 
The Plant – A Steampunk Story

by Francis Rosenfeld

© 2015 Francis Rosenfeld

Cover Design by Melchelle Designs

Discover other titles by Francis Rosenfeld:

Terra Two

Generations

Letters to Lelia

Fair

Door Number Eight

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Epilogue

About the Author

Other Books by Francis Rosenfeld

Chapter One

He was sure he had seen that plant before, although he couldn't, for the life of him, remember where. It was a nice looking vine too, if one was into that sort of thing. Plants, that is, something his mother always found a reason to coo over, God knows why!

Richard walked around the bend, passed the Belvedere point, without stopping to admire the view this time, and picked up the pace on the old cobblestones of the pedestrian trail that connected the town to the steam plant. Back in the day when everyone walked to work it used to be the principal thoroughfare to and from town, but since they had built the railroad for the commuter train nobody took the long walk along the side of the mountain anymore, and the trail hadn't been used in years.

The path started literally within a few feet of Richard's back yard, and in a very strange way it looked like it was supposed to emerge from it, as if it had been intended to originate somewhere inside his house and cut across the back yard. The work on it had obviously been halted at some point, most likely for no other reason than somebody got fed up with this town improvement project and decided that particular spot was as good as any to end it.

But it didn't feel that way to a curious child. When he first discovered it a few years back, while searching for flexible willow branches for one of his wooden catapults, the path felt magical to little Richard, who had just finished reading the Wizard of Oz and whose thoughts were brimming with fantasy, adventure and valiant deeds; the path seemed to have been laid at his feet on purpose and its symbolism gave him goosebumps, but his foreboding emotions didn't prevent him from following through to see what his destiny had in store for him at the other end.

The pedestrian route passed through a lightly forested area and changed dramatically as it passed through the valley, hugging the rocky side of the mountain, where it became barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side and was festooned by a heavy metal rail that guarded the side of a dramatic ravine, and then continued sinuously between large boulders and brambleberry bushes, following the course of the commuter rail almost to a T, but from a safe distance, like a reluctant guardian angel. There were a few cobblestones missing here and there, but the path was otherwise in very good condition, a testament to the dedicated craftsmanship of the workers who had put it together a long time ago.

The walk didn't take very long, about half an hour or so, and the trail wound up pleasantly, with a clearing and a look out point half way down the road, where one could see the entire town nestled between the mountains, like candy in a bowl, and the billowing chimneys of the steam plant puffing in the distance above the large ungainly mass of the factory building.

The eerie image of the steam plant always made Richard picture a sleeping dragon in his mind, and all throughout his childhood he made up all sorts of stories to explain the semi-spirited presence, stories which scared the daylights out of him, more often than not. Terrified, he watched the sleeping giant get engulfed by steam and expected it to rise menacingly upon the city at any moment. He closed his eyes to avoid the apocalyptic imagery and opened them half way a few minutes later, after nothing happened, to see the monster still inhaling and exhaling peaceful breaths of pressured steam, sound asleep.

Richard had feared the mythical giant for years, the monster who was always making strange noises, always huffing and puffing steam clouds, but he was all grown now, almost fourteen, and this kind of stuff was only scaring kids anymore.

The path ended, logically, at the large factory gate, which was two lanes wide and tied to the fence post with a heavy chain wrapped around both of them several times, secured with an impressively large padlock. The gate looked like it only opened if it had a reason to, and in Richard's case, it did not. Both the gate and the fence were tall and sturdy, without any of those wonderful horizontal elements that could have provided him step ladder help up and over.

Like all boys his age Richard was a master at fence jumping, and furthermore, 'fences are for grown-ups' seemed to be one of the guiding principles for his circle of friends. He could have asked one of them to help push him over the fence, but he covetously yearned to keep this discovery all to himself, at least for a while, until he could better anybody else with the knowledge of its details.

Instead, he circled the perimeter, getting scratched and poked by some very hostile bramble, keen on keeping its turf untouched by human foot, and his efforts were eventually rewarded by finding an opening in the wire fence, so small that any reasonable adult would have thought it could barely let a cat fit through.

But the fate of the universe is always at the whim of details. It so happened that Richard was wire thin and very flexible, and could sneak through openings so small they looked impossible to the average person. His friends had nicknamed him Snake for this very reason, a nickname that was much better than Ricky, for God's sake! Ricky! What was he, four? It made him picture himself in a romper covered with smiling hippos and colorful giraffes. He so wished his parents and sisters stopped calling him that, especially in company, that was so embarrassing!

After managing to pass through the fence without nary a scratch, he couldn't believe his luck to have this magical land of Oz all to himself and from then on he dubbed the trail, the factory and its surroundings his territory which he shared with no one and learned like the back of his hand.

Richard's interest in science had grown over the years, evolving from building simple wooden contraptions to more elaborate metallic gear boxes with intricate moving parts, and to this end he got into the habit of sneaking through the hole in the fence, enter through a basement hatch that for some reason nobody ever thought of locking and get straight onto the factory floor. He never thought twice about liberating a few screws and gears from the scrap pile, pieces he knew nobody would miss, but which were invaluable to him in the development of his strange geared machines that he was so passionate about lately.

Most of the components of his miniature gear boxes were assembled from pieces and parts from his dad's garage, so nobody in the family ever thought to check for the more intricate and custom made parts he could only find at the factory. Lucky for him, none of the family members showed any interest in his hobby, though they found it admirable in principle and encouraged him to participate in all the science fairs.

Richard didn't want to contemplate the wrath of Zeus if his father ever found out that his pride and joy and unquestioned heir to the manufacturing job he had been holding proudly for a couple of decades, was breaking and entering to appropriate machined parts, so he decided it was better for his health to omit mentioning this detail to his dad at the dinner table, when all the family members shared in the experiences of the day.

As far as his mother was concerned, the boy could almost feel her envision her eldest son going straight to Hell for his misdeeds, and knew she would anguish over this thought in a manner so horrid that he would eventually have to go there, just to give her some peace of mind.

Richard, however, was completely unmoved by their social expectations, because his heart told him differently. The first time he emerged from the narrow stairwell onto the factory floor, empty and silent on a bright Saturday morning, he felt like a god (yet again another thing he would never think of sharing with his mother, Hell and all), but he really did feel like the demiurge under the metal arches of the ceiling, so high up he could barely distinguish the details in-between, in the flood of light that poured through the giant windows, and among those huge, quiet machines he knew he could activate with one touch of his finger.

"What was that plant again?" his brain tormented him, making him obsess over the long flexible vine with lance shaped leaves sticking out of it, opposite, in a regular rhythm. Normally, he wouldn't have cared, but the weird part was he had found it growing out of one of the steam valves in use, and then winding around its scolding hot pipe like nobody's business, in a place where hot water vapors could hit it at three atmospheres.

He went over the details of it in his mind, trying to remember everything he could about it. The leaves were deep green, with very sharp edges, and felt rigid to the touch, almost like sheet metal. They bent easily under his fingers, but snapped back to their original shape, with not a crease or a dent left on them. The entire plant was warm to the touch, no doubt due to the fact that it was located inside that sunny window, whose southern exposure made the entire adjacent area feel like a heat collector. The plant stem had no spikes or thorns, but wasn't smooth either, if anything, it made Richard think of cable wire. On closer inspection he noticed the stem itself wasn't solid, but a strand of very thin filaments tightly twisted around each other. There were no flowers or fruit on the plant, at least not at the time. One last interesting detail about it, it seemed to almost float around its supports, without touching them, as if held in place by invisible sky hooks.

His first thought was to ask his biology teacher about this strange plant, and maybe even bring a cutting of it to class, to study it further, but then he realized she would tell his father, which would bring about a moment of reckoning, starting with an explanation about what he was doing inside the steam plant to begin with.

The factory was always spotless, not a nail out of place, not a scrap on the floor, not a drop of grease on a lathe, and it became his secret kingdom for a few very happy hours every Saturday morning, when the good working people of the town, for most of whom this mechanical realm was their place of employment, were enjoying a well deserved rest. Richard told his parents he was going out to collect rocks for a fictitious geology project and then took the worn cobblestone path out of town, to get to the factory and learn all its ins and outs. The factory was relatively large and it took him a while to figure out all the shortcuts and the logical flows of industrial processes that engendered the design of the halls, but eventually he learned the place so well he could travel it with his eyes closed, which he did, on occasion, just to prove himself right.

It was because he knew the factory floor so well that he noticed the plant immediately, even though it was growing in a steam pipe all the way in the back, facing a southern window, and sheltered from view, in an area that served for the storage of new parts and was kind of difficult to navigate.

His eye took a glimpse of something green and sinewy that simply didn't belong in this gleaming stainless steel and somber cast iron kingdom and he weaved his gangly body through a narrow space between two large metal pallets to get a closer look. And there it was, the torment of his mind, happy as can be, sunning itself in the quiet window like it was on vacation.

"How does it live there?" Richard's question tormented his mind. "Maybe it grows back every weekend and gets destroyed on Monday, when the steam pressure starts getting pushed back through the pipes," the scientist inside him replied, and for the time being he had to accept this explanation, for lack of sufficient data, and wait to see what would develop in the future.

But right now he was late, he had promised his father he'd help rebuild the engine on their old car, and he knew his little geology research would come into question if he pushed the limits on the time he spent on it.

Richard didn't mind helping his dad, he was good with his hands and knew it made his father happy to see how skilled he'd become at mending those engine parts. He started walking even faster to get home before his father returned from his customary Saturday morning fishing trip and in his absentmindedness he almost missed the abrupt transition that the cobblestone path made to the grass in their back yard.

He balanced himself just in time to see his father walk into the garage. Richard hoped that the latter didn't notice his ungainly stumble, after all of the volunteering on the sports team and his efforts to turn his progeny into a strong athlete, but the boy wasn't the athletic type and his large motor skills were average at best, reason for which he never failed to disappoint on the field.

He walked into the garage where he and his father worked in a comfortable silence, broken only by a "can you hand me the five eights hex" or "I need a clean rag". The car engine accompanied their sparse conversation with rhythmic revving, meant to test the work they had done so far. After a couple of hours, distracted and a little tired, Richard brushed his arm against the hot engine block, which still held at about two hundred degrees from all the tests they'd been running.

"There is no way that plant could live in those steam pipes, not one way in this world!" he thought, wincing over the burn on his arm.

"Are you alright?" his dad asked. "Go ask your mother to put some toothpaste on that, you'll be fine," he continued. He didn't like to coddle his children, or dote over their boo-boos, that was a woman's job. He wanted to make sure his son grew up to be a man, not fuss over every scrape and indulge his weaknesses.

"No way!" Richard continued his thought process as he walked into the house to find his mother, or the toothpaste, whichever came first, even though the pain from the burn on his arm had already subsided.

Chapter Two

His mom wasn't in the house, so he went straight to the bathroom to put some toothpaste on the burn on his arm. Every single surface in the room was spotless and not a single object was out of place, which reminded Richard that he would be wise to keep it that way. Carol was a cleaning fanatic and gave the children the mother of all guilt trips if they made a mess, and her lectures on disrespect and parental disappointment could last for hours, depending on the amount of dirt and disorder that had been generated. By now all of the children would rather scrub the floors with their own toothbrushes than have to listen to one of those discourses again, all of course, except Teddy, whose young age gave him the benefit of an excuse, to the older siblings' silent grudge.

Richard put the cap back on the toothpaste and placed it back in the drawer, exactly as he had found it. He looked at himself in the mirror, as always wishing he was blessed by nature with a bigger build. Despite his wishes to enjoy body building activities, he just couldn't stand working out, and he found the amount of time it required in order to get visible results simply revolting. He got easily bored by repetitive activities and concluded that he had better things to do with his time. To circumvent the unpleasantness of physical strain he became a big fan of any and all gadgets, diets and techniques that promised to yield results with no effort at all, and had tried every one of them at some point in time, with constantly disappointing results. His stringy body seemed to absorb the shock of lifting weights and distribute it in waves through his long and slender limbs rather than bulk up to withstand it. No amount of food managed to put more meat on his bones, it only seemed to make him grow taller and more wiry. He drew his mother nuts during his pasta period, when he ingested vast amounts of the aforementioned food, only to notice, to his dismay, that it went straight through him, without leaving anything behind.

Unfortunately for him he was taking after his mother, a slender woman with small bones and delicate features, whose weight hadn't budged an ounce even after giving birth to four children, and who could never open a jar of pickles by herself. He was relieved to also have inherited her height, she was relatively tall, and her glorious head of hair, dark, thick and shiny, a beauty feature she nurtured almost religiously, despite a schedule that seemed to leave her no time for herself.

Richard was also happy to have inherited his mother's almost superhuman constitution. In the fourteen years he had been alive he couldn't remember her suffering from a single cold, pain or sniffle, it sometimes felt like she possessed immunity to disease in general, and she often liked to joke that she couldn't find the time to get sick.

Carol used to be a stunning beauty in her youth, when her alabaster skin and her small frame gave her an air of vulnerability that was almost impossible to resist by anyone with a protective streak. She had huge brown eyes that always seemed to be shrouded in a veil of tears, even when she was happy, the strange effect of her overactive lacrimal glands. Her frail, helpless look was deceiving, because she was a practical, cool headed woman, always in control. The household became her unchallenged fiefdom very shortly after her marriage, and over it she reigned supreme. None of the family members ever thought of questioning her rule, from the right way to stock groceries in the pantry to the proper alignment of towels in the bathroom.

Tom, her husband, had decided not to fight a losing battle over the way the household was run, since Carol seemed to have it handled to perfection standards, so he negotiated a hard won autonomy over the garage, where he kept his tools, and he retreated there when the racket of a four child household weighed to heavily on his nerves.

The predicament of starched lace curtains and embroidered tea cozies hadn't been helped by the fact that their first two born were girls, which gave Carol a reason to step up the flower, candy pastels and ruffles theme, with occasional accents of ballet recitals and make believe fashion shows. When Richard was born Tom was so grateful to have acquired an ally in this predominantly female household that he didn't even care that the new man of the house was quite a few years too young to throw a ball. From the moment little Richard learned to walk and talk his father always kept him close when he fixed stuff around the house, or when he worked on the car, proud to teach his son skills he was sure will serve him well one day.

More than a decade later, the family was surprised with another addition, but by this time the girls were almost finished with high school and Richard was a teenager, so Carol decided to pour all her dedication into the new baby boy, which left very little room for anyone else. In all fairness, Teddy was moody and opinionated, and putting up with his whims and tantrums could test the patience of a saint.

So, at least for now, the eldest son was it: his father's helper and trusted confidant and the sole beneficiary of his life's wisdom.

Richard turned off the lights in the bathroom and ran upstairs to the attic to spend some time in his room. He liked his room a lot, even though by any standards it would have been considered small. His father didn't miss any opportunity to regale the family with the story of how he had converted that unused portion of the attic all by himself, with only his own two hands, a few good tools and a scrawny budget at his disposal. The craftsmanship was indeed admirable, Tom couldn't make something sub-standard if someone put a gun to his head, his lifetime of experience in manufacturing didn't allow him to.

The room was a little dark because of the dense tree foliage that grew in front of its only window, tucked inside a deep dormer. Right underneath, a storage bench covered with a soft mat and pillows was Richard's favorite retreat, the place where he could find some peace and quiet, and also the birth place of many of his ideas. Across the room from it his father had customized built-in shelving to cover the entire wall, shelving that was by now overflowing with books and stuffed beyond capacity. Right next to it, built as an afterthought, stood his undersized clothes closet, which couldn't hold enough apparel for a cat, he always thought. His mother always scolded him for not keeping the closet neat and tidy, but even she had to admit that it was an impossible task.

The walls were made of smooth wood planks, with just a coat of clear stain to protect them, and between the wood finish on the walls and the exposed rafter ties the room felt warm and cozy, like a vacation cabin in the woods. On one of the walls, surrounded by ninja posters, gleamed a very ornate oval mirror, surrounded by a gilded frame, heavily carved. Richard had protested the addition, of course, but it seems there was no room for it anywhere else in the house, and his mother insisted that everybody had to have a way to check themselves before they got out in public, regardless of their gender. Then she went on a tangent about the dreadful state of his hair, commented on the length of his fingernails and sent him to change his shirt, so he decided that keeping that ridiculous mirror in his room was a small price to pay to avoid having this discussion on a regular basis.

The only things that really bothered him about his room were a very noisy plumbing stack that couldn't be relocated and had to stay in one of the corners, and whose noise used to keep him up at night before he got used to it, and the fact that the wiring was a little temperamental, which made his lights flicker every time it rained. He still loved it when it rained and a myriad little fingers wrapping on the roof lulled his mind to sleep.

He jumped on his bed, neatly tucked under the roof slope, grabbed his headphones and turned on the music. An explosion of cymbals, drums and tormented guitars blasted through his ears with painful intensity.

He closed his eyes and immersed himself in the music for a while, chasing away every thought he considered useless, to concentrate on the fact that there was a plant that could grow inside the factory, inside a pipe filled with steam running at three atmospheres and three hundred and fifty degrees, and his mind was twisting and turning, wondering if he should tell somebody about it, then figured it wasn't worth his inconvenience, and it wasn't his responsibility either, since somebody will notice it eventually, and the grown-ups should be able to figure out where the plant came from eventually. On the other hand, he worried that meant he would never find out how things turned out, unless he figured out a way to encourage his father to share more of those boring stories from work the latter felt the need to share with everybody at dinner, but then he risked the pain of having to sit through a completely unrelated story and not get any of the details he actually wanted to learn.

He mulled these thoughts inside his head, while the music amplified to deafening crescendos, not even realizing how long he had been laying there, until he felt the hand of his oldest sister, Diane, grab his shoulder. He took his headphones off, but the noise level didn't subside. Teddy was throwing a temper tantrum and their mother, in a calm tone of voice that sounded surreal under the circumstances, was trying to put an end to it.

"Are you kidding me?!!!" his sister screamed to cover the ruckus, "I called your name a million times, how is it that you can still hear with those blasting out in your ears? Where is my biology textbook?" she started the interrogation, "and my scientific calculator?"

"I didn't take..." Richard started, his genuine revolt stunted by the presence of a very large and colorful biology manual looming large from across the room.

"There it is! I can't believe you took it! How many times do I have to tell you not to touch my things!" she protested, livid, her voice almost drowned by Teddy's screams. "I'm sure you have my calculator too, don't tell me you didn't take it, you always take my things without asking! MOM!" she yelled. Her mother replied with something that sounded like an answer from the other room, and the withdrawal of her attention, if only for a second, made Teddy wail even more enthusiastically, reaching vibration frequencies that Richard was sure could break glass.

"What do you need with my biology manual anyway! You can't understand the material, it's senior high school stuff, you just do this to spite me, you hateful brat!" she harangued.

"Take your stupid manual, see if I care!" Richard screamed back, secretly irritated that he hadn't had the chance to look inside the book yet, to see if he could find any answers for the current scourge plaguing his scientific curiosity. Then he consoled himself with the thought that on Saturdays the children were usually encouraged to visit the library and pick up some good reading material for the following week, and he was sure he would find plenty of reference material there, better than his sister's precious manual, anyway!

"Where is my scientific calculator?" his sister pressed on.

"I don't know! Leave me alone!" he yelled, and left his room, slamming the door behind him. His mother, who had miraculously managed to settle little Teddy into a more amenable mood, signaled to Richard to stop making noise, and despite the fact that the boy knew about his mother's peculiar medical condition, seeing her eyes veiled by tears still filled him with guilt every single time, so he conceded the fight, although he was sure he was the one with the valid grievance.

His other sister, Stacey, who at the time was parading around the house, trying on way too many pairs of pumps for her homecoming party, ran into him in the corridor and almost stepped on his foot, which made Richard wonder why they made women's shoes so uncomfortable and what the heck was the benefit of spending time to decide between ten virtually identical pairs of black pumps. He passed her by and gave her a disapproving look, which was interpreted as hostile, so she immediately went to their mother to complain.

"There is no room to breathe in this house, I swear! They're like a popcorn pack that just started expanding, I have to get out of here before I get squashed into the walls." He let his imagination run wild, and the fantastic imagery gave him even more reasons to skip out to the library early, just to escape the craziness.

***

The library was always quiet, oh, what heavenly bliss, but never empty, and by the time he found the biology section and pulled out all the reference material he wanted to take to the study area and research in peace, he'd already run into a couple of his teachers, three of his friends' parents and the charming owner of the malt shop down the street. They all stopped to engage in conversation, naturally, and expressed curiosity about his sudden interest in plants and biology. Every one in turn suggested that his class teacher was probably a wonderful resource for whatever questions he might have, and asked what he wanted to know, in the hope that maybe they could be of assistance. Richard thanked them politely, mentioning that he was just browsing through a couple of books to pass the time until his sisters got there, quietly cussed the blasted curiosity of the town folk and wondered how hard it would be for everybody to just mind their damned business.

The books he picked up shed no light on the plant in the factory, but offered an answer as to why it looked so familiar, from a distance it was almost indistinguishable from a broad variety of plant life, belonging to various families and genera, all with unpronounceable Latin designations and growing all over the world.

He shrugged, annoyed, put the books on the re-shelving cart, and went back to the section on mechanics, to double check some details for his latest project. He found a little illustrated book on bioreactors and pored over it for a few hours, happy to enjoy a little quiet for a change.

Chapter Three

The next Saturday he skipped out again, in search of interesting rocks for his "geology" project. He arrived at the factory breathless and rushed to see if the plant was still there. It was. He couldn't tell if it was the same plant, or one that kind of looked the same, but it was definitely growing out of the same valve, wrapping around the steam pipe almost half way up now.

Richard, who worshiped the scientific method, tied a little string around the plant and marked its height on the pipe. He tried to snip a little piece of stem with leaves, but the stem was harder to cut than a steel cable. He managed to pull a leaf, after much struggle, placed it in the back pocket of his pants and tended to other things of interest, after all his secret weekend kingdom had so many things to offer.

He wondered about a little bit, moving from the engine room to the pipe manifold distribution center, the most impressive area in the factory, and Richard's favorite spot. It looked almost like a gigantic organ, with tubes splaying out in every direction, through windows and transoms, along walls and bending around openings, snaking about a few inches off the floor, splitting and reuniting with the twisted patterns of a gnarled old tree. Richard spent hours wandering inside this mechanical forest, following its logical flows, trying to understand which steam pipe fed what, learning the inner works of its vortex flow meters, its pressure couplings, its every bend and elbow.

There was a place inside this knot of metal limbs, a clearing almost, a hollow, from which he could see the entire manifold branching overhead, and when he sat there, on a little concrete base that for some reason had remained unoccupied, it made him feel as if the entire power distribution system was an extension of his person, and that as small and weak as he was, compared to this enormous metal monster, he was its heart, the soul in the machine, the essential component that allowed the whole system to work. Even though he knew the distribution manifold very well, and if he closed his eyes he could see its every detail, he liked to take a walk around and inspect it every time, and then, with the relief of having found everything exactly the way it was supposed to be, he sat there on his concrete base for a while, and dreamed. And, indignity of indignities, that's where he found the plant again, inside his precious, sneaking out between two pressure rated flanges and then back in via an isolation valve.

At first he didn't want to believe it, of all the places this trespasser could choose to inhabit, to intrude on his beloved pipe manifold was simply unthinkable! He looked closer at the pressure flanges. The plant seemed to grow not through them, but from them, there was no discernible space between the stem and the metal. Richard was dumbfounded by this living puzzle, and in his bewilderment he failed to notice that the temperature in the room was significantly higher than usual until pearls of sweat started beading his forehead.

"What on earth?" he thought. "Do they turn off the fans over the weekend? This place is an oven!"

He didn't remember it ever being that hot in the manifold room, and since the seasons were moving in the wrong direction for an increase in temperature, he had to accept that the reason for the unusual warmth could only be the other parameter in the equation. He turned around and touched one of the leaves, which was hot.

"Oh, this can't be good!" Richard panicked. He agonized over the fact that now he would have to tell his father, it was the right thing to do, and face the consequences of his unauthorized access to the factory floor. On the other hand, if he noticed all of these changes, and they were quite blatant, surely somebody else, a grown-up, with any luck the very person in charge of this section, would notice too. How could they not? They'd have to turn down the heat, for one, nobody could work in that sauna.

But then again, what if nobody did, and his precious distribution manifold would end up fully engulfed in hot plant! The vision of a very large and strange tree, a fusion of green and metallic branches, with limbs made out of steam pipes and twisted ropes of green stems running between them occupied his mind. The thought made him burst with laughter with its absurdity.

He headed home, eventually, so deep in thought he didn't notice the light drizzle that felt bone chilling after leaving that toasty tropical greenhouse environment. When he got to his room, the leaf in his pocket was still warm. Tormented by guilt and curiosity, he spent all his weekend orbiting around his father, trying to strike up conversations in the hope of finding out if he knew anything about the plant. Surely somebody must have noticed it by now, it was literally taunting people, that cheeky vine, as plain as the nose on their faces.

***

The weekend passed, completely uneventful, but to Richard's surprise, Monday finally brought with it the discovery he was hoping for.

"You wouldn't believe what happened at work today!" Tom started, and before waiting for an answer, continued. "They found a plant growing out of, wait for it...the distribution manifold! Oh, how it rained Hell over the poor schmuck who manages that section, I really wouldn't want to be him today!"

"Thomas!" Carol exclaimed, outraged that salty language, and a mention of unholy things have been used at the dinner table, in the presence of the children.

"Sorry, dear, I forget myself sometimes," he continued, unperturbed. "How do you not notice a plant growing out of your machine, it's like he'd been sleeping on the job, or something. To be fair, it's not your everyday plant either. It took two men and a saw to get it out of there, I'm not even sure they got it all out, but it's not like it's going to survive inside those pipes, it would have to be supernatural, for Chrissake!"

"Of all the things!" Carol protested again, indignant, and Tom waved his hand to appease her. Richard gulped hard, remembering that the plant didn't seem affected by the aforementioned pipe environment, quite the opposite, it looked perkier than before. He gathered all his courage to interject what he hoped it would be an inconspicuous comment, but his voice shook and broke at the same time, drawing all the attention of those at the table to him.

"So, hhm..., did they find out what plant that was?"

"Well, no, not yet," his father replied, surprised by the teen's sudden interest in his work related stories. "They sent it to a lab in town to get it analyzed. It will take them some time to turn in the results, a couple of weeks or so, I guess there is no rush. Whatever it was, it couldn't be too happy there, when we pulled it, and I can't tell you with how much effort, it was almost hot. It's probably the closeness to the steam pipes, it can get pretty toasty in that room," he concluded his response and returned to the enjoyment of his meal. "Rack of lamb, Carol, you really outdid yourself today! This is delicious!"

Carol didn't answer, she just accepted the compliment with a pleasant smile, which was enough to put Tom in a good mood. The plant and the factory were forgotten for the time being, and the conversation turned to the children and their school projects.

After dinner, Richard went back to his room, half relieved that the plant story had finally come to life, without his incriminating confession, half frustrated that his father took this whole incident in stride. What would it take, he wondered, to make the adults pay attention to the world around them, it seemed to him that they were sleepwalking through life half the time!

The next evening everybody was unusually quiet at dinner, and when Richard tried to bring up the plant again, his father snapped a snarky comment at him, then found something wrong with one of his math grades and excused himself from the dinner table early, pretending he had something to finish inside the garage. Richard was on pins and needles, and his impatience grew with every passing day, until the next Saturday arrived, with its long awaited opportunity for geology research.

To his despair, his father asked him to stay home and help him in the yard that weekend, and the new developments about the factory, the steam pipes and their resident plants had to remain a mystery.

Disappointed, he planned a get together with his friends in the evening, to catch a game and unwind. They met at the malt shop, as usual, where their regular vanilla float was accompanied by a copious helping of gossip and fear mongering.

"Did you hear what happened at the plant?" the malt shop owner cheerfully volunteered. She prided herself to be quicker at delivering the town's news than the local newspaper, and this was not the time to challenge that reputation.

"Oh, dear, yes," the lady she was talking to said, and then looked around and whispered something in the shop owner's ear. Richard kicked himself for sitting so far away from the counter, in a spot from which he couldn't overhear anything.

The shop owner gasped and covered her mouth, in a very theatrical gesture, followed by the elaborate hand gestures of her conversation partner. A short pantomime ensued, from which Richard attempted in vain to extract the gist of the conversation.

"What happened?" he asked his friend Jack, whose father also worked at the plant.

"You didn't hear? They found a plant in the steam pipes. My dad says nothing can live in there, but this plant does. He's not sure it's even from here..." Jack said.

"What do you mean, not from here, you mean, like, alien?" Richard whispered back.

"What else could it be?" Jack replied. "They took it to this lab, right? And they're still working on it, they can't figure what it's made of, they say it feels more like metal than anything else."

"No way!" Richard replied.

"And, get this! Yesterday they pulled it all out and it grew back. They say it's bigger now. And it's hot to the touch. They thought it was because of the proximity to the steam pipes, but no, it's the plant. I'm telling you it's not from here."

"Wow!" Richard didn't know how to end the waterfall of details that just kept kicking him in the face.

"And, and one more thing. They found a string tied around the plant, obviously someone had seen it before. They are starting an inquiry into who that might be."

"Oh, crap!" Richard let out.

Jack looked at him, worried.

"I'm sure it has nothing to do with your dad, if he saw it he would have told someone, not tied a string around it. I wonder who it might be?" Jack thought out loud. "Maybe it's that tiny fellow, what's his name, Roger? He looks like the type."

Richard shuffled uncomfortably. Of all the idiotic things to do, why did he ever consider leaving evidence behind! Not only he risked getting in trouble himself, but now it seems he implicated that Roger, whoever he was, a person who was completely innocent.

"Can you believe that guy?" Jack continued, oblivious to his friend's torment. "And what's with the string, anyway? Was he marking the plant or something? What kind of idiot does that?"

"Exactly," Richard replied.

"Huh?" Jack looked at him, at a loss.

"Oh, never mind!" Richard protested, immersed in his vanilla float.

Chapter Four

He had to wait an entire week for an opportunity to visit the factory again. He anticipated with trepidation another one of his father's intrusions on his schedule, but when no restriction was placed on his time, he rushed back to his beloved factory, to see what happened to it in the meantime.

No wonder his father was impossible to please lately, the scene he came upon was simply surreal. The plant was growing in several locations now, immediately noticeable by anybody blessed with eyesight, it was as if spring had sprung in the factory and the pipes' leaf buds had started to open. The vine sneaked out of every crack and crevice, looking deceptively delicate, but harder to tear than tension cable, and then formed bridges and overpasses through the machine room, like a secondary system of sorts, bypassing the mechanical flow.

It was pleasantly warm inside the room, although the heat had been turned off altogether, and it was the middle of November. Richard wondered how come the machinery was still working, because appearances led one to believe that plant invasion would put it into an unmanageable state, but he hadn't heard anything to suggest that, and during the previous week the puffing dragon had been billowing smoke like nothing ever happened.

Since he had been unwise enough to mark up the plant's growth two weeks before, he went to check how it developed, which was kind of a futile activity, judging by the general appearance of the room. The plant was wrapping the entire pipe now, and just as last time it kept a weird distance from the metal, as if slightly repelled by an energy field. Richard couldn't figure out how it attached to its support, and had to conclude that it didn't. It seemed as if the plant used the pipe system as a background pattern and embroidered itself a separate, parallel motif, following the former but not touching it, except at the places where the two systems intersected. If he didn't know any better, Richard would think the plant was learning what proper flow patterns should look like from the pipe manifold, like a novice seamstress uses the pieces and parts of a well-fitting garment to cut patterns for a new one.

He didn't delude himself that the green interloper was endowed with intelligence, not more than the average share of instinct and self-reliance nature doles upon every living thing to ensure its survival. Forgetting for a moment that the presence of a random component in this well planned environment, especially one that was stubbornly resistant and marched to the beat of its own drum, was a total disaster from the standpoint of system management, he took some time to study the plant's self generated logic, to figure out how it fit in.

The first thing he noticed was that the vine's unbelievable resilience was supported by two basic features: its tension steel strength and its purposeful redundancy. Every one of the twisted ropes it wove around and through the pipes was fed by a myriad of strands coming from different directions, none of which was essential to the stability of the system, but all of whom contributed to it. Much like the circulatory system of an organism, it had minor pathways and major arteries, it didn't leave any spot uncovered and doubled down on itself at times, to create secondary system loops.

If there was one thing that was different about the pipes, was that they looked shinier, as if brand new, and since this was evident throughout the system, it made Richard contemplate the possibility that the energy field, or whatever it was that held the plant around its supports, must have an inhibiting effect on corrosion, which was a blessing in the now warm and humid air, which would otherwise run havoc on metal components.

Richard took a deep breath, and the large hall smelled like the forest, with none of the usual pungency of burnished metal and mechanical lubricants. "How on earth do they keep this place running?" Richard asked himself, flabbergasted by the impossible interdependence.

It was at this time that he made the decision to abandon all his guilt fueled scruples and self-imposed moral imperatives with respect to the plant, eliminate all preconceived notions about what was or was not possible and just study its development, using no other assumptions than those made obvious by the environment itself.

The first thing he noticed was that he couldn't see the roots of the plant anywhere, which could mean one of two things: it was either an epiphyte, if one wanted to envision the main manifold as a large pseudo tree, or its roots ran deep inside the underground portion of the system, out of sight and out of reach.

The plant's ability to thrive in the steam pipes remained a mystery, a fact he just took as a given and decided to revisit later, when he had more information about it. It wasn't clear either if there was any logic to the entry and exit points, which seemed to be determined more by convenience than systemic concerns. He couldn't help notice that one of the green rope bridges had spanned between two remote sections of the manifold, allowing heat transfer between them, a feat the engineers had been trying to accomplish for years, only to be daunted by the costs.

Richard remembered the myth of the salamander, who was fabled to make its nest in the fire, and really started wondering, despite his penchant for scientific proof, if there was any truth to that story, which up until this point he would have dismissed immediately as laughable. After all, there were many species adapted to extreme environments, who was to say that a plant can't withstand two hundred and forty degrees of steam pressure?

***

Upon returning home, he found out that both of his parents had gone to a town meeting, no doubt to discuss the current dilemma. The meeting was open to the public, and even though the presence of a child would normally have been considered odd, Richard decided to go and fill in some of his information gaps.

He tried to sneak into the balcony section unnoticed, and effort wasted on a couple of very squeaky floor planks and a heavy door whose hinges hadn't been oiled in years. Fortunately for him, the disturbance was drowned by the animated discussion below.

"What do you mean you tried to remove it? Trying is not a strategy! We expected you to resolve this problem by now! It's been three weeks!" one man protested.

"How does the factory even stay functional? Surely the presence of a parasite of this size must be a major concern! What is the capacity that the factory can run at right now?" an assertive lady asked from the first row.

"To tell you the truth, we had to double check, to make sure we weren't crazy, and ran it by several people for accuracy, but the plant's efficiency increased by twenty percent during the last month," the factory spokesperson replied.

"You still haven't answered my question!" the assertive lady stuck to her original question. "What capacity is the factory running at?"

"Same as before," the spokesperson said.

"You didn't close any of the sections? Slowed down production?"

"No."

"Does that seem like a reasonable approach to you, under the circumstances?"

"Surely you don't suggest we close down the plant, even briefly! Create hardship for people who are working hard, why don't you!" a guy in the back protested, daunted by the prospect of unpaid idle time.

"No, we should all wait for the plant to shut itself down! Permanently!" the lady protested sarcastically. "The system needs a maintenance overhaul, at least, for safety, if nothing else!"

"Please, people, there is no need for this kind of doomsday talk! The machines are running efficiently, and we are in the process of finding a solution to the problem. Please bear with us as we're working on it," the spokesperson tried to appease the audience.

"But this should never have been allowed to become a problem in the first place, it is unthinkable! Who is responsible for this debacle? Don't tell me this stuff just happened!" an elderly gentleman retorted, outraged.

"He's right! You guys let this happen on your watch! I don't see why the rest of us should be inconvenienced! I expect you to resolve the situation immediately, and put things back the way they were before!" a few people in the back protested vigorously.

The long suffering spokesperson took a second to picture the factory floor as it was reflected in the present moment, considered the amount of effort the management had already expended to remove the stubborn invader, and wondered if there was a combination of words in the English language that could present the state of fact in a way not conducive to public lynching.

"I can assure you that we're sparing no effort to remedy the situation in the shortest possible amount of time," he said convincingly, gaining more confidence as the roar in the audience subsided.

"Some way to spend the weekend!" a man complained. "Instead of enjoying time with my family! After the week I had! Nothing but problems all the time!" he vented his frustration. He had been under pressure to deliver on a deadline by Friday, and the mere thought of the ubiquitous plant irritated him.

"Dude, what are you doing here?" Jack's voice startled Richard. His friend was seated right behind him, and seemed to have been there for a while.

"I could ask you the same question," Richard retorted, turning around to talk to his friend.

"Are you kidding me? How long has it been since something really cool happened in this town? I wouldn't miss it for the world! Especially considering that it may be related to, you know..." he suggested, twitching his head sideways to get his point across.

"You're still on your alien theory, I take it?" Richard asked.

"You mean you are not? What else could it be? Of course they're not going to tell us anything about it if it is, you know how these things go. But I decided to do a little bit of the research myself!" Jack declared, secretively and with pride. He was a big fan of alien conspiracies and managed to insert them into every situation whose cause wasn't immediately obvious. "Want to come with? I could use some help."

"Where are we going?" Richard hesitated. Jack had this innate talent to get himself in trouble, even where there was no trouble to be found, and his ideas always had an unpleasant aftertaste, usually experienced in the form of school detention. He was, however, his best friend, and Richard didn't want to hurt his feelings, especially since the alien conspiracy theory was one of Jack's core beliefs.

"You're going to help me sneak into the lab. I want to see those analyses and reports myself," Jack replied eagerly.

"No, man! There is no way!" Richard shook his head vigorously. "What are you, crazy? If they catch us my dad will never let me out of my room! I'll be an old man before I am allowed to touch my game pad again!"

"You know they won't catch us! Who cares about the stupid lab results, anyway, other than the two of us! The lab workers probably don't even want to think about their work over the weekend! Besides, nobody strolls through that part of town on a Saturday!" he tried to persuade his friend.

Life doesn't come with a lot of certainties, but Richard had pinpointed at least these three: death is inevitable, the sun always rises in the East and every time Jack tries to do something wrong, he gets caught. His heart squirmed like a worm on a hook, torn between his loyalty towards his friend and the anticipation of certain punishment. The last time he had joined in on one of Jack's adventures, the two of them had to repaint the school hallways and the Physics lab, an endeavor which ruined their whole summer vacation.

"Oh, come on, man! You owe me this one! Remember how I covered for you three days ago in chemistry class?" Jack upped the ante, piling up on the guilt.

"Seriously, Jack, a break in! That's a misdemeanor, dude. Dad will kill me! I don't want to get mixed up in this, seriously!" Richard held his ground.

"How chicken are you? When the aliens completely take over this town do you think anybody is going to care that you kept yourself out of trouble? We need to take our fate into our own hands, man! What if by the time they give us an explanation as of where the plant came from, it's already too late to do anything about it? Can you live with that burden?" Jack exhausted his entire persuasive arsenal.

The last thought resonated with Richard, who, having seen the actual rate of the plant's growth, knew that every minute counted. He was also dying to find out what kind of living thing that was, and had a passing command of biology he hoped would help him guess what the lab report said.

"I swear, if you get me in trouble, I'll never speak to you again!"

"You're such a chicken! Who's going to catch us?" Jack replied, happy to have convinced him.

"The security guard, for one!" Richard started enumerating.

"Who, old johnny cakes?" Jack pointed out that good old John earned this nickname because he always fell asleep after eating that specific breakfast item.

"The police," Richard continued.

"What are they going to do in that area? Squirrels pass through it and get bored to death! Nothing ever happens there! Not over the weekend!"

"We might run into somebody we know?" Richard tried the last resort.

"Common, Ricky, you should be able to come up with something better than that, man!" Jack taunted him, knowing how much his friend loathed being called Ricky.

"I already know I'll regret this, you hear me? You always get caught, dude, and I always get stuck with detention because of you!" he protested, really annoyed by the diminutive.

"This is why your life is so boring, you never take any chances! You would grow mold if I wasn't here to shake you out of your complacency! Don't tell me that summer painting the school corridors wasn't the best time you ever had in your life!" Jack kicked him in the ribs.

"No, it wasn't! I wanted to build a water powered automaton!" Richard protested.

"Oh, God!" Jack said, visibly disappointed. "You definitely need to get out more, dude. As luck has it, I'm here to help!"

Chapter Five

Jack's plan was presented and analyzed for potential risks and flaws during the following week, over a few milkshakes at Jack and Richard's favorite hang out spot, and it was supposed to go like this: the boys were going to tell their parents they had volunteered at school to reorganize the supplies in the Art Studio, and since most parents had complained repeatedly about the mess their kids generated in art class, mess that always seemed to follow them back home, this was a very plausible reason to get out of the house, sure to meet with no resistance whatsoever.

They would then proceed to school, where they would enter through the front door while being very noisy, making sure to attract the attention of at least a couple of credible witnesses. They would then go out through the back, take the long way through the woods, which would take twice as long, increasing the risk of them getting caught, but it was an inevitable necessity, and arrive to the lab, also at the back of the building. Here the plan hit a snag, because Richard insisted they should have a valid explanation as of why they were there, just in case they ran into somebody they knew, and Jack had to concede him this additional security measure, even though he felt that Richard was being ridiculous. After long deliberations and creative brainstorming, they came up with a reason: Richard was waiting for a parcel, which he was supposed to pick up at the post office, and he figured they could say that he suddenly remembered that, went to pick it up and got lost. Jack was supposedly going with him to keep him company, so his friend wouldn't have to walk there all by himself. Granted, since they both grew up in that town and could walk anywhere backwards and blindfolded without getting disoriented, this scenario had some flaws, but they moved on with the planning, anyway, figuring out they would perfect the details later.

Once arrived at the lab, Jack would climb through a window to get in. Here they stopped to figure out how were they going to ensure the window would be open, and after realizing that none of them could sneak around the place during the week without looking suspicious, they abandoned the idea. This left them with option two, that involved picking the lock on the back door. At this point, Richard went in full retreat mode, threatening to leave immediately and abandon this insane plan altogether.

And then, in a brilliant moment, fueled by despair, Jack came up with option number three: they were going to climb the fire escape to the roof, enter through the roof hatch, which, even if it was locked, at least wouldn't put them in full view of every passerby as they were trying to open it, and then, through the exit stairs and down to the first floor, where the lab was.

The big day arrived, and the two executed the plan perfectly to the last detail, descending upon the empty laboratory via roof access, like two Santa/Peter Pan hybrids fitted with notepads and sharp pencils. It took them a while to find the filing cabinet where the report, still a work in progress, was kept, but they found it eventually. It seemed to be almost finished. Richard started copying it feverishly, getting down as much as he could, undaunted by terms like metal enabled bio-polymer and redox proteins. Jack was on the lookout, and during a brief moment when he took his eyes off the window, he noticed a tiny blinking light that seemed to come from under the very desk Richard was sitting at, diligently copying the report. It took Jack a second to process what the light could possibly mean, and then he jumped to his feet in a panic.

"Dude! We triggered the silent alarm, the police are going to be here any moment. Drop everything and run!" he said, simultaneously opening the window and jumping out, as police sirens were blaring close by in the neighborhood. Richard grabbed his notepad and jumped quickly after him, making a promise to himself to strangle Jack later, if and when they reached safety again, and fumbled so much to get out of that window that he almost got noticed by an elderly lady who was making her way to the grocery store.

The boys didn't stop to watch as the officers pointed to the open window and canvased the area for suspects, they never stopped running until they reached the woods, from where they walked as fast as they could back to school.

Even the best laid plans succumb to the cruelty of fate. How unfortunate of Richard to have forgotten his packed lunch that day! His mother had prepared it for him, to make sure the boy didn't starve as he volunteered his effort for the benefit of his peers.

She followed her son to school, about half an hour later, and searched the premises from top to bottom, to find the boys. When she realized her search was in vain, she went back home to get Richard's father, and now they were both waiting inside the Art Studio, in a panic, trying to build up the courage to report the boys as missing. When Richard and Jack arrived, flushed and sweaty from all that running, Carol was so relieved to see both of them were ok, that she didn't even think of scolding her son. Tom, on the other hand, regained his wits immediately, told Jack to go home and informed Richard that he will be grounded indefinitely, and also owe his parents an explanation for his sneaking around behind their back.

***

Richard fumed silently all the way home, walking behind his livid parents and feeling and irrepressible urge to kick himself for being so stupid. Why did he ever listen to Jack! He just knew this would end badly, it always did! Not as badly as it could have, but still!

What on earth was he thinking! They could have gotten caught, there were at least six police officers at the scene. If he thought his current situation was bad, try picturing his dad picking him up from the county jail! He shuddered.

Upon arriving home, after a brief interrogation that yielded too much vagueness for his father to bear, he was sent to his room without supper and told not to get out for anything other than school or chores.

The silver lining around this black cloud of dreary luck was that being sent to his room finally allowed Richard to experience some peace and quiet, very welcome under the circumstances, and gave him time to think through the research he had brought from the lab. But the peace and quiet was short-lived, broken as it was by a familiar rap on the window.

"That can't be!" Richard thought, outraged. "No fair providence would allow this!" He looked out the window, to see Jack wave from the large tree in front of his window.

"Dude, you haven't the faintest how much I hate you right now! How are you even out?" Richard exploded, furiously.

"I climbed out the window," Jack said, matter of fact. "Listen, are you hungry?" He had anticipated Richard's being sent to his room without supper and brought with him a cheese sandwich, which he threw a at his friend through the open window. "Sorry, that's all I could put together on short notice! Can I come in?"

"NO!" Richard protested, terrified of what his dad would do if he found Jack there, but by the time he finished his thought, Jack had clambered his way up the window and made himself comfortable on the built in bench in front of it.

"So, what did you find out?" he asked, his eyes shining with curiosity. Richard pondered the pros and cons of giving Jack a piece of his mind about this determined effort to sink him even deeper into trouble when he was already swimming up to his neck in it, and decided that it wasn't worth the trouble, since he never knew Jack to give a rat's about personal responsibility. He realized that the sooner he filled in his friend on the details he wanted to know, the sooner the fiend was likely to get the heck out of there.

"Not much," Richard replied. "I could probably figure things out a lot faster if I wasn't locked up in this room! Guess whose fault that is?" he raised his voice and lowered it immediately, because if somebody heard him, they would come in and he would be in a lot of trouble.

"Just tell Jack what you need, I'll do my best for you, my friend!" Jack smiled, completely unaffected by their current situation.

"How are you going to get me anything if you can't be seen anywhere? We're dead in the water and I told you so before we even acted on this moronic idea of yours!" Richard hissed at him.

"Richard, my man, I told you you were boring! Live your dream, follow your destiny, let Jack figure out the details!" he patted his friend on the back with a patronizing, but warm gesture. "You're the Snakester! Own it! Be proud! Don't chicken out on me!" he got up, sure of himself, while giving his friend this quick pep talk. "Now I have to go, dude! If my mom figures out I'm not in my room I'll be in a world of hurt!"

"So much for being footloose and fancy-free," Richard thought, as he watched his friend go out the same way he had come in.

"I'll bring you a few of those books you were researching at the library last week, maybe they'll help. Make me a list."

***

After Jack left, Richard went back over his two principal goals: putting together a believable scenario to justify their absence and finally getting to understand the cause for his predicament – the intruder plant. As a reality check on what was the order of priority between an important and an urgent activity, he spent quite a lot of time on problem number one first, whose consequences he was going to face any moment now. He eventually decided that confessing to a lesser crime, say, sneaking out with Jack to go watch the race tracks, an activity his father strongly disapproved of, would engender sufficient outrage to mask the unavoidable flaws in the narrative, but not engender too harsh of a punishment.

With the shadow of problem number one safely behind him, he turned to problem number two. He pored over whatever he had managed to copy from the report, plagued by his limited knowledge of chemistry and biology, and his eyes glazed over when he read the research that explained the transgenic mutation that kick-started the plant's production of scleroprotein, which, in the presence of heat and pressure allowed the keratin similar bio-polymer to free its sulfur bonds and participate in an exogenous reaction with the iron in the pipes.

The resulting metal enabled bio-polymer coated the surface of the plant by trapping titanium alloy platelets between its modified protein layers, in the same way nacre forms, but malleable and elastic, endowing the super-plant with both superior strength and great flexibility, and an ability to conduct electric current that changed with temperature and pressure.

"Darn!" Richard thought. "The thing really is made out of steel cable! No wonder I couldn't cut the scary plant with shears!" He looked around the room, to find the pair of pants with the leaf in them, only to notice that his mother had already washed them and placed them neatly back in his closet. There were days when he wished she wasn't so thorough.

His head was spinning from all the details, and he wondered, since the report seemed to be pretty clear with respect to what they were looking at, if the scientists at the lab weren't a bit reluctant to break the story of the mutant titanium alloy plantzilla to the good people of their town. At the same time he felt a little sad for Jack, because, alas, his alien conspiracy theory didn't seem to pan out!

The thought of a hybrid that blended a living thing with inorganic matter, metal, no less, was so fascinating to Richard that he almost forgot he was grounded for a length of time still to be determined, that he almost got caught by the police while breaking an entering and that the subject of his love at first sight, the extraordinary metal plant, was growing like kudzu vine at that very moment, swallowing whatever portion of the distribution manifold had been lucky enough to remain untouched so far.

An hour later, his mother, who couldn't bear the thought of her child going hungry, sent Diane to his room with dinner, and the message that he wasn't supposed to use his being grounded as an excuse to skip brushing his teeth, trimming his nails, and cleaning his room.

His sister took the opportunity to give him an ear full, touching upon all the things he missed as he was cooped up that afternoon.

Everyone spoke of nothing but what happened at the factory anymore, it seemed there were no subjects of conversation for the dinner table other than that stupid plant. Apparently it had grown larger, big surprise! The factory was expected to get a result from the lab some time next week, and everyone was waiting for it in order to decide on a course of action going further. There motors' efficiency had gone up again, and the output grew by half. Dad said people were worried about the engines being overworked until somebody pointed out that most of the extra energy came from the heat recovery cycle. Mom had made her favorite, glazed peas, and Stacey got a B in math, which was considered unacceptable by both parents. Oh, yes, and she, Diane, got a boyfriend. And he was so cute. The next half hour was dedicated to Diane's new boyfriend's qualities, likes and dislikes, pets and hobbies. And dad finally agreed to let the kids get a new puppy!

Diane was sorry that he got grounded, and promised to bring him his portion of ice cream a little later. She commented on one of his posters, which she found weird, and then she remembered she had an essay to finish in English Lit. It wasn't her favorite subject, and these took hours and hours, so she groaned, picked up the empty dinner plate and left the room.

After Diane's departure, the house turned very quiet, allowing the sounds of nature to come through the open window. After a few brushes of wind rustled the trees, rain started, steadily rapping on the roof, like a song of the night.

Chapter Six

After hearing his story, strongly disapproving of his son's choices and discussing the situation with Carol, Tom agreed to lift Richard's punishment, even though very reluctantly.

The boy counted the minutes until the following Saturday, when he expressed renewed enthusiasm for his rock collection and left for the factory as soon as the first rays of sun peeked over the horizon. He was so eager to see what the plant did in his absence that the half hour walk only took him twenty minutes.

In his enthusiasm to get to the factory floor as soon as possible, he almost ran straight into the evaluation committee, assembled for the purposes of finding a solution to the plant problem, and, just as importantly, figuring out how was it possible for it to happen?

"#*%&!" Richard said to himself, peeved that his secret weekend kingdom was overrun by non-compliant zealots. "Can't they do this during the week, why did they have to take over my time?" he mulled, resentful. First his dad was putting the stops on him, and now this!

He found a good place to hide, where he knew nobody would think to look, and tried to make the best of the unpleasant situation by trying to find out more about what the research unveiled so far. In his irritation, he almost failed to notice the change in scenery, which could only be described as breathtaking by any human soul.

The plant seemed to have matured by now, and the bright chartreuse of its young foliage had softened to a deeper, less saturated green, that gleamed with a coppery and tungsten sheen as the morning sunshine passed through it. The plant swirled and weaved around the pipes, just floating around them, touching them only at the penetration points, dispersing main branches into a profusion of metallic stems and then reuniting them, like a large river at an estuary, all the while surrounding the glossy islands of the control valves, flow meters and y connections, presenting them to the stunned observer like high end jewelry stores display expensive gems on velvet pillows. There were no visible signs of corrosion anywhere on the pipes, no water spots, no discoloration, no salt deposits, every component sparkled. It looked as if both sides of this unbelievable bio-mechanical forest had been installed together very recently, and carefully designed not to interfere with each other any more than it was absolutely necessary.

The coppery and silver gleam on the dark foliage changed the quality of the light in the large hall, making it softer, almost surreal, like an illustration for an enchanted fairy-tale forest. Richard was dumbfounded. He watched the leaves and tendrils sway gently in the air conditioning flow, and they appeared to him to move of their own free will somehow, playfully, as if they were trying to impress the boy with their prowess.

"We're still waiting for the lab reports," a gruff voice woke him up from his reverie, "but as far as I can see it shouldn't be so hard to rip this out, it only attaches in a few points." He drew closer to one of the meld points, to assess the strength of the connection, and the rest of the committee followed him.

"This looks like weld, but I'm sure it's not as strong, although we'd still probably need power tools to cut it out. We might be better off cutting out that section of the pipe altogether and replacing it," he offered his opinion.

"That's the main distribution branch, it would be very costly to shut it down. How many man hours do you think you'll need to have this taken care of?" his colleague asked.

"Off the top of my head, I'll say two men, four days, but I'll have to run the numbers on it to tell you exactly," the gruff voice answered.

"For that section alone?" his colleague asked.

"Yes. Of course we can't do that before we get the replacement valve, these things tend to be on back order."

"And cost a fortune," the third voice interjected. "I suggest we don't replace anything we can repair until we put together a cost comparison of the options."

"Also, we don't know how far inside the pipes this pest runs, we don't want to spin our wheels and lose our shirt on this repair, and then have it sprout leaves somewhere else the moment we are finished," the gruff voice complained.

"He's right about that. Kendall, why don't you get a team together and X-ray the pipes, we want to have a good picture of what we're dealing with, here. Although the information is probably going to be outdated by the time we finish, I can feel this monster grow as I'm looking at it, but it's better than having no information at all."

"Did the lab issue at least a preliminary report on this nightmare?" a fourth voice asked the first guy, who seemed to be the group leader.

"Unfortunately. It seems to be a random mutation that makes the plant grow a metal coat, so to speak, based on iron and titanium; there are a couple of other metals in the alloy too, it's going to be a pain to cut."

A soft rolling rumble passed through the group, testimony to their collective disbelief that nature would even allow such an abomination.

"It's going to eat through the pipes like a termite until it finishes all the iron!" the fourth voice protested.

"Not so. It did consume some iron in the beginning, now it replicates it," the first speaker replied.

"It grows iron like produce?" the fourth voice replied, incredulously.

"From what I understand, it's more like nails or hair," the former explained.

"The plant grows steel hair," the latter mocked.

"Well, not exactly," the former tried to clarify his point.

"Great! We get the metal already drawn into wire and everything!"

"Never mind!" another voice in the background protested. "So, you mean there is potential for us to actually harvest and use some of this metal?"

"Some. We need to study it further, for now the first priority is to remove it from the pipes."

"We don't even know how it propagates, or under what conditions. What makes you so sure you'll be able to grow it somewhere else? We need to take our time and not rush into anything we'll regret."

"Not rush? It's going to swallow us alive before we get the metal out if it! Are you seriously considering any delay on the removal of this? Have you even looked around? Does this seem like a functional factory floor to you?" another person exclaimed, exasperated. The group quieted in acknowledgment of the fact that machining high precision components in the middle of the enchanted forest didn't seem like a rational proposition.

"Ok, so, action items: Ken, X-ray the pipes, Chad, give me a comparative cost estimate on replacement vs. repair costs, Julie, call the lab and commission another study, to assess the usability of the metal. I can't believe I'm saying this, but do I have a volunteer who would like to spend some time with a horticulturist and get an understanding of what makes this thing tick?" Groans and protests ensued.

"Please, it's important," he cajoled. A volunteer stepped forward, with all the joy and enthusiasm of a human sacrifice. After this, the gathering finally scattered and everyone went home, after the customary polite inquiries about children and family events. Richard was relieved to finally see them gone, so that he could get out of his hiding place, which was cramped and uncomfortable.

He found himself rooting for the willful plant, and hoping, in spite of logic, that the research took as long as possible, to allow it to thrive a little longer, the beautiful trespasser. He vowed to do a little bit of research on his own, to figure out if he could take a cutting, or a leaf, or something, and grow it somewhere else, there must be a good location somewhere along that abandoned route where he could plant it and care for it, away from prying eyes.

He touched one of the leaves and gasped, because it was as hot as a stove, and this brought up another practical concern. How does one care for a plant one can't touch without burning oneself?

He spent an hour walking around the factory, inspecting his precious, not knowing whether to be happy or sad about its extraordinary transformation. It definitely looked nothing like his secret weekend kingdom anymore, it almost seemed to have grown another dimension, and under the thick padding of greenery he could barely discern the bones of its original structure.

He stopped at the look out on his way back to rest his eyes on the beautiful city view, trying to figure out how much their lives were going to change. He feared that change and the uncertainty it brought, and then remembered Jack and his alien conspiracy theories. Richard would have been almost relieved to prove his friend right, at least it would have given him an explanation for why all of this happened, it would have given him someone to blame. But there wasn't anybody to blame and nothing to blame them for, either, getting upset about this situation was just as useless as blaming the wind for scattering the leaves you just finished raking. The wind doesn't care.

***

He arrived home just in time to avoid giving a full account of his morning activities, and spent the rest of the day being a model teenager, to his parents great joy and bewilderment.

Jack showed up for their regular get together at the malt shop, a little late and frazzled. Richard decided to start with the bad news, just to get them out of the way.

"Sorry, man. No aliens!"

"Yes, I know," Jack said, irritated. "Say, do you think it would be possible to get a piece of that plant? I'd do anything to get a peek!" he exclaimed, eyes gleaming.

"How?" Jack faked shock. "I can't get into the factory, I'm sure it's locked all the time."

"We could, maybe, find our way inside it somehow, you know..." Jack suggested.

"There is no way, you know that. Besides, we just dodged a bullet, I don't want to get in trouble any time soon," Richard protested, really irked that Jack couldn't even give their latest disaster a couple of weeks to cool down before he proposed another blunder.

"You don't know that we're going to get in trouble, what makes you think we're going to get in trouble? Maybe there is a way to get in," Jack insisted, really fixated on his new project.

"There isn't," Richard thought on his feet, trying to find the quickest detour that might circumvent this conversation. "Hey, maybe I could ask my dad to bring home a cutting when they start removing it!" he offered, pleased to have come up with an escape hatch.

"Do you think he would be willing to do that?" Jack asked, filled with hope.

"Sure, dude! It wouldn't be a problem! My dad and I, we're like that!" he presented his hand to Jack, to show his middle finger wrapped around his index. "All I need to do is ask!" Richard bragged, very sure of himself.

"I heard it grows metal," Jack spoke, in a low, hopeless voice. "That's not natural, man! If the aliens aren't involved, then there's got to be something else. Something more sinister, I fear. I think, my friend, that we are looking at the end of days," he said, with the seriousness of a person preparing to experience terrible hardship. "I'm going to miss you, dude!" he declared, emotional, looking Richard in the eyes.

"It surely isn't your average natural phenomenon, but I don't know about the end of days..." Richard debated his friend's premise.

"You don't have to spare my feelings, I can deal with whatever comes, I always have." Jack stopped his attempt to comfort him. "Things are what they are, right? No reason to sugarcoat the truth." he bequeathed his brave last words unto the world. He then looked down into his glass, to be further saddened by the fact that all of his beverage was gone. "Do you think we could have another one of these? We don't know how long we have left to enjoy them, you know?"

Two more vanilla floats made their way to their table, which was by the window, bathed in the gorgeous light of the winter sunset, with views to a sky painted in incredible shades of orange, purple and canary yellow. Across the street, two families had taken a short break in their daily stroll, and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to exchange the latest news. Their toddlers were running around them, full of an energy impossible to tame, forcing them to interrupt their chat regularly, to settle down the little ones, stops that put a strange, almost musical rhythm in their conversation.

The first snow had fallen the day before, and it glowed sparkling white, in contrast with the tree decorations and the colorful winter coats.

"Who knows how long we're going to enjoy sunsets like this," Jack mourned, philosophically.

"I'm pretty sure the sky is going to stay put," Richard replied, confused, not understanding what got into his friend, who was normally very upbeat, bordering on irresponsible.

"What guarantees do we have, really? Yesterday you were sure there couldn't be a plant growing in the pipe distribution manifold! How do you know that it's not going to suck all the air out of the atmosphere, and let us all expire, desperate and gasping for air," he painted their gruesome demise, lingering over its details. Richard didn't know how to answer him.

"And all the heat will be drawn from all of us to be consumed by that ice cold plant, so cold, so dreadful..." Jack continued contemplating his landscape of doom.

"Actually, it's hot to the touch," Richard let out without thinking. He realized his mistake as the words were still passing his lips, but it was too late, the cat was already out of the bag.

"Aha! I knew it! You scoundrel, you saw the plant and don't want to tell me anything about it! Spill!" he ordered, miraculously regaining his hope for the future.

"Wow, wow, wow, back up, dude!" Richard tried to repair his misstep. "I heard my dad talking about it, is all."

Jack stared him down with a look that didn't leave any room for dissimulating the truth.

"You're a terrible liar, Snake! Leave that to the experts, man, you really stink at it. So, what do you know about the plant?"

Chapter Seven

One thing was sure: Richard was terrible at hiding the truth, and the last drop of it was pulled out of his tormented psyche despite his efforts; it came out in painful, somewhat inarticulate blobs as Jack attacked the matter from all sides, placing strategic questions at the critical points of the story, to eliminate the possibility of any important details being left out. After he squeezed the whole truth out of his friend, like one would get the last glob of toothpaste from an almost empty tube, he seemed content with the results, and pondered deep in thought for a while. He had that preoccupied look on his face, the one he got when he was planning something, which was exactly what Richard dreaded.

"We're not doing anything about this, you hear me?" he tried to jump in front of his friend's speeding train of thought, but he knew his efforts were wasted, because once Jack made up his mind, very few things in the universe were capable of changing it. His mother's disapproval was one of them, and Richard grabbed onto that unlikely straw with the despair of a drowning person.

"Think how upset your mother would be if she found out we broke into the factory at a time like this! We can't do that to her, dude!" he told Jack, responsibly.

"She wouldn't be more upset than your dad!" Jack replied, giving his friend a long, probing look. "I'm proud of you, Snake. I didn't think you had it in you, man! How long have you been sneaking into the factory?" his probing stare continued to poke around in Richard's mind, in search of juicy details.

"Long enough to know that it has become unrecognizable," Jack frowned. "I still can't figure out how everything is still working, it's like the plant is smart enough to avoid interfering with any of the vital components."

"You think it does that on purpose?" Jack grabbed onto the possibility.

"No, " Richard thought about it for a second. "No, it can't be. There must be something else, something more basic. Maybe it instinctively shields its food or water sources," he postulated.

"Or its environment. What if it needs the steam pressure and high temperature to survive?" Jack replied.

"Then we won't be able to grow it anywhere else, if they rip it out of the pipes," Richard got sad all of a sudden. "We can't let them kill it, Jack, we need to find a way to protect it!"

"How? Didn't you say the committee was evaluating what it would take to cut it out?" Jack said.

"Maybe if we can find a way to make it useful, you know? Productive. Maybe then they'll consider keeping it," Richard thought out loud.

"You said it was hot," Jack reminded him of the slip of tongue that opened the door to the entire story. "And that most of the extra power capacity is coming from the heat recovery cycle. What if we can make it generate more?"

"More heat? It already feels like a jungle in there, whatever extra energy we can make it generate is going to end up being used to cool the place down," Richard disagreed.

"What if it makes more energy without generating heat?" Jack offered.

"Any suggestions on how?" his friend asked.

"Not really, that's your turf, man. Can't you think something up? Make it turn up more metal, or something."

"I don't know, Jack," Richard said.

"Do you think it breathes steam?" Jack asked.

"In a way, maybe, like the cloud forest, only at high heat and pressure."

"It's still strange that they think it is hard to remove, didn't you say it doesn't cling to the pipes at all?" Jack quizzed his friend.

"It doesn't, it's like it's held up by sky hooks or something," Richard confirmed, and the alien intervention possibility raised its ugly head again in Jack's mind, triggered by this oddity.

"It's got to be extraterrestrial, I tell you!" he tried again to convince his friend. "You can deny it all you want, but stuff like this doesn't just happen on earth, not by itself, anyway!"

"It doesn't matter, now, it's already here, and we have to deal with it," Jack corrected him. "Maybe it's for the best if they manage to rip it out," he said, unconvinced.

"Are you kidding? Kill off a plant that grows cable wire? You'd have to be out of your mind!" Jack protested outraged. "Did you find out anything about what kind of plant it is?"

"It looks like every weed I never gave a second look to, could be a variety of different species, none of them in any way related. You'd be surprised how many completely different plants look exactly the same. How botanists tell them apart it's beyond me!" Richard replied.

"Anything at all that they have in common?" Jack insisted.

"Well, they're all vines, but that's because I only looked up vines, since it is a vine," Richard explained his logic.

"What else?" his friend pressed.

"Not much. Some are epiphytes, the majority are not," he continued.

"So there is a good chance that this plant has roots somewhere in the underground portion of the system," Jack continued his train of thought. He saw his friend's surprised look and protested. "Don't look so flabbergasted, I took biology too, I know what an epiphyte is, you jackass!"

"Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. It can go either way," Richard clarified.

"What else?"

"I didn't see any fruit, or flowers on it. I don't know whether this is because it's not old enough to have them, or because it doesn't need them," he continued his explanation.

"Does that help us in any way with convincing people to keep it alive?" Jack returned to his original concern.

"Not that I can think of," Richard conceded.

"Keep moving then. What would help us convince people not to rip it out?" Jack insisted, and Richard just realized he was staring at his friend's next project, the self-guarding of the plant, an endeavor that Jack wasn't willing to let go of if his life depended on it.

"You really care about it, don't you?" he asked, surprised.

"Don't you? This plant is extraordinary, the grown-ups are crazy! It's like throwing away the Mona Lisa because it takes up too much space!" Jack protested. "When do I get to see it?" he said, eyes shining. Richard sighed, resigned. He knew that trying to convince his friend to abandon the prospect of a factory visit was a waste of his time.

"Next Saturday, probably. I swear to you, dude, if you get me in trouble this time, I'll never speak to you again!" he threatened, very serious.

"Scout's honor!" Jack swore, and raised his hand to seal his vow. The look on his face didn't do much to reassure Richard, but he comforted himself with the thought that if Jack didn't care enough about getting caught, he cared enough about the well-being of plant to be on his best behavior.

***

The next Saturday they took the cobblestone path together to the factory, barely scraped through the hole in the fence, widening it in the process, because not everybody in the exploration team had Richard's contortionist body, and reached the factory floor, which by this time looked so much like a rain forest that one had to search really hard to find the bones of the main distribution manifold. All the way, Jack held his tongue in protest of the fact that his best friend, the one he had always shared his every thought and aspiration with, decided to short shift him in the pursuit of such an exciting endeavor. By the time they got to the factory, he was furious, and he had decided to express that emotion with dignified silence, while seething with resentment at the same time.

"Well, this is it," Richard said, modestly, upon reaching his, up until now, exclusive secret kingdom.

"Wow!" Jack couldn't help himself, in spite of his anger, dazzled by the sight of this extraordinary metal forest, all shimmering green, copper and silver in the morning sunshine.

"You should have seen it before!" Richard replied, surprising himself with the realization that he missed the way his perfect little kingdom looked before, when every purpose was planned and everything was in its place. It used to be brighter, too, before the lush metal foliage filtered the light, turning it green and gold, and tamed, like the entrails of a forest. "There used to be so much light in here!"

"What are you talking about, dude! This is awesome! Do these really feel like metal? Awww!" Jack exclaimed, surprised to find out, upon touching one of the leaves, that they were really hot. "You're right, man, we can't make this stuff any hotter than it already is, we'll fry ourselves. Can we cut up a piece of stem with leaves, to take with?"

"Last time I tried, I wasn't able too. I didn't want to use power tools, out of concern that somebody around might hear me. What on earth are you doing!?" Richard jumped, stunned by the casual way in which his friend took liberties with the factory equipment.

"Nonsense!" Jack replied, grabbing a saw and making Richard instantly regret his decision to bring him along. By the time the latter had regained enough of his wits to reply "Are you out of your godforsaken mind?" Jack had already finished his task, and emerged triumphant from a profusion of radiant leaves with a piece of stem in his hand. The stem was hot, and he kept transferring it from one hand to the other, like a baked potato, to keep from burning himself. "I wonder how long it takes for this thing to cool down," Jack pondered.

"Ok, now that you got that, let's get out of here," Richard tried to get Jack out of the factory as soon as feasible, in order to avoid another disaster.

"What, are you crazy? We just got here! Show me it!" Jack objected, peeved, so Richard had to give his friend the tour, relieved that he was able to keep an eye on him the entire time, and explained the many sections and parts of the equipment assembly with the ease of an expert.

"So, you're saying that all of this runs at one hundred and twenty percent capacity now," Jack commented.

"Actually, I think it is closer to one-twenty-five," Richard replied.

"And it's all due to the recovered heat," Jack tried to understand. "I don't get it, dude. It's really not that hot," he spoke aloud the doubt that had plagued Richard's mind from the moment he heard the heat recovery cycle theory. "It's got to be something else."

"Like what?" Richard retorted.

"I don't know," Jack said.

***

After a few more minutes, Richard managed to rush Jack out of the building, after a brief fight to convince him that it was getting very late and they really had to get back home, but his worry wasn't warranted, because by the time they got back, their parents were gone to another one of those town hall meetings, one that the boys decided to skip, for a change. Instead, they made their way to the library, to examine the new evidence in peace. The plant was still warm to the touch half an hour later, and it made Jack's hand tingle in a way that reminded him of the time when he touched a battery with his tongue.

"This thing is charged!" he exclaimed, way too loud for Richard's taste and the opinion of the librarians, who gave him a stern look. "It is!" he continued, in a whisper, but with the same level of intensity. To demonstrate, he placed the piece of stem on a metal shelf. Instead of laying down neatly on its surface, the plant hovered over it, about half an inch up.

"Wrong section," Richard replied, unperturbed, staring at his manuals on thermodynamics, and got up to find some research material on electricity and magnetism.

"Would you stop it with the darned books? You haven't even looked at it!" Jack protested, unable to take his eyes off of the magical floating plant, which was defying gravity under their very eyes.

"It's a field," Richard commented, just to say something.

"Duh!" Jack mocked, gently guiding the plant over the surface of the shelf, with his cupped palms, like one would push a moving seaweed under the surface of the ocean. "Still think it might be ok to get rid of it?" he returned a beaming smile to Richard, who was more impressed than he wanted to show.

"What are you two doing here?" a stunned librarian protested from behind, in disbelief of what she had just seen.

"We're practicing our magic tricks," Jack explained, smiling very sure of himself and continued without skipping a beat. "See?" he demonstrated a few passes over the table to the bewildered librarian, to show how he could magnetize the floating stem. The plant graciously obliged.

"How are you doing this?" the librarian laughed, curious.

"It's a secret," Jack smiled, with an innocent look in his eyes that instantly secured her empathy. "A magician never reveals his tricks!" he justified himself.

"Don't take too long with that, boys, the library closes in fifteen minutes," the librarian smiled and left them alone.

"That one was way too close, Jack!" Richard breathed a deep sigh of relief after she left. "Thank goodness you're good at improv."

"Live and learn, my friend, live and learn!" Jack replied, unfazed, still mesmerized by the unbelievable floating plant. "Where were we?"

"I need to find a couple of books before the library closes, I'll look through them tonight and see if I can figure out what makes this plant hover," Richard excused himself.

"Knock yourself out!" Jack dismissed him, and continued staring at the floating plant with almost religious awe.

Chapter Eight

It's not that Richard wanted to get himself in trouble, but his curiosity always seemed to get the better of him, and since the plant problem was now the center of all the town folk's attention, which gave his parents little time to organize his schedule, he had plenty of time to dedicate to his research.

In the meantime, the lab results were finalized, to be presented to an already weary audience who didn't think they were going to hear anything they didn't already know. The real surprise came from the X-ray scans. The plant's tuberous roots were weaving through the pipes and taking up sufficient space to make the steam inside them run at higher pressure. There didn't seem to be a beginning or an end in this incredible system of ramifications, which exhibited the same strange behavior as its exterior counterpart, seeming to float inside the pipe, and touch it only at the penetration points.

A team of experts was convened, from many institutions in the surrounding areas, and representing many different fields, to assess the nature of the problem and come up with solutions. They spent a month to analyze the situation from every angle, time during which the plant, luckily,seemed to have reached a certain equilibrium with its environment and stopped leafing out of control. When the experts reached their conclusion, they returned to a hopeful audience with their findings and a list of options.

To this end, the town hall auditorium was filled to capacity, with everyone eager to hear what the team had come up with. Jack and Richard had found good seats in the first row of the balcony, where they were fidgeting to pass the time, to the annoyance of the elderly ladies they were sitting next to.

"As we mentioned before, the plant has mutated," the first expert started explaining. "It formed a keratin-similar surface structure, like a shell, almost, only elastic and metal based."

"How could something like this have happened? Did you pinpoint where the plant sprouted, at least?" someone from the audience asked.

"No, the plant development is too homogeneous now for us to identify a starting point, it's hard to differentiate between old and new growth. We have good news for you: the plant seems to have matured and slowed the rate of producing new shoots. It will probably continue developing its existing stems and start generating seed. Until that time comes, we won't know how it propagates, but it is unlikely that it will do well in another location, the steam pressure and temperature seems to be essential to its survival."

"Great!" somebody else exclaimed from the audience. "So, how do we get rid of it?"

"Well," the expert hesitated. "It is a little more complicated than it looks at first sight. That 'floating' quality the plant has, it is due to a field that the vine generates between its tuberous root system and the external stems, in a manner I could only compare to an electrolytic bath."

"A what?" the voice in the audience challenged. "So? What does have to do with removing it from the pipes?"

"A great majority of the electrons are, for the lack of a better word, shared between the tubers, the vines and the metal pipes, a phenomenon which is accelerated by the high temperature and pressure of the water vapors," the expert explained patiently.

"It might as well power light bulbs, for all I care, what does that have to do with our factory equipment? Just tell us how to get it out of the pipes!" a burly guy in the front row protested the detailed description of the plant's electron sharing habits.

"It has a lot to do with that, unfortunately," the expert hesitated again. "At this point the plant really interacts with the metal support at molecular level."

"It's a plant! What do you mean, molecular level? You don't mean it fused with the pipes?" a stupefied lady in the front replied.

"You could say that," the expert tried to evaluate the veracity of the statement.

"You mean to say we can't get it out of there?" the lady started cried, incredulous.

"It is theoretically possible to remove it," the expert postulated.

"Theoretically possible doesn't put bread on the table," the burly guy protested. "Can you or can't you get the darned plant out of the pipes?"

"Yes," the expert replied, as the audience roared, relieved.

"Dude, what are we going to do, they're cutting it out!" Jack whispered in Richard's ear, panicked.

"Shh! Wait, let them finish speaking," Richard hushed him up.

"We should, theoretically, be able to recover most of the metal," the expert explained, without any emotional involvement. "The plant will, of course, have to be destroyed in the process."

"That's great news!" another person from the audience exclaimed. "So, what portions of the equipment you think might not be salvageable?"

"I'm afraid I wasn't very clear in explaining the situation. It will be possible to recover most of the metals, separately, of course. All the alloys will have to be recomposed. Some of the material will be lost in the melting process, it's unavoidable," the expert continued, with a calm that put chills through the bones of the audience.

"You mean like, this much iron, this much tin, this much vanadium? In separate little piles?" a voice of despair resonated from the back.

"Precisely!" the expert pointed out cheerfully, happy to have explained himself clearly, and oblivious to the audience's indignation.

"What are we going to do with all the equipment decomposed neatly into piles of separate metals? We need the working equipment, exactly the way we have it!" a reasonable voice protested. "Had it," he corrected himself. "Whatever!" he gave up.

"The equipment will have to be rebuilt, of course," the expert pointed out the obvious.

"So, what you're telling me is that this stupid plant has formed one solid block with the pipe distribution system?" the burly guy in the front exploded.

"It's not a solid block, it did however interact with it at molecular level," the expert corrected him.

"What difference does it make! Do you mean to tell us we can't rip out the stupid plant without destroying all of our machinery? You can't be serious!" his partner of conversation grew more and more irate.

"I knew that!" Richard whispered to his friend.

"Did not!" Jack objected.

"Did too! I figured there had to be a reason why that plant didn't budge!"

"They're not going to rip it out!" Jack replied, excited, stirring the indignation of the people sitting next to him.

"We can't remove the plant without damaging the metal components, you are correct," the expert answered the burly guy, but to Jack, it felt like he had replied directly to his own comment.

"Might as well close down shop right now, it's just a matter of time before the machines will be damaged beyond repair," the burly guy predicted. "Cursed luck, that is!"

"Actually, the equipment, as it stands, I can only describe as being in its optimal state," the expert continued.

"What's optimal about it sprouting leaves?" somebody blurted sarcastically.

"The metal doesn't tarnish, for one," the expert started enumerating.

"Big deal!" the conversation partner brushed him off.

"At that steam pressure, the plant yields the heat it generates through its own metabolism and it's own electrical activity to the system," he continued.

"You mean it generates energy?" somebody asked, unconvinced.

"Yes, about twenty percent more."

"Twenty-five," Richard whispered to Jack, to correct him.

"This is nuts! You are not seriously considering keeping the situation as it is! Does anybody here not think that this is a complete nightmare? Who in his right mind wants to work under those conditions!" another person protested, stirring a small roar of approval. "You mentioned that the plant needs the high steam temperature and pressure to survive. What if we just shut down the equipment for a length of time?"

"He's right. Listen to him," a few voices in the back supported his idea.

"It's being turned off over the weekend, so obviously a couple of days wouldn't do it. How about we all take two weeks off, see what happens?" he suggested. This generated serious protests from those who didn't want to lose so much working time, so the groups negotiated back and forth until they reached the compromise of one week.

"What do you think will happen if we shut down the factory for a week?" a person asked the expert, in the name of the entire group.

"I'm not sure, I guess we could give it a try," the expert hesitated again. "There is a small risk that the metallic structure might disintegrate when the plant's metabolic balance is disturbed," he said, poised, and upon further consideration, he felt obligated to reassure the person who was staring at him, eyes filled with dread. "I wouldn't worry about that! There is a very low probability of that happening, very low!"

"I'd say put this to a vote!" the self-appointed leader of the group proposed. "Who wants to try and shut down all the equipment for a week?"

The ayes had it, and to Jack and Richard's great distress, a full system shutdown was scheduled for the following Monday. The two prepared feverishly the entire weekend for an unprecedented whole week of having the factory floor all to themselves. They soon realized they had to account for the time, and Richard left it to Jack to figure out another explanation for their absence, since the latter seemed to be better at this kind of thing than him.

***

Jack acquitted himself very well of the task, and with the issue of the excuse safely in the rear-view mirror, they proceeded to the factory on Monday afternoon. Richard ran around like a mother hen, distressed over the well-being of the plant and wringing his hands sorrowfully. To Jack's dismay, there was nothing he could say or do to make his friend feel better about the imminent demise of his beloved plant.

Tuesday unfolded, more or less the same, with the plant not showing any signs of distress. Wednesday afternoon, the boys arrived to the factory, only to find it running. They had noticed the billowing clouds rising from the chimneys and assumed the people had changed their minds, so they sneaked in hesitantly, expecting to run into somebody at any moment, but there was nobody there, and everything looked exactly the way they have left it the day before, with the exception of the fact that all the equipment was running at full capacity.

"I've never seen the machinery running before," Richard noted, with an inspired look in his eyes. His beloved, and he wasn't sure if that was the plant, the metal forest of steam pipes, or their blended entity, was breathing again, happily alive, leaves all a quiver. "Why do you think they turned it back on?" he turned to Jack, pleasantly surprised.

"Who says they did?" Jack answered ominously. His answered bewildered Richard, who took a second to understand his friend's argument.

"It couldn't possibly!" he protested in disbelief.

"If you see it with your own two eyes, it's possible!" Jack replied.

"How?!"

"How does it do anything else?" Jack retorted.

"So, what you're saying is that any moment now somebody will see smoke billowing out of the chimneys and come here to check out what's going on?" Richard said.

"Probably on their way here as we speak," Jack assessed the situation.

"Still arguing it's not smart?" Jack asked his friend after they had left the factory in a hurry and were making their way back home. Now that the whole town was alerted to the fact that the factory had restarted itself, they knew their absence will not go unnoticed.

"I don't know, man," Richard replied, open to the possibility.

"Still arguing it's not alien?" Jack pressed on.

"What's with you and your obsession with aliens?" Richard asked, exasperated, but backed off when he saw the hurt look in his friend's eyes. "I don't know, dude. Maybe."

***

Carol had been waiting for Richard at the front gate the entire afternoon, and was annoyed when she went back into the house and found her son already there.

"How did you get past me?" she asked him, and then continued without waiting for the answer. "Your father had to go to the factory, it's an emergency. I want you in your room, doing your homework," she ordered, then picked up Teddy and went back to the gate, to wait for the girls.

Richard went back to his room, where he closed the door, opened the window and climbed out. He went straight to the library, hoping to run into Jack, and indeed he found his friend immersed in a treatise of comparative biology, studying the section on genetic mutations.

"What on earth do you expect to find in there? Unless they have a chapter on electron emitting plants that can weld themselves to metal," Richard commented, half-serious.

"No need for the sarcasm," Jack defended himself. "You don't have a clue either!"

Their lively chatter attracted the attention of the librarian from the day before, who saw them in the reading area and walked towards them, filled with excitement, before they had time to pretend they needed to be somewhere else.

"There you are! Hey! I told my friend Sheila about your magic trick, she runs the children and young adult section, and they have a lot of activities for the little ones there. That trick was quite something! Do you think you could demonstrate it for the younger children? We have a half hour available on their summer vacation schedule, and we couldn't find anybody to fill it." She stopped for a second, oblivious to the trepidation her suggestion had generated. "What was that thing you were playing with yesterday? A plastic plant?" She saw the look in Jack and Richard's eyes and mistook their panic for surprise.

"Don't be modest, boys, just give it some thought and let me know later if you can fill in, that was very entertaining," she smiled encouragingly and left.

"You and your stupid ideas!" Richard hissed at his friend. "Why did you have to bring the plant here?"

"Would you relax? We'll just tell her our parents didn't give us permission," Jack found a quick solution to their predicament.

"What if she asks them?" Richard pointed out, and then remembered that he was supposed to be in his room, and if his parents ever spoke to the cheerful and talkative librarian, she would definitely remember their encounter this afternoon. "Great!" he said. "Now I have to find an explanation for this, too!"

"Why do you always have to create problems, Richard!" Jack admonished his friend, to the outrage of the latter.

Chapter Nine

The news that the plant restarted all the machines spread through the town at lightning speed. Most people didn't believe it, pointing out that it was more likely that somebody with a peculiar sense of humor decided to pull a prank. Others ventured less benign explanations, covering the entire range from alien conspiracies (apparently Jack was not alone in his search for extraterrestrial involvement) to the impending apocalypse.

Regardless of the explanation, all the town's folks were nervous, in equal parts due to the unexplained nature of the occurrence and its potential impact on the future of the factory.

Nobody managed to figure out how the vine got into the steam pipes, and even less on how it changed itself to survive in such a hostile environment, but the botanists finally managed to figure out what kind of plant it was. It seemed to be a distant relative of the Carolina Jessamine vine, poor man's rope, as they called it, at least that's what it started out as, before it mutated twice and shed its biological shell to evolve into a partly inorganic hybrid.

Despite all the hype around external intervention, alien, divine or otherwise, the scientific basis of what had happened to facilitate the evolution the plant into what it was now was quite self-explanatory, which made the cascading sequence of consequences even more difficult to accept, because, in people's minds, nothing this straightforward should have been allowed to radically change life as they knew it. The scientists' theory about alternate electron transfer between one side of the pipe and the other, transfer that put the pipe itself in a perpetual state of flux, became a very popular subject of conversation around the dinner table, and even young children became adept at reproducing it adequately, even if not understanding it completely. After a while, the concept of a plant that self-welds to metal stopped raising eyebrows in the community, even in its most skeptical of members.

The only entity not in the least affected by the commotion was the plant itself, which minded its chlorophyll driven life quietly, happy to thrive in its new environment. The production output went up another ten percent during the following month, but everybody was too spooked by the strange bio-mechanical monster to notice.

Overall nothing had changed, other than the impressive increase in the factory's output, nothing, that is, if one could bring oneself to ignore the giant presence in the middle of the floor, whose coppery-green mass of leaves, sprouts and curlicues filled up every nook and cranny between the pieces of machinery. Nobody could.

"I can't deal with this!" Tom blurted at the dinner table, frustrated, while Carol tried to maintain a pleasant family atmosphere, for the benefit of everyone's digestion.

"I'm sure it's not that bad, honey! What can it possibly do to annoy you, it's just a plant," she tried to appease him.

"It's not just a plant! It's evil spawn, I tell you, the malevolent sprout from ... you know where!" he said, remembering Carol's ban on mentioning evil inside the house. "Nothing alive should be able to thrive at three hundred degrees!" Tom fumed, even more irate. "Look at this! Look! Look! Have you seen this?!" he pointed to a burn on the back of his arm, burn that unfortunately didn't require an explanation. "I shouldn't be able to burn myself with foliage! Inside!" he ranted.

"Have you guys tried training it on a string?" Carol asked in an attempt to be helpful, unaware of the fact that the entire concept of interacting with plant life in the context of factory production was simply unthinkable to a technically minded person.

"No, Carol! We haven't tried training it on a string! Should I be mindful of any other gardening practices? Do we need to fertilize it on occasion? Prune it, to keep it healthy? Oh, wait! We can't prune it! And you know why? Because it's made of metal and sprouted by the unholy one himself to bring misery to our lives!" he ranted, exasperated.

"No need to take out your frustrations on me, I have my hands full around here too!" Carol protested, smiling reassuringly to the children. The girls rolled their eyes and returned to their side conversation, and Richard pretended not to pay attention, so he could get as much out of the discussion as he was able.

"I'm sorry, dear! We're all at wit's end. Yesterday we had clear out a whole section of storage before the menace found its way inside and wrecked the lot of it. It's like the cursed think has a mind of its own, I swear to you! After we were done clearing the space, the vine looped around itself and steered clear of the area altogether, and now we have to waste another day and move everything back," he complained.

"Well, at least the output is not affected. Or the capacity," Carol kept looking for the silver lining.

"It's not our capacity, it's its capacity! Only God knows what it will do next! How can you be so calm?!" he snapped at his wife again.

"What can I do? I offered you a perfectly good suggestion and you dismissed it!" Carol commented, resentful.

"What!? Build teepees?" he asked her.

"Keep it out of the way. I thought it was a good idea, but then again, I'm not the one with the burn on my arm," Carol sulked, offended. She frowned at Tom, to express disapproval at his behavior, and then got up with a smile, asking. "Does anybody want dessert?"

"'Cause, God knows, pie will solve our every problem," Tom mumbled under his voice, unable to help himself, and then said out loud. "Thanks, hon, just a small piece. I'm full."

After dinner, Richard suddenly remembered he had to borrow a book from the library in order to finish his homework, and sneaked out to meet with Jack.

"Do you still have that stem?" Richard asked him, without any introduction.

"Yes. What do you need with it?" Jack asked, distracted. He was trying to figure out the schedule of the cheerful librarian, in the hope that they might be able to circumvent it in the future and thus avoid putting their foot in their mouth again. Every time she saw them she seemed to get another idea.

"I wonder if we could make it root. It propagates by cuttings, right?" Richard continued his thought process.

"Root in what?" Jack asked.

"Remember those hot springs, just out of town?" Richard said.

"That's like, ten miles away! Do you have to walk there?" Jack jumped, alarmed.

"Actually, it's three, I checked," Richard countered his objection.

"It's not hot enough," Jack threw another objection, because a three mile walk out of town wasn't his idea of fun.

"Says who?" Richard contradicted him.

"Says me. Besides, didn't they say the plant was a pest? Why would you want to make more of it?" Jack asked.

"Because it grows steel wire," Richard said, surprised that his friend didn't see the wonderful potential of the unlikely hybrid. "Out of nothing," he pressed his point. "Think about it," he dreamed, eyes shining, "a bright new future for metallurgy!"

"Yeah, not feeling it, man," Jack squashed his enthusiasm. "Those hot springs are kind of far, and there is always someone there, I don't know if it's worth the trouble. It's been a while, too, I don't know if that stem is viable anymore," Jack tried to get himself out of this challenge.

"I can't believe you! After all the trouble you got me in, I ask you for one little thing, one! And you can't even do that! Come on, Jack, for me? Just this once!" Richard insisted.

"What are we going to do about the metal? What if it needs some to attach itself to?" Jack found another excuse.

"I know a junk yard not far from here. We can pick up some scrap metal there," Richard came up with the solution. Jack kicked himself for coming up with this brilliant idea, because now they had added a trip to the city dump to their absurd attempt at helping metal self-replicate.

***

Jack had to give in to his friend's request, to get him out of his hair if for no other reason, and they set their plan in motion Saturday morning, bright and early, too early for Jack's taste. The fact that his reluctant effort at what he considered an absurd endeavor started knee deep in rusty sinks and half-devoured car carcasses didn't help boost his enthusiasm for it in the least, and he begrudgingly attended to his task, which was to find as many old pipes as he could, vowing never to get mixed up in one of Richard's projects again. After a couple of hours of intensive search, they finally started on their way to the hot springs, presenting a very odd view to the passerby, as they were carrying a ragged collection of metal rubble. With their faces covered in rust and their bodies overwhelmed by the quantity of metal scraps they were carrying, they looked like two little Tin Men, before being oiled, of course.

Richard was concerned about the amount of creativity they would require in order to make up a half-way believable story if they ran into someone they knew, but he didn't say anything to Jack, who was already upset, fact demonstrated by his sullen silence.

"It's not far now," Richard tried to cheer up his friend, despite the fact he knew full well they had only covered about a third of the distance.

"Don't talk to me!" Jack snapped at him, grunting under the weight of scrap metal, that felt a lot heavier than he anticipated when they left the junk yard.

"It's for a good cause," Richard tried to justify himself, if only not to feel guilty.

"That's it! We're taking a break!" Jack dropped the entire load of junk to the ground.

"Jack, come on, we still have ways to go, if we get there too late there may be people around," he tried to convince his friend.

"First of all," Jack said, as if he hadn't heard him, "not withstanding the fact that we are planning to dump rusty metal in a hot water spring where people bathe, I'm not taking another step with this load of crap on my back until you explain to me in detail what we're going to do," he sat on the ground, forcing Richard to do the same.

"It is pretty simple, really," the boy started explaining, with an enthusiasm he hoped would rub off on his friend. "We're going to stick one of these pipes in a hot spring, plant the stem in it, and let nature take its course. We'll sprinkle the other pipes around for later, when it spreads."

"What about the electric current, it's like putting a toaster in a bathtub," Jack pointed out.

"We'll find an abandoned spring," Richard adjusted his original plan.

"I can't believe you talked me into this, I feel like an idiot walking three miles with a pile of scrap metal on my back," Jack mumbled.

"Just think about it, Jack! A metal crop! And, as it grows, we can bring more old pipes to help it expand," Richard continued.

"You mean you expect us to do this regularly? No, dude! Just no! This one time, that's it!" Jack got up quickly, grabbing his load and picking up the pace to keep ahead of Richard's ideas.

Fortunately for them, they didn't run into anybody they knew on the way over there. They walked through the arid landscape, sweating buckets under the heavy load and wishing they had thought to bring a water bottle. They found a hot and kind of smelly swamp eventually, the kind of place that was sure to discourage potential bathers, and entrusted the plant cutting to it. Jack was relieved to be done with this absurd activity and rushed back with renewed energy. The return trip would have been a lot less unpleasant, given that they had been relieved of their loads, but just as they were starting to relax and enjoy their stroll, one of their teachers, Mrs. Jenkins, drove by, noticed their strange party, dirty and sweaty as they were, and covered with rust from top to bottom, and stopped her car to offer assistance.

"Great! Now we're never getting out of the house again!" Jack whispered to Richard, really upset. "Thanks, Snake! At least I will never have to come back here, maybe this is a blessing!"

"What are you boys up to, and what's on your clothes! I can't imagine what your parents are going to say when they see you! And so far away from home, too! Hop in, I'll give you a ride home, you can explain yourselves on the way," Mrs. Jenkins prompted.

"You shouldn't have ventured so far away from home at a time like this, well, with that cursed plant growing out of control and all," she broke the silence, after she had given the two a few moments to volunteer the reason that had brought them to that particular location. "Your parents have enough on their mind right now without having to worry about you, too. And with the ideas some people have. Can you imagine some crazies thought it would be a good idea to cultivate that pest? Who in his right mind would even consider such a thing, as if it's not bad enough that we can't get rid of the thing! Grow more of it, can you imagine?" she said, shaking her head. "But not to worry, boys, we won't let that happen, a few of us are keeping an eye on things and anyone who is caught trying to cultivate the plant will be punished immediately. I still can't imagine what kind of person would even consider such a thing!" she shook her head in disbelief, as she let the two out of the car, at the end of their street.

"Way to go, Snake! Thanks for always blaming me for getting us in trouble, man, now we have team Jenkins on our tail. Any more ideas, smart ass?"

Richard didn't respond, upset about the fact that the regular visits to his newborn metal crop farm had become a very unlikely possibility.

"We need an interface," he eventually said.

"The only thing we need at this point is to get out of these clothes before our parents see them," Jack didn't even listen to his comment. "A what?"

"An interpreter, a go between, you know, the plant and the pipe manifold," Richard continued his train of thought.

"You're insane."

Chapter Ten

"I don't understand this fantasy project of yours, what exactly is that interface you're talking about going to do?" Jack frowned, trying to make sense of his friend's idea.

"Think about it, what made the plant grow in the steam pipes in the first place?" Richard asked, and when he met Jack's befuddled gaze he answered his own question. "It needs the high temperature and the pressure, but what if it's not in any range, but the precise one the distribution system functions at?"

He caught Jack's skeptical look and continued anyway. "Of course there will be no way of really knowing that until our new cutting takes root."

"If our new cutting takes root," Jack corrected him. "It will be a true miracle if that plant sprouts roots, after two whole months."

"When that cutting roots," Richard said, as if he hadn't heard him, "given the different conditions, it will probably develop a different response to them." Jack tried very hard to hide a yawn.

"This is important, Jack!" his friend protested.

"Sorry, man. What do I care if the stupid plant changes its response? It's a plant."

"That has evolved enough to turn all the machines back on, because it liked them that way," Richard pointed out.

"So what?" Jack retorted.

"I was thinking of synchronizing the plant and the machine, you know?" he looked at Jack, whose expression said he didn't. "Finding a way to know how much energy the plant feeds back into the system and what conditions it likes best."

"I don't understand a thing you're saying, dude. Whatever! What do you want me to do?" Jack interrupted him.

"I need you to find a reason to get me out of the house every day for three hours," Richard replied.

"I'm not a miracle worker, Richard!" Jack protested.

"Don't be modest, Jack! If anybody can cook up a story that would stand on its end, it's you!" Richard encouraged him. Jack shook his head, flattered but still uncertain.

"I'll think of something," he eventually agreed. "I'm not promising anything, mind you!" he pointed out to Richard. "Don't get your hopes up," he warned.

The story of how Richard built a synthetic biology interface between the plant and the machine paled in comparison with the tale his friend concocted for him to supplant it, tale that involved a never before heard of second cousin of his from out of town, the latter's life-long dream to participate in a science competition for school age children that didn't exist, the challenge of a theoretical engine that ran on bio-fuel, ample library time for writing down the research papers, and the justification for building a gizmo whose function nobody could possibly understand.

Richard was thrilled, and had to admit that his friend had gone above and beyond in his ability to reshape people's perceptions in order to accommodate their current needs. Not only did Jack give him the three hours he requested, but he also produced an explanation for the device, which was kind of too large to hide, a pre-approved list of parts Richard couldn't do without and a reasonable justification for parts he might need in the future that he might have left out.

The construction of the device advanced slowly, and the more it progressed, the less the gizmo made sense to anybody who saw it. It looked like a miniature robot and behaved like a plant, moving hot sap through its transparent tubes, with a cathodic tube at one end and what could only be described as roots at the other.

Richard's parents and siblings saw the weird device, and even though it was a lot more peculiar than the boy's usual fare, they didn't think twice about it. Stacey even joked that it looked like a plant that blooms television sets.

"How are we going to transport this to the factory?" Jack exclaimed the first time he saw the semi-finished device. Richard gestured impatiently, to convey that was the least of his concerns.

"This is just a prototype, the final object is going to be a lot smaller," he commented.

"Thank goodness for that! It would be kind of difficult to explain bringing beautiful here to the factory floor," Jack said, relieved.

***

Meanwhile, somewhere in the arid outskirts of the city, from a hot, somewhat smelly swamp, a little sprout emerged, a little hesitant at first, but then, feeling established, it unfurled its leaves and tendrils and asserted exclusive rights over its sweltering home and weaved itself through the rusty pipes and scraps of metal that Richard and Jack had brought to feed it.

It looked so different from the plant at the factory, due to the differences in water solutes, temperature and pressure, that the team who had volunteered their efforts to nip in the bud any expansion of the plant beyond the factory floor didn't recognize it at first, especially since many of them, who weren't working there, haven't actually seen the original. It took the complaint of a weekend sight-seer, who claimed a hot plant pinched her when she touched it, to make them give the eager sprout a second look.

When the identity of the plant was confirmed, a new wave of concerns and suppositions overtook the city. Some feared the plant had emerged spontaneously in the remote hot spring, and would expand until it filled their entire universe with hot leaves. Others pointed out that it couldn't survive outside of its compatible environment, which was quite limited in size. Most agreed that somebody must have planted it, and offered their suspicions about who that might be.

Evidently, Richard and Jack's names never entered their minds, first of all because everybody knew, by the grace of Carol's maternal boasting, that the boys have been spending all of their time working to help Jack's cousin with his science fair project, and besides, how would they have access to the plant when they had never stepped foot on the factory floor?

The fact that the plant had sprouted in the middle of winter was even more worrisome, and people had to wonder what was going to happen when hot weather came along and sped-up its growth even more.

In the tumult of opinion and fact finding the team of experts was convened again, to offer advice on managing the interaction, rather than eliminating it. Some of the town folk refused to show up to the town hall meetings this time, objecting that giving up their time too on top of a revolting fee for no results at all was simply insulting their intelligence.

Jack and Richard, on the other hand, didn't miss a single minute of them, eager to collect as much detail about the current state of affairs as possible.

"We are expecting the plant to bloom soon, probably in the next couple of weeks or so," one of the experts was explaining as the two boys sneaked in to their now regular seats up in the balcony.

"And why does that matter to us at all?" somebody protested.

"Usually, when plants prepare for the production offspring, they intensify their metabolic processes," the expert continued.

"Which means it is going to generate even more energy?" the person in the audience said.

"Most likely," the expert agreed. "In fact we anticipate a significant increase in output, probably in the neighborhood of forty percent."

"Great! We'll have the stupid plant run our lives even more than it already is!" somebody commented bitterly, stirring a little cloud of discontent above the audience.

"We thought this would be good news!" the expert commented, surprised.

"Did anybody give any thought to the fact that when those beautiful and most likely poisonous blossoms fade, they're going to rain hot metal on top of our heads?" a lady from the back said. She had had some experience with growing the plant's normal relative, the Carolina Jessamine, and knew what to expect. "They're a lot of blossoms, too," she added.

"We should probably stretch some nets overhead to catch the petals as they fall," the expert replies. "Now that I think of it, this would be a great opportunity to claim the metal inside them with the least amount of effort."

"What I think is that we should install a couple of trapezes too, to go with that," a sarcastic voice from the back replied. "You know, for the full circus experience!"

"There is no need for snarky remarks," the expert countered, "this may provide the factory with a great opportunity to expand its scope."

"We're a power plant, not a foundry!" a person protested.

"Wait a minute! Why not expand? This would be great!" somebody else contradicted him.

"That's seasonal work, it's not worth the investment in the equipment," the first person retorted.

"What if we could entice the plant to produce year round?" a second expert suggested.

"You can't entice the plant to get the heck out of there!" a gruff voice replied. "How are you going to 'entice' it into continuous bloom?"

"Actually, it's still a plant, there are all sorts of ways to trick it into bloom: special nutrients, artificial seasonal changes, grafting, there are ways," the second expert started offering solutions, happy to present his current research.

"You want to super-feed this monster?" the lady in the back replied, terrified. "Is it not taking over the universe enough as it is? And what are you going do when the blooming stops, you're going to exhaust it pretty fast if you're forcing it into bloom like that?"

"We should be so lucky!" the gruff voice snapped. "It will never die, this thing! Did you see how it took off back there, in the swamp?"

"Yes, we really need to find out how it got there," somebody jumped immediately. A little group congealed around this opinion and the whole discussion took a detour in that direction for a while.

"One can only wonder," Jack whispered to Richard, still bitter over the process through which the plant had found a home in the smelly hot spring.

"Shh!" Richard said. "I just got an idea!"

"God help us!" Jack mumbled under his breath, scared by his friend's potential prospect. The latter ignored him, so Jack turned his attention back to the meeting.

"So, say we build a foundry, there aren't enough people in this city to run it and the steam plant at the same time," a gentleman in the front row brought up the obvious challenge.

"We should be so lucky to have this problem," the gruff voice replied, because lately he had been worrying about the security of his position, and was happy to find himself blessed with additional options.

"I guess we could give the petal foundry idea a try," a shift manager spoke, trying very hard to keep a straight face as he proposed this unlikely expansion of the factory scope.

"Did that sound batty to anybody else?" another person said. He had arrived late and was standing in the isle because they couldn't find a seat. "I thought I heard somebody say petal foundry."

"We can call it high performance integrated hybrid energy reclamation complex if that makes you feel better," the shift manager replied, touchy.

"And what exactly do you expect this aberration of nature to do for us?" the guy replied. "Other than give our current customers a good laugh?"

"How about open another field for our products?" the shift manager said.

"See?" Richard turned to Jack, eyes shining. "I told you the metallurgy thing was going to be big!"

"Until we're overtaken by the wrath of the steely swamp dweller," Jack mumbled. "Doesn't it concern you that that plant can root on bare rock if it had to? What if somebody puts it in their hot water tank?"

"Somebody might try to stick their head in the oven, too, but we're still going to continue cooking our food," Richard replied.

"Only in our case we can never turn the oven off, or change its temperature," Jack found the fly in the ointment.

"And that's where my plant-steam pipe interface comes in," Richard was thrilled to return to his latest area of interest, and then went on a tangent trying to explain to his friend how the device worked.

"You scare me sometimes, you know?" Jack stared at him intently, and then let the reluctant smile freeze on his face because right behind them, and having listened to the whole chat, was Mrs. Jenkins, who seemed very interested in the subject of their conversation. Jack's mind took off at a hundred miles an hour, trying to recall if any of them had said anything incriminating and wondering if there was any 'hypothetically speaking' in Richard's description of the device's function.

"Why, if I don't run into you two in the darndest of places! What could you possibly find of interest in here, at your age?" she said, puzzled rather than upset. "They have to make me attend these snooze fests, I'd rather be out shopping, or grabbing a coffee with my friends. Are your parents here?" she brought the boys' anxiety to a peak. "Why aren't you with them?"

Richard threw a lightning fast glance at Jack, hoping against reason that the latter would, by some miracle, manage to come up with a way out of this one.

"We had to finish our homework, Mrs. Jenkins, and our parents didn't want to be late for the meeting, so they allowed us to catch up with them later," Jack said, his face the mirror of truthfulness itself. Mrs. Jenkins, who in her thirty years of teaching had listened to a fair share of fibs and innovative excuses, didn't trust their explanation any more than she would accept the world was flat, but didn't want to pursue this issue any further, because her free time was limited as it was, and she didn't want to spend it enforcing discipline on teenagers.

"Just make sure they know where you are, this place becomes a zoo at times like this. You should be heading home soon, anyway. Isn't this a school night?" she reminded them, smiling.

"Yes, Mrs. Jenkins," the boys replied together with all the innocence they could muster, and hurried past her towards the auditorium doors, relieved to have gotten out so easy.

"How does this always happen?" Richard protested, tense.

"You should be the one to ask, you and your crazy projects!" Jack retorted bitterly, still shaken over the close encounter.

"How is this in any way my fault?" Richard's tension exploded.

"Ech!" Jack dismissed him, for lack of an explanation.

Chapter Eleven

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?"

Chapter Twelve

The plant reached the back wall and went through it, as if it didn't encounter any resistance, as if the wall wasn't there at all. It was very strange how the two systems crossed without interacting, like they belonged to parallel realities, or different time lines. There didn't seem to be a wall cavity where the hybrid pipe penetrated it, and through the vaguely translucent material of the new branch one could actually see that.

Nobody questioned the new development, for more reasons than one, but mostly because after having lived with this constantly changing story for a while, about the plant that wouldn't go away, people got kind of tired of worrying about it all the time. Everybody acknowledged the wall penetration that wasn't there and simply put it out of their mind, in order to ensure life as they knew it continued to make sense. Those who couldn't ignore it, because they stumbled upon it's intrusive presence in their daily activity, simply refused to talk about it, or acknowledge its presence, and went on about their daily lives, overseeing the operations of the hybrid bio-machinery, which, for what it was worth, increased its output again, by another twenty percent.

As projected, the plant bloomed abundantly, and the harvest of petals was so heavy with iron and tin that it weighed the nets down, like a veritable miraculous catch. The sheer quantity of metal that required processing pushed the foundry project to the front burner. The design team worked around the clock to produce and coordinate the plans for it and the next few months passed in a flurry of construction activity, frustration over having to deal with the plant in places one couldn't anticipate it would go and concern that the storage facilities were vastly undersized for the anticipated production.

Jack and Richard decided to lay low for a while, now that Jack's cousin's project had already been submitted to the science fair, awaiting evaluation.

"How was your day, hon?" Carol asked Tom at the dinner table, as it was the family custom.

"I don't want to talk about it," the latter replied sharply, then, realizing that he had been inexplicably harsh, turned towards the children for help. "Any news about your science project, Ricky? You haven't mentioned it lately," he asked his eldest son, who flinched at the sound of the reviled diminutive.

"Not yet, dad. There are a lot of projects in the competition, they're not going to finish evaluating them until the beginning of summer," he said.

"That was quite something, what you did there! What was it, anyway? It looked like a mechanical jellyfish!" he enticed his son to talk about one of his favorite subjects, thus avoiding the fact that the last thing in the universe he wanted to remember during family dinner was that stupid plant, which seemed to be mocking him, was always in his face.

Richard started talking about the bio-similar engine he had supposedly been designing, with a lot less enthusiasm than anticipated. The description of the device's components and function was actually correct, for the most part, but the thought of dear Brenda living its altered purpose somewhere in the entrails of the giant plant haunted him. Fortunately for him his sister interrupted him to ask their father when they were going to get the puppy he promised.

Tom reached for this unexpected rescue rope like it was salvation itself, and the rest of dinner was dedicated to the qualities and defects of the various dog breeds, details regarding their care and feeding, and assigning dog responsibilities to all the family members, on a carefully put together schedule meant to grace the refrigerator door. When the dog discussion was exhausted he turned to his next best hope, Carol, who always had something to say, usually touching upon light, cheerful and inconsequential subjects, guaranteed not to give anybody indigestion.

Carol gracefully obliged, regaling the family with a spellbinding story about the way they had changed items from one side of the grocery store to the other, move which made the flow through the isles while shopping a little more logical, but took some getting used to. She then gave a detailed account of what seasonal items they did or did not have available, and mentioned she saw Mrs. Jenkins, who was also out food shopping, but the latter was way on the other side of the store and didn't see her when she waved. Carol carefully kept out of the narrative the fact that she had ran into three or four acquaintances while shopping, all of whom were none too eager to complain about the plant, the wall, the pipe manifold that wasn't, the unfairness of life and in a more general context, the end of time.

***

After dinner, Tom encouraged Richard to go out and meet with his friends, concerned by his son's recent lack of interest in socializing, so the latter, to keep things running smoothly inside the family unit, decided to go to the malt shop, where he hoped might run into Jack.

Jack wasn't there, but the malt shop was packed full with other kids from school, so Richard stuck around anyway, in the hope of getting a fresh scoop on the plant's latest exploits.

"I swear to you, Jane, that it's God's honest truth! That plant went through the wall like it wasn't there!" the malt shop owner leaned towards her interlocutor, who gasped, shocked. Richard made an effort not to roll his eyes at the old news, and did his best to hide his disappointment with the fact that the entire evening portended to be a bust.

"You do know what happened to the other one, right?" her partner of conversation commented, making Jack cock his ears.

"No, I don't!" the malt shop's owner drew closer, thrilled to find out something she didn't already know. To be totally honest, she had told the story of the plant and the wall so many times, even she couldn't fake excitement over it anymore.

"It seems that it built itself a shell, like a little shelter, completely transparent, to keep out of the weather," the second lady said. "How did it made glass, you tell me?" she turned to the malt shop owner, to enjoy the stunned look on her face. To out gossip the master was not an easy feat, and an aspiration she had had for years.

"No!" the malt shop owner replied, in disbelief. "Get out of here, that can't be true!" she made sure to confirm the accuracy of her source.

"As I live and breathe, I saw it with my own two eyes!" the lady protested. The malt shop owner evaluated the truthfulness of her words with a probing stare, and then, satisfied with the results, carefully stashed this delightful scoop on top of the pile of fresh news to spread.

"Now, that's something worth getting out of the house for," Richard thought, both awed and scared by the plant's amazing abilities to adapt to its environment. It became clear as day to him, and he wondered why he didn't think about it before, that the plant and the pipe system, and whatever else this conjoined entity cared to put forth, formed a living being together, with needs and purpose, and most of all, a fierce survival instinct. "Of course," Richard thought, "if I had the ability to grow shelter around myself, that's the first thing I would do, too!"

He immediately made plans to go see the transparent shell for himself, and was a little disappointed that of all times, Jack wasn't there now, to share his news and plans with him. Richard finished his vanilla float and went home with a new pep in his step, which strengthened his father's conviction that getting the boy to socialize more was doing him a world of good.

***

Between then and the next Saturday, Jack and Richard made arrangements to go visit plant number two and see its wonder shell. Spring was drawing near, and the little dwellers of the desert had started to get out of their winter burrows, a little hesitant and shivering in the crisp sunshine. The boys could see the transparent shell of the plant as soon as they turned onto the dirt trail that led to the hot springs, and it looked like it was floating over the swamp, creating its own micro-climate in which creatures big and small sought food and shelter from cold and danger. The critters moved around the plant undaunted by its metal leaves and stems, attracted by its warmth, protected from predators by its dense foliage inside which many of them had built nests and burrows to protect their young.

Inside this glass enclosure it wasn't just the plant and its metal extensions who determined the actions of this new being, but all the birds, and mice, and swamp plants, and frogs, and water spiders, and dragonflies.

"Look at this, Snake! It's like a greenhouse oasis!" Jack stared at the strange hybrid entity, which was so blatantly teaming with life, and which looked quite content, thank you very much, despite the unpleasant smells that emanated from the muddy hot spring where its life began.

"It's a living thing, Jack, the whole thing is a living thing!" Richard exclaimed, forgetting his resentment towards the monster that ate his beloved interface, and hoped that Brenda was reasonably happy synchronizing whatever she was synchronizing inside the plant's metallic shell.

"A smart living thing," Jack said, dancing around the concept of sentience, which was a little hard for him to swallow. "You don't know where this plant is coming from, man. It may be an alien intelligence for all you know," he revived his theories on extraterrestrials and their surreptitious intrusion on human lives, a concept Richard found strangely comforting for once, given the circumstances.

"If it is, it seems very protective of life," Richard said, watching the little swarm of activity, eerily similar to an ant farm as seen through the transparent shell. "Have you ever thought about this, Jack? This plant increased production by what, close to sixty percent now? It yields raw material worth building a foundry, has cut the heating bills to nothing, and other than the fact that it is hot and slightly electrically charged, both things intrinsic to its nature, hasn't done anybody any harm. Why do you think everybody is so hell-bent on destroying it?"

"How about the fact that it made having any control over the factory equipment and processes impracticable, went through a brick wall without putting a hole in it and it will probably expand into infinity and take over the earth?" Jack played devil's advocate.

"It is a sentient living entity and we have the moral responsibility to allow it to develop in whatever way it sees fit," Richard uttered the s word, to Jack's great displeasure.

"It's hardly sentient," Jack said. "It's just genetically programmed to look after itself."

"By copying an entire branch of an industrial design that took people years to optimize," Richard defended his argument.

"Parrots can talk, that doesn't make them intelligent," Jack debated.

"What about that time when it changed its mind and refused to go into the storage room?" his friend countered.

"Coincidence," Jack replied. "What about the time when it headed straight through a brick wall into an environment that doesn't support its development?"

"Maybe it realized it was able to mitigate that," Richard countered.

"I don't believe it knew that before it busted out," Jack protested, frustrated. "You wouldn't go out of the house in winter without a coat!"

"Actually, I might, you know, if the sun was shining and I'd never been outside before," Richard defended the plant. "How would I know it's cold?"

"This is a completely ridiculous argument," Jack said.

"You brought it up, I'm just expanding your hypothesis," his friend didn't want to let go.

"It's just a plant, dude! A scare the living out of me metal producing, glass domed, three hundred degrees of steam won't kill it, can't cut it with a power saw plant! There is no more intelligence inside it than there is in this one over here," he pointed to a fragile dandelion sprout that had decided to brave the whims of weather very early, just to get a head start on the season.

"How about the way it welcomed Brenda?" Richard found another example.

"You designed Brenda to 'talk' to the plant!" Jack protested.

"I didn't design the plant to incorporate it into its structure," Richard said.

"Maybe it swallows everything you put in its path, like an ostrich!" Jack got frustrated.

"It didn't swallow any of the people," Richard offered.

"Yet," Jack finally voiced his unspoken concern.

"Come on, Jack! If it wanted to harm us it would have done it by now! It's been, what, six, seven months?" Richard argued, vexed that his friend would even think such a thing.

"Don't come whining to me if you find yourself providing as a human extension to our leafy overlord here," Jack mumbled under his breath. "At least then it will have real talking capabilities," Jack got tired of defending his argument, but still didn't want to let his friend have the last word.

***

The construction of the new foundry found itself in competition with the plant's efforts to build itself a new enclosure, since the portion of it that was out of doors found itself exposed to the elements and rushed to remedy this unfavorable circumstance. As strange as it seems, the factory workers made it a point of pride to one up the prolific intruder, unwilling to be outdone on their own turf. Finishing ahead of the plant provided them with a small, but morally significant victory, which lessened a bit the sting of fighting a lesser life form that had the ability to replicate pipe structures.

Everybody was reluctant to venture into the plant's dome at first, because many suggested that once inside the belly of the beast there was no way a person would ever come out, but as it is with all human endeavors, a gutsy few decided to risk taking fate into their own hands and debunked the superstition.

"You can add building shelter to its list of beneficial features," Richard bragged.

"Wouldn't it bother you to live in the dry land equivalent of a coral reef?" Jack asked. "There is no rhyme or reason to this structure, it's so..." Jack turned his nose at it.

"Organic?" Richard laughed. "Not if I don't have to lift a finger to obtain it," he replied. "And I assure you, if you didn't have a roof over your head, you wouldn't care either."

"I was going to say amorphous," Jack didn't relent.

Just in time for the foundry's ribbon cutting, the plant bloomed again, as a peace offering to its inconvenienced human companions, to provide their new enterprise with fresh material for the beginning of production.

Chapter Thirteen

Everything would have gone well for Jack and Richard, as much as one could expect under the circumstances, if it weren't for the parents' and the teachers' curiosity. Came summer, everybody was on pins and needles to learn the results of the science fair, where, they had no doubt, the boys' project was certain to grab the interest of the evaluating committee.

After unsuccessful attempts to get the pertinent information from Jack, Mrs. Jenkins decided to take the matter into her own hands and reach out to the various science fairs, in the hope of surprising the two by sharing with everybody their outstanding results. When her phone inquiries turned out nothing, she thought that the school principal might have a better grasp of the ins and outs of these competitions, and she asked him for assistance. The principal researched all the science fairs in the area himself, but none of them happened to feature any bio-engines at the time, so, a little puzzled by the conflicting information, he called Jack's mother, to find out the name of his cousin.

Jack's mother wasn't able to shed any light on his query, due to the fact that Jack didn't have any cousins that she knew of, and this was the first time she'd ever seen her son show interest in a science fair, since the boy seemed to be drawn to artistic endeavors, rather than technical ones.

The principal then called Carol, who knew even less about the details of the project. She had shown great interest in its development right from the very beginning, but her interest was more from the standpoint of maternal pride, as a great piece of news to be shared with friends and neighbors.

By the time the boys got back from school, both of their houses were on full alert. Carol sent Richard to his room until his father returned from work, unwilling to deal with whatever it was that made Richard get in trouble at school.

The boy went to his room, almost relieved to have a couple of hours to himself, to cook up an explanation before he had to face the music. He used his time wisely, revising his story, and worrying that he would not be able to coordinate it with Jack if the need arose. When his father finally got home, the tiredness of a long day was amplified by the fact that he now had to discipline his son. Dinner was a lot quieter than usual, with both father and son searching for a way to avoid the mandatory conversation.

"Your mother tells me that the school principal called," his father finally started, wishing he were anywhere else instead. "He mentioned there was no science fair in the whole district," he said, softly, and continued after a long pause. "What on earth are you two up to, Richard?" he asked, uncomfortable, swallowing his words.

"I'm going to strangle Jack," Richard thought. "It's just as simple as that." He couldn't come up with any reasonable explanation for the web of truth enhancements, so he looked around, in search of inspiration.

"I hear Jack's mother never heard of that cousin of his, on account of the fact that he doesn't exist," Tom continued, unable to stifle his sarcasm. Richard's gaze was still sweeping the room and his mind grabbed hold of the first image his eyes came upon, which was the tankless water heater.

"We wanted it to be a surprise, we didn't know whether it would work, so we didn't want to let anybody know before we tested it," Richard replied in an embarrassed mumble, looking at his plate.

"Didn't know if what would work?" his father's questioning continued.

"The bio-engine. We wanted to make a chlorophyll enabled solar heater," he blurted the first words that came to his mind. His father gave him a long, probing look. It was quite obvious that he didn't believe a single word Richard had said, but he wanted to demonstrate to his son that lies never lead a person to a good place, and he was willing to allow the deception to continue to the inevitable point where the fibs imploded onto themselves.

"Ok," he said. "Now we all know about it, so you no longer need to hide your work. Why don't you bring your prototype here and show us how it works?" he suggested.

"That one was a first draft," Richard improvised on the spot, with a sudden appreciation for Jack's talent to make up stuff on cue and somewhat relieved that some of his friend's useful skill seemed to have rubbed off on him. "It's not working-working," he continued. "We were in the process of refining the concept," he said, and his father interrupted him with an impatient hand gesture.

"We know, we all saw the little jellyfish. That was an almost finished gadget, was it not?"

"Which broke, unfortunately," Richard didn't skip a beat, "Jack and I dropped it on accident just as we were about to test it for the first time."

"That's regrettable," his father kept him on the hook, "after all that hard work you guys put into it! What was it, five, six weeks?"

"Two months," Richard corrected him.

"I hope you get a new working prototype soon, we're all very curious about how it works." Richard nodded with his mouth full, grateful that the meal of the day, venison stew, required extra time for chewing.

"Sure, dad," he finally said when they reached dessert.

"It shouldn't take you very long now, that you already have it all figured out," his dad put some pressure on the expected timing of the delivery. "Two weeks? Three, tops?" Richard nodded, so he wouldn't have to answer.

"One thing I don't understand, though," Carol stumped him, just when he thought he had safely delayed the reckoning for his elusive activities for at least another week. "Why did you have to make up a cousin for Jack?" she looked at her son, as if searching for his former innocence. The thought of strangling his friend occurred to Richard again, and at the same time he wished the latter was there, because he surely would have come up with something half-believable. For lack of an answer, he shrugged his shoulders and dove into the seven layer cake with surprising enthusiasm.

"Just don't keep us all on tenterhooks," his father insisted, to make clear to Richard that the event will not die down without an adequate explanation. "I, for one, want to hear all the technical details."

Later, at the library, Jack and Richard buried themselves in a mountain of technical documentation that nobody could understand, in order to carve for themselves a half hour of uninterrupted dialog and assess the magnitude of their kerfuffle.

"Are you crazy?" Jack snapped. "Why on earth would you tell your father we were making a chlorophyll enabled..." he forgot the rest of the designation.

"Solar heater," Richard completed it. "I didn't know what to say, ok? I panicked! This is the first thing that came to mind!" he whimpered.

"That gizmo better look a lot like Brenda, 'cause we don't have the time to design a new device from scratch. Can you adapt the jellyfish to look like it heats water?" Jack inquired.

"Well, technically speaking, it has to be able to heat water, I don't think dad will give me a pass for a device that doesn't do what it's supposed to, not after two whole months of tinkering and two previous prototypes," his friend replied.

"You mean to tell me that you are going to have to attach a real Brenda to the hot water pipe in your kitchen?" Jack asked, incensed by the mere contemplation of this possibility.

"Relax, Jack! This doesn't have anything to do with the plant. It's not going to grow, meld, incorporate, or do anything weird. We need to design an instantaneous water heater that looks like Brenda, that's all. It shouldn't be too hard!" Richard replied, confident of his engineering prowess.

"I wish I were there with you during that conversation, you come up with the most ridiculous fibs, dude!" Jack highlighted his own creative skills while shaking his head with disappointment at the same time.

"Oh, yeah?" Richard challenged him. "And what exactly would you have said?"

"I would have approached the subject from an emotional angle, first of all," Jack started expertly and then remembered."What did you tell him about my cousin?"

"Nothing!" Richard confessed. "I couldn't think of a single thing to say."

"Oh, man! This is a disaster!" Jack frowned. "Just give me a few minutes to compose myself, I'll try to figure out a way to get this chestnut out of the fire, but you're stretching my limits, man!" They spent some time in silence, with only the shuffling of pages and thumping of books between them.

"You know?" Richard couldn't help himself. "Maybe this is not the best place in the world to retreat to in order to come up with a scenario, not with that jolly librarian on our case constantly."

"As compared to what?" Jack replied. "Your house? The malt shop? School? At least this place is quiet enough for us to be able to think!" he frowned, irked by the interruption.

Richard spent the next couple of weeks trying to reconfigure Brenda to function as a water heater, a task that, as it is often the case, proved to be significantly more difficult in practice than its theory originally assumed. At the end of this time period, however, an updated version of Brenda was born, a little smaller than the first one, but just as strange looking.

"I still can't look at those tentacles, Snake!" Jack gave the mechanical jellyfish a dirty look. "No offense to Brenda!" he corrected himself.

"Priorities, Jack!" Richard scolded him. "If I don't come up with a Brenda heater by the end of this week there will be hell to pay!"

"How is it coming?" Jack asked, eyeing the device with intense curiosity.

"Never you mind!" Richard retorted. "Did you come up with an explanation about your non-existent cousin?"

"Of course I did!" Jack replied, vexed that his friend could even suspect otherwise. "It was because of the science fair regulations, which required the teams to consist of at least three people, and we didn't have a third, so we made one up."

"But the science fair is no longer in the picture, remember?" Richard pointed out.

"Pay attention, Richard! Doesn't matter what is or isn't right now, it made sense inside the original premise, the one we have to explain! This thing is harder to keep track of than a soap opera. What was next? Aah, yes, the surprise," he remembered. "Why did we want to keep it a surprise?" he asked Richard, who again was caught unawares.

"You never think these things through," Jack chastised him, shaking his head again. "We wanted to keep it a surprise because everybody is bothered by the plant and since our device is kind of based on plant biology, we worried that it might make people uncomfortable," he explained, as if describing the proper set-up of a scene from a movie.

Jack approached the synthetic jellyfish again.

"I'm not sure I'd trust this thing with the hot water pipe, what if it sinks its hooks in it and refuses to let go?" he said.

"It's just programmed to grab hold of anything that looks like a tube. See?" he demonstrated, slightly touching the quivering tentacles with one of his fingers. Brenda grabbed onto it eagerly, to Jack's dismay.

"Wow, dude, don't do this to me, I don't want to see this thing chew your finger off!" he flinched.

"She's a sweetheart," Richard defended his synthetic pet, "totally harmless."

"How does she let go of it?" Jack asked, and watched as his friend tapped Brenda on the head, prompting the mechanical jellyfish to release his finger.

"I don't know about the utility of this object, but it sure is entertaining," Jack giggled. "Are you sure it needs to be a water heater? We could turn it into a toy," he suggested, but his friend ignored him and immersed himself in his work.

***

In the meantime, back at the factory, some of the workers slowly started populating the plant's bio-dome with light furniture and tropical plants, which attracted birds and small wildlife to create a little garden for winter weary people.

The dome was large enough now to be noticeable from the Belvedere point, and, if one were to adhere to Richard's smoke hissing dragon metaphor, one would have noticed that the dragon had grown a little chubby.

From the height and distance of the observation deck this organic addition to the factory assets looked like a strange Noah's Ark, upside down and gleaming in the sunshine, filled with life to protect, indifferent to opinions and human priorities, the ultimate triumph of nature, benevolent and gleeful in its will to survive.

In the few moments he afforded himself for relaxation, with the deadline of his project looming, Richard sometimes liked to walk to the look out point, watch the city that bustled with life in the valley below and wonder how things might have turned out differently if he didn't, in a manner of speaking, help bring this new life into the world, however strange and unsettling it was.

At times like these he stopped thinking of this large living conglomerate in terms of good or bad. One doesn't question whether the squirrels or the lions, or the grass of the plain, are good or bad, they just are, and so is the sun in the sky and the snow on the mountains. When you open your eyes to life and see them for the first time, you don't judge whether they belong or whether you belong. The wholeness of being is a shared experience and it is laid down before you, to provide the fabric and the context of your life.

Chapter Fourteen

The construction of Brenda two didn't go as fast as Richard had hoped, in part because, strangely enough, designing a complete breakthrough in engine technology was really hard, and in part because, despite their continued promises to give him space to work, his parents and sisters couldn't help themselves and their curiosity about the project's development.

When his family finally left him alone, Jack climbed through the window to help, managing to distract Richard so much with his constantly wandering chatter that he usually ended up abandoning the portion of work he had scheduled for the day and spent all the time listening to his friend's latest finds of fresh gossip.

Brenda two looked almost exactly like its older sister, if only a little smaller, but having to adapt the look of the old prototype to accommodate the functions of the new one presented an additional challenge that Richard could gladly have done without. From a design standpoint the structure and general aspect of the new prototype made absolutely no sense, and because of that when the big day finally arrived the boy showed up in the kitchen with an object that related to plumbing just as much as rope pertains to needlework.

"I'll be darned!" his father exclaimed at the sight of the smaller and overly designed mechanical jellyfish. "To be completely honest with you, I didn't think you were going to pull this off. I know you weren't designing a water heater, Ricky, but now that you actually made one, let's see how it works, shall we?" he drew closer, looking forward to the demonstration. The rest of the family joined him, barely leaving Richard enough room to move around.

Richard tapped the jellyfish on its head to make it release its grasp on his fingers and placed it on the long goose neck sprayer, right on top of the bend. Brenda dutifully attached itself to the spout, its display turning every color in the rainbow in a swirl of pastel pudding hues.

"How on earth does this work?" his father couldn't stop laughing, unsure if that was because Brenda looked absolutely hilarious, or because he was excited and emotional about his son's innovative spirit.

Richard waved a few passes over the surface of the display, brushing off the color with his palms and making it shift from rose to aqua and every nuance in between.

"I assume rose stands for hot and aqua for cold," Tom said. "A bit involved for a water heater, don't you think? Although nothing to sneeze at, that's for sure," he commented, all the while thinking that constraints often yielded the greatest discoveries and extremely proud of his son, even though he had a bit of a moral quandary showing it at this time, all lies considered. "You should enter this in the science fair for real this time," he suggested. "Why didn't you tell us about it?"

Richard was instantly grateful to Jack and his constant pestering to get their story straight, and he eagerly produced the latest and greatest version of their joint scenario, version which was guaranteed to satisfy both the curiosity and the pride of the family members.

Upon finishing the demonstration, Richard tapped Brenda gently on the head and the colorful jellyfish released the spout from its transparent tentacles.

"You mean you can attach this to any pipe anywhere?" Tom's pride at his son's inventiveness went up a peg or two.

"Yes," Richard said, relieved that his many hours of stress sweating over Brenda two at least earned him a reprieve from uncomfortable questions.

"You know, in better days I would take this to the factory and show it off, but now I have no untouched pipe branch to demonstrate it on, the darn plant is managing all the environmental controls now, it would be redundant. I can't stand the darn thing, it makes me feel superfluous," he frowned. "The system balances itself, and keeps within the tolerance range, even if I wanted to control it myself, it wouldn't allow me. To think that I've been replaced by a plant, it's so embarrassing!"

"It's no worse than automated controls," Richard felt the need to defend the good work Brenda number one was so evidently doing, hidden from view inside the plant's vascular system. He wondered what the jellyfish looked like right now, and if the plant warped it in some way, to adapt it to its needs.

"I don't like it one bit, it's like the factory is going to manage itself soon, we're just there to enjoy the view. I guess we're lucky we're still needed, that fiendish plant is keeping us all on our toes, you never know what you'll run into from one day to the next. Did I tell you it built itself a secondary system, ready to take over in case anything goes wrong with the main? I'm not comfortable handing over the controls to a plant! It's a plant!" Tom suddenly recalled the source of his frustration.

"I'm sure its inner workings are infinitely more intricate than any piece of machinery anybody can devise," Richard protested, to his father's great surprise.

"What do you mean?" his father asked.

Tom looked at his son, a little surprised by the youth's excitement over something that so far had engendered nothing but tension and discontent in the grown-ups. He hesitated for a second, to evaluate whether his own feelings about the current situation were reasonable, and after recalling that he and his team members had to cut a tunnel through the hot foliage last week in order to be able move from a section to another, he concluded that his irritation was completely warranted.

***

Later that day, Richard and Jack met at the malt shop to celebrate their narrow escape from perpetual detention with two vanilla floats.

"To tell you the truth, this stuff is getting kind of tiresome, man," Jack complained. "I love making up a good story as much as the next guy, but it's exhausting having to come up with fresh excuses every day to keep up with the darn plant! Any day now that lovely librarian is going to run into our parents at the least convenient moment and volunteer the story of the floating stem, and we're going to have to invent ourselves a fairy godmother for that one!"

"The demonstration went very well, thank you for asking!" Richard replied, staring at his friend with reproach.

"Sorry, Snake! I didn't mean to snub the jellyfish," he slurped his beverage with a thoughtful look on his face. "So, I take it that Brenda two was adequate to the task," he questioned.

"How is it that nobody cares about a machine made almost entirely of modified plant cells?" Richard asked, revolted.

"That's your gig, why should anybody care? Do you care how the hydrophore regulates the water pressure on the second floor of your home? You just turn on the tap and expect water to come out," Jack argued.

"Maybe if I cared more I would find a way to make that stack quieter, that would save me a lot of sleep," Richard retorted.

"Maybe it would," Jack agreed.

"Any news from the factory?" Richard asked him.

"Same old, same old. The output went up again, the foundry turns up steel profiles around the clock and everybody blames the plant for destroying their lives," Jack said, without grasping the irony of the statement, which, taken out of context, would have been evident.

"That's because biological systems are a lot more efficient than mechanical ones," Richard noted.

"Whatever," Jack devoted his attention to the remainder of his vanilla float.

"What's wrong, Jack?" Richard asked. He knew his friend well and he couldn't help notice how much his mood had changed lately. He seemed quieter, withdrawn, very unlike himself.

"Nothing, it's just..." Jack hesitated. "Ever since this stupid plant appeared in our lives, we've been doing nothing but babysit it. It's like nobody has a life anymore, maybe our parents are right, you know?"

"What would you be doing instead?" Richard asked.

"I don't know, hang out, play some ball, catch up with gossip," Jack started recalling his old habits.

"But we do that now, don't we?" Richard asked.

"Yes, we do. And somehow we manage to make it all about the stupid plant! It's just a plant!" he protested.

"Well," Richard frowned, moved by his friend's distress, "so what do you want to do about it?"

"You know, sometimes you sound just like my mother," Jack replied. Jack's mother was a psychologist, and the main reason Jack had developed his spectacular ability to make up the most unlikely stories right off the cuff, at will. He surprised himself sometimes, when the glut of fictitious events came to him so easily he almost believed half of them. "You don't want me to reassure you too that I'm ok, do you? It's, like, extra work on top of the upset."

"I'm not saying this to rattle you, but I thought about this for a long time, for all the time since the plant appeared, in fact, and for the life of me I can't figure out what anybody could possibly have done about this situation that we haven't already tried. I don't want to wake up every morning just to fight the new day. There are so many things about this change that are really good, actually."

"Oh, yeah?" Jack challenged. "Like what?"

"Like Brenda," Richard brought the conversation back to his favorite conversation topic. "I wouldn't have thought to build a Brenda if it wasn't for the plant," he said, smiling.

Jack stared at him with a conflicted look in his eyes and didn't say anything for a while.

"Not everybody is a tinkerer, Snake."

"So," Richard continued, in a small voice that sounded rather miserable. "Would you rather the plant was never here?"

"No, see, that's just the thing," Jack replied, frustrated, "'cause then I remember how it used to be around here before this pest invaded. Death by boredom!" He smiled to a memory. "Remember how we broke into the lab? Those were the days!"

"They would have been a lot worse days if we ever got caught," Richard noted.

"But we didn't, right? We didn't! Admit it, that was fun!" Jack said, excited, and Richard, who was infinitely less of a thrill seeker than his friend, nodded in agreement, just to make him happy. He still woke up in a cold sweat at times, dreaming that he went to prison, was repudiated by his family and friends and deprived of his future. "On occasion," he said.

"I guess we owe the plant for that," Jack had to admit. "Life has been an adventure ever since."

"What's the problem then?" Richard asked.

"I can't put my finger on it, it's like being kind of pregnant, you don't know whether to quit smoking or start shopping for bikinis. Hypothetically speaking, of course," Jack frowned.

"I'm sure you can put that concern out of your mind, that's one thing you won't have to worry about," Richard laughed.

"That's just it! I can't be sure about that either. Nothing is out of the realm of possibility anymore," Jack replied, half-serious. "And here we are, talking about the plant again."

"We can talk about anything else you'd like," Richard tried to appease him.

"No, we really can't. It's like this thing grew extensions into our brains too, it sneaks its way into our every thought!" Jack contradicted him. "I dare you to go ten minutes without mentioning the plant, you'll see you can't do it!"

Richard tried to kindle another conversation, but tried as he might, he could only come up with details about Brenda.

"Oh, what's the point! Go ahead, brag about your jellyfish, I know you want to!" Jack conceded the argument, as if he had read his friend's thoughts.

Richard took the rare opportunity his friend afforded him to give Jack an ear full of Brenda two's features and capabilities.

"Is it really made of plant cells?" Jack couldn't believe it.

"Yes, it is," Richard said. "Of course, they're all altered somehow to accommodate the design, but they're real plant cells."

"I always thought you made those, you know, in a dish," Jack hesitated.

"I couldn't possibly! I can't duplicate such a level of complexity!"

***

As smitten as Richard was with the plant's surreal qualities, he had to admit that Jack had a point. In less than a year, quietly but irrevocably, the plant had set roots not only inside the factory assets, which it adapted to its own needs, but in a broader sense, into the very life of the city, into people's thoughts, finding its way into their old customs, weaving its strands into their daily conversations around the kitchen table, reshaping their experiences. Even the image of the town, as seen from the Belvedere point, was different, in a way not easy to define, a way enhanced, maybe, by the fact that the plant had clambered its way up the factory chimneys and was now sticking out of them, like a bud in a vase, surrounded by swirls of fog.

Everything had changed, in a subtle, but irreversible manner, and Richard knew that Jack was right, that their world will never be the same. In the continuous flow of events, he hadn't had time to ask himself whether that was for better or for worse, and if he ever stopped to think about it, he would have had to admit that it was a mixture of both. Just like life, the plant had brought the bitter with the sweet, excitement in frustration, birth in the middle of chaos. All things considered, it was literally a hot mess, but what a creative mess that was, and what commanding potential emerged out of it!

The fact that a small whim of fate, one mutation out of the many that get rejected every day, set events in motion on such a life altering path was still surreal to Richard, and when reality bore down too hard on him he usually went back to his room and found some new gadget to put together, gadget which, in accordance with the times, looked more and more like a living thing and less like a mechanical device with each passing day.

Richard wasn't the only one who found a way to put the plant/machine hybrid to good use, and as bio-based gadgets ceased to be an oddity, the town was soon awash with them, and they all looked strangely alive, as if nature had decided to grace the planet with a whole new branch of species, all at once. As it happens when life challenges ingrained concepts about what things are possible, it only takes one instance to prove the contrary. The plant had broken the ineffable barrier between organic and inorganic, the four minute mile of life and matter, so to speak, and from that moment on, the rift between the two forever ceased to exist.

It wasn't climactic, it was barely noticeable, and just like always when life is evolving, it happened in silence.

Chapter Fifteen

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 something 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 it 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 manged 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 beseeched.

"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.

Chapter Sixteen

The meetings at the town hall were so common that one could almost randomly stop by and find oneself right in a middle of one. The scientific team decided to stick around for a while, partly in response to the town folks' insistent requests for continuous updates, and partly because they were so excited to study this new embodiment of life, any other project felt dull in comparison.

Jack and Richard arrived somewhere in the middle of the current meeting, but they were so familiar with the subject matter by now that they were always able to fill in the details, so they found a couple of seats somewhere in the back and made themselves comfortable.

"So you are saying that..." somebody from the first row was making sure they understood the biologist correctly.

"It is a living entity," the biologist replied.

"What part of it, the plant and the extension ducts?" the other speaker replied. "We already know that!"

"No, not only those, everything that it interacts with, the wall, the dome, the wildlife inside it, well, by extension, every person that enters it," the biologist smiled.

The audience gasped. For months, rumors of the plant being capable of integrating people into its dense network of stems have been circulating, rumors that the factory was very assiduously trying to dispel.

"No, no!" the biologist realized he had touched the third rail of the communal subconscious fear. "Not like that!" he tried to reassure everybody. "It creates its own micro-climate, and everything inside it is a part of a coherent living organism. It adjusts itself to the warmth generated by the birds and plants," he continued.

"And humans," a morose person pressed the point that displeased everyone.

"And humans," the biologist smiled. "It compensates for the heat transfered through metal and through glass, and for the energy generated by the movement of electrons. Did you know that the areas where birds are nesting have dropped their temperatures to a cozy ninety six degrees? It's like a zoned climate system, with separate temperature controls."

"And if the birds leave?" the first person asked.

"Than it goes back to getting hotter than the fires of Gehenna! How sweet of it to adjust its temperature for squirrels and mice, but it crisps us every chance it gets!" the morose man commented.

"Actually, it doesn't get above one hundred and twenty degrees anymore. At least not in the active work zones."

"I don't believe it!" the man replied.

"It also increased the ventilation rate and the oxygen content in populated areas. It feels almost...purposeful," the biologist spoke. "I hesitate to call this intelligence, but it is certainly cohesive in demeanor and intent."

"See?" Richard whispered to Jack, excited. "I told you it steered clear of the storage room!"

"You don't believe that!" Jack contradicted him. "It went straight through a wall and you're telling me that it avoided an open space on purpose!"

"What makes you think it didn't notice the wall?" Richard said.

"Why would it want to go out into inclement weather?" Jack doubted.

"Maybe it was curious," Richard replied.

"Get out of here!" Jack leaned back into his chair. "I think your love for this plant is making you crazy, dude! It's just a plant!" he exclaimed.

"Sure it is, Jack! Sure it is!" Richard smiled back at him.

"Also," the biologist continued the account of his latest research, "we noticed that it adjusted the percentages in the metal alloy of its petals to closely match the composition of our extrusion profiles. Our team concluded this is too specific for a random occurrence."

"Great! Now it's mixing our alloys for us. What's next? It messes with our breakfast?" the morose man replied.

"One more thing," the biologist said. "It seems to be very protective of all of its living components. I wouldn't, for instance, try to remove any of the sparrows. I know some of you have complained about the...hhm...bird 'accidents' that happen on occasion."

"Why don't you call a spade a spade, sir! It's bird poop dropping on our heads," the morose man replied.

"I understand," the biologist said. "Maybe we can take some protective measures, to mitigate that."

"Oh, come on!" the other man exclaimed, exasperated.

"Well, that's all we have for now, we'll continue our research and keep you posted if there are any new developments," the biologist smiled to the audience.

Jack and Richard headed home, and since it was a nice warm evening at the end of spring, they decided to take the longer route and enjoy the weather. The route wandered through a couple of side streets and then merged into a larger road, through a commercial area, edged by little shops. Along the sides of the pedestrian alleys, the late blooming trees were shedding their last petals, sprinkling the walkways with fragrant clutter.

"What do you think would happen to all the blossoms if they were allowed to fall to the ground?" Richard asked Jack, suddenly.

"I really don't know," Jack thought for a second.

"See, 'cause if it were a normal plant, the petals would wilt and eventually turn into humus, but metal doesn't decompose, at least not for a long time. I guess the plant would be smothered by it if we didn't remove it," he said.

"What's your point?" Jack said.

"Do you remember how in the beginning it wouldn't bloom?" Richard replied. "We even thought it wasn't able to produce flowers or fruit."

"So?" Jack said.

"So, after we stretched the nets it started blooming twice a year."

"I don't understand," Jack said.

"Don't you see, Jack?" Richard stared at his friend, in disbelief. "It...adopted us!"

"Huh?" Jack blurted.

"It, ahm, evaluated the components of its environment and adjusted its development guided by our continued presence in it," Richard said, laughing. "We're just like the sparrows, my friend, only bigger," he started laughing.

"I'm not sure I like the sound of that, dude! Aren't we supposed to be smarter than it is? It's just a plant!" Jack frowned.

"How many times did we say that by now and were wrong every time? I think we all take ourselves a little too seriously. We're not better than the world we live in, we're just capable of understanding some of it, is all."

"So, what are you saying, that if we stretch more nets it will bloom three times a year instead of two?" Jack extrapolated.

"Probably, but that's not the point. I am wondering what else the plant does now simply because we were there?" Richard said.

"What do you mean?" Jack said.

"What if it decided to make itself tools because we make tools, or to build shelter, or to protect another living thing?" Richard said, suddenly realizing that his own ardent desire to keep the plant from harm, his curiosity to see how it would evolve and interact with its surroundings, had infused the evolution of this very strange composite living entity. He was instantly humbled by this thought, and felt unworthy of the privilege.

"It's you!" Jack exclaimed, shocked by the sudden understanding. "It is just like you!"

"Not entirely," Richard tried to joke, to lessen the tension of the moment. "I, for instance, don't release droppings on people's heads. It is a little like me, though, isn't it?" he asked his friend, smiling from ear to ear with all the eager pride of a new parent.

"I'm hurt," Jack teased. "I can't recognize anything of mine in it, not even a little bit!"

"Don't worry, Jack! When it starts poking fun at me, I'll be sure to let you know."

***

The thought didn't leave Richard, and the more his mind dwelled on the adaptability of this environment, the more he saw its future potential, so he decided to do a little experiment. He didn't tell Jack, who would have tried to talk him out of it, but spent a lot of time, as summer approached, observing the new plant habitat, the one at the hot springs, monitoring its growth patterns, its wildlife, its temperature changes. After that he went home and spent a lot of time in his room, building. His parents and sisters stopped by, on occasion, and asked a few questions about the new device, but they were used to Richard's gizmos, so they didn't study it too closely.

When it was finished, the little knot of gears spun conscientiously, making weird noises through a cluster of pipes. The entire device wasn't bigger than a fist, and it moved about on a multitude of little mechanical legs, like a giant bug carrying a pan flute.

Richard took the little mechanical creature to the hot spring habitat, released it inside the glass dome and left. A few weeks later, he came back to find the dome populated by little walking pan flutes, chugging along on their tiny mechanical legs and humming eerily in the faintest breeze. He turned on his heels and ran all the way to the town, to tell Jack, who dropped everything he was doing and accompanied him back to the dome, to see the creatures with his own eyes.

"What exactly is that?" Jack stared in disbelief at a group of metal creatures who were congregating on a hot leaf. The plant didn't bother to lower its temperature for them, which gave Richard an idea of the range of temperature the little creatures could tolerate. He quickly recorded the finding in his notebook. "Are you taking notes? Don't tell me you had something to do with this!" he shook his head.

"I had an idea, I just wanted to see if the plant discriminates between useful and worthless ideas, and unfortunately, it doesn't. That can be both a good thing and a bad thing," he explained, still filled with the excitement of his successful experiment.

"How is that?" Jack asked.

"The good thing is that we can make it manufacture anything we want, of course it is not very precise yet, but I'm sure it will evolve to become as precise as we need it to be." Richard said, and then he continued. "The bad thing is that we can make it manufacture anything we want. It's ironic, isn't it?" he smiled, a little sad. "Our beacon of freedom here can overcome any barriers, but can't stop itself from replicating rubbish."

"What do the little bugs do?" Jack asked, touched by his friend's distress.

"That's just it! I designed this little machine to be absolutely worthless. It doesn't do anything, it just moves around and makes noise. Now we have a whole species of it," Richard said.

"Setting aside the fact that what you did was incredibly reckless, I'm not going to go into details why," Jack stared at his friend, who nodded in agreement, "I'm not entirely sure you are right about that. You are not this new living thing, you don't know what it considers valuable and what it tosses out. Garbage is in the eyes of the beholder," Jack tried to comfort his friend.

"What could possibly be the benefit of a glut of little creatures that do nothing other than move about and sound weird! For all intents and purposes, they're giant cockroaches!" Richard blurted out, on the verge of tears.

"You put too much faith in the judgment of a plant," Jack tempered him. "It's a plant!"

"Would you stop with the it's a plant already? Why does everybody keep saying that!" Richard jumped to his feet and started walking around the dome, really upset.

"Besides, bugs serve a very important role in the natural equilibrium of living things, I'm sure the plant found a purpose for them. And they sound nice, if you manage to get over the weirdness factor," Jack said.

"One of this days some idiot will throw a bag of trash in the dome and we'll all be overrun by refuse," Richard said.

"Nobody will throw trash in the plant habitat!" Jack protested.

"Whatever gave you the impression that this is not the kind of thing that could happen?" Richard commented.

"I'm sure the plant will figure it out eventually," Jack said unconvinced.

"The plastic alone," Richard continued his lament.

"There is no overflowing of trash in the other dome," Jack finally found something to bring consolation to his friend. "I'm sure people must have left trash in there at some point!"

Richard postponed his lamentation until a later date, when he could ascertain that it was indeed pertinent to their actual situation.

"So, what did you tell your family this stuff was?" Jack couldn't help be amused by the little creatures, who wandered about their brand new home, given to a swarm of activities that didn't make any sense.

"I told them it was an automated weather vane," Richard sniffled.

"And they believed you?" Jack laughed at the oddity of the concept.

"That's the problem with useless machines, Jack! You can make them look like they could do anything, they just need to look complex enough."

"I kind of like the little buggers, they seem harmless," Jack looked at the pan flute creatures again, and the latter rewarded him by harmonizing in the flow of the air conditioning, into something that sounded like countless wind chimes.

"So, what now?" he asked his friend.

"I don't know," Richard said. "We go to the other dome, see if it replicated trash, monitor the pan flutes to make sure they don't spread all over town to torment us all, start figuring out if we can make the dome build something useful," Richard started enumerating.

"What about them?" Jack pointed towards the pan flutes. "I'm sure somebody will notice them eventually."

"In this mess?" Richard pointed to the abundance of leaves, and the birds, field mice, frogs and a million other things that were crawling, jumping and flying their way through them. "I really don't think so, Jack. Would you have noticed them if I didn't tell you?" he tried to reinforce his argument.

"Duh! They're everywhere! And they're moving! They're kind of hard to miss!" Jack gestured feverishly.

"What are you, a cat?" Richard downplayed his concern.

"Isn't Mrs. Jenkins' patrol still roaming around?" Jack mentioned. "Somebody is bound to notice them, for sure. If they think the plant generated them all by itself, they are going to freak out."

"I wouldn't worry about it, between the smell and the heat, this is not the place that draws people near. I doubt anybody will stick around long enough to notice them," Richard reassured him.

They made their way back home, quietly, and spanned the three miles so quickly they didn't realize when they were almost home. Jack spent the entire time thinking about an entire city overrun by pan flutes, and wished he could kick Richard for not having a second of hesitation before implementing any of his scientific experiments, while Richard mentally put together a prototype for something he had wanted to build for a very long time, too absorbed in its details to pay attention to his friend's mood.

Chapter Seventeen

The rumor about new metallic creatures roaming around in the swamp dome brought agitation and endless discussions in the community. The general hypothesis was that the life entity, or whatever you wanted to call the plant-pipe-dome-wildlife combination, had somehow evolved to create its own species, a thought both worrisome and blasphemous for many of the city's inhabitants.

Richard's family members, who had never been anywhere near the swamp dome, and who gathered all the information about the mechanical critters through hearsay, never connected the terrifying description of the crawling pan flutes to the innocent looking weather vane their son had designed. They had been around for enough of Richard's contraptions to cease finding them scary looking, especially after the two versions of Brenda.

Besides, with the plant taking over the pipe manifold and all the consequences thereof, whatever Richard managed to build in his spare time didn't get the benefit of their full attention.

On top of everything, Diane had had an argument with her boyfriend and the entire household was on call to bring her comfort foods and listen to her wildly swerving stories. Stacey had enrolled in a dancing class and was driving everybody crazy with the constant tapping, which went up the stairwell like through a resonating chamber, to find its way straight into Richard's room, amplified.

Little Teddy was finally exiting his terrible twos, to the relief, albeit unspoken, of the entire family. Carol wouldn't have anybody say a single bad word about the little boy, who, as she often liked to mention, didn't know any better.

So, there they were, in the middle of the daily family drama, discussing the tiny invaders, who were a lot more worrisome to the city folk than the plant because they had no roots, while the family dog ran around, completely out of control, spilling his bowl of food and overturning furniture in his wake.

"Wouldn't you know it? They never found out how the plant spread to the hot springs area to begin with," Carol commented as she sliced the pound cake, distributing it evenly between the dessert plates. "I know nothing good could come out of that, that place is completely forsaken. I guess we're lucky it evolved those ridiculous looking crawling creatures and not something really dangerous."

"You don't know that! You don't know they're not dangerous!" Tom said. "Who knows what else is slithering inside that dome, nobody ever got inside it to do a real survey, it might be crawling with metal alligators, for all we know."

"You think somebody could have done this on purpose?" Carol asked, incredulous.

"Done what?" Tom asked.

"You know, the plant, and everything else around it. Do you think somebody planted it?" Carol continued her thought.

"How else would it have gotten there?" Tom argued.

"I don't know," Carol suggested, "maybe the wind carried its seeds, or something."

"It's not very likely that it can propagate by seed," Tom contradicted her, going over the information they kept churning over in the town halls lately.

"Sure it can!" Carol said, very sure of herself. "Anything can propagate by seed, that's why the plants make seed, it wouldn't make any sense otherwise." She paused for a second, and then she realized that she was sick and tired about having that dreadful plant and all the other things associated with it run their dinner conversation every single night. "Enough about the plant!" she said, effectively ending the subject, and then turned towards Richard. "How was school today, honey? Did you and Jack talk to your science teacher about enrolling Brenda in the science fair?"

"Not yet, mom. The teacher is still trying to decide which science fair would be most appropriate," Richard replied, with his mouth full, determined to linger on this precarious subject as little as possible.

"I haven't seen Jack lately, not since he came to ask us if you could help him with that wildlife restoration project. How thoughtful of him to include you, dear! This is exactly the kind of activity your father and I would love to see you more involved in, rather than watch you spend all of your time putting together those gizmos of yours, you know? Get out, experience nature, breathe in fresh air, do something wholesome like bringing the native habitat back to balance," she said. "Not that we don't appreciate your scientific curiosity, it's just...we worry sometimes. No boy your age should spend so much time alone," she smiled encouragingly at his son, who almost choked on the pound cake. Tom nodded in agreement, which made it clear to Richard that his parents had given a lot of thought to his and Jack's latest commitment. "So, how is it going? Have you planted a lot of little tree saplings?"

Richard made an extreme effort not fall back in shock at Jack's latest reality embellishment, which, technically speaking, was not even a lie: they were working to preserve wildlife, if only in its hybrid mechanical form, and the project did involve being outdoors in the wetlands, in the company of his friend.

'So that's what the scoundrel told my parents! I was wondering how he managed to get us a free pass, no questions asked,' he thought. He gave credit to Jack's endless reserves of creativity and then said out loud. "Not a lot of them yet, we're still trying to evaluate the impact of introducing a new species into the habitat, we worry that it might bring about some unforeseen outcomes."

"That sounds like such an interesting project," Carol continued the conversation. "When do you think we will be able to see it? I can hardly wait, you know how I love nature!"

"Uuhhm, I think it's going to be a while, mom. We're in the incipient stage of the project, there is not much to see yet," Richard tried to change the subject. "Besides, the swamp is not that user friendly, which is why we decided to restore its natural settings to begin with."

"Oh, yes, I understand. In fact, Jack told us that the area you're trying to restore is somewhere outside of town, near the hot springs," Carol went on. "Be careful, Richard, with all the things that are going on over there. I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with you boys spending a lot of time in the area all by yourselves," she started to say, and then she encountered Tom's exasperated look and changed the subject. "I know, I know, I'm being overprotective! You boys go and have fun! Besides, a three mile walk every day will do you a world of good!" she flashed her son an optimistic smile.

***

After dinner, Jack and Richard met at the library, to go over their plans for the following day. The library was surprisingly empty, maybe due to the fact that people were congregating in other venues, more suitable for talking.

"So, I hear that we're doing ecological restoration," Richard said. "How nice of us to lend a helping hand to mother nature!"

"Replanting the wetlands, that's what I said," Jack corrected him.

"It's not a lie," Richard noticed.

"No, it's not. I didn't specify what we were going to plant," Jack explained.

"One of these days, Jack..." Richard sighed.

He stopped. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the jovial librarian walking straight towards them, all smiles and looking like she was hiding something under her jacket.

"Oh, boy!" Jack prepared himself. "Watch out, dude! She's headed here!"

The librarian stopped in front of the table the two were seated at, with a mysterious smile and excited by the big surprise.

"You would never guess what I have here!" she pointed to the tiny bump inside her jacket, looking around surreptitiously, to make sure nobody else saw or heard her. Her concern was really unnecessary, since they were the only people inside that wing of the library. The librarian took out the pan flute from inside her jacket and placed it on the table. It wasn't the original, Richard noticed immediately, because it had the same hand crafted finish as the new pipe distribution branch. Also, the little mechanical creature had grown a transparent shell around its complicated assembly of gears, pistons and rods, no doubt to protect them from dust and moisture. Richard wished he had thought of that when he designed the prototype.

The pan flute walked hesitantly on the shiny surface, its many legs quivering with apprehension towards the new environment, and then chimed harmoniously in a major scale, as if to ask what it was doing there.

"Isn't this the cutest thing you've ever seen in your life?" the librarian couldn't contain her excitement. "And to think that thing from the swamp is capable of generating something like this! We really should pay more attention to that dome, it seems to hide endless treasure inside!"

"How did you manage to get one out of the dome?" Jack couldn't help himself.

"Oh, I just stepped inside and grabbed it," the librarian said, as if it was nothing. "The smell is not to be taken lightly, but you get used to it, eventually. It is a swamp, you know..." she excused herself, as if the stench was her fault.

"Is it safe in there?" Richard managed to mumble.

"Well," the librarian said, "you have to go prepared, the leaches can be a menace. Nothing a pair of rain boots can't handle, though." She stopped and looked lovingly at the pan flute again. "I wonder what this little guy uses for energy!"

"I'm sure it's solar powered," Richard said, too unimpressed and sure of himself not to arouse suspicion.

"And how are you so sure?" the librarian gave him a probing look. Richard pointed to a little black surface inside the shell.

"Aah, the cells, of course," the good lady seemed satisfied with the finding. "Although you have to ask yourself where in the world did the dome find the information on how to produce solar shingles. Surely it couldn't have come up with it all by itself, somebody must have thrown one inside at some point."

Richard and Jack looked at each other, not knowing how to extricate themselves from this discussion, which had all the perilous unpredictability of an avalanche. The librarian was just getting ready to go back to her tasks, to Jack's great relief, when Richard rekindled the conversation, managing to aggravate his friend.

"So, what are you doing with it?" the boy asked, unperturbed by the fact that he was reopening the Pandora's box his friend had tried so hard to close.

"I'm not sure. It doesn't seem to do much, it just chimes and moves around, but it's very entertaining. It makes for a great pet. If I want it to go to sleep, I just cover it with a blanket. You should see it roam around under it for a little bit, before settling down! It drives the cats crazy!" the librarian was excited to share.

"Doesn't the chiming bother you?" Richard continued the questioning, despite the fact that Jack's very sharp elbows were already poking a hole in his ribs.

"No, I got used to it. Actually, I'm trying to teach it to sing. Watch this!" she said, and started whistling a little jingle. The pan flute responded in a somewhat guttural tone, a little flat. "I can't get enough of it!" the librarian exclaimed, eyes glowing with excitement.

"Does it..." Richard was preparing an entire selection of questions, when he was interrupted by Jack, who had completely lost his patience with this blunder wagon waiting to overturn.

"Sorry to interrupt," Jack said, putting sufficient urgency in his request to make it believable. "Richard, did you forget our science club starts in ten minutes? We barely have enough time to make it there, that is if we're running."

Richard tried to dodge his friend's diversion, but the latter grabbed his arm and his backpack and pushed him towards the door, walking backwards and excusing himself to the librarian.

"I wish we could stay, that little guy is so great, maybe some other time!" he said, dragging Richard out the door despite sustained resistance from the latter. "Have you lost it completely?!" Jack scolded his friend as soon as they were out of earshot. "Were you planning to show her the blueprints and the operation manual next? Do you know how hard I have to work to keep us out of trouble? What do you think she was going to do, present you with a medal? You act like a baby, dude!"

"Did you hear she went inside the dome?" Richard replied, completely ignoring his friend's misgivings.

"You mean the putrid stinking swamp? Environmental remediation indeed!" Jack mumbled under his breath.

"Don't knock what you don't understand, you're not a frog," Richard tried to present to him the benefits of swamp living as seen through the eyes of an amphibian species.

"Yet!" Jack replied, exasperated. "I often worry that your next project will turn me into one!"

"I don't have the necessary capabilities," Richard teased. "Well, at least now we know why the dome is protecting the pan flutes. If the librarian found them endearing, the plant probably did too, on an instinctive, primal level."

"You should have brought it a Brenda," Jack said. "Brenda is not endearing, she looks like the thing that eats you at the end of a horror movie, only smaller!"

Richard wanted to protest the offense against his dear jellyfish, but Jack waved his hand with annoyance before giving him a chance to reply.

"We're late again, dude! My persuasive abilities can only stretch so far! Who's going to believe we're planting tree saplings at this time of day?" Jack pointed out that it was already too dark for horticultural pursuits.

"You'll think of something," Richard said, confident in his friend's coaxing abilities.

"So, what now? Do we wait for the pan flutes to multiply and take over the world?" Jack asked, as he was preparing to head towards his home.

"I don't think there are a lot of people crazy enough to enter that death trap of a dome and bring them out, but I'm sure a few of them will. It seems the little monsters make great pets!" Richard cracked up.

"And you don't think they'd come out all by themselves," Jack doubted his friend's theory.

"Not any more than your toes would decide to split and wander around all by themselves," Richard replied, very sure of himself.

"So, our librarian went inside the belly of the beast, so to speak. Visiting the entrails of a living entity," Jack couldn't help retch. "Don't you think we should tell her, dude?" he asked pitifully, his face all scrunched up at the thought of walking through products of digestion.

"Who's the baby now?" Richard retorted. "Besides, I think the putrid smell was reasonably self-explanatory. Why don't you mind spending time inside the other dome? People go there for lunch!"

"I don't think I'll ever eat again," Jack commented, with a forlorn look in his eyes.

Chapter Eighteen

The pan flutes played second fiddle for the time being, with Jack and Richard involved in the construction of a new Brenda and filling up the forms required to enroll it into the science fair. All the while, Richard's parents and sisters walked around him on eggshells, making sure he wasn't disturbed, bringing him his favorite foods and providing any assistance he happened to need.

The new Brenda was finished, packed and shipped, in a wave of anticipation and enthusiasm. This was the third Brenda already, if one didn't count the oldest prototype, and it had become more and more sophisticated, since Richard felt the need to add features with every iteration.

The one thing that didn't change was the device's distinctive jellyfish configuration, and every time he thought about that, Richard was grateful that the plant swallowed Brenda One, who would have been a dead give-away of their trespassing and meddling in things that didn't concern them. He sometimes thought about his secret weekend universe, the one where everything was in its place, the one he didn't have to share with anyone, and he felt guilty about wanting to keep this little mechanical kingdom of his from Jack, who seemed to love it as much as he did.

Things used to be so much simpler back then, before the Brendas and the pan flutes, even though he had to admit the aforementioned gadgets were running circles around anything else Richard had built. As far as the pan flutes were concerned, if there is one truth to nature, it is that it abhors pointlessness, so the plant had found an use for the creepy little buggers: they organized themselves into some sort of beehive, inside which they melted the blossoms the plant was blooming especially for them into a little metallic maze where they retreated at night. The design of the metal structure was unbelievably intricate, but in the way nature designs, not man, no two compartments alike, but all bearing a resemblance that didn't leave any room for doubt that they served the same purpose. It was wild, and intentional at the same time, and Richard couldn't help but be in awe of the ingenuity of the little creatures.

Of course, because they were not based in biology, like Brenda, but pure mechanical devices, the pan flutes didn't mind the high temperatures the plant generated when it didn't have to protect living things, but even so, he had to wonder how they managed to generate enough energy to melt steel, and since Richard didn't see how they could heat up to a few thousand Kelvins without melting themselves, he assumed they must have incorporated the plant's electrolytic properties and were molding the metal by putting it in flux.

They hummed to each other, to point out the good locations to pick falling blossoms, and worked so diligently at tidying up their metal sculpture of a home they seemed to have been designed specifically for this purpose. The mystery was solved a few hours later, when Richard noticed a real beehive hanging from an end vine close to the top of the dome.

"It's amazing!" Jack exclaimed. "This thing assimilates the properties of everything it comes in contact with! I can't believe it infused the pan flutes with bee behavior!"

"We really need to go inside the dome, Jack!" Richard said, amazed at the pan flutes' transformation.

"Did you hear a single word I said?" Jack shook him. "This thing adopts the qualities of everything that goes inside it! At best we're going to have obsessive pan flutes that like to build little machines, at worst we're going to build ourselves an anthill and insist on living inside it!"

"Or a burrow," Richard said, following the logic. "It would make more sense, size wise." He stopped for a second, to contemplate the possibility. "I hope I don't inherit the behaviors of a water rodent, I'd rather not get inside that swamp, it really stinks!"

He managed to convince Jack, though, after constantly arguing his point, and reminding him a million times that the librarian seemed to have made it out ok.

"I wonder," Jack postulated, "if there isn't a little tree frog in there, chasing pan flutes and wearing rain boots!"

"Only one way to find out," Richard smiled.

"But I can smell the swamp from here," Jack complained with a disgusted look on his face. "I'm sure getting closer is not going to make it better," he used the last argument in his arsenal.

"You know we're going, right?" Richard ended the debate.

"Unfortunately," Jack sighed.

The next weekend they started out bright and early, donning rain clogs on a sunny morning and grunting under the weight of the bags they carried. Richard wanted to make sure they had plenty of means to record and immortalize whatever they found inside the dome, and pads of paper to jot down a few notes if they had to. Between those, the bottles of water, the snacks and a change of clothes the bags were heavier than lead.

"At least it's not scrap metal," Jack mumbled under his breath.

"We're almost there," Richard picked up the pace, to reach the dome that was already visible as they passed the bend.

Richard didn't wait for Jack, he dropped his bag and headed straight inside the dome, seemingly unaffected by the dreadful odor. Jack could see him walk around, careful as if stepping on eggshells, his countenance warped by the strange refraction through the uneven glass.

"You have to come in, Jack!" Richard said. "This is amazing!"

Jack hesitated at the natural entrance of the dome, through which he could already see a little self-contained world that was too beautiful for the wretched smell it exuded. The stench of the swamp blended with the powerful fragrances of several water plants, and amplified by the heat and humidity was almost impossible to bear, but this smelly greenhouse universe was teaming with life. A swarm of blue and brown butterflies fluttered overhead, reigning over a land of water dwelling creatures, and the chirping of the tree frogs, mixed with the songs of the birds and the weird harmonic tones of the pan flutes drowned the noises coming from outside. Jack gathered the courage to step into this other world, one that had its own sounds, and its own surreal images, and, unfortunately, its own smell. Distracted by his strange surroundings, he stepped into the shallow water and was startled by the soft squish his clogs made in the wet swamp grass.

"I guess it was a good idea to wear the clogs, right?" Richard said, with a beaming smile.

"This place is awesome!" Jack couldn't help exclaiming. "Granted, the smell can choke a horse, but still awesome!" he looked around, amazed. "Is that a tree?" he frowned to make sure his eyes didn't deceive him. About half of the way up to the top of the dome, a tree had taken root on a thick branch of the vine. The roots didn't seem to fit inside the vine altogether, and were sticking out through the bottom, like those of a pot bound house plant.

"I guess one of the water rats brought in an acorn," Richard explained, naturally.

"You think it would let us climb to the top?" Jack asked, suddenly very interested, more of the plant than of his friend. "I wonder what else is up there?"

"Didn't you say it wasn't safe to come in here? Now you want to go even deeper?" Richard protested, but his friend had already started climbing the thick vine, whose metal based shell was cooling down a path through scorching foliage, trying to keep up with him. Jack disappeared from sight, his presence still made manifest by a shuffling of leaves. The birds flew out of his way, dumping a scattering of hot blossoms on top of Richard's head.

"Jack!" the latter yelled, rushing for cover. The pan flutes chimed in harmony, matching the tone of his voice.

"Up here!" Jack said, sticking his head out of the foliage. He was almost at the top of the dome, where the smaller, more flexible vines gave in visibly under his weight. "Come on, dude! Don't chicken out on me now, you don't know what you're missing! I found a nest with eggs," Jack laughed at him.

"What kind of eggs?" Richard asked.

"I don't know, they're purple," Jack answered.

"There are no purple eggs!" Richard corrected him.

"Maybe the pan flutes laid them," Jack offered generously.

"Don't be a jerk, Jack!" Richard retorted.

"Come up, see for yourself!" Jack said, once again invisible inside a sea of metal leaves.

With every step up the vine, a different view presented itself, the floor, the under story, the canopy, the emergent layer. The foliage color changed from layer to layer, and so did the light levels, the temperatures, the variety of wild life. For all practical purposes, the plant had built its own universe, and its small self-contained world inside the real one was surreal and beautiful.

"I would never leave here!" Richard said, almost against his will.

"Aha! Now you know how it does it! I would be surprised if this sneaky plant didn't ooze some sort of pheromone to keep us all smitten! No, seriously, dude! I think we should get out of here if we don't want to start building a nest on that branch, Jack pointed to a particular portion of the vine, where a nest with three purple eggs could be seen.

"You weren't joking!" Richard said, surprised.

"I assure you I am a much more serious person than you think, my friend," Jack protested, thoughtful. "Now, let's get out of here, and try not to slip on that vine on your way down, it just dawned on me that climbing trees in wet clogs isn't the smartest thing in the world."

***

"What on earth is that dreadful smell!" Carol acknowledged her son's presence way before he made his way through the door. "Good grief! Go! Change! Shower!" she urged Richard, who was only too happy to oblige.

"What are you rebuilding there, Ricky," she questioned, using the despised diminutive for good measure. "I understand those are wetlands, but it reeks like a sewer!"

"The bacteria in the hot springs," Richard apologized. "It's the sulfur."

"How can anything survive in that smell!" Carol remembered the stench and instinctively held her breath. "Surely, you don't expect to remediate that! How are things going, anyway? You promised to take us see how your project is progressing, but, judging by that smell, you're still ways off of showing results."

Richard didn't answer.

"How long do you think that project of yours will take?" Carol asked, worried that the horrid miasma was going to grace their home on a regular basis now.

"I really don't know, mom," Richard mumbled under his voice, and for once in the last year, he was telling the truth.

"Well," Jack spoke philosophically a few hours later, nursing his vanilla float with a lack of interest that worried Richard, "I guess it wasn't the aliens."

"I will never take you seriously again," Richard pouted. He was preparing to offer Jack a shoulder to cry on, only to find himself at the receiving end of his friend's sharp tongue. "One of these days, Jack..." he said again, and as always he left the affirmation open ended.

"Oh, come on! Admit it! I had you!" Jack cracked up.

"Sometimes I wish it were the aliens," Richard mumbled, still upset.

"Me too," Jack volunteered eagerly. "Well, we can't always get what we want, can we?"

"You know, my mom asked when she and dad can see the project," Richard pointed out the obvious flaw in Jack's plan.

"Can you believe some crazy person ventured inside that dome?" the malt shop owner whispered to one of her customers, in a conspiratory tone.

"I heard it smells like the dickens!" the lady replied. "Why would anybody want to go in there? And how do you know?" she remembered the obvious question.

"One of the hot spring bathers walked by the dome and saw foot prints inside," the malt shop owner said, and then continued in a whisper. "Some say there are weird lights inside it, you can see them through the glass at night," she shook her head while polishing the teaspoons. "I'm telling you, whoever got in there, they're up to no good!"

"Who would go in that God forsaken area at night?" the lady said, sipping her coffee.

"Precisely," the malt shop owner replied.

Richard wanted to say something, but Jack signaled to him to keep quiet, so they could listen to the unfolding conversation.

"They are not like you and I, those people," she continued, wise and distraught. "Hear my words, there are horrible things going on inside that dome, unnatural things. I heard," she said in a very low tone of voice, approaching her customer to whisper in her ear, "that if you are close enough, you can sometimes hear strange chanting from inside, and see shadows moving. I'm telling you, it is a shelter for perdition, what else could it be with that smell?" She turned around to put the teaspoons in the silverware drawer, and then continued, knowingly. "How can a place that smells like sulfur can be anything but evil?"

"I guess that pretty much covers it," Jack commented to his friend. "It appears we ventured into...hhm,...uncharted territory, so to speak. I guess it wouldn't be wise to mention this to anybody, you know, brimstone and all."

Richard nodded, convinced by the pertinent argument, only to remember the little conundrum Jack's cover story placed them in, with respect to what they were going to tell their parents.

"So, what should I tell my mother? Please don't make me plant an acre of desert, just to give us a cover!" he looked pleadingly in Jack's eyes.

"We, Snake! We are going to plant an acre of desert. Teamwork, my friend," he smiled encouragingly, patting Richard on the shoulder.

"But I don't know anything about plants! My mom would make me in two seconds! She's a green thumb!" Richard protested, wretched.

"Then you should hit the books immediately, we don't have a lot of time," Jack suggested.

"Where do you want me to get the plants, and the tools," Richard couldn't believe his ears.

"Details, my friend!" Jack said.

"What about a source of water? You can't grow anything without water, that's why stuff didn't grow there in the first place!" Richard continued complaining.

"Xeriscape, Jack. You always get lost in the minutia. Get the big picture and the details will take care of themselves," Jack said, very convinced.

"No, they won't!" Richard said. "When did the details ever take care of themselves?"

"Anyway," Jack changed the subject. "Go home, get some sleep, we're going to need to be well rested. Planting the desert is a lot of work!"

Chapter Nineteen

"Of all the crazy things you ever came up with, Jack, I, for once, can't believe you're making me do this!" Richard said, exhausted and sweating profusely in the unforgiving sunshine, as he tried to force his shovel through the obstinate dirt. They had been at it since the first rays of dawn, about five hours or so ago, and the meager area they had managed to till got lost in the vastness of land yet to be confronted.

"Shut up and dig, Snake, we only have a week to make this valley of tears look planted," Jack mumbled through his teeth, just as exhausted as his friend and in a vile mood.

"What do you think people assume when they see us walk into the desert with a heavy bag and shovels?" Richard asked, panting from the effort but not slowing down the pace.

"What did you want us to carry our supplies in? Glass jars?" Jack asked.

"I'm just saying," Richard gasped, struggling to dislodge a large rock from the middle of the border he was trying to define, from which the cursed thing refused to budge. "You know, if our parents wanted to devise a punishment for our creative truth telling, this would probably be it!"

"Don't mess with karma, dude!" Jack said philosophically, suddenly distracted by the fact that digging got a lot easier than it had been so far, and upon further examination he noticed he was shoveling through soft silt. "This medium is completely worthless!" he cussed under his breath.

"Just mix it in with clay, I'm sure it'll be fine!" Richard suggested, wiping his brow.

"And where do I get the clay?" Jack asked, and then, following Richard's unspoken directions, retorted. "Since when are you the expert in plantings?"

"Since you made me study them. Hey!" Richard suddenly remembered. "Why is karma punishing me? It was your idea!"

"You unleashed Brenda upon plant land," Jack justified himself.

"You made us break into the lab!" Richard protested.

"You sneaked into the factory and didn't tell anybody about the plant!" Jack said.

Richard pondered it for a bit, then shrugged.

"Still," he said. "Harsh!"

"So, what are we planting," Jack asked, "before I collapse of heat exhaustion?"

"Succulents," Richard said. "From over there," he pointed somewhere in the distance, where one of the springs had created a little oasis of greenery.

"Oh, no, that's great," Jack kvetched, "as long as we don't have to make several half mile trips to get them!"

"Would you rather have carried them from town?" Richard replied. "Besides, they're native to this area, if we have one chance in a million to keep something growing here, they're it," he frowned.

"You know?" Jack said, filling the bag with clay to amend the silty soil. "Maybe this was not the best idea in the world."

"Now you're telling me!??" Richard burst with annoyance. He looked towards the dome and got instantly aggravated. "That stupid plant made a rain forest in the middle of this desert and we can't even grow cacti!"

"Maybe we should have started by building a dome," Jack commented sarcastically.

"That's it!" Richard threw in the shovel. "I'm done! I'm not dying in this damned place! I'm going home!" he exclaimed, and then he felt both guilty and ridiculous about the protest and he headed towards the oasis in the distance to grab some plants.

"Hey!" Jack yelled from behind him. "What about the water source?"

"Details will take care of themselves, Jack! Look at the big picture!" Richard responded without turning around, suddenly irritated again.

***

The next day they stopped the planting to score a little watercourse through the petrified dirt and bring a shy trickle from the dome to the site. One couldn't tell whether it was luck or science that made it so that the dome was uphill from the planting site and not too far from it, either, and the boys were, frankly, too tired for this sort of philosophical musings.

The environmental recovery area didn't feature tree saplings, to Carol's unspoken disappointment. Despite the limitations of climate and location, she had always envisioned the boys' project as a new born evergreen forest. Carol didn't show her lack of enthusiasm, and as always she encouraged her son to continue, a little confused about his sudden shift in interest from mechanics to botany and trying to convince herself that all of his work was for a good cause.

The planted acre had served its purpose, which was mainly to be anything other than the brimstone laden dome. There was no expectation on anyone's part that it would be a smashing success. The plants didn't prosper by any stretch of the imagination, but tey didn't die either, holding on for dear life under the heartless sun. Both spiky and succulents hesitated for quite a while, unsure whether to adjust to their new home or not, but nobody was the wiser about that, because their thick and shiny foliage looked frozen in time, hiding the drama underneath their skin.

"Have you ever thought about all the things we've done lately, all because of this blessed plant, dude?" Jack asked Richard later, while they were trying to comfort their aching bodies with their usual vanilla floats at the malt shop. "I don't suppose you ever imagined being involved in propagating cacti."

"Of course not. Those things are vicious!" Richard remembered with a frown. His hands were still stinging from the pricks and his face had acquired a healthy tan from being out in the sunshine all day. He pondered for a while, and then said. "Come to think of it, I never took any interest in plants, I always found them kind of boring."

"Except one," Jack laughed.

"Yeah," Richard said, smiling. "In a way, I felt like I owed the plant one. You know, for Brenda."

"Do you realize how lucky we are?" Jack said. "Most people spend entire lifetimes without ever encountering something so extraordinary. We are like the first ones who saw the light bulb."

"Worth every fib, no doubt!" Richard agreed.

"Not everybody seems to agree with that," Jack offered, after a brief pause. "As far as some of my mom's colleagues are concerned, this situation is a nightmare, but it will surely pass, because even if life has become frightening and completely out of control, any moment now somebody will find a way to kill that stupid plant and return existence to normal, whatever that means. Quite a spectacular display of denial, especially coming from a profession specifically trained to expose and dismantle it. Even if somebody managed to kill that plant, you can't unknow its existence, at least I can't," he said, looking down, kind of sad.

"Why would you want to?" Richard said, obstinately.

"I guess it's in the human nature to fear anything you haven't encountered before," Jack said. "Heck, even I am reluctant to interact with your Brenda, even though I know you made it," he said, lowering his voice. "That thing looks terrifying, dude! You have to do something about that."

"My parents just like to pretend that the plant doesn't exist," Richard pointed out. "My sisters wouldn't care if it grew out of their own heads, as long as it doesn't interfere with their social agenda, and little Teddy, well, we're not supposed to talk about the plant in front of little Teddy, because it gives him night terrors. It seems to be some sort of scary monster to him."

"What about you?" Jack asked him directly, making him recoil from the unexpected question.

"What do you mean, me?" he asked.

"What comes to your mind when you think of the plant?" Jack eyes gleamed with curiosity, and Richard realized this was a question that preoccupied his friend for a long time.

He didn't respond, trying to find the best explanation.

"Do you remember when we went to the zoo for the first time and fed a giraffe? It was so unbelievably tall, you don't realize how large it really is until you're really close. I was kind of scared of it, but excited, too, and I knew it was a giraffe, because we all saw pictures of them in our kindergarten books. This plant is just like the giraffe, only without any prior warning. I look at it, I touch it and feel that it's hot, and still have trouble believing it's real half the time."

"I thought as much," Jack said softly.

"Why?" Richard asked.

"Brenda. You wouldn't have taken Brenda to the factory otherwise, at least not the you that I knew." Jack replied. "You might have trouble coming to terms with the fact that it's all real, dude, but I assure you that it is."

"It's not that I don't like it, it's just...snow in July. Every fiber in your body tells you that it shouldn't be there and you question whether your senses deceive you, but it's not something that's out of the realm of possibility. In fact, it even happened. It's a very rare occurrence, but certainly not impossible."

"It makes you uneasy," Jack noticed.

"It's the speed, it changes so fast! Last year it was a strange sprout that grew where it shouldn't have and now it has it's own microcosm. It improved on my design, Jack!" he complained to his friend. "And it's only a plant!"

"Aren't you the one who always says that biology is infinitely more complex than any machine man can design? The pan flutes just needed to protect themselves, and they grew shells, it's not that unusual in the natural world."

"For a living thing it isn't! The pan flutes weren't living things when I released them into the dome, and now they are."

Jack shrugged, seemingly unaffected by the status of the pan flutes.

"How are you so calm?" Richard asked. "This doesn't disturb you at all?

"Of course it does, it's just...I like interesting things. The plant is interesting," Jack smiled.

In all the commotion associated with their strange activities, the boys completely forgot about the librarian and her fondness for the pan flutes. In all fairness, they didn't give a second thought to her trips to the hot springs and were completely shocked when they almost ran into her as she exited the dome.

"Oh, what a surprise, boys?" she said, even more shocked than they were. "What are you doing here? Oh, wait, that's right, your little environmental project. How is it going?" she said, cocking her head to see the fledgling garden over their shoulders. "Coming along, I see. Can I take a peek?" she asked, rushing down the hill without waiting for an answer.

Jack and Richard hurried behind her, relieved that they didn't have to justify their presence there and running through things to point to and explain in their heads, but the librarian gave the xeric garden a quick tour and stopped to let the two in on a topic that really preoccupied her at the time.

"You know what I was thinking?" she said, completely oblivious to the fact that her water shoes, as well as a good part of her clothing, were covered in smelly muck. "How unfortunate that the plant happened to develop into this particular pool, if it weren't for the smell, the inside of that dome would be paradise on earth. So, I've been thinking," she said, looking around to make sure nobody else could hear her, "what if we help it along, in one of those other pools, one that doesn't smell. Please don't tell on me, but I managed to cut a piece of stem and planted it in that pond over there, I'm hoping it takes root," she smiled proudly.

"It's not going to root without metal!" Richard blurted before Jack had a chance to stop him.

"I kind of thought it was you," the librarian kept smiling. Jack sighed in despair. "What a wonderful job you did with this dome, now that's a real environmental wonder, right there!"

"Actually," Jack sighed again, we didn't do that much, just planted the cutting with some scrap metal, the plant did the rest.

"Yeah, that's what I heard," the librarian said. "It looks like the one at the factory did kind of the same thing. By the way, where did you get the cutting?" she asked, cracking up with laughter, watching the two squirm to make something up. "That's ok, don't answer that," she said kindheartedly. "One thing bothers me, though. I understand the wildlife, and the cross breeding, but where did the little metal bugs come from?" she looked at Richard and Jack, who at the time were carefully examining the multicolored thread on their t-shirts. "No matter," she said. "That dome the plant made, smell or no, it is a dream come true for a life scientist. I must confess that was a passion of mine in my youth, but I never had the opportunity to dedicate myself to it, at least not until now. "

The boys looked at each other.

"I bet if we plant this in another pool it will create a completely different environment, these domes are like angels, each one of them is a species in and of itself."

The boys fumbled around, uncomfortable, trying to find a way to extricate themselves from the situation.

"You have been inside, right?" the librarian said. "Please tell me you have been inside!"

Richard nodded in agreement.

"Isn't it something? Well, I have good news for you. Today I thought I saw a flying metal bug. How they keep their balance in flight with those tubes on their backs is beyond me!" the librarian said.

"How?" Richard asked, flabbergasted. "Did they grow wings?"

"No," the librarian tried to remember. "It looks more like they are hovering. By the way, if you're going inside the dome, don't try to collect any plants or insects. It seems to be very protective of its components," she mentioned as she was leaving. "Nice garden, you might want to try some sedums."

Richard and Jack watched her leave, wondering how exactly did she find that out, and what specimens was she trying to collect, and between the fearsome smell, the digging out in the middle of the desert, the strange encounter with the librarian, Carol's unreasonable hope for a coniferous forest and the constantly changing environment inside the dome, their minds got drained of all thought and feeling like a wrung cloth.

"Well, at least we don't have to worry about her telling our parents," Richard commented as he saw her disappear behind the bend.

"What in the world would make you think that?" Jack brought him back to reality. "In fact, that's probably the first thing she is going to do. Oh, well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, we had a good run," he resigned himself to fate.

"Don't you just wish we were her? She doesn't have to make stuff up to get inside the dome!" Richard coveted bitterly.

"Yeah, but she can't fit through the fence," Jack smiled, reminding his friend of the advantages of not being a grown-up yet.

Chapter Twenty

Naturally, the librarian told the boys' parents and teachers the good news that Richard and Jack had singlehandedly made the second dome happen, very excited about the spirit of adventure the two had displayed and praising the innovative approach they took to create something so extraordinary. To her great surprise, but not Richard and Jack's, who wished they could have moved to a parallel universe where people didn't disapprove of the plant and anyone associated with it, the boy's parents didn't take lightly to the news that their son, whom they trusted to know what he was allowed to do and what he wasn't and who was raised to never displease his elders in the slightest, was the main protagonist in the propagation of something they considered the annihilation of their values and way of life. Nothing, not the increased factory output, not the new foundry, not the plethora of new devices that clearly had made her life easier would ever convince Carol that the plant wasn't evil, and by association, she considered anybody who interacted with it evil too. The fact that her son was one of 'those people' was a serious blow to her maternal fulfillment, and something she mourned going forward, making sure her grief weighed down heavier than a tombstone on the hearts of the other family members.

Tom was conflicted about the plant, since he kind of liked the fact that he didn't have to break his back to provide and the future looked just a little safer and brighter than before, but then again, in his entire marriage he did everything in his power not to displease his wife, so he did what was expected of him and had a stern conversation with their son. That conversation was the last he and Richard had, because from that day forward he decided to give his son the silent treatment.

The teaching staff at the boys' school set up a meeting, involving everybody in a brainstorming session, to figure out what would be the best approach to the problem. They were in a bit of a bind, because, despite the very creative truth telling about how the dome had come to life, the boys didn't really do anything wrong, or broke any rules that they could think of, and they felt really uncomfortable punishing them, for fear that this would squelch their scientific curiosity and their innovative spirit going forward. Some of the teachers pointed out that what the boys had done created a dangerous precedent for children, encouraging them to get involved in potentially hazardous unsanctioned activities, and besides, the parents had expressed unequivocal outrage for such pursuits, so the school had to do something to support their disciplinary efforts. At the end of a fiery debate, where both pros and cons were vehement, the teachers came to an agreement around a compromise, which consisted of an hour of detention twice a week for the remainder of the semester.

Jack's mom was furious. Not only she didn't have the time to deal with her son's disobedience, because she was overwhelmed with duties and responsibilities, both at work and at home, but she took the fact that she wasn't able to sniff out Jack's extracurricular activities as a personal failure, one that she wasn't willing to own up to. In order to maintain control over the dreadful situation, she decided that it was in Jack's best interest to see one of her friends and colleagues, who was specializing in child psychology, for counseling, to draw out the roots of his rebellious behavior.

The librarian, who really didn't mean any harm, was saddened by the turnout of events, and she softly expressed her support for the boys' daring endeavor, but since she wasn't a parent, or a teacher, and therefore didn't have any authority over the decisions made, she soon returned to her favorite activities and put this sad story behind her.

So, Jack and Richard were left to carry out their sentence for no crime committed, at least none that could be proved, since Richard had enough sense to at least not go over the break-ins at the factory and the lab. They did so with a martyred attitude and an expression of hopelessness that even Carol couldn't muster, not on her best day. Their teachers, most of whom hadn't agreed with the punishment in the first place, felt uneasy watching the two suffer in detention while their friends were out, free to engage in enjoyable activities, and for this reason they did their best to avoid being around the boys unless they absolutely had to.

At the end of the month nothing had changed, other than the fact that the jolly librarian, who felt uncomfortable carrying the guilt of having made the boys' lives so unpleasant, took it upon herself to pick a new hot spring, one that was charming and in no way smell challenged, and plant another cutting, together with all the scrap metal it would ever need for the development of a new dome. The project was so fascinating to her that between the observations and the monitoring of the strange life growing right in front of her eyes, she forgot about Richard and Jack altogether, and only recalled their fateful involvement in passing, literally, because she had to pass through their garden 'project' on her way to the new dome.

Because his parental disavowal also included banishment from the making of any mechanical devices, Richard had a lot of time on his hands, time which he spent laying in his bed, with the headphones blasting tortured guitar music in his equally tortured eardrums, watching the passing of clouds through the dense foliage of the tree in front of the window and wondering what happened to the pan flutes, who, for all he knew, could have evolved a proto-society and started making themselves rudimentary tools by now. Jack visited sometime, a lot more careful now than before. Despite the fact that their lives weren't exactly enviable, he said, there was ample room for things to get significantly worse. During those visits the two shared whatever they managed to learn from the world of the living outside of their much diminished universe, information that was sparse and stunted by lack of mobility and social connection.

When one says that life is not fair, one doesn't usually provide an example to go with the adage, so its words go to get stored somewhere to the back of the brain, unprocessed. There they joined the debris pile of other untested proverbs, like 'easy come easy go', or 'the early bird gets the worm'. One had to admit, if only to salvage logic and causality, that the last one was at least statistically flawed, because, for all practical purposes, the two of them were those very birds, and yet, alas, had found themselves now wormless. Jack, whose imagination hadn't been dulled by his recent misfortune, usually pictured the unfairness of life with an 'and how did that make you feel?' at the end, like a never agreed upon sisyphean penance to go over the same situation again and again, with absolutely no breakthrough in sight.

Richard's science teacher, who never agreed that the boys should be punished, tried to sweeten his sentence and entered Brenda into several science fairs. Brenda won a couple of them, but since Richard's parents had expressed in no uncertain terms that they would take any activity in any way related to the darned plant as a direct challenge to their parental rights, Mr. Feldman never told the boy anything about it.

Diane's relationship with her boyfriend was on again, off again, and the unfortunate romantic interest managed to magically metamorphosize from Prince Charming to Attila the Hun every other week, with all the crisis mode associated with the process. Of course, the entire family was very supportive of Diane, regardless of which side she happened to be on at the time, and for once, Richard was a little relieved that his unfortunate confinement prevented him from having to contribute his expected share to the family drama.

***

"Not to blind you with the brilliant flash of the obvious, but I TOLD YOU SO!" Jack yelled the last comment, to make sure his view of the situation didn't get lost in one of Richard's denials.

"Ok, so you were right," Richard said.

"I was right about what?" Jack pressed him.

"I should have kept my mouth shut and I could have saved us a lot of hardship," Richard said.

"And?" Jack continued prodding him.

"And..." Richard didn't know how to continue his phrase.

"And you shouldn't have trusted a grown-up to keep your confidence and support you when you're in trouble because they always think they know better and don't feel in any way responsible with respect to your life!" Jack continued, furious.

"Well, you know she planted another dome, right?" Richard tried to appease his friend.

"That's great news! I hope she sends you a picture, which may be the only way you'll ever get to see the inside of it without getting in trouble! Oh, wait! You can't receive it because your parents won't allow it! Way to go, Snake!" Jack hissed bitterly.

"On a happier note, how is your life lately?" Richard tried to change the subject, only adding more gas on Jack's emotional pyre.

"I'm in counseling with a child psychologist, thank you for asking. I got to revisit every second of my life, forwards, backwards and out of sequence, I discussed any and all childhood trauma that I might have been subjected to, I looked deep inside myself to find my true feelings and guess what? I can't share them, 'cause they're the ones who unleashed this lovely medical specialty upon my life in the first place. It appears that I'm defective, Richard, and I owe it all to our enchanting adventure. This situation is almost bad enough for me to give up making up stories." he threw a quick glance in his friend's direction, to see if the latter would take the bait. Richard didn't react. "Not!" Jack cracked up. "And how is life treating you, my friend?" he returned the favor.

"Well," Richard hesitated to answer, trying to get the flavor of bitterness and defeat out of his mouth. Ever since his life had turned sour, he had this strange sensation that everything he ate tasted like ashes. He gathered his courage and continued. "My mother mourns me like I'm dead, and my father decided to behave as if I don't exist. I'm a ghost with a heartbeat, Jack, quite an interesting experience, to tell you the truth. You like interesting, right?" he retorted sarcastically.

"Not going to work on me, man!" Jack replied.

"What?" Richard said.

"Guilt. I'm immunized already. One can only go over the same wrongdoing so many times before one completely loses any emotional attachment to it," Jack responded.

"Doesn't matter anymore, does it? Water under the bridge. Sand past the top of the dune. Cat no longer in the bag. Horse out of the stable," Richard started enumerating, to see how long it would take for Jack to lose his patience.

"Alright, alright!" the latter finally cracked. "I get the picture!"

"Hey, did you ever find out what happened to Brenda?" Richard asked, trying to change the subject again. "I overheard it got picked, but I couldn't get any details."

"Yeah, dude. It won a couple of fairs, I heard Mr. Feldman tell the principal," Jack was suddenly thrilled to be able to give his friend good news for a change.

"It doesn't make any difference now," Richard said, suddenly depressed. Memories of his previous days of valiant exploration flooded him with images from when he ruled the factory floor over the weekends. Those cherished images drilled agony into his psyche and planted in it the beauty of the plant at dawn, when the first rays of sun shone on the shimmery leaves, casting halos around them.

"Don't you ever say that, dude! You are the maker of Brendas! You are the Brendamaker! Nobody can ever take that away from you!" Jack started to give his friend a pep talk, and the passion in his voice made Richard realize how much his friend admired his talent for making gadgets, even though the latter had never shown it before.

"I didn't know you cared about this stuff, you always make fun of me, man," he said, slightly embarrassed, but also a little less disheartened than before.

"Of course I care, Snake!" Jack said, with great sincerity. "You're my best friend!"

They stood quietly for a few moments.

"Well," Jack broke the silence, "at least there is one good thing in this slow rolling disaster of a situation. Sneaking out the window to come here lifts the requirement for making excuses, this way we don't risk getting everyone's knickers in a knot over some mishandled story detail!" Jack said, gazing into the distance through the glass of the dome. They were sitting high up on a branch close to the top of the enclosure, and from there they could see a panoramic view of the city, all lit up at night, with cars moving on the streets, looking smaller than toys from that distance, and the contours of the factory, the old puffing dragon, barely noticeable without its characteristic cloud of smoke. Its chimneys were adorned with leafy garlands, as if they were preparing for a weird nature holiday, and their massive presence obstructed a good portion of the second dome, whose gleaming surface only made itself manifest as an eerie presence behind them. On the other side of the dome, two hot springs away, the young plant was showing significant progress, although it was still exposed to the elements, from what they could distinguish through the scant light of the moonless night.

"Is it growing a dome yet?" Richard asked Jack, leaning forward to see better and almost losing his balance.

"Careful, dude! I don't want to see you go splat! There's sharp metal down there!" Jack said, and after he reassured himself that Richard was safely perched on his branch, right next to the nest of purple eggs, he tried to make out a dome shape in the darkness surrounding the young plant, but wasn't able to. "I don't think so, not yet," he concluded. "No worries, it's only September, it will build one up really quickly once cold weather comes along."

Richard nodded in agreement.

"You do realize that we must be either stupid or crazy, probably both, for walking three miles through the desert in the middle of the night to climb a hot vine that grows in a swamp, with no light. Maybe my mother was right to send me to a psychologist. Should I share this moment with him, you think?" Jack turned to his friend.

"Don't even joke about that, dude!" Richard's mood soured suddenly.

"Well," Jack looked into the distance again, trying to find his home in the profusion of tiny roofs, all of them looking more or less the same under the clear night sky, bedazzled with stars. "It's not the most comfortable of surroundings, but you sure can't beat the view!"

"I guess," Richard agreed.

Epilogue

Jack's thirst for the interesting and the unusual was never quenched, and since he was so good at making stuff up he decided to put his talents to good use and become a professional liar. A fiction writer, that is. He flirted with journalism for a little bit, but after his own unpalatable experience with revelations and consequences, he decided that this field really wasn't for him. He did some travel, learned a lot from his journeys, and a few years later, when he had the means, just to put the frustrations of his youth behind him, he bought a piece of land and planted a dome on it, which became his retreat and occasional writing studio. Of course people thought that was odd, but then again, writers get a pass on being eccentric.

The jolly librarian moved heaven and earth to start a council for ecological preservation and have the plant declared a protected species. She used up all the good will and favor she had with the city hall to designate the wild domes area a nature preserve, and got the funds to maintain and expand the zone, which had grown significantly larger over time, with the promise that revenue from the stream of tourists would benefit the city as a whole.

Diane outgrew her youthful romantic drama, went to college and became an attorney. She rented a little space downtown, quite close to the science lab, actually, and put up her shingle there. She had quite a successful practice, to the pride and joy of her parents, who never ceased bragging about it.

Stacey joined the Navy, to the shock of her friends and acquaintances, who had always pictured her as a little live Barbie. She advanced through the ranks with honors and became a rear admiral. The only qualms Tom and Carol had with a career like that was that, for obvious reasons, it took her quite far from home, but they resigned themselves to see her over the holidays and visit whenever they could. Tom liked to joke that their daughter had turned him and his wife into real globetrotters, now in their old age.

As far as he was concerned, he worked at the factory/plant habitat/petal foundry until his mid sixties when he retired from it, just as he expected, comfortable enough to enjoy his golden years with Carol and tackle a few projects he had put off over the years, for lack of time.

Little Teddy was a bit of a troublemaker all throughout school, it seems that personality reveals itself early and his endless temper tantrums weren't just the terrible twos. His father decided to guide him towards athletics, thinking that strenuous physical effort might burn off some of that extraneous energy. Teddy wavered between sports and several other fields, started college a couple of times and then, through a weird confluence of circumstances, got to try photography and loved it. He became a traveling photojournalist and contributed to a few reputable periodicals that Carol never failed to display on the coffee table, for all the guests to see.

The malt shop owner kept tending store way past her retirement age, out of concern that whoever it was that took up from her wouldn't have the curiosity and communication skills to keep it the hub of news and social activity in town. She finally found a young apprentice, whom she taught her craft and entrusted with the rich history of the place, and she handed him the keys to the store, her heart finally at peace.

Mr. Feldman continued teaching at Jack and Richard's school for many decades, guiding generation after generation of children through the wonders of science and the challenges of science fairs. He ended up teaching Diane's children, too. All three of them.

Mrs. Jenkins went on spearheading her efforts to keep reality from interfering with the way she thought life should be, and continued being an outspoken advocate for the restoration of good old fashioned values. She had a small but faithful following of devotees.

Richard went to college to study mechanical engineering. He put together a few of his old projects, together with a few theoretical studies, presented them to the scientific committee and received a research grant to develop biologically based machines. Grace to his first successful attempts, the grant became permanent, and he funneled all of his efforts into becoming one of the pioneers of this new field. Over a decade, he set up the infrastructure for a department of bio-mechanics inside the school of engineering, department which he ended up running. He never stopped advocating for the ethical treatment of bio-based mechanical composites, and he treasured as the most important accomplishment of his life the fact that he managed to convince the scientific community to qualify them as life.

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About the author

Visit Francis Rosenfeld's Blog at

www.francisrosenfeld.com

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Other books by Francis Rosenfeld

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Terra Two

Generations

Letters to Lelia

Door Number Eight

Fair

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