“Are you suggesting a double standard between plant and animal life?” she typed.
“Obviously,” his answer came back.
“How can you think that?”
“How come it’s not obvious?”
“Oh, I see now,” she wrote. “You’re a velocity bigot.”
“A what?”
“Anything that can’t outrun you is fair game.”
“Ha-ha,” George typed.
“I’m not joking,” Pandora joked. “And this isn’t over.”
Next, George detailed all the stuff he couldn’t eat anymore, Pandora stopping him when he reached cheese and ice cream. “Honestly, I don’t even know who you are.”
“George,” George typed, as if in answer. “George Jedson.”
“Which is exactly what the pod George would say,” Pandora typed back. “Nice try, space fungus.”
Playful ribbing: that’s all she intended. They couldn’t have everything in common; where was the fun in that? A little verbal sparring over a harmless topic. Not that she didn’t argue her points like she meant them—failing to appreciate, yet again, what a miserable medium texting is for sarcasm.
“You know veganism is a luxury, right?” she poked.
“How so?” George typed back, as he knew he was supposed to, though truth be told, he could do without this side of their relationship.
“Well, I live in one of the few parts of the world that allows me to scold vegans for their privilege because lichen salad is not a thing—not a thing humans can live on, at least.”
“You might be surprised,” George tried. “Have you ever had an Impossible Burger?”
“Listen, the indigenous diet here is pretty meat heavy, including whale if your people subsisted on that stuff for generations. And as far as trucking in some lab-grown vegan crap, the carbon footprint is going to be way higher than me killing a caribou in my backyard. Not to mention that plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but you’d rather eat them instead.”
“*Sigh*”
“You know Hitler was a vegetarian, right, called chicken soup ‘corpse tea.’”
“Please see previous *sigh*.”
This was the playful part of their relationship—until it wasn’t. Because George was serious about saving the planet. He also wasn’t keen on animal suffering, and—if they were going to be so audacious as to code consciousness into a machine—well, they needed to accept that animals might be conscious too. “Even a hamster’s better at image processing than most commercial AVs.”
“Okay,” Pandora conceded. “Let’s say animals have little animal souls, tasty though they may be. Are you saying that plants don’t?”
“You’re not seriously going there.”
“Oh, I’m seriously going there.”
“Okay,” George typed back, although the truth was more like he was stabbing the keys with his fingers. “Have at it.”
And so Pandora did. “Have you ever watched how plants move when you level the playing field?”
“You mean like time-lapse photography?”
“Yep. Your average, lowly field is like a vegetable ballroom,” Pandora typed, adding, “Those puppies can dance.”
“Those puppies are tracking the sun, and what you call movement isn’t an act of free will but simple cellular growth. The sunny side of a stem does a little more photosynthesis, grows more cells than the shady side, and voilà, the stem bends.”
“Did you just google that?”
“I’m just saying how it is,” George typed, a bit more gently, having concluded that he’d won this round of vegan versus vulture. “Your dancing plants are an anthropomorphic illusion.”
“This isn’t over,” Pandora shot back.
“So you’ve indicated.”
If intellectual intercourse was what stood in for the sexual kind between them, what happened next was probably inevitable. Which is to say, George got the clap—logically speaking. Transmission vector: the internet.
Out of curiosity, he’d run a search on “plant consciousness” to gather more ammunition to use in their food fight. What he found was some serious research showing that plant life and animal life shared many of the same basic behaviors—as well as seventy percent of their DNA. One study demonstrated that plants can communicate with one another, warning of predators and taking measures to protect themselves by secreting toxins or emitting aromas to draw in different predators to feed on the predators feeding on them. Another showed that while trees in a forest might appear to be separate, they’re as networked as the World Wide Web, their roots connected underground by fungal tendrils like Ethernet cables. Another showed that a mother tree will divert resources to her saplings to compensate for their growing in her shade.
George cupped his forehead as he looked down from his screen at the vegan lasagna he’d brought up from the cafeteria, gone cold and congealed as he fell down the rabbit hole of his research. He found the sight now disgusted him, and he was tempted to slide it into the wastebasket, but for the thought that what was done was done. The plants murdered in his meal’s preparation wouldn’t come back because he decided to abstain halfway through eating them. And consigning their corpses to the trash seemed especially disrespectful, in retrospect.
And so George took the elevator down to the ground floor, stepped out the front door, and went looking for a piece of ground to return the remains to, in hopes that maybe there was a seed of something still alive in there, somewhere, with a future ahead to enjoy.
Roger was the first to notice the toll George’s increased abstention was having, thanks in large part to his actually being able to see his client. “What the hell happened to you?” he asked.
“Enlightenment,” George said.
“If by that you mean you’ve lost weight, I’m afraid I agree,” Roger said. “And too much, by the way.”
“Too much what?”
“Lost weight. You get any thinner and they’ll have to take in your skeleton.”
“Take in?”
“Alter,” Roger said. “Like a tailor.”
“Oh.”
And so it went, Roger doing most of the talking, George responding in monosyllables and looking like he might pitch forward into the camera. Finally: “This is pointless,” Roger declared, preparing to end their session early. “I’m writing you a prescription, and I want you to get it filled. I’m prescribing air. You need to take it with a meal, not on an empty stomach. The cafeteria’s free, for Christ’s sake. Go eat something. It’ll do you a hell of a lot more good than talking to me.”
“Is that an order?” George asked.
It hadn’t occurred to Roger, but . . .
“Yes,” he said. “That’s an order.” And with that, their session ended with only two more to go.
51
“That makes two of us.”
That’s what Gladys had said—had teased—just before her circuits went back down. And it wasn’t like Pandora was dense; she knew the implication. The subject of boyfriends had been raised. Gladys’s declaration suggested that she, too, had a boy friend or boyfriend. But which? More importantly, in what time frame? In which of her brain’s oniony layers did this mystery man reside? Was it Grandpa Herman? Alan Turing? Some white-haired Romeo from down the hall? But the more desperately Pandora needed to know, the more Gladys’s available RAM seemed to shrink.