Time and Dirt
(First Day -- Previous Day -- Day 9 -- Next Day)
Day 9
Heliopause Colony on Planet Vertumna, Medbay
“Solane... I’m here again... do you know how much I miss you? Can you hear me at all? Today when I was in the greenhouses, harvesting the mature spinach and planting new baby spinach plants from the seedbox into the long hydroponic trays, I thought I could hear *you* for a moment, singing the song we used to sing as children when replanting seedlings. The plants really seemed much happier after it, didn’t they?
But then I turned around and there was no one, just the whirring noise of the automated greenhouse. It was so disorienting! All this new technology we are now using... neither of us grew up with it. We used to mostly just plant in the open field, remember?
It makes makes me sometimes feel so alienated from the plants, and the plants must feel similar. We are stripping them from their natural environment, putting them in this highly controlled artificial closed system where they are isolated, constantly monitored, entirely depending on technology for all their needs and basically manipulated into growing. We aren’t nurturing them like parents, we’re reducing them to living... products.
Like I know it means they are largely safe from herbivorous xenos, they will never be thirsty or hungry, and we will have a stable supply of vegetables allowing for more variety throughout the year rather than just on holidays, but still. It makes me feel so empty inside sometimes.
The plants will also never adapt to Vertumna if we keep sheltering them that way, and the ecosystem won’t be able to make room for them. They will forever stay strangers, and we alongside them if we depend on them. And what if our hydroponics fail again? We can’t repair it here, we would need hardy crops in that case... You know, I would normally be more optimistic, but with the way things have been going...
You were my source of confidence these past years, Solane. I know I could count on you, everything hurt less with you around, calm like a rock. Growing like a flower. And... and... I just want to see you bloom again. See the warmest smile anyone has ever seen. Let your red eyes burn in mine...”