Day 3467 aboard the Minimally Viable Habitat began like every other: slowly, clinically.
Nora woke up, showered under the fourteen-second spray of lukewarm water, then headed to the garden.
Or, as she liked to call it, the botanical farm for genetically challenged creatures, who, for reasons only they understood, sprinkled her day with a heavy dose of interruption and chaos.
It’s been 3468 days since earth was officially abandoned for a life among the stars, and the plants had proven that, even after all this time, they truly fucking hated space.
In fairness, Nora thought as she plucked at the worn down keypad that allowed her access into the climate controlled rooms, she couldn’t really blame them. The amount of water, formulated from the passing atmospheres of uninhabitable planets and other nearby colonies, was barely enough to sustain them. The soil, manufactured and over processed, lacked nutrients for truly viable growth. The light, artificial, usually, unless the orbit was favorable and the nearby hatches pointed towards a passing sun, was lackluster.
Then there was the sentience.
Around 200 years into the search for a permanent planet, something had struck the far side of the Minimally Viable Habitat. By then, what remained of the International Space Station—now just… home—housed only the farming quarters. The living quarters weren’t far, connected by a precarious bridge of metal and churning hatches.
It’s not known what exactly left the bite-sized indentation in the shell of the farmland walls—large enough to decompress the space, setting off alarms and sending the workers into a panic, thinking the only food source was soon to be sucked into the abyss—but what is known is that whatever it was changed something.
After repairs were carried out, heart attacks were averted and the air returned to a breathable state—the workers found something.
The plants, for all their trying-to-die qualities, started behaving…oddly.
First, it was the beetroot. Hardy and nutrient dense, it fared the best in these unfavourable conditions. Nora brushed a hand across their leafy green tops, smiling to herself as they shivered in response as she made her way towards her latest project. Beetroots were her favourite.
You see, beetroot is an unassuming vegetable, so when strange shoots began to sprout from the sides of a select few batches, the workers were intrigued—but thought it a strange happenstance, a genetic anomaly as the vegetable sought out additional sustenance it would never find. And so, they carried on farming.
The story has been churned and twisted over so many years. The version Nora chooses to believe is this one: A select few workers started to feel… things.
Working amongst the plants, hands in the soil and dark crescent moons crusted under fingertips, they began to sense they weren’t the only thing in there. There was the “hysterical” worker who screamed about something touching them. Then, there was the next one, the one who took over from said hysterical worker, who said they had the insane urge to try speaking to the beetroot.
Nora smiles as she relays the tale to herself, sighing as she plonks down into the cracked plastic covering of an overworn chair. She opens up her planner, stained with soil and water droplets, and begins inking in her next entry.
“Third cycle of plant rotation complete, soil quality reads as—”
She glances up at the monitors.
“ —fair. Humidity levels a steady 83%. Beetroot colony have expressed—”
After those two workers, three more came forward to express strange goings on within the beetroot area of the farming station. One worker, a senior Phylogeneticist who was supposed to be studying how plants can be genetically engineered to live off of less than 1ml of water a week, took an interest.
Nora brushed a hand over the well-worn cover of the journal they kept, vowing to indulge this afternoon and re-read one of the entries. Working here, in this area, had its perks.
The Phylogeneticist, named Peter, took samples from earlier batches of beetroot—pre impact-event. In his notes, he said the only samples still available had been partially composted, so his stats were skewed by decomposition. Nevertheless, he prevailed, slicing, stewing, adding chemicals, working on tinctures, observing the cells and their shape. All was well.
It was only when he took a small sample from a few post impact-event batches, the ones where workers had experienced… things—interestingly, those batches were right up against the impact-zone wall—that he reported extraordinary findings.
“Plants appear hard to remove from soil….”
“Cell walls appear warped….”
“…strikingly more like human muscle tissue…”
A ferny leaf brushes the exposed skin of Nora’s ankle, and she reaches a hand down to shoo it away, focusing on charting the ships current trajectory and registering the next time the sun will be appropriately placed for natural photosynthesis—she’s working on how to harness this to improve plant reproduction, dull but needed considering the population boom that’s occurring.
The leaf is persistent, tickling a trail along her ankle, under the edge of her trouser cuff and dancing across the top of her sock. She chooses to ignore it.
Once Peter had determined that the cells were different, he took his findings to the crew. Not the leaders, or the ship Captain. No, they had brushed off these concerns as absurd ramblings of soil-dwellers—something to joke about over a glass of pear-wine, one of the few fruits that had taken well to genetic modification so the trees were only a few feet tall.
Peter went straight to the workers, those who had experienced these strange occurrences, who no longer spoke about them openly and stayed away from the rest of the ship, branded “stir-crazy” or “space-junkies.”
He’d written how, when they’d finally released the air-hatch and allowed him in, there was a shiftiness—an air about the room he couldn’t quite pinpoint. He’d laid out his findings, explaining them, probably too technically, to the gruff-voiced, seldom talkative manager of the farming section. Then, he’d written, there was silence. He felt his face heating, thinking he’d come in and over-explained cellular malformations to a bunch of workers who, by all accounts, had been treated pretty poorly by the rest of the population.
Then, something extraordinary happened.
Peter wrote that the gruff manager shifted his gaze, finding the eyes of a small, brightly coloured individual who introduced herself as Elena. Elena’s eyes were alight as she took Peter by the forearm—a gesture, Peter had written, that sent a shiver down his spine.
Nora smiles as she remembers. The tickle at her ankle feels more persistent as multiple ferns tangle around her calf. The tale of Elena and Peter is something her mother had relayed to her a thousand times over her childhood.
Elena had taken him to the wall—the one where the impact-event had happened and the metal was still warped from the quick welding repair—and stepped aside.
After that, the details of the story had been lost to time—even the journal had pages missing—so no one can be entirely sure what Peter saw that day. All that is known is that what we knew of vegetables, of “living” things, and of our role in maintaining life aboard the Minimally Viable Habitat was changed forever.
The itching ferns at Nora’s ankle have traversed her pant-leg and are making a valiant effort to tickle up and under her sweater. Throwing down her pen, she ushers them into her palm.
“Fine, fine. I don’t even know why I bother trying to get any work done with you around.”
Lifting her hand up, she levels her gaze at Beethoven.
His lush, elongated ferns retract to a more reasonable size as she glares. Ripe, rounded cheeks, dusted with soil, glow hot as he averts beady black eyes to somewhere on the ground.
Beethoven is the most persistent of the crop.
Next, is Professor Dirt. The oldest of the senti-beets and a cranky old thing who likes to bite the fingers of workers who get too close to whatever patch of soil he’s buried himself under in an attempt to avoid the children.
Including those two, plus the three croplings still yet to sprout, they have a healthy population of eighteen sentient beetroot rumbling around the farmlands—causing mischief and chaos and largely inhibiting the work of the farmhands attempting to harvest or tend the non-sentient plant life.
“Have you looked out the hatch today?” His ferns perk and dark eyes slide slowly to meet hers. He gives nothing away, but his shiny complexion tells her all she needs to know.
“Would you like a hand up there? Planet Euphoria is coming into view soon.”
Ferns bounce vigorously as he nods, already scrambling with red fingertips gripping onto her palm to scramble up her shoulder.
“All right, all right. Let me do it, or you’ll fall off again and that’ll be on my head.”
Beatrice and Gerald always await, their small red palms pressed to the thick glass.
Beethoven, along with the rest of the inhabitants of the Minimally Viable Habitat, have been awaiting the descent to Planet Euphoria for fifteen years. Finally, it’s only a few short days away.
“Lush green grass, soil, water, a nearby sun…” She raises him onto the ledge, resting her cheek on her hand that grips the cool metal. “Our new home.”
By Elvie Grace.
Featured image by Christin Noelle on Unsplash.
