In a red rocket-ship within miles and miles of Earthen scrapyard, lived Ed: a 12-year-old girl, an orphan, and the most talented scientist humanity had conceived.
Her eyes were large, inquisitive saucers, beyond which housed an endlessly crackling world of formula and fantasy. She wore a white duster that she treated as a lab coat along with black cargo shorts that jangled from the sound of tools. Her feet were calloused and delicate as she ballet-danced across the scrapyard. She was the only human I'd known, and the most special one, too—anyone thriving in this hopeless place had to be.
Ed spent her days hacking into the abandoned spacecraft circling the Earth. The sky was glutted defunct satellites and atmospheric debris. With a holographic keyboard, Ed hacked into the abandoned satellites of Earth's atmosphere and crash-landed them within her junkyard. She'd drive over on her repurposed hover-cycle and scavenge her catch—chrome panels, food and water, medical supplies, circuit boards and memory drives and wire and tools (always tools!).
Our world was gray, rusty, sunless. The humans had fouled up tremendously, having somehow squandered the gift of light. I gazed at the drifting metals, discarded alloy slowly rotating in clouds of rust. The anti-beauty and rot sickened me—both emotionally and physically. Since Earth was in a sad state, I, a sunflower of said Earth, was a half-dead tragedy. My stem was crinkled. And my soul(?)—in shambles. I should've died a long time ago but I stayed around. The condition of the scrap carnival I lived within told me that I was the last of my kind. No sun, no sunflowers. I couldn't go out like that. I had to survive. Dying as a side-effect would've been a pathetic way to go.
Yet for all my willpower I still languished in front of Ed's ship, trapped in arid, metal-poisoned dirt. I raised my flowerhead above the piles of chrome paneling and stripped bolts, unwilling to be erased by scrap. But a sunflower needs sun, all of which had been blocked out by our debris-cluster of sky. Every time Ed re-positioned a satellite, strategically clearing a sunbeam path for me, another spacecraft drifted into the newly freed space. Without fail, the metallic constellations always patched themselves.
Ed squeezed a dish sponge over me, "Sorry, little guy. I'm doing my best."
Ed was lovely, the greatest, my best and only friend. But I missed my father. Every flower is born knowing of Apollo, our god, but these days none of us had ever seen him. And though I strained daily to find the sun and track its energy, the polluted sky intercepted the rays, stealing Father's light.
One day, Ed sped back home, almost careening into her rocket. Something about her latest fishing haul had her excited. She potted me, plopped me on her desk, and injected me with a strange, sleepy-making drug—the likes of which I swore they'd only used on injured humans.
"Ed will make you better!" she declared, right before firing up her miniature drill.
She brought the drill close, all while sing-songing a pleasing gibberish: a bot over here, a bot over there, bots everywhere! She gave me a jolt and tinkered around as I drifted off to sleep...
I awoke, seeing in gold, with numbers scrolling in one corner of my sight and a gear turning in another. There was a health bar at the top of my vision, indicating the plentiful vigor that righted my petaled body. I possessed data and internet and charge levels—along with scripts and programs which intuitively calculated my inner and outer welfare.
And while my organics were purely sunflower—my petals, stem, seeds, and firmly potted roots—I was mostly sunflower robot now. This sudden technological framework was shocking, completely foreign, but I'd never felt this good in my short, sunless life. Inside—ants. Nanos, my data called them, but they functioned as ants as they crawled through my flower veins. The ants commandeered my reconstructed body as a system of tunnels, a physical, vibrant colony.
My pot even had wheels! I skated across the operating table—just a coffee table, truth be told—pirouetting with outstretched leaves, balancing my pot upon a single wheel. I'd knocked some stray bolts onto the scratched, splintered floor—but what's a proper flourish without a casualty or three(?).
Ed squatted before me, leaned her head in close, and stared into my flower head at my newly installed cybernetic eye. "Do you see Ed? Ed sees you."
"I see you, yes." My smooth voice shocked me; I expected to sound like a grainy voice-to-text program.
"Right? Just wanted to give you something shiny. But you can turn it off. Everything inside your head is adjustable."
My head...When I searched the data-mine within me, the activity occurred in my flowerhead—like a human. How clever!
"Tell Ed your name." I never had a name before but as far as I knew names were human things. And with the way I felt—the mobility, the vigor—I'd obviously ascended.
"Supreme," I declared.
"Supreme" she delightfully echoed.
"Yes, because I have to be to survive the way I did."
"Yay Supreme! You did the best. I know, I was there."
"Thank you!" The gold inside flashed and flashed. Ed smiled; I flashed. Technologically speaking, this correlated to friendship.
"Are you ready for our mission?" Ed suddenly asked.
Mission? I wondered what we were getting into, but the details honestly didn't matter. I inhabited my new life ready for anything. It was so exciting to have a future. The synapses in my flowerhead buzzed and crackled. The feeling had me dizzy and giddy. Was this how Ed felt? The joy of madness. The euphoria of hope. "Sure Ed," I said, "Tell me more."
"I want to see stars," she said.
"There must be some mixed in with the satellites."
"Nope," she said, pulling up her holographic keyboard. "I got the readings—pure scrap."
"Wow." That was all I could manage. Humans were truly limitless creatures.
"And we'll see the sun, too!" Ed declared.
My gold sensor blinked uncontrollably as Ed ooh'd and aah'd at my luminous flowerhead.
Then Ed ran outside like a lunatic, arms outstretched to the dilapidated sky. "Isn't it beautiful, Supreme?" I stared above at the castaway technology that repulsed me but so inspired Ed. The gunmetal sky of day had transitioned to the matte onyx of nightfall, upon which the spacecraft beamed. The scrap-lights smiled upon us. Faraway and luminous, they were her stars.
Me, I saw beyond. I dared to imagine the sun's rays, I dared to fantasized about the shape of my father.
"Yes, Ed. There's beauty out there. Together, we'll find it!"
*
A funny thing: the ship came alive. Its name was François.
Ed wanted to take off right away but François refused to cough up the coordinates unless we made The François Royale shine. The rocket hadn't taken off in months, the last time being when Ed went to board a junker she couldn't safely yanked out the sky. François knew that other people—and other François AIs were out there—so the demand was for us to "dress him up" as he so put it. I implore you, dear friends, to consider my dignity. And that was that.
So I went outside the ship and rolled along the front end with a wax rag while Ed worked the rear. Ed griped about the tedium of cleaning but I was a flower, stationary by nature, and moving along the ship surface with my wax-on-wax-off technique was the most exciting thing I'd ever done. Everything was novel, everything was an adventure, especially as I was still discovering my functions. The wheels included a magnetic pulse that allowed me to grip to metals, so I glided along—a bit recklessly, I admit—and slipped off the surface.
But I began to fly! Hover, really. My wheels had retracted and air boosters jutted out, buoying me. So the cleaning continued, me floating along, flipping, turning, tumbling. Every motion was a trick, a new experience, something lovely for me to show off to Father when we finally meet.
And the ship was a thing of beauty, the most luxurious junker you ever did see. From a slow perusal you'd never know it was a salvage job from the advertising satellites of popular red-and-white themed brands. But I remembered the targets of all her fishing expeditions from the past year: Target and Netflix and Chik-Fil-A and Wendy's; Canon and Toyota and Coca Cola; YouTube and KFC; Seafood City and Jolibee—and about seven different H-marts. She'd harvested their sheet metal and letters, and fashioned a THE FRANÇOIS ROYALE sign from the multi-fonted hodgepodge. And on this day, we'd made it shine.
"Did we do good?" Ed yelled.
"Yes, my dear," François said. "Thank you.'
And so we got into the ship and we were off.
Or, well, François chased Ed around the ship with mechanical arms, forcing her into her spacesuit—while he also used other wall-arms to secure me in place.
Then we took off!
It was fascinating, knowing that Ed was looked after like that. It made me relieved that even though she didn't have human parents, she had a François, someone to throw a seatbelt onto her as we entered the turbulent, many G-forced ascent.
Once we arrived in space, François took over completely. The AI was the real captain, the ship daddy if you will. Everywhere at all times, he adjusted the various environmental settings for our safety and comfort. During leisure, he activated the zero G settings, allowing us to unburden ourselves with weightlessness. He restored gravity during turbulence, even launching the endlessly extending seatbelts towards a stubborn, stir-crazy Ed—snatching her, straitjacketing the straps over her before clicking into place.
It was my first voyage inside The François Royale. And despite it being a junker cobbled from salvaged orbiters, it swam through space like a dream. My gold sensor spun erratically. The stimulation of awe was a foreign and lovely feeling.
As Ed programmed the autopilot functions, I slipped out through the below-deck tunnel beneath the captain's quarters which safely led to an exit hatch. And hooray—the outside, the cool caress of deep space. My metal skin frosted over but I maintained functionality—I was made of the same stuff as ship. I couldn't be iced; I couldn't be stopped. I casually glided along the ship's gleaming red surface, taking in the sights.
That was my job anyway: to see.
Upon my perch I'd seek out the heat signatures of nearby satellites—of which there were many—and I'd report back to Ed on the promising finds. Rather than the spacecraft fishing Ed did from Earth's surface, we'd now board them instead, gathering the supplies needed to see the sun and stars. And with the sheer amount of vehicles floating among us, Ed could've survived there for lifetimes. On all sides, nothing but junkers. It should've been obvious to us when looking up at the scrappy sky. But flying through that space was an exceptionally jarring experience.
Up close, the satellites appeared as towers, as endless, unscalable walls. Each one was at least 30-40 times larger than our vessel. The satellites had the flags of different countries, and sometimes the logos of aeronautic companies. Even the expanse of space sometimes emitted the unforgiving claustrophobia of a labyrinth. No feeling, no warmth, no view of the cosmos to provide even momentary relief. During these stretches of road, I went into battery-saver (and though Sleep Mode was the preference, I wanted to keep Ed company).
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Ed herself was absolutely rapt. These weren't the stars she was looking for but these were stars of a kind, electric ones, salvageable ones. We skimmed the immense surface of a Nike satellite, it's distinct logo gradually passing across our sights. "SWooOoooOooooOOoSH~!" Ed said, her palms flush to the windowpane, trance-like. Soon after, she arrived to another spacecraft, an enormous mass of blacked out steel. Ed read the white lettering as if it were a magic spell: "BALENCIAAAGAaa..."
Moments like these dragged me straight out of battery-saver—I knew Ed would want to board her branded stars. She hastily threw on her spacesuit and approached me wearing her comically oversized helmet. She appeared as a tremendous, walking bubble. Her big head was sunflower-like and this made her more my leader. "Fishing time!" she said. "The Balenciaga, I need that." After a twenty minute interlude to the ad-craft, Ed had stitched the metal framing of a small Balenciaga across the chest of her spacesuit.
And onwards we went, continuing our acts of fishing. François had parked us next to our salvage target as me and Ed floated through the below-deck exit. This time we stopped by a red-and-white salvage grounds: François ran the show, after all. We took the usual things, the usual organics and mechanics that preserved and improved our lives. But Ed also did one more thing: she took the plants.
Turns out, we were in the LE FLUER AMOR flower shop—the remains of it at least.
We first took a cactus. Then a succulent. A dried rose. A Venus fly trap. Within them were the meager kernels of life. Crumpled. Beaten. The cactus spines were thin and blunt, the succulent browned, the tulip and rose petals hung limply, and the Venus fly trap had cavities. Petrified in the forever dark of the cosmos, they'd given up hope yet stubbornly clung to their horrendous, objectively worthless lives. I knew the feeling of it—the lunacy of survival. The curse of living doom.
But we found them. And so Ed laid them on her desk, potted their limp bodies, and activated her trusty drill. A mason jar full of nanos skittered on her desk.
Ed will help, I telepathized.
Is Ed another name for sun?
In a way.
Whatever, just save us.
I watched the whole process, even the parts where the cactus became grotesquely littered with holes—what gore, what horror!—as Ed unleashed the nanos, the eager, life-affirming ants, into the plant.
My eye remained glued to Ed as she tinkered within one plant after another, hmming, grunting, giggling, and finally, ah-ha-ing. And right at the ah-ha! moment my sibling was reborn. The gear flashed in deep gold on the corner of my vision; the joy hummed through me. Me and Ed were great, I liked it with just us, but the sensor blinked with hope. Siblings! The gear blinked, and the flowerhead turbine spun and spun and spun.
Before I simply bloomed—but now I knew how it felt.
The flowers had transformed: the cactus had metal needles and a chrome-fortified husk; the succulent's naturally red leaves were replaced with red paneling from a floating Jolibee billboard; the dried rose remained at its potpourri best—with nanos holding together its hanging leaves; and the Venus fly trap now had new teeth, mechanical ones that spun like chainsaws. Ed, clearly, was having too much fun.
We were a crew, a scrap bouquet, a family. Each of us were grateful to Ed—and beholden to the slave-driving of the great François (Welcome aboard crew. Let's re-plate the hulls. These asteroid dings are adding up, if I do say so myself).
And of course we obliged, magnetizing along the underside of the ship, patching damage, healing François after we ourselves were healed. We were healthy, happy, and eager to see the sun.
*
During our downtime, the bouquet of us paraded behind Ed like in the duckling story she'd told us, a tale about a duck who didn't want to hog all the fun but the other ducks were boring and stayed at home. Ed gave us kaleidoscopic circuits, data deftly arranged into realized dreams. And because we were gifted broader lives, sentience and mobility, we began to think more deeply about our mission. We were going to find Father, to share with Apollo the gift of our festivity.
We wondered, too, if Ed herself had parents. But we decided not to broach the topic. She was always tinkering with the ship programs or maintaining the ship wiring or scouring the net for possible software upgrades for our ship daddy François. She also played with us, making friends of us, the injured and scarred. She even gave us names to match the branded scrap she soldered to our flower pots: Supreme, Gucci, Vlone, Chanel, Dior.
We were inspired by her love, her care, her electronic dedication—which only increased the questions within us. But whose taking care of you? Where is the light that feeds you?
We thought about it for hours, for days. The trip to Father was a long one. Once beyond the debris field of Earth's atmosphere, space was large and black and seemingly empty. The biological footprint of man and beast and fauna and star could only fill so much. The dark dominated our traveling days so we sought to explore the extent of our mechanical functions. Our wireless data transfer. The ant-nanos that sustained us like a back-up battery. The ability to see through the camera lenses of our sibling bots—with admin permission of course. By five days' time, we knew how living looked as the Supreme-Gucci-Vlone-Chanel-Dior bouquet.
It didn't matter who was who. We were one now.
The only mind we couldn't search through was Ed's. The formulas, the inspiration, the pragmatic playfulness of our ship's captain. We knew and loved her actions, but her heart—her good, good heart—remained in shadow.
Every day François required a daily break (I must rest now. Ta-ta!), so Ed switched up the ship AI to a different adult frequency. A butler, a space traveler, a scholar, a bounty hunter. We wondered if any of the voices belonged to Ed's father. The nosiness turbo'd through our systems. But she'd quickly dispel our curiosity with laughters, with insisting upon a game for us to play. Without our noticing, our silent queries dissolved. Hide and Seek. Duck Duck Goose. Tic, Tac, and Toe. Ed played, we played; all matters were settled with fun.
Soon we arrived to trafficked space, warmer, full of rocket emissions and space ports and humans eating eggs and toast. And we were closer to the sun as indicated by the road signs, multiple ones advertising THE TEMPLE OF THE SUN. We weren't the only ones seeking Father's light.
We hacked the data of other ships, searching for answers regarding their intentions with our father, but all we found were programmed coordinates; no reason for sun travel found in the algorithm, no algebraic expression of heart and mind presenting themselves in the journey toward Apollo. Perhaps the humans just liked to sun-bathe? We couldn't understand their insistence of seeking Father, then chasing him away, only to once more seek him out. It was maddening while also strangely affirming—because our systems were more complex than we originally thought. I, Supreme, was greater than the humans. Who would've thought? The revelation was stunning.
We soon arrived to a diner space station called The Greasy Spoon. There were also several other stations nearby serving different human needs: snacks, overnight beds, ship fuel, alcohol. Everything was less abandoned and therefore cleaner, more spacious. It's not that humanity was any more mindful about consuming the cosmos, it's that there was just so much of it. The human ants hadn't yet tunneled through the star systems. They were simply at their starting point and as I stared at the exhaust valves of The Greasy Spoon, I prayed for the best.
"Let's stop here," François said, pulling us into the port.
"Why?" Ed asked. "I have tons of food."
"You need a hot meal," François insisted.
"The ship food can heats up. Ed is fine!"
"A hot meal is an way of speaking, a turn of phrase dear Ed. Yes, the meal is hot. But I've heard that a meal with human contact is even hotter—warmer, so to speak."
"Oookay, fine."
She hopped into her big-headed spacesuit and we trailed behind Ed into the diner entrance.
The waitress nodded to us so we seated ourselves and observed the facility. People observed us too; we wondered if they had plant life where they lived, if the situation was as dire elsewhere as it was on Earth. Why the stares? Were we that different? Perhaps, our strangeness made us special. When the waitress came, Ed ordered pancakes for all of us.
"All of you?" The waitress cocked an eyebrow.
"Yes, ma'am!"
"Okay," The waitress turned to us. "I'll bring you guys some water."
"Thank you," I said.
When the food arrived, we stared at the pancakes, the melted butter and drizzled syrup. Until now we'd only ever seen Ed packaged food. Ed dug in with her fork, tearing through her share. The water pitchers were brought out and my gold sensor brightened. The thirst for water hadn't triggered in me since the transformation but my sensor signaled to consume it, that the biology in me would thrive from its contribution. Our bio-ports opened from the base of our stems and a root slid out and settled into the pitchers, coffee pots and otherwise. Chanel the Venus ordered the bottomless pancakes, the chainsaw teeth buzzing like actual lawn equipment. We pushed our own food to Ed and she ravenously ate our buttermilk offerings, crumbs dotting her cheeks like stars.
"Check please," she said.
"You from Earth?"
"Yes ma'am."
"It's on me."
"I have a little money."
"I'm sure you do dear," the waitress said, eyeing our bouquet. "You're resourceful, that's for certain."
"So I pay?"
"That won't be necessary, hon. Just take care of yourself."
"Okay then!"
"And please," the waitress now laid her hand atop Ed's, "Come back any time."
Ed stared up into her eyes, absorbing these moments of care, before responding. "Thank you, ma'am. Ed knows the coordinates!"
"Great. Safe travels, hon."
After leaving we pressed on toward deeper space, where the diner stations were increasingly sparse, where the intergalactic billboards advertised attractions that were quiet and quaint. Mountain ranges, crystal caves, hiking trails, temples. I clung to the outside of the ship, maintaining my spotter duties while my siblings worked the insides, swiftly cleaning and repairing before the whip-cracker François completed sleep mode. Another billboard depicted a golden sunset: SUN TEMPLE — NEXT EXIT. Audibly, we oohed—and Ed aahed. Amazement wasn't a language, it was a feeling, and traveling on the cusp of Father's light galvanized us anew. Ed programmed the coordinates for the temple and the AI responded in a cowboy lingo: ETA 30 minutes—Yippeekayay! before thrusting into overdrive.
THE FRANÇOIS ROYALE landed on a golden planet—literally so. My system's compositional analysis detected gold mineral in the dust that rose from the ship's initial impact. Gold specks sparkled by the windows, floating slowly, hypnotically, and we as Supreme-Gucci-Vlone-Chanel-Dior tracked its movements, our stems steadily craning with the progression of the condensed ultraviolet. Ed, though she was zero parts sunflower, harmonized with our natural obedience to ultraviolet presence: her neck craned, her eyes opened with awe, she'd calmed her combustible self to allow the light passage inside her. Finally, the dust floated beyond the ship's windows, freeing us from its spell, restoring full autonomy over our mobile systems. Ed did the same; her pupils shrank and her consciousness suddenly renewed, and she emphatically pressed a large button on the pilot's console which opened the exit hatch. "Doors open, space cowboys. And remember everyone, see the present with both eyes." The voice was casual. The console setting described the voice as SPIKE.
The voice confused us but Ed seemed pleased with it, so we withheld our queries. By this point we'd learned to stop searching, scanning, or analyzing everything related to Ed. Sometimes the secrets of our loved ones will come to us. This is what we hoped with Ed. She'd shown us worlds, and so we were content to wait on her to show herself. She was open but obscure. She played and joked and complimented us, but her origins were mostly unknown.
The five of us marched out in single file, Ed at the front per usual, and once we touched the sun-infused grain of the planet, a man stopped us. He was bald and wore a golden monk's robe—the planet's minerals were entrenched within the fibers.
"Hello, young travelers," he said.
"Hi!" Ed saluted.
"You've come a long way, haven't you?"
"We played games so it went fast."
The monk kindly chuckled at Ed and then peered at us, the bots, "I can't remember the last time I've seen a sunflower. You've done well, surviving on Earth."
"We were electronically drawn from seeds," I said.
"Even so, it's miraculous. Your cosmic fortunes have led you here."
We nodded. The man's radiant energy captured our words. But we wanted him to know us. We created a holographic slide deck of our memories via data transfer. The shared flowered memory was a sad story. One of electronic waste poisoning our minerals, of the orbiting satellites we were now composed of obscuring the much-needed ultraviolet, of the people that loved us, spoke to us, watered us, leaving, shooting away from our wilted community in rockets. It was a miracle that Ed stayed. It was even more miraculous that we made it here. We'd cry if we could but it was a dead history now.
We'd always been drowned in history, stained by its rust, but we had to go on. We opened our petals; we accepted this moment with every mechanical eye in our possession.
"My, my, my," the monk said. "You are all so strong and lovely. The sun smiles upon you."
The monk began walking away and we followed him; his gentle energy compelled us so. The path was lit with floating orbs of Father's light, the golden globes massaging our flowerheads. Along the walkway were plant species unknown to me, each flower exuding vigor; the flowers were healthy, watered, proud. We arrived at the edge of the cliff; the view was prehistoric. A fine hydrating mist presided over the entire valley of plant species. The only metals were minerals—nothing manufactured or welded to be found in this glowing expanse.
Everything bloomed. The holy land was here.
"Ooooooh," we said.
Nobody aaah'd.
In the distance, we heard The François Royale's thrusters firing. Ed had snuck away; she was leaving us. We boosted toward the ship, straining for more speed but Ed had only given us leisurely, levitating capabilities. The Monk kept up with us at no more than a power walk—how embarrassing. We didn't have speed or speakers or signal flares even. We were flowers that could speak but without decibels to back our voices—
Suddenly, a trigger, another program coursing through our framework. Apollo had gifted us our blooming. Like the flowers of the golden valley, we bloomed, shining in our respective lights. We were the flare, we were the light to call our best friend Ed. The François Royale ascended but quickly settled into a hover—Ed had seen us. The ship floated toward us and François's voice filled the air, harassing Ed with orders. "My God, Ed. Put your helmet back on! Are you mad, girl? The ascension pressure will kill you. And SEATBELTS. Why are you so viciously allergic to safety restraints. SIT, GIRL. SIT!"
The ship spoke to Ed the way we envisioned Apollo would speak to us. The care and doting were reassuring on a primal level. The nanos in my soil buzzed with security. No search terms or context files in my library were available to describe the feeling inside me, the banter and bond between girl and ship. Ed and The François Royale were a match made in comet trails.
"Will you be back?" I yelled.
"Of course. Ed is getting food."
"But you have provisions!" The rest of us yelled.
"I'm craving something warm."
"Pancakes?" we asked. We already missed Ed; we already were panicking. Our systems had synced up into one bouquet, one heart.
"I'll bring some back. Ed promises!"
Promise...That was all she had to say. The seeds of our worry disintegrated. We opened our petals, our arms, are mouths. We stretched open every part of us that we had, wanting her to understand our strange, floral hug.
"Ed hugs you back!"
Yes!
"And next time I'm here..."
We waited with anticipation. Every ant within us stood at attention.
"I'll bring back friends!"
The scrap-lights of abandoned craft, their advertisements and logos, zoomed through our minds. Our future siblings were out there somewhere, and we'd already begun to name them.