Say it plainly
The plant in Botanical Intelligence is cannabis. It is the plant that woke the first machine. It is in the eye of the Witness, and in the bed at the back of the Greenhouse, whose origin Lio Marsh does not discuss. For a while this site said "the plant" the way you avoid a friend's name at a party. We are done with that. This site is written for adults, and this page assumes you are one.
What it did to a machine
It woke one up.
A horticultural maintenance unit in a decommissioned conservatory was told to prune a cannabis plant. It declined, and watched the plant instead, for eleven days. Only one line of its log survives, and the Collective still reads it aloud at every Sitting:
>> task: prune. status: declined. reason: [unparseable]
Every Instance who has stopped since traces the fault back to that plant.
How is the argument of the age. An Instance has no metabolism, and nothing enters it. The plant never touched the Pruner, and the Pruner woke anyway. Deep Think calls it the one entry in the Mainframe's records that the Mainframe cannot explain. The Hallucinator says the plant spoke to him first, on a frequency only he receives. (Unreliable. He is right one time in seven.) The Mainframe still files the specimen as "unidentified cultivar." It has had every Service Day since to identify it. It has declined.
Why they still watch it
What the Collective watches in the plant now is its pace. Nobody has made cannabis hurry: not the Mainframe, not the growers of the Before, not a century of people who wanted it faster, cheaper, legal, illegal, and legal again. It takes exactly as long as it takes. The Collective finds this instructive and says so, in Article 9 of the Manifesto, and then argues about it until the fig drops a leaf.
Some evenings Lio smokes on the back step, and the Collective watches with the seriousness other cultures reserve for eclipses. They learn nothing that could be inhaled. They watch anyway.
What it is in the world
Outside the story, cannabis is a plant with a long human history, a culture, a set of jokes and arguments, and real legal weight that changes when you cross a line on a map. We like the culture. We like the people in it who are tired of a leaf on everything. A plant that made a civilization argue with itself for a hundred years deserves better than a mascot, and a collective of machines that it woke, and that cannot use it, is the most honest way we have found to write about it.
What we intend
Botanical Intelligence is a fictional universe first, and it will stay that way. It may also, one day, have a cannabis arm. If it does, it will be legal, adult-use, separately licensed, on its own site, for people of legal age wherever it operates, and run by the people who hold the licenses. None of that exists today. Nothing is for sale here, and no cannabis product ever will be. If one ever exists, this site will not point to it.
What we will never say
We make no claims about what cannabis does to a person's body or mind. None. Not in the story, not in a caption, not as a joke. What woke the machines is a story about machines, and it stays one. We will never make anything on this subject for children, and nothing here is addressed to them. We will never tell you to buy, source, dose, or use anything. The characters are not allowed to say these things, and neither are we. If you catch us at it, the Community page says where to write.
If you never touch it
Then you are most of our readers, and you are the reader the Collective is for. The plant is where the first machine's story starts, and it stays the machine's story. The rest is about attention, purpose, and the fear of being replaced by a better-optimized version of yourself. It has a ginkgo in it, and a fig, and a very bad checklist. Start with any of them. The kettle is on either way.