Plantagion

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

This is how I remember it.

It was several years ago, when there was still hope. Hope for the human race. It was the year 2099, and we were on the verge of a new century. December thirty-first, and everyone in Pothem was in a festive mood. A new century… A new way of life… But this wasn’t just the eve of a new century, it was the eve of The Revolution.

I was in my lab, working late. I always worked late on holidays, not because I wanted to, but because I didn’t like talking to anybody. It was snowing, and it was the kind of romantic snow that my boyfriend loved to walk in. Oh, Eryn. How often we used to walk in the park, hand in hand, talking about our futures. How funny it seems, looking back on those moments. Why talk and talk about futures that only existed in our dreams?

Anyways, in the lab. I was working one of our latest experiments. When I say “our,” I mean the  Plant Experimentation Lab, or the PEL. The main goal of the PEL was to create the perfect agricultural plants. Founded in 2045, the year after of The Drought, the PEL has been trying to perfect the crops that we used to grow in our farms. If it hadn’t been for The Drought, the PEL wouldn't've had to been created, and none of this would’ve happened…

The Drought was a man-made disaster. In the Third World War, which started in 2031, in which 46 countries had been involved, The Coalition of Paraguay released a massive amount of dry air and heat up and down the Americas. Although the plan backfired, the PEL and similar institutions have been formed up and down the Americas to make plants that grow in the new climate. Back to the lab...

The experiment I was working on was my biggest in the eight years I had been working there. I was on the verge of discovering the formula for the perfect apple tree. I had been commissioned to work on it several months earlier, and it had taken hours of dedicated experimentation and scientific notation to get that far. So, on this holiday, I stayed late not only to avoid other people, but because I was on the verge of one of the most important discoveries in the history of this company. Of course, I hadn’t been working on it alone. I had a whole team of scientists, but they had just gone home for the night. My lab was filled with apple trees, and I had been continuing to test until ten o’clock. I was getting very tired, and I could already hear the muffled celebrations starting in the city’s Green Square. I was very tempted to go join them, but instead I walked over to the kitchen corner of my lab to make some coffee. That was when I heard the noise.

It was many muffled klumphs, the sound of dirt and soil falling to the ground. This sound was well known to me. When all of my team was working in the lab at the same time, something usually fell over. But my whole team wasn’t there, and I was the only other person with access to the lab after hours. I spun around, spilling my steaming pot of coffee all over the floor. What I saw amazed me. All of the apple trees that had been stationed at various research tables had vanished, the tracks of dirt led to the emergency exit of my lab.

Plants have been growing in intelligence ever since The Drought. The PEL, in its early years, worked on developing the intelligence of the plants that had survived The Drought. They had to ensure that if another mass drought happened again, plants wouldn’t die out. But as the early scientists continued to experiment, they did not realize that the plants were growing even smarter than their tests were showing. The plants started to develop a primitive language, and some even developed limbs that they used to move around in extreme cases. The scientists called these plants the Intelligent Plants, or IPs. It took the scientists a while to realize the extreme intelligence of the plants, so they tried to destroy all the plants that they had created. But the damage had been done. Because the plants had become so smart, they found new ways to maximize reproduction, even in the worst environments. This mass reproduction was too fast for the scientists to contain, and the offspring of the parent plans were extremely smart, and continued the cycle. The government had to set fire to entire cities to stop the Plant Reproduction, as we call it. After The Fires died down, the government was confident that they had killed all of the IPs. Many thought it was over, and, along with government officials, they put in place strict laws regarding plant experimentation.

But there were those who doubted the fires had been enough to kill off all the plants. They were always trying to push the government to investigate the labs of PEL to see if any intelligent plants still existed. But the government ignored them, and this turned out to be a horribly miscalculated decision. The plants had been experimented on so much that they could adapt to any climate. Any climate. So, although the government believed they had brought about the extinction of the Intelligent Plants, some had survived The Fires. This mistake was one of the factors that had kept the IPs alive and caused The Disaster.

I dropped the pot of coffee, and it broke into shards on the tiled floor. Get to the Emergency Operation System, I thought. The Emergency Operation System, or EOP, was built in to the lab in case anything went wrong. And this was most certainly an emergency. I ran over to the panel, lifting it up, setting off an initial alarm. I then entered the 10-character Emergency Code. The first nine characters, although they seemed quite simple, we're emergency. The last character, another simple idea, was a number. This number was a number between 1 and 9, a code that demonstrated the severity of the emergency. 1 being a complete disaster, ranging to 9, meaning a lesser emergency, like a water leak. I thought about it for a fraction of a second, and then entered the last digit. 1.

I knew that once the initial alarm had gone off, when I had lifted the panel, the government had already contacted the police and fire department to be on standby, but the number after the emergency code would be a deciding factor on how the government would respond. I knew, as was the protocol, that the government would call off the fire department and the police once I entered the number 1. They needed more, uhh, suitable authorities to handle this “complete disaster.” Special Circumstances Department would be summoned, along with the National Disaster and Terrorist Unit, the Hazardous Material Department, and the Central Forces. The number I had just entered confirmed that the city needed a full evacuation, and that the time that it took for the authorities to respond would be almost instantaneous. One minute, at the most. One. But, at that time, I did not understand the disaster at hand, For not only did the plants escape from my lab, but from all the labs at the PEL. I had done the right thing to press the number one, but I didn’t know that it was the same number being entered in all the labs. It had been fifteen seconds since the code had been entered. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Thirty. Forty-Five. The seconds ticked by, and I started to worry that the authorities weren’t coming. Fifty-Six. Fifty-Seven. Fifty-Eight. Fifty-Nine. Just as the minute of time that guaranteed the authorities would be there ran out, I heard the screams.