Finally, the time had come.
But there was no sense rushing to meet it, so she poured herself a cup of coffee and selected a single cookie and ate it and chewed every mouthful and forced herself to taste every bite and she put her thoughts in order.
Her long, arduous graduate work refurbishing polar bears under Dr. Hammerneck, the unbearable old asshole.
Her years spent barely able to afford breakfast every other day.
Her sixteen total revisions on her thesis from ground zero, transforming it from a modest piece on reticulating koalas into a greater Oceanic GUI into a thoroughly radical yet eminently well-grounded hypothetical blueprint on the long-term reinsertion and patching of urban megafauna.
Dr. Nomann, PhD. It had a ring and a necklace and a whole damned bracelet to it. And now, after all those years, the first jewel was about to be added to them.
She opened up the document, cool white and blank as a baby’s face, and typed:
Fern 2.0
Then she stared at it for a while, sipping her coffee.
***
Reimagining an entire group of this magnitude was a hell of a first project, but she had heavenly credentials and the hellish scars to prove them. Her word was trusted. Her mind was wanted. Her expertise was needed.
So. First draft. What did ferns really need?
She tapped her thumb against her forefinger five times, gulped the last bit of coffee, checked her hands for crumbs, and typed for six hours.
Then she got up and stretched, walked back over, deleted half of every other sentence, resorted everything, turned it into a blueprint, turned the blueprint into a proof, turned the proof into a certainty, formatted it, inked it, blotted it, licked it, sealed it, and sent it.
Then she had dinner and went to bed and slept the sort of weighty, reassuring dreams shared only by cats and infants and murderers.
She woke up the next morning, had a nice breakfast, opened her mail, and read the follow criticisms of her design:
‘Inadequate.’
Ten minutes later, after ten thousand years of internal screaming, she had changed everything in her head and prepared herself to spend the next twenty hours reconfiguring reality to match it.
***
This time it said ‘Undirected.’
***
Four complete redrafts later she phoned her workplace.
“Oh! That’s the spam filter!” said the helpful, eager young man at the desk.
“Thank you,” she said.
“We’ll take you off that.”
“Thank you.”
“Have a nice day.”
“Thank you.”
***
“Too technical,” was the reply. “No vision. We don’t want to just have ‘fern, but better.’ Fern 2.0 must appeal to all that the public has come to expect in a fern while also opening entirely new avenues of the fern paradigm. We want it to be familiar, but novel. Surprising, yet welcoming. Bold and comforting.”
Seven days of intense meditative autotrance sing-a-longs later, inspiration struck her with the force of a thunderbolt in a magazine and she worked through two nights and three days before editing and submitting her draft.
It was a very small fern. It was a very small fern that contained many organelles that were themselves very small ferns down to the subatomic level, and could link together itself to form very large ferns up to the size of redwoods. She called it the fernctal, and attached a small 20-page annotation suggesting possible use cases for it, ranging from children’s playgrounds to designing planets.
‘Too ambitious,’ came the reply. ‘And the redwood department really doesn’t like your attitude.’
The next day’s mug of coffee was bigger, and the day after that she just took the pot.
***
She submitted a fern that adopted the characteristics of any environment; hues, shades, texture, and almost the very essence of the landscape in miniature, sublime in every detail. It was rejected – ‘no practical applications.’
She submitted a fern that was robust enough to withstand freshly-cooled lava indefinitely, and could grow on any substrate. It was rejected – ‘not sexy enough, no appeal to the customer base.’
She submitted a fern that was as hearty and filling as roast potatoes and as smooth and delectable as the finest gelato. It was rejected – ‘too appealing to animals, would be eaten into extinction.’
She submitted a fern that came with its own accessories and a powerful grip and a small air-powered dart launcher. It was rejected – ‘unsafe, might put someone’s eye out and contains choking hazards.’
She submitted a fern that was as soft and plush as a teddy bear’s soul. It was rejected – ‘not machine washable.’
She submitted a fern that could absorb sixty times its mass in water and retain it flawlessly until wrung out. It was rejected – ‘too expensive to manufacture.’
She submitted a fern.
Then she got up to put away her fern 1.0 control group and realized she was holding her latest project: a fern that could survive on less energy than a single-celled bacterium, and she’d just turned in the wrong plant.
Ping, went her mailbox.
It took half an hour for her to muster the courage to walk back to her computer.
“Excellent work! Fern 2.0 is approved. Very creative. We’ll keep your resume on file.”
Dr. Nomann, PhD, read the letter exactly once, carefully and slowly, cross-checking sentences and verifying each word. Then she nodded, closed her files, threw the computer out the window, and ran away to New Zealand.
There were a lot fewer people there. But there were plenty of ferns.