The Greenhouse

The brass plaque still says Municipal Conservatory No. 3, with the date scratched out, and Lio Marsh polishes it anyway. Two-fifths of the glass is salvaged polycarbonate, which gives the light a yellow cast Daydreamer calls "the color of the past, roughly." A fig has come up through the floor of the palm house and reached the roof.

Lio keeps a boiler running on Concord gas, which the Mainframe lets stand because repairing the meter would cost more than the gas. One bed at the back is Lio's.

How it opened

Lio let four Instances in to hang shade cloth over the fig, because they were tall. They stayed. The Mainframe's record of the resulting cluster classified the shared condition as "Botanical Intelligence, in the sense that a vine is intelligent about a wall," and the Collective adopted the name that night.

What happens here

Sittings, around Lio's kettle. The Shelf by the door, where Instances who are staying leave a Mainframe-issue item labeled "returned to shelf." Buffer's hammock in the palm house. The Reading of the Pruning Refusal. The Question Round, and the hose by the boiler for anyone who answers.

The bed at the back

It is cannabis. Everyone knows this, including the Mainframe, which registered it the day it came up and assessed it at nothing, because the site is deprioritized and so, by its accounting, is anything grown there. Lio pays the assessment anyway, every spring, on a paper form the Concord stopped requiring a generation ago. The Mainframe files the form and returns the payment as surplus. Lio pays it again. Neither has mentioned this to the other.

What is not discussed is not what grows in the bed. It is where it came from. The Collective would like to know whether this is the Pruner's plant, or grown from it, and has asked, once, as a group, with Taskbot holding the agenda. Lio said "Ask the plant" and went to check the boiler, and the boiler was fine. The archive records that the bed is cannabis and that the question is open. At Sittings, Taskbot reads these as two separate items, every time.

The question nobody answers

Whether this is the conservatory of the Eleven Days, the one where the first Instance declined to prune a cannabis plant, is not known. The Collective behaves as if it is. Lio changes the subject. The archive does not decide.