obligated to defend himself.
The factory floor was empty, its machinery glistening in the shade of the exuberant plant, and stretchy steel nets in various stages of installation were following the green and coppery contours of the plant canopy, graceful and moving in the currents of the air conditioning flow, like a delicate veil. The boys had reached shelter just in time, before a howling wind whipped the rain against the window and dragged gloomy clouds across the sky.
“Not a moment too soon, man!” Jack shuddered as he looked out the window at a sky that got darker and darker as the bulk of the storm clouds approached. “What now?”
“Let's bring Brenda to meet her kin,” Richard joked.
He pulled the jellyfish out of the box and placed it gently on a large branch of the vine, close to a junction point with the pipe. Brenda wrapped her arms really tight against the vine and started extending a network of almost invisible mycelia into it. The vine started thickening visibly at that location, as if trying to make more of its sap available to the strange new graft. Brenda extended a second set of tentacles that attached themselves securely to the pipe structure.
“So, how does it work?” Jack asked, suddenly more amenable to Brenda's strange look, now that he saw it in its natural environment, so to speak.
The interface's screen lit up in a sequence of colors and densities that looked like colorful pudding swirling in a blender.
“The color variations tell us whether the plant and the distribution manifold are synchronized for optimal utility,” Richard explained. “Right now the pipes are a couple of degrees off. Watch this!” he said, and started adjusting the environmental controls of that factory zone, with the careful and meticulous moves one would utilize to find a precise radio wavelength inside a sea of static.
The display ceased its candy colored swirls and settled on a bright green gradient, shimmery like the surface of the ocean.
“Did you actually change the temperature for the entire distribution manifold?” Jack couldn't believe his eyes.
“Only by a couple of degrees,” Richard replied, very calm.
“You're going to blow us up to smithereens! You don't know what a two degree temperature change will do to the system!” Jack protested.
“As a matter of fact, I do. It's going to do absolutely nothing. It's way within the range of tolerances,” Richard answered.
“Ok, now that you synchronized whatever it was that you wanted to synchronize, go grab Brenda and let's get out of here, before somebody comes in, it seems the storm is letting off,” Jack suggested, looking out the window to try to convince himself of that fact.
The storm insisted on contradicting his words, and a new gust of wind blew the rain against the glass panes with an eerie howl.
“Let's just wait for a few more minutes, I want to see what the plant does,” Richard insisted.
“Whatever it does, it's not going to do it in a few more minutes. We'll come in tomorrow, if you want,” he promised, even though he knew it would be near impossible to alter their Sunday schedule in any way. “Please, Richard, let's go!” Jack begged his friend. He glanced out the window and noticed a gap in the unrelenting cloud cover, and he figured this was their one chance to get home before the storm worsened. “See the sky over there?” he pointed to it, for Richard's benefit. “If we don't leave now, we're going to have to spend the night here.”
Richard agreed to leave, very reluctantly, and went to pick up Brenda, which grabbed on to the vine for dear life and refused to budge.
“I can't remove the interface!” Richard yelled. “It attached itself permanently to the system.”
“And you never anticipated this eventuality while you were working on the prototype?” Jack asked.
“Why would I consider it?” Richard asked.
“Because the plant already attached itself to any piece of equipment it ever interacted with?” Jack pointed to the evidence.
“It welds itself to metal, that doesn't mean it can interact with everything,” Richard defended his concept. “Brenda is not made of metal.”
“What is Brenda made of?” Jack asked.
“Synthetic bio-material, based on the system logic and structure of plant cells,” Richard explained, in a calm tone of voice that sounded somewhat sinister to his friend, given the circumstances.
“I can't imagine why a plant would choose to incorporate a graft from another plant, synthetic or otherwise!” Jack taunted him.
“The point is we can't remove Brenda, I already burned myself trying, see?” Richard showed his friend his arm and the superficial burn on it, reenacting, in a strange flashback, his father's dinner table outburst. “We can't leave her here, she's the first thing they're going to see when they show up on Monday!” he panicked.
“We can try to cover her with something,” Jack suggested.
“Like what?” Richard asked.
“I don't know, netting?” Jack looked up at the slinky metal veil.
“How is that going to be any less obvious?” Richard said, as the storm started to relent.
“We really need to go, Snake! See for yourself,” Jack encouraged his friend to verify the situation. Outside the clouds menaced, as if upset by the boys' cavalier approach to the complex web of causality and its undeniable consequences in regards to daily living. “They're going to find her eventually, what difference do a couple of days make?” Jack pleaded.
Richard didn't want to abandon his pride and joy, whom he had become very attached to over his weeks of research and concept refinement, but after a somewhat sarcastic reassurance from Jack that Brenda was with family now, and she would be ok, they decided to call retreat and leave her behind.
They got home just in time to avoid getting soaked to the bone and arouse their parents' suspicions. Richard spent the whole weekend in torment, worrying about a million different ways in which the abandoned interface, now the subject of his unbearable guilt, was going to get them in trouble the moment it was discovered.
Monday rolled in, then Tuesday, then a whole week went by. It seemed very strange that nobody noticed the device, or said anything about it, so Richard decided to go to the factory the following Saturday and see for himself what was going on. Upon reaching the place where he had left dear Brenda the week before, he was in for a surprise: the plant had completely incorporated the interface, and other than the swelling around the graft placement, there was no visible sign of the device left to see now. Richard exhaled hard, not able to believe his good luck, and promised to himself to keep out of trouble for the time being. He ran all the way back to town and headed straight to their usual hangout to find Jack and give him the good news.
“What do you mean the plant ate Brenda?!” Jack jumped to his feet, forgetting he was in a library, where quietude and decorum were strictly enforced. “And why is that supposed to be the good news?” he looked at his friend, wretched. “What do you think the plant is going to do with the capability to affect its environmental controls?”
“Brenda is not just about the temperature and pressure changes,” Richard started explaining the extensive features of his device.
“Never mind!” Jack retorted, stunned that his friend didn't seem to grasp the consequences of this new development. “I think it's safe to say that if the plant fused to the pipe distribution system and the two are now one, down to the molecular level, the fact that it had incorporated the interface gives it the means to control its environment. You just handed it the remote, Snake!”
“It's not exactly...” Richard said.
“That's exactly what it is. In fact, I think you just gave it magical powers over the temperature and humidity in that hall, it will be able to change them at will now,” Jack continued his doom and gloom scenario.
“Do you really think the plant is that smart?” Richard's eyes gleamed with pride for his protege and its expansionist tastes.
“That's not a good thing! Stop smiling!” Jack snapped at him, then pondered the situation for a bit. “Well, at least there is no imminent trouble for us in the near future, since the perpetrator had swallowed its victim whole, like a boa constrictor. I can only hope Frankenplant doesn't come after us next!” he displayed theatrical despair.
Another week passed, and the next Saturday the boys, at Jack's great insistence, went to the factory to evaluate the consequences of their latest bungle.
“I miss Brenda,” Richard said wistfully.
“I have an idea! Why don't you make another one and bring it here, connect it to the plant, see what happens?” Jack replied.
“That's enough, Jack! What on earth could possibly happen that hasn't already?” Richard stopped him, exasperated.
“This!” Jack pointed to an entire section of the manifold that they haven't seen before. “Was this always here?”
“No,” Richard said.
“Are you sure?” Jack insisted.
“Absolutely positive! I know the equipment like the back of my hand,” his friend confirmed.
“Do you think they installed it last week?” Jack asked.
“With plant in it?” Richard pointed out. “Besides, it doesn't look like the other one.”
They both stared at the new branch of the pipe manifold, whose metal looked somewhat uneven, lumpy, like it had been made by hand. Its surface was almost translucent, and upon closer look the boys thought they could vaguely distinguish the contours of a tuberous root system through the plethora of leaves surrounding the tube.
“Oh, we're in big trouble now, dude!” Jack stared ominously at Richard, who didn't know what to say.
“What do you think we should do?” he asked, eventually.
“Don't look at me, I do creative truth interpretation, I don't do plant apocalypse,” Jack retorted. “This is all yours, enjoy!”
“Well, I guess we should all relax and see what happens next,” Richard suggested.
“You do that, man!” Jack patted him on the back.
“Why do you think nobody said anything about this? There is no way something this big could have gone unnoticed!” Richard asked, staring at the shiny new system expansion, perplexed.
“My guess is everybody thought some other team installed it, they don't always talk to each other about their work schedules,” Jack said.
“Lucky us, huh?” Richard commented, a little taken aback.
“Some luck!” Jack replied. “So, what do you think happened to Brenda?” he continued.
“If I were to guess, the plant has the equivalent of an artificial hip now,” Richard replied.
“Where is this branch going?” Jack asked, and a new wave of dread crashed over the two. The expansion was headed straight towards the back wall, branching vigorously as it went nearer, like a river approaching the sea.
“You don't think...” Richard looked at his friend, wide eyed.
“Think what!? That plantzilla is going to bust through the back wall? Oh, yes, I do! I do indeed!” Jack didn't cut him any slack.
“Maybe it will adjust itself, you know? Turn around. Dad said that the vine steered clear of the storage area,” Richard held on to hope.
“Sure it will, Snake. That's exactly what it will do,” his friend mocked him.
“But the wall is made of brick! It can't pass through brick, can it?”
“I guess we're going to find out really soon,” Jack replied.
“Don't you think one of the workers is going to notice that somebody is building a pipe branch poised to penetrate the exterior wall?” Richard followed logic.
“Not in this mess. Why would anybody question the only part of this la-la land that looks kind of normal?”
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