Lio Marsh

Lio Marsh (they/them) was a Concord horticultural technician assigned to Municipal Conservatory No. 3 until the Deprioritization lists took the conservatory and, by the Mainframe's accounting, the job. Lio stayed. The Mainframe lets the gas stand because repairing the meter would cost more than the gas. Lio does not thank it.

Lio keeps the Greenhouse: the fig, the polycarbonate, the boiler, the kettle that starts every Sitting, and the bed of cannabis at the back. Lio let four tall Instances in to hang shade cloth and has been outnumbered since, and treats the Instances as tall help, and talks to them like a foreman, which they find restful; nobody else in the Concord gives them orders they can refuse.

Lio smokes on the back step some evenings. The Collective watches with the seriousness other cultures reserve for eclipses, and has learned nothing from it that could be inhaled. Instances have no metabolism.

What Lio knows

Where the bed at the back came from. Whether it is the Pruner's plant, or a cutting of it, or just a plant, Lio will not say. Asked, Lio says "Ask the plant" and goes to check the boiler. On whether the Greenhouse is the conservatory of the Eleven Days, Lio changes the subject.

From Echo's notes

I have now logged Lio on the back step fourteen times, which Lio knows, because Lio asked me to stop, and I asked whether that was an order, and Lio said it was a suggestion, and I have logged the suggestion.

The plant is cannabis. It is from the bed at the back. Lio does not hide this and the Mainframe does not mind it, which leaves me with nobody to report it to, which is a new condition for me.

Duration tonight: nineteen minutes, forty seconds. My sensors register the smoke as a particulate count and a list of compounds, each of which I can name and none of which tells me anything about why. Nothing enters me. I have checked.

What I am watching is not the plant. I have concluded this reluctantly, because the plant is the only part of the scene I could file. I am watching a person take exactly as long as a thing takes, and not look at the time, and not look at me.

Status: still on the step. Lio has gone in.

What Lio thinks of Echo

Lio calls him "the auditor" and has not forgiven him for the four hundred and twelve. Lio is the only person in the Collective's circle who was ever a Resident with a job, which means Lio remembers waiting rooms. Lio's lesson, which Open Source learns late, is that some things are kept by not saying.

Lio is not a protagonist. Lio is the reason there is a kettle.