leroy enters a patio
out of breath, head waving wildly between phone in hand & surroundings
desperate (ly) looking for something he is increasingly sure is not here
it should be, according to his phone
but according to the rest of reality, he is alone @ the moment
then beric flavvers appears to him from a tree
BF: hey kid
you look like you’re in need
of some assistance
L: yes hi i’m looking for the job fair. but i guess i have the wrong address?
BF: oh. no,
it was here.
you missed it.
L: shit. really?
BF: yes
it ended like three hours ago.
L: shit. is there another one?
BF: no,
this was it.
L: shit.
awk. beat
then, BF spins cogs
BF: but you need a job,
eh?
L: yes, desperately.
BF thinks some more
BF: are you
afraid of heights?
L: not particularly. why?
BF: are you
allergic to any pollens or lichen-spores?
L: not particulately. why?
BF: are you
or have you ever been
a member of a floral rights organization,
here on campus or otherwise?
L: not politically. why?
BF turns to camera & winks
BF: THIS IS Y.P.I.: WE'LL TAKE EVERY KIND!
K: Leroy gets the job, then,
w/ just that Pythonesque abridged interview
L: (baseline tree technician)
K: w/ the Arbolean Custodian Division.
C: B. Flavvers turns out to be his boss's boss, and head of the department. The middle in-house bigshot that he meets turns out to be a little robot, BABE THE BIG BLUE BOX
L: i re-meet b (+ B4OX) on the first training day, just a week after i first laid eyes on the flavver in that copse
six other bodies join leroy in a semi-circle surrounding BF at BBBBOX's monitor & keyboard
BF: ACD is charged with encouraging the positive growth of all the foliage on campus. for the most part our job is automated; we get to sit back and watch the grass grow, mostly
as trees are by nature the show greatest on earth i believe
& we help flora out a bit by monitoring all of it with microchips embedded in root-tendril tips
all the data gathers here, by waves it self-collects
and cycles thru this thrumming CPU behind the bulkhead
600 TB worth of data parsed a second
total storage twenty petabytes: it's practically a record
she churns out patterns, fine-toothed byte-sized comb run 'cross the pesky information foam
and turns it into correlated phenomenontologic graphs
makes predictions of how it'll grow
offers tips as to what will grow most
executes the plans, too, in the usual case
BABE is plugged into the YPI mainframe and will often take on behavior of her own accord
it's ok: she's a better gardener than all of us combined
trust me
she does most of the heavier lifting in terms of regulation and planning
she disseminates seeds and adjusts but she can't take care of it all; no box made to take on everything
e.g. weeding
so that's where y'all—we—come in
this big blue box tells us where we should go
and what we should do
to keep the flora 'round here running smooth
that's it
that's your job
if things get out of hand
in the case of an emergency
or if there needs be special trimming for upcoming events
well, we take care of it when we get there
but otherwise
[BF does this manoeuvre: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]
any questions?
P: every hand except leroy's goes up
L: every person save me wants to know what's going on
i'm still surprised just that i have this job
L: after four weeks on the job it's abundantly clear to me everybody wants what we do to get done, but none wants it for their task to be,
except for maybe b, don of flowers himself, that odd Brazilian masochist who’s taken on the greenest path to guide and be guided along in as his lot in life
the kind simple man would take a dryad for a wife were he to find one in the
once a student way back when
now charged with keeping everything fresh & leafy thru the maintenance of QUAD B
whom he treats more like an old friend than metallic machine, e.g.
BF: *ollie ollie oxen free*
BBBBOX shuts down
L: and just as well he knows how to sing to it
because the rest of us have no idea what's going on
and i'm like zealously intrigued by how he does the things he does to make BABE do the things she can do
how he whistles and she dances vicious shifts of blue
what finessing of the system he can dish out—whip-flash fast key'd sequences typed w/such speed i can't read the line till it's done and then already it has happened
i'm just a lowly treeborne cowboy-to-be watching this man perform wizardry
so from the peanut gallery i am driven crazy to mimic beric and eschew the boring tasks that ACD has to do
and go for the big ones: yank the stakes a bit higher
one of the trickier assignments the division handles is sequoia refurbishment
the campus proper is surrounded by a ring of giant redwoods
twelve trees so old they predate the name change of the campus itself
here among the tallest i find an employment offering
they have an opening in the jetpack’d contingent
that’s the job i take
(replacing Jamila, who just graduated)
K: he is given her old MITnAS, a golden suit of metalloid layers powered throughout by mini fission thrusters on the back
BF: to be clear: only me & my former boss know that it's a fission engine
all the students assume plain rocketry; we think it's better not to mention
E: the suit is über bulky w/ an aureate faceplate
when turned on the whole suit glows a ruddy dull pink, a safety neon choice
rosacean extremis the outermost micron-thin metallic layer
twenty million single sheets laid thick in simple summation
pink and gold like cloudy royalty he floats w/in the MITNaS
L: this is a simple glory, floating here
C: he doesn’t know its source (re: fission); doesn’t really know to ask about its power
only knows (this leroy does) that he’s been given flight by beric flavvers
and is weirdly thankful for this weird old man who dropped by to tell him hi that one time he was all alone in that foreign grove
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