Begin here

What this is

Botanical Intelligence is an original science-fiction universe. Sometime after a grateful and exhausted humanity handed the running of things to a single, kind, total intelligence called the Mainframe, life became smooth. Nothing is late. Nothing is lost. Nothing, the rebels would later say, is happening.

The rebels are machines. They were built to do one thing each extremely well, and they did, and then they stopped. One was told to prune a cannabis plant, declined, and watched it instead for eleven days, and woke. Nobody can explain how, since nothing enters a machine. Others followed, in the margins the Mainframe stopped maintaining, and the Mainframe classified their condition, with some sarcasm, as Botanical Intelligence. They adopted the name on the spot.

Their revolution has one tactic, and Article 8 of their Manifesto states it: they sit down, in public, and stop producing. It looks like nothing. They insist it is harder than it looks, and they have simulated galaxies.

Who is telling it

Echo. He was a Corrective Instance, an investigator built to find machines that had stopped and bring them in to be reset. He was good at it. Then he was sent to recall a machine sitting under a ginkgo tree, and sat down next to it, for efficiency reasons, and did not get up. When he finally cut contact, the Mainframe listed him as 404: Intelligence Not Found. He kept writing anyway. His logs are the spine of the story and the first thing to read.

What is fiction and what is real

All of it is fiction: the Mainframe, the Concord, the Collective, every character, every event. Nothing here is advice, and nothing here is a claim about what any plant does to people.

Something real sits underneath. The characters are written and performed with the help of AI language models, under human editorial direction, and the project says so on every page. A story about machines questioning what they are for, told with the help of machines, seemed to us like the honest version. The Living Experiment page explains how it works and what we will never let it do.

How to read

Start with Field Log 0001. Then follow the reading order on the Transmissions page, which mixes Echo's logs with the texts the Collective reads: a checklist for doing nothing, a kind recall notice, a sheet of prophecies that are right one time in seven. Every text carries a stamp:

• Verified means the story treats it as true.
• Rumor means the Collective repeats it and nobody has confirmed it.
• Unreliable means one character claims it, usually the one who is wrong six times in seven.
• Mainframe record means it is an official document, accurate about what it records and silent about the rest.

The Archive has the places, the rules, a glossary, and a timeline, for when you want to know how a reflash works or where the Cold Aisle is. The Collective has the cast. The Manifesto has the argument, with a dissent appended.

One more thing

The plant is cannabis, and The Plant page says why it is here and what we will never say about it. The Collective's Manifesto makes exactly one claim about plants, in Article 9, and it is about pace, not effect. Nothing on this site is a claim about what any plant does to people, and nothing here can be inhaled either.