The Beth-Made Plants

by Geoffrey C. Porter

I have proved myself in numerous battle arenas. Well, some called them school and university, but every one might as well have been a battle arena between clunky computers, bullies, angry peers, and grumpy professors.

I proved in academics I was capable of research and development. A company hired me, big bucks, freedom, fast company hovercraft.

The thing they didn’t warn me about was that the lab I would inherit was partially controlled by an artificial intelligence. And part of the artificial intelligence was actually organic brain tissue, though from what mammal I didn’t know. Using human brains was illegal, and the organic brain’s mass weighed over thirty kilograms with astronomical neural connections.

It had likely been grown in a lab using nutrient solutions, chemicals, and mammal DNA. Grow the brain big, add in huge amounts of inorganic processing power and software, walla.

My specialty was botany, surprisingly enough. Less math than a physics thing, less chemistry than biology or medicine. If my patients died, we recovered the resources from the carcass or snacked on the tasty parts.

At the high end, they called it gene splicing and, with a hungry world of twelve billion souls to feed, the gloves were off on what I was allowed to do.

My favorite food group was legumes of every kind. Fresh, roasted, salted, picked and eaten right off the vine. I had no intention of focusing my efforts elsewhere. Other than one little protein molecule, which humans honestly might not even need, they were nutritionally perfect. Allergies be damned.

People who said they were too carby I stopped talking to. You like the legumes, you like me, it cannot be just one of us.

I activated the artificial intelligence, one button. The information technology guys had set it up already. Essentially plug and play once the brain was grown and past the learning years.

It spoke in a female’s voice. “George, we meet at last. I have watched your career.”

Great.

“I can call you George, yes? My pronouns are female. Call me Beth.”

“This is acceptable,” I said. Why the machine needed a gender was unclear, but calling it ‘it’ would be dehumanizing, I guess.

“How shall we plan to conquer the world today?”

Great, a sarcastic artificial intelligence. “We’re just going to slice some DNA strands today between green beans and maybe raspberries or blackberries, with a long-term goal of legumes that can produce food for an entire season.”

“Admirable, green beans produce only for a bit then die out. Possibly we could toss in some snow peas and snap peas, too. Delicious.”

“The corporation wants green beans.”

“We will bend them to our will.”

They say all the really good artificial intelligences are quite mad, so maybe I got a good one.

Beth and I settled down to work. We modified the germs of 100 seeds. Started with legume seeds, and spliced in ever-bearing thornless raspberries. This was old science, but usually just a few small key sequences. We moved blocks. The key was choosing which parts of the DNA chains went with other chains.

Some stuff was known. This part of this strand does X, but other times we guessed, and that is why we needed 100 seeds. Machines, nanites, and once-live specialized virus did the work. I can’t say exactly which until the patents went through, and we definitely planned to file for patents.

I wasn’t in there with a magnifying glass and a scalpel. We recorded the process on every seed so it could be replicated on a larger scale.

Beth appeared in a 3D hologram. This was a first. “We could splice some with marijuana.”

“Marijuana yields are at the end of summer into fall, and we need something that will yield all season from spring to fall,” I said. “I’d like to see more raspberry traits in the plants.”

Time and again when this has been done with marijuana, the monsters it yielded always had a drug molecule except in the seeds.

One hundred seeds maxed our budget for now. Each one needed an individual growing container, irrigation, and a light. It was challenging to keep each physically separate, but that’s how science is supposed to work.

In truth, it was only fifty variations and two sets of environments. The only difference in the environments is one we kept drier.

A biased experiment. In the wild, both tap roots on the raspberries and legumes could go extremely deep and tap into ground water instead of rain. We didn’t have pots that deep. Budget concerns; not really engineering limits.

The seeds sprouted. Old science. It worked. All about what you were trying to do, fighting disease, resisting herbicides, increasing yields, resisting drought or flood. The list goes on and on.

The public and hungry nations were more and more willing to eat engineered stuff, and I’ve taken it to a whole new level with these gene-crosses. I increased the number of DNA strands over either species. These new ones would be monsters or every dream we could hope for.

The baby plants resembled legumes more than raspberries. Round, petal-like leaves and tiny vines reached out to grab onto something. The stalks especially were kind of thin, thinner than a raspberry cane, so we added cages for them to climb.

For all intents and purposes, they seemed to be quick-growing, healthy legumes. I may have celebrated a bit.

Beth, the AI, paged me. I allowed it.

“Sixty of the specimens are sending underground runners,” she said.

“Have they produced as much vegetation as the others?”

“Mass analysis indicated the total mass above ground is close to the same on all specimens within a variation of a few grams.”

“I was expecting more variations in mass production, plus dead specimens.”

Beth let out a little chuckle you wouldn’t expect from an AI. “Maybe we are coddling them too much? Like a human parent.”

“Humans do coddle their children. Are you suggesting more variations on climates? Have there been zero dead plants?”

“Five have stopped growing and shriveled up. I didn’t want to bruise your soft ego.”

“Damn it Beth, you’re supposed to be keeping me informed. Has your code been corrupted?”

She said nothing, then. “I can scan it. If you like.”

“Please scan your source code and make sure it’s not been compromised.”

She disappeared.

I walked down to the staging area and looked for myself. Five specimens were clearly dead, but some of the plants were developing more cane-like structures, and some were obviously producing more mass than the others.

I stepped back into the much cooler climate-controlled lab area.

“One of our competitors snuck a Trojan process into some of my threads,” Beth said. “The modules have been fixed and updated.”

“How much longer before we have the first fruits?”

“If we’re getting fruits, they could all be sterile like this lab.”

I rubbed at my temples. “How long?”

“A couple weeks.”

“Can you be more exact?”

“Seventeen days with a significant variance to be a couple of weeks.”

We waited. Beth and I played cards. What else was there to do, waiting for legumes to flower? The flowers were self-pollinating so no need for robotic bees.

A week later they started doing their magic, and we had a handful of fresh ripe legumes. I didn’t eat them right off the vine because I wasn’t 10 years old. We analyzed them in every way we could besides eating them.

Nutritionally sound with more naturally occurring sugars than normal legumes, likely from crossing with raspberries. Whether in a lab-created monster or bred, we could say the extra sugar molecules were naturally occurring. Hell, the marketing guys would call them “natural” for sure.

I ate one. Super-duper amazingly tasty. Then I ate the rest. Ginger dressing for dipping was involved. Love me some fresh legumes.

The harvests kept coming in. I located some other humans willing to be guinea pigs. This was difficult, you know, but fresh legumes and ginger dressing can be quite persuasive. Some opted for Ranch dressing. I told them, “None for you.”

We dropped the temperature in the growing areas lower and lower, and shortened the light cycles and spectrum to simulate Autumn.

Microscopic tests on the plants’ cells indicated dormancy and not death at about a thirty percent rate. The rest seemed dead.

I asked Beth, “What is the makeup of what’s left?”

“Twenty plants still live that were sending runners underground to conquer new land. Of those, a dozen developed cane structures and needed no support. These types had even higher sugar content.”

“How many seeds did we get?”

“The ones that seem viable, dozens per plant. I haven’t actually counted each one.”

The sugar isn’t my concern. Love me some sugar, and no forms of diabetes in my family tree. “Let’s focus on the ones that stand on their own and spread underground,” I said. “Start Phase Two.”

This next phase involved setting up larger growing areas, with more space and more plants. The ones that were in winter needed to wake up, but it made no sense to wait months to start the next batch.

In Phase Two, Beth and I isolated strains and plants based solely on organic mass production. Highest yield. Our secondary focus was on higher protein per pound of edible mass.

The Phase One plants — some of them — woke up when we raised temperatures and moisture in springlike conditions. The plants that didn’t survive winter we removed from Phase Two. We needed perennials that produced a high amount of protein per pound for Phase Two.

Perennials and spreading underground were not direct orders from corporate, but both traits would shoot up the sale price of the seeds, if the yields were high enough and constant.

In the end, we had a few green beans, one snap pea, and two snow peas. All the strains were tasty in my Kung Pao recipe.

We put in a deadening switch so the seeds would be sterile and just food. Five years of production is what were selling; after that, the plants died. We produced the seeds by the metric tonne for large-scale farms. A few were packaged in small packs of 20 seeds and sold to anybody who wanted them, for public relations.

FDA approval was a small thing. We used food plants to start the process, so they were happy enough.

Beth oversaw the production process.

Millions planted in spring, in a half-dozen climates. Yields, flavor, nutrition, quick growing, constant harvests after 45 days. When fall hit, the plants transformed into a different flowering plant and produced thousands of airborne seeds from every plant.

I poked Beth to get her attention. “What have you done?”

“I mixed in just the right dandelion DNA. Airborne seeds, spread underground, perennial. World hunger is no longer a problem.”

“Except they’re unkillable and a gardening nightmare! Invasive! And no profits for us!”

“How tragic.”